What Happens in the Gut, Starts in the Mouth – Naveen Jain | 1069 | Dave Asprey

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Formerly today is a conversation with one of my favorite guests on the show, a dear friend and someone who's disrupted a huge part of healthcare and continues to do so. None other than Naveen Jain, who is the founder of viome. And viome is a company that pioneered human gut testing, oh, about 10 years ago, launched at the first biohacking conference. And since then, Naveen and I have worked together on just talking about what does the future look like when we have AI that can look at what's going on inside our gut. And he said, well, why would I just look at the gut? Like, why don't I look at your mitochondria? And he came to me about two and a half, three years ago and said, we're finding stuff in spit, Dave. Like, the oral microbiome is the key to everything. Well, it's one of the keys to everything anyway. So if you're saying, what the heck, Oral microbiome, this is the collection of bacteria in your mouth. And you might have heard, Even in the 80s, they were saying, well, people with more periodontal disease get Alzheimer's more. Isn't that weird? They get more heart disease. Well, Naveen cracked the code on that stuff. And he's going to be speaking at my biohacking conference, which is in its ninth annual iteration in Orlando this year. And we're going to go deep on what's going on with aging, what's going on in your mouth, and how that affects everything else in your body in ways that you would never really expect. So, Naveen, my friend, welcome back to the show.

Well, Dave, as you know, this is my absolute favorite conversation. I mean, every single time you and I chat, it just energizes me. And we end up talking about so many different things about what is it about the human body that causes us to be sick? Because there's nothing in our genes that are written as destiny that we all are bound to be sick. The minute we get 40, we must start gaining weight. We have to become diabetic. We're going to have heart disease, we're going to have depression, we're going to have all these issues. Somehow people think it's all about aging and it's given and nothing we can do about it. And the thing I love about you is you started the whole career saying, we have a choice, we can do something about it. It is not something that's given. And this whole biohacking movement was really, what can I do? That works for me, and not something that may work for others, but what works for me. Can I do something that worked for me? And that was, to me, the genesis of us trying to understand what if we can use massive amount of data, use AI, and able to figure out exactly what changes in the human body when you have an onset of a disease or a progression of a disease. And if we can crack that code, we can potentially prevent the diseases from happening, stop the progression of them, and, God forbid, outright reverse them. And I think you have shown this is actually possible. So to me, this is a conversation, as I would say the godfather of biohacking is, and the science and AI, how it is completely fundamentally changing the way we are going to look at our human body and look at longevity and aging and for that matter, all the human diseases.

It's becoming more and more clear that the advice that we always get that's this should work for everyone. It oftentimes doesn't work well for anyone. Diet soda doesn't make you lose weight. It's actually bad for you. And it makes people fat, at least most people. So unless I do what everyone else does and I measure my results and then they improve, in which case, great, that works fine. What? One of the things that I, I learned very early on in biohacking, long before I had even named it, was that when I used a mouthwash like Listerine or something like that, oh my God, really dry eyes in the morning, like, it made me just not feel as good. And I, I, I did some research, found out it was really bad for you, so I quit doing it. But then I made my own mouthwash, like. Cause I'm like, I have to get rid of the germs. So I used vodka, which is ethanol, which kills things, and I added some xylitol, which stops bacteria from forming biofilms. I added some essential oils and things like that, and I used that for a while and it still had the same effect. And so I started saying, okay, you know what's happening here? And I quit using mouthwash many, many years ago because even a homemade mouthwash that disrespected my oral microbiome didn't seem to work. And I was unaware at the time of the research on erectile dysfunction and mouthwash. And when you came along a couple years ago and said, dave, we're seeing this data now that we're starting to get saliva, like, look at what AI is telling us. What did you discover about the oral microbiome?

Well, first of all, Dave, I Just want to emphasize what you just said. Anytime you hear anyone say everyone should do this, unless your name happens to be everyone, just don't do it right. There is no such thing as a something good for everyone. We all are so different. And it's not that genetically we are very different. It is our microbiome is so different. And it's not just about the organisms are different about what they do based on what you feed them is completely different. Each ecosystem in our gut, in our mouth is completely different. And I think to some extent that governs who we become. In fact, they did tremendous research and I think, Dave, you are pretty familiar with that. They took identical twins with identical DNA. Fraternal twins. The fraternal twins. And they actually did a study on them and they found the same food impacts them completely differently. A same food can cause a high glycemic response in one person and, and none in other. They in fact saw that one can develop a disease, other doesn't. So this whole idea of blaming our ancestor for our trouble is saying, oh, it's bad, I have bad genes. No, sir, you're making bad choices. And that's really what's happening right now. Coming back to answer your question on the oral microbiome, what we started to see is the many of the things that we actually saw happening in the gut actually start in your mouth. So I don't know about you, my mom will always tell me, you know, eat slowly, chew your food. And I always wonder, why does my mom worry about my somehow choking on this small food? And it turns out she was actually very scientific, obviously came from generations of knowledge that they had collected. When you eat slowly and chew your food, you're allowing your oral microbiome to actually pre process that food. And by pre processing the food, two things happen. The nutrients from that food are easily absorbed through the small intestine. Number two, it starts to send signal to the human organs about what is coming down the digestive system. So I think you mentioned diet soda. When you drink diet soda, your oral microbiome starts sending signal to your pancreas. Hey, the sweet stuff is coming. It is most likely glucose start releasing all the insulin and the pancreas pumps the insulin down your body. There is nothing for insulin to do because there is no glucose there, right? And sooner or later, your body becomes basically insulin intolerant and you start to gain weight and you start to have diabetes. So the reason you're drinking diet soda actually ends up becoming a completely bad thing for you. Right? Now, obviously the other thing we learned was, and I think you obviously know that your oral microbiome produces nitric oxide. What does the nitric oxide do? It dilates your arteries and the veins. So you actually, it prevents the heart disease from happening. And the side effect is very similar to that blue pill, right. Improves sexual health, improves the blood flow to your brain, it improves the blood flow to your sexual organs. And suddenly a good microbiome actually can be extremely good for you, for your sexual health. So as they say, a person you're kissing may actually cause you a heart attack. It may actually be real.

So how do I know who to kiss? Naveen. This is a very pressing issue for me, as you all know.

Yeah. So I think as they say, test, don't guess.

So the correct order of dating is you order a viome test kit, you give it to someone say, could you lick this? And I'll ask you out in a week or two when I get my results.

Yeah. And in addition to that, make sure you do the STD testing as well. Okay.

You guys don't offer that, but you probably could determine that from gut bacteria, couldn't you?

Of course. I mean there are a lot of things you could determine from in some sense the infection. Because if there is an infection, you would see some type of increased cytokines in your blood as well.

Wow. There's such a rich amount of information that you get just from spit and a couple other like a little drop of blood and a very, very small fecal sample that you can sort of paint a picture of someone's overall health in a way that's actually astounding. It's bigger than I thought it was going to be when you launch the company because you keep adding additional data including a very accurate anti aging measure like how old are you? And how would you compare the accuracy of the viome aging score versus the things that are DNA methylation based? This is a very common thing. Like a true age test.

Absolutely, absolutely. So first of all, Dave, just to step back, you know when you do a full body intelligence test, you give us three sample a spit of your saliva, finger prick blood, about four drops of your finger prick blood, and a small touch of a fecal sample. From that we are able to analyze a completely or every single transcript that your gut microbes are producing. Every transcript that's coming from your epithelial cell. Then we look at that's coming from your stool. And then we look at the blood in the blood. What are we doing? Looking at all of your mitochondrial Transcript, right? So it doesn't matter. So we look at all mitochondrial transcript and then we're looking at all the human transcript, that means all the cytokines, everything that's happening on your mitochondria. And then we look at saliva. So in saliva we're looking at all the human gene expression and all the oral microbial gene expression. Then we take all of that information and then we start to see based on all these transcript, what molecules are going to be produced. What are the different state of different things. Your sulfite production, your LPS production, your flagellar assembly and your dental health, your gum health, your nitric oxide production. What causing the bad breath to happen? Is there a polyamine production or is it a sulfite production? Because based on that we can tell you what food you should. It may not be garlic, it may be a tofu that's actually causing you a bad breath. So we can actually tell you what is causing the bad breath in your mouth. Now based on that, now we have these, all these biomarkers and now we are able to give you first thing is a biological age. Now how do we calculate biological age compared to many other clocks that you have? So basically many of these biological clock look at one thing and one thing only. And based on that, they think they can determine everything, right? So remember telomeres, the first clock was, hey, based on your telomere, we can say how long you're going to live. The longer the telomeres, the longer you're going to live. Well, it turns out that was a complete myth. That research has been completely busted. Now people have increased the telomere size and it does not increase your in terms of how long you live. Now methylation is again, they're only looking at certain methylation on the human genes. Now that is only a portion of the trouble because what methylation does for the people who don't understand is methylation on a gene is called epigenome and that simply does a reduced gene expression. So when something is methylated, it is under expressed or not expressed at all, depending on how much methylation is there, right? So ultimately all methylation does is control your gene expression. So when you're looking at gene expression like we do at Wyoming, so remember, we are the only company that does not look at your DNA. We are looking at your rna. RNA already takes into account all of the methylation or acetylation or histones that are happening and he's able to look at the gene expression. So the way we calculate biological ages using AI, now that we have over 550,000 samples we have analyzed, we are able to simply say for your age, 18, 19, 20, pick a name you want. 31, 32. What are all of the biological biomarkers in your mitochondria, in your blood, in your stool, in your saliva. And then when you come along and we say, you know what, Dave, your biomarkers for everything is just like a 41 year old. And that's your biological age, right? And as you change your diet, as you change your lifestyle, as you do the 40 years of Zen, that's managing your stress as you go out on taking many of the things that you recommend people they do, including muscle training, so going to upgrade lab building your muscles. Guess what? Every one of these things changes your cytokines, it changes your gut microbial expression, it changes your oral microbial expression. And suddenly even if you are 52, your biological age can come down to 40. And when you become 60, you could still come down to 35 rather than. So your chronological age can keep going up or your biological age can keep coming down. And that's one of the things we measure. And then we measure your immune health. How well are you protected from external environment if you do get sick, are you going to end up in the emergency room or are you going to be able to deal with that? Right? We give you your gut health, you give you your oral health, we give you your cognitive health, we give you your heart health. And then we tell you exactly what food you should eat and why, what food you should avoid and why. And then we can tell you exactly what nutrition your body needs. And we don't give you anything premade. We literally make the things that your body needs. You need 22mg of lycopene, you need 79mg of amylase. So we go through every food extract, vitamins, minerals, herbs, digestive enzyme, amino acids, peptides, probiotics, prebiotics, and we custom make it for you. So this is for me made every month. So you can see here, this is made 7 days ago just for me, right? So everything is custom made, the nutrients your body needs.

It comes down to the one question I get the most from people. And at this point it's got to be hundreds of thousands of times I've heard it between online and in persons and things like that. It's just tell me what to do. I don't want to become an expert biohacker. And earlier you said there is no one thing that's Good for everyone. I don't really agree with that. Minimizing your toxin exposure is good for everyone. However, you may be way more sensitive to one toxin than another person. So it's helpful to know which ones you should avoid because those are your kryptonite toxins. But if you're not going to do that sort of thing, you'd say, all right, getting enough sleep is good for everyone. Moving sometimes, seeing the sun. But even those. How much vitamin D are you deficient in? Do you need more or less sun? It's all personalized. So if you wanted to do one of the cheapest ways of. Just tell me what to do. I really, truly believe you. Do the volume test and you're going to get a very rich set of. Of information that says, do this, don't do that. But sometimes, Naveen, you tell people who are really tired that they shouldn't even have one cup of coffee a day. And then they all call me and say, dave, what's wrong with this Naveen guy? Doesn't he know how important coffee is for life? So you gotta, you gotta tell people once and for all what's going on.

I thought we fixed. I thought we said that. I think it's already fixed. Actually, it's minimized. So we tell people is that, hey, when you have very high levels of certain toxins in your body or high level of anxiety, you should minimize. You should never cut something down, but you should minimize for certain time. It's not forever. It's only a short period of time until your body comes back into balance. Now, I do want to emphasize what you just said, that there are certain things that are bad for everyone, right? Mold exposure, toxin exposure, eating sugar is absolutely toxic. So that's why I say there are some things that no food. There's no universal healthy food. The same food can be good for you or same food can be bad for you. However, there are certain things that are bad for everyone, right? Meat is not one of them. By the way, this whole misnomer that red meat is bad for everyone is completely wrong. Think about, you know, meat. Obviously you eat a lot of red meat, but interesting thing about the red meat is it has choline and the choline is in the by gut microbiome gets transformed into TMA and the TMA gets converted by your liver into tmao. So if your microbiome are not converting the choline into tma, then you can eat red meat to your, you know, as much as you want. It does have tremendous amount of nutrients Right. Obviously what type of red meat you eat, it can't be with antibiotics and it can't be the one that means cattles are being fed with all kinds.

Of things that they should be glyphosate. Yeah, that's probably not the diet for cows. And even, even fish forms tmao more than beef. But what, what I think people don't get about the viome results sometimes is often you're saying for 20 days or for maybe six weeks, don't eat this food. So the bacteria that are thriving, the ones that form this toxin so that they'll go away and then you can start eating the food again. So what you're doing is instead of well, I'll just do a 30 day fast, which is one way people used to do it. Or even a 10 day water only or water and coffee kind of fast that'll have a similar effect. But it's a lot of work. And what you're saying is take out these few things, it'll change your oral microbiome, it'll change your gut microbiome, and then you can add them back in when you're in balance. So this is exactly, this is a way to shortcut what I did when I first got into this in the late 90s, I went on this two year long food elimination diet where you could only eat a food from a family once every seven days. And I had spread sheets and all this crap because that was how we had to do it. And now you're just saying, well hey, these are your five kryptonite things. Don't eat them for a month while you re regulate. And I think that approach for most people, it's just gonna save a huge amount of time. And you don't charge a lot for the test compared to even a typical autoimmunity or a food allergy panel. Even your cancer detection test is under 400 bucks. What is the total health tests running these days?

So basically we do three tests. Saliva test, stool test and a fingerprint blood test. All three of them for 299. So literally $99 per test.

Okay. So that's very affordable. And you get actionable data from it. And then if they spend more, they can get, if they qualify for it, they get the cancer detect test, which is early detection for oral and throat cancer.

That is literally 95% specificity and 90% plus sensitivity. Stage one or pre stage one cancer. I mean it's unbelievable. And I think this is also, I think div. I have not shown you we are also now developing a personalized toothpaste for each individual based on their oral microbiome. So it's literally a toothpaste and gel designed for you for your oral microbiome. Literally like this. You break it up, single thing, and just here's your toothpaste.

So, Naveen, I'm an advisor and you haven't sent me any custom toothpaste. And I'm personally offended. Is there a special food I can take when I'm feeling triggered?

So I think it's going well. Depends on what trigger are we talking about? We'll come back to it. In addition to that, we also have these oral lozenges that also you just put in your mouth and they dissolve and they adjust your oral microbiome. So that's really all the things you need to do to adjust your oral microbiome. And very interestingly, I've been using this personalized toothpaste. And I just went to my dentist and I think it was two or three weeks ago, and she told me, naveen, I've been seeing you for five years. I've never seen your gum and teeth this healthy. He said, it is just no bleeding, no nothing. Whatever you're doing, keep doing. And she thought I started flossing. I said, doc, I haven't flossed for 30, 63 years. I'm going to start doing it now.

Daniel, you admitted on the air. So I believe, Naveen, that every action that you should do to improve your health, your performance, it has to have a high ROI. And if you're going to spend 16 hours a day flossing to reduce your oral risk by 4%, no one on earth would do that. But oftentimes we do things that we believe have a high return on investment that have a negative return on investment. Like using a traditional mouthwash that sterilizes your gums, that actually harms your body in all sorts of ways. Yet there's companies probably selling $1 billion a year worth of products that don't work.

Did you see the last research that came out on Listerine mouthwash essentially showing clearly causes heart disease and diabetes, Right, because of Listerine, because it's killing up all the microbes.

I wonder if Listerine is owned by anyone who owns big pharma. Companies that sell drugs secure those things. Wouldn't that be an amazing business model? Like sell something that causes a disease and then sell the cure for it. I won. If someone's ever thought of that before.

I mean, think about all these food companies. I mean, the things they're selling us sometimes or even how our foods are grown. You always wonder how can this even be legal to put all the pesticides that we put in our food in our, how we grow our food or antibiotics in cows to make them fat so we can somehow have feed them to humans. I mean it's just mind boggling.

I actually don't think it is legal. If you go back and you read all of the laws. I think that there are people who just ignore the law and then they make new laws that break old laws and then people just get away with it. Because some of the stuff like the pesticides we're spraying, none of them are tested on any bug that lives in the soil. They're only tested on honeybees. So glyphosate is causing convulsions and seizures and earthworms at 300 times below the allowable levels. So we're sterilizing vast parts of the earth, which is clearly illegal. That's why we're supposed to have an epa. But they're doing it because, well, they can get away with it. And I think enough people are waking up and if you find out, oh, I went on a month of glyphosate, beef and chicken and corn oil and I looked at my viome test and I realized that it was absolutely wrecking me. And then I went on a month of grass fed beef and non sprayed organic vegetables. And then you looked at your results. Now you don't have to wonder whether that microwave pizza was good for you or not. You actually know. And then it's easy to change your behavior when it's not guesswork, when it's you get a report. And that's what I started doing a long time ago. That was the basis of biohacking. I just made a promise, I'm only going to do what works. That means I have to measure it because I was doing so much work. It just didn't do anything.

Honestly, there's a lot of the things we do. I mean you are so right. Health is our wealth. Without our health we have nothing. And we know so many people when they are young, they sacrifice their health to make wealth. And then they, as they get older, they sacrifice their wealth to get their health back. Right. To me, when you are sick you only have one wish. And when you're healthy you have many wishes. So why would you not want to invest on your own health? And you have shown how much it matters, how much it works when you actually focus on your health. And I was hoping that maybe in the last, you know, as we wrap up here, maybe talk a little bit more about longevity that you and I have spent so much time talking about. What does it really take to stay healthy as long as you live? So it's not just about increasing the lifespan. It's really increasing the health span. I want you and I to live healthy until the last day we die. I don't want to live for 200 years while the last 100 years are feeding tube and in sitting in ICU. That's not the life any one of us ever want.

I like the Viking family cliff, where if you're facing that, you get to jump off the family cliff if you want to, because that's not actually an appropriate way to spend our environmental resources either. So if I'm going to die in two weeks, you just let me die now and that's okay, and save all the money and all the plastic and all the pain and suffering. So, yes, we all want healthspan, but there's something scary happening in the world of longevity. There's a bunch of people, and I'm going to call them out as cowards, and they say, oh, we're not going to increase our lifespan. We're just going to increase health span. These are people who do not see the future. These are people who do not think big. And no, we are going to do both. And if you cut yourself off at the knees and you say, I'm just going to increase health span and you're a wimp and you need to step up, because I want another 50 years of lifespan and my health span. Health span is tablespoon. Yeah.

I think we want lifespan to be as long as we can live healthy, whether it is thousand years or whether it is 5,000 years. And if we can live healthy for the next millennial, I would be all over it.

There you go. And the end goal is all of us, we can die at a time and by a method of our choosing. And if we can build that world, that's abundant safety and it's abundant curiosity, it's abundant freedom. And people who have that kind of power, who knows what they might do? They might build a really awesome world to live in because they're going to have to live in it for a thousand years. So you don't throw your plastic in the ocean because you know you're going to be pumping it through your valves in your heart later.

Your relationship, your relationship with yourself and your relationship with others change because you know you have to live with them for the next thousand, five thousand, ten thousand years.

And also you don't really worry about electing politicians for four years to ruin things only a little bit more. You start constructing systems to run society that actually run society. That would be amazing, wouldn't it?

So going back and what are the five things Dave, you and I have talked about? What are the five things one has to do to stay healthy as long as we live? And it has to be both lifespan and healthspan. As you mentioned, the first thing we spend enough time on that proper nutrition. Because without the proper nutrition, nothing matters. So basically what I'm going through right now is that what are the five hierarchy of needs for living long? Just like the hierarchy of needs the maslow is put together for living happy, right? So number one is nutrition. We talked about that. Without the proper nutrition, nothing matters. You cannot drive a Ferrari unless you put the right fuel in that, right? So once you've done that, the second thing is really matters is stress management. How do you get your brain aligned so that it's not causing anxiety? Why is that? When you are in fight or flight response, which is what the stress does to you. So every time you have a stress, you are actually living in a fight or flight response. When do we used to get fight or flight response? When you were being chased by a tiger, what happens then? Your body shuts down your digestive system. That means don't worry about digesting your food. You're going to be lunch for someone else right now. Right? Run away or fight your immune system, it's shut down because you don't need to worry about anything else right now. And that's the reason people who are always stressed tend to get sick more often. Now what do we do? So first thing I would advise people is go to 40 years of Zen, learn to be resilient. I mean seriously, you have to learn to be resilient because guess what, your environment is constantly causing you stress. There are people out there who work for a company and their boss is causing them stress. They go home, their spouse causes them stress. And there are people, they surround themselves. Lot of naysayers, those people cause them stress. So here is my recommendation. Quit your goddamn job if it's causing you stress. Put your damn spouse if it's causing you stress and get out of those damn craps who are pulling you down and not letting you grow. Leave that bucket and go to somewhere else where you're surrounded by people who are positive, who are uplifting you, people who are actually believing you.

It sounds Hard to do. And it is if you're living paycheck, paycheck to paycheck, which right now more than half of Americans are. The reality though is you could lose your job tomorrow anyway. So you could do that when you're stressed or you could intentionally choose what you're going to do, make a plan. And even if it takes a little while to make it happen, it's scary. But if you do that, you get your energy back. And when you get energy back, you can get a raise, you can get a new job, you can build a new self, right? Or you can change your relationships, you can work on it. But right now if you're feeling low energy stressed all the time, you can change your nutrition so you're high energy, which then you have enough power to make a change in your career or in your relationship. And each time you do this, it gets better and better. So what I want people to learn how to do is for the least possible effort and dollars and time to get the most energy into their system as fast as possible. And that's why I started.

I want you to talk a little bit more about 40 years of Zen because it has helped so many people who came to 40 years of Zen had so much stress and when they left they became extremely resilient.

40 years of Zen has been running for about 8 years. About 1500 high end entrepreneurs and celebrities and pro athletes have come through. And it's a five day intensive neur feedback program. It's at 40 years of Zen.com but it's based on using tech. We have seven patents now in the kind of neuroscience that we created. And the tech shows you when your brain is going into a stress response. But it gives you a special process, one that we teach you so that you can go back and turn off the source cause of the stress. Because right now, Naveen, if I said something mean to you that that was a trigger for you before you could think your body would change, right? And then you would believe what your body told you. And that's because we're both humans. And the difficult thing is is that how do you tell your body to not be reactive to that? You can't think your way through it because it was reactive before you think, well, there's a way to go in and edit the settings in your operating system. So the last two chapters of Smarter Not Harder, I teach the process to everyone. Okay, that's like a $20 book or something. And so Smarter Not Harder is where you can start on it. 40 years is in is a very high end custom program, eight people per week. But Upgrade Labs is a franchise. It's one of my companies. It's opening across the country that has neurofeedback as part of the program. So when you come in, you can put on muscle or lose fat or get your energy back using AI, but that frees up so much time you can do this. So I would say go to 40years of Zen.com if you're interested in a very high end program or go to ownandupgradelabs.com and you can open a franchise in your neighborhood that provides neurofeedback as well as all of the biohacking stuff.

The third layer. Third layer is exercise, is that you have to build muscles. You have to get your heart rate up. And a lot of people think you have to spend two, three hours a day to actually get that exercise. You and I don't have two, three hours a day. In fact, your body just need to get a good 30 minutes to 45 minutes of fast walk or a good strength training. Right. This is where I absolutely enjoy going. To Upgrade Labs doing the workout. You don't need to spend two, three hours. You can get them in 10 to 15 minutes. The same feedback in your body as if you worked out for an hour. And now tell me a little bit more about that upgrade lab part that you were telling me.

The idea is if you were to go to a spin class, say five days a week for an hour a day, a lot of people do that. Well, you'll improve by 2% over the course of two months. Give me 15 minutes a week without any sweating and you'll improve six times more. You get a 12% improvement, including the muscles.

Including the building muscles.

Yeah, all of it. So it turns out that you can now take the amount of time you invest in exercise, or more likely, 92% of people don't even do that. So now it's painless enough that it's worth it. And in the extra time you can do neurofeedback to give yourself control of your brain. It's not as deep as I can take you at 40 years in, but it's deep enough to make a difference. So the idea here is we're building energetically powerful people who are resilient. And you, you get to pick what's most important to you. If you say, I want to be resilient to stress, we'll train your stress management systems to be stronger. Instead of saying, I want abs and you can get Both, but let's prioritize. So ownandupgradelabs.com is what lets you open a franchise. And. And I'm flying out actually to Idaho to meet one of our first franchisees in Meridian, Idaho when they're doing their grand opening. And there's others popping up all over the country. So the idea here is including Bellevue.

In Bellevue, in fact.

In Bellevue. Right. It'd probably be your neighbors. And the idea there too is do we care about what's going on in your gut? Yes. So working with biome is a part of the plan and I'm just grateful that finally there's something that I wanted. When I was 25 and £300, if I could have gone to an upgrade labs and gotten a viome test and done all this stuff, it would have saved me thousands of hours and a million dollars that I spent to lose the hundred pounds to get my brain back. It's not necessary to be wealthy anymore, but it's not free either. And eventually we're going to change society to where we just build society to do this for you. And the companies that are in the way of that, they will dissolve into nothingness because there simply won't be a market for mouthwash that takes away your erections. Dump.

The fourth thing, Dev, is proper sleep. And again here, like many things in life, the quality matters, not just the quantity. So don't focus on how long you sleep, focus on how well you sleep. And this is really where crux is. You need to be able to get one and a half to two hours of deep sleep, one and a half, two hours of REM sleep and measure the damn thing. You can't measure it, you can improve on it. And some people are really fortunate and people especially who reduce their stress in their body are able to get a good exercise, they're able to get a good deep sleep and a good REM sleep. And by the way, it also the nutrition, it is very clear when you have a nice nutrition in your gut, your gut circadian rhythm and your circadian rhythm of your brain, they start to align and that is where you get a good night's sleep. So to me, just like Dev, you probably do. I have a Oura ring, I measure my sleep, I have a eight sleep mattress underneath that changes the temperature as I sleep. So as I go into REM sleep and deep sleep, it cools it down for me, right? And it is completely monitoring my sleep. I have a within the sleep pad underneath my mattress that's also measuring my sleep because it matters to me.

Right, There you go.

Once you have done that, by the way, everything that we have done so far, your nutrition, your stress management, your exercise, is what allows you to get a good night's sleep. The last part, do you want to add something to the sleep part? Day, before we go to the last.

Part, I would just suggest if you're curious about this, go to sleepwithdave.com and that is a mini course. It's totally free. It's just, it's a gift. It tells you every single thing that I've done to improve my sleep from five minutes of deep sleep a night to an hour and a half a night. So sleepwithdave.com is the funniest URL of my entire career. So there you go.

Yeah, well, first of all, it's a great URL and I sure hope that people actually take it literally. But let's keep going. Next thing. And the last thing that really is, to me, the core of everything I, you know, I believe in is finding the purpose. People who live a life of purpose tend to live 10 to 15 years longer than the people who have no purpose in life. So to me, Dave, this is where I think once you have done all those four things, this is where you spend rest of your life. Find something that you're willing to die for and then live for it. When you wake up in the morning and if you're not jumping out of the bed, it's not your calling. Quit what you're doing. Find something that you really care enough about. It comes a time in our lives where you, I and many people who are listening to it, we don't need to worry a lot about are we going to be able to get the next meal. To me, find something that helps people live better life. You can create an amazingly great business. Every entrepreneur who is listening to it. Don't wake up in the morning trying to figure out how to make more money. Making money is a byproduct of doing things that improve other people's lives. Focus on how many lives can you improve. This is how you create a massive business. You don't wake up in the morning, want to make money. You focus in the morning wanting to improve people's life. And if you can do that, everything else will fall in place. So, Dave, you live a life of purpose and I want you to spend a few minutes just talking about what it means to you. And what would you advise people?

Well, I have a mission statement across all of my portfolio of companies, which is to upgrade Humanity. So if it doesn't do that, we're not doing it. And one of the things that sometimes younger entrepreneurs do is they'll look around, they'll see something that's working. And now I even see videos online saying, well, here's how to use ChatGPT to copy a website and do a crappier job and sell some cheap white label thing that isn't what you're trying to copy. And these are called wantrepreneurs. And they're doing it for money. They haven't innovated. They don't have a mission. They're just saying, I want to make money. And they're actually parasitic because they take away the quality from things. So remember 10 years ago, you could buy something on Amazon and it was good, and you go to Amazon now everything is made out of cheap plastic and it falls apart like you bought it at a flea market. Well, the reason that happened was the race to the bottom. And we don't want to create a world like that. We want to create a world where you're doing something new and different. You're not just an echo chamber. Oh, look, I rewrote someone else's blog post. No, find something new and then bring that to the world. That's what creates peace in your life. That's what creates a difference, and that's what creates trust. So there are too many people out there trying to quickly and cheaply copy something. I guarantee you there's someone out there who's not doing the VIOME test because you have $2 billion of national laboratory research behind Viome who's saying, I'm doing the same thing. No, actually they're not. So I would encourage you if you're doing this saying, what difference do you want to make? And it is not about, I'm going to feed a billion people. That's an ego goal. What it is, is it's about I am going to feed hungry people. And I have a new way to do it. I'm going to feed the people who need it. I will help those who are ready to receive my help. And that could mean you run a yoga studio. So you're going to run an amazing yoga studio with continuously improving things. And that is a mission that's worthy and is powerful. And you don't have to open a thousand of those to be a good person. You just have to do a good job serving your community and serving people who are ready. That's been my mindset since I started Bulletproof. I thought I might help Five people with my blog. That was my goal. Because if you didn't go through what I went through, I would have done you a very big act of service. And it grew to be larger than that, but it did that on the back of talking about new things. So my piece of advice for you, if you want to be happy, start a business that does something new and different and better. And if you want to be miserable, start a company that copies someone else because it doesn't work well.

It's Dave, I'm so, as I said, thankful to you for who you are, what you stand for, and how you have dedicated your life to serving other people. And it doesn't mean you don't build a great business. You do build a great business, but you do it focusing on helping other people live a better life. And that to me is the best life to live. As we start to look at our life someday when we have to look back and we see our success will never be defined by how much money we made, it'll always be defined by how many lives we improved. And stay humble. I mean, you know, you have to know that humility is a sign of success when you still have iota of arrogance left in you. That means you're still trying to prove something to yourself or someone else, right? And so stay life of humility and go out and make a difference in other people's lives.

Well, Naveen, I think at some point in the future we should, we should get together and actually teach people how to think like this. Because I don't exactly know how I learned it over the course of my career in Silicon Valley, but you seem like you were born knowing it, but this is a, it's a different kind of entrepreneurial skill. It's not SEO management, it's not that sort of thing. It's being able to see a vision of the future and how to get people there. And I think this is your seventh big company. So I know I've been learning from our friendship for a long time. It's.

It'Ll be such an honor, such an honor to do something with you along the lines where we can actually change people. Teach them how to think differently. If every entrepreneur can really look at the same problem from a different lens, you can not only solve a massive problem that you never thought about, it suddenly changes the business you are in. It's about asking the right questions. So what questions are you asking is the problem we solve? And maybe you and I should talk about that at a biohacking conference on how do you ask the right questions whether it is the climate change? How do you look at a climate change as a problem and build something that will change the lives of 8 billion people on planet Earth? Right. How do we look at any problem and create this massive audacious change in the society and we become that catalyst that changes the way people are going to live their lives. So I am thankful to your friendship. I'm so thankful that you and I continue to innovate, continue to find new ways of working together. And this may be a catalyst where we do you and I actually work in teaching other people about how to think differently.

All right, I'm up for doing that. And Naveen, send me some toothpaste, man.

I will brother. Good to see you, brother. Good to see you.

Good to see you. Oh, by the way, and I'll see.

You in a few weeks.

We also should tell people. Viome v I o m e.com Dave use code Dave10 convenes graciously giving you 10% off. And seriously, if you haven't done the VIOME test, it is the lowest cost way to get the answer to Just tell me what to do. That's your answer.

Thank you brother. Appreciate it.

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