#17: Dave Asprey: Top hacks to improve memory, mental and physical performance

Listen to the recording

 

 

Dave Asprey has spent the past 15 years experimenting with hacking his own biology. Through nutrition, nutraceuticals, and technology, Dave was able to transform himself and became a better entrepreneur, a better husband, and a better father.

Dave will shares his experiences and discuss the following topics:

Activities to upgrade your brain • Heart rate variability • Neuro- and biofeedback • Light • Sound Fuel to upgrade your brain • Nutrition • Coffee • Nutraceuticals • Pharmaceuticals Technology to upgrade your brain

About:

Dave Asprey is a Silicon Valley investor and technology entrepreneur. Dave lost 100 pounds without counting calories or doing excessive exercise. He used techniques to upgrade his brain by more than 20 IQ points and lowered his biological age while learning to sleep more efficiently in less time. Learning to do these seemingly impossible things transformed him.

Show Notes:

02:19 Dave’s Journey to Health and Longevity: Dave has learned that the only people who care about health are sick people and the only people who care about youth are old people. He wanted to get the attention of the people who could benefit most by taking care of themselves, preventative maintenance, instead of fixing problems. His goal is to help people perform better as well as keep people from getting sick and from the impacts of aging. Dave considers himself to be a human guinea pig and advises others to do the same to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

 

06:02 Biohacking: You have the ability to control your biology. When it is done correctly, you change how you perform and how you feel. Biohacking uses medical techniques, nutritional techniques, electronics, big data and quantified self, getting data from your own body. This allows you to understand what you are feeling and you can tell what worked and what didn’t work. It is transformational. You get stronger, smarter, and faster. Sex hormones improve and you live life more fully.

 

07:14 Dave’s Story: Throughout his life he would get serious brain fog. He measured it using his performance on a computer game. Some days he could play it and other days he could not. He monitored his epinephrine and norepinephrine ratio and found that his stress levels were off the chart. He was also dealing with environmental toxins and the wrong diet. He fixed his brain. His IQ is substantially higher and his memory works. He began to share what worked for him.

 

09:24 Sleep to Upgrade Your Mind: Activities you do, your nutrition and technology change your brain.  Eight hours is the right amount of sleep for some people. In a study of 1.2 million people followed for several years, data showed that people who slept 6.5 hours lived longer than people who slept 8 hours. People who slept 9 hours lived less long than people who slept 6 hours. Dave believes that people who are healthier need less sleep. If you awaken feeling fully rested, your hormones work, your brain works and you are ready to go after 6 ½ hours, there is nothing wrong with you. When you wear blue blocking glasses at night, use dimmer switches and use aps on your electronics, your sleep quality improves. The bedrooms in Dave’s house will have remote control switches that shut off the electrical circuit in the bedrooms. There will also be amber lights in the bedrooms.

 

11:46 Blue Light/Red Light: You can increase mitochondrial activity and reduce hair loss by adding some red light in the morning. It helps you to bracket your cortisol exposure. Throughout our evolution, we saw red light in the morning and evening and blue light during the day. Having bright white or blue light in the middle of the day will also improve sleep quality. Helping your body determine night, morning and mid-day helps mitigate depression and sleep issues, improving quality of life. Use a red bulb in your light in your bedroom at night and first thing in the morning. The results are surprising. Dave uses full spectrum lights. The best idea is to go for a walk outside at lunchtime. Florescent lights, particularly compact florescent lights have a negative impact upon cognitive function. They cause parasympathetic nervous system stress in many people. Using high end LED or halogen lighting can change your experience and health.

 

15:03 Hair Loss and Cortisol: Red light stimulate collagen production. It helps with wrinkles too. Some antiaging salons will perform a red light treatment. Red light on chicken farms controls molting. Red and infrared lasers used on the scalp help with mitochondrial, nitric oxide activation and ATP recycling probably do have a positive effect upon hair loss. Dave has been a fan for more than a decade of using cold lasers topically for neurological inflammation and to speed healing.

 

16:25 Sleep Timing:  Classical text on adrenal dysfunction say go to bed by 11 pm. You may have a slightly long circadian cycle and thus be a night person. You may have a slightly shorter circadian cycle and be a morning person. There is also a circadian rhythm around your body’s pH. It is individual. Studies show that night people are little smarter than morning people.  It is probably lowest stress to be in bed by 10:45 and lights out by 11:00.

 

19:29 Upgrading the Brain with Exercise: Many of us believe that exercise is moving your body. Calories in/Calories out equation works for short term famines. It does not work for sustainable health. Walking is great for you. It stimulates BDNF and lymphatic flow. It helps eliminate toxins. It does not count as exercise. Tracking steps is useful data, but it does not reflect meaningful calories burned. The workouts that cause change are intense, short and infrequent. Do heavy duty sprints for 15 minutes once a week or do heavy duty lifting to failure with core exercises once a week. By taking 3 to 5 days to recover and get the hormonal effects on IGF-1, growth hormone and testosterone. It is the most efficient protocol. Dave manufactures a whole body vibration plate that a number of chiropractors use. Body vibration upregulates bone density and muscle mass. It relaxes you, stimulates muscles and produces lymphatic flow. When Dave cannot go for a walk, he uses the vibration plate for 15 minutes. It is neurologically stimulating, physically stimulating and stimulates microcirculation.

 

24:27 Nutrition for Upgrading Your Brain: The Bulletproof Diet is on an infographic that is free on Dave’s website and in his new book. You eat a ton of vegetables, but 50 to 70% of your calories comes from the right kinds of fat. You eat little fructose or starch. You don’t excessively over eat protein. Dave also recommends Bulletproof Intermittent Fasting. He also recommends once a week not eating any protein. It triggers a massive autophagy.

 

26:05 Reduce Fructose: Do not eat much fructose. It goes to the liver. It raises your triglycerides and cross links with collagen, creating oxidized LDL. Scientific evidence shows that we should consume less than 25 grams per day. Fructose in most uses contributes to food cravings and hour or two later. An exception is the sleep hack, a tablespoon of raw honey taken before bedtime on an empty stomach (or at least 2 hours after eating).  It raises and stabilizes your blood glucose for as much as 6 hours. This helps those of us who awaken in the middle of the night from unstable blood sugar.

 

27:17 Histamine Tolerance: Histamine is a biogenic amine, a neurotransmitter. In excess it disrupts gut function, slows metabolism, causes food cravings, gives you brain fog, causes headaches and can initiate things that feel like allergy attacks. Putrescine and others like it can be toxic. A number of us eat fermented foods and should monitor how we feel after we consume them. Some probiotics form histamine in the gut.

 

28:37 Grass Fed, Grain Fed Beef, Butter and Your Brain: The fatty acids in grass fed beef look more like that in salmon. When you feed low quality grain to cows, cows accumulate the mold toxins on the grain, antibiotics, and pesticides. When cows are fed grass, you get high levels of conjugated linoleic acid, which have been shown to have huge health benefits to brain function, gut function, gut permeability, type 2 diabetes and inflammation. Grass fed butter provides the same benefit. The butyric acid in butter is known to decrease intestinal permeability and increase gut healing. Butyric acid affects NF kappa beta, in an anti-inflammatory manner. People who eat butter experience increased energy and have less mental illness. It improves hormones, especially in women. Your hormones are made of saturated fat and your cell membranes contain high amounts of stable saturated fat, with some omega 3s between them. It increases fertility.

 

33:14 Saturated Fat Recommendations: Kerrygold Irish butter is grass fed and is widely available. Ghee works as well.

 

33:57 Coconut Oil: It is delicious, but weak. Dave’s Brain Octane Oil is a single chain MCT, just the shortest chain of the MCT oils. It has 18 times more caprylic acid than coconut oil. It most effectively converts to ketones in the body. Caprylic acid helps to eliminate yeast in the gut. Dave cautions those of us with thyroid issues to start slowly with MCT consumption. It can turn your thyroid on in a big way.

 

36:16 Avoiding Food Toxins: Many of us eat a meal and in an hour to up to 6 hours later, we stop being able to think, we get tired, or we lose focus. This happens when your body is breaking down toxins, but it has run out of glucose. Glucose or fat is used in the liver to help oxidize toxins. By cutting out lectins, phytates, gluten and mold mycotoxins people feel great boosts in cognitive energy. Dave has an ap called Food Sense that measures your heartrate to determine whether your heartrate spikes after a meal. If your heartrate goes up by 16 beats per minutes within 90 minutes of a meal, it is an indicator that you ate something to which you are sensitive.

 

38:05 What’s up with Coffee? Dave makes Upgraded Coffee which is made with mycotoxin tested coffee beans. Dave was intermittently sensitive to coffee. The coffee wasn’t all the same. A study revealed that up to 91.7% of green coffee beans have toxins from mold. Insects and other stressors effect the coffee fruit as it grows. Insects introduce mold spores. The natural coffee processing is where the fruit is thrown on a tarp and the husk rots off. After a rinse, it is a coffee bean. Or, the beans are placed in a large vat for fermentation where mold spores germinate. Mold spores make enough toxins that most governments around the world have installed upper limits for coffee for one of the many toxins. Dave tests for 26 of them. Okratoxin A is common in coffee. It is limited to 5 parts per billion in most of Asia and all of the EU. Okratoxin A is not limited in coffee in the US.

 

41:57 More to Coffee than Beans: Coffee is the number one source of antioxidants and is a great source of polyphenols. Coffee triggers thermogenesis, muscle growth. Polyphenols in coffee affect the gut biome. The bacteria bacteroides eat polyphenols, like those in colored vegetables, chocolate and coffee. Caffeine improves executive function, but coffee does it better. Butter is better than milk or cream in coffee. Coffee with MCT oil and grass fed butter eliminates food cravings.

 

46:07 Glutathione: Glutathione is pure magic for cognitive function. Whey protein is not a good idea beyond 2 tablespoons a day because it contributes to inflammation and you can only make a finite amount glutathione from it.

 

46:49 Charcoal: It is another major brain fog clearing substance. It has been used in Ayurveda for thousands of years.  We think of it as a digestive remedy, but it has a negative electrical charge that attracts toxins that are usually positively charged. The charcoal you consume should be acid washed to remove accumulated toxic metals.

 

47:36 Heartrate Variability Technology: Heartrate variability is important for tracking when the parasympathetic or sympathetic nervous system is activated. Dave makes an I-phone ap that, with a chest strap, can monitor your heartrate all day. You are unaware of it at the time, but when your sympathetic nervous system is triggered by something in your environment, your brain turns off and you get distracted. When you can determine when your body is under stress, you can learn how to manage it and turn off stress. This raises alpha in the front of the brain and increases your ability to pay attention and get things done. It has a huge health impact as well.

 

48:33 Neurofeedback: Dave uses a program called 40 years of Zen. It takes 7 full days of neurofeedback to learn to mimic the brain state of someone who has spent 40 years of daily practice learning advanced Zen states. A NIH study showed an average increase of 11.9 IQ points that are stable a year later. Even lighter weight neurofeedback is beneficial for PTSD and chronic anxiety.

 

49:54 Dual N-Back Brain Training: This simple mental exercise is so frustrating that most people won’t do it. It makes you feel like a failure every time you try. It has been proven to increase your fluid memory and IQ score. It raised Dave’s IQ score by 12 points. He is putting together a program that teaches people who to do dual n-back training and another form of creativity training.

 

53:44 HeartMath for HRV: Dave recommends that his clients do a minimum of 10 minutes per day for 6 weeks. Twenty minutes per day is preferred. Six weeks is the habit forming window. After this, we are in the habit of turning off our sympathetic nervous system. It is best done when you first wake up or before bed. Many of us determine that it is good to do at the end of our lunch hour to combat anxiety.

 

56:01 Cold Thermogenesis: Dave followed Dr. Kruse’s radical thermogenesis protocols for about a year and had enormous benefits. It was impossible to do consistently while traveling. In his new facility, Dave will have an ice tub next to an infrared sauna. He occasionally uses a cold thermogenesis vest or a cold glove. Cold exposure increases biological resilience. It is relaxing once you get used to the ice. Cryotherapy is rapid cold exposure to the very outer layers of the skin that can cause beneficial changes.

 

Read the transcript:

Mike Mutzel: with Dave Asprey, the author of The Bulletproof Diet: Lose up to a Pound a Day, Reclaim Energy and Focus, Upgrade Your Life

and “The Better Baby Book: How to Have a Healthier, Smarter, Happier Baby,” as well as the founder of Bulletproof Executive, the cutting edge information site, podcast blog, and much, much more. Dave, I needed to clarify this for you. I know that your podcast is top-rated in iTunes. Is it No. 1? Dave Asprey: It depends on the day of the week, but it’s No. 1 quite often so I’m happy to call it No. 1 rated. Mike Mutzel: Okay, good. That’s what I thought as well. As many of you know Dave, his stories are really unique. We’re going to learn much, much more about that tonight. He’s a Silicon Valley investor and technology entrepreneur. He basically invested over to close to half a million dollars traveling the world and spent a lot of time and money trying to enhance his own cognitive performance. In so doing, he lost a hundred pounds, and improved his IQ, and much, much more. Dave is going to share that story with us tonight and hopefully, help us all achieve the state of being bulletproof. So Dave, thanks so much for joining us. Dave Asprey: Mike, it’s an honor to be here with you and to be presenting to all of the people who are listening. Thank you for your time. Is my screen visible to you? Mike Mutzel: Yeah, looks great to me. Dave Asprey: Alright, great. So I’m the CEO and founder of the Bulletproof Executive. I’m an author of a book called “The Better Baby Book,” and soon will be author of the book of the “Bulletproof Diet,” which they will be publishing in December of this year. The “Better Baby Book” was about epigenetics and about what you can do before and during pregnancy to increase the intelligence and basically, potential of your own children. I’m host of the No. 1 rated health podcast we just talked about, The Bulletproof Executive Radio. My blog gets, in combination with Facebook, about 2 million people a month, so it has become a place where people go to learn not about health, but about how to feel good, how to perform well. Because I’ve run the anti-aging non-profit group called “Silicon Valley Health Institute” for 10 years, I learned that the only people who care about health are sick people, and the only people who care about youth are old people. And, I say that as someone who was old when I was young and has had a lot of health challenges, and it always frustrated me that I didn’t get the attention of the people who could benefit most by taking care of themselves – preventative maintenance instead of fixing problems. The language and the position behind the Bulletproof Executive is how do I help people with at least, not at work, and people who aren’t sick and aren’t old yet. If I can keep them from getting older, keep them from getting sick, it’s just a better use of time. My background is Silicon Valley. I’m the first guy to sell anything over the internet; I sold caffeine, tissues out of my dorm room, pay for my undergraduate studies in Computer Science. I’m a systems thinker and literally worked in computer securities for many years. I think like a hacker. You show me an obstacle and it’s my job to get around it. I did that for my own health. I lost a hundred pounds that way, for instance. I’m an angel investor. I worked with some of the early quantified self start-ups. I am a coach for very senior executives and a few Hollywood people helping them not on medical things at all because I’m not licensed for that and that’s not what I do, but helping them figure out what can they change in their daily practice so that they perform better. Often times, they do have energy issue or brain-fog issues, or undiagnosed thyroid problems. At which point, it’s time to talk with your doctor, but in the meantime, what should you eat so that you’ll feel better all day and you won’t forget your lines, for instance, Jeremy Piven, the guy from Entourage, is he drinks Bulletproof coffee; he uses bulletproof techniques in order to have more energy on stage. The Third Eye Blind, the band, drinks Bulletproof coffee and does a ton of the recommendations on the site – the ones that are all free – in order to have tons of energy on stage and in the recording studio. The list goes on, but people who are at that top 1% of performance where they just want to get everything they can out of life, they’re using the knowledge here, and this is the stuff that I did for myself because I wasn’t working well. I’m a human guinea pig; I’ve been doing this for quite a while. If you don’t want to experiment on yourself and accept the results, and document them, and understand what they are, and talk about them, then I just don’t think that you’re really living life as a human being. I know patient compliance can be a major issue. I’m married to a girl, who’s got trained in an emergency room position, and we talk quite a lot about this sort of thing – how do you get people to do the right thing. I believe that being a human guinea pig, and being willing to look at what worked and what didn’t work, and to believe what your body is telling you, is critical as a patient. There’s a big disclaimer here. Basically, I’m speaking my own self. I’m not representing Xymogen. In fact, I’ll tell you at least one thing, that I’m going to tell you today, is probably wrong, but I don’t know it and we don’t know it yet. I really, really look for science to back up what I’m saying. When I tell you something that I don’t have a study for, I will do my very best to tell you there is no study. That said, nothing I’m doing here is a drug, or diagnoses, treats, cures and prevents, or has anything to do with any disease, because that would be a fault. I don’t work for Xymogen; I am a customer, and I guess I will receive compensation. I didn’t realize that, but that’s cool. Mike Mutzel: Hey Dave, really quick. I’m seeing your notes and such. I wonder if we go on display settings, just so people can get real and concrete pictures. Dave Asprey: I did not have any idea that you’re doing that. Give me one second here. Mike Mutzel: Sure. Dave Asprey: Why is this happening? I’m assuming this is due to the slide. Mike Mutzel: Yeah, I’ve never seen this viewpoint. Dave Asprey: Okay, let me just show you my screen. Mike Mutzel: That’s a cool app by the way. Dave Asprey: Thank you. It’s quite fashionable. We’re going to do this. Does this work better? Mike Mutzel: There we go. Full screen – perfect. Thanks. Dave Asprey: I am so glad you told me that. I’m going to hide my control panel. Alright, we’re good to go now. Mike Mutzel: Yep. Dave Asprey: So where were we? We’re also talking about. It’s not letting me progress my slides forwards or backwards. There you go. I’m just saying that I will not receive compensation. What I do is called biohacking. The idea behind biohacking is that you have the ability to control your biology. There is science to it, and there is an art of practice to it. When you do this right, you change how you perform and how you feel. Yes, there are medical techniques. There are also nutritional techniques – things you can do with electronics, with big data, and even quantified self where you just can get data off of your own body. Not only do you understand that what you’re feeling is real, but you can actually tell what worked and what didn’t. The end result of this is transformational. You do get stronger, you do get smarter, you do get faster, your sex hormones improve, and overall, this is about living life more fully and not about being healthier. If you look at me on the left, that’s about 10 years ago. That’s a photo that was published at least a hundred thousand times in the university catalog; I weighed about close to 300 pounds there. On the right, that’s a relatively recent photo; I weighed close to 200 pounds there. The difference was about 10 years and about $250,000, and honestly, it’s closer to 300,000 and all or beyond that, and that photo was 10 years’ time, or about 15 years. On the left, I was fat. The scary thing what they told me in 7^th grade was actually true. I don’t think I was ever stupid, but I felt that way because I was getting serious brain fog as I was working in Silicon Valley, one of the first networking companies. I couldn’t remember what happened in meetings and I quantified this. I measured it with a little game on my computer that I couldn’t play some days, but other days I could. It was pretty amazing because stress was a big part of this. I monitored my epinephrine to norepinephrine ratio, and it was just almost off the chart. So, I was dealing with stress, I was also dealing with environmental toxins and the wrong diet, and all sorts of things that were all coming together to turn my brain off. When I fast-forward this time, I’m lean; I have an amazing career because I fixed my brain, and I did everything humanly possible to do that; I have a family, a book; my IQ is higher, substantially higher; and, my memory works. I don’t have this problem, “What was the word I was looking for,” “What was I saying,” “Why did I open the refrigerator?” The things that I thought that were normal for my brain were a sign of honestly, pathology. Now, I’m 42; I cannot believe my energy levels. They are different and amazing, and I run circles around the people who work for me who am 25. I can stay up later than them, and I can get up early than them. I could do more, and I’m so grateful for this. The reason I write the blog is that I thought of few other people would benefit from the knowledge that I got through hard work and honestly working with a lot of anti-aging physicians who’ve been presenting every month for 10 plus years in Silicon Valley. I did not know that quite so many people would be interested in the things that worked for me, but it turns out that they tend to work. On the left is illness; on the right is wellness. As we mentioned, that language doesn’t necessarily work to get patient compliance. On the left is not so good; on the right is kicking more ass. You don’t hear a lot of doctors talking about that kind of thing, but when you’re practicing medicine and you position it that way, especially for the younger audience, they will respond to that in a way that is amazing. They will not respond to wellness that way. Today, there are three things that we’re going to talk about around upgrading your mind. One of those is the activities you can do that change your mind. We’re going to talk about nutritional, fuel approaches for the mind, and I’ll talk about some of the technology – some stuff that’s available today and some stuff that’s about to come out. From an activity perspective, this should be no surprise, but sleep is pretty important. Most of the people that I’ve worked with sort of blindly believe is 8 hours is the right amount of sleep. It is for some people. The only little problem is that in a study of 1.2 million people followed for several years, the data showed that people who slept 6.5 hours lived longer than people who slept 8 hours. People who slept 9 hours lived less long than people who slept 6 hours. I wouldn’t say that sleeping 6 and a half hours makes you live longer, but I would say that people who are healthier need less sleep. This is a function of mitochondrial activity; it’s the function of all sorts of basically health markers. If you wake up feeling fully rested, your hormones work, your brain works, and you’re ready to go after 6 and a half hours; it’s not that there’s something wrong with you. If you take steps to perform better and to change your biology… Can people start hearing me? I guess I’m not presenting… Mike Mutzel: No, you sound good now, Dave. I’m sorry, I got boodled off for some reasons. Dave Asprey: I think you have to make me a presenter again, and then we’ll be back and good to go. Mike Mutzel: I don’t know what the heck happened. I really apologize, guys. Okay. You stopped on the sleep side. I can’t really get back in; that’s really bizarre. That’s never happened to me, so I really apologize to everyone. We’ll get going here very shortly. Dave Asprey: Are they still on or did they kick everyone out? Mike Mutzel: No, we’re good. We still have a… Dave Asprey: Alright. Mike Mutzel: Yep. Close to 200 and on. Dave Asprey: Great. Sorry everyone. It sounds kind of strange, but imagine yourself in your office with someone who has sleep or even depression or mood regulation issues, and you tell them, “Here’s a free app you can install in your computer that’s going to let your body naturally make a little bit more melatonin at night. Maybe you should think about that.” I have consistently found that when people wear blue-walking glasses at night (You can buy them for about 6 bucks on Amazon.) or they install these types of things on their technology, that the quality of their sleep, the time it takes to go to sleep just drops dramatically. They feel so much better in the morning, and there’s lots and lots of feedback from people on this so I consider it to be something where I do have dimmer switches in the house. I’m in the middle of remodelling my house and my bedrooms will have remote-control switches that turn off the electrical circuit going through the room, so there won’t be as much aim at the room and there will be amber lights in the rooms. So, when it’s time for that to happen, it will work. My screen should be showing. You see it? Mike Mutzel: Okay, we’re back. Yeah, it wasn’t showing for a while. Great. Thanks so much, Dave. Dave Asprey: No problem. The other thing, I just had a really, really cool webinar about this. For those of you who aren’t really probably into your own health more so then you’re going to talk with patients about, you can increase your mitochondrial activity and probably reduce hair loss by adding some red light in the morning. You can bracket your cortisol exposure. The likely mechanism for this is that from an evolutionary perspective, we would have seen some red lights in the morning and in the evening, and during the day, you’ll see lots of blue light. So, having bright white light or blue light in the middle of the day helps you sleep well late at night, too. We’re still animals, so telling your basic reptilian biology, “Hey, it’s daytime now, and it’s night time now,” helps your human parts of your brain deal with things like depression and sleep problems. It is kind of shocking – the difference in your quality of life when you do that. Mike Mutzel: Now Dave, can you explain on that – how would one go about getting exposure to red light during the day and avoiding blue light in night and so forth? Dave Asprey: The red light thing is kind of funny. For about 30 bucks at Costco, you can buy a color-changing LED light that’s pretty bright like a strip light. You put one of those in your bedroom, and before bed, when you’re reading, turn it on red for 10 minutes. See what it does to your sleep and how you feel, and when you wake up and the lights are off, turn it on. I have these in my kid’s bedrooms even. It is surprising how much that makes you want to go to sleep at night, and makes you sort of feel more energized in the morning. The blue light thing – you want to have natural spectrum lights; I use halogen because I can get a lot of walks that way, but it’s possible also to get straight blue LEDs that are like mood lights that you can buy. If you are in an area where you have a particular issue with that or you’re dealing with a jetlag, best yet go for a walk outside at lunch time; show your body this is the middle of the day. And, it is unbelievable what light exposure does to your mood levels. Fluorescent lights, particularly compact fluorescents, are disaster for cognitive function. If you’re sitting in your exam room and you have especially those fatter, older fluorescent lights that are unshielded or that have those metal grids where they shine straight down on you – those cause the parasympathetic nervous system stress in a lot of people, and they generally don’t provide great illumination. So, switching to natural spectrum fluorescents with good quality electronic balance or better yet high-end LED lighting or halogen lighting in an exam room can change the entire experience of the patient, especially your own health as someone who spends a lot of time in an exam room. It’s amazing with just a little bit of light hacking does to make people feel more comfortable. If you are in the kind of physician who uses nutritional supplements, kudos to you; thank you. And you’re also probably the kind of physician who practices a little bit more in the intuitive side of things, so having an office environment where you spend half an hour or an hour with a patient, that’s comfortable for you and the patient; it’s a priority, and it matters. Mike Mutzel: That’s great. You mentioned that a couple of key things here in the hair loss and cortisol and such. Could you explain on that? I have never heard of that before; I don’t think any people have. That’s very huge. We get that question a lot, strictly from men and women hair loss in middle age. Dave Asprey:Well, red light stimulates collagen production, so it helps with wrinkles, too. Some of the anti-aging salons will use red light treatment, which is medically shown to work to increase skin collagen. And red light, funny enough, is used in chicken farms to control molting, and there is a relationship between molting and hair loss. I wouldn’t go around promoting just red LEDs, especially in the environment, as a massive difference in hair loss, but red and infrared lasers use on the scalp probably do because of the mitochondrial activation and their nitric oxide activation, and their ATP resynthesis/recycling activation probably do have a positive effect.  I’ve been a fan for more than a decade of using cold lasers topically for neurological inflammation and to speed healing. I believe they probably work on boldness, but I don’t walk around with a laser strapped to my head most of the time. Mike Mutzel: Right. Last question – if someone is going to implement all the things that we talked about here in the next 40 minutes or so, and they can function fine in six and half hours of sleep, let’s say, are you encouraging people to go to bed earlier and then get up earlier? Because there’s someone who stays up late, some go to bed at midnight and then they wake up at 6. They are likely to be exposed to a natural light. So, what do you recommend in terms of the timing of sleep? Dave Asprey: The classical text on adrenal dysfunction says go to bed by 11 p.m. The problem is that some people slightly have a long circadian cycle. If you have 25 hour a day, you’re going to be a night person; if you have a slightly short one, you’re going to be a morning person. There is also a circadian rhythm around your body’s PH, so it kind of depends on who you are. Some people really are night owls, and there’s some interesting study saying that you might be a little smarter when you’re a night owl; no offense, morning people. There’s an argument to be made that’s said wi-fi your biology. If you perform well, stay up to 11, 12, 1 – whatever works for you – and make sure you’re getting adequate sleep. From a melatonin biological perspective, I think it’s probably lowest stress to be in bed by 10:45, lights out by 11; I cannot say that I practice that on a daily basis. Your mileage might vary. I’ve always been a night owl person, and I’ve built my life to support that. It’s also a question if you have kids, what your job – those things tend to be really good variables there. If you’re comfortable going to bed earlier, that’s probably better; if it doesn’t work for you, then that’s not right for you. Mike Mutzel: Sure. Awesome. Dave Asprey: From a cortisol-bracketing perspective, I would invite you to check out one of the podcasts on Bulletproof Executive Radio with Steve Fowkes. Steve is honestly the guy who saved my career. He is the creator, editor and author of “Smart Drug Use” back in the 80s and early 90s. It was his writing on piracetam and some of the cognitive-enhancing agents that undid my brain fog enough to let me use my own brain, to hack the rest of the challenges I was facing, which by the way included repeated exposures to toxic molds, including stachybotrys, and very well confirmed with diagnosis “Lyme disease.” I’ve recovered quite well from some pretty heavy-duty things. Those both resulted in fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. I’ve had high mercury levels, etc., candida… It’s been an interesting life, but those kinds of things are hackable, and I think a lot of practitioners must work with those. If you haven’t heard of Steve Fowkes, he’s a luminary in the field who does do a good job in running himself and up. So, Steve Fowkes on the Bulletproof Executive podcast. There’s a whole podcast about cortisol bracketing and red light, and I’m interviewing him about that. Mike Mutzel: Oh, great. Perfect. Dave Asprey: I’d also invite anyone who’s in the bay area to consider stopping by the Silicon Valley Health Institute (SVHI) third Thursday of the month in Palo Alto. Meetings are 5 bucks to cover the cost of the room we hold them in, and Steve is always there as a member and an adviser. You’ll usually find a mix of good health professionals and a well-connected community members talking about the very latest anti-aging research, and a community forum with a good quality presentation. So, if you want to get a chance to meet one of the luminaries in the field, who you should probably know, he’s one of the guys. Mike Mutzel: That’s great. Dave Asprey: Should we move on to exercise, Mike? Mike Mutzel: Yeah, perfect. Thank you. Dave Asprey: Sure. A lot of people believe that exercise is moving your body. I used to believe this. In fact, when I weighed 300 pounds, I worked out an hour and a half a day – 45 minutes of cardio using a 15-degree treadmill walking uphill as fast as I could, wearing a backpack, and I would lift heavy weights for 45 minutes. The work that I was doing was called “overtraining.” I didn’t understand the calories-in-calories-out equation. It just doesn’t work very well; it works for short-term famines; it doesn’t work for sustainable health. Something that makes me really sad is you got out lunch in a big city and you’ll see women who are pear-shaped because they have hormone-regulation problems walking, because they believe walking is going to allow them eat five more Doritos before they continue on that afternoon. It is sad and it is irresponsible to allow that kind of thinking to continue. So, walking is great for you; it stimulates BD&F; it stimulates lymphatic flow; it helps with toxins; and it’s a great thing to do. Unfortunately, it doesn’t count as exercise, and you’re not a better person if your little bracelet says that you walked 10,000 steps today or you didn’t. I said that as a former CTO and cofounder of Basis, the risk bank company that was just bought by Intel for $400 million. It’s useful data, but it doesn’t mean that you burn the calories that were meaningful; it just means you move. The kinds of workouts that cause change in people are very intense, very short, and very infrequent.  Doug McGuff, who’s a physician and an exercise physiologist, and an ER doctor and a friend, has written a book “Body by Science,” a well-researched book on exercise and, I’ve got the clause notes on my site. The short answer is do heavy duty sprints for 15 minutes once a week, or do heavy duty lifting with core exercises; I mean, lifting to failure once a week. Now, you’ll be sore, and then you’re going to take three or four, five days to recover and get the hormonal effects on IGF-1 and growth hormone and testosterone from doing that. It is so different that working out and going for a jog every morning, or even lifting weights 3 or 4 times a week. That is the most efficient protocol I’ve managed to find. If you talk to the average person with a family and a career, and as a practitioner say, “You really have to exercise 3 times, 4 times, 5 times a week,” compliance goes out. When you talk to that same person and say, “You know what? I want you to move every day, but do something fun; it’s not exercise. I also suspect that maybe you could find time to work out for 15 minutes once a week,” you’re going to get a resounding “yes,” and they’re going to get resounding results, especially comparative at the amount of time that they spent. If I was showing my video, I looked like I lift weights all the time. I honestly – the only thing I’ve been doing lately is electrical simulation and whole body vibration because I’m kind of curious what that can actually do for me, but I have a minor six-pack and I’m pretty darned V-shaped for a guy who doesn’t need to work out a lot, and I have a ton of energy and all my biomarkers are looking really good. I manufacture whole-body vibration plate called the “Bulletproof Vibe” that a lot of chiropractors use. It’s a 45-pound welded steel thing that runs about $1,500. I designed this not for that kind of use, but for people to have in their offices or homes, and to not break. The reason why whole-body vibration is interesting is that there are tons of studies, mostly out of NASA and some out of Russia, about bone density and prevention of cytopenia. You want to maintain this muscle mass, and you get to feel the electric effects in your bones. What the Bulletproof Vibe does is it vibrates up and down 30 times  a second, which is the frequency most studied for these kinds of benefits. It’s a relatively small vibration, but you feel it, and you can stand and hold the dumbbell in your hands or not; you can do a forward-fold yoga pose, but it relaxes you, it stimulates the muscles a little bit, but most of all, you hit lymphatic flow. So, when I don’t have time to go for a walk or hike for an hour, I’m going to stand on the same for 15 minutes potentially when I’m even doing email or watching podcasts I wanted to watch, and I’m going to get my days movement in. It’s neurologically stimulating, it’s physically stimulating, and it gets the microcirculation going. So, this is an option for people who are just not going to exercise any other way because they’re too busy, because they’re not going to do it, or because of some injury or something. I found that to be a real technology that has a very far stretch than those weird belts we used in the 70s. Let’s talk about what you feed your mind. The Bulletproof Diet is an infographic that I’ve created here. You can see it, but not going to be able to read all of it, but it’s free online – BulletproofDietBook.com. You’ll just get it when you sign up so I can send you an email when my book comes out. I’m not going to spend any on that list at all. The idea here is you eat a ton of vegetables, but 50 to 70 of your calories come from the right kinds of fat. You don’t eat a lot of fructose; you don’t eat a lot of starch, but you eat some, and you don’t excessively overeat protein like some of the pioneering dieticians today. There are two other recommendations that I recommend to people – one is just called “Bulletproof Intermittent Fasting,” which is many of the benefits of not eating for 18 hours a day, but not the downside. The downside of not eating for 18 hours a day is that you end up getting hungry, cranky and tired right in the middle of your workday, which doesn’t work unless you don’t have a regular workday. The other thing is once a week – don’t eat any protein; when you do that, you trigger massive odd of aging. So, my book will contain these things. In the meantime, the infographic is free, it’s been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, and lots of people put it on their fridge. They do that because it just gets in the road map to say, “If I’m going to pick up fat, what are the good ones again? What are the ones that are okay, but high in omega-6? What are the ones you just probably don’t want to eat?” And the same thing goes for every food calendar. As an example, this is a Bulletproof part of it – eat lots of vegetables; it’s not that hard to do, but knowing what one has to eat – the canola oil isn’t healthy even though it has omega-3 difference, and this is a very useful thing to know. It’s all in here, and it’s pretty well-researched. Another thing for making your brain work better is don’t eat a lot of fructose; it goes to the liver, it raises your triglycerides; it gives you problems with the AGEs; it really cross-links with collagen, which is bad for you; you get that oxidized LDL. I used to say keep fructose for less than 50 grams a day; there’s increasing evidence that even less than 25 grams a day is a good idea. One of the other things that happens is that fructose in most uses contributes to food cravings an hour or two later. The exception is actually sleep hack. One of the very cool sleep hacks is a tablespoon of raw honey taken before bedtime on an empty stomach, or at least 2 hours after eating. Now, that flies in a face of this sort of ketosis-oriented thinking that I’m well-known for, but a small dose of fructose taken like that will raise and stabilize your blood glucose for as much as six hours. So, if you’re waking up in the middle of the night because you don’t have stable blood sugar, this is the way to fix that. You can probably also do with resistant starch, something I’ll cover a little bit in my new book. Another problem with modern nutrition is that biogenic amines are a problem. The most famous, of course, is histamine, which is a neurotransmitter that is quite useful, but in excess, it messes up your gut function, it slows down your metabolism, it gives you massive food cravings, gives you brain fog, headaches, and even things that feel like allergy attacks. Often times, this is in people’s food because they have poorly fermented sour crop, or because they really didn’t know that soy sauce might not be a great choice for them. Of course, things like putrescence and other polyamines could be really toxic, and I found there’s a good number of people who, out of the goodness of their heart because good people eat fermented foods, but they don’t monitor how they feel after the fermented foods, so they get kind of tired, foggy and cranky; they don’t know that there’s a histamine effect. So, it’s not just fermented foods are good for you – the right fermented foods are good for you, and it depends on the person and your own histamine tolerance. I believe that this BA is a much bigger thing as we learn about more and more about the gut and bile because some of the probiotics that are sold as healthy probiotics actually form histamine in the gut, and that can be a disaster for people who don’t have higher levels of diamine oxidase, which is the main histamine detoxifier in the liver. The next thing that I recommend for brain function is considering the fact the grass-fed meat and grain-fed meat have very different effects on your brain. It’s kind of funny because even though this is a slide on grass-fed, the cow is not actually eating grass, so there’s a little bit of irony in here. The final irony is the guy who just bought 32 acres of farm land ram working on opening an organic farm, so my kids can grow with the right soil biome. It’s that cows and horses really don’t like kale or chard because it’s too high in oxalic acid, but still, it’s a pretty cool picture. That A is Canadian because I live in Canada, but I have an American background, too. Now, grass-fed meat – different fatty acids. Grass-fed beef actually looks more like salmon when you just look at the fatty acids that are in it. The other thing that ranchers notice very, very well that when you feed low-quality grain, which is cheapest, to cows – that the cows accumulate the toxins in the grain. The toxins come from mold in the grain; they come from pesticides, and of course, cows accumulate antibiotics in our tissues – those things that are synthetic estrogens. When you feed a cow grass-fed meat, none of that stuff really happens, and you get very high levels of conjugated linoleic acid, which is all sorts of health benefits that are shown in multiple studies. CLA specifically affects inflammation; it affects brain function; it affects gut function and gut permeability, and type-2 diabetes. Those are pretty good case from eating some CLA. Grass-fed butter provides the same thing. Speaking of butter – there are lots of studies around butter, and butter is not as bad as it is made out to be.  For instance, the butyric acid in butter is known to decrease intestinal permeability and increase gut healing. Butyric acid affects NF-Kappa-Beta in an anti-inflammatory manner. People who eat butter increase energy. There’s even a study that says butter eaters have less mental illness than those who eat other types of oil. So, it’s safe to say right now that butter is back in fashion, and butter consumption is at its all-time high from 44 years, and the saturated fat phobia, I think, is finally ending. I, for years, didn’t eat saturated fats, and it was only when I read some of the research on about butter and I said, “I’m going to eat my own dog food. I’m going to have a lot of butter on a regular basis.” Honestly, that helped me to recover from the time I’ve spent as a raw vegan when I believed that that was going to be the right thing to do for health. Honestly, I would eat bulls of gravel if it worked, and I’m grateful that butter works to give me the sustainable energy and the gut effects that it does do. I wrote down a ton of this research about butter; there’s butter infograph that you can get. You’ll find that patients or clients – when you tell them, “Add a couple of tablespoons of butter to your diet every day, and see what happens;” well, there hormones get better, particularly women, because as you know, as medical professionals, that your hormones are made out of saturated fat. Your cell membranes contain high levels of saturated fat with some omega-3s between them. Your cell membranes are not naturally made of omega-6 oils, and seed and nut oils. So, just the addition of this increases fertility very much in particular. The Bulletproof Diet is different than the diet that I recommend in “The Better Baby Book,” but there are a lot of similarities particularly around the types of fat that you consume. And I’ll tell you – anything that increases fertility is pretty likely to be helpful from an aging perspective – not everything – and the reason for that is that healthy animals can reproduce and unhealthy animals can’t. If you’re aware of it, you should be scared by the fact that 1 in 8 couples cannot conceive naturally already in this generation. The next generation, I would not at all be surprised if it goes 1 in 4. So, we are dealing with environmental toxins and we’re dealing with a lack of healthy kinds of fat like grass-fed butter. My wife, Lana, runs a fertility coaching practice online with global clients, and it’s pretty unpredictable what happens when you cut toxins and increase healthy saturated fat intake – what happens is babies. Mike Mutzel: That’s amazing. Hey Dave, so along those lines, how can we – for practitioners that might have patients that don’t have whole foods as really very accessible or a farmer’s market – what are some name brands and tips when purchasing butter and encouraging people to eat more saturated fats? Dave Asprey: Kerrygold Irish butter is grass-fed. It’s about 3 bucks for half a pound of it. They sell it at Trader Joe’s, they sell it at most Safeways. I’ve been able to buy it in almost any city in the U.S. When you’re going international, you can get it in most countries. Canada is probably the most challenging place. Ghee works as well. There’s a global shortage of grass-fed butter, and I contributed to that and I apologize, but I’m also grateful for it because of the stimulating demand for grass-fed animals. We need grass-fed animals if we want to have healthy soils, and if we want to live for multiple generations, we’d better take care of our soil. Mike Mutzel: Perfect. Thanks. Dave Asprey: You got it, Mike? Now, let’s talk about coconut oil. It’s delicious, but it’s kind of weak. What I use is the sprain acting oil – yes, shame as a pug, I do make it. The reason I make it, though, is for my own use. It is a single-chain MCT, just the shortest chain of the MCT oils. It’s got 18 times more of that fat like a propionic acid that you’ll find in a coconut oil, and propionic acid doesn’t usually taste very good. This has a completely neutral and no flavor at all, so you can pour it on food and that’s what I do and I pour it in coffee and food. It is the one that most effectively converts the ketones in the body, so you can get low level of ketones even in people who are still eating sugar and excessive carbs, and the difference in how they feel and their ability of their brain is amazing. They literally – like they’ve got their life back – their energy turned back on. Part of the reason that may happen in some people is that they have tons of yeast in their gut, and propionic acids are definitely not something that yeasts enjoy. The difference you hear from someone who has a teaspoon or a tablespoon is shocking. In populations of people, especially women who over 40, people who have thyroid problems, I recommend that they start very slow because this stuff can increase mitochondrial function because you have the ketones that don’t burn glucose in the mitochondria. So, you can turn your thyroid on in a big way. One of my employees, who is 62, shed a clutter of thyroid meds by 75% after she went on it. When I started making this as a regular part of my diet, my T3 time release went from 10 mcg a day down to 2.5, so I cut them up by 75%. This is not a thyroid drug, but when you fix your biology, you might want to adjust your thyroid medication. I would tell you something else amazing about what CAMCT oils like this does for aging brains, but then I would be making a drug claims so I ‘m not going to do that; I apologize you might have to do that research that for yourself. The reason people who make really cool stuff like this don’t make drug claims because we want to keep doing that. The other thing that’s really important for making your brain work is just avoiding food toxins. So many people eat a meal and then in a half an hour, and an hour or two hours, even six hours later – they stop being able to think, they get tired, they lose focus. What’s going on there is there body is processing these toxins, breaking them down, and they ran out of glucose because the liver really likes to have glucose or in some cases, some fat that they can use to oxidize toxins. So by telling people to cut out lectins or phytates and in particular, gluten, or one of my favorite areas of researches, mold toxins, mycotoxins that are very common in many processed foods today. People feel amazing boost in cognitive energy, and they don’t know why, then they use the Bulletproof Diet as kind of a roadmap. And then there’s a free app that I make called “Food Sense,” an app that measures heart rate to figure whether or not your heart rate spikes after a meal. Dr. Coca developed a rough test for food sensitivities years and years ago that says if your heart rate goes up by 60 beats per minute with a 90 minutes of a meal, it’s a pretty clear indicator that you ate something you are sensitive to, so you might need to do a crossfit workout after anyway. Using that rough thing, you have a guide to eating less toxic food and the ability to test whether a certain meal triggered you or didn’t trigger you. This is faster and more data-driven than a typical elimination diet, which no one will ever do unless they’re profoundly unwell, speaking from personal experience. So, all these are as controlled for as possible and the recommendations I make there. One of the things that I get most questions about is, “What’s up with coffee,” because I do make upgraded coffee, which is a mycotoxin-tested coffee bean. The reason I did this is that I gave up coffee for five long dark years. I did that because even though it made me feel good, I feel good for an hour or two, but then I crashed and then I got cranky, but I would get joint pain, and I would get headaches and just a feeling of irritable anxiety that would come with it. After a lot of work – I’ve read about a lot of agricultural research and some biotoxin research, and I realize that what’s going on here is that not all coffee is the same because I would drink it one day, “Well, I’m cured;” the next day, “Oh, I’m allergic to coffee.” I didn’t turn my food allergies one day off after the other. The coffee wasn’t all the same. When I got to serve the end of that rabbit hole, I found out that there’s a study that says up to 91.7% of green coffee beans have toxins from molds. This happens because insects and other biological stressors affect the coffee fruit as it grows on the coffee plant. The insects, in particular, introduce toxic mold spores, mostly species of aspergillus and a few others, onto the coffee fruit. The coffee is then processed in one of two ways. The natural process means you throw it on a tarp and let the fruits spoil to let dries and you sort of flake it off, rinse it, and then it’s a coffee bean; or, you throw all of the beans into a big vial of water and you let them ferment for a while, at which point, the mold spores terminate. The mold spores make enough toxins that most governments around the world have put in upper limits for coffee for one of the many toxins. They tested for 26 of them, but one of the main toxins that’s known in coffee is called “ochratoxin A.” Ochratoxin A is limited to five parts per billion throughout most of Asia and all of the EU. The acceptable limit for ochratoxin A in the U.S. is – oh, we don’t have one. So, if you look at my episode No. 100 on Bulletproof Executive Radio, I interviewed one of the world’s foremost experts in coffee who flat out sales. There is a problem with coffee dumping, and coffee producers who have coffee that isn’t clean, they won’t send it to Europe because they have to destroy it. If it doesn’t meet European regulations, they ship it somewhere else. It’s not a particular stretch to understand that that coffee’s going to go somewhere and it’s going to go in a country where there are no regulations, so I set extremely strict limits for a list of mold toxins including ochratoxin A. I have completed a study, that I haven’t published yet, where for six weeks we looked at seven different measures of cognitive function for people drinking coffee they bought at a corner coffee store versus coffee made with my upgraded beans, and on 5 of 7 measures, we found a very substantial difference in cognitive function. The sample size, by the time they have been watched out in the study, which is really an annoying study – we may have 17 people who finished out of 54 – but the sample for that hour was like a pee that’s less than .001, meaning the effect is quite of large and measurable. I can tell you thousands and thousands of people have emailed me and said, “I can drink coffee again.” And the difference is that these people are more sensitive to histamines, they’re more sensitive to mold toxins, and this is a problem in coffee and mold toxins aren’t good for anyone. So, the difference in how you feel is noticeable, and it’s quantifiable and measurable, and that’s the path of how I went about creating the beans. But there’s more to coffee that just the beans. Coffee is the No. 1 source of antioxidants; it’s also an amazing source of polyphenols, but coffee triggers thermogenesis, and there’s a model for mtor, or the “million target of rapamycin.” mTOR is what triggers muscle growth, and there are three things that inhibit mtor. The way you grow muscles is you inhibit mtor and when you stop inhibiting mtor, mtor surges forward like a spring being compressed, and when it does that, that’s what triggers muscle growth. Certainly, there are hormonal things and there are nutrient things, and muscle growth is a complex subject, but we’re just talking about mtors’s effect on it. The three things that inhibit mtors, what will surge forward are: Number 1 – intermittent fasting, and I highly recommend you do that on the Bulletproof Diet; Number 2 is exercise, which I recommend you do in a fasted state towards the end of the fast; and Number 3 is coffee. So, if you do this right – you didn’t have breakfast, drank Bulletproof coffee (which I’ll explain in a minute), you exercised right before you have lunch, and you got this triple compound compression of mtor, so when you’re done, you got a huge impact from the exercise. You only needed to do the exercise once a week for 15 minutes. You can look amazing by doing things like this. There are also several studies now about the polyphenols and coffee, and their effect on the gut biome. There’s really interesting data on the gut biome of fat people versus thin people. It turns out that if you take the gut bacteria from one and give it to the other, they trade pent sizes as well. The difference is the ratio of bacteroidetes to firmicutes. Bacteroidetes eat polyphenols; that’s their prebiotic, and you can’t supplement those. There is no company that makes a bacteroidetes probiotic. There was one company in Vancouver, but they’re out of business now because those bacteria aren’t particularly stable. So, the way you get them is you eat lots of polyphenol-rich foods like colored vegetables and chocolate and coffee. It’s interesting that your coffee could be your probiotic. There are some studies about coffee that I really, really want to tell you about, particularly very large, very impactful things that everyone’s concerned about, but I would be making drug claims; and since coffee is not a drug, it is a delicious beverage. You have to go to PubMed and type in “coffee,” and see all the amazing things coffee does for yourself. There are studies I’m allowed to talk about improving executive function – caffeine alone does it, but coffee does it better.   The other biohack that I maybe most famous for is that butter is better than cream and certainly better than milk and coffee. There are multiple reasons for this, but the big reason is that casein binds to the antioxidants in coffee and makes them unavailable to you. So if you want to get the benefits of the antioxidants, best of all, blend your coffee with tea and that brain octane oil that we talked about before, which enhances absorption. In fact – brain octane oil – that ingredient is used by pharmaceutical companies to increase absorption of things. So if you take coffee without the toxins, you, in a blender, combine it with grass-fed butter and brain octane oil – you’re getting a burst of ketone energy, you’re getting the  butyric acid in the satiation that comes from the butter, you’re getting the CLA, and you’re getting the benefits of coffee itself. When you blend it, you mycelize it, so now it’s more absorbable. Once you do that, you have zero food cravings. I mean – zero food cravings for the most hard core sugar addict in your practice. Literally the first day they have this for breakfast done right, they’re like, “Oh, my goodness. I didn’t think about food. It’s lunch. I just didn’t care. I didn’t use my willpowers to ignore the bagel. I ignored the bagel. The bagel had no power.” That rocks. Because I’m watching the clock and we had a couple of technical difficulties, I’m going to go really fast on the couple of these slides, so we can talk about some of the electronics stuff you can do. Glutathione for cognitive function is magic. Mike makes an amazing form of glutathione that works very well. If you do IV glutathione in your practice, good for you. If you don’t, think about it. The form that I work with is called “MAP-D glutathione.” It’s a glutathione liposome bound to a lactoferrin molecule, and it works really well. Anything you do to get glutathione into your patients is a good idea. Whey protein is not a good idea beyond two tablespoons a day because it tends to contribute to inflammation if you’re over consuming way, and it’s rate limited on how much glutathione you can make from it. Another major brain-clog clearing substance is charcoal. It’s been used in Ayurveda for thousands of years. People think of it as a digestive remedy, but it’s got a negative electrical charge that it tracks toxins that are usually positively charged. I’ve seen brain fog particularly in kids, but even in myself, it turned around especially after meal very quickly with this. A lot of the charcoal that you could get today is not acid-washed, and since charcoal naturally simulates toxic metals because it’s a larger volume of wood turned into a small volume of ash, I use acid-washed process, and I’m the only supplement company that uses ultra-fine grain charcoal, where it’s the top 15% finest. Let’s talk about the three technologies for increasing your cognitive function because I promise that I’ll be upgrading your brain, and I have four minutes left. Number 1: heart rate variability. If you could convince your patients to do this, the impact on the quality of life is amazing. I’m a certified heart math coach, and I’m making an app called the “HRV Sense” iPhone app that uses chest straps; you can monitor your stress every day long. The long-standing issue is that most people don’t know when their sympathetic nervous system is triggered by something in their environment, and every time that happens, their brain turns off; they get distracted, they don’t know it. So by teaching people to feel what it’s like and know when their body is in a state of stress, and if their mind doesn’t sense it, they become more away of stress and then they know how to manage it and turn off stress. That alone raises alpha in the frontal part of the brain, and it increases your ability to pay attention and get stuff done. It is a huge help in that. Next stuff is neurofeedback, and there is my cool, sexy hat there. I use a program called “40 Years of Zen” for my most senior clients. It takes seven full days of neurofeedback, and you’ll learn to mimic the brain state of someone who spent 40 years of daily practice learning advanced zen states. The side effect in NIH back study is 11.9 IQ points that are stable a year later. This is heavy duty stuff. There are much lighter weight forms of neurofeedback that do amazing things for PTST and for people who have chronic anxiety and don’t know why. If you take someone and you put them on brain octane oil, you put them on a Bulletproof Diet or paleo, or some sort of high healthy fat diet that’s relative to bone toxins, and then you give them neurofeedback or you give them other form of therapy something like MEDR, you can get people who are just functional human beings to wake up. If you do the therapy without the food, it’s much harder. If you do the food without the therapy, it’s much harder. You have to have mitochondrial energy in order to make the prefrontal cortex turned on, so that you can become in charge of your own mammalian and reptilian biological systems. This is a core kind of Bulletproof teaching on the blog. The other thing that is shockingly cool is Dual N-Back Brain Training. Unfortunately, this simple mental exercise is so frustrating that most people including my hedge fund manager’s gazillionaire clients – they never do it because it makes you feel like an otter failure every time you try. But it is something that is proven to include your fluid memory and to increase your IQ score, and something that for me, it raised my IQ score by 12 points. I am putting together now a mind upgrade program that teaches people how to do Dual N-Back Training and another form of creativity training because we’re at the edge of the renaissance of brain training, because really cheap systems and really cheap biofeedback are making it possible for you to talk to your patients about ways for them to make their brain way more functional and, the way someone’s eyes light up when you tell them, “You can be more than you are today,” is incredible. I think, for physicians, not necessarily this specific program, but the ability to work with inner intuitive type clients on their cognitive performance as a marker of aging or as a marker of health. We’re going to see incredible things happen. Thank you, Indiegogo. Thank you, crowdfunding. Thank you, quantified self. Because we’ll be able to tell what doesn’t work in short order and you’ll be able to monitor it in ways that are amazing. Thank you, even companies like Lumosity, for teaching people that you can train the brain with software in a way that was not even possible five years ago. Keeping track of the time here – it’s 6:30. Brief plug here – I told you guys about the coffee; I told you about the problems in coffee altogether. Glutathione for cognitive function – ketones, however you can get them, from fasting, from butter, from low-carb diets, or from brain octane, and binding of toxins – all of those were kind of upgrading your brain. I talk about this stuff on a regular basis on the Bulletproof Executive Radio Podcast on iTunes, and I’d be more than pleased to take questions if Mike allows us to have time to do it. Mike Mutzel: Absolutely, Dave. We quite a few questions and quite a few hands being raised. I think what we’re going to do really quick before we open that up is inter-chat – if you guys do want free coffee, the first one to type in coffee in the chat bar will get the free coffee from Dave. So, if you’re interested in that, you can go and type that in, and I’ll monitor the chat bar here. While we are waiting for those – Dave, a couple of questions. You’re big on quantifying your brain function, and you mentioned Lumosity and such. Is that a great tool? I know that they recommend – there’s in-house studies and stuff. Can you give us your feedback on that program? Dave Asprey: I was at a panel by South, the big media conference in Austin, and I can tell you that there’s good research and the people at Lumosity are really working hard on creating software, and it’s engaging. I mean compared to the average angry-birds thing, you’re totally rocking it. That’s a wonderful thing to do. Not all brain-training software makes you better at generalized skills, it actually makes you better on brain-training software, but that alone can make a difference. I felt a difference from Lumosity. There’s a lot of in-house study data. So, I wouldn’t say that it’s a negative thing at all; I would say some of it probably makes you feel better in Lumosity, and they even have a little dual n-back app. It doesn’t do all the dual n-back app does, but it is in there. So, I wouldn’t encourage people to do that as it’s much healthier of video game than what you can get almost anywhere out. Mike Mutzel: Right. That’s awesome. Now, for cognitive function, you mentioned heart rate variability – what’s a good…. I’ve been doing HRV for a while now, but for specifically cognitive function – what’s the duration? How many times a day? Things like that – what would you recommend? Dave Asprey: I suggest from my clients that they do a minimum of 10 minutes a day, hopefully 20, but 10 is okay, for all six weeks. The reason for that is because 6 weeks is the habit-forming window that’s pretty well-defined in psychology text. Once they get used to that, they’re in habit of turning off their sympathetic nervous system. If you can get them into 20 minutes, that’s great, but 10 minutes is the minimum required, either when they first wake up, before bed. Usually for people, if they do it for 2 weeks, they realize that they probably should do it at the end of their one shower or two if they tend to be anxiety-problem people. Mike Mutzel: Fabulous. We do have some live questions. You want to admit some folks? So first one is Christiana de Leon. You’re live. Welcome. Christiana de Leon: Hi. How are you? I just wanted to thank you for the presentation and all. You mentioned that casein affects the absorption of antioxidants when you are drinking coffee, so what about dairy-free alternatives like almond milk or coconut milks, anything that does not have casein in it? Dave Asprey: If it specifically binds to the catogens in coffee, and dairy-free alternatives work. I tend to prefer ghee because you’re still getting the CLA and things like that, and has zero casein in it. Almond milk can have mycotoxins in it, and it generally is higher in oxalic acid which can be a problem, even for cognitive function for a lot of people, but if they respond well to almond milk, it certainly works. Anything with fat that the body likes, without casein, is going to increase absorption of those antioxidants. We know the putting butter or other fat in your vegetables makes those nutrients more absorbable. It’s even more so when you’re dealing with high levels of antioxidants in coffee, or even in tea. That’s the reason for butter tea – that I personally got the idea for putting butter to my coffee from – that’s the reason that works. The reason is such big part of that diet. It’s the same principle. Christiana de Leon: Okay, great. Thank you. Mike Mutzel: Great question. Hey there Dr. Jone, you’re live. Dr. Jone: Yes. Good evening, Mike and Dave. How are you doing this afternoon and evening? Mike Mutzel: Good. Thank you. Dave Asprey: Great. Thank you. Dr. Jone: Great. Dave, I wanted to ask you two questions if you don’t mind. The first one is – are you still following Dr. Kruse’s cold thermogenesis protocol? How are you dealing with it? Dave Asprey: Dr. Jone, I appreciate that question. I’ve been getting an echo. I hope everyone else isn’t getting it, too. The cold thermogenesis stuff is amazing. Dr. Kruse suggested some pretty radical stuff about this. I followed it for about a year and had enormous benefits, and then I started traveling a crazy amount for the Bulletproof Executive, and  I found I just couldn’t get hotels with bath tubs where I could consistently expose myself. So, the new biohacking facility, that I am in the process of building now, has an iced tub specked out right next to a farm with sauna. So yes, I will be getting back into it and I have a cold-thermogenesis vest that I use occasionally, but I miss proper cold thermogenesis; it just takes being in one place with the right facility some of the time. I also use a cold glove. So, cold exposure is one of those things that does increase biological resilience. I highly recommend it especially for people who are super sick. It’s relaxing once you get used to the ice. Dr. Jone: Thanks Dave. I appreciate that because I talked to Dr. Kruse and he’s against cryotherapy, so it looks like it’s only the cold bath is the only way to do it according to him. Dave Asprey: You know I am about to go try some cryotherapy, and there’s pretty good evidence about rapid cold exposure to the very outer surface of the skin causing some changes, but I haven’t talked with Dr. Kruse about why he is against cryotherapy. He’s a knowledgeable guy, and I really value what he has to say. Since you told me that, I will find it out. Dr. Jone: I appreciate, Dave. The last quick question is in regards to, I think it’s Benjamin Rubin’s new Beddit, the old Zeo. Could you hand on your thoughts or exposure to that new system and do you think that the Magnetico bed system would interrupt that Beddit if you were to try it? Dave Asprey: Ben Rubin joined Beddit? I am so pleased. Ben is a friend, but I haven’t talked to him for a little while. I’ve been using the Beddit sensor on my bed for about – honestly, almost nine months. It is the coolest sleep monitoring system ever. You can wake up in the morning and get a graph of your heart rate variability. Noises in the room, light levels in the room, temperature in the room – as a sleep hacker, it is nirvana. I use that in the sleep cycle app in my phone. I believe it would not likely interfere with the Magnetico Sleep System. I don’t use the Magnetico System. I use an earthing sheet and I use a pulse electromagnetic frequency generator in my bed pretty often. So, there’s definitely good evidence around the Magnetico stuff. Mike Mutzel: Awesome. Great questions there. Dawn Teppermin? Dawn, you’re live. Please do have the question. Alright, we’ll go to the next one. Jane Rohan? No anything, so we will skip Jane. Just a couple more here. Carlos Castro? People are getting shy. So, that’s all for the live… One last one just came in. Hey there Candice, you are live. That’s weird. Let’s see. There was a bunch of questions that came in today, so I’m just going to quickly scan through them and then maybe we can answer them afterwards and such. The coffee – is it organic or trade? Does it have anything to do with microtoxic exposure and such? Dave Asprey: No. Part of my philosophy on the Bulletproof Executive is that everything is a complex system. Your body is a complex system. It interacts with the environment in kind of a seamless way. Your gut biome is a reflection of what you eat. So, if we can do something that’s more sustainable, that’s just a better thing to do. Organic coffee is no more or less likely to have mold toxins than non-organic coffee. Single estate coffee – you’re just flipping a coin, since your goals have no mold toxins, the estate either has a mold problem or doesn’t have a mold problem. If you take two estates, you mix them together – you increase the odds that there’s mold in your coffee. If you get a single estate that’s clean, that’s a pretty good thing. Question is how clean? Your mileage may vary that’s why I ended up going down to the lab testing side of things. That said, there’s a pretty strong argument for getting organic and getting fair trade impossible. Even my coffee isn’t certified organic because the organic certification process when you talk with small-scale farmers in Central America, it is devastating economically to get certified to be organic. So you tend to only find larger, basic conglomerates working on that process. I’m a huge fan of Rainforest Alliance Certified and the people I’ve worked with are – they work with Rainforest Alliance. I’m not certain it’s legal to say my coffee’s Rainforest Alliance Certified because there is some kind of political thing going on there, but bottom line is the people who I get the coffee from and I work with on its production, are paid the living wage designed for the workers, not just for the coffee. Mike Mutzel: Perfect. That’s great. Basically what you’re saying is there’s really no correlation. Dave Asprey: No, not really. In fact, this is kind of sad. If you spray the fungicide on the crab, it’s probably going to have lower mold toxins, and apples, for instance, is going to have 5,000 times more petulant in it when it’s organic than when it’s not organic. Pesticides are bad; mold toxins are bad. You know – you state potato, I state potato. What you want is clean apple juice, and that is a subject of lab testing and proper agriculture and food processing techniques. At the end of the day, that’s what I’m pushing for. I want the world’s coffee to be clean and I want us to look at food storage and preservation throughout the supply chain because it would cause a huge shift in human health and chronic disease when we get that right. Mike Mutzel: You know the thing that I’ve run into with your protocol, and I loved it by the way, is having a glass blender. A lot of folks have a plastic blender, and even Vita Mix I make and stuff, and I cringe with that – I’m talking about the hot water leaking palates and such. What are your work rounds for that? Dave Asprey: There really isn’t much to do there. I mean you can buy glass blenders, but most of the glass blenders I’ve found have very low quality seals. Any fat will degrade to seal, but coconut oil, in particular, degrades plastic even faster. The new Blendtec blenders are BPA free, but it doesn’t mean they are free of all plasticisers because they are plastic. I tend to use for cold stuff, a Vita Mix; and for hot stuff a Blendtec. I’m opening a Bulletproof coffee shop in Los Angeles and raising some money for that now. I’ve actually tested both blenders – the commercial quality ones. I even tested them for BPA, but I’ve looked at the certification; they both claim BPA-free. So for hot drinks, Blendtec works better; for cold drinks, Vita Mix works better. If you’re going to buy yourself a super blender, I tend to favor Blendtec for how many years, but it’s very personal. Mike Mutzel: Sure, sure. Let’s keep it short and sweet, blend it as quick as you can and pour it out. Dave Asprey: Yes, the sweetener should be xylitol and non-GMO-based. Just kidding. Just short and sweet. Mike Mutzel: Alright.That’s funny. Question came in on the app that you use to reduce the blue light from the screen of the computer. Dave Asprey: It’s called flux, and it’s spelled f.lux. The website is getflux.com, without the dot on it. Mike Mutzel: Great. Well Dave, this is amazing. Thank you so much. We’ll make the recording available to everyone. A couple of folks here did go for free coffee, so I’ll send it over to you and you guys can work it out. Awesome. Have a great night. Dave Asprey: Thank you so much for listening. I really value the work you’re doing with people to help them get healthy and stay healthy. It’s so important and I thank you for being at the cutting edge in using the Xymogen stuff because I’d love to see more doctors doing that. Mike Mutzel: Awesome. Thanks Dave. Take care. Dave Asprey: Take care. Bye.