Bulletproof Founder Dave Asprey Shares the Laws of Happiness, Health, and Success and How to Upgrade Your Biology

[00:00:00] Zach: We say it all the time on the show. If you're sick of your own shit and ready to make a change, you're in the right place. 

[00:00:06] Jeremy: 

[00:00:06] But figuring out what to change can often be the biggest obstacle between who you are and who you want to be.

[00:00:12] Zach: That's why this week we're digging into the fitness archives for an interview full of dozens of options to consider if you're ready to do something different. 

[00:00:21] Jeremy: And this Encore episode, you'll hear what leaders, innovators, and Mavericks do to win at life from Bulletproof founder, New York times bestselling author and host of the human upgrade podcast. David.

[00:00:32] This is the fit mess conversations with world-class experts in the fields of mental, physical, and emotional health. And this episode 

[00:00:41] Dave: if anyone on earth could improve their performance, , I would probably be the worst candidate to do that because I was in such bad shape, , psychologically, physically at a cellular level. , and so if I could do it, it's gotta be much easier for most human beings.

[00:00:54] Now, here are your hosts, Zach and Jeremy. 

[00:00:57] Zach: Welcome to the fitness brought to you by athletic greens. Thanks for listening while you're doing whatever it is you're doing right now. I'm Zach he's Jeremy. We've been through all kinds of struggles and ended up stronger because of them. And we want to help you do the same.

[00:01:10] So if you're sick of your own shit and ready to make a change, you're in the right place. 

[00:01:14] Jeremy: But where do you start some answers? I actually went back to the fifth episode we ever. We were lucky enough to talk with Bulletproof founder, Dave Asprey, about what at the time was his new book game changers. What leaders, innovators, and Mavericks do to win at life

[00:01:30] Zach: In that book, he details how to apply 46 laws to happiness, health, and success, any of which are well worth your consideration. As you take on new challenges to improve your wellbeing. 

[00:01:41] Jeremy: Zach has I listened to this episode? I was surprised to hear how new all of this health and wellness stuff was to me at the time, I was only about a year into this journey, which had largely started with drinking Bulletproof coffee. 

[00:01:51] Zach: When he first got started with Bulletproof coffee, I remember tracking that. Four or five years ago and trying it myself for the first time.

[00:01:59] The first time I ever tried making it though, I use, I used salted butter. Oh, that don't make that 

[00:02:04] Jeremy: mistake. I was just going to say it the first time. I, cause before I even heard of him, there was the story going around about putting butter in your coffee, like instead of cream or what. Yeah, it did the same thing.

[00:02:14] Chopped off a hunk of salted butter, put it in the coffee and just stirred it like cream. And I drank it. I was like, this is oily as shit. Why would you do, oh my God, this is horrible. Why are people doing this? And then, you know, fast forward eight or nine months when I started taking things more seriously.

[00:02:30] I was like, oh, the blender. Yeah. Oh no, 

[00:02:33] Zach: I get it. Yeah. But this guy is amazing because he just has all these little tweaks that you can do that just make your life better. And honestly, one of the little tweaks that I did way back when we first talked to him, I was taking athletic greens at the time. And to me, that was a huge biohack. Now it's just my baseline. I need that to survive.

[00:02:52] But, , I started taking athletic greens because I really needed to have a sufficient. That tasted great, gave me all the things that I needed. , and I didn't want to have to take 10 pills a day or, spend all of my time cooking all the meals.

[00:03:06] I try and get my nutrients from food, but let's face it. We don't get everything we need every day from food. So athletic greens was a great solution for me. It tastes great. Gives me everything I need for more energy, better gut health optimized immune system. 

[00:03:21] It has less than a gram of sugar and there's no nasty chemicals or artificial anything. And it actually does taste good. And for what you get, it's less than $3.

[00:03:29] and right now is the time to incorporate better health and athletic greens is a perfect start to make it easy.

[00:03:35] Athletic greens is going to give you a free one-year supply of immune supporting vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit athletic greens.com/fit mass. Again, that's athletic greens.com/fit. Mess to take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance.

[00:03:54] that link will be on the show notes and it's plastered all over our website@thefitness.com.

[00:03:59] Jeremy: so Dave Asprey, hasn't always been super. When he first joined us in 2018, we started by asking him who he was before he upgraded his biology.

[00:04:08] Dave: I was, uh, probably at the bottom of my class in business school. Um, they call the person who gets an MBA with, uh, at the very bottom of the class.

[00:04:18] They call them an MBA just as well. And that's something I wrote about my new book was sort of my take on that, focusing on your strengths. Okay. Along the path to where I am now. I'm I just turned 46. I have more energy, , than I've ever had. My brain works better than it ever has. I have a lower stress level, , than I've ever had.

[00:04:40] Uh, despite having started a company with $68 million in venture capital and writing New York times best selling books and running a award-winning podcast. Uh, all, all of those things should be just weighing on me, but I go back to when I was in my early twenties, I weighed 300 pounds and I was probably 35% body fat versus that 9.6%.

[00:05:03] And I had arthritis. My knees, since I was 14, I started getting cognitive dysfunction and my career was taking off in Silicon valley. I did very well in my mid twenties, but I was, I had the accelerator all the way to the floor. I was slowing down and I just didn't know what to do. And I tried working out an hour and a half a day, six days a week, and going on a low fat, low calorie diet for 18 months, I did that and I was still weighed 300 pounds, but then I was tired and even more burned out.

[00:05:35] Uh, and I, I kind of hit rock bottom and said, you know, I wouldn't hire myself. I bought disability insurance in my mid twenties saying, I don't know what's going on here, but my doctor can write. I'm going to have to learn this myself. And I took all these computer hacking skills and my career wasn't Silicon valley and cloud computing and computer security.

[00:05:53] Uh, and I said, if I can hack the internet, how hard could it be to hack this? And I started hanging out with anti-aging experts, people three times my age, who had similar conditions and had reversed them. And I started discovering this whole new hidden world that people were doing things that weren't supposed to be possible.

[00:06:12] And over time, Look it's possible, but not just undo all the damage that I've done or my genetic weaknesses, whatever they are. And that there's a whole nother level of, of human performance that I'm capable of way beyond whatever thought of, and I still am finding every day there's there's new levels.

[00:06:30] Even beyond that. And one day I just said, I've got to share some of this stuff. If someone had just told me the basics, when I was 20, it would have saved me. At this point million dollars I spent on upgrading, my biology would have saved me a lot of suffering, a lot of acting like a jerk because I was hangry or hypogonad bitchy.

[00:06:45] And I just looked back on this path and I I've, if anyone on earth could improve their performance, , I would probably be the worst candidate to do that because I was in such bad shape, , psychologically, physically at a cellular level. , and so if I could do it, it's gotta be much easier for most human beings.

[00:07:03] Jeremy: So let's talk about, , one of those things and perhaps the thing you're most famous for. And that's a, the bright idea to put butter on your coffee. Is that fair to say? That's sort of what got you started in this. It's 

[00:07:15] Dave: one of the two big things that got me started in the field. And the way I came about butter and coffee is after I did all the stuff that's supposed to work.

[00:07:24] You exercising all the time, you know, eating a lot of beans and stuff like that. I even being a raw vegan for a while, I decided I was going to go to Tibet to learn meditation from the masters. And I follow this algorithm. You do, what's supposed to work. You measure it. If it doesn't work, you do. It's not supposed to work, but some crazy person said.

[00:07:40] So I went and I, I was on the side of mountain highlights, which is in the middle of nowhere in Western Tibet. And it's the headwaters for the induce in Ganges rivers. It's sort of the Mount Olympus for Hindus and Buddhists, uh, probably the holiest mountain in the world. And you go to this thing and you walk in a circle around it, 26 miles at 18,000 feet elevation.

[00:08:03] And I just wanted to go do it for no particular reason. Other than that, it sounded like. Epic and amazing that I never going to do again. When I was there a little Tibetan woman gave me a bowl of yak butter tea, which doesn't taste very good, but my brain turned on afterwards at a time when you're at that altitude, you feel like you're going to die anyway.

[00:08:21] And I just felt good. And I came back to Silicon valley and started experimenting and. , the science that I knew about making coffee, that didn't give me jitters and crash. , adding something called brain octane oil, which came from the anti-aging research on Alzheimer's disease and metabolic and metabolism and ketosis and ketogenic diet, putting all that together into this new creation.

[00:08:42] Uh, and I put it on the blogs. There was no market size for butter and coffee. There was no market for ultra clean lab tested coffee beans, or. Brain octane extract of coconut oil that makes you feel different. And I said, look, I find these things mattered greatly. How I feel is the most important thing in my life.

[00:09:00] If I have more energy, I can put things back into the world. I think it works for other people. I've tested on a small group of people here. You all should try it. And it took off like, wow. But that was one thing because it's so noteworthy to put butter in coffee. And today people have a lot of people have heard of it.

[00:09:16] In fact, we've done, , something like 150 million cups of Bulletproof coffee, where the top selling cold brew coffee at whole foods, I get it's become a real thing and not a fad, but actually people, they feel different. They do it every single morning. They travel with sticks of butter. The way I used to.

[00:09:32] But the other thing that put Bulletproof on the map is since the very first blog posts I was willing to talk about, Hey, I actually want control of my own biology. And I ended up creating a field called bio hacking. And this year Merriam-Webster is added this word to the dictionary as one of 840 new words in English language.

[00:09:52] And I'm in the definition online, which is remarkable and cool, but biohacking is that. Changing the environment around you and inside of you, so that you'll have control of your own biology. I felt like my body was a trader. I did not want to eat the cookie, but I would eat the cookie. I did not want to weigh 300 pounds.

[00:10:07] I did not want to yell at my coworkers or my spouse, but I did. And it wasn't a choice I made. It was something that happened. Yeah. It felt like a betrayal. I said, there's gotta be a way to get control and to look the way I want to look and feel the way I want to feel and act the way I want to act. And it was that creation of a community around biohacking.

[00:10:24] So it's created this giant movement and that movement of saying, Hey, how I feel matters. Most that's really what pull it, but put Bulletproof on the mat before that it was either how I look or sort of how people perceive me, but this is about the energy to be more of.

[00:10:39] That's 

[00:10:39] Jeremy: a brilliant segue into, uh, the many questions we have about your book. But before we get there, I just wanted to say, I, as someone who is one of those people that has replaced my breakfast with butter in my coffee and brain octane oil, I feel a massive difference about a year ago. , I started making some, , , very small changes, but I think it falls under the category of biohacking.

[00:10:57] A lot of what's in your book is things I've been sort of doing. , and I obviously have a lot more ground to cover after reading your book. , but I, if I can just for a minute sort of sing the praises of the brain octane oil and the butter and the coffee it's it is one of the keystones of what has been the dramatic, uh, life-changing decisions that I've made.

[00:11:13] So. Uh, so thank you for introducing it and, uh, and keep up the good work. Cause it's a, it's been a big help for me. 

[00:11:20] Dave: Thank you so much. It sounds, it sounds a little bit crazy when you say it like that because they really, how is it possible that changing the kind of oil that goes into your body would do that to your brain.

[00:11:30] But at this point, millions and billions of people are doing it and. Imagine a day where I would choose to not do that unless I was maybe just fasting entirely. I would not want, I don't want to go back to where I 

[00:11:44] Jeremy: was. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, I think of myself about a year ago and you know, I was much heavier than I am now depressed just out.

[00:11:53] I was medicating self-medicating in a lot of. , and really just kind of saw no future. And it's amazing how just a couple of changes, you know, I cut alcohol and drugs and, and, um, antidepressants out of my life and started drinking this coffee. And it just, it lit something up that it brought back creativity.

[00:12:12] It brought back just having something to get out of bed for every day, aside from just delicious coffee, but like, you know, a life purpose. So, uh, it does sound crazy, but for me, it's been, it's been. 

[00:12:24] Dave: The reality is that that is inside every one of us, even my company named Bulletproof it, our tagline was the state of high-performance.

[00:12:33] It's always been there. It's just hidden. Uh, and when I look back at all this stuff, I've done. Not in my own interest. If I didn't have that spark in order to, to have the willpower, to, to do the changes. And you just described it perfectly in, in a year, uh, the, the transformation is big and it's not one of these things like, oh, eat kale every day.

[00:12:54] Your life will be like it was before, except now it tastes bad.

[00:13:01] Zach: Yeah. Awesome. I've been drinking Bulletproof coffee for probably four years now. And it's so interesting. , I tell people about it the first time and they give me a funny look. I tell them about it a second time. And they, they say, Hmm, maybe I'll try it. And then the third time they'll try it.

[00:13:15] And it usually takes off from there. , it's my staple. I go to it every day, but we wanted to talk to you about your new book game changers, you know, Jeremy and I had the chance to read it. It's a great book. It has 46 laws in it. , what are those laws? And where'd you come up with those. And wait, 

[00:13:31] Jeremy: and you don't have to list all 46, but, but how did you land on 46?

[00:13:37] Also? 

[00:13:38] Dave: I decided that I wanted to talk to some of the most interesting people in the world and I started Bulletproof radio. , my podcast now has, uh, this year we should cross a hundred million downloads and I've talked to Nobel laureates, Navy seals, people who created new fields of psychology or medicine.

[00:13:55] Uh, and people doing interesting research across a variety of domains and people who've literally changed the game in their industry. It does something noteworthy. And at the end of every episode, I say, look, tell me the three most important pieces of advice, everything, you know, three things that matter most if I want to be as impactful as you and after 450 of those interviews.

[00:14:17] I put it all into a spreadsheet and I hired a statistician to go through. And instead of following this idea, well, that one billionaire over there, or that one Olympic athlete, they did something. So I'm going to do what they do and see if it works. Your life is not like. To see if that it, to see if that's kind of work for it, you might hit something you might not, but we're all very different human beings.

[00:14:37] But what if every one of these people agreed on their priorities? What turns out? They don't all agree, but there were clear patterns that emerged statistically. So in the course of just analyzing the data, going through all of these interviews again and saying, what are, what can I distill from this for my own edification?

[00:14:57] So I can be a better CEO and a better father. Uh, and just a better human, what comes out and what immerse with these three big patterns of people who are successful are doing things to be smarter, to do things, to do smarter, to be faster and to be happier and. Happy people generally have a big impact and , miserable.

[00:15:18] People can have a big impact, but they usually hate their lives and then burn out and then have to do the work to become happy people. And I interviewed a few of those too, including a Buddhist, a Buddhist monks who, you know, had affairs and, you know, fell, fell from greatness and had to climb their way back up and to learn from these people.

[00:15:36] And the 46 laws emerged from. Careful analysis of the data from putting all these different pieces of advice into buckets, seeing where people agreed and didn't it. And then boiling them out 48 laws of power style, which was really interesting. Robert Green wrote the very famous book, 48 laws of power. I got to interview him as one of the people in the survey, one of the guests on the show.

[00:15:58] And I said, you know, his book where he said, here's the rules to follow. So you can literally. Just look at one paragraph and the rule and figure out what does that mean for you? And then each of these 46 laws has a little workbook in the book where you can say, all right, is this the one for me? I'm expecting someone to read this and go, oh, now that I have more energy for my Bulletproof coffee, now that I'm on the path to being, uh, having more control of my biology, to being just a better person showing up wherever I want to show up.

[00:16:29] What should I do first? And you go through the laws and you say, I like these three. I'm going to apply these in my life. And the first law and the whole book is called use the power of no. And the short version of the law is you have 24 hours in a day. You can choose to spend those hours creating things you truly care about on insignificant matters or struggling to prove your worth by doing things that are hardest for you.

[00:16:53] Master the art of doing what matters most. The things that create energy, passion, and quality of life with the lowest investment of energy, say no more and decide less. So you have power for your mission. And to get this advice, I looked at the guy who coached nine of the tour de France teams, , to, , win.

[00:17:15] And his name is Jeff Spencer. He's an executive coach now who coached me. I looked at Stu Friedman, one of the top a hundred executives at Ford motor company and a Wharton professor. And a guy named Tony double-bind who has been on the show. Who's a coach. So there's three stories woven in about how powerful it is to say no most people who are listening to the show, they say yes, because they're trying to please someone.

[00:17:37] And when they say yes to something that actually takes away their energy, They're making a very poor investment and just to point that out and then to put in exercises how you here's, what to do about that. So that was one of the things that came out of these interviews and other things that are in the book that, that were, uh, kind of, kind of shocking related to some of the other books I've written, uh, lost seven is smart.

[00:17:59] Drugs are here to stay. And here I interviewed Steve folks, the guy had. The smart drug news, the first and largest newsletter, going back into the eighties, a brilliant biochemist Stan Grof, who is 94 years old and created the field of transpersonal psychology and was the first person to treat 3000 patients as a licensed psychiatrist in the old Czechoslovakia.

[00:18:24] Uh, with LSD, uh, pharmaceutical grade legal LSD, which led to this whole creation of a lot of the personal development. We know today, this is the father of the field, uh, as well as, , several other people, , in the field. So if you are looking at things like that and saying, well, can we enhance our cognition with pharmaceuticals or with natural substances, will these experts in the world say you can, so is this something you want to do now?

[00:18:52] But at least, you know, it's a tool you could have and that some of the world's most powerful people are doing it. There's other rules about overcoming fear about what happens when you're a high performer. If you push your limits for too long, there's a whole rule. Don't push your limits for too long. And here I talk about a world's top powerlifter.

[00:19:10] I talk about one of the world's top Zen Buddhist monks. Another guy. Who's a different style of monk in LA called the urban monk Pedram Shojai. And we look at what happens when people like me burn the candle at both ends and in the middle. And we do it without giving ourselves recovery. And what happens is your body starts to attack itself and your overall performance will decline.

[00:19:32] No one tells you this when you're 18, and you're saying, I can stay up all night, I'm going to work two jobs. I'm going to start a company. I'm going to date a supermodel and I'm going to run a marathon. And all the things that we think we're going to do when we're young and we don't know where to. The bank account.

[00:19:45] Well, I'm going to learn this from people who are 25 years older than me, and now I can apply this to my life or people who've studied the biology of it. So the idea is if you read this book to read game changers, it's going to save you listening to 500 hours of Bulletproof radio with a lot of thinking, thousands of hours that went into boiling these things down.

[00:20:04] So you look at it and go, does this apply to my life? If so, I like this law. If not, I'll move on to the next one. It's all about saving you time when you read it so that if you're going to do something, you're gonna do the thing that 

[00:20:13] Jeremy: matters. You know, someone listening to this might be thinking, okay, I don't know that I'm ready to dive in with LSD.

[00:20:18] Uh, I don't know that I'm ready to, to experiment with smart drugs. Where, where would you recommend somebody who's brand new to this idea of biohacking? What are some simple things they can do to sort of start down this 

[00:20:29] Dave: path? 19 and 20 are some of the most important laws in the book. One 19 is waking up early, does not make you a good person.

[00:20:40] And here I'm looking at the power of sleep, a surprising number of these world. Changing people, talked about sleep as being their top three most important things. And the waking up early, does that make you a good person? It turns out 15% of us will destroy our performance. If we wake up early and 15% of us, if we stay up late, it completely wrecks us.

[00:21:03] And, but the rest of the pill is somewhere in the middle. And what you do in the morning really matters, but your definition of morning is not the same as everyone. Else's and just understanding that one thing. Changes a lot. So figuring out where, and when you should be sleeping and LA 20 high quality sleep is better than more sleep for years, I say, well, you're supposed to get eight hours of sleep, but it turns out the data.

[00:21:29] And I've written about this on the. Blogs for more than five years, the data shows that people live the longest sleep six and a half hours a night, and people are healthy, needless sleep. And the quality of your sleep is more important than the length of your sleep. In fact, if you sleep eight hours a night, your odds of dying from all cause mortality go up compared to the person who sleeps eight hours tonight.

[00:21:49] It doesn't mean more sleep is bad for you. It just means that if you need more sleep, something needs work. And in this chapter of the book and this law, I actually tell you what to do in order to improve your sleep quality and that's core biohacking. And I tell you for, for people listening to the show right now, there are things that cost nothing or cost $6, uh, that you can do that will change the quality of your sleep, how you feel in the morning.

[00:22:15] Like what does that 10% more energy tomorrow because you slept. Tonight. That's completely doable. We have the science, we know it and no one talks. 

[00:22:24] Zach: Yeah. I have to say, , I heard you say a long time ago, , block out the blue light before you go to bed. And I went out and bought a pair of the orange glasses, the blue light blockers, and I wear those around the house.

[00:22:35] Yeah. And my, my seven-year-old daughter. Is fascinated by it. As soon as I put them on, she starts making fun of me, but I don't care. I get better sleep. 

[00:22:43] Dave: , 

[00:22:43] this true dark makes kids glasses that will fit her. There you go. My kids, I just posted a picture of us going to why we took a red eye back. So my kids were in the airport wearing their.

[00:22:53] The red at true dark glasses, all four of us, the whole family sitting there looking like superheroes or something. It doesn't matter. Cause we got to sleep on the plane and no one else did. 

[00:23:03] Jeremy: Oh, awesome. It's funny though. Just last week I was, , testing myself to try and be one of those people that gets up a couple hours early.

[00:23:10] To do all the things that I want to do that I don't have time for. And I just was exhausted. It wasn't working for me. And so the last few days I've been experimenting with doing all those things I want to do with the night before and maybe getting a little bit less sleep, but I'm able to get to sleep instead of sitting there thinking about all the things I should be doing.

[00:23:26] And it's I already, again, I already noticed a difference. So it's so it's so funny how it, it is just a matter of testing it, tracking it and making the changes that, that you can make some big differences. 

[00:23:38] Dave: It sounds just kind of weird. Like, wait a minute, I'm supposed to struggle.

[00:23:42] We've been taught forever that there morality and struggling. Well, of course you wake up at 5:00 AM and I did this every morning for two years. I became an early morning person. And what I found was actually, it makes me tired and less creative and I'm not. I'm not stronger. I'm not happier. I'm going to go back to doing it.

[00:23:58] And it turns out genetically I'm one of the 15% of people who was evolved to be the night shift. So I wrote Gamechangers after 11:00 PM, mostly because they had quiet time and I controlled the color of light I was looking at. I slept like a baby the whole time. I didn't damage my health, doing it. Uh, and I wrote it for the kid book.

[00:24:17] So you can do all these things, but for another person, they should wake up at 4:00 AM and write the book. And neither one is morally superior to the other. And just knowing that in a law is it's liberating because now you're not a good person. If you wake up early or you sleep in, you're a good person.

[00:24:32] If you're a good person and you do the things that support your biology, the best. So 

[00:24:37] Zach: one of the laws that you have , is disrupting fear. And you talked about an emotional stack within that law. I feel like a lot of what holds people back from making changes in their lives is fear. So that law really struck a chord with me.

[00:24:52] I was just hoping that you could talk a little bit more about why we need to disrupt fear and what the emotional stack is that you refer to in the. Oh, I 

[00:25:01] Dave: love it. That, that we're just talking about. The lot 10 fear is the mind killer. In my other life, I started a company called 40 years of Zen that does very high-end executive brain training using computers.

[00:25:15] And I spent four months of my life with electrodes connected to my head, doing advanced and meditation with a computer telling me how to do it better. And it's one of the reasons I can do the things I. And what you become aware of in advanced Buddhist teaching. In fact, any kind of advanced psychology eventually gets to the same thing.

[00:25:33] It doesn't really matter whether it's a kind of a spiritual path from the east or more of a Western cognitive approach. You end up realizing that there is a, there is fear behind everything you do. And in the hierarchy that we teach. There's the lowest level of awareness is actually apathy. And when you're so afraid of something that the fear turns into anger, and then you're like super mad about it.

[00:26:02] And then that angry. Can turn into things like shame and it can also turn into apathy. And at this point you're saying, I just don't care. Like it's just, you know, I'm numb to that. And eventually was okay. Well what's really going on is I'm actually really sad about that. And behind that sadness is anger and behind that anger.

[00:26:24] It's always here, but what the fear hides is the natural human state that we all have, which is happiness and joy. And the people who are changers, many of them have figured this out in one way or another, and they figured out, all right, if I'm going to be in that happy state, at least most of the time I can achieve my mission and I can have a great time doing it and things feel.

[00:26:48] So for me, I, I was successful as a young man, but I was running away from failure. Cause I was frankly anxious all the time. I didn't even know it. And so to be able to unpack those things where now I go, oh, I'm feeling sad about something that means I'm actually angry about something, which is actually afraid of something.

[00:27:04] Uh, let me just unpack all that stuff. And then depending on how big that fear is, uh, I'll, you know, do the appropriate intervention so that I can remove. Fear as a response. And what I write about in this law, which is probably one of my favorite laws in the book, as I think about it is that that fear response it's actually not you, it's your body trying to survive in the world around you.

[00:27:27] And that if you realize that, okay, you're responsible how you act about the fear, but the fear is, is a distributed system throughout yourselves, based on my last book about ancient bacteria. The puppet masters in our biology. Well, okay. All of a sudden it stops being a moral failing. It's not about whether you're a good person or bad person.

[00:27:46] It's about whether that fear is causing all this other cascade of emotions. And if you can get through that stuff, what feels like a huge burden now suddenly stops being a burden. And you realize I have so much energy now that I'm not trying to deal with all this fear that I can go do things. I didn't think 

[00:28:03] Jeremy: we're human people.

[00:28:04] One of the things you mentioned in the book is that you suck at remembering long lists. And I've got to know someone who has biohacked yourself into a high performance individual. What else do you suck at? , 

[00:28:15] Dave: you know, I started out life living in a, in a basement that had toxic mold in it, like really bad toxic mold.

[00:28:23] I had all sorts of weird physical symptoms. It's probably one of the reasons I was, I was a beast. And it affects neurological development. So I had all the symptoms of Asperger's syndrome, which, which runs in my family anyway until my mid twenties. So I have changed my brain changed my. Where I don't identify that way anymore, but some of the core patterning around facial recognition and name recognition, I am probably three or four standard deviations worse than the average person.

[00:28:54] So if someone at work walks up to me, I'm like, yeah, I know, I know who you are. Of course, you know, the CEO you'd hope, you'd hope. Uh, but if, if someone that I don't work with really frequently walks up to me, say at an airport, like man, without context, I have a, really, a much harder time than the average person placing the person.

[00:29:13] And because now I meet thousands of people and because people walk up to me and airports for selfies, I am always getting, wait, do I know this person? I think I'm much worse at that than the average person. 

[00:29:26] Jeremy: That's 

[00:29:27] Dave: funny. I haven't mastered that one yet, but I'm working on it. 

[00:29:30] Zach: Well, when, when we see you in the airport, we'll, we'll let you know that you've never met us before.

[00:29:36] Dave: Yeah. Cause see me in the airport say, oh yeah, I'm a big fan. And we haven't met or, or tell me your name, even if I already do it because it's going to make me feel a lot happier. That's funny for 

[00:29:46] Zach: sure. All right. So last question that we've got for you is, , one of the lines that I saw in your book was sunlight is not optional.

[00:29:55] And, , we live in the Pacific Northwest, , just like you do. And as I read it, I was looking outside going, uh, there's no sunlight, the next nine months here. , if sunlight is not optional, , how do those of us in the Pacific Northwest get through the 

[00:30:10] winter? 

[00:30:11] Dave: No, this has been a big challenge for me.

[00:30:13] I grew up in a desert, but I moved to the Pacific Northwest eight years ago. I'm looking outside right now and all I see, I can't even see salt spring island right now. It's still just all gray and. What I do is every winter I do my best to get out of Dodge. If you can spend a week in a sunny place, it, it recharges you and people who live in Sweden, Norway, they all do the same thing.

[00:30:38] The native people here in the Pacific Northwest, the first nations up here on Vancouver island, where I live, uh, they actually ate medicinal mushrooms. Um, the kind that make you trip, but they prepare them. So they wouldn't do that. And then. Yeah, when they do that, they would use it to make themselves resilient to the gray and the cold.

[00:30:58] And I don't do that. But what I do is if I'm not going to have a chance to go to Hawaii, like I did last week, I am going to expose myself to sunlight, including ultraviolet frequencies from a man-made source. So in my, uh, in my dining room where my kids and my wife and I have breakfast, we have a very. Um, lamp, uh, not an led one, not an infrared, one, those things for SED, those are generally bad on your eyes.

[00:31:24] We have a bright halogen light, and we have a reptile light that's full spectrum sunlight. And that sends a signal to your body that says, oh, it's morning. And that means your circadian rhythm stays on. If we were to live in the Pacific Northwest without either that weird mushroom concoction or. Sunlight like this, we're supposed to hibernate.

[00:31:44] We're supposed to sleep 10 hours a night. We're supposed to slow down, but since we're not going to do that, you've got to tell yourself in the morning it's sunlight. So I have a suntanning lamp or an ultraviolet, like full spectrum sunlamp and I turn on for 20 minutes and it completely changes things.

[00:31:59] Wow. 

[00:32:00] Jeremy: Okay. Well, I guess I got to go shopping. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for the work that you're doing for this book and for being so generous with your time. It's a, it's a real privilege to get to talk to you. And, uh, just, we really appreciate you doing this. 

[00:32:15] Zach: Uh, you got to 

[00:32:16] Dave: really, really appreciate the support on the launch and just for letting me know that it's a, it's made a difference for you.

[00:32:21] Cause I that's why I do what I do. It's like I, I left my career in tech and because I thought this, this mattered more. So 

[00:32:28] Jeremy: thanks for letting me know that it helped. 

[00:32:29] Zach: That was Bulletproof founder, New York times bestselling author and host of the human upgrade podcast. Dave Asprey, truly one of.

[00:32:36] my favorite human beings. 

[00:32:37] Jeremy: I'm so glad we went back and publish this interview again, because so many times we forget. That, when it comes to biohacking or upgrading your life, or however you want to look at it, it doesn't always have to be, you know, blue blocker glasses and high-tech gadgets and apps and things to plug in and attach to your body.

[00:32:56] Sometimes it's just paying attention. It's just changing the way, sleep, going to bed a little earlier, getting up earlier, whatever works for your body, it doesn't have to be super scientific. You just have to pay attention and know what's working for you. So I love that. Had that interview and have that resource to share with you as you consider whatever changes you're trying to make to your life to become better.

[00:33:18] I also think it's important when you're on a journey like this to Chronicle it in some way, journal it, do a podcast. That's what we did. And it's just, it's so funny to go back and listen to the fifth time that we hit record. And compare it to now, number 113, and to here where I was like, I, I, it's hard for me to believe that it was only 2018 when I was freshly off of my antidepressants freshly off of, you know, depending on alcohol to manage my emotions very recently lost weight.

[00:33:49] I mean, that was just a few years ago. It feels like a lifetime ago. So it's really important to, I think, to keep track of where you are on this path, because it's easy to, for. All of the small steps that you took and all of the hard work that you put in that now seems normal, but to be able to pat yourself on the back and go, I've really come a long way and I deserve some credit for it from myself.

[00:34:13] Zach: I'm yourself and you're absolutely right. I mean, I fall into it all the time. Just thinking about I'm still not good enough, or I have more to go and feeling bad about myself.

[00:34:23] when I should really be looking at, the full portion of that glass. That's that's half. And going, holy shit. Look what I did.

[00:34:32] This is amazing. 

[00:34:33] Jeremy: And that sometimes is all the motivation you need to go. Okay. I'm ready for the next level. Whatever that thing is,

[00:34:39] Zach: Yeah, but we're recording this on a Friday, so I'm, I am done 

[00:34:43] Jeremy: you're ready for the weekend. 

[00:34:45] Zach: I am. 

[00:34:46] Jeremy: Although most people are listening on a Tuesday, so let's call it an early week and get outta here. Shall we? 

[00:34:51] Zach: Yes, let's do that. 

[00:34:52] Jeremy: All right, well, don't let the conversation end there. Join us in our Facebook group, where you and fellow fitness listeners can connect for monthly challenges, accountability to reach your goals and just find a supportive community to help you through whatever changes you're trying to take on in your life.

[00:35:05] The link to that group is available on our website, the fitness.com, where are we will be back next week with a new episode,