EXPERTS ON EXPERT: Dave Asprey

[0] Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert.

[1] I'm your friend, Dax Shepherd.

[2] I'm joined by your girlfriend, Monica Padman.

[3] That's right.

[4] And we are, where are we?

[5] We are on set of Bless This Mess in my trailer.

[6] That's right.

[7] And today we have a gentleman by the name of Dave Asprey.

[8] He's an American entrepreneur, an author, and a biohacker, founded Bulletproof 360 and Bulletproof Nutrition.

[9] And he created one of the world's first working cloud computers.

[10] Most people, I feel like, have tried Bulletproof coffee, so they'll know him.

[11] Yeah, so, you know, this is another expert that has strong opinions on what we should eat and not eat.

[12] And so if you would like to read something Dave has written, he wrote Upgraded Chef, the Bulletproof Diet, Headstrong, and Game Changers.

[13] His new book, Superhuman, The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and maybe even Live Forever is out October 8th.

[14] So please enjoy Dave Asprey.

[15] Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to armchair expert early and ad free right now.

[16] Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.

[17] Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts.

[18] As someone who studied anthropology but is now sober, one of my great regrets is that I never went down and just chewed coca leaf like my professors did.

[19] because now I'm a little, I don't know how I feel about me chewing coca leaf.

[20] What do you think?

[21] Could you fill in for my sponsor and tell me, having chewed it?

[22] You know, it is not going to get you high in at all.

[23] But you can drink matte de coca, which is when they take the leaves and they make a tea out of them.

[24] Uh -huh.

[25] I don't think, and I know a lot about like roots of addiction and stuff like that.

[26] I don't think biochemically it's going to push that button.

[27] Uh -huh.

[28] But who knows?

[29] But what is.

[30] I was going to say, you should talk to my wife.

[31] She's a drug and alcohol addiction emergency medicine specialist from the Karolinska Institute.

[32] She would know.

[33] I kind of feel like if you're an alcoholic and you have four drops of vanilla extract in your coffee, it's only four drops.

[34] It's probably not going to trigger you.

[35] But if you drink the bottle of vanilla extract, it's going to trigger you.

[36] Yes.

[37] I feel like it's there.

[38] But who the hell knows?

[39] Well, one time I was like out somewhere and I was drinking in Odules and I ran into a dude from AA.

[40] And he's like, oh, you're drinking near beer?

[41] And I'm like, yeah.

[42] And he's like, well, you know what they say?

[43] When you're near beer, you're near.

[44] beer.

[45] And I was like, okay, well, let me tell you why this isn't beer, because I don't buy cocaine after three.

[46] Like, that's how I know for me, whatever definition you've crafted, but for me, I don't, I've never bought cocaine after drinking three odules.

[47] So that's my bar for whether it's triggering or not.

[48] All right.

[49] I love it, man. You know yourself well.

[50] And where do you live?

[51] Vancouver Island on a small phone.

[52] Oh, you do.

[53] You're not Canadian, though, are you?

[54] No. You're not.

[55] What brought you up to Vancouver?

[56] I thought my wife's medical license was going to work up there.

[57] So I've been there for 10 years.

[58] We have a, you know, pigs and sheep and kids in school.

[59] And it's, you know, a straight flight down west coast.

[60] And I can, I can live on the ocean for one percent of the cost of Malibu.

[61] I, um, I took a cruise out of there.

[62] And then, and I believe I passed it.

[63] And it looked very idyllic and utopian.

[64] And I've got bald eagles in my backyard.

[65] Oh, wow.

[66] And on the farm, like, looking out over Salt Spring Island and forest and it's, it's as idyllic as it gets.

[67] And our new place is on a 100 -foot granite cliff on a bluff, like on a point overlooking the ocean.

[68] Oh, wow.

[69] 10 minutes from the airport, 10 minutes from downtown, and 10 minutes from the cruise ship terminal that you probably went through.

[70] And it's like, it's pretty darn cool.

[71] Are you a citizen there?

[72] No, I have a green card.

[73] You have a green card.

[74] Yeah.

[75] And what happens with medical stuff?

[76] Are you...

[77] It's all free.

[78] It's nuts.

[79] You can go to the doctor.

[80] Yeah, when I first moved up there, I actually got pneumonia because the rental that we had to have toxic mold just gives you pneumonia.

[81] And I went to the hospital and they did all whatever they were going to do.

[82] And this is maybe 10 years ago.

[83] And I said, where did I pay?

[84] And they're like, pay.

[85] Like, you can't even pay.

[86] It's the hospital.

[87] Like, we didn't even have a credit card machine.

[88] And literally, it was five bucks for my medication at the pharmacy.

[89] And I could not have paid more if I tried.

[90] Wow.

[91] Oh, that sounds pretty heavenly.

[92] It's awesome.

[93] Four, I'm sick, right?

[94] But if it's, you know, I have this weird thing going on, like, that'll be nine months.

[95] Right.

[96] And then you go privates.

[97] But it's not perfect, but I tell you it's better than here.

[98] Right.

[99] Yeah.

[100] That seems to be the thing people get.

[101] scared of, right?

[102] Is that they'll need some kind of very hyper -specific type of procedure that they'll wait list you for two or three years.

[103] Go over the border.

[104] And the way it is in the U .S. now, if you go through your insurance company, it's $300 ,000.

[105] And if you just pay the guy cash, it's $20 ,000.

[106] So it's the same thing.

[107] Right.

[108] Yeah.

[109] Right.

[110] Now, you got your start in computers, technology.

[111] That's really where you started.

[112] Yeah.

[113] So I was the first guy to sell anything over the internet.

[114] Like before there was e -commerce.

[115] Yeah, that's incredible.

[116] And also, didn't you, you were a professor yet?

[117] You see Santa Cruz?

[118] I wasn't a full -fledged.

[119] professor, but for five years, I ran the web and internet engineering program.

[120] So I taught working engineers how to build the internet.

[121] Okay.

[122] So it was a pretty deep geek, yeah.

[123] And that turned out to be the first cloud computing system that was functional?

[124] That company did launch the first shipping cloud computing.

[125] That was my product.

[126] I have the poster at home still.

[127] No one knows what it means.

[128] I'm like, do you know how important this is?

[129] And just managed web hosting.

[130] It's kind of boring.

[131] But to me, it's like, I did something that mattered.

[132] Yeah.

[133] And where did you grow up?

[134] I grew up in New Mexico.

[135] Oh, you did?

[136] Yeah.

[137] In Albuquerque area?

[138] Really.

[139] In fact, you know, Breaking Bad where they'd pull up in the red minivan to disappear, that little structure.

[140] I used to ride my mountain bike up that when I was, like, 12.

[141] Oh, really?

[142] Yeah, I love that show.

[143] And what did Mom and Dad do that, had them in National Laboratories?

[144] Okay.

[145] Los Alamos National Labs, where my grandparents worked as my family got out there, and in Sandia National Labs.

[146] And this is where they tested all the nuclear bombs and whatnot?

[147] And power.

[148] It's been more about power than bombs.

[149] Oh, it has.

[150] Los Alamos came from the bombs.

[151] So my grandmother was a nuclear engineer.

[152] She worked on power production and stuff like that.

[153] Oh, no kidding.

[154] That's a rare story, probably, your grandmother?

[155] Yep.

[156] So it's in the 60s?

[157] Yep, in the 60s.

[158] Yeah, so that wasn't a profession held by a ton of women, was it?

[159] It's kind of a bit of a sideways story, but she got so tired because women didn't get engineering degrees, and she loved math.

[160] And so she did her whole thesis, and she typed it up.

[161] But by the time she could finish, and she had like seven kids, so by the time she finished it, all of her advisors had moved on to other schools and the new advisors are like, oh, we're sorry, ma 'am, we don't like you.

[162] So she did it twice.

[163] And both times, by the time she could turn it in, everyone changed.

[164] And she's like, screw you guys.

[165] I don't even might agree.

[166] And a secretary found it in a drawer and retyped her thesis for her and submitted it.

[167] And like two years later, she gets a phone call.

[168] You're approved.

[169] So after she gave up, she got her degree.

[170] Really?

[171] Yeah.

[172] To go and then she then worked.

[173] Well, she was already working in the film.

[174] Oh, she already was working.

[175] And with seven kids.

[176] She was crazy.

[177] Oh, my goodness.

[178] I mean, in a good way.

[179] And she's still a lot.

[180] How many kids do you have?

[181] I just have two.

[182] Yeah, I have two, and that's already quite overwhelming at times, right?

[183] With seven, I don't even know what you would do.

[184] I would hide in a basement.

[185] Yeah, it would hit critical mass, in my opinion, around four, and you'd just have to surrender.

[186] You'd have to go, like, well, I'm not going to be very present for some of these kids at a certain point.

[187] At a certain point, and I love my kids.

[188] I like it, but I can't imagine handling a couple more.

[189] My head was, how old are yours?

[190] Four and six.

[191] Okay, so those are fun.

[192] Where are you at?

[193] 10 and 12.

[194] 10 and 12.

[195] Uh -huh.

[196] So junior high and all that exciting.

[197] Yeah, it's pretty different.

[198] But I imagine it's kinder in Canada.

[199] Mike, is that a fantasy?

[200] You know, it is.

[201] And I can only compare to New Mexico in, you know, the 70s and 80s, but I was in more than my fair share of fistfights.

[202] I was, you know, the super tall, super fat kid without social skills.

[203] So that usually gets you, you know, set up to.

[204] And but I just, I hated all that stuff.

[205] I don't think Canada's like that.

[206] And, yeah, there was a culture like that.

[207] I mean, there are certain things.

[208] You, you know, you say, oh, like, you know, I, you know, I, I think people should be allowed to be gay, at least in New Mexico, like, well, I wouldn't kick your ass.

[209] You're like, dude, all I just, like, all I said was like, people should be able to do what they want.

[210] I thought, you know, that was like freedom and stuff.

[211] And, but I also, I just didn't really care because I was a bigger guy, so.

[212] And you, obviously, the household you grew up in, valued STEM.

[213] Oh, yeah.

[214] Yeah, my dad was an IT guy.

[215] Uh -huh.

[216] So where'd you go to college?

[217] We actually have some commonality there.

[218] Uh -oh.

[219] U .C. Santa Barbara.

[220] I was there in the mid -90s.

[221] Okay, so close.

[222] I didn't go to UC Santa Barbara.

[223] Maybe we were in Santa Barbara.

[224] Yes, yes, yes.

[225] Yeah, I was at Santa Barbara City College.

[226] But you went to Ivy and partied.

[227] I did.

[228] You bought my Halloween T -shirts, didn't you?

[229] I never owned one of your Halloween T -shirts.

[230] But that's only because I was always so broke.

[231] I didn't buy any T -shirts, really.

[232] What's that?

[233] What?

[234] So he in college created these T -shirts.

[235] You've seen him.

[236] It's the molecule for caffeine.

[237] Am I saying that correctly?

[238] You got it down.

[239] Yeah.

[240] Caffeine, my drug of choice.

[241] That was the first e -commerce product ever sold over the Internet.

[242] But I also had, like, Halloween Party T -T -shirts said UCSB.

[243] So knockoffs of Renan, Stempe, and Calvin and Hobbs and stuff like that.

[244] Okay, so I went there.

[245] I graduated high school.

[246] I had no intention of going to college.

[247] I had read on the road and I was going to live in my car.

[248] And my best friend and I just lived in the car for six months.

[249] But a good chunk of that time was in Ila Vista in 1993, fall of 1993.

[250] And I was like, wait a minute.

[251] I live behind freebirds.

[252] Oh, you did?

[253] Oh, I've had a couple hundred of those burritos.

[254] But yeah, our first night in Ila Vista was going to a party on the cliff over looking.

[255] in the ocean, and the kids had a keg of Samuel Adams, and I thought, this can't really be all happening.

[256] Students don't live on the cliffs overlooking the ocean.

[257] They don't drink Sam Adams.

[258] You know, they don't drive BMWs, yet there they were.

[259] It was a real culture shock for me. Well, I was on the other side of town where we had two people per bedroom in the falling down things, and we drink schlitz when we could afford it, but I did get to go to the ocean side and drink their beer sometimes.

[260] Yeah, yeah.

[261] Natural light was a big purchase for us.

[262] us.

[263] And then the bagelow cafe.

[264] Did you?

[265] Oh, yeah.

[266] Oh, so good.

[267] And then what was the other burrito place?

[268] I preferred the one.

[269] The dollar burrito place?

[270] That was like on the north side of Ila Vista.

[271] T .O. Alberta's?

[272] That's not the...

[273] Yeah, yeah.

[274] I know.

[275] I remember that place.

[276] Again, first time I ever had a California, like, two -pound burrito.

[277] They didn't, we didn't have those in Michigan.

[278] Anyways, that's fantastic.

[279] So while you were there, did you major in computer science?

[280] I did.

[281] You did.

[282] And then you immediately, did you go to graduate school?

[283] No, I actually failed out of computer science because my brain was jacked and I was fat and I kept having knee surgeries and...

[284] Already at that age, you were...

[285] Oh, yeah.

[286] I actually was at UCSB when I hit 300 pounds.

[287] Okay.

[288] And how tall are you?

[289] 6 .4.

[290] I'm about probably 205 right now and 10 % body fat.

[291] So I was about 95 pounds more fat than I'm carrying today.

[292] Okay.

[293] It was great for dating.

[294] I was just going to say it's not ideal for a meeting a lover.

[295] But I'll say it's compounded by UCSB, which is like a...

[296] beach school and everyone is in phenomenal shape.

[297] Like when I went there, I was like, oh my God, everyone here looks like they're on a fitness calendar.

[298] Yeah.

[299] And you're like, there's a beach.

[300] I'm not going to take my shirt off.

[301] I think so, yeah.

[302] It's very intimidating.

[303] But you failed out of there and then how did you find your way into employment in that realm?

[304] I got a degree and I didn't technically quite fail out, but I failed out of my major.

[305] And so I ended up going to California State and getting a degree in information systems.

[306] My whole deal is computer science is boring as all hell.

[307] It's the technical equivalent of masturbating.

[308] Like, let's think about this incredible problem and let's the problem solve wrong.

[309] Nothing productive happened at the end of your two -year, like, whacking off thing.

[310] And I'm like, so it was like too theoretical, not, not.

[311] It was too theoretical.

[312] I'm like, guys, could we learn about the internet?

[313] Because I just sold T -shirts to 14 countries over the internet, and we have no classes on networking, internet, on anything useful.

[314] And the professors are like, huh?

[315] And so I went to school and I got a degree and how to use a computer to actually solve a problem that we face today in business and in life.

[316] And it turns out my concentration was in artificial intelligence.

[317] It's called Decision Support Systems.

[318] So I got an early degree and, you know, that kind of stuff.

[319] And I can't imagine that the curriculum then even reflects remotely what it is today, right?

[320] I mean, that was in its infancy.

[321] It was in its embassy.

[322] In fact, they told us, Dave, you're not allowed to say artificial intelligence because everyone will make fun of you because it's never going to happen.

[323] I'm like, you guys are so wrong.

[324] It is going to happen.

[325] And now we've got machine learning and AI.

[326] But because I've spent 20 years in tech, those are my people.

[327] That's how I think.

[328] And the whole biohacking, this new word in English language, it's just the same kind of hacking we did to make the Internet pointed at our body.

[329] Because the decisions made in your body are very similar to how distributed systems on the Internet work.

[330] Well, in that they're binary, they're on or off, they release something, they don't release something.

[331] It's not about being binary.

[332] It's about being a whole bunch of tiny decisions made all over the place that you can't possibly know all of them.

[333] Like decentralized kind of.

[334] Yeah.

[335] It's like a full -size map of the United States would be kind of useless.

[336] Right?

[337] So you can't ever know everything.

[338] So, you know, how does your body know what to do when individual decisions are being made inside the cells in your wrist?

[339] Like, how do they know what to do?

[340] And how's my brain knows what's going on there?

[341] Well, there's a whole system, but it's made of tiny decisions made all over the place that coalesce and do, oh, there's my ego.

[342] Oh, there's my desire to have sex with that person.

[343] There's why I'd have to say yes to the cookie.

[344] It's not coming from a conscious thing in your brain.

[345] It's coming from distributed stuff everywhere.

[346] Yeah.

[347] And even now, by the time someone hears this podcast, like it's been broken into billions of pieces and spread all over, and this one went that way and that went that way, and a decision was made here that no one knows how or why it was made, yet it worked.

[348] Same thing happening in yourselves.

[349] And so that's how I can write, like, superhuman.

[350] I can write the books I write because I think like a computer hacker.

[351] Okay.

[352] Okay, let's inch towards that.

[353] So first, you do well.

[354] I imagine financially in all these different endeavors.

[355] You've helped start companies.

[356] I kind of did it.

[357] When I was 26, I made $6 million.

[358] Okay, that's $6 million more than I made when I was 26.

[359] It was pretty solid.

[360] It was the company that held Google's first servers, and I was a co -founder of a part of that company.

[361] Okay.

[362] The professional services thing, we did $100 million a quarter, like all these big business things.

[363] I lost it when I was 28.

[364] Well, here, this is what I wanted to say.

[365] It was kind of cool for two years.

[366] We'll get into all the fun science stuff, but you give someone who didn't, for lack of a better word, get late often, and then you give them $6 million at $26.

[367] What do you do with that money?

[368] Some flashy stuff?

[369] You look at your buddy.

[370] Everyone at this company made more money than they should have, and you say, I'll be happy to want to have $10 million.

[371] Yes.

[372] That's what I did.

[373] I literally said those words, like the biggest asshole words of my life.

[374] And on one hand, I knew, I'm like, I'm set for life.

[375] I'm going to go get a PhD in psychopharmacology.

[376] It was my plan.

[377] All I got to do is to hang out here for two more years.

[378] But I like making stuff change.

[379] And so I kept getting like bigger and bigger jobs in the company.

[380] And it was illegal for me to sell the stock because I was in charge of like looking every acquisition of another company.

[381] So I was always inside information.

[382] Yeah.

[383] So I just watched my wealth.

[384] Oh, okay.

[385] So I got you.

[386] You had basically $6 million worth of stock at one point.

[387] And then that's a very common occurrence.

[388] I mean, I literally could have sold it.

[389] I could have just said, all right, I'm done, but it wasn't ethical, legal, general counsel, whatever.

[390] So I took the high road.

[391] I didn't sell the stock because I knew things about the company that weren't public.

[392] And it cost me, you know, 20 years of working.

[393] And I did get a used BMW and a down payment on my house out of that at the end of the day.

[394] Okay.

[395] Well, that's not terrible.

[396] There's worse things.

[397] So you just said you wanted to go get a doctorate degree in pharmacology.

[398] So my assumption then is during this period, even though you're probably experiencing some element of control over your life because you have the skill set and it's bearing fruit.

[399] There's some rewards happening.

[400] But I'm assuming you don't have an accompanying self of peace or contentment or happiness that you had told yourself you would have if you had those things.

[401] I was miserable.

[402] I mean, I was in a bad relationship for years.

[403] I was highly anxious, but I didn't know it because if you're anxious, you probably don't know you're anxious because that's just how it's always been right and i finally when i was 30 i'm like you know what i just like had this long failed relationship i just made and lost all this money like i'm completely miserable i don't know what else to do i've kind of you know done what at the time i felt like was a rock bottom but now i'm like don't i still have both my legs i wasn't at rock bottom there's always levels like i've made guys who are in 10 ,000 times worse than i ever was who are happier and more peaceful than i am so like i i felt like that yeah and a we call it a high bottom Yeah, there you go.

[404] But the relevant piece is you are so miserable that you are now open to change that otherwise you're not.

[405] You nailed it.

[406] I definitely got there.

[407] And I finally was like, I don't have to do enough friends.

[408] Like, you should go to this personal development retreat thing.

[409] I'm like, look, I'm an engineer.

[410] I already take smart drugs.

[411] I already know about food.

[412] I've already lost, you know, 50 of these pounds.

[413] I feel like I've got control.

[414] And this friend's like, I'm not even going to tell you what they do there because you'll hate, you'll hate everybody.

[415] But just go.

[416] So I said, I'm so miserable, I'm just going to go.

[417] And it was transpersonal psychology based.

[418] This is, I've interviewed the father of that field, Stan Groff, is like 94 years old.

[419] This is a guy who gave 3 ,000 people LSD in Czechoslovakia when it was legal.

[420] And he was like a Freudian psychologist going, this Freudian stuff doesn't work.

[421] This drug does work.

[422] And here's what it's doing.

[423] And they're like, oh, Dave, you have PTSD from when you were born.

[424] I'm like, that is the biggest bunch of hippie bullshit ever.

[425] And like, yeah, let us show you.

[426] And I mean, they had.

[427] me like a like a butterfly pinned to one of those wax spores and like holy shit like they know all my deep dark secrets and they shouldn't yeah and as i was i was i had the cord wrapped on my neck when i was born oh so i came into the world wired at a unconscious level to be like something's trying to kill me so i was like i'm not going to connect with people i'm going to just protect myself why was on all those fistfights when i was a kid right why did i look at no one wants to help me like i got to handle this all by myself so i was not connecting to people for the first 30 years of my life because I came into the world thinking someone was trying to kill me. Yeah.

[428] And I got over that.

[429] And man, life is a lot better.

[430] Isn't it fascinating, too?

[431] That makes me think immediately of the Vanity Fair article I read.

[432] I did not read the book, The Big Short, but then I saw the movie.

[433] But at any rate, the guy who predicted the subprime -morm crisis and got all the credit default swaps purchased by all these huge places that should have known better, he, you probably know the story.

[434] His son was having problems in school.

[435] They said, we think he's autistic.

[436] No, he's not.

[437] Well, here's the questionnaire.

[438] you tell me how many he answers yes to.

[439] He reads the questionnaire.

[440] He himself goes, holy fuck.

[441] I'm answering yes to 90 % of these.

[442] And he goes backwards in time and says, oh, my God, because he had a glass eye.

[443] So his whole narrative was, oh, this glass eye is keeping me from connecting to people, and that's everything.

[444] And then finding out, oh, no, I think I'm on the spectrum.

[445] It wasn't the glass eye.

[446] Similarly, I imagine you go, oh, I was overweight as a kid.

[447] That explains all my social awkwardness.

[448] I was on the spectrum, too.

[449] Oh, okay.

[450] Okay.

[451] Remember that Ph .D. grandmother engineering thing?

[452] Yeah.

[453] That kind of is a good sign.

[454] Yeah.

[455] And all of her kids and me on that same survey from Vanity Fair, it was like 45 out of 50.

[456] Oh, really?

[457] Absolutely.

[458] Until I learned social skills and I turned my brain on biologically and I did, geez, four months of neurofeedback.

[459] I own and run and neurofeedback brain upgrade facility.

[460] I wouldn't have made eye contact.

[461] I didn't know how to do this.

[462] These are learned skills and, like, repaired biology.

[463] Right.

[464] Yeah, I was full on Asperger's.

[465] So right now, recently, and you're friends with Gundry, so you're aware of it, and we love this guy, Eric Topol.

[466] You know, there's a lot of stuff going on about gut health, and there being some very specific bacteria that kids with autism have.

[467] But the explanation I had heard prior to that, which to me held a lot of water, I've not read a study.

[468] But prior to the computer revolution, you had all these people who would have normally not entered the workforce.

[469] This is totally true.

[470] Right.

[471] So now you have all these people that there was no job for them prior to computers, but now they're entering the workforce, that's where people meet and have kids.

[472] So you would generally, like this was an explanation for the explosion of autism was just, now you have like twos working together and the two and the two get together and they have a kid.

[473] Now the kids are four.

[474] And that just wasn't happening, those people weren't commingling.

[475] So I wonder if it's some combination of all these things or even maybe their original autism was gut health related or something.

[476] Do you have an opinion on that without us getting killed?

[477] Back when I had that $6 million, I started a nonprofit that I couldn't fund because I didn't have $6 million for autism research, particularly in adults.

[478] This really affected my life.

[479] And I was like, oh, my God, this explains so much.

[480] Yeah.

[481] So I was really into this in like the late 90s.

[482] And I've spoken at Autism One at the conference and looked at the biology of it.

[483] There isn't one thing.

[484] There's chronic neuroinflammation that's usually autoimmune.

[485] In other words, your body, for some reason, starts to mess with your brain.

[486] And the end result of that, what caused it?

[487] Look, it could have been aluminum.

[488] It could have been mercury.

[489] Toxic mold is a big contributor.

[490] It can be nutritional imbalances.

[491] It can be hormonal imbalances.

[492] Sometimes it's trauma.

[493] But here's the weird thing.

[494] When people run marathons, the type of gut bacteria, they have changes.

[495] When they're training or during the marathon?

[496] When they're training.

[497] Okay.

[498] So, wait, if you train more, your gut bacteria changed to make you better at marathons.

[499] What the hell?

[500] Right.

[501] So did the bacteria cause the marathon?

[502] No. With them back, so...

[503] It's all chicken and the egg eat, right?

[504] You would have to prove that these gut bacteria cause autism, and they probably do.

[505] They're certainly tied to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, and all of the plaque in your arteries comes from your gut bacteria, not from what you eat.

[506] And this is now proven in two studies, like that kind of throws a lot of stuff we used to believe on its head.

[507] So I wouldn't want to say that these things cause it, but are there is no genetic marker, at least, that we're aware of.

[508] There isn't a single one, but you can say people who have something called H -L -A -D -R, 28 % of the population, they're more sensitive to toxic mold, they're more sensitive to Lyme disease, they can't excrete toxins as well, and they're more likely to get autism.

[509] So if your two parents are autism or autism -related sort of things, and they have you, you're at a higher genetic risk because you can't excrete toxins very well, and then you end up with some trauma, right?

[510] You end up with, you lived in a basement like I did as a kid with toxic mold that contributed to my obesity and all these other things.

[511] And then, like, oh, there you go, you got it.

[512] Yeah.

[513] Well, that's, I think, where a lot of these folks get into trouble is you're almost required to declare a camp that you're in, whether it's nature, nurture, environment, or genetics, which seems obvious to me is, of course, it is a combination of all these things, not unlike culture and our biology is a combination of what we are as a species and all these things, but there seems to be some inclination to plant a flag, and we found the genetic marker to say that it's one thing or another, and we're infamously terrible creatures to study, right?

[514] Because we have so many layers going on besides our genetic.

[515] It's not just us, man. It's just scientific hubris.

[516] Check this out.

[517] Every mouse study you've ever seen, do you know if it was a man or woman feeding the mice?

[518] I have no clue.

[519] Well, here's the deal.

[520] Mice changed their behavior when a woman feeds them versus a man. And they go, we controlled for all variables.

[521] I'm like, bullshit, you did.

[522] You did not record the gender and age of your lab assistant, and you also didn't record whether they were wearing cologne or not, because that also affected the mouse.

[523] So we are not controlling for all the variables.

[524] We don't even know what variables matter yet.

[525] Right, right.

[526] Huge amounts of science are masturbation.

[527] Like, it feels good, look, look, but nothing happened at the end that was productive.

[528] Yeah.

[529] They often just really confirm a gut intuition we had all along.

[530] Yeah.

[531] It's like all confirmation by it somehow.

[532] And I do think it's done subconsciously.

[533] I don't even think they're trying to manipulate it.

[534] But I just think you find what you're looking for.

[535] People want answers for things.

[536] So you're going to try to find one regardless.

[537] Yeah.

[538] And you know what the real massive like things are uncovered?

[539] is in clinical trial.

[540] What that means is you go to the doctor and he's like, I've been here for 40 years and I've been treating the same thing and I noticed these patterns and they happen over time.

[541] And if I use this, it works.

[542] And if I don't use this, it works.

[543] And the greatest breakthroughs that I've ever covered on my show, the stuff I write about in my books are largely from people who just treated 10 ,000 people and noticed it.

[544] And then they say, well, there's a study from mice or a study in a lab that says that can't happen.

[545] And they're like, bullshit, it can't happen.

[546] I treat people, and if I do this, they get well.

[547] If I do this, they don't get well.

[548] So don't show me your stupid study, young Turk.

[549] Come into my office and I'll show you a patient and get better.

[550] That's what's been missing.

[551] It's almost like bullying from academia of the actual doctors on the street who are healers.

[552] Those are the people who saved my life that want to turn my brain back on.

[553] Well, I had the personal experience of trying every single Western option for psoriotic arthritis.

[554] And my wife forced me to go to Araveda cleanse.

[555] I did it.

[556] Lo and behold, my body felt better.

[557] And I left going, again, no disrespect to the Ayurvedic community, I was like, I don't know that they know why what they're saying is working, but they have been studying people for 10 ,000 years and keeping records, and they've seen some patterns and they've figured some shit out.

[558] Now, whether they know biochemically what's happening is kind of irrelevant to me because I feel better.

[559] But I'm very much caught between pseudoscience scares me. Eastern stuff often scares me. I hear a lot of people in my circle talking about, they had a blood pan on, they figured this out and I mean, I don't really think we can watch your food interact the way this blood panelist is saying that they've observed.

[560] So I think it's sometimes, I guess I'd feel better about it if everyone just kind of own the, well, this is a mystery, but this is working.

[561] Does that make any sense?

[562] It makes great sense.

[563] And the truth of the matter is that until we can take atoms and line them up and make a life, even just a single cell life, we are completely fooling ourselves that we know what's going on there.

[564] We can now take an embryo and pull the guts out and put another one in.

[565] We don't know how to make that first spark happen.

[566] So what's up with that?

[567] Yeah.

[568] So all of the stories we tell herself, reminds me of the lady who discovered the endorphin receptors in the brain.

[569] And she wrote this amazing book, and it was Candace Purr.

[570] And it's called The Molecules of Emotion.

[571] And she died before I get interviewed, which is one of my regrets.

[572] She was an NIH researcher and just kind of this tough lady.

[573] And over the course of her career, in her autobiography, she describes how she kind of softened.

[574] And towards the end, they discovered the opiate receptors, like how it actually works.

[575] Like her work led to what we know about addiction today.

[576] And she said, well, I finally went to Esselin and I met these shamans, and I was trying to explain to them about opiate receptors, and now all these amazing neurochemicals move around in the brain.

[577] And they started laughing.

[578] And I go, what is it?

[579] And I asked the translator.

[580] And the shaman looked at the other shaman.

[581] And you said, they actually think all these things exist.

[582] So the shaman is like, like we see.

[583] I don't know, spooky goblins moving back and forth.

[584] It doesn't matter what you call them or whether you put this amazing scientific framework.

[585] I'll tell you, Western science works because we can make cool drugs that target receptors.

[586] We know more, and it's like the best time ever to live to 180.

[587] But do we really know the mechanism or do we think we know the mechanism?

[588] Well, I'm not sure.

[589] Yeah, I remember, like, getting lots of blood work done for the arthritis and they go, oh, you know, you need vitamin D, you need vitamin D. Lack of vitamin D causes inflammation.

[590] And then I heard someone on Howard Stern, his doctor, And the doctor goes, no, they have it completely backwards.

[591] When you have inflammation, it takes all your vitamin D. So it doesn't matter how much you took.

[592] It's actually the sign that you have inflammation.

[593] It's not the cause of the inflammation.

[594] It's the downriver result of inflammation.

[595] I'm like, well, fuck everything.

[596] Now I don't know which one's true.

[597] And it's just endlessly maddening, really.

[598] But cause L .E., so that's something that you talk about a lot, right?

[599] I talk about it a lot.

[600] And also, you are the ultimate guinea pig.

[601] I had arthritis diagnosed when I was 14 in my knees.

[602] So I had like all the diseases of aging before I was 27.

[603] And it was just a pain in the ass.

[604] And I said, you know, this stuff is supposed to work.

[605] It says joints.

[606] It's a glucosamine.

[607] And you know what?

[608] It actually worked.

[609] So great.

[610] I performed this amazing scientific thing.

[611] I made a hypothesis and I tested it and I observed the results.

[612] And when I stopped taking, it got worse.

[613] When I started taking it got better, therefore it's helping.

[614] Right.

[615] Right.

[616] And like that's what we can all do.

[617] It's not that hard to do.

[618] Well, that's what I guess I got to the point where, was like, why not be, what does it cost you to try these things?

[619] I have done so much stupid shit.

[620] Yeah.

[621] Like, this has no right to work, but I have done multi -day shamanic trainings.

[622] I've been to Tibet to learn meditation from the masters.

[623] I've done all kinds of crazy Chinese energy medicine, acupuncture, and I've tried boiled bags of herbs.

[624] Because you know what?

[625] They're probably not going to kill me, and it might be interesting.

[626] This neurofeedback thing?

[627] Like, I left my body.

[628] I've upgraded my brain.

[629] The angry dickhead voice in my head is gone.

[630] My stress levels are lower.

[631] I can do more.

[632] It's been worth it.

[633] But I've also done some stupid stuff that didn't do anything.

[634] But I'm okay with that.

[635] And if you had the experience, again, we both can acknowledge that we are terrible observers of ourselves.

[636] First and foremost, I think all of us are pretty bad at that.

[637] But if you had the experience where you try something, it works, have you ever thought to yourself, oh, that was placebo?

[638] I bought into placebo, which I just want to point out, a doctor told me, placebo is as real is.

[639] the real medicine.

[640] If it has the outcome, it has the outcome.

[641] So it's kind of irrelevant.

[642] But have you ever found yourself going, oh, I think that one goes in the placebo category?

[643] Every year I put on the biohacking conference, it's going to its seventh year.

[644] And last year I had Robbie Richman, a friend of mine who's, who's actually on stage.

[645] He sells the ex -pill.

[646] It is a purple pill that says placebo on the bottle.

[647] What you do is you take it and you put a little glass, fancy -looking ampule thing, and you write a little chalk thing on there what you want it to be.

[648] And then you set your intention and then you swallow the pill.

[649] And you know what?

[650] He's got clinical trials that show that shit works.

[651] Okay.

[652] That is the usefulness of placebo.

[653] Sure.

[654] So, sure.

[655] What I do, and I'll tell you right now, the vast majority of homeopathic stuff I've tried, I really can't tell that it's doing anything.

[656] Right.

[657] That's kind of where, like, I took that glucosamine or what is?

[658] Glucosamine, yeah.

[659] Yeah.

[660] I don't think I ever felt anything.

[661] Glucosamine, I'll tell you, I was of that mindset, too, and I found a glucosamine HCL, the form really mattered because the normal glucosamine sulfate It doesn't do anything as far as I can tell.

[662] Okay.

[663] But it might for other people.

[664] And for me, that was the important variable.

[665] Yeah.

[666] Right.

[667] And also, I had pretty darn severe knee pain.

[668] You know, when you're 14 and you're trying to play soccer and all, I really noticed it.

[669] It was impacting my quality of life.

[670] So I do absolutely see things.

[671] I've also, I will still try some homeopathic remedies from people who are masters of their field and have had profound results with patients and know their shit.

[672] You know who those people are.

[673] And if they say, try these little drops, I charge them myself using the power of moon beavers, like, hey, who am I?

[674] Like, I haven't studied this for 40 years.

[675] Yeah.

[676] So the worst that'll happen is I'll take some drops of water.

[677] And I've had a few times where I don't think that was placebo because I did not expect that to happen.

[678] Like, holy crap.

[679] Uh -huh.

[680] So how can I know?

[681] Here's the thing, I can't.

[682] And I don't use the can't word very often.

[683] It's a weasel word.

[684] But I'll tell you, I'm not going to know.

[685] And it's okay.

[686] Right.

[687] I know people, I think in general, people need to be a little more comfortable with not knowing stuff.

[688] You almost never do.

[689] You just think you know and you feel safe when you feel.

[690] think you know, but you don't know.

[691] Stop being so arrogant.

[692] Right, right, right.

[693] And, yeah, people go, like, I get in, not as many anymore, but I used to get in debates with people about religion quite often.

[694] I used to do that too.

[695] Yeah, it's a total waste of time.

[696] But quite often people be like politics on top when the religion gets too.

[697] Sure, sure.

[698] We haven't lost enough friends and family members, introduce that.

[699] You know, those conversations generally would always get to a point where it's like, well, you think this all, you think the Big Bang explains it?

[700] And I'm like, I understand the big bank theory i don't know that i believe the big bank theory i don't give a fuck i don't need it's okay with me that i don't know it doesn't for me require that i insert some other thing i don't know to to yeah bandaid that stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare what's up guys this your girl kiki and my podcast is back with a new season and let me tell you it's too good and i'm diving into the brains of entertainment's best and brightest okay every episode I bring on a friend and have a real conversation.

[701] And I don't mean just friends.

[702] I mean the likes of Amy Poehler, Kell Mitchell, Vivica Fox, the list goes on.

[703] So follow, watch, and listen to Baby.

[704] This is Kiki Palmer on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcast.

[705] We've all been there.

[706] Turning to the internet to self -diagnose our inexplicable pains, debilitating body aches, sudden fevers, and strange rashes.

[707] Though our minds tend to spiral to worst -case scenarios, it's usually nothing, but for an unlucky few, these unsuspecting symptoms can start the clock ticking on a terrifying medical mystery.

[708] Like the unexplainable death of a retired firefighter, whose body was found at home by his son, except it looked like he had been cremated, or the time when an entire town started jumping from buildings and seeing tigers on their ceilings.

[709] Hey listeners, it's Mr. Ballin here, and I'm here to tell you about my podcast.

[710] It's called Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries.

[711] Each terrifying true story will be sure to keep you up at night.

[712] Follow Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries wherever you get your podcasts.

[713] Prime members can listen early and ad -free on Amazon Music.

[714] This is the difference between biohacking and medicine that you're getting down to.

[715] Biohacking is the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so that you have control of your own biology.

[716] Yes.

[717] Okay, medicine and science, who are dear friends, I'm married to a doctor, I love science, I've trained as a scientist, they want to know why.

[718] Like, I don't care.

[719] The body's a freaking black box.

[720] And if I find reliably that I stand on my right toe, put on a tutu, a Tuesday at Bernie Man, spin around four times and wink that it does something.

[721] I don't have depression for a week.

[722] Yeah, I'm going to do it.

[723] And I can tell myself a story.

[724] Oh, it's because my neurotransmitters are spinning at the vibrational frequency of Avogadro's number, and I'm a good person.

[725] Who the F cares?

[726] It is not relevant.

[727] The bottom line is, it is repeatable.

[728] and it works and I will leave it from there and I'll share that and then the scientists can go in and figure out why and they'll probably tell themselves five or six versions of the story over the next hundred years before they finally hit what is actually probably right yeah yeah that's a long time and I might be dead by then so I'm just going to keep spinning around in my two to or whatever the heck it is as long as it works I want control I want my body do what I don't want it to do I don't want to act like an asshole I want more energy than I'm supposed to have I want to live longer than I'm supposed to Uh -huh.

[729] You do what it takes, and without knowing why, it's okay.

[730] Well, now, so here's where we get into a place that's, like, tricky for me ethically.

[731] And I recognize and own, it's largely based on the fact that I come from a tradition for the last 15 years of being sober, sharing sobriety with other guys, and they're being just a little bit of hard fast rules in that.

[732] You are not allowed to tell somebody else what they need to do to be sober.

[733] All you can do is say what your story is that may resonate with some.

[734] someone.

[735] They might want to replicate what you do.

[736] That's on them.

[737] Good for them if they do it.

[738] So I think I get a little triggered when I hear people who have discovered something for themselves, which is great, and I'm open to believing them.

[739] When they start prescribing it to the population at large, there's a part of me that just bristles about that.

[740] Why don't just tell your story?

[741] If people want to replicate it, cool, but it's the kind of getting people on your team.

[742] That part for me is dicey.

[743] I see that you're using it.

[744] This is because of you.

[745] Gundry was in here And I was like I had just quit dipping that week Or no I was still dipping in front of them It was your last week on it Yeah Oh you got it too You gotta get these motherfuckers from New Zealand That really probably Oh they have them in Canada?

[746] At Costco I don't find out of that doesn't You just changed my life Anyways he said you know my friend Dave uses a spray And then I went home and like try And I found the spray It totally works I love it You know what though also Lucy Gum Zero bad sweeteners the only nicotine gum without bad sweeteners in it.

[747] I'm going to write in.

[748] What's the name of it?

[749] Chew lucy .com.

[750] I actually brought like four cases of it to Burning Man and gave it to friends.

[751] I don't want artificial sweeteners, right?

[752] So it's either spray.

[753] And just if people listening, vaping will seriously make you old and screw you up and it's just bad.

[754] Smoking's even worse.

[755] Dipping, slightly better, but still really bad for you.

[756] But oral nicotine, low dose, I even write about in the book, there's recommendations for Alzheimer's.

[757] Like, it's actually, there's benefits.

[758] There's some pretty, uh, believable studies about it prolonging the onset of that in parkinson's little bit of nicotine not too much does something magic yeah i'm probably doing too much i can i can own that your hair will fall out if you do too much oh really yeah okay well still there oh rectile dysfunction but isn't that is that a result of your blood pressure goes up when you're the only downside of nicotine right is it does elevate your blood pressure so if you you have high blood pressure or hypertension it's probably not for you it's not the only downside there's like some microvascular things low doses don't appear to do it but high dose seem to cause damage to your vascular system, much worse from smoking.

[759] Right.

[760] But, yeah, there are studies on ED and hair loss at high dose, even for oral.

[761] Okay.

[762] So, well, I got a boner last night.

[763] Actually, I look up with a kickstander, sorry.

[764] Oh, great.

[765] So I think we're still in clear.

[766] So I completely understand and relate to your personal journey.

[767] Because I even heard, I was listening to you talk, and you didn't explicitly state it, but I was like, oh, he must have been on a fat -free diet.

[768] because I was on a fat -free diet from 95 to like 96 or something.

[769] I was trying to lose that weight.

[770] Oh, it was horrible in the 90s.

[771] Yeah.

[772] But what's weird, and this is what's funny, is I lost weight on the fat -free diet, I lost weight on Atkins, I've lost weight on paleo.

[773] So as much as I don't subscribe to the calorie -in -calorie model, I don't think that's true.

[774] It is interesting that most of these diets do end up restricting calories on some level because it's so fucking hard to eat on the diets themselves.

[775] So I just can look at my own story and go like, yeah, all three work.

[776] I don't think I, I didn't feel as good fat -free, for sure.

[777] Well, on the Bulletproof Diet, I'm like, all right, let's test this thing out.

[778] I did between 4 ,000 and 5 ,000 calories a day, usually about 4 ,500.

[779] I was intentionally eating more than I wanted.

[780] I was putting extra butter in my coffee.

[781] I was taking digestive enzymes to make sure I absorb the fat.

[782] Like, I was pushing hard.

[783] And I cut my sleep to less than five hours a night.

[784] It was usually about four, and sometimes less.

[785] I just had a new baby.

[786] That was part of the plan.

[787] And I'm like, I'm not sleeping anyway.

[788] I might as well cut my sleep.

[789] And I said, I'm going to do this for a month.

[790] I'm going to maintain my body weight, even though the math shows I should have gained you 20 pounds.

[791] I go, look, the math is stupid.

[792] Because it is.

[793] Because it is, calories in, calories out, is just wrong.

[794] Yeah.

[795] And instead, I actually lost way.

[796] Well, again, could it be combination?

[797] Could it be all, I mean, could it be all things?

[798] Again, it's kind of like there's this great drive to declare one of them right or wrong.

[799] And I'm sure maybe some combination of both these things.

[800] Well, no?

[801] I will tell you categorically.

[802] no. It's not saved by cutting calories won't sometimes make it lose weight, but here's why I would categorically say no. And it has to do with the ranching industry, because with animals for money, we control things, and they don't have any rights, they don't have any ability to say what they want.

[803] In the 60s, we might have done tests on inmates and things like that.

[804] Yeah.

[805] But there's a metric called feed efficiency in the ranching industry.

[806] And one of the things that they've learned is they can take a purified mold toxin called xeralinone, which is a synthetic estrogen, about a thousand times more estrogenic than our own estrogens.

[807] They make a little waxy pellet.

[808] It's called xeranols, is what they sell for, and they stick it in the ear of a cow.

[809] Ooh.

[810] And after they do this, that cow will gain weight on 30 % less calories.

[811] Oh.

[812] If it's calories and calories out, zero and all cannot exist.

[813] Right.

[814] Okay.

[815] We broke that.

[816] Okay, but hold on.

[817] Now, here's where I'm going to try to make an argument that it could still.

[818] be both, which is give them the zirinol, or whatever the fuck you just said, and we increase the calories.

[819] And I'm sure even more gains, no?

[820] Probably.

[821] In which case it's still part of the equation.

[822] I'm not saying that calories don't matter.

[823] I'm just saying that calories don't make your fat.

[824] Because if you can get fat on one third less calories, calories don't make you fat.

[825] Right?

[826] Or some other variable is...

[827] One thing is, if it's more than one variable, calories aren't the only variable, but certainly calories matter, right?

[828] And also the time you eat really makes a difference.

[829] If you eat all of your food at night versus during the day, you will gain weight, but you won't gain during the day.

[830] That's my preference, by the way.

[831] I think it's everyone's right.

[832] It doesn't work.

[833] If you quit eating when the sun goes down, you'll lose weight.

[834] It's pretty shocking.

[835] And Sachin Panda from the Salk Institute, like he came on my show and I've written about that in a couple of my books.

[836] And the time you matter.

[837] So you can say, do calories matter?

[838] Yeah.

[839] Do calories make you fat?

[840] I can tell you, I was militant when I weighed 300 pounds.

[841] I went on like serious 1 ,800 calories a day.

[842] I worked out an hour and a half every day for 18 months, six days a week.

[843] And half weights, half cardio, I kicked my ass.

[844] Do you know how much I weighed at the end of that?

[845] 300 pounds.

[846] And I could max out all the machines at the gym.

[847] I had some muscle under the flag.

[848] Had you traded, though, at least like 20 pounds of fat for 20 pounds of muscle?

[849] I'm sure I did.

[850] But I was still fat and I was still a 46 -inch waist.

[851] And I was like, God, maybe it's, I'm eating too many of these salads with no dressing.

[852] Sure.

[853] And what it comes down to is if you have toxins in your body, If your metabolism isn't working, you don't have thyroid hormone, it doesn't matter.

[854] And increasingly, right, they also think there's like a microbiome that is an obesity.

[855] Oh, yeah.

[856] Yeah.

[857] In fact, you can change it.

[858] That was a big part of the Bulletproof Coffee thing.

[859] Walk me through Bulletproof Coffee, which I've had.

[860] Okay.

[861] My wife, by the way, I read your Wikipedia page, and there's just a fantastic paragraph that I read to my wife in bed last night.

[862] And I said, I think you're Dave.

[863] Can I just read it to you?

[864] for it.

[865] He expects to live to age 180.

[866] As of 2019, Asprey said he has spent at least one million hacking his own biology, including having his own stem cells injected into him, taking 100 daily supplements following a strict diet, bathing an infrared light, using a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, and wearing special lenses when flying.

[867] Now, my wife would check many of those boxes, and she'd like to check all the boxes.

[868] Like, she's been trying to get me to get an infrared sauna.

[869] She would, we would definitely have a hyperbaric oxygen chamber if we had enough room in our bedroom.

[870] I just thought it was, my wife happens to just love hearing about something that's working for somebody, and she's so open to trying it, more than I am, and I applaud her for it.

[871] But she, of course, brought home bulletproof coffee and some of the, just the fats you add, right?

[872] Nice, yeah, the brain octane oil.

[873] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[874] And I used it, and I liked it.

[875] Nice.

[876] It turns out, I've actually been on a few shows about addiction, and there's a lot of times part of the addiction biology is that if your cells aren't getting enough energy, there's like a background anxiety in the body.

[877] It's like the background hunger noise, hunger craving, kind of like a buzzing thing.

[878] Sure, sure.

[879] Discomfort.

[880] Right.

[881] And I imagine that in addiction, that it's amplified in that you have other things like I'm not getting whatever I'm addicted to, you know, sex or alcohol or whatever.

[882] Yeah.

[883] But if you stack that on to my cells are like, dude, I need some energy right now.

[884] I don't have energy.

[885] I don't know why.

[886] and whether there's something blocking energy production or eating the wrong foods or whatever else.

[887] But there's a lot of people who are saying I started doing this stuff that gives myself more energy and I felt less cravings, not just for food, but for everything.

[888] And that reduction in cravings for me was really liberating as a fat guy.

[889] So here's what Bulletproof coffee is.

[890] It's special coffee beans that don't have the jittering crash that comes with a lot of coffee, and it's because we purify the coffee differently when it's a green coffee bean.

[891] And we lab tests for mold toxins, 34 studies support what I'm saying.

[892] And I discovered this because I quit coffee for five years because it made me jittery and cranky and made me feel crappy.

[893] And then I found a way to make coffee that didn't do that.

[894] Instead of milk, milk sticks to the good stuff, the antioxidants and coffee so your body can't use it.

[895] So you put butter in there.

[896] Butter is the same fat that's in milk without the protein, which causes the problem.

[897] The casein, is that what is?

[898] Yeah, casein, exactly.

[899] So casein sticks to polyphenols and you can't absorb them.

[900] And then you add this brain octane oil.

[901] Brain octane oil is basically the ever clear of coconut oil.

[902] It's 5 % of the fat found in there.

[903] It's much stronger than normal MCT oil.

[904] and MCT oil is famous because of blowproof coffee, but you've got to go a little bit stronger than that.

[905] You blend it all together, it tastes like a latte.

[906] You can get it cold brew, it's whole foods and Target and all over the place, and you drink it and like something happens.

[907] And you get the normal amount of caffeine from coffee, so it's not just that, but for most people, cravings go down very dramatically.

[908] And I would hypothesize, based on a bunch of science and things like that, it's because that oil raises ketones, as if you'd been fasting for a couple days around the keto diet, even if you had some sugar the night before.

[909] So you're getting the benefits of ketosis.

[910] And you can say, well, what are those?

[911] Well, if your ketones just bump up a little bit, there's two hormones that change everything.

[912] One of them is called ghrelin, and this is the hunger hormone.

[913] When your ghrelin levels are high, you're craving, and you're hungry.

[914] A very small bump in ketones turns off ghrelin, so you're also, well, I'm not hungry.

[915] And there's a satiety, the fullness hormone, called CCK.

[916] And Calvin Klein makes it.

[917] this is what tells you when you're full right yeah exactly and that when your ketones bump just a little bit you don't have to be like on the all bacon diet or fasting for four days for this i'm talking from the brain octane oil your ketones up to that's 0 .48 which is way less than nutritional ketosis all of a sudden the bagel that was calling to you or the cookie just was like eat me and you're just you're thinking about it and you're meeting and it's distracting you and you're saying i'm gonna hold off to lunch and eventually you eat half the cookie and you're a bad person and all that yeah and you're going to a shame spiral and eat something different to feel a little better, you know.

[918] It just goes away.

[919] And for me, as a like former 300 -pound guy, I remember I'd sit there in Silicon Valley and look into those stupid cookies they bring it to in the afternoon when you're your weakest.

[920] Yeah.

[921] And like, I'm not going to do it today.

[922] And at the end of the day, you just hang your head.

[923] So you originally, you go on your own voyage.

[924] It brought you to Tibet where you, that's where you first saw people putting animal fat, butter in drinks there, right?

[925] And that kind of sparked the idea.

[926] And then you come home and you start experimenting on your own, or do you like immediately reach out to some kind of food engineer or something like that?

[927] Oh, I experimented on my own.

[928] I mean, I had been looking at diet since the 90s and tried the zone and Atkins and paleo and got really deep in the research and looked at natural bodybuilding and I looked at polyphysics sleep.

[929] I was already taking smart drugs before I went there.

[930] So I was already beginning to be a biohacker and I was just like, I got to not be in pain all the time and I want my brain to work.

[931] And I'm so tired of it not working.

[932] But I actually got through business school before I went.

[933] went to Tibet.

[934] I did that on modafinil.

[935] I bet it was on modafinil.

[936] What's modafinil?

[937] Modafinil is also known as provigil.

[938] It is the limitless drug.

[939] It's amphetamine, right?

[940] No, no, no, no. A lot of people think it is, but unrelated drug category.

[941] So Adderall is amphetamine and riddlin and things like that, and they used it for ADD.

[942] They used modafinel instead.

[943] So Nightline came to my house like 10 years ago and did this special on it because I was the only guy who was like willing to admit that I took it.

[944] Yeah.

[945] So the military used it for fighter pilots because Adderall makes you want to kill people.

[946] That was a go pills.

[947] Modafinil just makes you more alert, but it doesn't make you want to kill people.

[948] Bummer.

[949] Yeah, it really cram my style.

[950] What they found is that this was for narcoleptics, people who fall asleep uncontrollably.

[951] And for me, it was like, man, I run a neuroscience facility.

[952] So my meditation brainwaves are higher when I'm on the stuff.

[953] I could pay attention in business school.

[954] I just had energy.

[955] I just felt more like myself.

[956] It was really transformative.

[957] Yeah.

[958] And so I've written about smart drugs and several of my books because, for me, I wouldn't be here today.

[959] I wouldn't have graduated from an Ivy League business school.

[960] He went to Wharton.

[961] We love fancy colleges.

[962] Yeah.

[963] We don't even know why.

[964] Good for you.

[965] I wasn't going to drop the W bar.

[966] Well, we needed to say it.

[967] It was one of those things where I never thought I'd really do that.

[968] I went to California State University where my degree is from.

[969] So I was like, all right, that's cool.

[970] But I'm just telling you, I started.

[971] taking smart drugs in the middle of university because I was like, these people are way smarter than me. I don't think they were.

[972] I just had brain things.

[973] I had no blood flow in my brain during test taking, which was a problem.

[974] That's called ADD.

[975] Right.

[976] And what are the side effects of it?

[977] The side effects of it are actually surprisingly mild.

[978] Some people get a headache.

[979] I didn't.

[980] Is there a crash from it?

[981] Like, do you feel yourself dissipating and do you long for it to be?

[982] No. The addictive nature is very low.

[983] And some people say, oh, it's addictive.

[984] My wife is like a licensed, trained drug and alcohol addiction doctor from one of the top medical schools in the world.

[985] And she laughed when people said it was addictive.

[986] Well, Monica, I have two new drugs that can start taking.

[987] Oh, no, I know.

[988] Don't add more drugs to the next to please.

[989] Here's the side effects.

[990] Five out of a million people, if I remember the statistics right, can get an autoimmune condition, the same one that ibuprofen causes.

[991] So if you have weird genes and you're unlucky, it can cause like a really big skin thing that could be dangerous.

[992] but it is exceptionally low likelihood there.

[993] Right.

[994] And generally the side effects are low, and it's very well studied for increasing cognitive function, actually working.

[995] So for me, that stuff was like completely game -changing, and I just was like, wow, I got my brain back.

[996] But the other side effect is, if you're a dick, it'll make you more of a dick.

[997] It makes you more, like more of what you...

[998] More of everything.

[999] Yeah, but you get used to that too after a while, and then you're walking around me so slow, and that can make you really angry.

[1000] If you're an angry kind of person, And I got over all that kind of judgment and ego stuff.

[1001] Yeah.

[1002] Maybe most of it.

[1003] There's probably something that I don't know about yet.

[1004] Yeah.

[1005] So that's the other.

[1006] So are you still on that?

[1007] You know, I probably have taken it four times in the last year.

[1008] Like if I'm either like, I really want to go into special writing mode.

[1009] Uh -huh.

[1010] Or if I'm just like, I don't know what happened to me, but something bad happened in my biology and I woke up with muffin top and I can't think and I need to show up on stage.

[1011] Yeah.

[1012] I'll take it.

[1013] But otherwise I don't need it anymore.

[1014] And are you addictive by nature or no?

[1015] Or let's say it's a zero to ten spectrum.

[1016] Where would you place yourself?

[1017] Probably somewhere in the middle.

[1018] Okay.

[1019] I mean, I like my coffee.

[1020] I like my nicotine.

[1021] But I did go from 40 sprays a day to zero sprays a day in three days because nicotine without all the other crap they put in it isn't more addictive than coffee.

[1022] And there's really good science on that that's in the book as well.

[1023] So, you know, that said, when I was younger, I probably was more addictive.

[1024] And when you have an ADD brain, what I like, and I know very well, I like intensity.

[1025] That's different than addiction.

[1026] Right.

[1027] That means the dark side of that is all stir up shit.

[1028] Sure.

[1029] The good side of it is it means I can handle a lot of stuff.

[1030] So it's about like how do you stay in the good that you've got versus the bad?

[1031] Yeah.

[1032] For me, there's a lot of deep personal development psychology work.

[1033] That's why the neuroscience and the personal development side, what I do, my last book before superhumans, that's the anti -agent book, it was a personal development book.

[1034] It's like, what does, you know, Jack Canfield say?

[1035] You know, what do all these other people say?

[1036] What do I say?

[1037] What's worked to get the angry asshole voices out of my head?

[1038] And so that, you know, what are the things that make you happy?

[1039] Because I did not know and Tommy how to be happy.

[1040] So once I'll learn that, well, it's a lot easier to build businesses and have marriages and kids and stuff if you know how to be happy as a skill.

[1041] Yeah.

[1042] Yeah, we just had a very fascinating guy from Harvard on, you know, tall.

[1043] Ben Shahar.

[1044] Yeah, Tall Ben Shahar.

[1045] Interesting.

[1046] He had the most popular class at Harvard, and it was on happiness.

[1047] Positive psychology.

[1048] That's very cool.

[1049] There's something to that stuff.

[1050] It matters.

[1051] Oh, 100%.

[1052] You know, one of your kind of pillars deals with that, and it's one I'm a huge proponent of, which is gratitude.

[1053] Oh, yeah.

[1054] Well, go ahead.

[1055] Tell me about gratitude and why we think it's such an important part of mental health and just being alive.

[1056] What I learned in the course of all that personal development stuff going to bed and learning from all the different disciplines and then testing it with EEG neurofeedback.

[1057] is that gratitude changes your fight -or -fly response.

[1058] It measurably changes it.

[1059] Like your cortisol levels and your...

[1060] Cortisol is a slow -moving thing.

[1061] It's heart rate variability.

[1062] Okay.

[1063] But adrenaline is that in the mix or not?

[1064] Adrenaline and cortisol are in the mix, but they take a while to change.

[1065] I'm talking, if you were to do something that was a deep, real gratitude, you can measure the space between this heartbeat and the next heartbeat and the one after that.

[1066] and you can predict whether the spacing will change.

[1067] Right.

[1068] And you wanted to get longer?

[1069] You wanted to slow down?

[1070] It turns out you just wanted to be different each time.

[1071] Oh, okay.

[1072] So if you're stressed and you're holding on anger at someone, right, and you're not feeling gratitude, you're going to have to do -dum, to -d -d -d -d -d -d -d -d -d -d -d -.

[1073] And if you've practiced gratitude, if you've forgiven the person, whatever, you're going to have to -dum, to -dum, to -dum.

[1074] So you see how the spacing between the changes, same number of beats, same number of seconds.

[1075] but they were spread out differently.

[1076] That's a huge biological signal.

[1077] You can actually train yourself just using your heartbeat to positively and consciously change the spacing of your heartbeats to go from.

[1078] I'm pissed off.

[1079] I'm in the adrenaline, sympathetic state.

[1080] The one that I was in all the time because I was born with a cord around my neck, the PTSD state, I'll kick that guy's ass state.

[1081] Yeah.

[1082] You can conscious, oh, that's what that state feels like.

[1083] Let me change my heartbeat.

[1084] Yeah.

[1085] It'll change.

[1086] And you do it with a list?

[1087] Do you do a gratitude list?

[1088] I do with my kids.

[1089] And I say, all right, tell me three things.

[1090] you're grateful for today.

[1091] It can just be anything.

[1092] And just tell me why.

[1093] And then I'll tell them three things I'm grateful for.

[1094] A lot of people miss the real power.

[1095] Just that alone, it'll change how you sleep.

[1096] It'll change how you wake up.

[1097] It'll change how you see the world.

[1098] It makes you a nicer person.

[1099] It's free.

[1100] It's like one of the most powerful things you can do.

[1101] But you know, you can look at someone and you can say, you know, that guy's a real jerk.

[1102] Like you did something bad to me. I'm pissed off about it.

[1103] And you say, what does gratitude you have to do with that?

[1104] Right.

[1105] You say, you would say, I want to forgive the person.

[1106] But what I do in the neuroscience facility and what I spent four months of my life doing with electrodes glued to my head is you sit down and you say, all right, I'm really pissed off about this situation or at this person, I'm going to find something I'm grateful for first.

[1107] And gratitude is the thing that opens the door to forgiving someone.

[1108] And forgiving someone doesn't mean telling you forgive them.

[1109] You never have to talk to them again.

[1110] It means you stop carrying any neurological response to the person.

[1111] So you want to turn off the, God damn, I'm going to eat that guy.

[1112] You want to turn that off?

[1113] You start with gratitude, and then you do forgiveness.

[1114] If you do not start with gratitude, you will not forgive that person, and I can show it to you in your brainwaves.

[1115] Look, they didn't change.

[1116] You sat there and you went through this meditation.

[1117] You said, oh, I'm going to think good thoughts about this person, and I'm going to forgive them and blah, blah, it doesn't work.

[1118] You've got to say, I'm grateful that even though they punched me in the face and it really hurt, that at least I still have my eye.

[1119] There.

[1120] Now you've got a gratitude.

[1121] Now you can forgive them for a punch you in the face.

[1122] Right.

[1123] No one teaches that.

[1124] And that is like a missing thing.

[1125] thing yeah like helps you step outside of the spiral you're in yeah i want to ask you this in the context of of being a recovered addict sex yeah i i mean i i published an entire year's worth of ejaculation data because it turns out oh wow the taoists were wanting to live forever and i'm on this i'm going to live 180 years path right so they said all right here's an equation and threw this equation down they said it's your age and years minus seven divided by four And they said, that's going to yield a number.

[1126] And if you're a guy, do not ejaculate more often than that number of days.

[1127] So for me, the number is like eight.

[1128] And they're saying you want to live?

[1129] Eight a year.

[1130] No, eight days.

[1131] So if there's eight, no, they're saying you're allowed to ejaculate once.

[1132] Wait eight days before you ejaculate.

[1133] Got it.

[1134] Oh, so gap it out.

[1135] Okay.

[1136] And they're saying, but if you want to live forever, you only ejaculate once every 30 days and keep your orgasm to less than an hour.

[1137] I'm not kidding.

[1138] This is in the Taoist text.

[1139] And I'm like, that's very specific.

[1140] Wouldn't you turn yourself inside out if you had an hour long, As I was a guy.

[1141] Yeah.

[1142] So I said, I'm going to disprove this, right?

[1143] Because I am a bit of a contrarian, and I like to oppositional defined disorder is one of my hobbies.

[1144] So for a year, I said, I'm going to test this.

[1145] So I tested my daily happiness score.

[1146] Like how much I like my life, my wife, you know, my job, you know, just, am I just gruntled today or not?

[1147] Yeah.

[1148] And what I found out was that they were right.

[1149] And so it turns out, I don't know about living forever, but that was their goal.

[1150] And I've talked to, like, Chinese energy medicine masters and people like that.

[1151] And there's general agreement on this stuff.

[1152] And what I found was there is for men, there's an orgasm hangover.

[1153] So the day after you have an ejaculation, you generally like your life less.

[1154] But, okay, you've been an addict.

[1155] So a lot of people go to sex because it's comforting and you get oxytocin and things like that.

[1156] Sure, sure.

[1157] But then you also have sex addiction.

[1158] So given that these guys are saying, well, just don't finish, basically.

[1159] Okay, so you are allowed to get up to the point of orgasm and then not orgasm.

[1160] Just don't drop your loud.

[1161] Oh, wow, wow, wow.

[1162] This reminds me of trying to quit masturbating in junior high, and I would masturbate right to the point of orgasming, and then that became my definition of what I hadn't masturbated.

[1163] And it's so excruciating to do that in my limited trials in junior high.

[1164] Here's what I found.

[1165] I tracked frequency of sex, frequency of ejaculation, whether I could actually go 30 days.

[1166] And like, publishing the data was kind of funny.

[1167] I'm like, well, there's 24 days, and you're like, oops.

[1168] Like, how do you show that on a graph?

[1169] Uh -huh.

[1170] Right?

[1171] But you could track the happiness score.

[1172] And what I found was that the less I ejaculated, the more sex I had.

[1173] Because I'm like, could we go again?

[1174] Okay, oxytocin levels go through the roof for both partners when you do that, right?

[1175] You want to live a long time?

[1176] Get your oxytocin levels up, right?

[1177] You want to not have addictive things going on.

[1178] Get your oxytocin levels up.

[1179] That's why hugs matter for addicts.

[1180] That's why social community matters.

[1181] These are oxytocin variables, right?

[1182] So, all right, this is kind of interesting.

[1183] And, of course, by the end of 30 -8, you, like, I'm going to crawl up the wall here with me. But I went through that, and I'm just, I'm kind of curious because if sex itself is something that can be addictive.

[1184] Well, here's where we get into the tasty debate of causality.

[1185] So I can definitely recognize that a hangover would be predictable from an orgasm.

[1186] Yeah.

[1187] But I would also predict that in many of the cases, the hangover is a result of why you did that.

[1188] Often sex, to me, is medicine to not deal with something that's giving me anxiety.

[1189] So then after the sex is over, then I get the full dump of the anxiety I was trying to avoid.

[1190] That's the addictive side.

[1191] Yeah, and regulate with the sex.

[1192] Quite often, too, before I was married.

[1193] I've done it with somebody I said I wasn't going to.

[1194] I now am emotionally responsible for somebody.

[1195] You said you weren't going to eat.

[1196] Yes.

[1197] So now, did the physiological act of coming create all that havoc or the hangover?

[1198] Or was it the emotional things that accompany that endeavor?

[1199] so I don't doubt that there's a hangover from it yet I'm not sure what what it's the causality I'm not and I'm sure for every person it's kind of different maybe some people have sex for like the purest of reasons I don't I want approval I I don't want to have sex if the person doesn't have an orgasm my goal is for them to think I was great at sex and get all their approval in the world and that's the high from sex for me stay tuned for more armchair expert if you did All right.

[1200] Now, we're talking about this from the extreme dude perspective.

[1201] There is an equation for women, too.

[1202] Oh, uh -oh.

[1203] Right?

[1204] Because if women follow that equation, like, it's not good.

[1205] Okay.

[1206] That's the guy equation.

[1207] And women technically can ejaculate, but most of them don't regularly.

[1208] Right.

[1209] And it was proved to be urine, but anyways, continue.

[1210] Yeah, I never.

[1211] Again, Howard Stern.

[1212] They had a doctor analyzed the ejaculate.

[1213] I would trust him in a minute on that.

[1214] Yeah, it was urine.

[1215] Okay.

[1216] Even though Ronnie, the limo driver, insist it's some little reserve tank of female.

[1217] People say different things on it.

[1218] Yeah, I love how many.

[1219] Yeah, I've interviewed a few experts who are absolutely certain that it's not.

[1220] It's Amrita and things like.

[1221] Right, sure, sure, sure.

[1222] Some of them I kind of believe, but I don't know.

[1223] I don't get to go sample 20 of them and be like, I don't know if that one's being.

[1224] I'm not at that stage in my life.

[1225] All right, so the women.

[1226] So there's any questions.

[1227] Any guesses?

[1228] I mean, I guess I would say the number.

[1229] is much smaller.

[1230] It turns out this is the equation for women.

[1231] It's the number of orgasms until you feel like you're going to die plus two.

[1232] Wait, wait, wait, wait.

[1233] But you're saying for longevity?

[1234] Yeah.

[1235] Oh, wow.

[1236] Sure.

[1237] You need to start taking like, you need to start taking breaks during the longer interviews.

[1238] Just for your fucking, for my longevity.

[1239] I'm trying to live to 180.

[1240] For people who are listening, those are numbers for men.

[1241] and the Taoist teaching is that women walk away from an orgasm undiminished, but it takes something out of guys.

[1242] We're making prostate glandins.

[1243] We're making hormones.

[1244] We're doing something.

[1245] So whatever the deal is, I found that that was, I mean, this was a year worth of experimenting.

[1246] It wasn't entirely unpleasant, right?

[1247] You know, I get to have more sex.

[1248] Sure.

[1249] But there is something to that in terms of, like, if you're going to go and do something really big, you might not want to ejaculate the night before.

[1250] Well, that's the old, like, football, don't have sex before the game type of thing.

[1251] It's real.

[1252] You think it's real.

[1253] Yeah.

[1254] That's great.

[1255] Because of a physical.

[1256] toll it's taking.

[1257] Interesting.

[1258] I want women to be like, I'm going to have less orgasms because your EQ drops if you're a woman and you don't have orgasms.

[1259] It's not good.

[1260] So I just want to not be.

[1261] You've heard me lamenting lately about the fact that I don't jerk off that much.

[1262] We've had many conversations recently with different guys in our friendship circle, like how much they do.

[1263] One of our friends does before they're out of bed in the morning.

[1264] And I'm like, wow, maybe I'm jerking off once every couple weeks.

[1265] And I was nervous about it.

[1266] I thought, oh, my virility is low.

[1267] and this and that, but now it feels like it might have, maybe you're happier.

[1268] If I subscribed to the Dowell's view of it.

[1269] Is this the seventh grade definition or like I didn't finish?

[1270] No, I would never jerk off and not have an orgasm at this stage of my life.

[1271] Yeah, I have no shame about masturbating, thank God, anymore.

[1272] But you keep saying 180, I took a gerontology class in college and they said basically potential lifespan for us as a species is 150.

[1273] Where does 180 come from?

[1274] It's interesting they chose 150.

[1275] That's pretty aggressive.

[1276] by most people's standards.

[1277] So I know we can do 120 because we have people who are 120.

[1278] And I've been working in this anti -aging nonprofit field for 20 years.

[1279] I've learned things for people three times my age who have more energy than I did.

[1280] And I know what's happening because I just wrote the book about it from interviewing 600 people about it on my show.

[1281] We are cracking the code of aging.

[1282] And if we cannot, with our combined resources as a species and the Internet, which allows us to find research that would have been hidden for decades before.

[1283] If we can't do 50 % better than our best today over the next 100 years, it's because there's been a zombie apocalypse or an asteroid hit the earth.

[1284] Okay.

[1285] 50 % improvement of where we are now is not even very good.

[1286] You look at what we were doing 100 years ago.

[1287] We were fighting World War I on horses.

[1288] This is 100 years.

[1289] That's how big it is.

[1290] And that's the last 100 years when we are moving slowly.

[1291] Right.

[1292] And right now we're using AI.

[1293] We're using all these cool technologies to build new technologies.

[1294] So we're exponentially getting better.

[1295] I don't even think I'm being very crazy pants with 180.

[1296] Now, a truck could hit me tomorrow.

[1297] You know, something bad could happen.

[1298] But barring things like that, this is not crazy pants.

[1299] There are people listening to the show who are going to live longer than 180.

[1300] It is already in, it's happening.

[1301] Now, do you know Brett Weinstein?

[1302] Weinstein.

[1303] You know Brett Weinstein?

[1304] What did?

[1305] He, well, he's an evolutionary biology.

[1306] I just text him the other day saying, here's what I don't understand.

[1307] Your cells go through mitosis.

[1308] They make a perfectly identical copy of themselves.

[1309] If everything works, right?

[1310] Yes, they have the power to make an identical copy of themselves.

[1311] I text him and said, if we can make an identical copy of our somatic cells through mitosis, why evolutionarily did us dying ever benefit the species?

[1312] because there's really no reason that an animal couldn't live forever.

[1313] And there would be no cost evolutionarily because you would just be able to spread your genes longer and longer and longer.

[1314] It really begs the question why dying's even a part of the biological equation because it doesn't have to be.

[1315] There is a realm in which I just start making an identical copy of myself this day going forward.

[1316] and there's no creepy genes that's destroying elasticity and all these other signs of aging.

[1317] Why is that not possible?

[1318] Why hasn't that ever happened?

[1319] What would you eat?

[1320] What would I eat?

[1321] Let's say I ate a gel packet that was completely scientifically engineered to be the sick.

[1322] That came from what?

[1323] Some things that died.

[1324] Plants.

[1325] So the plants had to die for you to eat them.

[1326] What are the plants going to eat?

[1327] Son.

[1328] No, the plants are dead people and poop.

[1329] That's what plants eat.

[1330] Well, no, because plants were around before dead people and poop.

[1331] They had bacteria, dead bacteria that they were eating.

[1332] They eat dead plants.

[1333] But in all seriousness, we would have no soil on the planet without these amazing probiotic sources, giant herds of buffalo, elephants, giraffes, sheep, goats, pigs.

[1334] Sure, they're spreading seeds and poop.

[1335] Yeah, but not the seeds.

[1336] It's actually the poop.

[1337] You actually need to have a carbon cycle.

[1338] Right.

[1339] So if we have animals that never die, then we'd have no predators, right?

[1340] And if you were a species that was engineered to never die, you would never reproduce and you wouldn't have the benefits.

[1341] Well, why wouldn't I reproduce?

[1342] Well, because you'd eat and you never die, you get overpopulation into the planet, right?

[1343] So you'd eat all of the food in your environment, especially if you weren't a human.

[1344] But even in the model where five of the 200 -person small hunting and gathering group live forever, they would pass their genes on indefinitely and slowly that ratio of people that don't die would become 100 % over the course of five generations or whatever it would be I still don't understand the tool by which it's going to self -correct and there's no record of those mutations still around you know what I'm saying there's what would act against the animal that live forever to correct it overpopulation okay so There'd be overpopulation, and let's say 80 % of the people would die of starvation or malnutrition, but those 20 % would still be around.

[1345] That's a completely valid point.

[1346] I just, I think the mere fact that we don't have a single example of a carbon -based life form that has lived forever, I mean, we have coy fish that live for 200 years and we have trees that live for 10 ,000 years, all these things.

[1347] Naked mole rats and oxalottles and these cool corner species.

[1348] The fact that thus far we've not found anything that has been around since five billion years ago when the earth was formed, to me seems like there's something weird there.

[1349] But let's get a little bit woo here.

[1350] Okay, good, good, good.

[1351] One of the really interesting books I read, the name is escaping right now, and the author's name is Todd.

[1352] The foreword in this book is something about states of consciousness, but the forward of the book is by the Dalai Lama.

[1353] You know how many times the Dalai Lama writes the forward for books?

[1354] I don't know.

[1355] He's very popular.

[1356] Pretty much never.

[1357] Okay.

[1358] I can see him doing Oprah's.

[1359] This book, yeah, okay.

[1360] Yeah, Oprah and Dr. Oz.

[1361] And this book was about the evolutionary biology arguments for reincarnation.

[1362] And this is from a hardcore science guy who rewrites USB drivers to talk to brain stimulation things.

[1363] He went in and he said, here's all the reasons that it would make sense, that consciousness moves between lives.

[1364] meat needs renewal, right?

[1365] And that solves a lot of problems.

[1366] And one of the biggest issues here is epigenetics.

[1367] We're going through an environmental change right now.

[1368] It is actually getting hotter than it used to be.

[1369] And there are some fantastic, just amazing studies of bacteria.

[1370] They take bacteria that do not metabolize lactase.

[1371] This is a type of milk sugar.

[1372] And they put them in an environment where they don't have the genes to do it that are turned on.

[1373] They will starve.

[1374] Magically, they change and they turn on lactate production long dormant genes in order to do this in their environment but their offspring do anyway so like there's all kinds of weird things that happen where life will change more rapidly than genetics predicts based on the mutation model would suggest it's probably because the you from a thousand years ago probably wouldn't survive very well in today's environment but if you believe any of that past life stuff and I've no some very wise people who've come to grips with the fact that that is a part of the world that they live in, including the guy who wrote this book, they're saying, you know, maybe we're living.

[1375] We just don't really perceive it that way.

[1376] I find there's a great mystery here.

[1377] Oh, yeah, there's, yeah, we know a cabillionth of what there is to know.

[1378] The other mystery is why you've been just waving your nicotine around and you didn't even offer me a spray?

[1379] Well, I saw that you have one over there.

[1380] That was Martin's he was handing it.

[1381] Oh, Martin.

[1382] Warren, why aren't you offering a spray?

[1383] All right, geez.

[1384] When does superhuman come out?

[1385] Let me just ask you that.

[1386] October 8th.

[1387] It hits its shelves.

[1388] It's available.

[1389] Pre -order.

[1390] You get at Dave Asprey .com, and there's a bunch of interviews with anti -aging experts you can't get in other places.

[1391] Well, you asked me the one big question is why 180?

[1392] But what you didn't ask about was overpopulation.

[1393] And I'm telling people in here, here's the seven things that are making you old and the four things you have to not do.

[1394] Don't die of these four things and fix these seven things with some small tweaks and your odds of feeling really good when you're old.

[1395] and living longer go way up.

[1396] Like, it's pretty straightforward.

[1397] But what happens if people live a lot longer?

[1398] Like, what about the overpopulation problem?

[1399] Let's talk about it because, you know, it's funny, and maybe this is related or it's not related.

[1400] I constantly stress out about the fact that there's seven billion people here, and I think it seems untenable and all these things.

[1401] But I did think, oh my gosh, this is the easiest problem that could be solved of all the problems we have because literally, if just we cut the birth rate in half, we're going to shrink precipitously, but then I started worrying about what that does to the world, economy and lack of growth and all this money we've lent that demands we have a three percent level of growth all this stuff i went straight to the economics of us downsizing on the planet but it is a problem that could be fixed in 30 years truly all that has to happen is we don't reproduce for 30 years and our population goes in half my first book was a book on fertility my wife was infertile when i met her we had our first child at 39 one at 42 with no fertility assistance other than food and supplement and getting hormones dialed in.

[1402] That's her medical practice now.

[1403] She does consulting over the Internet.

[1404] Oh, wow.

[1405] So we know a lot about fertility.

[1406] Five years of writing a book, 1 ,300 references my own children at stake.

[1407] Yeah.

[1408] We don't have a global population problem.

[1409] We have a global fertility problem.

[1410] The fertility rate in every developed country is plummeting right now.

[1411] You want to have kids and you can have kids?

[1412] There's your 30 -year thing.

[1413] The global population problem, it's a single generation problem.

[1414] The world is too polluted.

[1415] are unable to have kids and the kids are less viable than they ever have been.

[1416] That'll get solved over the next 60 years.

[1417] I'm planning to be around and I'm planning for my kids to be around to see it.

[1418] Yeah.

[1419] Right.

[1420] So what I'm more worried about over 60 years is the destruction of our soil and in the pollution of the oceans because we need them to soak up carbon.

[1421] Yeah.

[1422] And that's going to be a much more ugly problem than there being too many people.

[1423] Right.

[1424] But let's just talk about what the world looks like.

[1425] If people listen to this now, you're like, oh, old age isn't tubes, diapers, forgetting my name and giving all my money to the hospital before I die, right?

[1426] This is pretty much the picture most people have.

[1427] What if the picture was, when I'm old, I'm going to be the village elder, and I'm going to have the ability, I'm going to have the energy, the memory, and the desire to share decades of wisdom with the next generation.

[1428] And this is actually what old age has been through all societies, throughout all of history, except those Norwegians where they were just pushed them off a cliff when I got old.

[1429] So other than that, it's actually been this way.

[1430] So do you want to talk to someone?

[1431] Yeah, I was married 14 times and I finally got it right.

[1432] Maybe you should get advice when you're 25 from that guy.

[1433] Sure.

[1434] Because he maybe learned something, right?

[1435] And so I envision this world where we have people who actually have wisdom, who've dealt with their shit, who figured out their addictions and shared with other people, who figured out why they used to be a jerk, right?

[1436] And actually made themselves better and made the world around the better.

[1437] But if you think your life is going to look like that when you're old, and old for you is now 180, are you going to allow plastic in the ocean?

[1438] Are you going to shit in your own sandbox?

[1439] Right.

[1440] No, you're going to take care of the planet you live on because you're going to be here longer than you thought.

[1441] Yeah.

[1442] So the fix for all this crap is, no, old age is not what you thought it was going to be.

[1443] It's actually the time when you are most equipped as a human being to do the greatest good.

[1444] Mm -hmm.

[1445] And global population, people stop having babies because they can't get it up.

[1446] And because if they can get it up, there's no fertility there.

[1447] That's already happening.

[1448] Well, it is fascinating this trajectory that all, I don't want to say Western, because that's not the case.

[1449] Japan's following this course, a lot of...

[1450] The U .S. is following it, yeah.

[1451] Yeah, the more middle class, the more comfortable, the longer people delay.

[1452] The more educated in the more, yeah.

[1453] Yeah, the more educated, the less your fertility rate is there was the study that came out in Japan like eight years ago where guys aren't even listing sex in the top five.

[1454] of their priorities and we've just had all these sex experts on that millennials, millennials are having way less sex.

[1455] They're having solo sex.

[1456] It's like, oh, wow.

[1457] So the millennials are even going to up it.

[1458] And yeah, you're going to see less and less.

[1459] We're wired to only do three things.

[1460] This is every bacteria on the planet.

[1461] And we're run by ancient bacteria inside our cells.

[1462] There's only three things they do.

[1463] Run away from scary things right now.

[1464] By the way, that's the root of addiction, right?

[1465] It's fear.

[1466] If it feels like it's going to kill you, even if it's not, you'll do anything to escape it, including take a substance that makes you not feel the fear.

[1467] Avoid dangerous things, or you'll die.

[1468] Second thing, eat everything, because most species have had famines many times.

[1469] So eat the damn cookies.

[1470] Eat all of them right now, or you'll die, and then you do.

[1471] And the third thing is, it's also a fear, feed.

[1472] And the other one is, fuck everything.

[1473] Because you better spread your genes because you're going to die and the species will die.

[1474] Those are our primary urges, right?

[1475] And you want to get control of those urges.

[1476] That's one of the reasons I talked about that sex experiment before, right?

[1477] Okay, I can intermittent fast.

[1478] I can not eat for three days and I don't feel like I'm going to die.

[1479] I feel okay.

[1480] My biology works.

[1481] Yeah.

[1482] I've learned to deal with the fear and the negative voice in my head and things like that and I can still jump if a tiger comes at me. So I feel like I got that mostly dialed in.

[1483] There's always work to do.

[1484] Right.

[1485] And then this whole thing, like can I have desire?

[1486] Can I have passion?

[1487] Can I have sex?

[1488] But man, if you disconnect yourself from food and you only eat gel packs, you disconnect yourself from sex and say, I don't need that.

[1489] I'm a human robot.

[1490] You're actually going to spend all your time living in fear because all you got left is anxiety.

[1491] and it's going to suck, right?

[1492] And we're not meat robots.

[1493] Right.

[1494] I mean, in a superhuman, I write about, like, I don't know what's called him, Dick Enhancement Technologies.

[1495] Oh, is that on the horizon?

[1496] Or it's already here?

[1497] It's already here, and I did it.

[1498] I do all this.

[1499] I've done more stuff than any human.

[1500] Yeah.

[1501] What did that in tell?

[1502] Tell us about that.

[1503] Yeah.

[1504] Tell us about your dick.

[1505] Okay.

[1506] So, there's a technology using sound waves, shockwave therapy.

[1507] It's called Gaines Wave, and I went and I did it.

[1508] and it's for ED, and it actually causes new blood vessels and new nerves to grow in your junk.

[1509] Okay.

[1510] Now, that means it gets bigger, and I try all the tech I write about, stem cells, whatever, so I've had stem cells injected in my dick.

[1511] Oh, wow.

[1512] That was really noticeable.

[1513] Your own stem cells or, like, baby stem cells?

[1514] My own.

[1515] Okay.

[1516] And my wife actually had her stem cells injected in her vagina, which was transformative for her after having a couple of goods.

[1517] Like, like back to 25.

[1518] She just raves about it.

[1519] Wow.

[1520] But aside from the stem cells, there's shockwave there, but you do it, it actually gained.

[1521] Like, the show were in the grower side, like, noticeable, you walk by in the mirror, you're like, who's that?

[1522] Oh, that's me. Wow.

[1523] It was un - Through sound waves.

[1524] Unbelievable.

[1525] I mean, it's, you numb it with numbing cream, and they, they, it's like a sound jackhammer.

[1526] Oh, wow.

[1527] Holy crap.

[1528] And, of course, it works for ED, but for me, I was like, I'm just going to try this because what the heck, you know, if I can control my own biology.

[1529] But this stuff is real.

[1530] So as you age, would you like to be 100 and still have an active sex life?

[1531] I think it's kind of important.

[1532] So maybe we could take care of that now.

[1533] And if you're 25, you're like, I have no sex drive.

[1534] You either have a cortisol problem because you're stress and anxious all the time, which is probably the case.

[1535] Or you have a testosterone problem.

[1536] And that's for a reason.

[1537] So I had less testosterone than my mom at 26.

[1538] So I went on testosterone replacement therapy to get my levels where they should be.

[1539] And oh, my God, I still have a sex drive.

[1540] Who would have imagined?

[1541] And this is, it's important.

[1542] If you're ignoring food, you're ignoring fear, and you're ignoring fucking as core things that humans do in order, you're kind of doing it wrong.

[1543] Right.

[1544] Interesting.

[1545] That is interesting.

[1546] Okay.

[1547] Now, my last question is, do you ever step back and ask the global question?

[1548] To what end?

[1549] Like, be productive, be the most self -actualized, be as engaged as you can be, all these things, right?

[1550] The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow of all this would be like kind of enhanced performance, efficacy, all these things.

[1551] Do you ever step back and go, why?

[1552] I mean, ultimately, we're just monkey staying fucking busy until we die.

[1553] That's really what's happening.

[1554] If you're an alien looking at us and I go, oh, okay, this guy, Dave, he's got this whole system to be even busier before he dies.

[1555] Is there even a point to it?

[1556] The question that I asked for the first, like, 500 episodes of Bulletproof Radio was three most important pieces of advice for someone who wants to perform better as a human being.

[1557] I didn't say work harder.

[1558] I didn't say be busier.

[1559] Because human beings are lovers, we're artists, we're givers.

[1560] Because the fourth F word I didn't mention is what all bacteria do and what we're wired to do when we're not fearful, we're not starving, and we're not unloved is actually friend.

[1561] And we build communities the same way that bacteria build yogurt and kombucha and cheese, right?

[1562] We form communities, we specialize, we support each other, and we're wired to do that.

[1563] So the reason that performing better as a human being is important is because human beings are here to help each other.

[1564] and it feels good to give back.

[1565] And you know that from your work with addiction.

[1566] So if you want to show up all the way as a human being, there's something you're going to do that it takes a huge amount of energy.

[1567] And you can only do that if you're not putting all your energy in those first three things.

[1568] And it's evolve.

[1569] Our job is to evolve as a species and our job is to evolve as individuals.

[1570] So I'll tell you, all that free energy that I have from modafinil and from bulletproof coffee and from meditating and learning how to sleep better and less time and all that cool shit that I do that I just love, it gives me extra energy to be a better dad gives me extra energy to work on becoming fully enlightened if there's such a thing and if not then I'm just masturbating but I don't think that's the case I dig it but if you are just masturbating the penis is bigger and sturdy and you're only doing it once every 30 days well Dave good luck with superhuman just to give you the full title Superhuman the bulletproof plan to age backward and maybe even live forever God you know what would be great is you'll have the juiciest I told you so for all 180.

[1571] Yeah, it'll be a really good one.

[1572] It'll be, uh, look at us.

[1573] Except we'll be dead, so we can't even say, I told you so to us.

[1574] Oh, we'll be dead, but he'll be alive.

[1575] It's still a juicy I told you so.

[1576] Oh, sure.

[1577] You really can't lose with that promise.

[1578] Think about it, like, if I don't make it, I'll be dead.

[1579] So, like, oh, yeah.

[1580] Jokes on you.

[1581] That's right.

[1582] I mean, I'm willing to die trying.

[1583] Yeah.

[1584] I just, I don't think I will.

[1585] I think it's a cool endeavor.

[1586] Thanks to tell him for coming.

[1587] I'd like to talk to you soon.

[1588] And now my favorite part of the show, the fact check with my soulmate, Monica Padman.

[1589] Come as pre, and you'll see a world of pure imagination.

[1590] That was good.

[1591] I was not expecting such creative.

[1592] A world of pure imagination.

[1593] Well.

[1594] Well, okay, so we're a bad, just to remind everyone, we're in my trailer.

[1595] Trailer.

[1596] I feel like that's pertinent info, don't you?

[1597] I do, because it changes everything.

[1598] Like, if I was listening to Howard Stern and they were doing the show from the back of a taxi cab, I'd want to know.

[1599] Me too.

[1600] Me too.

[1601] Visuals are everything when it's only audio.

[1602] So we're on a couch that's in my trailer.

[1603] Yeah, and it's a beautiful trailer.

[1604] Mahogany.

[1605] There is a laminate, yeah.

[1606] Yeah, and it seems to be a little bit mahogany flavored.

[1607] That are a burled walnut.

[1608] maybe oh okay that's a little specific for my taste a little too temporally specific as our friend gordon keith would say yeah we're here we're in sand canyon oops am i allowed to say that good luck finding us in san cany it's a pretty big area oh by the way do you know that um so they're doing reshoots for i think call the wild the jack london book i guess they're making into a movie and harrison ford is here oh get off of my plane oh oh my And also the, um...

[1609] Get the fuck out of my house.

[1610] Yeah, yeah.

[1611] Dan!

[1612] There's a man in my house.

[1613] That man had one arm.

[1614] You find that man. He killed my wife.

[1615] Wow.

[1616] Your whole phase shifted when you did him.

[1617] Well, I tried to look like him.

[1618] Anyways, he's, he's been spotted.

[1619] He's been driving like a gator around.

[1620] He drives, as you'd expect.

[1621] Sure.

[1622] He's like other crew members in it.

[1623] And he's been spotted by transfer.

[1624] He did also take a helicopter in to work one or two days.

[1625] Man, that's exciting.

[1626] It is, but I haven't seen him.

[1627] but I want to do his run for him.

[1628] You know I do his run.

[1629] Oh, and you're going to show him?

[1630] Yes, you know how I do just.

[1631] I only do a couple of physical impersonations.

[1632] One is Jess's walk.

[1633] Oh, yeah.

[1634] And you're, that's very good.

[1635] Thank you.

[1636] And I do a pretty good Harrison Ford.

[1637] I don't think I've seen it.

[1638] You have to really jut your haunches out.

[1639] That's the most critical thing.

[1640] Oh, wow.

[1641] He's got such strong hindquarters.

[1642] And when he runs, it's like you just really see that.

[1643] You can see the, like the cheeks moving.

[1644] Just all of it.

[1645] Yeah.

[1646] It's just very thrust out.

[1647] It's very powerful run.

[1648] get off my plane okay there was a man on my set that man ran like me you find that man okay we're back okay and we're back all right Dave David yes uh well first have to air a grievance okay great I love your grievances I'm doing this publicly because it was so bad okay I had a customer service issue oh no at H &R Blah Oh, no, you're not going to shame them publicly.

[1649] I think I am.

[1650] Oh, no. I have to.

[1651] It was really bad.

[1652] They can't sue me. This all happened.

[1653] Okay.

[1654] What happened?

[1655] So, so.

[1656] Go on.

[1657] So I'm in a bit of a panicky pickle trying to get some of my tax returns.

[1658] Oh, right.

[1659] So I go on to the website as you're supposed to do.

[1660] Log into my account.

[1661] Try to retrieve them.

[1662] It won't let me confirm my identity, even though.

[1663] Yeah.

[1664] guy you just heard one of the real life pitfalls of recording in the trailer is they're going to call you back to set yeah yeah yeah well this is what happens we expected that again if if stern was in the cab and i heard the horn honk I'd go I'd want to know did they just did a car cut them off or it was a pedestrian in the way we need to tell everybody what's going yes I just wanted everyone to know that Rudy our wonderful set base PA just told us it's time okay so anyway in a pickle and so I had to get these tax returns I couldn't confirm my identity it was a wonderful set base PA just told us it's time okay so anyway in a pickle and so I had to get these tax returns I couldn't confirm my identity it was wouldn't let me, even though I know I put in my right information, because it's my information, so I know it's right.

[1665] Yeah.

[1666] Then it wasn't working.

[1667] It wasn't working last night or today.

[1668] So then I had to call them.

[1669] Okay.

[1670] And then the man on the phone was trying to help me. And then he was like, okay, yeah, it's not working.

[1671] Can you try in an hour?

[1672] Oh.

[1673] And I was like, is anything going to change in the hour?

[1674] Mm -hmm.

[1675] And he was like.

[1676] It's like a full system reboot or something?

[1677] No. He's just like, it's not working right now.

[1678] And I'm like, it didn't work last night.

[1679] It's not working right now.

[1680] It's not going to work in an hour.

[1681] And it's time sensitive and I need it.

[1682] Yeah.

[1683] And also, like, these are important documents.

[1684] Like, I need to be able to access them.

[1685] Yeah.

[1686] And he was saying it was an issue on their end.

[1687] And I was like, okay, so is that going to get fixed?

[1688] And he's like, ma 'am.

[1689] And then he was getting so frustrated at me. And then I got mad.

[1690] Oh, you got hot.

[1691] I was like, are you out of your mind, sir?

[1692] Like this, no. So then I asked to speak to a supervisor.

[1693] Oh, great.

[1694] And then it took a long time.

[1695] The supervisor came on.

[1696] And then I don't think it was a supervisor.

[1697] I think it was his friend.

[1698] His buddy, right?

[1699] His lunch friend.

[1700] Yes.

[1701] So then I started to tell the story and then it cut off in the middle and went to the survey.

[1702] So he hung up on me. Okay.

[1703] And set me to the survey.

[1704] And then I was ready to give a horrible survey.

[1705] And then the survey didn't work.

[1706] So this is a nightmare place.

[1707] It is.

[1708] It is.

[1709] I do want to say one thing.

[1710] Okay.

[1711] Just because I have to.

[1712] All right.

[1713] I sometimes feel bad for these business.

[1714] businesses that like the people who built the business are really thorough and hard work and stuff.

[1715] But then as you grow just inevitably, you just have to hire a bunch of people.

[1716] And then sometimes there's just, you're going to get some bad eggs, right?

[1717] Yeah.

[1718] And then they ruin your whole business because there's some turkey who makes zero effort.

[1719] Yeah.

[1720] And so often you see these big businesses basically taken out by some dip shit.

[1721] I know.

[1722] The Valdez, whatever bozos were doing, the fucking oil rig and the in the gold.

[1723] It's like, you know, I don't know.

[1724] When an armchair expert eventually has 609 employees.

[1725] Never.

[1726] Someone's going to really shit the bed.

[1727] And we're going to be like, oh, my God, we were just taken out by this bozo.

[1728] That's never happening because we're going to say the three -man operation forever.

[1729] I'm going to go out on a limb and say that H &R Block did not use ZimpRecruita out because that's not a qualified candidate.

[1730] That's right.

[1731] They did not.

[1732] Two, two of them and then a bad survey system.

[1733] Oh, man. Not good.

[1734] Boy, no. Well, let's also, though, just be fair.

[1735] I do, I don't want to get sued by H &RB.

[1736] Have you had a good experience prior to this?

[1737] No. I can't pull you back from the ledge, can I?

[1738] I think they are evil.

[1739] Oh my gosh.

[1740] Oh my gosh.

[1741] You're going to get us taken off.

[1742] Wait, why?

[1743] I can't get sued for having an opinion about a place.

[1744] You can't.

[1745] But this to me, I don't even an opinion.

[1746] This is what it runs the risk of.

[1747] I hate when celebrities tweet some grievance about an airline.

[1748] Yeah, but you tweeted about the...

[1749] Yes.

[1750] I did.

[1751] Fuck, you're right, I did.

[1752] You did that exact same thing.

[1753] Because it was criminal.

[1754] Yeah, that's how this feels.

[1755] Yeah.

[1756] But when people are like, oh, cool, thanks.

[1757] I'm so glad I sat on the runway for 15 minutes jet blue or whatever they tweet.

[1758] And I'm like, you know, that just wrote.

[1759] I'm just trying to protect you from that.

[1760] I get it.

[1761] And I don't like it when people do that either.

[1762] And I thought about it on my drive.

[1763] I said, am I going to talk about this?

[1764] Yes.

[1765] And I got to support your decisions, and I do.

[1766] The other thing is I sometimes will try to imagine, like, if I see a movie that is fucking garbage, I will not bash it publicly.

[1767] Oh, no, no. Because people work so hard to make the movie.

[1768] And then sometimes I try to extend that to like all, I assume all businesses are working really hard to try to be good.

[1769] Well, with the exception of my prescription provider.

[1770] And H &R Block, clearly.

[1771] Sometimes they're not.

[1772] Look, I get, it's not Howard and Ronald Block's fault.

[1773] Right.

[1774] It's these customer service people.

[1775] It's Gilbert and Terrence Block.

[1776] Yes.

[1777] The sons, nepotism.

[1778] The nephews, I'll say.

[1779] Oh, boy.

[1780] The recording?

[1781] Yep, we're recording.

[1782] So, really fun update.

[1783] Now I'm getting a fake eyeball attached to my face, right, Monica?

[1784] It looks like a piece of bacon is hanging from your face right now.

[1785] Yeah, it's real grody now.

[1786] It is.

[1787] It is.

[1788] I like it.

[1789] What were we talking?

[1790] We were talking about your issues with my customer service experience.

[1791] With H &R Block.

[1792] Now, in the break, did you rethink it or you still have conviction that it was the right move?

[1793] So since this, since we spoke last 10 minutes ago.

[1794] The taxi cab has stopped in a couple different places.

[1795] That's right.

[1796] So what happened is I had these printed out.

[1797] I had a hard copies.

[1798] So what I had to do was take pictures of every single page, 27 pages.

[1799] And turn them into a PDF?

[1800] Exactly.

[1801] Do a little dock scan.

[1802] Now, the problem is for one of these tax returns, I'm missing the front page.

[1803] Oh.

[1804] Okay.

[1805] No, boy, no. Nope.

[1806] And so then I tried to get online again.

[1807] Maybe something's changed.

[1808] Maybe I'll change my mind about H &R Block.

[1809] And I can't even get into the website now.

[1810] Oh, do you think maybe that they have banned you from the whole service?

[1811] Yes.

[1812] And so I'm retaliating.

[1813] but it's interesting they somehow had an inkling that you were going to do this well you know they decided to lock you out of your account well i got pretty ornery on the phone did you do you curse at all no no cursing but it's very stern i'm always disappointed to myself if i i get to the point with a customer service person where i swear because i just imagine they're recording all of it so if and when the whole thing becomes public or in a court transcript i'll have kind of lost the upper hand having sworn i did feel a little nervous that this person knows my social security number and is mad at me and is a stranger it is yeah it's not the ideal person to pick a fight with no they have the nuclear option well look if my if my identity gets stolen oh my god i'm taking h -n -r block i mean that that that company's going to the ground oh you're going to take it all the way down yeah all the way Like, like, what is it, Purdue, pharma?

[1814] You've seen all the stuff about Purdue, right?

[1815] The chicken?

[1816] No, no, no, no, Pardue.

[1817] The people who made Purdue, who made OxyContin, they filed bankruptcy because of all these lawsuits.

[1818] They're going to be paying out like $12 billion or something like that.

[1819] Oh, wow, good.

[1820] Also, so we definitely agree that this pharmaceutical is not Purdue the chicken.

[1821] I don't even know about Purdue the chicken.

[1822] Purdue is a huge chicken.

[1823] College, too, right?

[1824] And it's a college, yeah.

[1825] It's a college of chicken.

[1826] It's a chicken college.

[1827] Yeah.

[1828] Now, my college was a chicken college because if you drove by on...

[1829] All that processing.

[1830] On the loop.

[1831] You drove along the loop on the east side and you get a nice whiff of chicken.

[1832] Stinky chicken.

[1833] Of chicken carrion, really.

[1834] Rotten chicken.

[1835] Yeah, yeah.

[1836] Dead chicken.

[1837] Trigger warning.

[1838] Wait, Rob, can you take a picture of this?

[1839] Well, that's a good idea.

[1840] Yeah.

[1841] It is a pretty unique fact check experience.

[1842] It's a look for sure.

[1843] Okay, so Dave.

[1844] Dave Asprey.

[1845] It's like burning in my eye, but I'm sure that'll pass.

[1846] That'll pass, I'm sure.

[1847] So he said that he was the first guy to sell anything over the internet.

[1848] Hard to substantiate, right?

[1849] Very.

[1850] I did not, in fact, substantiate that.

[1851] So this is what it says.

[1852] The first online transaction was by some reports, marijuana sold by Stanford students to MIT students via the ARPANET account at their artificial intelligence lab in 1972.

[1853] Oh, my goodness.

[1854] However, the first online shopping transaction on the internet took place some 22 years later, the sale between two friends of a sting CD.

[1855] Oh, okay.

[1856] The time said...

[1857] So it was a resale of a Sting CD.

[1858] Right, right, right.

[1859] So anyway, but I didn't, in all of this, I did not see his name come up in regards to that.

[1860] Being the first.

[1861] To being the first, correct.

[1862] Now, the interesting thing about the MIT -Stanford marijuana transaction is so far away, 3 ,000 miles.

[1863] That doesn't seem like the ideal person to sell weed to, because now you've got the logistical issue of getting it to MIT, right?

[1864] Yeah, exactly.

[1865] But maybe they wanted a big challenge.

[1866] I'm nervous this is pulling down on my eye and then I'm going to have a really wrinkly right eye at the end of this day.

[1867] Do you think that's possible?

[1868] I don't think you're going to know.

[1869] I think you're okay.

[1870] Can I see?

[1871] Yeah.

[1872] Oh, my God.

[1873] That's creepy.

[1874] Creepy.

[1875] Wow.

[1876] Listeners, I can't wait for you to see.

[1877] Oh, that's gross.

[1878] And earlier he had a big bruise and I got.

[1879] very scared.

[1880] It was a pop out for you.

[1881] It was a big pop out.

[1882] It was a makeup bruise on my abdomen and you thought it was real.

[1883] Yeah.

[1884] And your eyes an actual pop out.

[1885] Your eye popped out.

[1886] It literally popped out.

[1887] Yep.

[1888] Yep.

[1889] I'm excited to know what happened.

[1890] Why?

[1891] What is this episode?

[1892] Sure.

[1893] It really begs a lot of questions, right?

[1894] It does.

[1895] You know, I don't know that we're declaring one way or another, whether he possibly sold something earlier and it just was never documented.

[1896] Yeah.

[1897] I mean, I'm sure he was early.

[1898] Sure.

[1899] I'm sure.

[1900] People love being the first.

[1901] They do.

[1902] I think inordinately so.

[1903] Oh, I know.

[1904] All of it.

[1905] I was just, I had a nice long chat with Bradley when I was in New York this weekend and we were just talking about all those things.

[1906] Those ego things where it really all comes back to Leno saying that he watched them take down an Elvis statue.

[1907] You know?

[1908] Doesn't that sum it all up?

[1909] What?

[1910] Elvis Presley.

[1911] They took the statue down in front of a casino because they said people don't know who Elvis is anymore.

[1912] Oh, right.

[1913] So whatever thing you're telling yourself about being the first or the best or the this or the that, no one's going to give a flying fuck 40 years after your debt.

[1914] It's just, you know, it's all for not.

[1915] Yeah.

[1916] I'm feeling weird about your eye.

[1917] Mainly because the profile is a very interesting.

[1918] It kind of looks like it's just coming out of your nose.

[1919] Oh, like I had a big snodder.

[1920] Yeah, but my brain came out.

[1921] Yeah, your brain came out.

[1922] Exactly.

[1923] And I kind of feel like I really want to help you.

[1924] Sure.

[1925] Oh, I bet this is triggering some of your nurturing instincts.

[1926] Yeah, and I can't.

[1927] Right.

[1928] Right.

[1929] You want me to cry right now, right?

[1930] Will you?

[1931] No, you can't because you're, no, it'll mess up your floppy eye.

[1932] Okay.

[1933] Okay.

[1934] So he said that he co -founded the company that held Google's first servers.

[1935] Mm -hmm.

[1936] So he's talking, I think he's talking about the company Exodus Communications.

[1937] Naturally.

[1938] Which he did co -found a part of it.

[1939] Okay.

[1940] But he wasn't the co -poh.

[1941] Okay, thanks.

[1942] There wasn't, there are two other co -founders.

[1943] Oh, okay.

[1944] Who are they?

[1945] I didn't write their names down, but they're not them.

[1946] Trent Bigsby and Phil Harrington.

[1947] It was the same guys who started H &R Block.

[1948] Okay, I'm mad at them.

[1949] No, anyway, and it did, it had the highest profile of N. data center builders during the dot -com boom and then it did file bankruptcy but I again I can't find that it was Google's first server okay hard to track that down well because also the first Google server was created by the guys who created Google Sergey and Larry and Larry so they built that in the 1990s okay so anyway so he Dave made a few medical claims.

[1950] Okay.

[1951] And I then fact -checked with a doctor, friend of ours that we'd trust very much.

[1952] Mutual friend.

[1953] Yes.

[1954] And so here's a few of the things.

[1955] Okay.

[1956] When people are training to run marathons, he said that like their gut bacteria changes.

[1957] Okay.

[1958] And this doctor said that there is a recent controversial paper on marathon runners and their microbiome, small study of 15 runners, there's 10 controls not replicated.

[1959] Okay, so a real preliminary data set.

[1960] Yes.

[1961] So one paper is connected to that.

[1962] He also said that HLADR is in 28 % of the population and makes people more sensitive to toxic mold disease and more likely to get autism.

[1963] My doctor said, no, that's not true.

[1964] That's not true.

[1965] They're not more likely to get autism.

[1966] Okay.

[1967] And he said mice changed.

[1968] behavior when a woman feeds them versus a man. Uh -huh.

[1969] He said, I've never heard of mice behavior modulated by sex of a person feeding them and can't find any paper to substantiate that one.

[1970] Okay.

[1971] Although it seems intuitively believable, right?

[1972] Could be.

[1973] Yeah.

[1974] Yeah, it could be.

[1975] He said nicotine when it doesn't have all the other stuff added isn't more addictive than coffee.

[1976] I'll read you what this doctor said.

[1977] Just, yeah.

[1978] This doctor's first food cleanse.

[1979] Yes.

[1980] Super food cleanse?

[1981] First I'll read, let me read all the things that are they going to get talked about.

[1982] Okay.

[1983] So when people are, so HLADR, mice changing their behavior, nicotine, he said heartbeat should be different each time.

[1984] Oh, right.

[1985] And he said if you're stressed, your heartbeat's steady, but if not the space between should be different.

[1986] So this was a response.

[1987] Many are unsubstantiated by any science.

[1988] Then he talked about this to the controversial paper.

[1989] And then he said the HLADR and autism is off base, as is.

[1990] the nicotine and the heart beats.

[1991] Okay.

[1992] I never heard of mice behavior modulated by sex of a person.

[1993] That's all.

[1994] Okay.

[1995] So that, you know.

[1996] Yeah.

[1997] I'll defend Dave just a tiny bit to say that he did also on like, you know, I've heard all these studies.

[1998] I've read all this stuff.

[1999] And I also don't care because I have anecdotal personal experience.

[2000] And sometimes I'm just going to always value that over the, you know, whatever the clinical trial was.

[2001] Yes, absolutely.

[2002] He did.

[2003] He totally said that.

[2004] So maybe he doesn't even on some of these, I wonder, he's not here to answer.

[2005] But I wonder if he would even say like, oh, yeah, I don't know that there's a study to confirm that I just anecdotally have observed it or something.

[2006] Do you think he would defend it maybe like that?

[2007] Yeah, he might.

[2008] He definitely might.

[2009] Okay.

[2010] Should we stop for a bit?

[2011] Yeah.

[2012] Okay.

[2013] Part three.

[2014] Part three.

[2015] I just want to thank you guys publicly for coming out here and doing this.

[2016] I know it's a pain in the ass.

[2017] No, it's a pain for you to.

[2018] Keep having to...

[2019] No, not for me at all.

[2020] But you have to wait for all these scenes.

[2021] We got to watch a funny scene involving your eyeball.

[2022] Now we know.

[2023] We know the answer.

[2024] We won't tell the listeners, so they'll have to tune in and see.

[2025] Okay.

[2026] So, Dave...

[2027] Part three of Dave.

[2028] Asprey.

[2029] Yeah.

[2030] Asprey is kind of like Apre ski.

[2031] That's what I think of.

[2032] Oh, it's Apre ski.

[2033] Isn't that like something?

[2034] Aprey pose?

[2035] No, Aprey ski.

[2036] It's the lounge at skiing.

[2037] Oh, I think.

[2038] Or a brand of downhill skis?

[2039] No, I think it's like people who like go and then they drink hot chocolate at the lounge bar.

[2040] Yeah, like a skiing bar, skiing, ski and ski out.

[2041] But they don't do very much skiing, you know, it's like apprae.

[2042] Oh, wow.

[2043] You're so frank.

[2044] I don't know if I'm saying anything.

[2045] You're very more sophisticated than me. Thank you.

[2046] I don't think that's true.

[2047] I really don't think it is.

[2048] I'm sorry, I was very thirsty.

[2049] Yeah, you're dehydrated.

[2050] I haven't drank any water all day.

[2051] You haven't?

[2052] No. You're so naughty about not drinking enough water.

[2053] I know.

[2054] Live on the edge.

[2055] Oh, my God.

[2056] Brown pee.

[2057] Oh, jeez.

[2058] If I get some brown pee, I'm really excited.

[2059] Okay, we're on the clock.

[2060] Part three.

[2061] Okay, so you said that coy fish lived for 200 years.

[2062] And he said some trees have lived for 10 ,000 years.

[2063] So the oldest known coy was Hanako.

[2064] Oh.

[2065] Which is cute.

[2066] I know, it should have been Hannaquay.

[2067] Yeah, I missed opportunity.

[2068] Who lived to be 226.

[2069] Oh, my gosh.

[2070] Who was keeping track?

[2071] That's like three generations of people.

[2072] And who, a great -grandpa, Larry, remembers when he bought the Krabri -Coy?

[2073] Well, yeah, this is what happens.

[2074] The person buys it.

[2075] The old caveman buys it.

[2076] Okay.

[2077] And then he's recording.

[2078] They scratch into the cave.

[2079] Yes.

[2080] The date.

[2081] And then he has a baby boy.

[2082] But he's on a lunar calendar, so it's five days shorter every year.

[2083] no oh man yeah that's where it gets tricky all right well we can't believe any but to 226 is that what you said 226 I wish it was one I wish it lived one year older so it could be 227 like that show in the 80s I don't know what that is it was um you would now say urban was a black show it was their address oh they hung out on the stoop and stuff a lot yeah yeah it was a great great program that's kind of odd though that you want that because you love even numbers you great point.

[2084] Great point.

[2085] I do make an exception with the number 27.

[2086] That's so strange.

[2087] Because many of my favorite engines have the 27 in it, the 427 rat Chevy motor, the 327 small block that originally appeared in the early model corvettes.

[2088] And of course, Lincoln's born on 327.

[2089] And I'm my dune car, I have 327 written on the side.

[2090] Have you noticed that?

[2091] No. Oh, for her.

[2092] Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[2093] Oh, I thought it was a coincidence.

[2094] Which is backfired a little bit because, you know, I'm really, it's like, for engines, it's just like penis size, right?

[2095] So you want the biggest engine possible.

[2096] And my sand car really has a 428 in it.

[2097] That's twin turbo.

[2098] But I've got 327 written on the side, and people are like, oh, you got a 327 there.

[2099] I'm like, no, no, I got a 428 in there.

[2100] That's my daughter's birthday.

[2101] I get really nervous.

[2102] People think I have a tiny little engine back there.

[2103] Speaking of penises.

[2104] Oh, yeah.

[2105] Oh, yes.

[2106] We are both watching euphoria.

[2107] And I want to, when we have more time, I want to start really exploring euphoria on this program.

[2108] Yeah, let's talk about it.

[2109] Because they are, they are really dealing with all kinds of really crazy issues.

[2110] I know.

[2111] In a very brave and provocative manner.

[2112] I think some of the topics are handled exquisitely.

[2113] Uh -huh.

[2114] Yeah.

[2115] Supremely.

[2116] Supremely.

[2117] But there is a scene with, I don't know, 25 penises in it, which I love.

[2118] And you get to just see the variety.

[2119] in one space.

[2120] There's so much variety in the penis.

[2121] You know what's interesting, again, this goes into one of those double standards, which I support this double standard, by the way.

[2122] Oh, are you about talking about boobs?

[2123] Yeah, I was going to say, we would never, if there was a scene in a show that showed like 12, 24 tities, we would feel unethical about like...

[2124] Comparing.

[2125] Yeah, comparing them, contrasting them, pointing them out, basically objectifying.

[2126] But I have no qualms about objectifying the male penis.

[2127] But it's not really objectifying.

[2128] It's just noting It's just being aware It's being present And I think it's okay to do that with boobs As long as you're not like Those are gross Those are good You know We're not doing that with these penises But some of these penises were gross I know I'm teasing Me too I'm teasing Yeah we're all teasing Everyone's teasing Yeah But it is crazy How much variety there is In the PP department I love it I didn't see two that looked alike I think that's fun Isn't it?

[2129] Or nerve -wracking I mean no I think it's fine because I think you can get pleasureed by many different types.

[2130] Right.

[2131] Yes.

[2132] So it doesn't need, it's not like, oh, no, that's not one that's going to do anything for me. It's not the size of the boat.

[2133] It's the motion of the ocean.

[2134] So some of these folks might really be thrown it down between the sheets.

[2135] That's right.

[2136] Okay.

[2137] Anyway, so the tree.

[2138] The tree is 226.

[2139] I think you extra like the number 226.

[2140] You should because they add up to 10.

[2141] That is really low.

[2142] That's pleasing.

[2143] Yeah.

[2144] Yeah.

[2145] Although 2 -24 is an ideal number because it's two even numbers that then add up to the third number, which is the most stable number.

[2146] And then those two numbers together equal eight.

[2147] That's right.

[2148] Okay, so trees.

[2149] Until 2013, Methuselah in ancient bristlecone pine was the oldest known non -clonal organism on Earth.

[2150] How old?

[2151] Well, Methuselah still stands as of 2016 at the ripe old age of 4 ,848.

[2152] Oh, wow.

[2153] In the White Mountains of California, Inyo National Forest.

[2154] Another bristletone pine in the area was discovered to be over 5 ,000 years old.

[2155] God, is that cool?

[2156] Very cool, but also not 10.

[2157] Right.

[2158] But just really quick, was this for the oldest currently living?

[2159] Or are there in the fossil record?

[2160] Is there an older tree?

[2161] Who knows?

[2162] I think an ancient bristle.

[2163] This whole thing is what led to me texting Brett Weinstein to say, why do things die?

[2164] Right now.

[2165] Yeah.

[2166] He just kind of gave me the technical terms for what that means, like aging and dying, which wasn't really helpful because it is conceivable.

[2167] Like that tree's an example.

[2168] If it could live 5 ,000 years, why can't it live a million years?

[2169] Yeah.

[2170] And if your cells are making identical kinds.

[2171] of themselves, why couldn't that go on indefinitely?

[2172] If you were an animal that had the mutation of living forever, what would be the downside to that?

[2173] You could pass on your genes indefinitely, it seems like it'd be rewarded over time.

[2174] Why isn't there an animal that, why do we die?

[2175] I mean, I don't know why it took me to 44 to ask this question.

[2176] That's interesting.

[2177] There's no reason.

[2178] I mean, other than overpopulation, then we'd kill each other.

[2179] But that doesn't, that wouldn't have an effect on the, the genes that had mutated and allowed something to live forever.

[2180] It wouldn't impact, because those genes you could still pass on indefinitely.

[2181] I guess unless like that happened for, I don't know, however many generations, but no, even at that, we're at seven billion worldwide population.

[2182] Even if that, if people have been living forever from, you know, 25 ,000 BC, it wouldn't have added up to seven billion.

[2183] Why?

[2184] Well, just the fact that they had lived forever.

[2185] The die -off isn't the huge contributor to the 7 billion people.

[2186] It's like the mass fecundity rate.

[2187] Well, yeah, but if you never die, then you're constantly procreating.

[2188] Mm -hmm.

[2189] We'd definitely have more than 7 billion people.

[2190] Well, we would have more.

[2191] I'm just saying there was such a small population that surely some animal could have lived for, you know, 3 ,000 years before overpopulation became an issue.

[2192] Well, yeah.

[2193] That's what I'm saying.

[2194] So in the geological record, we should find something that lived for 3 ,000 years or something.

[2195] I don't know.

[2196] There's a mystery here.

[2197] I'm not willing to insert God just yet, but there is a bizarre.

[2198] You know what?

[2199] It feels intuitively right?

[2200] Like you're going, well, of course we'd have to die and decay.

[2201] But no, if something can make a perfect copy of itself, there is no reason that should start degenerating.

[2202] I mean, they've been trying to isolate what turns on the genes that make your elasticity and all that, all the signs of aging, the study of gerontology, all that's.

[2203] stuff.

[2204] And they're trying to isolate what turns that on and why does it start making not an identical copy?

[2205] But let's just assume that that process never took place in the animal.

[2206] And you're, because currently, if you're going through mitosis right now, you should be making a perfect copy of yourself on every single cell.

[2207] So you should stay this age forever.

[2208] And why can't you?

[2209] And we're going, oh, well, it just makes sense because all we've ever observed in our lifetime is things that are born and die.

[2210] So it makes a ton of sense to us that that happens.

[2211] but there isn't a great explanation of why it wouldn't be evolutionarily advantageous to just live forever.

[2212] Why couldn't that be a mutation?

[2213] Maybe.

[2214] I don't know.

[2215] I'll ask my doctor friend.

[2216] Ask your doctor friend.

[2217] He might know.

[2218] We got to get bread in and I got to push him and I got to make him speak more in late terms for me. That's interesting.

[2219] Because he just hit me with a bunch of multisyllabic words and then I had to look them up.

[2220] And I was like, okay, well, he just kind of restated my question in a technical manner.

[2221] Like a politician does.

[2222] He answered the question he wanted to be asked.

[2223] Mm -hmm.

[2224] He dressed for the weather he wanted, not the weather he had.

[2225] By the way, there is no way a strike against Brett.

[2226] Oh, we know.

[2227] We love Brett.

[2228] Yeah.

[2229] Okay.

[2230] So you talked about the study of Japan eight years ago.

[2231] Guys aren't listing sex as the top five things are going after.

[2232] 2015, there was a report from the Japan Family Planning Association.

[2233] Shockingly, a few people in the land of the rising sun are doing it.

[2234] Oh, fun title.

[2235] Yeah, that was from Vice, I think Oh, that makes more sense Well, that wasn't the title, but that was a line in it Oh, okay Anyway, but yeah, that's all true Okay, great, that holds up Yeah, yeah I think that's all That was all?

[2236] What do you think of the boner, the penis light?

[2237] Excuse me?

[2238] The sound wave thing?

[2239] Dave said that he had a contraption That had made his prick bigger And stuff, and that he would Catch his own reflection in the mirror And wonder whose penis was on him Should guys be?

[2240] care about them.

[2241] Well, should they do it?

[2242] I think this goes back to, hey, whatever makes you feel confident.

[2243] Like, I would never tell someone that got a breast augmentation that they shouldn't have done it.

[2244] I agree.

[2245] I totally agree.

[2246] Like, if that makes you feel confident and helps you love yourself, then fine.

[2247] Of course.

[2248] So I guess you could argue why, why not let a guy elongate and inflate his peepee part?

[2249] I agree.

[2250] Although, inevitably, they're going to run into a situation where they've just made it too darn big and they're going to find out the hard way that's too much.

[2251] Dong for gals.

[2252] And then someone's going to have to create a shrinking machine.

[2253] Oh, wow.

[2254] To return the peepee back to a...

[2255] Honey, I shrunk the penis.

[2256] Honey, I shrink.

[2257] Honey, you need to shrink your penis would be the...

[2258] Yeah.

[2259] I mean, so we just did this episode of mom -splaining.

[2260] That was really interesting.

[2261] I learned so much.

[2262] You did.

[2263] First and foremost, I learned the vagina means sheath.

[2264] I told you this.

[2265] Oh, right.

[2266] Which was brand -new information.

[2267] I loved it.

[2268] Yeah.

[2269] Also, there's...

[2270] And that's where a man should store his sword.

[2271] A sword comes out of the sheep Or a knife comes out of it I mean that's probably where it started So there's a A tool That you can use You can put it at the end of your penis Okay It's kind of like a Turtleneck for your penis Oh You put it at the top Okay But it's like silicon Cone Uh huh So if your If your penis is too big basically Like you don't go too deep What?

[2272] Like it stops It basically like stops Your penis from going all the way it's a governor what we will call in motorsports is a governor on the engine so you put a it's a cop governor i guess i don't know what a go i don't know what that means but it doesn't let the engine rev to a certain RPM so you can't go too fast yep that's what this is wow yeah and did Kristen say she thought i needed it she didn't oh bummer all right well i love you and i thanks for this fun field trip i know so fun i hope people feel like they traveled during it they did they did they traveled all over the place in the attic in a trailer in a second trailer eye hanging out of my face eyes hanging out wardrobe changes oh hang on tight guys mahogany a burled walnut all the rich rich woods materials um i love everyone love you love you good night bye app, Amazon music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[2273] You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts.

[2274] Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondry .com slash survey.