PNTV: Head Strong by Dave Asprey (#368)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another episode of Philosopher's Notes. TV Today, another great book, Headstrong by Dave Asprey. Headstrong, subtitled the Bulletproof Plan. To activate untapped brain energy to work smarter and think faster in just two weeks. Dave Asprey is a fascinating guy. He's the founder of Bulletproof. We did an episode on his and a note on his bulletproof diet. He is a professional biohacker and has a publicly stated goal of living to 180 years old, which I find awesome. In this book he takes all of his 10,000 plus hours of research on how to biohack our bodies and specifically our brains to optimize our brain efficiency and energy. It's packed with big ideas. As always, we've got a philosopher's note six page PDF with a 20 minute MP3 and five of my favorite big ideas here. So head strong. The first thing we need to know is that your brain is using a ton of your body's energy. 20% your total energy consumed goes to your brain. That is a lot. We just talked about oxygen as the primary source of fuel for ourselves. Well, your brain uses 20% of the oxygen that you breathe. It uses 20% of the calories you consume. So that's our first big idea. Your brain is hungry for energy. The question is, are you? Are you optimizing your underlying energy? And if not, we need to work on that because that's the source of our power. And as Dave says, he hasn't met anyone who can't up level their game. Everyone has room for those marginal gains where we can get a little bit better and explore the upper limits of our potential, which requires us to start there. Realize our brains are consuming 20% of our energy. Then he says, drill down into how your body actually creates energy. And then we discover little organelles inside each cell which are called mitochondria. If you're like me, you haven't thought much about your mitochondria since your high school or perhaps college biology class. Your mitochondria, you may recall, are the little powerhouses within every cell of your body. Now you have 15 to 70 trillion cells. And within each of those trillions of cells, you have hundreds to thousands of little mitochondria. Add that up and you have a quadrillion plus mitochondria in your body. I'm going to write that out because this is kind of fun. 13 zeros gets to 1000, not even going to have room. 6 zeros gets us to a million 9 zeros. We're at a billion 12 zeros. We're at a trillion 15 zeroes. We are officially at a quadrillion. That's how many mitochondria you have in your body. It accounts for some double digit percentage of your total weight is in your mitochondria, these little powerhouses. And guess what? Your cells range from having hundreds to thousands of these powerhouses inside them. The most important parts of your body. Those cells, like your heart, your retina and your brain, have up to 10,000 mitochondria in each cell, which is why your brain consumes 20% of your energy more than anything else in your body. A quadrillion mitochondria. And we as optimizers want to think about how we can optimize our, those little guys. Which leads us to our next big idea, which is we need to pay attention to what Dave calls kryptonite dust. This might be one of my favorite, certainly is one of my favorite big ideas, and perhaps the favorite big idea of all the ideas we've explored. This idea of kryptonite dust, I think it's a perfect metaphor to understand what's getting in the way of, of those quadrillion mitochondria crushing it for us, such that we can experience the energy we want to experience. And Dave says, look, we all know that if Lex Luthor came up to Superman and gave him a chunk of kryptonite, big old boulder of kryptonite, what would happen? Superman would be crippled immediately. Right? He'd lose all of his power. But if Lex Luthor wanted to be creative about it, he'd go into a little lab and, and he'd break that kryptonite down into dust. And then he'd sneak into Superman's house, in his office, Clark Kent's office, right. And he'd sprinkle a little dust around his house. Now, that dust is not going to immediately cripple him, but as you aggregate and compound the accumulation of that dust over an extended period of time, Superman's powers are suddenly going to become, or slowly going to become a little bit diminished. A little bit diminished. A little bit diminished. He's still going to be able to fly around and save people, but he's going to feel a little off and he's going to get to a point where that new offness becomes a new normal. He's just feeling a little lethargic. He can't quite get it together the way he used to be able to. The kryptonite dust is working itself on him. And Dave makes the point that that's what's happening to us. And he also makes the really important point that that the most powerful way to improve your performance isn't to start doing something new, right? So it's not to eat more broccoli or to exercise more per se, or to do any new particular activity. It's to stop doing. If you want to boost your performance the fastest. It's to stop doing the things that are destroying your performance. It's to take a vacuum to the kryptonite dust in your life. It's those little tiny paper cuts that add up that diminish our power, and then we feel depleted, but we just accept it as a new normal. So my question for you is, thinking of these quadrillion little guys, what little tiny things do you do? Just think of three of them right now. What three things do you do currently that you just know aren't serving you? Not only do it be a big deal, but what little things do you do, right? Think about that and then maybe think about what one thing you could do that you could stop doing. We talked about this in the Plant paradox, right? His number one rule of nutrition, which applies whether you're vegan or paleo or something in between or whatever, is stop doing the things that aren't working for you. Remove that toxin from your life. Kryptonite dust style. It's exactly what the 4 dx 4 disciplines of execution guys said in relationship to our productivity. The gnats are what kill us and take us away from our wildly important goal. Get rid of the gnats, get rid of the kryptonite dust, and your mitochondria will thank you. Then if we're thinking about mitochondria, we're thinking about the tiny little things, right, that we need to optimize that add up to the big things we want to think about our fundamentals. Dave walks us through all the different ways that we can eat, we can move, we can sleep to optimize our performance. And of course, we can breathe, we can focus our minds, etc. So again, run through your inventory. Eating, moving, sleeping, focusing your mind, breathing. What can you do to optimize? Again, we just talked about this in breathe. 20% of your brain. Your brain is using 20% of the oxygen you consume. Well, practice optimizing your breathing. Breathe through your nose deeply. Expand on the inhale, squeeze on the exhale. Right? Belissa Vranich style, eating. Dave's number one tip there, sugar. Eliminate it it's been scientifically proven to reduce neurogenesis, the creation of new neurons in your brain. Want to kill that process? Eat a lot of sugar, eat a lot of processed food. This isn't rocket science again. It's the simple little things, kryptonite dust style, that are diminishing our well being. And of course, moving is going to help sleeping. When does your mitochondria clean house? When you're sleeping. Therefore, prioritize getting a good night of sleep if you want to optimize and actualize your potential. Fifth and final big idea is water and light. So Dave has tons of little bio hacks that we can implement into our life. Two of them that I found most interesting and impactful. People are always wondering how I apply these ideas to my life were water and light. So first light. Actually, first water. So Dave tells us there's something called EZ water, exclusion zone water. Apparently there's something in between a liquid and a gas, right? So there's something in between a liquid and a gas that is called exclusion zone. And that's relevant within our bodies and our mitochondria because apparently some of the ways that energy is transmitted, or whatever you call it transferred via little microtubules is via this exclusion zone water, between the gas and the liquid. And there are certain things we can do to optimize our exclusion zone water. Things like being in the sunlight, direct sunlight, without sunglasses and. And without excessive clothing for a few minutes a day triggers some of that exclusion zone stuff, right? Sitting in a sauna is another way to do it. An infrared sauna, I had done that periodically. I now do that every single day. We got the sauna that Ben Greenfield has, another biohacker extraordinarian coach of mine. Google Ben Greenfield's sauna, infrared sauna, and you'll see the science of why saunas are awesome. And the sauna that we now use and that I sit in every afternoon. So exclusion zone water. And then when I think of water, I also think of Dr. Mercola in his book Effortless Healing. His number one way to effortlessly heal is to improve your consumption of water. Get good water, spring water, etc. And he makes the point, it's not just what you're drinking, it's also the water that shows up on your skin. Your skin is your body's largest organ. It's sucking in water kind of like you're drinking it, right? So if you're showering in unclean water, hyperchlorinated water, with all the chemicals that are found in Normal water supplies. Something as simple as getting a water filter would be a really, really good idea. We actually just got a housewide water filtration system to take care of that. Now all the water is fine. We have little shower heads. But anyway, water matters. Exclusion zone is fascinating. Get out in the sun if you're really feeling it. Find an infrared sauna, et cetera. And then junk light is the other part of this little idea. So we all know that we can survive on junk food, but we're not going to thrive on junk food. But I'd never heard of junk light before studying Dave's work. Junk light, right? So think of fluorescent lighting. No one enjoys junk being in a fluorescently lit room or feels great afterwards. No one's gonna say, yeah, I felt so uplifted hanging out in those fluorescent lights. That's junk light. We can survive in it, but we're not gonna thrive in it. And when you're in environments with junk light or you're exposing yourself to too much blue light all day, every day, which is one of the things that makes fluorescent light. So junk e. Your eyes are gonna be strained, your mitochondria going to be strained, and your brain is going to be strained. Dave also talks about blue light. He's all about blocking that blue light at night via some glasses you can get. You can find him on his website or on Amazon. Just simple orange colored construction glasses. It's what I used to rock. And I have some of Dave's glasses as well. But basically you want to moderate the amount of junk light you're exposed to. Another hack to deal with that, to install flux on your computer. If you haven't done that yet, Google Flux or F Lux. You'll find this little software you can use to dim the blue light on your screens. IPhones. I don't know if Androids have this now, but you can actually go into night mode. It's the same thing. It basically reduces the blue light, which is going to be stressful on your eyes and mess up your melatonin that you want to get right at night. I actually haven't turned on my phone in a few weeks, but my phone and Alexander's phone has night mode on all day. We reduce the blue light all day. I don't need that blue light at any point, certainly not at night, but I don't need it at any point. So we actually set night mode from I think it was like 12:01am to 11:59pm all day. It's in night mode. So you Might want to think about that as you reduce your junk light. Get your good water in. Focus on your fundamentals. Eating, moving, sleeping. If you got to get one thing done eating wise, reduce, remove, eliminate. Whatever you got to do to get control of the sugar consumption. Remember the kryptonite dust. Our challenges aren't so much with the dragons, they're with the gnats. It's not with the big block of kryptonite that's obvious and easy to avoid. It's the little things that we need to pay attention to that lead up to the big things. Mitochondria, the little organelles that are the power centers within ourselves. The trillions of cells, each of which have hundreds to thousands of these guys. A quadrillion 15 zeros. That's a lot. Your brain needs them to function well. So what can you do to optimize this a little bit today? Well, one thing. Did you get out of this little session together today that you can go apply to your life aggregate? Compound those little optimizations over an extended period of time and get your head strong in your overall life, optimized and actualized in service to the world. Let's do this. Have another awesome day. See ya. Isn't it a bit odd that we went from math to science to history but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule. Of course it's too late to go back and change that and you're too busy to read full time to catch up. But if you're like us, you're all about optimizing your life so you can actualize your potential. So imagine this. Imagine having someone read the best books on how to optimize your life and pull out the big ideas that can really change your life. You know those sections, you underline an asterisk and mark all up. Then imagine that guy me connecting those awesome ideas to other great books and helping you actually apply the wisdom to your life today. Well, that's what I do with something we call Philosopher's notes where I've distilled hundreds of great books into 20 minute super practical summaries. Then imagine me taking the absolute best big ideas from those great books and sharing them with you in hour long Optimal Living 101 classes on everything from productivity, purpose and confidence to nutrition, goal setting and conquering procrastination. Helping you optimize every facet of your life so you can actualize your potential. You've got a personal trainer. I'm kind of like your personal philosopher. Ancient wisdom, modern science and practical tools. That's what our optimized membership program is all about. If you're feeling it, we'd love to have you join us.