Body Hacking EXPERT Reveals The Daily Hacks To REVERSE AGING & End Inflammation! | Dave Asprey

A flexible mind is one that can allow something to happen and then instead of immediately reacting, sense what actually happened, identify what's the story you just told yourself about what happened and then what actually happened. Having a flexible mind is kind of a holy grail for a lot of people, but we don't usually call it a flexible mind. What we're seeking is we're seeking resilience. And resilience comes in part from having a body that works well enough but it also comes from your mindset. And a flexible mind is one that can allow something to happen and then instead of immediately reacting, sense what actually happened, identify what's the story you just told yourself about what happened and then what actually happened. And a good example of a flexible mind is you're driving in traffic and someone cuts in front of you. Now, the immediate story is that the person in front of you who clearly deserves a middle finger did it because they don't respect you, because they think they're more important than you, or whatever story you told yourself. Now, the reality is, now the reality is someone cut in front of you. That's all you know. An equally likely story that a flexible mind can have is that the person cut in front of you because they're on the way to the hospital to help someone give birth. You just have no idea. So it could be a really powerful thing or it couldn't be. But a flexible mind is one that doesn't believe its stories right away because you've got to find out if your stories are true. And what the neuroscience has shown is that we have a feeling, then we tell ourselves a story about it. We never tell ourselves a story and then have a feeling. The body feels before you can think. And I can prove this with neuroscience. I run a neuroscience facility in Seattle called 40 Years of Zen. This is real. Even now, when you're judging my words, you're telling yourself a story about them. That story is probably not based on the words. That's based on your story, and that's okay. We're human, we're supposed to do that. But remember that, that's a flexible mind, the ability to tell your story from the world around you. There's a gut and a heart and a brain connection, and funny enough, 80% of the nerves between the heart and the brain are sending information from the heart to the brain, not the other way around. So we like to think that the brain is this massive control system for the body, but it's really the other way around. The body starts at subcellular components called mitochondria that sense the environment around us and make energy. And they roll up into your nerves, and they roll up into local systems, local organ systems, and it all rolls up into your brain. And your brain picks apart layers of patterns and throws them out until that little tiny bit that you can think of as reality, that's what you notice. But all the rest of it was picked up by your body and ignored. since your body picks up these threats, it's just trying to keep you alive. That's its job. It's going to pick them up. It's just not very good at knowing that's not a threat. That's my mother-in-law. So it's going to make a mistake and you're going to feel that emotion. And then you're going to react a certain way based on your story and you're going to say something maybe that you regret to your mother-in-law. And whatever that pattern is, that's what's happening there is that the sensation happened. The reality is maybe your mother-in-law pushes your buttons for a reason that's your own reason. And understanding that the story says, well, I'm feeling this way because she said this or she said this or whatever else, it's all BS. You were feeling that way for whatever reason you were feeling that way, but the story about why? Probably not true. There are two different pathways that your brain can take. If you're sympathetic dominant, this is your fight or flight is turned on, you're going to bypass the thinking part, the prefrontal cortex of your brain, and you're actually going to immediately go into the reactive mode. And if you are in parasympathetic dominance, which means you're in the rest and relax and recover mode, then you're going to actually shunt a behavior or a pattern into your, I wonder what I should do here? Let me think about it part of the brain, that PFC or prefrontal cortex. So fear is a way of preventing you from having a flexible brain. It's a way of preventing you from thinking and then acting, but it's useful. If there actually is a tiger there, that fear is the same fear that's going to cause you to jump out of the way before you could think about it. Oh, is that a tiger? Hmm, I wonder if I should jump because by then you're food and your brain really doesn't want you to be food. To overcome fear that isn't fear of real threats, meditation is one of the most powerful things you can possibly do. As a professional biohacker, someone who's hooked incredible amounts of electrodes up to my body to look at what works, how I function, and all. There's an advanced form of meditation called heart rate variability. And this is breathing exercises with a device clipped to your ear and you look at your phone and it tells you when your body's in fight or flight mode or when you're in rest and reset mode. And being able to do that just for a few weeks for 10, 20 minutes a day will teach you how to feel the difference between I'm in a reactive mode and I'm in a thoughtful mode. And once you feel the difference, it turns out you can consciously change it. So whenever you catch yourself being there, you can take a deep breath and move back. Meditation doesn't have to be really big and complex. Breathing-based meditation seems to work better than non-breathing-based meditation. But the simplest meditation can be sitting in a posture with your back straight and staring at a pebble. That's a meditation. And there are lots of soundtracks you can use. There are lots of different teachers you can go to. The bottom line is any meditation is better than none. And the meditation that works well for one person might not work well for you. It's sort of like finding the right food for you. You go out and try a few and see what you like. Willpower is something that we've always thought was maybe a moral characteristic. Like, oh, you've got good willpower. You kept going. But what we've missed is that willpower comes from electrons, electricity in your body. The that powers your iPhone. And you can run out of those. You can use them ineffectively. And we all, no matter how strong we are, no matter how strong our moral character is, whatever that is, we can run out of willpower. It's because we run out of energy. And when you turn up willpower, you suddenly can do more things. And one of the things that sucks your willpower is telling yourself things that aren't true. And in my last book, I talk about weasel words. And these are words that we use to unconsciously limit ourselves because our brain is so lazy. It wants to save willpower and says, wouldn't it be better if I just didn't think about that anymore? I'm going to cut it out of my vision. I'm just going to remove it. And one of the easiest things that we do for that is we say can't. And sometimes it's a little thing like, I can't make it to the store. Well, the reality is you probably really could have if it was a life or death situation. you just didn't. So your brain is tricking you into believing things aren't possible. But if you erase that can't from your vocabulary and you said instead, I'm not going to go to the grocery store, it suddenly frees up ideas like maybe I could ask a friend to go for me and the world of possibilities opens up. So I've taught myself and my kids and in my books, I write about how words like need, can't and try actually take away your willpower. And they do this because your brain is trying to save those precious electrons that you use to keep yourself alive by making you not consider things that you really want to consider as a thinking feeling human being. Confidence is a really interesting concept. We might say we don't have self-confidence or we're not feeling confident, but when you really dig into it, the cells that make up your body really only want three things and they want it before you can think about it. They want to make sure that nothing eats you and they'll have you do anything possible to hide from scary things or to run away from scary things or to kill scary things. They want to make sure you eat everything and they want to make sure you reproduce the species. You know what I'm talking about there? Well, confidence comes down to that first thing where your body, without your conscious permission, will make you shy away from or even create a voice in your head that says, I can't do that. I won't do that. I'm not good enough. Because somewhere in your system, before you have a chance to think about it, your body's so worry that you might not do a good job that it's better to just tell yourself you can't do it. And that weird confidence competence loop is how you break it where you say, you know what? If you just do it anyway until you get a little bit of competence, it breaks that belief system and suddenly your brain stops telling you that and you realize, actually, I can do it. So it's not about can't or can anymore. It's about, am I doing it and am I doing it well enough? and when you go through and you start building this in your life, you realize that the voice in your head is pretty much always lying to you and that's the source of bad self-confidence. One of the first things you can do is start to pay attention to how you're feeling and how you're feeling is physically. Is your digestion okay? Do you have joint pain? Or are you angry? Are you super tired? Are you ampy? Because believe it or not, It's your fault. You just don't know why or how, but that's a sign that something isn't working in your biology. And the easiest thing to do is go back, what did you eat or do in the preceding couple hours? And shockingly, it's usually something there, but it gets really difficult. And as I've lost a hundred pounds and reversed aging in myself, it turns out that a lot of things cause pain a day or two after you do them. So you do something on Friday night and then it's Monday morning when you feel like a zombie and you wonder why. Maybe it's just Monday. Well, maybe it was actually Friday. So it's that awareness loop is step one. In step two, you might want to start looking at the data. So getting a basic set of lab panels is really important. I suggest that almost everyone get a basic hormone panel that says, what do your hormones look like? And if you're 25 and you're doing it, you want to know those numbers because when you're 75, you still want to be at those numbers. and if you're 50, the odds are that you've already started to have less testosterone. We have an epidemic of people with low thyroid function right now, and low thyroid controls your energy, which controls your willpower, it controls how much fat you have. It's completely unacceptable to walk around with a low thyroid because it raises your risk of cardiovascular disease, of Alzheimer's, of almost every neurodegenerative disease because it makes your cells make less energy. So if you know your thyroid's working, you know you have your hormones working, and you get a basic inflammation panel, you are going to be so much further ahead than everyone. And hopefully you'll find that you don't have any inflammation. But if you do, then you have a really big target because every disease of aging, in fact, even more so for the brain, is driven by, you guessed it, inflammation. Inflammation happens because your cells are supposed to take air and food and combine them to make energy, but instead they're combining them to make inflammation because something in the process is broken. and you fix it by eating more real food, maybe by taking some supplements, and certainly by avoiding the foods that make you weak. And a large part of the Bulletproof Diet is around how do you take those foods out that aren't working for you? And Dr. Mark Hyman's work is so much about what are the types of foods that are really good for you? What are the things you should do? What are the things you shouldn't do? So you can follow that advice and you'll find that those times you write down in your journal, I feel like a zombie or I feel angry or I had a lot of emotional stuff, you might think the emotional stuff is because someone yelled at you, but would you always have reacted that way? Well, if you overreacted today and you wouldn't have done another day, there's a reason and it's probably something you can control. In my book, Game Changers, I interviewed 450 people who've done really big things like Mark, who's in the book, and I asked them this question, what are the three pieces of advice you'd have for people who want to perform better at everything they do as human beings. And really interesting data came out of this because I didn't want to know what one person would do, but I wanted what they all agreed on so I could do it myself and you could too. It turns out the number one rule in game changers is the power of saying no. And most of us say yes to so many things because we have this fear of missing out. And the people who've done really big things in the world realize that it's their job to say no. Even when something might be really fun to really sit down and think about it instead of just feeling about it and then say, all right, I'm going to choose to do this. And that conscious decision making that says, I'm going to choose to say no, really sets aside a meaningful amount of time. And that meaningful amount of time is the time you use for self-care or you use to strategize about self-care. The other problem we have is that so many people have been taught that self-care hurts. Let's see, eating lots of raw kale. Nobody really likes raw kale. Going to the gym and getting on a treadmill and sweating while some kind of TV blares. No one really likes that, but we know it's good for us. In fact, most of the things that we think of as self-care come from puritanical sort of self-flagellation. And that's one reason we tend to shy away from it. But when you realize that things like meditation, things like going for a walk, are profoundly important for self-care, even things like going out and spending time with friends. That's what self-care is, and self-care is supposed to be fun, it's supposed to taste good, and it's supposed to feel good. And all of a sudden, your problem with saying no goes away. When we get into advanced breathing exercises, breath is one of the most powerful drugs out there. You can put yourself in incredibly altered states with breathing. Breath is a really powerful drug. So powerful, in fact, that in the 1960s, a licensed psychiatrist named Stan Groff treated 3,000 patients with pharmaceutical grade LSD. And he had incredible breakthroughs in his patients. And when LSD was made illegal and the pharmaceutical companies stopped making it, he said, well, I don't want to stop helping people. What can I do? So he looked into Ayurvedic and yoga breathing techniques and found one that creates an altered state similar to something as powerful as an illegal drug. And what he found using this breath work was the creation of the field of transpersonal psychology. And had the honor of interviewing Dr. Grof on Bulletproof Radio and even hosting an event with him where we had 150 people sitting in a room doing breathing exercises led by Stan Grof's team. He laid on the floor, and listen to some movie soundtrack kind of music, evocative music, and you breathe in a certain way. And after a few minutes, you leave your body and you have profound experiences, really deep healing experiences that are even hard to explain. I did this first when I was 30 years old and just realized I had no idea that was always in here. So that's at one end of the spectrum of what you can do with breathing exercises. all the way to the other end of the spectrum, which is you're sitting in a stoplight and you're feeling stressed. So you want to do a box breath. So you breathe in for five seconds, hold your breath for five seconds, breathe out slowly for five seconds, and if you want to get good at it, hold your breath empty for five seconds. But just breathing in a little box like that is something that SWAT teams do before they go in on a raid. It's something that the Navy SEALs do after a raid. This is really powerful stuff and it's Breathing is really incredible for controlling your brain, but more specifically controlling the other systems in your body that are so carefully attuned to the world around us. Nootropics are cognitive enhancing substances, and there's two classes of nootropics. One of them is natural, usually plant-based compounds that research shows increases different facets of cognitive function. The second category is pharmaceutical drugs. These are actual things made by pharmaceutical companies that are not present in Mother Nature, but some of them can have profound effects on how your brain functions. The most famous one, Modafinil, got me on Nightline about eight years ago, where they came to my house and I said, Guys, I took Modafinil every day for eight years, and it saved my career. It made my meditation better when I measured it with an EEG machine, and it allowed me to feel more like myself so I could literally go to business school at Wharton while working full-time at a startup that was successful. And not saying that was a wise thing to do looking back on it, but what I can tell you is that where my brain was without that modafinil, I would have probably fired myself. I would have not functioned. And what I found after using this for eight years and developing Bulletproof Coffee, developing the Bulletproof lifestyle, learning how to meditate, doing neurofeedback, heart rate variability, all the different technologies of biohacking that when I stopped taking modafinil and I kept using the plant-based compounds, some of which I formulated into various supplements, my brain actually works the same on and off of it. It is a very small difference now, but there was a long period of time when modafinil was the difference between success and not success. So for students, here's my advice. you don't need most of the pharmaceuticals. In fact, your brain isn't even done baking until you're 24. Your prefrontal cortex, that part of your brain that's responsible for your thinking, for your human thoughts, it doesn't finish growing until you're 24. So starting pharmaceuticals that could have a profound impact on that isn't a wise choice. So if you're in school, don't do Adderall, which isn't even a nootropic, it's just a stimulant. Don't do things like modafinil, even though it's really tempting. And consider Mother Nature's original smart drugs. Number one would be coffee. And coffee works really, really well as nootropic. The number two, and this is going to be very controversial, and I'm going to say this, it is not without risk, and this is not an excuse to smoke or even to vape. But if you're studying for finals and you have nothing else to do, oral nicotine, like the bad tasting lozenges or gum, something like that, is the other plant-based compound that has shown itself in many studies to increase cognitive function. You don't want high doses, you don't want to do it every day, never smoke, never vape. Those are not things I'm talking about and don't do it every day or you'll get addicted. But those are examples of plant-based smart drugs. Now, What would happen if you went deeper in the research? It turns out there's about a dozen other things that are shown in some studies to work, but here's the deal. For your brain, it may or may not work. Another class of nootropics that I write about in Game Changers that's very potent is called the racetam family. And piracetam has been around for 60 years. It is a pharmaceutical, but it's a neuroprotective one that probably makes your brain last longer. I've been on it for about 25 years now. And I really like how I function on it. However, I know people who don't feel anything, and I know people where it actually makes them feel worse, which is why if you try any one of the classes of compounds in that family, which you can buy online and which have a long track record, well, try them one at a time. Don't take a random mix of a bunch of different ones. You're less likely to get the results you want. Mother Nature really doesn't like things to stay static. And this is why moving your body, sometimes eating, sometimes not eating is so important, why temperature variations are important. To your brain, flat and unchanging equals death. And one of the ways we solve that problem is through curiosity. And when you work on things, you ponder, you wonder, you create, It does things to create neuroplasticity in your brain and to stimulate new synapses to grow. And if you stop doing that, you literally can get brain atrophy where your body will say, I'm not using these neurons anymore. I'm not using these synaptic connections. I'll put that to better use. So staying curious and doing things like solving puzzles is really good for you. But the stuff that drives the brain to improve the most isn't very fun. Just like if you want to get swole and put on a lot of muscle, you pick up really heavy things and it doesn't feel very good when you do it, but you like the results. Well, if you push your brain to do things it doesn't want to do that are hard to do, you can get much greater improvements in your ability to change things. You can even do things like change the amount of working memory you have. The problem is that you feel like such a failure doing these frustrating, challenging things that most people give up before they get the results. However, it's right there for you to do. If only you have enough willpower. And I think willpower mostly comes from coffee. In game changers, when I did all this research, I thought some of these people who've become massively successful had a really big impact on the world, like Mark. They would have said, I really wanted financial success. I wanted money. I wanted fame. I wanted power. I stood out. Not one of more than 450 people I've interviewed ever said that was one of their top three pieces of advice. Instead, they focused on personal growth, on being a good human being, on integrity. One Nobel Prize winner who I spoke with was 94 years old, Eric Kendall. He said, well, my first piece of advice would be have a good wife. And he's talked about how his relationship over about 60, maybe 65 years had supported him to the point that he was 94 and actively doing research right next Central Park in New York City. And you look at that and go, this is a guy who literally changed the world with his discoveries around neuroplasticity, and he cared about his wife, not about money and power. There's a strange correlation between muscle mass in your legs and your brain size and cognitive function. So you could argue that the muscles exist to carry around the brain. But on the flip side, if your brain isn't doing very well, you're less likely to have muscles. So what scientists have figured out is, you know what? Do something that makes you have muscles throughout your body because it will be reflected in your cognitive function and in your brain health. The kind of exercise that puts on muscle the fastest, whether you're a man or a woman, doesn't take very much time at all. It's just not very fun. It turns out that flopping those pink weights up and down a lot doesn't really do anything for your brain. what you want to do to put on muscle is you want to lift up something that's so heavy that you can only lift up a few times and then your body won't do it anymore. If you do that once a week, you can do it with your body weight, some push-ups, pull-ups if you have access to something to do that, even just air squats. Those are the things that drive the most muscles in the least amount of time, which is going to drive you to have a younger brain. A while back, my dear friend Mark, which is one of my favorite people on earth, called, and he looked ghastly. He was not doing well biologically. He lost weight. His brain was foggy. He was stressed, and I was worried about him. And we talked, and Mark is a very knowledgeable functional medicine guy. And I said, what the heck is going on? And he was looking at all sorts of tests, and I said, Mark, you've got to look at toxic mold. Do an air test, see if that's what it is. Because what I'm seeing here, this broad swath of symptoms, it's so common. in toxic mold. And I know this because I grew up in a house that had toxic mold. My brain was poisoned by toxic mold. One of the reasons I weighed 300 pounds was toxic mold. I even filmed a documentary called Moldy about toxic mold and interviewed doctors like Mark who'd been taken down by toxic mold, as well as doctors who had healed themselves or healed others like Mark has done. And what you find out from toxic mold is that it comes in and it poisons its ancient enemy. What does mold hate? Bacteria. That's where penicillin comes from. It's a mold toxin, just like the toxins that can poison us today. Our bodies are powered by ancient bacteria called mitochondria. So some species of mold make really nasty chemicals that slow down your body's ability to make energy and cells, which leads to inflammation in the brain and elsewhere. So When you're in a house that has a toxic mold, or even if you've been exposed at work, you come home and you lay down and you go to sleep and you wake up and you feel hungover. And you didn't really get much sleep that night. And then you start getting sinus infections, you get frequent bruising, nosebleeds, huge amounts of emotional symptoms where you yell at people you love. But the symptoms are so all over the place, neurological buzzing in your legs or your arm hurts or you get sore joints, nothing explainable, rashes. so you go to the doctor and the doctor says, well, someone with this many symptoms, clearly they're not sick, they're crazy. And they try to give you Prozac because we are not taught in medical school that one thing in the environment at a parts per billion concentration can completely wreck your biology. And the way it does that is by hitting you at the power plants, so the energy that causes you to make healthy skin so you don't have wrinkles, the stuff that gives you enough neurotransmitters, it's all just off kilter. And the good news is that you can recover. I have a scan of my brain from about 2000 and it shows holes in my brain and the diagnosis was toxic brain damage from chemical exposure. I literally had a brain that wasn't working right because of toxic mold. And when I looked at my brain scan 15 years later, what I found was a brain that didn't have holes anymore. So you can grow back from this, but I learned how to get rid of the toxins the same way that Mark is. And what's frightening to me is that there is a clear and present link from mold toxins in our environment and our food and cancer, cardiovascular disease, and especially Alzheimer's disease. So we have, according to my calculations, at least 100 million structures in the US that are affected by toxic mold right now, and people think there's nothing they can do because they can't afford to move. One of the things that I've done to help solve this problem, I started a company called HomeBiogic, and it's a natural probiotic that you spray around your house. You can't tell it's there, and it eats toxic mold as its fuel source. In soil, we have healthy bacteria that eat toxic mold, and then they come to an equilibrium. In your home, you have no bacteria, so when a few mold spores and a little bit of moisture comes in, it can grow in the drywall, and suddenly you wake up and you just feel like a zombie. I don't want that to happen to my kids. I don't want that to happen to anyone. It is truly horrific and it happened to Mark, this fantastic human being, and it's not okay. So we've got to fix the way we make our houses. We've got to raise awareness that if you can see or smell mold, it is a clear and present risk to your health and even your survival for some people, certainly to your longevity and to your brain. And that there's things you can do, whether it's an air filter, whether it's fixing ventilation or spraying, homeopathic around, you got to get on top of that stuff because toxic mold can really take away the quality of your life if it doesn't take away your life itself. We oftentimes think about how do we support our bodies? How do we get more energy? How do we do these things? Oftentimes the simplest thing is to stop doing what makes you weak. So it's not about doing more, it's actually about stop the bad stuff before you do the good stuff. In the case of toxic mold, you get away from it. You either remove yourself from it or you remove it from your environment. and then you go through and you clean out the poisons that it leaves behind in your body. The biggest environmental threats to us right now are certainly number one, toxic mold. It's a mother nature made toxin, but it's made far more aggressive by our use of pesticides and herbicides that change soil chemistry. The second big thing that's happening is toxic metals, things like aluminum, mercury, lead, cadmium, nickel, even thallium, they're showing up in blood tests everywhere because we've been burning a lot of coal for a long time and it goes up into the air and it comes down in rain and it's everywhere. So as we age, these build up in our system. So unless you're doing something to help your body let go of those metals, to get rid of the mold toxins and to reduce the amount that you take in, well, over time you're much more likely to have problems. An example there is lead. The EPA used to say you could have 20 parts per million of lead and it was safe. They said, oh, we were wrong. It's 10. And then a few years later, oh, we were wrong. It's five. And now they basically said, you know, the EPA hasn't said this, but scientists doing the research have said there is no safe level of lead. Anytime you can reduce lead exposure, you reduce your chances of having a heart attack very dramatically. This is just one of those toxins. So we've got mold, We've got metals and then what's next? And what's next is glyphosate and other pesticides and herbicides. Glyphosate in particular is a really big problem because we spray it everywhere on this incredible story that, oh, it won't affect humans because it only affects bacteria. Newsflash, you are made out of bacteria. They're called mitochondria. Newsflash, your gut is full of bacteria that you rely on that affect how you think, how you feel, how you make energy. how fat you'll be, how thin you'll be, how fertile you'll be, they're affected by glyphosate. The other thing that's happening with glyphosate is that your body makes collagen, this precious molecule throughout your body. Your joints are made of it, your skin, your hair. And I've studied collagen a lot because Bulletproof is the company that put collagen on the market as an important protein to eat. Every time you see collagen in a recipe, that was based on research and learning that I did about collagen. So, given that this is so important, the amino acid glycine that makes up your collagen, it's called glyphosate because it has a glycine molecule. Your body will pick up glyphosate and build your skin, including this stuff, which then can cause free radicals in your body. So it's a really good idea to avoid exposure to all pesticides in your life, but I would do it in order. metals, pesticides. When I was studying game changers and writing this book about it, it took years of interviewing people on Bulletproof Radio. And what I found was that not a lot of people would talk about sex on the radio. I can't imagine why. But it turns out when you go back in time even further, whether you're looking in India, you're looking in China, you're looking in even ancient medieval Europe. What you find is that there were various fields of alchemy, people studying immortality, studying how we could be superhuman way before we had the idea of comic book superhumans. And all of these practices included some sort of plant medicine, some sort of diet, some sort of movement, some sort of breathing, some sort of meditation, and sex. And it turns out that sex is one of the three primary things that we are wired to do even if our brains aren't present. you run away from things that might kill you, you eat everything so you don't starve, and if you have anything left over after that, you make sure you have a lot of sex because if you don't do it, the species will not survive. That's why it's hardwired into us at a cellular level. And for us to deny sex or say, oh, it's not important, or, you know, it's just some sort of a primal thing, it takes away from the spiritual nature of it. Game changers. I did find a few people who had, for instance, looked at what happens during orgasm in your brain on an fMRI machine that's looking at metabolic activity in the brain. And if you think meditation is really powerful for you, let me tell you, orgasm is even more powerful for you. So by taking sex out of sort of the, the bedroom where no one's going to talk about it and saying, this is an absolute requirement. for happy, healthy, successful, connected people with enough oxytocin, this neurotransmitter of trust and love and connection, if you don't have love in your life, or you maybe don't know how to orgasm, or you've always associated it with feelings of fear and shame and regret, or whatever other story you have going on, this will radically limit your ability to show up in the world. the people who would talk about it on camera, on Bulletproof Radio, were pretty open about the profound effect it has on them and on others. Even guys like John Gray, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, has profound knowledge about what happens during sex and even tells you here's what sex does at different times of the month for the woman in a relationship because there are times when it creates one mental state, times when it creates another one. So, the gist of this is that you can use sex as a tool to become a better human being and to deepen your relationships and that it doesn't have to be carnal and unpleasant or cheap, but that it's actually something that your brain needs and that every cell in your body is wired to need. And if you don't feed that need sometimes, your body feels it. It knows it. And just like having a tiger right here, that could eat you, that's going to create stress. Well, if your body thinks that our species is going to die because you never have sex, that's going to create stress too. About two billion years ago, there was some kind of an organism floating around in the ocean, and there were some bacteria floating around. And we like to think we were this organism, and we harnessed these ancient bacteria so that they could become our power plants, which would allow us to be cells that could actually make energy from food and air. What a powerful idea. Well, the real narrative is more like this. Two billion years ago, there were these bacteria floating around and they saw a cell and they said, Hey, let's move in and take over and never stop. And that's you. That's us. That's every animal and really every plant on the planet. All of us are based on, in every cell, this fusion between a cell and ancient bacteria. And since those bacteria are the things that sense the environment around us, and decide how much energy to make based on the food, the light, the air, the sound, the vibration, and everything else they can pick up in the world around us, including your fear and your mental state, your emotional state. They pick that up too, and they decide, do I make energy for folding new proteins so you can stay young, or do I make extra cortisol so you can run away from what I think is a tiger even though I'm a dumb bacteria? So today there are way more of these ancient bacteria in your body than there are cells in your body. of them than there are bacteria in your gut. They make decisions on a microsecond by microsecond basis, and they only care about three things. Don't die right now by getting killed by something scary, eat everything, and have sex with everything else. Except there's one other F word other than flee, feast, and well, I'm not going to say the other one. The other F word is friend. And that's because if you've ever seen yogurt or kombucha or cheese, when bacteria get together, they actually help each other. They are hardwired when those first three needs are met to connect with other ones to specialize and to create something greater than a single bacteria. And we're wired the same way because we come from the same thing. We automatically do the things that are going to keep us from being unsafe. Sometimes they're the right things, sometimes they're the wrong things. We automatically eat oftentimes the wrong things and too much We oftentimes have sex, usually with the right people. And that last F-word is the one that makes me believe that we're actually wired at a cellular level to be kind to each other. It's just really hard to be kind to each other when you got all the garbage from the first three rules sitting around. And all that garbage comes from your mitochondria. They're the puppet masters. The good news to all of this is that what do they listen to? They listen to the world around you. What do you have control of in a way that no one has ever had control of in all of human history? The world around you. Do you want it brighter? Make it brighter. You want it darker? Make it darker. You want it hotter? You want it colder? You want more water? You want more sugar? You want more protein? You want more fat? You want more vegetables? This is achievable in a way that 100 years ago, the king of the most powerful country on Earth could not do. And so you live in a world of incredible plenty. where you can tell your body what you want it to do. And those little bastards, those little mitochondria, they will listen. And you can sit there and you can meditate and tell yourself, I'm in a place of safety and calm and focus, and they will respond and make more energy for your brain. Or you can not meditate and sit in a place of stress and fear, and they'll make the hormones for stress and fear for you because they're obedient little puppet masters. And that's why writing the whole book Headstrong really changed my life because it made me understand why we behave the way we do. It's not always us. It's ancient programming from billions of years ago.

Digital dementia where, yeah, how many phone numbers did we know growing up? We knew all of them, right? But how many phone numbers do you know now?

That's true.

And it's hard and people listening are like, well, I don't want to memorize 500 phone numbers and honestly, either do I, but we've lost the ability to remember one.

I mean, even directions, I mean, I, you have to find your way through a map. you'd figure out where you're going and then you would actually memorize the route. Right. And I just was in New Zealand, living with my wife and I like to play tennis every day. So I was playing tennis every day and I had my Google Maps. I used to stick it up and I went to the same place every day but I actually needed the map because I wasn't really paying attention except to the map and I easily could have found my way around. It wasn't that many turns but I didn't really care to pay attention and.

It does have an effect because unless you use it, you lose it. Exactly, because our brains act more like a muscle than anything. It's use it or lose it. If I put my arm in a sling for a year, it wouldn't grow stronger. It wouldn't even stay the same. It would atrophy. And a lot of our brains, digital dementia is where we're outsourcing our brains to our smart devices. It's keeping our calendars, our to-dos, it's telling us how to get from here to there. They're not getting early. I heard recently that we're not getting early detection of brain aging challenges. And one of the reasons why is GPS. Like if you're relying on technology to take you from here to there, you're not realizing when you would have a memory lapse. So you're not going to get checked out and get looked at. And so these are the challenges, digital dementia. And I'm not saying- and by the.

Way, in terms of medical research on actual dementia, people who use their brains get less dementia.

Right.

Are learning and lifelong learners who read, who do mental puzzles, who do brain learning exercises, who follow the work that you do, don't get dementia at the same rate as everybody else. And it can stave it off because.

It'S just, you know what it is if it's not just about mental intelligence. You know, in this book I show you how to learn languages, how to be able to focus, how to read faster, and remember facts, you know, figures, all that information. But it's also about mental fitness and mental health. and then that's a conversation that I'm glad that we're having because more and more people, because our brains control everything, right? You write whole books on brain health and optimizing our brain's potential. So digital dementia is a challenge that wasn't there previous generations. And the last one I would say is this thing called digital deduction, meaning that Now with technology, and again, technology is not good or bad, and in a lot of ways it serves us. It helps us to be able to connect, it helps us to be able to learn, to be able to inspire, to be able to educate ourselves. But digital deduction is where technology is just doing all the thinking for us. We no longer have to use critical thinking or use our own reasoning or using our own analysis because everything is being spoon-fed to us. Everything is like, this is what you should be buying or reading or anything. It's all these algorithms that are there. And so in this book, you know, to overcome those four super challenges, those that we have, and I think through challenges could come change and positive progress where sometimes, you know, in the hero's journey and this book is written in the hero's journey as a, as an homage to Joseph Campbell's work, you know, where there's a call to adventure and we leave the ordinary world that we're in to this more extraordinary world and we face trials and we find mentors and you learn techniques and strategies and then you come home and then you bring that back in the return with this magical treasure of elixir. Because I believe the life we live are the lessons that we teach. But it starts with the brain. And you and I have had this conversation where metaphorically our brain is like a computer. You have the hardware which is you want to optimize that because more people upgrade their phones and they upgrade their brain. You need stress management, you need to sleep, you need to be around positive peer groups because as you've mentioned, it's not just your biological networks or your neurological networks, it's our social networks because who we spend time with is who you become. Which is why it's so important to really do an audit around the people that you give them the power over how you feel and how you think, because you have these things called mirror neurons where we're always imitating the things that are around us. When you watch a movie or you watch sports, you could feel what the players or the actors are feeling because that's how we learn things. And whoever we're spending time with on a regular basis, that's why I watch.

Tennis a lot so I can get.

Better to beat you through osmosis, because we're always adapting and adopting the the language patterns of people around us, the habits, the routines, the behaviors, they say who you spend time with is who you become. That be careful. If you're spending time with nine broke people, you're going to be number 10. But all these things play a role and especially the thing that you're on a mission for is food because what you eat matters especially for your gray matter. So that's all on the hardware part and what a lot of the book is about is really the software of it. Like, you know, how to be able to read faster, how to be able to pick up another language, how to memorize poetry or your, or your, that TED Talk or that toast you have to give at the wedding or to give a sales presentation or have, how to have laser Focus so you could get through your, your to-do list, all the things that, you know, we've really honed over the past three decades.

I mean, that all sounds fun. People are like, well, so why do I should care about speed reading or do my to-do list? But is a bigger framework here because everything that happens in our life is a result of how we grow. And how we grow is connected to how we learn. And learning literally physically changes our brain, it changes our intellect, it changes the possibilities we have in our life. And there's an old Chinese proverb that says, Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere. What we learn becomes part of who we are and the tools that we can access them are so important and you teach those tools. You know, I read an article in the New York Times recently about, you know, Jewish community and why there's so many Nobel Prize winners and scientists and leaders in society and part of the reason is that we were persecuted, we were slaves, we were chased around the world, there was the Inquisition in Europe, we were chased out of Europe, chased out of Russia. I mean, and so the only the only thing that we had was knowledge. No one can take that away from you. It's portable, it's in your head, and it's why Jews have focused on that. I remember my mother, the drumbeat was education, education, learning, learning, learning. Why? Ask why, learn and learn and learn. And I think that's really what your gift is to humanity, is reawakening people's enthusiasm to grow and learn, because the result is possibility, advancement in your life, is being able to actually have deep and connected relationships and do the things you want.

An investment in knowledge pays the most dividends, especially in today's age where we live in the millennium of the mind. Nobody who's listening this is paid for purely their physical strength. It's our mental strength, our ability to solve problems, our ability to be creative, our ability to imagine new, new things. You know, it's not our muscle power, it's our mind power. And really, the faster you can learn, the faster you could earn. Not just financially, that that's obvious, but all the treasures of our life. The reason why I'm so excited about this conversation is because let's say to the person who's listening to this right now, if there was a genie could grant you any one wish, any one wish, just one wish, what would you wish for? you would wish for millions of wishes, right? Infinite wishes. That would be the hack, if you will. Well, if I was your learning genie...

But in Latin, genie said you can't wish for more wishes.

Right, right. But if I was your learning genie and I could grant you any one wish to learn any subject or any skill, but just one, what would the equivalent be for asking for infinite wishes? In that same spirit, it would be, I would want to learn how to learn. Because if you can learn how to learn, everything gets easier. You could grant all your own wishes. It could be Mandarin, martial arts, music, marketing, management, anything that you're excited about.

-Memorize the entire stock market.

-Exactly. Anything that would be able to serve you better, it's a meta skill. They call it meta learning. Learn the science of learning how to learn. and that really, I believe, is that if knowledge is power, learning is our superpower, and it's a superpower we all have. So in this book, Limitless, it used to be when I wrote this a book purely on methods, all the things that I was telling you about, on how to remember people's names, on how to give speeches without using notes, on how to remember facts and figures and to vantage your memory.

Why haven't I hired hire you yet to work with me.

Right. But what I realized was...

I think Jim's my friend. I'm like, oh, but I didn't forget.

Like, you know, we need to do this. So one of the things is people know what to do, but they don't always do what they know, right? And this is the reason I wrote this book is because just knowing something is not enough. I believe one of the lies, and I talk about all the lies in this book around learning, like seven lies specifically that keep us from moving forward. And one of the lies is that knowledge is power. People believe, we've heard this so long ago, that knowledge is power. I even said it just a few minutes ago, right? But if you think about it, it's not really true. Knowledge alone is not power. Knowledge applied becomes power. Knowledge is potential power, but when you use it, it becomes power. And so here's the thing, all the books and podcasts, online courses, conferences, none of it works unless we work. And I've always been curious, what's the difference that makes the difference? What's the difference that takes the common sense things that you know we should do, eating whole organic foods, meditating each day, journaling, having emotional bonds and social connections. exercising. We know what to do, but we don't always do what we know because common sense is not common practice. So after I had all Mark Twain.

Said, the problem with common sense is it's not too common.

And that's the truth. So this book was all techniques and then I was like, this is great and I'll keep these here because they'll help people to advance their careers and do everything better. But then I was like, what keeps people from doing these things? things. And I created over the past three decades a model, a model that I call the Limitless Model, that really explains how to learn and achieve anything faster. And it's, if everyone could picture a Venn diagram, right, three circles that intersect.

Yeah.

Right.

So you have three circles that intersect and there are three M's and this is the key to be limitless. usually, if there's a gap between where you are and where you want to be, let's say it's a, it's a your current reality and you have this desired reality for your health or in your relationship or in your career, whatever area it happens to be. If you're not making positive progress towards it. And that's how I Define Limitless. I do not Define Limitless as being perfect. I don't, I don't believe in Perfection. Limitless is not about being perfect. It's about advancing beyond what you believe is possible. I believe the ultimate quest that we're all on is to be able to realize, reveal our fullest potential. That's what I think we're here to do. And I think it starts with learning, because learning is the grandmother, grandfather of all transformation. You can't do anything unless you learn it first. So three M's. and if you're not achieving or making progress towards your goal, usually there's a constraint and it's usually unconscious, a constraint in one of these three areas or more. So I want everyone to think about the first Circle. The first M is the M of mindset. Now, I Define mindset as these assumptions and attitudes we have about the world and ourselves. So what would fall under mindset is what you believe you deserve, what you believe you are capable of, what you believe is possible. Now, you could have that positive mindset, this growth mindset that you hear Dr. Carol Dweck talk about, versus a fixed mindset. Now, that alone is not going to get you your goals and your dreams, just having an empowering mindset. You need the second M and the second M is motivation. Now, when I say the word motivation, it's a little bit loaded because some people believe motivation is they associate it to being hyped up, getting excited for a couple of minutes while they're at that seminar jumping to music. It's kind of like that metaphor of a warm bath. It's nice in the moment and yes, I'm going to dump in a journal every day, I'm gonna do Pilates three times a week, I'm gonna eat the best food ever and in the moment you feel like that's the case but then it cools down. I'm not defining motivation like that. For me, motivation is having a purpose and I'm not talking about a life purpose, I'm talking about having a reason. So for example, I was talking to entrepreneur Tom Bilyeu and he wakes up every morning at 4 something and he works out at 5 a.m. and I was like, Do you enjoy this every single day? He's like, no, I hate, I hate working out. And 'cause some people feel like that if they're motivated about something inherently means you find joy in it. And I haven't found that to be the case. Like occasionally I do these ice baths or these cold showers to lower inflammation. It helps me reset my nervous system. I have a video online that has 10 million plus shares just on my morning routine. I don't enjoy, I hate the cold. I despise the cold. I grew up in the Northeast here and it's not for me and I've done it for years and I still don't find joy in it, but I still do it and I'm motivated to do it every single day because I have a reason. So for me, motivation has a three-step formula. Motivation for me is not about being hyped up and excited for the moment. It's about reason, right? Purpose.

What's your reason?

Yeah, having a clear reason and purpose times energy times small, simple steps. Now let me just break this down for everybody. I want you to think about something that you want to be motivated for, where the opposite in the book is procrastination. I teach people how to smash procrastination. But think about something you want to be motivated to do, something you know you should do, but you're still not doing it. Now, first, the reason is Like, for example, remembering names. A lot of people do not remember names, not because they're not capable of remembering names, because the truth is 95, if I was to ask your audience right now, who has challenges remembering names, 99% of them will say, if they're honest, I do. I'm bad at remembering names. And then I will say, okay, well, let's say Mark has a suitcase of a million dollars cash for you. If you just remember the name of the next stranger you meet. Who's going to remember that person's name for a million dollars cash, tax-free for your favorite charity? Everybody. So all of a sudden, your whole audience is full of memory experts now. So it's actually a lie, a lie, and these are the lies we tell ourselves. I'm not good at remembering names. If they're not present to it. Exactly, and you need a reason because here's the thing, not everybody remembers everyone's name, but we certainly don't forget everyone's name either. and if you reverse engineer it, you'll find that there's a method behind what looks like magic. You didn't just happen to remember the person's name. There was a motivation. There was a motive for taking action. There was a purpose.

But you've got special tricks.

How do you remember 100 people in an audience? Well, even here, and we'll go through the methods, even here, a simple trick would be asking yourself, why do I want to remember the person's name? Because a lot of people's names you remember are people you're attracted to. people who could be good for your brand or your business, right? There's an inherent motivation and so when you're meeting somebody and you want to remember their name, ask yourself, why do I want to remember the person's name? Because write this down as I know a lot of people are taking notes. Reasons reap results. If you do not have a reason to do something, you will not do it. Reasons reap rewards. And so the first part is like a lot of people, they can't get themselves to read they want to read a book a week. We know if the average person reads two or three books a year, but a book a week, 52 books a year, that will transform your life. But a lot of people can't get themselves to read 10, 15, 20 minutes a day because they're not associating themselves to the reason. But let's say they do have a clear reason. The second part of the formula besides having a purpose is energy. What keeps people from, and this is never really talked about in books, 'cause you'll get books on mindset, you'll have books on motivation, but a key element to motivation, your motive for taking action, like the proof that you're motivated is your acting, right? And so what I'm thinking about is energy. Some people could have a clear reason to read, to work out, but they have no energy. Like they didn't sleep the night before, right? Or they're super stressed, so they lack the vitality to do that action. and that's keeping them from doing those sales calls or taking that road trip or to do the things that they need to be able to do. And so you need to look at energy. So in here I talk about 10 ways of jumpstarting your mental vitality, right? Which includes maximizing your sleep, stress management, and I quote you in there also a lot about the brain foods. Because as we talked about on your show, what you eat matters, especially for your gray matter.

Right?

And then once you have, you're motivated, see my question is always critical thinking. I'm thinking, okay, is the person, if I'm programming this robot, for example, if it has a reason, is it going to do it? Not necessarily. It needs energy. Okay, so let's say it has a reason and energy. Is it motivated yet? The one thing I could think of that it won't take action on is because the thing that they're thinking about is too big. Meaning that you think about, oh, I want to start a business. Like how do you like that's not, that's not a task or a step, right? So the third part are small, simple steps because this is motivation for me is about, you know, time management. This is energy management. Having a clear purpose gives you energy and clarity because something that's not clear takes away energy. You know, having energy and energized brain gives you energy. And then finally, small, simple steps require very little energy. They require very little effort. So my thing with getting people to really make functional change, like to put down this food and pick up this junk, pick up in this food, is to break it down in a small, simple step, meaning that instead of thinking your goal is to have the perfect relationship or the perfect body, how do you break it down into the smallest step where you cannot fail?

Yeah.

It's like this, you know, like the BJ Fogg framework. Exactly. So in here, we talk about reverse engineering your habits. And I take Dr. BJ Fogg, who heads the behavior lab at Stanford University, and he talks about tiny habits. He's saying, Hey, flossing your teeth, we all know it's good for your longevity. Floss one tooth. Floss one tooth. Same thing with reading. If you want to read a book a week, don't focus on that 45 minutes a day that it takes to read a book, you know, or if you learn speed reading, doing 15 minutes a day, hey, read one sentence, because nobody's gonna stop after one sentence. It's not like, oh, I gotta do this one hour soul cycle. It's like, I gotta put, I gotta.

Get myself out the door. I hate it because I hated like weightlifting and push-ups and all that stuff. I love to run and bike and tennis and all that. And I decided, okay, I want to start doing more strength stuff, so I'm gonna start with push-ups. I can do that. I'm like, well, I really can barely do 10 push-ups, but I'm gonna start and I realized, well, what do I need? Well, I'm motivated. I have a reason. I'm aging. I want to age well.

I'm motivated.

You have energy, and I have the energy. So I realized I shower pretty much every day. Okay. And I turn the shower on. It takes, like, a few minutes to warm up. So I do push-ups before I want. So the trigger is the turning the shower on, and then I do my push-ups and I want from 10 to 50 push-ups.

That'S amazing.

Just by just these little steps, and it works.

And here's the thing. It's. It's really, if you're persistent, you could achieve it. But if you're consistent, you could keep it. You could keep it. You know, I believe consistency compounds that little by little, a little becomes a lot. And that's how you create a transformation in an individual or in a culture, like the movement that you have with food fix. It's these little things that add up, that add up to big. things over time. So that's motivation.

And the third part.

And then the third circle on here, once you have the mindset and the motivation, are you getting the result? Not necessarily. What's the one thing that's missing? The third M, which is the method. The methodology. You need to know how to do it. So the mindset is the what. The motivation is the why. Your reason. And then the methods are the how. Now here's the thing, this is where the magic comes in. I want everyone to think about something they want to be more limitless about, meaning progress, make progress, make some advancements that are measurable. The minds where mindset in this Venn diagram crosses over with motivation. That's where you have something called, I call inspiration. And because I alliterate everything, three M's, there, here are your three I's. So mindset crosses over with motivation. You have inspiration. And there are books on mindset and there are books on motivation, right? And there are books on inspiration or social media posts or speakers or something. That's inspiration. Now, that doesn't mean that you're going to have the result because what are you missing? You're missing the methods, right? Now, if you have the motivation and the methods, then you have the second I where that crosses over. You have implementation. But the problem is you're doing it Right? You're motivated and you know what to do, but the ceiling in your results is your mindset. What you feel like you deserve, what you feel like you're capable of. Because all behavior is going to be belief driven. If your mindset is, I have a horrible memory, you can be motivated and know what to do and you still won't remember because the behavior will be limited by the belief.

So show me the money. What are the methods?

And then so we're getting, so in the book we show people how to, how to unravel these negative beliefs that hold them back. Now finally, where mindset crosses over with methods, that's where you have ideation. So you have inspiration, you have implementation, and then you have ideation. You have the right mindset. You have this winner growth mindset, anything is possible, I deserve it all, and you have the methods, right? But you're not motivated. So it just stays as an idea. This is ideation where people just analysis, paralysis, think about all these different things. Where all three of these intersect, where mindset, motivation, and methods intersect, where inspiration, implementation, and ideation intersect is the fourth I, which is integration. Because ultimately real transformation is a full integration. And that sweet spot where all three connect, is that limitless state.

If you loved that last video, you should check out the next one for sure on getting to the root cause of all disease.

Alzheimer's is inflammation of the brain. Like Parkinson's is inflammation of the brain. So we have to do everything we can to recognize that, not necessarily.