Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - The 5 Biohacks Anyone Can Implement To Live Longer w/ Dave Asprey | EP #109

Episode Date: July 11, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Peter discuss the top 5 health hacks you need to implement in 2024, what nootropics you should know about, and the benefits of psychedelics.  10:42 | Beware: Too Much Protein? 36:05 | The Power of Caffeine as a Nootropic 58:45 | The Risks and Benefits of Microdosing Dave Asprey is an entrepreneur and thought leader best known for founding Bulletproof 360, which revolutionized the wellness industry with Bulletproof Coffee and the biohacking movement. He is the CEO of Upgrade Labs, founder of 40 Years of Zen, and host of the Biohacking Conference. A four-time New York Times bestselling author, Asprey shares his expertise in longevity, brain performance, and biohacking. He also hosts "The Human Upgrade," a top-ranking health podcast where he interviews experts to explore innovative approaches to living a healthier, more productive life. 40 Years of Zen: https://40yearsofzen.com/  Danger Coffee: https://dangercoffee.com/ Website: https://daveasprey.com/  The Human Upgrade Podcast: https://daveasprey.com/category/podcasts/  Upgrade Labs: https://upgradelabs.com/  ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are,  please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:  Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter  _____________ Get my new Longevity Practices 2024 book: https://bit.ly/48Hv1j6  I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now:  Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots

How do you maintain muscle mass or build muscle mass? On 20 minutes a week. I don't get it. That doesn't sound plausible to me. I tried being a vegan. I tried being a semi-vegetarian. I was low-fat. I went to the gym six days a week, 90 minutes a day, when I had a 46-inch waist. And I ended 18 months of just struggle with more muscle, but still had a 46-inch waist and still weighed 300 pounds.

We like to think that if something is good, more is better. It's just a typical cognitive bias that saves electricity in our brains. If you go to the gym, if you lift twice as much or for twice as long, or you run for more, you'll get more benefits, right? You know, more training is better. It turns out that that isn't really how things work. What the body is looking for is... that that isn't really how things work. What the body's looking for is.

I am as are you in the longevity business. I wanna see as much of life, I think this most amazing time ever. I wanna see where Starship takes me into the cosmos. I wanna meet my great grandkids. I wanna upload myself, all of those things. Man, this works and it works so effortlesslylessly that I've never looked better in my life. All right.

So listen, I need the secrets right now because I have a lot to do in life. Welcome to Moonshots. I'm on today with Dave Asprey, the original biohacker. He is the CEO of Danger Coffee, Upgrade Labs, 40 years of Zen, author of nine books, one of the most extraordinary thinkers in the field of biohacking that I know. We're going to talk about how do you add muscle with just 20 minutes of exercise a week.

I'm going to challenge him on that, but we'll dive into the details there. We'll talk about psychedelics. We'll talk about consciousness, nootropics. How do you increase your cognitive capacity? We're talking about what to eat, what not to eat. This is a deep dive with a dear and brilliant friend, one of the smartest people I know in this field.

I'll challenge him, I'll learn from him, and so will you. All right, if you love this content, please subscribe so I can bring you more. Let's jump into the episode with Dave Asprey. Dave Asprey, good to see you, buddy. Peter, my friend, it's always just great to get a chance to talk. I love it. And you are looking as veiled as ever.

I just heard something that you said recently that blew me away, which I want to dive into right away because I've made a huge deal about the importance of adding muscle mass. mass and last year for me adding 10 pounds of muscle was like a number one objective and I hit it but it was a lot of hard work. You know you've just written this book Harder Not Smarter or Smarter Not Harder and either I heard you're doing how much weight a week how much weight workout? I'm doing 20 minutes of total exercise a week Peter Okay, so and you feel like that is delivering you I mean pretty amazing my Tattoo I feel like it's working. Yeah one one three seven one three seven trimethyl xanthine. I can read those exactly

What's on the arm? Yeah, but like I? Feel like in kind of a douchebag flexing as a nerd on on Instagram But I've I was just in a couple magazines and actually on nightline with my shirt off. I Was a fat computer hacker. I saw stretch marks like this is this is so unlikely All right. So listen, I need the secrets right now because I have a lot to do in life and You know keeping muscle is a top objective. I do like working out. I like the habits of it, but I don't want to have to. So how do you get, how do you maintain muscle mass or build muscle mass?

I'm 20 minutes a week. I don't get it. It doesn't, that doesn't sound plausible to me. It's okay. It doesn't sound plausible to a lot of people. In fact, it makes some people mad when they say that. Diarrhea Vico. Makes me hopeful, buddy, makes me hopeful.

Good, it makes me hopeful too. Diarrhea Vico actually canceled my interview, which is a big podcast, because they thought I was lying. I'm like, do you wanna ask my girlfriend or my assistant, and how do I prove what I'm not doing? And number one, you have to have working mitochondria for this to work right so mitochondrial function is terribly terribly important and thyroid hormone is important no matter how much exercise if your thyroid is off even a little bit

your TSH levels should be at or below one for longevity and there are other measures of thyroid function that matter besides just TSH. That's the easy one. So I've been on thyroid since I was about 26 because I had Hashimoto's because I had toxic mold. In fact, I had very low thyroid back then. So building muscle requires energy. Having energy requires thyroid. Number two. How much do you take each day? I take about two grains of Armour Thyroid or equivalent, which is appropriate for my body weight and my markers.

It's totally different for different people. I do think anyone over age 40 will have early onset mitochondrial dysfunction. We just call it aging and we call it normal for your age. So, the idea that I need- I take it first thing in the morning, I have I have literally armor thyroid pill on the good for you. In fact, if you want to have less Alzheimer's and less diabetes, taking even a quarter grain, which is a relatively small dose

starting in your 40s or 50s is going to help to stave off cognitive dysfunction. As long as your labs support doing it. Your TSH is probably at two or three and you want to bring it down to one and just keep it there. And that's a part of building muscle. It's also part of being lean. I'm 6% body fat right now. And this isn't by trying Peter.

I'm never hungry. This is ridiculous. Uh, and the second thing is exercise without adequate animal protein doesn't work well. And I say animal protein specifically because I've been a vegan, I've been a raw vegan, and I've experimented with like highly processed plant proteins. The evidence is in that even the very best plant proteins have anti-nutrients and you need their amino acid availability is so low low you need probably twice as much

so I do one gram of animal protein per pound of body weight and So I do the same I've done that I've actually started going between Animal and plant protein back and forth, you know, I recently had a long conversation with Dan Buettner who you know Yeah, I love Jones Dan's amazing. and what he says is that you know, if you look at all the Blue Zone diets, it's like a minimal amount of animal protein. I think it's wishful thinking. You look at Hong Kong, which has the highest intake and has similar Blue Zone numbers, it's just not in the book because it didn't fit the model and And so I think Dan's a beautiful human being and a true believer in longevity. But when I sat down with him on my show, I did like, can you tell me why beans?

We goes, look, epidemiology says beans work, therefore they work. But I am not an average of a hundred thousand Okinawans. I am exactly this human being. And when I eat beans, they wreck my metabolism for very specific reasons. So doing what everyone does would be the limbing approach. I'm all about personalization. Yes, I've tested a vegan diet, I've tested beans, I've tested animal protein and plant protein, and I've also looked at the mechanistic studies. I think you can start with epidemiology to find clues, but you have to look at mechanistics and

look at personal outcomes. And I'll say straight up, the Blue Zones Diet's a recipe for disaster for most of the people I work with. So you are the king biohacker. In fact, in Webster's dictionary, you define biohacking. So you live that life. And the question is, you're not saying these are the right things for everybody. You're saying you need to test, and this is what you do and works for you.

Biohacking's kind of the enemy of epidemiology. And it's that end of one baby. And it's a commitment to only do what works for you and to measure it. Because I tried, I tried being a vegan. I tried being a semi-vegetarian. I was low fat. I went to the gym six days a week, 90 minutes a day when I had a 46 inch waist. And I ended 18 months of just struggle with more muscle, but still had a 46 inch waist and I ended 18 months of just struggle

with more muscle, but still had a 46 inch waist and still weigh 300 pounds. So I don't care if it's supposed to work. If it doesn't work, then quit doing it and do something better with your life. And I just wish I'd have had the courage to do that earlier because I want to go back to this 20 minutes on, and building muscle with 20 minutes. Okay, so protein, protein loading, how often, 150 grams or is it a gram per pound, yes? It's a gram per pound, so for me it's closer to 200.

Yeah. And when you take it through the day? Throughout the day, but here's what we used to believe, and I even put this in one of my early books, that 30 to 50 grams of protein is all you can absorb at one setting and. About three years ago, when I started getting linear and putting on some muscle, I thought to myself, I only eat two meals a day.

I can't do 200 grams of protein. So I'm just going to do a hundred grams per meal and I'll take digestive enzymes. And if it's not absorbing, it'll make ammonia and I'll smell it when I fart. So there was no weightlifter farts involved. So I was absorbing the protein and just about three, four months ago, a study came out that completely decimated this idea of 30 to 50 grams. It turns out that's a myth. You can absorb more than a hundred grams of protein in a meal as long as you have enzymes

present and it'll absorb throughout the day and affect protein synthesis. So the reason this is working is that when I eat protein, I took 100 grams of animal protein powder this morning and I'm gonna eat a steak tonight with some enzymes and I'm good to go. Any particular enzymes you use? I like broad spectrum enzymes that contain betaine, HCl and ox bile.

And that seems to work better than just taking something like just a protease or a popane or something like that. So you want something that will break down as many different proteins as you can. So they typically have a lot of ingredients. Creatine? Yes. How much? I am a fan of creatine but with the amount of animal protein I need I get about five grams a day but I take an additional probably three or four grams every day There's a form called GAA creatine that seems to have better evidence behind it So that's what I use but honestly creatine monohydrate works

Just fine the hack for creatine if you really want to absorb it is to don't put it in in Cold water put it in warm water so that it actually dissolves. Suspending particles of creatine doesn't work very well. Getting it to dissolve like salt to make salt water, that makes creatine much more bioavailable. There's a new creatine product called Create, which is a creatine gummy that I just got sent to me by some friends and tastes yummy and easy. You know, one of the things you have to worry about

with your protein loading is making sure your kidney function. You know, so I actually recently backed off on the amount of protein I was taking in because my body was trying to eliminate it and my kidney functions began decreasing. Mm-hmm. It's a conundrum because kidney function is sort of the fifth of the horsemen in my book on Longevity and like okay diabetes leads to cancer cardiovascular disease And Alzheimer's but right behind that the high blood pressure. That's a part of diabetes leads to kidney dysfunction So if you can fix kidneys, you've got a blockbuster drug. So I also only have one kidney.

I was born that way. Didn't know it until I was 30 because I have a super mega kidney and it doesn't cause any health problems. But I monitor my function really well at GFR. Turns out the hack for that is don't eat the plants that contain oxalates because calcium oxalate radically shreds your kidneys. I'm talking kale, spinach, raspberries, almonds, a lot

of the so-called superfoods. These are measurably and very quantifiably high in a compound that is so bad for your kidneys. I also take two tablespoons of lemon juice for the citric acid that helps to dissolve extra calcium throughout my tissues. So I have really young tissues when people do work on me, like what is going on? You feel like you're 20, not like you're 50. And I think that's really important to just talk about oxalate and kidney function.

So nuts, seeds, and some, but not all vegetables, 70% of kidney stones are caused by plants, by oxalate, not by phosphate, which is the ones we'd be concerned about. The other one, Peter, is a quarter to a half a teaspoon of baking soda away from a meal every day is gonna also change pH in a way that protects your kidneys. I can imagine that. Going back to 20 minutes of workout building muscle,

I'm still, I'm trying to learn this and believe this. Here's the principle, and this is in Smart or Not Harder. It's that we like to think that if something is good, more is better. It's just a typical cognitive bias that saves electricity in our brains. So if you go to the gym, if you lift twice as much or for twice as long, or you run for more, you'll get more benefits, right? You know, more training is better. It turns out that that isn't really how things work.

What the body's looking for is the slope of the curve. How quickly did you bring on the stress? And most importantly, how quickly could you return to baseline, which sends a signal of safety? And if you have safety and adequate minerals and adequate protein, the body can put muscle on very effectively, oh, inadequate testosterone, which we can talk about in a minute.

So this is, people say, oh, you mean high-intensity interval training? No, it's even less than that for cardio. You get a 12% VO two max improvement in 15 minutes of exercise without sweating every week. This is part of the stack at upgrade labs. This is a franchise and we've got 30 locations across the US that are opening and probably another dozen or two that'll happen after my last conference.

So you come in, oh, in the amount of time I brush my teeth, I did cardio, but I got six times better results than I did from going to a spin class five days a week. And this is university studies on just that AI tech. And then for muscle, there's about five or six things that will get a signal into your muscle more quickly. As long as you know how to calm down and you're properly nourished, you'll put muscle on in stupidly small amounts of time. And it turns out picking up rocks, which is what weight lifting is, we just concentrate

the rocks into plates, which is our biggest innovation in 5,000 years. I don't pick up rocks. I fight against a computer that doesn't believe in gravity. So the feedback system against my muscles, also part of Upgrade Labs, it's called the AI cheat machine. And what it's doing is it's causing either perturbations or a movement of the weight that confuses my muscles. My proprioceptors don't try to protect my joints. They don't need to when it's a controlled environment.

That means I can load faster. And that means when I'm done, if I had the protein and I had the minerals and I had the testosterone, the body says, oh, that was hard, but I'm safe. Let me put on muscle quickly. So it's about setting up the environment and then getting the right signal in. And man, this works and it works so effortlessly that you just like, I've never looked better in my life and I've never had an easier time doing it because

I'm using precise signaling instead of brute force. Talk to me about testosterone. What levels do you like maintaining? How much do you supplement? How do you supplement? Everyone should have the levels of a healthy 25-year-old from 1970 if you really want to change the world. Before they changed the recommendations? The recommendations and before we flooded the world with estrogen plastics and all

these other chemicals, because kids today have half the levels that they did 30 years ago and adults do as well. And if you're sitting here going, I can't put on muscle and I'm tired and unmotivated testosterone drives dopamine in the brain. So if you have enough testosterone, but not too much, suddenly you're excited and motivated to change the world. And if you wake up and you're just like, Oh, maybe it's your testosterone affecting your dopamine and it's not the amount of effort you did.

And what I found is that when I was over training, over training reliably suppresses testosterone. So I've been supplementing testosterone since I was 26, when my anti-aging doctor showed me that my lab results on testosterone were lower than my mother. This actually happened named Dr. Phil Miller, right? And I had some metabolic problems you could say. So I've kept my levels between seven 50 and probably peak around 1100 sometimes, but around nine hundreds where I want them different men with different

backgrounds feel best at somewhere between at the low end about 750 and around 1100, but you gotta find the number for you. And it's the one where you're not like trying to hump a doorknob because you're not too full of libido, but you just, you feel like you can handle things and you feel like you wanna take care of your family. And for women, it's the same thing.

It's also a motivational hormone. Women have more testosterone than estrogen, but much, much less than men. So getting that level dialed in, it's about happiness and joy and motivation. It's not about sex. Sex is a side benefit. Agreed. How do you take your testosterone injection? You know, today I'm taking an oral testosterone for the past three months,

which is a new form. It's called testosterone undecanoate. And before that, I've been injecting testosterone on enthanate, which is common in the entire world except in the U.S. In the U.S. we use testosterone, cypionate. Problem is cypionate causes water retention. I was always puffy on that stuff. So when I bought my testosterone in Mexico, because I was tired of getting it refilled here,

suddenly I leaned out because I had the right form. Levels are the same. And before that, years ago I would use a cream. The cream though, you have to put in your armpit or in your groin. And creams are dangerous to have young kids because even the amount of testosterone on a sheet, if you rub it on a baby, it's gonna affect them.

So you gotta be really careful with that. Interesting. TV episodes around that don't go there. So let me ask you a question. When you take, when you supplement testosterone, and I do supplement, I do it with injection, I'll try the oral, I don't feel different without it. What are your levels when you're injecting?

It's typically, obviously they range depending levels when you're injecting? It's typically, they obviously they range depending on what I'm injecting, but they're in that range of 800 thereabouts. Some people need 15 or 1800. I would double dose and see if you like your life. I mean, you really. I love my life right now. Okay, so you might not feel different

because it's keeping you where you are. I have gone up to 1700 for brief periods just to see what happens. And I find it's a you where you are. I have gone up to 1,700 for brief periods just to see what happens. And I find it's a little easier to put on muscle, but I don't think that's necessarily worth it. And if I start getting pimples or something, that's an issue that- Yeah, because I've had this conversation

with my medical team and it's like, well, typically if you're low on testosterone, you're sort of grouchy old man, you don't have the energy, you don't have the ambition, all of that. And I'm saying like, I'm like the most optimistic person I know, you are and and I don't feel any different with so I've stopped for like three or four weeks. And then gone back on and I haven't felt a difference. So maybe I didn't see a difference

in like how you looked in the morning energy when you first wake up, nothing. Well, you look at yourself in the morning. Just kidding. So I'm just super curious. How do you feel different? How often did you inject? How often do you take a pill?

There's a lot of studies that show injecting twice a week would be preferable. But I'm kind of lazy, so I would usually do it once a week. The reason I switched to the oral form just as an experiment here is allegedly it doesn't turn to estrogen as much as the other stuff does. I've had to carefully manage my conversion to estrogen like most people do. I don't use it pharmaceutically. I just do it with herbs. But the thing is you get testicular shrinkage

when you inject, unless you're using HCG or Clomaphene or Arimidex. And all of those have a downside. So let's just say that testicular volume is not high on my list of personal characteristics that I care about. But given that this stuff doesn't suppress FSH, FSH is by itself a longevity compound.

So there's emerging evidence that having FSH levels of a young person probably also keeps you older. So maybe the oral form works better. I'll tell you in six months. Okay. Anything else on muscle mail? First of all, upgrade labs Delivers those AI cheat machines as you as you mentioned. Yeah, it's we're opening them across the country So guys upgrade labs calm and if you want to start you're moving the one that was near me in Santa Monica in Venice Where you need to go? We're looking for a franchisee in LA who wants to do a franchise They've got a bunch of members who are ready to go wants to do a franchise. They've got a bunch of members who are ready to go.

Unfortunately, the landlord wanted to increase the rent dramatically with a 10-year lease and a part of Santa Monica that's getting a little sketchy, so we just couldn't make that work. So if you are listening to this and you're in Los Angeles and you'd like an Upgrade Labs near you, contact Dave, because I will be one of your members. Okay.

There you go, ownandupgradelabs.com. Thanks, Peter. It's fun stuff. There's, there's so many things that are just higher return on on time that you can do for longevity. And we track everything with a clinical grade electro dermal screening. So we can tell you, do you have visceral fat like I have the visceral fat levels of an 18 year olds at the low end of the range, even though I was obese when I was that age.

So you can reverse aging. In fact, my extrinsic age score on my most recent panel from TrueAge was 19 and a half years younger than my current life. That's what happens from lifestyle components for aging. Yeah, I'm at, I'm 63 now and mine was 45. So whatever that is, 18 years or thereabouts You're killing it Peter. Well, not clearly as good as you are, but hey, let's go back to this. So

Anything else on on muscle? It's lift heavy. Yeah. Oh, I guess the other one that just has to be talked about Everyone is mineral deficient if you eat them blue stones diet and apologies, Dan, I love you. Like I, I love your vibe. Plants contain phytic acid and oxalate, both of which are well documented to decrease your minerals. Even if there's minerals in the plants, they suck it out of your bones. You cannot make testosterone without adequate zinc and copper. And even some of the trace minerals like boron is terribly important.

So if you're deficient in those, you won't get the results from your exercise and it's funny danger coffee, which is my new post bulletproof coffee brand, it has a therapeutic dose of ionic minerals that can enter cells and it's in there for a reason and electrolytes so that you get the minerals into the cells when you need them. And I think that's made a difference. Just having adequate minerals for the past five years as a big focus has has changed my responsiveness to exercise Yeah, I supplement with IVs with a mineral additive. Good. Yeah, you're good. All right, let's talk about food I mean, you know food is medicine etc, etc

Protein I heard you say something recently and I'm curious. I am a you know of Greek descent I love olive oil and I'll do a daily olive oil shot, but you said too much is not good What are your thoughts there? Well, there's tons of evidence as olive oil is good for you Historically, no one has lived on just olive oil. Even if you're from Greece, you can't afford it It's actually much more expensive than butter and cream, which are also part of the traditional diet there, right? Yeah.

Okay. And the superpower that's in olive oil is called hydroxytyrosal, which is a very potent antioxidant. I take 100 milligrams of hydroxytyrosal most days of the week. That's about 100 bottles of olive oil. So I feel like I've got that one covered. And I do, an ounce or two of olive oil, and I think it's very beneficial in studies.

But excessive oleic acid will raise delta-5 disaturase and delta-6 disaturase. And these cause linoleic acid, that negative omega-6 acid that's so omnipresent in our diet, it causes it to oxidize very aggressively. So too much olive oil in the face of eating any other oils at a restaurant or any prepared foods, it makes the other oils more harmful.

So I typically focus on getting couple ounces of olive oil and I'm eating a two grass-fed Butter and I'm using grass-fed Tallow and some avocados not avocado oil because it's generally oxidized and half of its fake So super premium olive oil, but I look at what I see people eat when I go to Greece I don't think there's swimming in olive oil if they have some cheese on their plate. And I think cheese is on the plate whenever I go there. So it's actually a mix of saturated and oleic that seems to be actually present in the diet. I don't believe the story that it's not there.

And when I talk to people from Greece, I mean, Tzatziki, there's so much dairy. I will be there next week. I will be going to Spending two weeks. I haven't taken a vacation a while. So I'll call it research instead When you pour your olive oil on the feta cheese on the platter, just remember there's fat in that feta, too You know, I want I want to go cognitive Yeah, cuz at the end of the day, you can feel great, look good, but thinking clearly, I mean, that's the single most important asset, right? Just when your brain is on fire and you've got clarity and you're enjoying life, you're

experiencing full spectrum of everything. Let's go there. How do you rate your cognitive ability right now? I know is your attempt scale. My brain has never worked better in my entire life Peter. I love this and people look at me and say how how do you remember all this stuff and the answer is complex, but I have this whole picture for longevity and aging and I remember a Delta Phi Disatres.

I don't know the reason is because it's all in a picture in my head that I could not do when I was 25 or 30. And I use a variety of compounds, some pharmaceutical, a lot of them natural. I've been formulating and taking Neutropix for 25 plus years. And I've taught by the guy who wrote the first newsletter called Smart Drug News, which was a print newsletter in the 80sies was my mentor.

His name is Steve folks, just a total genius of a biochemist. And so this has helped. I've also spent six months of my life with electrodes glued to my head, developing and perfecting the 40 years of Zen program where 1500 elite executives have come through and reprogram their brains. I'm coming through soon. I promised myself that as a gift. Anytime, Peter.

Have you talked to Naveen? He just went through. He's been really public about it. Yeah, you know, I have. And let's dive into nootropics. So define nootropics and what are you doing? I want me some. All right.

Nootropics are compounds that enhance cognitive function function and people say, well, hold on. Is that a drug or is that a nutrient? It doesn't really matter if it makes your brain work better. It's a new tropic. So there are new tropic drugs and there are plant compounds. The two drugs that are probably most impactful, one of them is modafinil. This is a, it's, they have to create a new category of drug, it's called arousal promoting

because it's not a stimulant. And it affects dopamine and something called orexin in the brain. It has a very good safety profile, safer than Advil, but about five out of a million people can have a genetic reaction to it. Same exact reaction that Advil can cause it's a Actually life-threatening skin reaction, but it's exceptionally rare

What it and full disclosure and full disclosure? I I use modafinil and have been for some time and I have spoken to every neurologist That I ever speak to you I asked the question, how do you feel about modafinil? What's the downside? Is there any addictive elements? Is there any elements that are suppressed by the part of mental cognitive function? And so far, I've not received any warnings that concern me at all.

The only one that might matter is it does increase histamine in the brain. Histamine's a neurotransmitter. It's not all bad. And there are some people who get hives from it. So if you have weird allergic responses when you take it, maybe no. But in terms of long-term harm, I've been on this since about 2001. And I went to Daniel Amon's clinic, and today I'm so grateful to be on the Amon Clinic's

board of directors that the scan changed my brain because it documented a hardware problem. One thing that modafinil does, it increases blood flow in the brain, and this is one of the nootropic effects that you wanna look for is how do I get blood up there? And I had brain damage from toxic mold exposure, and that meant low blood flow. So when I'm modafhnil, that's why I graduated from Wharton Business School

because I was on Daphnil and my brain wasn't working very well at the time. It's I had to fix it. The other pharmaceutical that is worth noticing, there's a class of compounds called the racetam R A C E T A M and peracetam is the most famous. This was made by Sandow's Pharmaceuticals. the racetam, R-A-C-E-T-A-M. And paracetam is the most famous. This was made by Sando's Pharmaceuticals, it still is. And it wasn't even in the PDR, the physician's desk reference in the US for many, many years, probably still isn't.

It's almost like it doesn't exist here, even though it's sold by Big Pharma in Europe. And there's an analog that's fanciful called aniracetam, A-N-I-R-A-C-E-T-A-M. I have been on aniracetam most days for 25 years. There's two reasons. One is it's neuroprotective of the brain. Two, it increases memory I-O.

Peter, you and I are both engineers. You're a doctor, I'm not. But input-output bandwidth is one of the primary performance enhancers of computing systems. In fact, I'm a network engineer input output bandwidth is one of the primary performance enhancers of computing systems. In fact, I'm a network engineer by training in Silicon Valley. So more IO, you mean maybe I remember stuff because I'm doping for my brain. Yes.

So can you, and your brain will probably last longer if you do this. So anoracetam and badafenyl are the two big ones. And then from, uh, from like a other cognitive enhancing function, my big book on brain function, I hit the New York Times list, Sandwich Between Homo Deuce and Sapiens, which is like the hugest honor ever. That's fantastic.

It's called Head Strong. And the two big theories in that are number one, increase mitochondrial function in the brain via any means necessary, and I go through those. And the second one is increase BDNF and NGF and BDNF is brain derived, nootropic factor. This is a compound that causes nerves to grow and nerve growth factor does the same thing. It turns out there are some supplements and some practices that will cause this to happen. So if you have the neuroplasticity of a young person, because your brain can change itself, uh, and you have enough energy to do it, you'll have a

nootropic effect. So I even interviewed Eric Kendall, who won the Nobel prize in 1994 for proving neuroplasticity was real. And in fact, talk about an unusual guy at 94 years old, still has a lab off central park and just cranking away on new ideas to this day, cause he gets it. And in fact, talk about an unusual guy, 94 years old, still has a lab off Central Park and just cranking away on new ideas to this day because he gets it. So how do you raise BDNF? Well, exercise, intermittent fasting, some of the core biohacks I've been writing about

for a long time and so have you. But there are also some plant compounds that raise this and some interesting pharmaceuticals. The number one plant compound is all lion's mane mushroom. The problem is it doesn't work. I got so excited when I read the studies. I took lion's mane every kind for three years and gave up on it back when I started Bulletproof before I left the company. And

I found out the reason is that for this to work, you have to have fruiting bodies and it has to be extracted with alcohol And hot water so a high quality one will work but the stuff they put in coffee doesn't do anything and You'll know it's working because if you take lion's mane or anything that raises BDNF you have vivid dreams It's a very good sign that it's working. I can imagine that sure. Yeah neuronal growth is gonna Excite functionality while you're sleeping. I actually just had a couple of PhDs in the studio about 15 minutes ago here,

working with a supplement called Brock elite. And we they went through a bunch of research on how it increases BDNF. So this is sulforaphane from sure, it's different vegetables. And the hack for listeners is if you're not going to use a supplement if you're eating say cooked broccoli You need a bite of radish or a bite of raw broccoli to activate the enzyme That lets lets the sulforaphane out of cooked broccoli So cooked broccoli won't affect brain function cooked broccoli with a little bit of raw will how is that? I mean, I don't need to go into detail here, but I love broccoli and I love sulforaphane. I mean, my number one food, you know, is if you said, okay, what's the food you would

not want to eliminate from your diet right now? It's broccoli. I love broccoli with olive oil and lemon. That's what I will obsess about. But why the raw broccoli requirement? When you cook broccoli, you inactivate the enzyme that releases the sulforaphane. But why the raw broccoli requirement? When you cook broccoli, you inactivate the enzyme that releases the sulforaphane. And it's present in, and just to, if you get a little bit of it, it cascades and provides

release. Yeah, it turns out it's a very active enzyme. So all it takes is one radish or even a slice of radish. So when you were going to the Upgrade Cafe Santa Monica, yes, whenever you had cruciferous veggies, there was always a piece of watermelon radish on top It was actually enzyme that was there for a reason And it's it's funny. It's so active If you wanted to be really fancy you would take like one little stalk and just smash it because the more smashed It is more exposed to air the more of the enzyme is released

And then you just have one bite of that, and then your broccoli does something extra for you. And I would put that in the realm of nootropics. And interestingly, almost every psychedelic, I'm working on these for my book that'll come out later, sometime in 2025, don't even know the title yet. Almost every psychedelic increases BDNF meaningfully. And the one that I'm most intrigued with is ketamine because it's legal and well studied.

So I just hired Dr. Mark Bronstein to be the medical director for me at 40 years of Zen. So we're using ketamine as an optional add on on top of intense personal development neurofeedback because every dose of ketamine, even a low dose, not the kind where you're going to go see aliens, this is a low, it's called a psycholytic dose. It causes 72 hours of profound brain plasticity. So that if you're going to be doing some resetting of old patterns, you might as well have a brain that's ready to receive a reset with less work. And so ketamine, DMT, LSD, and psilocybin work.

I'm even an investor in Paul Stamets' company where he said, well, what happens if you stack Lion's Mane and psilocybin and a B vitamin called niacin that causes basal dilation? Yes. Well, he's showing whole brain nerve regeneration. Right now, Lion's Mane and all the other ones, they only do hippocampal regeneration. Right now, Lion's Man and all the other ones, they only do hippocampal regeneration. So he's fixing things that are, you know, brain injuries and things like that. And if you stack that with hyperbaric, and I've got a hard-sided oxy health chamber, you know, the medical grade one downstairs, that also will regrow things in the brain. So if you stack your hacks in the right way

for your goals, there's an argument. But there's two other nootropics that we just have to talk about because of the most common ones out there. And some people are already triggered going, you can't talk about nootropics, that's cheating. OK, 90% of the population has this one. This is caffeine. Caffeine is a well-studied nootropic. I love that you tattooed caffeine on your arm. It's funny, right? Because I talk about the reason I memorized caffeine structure and name is I you know It's important to know what drug you're addicted to would you end up on an alien planet so you can recreate it there? Okay, that is awesome Peter. I loved you before but I love you even more now because you're such a nerd I love this like this one. I need this one

the reason I tattooed it there is way back in 1991 or 92, I sold a t-shirt with that molecule printed on it. It was the first product ever sold over the internet before the web browser was invented. So the first e-commerce on the planet was a caffeine t-shirt and I sold it to 16 countries out of my dorm room. So this is like, plus Bulletproof was a big company, now Danger Coffee is getting big. So it's like caffeine has served me well, and so how could I not have fun with it? If I had a tattoo on the other arm though,

it would be nicotine. And this is the controversial one. You wanna talk about a well studied smart drug, you'll type 15% faster on modafinil or nicotine. Almost every great work of literature was written on caffeine and nicotine, and not very often alcohol or THC. They're not good for cognitive enhancement.

I get that. Are you doing nicotine and Dauphinil at the same time? Yeah, you want to have a great day? So here's the thing about nicotine. Smoking and vaping will shorten your life. They are bad for you. So when I say nicotine, everyone hears tobacco. No, this is pharmaceutical nicotine extracted from tobacco.

One cigarette has 20 milligrams. I'm talking one to five milligrams of nicotine delivered either orally or through the skin. How do you do that? How do you deliver your nicotine? I usually use a nicotine spray and you can buy it in Mexico, Canada, all of Europe, all of the Middle East and Australia, but it's not approved in the US. It's from Nicorette.

God knows why. So in the US you can get little sachets. Lucy gum is good, but watch out for artificial sweeteners. Lucy gum? You don't want that. You what? What's it called, Lucy gum? Yeah, Lucy, chewlucy.com or dot co or something like that.

And full disclosure, I'm a small investor advisor, but I just wanted a nicotine without NutriSweet in it because NutriSweet is not good for brain function. So why would I want to take a cognitive enhancer that also punched my synapses in the face? That seems rude. I love this story. I love this study done years ago in university students. They studied a whole slew of drugs done years ago in university students. They studied a whole slew of drugs to determine what increased their test scores. And there were two particular molecules that increased their test scores the most. And it was glucose and caffeine. Yeah, Coca-Cola. I actually write about this for college students. I'm like, guys, if you really want to ace the test, you need to test yourself ahead of time so you

know dosing. But it's probably double espresso with sugar and one to two milligrams of nicotine. And you go into this hyper focus mode and just, you can do anything and everything is easy and it's all right there. And the problem is nicotine is addictive. And when you're young, I don't think you want to use it regularly. Um, at about age 40, I recommend one to three milligrams a day. The reason for this is research out of Vanderbilt, Dr. Andrew Newcomb, I believe is his name,

I call him Dr. Nicotine. He's been publishing study after study showing that nicotine stops Alzheimer's disease in Parkinson's. You don't want neurodegeneration. So is it possible that we threw the baby out with the bathwater and that smoking is bad for you chewing Is bad for your tobacco is bad for you

But a tiny dose of pure nicotine is cognitively enhancing so you feel good now and you don't have an aging brain I think so. It's part of my recommended stack for people, but it's controversial. Yeah, I remember reading about Midof nil Provisual is the other name it goes by yeah Yeah, and reading that it was developed for fighter pilots to be sharp during long missions. And if you decide to try it, it is a prescription drug. It typically does 200 milligram. I usually do 100 milligrams. You don't want to be drinking alcohol along with that.

I know a lot of people who do drink alcohol with it. If you did that you might want to take some glutathione because of liver pathways. It's not particularly hard on the liver but it could have a longer action in the body. So I don't drink alcohol. It gives you weird dreams. If you're doing that and you don't want to take any of these things later in the day, sleep is important. Yeah. Yeah. It's, they used to use amphetamine for the military and it turns out amphetamine makes you want to kill people which is bad if you're flying a hundred million dollar jet. So they they replaced it

with modafinil and I tried amphetamine when I was in Wharton, just prescription and I did focus better but it hurt my butt. It hurt my brain. I felt horrible afterwards, even on low doses. And when I switched to modafinil, I was like, wow, the lights came on. But all nootropics have this problem. Everyone around you feels slow.

And if you have personal development work to do and you're angry all the time, you're gonna be a bigger jerk if you're already a jerk. So the worst thing you can do is take someone with lots of trauma, lots of triggers, lots of hyper reactivity, give them a hundred milligrams of modafinil and coffee. Then they run around just acting like a jerk. It'll make you more of what you are.

So your job, if you do use, if you do use nootropics is to be more self-aware because self-awareness plus a faster brain equals kindness. And a faster brain without self-awareness equals big asshole. We don't want that. Yeah. The other benefit of modafinil for me is the dopamine element.

It makes me feel happy and joyful and filled with energy. So anyway, it's something which- Peter, thank you for openly talking about modafinil and testosterone. Yeah, of course. There talking about modafinil and testosterone. Yeah, of course. There should be no controversy about these at all. These are life enhancing, anti-aging, just powerful drugs that let you show up better in the world.

And I've been so open about it and some people get really mad and like, you're cheating, you're thin because you're on thyroid. I'm like, you're fat because you're not on thyroid. It's okay. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company That's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love Company is called fountain life and it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians

You know most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists Until that day when you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this but you have this stage three or four going on. And you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time. But because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US today and we're building 20 around the world.

These centers give you a full body MRI, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, DEXA scan, a grail blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it's solvable. You're going to find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action.

Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life. And we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller, Life Force, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships.

You go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners.

All right, let's go back to our episode. You know, one of the things which I'm excited about in the future, and I'm working on it right now with Fountain Life, is it should be absolutely possible. You do this because you're so extraordinarily brilliant and constantly consuming data and constantly experimenting. And I just, I know nobody who does it to the level of success and abilities that you do, Dave.

You're amazing. And I say that with full love. I feel the same. Where I want to go in working on it is, can we build an AI system that is able to have your genetics, which play some part, have your desires? Is it longevity? Is it muscle?

Is it cognitive clarity? Is it weight loss? What is it you desire to achieve? And then how many different meds or supplements are you willing to take per day like I'm probably taking 80 How much how many are you taking? 150 pills, okay, probably a hundred substances. All right about the same So, you know and a lot of people can't do that

Some people are like, you know, I can't deal with more than you know, a small handful I've gotten really good at being able to consume with more than a small handful. I've gotten really good at being able to consume lots of pills of a handful. So today, if you go to your physician and you say, these are my goals, here's the last labs I did, maybe they have your genome screen, your whole genome scan, and you ask them recommendations, every physician you go to will give you a different set of recommendations. Different, yeah. Yeah.

And based upon what they happen to have read, what they happen to have heard, a whole set of cognitive biases, recency bias, and so forth. But there is actually a optimal set of meds and supplements. And so my moonshot within Fountain Life is I want the AI system that has all my metabolomics and all of my biomarkers and all my genomics. I'm able to pick from a list of maybe their 20 objective functions I want and then the number of pills, drugs, whatever I want to take per day, and it will spit out for me every single time the exact set that are right for me, independent of who my physician is or where

I did this in the world. There is an optimization function that's possible. So we're not there yet. The data is going to get us there. And I think that level of large data AI integration is in the next two to five years. But that will be great. It will be. And when people come into Upgrade Labs, which is a non-medical franchise, we're using medical grade gear, but it's not.

We take in their wearable data and we take in all the stuff we can get there, and we make similar recommendations. Like, well, what was your goal? Because maybe you should focus on recovery, or you should focus on cardio, just depending on what you want. And we look at the supplements they take, and we'll incorporate basic lab value from lab data in order to make recommendations of the right biohacks for it.

But at the end of the day, we should be putting, like you and me and all of us working on this, we should be putting 90% of doctors out of the business they're in today and into a much better business. I agree. The three minute visit is so horrifying for doctors and for patients.

So all that should be handled. So you go to the doctor when you're actually sick and then they have time to treat you with the real expertise instead of just like going in and arguing about whether you really need a vitamin D or a thyroid test. You shouldn't have to ask permission for that. It should be just built into your system and it says, hey, you need some thyroid.

You can go talk to your doctor because clearly your labs are off, but you shouldn't have to go ask. Let's talk a little bit more about the psychedelics. We just recently had a little bit of a setback where the FDA did not approve. I don't remember the constitution giving the FDA right to tell me what I can do with my own body.

Did you see that in there? Did I miss that? I hate this. I hate this part of it. I mean, I have a, I get angry that the, there's an extreme case I'm most angry about, which is if, God forbid, you or a loved one is suffering from a fatal disease and there is some chance that this drug under development that hasn't been approved by the FDA could help you.

Being told, no, I can't try that just obliterates me. It means rich people can leave the country and do whatever the hell we want. And the rest of Americans are completely screwed and it's unconscionable. So Peter, before we met in 2008, I co founded a medical lab testing company, I think we're the second people to do direct to consumer marketing for lab testing. But all we did was a white blood cell, a

radioactive cell counting to figure out what toxin toxic metals you were allergic to. It was called the malyza test. And we could tell people were allergic to. It was called the malyza test. And we could tell people were allergic to their hypoallergenic implants that contained 2% nickel that wasn't labeled. And there was a boy somewhere around eight or 10 who had the condition where your ribs grow inward and it kills you, so they put a chest splint in.

It's a genetic thing. Well, as soon as the chest splint, which was titanium, went in, he started dying, and his physician just went crazy and found us late at night on the internet. We ran a lab test and the poor kid's white blood cells proliferated like crazy in the presence of titanium, even without antibodies. So we had to apply to the FDA.

It took a couple of weeks to get a compassionate exemption to allow a zirconium brace in. And the day they implanted it, the kid's health conditions all turned around and he lived and became healthy. Why did I need a compassionate exemption from the government I pay to keep me basically away from violent criminals? Why did it, that is unconscionable. And that two weeks of suffering that kid went through,

like some bureaucrat right now, you're going to hell for that. The old adage is they're not happy till you're not happy, but let's not go there. So there is a model here, Dave, and I don't know if we've discussed this before. I know we haven't discussed in the podcast, which is the idea of a, if you want to make an investment today, if you're investing in a public company where enough lawyers and enough financial experts have analyzed it so that if you're a widow or a kid, you can invest in it.

But if you want to invest in a company that's risky, you have to be an accredited investor, defined as having $250,000 or more or income of a million dollars or more. And it's basically saying the SEC, the Securities Exchange Commission is basically saying, if you have enough money, you're intelligent enough to lose it. But if you're an orphan or a widow, we don't want you having the ability to invest in these risky companies. And so they're trying to protect you from yourself.

And I get that. I mean, there are scams out there. Like Bernie Madoff, because all those accredited investors who invested in that were smart, right? Oh, wait. Oh, yes, oh, wait. So my objective would be, we should have an accredited patient program

that basically says, if you get your spouse and your physician or whomever, if you're of right mind and you get one or two people close to you to say, yes, we've looked at it and we want to take this risk with you, that you should be accredited to go and try the trial, not in Mexico or Costa Rica, but at your home. And I just think this protecting us against ourselves has got more downside than upside in a huge margin. One of the reasons, so my new coffee is called Danger Coffee,

because who knows what you might do. And this idea that being afraid of risk as an excuse to take away your freedom is a bad thing. I'm doing this for your own safety. No one who's ever said that had your best interests at heart. It's by design. It's they're saying I rule you. My will is better than your will. And honestly, I mean, that's why we have free speech and we have all these other amendments to protect ourselves from people trying to keep us safe by starving you or, you know, burning you at the stake or whatever other story they're telling

you to keep you safe, like not okay. I own my biology and no regulatory authority on earth has the right to do that. This is a built-in right as much as freedom of speech or anything else. So recently- I'm not political, but I believe in that. I believe in freedom. I believe in data. I believe in science.

I believe in the ability of intelligent people to read the data, especially now with AI in the loop, right? You can give a large language model a very complicated medical and say, okay, this is me, this is who I have, this is what I have. Is this risky to me? What are the risks? And explain to me like I'm five, right? And get that. So anyway, recently MDMA, which was under trial, was it was expected to be approved for for PTSD was turned down. And that was a sad day. The data looks to have been extraordinary. Thoughts?

Well, you have to look at who's funding the people who are doing things for our own safety. And seems to me like MDMA would cause a drop in the sales of a lot of the antidepressants and other addictive chemicals that are sold regularly by the people funding the NIH and NIA and FDA. You got to follow the numbers there, Peter. You and I both know them. There is corruption in the system in the U S which is why our healthcare is the most expensive in the world and rank somewhere around 50th in terms of outcomes, because there's people skimming off the top. Okay.

psychedelics. I have had extraordinary experiences on DMT and ketamine. I went- You know, those are two of my favorites. I'm so happy that you're willing to talk about them. Yeah. I'm not running for president or any political office ever. Even if you did, it might not hurt you. I've had dinner with Bobby, and he's not afraid to talk about that stuff because he's a former addict.

But I did it under care. I did ketamine with a physician. I did the DMT with a therapist. And it was some of the most joyful, love, exploding, transformative, insightful. I've seen a shift in you since you did that, Peter. You're happier at a very base level. There used to be like a little a little line of

Like a little bit of stress that was in there and and and you're still positive But there was a little line of stress and you just seem softer in a good way And I think that's what they do. I think one of the things for me, you know It's very interesting because I am as are you in the longevity business. I want to see as much of life I think this most amazing time ever. I want to see as much of life, I think this most amazing time ever. I want to see where Starship takes me into the cosmos. I want to meet my great grandkids.

I want to upload myself, all of those things. And the experience I had from a dimethyl tryptophan and DMT journey was complete loss of fear of death. A connection with the universe that made me feel extraordinary. And it's not for everybody. It is literally a shedding and letting go of the ego. It's a very powerful experience. And I don't think I would have been ready for it younger in life, but I was definitely ready to shed a lot of the bullshit to call it that had accumulated over

decades. I believe that the ego is an emergent phenomena from our mitochondria. They're a distributed intelligence running a distributed network of compute nodes and environmental sensing nodes And I can prove all that. Okay, we know how they make decisions they do it the same way advanced crypto does via quorum sensing and the ego is just the mitochondria trying to keep the petri dish alive as if you're not in there and You are the petri dish your body is so what that means is that if you can lose the fear of death You're reprogramming your operating system these very fast parts of your body to be less reactive to it

And when you're less reactive to fear Your body naturally allocates energy into things that matter more like folding proteins right or my top of your autophagy or happiness But if you're stuck with old pattern matching recognition, keep in mind that this is a very fast system designed to keep life alive with no brain in there, so it's reactive. So if your mother-in-law criticism is pushing an old network designed to keep you alive, until you undo that, you will be sitting in your ego because it thinks you're threatened. So losing fear of death is just critically important. You don't want

to die, but it just means that when you do, I look at death and birth, same thing. We all do it. Like you can't avoid it. The end of the universe is going to happen. I just asked Brian Johnson that on stage at my conference because we haven't proven the end of the universe will happen. But like, okay, fine. I don't mind at some point. Yes. Yeah. So do you have you experienced and made use of microdosing of any of these? I have. In 1999, I went down to Peru and I sought out a shaman to do ayahuasca.

And they said, you're white. I said, yeah, I know. You won't like it. This wasn't a true resemblance to it. It was unknown and I actually think ayahuasca is one of the more dangerous of the ones out there. Not not my favorite It's no one low on my list. Yeah. Yeah, it should be low on most people's list. You want to do it with With the shaman is very very well-trained

So I think there are some spiritual risks there that are hard to go into, but I've just seen too many people with a negative reaction. Uh, and, and there's a lineage and a respectfulness that maybe is missing in some places. But the active ingredient DMT, you don't microdose that stuff. Maybe if you're doing Joe dispense of broth work, you're getting a little bit of it. But, um, DMT can be incredibly potent and a similar experience. It's just shorter. A microdosing ketamine would be a bad idea.

So when microdosing came out, James Fadiman is well known for creating a protocol on microdosing for LSD or mushrooms. And it's about 5% of an active dose. So I, I decided to microdose LSD every day for 30 days and I put it, you know, tab in a drop of water. So you get a drop of water as a fifth of a dose, all that kind of stuff, or a couple drops. And when I was traveling,

I didn't want to bring liquid because of TSA. So I chopped up a tab into 20 things. And I was given a speech in LA on in front of a room full of entrepreneurs. And I was just making all these jokes and no one was laughing. I was like, oh my God, that piece of the paper was a little bit more than a micro dose. And I'm just making all these jokes and no one was laughing. I was like, oh my god That piece of the paper was a little bit more than a micro dose

And and I'm telling that story because most people who think they're micro dosing at least here in Austin Oh, it's a micro dose chocolate bar. I'm like, dude, that's a 25% dose party dose. That is not a micro dose so micro dosing causes neuroplasticity and a little bit of creativity and performance enhancement, but it's is neuroplasticity and a little bit of creativity and performance enhancement, but it's below the perceptual threshold. And it's just a very different dose. I think most people microdose wrong, but I've done mushrooms and I've microdosed LSD. The other one that I would really, really not microdose would be ibogaine. And I spoke with Tim Ferriss on my podcast about that, I think right before he launched

his podcast. And ibogaine resets neurotransmitters and doing that every day is probably not a good idea. So I began another very risky drug. You need to be under a doctor's care because you can have a heart attack from it. I haven't tried it. It's on my list of things I probably will do. But I think there's great value to it.

But honestly, try, even if you're doing ketamine once every week or two with a lozenge, you're going to get more neuroplasticity from that than you do from microdosing. Did you see the movie Oppenheimer? If you did, did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs, that they spent billions on bio-defense weapons, the ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their RNA? Well, a company called Viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos Labs to build a platform that can measure your microbiome and the RNA in your blood.

Now, Viome has a product that I've personally used for years called Full Body Intelligence, which collects a few drops of your blood, spit, and stool and can tell you so much about your health. They've tested over 700,000 individuals and used their AI models to deliver members critical health guidance like what foods you should eat, what foods you shouldn't eat, as well as your supplements and probiotics, your biological age, and other deep health insights. And the results of the recommendations are nothing short of stellar. As reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine,

after just six months of following Viome's recommendations, members reported the following. A 36% reduction in depression, a 40% reduction in anxiety, a 30% reduction in diabetes, and a 48% reduction in IBS. Listen, I've been using Viome for three years. I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities. Best of all, Viome is affordable, which is part of my mission to democratize health. If you want to join me on this journey, go to Viome.com slash Peter.

I've asked Naveen Jain, a friend of mine who's the founder and CEO of Viome, to give my listeners a special discount. You'll find it at Viome.com slash Peter. You've started diving into P300. Let's chat about that. What is P300 neuroscience? Why are you focusing there? What are you learning? And what should people care about? Why are you focusing there? What are you learning? And what should people care about? Well, P300 is something called evoked potential. And what this means is, if I do this,

and I clap my ears, you and I are both engineers. You know that there was a signal transmission delay when I'm converting the signal. There was a latency on the internet. It came out through your speakers and there was a latency before it hit your brain. But you heard it as soon as the sound was delivered. But what the science in neuroscience shows is that you didn't hear it.

A third of a second after the sound was delivered to your tissues, your auditory cortex got activated. So who's in charge for the third of a second? It's actually like when they do a broadcasting on TV, there's an eight second delay in case someone says poop or whatever they're supposed to not say. Well, your brain and your body has this built in. So your body gets to decide what parts of reality are worth showing to you. And it will filter them out reliably based on fear and based on programming.

And this is not your subconscious. This is in your body. It's before it gets to your subconscious. And when the signal gets to your brain, it takes you additional time to figure out, was that a voice or a clap or what was that? And to become aware of it and do the processing. So what happens during that delay? Well, number one, young people, teenagers about 18 have about 240 milliseconds of delay.

And as you age, it goes up to about 350 milliseconds. It levels off. And if it goes much you age, it goes up to about 350 milliseconds. It levels off. And if it goes much above that, you're starting to get an early sign of Alzheimer's or cognitive dementia. So we can do this for visual inputs and we do this for auditory inputs. So this is actually a marker of aging.

And I still have the response time of an 18 year old, a 240 milliseconds. Is it the modafinil? Is it the way I've trained my brain for six months with neurofeedback or the fact that meditators have a lower P300D? I couldn't tell you because I do all of that stuff and then some. But what I can tell you is that the existence of this system, that's where the ego takes action.

It will give you an environmental signal and an emotion at the same time. And the emotion will feel real. Even worse. There are studies showing that inside your brain, all of your memories are cued to emotions. So you remember something by imagining how it felt, and then you come up with the word and you do enough meditation or other neurofeedback or probably work with psychedelics and you start developing the awareness of how the system is

affecting you and how it's entirely possible for someone who's intelligent and smart when their body doesn't want them to hear something, they won't hear it. I've seen it straight up when I'm doing facilitation with people at 40 years is then, you know, PhDs and very, very smart people. There's something they don't want to hear. Their body will not let them hear it. You ask them a question, they'll answer a different question.

It gets edited in real time. This is what the ego really does. And so in the Buddhist kind of or any meditation framework, they say, well, emotions will happen. Allow it to come through you, feel your heart rate, feel it and just let it pass. Like, okay, that took a lot of electrons guys. I could have been folding proteins. I could have been making body heat. I could have been getting shit done.

Right. And see us, but it's just going to happen until eventually you calm the storm. Well, yes, I love all that. I've been in Nepal and Tibet and ancient China. Like there's so much value and knowledge and done breath work with three three four years like all of this But what if you just reprogrammed the mitochondrial network so that in that p300 window? It wasn't triggered so you didn't have to have it come through and what I've done in my life Peter is I've gone through everything that's ever triggered me and I've run a

structured reset process with basically a lie detector test at 40 years in on my brain where I re-experience whatever discomfort I had and then I create a very specific state that you can teach someone afterwards and that state cancels out the signal and it cancels out permanently so you're just no longer triggered because it's less work. And if it's less work, then you can have more expansive views of the future. And you stack that with some adafinil, some nicotine, some caffeine. And good God, like the amount of wasted effort we have on fear and hunger. I don't have hunger signals either.

Like, I know the difference between a craving and hunger. So all of a sudden I'm not afraid of death. My body doesn't react to the things that should make me reactive that would have made me reactive 10 years ago. And the amount of energy left over for living longer. I think this is one of the most important parts of longevity. And it turns out when you look at the data, people who are more stressed do die sooner from all cause mortality, maybe being triggered all the time because you never dealt with that time your teacher was mean to you in first grade

is actually important. I think it is for longevity. It's underrated as a longevity thing. And that's why for 11 years I've run 40 years of Zen. It's changed my life. I think being able to let go and not hold on to triggers is one of the blessings I have. It's like zero time for that. Let's move forward. What's next, where are we going?

You are one of the happier people just in general. I just finished my big 3200 person event and it was an amazing success, but your brain is fried. And I've seen you at Abundance 360 for almost 10 years when I come there. And you're the man of the hour. Everyone wants a PC, everyone's talking to you, you're running. And you're the man of the hour. Everyone wants a PC. Everyone's talking to you.

You're running around. You're managing the stage. You're doing all this stuff. It is so much work. But even though you're tired, you're still happy. And you're in a place of service, Peter. And that's the hard thing, to not just be so pegged out that you just get lost.

I remember our moment. I was like, it was late. I'm trying to get to sleep by 9.30, my bedtime. And I'm walking by. And was like, uh, it was, it was late. I was, I'm trying to get to sleep by nine 30, my, my bedtime. And I'm walking by and I see there's Dave and like, stop, go over, run, give you a hug. It's like, you're here. Um, you remember what I said? I said, go take care of your conference. We'll talk later. Cause like we both go through that and it's crazy. Uh, and it's that being of service all day long, even though it's,

it's powerfully good for you In fact, it also raises BDNF and puts you in a flow state into the day If you don't get that sleep and you're gonna be up the next morning At my event this year. I was picking my kids up at 945 at night from the airport in Dallas and I hit something on the road two flat tires along with 25 other cars We all got two flats. Wow. And I don't know what happened, Peter,

but I meditate and all that stuff. I was the first car to get a tow truck. I had new tires on the car and was back to the hotel in an hour and 20 minutes at 10 o'clock at night. How's that even possible? I, to this day, have no idea. But even then, the next day I showed up and it was the best conference I've ever had.

Because of the resilience, everything we've talked about here is about resilience. Did I wake up and take my modafinil and my aniracetam? Yeah, I did. Did I have some coffee with some minerals and maybe some MCT oil in it? Yes, I did. Because that's what works for me. But for someone else, if green juice is your thing, you should do it.

Just watch for the kidney stones. You got to find your stack. All right, buddy. Forty years of Zen. I have been hearing about this. I have been hearing about this. I've been reading about this. I've had incredible friends going through it. It sounds like the most transformational experience

you can have in a condensed period of time. Tell us about it. I've always been a little bit uncomfortable talking about 40 years of Zen, because I feel like when people are called to it, they just come. OK, I'm called to it. Tell me what I'm going to experience there. I am called to it 100%. I started this about 11 years ago because I knew that I had a weird brain. I had Asperger's

syndrome as a kid. I had brain damage from toxic mold. I've worked with Daniel Amon and I fixed it. And part of this was I would go do neurofeedback, but with people who are trying to make my brain average, because that's what we're trying to normally. I don't want an average brain. I want my weird brain just better. So I finally ended up hiring neuroscientists and facilitators and putting together this mix of personal development that comes from a whole bunch of different bodies of work on forgiveness. And forgiveness is actually the thing you do to drop the triggers.

It's not about saying something is okay. It's just about how do I drop my own triggers? And there's a very specific recipe for that. That's called the reset process. And I'm disclosing the whole thing in the new book, uh, that'll be out next year. But it turns out your body will not let go of an old trigger unless you experience a state of awe and gratitude first. So what I do is I, I do a QEEG brain scan.

So we know how your brain does compared to our sample set and compared to the standard sample set called the Thatcher database. So now we've got your strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats. But we spend three days cleaning out your triggers. Because if you can be triggered, you're carrying a loaded gun.

And that process, it's intense. And you go in there, and you run the structured reset process, and you re-experience something that was scary, and you experience this exalted state that is probably closest described as loving kindness, but it's got more to it, and it has to be in the right order. And when you do this, suddenly, whatever that trigger was, everything that's ever been involved with that trigger goes

away. So you fix a trigger, it just stops being a part of your life. And I've had some pretty heavy stuff happen in the last few years. And this has been just so helpful. I consciously uncoupled with my wife. Our total legal bill combined is less than $50,000, which is for her, which is extraordinary. It's unheard of. Extraordinary. Yeah, and we genuinely want each other to win, right? And I couldn't have done that.

And I don't think she could have either if we didn't have access to just turn off our triggers so that you can step back and see things as they are instead of through the emotional lens that your body installs when you're not looking. And then I also had, you know, Bulletproof was sold to an investment bank for 10% of what it was worth when they let me go a few years ago. Well, that was not a good outcome for me or for any of the people who believe in me. Again, I went through this reset process.

And so anything that's been a really big bump for me, and I've already gone through for six months, I've gone through everything in childhood, everything I can think of, even birth related trauma. The number of people have PTSD from being born. Like I was with a cord wrapped around my neck. I had to let go of that. And what it means is I can be non-reactive much of the time. I'm not perfect, but I'm 1% as reactive as I was.

And I find most execs come through there and they come out and go, wow, I'm I'm a much better leader because it's easier if things have less friction in the world, because your body was creating the friction before you ever even got to think about it. And there are so many of us who are intelligent. So we always try to bring it into our brain, but it's the preprocessing that needs to reprogramming, not the brain. And then we do specific things to help you remember, and we do specific things to increase neuroplasticity when you're there.

And the latest iteration is we're adding psycholytic doses of ketamine under a doctor's care. So you're not tripping. Do you remember, do you remember when I've done ketamine as a, as a psychotherapeutic and it's an experience that will last about 45 minutes and then is a recovery period but there's very little post downside. 90 minutes, two hours total but for me, I think it was a 60 milligram injection and then another fall on a 40 milligram injection about half an hour later It's I am ketamine or is it Los Angeles a loss inch We went back and forth and because we're personalizing the doses every day Laws and just have the same effect but it takes about four times as much

So we have a medical care provider there, but in order to be able to customize it each day based on your response We are going with after testing IM and lozenge, we've realized lozenges work better for this thing. The psycholytic dose isn't the journey that you go on. This, it almost acts like a truth serum. It just makes it so you're less resistant to seeing your own bullshit. Got it.

And then on two days we do a heavier dose for increased neuroplasticity and a soft journey we'll call it. But as you're coming out, your brain is hooked up to electrodes and we're guiding your brain to experience more awe and more gratitude and more forgiveness. And then you, you store that sensation of just profound, profound just amazingness in the world. And when you use that state to unlock the door of resetting a trauma, it just, it's so fluid and smooth, um, that if anything pisses me off these days,

I, I go and I, I run a reset. And fortunately for me, since I'm CEO and we have four patents in neuroscience, but I have the gear downstairs. I can just hook myself up and maybe breathe some hydrogen or something first, just to be fancy about it. And then I go do the reset and And my relationship today with my girlfriend, it's so cool because like I don't generally get triggered. And if I do, I'm willing to apologize

because I don't feel any shame about it because I work through my shame issues, right? And- That's beautiful. How- I'm not perfect, but that's what it does. Listen, being able to identify your own bullshit and let go of it is such a gift. Such a gift, right?

And the smarter you are, the better you're going to be at bullshitting yourself. There's something I don't teach you but they should. So the the most genius people oftentimes suffer greatly because my belief until I was about 30 when I started on this personal development path, I was feeling something in my body and I didn't know what it was. Uh, and I was just really uncomfortable and a therapist asked me, well, do you have any feelings in your body? I said, yeah, I'm angry because this is dumb. And, um, she said, well, there must be another fantasy. Yeah, my stomach feels weird. And she said, there's a name for that.

And I go, what is it? She goes, it's fear. And I said, there's nothing here to be afraid of. Therefore it isn't fear. And she just laughed. She was in her eighties, a beautiful woman. Barbara Van Dyson was her name. And she goes, fear is an emotion, it doesn't have to be logical. And I was like, mind blown.

You mean my body's gonna do stuff that doesn't make any sense? And I'm simultaneously irrational and rational at the same time. And that's unlocked a huge part of the biohacking movement I want to know what's actually happening I want to follow the data right and the data shows me that my body does weird stuff Before I can think about it and that window of 350 milliseconds at p300 that is real and that is where the meat on the bone

for personal development is how long is the The 40 years end program and words it takes place and it's five days it runs Monday through Friday every week in Seattle and It's gonna take about eight to ten hours a day and think of it like running a marathon with your brain every day I have to have an executive chef and a handful of supplements or you can't even do that much meditation in a day We're trying to cram 20 to 40 years of daily meditation into five days when you're done Your brain waves will look like that of an advanced in meditator. And we've shown that we can up regulate parts of brain function that generally are believed to be untrainable. And when we get exactly

the right brain waves for your brain and we train to that even alpha, there's a lot missing from the research on the alpha brain wave. In fact, the peak alpha that everyone trains to is not the right number. And I've got great evidence to support that. So we trained to the right numbers. There's a lot of proprietary tweaks. Anyone can do neurofeedback anywhere, but most neurofeedback is designed to make your brain look like an average healthy brain. So F students become C students, which is great, but a students

become C students, which is bad. I never want to do that We want to enhance the things and the last two days of the program after you get your triggers handled That's the performance enhancement part of this where we're doing a 24 channel AI powered Training of specific networks that are under overactive and there you get to pick of specific networks that are under overactive. And there you get to pick, do I want more focus, more executive function, more social connectivity, less of something that isn't serving you.

But you get to choose it. It's like you take your BMW into the Dynan performance mechanic and like, did you want acceleration or braking or steering? Like, let's tune this and which mechanism? You can do that for your brain. It's just not about fixing a broken brain. It's about enhancing a brain that already got you there website for this 40 years

of Zen.com four zero years of Zen.com. And like I said, I kind of have a hard time talking about it because like it, it's like a spiritual thing, but the people who've come through there, these are people who are affecting thousands or even sometimes millions of lives with the decisions they make. And if you can be 1% more conscious You need to do that and this is not a one-person shift It's much more than that and I've had many many friends many of them are CEOs

they're successful individuals who've gone through this and This is not typically What any entrepreneur any? executive anybody encounters during the course of their lives. And I think being able to step back and have this pattern interrupt in your life

so you can actually look and see what's going on and how to optimize it, so important. I can't wait, trying it myself. It reduces suffering so much. And you and I are both CEOs, and we hang out with them a lot There's a lot of suffering and CEOs because it's lonely You have your team but you can fire any of them

So they're your friends, but they're also your friends who always know you could fire them They're also there's some you just can't share also I mean There are people like Elon who is just so extraordinarily driven and I've had just so extraordinarily driven and I've had late night conversations where he's just in pain and not happy and he's cannot let go of what he has to do and he feels like and many times unfortunately it's true he's the only person who can actually make it happen. Unfortunately it is true sometimes. His biography was so profound and I would love to get a look at his brain waves

Someday and I could probably predict what's going on there he probably has some of the very unusual get shit done brainwaves, but the the Trigger ones that cause the suffering there I mean what a what an amazing human being and what if you get it done with more joy and less suffering? I hope that like what if I truly I truly hope that for him. I truly do. Yeah, I do too. I have so much respect there. His business mind, aside from his engineering mind, it's unusual.

My job is to look at unusual minds and people who have just unusual abilities to do things. What's the secret sauce in there so we can make it more teachable at 40 years of Zen? It's collecting the database. Let's close out with a simple subject, consciousness. I believe, referring to what we talked about a little bit earlier, that your body sees the world as it is, but your brain cannot possibly handle that level of complexity. In fact, we it can't so it filters and it filters and it filters and what your brain's really doing It's based on Jeff Hawkins work now the guy who invented the pump. Yes. I know I know him and I was work

Yes, it's amazing It's amazing. He says your brain predicts the future of microsecond and then checks whether they're valid. Yes Yeah, it just says you only notice things that don't match what you predicted So if you've been trained to predict suffering fear plague disaster shame grief guilt That's what you're gonna see because your body is programmed to do that Not necessarily the brain and then when you reset those systems in the body and sometimes in the brain Suddenly things that were in front of you all the time, you become aware of them. And when you go into these altered states, whether it's from breathwork,

neurofeedback, extended fasting, extended darkness and psychedelics, and some of the other things that I, I, I share suddenly now you're seeing the world without filters and it looks pretty freaking weird, but it also looks awesome and amazing and sometimes scary. Usually when you're seeing scary stuff, you're replaying an old trauma, but a lot of consciousness is just learning how to see the world with the filters you choose

instead of the filters that your body chose for you when you were a little kid or in the womb or some other time. You know, I think people don't really, Gharak, appreciate the cognitive biases that we have. All right, and what you said is absolutely correct. We have so much information coming into all of our senses all the time that you cannot process at all, right?

So, you know, everybody hopefully has had that experience where when you're asked, did you hear the person speaking down the hall, or did you hear that background music? And when you're in a conversation, you're not. And your brain filters. And there's, if you go and just Google cognitive biases, you find hundreds of them.

I, you know, I wrote about them in my first book, Abundance with Steven Kotler. We talk about there's negativity bias, which is unfortunate, right? You give 10 times more attention to negative news and information than positive. There's recency bias, what you just heard recently, you give more weight to familiarity bias.

If you look and sound and feel like somebody, you're gonna give their words more credence than someone who looks different from you. And we don't realize that we're processing all of this biased information all the time. One of my hopes and expectations from AI, from some version of Jarvis, an AI wraparound shell, is that I'm going to turn on bias alert

and have it just make me aware when I am giving improper weight to data based upon my biases. Yes. It turns out our brains are lazy. And your brain doesn't want to use more electricity than is necessary to get a good enough answer So any answer it gives you is going to feel a hundred percent true Including all the biases including the most toxic one is if something is good more is better And this is why marathoners die of drinking too much water

Right more wasn't Okay, they do it because they get hyponatremia, which is lack, they're diluting their electrolytes too much, which is why you should put some salt in your water. But it's profound that we do this for exercise at the beginning of our conversation. And in fact, in lots of studies, not just in my own experience, but there's also no exercise is bad. So it turns out there's an ideal amount, but for you and me to sit down and think about something

and look at all the data, it's a lot of work. So our brain says, that's too much work, don't do it, just make a good enough assessment and then argue to the ends of the earth that you are right. That's the toxic part. It's like, I'm wrong, and I know my brain does it, right? Yeah, that is so true. Yeah, and once your ego gets in the loop and you're you know, you're defending you're gonna die in that hill

Whether or not you have the actual evidence to support or not Because it does really really truly feel true and just understanding that this is a part of human nature and the advanced Zen masters And all they talk about three states that are important for consciousness. The first one is empathy. Can you feel other people's pain? But empathy is not a very high vibe thing because now you're picking up everyone else's negativity and you're suffering along with them. So the next step of development of your spiritual practice, your consciousness is compassion. And this means you automatically wish other people well

before you have a chance to think about it. Right, so you look at someone, I don't like them because they're fat, I don't like them because they're successful, whatever your biases are, you replace that with, I hope that person's successful, even if they're actually not a good person or whatever.

But you just- A loving kindness meditation. Loving kindness. But the highest level that they teach about In the West we call it resilience and these they would call it equanimity and it's part of the path to enlightenment And this is you choose your state and no force on earth can take you out of your state This is the monk meditating in a hurricane and that's what I'm working on It's what it feels like you're working on is how do I choose to be happy joyful of service?

I'm working on it's what it feels like you're working on is how do I choose to be happy, joyful of service? Even if things didn't go my way, even if I lost some money, even if I got injured, even if someone I care about isn't doing well, my heart goes out to them, I do what I can, but I don't feel like I'm going to die and I don't lose my state. And half of that challenge is biological, Peter. If your mitochondria are screwed up from toxins, they will feel anxiety. And it's really hard to be in a state of equanimity when you're making half the electricity you're supposed to.

So you practice your longevity, practice mitochondrial enhancement, take your cognitive enhancers, and then be as resilient as is humanly possible. And I think you're gonna be more conscious as a side effect, and that's been my experience. What do you think? I think you are brilliant.

And I could spend Thank you. countless hours in this conversation. And I hope we will. I hope we'll have more time together. And I'm looking forward to booking my time with you up in Seattle at 40 years. When you get booked, I will come up there.

I don't do a lot of the facilitating personally just because of the travel and the time. But when you're up there I want to spend five days hanging out with you. I would love that pal. Do it. It'll be fun ladies and gentlemen the one the only the the biohacker original Dave Asprey Dave Tell us where we can find you. Tell me the last three books that you that you recommend from your series smarter not harder

is Your last book out, just before then? Smarter Not Harder, the one before that was, fast this way to correct some misconceptions about fasting, mostly people over fasting. And then the one before that was, I think that was Superhuman. Yep, that was my big longevity book.

Yeah, amazing. And I'm at DaveAs superhuman. Yep, that was my big longevity book. Yeah, amazing. And I'm at DaveAsprey.com. Upgrade Labs is own and UpgradeLabs.com. And the human upgrade, my podcast, has only 1,200 episodes with world leaders in longevity. So there's something to be gained from that. I love it, I love it. And I've been honored to be a guest on your podcast.

Multiple times, yeah. Buddy. Peter, thanks for your work in the world. I appreciate you so much. Abundance has really helped me just have a positive outlook. Thank you. Thank you. See you soon.

See you soon.