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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:01:30 - Departure from Bulletproof
00:04:13 - 4 types of “qualified” people
00:06:25 - Screening execs psychologically
00:12:02 - Firing People
00:14:04 - Ideal interview questions
00:16:28 - Sponsor - Cozy Earth
00:21:37 - What is “Type 1 or 2”
00:26:36 - Can mental training fix most issues?
00:32:51 - Medicine that reduce reaction time
00:35:31 - Are you happier than most people?
00:36:12 - How long can you live?
00:37:15 - Sponsor - Pipedrive
00:38:54 - Healthier at 180 than now
00:41:12 - How much have you spent on your body?
00:44:08 - Forgetfulness cured
00:50:33 - His early 20s
00:51:24 - Overcoming Asperger’s
00:53:20 - Smart kids with Asperger’s
00:54:49 - Making $6M and losing it by 26
00:57:47 - Beginning of your healing journey
01:00:26 - Limitless vs. Modafinil
01:05:19 - Craziest biohack you’ve tried
01:06:34 - Sponsor - Range Rover
01:07:32 - Sponsor - Shopify
01:09:01 - Stem cell treatments
01:12:24 - Most overprescribed medicine
01:13:17 - Rate these biohacks
01:18:47 - Practical biohack tips
01:22:00 - How to get perfect sleep
01:28:49 - Worst foods most people eat
01:29:59 - Best everyday food
01:33:30 - Dangerous biohacking experiences
01:34:18 - Anti-aging products
01:37:43 - Is tap water safe?
01:39:59 - Thoughts on Bryan Johnson
01:40:41 - Eating while traveling
01:41:28 - How bad is alcohol?
01:45:13 - Fried food and brain health
01:47:29 - Nicotine
01:51:13 - Adderall
01:59:11 - Dopamine detox
02:01:51 - Freezing yourself post mortem
02:05:37 - A question you wish people asked
02:07:11 - Why are you controversial?
02:10:43 - Best health tip to apply now
*Some of the links and other products that appear on this video are from companies which Graham Stephan will earn an affiliate commission or referral bonus. Graham Stephan is part of an affiliate network and receives compensation for sending traffic to partner sites. The content in this video is accurate as of the posting date. Some of the offers mentioned may no longer be available.
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Transcript 27,976 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Speaker 00 Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones. Like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then sometimes you make great ones. Like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers, not available in all states.
0:30 Speaker 01 Humans, when we are sick or weak or struggling, we're wired to not show it to others because we might get kicked out of the tribe.
0:38 Speaker 02 My next guest says he holds a secret to being smarter, faster, and happier. And spoiler alert, it's not magic.
0:47 Speaker 01 I was desperate. I bought disability insurance when I was 25. My brain is failing. My doctor says everything is fine. Everything is not fine. I don't know what to do. So I started doing all the things that I didn't believe in. And shockingly, my body began to heal.
1:03 Speaker 01 The FDA does not want things that work. They want things that drive you to buy new drugs instead of old drugs or natural cures. And some of those people, their whole career is based on enforcing rules that are bad for humanity. The goal is to extend our life and to extend our quality of life. There's a path to doing that that we understand now that we didn't understand 10 years ago. And it's ridiculous what's possible.
1:31 Jack Selby? Dave Asprey, you've spent over $1 million on your body. You've built a multimillion-dollar buttered coffee brand, and you plan to live to over 180 years old. Thank you so much for coming on The Ice Coffee Hour.
1:43 Speaker 01 You're welcome, but it's a $750 million butter coffee company.
1:48 Jack Selby? So what would you call that? Multi-deca millionaire?
1:51 Graham Stephan? Why don't you round up? I feel like you just gotta round up to a billion at that point.
1:55 Speaker 01 They fired me a couple of years ago. That was before they fired me. I don't know, maybe they're across the billion now. Who knows?
2:00 Graham Stephan? What happened with that? Why did you get fired?
2:02 Speaker 01 Some of that's in in my new book, whatever I'm allowed to talk about. But venture capitalists, they're like, they're hitchhikers. Right? So, oh, sure, we'll fill up your tank with my credit card. But as soon as you want to go somewhere they don't want to go, they stab you and kick you out of your car and take the car.
2:17 Graham Stephan? So they had the voting rights, essentially, just to say, hey, we want to take it a different direction.
2:23 Speaker 01 Let's just say that it wasn't my perspective that they had the voting rights and it was their perspective that they did. So we were able to settle that legally.
2:32 Jack Selby? So their primary concern is return on investment. Were you trying to take this company down a path that maybe was a little bit more passion sided? That they thought wouldn't yield good returns on their money or?
2:44 Speaker 01 No, I was trying to exit the company. And in fact, we'd hired a banker when I was removed from the board. So a couple of years later, I found out that some, some people wanted to buy the company for less than 10% of what it was worth when I was there. So some things I can't talk about there, but it was not a great exit for me. And even the venture capitalists mostly got wiped out in it. So it was not a successful exit for, it was a really big, meaningful, impactful company. And that's the risk of taking outside investments. And you know, you do your best.
3:21 Graham Stephan? What would you have done differently in hindsight?
3:23 Speaker 01 Understand that VCs and governments run on exactly the same algorithm. They have a potato peeler and they start peeling away your rights. Right? And you, and when you finally get a noise, hey, that's not okay. Oh, sorry, sorry, we'll stop. They never put the potato peels back on and then they start again. Right? And then they start again. So there was one decision that I made around a board seat. And I made it, you know, in the middle of a whole bunch of stuff going on. And that was not the right decision. And there are other times where I had an executive in place and, you know, where your gut tells you, like this person is not the right person. And then you overcome it with your mind and say, no, no, but there's all these reasons.
4:06 Speaker 01 And that's what breaks companies. So part of heavily meditated my new book, I talk about the four categories of people and how to spot them. And I realized that my discernment of the team was ultimately the issue. I mean, if you're the CEO, it's on you. So there were times I could have chosen different investors. There were times I could have chosen one or two executive decisions I made that were just not the right people. And in hindsight, it's clear at the time, there was good reasons for everything. And so I'm a much better advisor for companies and I have a very clean culture in my company now because we have standards for these four types of people.
4:43 Jack Selby? Do you have certain specific questions that you ask people to try to determine if they are a person that's qualified or not? And what are those four different types?
4:51 Speaker 01 This comes from Lao Tzu. You know who that is? He's basically the Buddha of China. So there's a one monastery in the mountains where the oral lineage of the people who protect the emperor has been held and there's nine living grandmasters of this. Think Dr. Strange kind of stuff. One of them is Dr. Barry, who's a friend and he taught me this. Category one people, they're always win-win. So you do a deal with them, you're going to make some money, they're going to make some money. Right? They don't do deals where you lose and they win. And these are 5% of people. They're very unusual because they're always right. Then there's category two. They're usually win-win. They want to be win-win, but they screw up. And when they screw up and you say, hey, man, that wasn't okay. They apologize and they
5:33 Speaker 01 make it right. So you only want to hire category ones and twos. Category three people are people, they are win-lose. For them to win, someone else has to lose, but they don't know it. They have a voice in their head. They believe their own BS. So they're saying, oh, I'm a good person, or I don't fail. They cannot see themselves failing. And if they are failing, they will blame everyone else but themselves. And anyone who's been an entrepreneur, you know these kind of people. They're always deflect. They're always creating chaos, but they don't know it and you will never spot them in an interview because they believe their own BS. They're not lying. They're looking you straight in the eye and they believe every single word. The only way you can find them is reference checks and even then are those real?
6:14 Speaker 01 Because everyone knows if you say something bad on a reference check, you could get sued for it. So reference checks are a little bit sketchy and then category four people, those are sociopaths. They're win, lose and they know it and they're experts. You're not going to spot them. So it's reference checks and now in the nine companies in my portfolio, we have a standard. If we have a category three that we hire without knowing it and they make it through our, our hiring process, 60 days to fire them. And so far there's been three of those, but my company culture is working well enough to say, okay, when people are not doing what they say, when they're blaming other people, they're not working as part of a team, they're out. And it's created a lot of peace in the company.
6:55 Jack Selby? Do you screen psychologically people when you're trying to hire them for executive positions?
7:01 Speaker 01 I have looked at various frameworks like that and I haven't found one that works yet, but I'm excited about a new one. A friend named Busy Gold has a technique she thinks might work. I just did a podcast with her, so I'm going to try that out. And you've got to be careful there because you never want to use any information that would be unprotected. So if it's anything having to do with age or family or any of that kind of stuff, you can't look at that. And of course I wouldn't because I hire within the law. So you have to look at behaviors, right? And I have used things like the Colby test, which has been really helpful. Do you guys know that one? And Colby, Dan Sullivan taught me that one. Dan Sullivan has been teaching entrepreneurs for 40 years.
7:43 Speaker 01 How to have frameworks for operating businesses and coached me, very powerful guy. He's I think about 80 now and still actively going. He's on the leaderboard for longevity. He's not planning to stop anytime soon. And the Colby score says, what are your natural instincts for how much information you need to make a decision, right? Some people, they have to know everything. They can't decide. Some people will decide with nothing. And then how much follow through do you have? Some people like you give it to them, they're going to run that project to the ground. Other people, they cannot run it to the ground. Maybe they have a framework and an operating system to do it, but it's hard for them. So if you look at those kinds of things, oh, if I'm hiring an operating person and they have no follow through. That's probably not a good hire. And so there's many of these things, but a lot of them are not functional.
8:28 Speaker 01 Some of them are functional. So I'm, I'm looking for the right one. Do you guys do anything like that?
8:33 Graham Stephan? We hire based on friends.
8:35 Jack Selby? We hire based, I would say off of personality.
8:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:38 Jack Selby? Yeah, like, and, and we, we hire for aptitude, train for, no, hire for attitude, train for aptitude.
8:46 Speaker 01 That works when you're, when you're small. It's like when I, when I started Bulletproof and today Danger Coffee is my new coffee thing. I'm just, for anyone listening, I think so I'm still a bulletproof. The, the idea here is that I would hire young people who had evidence that they could figure stuff out. Right? So it's kind of funny to say, you know, what, what's adulting? Like going to chat GPT and asking how to do it and then doing it, right? It used to be going to Google or YouTube, right? And it's been that way throughout all of history where you're figuring out how to do stuff. But many people in their twenties, when they're affordable, don't have the ability to do something without permission. So if I'm hiring, when I did start Bulletproof, my first employee was under a thousand dollars a month and lived in his grandmother's basement.
9:30 Speaker 01 But he was willing, his very early twenties, good guy, and just willing to go out and figure stuff out. Right? So I don't know how to code, so I learned. Like, that's what you want. You find one of those, that's a great partner. And he made a ton of money when he left the company. The problem with hiring friends, you guys are gonna run into this, is that hire a friend now, three years from now, your company is three times bigger. And that friend may not have the experience that it takes. Cause if you have someone who helps you get to five million, not that many companies even get that big. But when you start getting to 10 or to 100 million, there's only 17,000 companies in the country doing 100 million. So if it's rarefied air, a mistake you make in a million dollar company is not that big of a deal.
10:13 Speaker 01 You make that same mistake at a 10 or a 50 or 100 million dollar company, it's catastrophic. So you start hiring someone who's done it before. And that means your friends, they're like, that's not fair, man. Like, I've been growing this thing. Like, yeah, but I, I can't afford to pay you to make the mistakes to learn. I'm gonna hire someone who has the knowledge and they're gonna have to be your boss. So what I do now is if I hire someone like that, it's like, look. If this is one of the smaller companies in the portfolio, understand I'm not going to make you a C-level executive because we only have two employees. We don't need C-level people. You're going to be a director, right? And understand that when we do hire someone, they will probably have 20 years of experience and they're going to teach you everything you need to know, but you're going to get us to there and you're going to get well-paid for it. You're going to have equity and all that. If you set expectations upfront, good.
10:58 Speaker 01 If you don't, you end up losing friends when they quit because they're frustrated because they didn't get the promotion because they weren't qualified for it.
11:04 Graham Stephan? Hmm. Yeah, with our business, it tends to be so intimate that we see people all the time.
11:10 Speaker 01 That helps.
11:10 Graham Stephan? And so a lot of it is like, would I hang out with this person if we weren't working together? And if the answer is yes, and we get along and we're on the same page, that's, that's what we lean towards, it seems.
11:21 Speaker 01 You want to lean towards people that you'd like to spend time with because you're working with them, right? You, so you want people who you want to spend time with who also know the mistakes not to make, right? It just depends on where you are in the scaling of the business and having built several companies. In fact, I think all of my companies now are north of a million and some are much bigger than that. And I've built, there are very few people have gone from zero to 100 million plus. Every time I've had to replace almost the entire executive team at least three times to get up to that 50 or 100 million because the people who get you up to five are probably not the ones who gave you 25, right? And they want to, they're good people. They're your friends. So what I do now is I'm like, okay, I have a portfolio. So if you're a specialist in this window of revenue,
12:05 Speaker 01 why don't we take over to this company where you can help it get there, but you know, someone who's really focused on just like juggling, which is the early stage stuff, they're probably not going to have cash flow forecasting and financial discipline and rigor to work with the CFO within, you know, HR constraints and all the stuff that has to happen as you get big. So it's, it's a, it's one of the biggest challenges of hiring friends is like, how do you maintain friendships when they can't do the job anymore, not because they're
12:30 Speaker 00 Bad, but because the company changed.
12:32 Speaker 01 How do you fire people?
12:36 Speaker 00 Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then sometimes you make great ones like protecting your home and auto with progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers not available in all states.
13:06 Speaker 01 The first time anyone fires someone, it's it's always scary. It feels terrible and it should feel terrible. Otherwise you're probably a sociopath. But there is a hack for that and it's this. If someone needs firing, they know that they're not working out. So they are stressed and unhappy in the business and they're taking down all the people around them who are doing the work. So firing someone is actually an act of kindness because you're setting them free to go find somewhere where it's a good fit. And it's being of service to all the people in your team who are doing the work. So I do my best to be kind and to say, well, you know, we're eliminating your position. It's really nasty right now because you're not allowed to tell someone why you fire them
13:51 Speaker 01 most of the time because firing for cause is, even if there is a cause, it's it's a thing that is fraught with legal risk. So what almost all employers do now is they say, we've eliminated the position. And then you do eliminate the position and some employers will do that just because like I needed to get rid of this person because they weren't performing. But if you try to tell them they're not performing, especially if they're a category three, they'll say, I was too performing, it's your fault, right? And then it just creates a huge amount of drama. So what I like to do is have a fair package, right? And when we eliminate a position, quite often we just didn't need the position anymore. And if someone is being eliminated for cause, then we tell them ahead of time. And it usually takes about six months of documenting and telling them and putting them
14:36 Speaker 01 on a plan and all that. So I have right now for my portfolio, my head of HR used to run a 10,000 person HR or 10,000 employee HR group because you have to be compliant with all the laws. It's really hard and many small companies. Get taken out because they hire a category three, a narcissist, or maybe a category four sociopath. And then the person's creating drama and chaos and then you fire them. But it couldn't be their fault. It's going to be your fault. And then they come after you. And there's specific tactics for that.
15:05 Jack Selby? If the law wasn't the legal barrier for you asking certain questions, what would you look for hypothetically?
15:13 Speaker 01 You know, what I would love to do with people is say, let's be honest. Maybe with a lie detector, that'd be fun.
15:23 Speaker 01 Let's talk about your childhood. Right? Like, let's talk about bullies. Let's talk about mean teachers and mean coaches. Let's talk about parenting. Right? Because all of the emotional crap we deal with as adults is just echoes of the way our operating system got set up when we were little. So it's amazing what all of my senior leaders do their first week on the job. They go do 40 years of Zen, which is my $20,000 a week. Brain upgrade for executives and entrepreneurs. It's up in Seattle. They come and spend five days. And this is an investment I make in my team and they go through and they turn off all of their triggers. Cause let's face it, if someone's emotionally regulated and they've done their personal development work. You can sit down and say, hey, man, you're failing on this. Right?
16:09 Speaker 01 And you can say, I don't know if it's because you don't have the right resources. I don't know if you don't understand what it is. Maybe something's wrong. But can we talk about the fact that this isn't succeeding and that it's important? Now, that's a great conversation to have, but most people will respond emotionally. They'll feel criticized. They'll feel judged. They'll drop into first grade or second grade or fifth grade or whatever. And then they yell, no, it's not, it's not. And then, and then you can't have a constructive discussion about it. So in some cultures, like the old Microsoft one or Ray Dalio kind of Bridgewater things. They're like, you know, we're going to have these kind of hard debates and it feels like crap. I don't have that kind of culture. We have a culture of kindness, which means you have to be truthful. We're not nice, but we're kind. We're going to talk about the problem. And if someone has an emotional reaction, it's like,
16:54 Speaker 01 do you need to hook some electrodes up to your head and get some regulation of your nervous system here? Because we don't actually treat each other this way. So we're going to talk about the problem. Right? And we're going to have constructive solutions. And if you're going to do the blame game and, you know, throw your emotions around. Everyone has outbursts. That's fine. Are you a category two who says, I'm sorry, let's make it right? Or are you a category three who blames someone else? If you're category three, you got 60 days. And that's how it is. And I just don't want to work in an environment like that.
17:19 Graham Stephan? And you can't ask someone about their childhood when you're trying to hire them?
17:22 Speaker 01 Nope, and I don't.
17:23 Graham Stephan? Why? What's the reasoning behind that? It seems like that would just be like a general conversation, like.
17:29 Jack Selby? One of the main takeaways I had from this episode is just how critical sleep is for longevity, brain function, energy, literally everything. Like, no matter what supplements you're taking, how much you work out, or how well you eat, if your sleep sucks, you're falling behind.
17:41 Graham Stephan? That's why I'm so excited that Cozy Earth is sponsoring this video, because when it comes to sleep quality, your sheets matter way more than most people realize. For instance, they sent us their bamboo sheet sets a little while ago. Honestly, it's completely next level. Their sheets are temperature regulating, they're insanely soft, and they help you sleep better for longer. By the way, to put this into context, their sheets are so soft, I don't even want to get out of bed in the morning. And I'm like, looking forward to going to bed at night because they're that good.
18:09 Jack Selby? Here in Vegas, it is so hot at night, and I already have a problem getting hot when I'm trying to sleep, but these are the first sheets I've ever had that actually stay cool when I'm trying to sleep and don't trap my heat like other sheets. So if you care about your sleep, and especially if you live somewhere warm, I'd say these are definitely worth checking out.
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18:38 Graham Stephan? Again, that's cozyearth.com with the code ICH. And if you get a survey after you place the order, by the way, just let them know that you heard about it through us, because they sent us a whole bunch of stuff and it's awesome. And I want to keep working with them, so that would help us out a lot, too. So thank you again to Cozy Earth for sponsoring this podcast. And now let's get back to the episode.
18:57 Speaker 01 You know, people file lawsuits for all sorts of things, right? And it's gotten to be, I don't know, you guys have probably been sued by a former employee.
19:05 Graham Stephan? No.
19:06 Speaker 01 How many employees do you have?
19:07 Graham Stephan? No one. It's really just all independent contractors and buddies.
19:10 Speaker 01 Independent contractors reduce the risk a lot. Yeah. If you were to build a team of, I've hired hundreds and hundreds of people over the years, and there's always people who are like, "I could never have failed at this job, therefore..." and they make up a long list of crap. So this is- This is why it's so expensive to hire people. It is a lot of it just goes into nonsense.
19:33 Graham Stephan? Hmm. Yeah, our team's like maybe like five people max.
19:37 Speaker 01 It's so.
19:38 Graham Stephan? And most of them live with Jack. So he sees him daily. So yeah, if that doesn't work out, it might be an awkward situation.
19:44 Speaker 01 It would be weird. Like, like, what if one of your, your team starts sleeping with another one?
19:49 Jack Selby? They're all guys. Yeah, but it's, that's not technically off the table. I guess not. Yeah, okay. I have some questions about, but no. They're, they're gonna see.
19:57 Speaker 01 Which one?
19:59 Jack Selby? I'm only joking. But yes, I don't know. I don't think that there could necessarily be drama because I think that our friendships, this could be very naive of me to say, kind of supersede the, the work. And this is just based off of like, like a long time of knowing them. Like, these aren't superficial friendships.
20:20 Speaker 01 It's, it's so, it's so helpful to have that background. Two of my employees have been with me for 12 years. Like, we're friends. And remember this.
20:30 Speaker 01 They're friends, but you can take away their money. So hiring a friend changes the nature of the friendship, especially if, you know, they have a family and if they're, they're,
20:43 Speaker 01 you're responsible for their financial well-being. All right. So it, it makes just a subtle shift in the power dynamic. Cause with a true friendship that doesn't have money flowing, then it's like, you know, you just be truthful and it creates, and I have hired friends and it creates, I also take money from friends. And it's not like calling up a friend who trusts you and saying, hey, man, it looked like you were gonna get at least a 20x on that and I was too. And we both just got wiped out. Right? So I've lost friendships because people gave me money and then I got wiped out too. Like I did my best. It was pretty traumatic for me. It was traumatic for my investors too. So understand as you scale and grow, some of those friends, it's like, well, I don't want to tell them this because I guess my job, but he's my friend. And it just creates those
21:27 Speaker 01 little things. So I would be like super blunt and just.
21:31 Jack Selby? Yeah, that's, I mean, yeah, communication was an issue in the beginning, but over, you know, some trials and tribulations, we've since learned that open communication and bluntness is, is the best way of doing things. Yeah. And plus I categorize them as the one and two. Like, I wouldn't say that they're three and four people. So that's why it's a hedge against that potential risk.
21:50 Speaker 01 And as you build your culture too, it means that your, your whole team knows, oh, that's a three, this behavior pattern, we know it. And a working culture, whether someone comes in as a contractor, we all do it this way. And if it's, I think of it like a school of fish and they're all swimming, right? And if one of the fish kind of goes sideways, the other fish kind of bring it back in. Right? And if it doesn't work, the whole thing can follow that fish. That's why a narcissist can destroy a company culture relatively quickly because it makes everyone think they're crazy and it kind of scatters the cohesion. But if you're aware of that and your team's aware of it, then you're like, okay, that one's a category three, right? And we'll have those conversations on my executive team
22:32 Speaker 01 like, oh, looks like we didn't hire the right person. That's a three, they're out.
22:37 Jack Selby? So you're saying that it's your experience as a young person, as a child, when you're growing up through your teens, that basically determines your engine, that you process information that you act by when you're older. And if you're, if you're determined as a category one or two, by the time you're 25, that's probably who you're going to be for the rest of your life?
22:56 Speaker 01 No, it's entirely editable. That's why I wrote heavily meditated. So here's how it works. All life runs the same operating system. And so most of our automated behaviors happen inside single celled organisms as well. And here's the algorithm. And this is kind of scary because your body follows the, these rules in a third of a second before your brain gets any notification of reality. And it's number one, they're all F words. Number one is fear. If something is scary, you gotta run away from, kill it, or hide it. And your body, before you can think, is going to put an emotional weight on things that might be scary.
23:36 Speaker 01 And this is where a lot of the childhood stuff comes from. Cause if someone yelled at you and it felt scary when you were three, when someone yells at you in a meeting, you're going to get a fear response and you're going to act emotionally instead of like an adult. Right. So fear is first. Second is food. Eat everything because there's been famines everywhere. A third of the average person's thoughts are about tacos every day. Literally a third of our thoughts, what's for lunch? It's crazy, but that's there. And then the third F word, all life has to do is to stay around forever. Can you guess that one?
24:06 Jack Selby? All life has to do is stay around forever.
24:08 Speaker 01 To stay around for multiple generations.
24:10 Jack Selby? Oh, I would just say habits, like their main thing is to. F.
24:15 Speaker 01 It's an F word, fear, food, four letters.
24:18 Jack Selby? Fornicating.
24:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, fertility, I was going to.
24:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, fear is pretty much the other F word, but it's fear, food and fertility. So every single thing in reality, all of the time, your body is filtering. Is it scary? Do I need to kill it? Can I eat it and can I hump it? Before your brain knows what's happening. Now, is there anything you've ever done, you're ashamed of, that isn't one of those three things?
24:46 Jack Selby? I have to think. I mean, yeah, that would take a long time to.
24:49 Speaker 01 There, there isn't, it always comes down to one of those three, every single time. It's not you, it's an automated protection system to keep your meat alive as if your brain wasn't in there. And that is why all the childhood experiences, the bullies, the teachers, all the stuff that happens to us. You've fallen off a bike, it doesn't have to be a big thing. That sets up reactivity and it's just your body trying to present reality in a way that will make your brain do what it wants you to do. So I developed something called the reset process. After 10 years of working with more than a thousand entrepreneurs at my neuroscience company, sitting down for five days and teaching them how to reprogram the operating system to not be triggered by things that are stupid. It creates incredible freedom and I've had billionaires go through there.
25:33 Speaker 01 I've had all kinds of people, spiritual gurus, and it always works. And that's why I wrote the book, because it costs 20 grand to come and glue electrodes to your head and have the whole team work with you, or you can do the process that I'm giving away in the book at home. And what you do for that is saying, you know what? Every time someone criticizes me, I stay up at night, you know, it really gets in there and I just ruminate on it. Great, you have a trigger. All right, so someone criticized you and they're in charge. Because if you can be triggered, it means you're carrying a loaded gun. That means you're not in charge of yourself. All right, so if I can make fun of something about you and it bothers you at all, you're just not in charge of yourself. You could think of your nervous system and the mitochondrial networks in your body. They're like a Labrador.
26:18 Speaker 01 Okay, this big floppy dog comes in, eats your couch, pees on the rug, chews up your shoes, barks and slobbers, right? And eats all the food on the table. Or that same dog, you put him through service dog school, comes in and sits there, you put a piece of popcorn on his nose and he just sits there and waits till you tell. Your nervous system is one of those two things or somewhere in the middle. And the people who are most successful in life don't waste energy on flopping around and peeing on the couch and all that other stuff because they train their nervous system. And that is so much more elegant and efficient than what most of us are doing, which is you're sitting in the meeting and someone criticizes you or does something that pisses you off. But instead of reacting and swearing at them or punching them, which is what sometimes we might want to do,
27:03 Speaker 01 you smile and you're like, oh yeah, that's okay. But it's like the fake smile, right? And everyone knows that you don't have congruence. Your inner state doesn't match your outer state, but at least you behaved yourself, which allows society to happen. And that works, it just takes a ton of energy. And your life sucks and you're like totally thinking about all these things that you don't want to think about because things didn't go the way you want it. If you go through and instead of learning to manage emotions, learning how to turn off the alerts in the first place, you have a ton of energy. And then someone during an interview can't manipulate you. You can't be programmed.
27:37 Jack Selby? What percentage of problems with your mind can be solved with training? The way that you respond to things, your motivation, stuff that directly relates to your brain versus fixing things with your body?
27:51 Speaker 01 Wow. That's a really hard question and here's why. You have a certain amount of energy and you pour it into the fear bucket. And then it goes from there into the food bucket, into the fertility bucket. And then the other two words are friend, which is supporting your community. And then into forgiveness, which is evolution and retraining yourself. So if you don't have enough energy because your body and mind are broken the way mine was in the twenties when I was 300 pounds and just had all these chronic fatigue problems and a lot of sickness. Fixing the hardware is most important. But once you have enough energy, then the answer shifts and all of the problems can be solved by changing the way your threat detection networks work.
28:36 Speaker 01 It's just reprogramming things. And this explains like the Buddhist stuff. It explains like the Christian forgiveness stuff, all of the things that all the different spiritual lineages that I've studied are trying to teach you. It's that. And the important trick is there is now a technique that lets you show the body, this feeling is not the right feeling. So you reengage the feeling, you flip a switch by finding something good that happened, even if you hated it. And then you go into another state and the body goes, oh, this negative feeling can't exist with this other feeling. So they cancel out and they remain canceled out permanently. It's like a real common thing. Someone cuts you off in traffic. Almost everyone gets pissed off at that, right? So if you went and you ran the reset process on that, the next time someone cuts you off
29:21 Speaker 01 in traffic, you just don't care. You don't feel good or bad, but oh, maybe they're on the way to the hospital. Maybe they're not. It just doesn't matter. So there was a time in my life where the most exercised, biggest muscle in my body was the one on this finger. Like I might've been a hostile driver. I just don't care if someone cuts me off anymore. It doesn't matter, but it's not that I thought that it didn't matter. It's that I changed my programming in my body. So I don't get the, I don't get the tightness in the gut.
29:46 Jack Selby? But that would be like a mental struggle, a flaw with your brain.
29:50 Speaker 01 It's not in the brain, it's in the body.
29:52 Jack Selby? That would just be reframing your beliefs about being cut off, right?
29:56 Speaker 01 That's all.
29:56 Jack Selby? Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
29:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's, that's all cognitive. So what the emotion happens before the thought. And I can prove this. There's one third of a second where the body picks the emotion you're going to feel. And the brain doesn't get the signal of what happened until after that censorship window. So your body is interpreting reality, putting emotion on it. Right? So you could say, well, I got this negative emotion and then you catch it with your mind and you go, oh, I'm going to reframe it. Dude, feeling a negative feeling about something that wasn't a threat and then catching it and then reframing it, it takes energy. I want to take that energy and use it for folding proteins or something.
30:29 Jack Selby? But it's not reality itself. It's the perception, right? And the perception is created by the mind.
30:33 Speaker 01 No, it's not.
30:35 Jack Selby? So what is the perception created by?
30:37 Speaker 01 Created by a network of trillions of environmental sensors studied throughout all the cells in your body, except for your red blood cells that are actively monitoring reality.
30:48 Speaker 01 And your mind has a one-third of a second delay on reality all the time. It's not your mind. Your mind is only getting what your body gives it.
30:56 Graham Stephan? One-third of a second seems like a long time, though.
30:58 Speaker 01 It's called P300D. And it's really funny. If I do this, clap my hands. Now, you know, it took some amount of time for the sound to get there, and then you heard it.
31:06 Graham Stephan? Right.
31:07 Speaker 01 That's a lie from your body. If we add electrodes glued to your brain, your auditory cortex doesn't get any signal at all for one-third of a second, and it takes another 700 milliseconds before your prefrontal cortex can figure out what it was. So you have about a one-second delay on reality that your body and mind erase from your consciousness because it's not useful to watch it. And you know how cats move? They only have 30 milliseconds. They're 10 times faster than us. That's why they can do all that crazy stuff, because their lag time on reality is much faster than ours. So you have a sensor in there. It's called your ego, but the ego's part of the operating system that keeps your body alive. Here's another example. You ever leaned on a hot stove? And then go, you know, this stove is pretty hot. I guess I should move my hand.
31:52 Speaker 01 No, we do. Your hand pulls itself away, and you take credit for what your hand did, but you did not decide to move your hand. Right? Your body automatically did it. That system is the same one that's making you feel all that negative stuff about the guy who cuts you off in traffic.
32:05 Graham Stephan? Yeah, but I feel like that touching a hot stove is way faster than one-third of a second.
32:09 Speaker 01 It is, because it's not your brain doing it. It's your body doing it, and then your brain taking credit for what the body did. Right? So what really happens? You go, ah, right? It's way less than a third of a second. So what's going on there? It has to be the body making the decision, and you think you did it. It's just the body tricking you into believing that what it's doing is what you're doing. It has an entirely different consciousness based on fear, food, friend, and forgiveness in order all the time. And it does that constantly before you ever get a picture of reality.
32:39 Graham Stephan? So the one-third of a second is only your conscious thinking, like interpreting the data?
32:45 Speaker 01 Think of it like your body catching the signal and holding on to the signal. Right? And then, one-third of a second later, the auditory cortex in the brain, it gets the first electrical signal that says the sound happened. And the sound has already been in your body for a third of a second. And then, after that happens, to figure out what it is, it gets routed to the prefrontal cortex, and that takes around 700 milliseconds.
33:08 Graham Stephan? Is there a way to... Speed that up somehow.
33:10 Speaker 01 There is. When you're young, under, let's say, under 18, it's a quarter second instead of a third of a second. You still have the same process, fear, food, all that stuff, but it's, you're faster. This is why you have a faster reaction time when you're very young. And if you're, say, a Formula One driver or very highly trained, you can train that. So my reaction time is 240 milliseconds, like it would be when you're 18, because I'm a brain hacker. But having a faster reaction time doesn't mean anything. What's important is if you were to pick up your phone and turn on the alerts from every app, it's like boing, boing, but you can't use your phone. So you go and you turn off all the alerts. You gotta turn off the alerts from your nervous system so that they don't get in the way. That's the trick.
33:53 Graham Stephan? This might sound stupid. Are there drugs that you could take that would shut down that reaction time? So it's like immediate?
33:59 Speaker 01 Well, even if you shut it down to five milliseconds, understand your body's job is to create a user interface on reality that's useful for you. Right? And this is why we hallucinate time into existence. We can go to quantum physics and we can prove mathematically time is a hallucination that we create. It's just a very useful one that lets us live, right? Even space is a hallucination and we can prove that too. Inside this microphone, it's mostly empty space. We just all see it and perceive it because it's useful for our meat bodies to do stuff. So you could narrow the window and there are drugs that make you faster like that. Like modafinil would probably do that. I've been on that stuff for 20 plus years. But you're still going to have the pre-processing of reality.
34:41 Speaker 01 Because here's the thing, your brain cannot handle reality. Right now, if you had to pay attention to every little valve opening and closing inside your body, making sure you breathe, you blink and being aware of all the micro stuff happening in the environment, little air currents and how it feels and the hairs on your arm and all that, you couldn't do anything. So we have a beautiful distributed processing system that keeps the body alive as if we're not in there. It's the same thing that runs a bear or a skunk or a blade of grass, fear, food.
35:11 Speaker 01 Always, always. That's what keeps life alive, right? So you just have to program it so that it doesn't feel fear, except when it's real. And if you just do that, it frees up so much energy that when people do this process, 91.7% report massive improvements in their relationships. Because now your girlfriend doesn't trigger you anymore. Like, oh, she's having some emotions. Okay, that's cool. It's not that you don't care. It's that it doesn't cause you pain, right? And then food, you learn how to do some intermittent fasting. And your body believes right now that if you don't eat every four hours, you're going to die. And it feels like that. And you say, I'm starving. Well, you just teach the body, you're not going to starve. You learn how to fast. And the amount of stress in the nervous system goes way down from when the stomach's empty. Now you have more energy.
35:56 Speaker 01 So stop wasting energy on alerts that are going off all the time over scary things or over hunger. And then there's another whole set of practices in heavily meditated around turning what I'll call lust or OnlyFans or whatever, into a source of transformative altered states work. And the way we go in and we fix all these things is altered states. And you can alter your state with meditation, with technology, with neurofeedback, with breathwork, with psychedelics, with tantric sex. Like, there's all these different ways. And all of these ultimately are, how do I change my state? So I can get into my control panel settings and I can change the settings on my nervous system so it behaves itself. So would you say you are happier than the average person? And by how much?
36:39 Speaker 01 You know, I don't compare myself to other people very much. I'd have to think about that.
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37:14 Speaker 01 I would say that I am reasonably happy. And one of the things that makes for the best entrepreneurs in the world is capacity to handle suffering without breaking. And if you read Heavily Meditated, I've gone through a lot. I mean, losing a company you built that's doing hundreds of millions, kind of your life's work, that was, that was a lot. So I am more resilient than almost anyone I know. And I have periods where I'm happy and I have periods where I'm less happy. But I'm not worried about either one of them.
37:44 Graham Stephan? And how much longer do you think you could live based on reframing a lot of these beliefs and going into that control panel?
37:52 Speaker 01 My, my book on longevity, I spent about $2 million to reverse my age by 20 years. And I just publicly said, I'm going to live to at least 180. And I picked that number because our current best is 120. I want to do 50% better. I have 100 years to do it. And I have AI and I have PubMed, which is all of the research we've ever done on medical stuff. And we have all these tools available, all this knowledge that the person who made it to 120 didn't have. So I don't think 50% better in the next 100 years is particularly aggressive. In fact, we've already extended life by six and a half years.
38:28 Graham Stephan? Do you think your life though would be, you would be able to do things at that point? Or do you think you'd be hooked up to a computer and like some, some like beeping sound would be constant? And your mind would be like uploaded to a computer that-
38:42 Speaker 01 Feeling better than I do now.
38:45 Graham Stephan? At 180?
38:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
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40:01 Speaker 01 Feeling better than I do now.
40:04 Graham Stephan? At 180.
40:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:05 Jack Selby? Okay, so I like, I am highly, highly, highly skeptical when I hear, and I'm sure a lot of viewers are saying the same thing. I would love to be proven wrong because that sounds awesome to feel better than I feel right now at 180. But it just doesn't seem intuitive. And usually my intuition on something like this, I feel like could be like, give me like your, your, your best sales pitch on how you think you can live to 180 and feel better than you do right now.
40:33 Speaker 01 Well, most aging comes down to mitochondrial dysfunction. We didn't know much about mitochondria until the 90s, and even now we're learning more about them. And we have top doctors at Harvard, like David Sinclair, who's a friend who's been on my show a couple of times. It's like, we can reverse aging in cells. I went down to Costa Rica and I did a stem cell procedure with focused ultrasound on my brain that reverses aging in the central aging clock in the hippocampus. So I opened up my blood brain barrier, put stem cells in there, and it totally works. I've had gene therapy that takes nine years off of the average person's measured age in a single injection. And we're just getting going on all this.
41:15 Jack Selby? Will you look younger too? Because I'm trying to, because all of these like scientific, like biomarkers and lab results, lab tests and stuff like that. For most people that aren't like super in the weeds, they won't be able to actually have something to meter if someone's getting older or younger. Here's biologically speaking.
41:34 Speaker 01 Here's what matters more. Do you wake up and your brain works and you have a ton of energy and your body doesn't hurt? Like, like if people have that, they're generally willing to have some wrinkles, right? And right now.
41:48 Speaker 01 As you, as you age, you cut your fingernails, right? Because they keep growing and that's considered normal. Well, your skin grows as you age. And that's something that we haven't yet, but probably will in the next five years resolve. So we need a way to get a signal into the body that says tighten up the skin. And a way that isn't, say, you know, creating scarring or something, which is what we do today. So this is about communication with the cells themselves, telling them what to do. And I've worked with a couple of companies that are actually figuring out how to program a single photon to do that. So bottom line, between peptides, between signaling compounds, between the magnetic stuff, the lasers and things like that, will probably solve the, your tissues over time
42:33 Speaker 01 grow, just like your hair grows and your fingernails grow. The skin growing thing that grows over the course of decades, that's annoying. But if I feel great and my body doesn't hurt and my brain is on fire and I have some extra skin, I don't care.
42:44 Jack Selby? How much have you spent on your body?
42:46 Speaker 01 About two and a half million bucks.
42:48 Jack Selby? What would you say has the best ROI on everything you've spent money on?
42:51 Speaker 01 Neurofeedback.
42:53 Jack Selby? What real results have you achieved from neurofeedback?
42:58 Speaker 01 I tripled the amount of electrical power that my brain can make.
43:01 Jack Selby? So what does that mean?
43:03 Speaker 01 Well, when your brain is making a, a brainwave, there's two things that we look at. One is how orderly are the brainwaves? Like, can my brain, can all of it decide to do the same thing at the same time? It's like having an orchestra that plays the same stuff in the right order versus just all over the place. And then the second one is how loud can it play? Or think of it like a wave. Do you want to be surfing the 100 foot wave or surfing the 10 foot wave? Right? You want your brain to be able to on demand make 100 foot waves, which is a marker of youthfulness and a marker of power. So you can train your brain to do that and I have trained my brain to do that.
43:42 Jack Selby? So is that just like cognitive ability? Because I also read that you had claimed you'd increased your IQ by like 20.
43:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's really simple.
43:51 Speaker 01 Okay. If you want to increase your IQ by an average of a dozen points, you can do it in a month. That's a horrible kind of training called dual in back training. And is the most frustrating thing I think I've ever done. You play this impossible video game that just frustrates you constantly. And you do it for 20 minutes a day. And if you can make yourself do it for 20 days, which almost no one does, at some time around there, all of a sudden you can do it. And it doubles working memory in your brain. So most people can remember seven numbers, maybe eight. You can remember 16 after you finish that. And that'll increase your IQ.
44:25 Graham Stephan? What's the game? Like, why is it so frustrating?
44:27 Speaker 01 Because it's a grid and you have to remember which squares lit up in order and what letter or number was inside it. And then four moves ago, on the top left quadrant, where was the color four moves ago? What was the number? And it sounds impossible. Because what our brains are wired to do is to remember either the order of things lighting up or the order of numbers. But when you just kind of torture the brain with failure, eventually the brain says, oh, I can remember both. And it's like turning on a new skill, a light switch. When I first did this years ago, I remember I had just finished it. And I was sitting with 16 people. And we were taking sushi orders to go.
45:12 Speaker 01 And I remembered everyone's order for 16 people. I'm not a waiter. And this was outside of my abilities, period. And it was effortless. It was just there.
45:23 Graham Stephan? But does that translate to different results on like a real IQ test? Because isn't IQ like technically just different than working memory? Like it would be, you know, problem solving and you're.
45:35 Speaker 01 Yeah. Increasing working memory will reliably increase IQ. That's why I claim about a dozen points from that.
45:40 Graham Stephan? So I'm curious, what does it mean when my memory seems to be sometimes so bad that I can't remember what I did last night or the night before?
45:50 Jack Selby? It means that you're clinically dumb.
45:53 Graham Stephan? Seriously, there, I started doing this journal that like every day you're supposed to fill it out. And it's like things you're grateful for in the morning. What would make today great? Highlights of the day. Sometimes I'll go by mistake, two days of that filling this thing out. And then I look back and I think I have no recollection of the day before or the day before that. And I have to think to myself, what did I do? And I have to go through text messages.
46:19 Speaker 01 Yep.
46:19 Graham Stephan? And we have a camera outside and I look through the camera to see, oh, I left at this time. Where were, oh yeah, I went there. What does that mean?
46:27 Speaker 01 Well, there's two kinds of memory. There's episodic memory, which is what you're talking about. Do you remember specific episodes? And then there's a kind of memory that's how things work and for facts. Right? And different people have a different mix of episodic versus factual memory. So for me, I don't care what I did yesterday. I have no idea. Like it's not relevant. I have systems for that. And people I know like, oh yeah, last year on July 2nd, I was doing this. I'm like, why do you know and why do you care? But that person can't remember mitochondrial function, which supplement to do. So I have this rich internal universe of biohacking and neuroscience and longevity and esoteric spiritual stuff. Cause that's what I care about.
47:10 Speaker 01 So for you, if you're a typical entrepreneur, you have ADHD anyway. And ADHD is the gift that you only pay attention to things you care about. And I would argue you probably don't really care about what you did yesterday. You'd remember it and there's nothing wrong with that.
47:24 Graham Stephan? That makes more sense.
47:25 Speaker 01 Some people organize their mental hierarchy by time. Others by function, others by human network. And this, this is foundational. It's like the systems architecture of your processing network inside your body.
47:37 Graham Stephan? See, I went down the rabbit hole of WebMD and convinced myself I might have early onset dementia.
47:43 Jack Selby? No, you do not have that.
47:44 Speaker 01 How old are you?
47:45 Graham Stephan? Thirty five.
47:46 Speaker 01 It's not impossible. I would really worry about that.
47:50 Graham Stephan? Actually?
47:51 Speaker 01 No, I'm just trying to see if I could.
47:53 Jack Selby? Yeah, I, I don't think you have that. I think that you like, you bring your brain to a different playing field whenever you're working. And like, it kind of just, it like exercising that muscle for as long as you have just makes you completely oblivious to other things that like might. Some other people might be more in tune with such as social dynamics, such as, you know, maybe episodic memory. But that's similar to kind of what you said. It's just Graham really cares about the things he cares about.
48:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
48:23 Jack Selby? And by virtue of that, it means he could care less about the things that you don't care.
48:27 Graham Stephan? If it's anything the Chinese embassy said, Jerome Powell said, any market fluctuations and know it. It's just.
48:34 Jack Selby? Graham is someone where if you're talking to him about something that he doesn't have interest in, his eyes immediately gloss over and he's just not listening whatsoever. So it's.
48:43 Speaker 01 So you probably have ADHD.
48:46 Graham Stephan? I don't think I have ADHD.
48:47 Speaker 01 You don't?
48:47 Jack Selby? He has incredible focus when.
48:50 Speaker 01 Hyper focus is part of it.
48:51 Jack Selby? But it's also, it's weird because it's in such a way of like, like you said, it's, it's easy to focus when you want to be focusing. But there are lots of times where he grinds on something that he may not be particularly passionate about, but he does like the grind. So I don't know what that necessarily means.
49:07 Graham Stephan? I have maybe that's just. Deep focus. Deep focus is a, is a passion of mine.
49:11 Speaker 01 Okay. So deep focus is an altered state.
49:13 Graham Stephan? Correct.
49:13 Speaker 01 So what if there were technologies to help you get into deeper focus more quickly?
49:17 Graham Stephan? Love that.
49:18 Speaker 01 One of those is called meditation, but meditation takes too much time. The other thing is around 35,
49:27 Speaker 01 your testosterone is low.
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50:27 Graham Stephan? It's high.
50:28 Speaker 01 Is high.
50:29 Graham Stephan? It's high. It might be lowering now, but.
50:31 Speaker 01 Your free tea, have you measured it?
50:33 Graham Stephan? It's in the eight hundreds.
50:34 Speaker 01 That's total tea. Your free tea is probably not above 20.
50:37 Graham Stephan? I could, oh, you know what? I could, I could find it.
50:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, check it out.
50:39 Graham Stephan? I have it online. Yeah.
50:41 Speaker 01 So there's, there's two things that happen. One is testosterone drops and for all of us testosterone's low right now because of plastics and lighting and fragrances and circadian disruption, all kinds of stuff. So just our species is in trouble from a testosterone perspective. Testosterone drives dopamine. Dopamine drives desire to focus and get stuff done. So you get rewarded for pursuing a goal, but if your testosterone is low, you don't care. And this is true in men and women because women have four times more testosterone than estrogen. They just have a lot less testosterone than guys do. So looking at that affects brain function in a meaningful way. The other thing that happens is your body makes cortisol and adrenaline, which are stress hormones that all entrepreneurs have
51:23 Speaker 01 and all people have, but it also makes counter stress hormones called DHEA and progesterone, and to a certain extent progesterone. And starting around 35, those go down, but the stress hormones don't, and it's worse in women than men. So in either case, if your DHEA is low, which happens as you age, well, welcome to aging. And 35 is about where you're like, oh shit, like it's not happening. So if you do the anti-aging stuff at 35, you don't have to dig yourself out of a hole by waiting till you're 40 or 45 or 50. So a major reason I started the biohacking movement is because the things that make old people young make young people powerful. And so the goal is to say, if I would have known about this when I was 20,
52:07 Speaker 01 I wouldn't have weighed 300 pounds because I would have known what to do and I would have done all these things that are cheap and easy. And I probably would have not had all the dumb decisions I made too, if I'd have learned all the meditation stuff. So if you take a few steps now to keep your stress hormone and anti-stress hormone levels at the levels of a young person, you're gonna like your life 10 years from now. And if you don't, you're gonna be like, God, I have a dad bod. I said I wouldn't do that. I look, you know, I'm losing some hair and all that kind of stuff. So prevention is much easier. And it turns out that is exactly the same stuff that makes your brain work better and gives you more energy and more power. So it's like you have nothing to lose from doing it.
52:45 Jack Selby? For those that want just a very, very quick kind of up to date background, you were very, very early on into tech and you made, what was it like $6 million by 26 and then lost it all by 28. You were also 100 pounds overweight at that time. What was like going on? What was your kind of life like?
53:07 Speaker 01 I used to have Asperger's syndrome. So it's on the autism spectrum and I had ADHD and something called ODD. You ever heard of that one? Oppositional defiant disorder. It means that when someone tells you to do something, you automatically and reflexively tell them no. You can imagine by the time I graduated from high school, how popular I was with the, the, the teachers and whatnot. And all of this comes down to hardware in the brain and threat networks and we'll call it the emotion and spiritual side of what's going on. So I reversed that and it took me years and a lot of money to reprogram my brain, reprogram my eyes, my ears, the way my tongue moves, the way my body moves. I had to redo all that and then I had to learn all the emotional stuff that I never picked up as a kid. All the social interactions, those are learned.
53:52 Jack Selby? Okay. So how, how did you lose Asperger's? Because isn't that kind of like a, like, you know, if you have it-
53:59 Graham Stephan? It's permanent, right?
54:02 Speaker 01 People believe all sorts of weird stuff. Did you know that until Eric Kendall won a Nobel Prize in 1994, scientists believed that you were born with a number of brain cells you were going to die with and that you could never change your brain or grow it?
54:15 Graham Stephan? It's funny. I still believe that. Like you lose your brain cells and they'll never come back.
54:20 Speaker 01 I interviewed Eric Kendall when he was 84 on my show and he's incredibly high performance brain, happy, engaged. And yeah, he proved that neuroplasticity is real. And when I'm, my cognitive enhancement book is based on that. So we've believed all sorts of nonsense. Here's what's happening with autism and Asperger's, especially the higher functioning stuff.
54:42 Speaker 01 Something happens environmentally that lowers mitochondrial output dramatically. And you can measure that and we find this autistic kids. So now you have a low power brain. It just can't make enough electricity to do what a normal brain should do. And then because of autoimmune inflammatory stuff, which can be caused by many different things, the signals that come into the brain are staticky. So eyes don't work right. Ears don't work right. Touch doesn't work right. Right? So now you have a low power brain trying to make sense of the signals in the world around you. But the signals are dirty and it's low powered. So you become really good at low power pattern matching. So what did I do? I fixed my mitochondrial networks and that gave me a huge amount of energy. And then I went through and I fixed my nervous system.
55:27 Speaker 01 So now I have a clean signal coming in. And then the hardest part was teaching my brain how to process the clean signal. And that took several years and I wouldn't be able to do without neurofeedback. I'm reprogramming my hearing and my eyes was so hard to do. But it is possible. It's just hard. And I know dozens of parents who've fully healed their kids from autism. It just takes a lot of work.
55:50 Graham Stephan? What about for the autistic or kids with Asperger's who are just really smart though?
55:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
55:54 Graham Stephan? Like they excel, like maybe Elon Musk, who said that he's had Asperger's or has Asperger's.
56:00 Speaker 01 Well, you don't lose the pattern matching. See, that's the gift. So my brain evolved in a low power environment. It learned how to process that. And even studies of Einstein's brain, it's not that it was bigger. It's that it was more efficient. So my brain through suffering learns to be hyper efficient at recognizing patterns, which is why I was able to create biohacking. Why I can, I'm a futurist. Like that thing I did in my twenties, I'm the first guy to sell anything over the internet. Like my, Dave, you weren't fat. I'm like, well, here's my picture from Entrepreneur Magazine when I'm 23. And that article about, hey, guys, this kid's selling T-shirts over the enter something or another. Have you heard of it? Like the words e-commerce. I knew that was happening because my brain does that. I still have that, but now I can make eye contact.
56:45 Speaker 01 I have social networks. I've got all my emotional stuff that works and I generally move pretty well. Although there's a couple of little movement patterns I haven't quite hacked yet.
56:54 Graham Stephan? You were one of the first people to sell something on the internet, right?
56:57 Speaker 01 I was the first person. The second one was the guys who ran virtual vineyards and the internet at the time was Usenet. We hadn't invented the browser yet.
57:07 Jack Selby? And you were selling the coffee T-shirt.
57:08 Speaker 01 Said caffeine, my drug of choice. It had this molecule on it.
57:12 Jack Selby? Caffeine is my drug of choice.
57:13 Speaker 01 Yep.
57:14 Jack Selby? Mine too.
57:15 Speaker 01 Exactly. I'm at least consistent on that.
57:18 Jack Selby? How, how did you make six million by 26 and lose it by 28, though?
57:22 Speaker 01 Well, I knew that the internet was going to be a thing because I'd been on it since I was studying computer science and all that. First mover advantage kind of thing. So I went to Silicon Valley and I made a resume that said internet on everything. And I got two job offers. One was for the company that made the first internet data center. Google was two guys and two computers. Hotmail started there. The Facebook was eight servers started there. I helped Salesforce when they were eight people. So we built 42 data centers and grew to, let's see, to 5,000 employees in three years. And the part of the business I started did 100 million a quarter in revenue.
58:04 Speaker 01 So my stock options were worth $6 million. And that was awesome. Then there was a crash in the market because WorldCom lied about internet traffic and a bunch of financial nonsense. But the company went bankrupt because I attended board meetings and I was high enough up, I was blacked out. It was illegal for me to trade my shares. So I watched my wealth evaporate from $80 a share to $5 a share and less. So that was, it was horrible. But here's the thing. I was miserable and anxious all the time and had terrible brain fog. I had arthritis since I was 14. And I'm like, I just, I want to be happy. I want to do the things I'm supposed to do. So I tried being famous. I was in Entrepreneur Magazine, all these other things
58:46 Speaker 01 about early business on the internet. And then I tried getting married in my twenties. That didn't last very long. That was not a good thing for happiness. And then I tried being rich. And I completed all of those before I was 28. And when I had $6 million, I looked at a friend and I said, I'll be happy when I have 10. And I didn't understand dopamine. I didn't understand brains. Because pursuing things makes you happy. Getting them never makes you happy. It's provable. Right? So happiness is an internally generated state that's irrespective of what's happening in the world around you. So the real game that we're all playing is how do we change our state at will? Because you want to be the person who can meditate in the middle of a storm. You want to be able to say, you know
59:31 Speaker 01 what? The economy is doing this. Social media is doing that. The government is doing this. And it didn't affect my internal state at all. So I'm going to do what I'm going to do. And you say, I like what happened. I didn't like what happened. Didn't affect my internal state. Because that's how you have the most power to change the world. That lets you show up for your friends and your family and your community. Not being programmed, not being triggered, just being present and being thoughtful and being in charge of yourself. So why was I working in 90 hour weeks back then?
1:00:03 Speaker 01 Because I was convinced it would make me free and happy. It doesn't do that. And I also was convinced that it would finally show the bullies from seventh grade that I'm better than you. That's not my motivation anymore.
1:00:16 Jack Selby? So what were like the next steps that actually started this healing journey of like where your body was in a rough shape? Your brain was in a rough shape. What were the first things that you actually started to see made an improvement?
1:00:29 Speaker 01 The first thing was I was desperate. I bought disability insurance when I was 25. I'm like, I wouldn't hire myself. My brain is failing. My doctor says everything is fine. Everything is not fine. I don't know what to do. So I started doing all the things that that I didn't believe in because I already tried antibiotics every month for 15 years for the stuff going on. I'd always get strep throat and sinus infections. I had toxic mold. I didn't know it. I decided I was going to spend 20% of my earnings, which were pretty sizable during some of that time, on fixing my biology. And one of the things that happened, I was going to Wharton Business School. I was failing out of my classes. So I went to a psychiatrist and I'd read Dr. Daniel Amen's first book about brain scans.
1:01:14 Speaker 01 And this is not the kind that I do at 40 years of Zen. This is a, it's called a spec scan to figure out where's metabolic activity happening. And I went into one of his doctors and said, I want to scan. And he said, oh, tech bro wants Adderall. I know this game. And he said, fine, we'll get you a scan. And I come back in a week later after they've injected this radioactive sugar. And he looked at my brain and he just kind of, his face is white. And he says, Dave. Inside your brain is total chaos. I don't know how you're standing here in front of me right now. You have the best camouflage I've ever seen. By camouflage, what he meant was humans, when we are sick or weak or struggling, we're wired to not show it to others because
1:01:55 Speaker 01 we might get kicked out of the tribe. Some other animals like cats, like if they're sick, they'll run away and go die in a tree so they don't get the other cats sick. Humans aren't like that. So there's people you know right now that are absolutely tapped out. They have the accelerator pinned to the floor all the time and they're slowing down and they feel helpless. There's nothing they can do. That was me. So that was the thing. And when he, when he said that, I was like, finally, someone believes me. And I started taking smart drugs, actually before that, that were helping. And he got me the drug that I actually had come to him for, which is called modafinil, which is an off-label treatment for ADHD, but I was dealing with chronic fatigue, not ADHD. And I learned what causes chronic fatigue, and I learned how to reverse it. And
1:02:39 Speaker 01 so I don't have it anymore. And I have an incredibly powerful and fast brain that I never had in my twenties or thirties. And it's doable for anyone. It just requires curiosity, and it requires data, and it requires systems thinking, which is my gift.
1:02:55 Graham Stephan? Was that the drug that Limitless was based off of?
1:02:58 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:02:58 Graham Stephan? How close is modafinil to Limitless?
1:03:01 Speaker 01 When you take it, if you're paying attention, modafinil will slightly change the saturation of color. So if you watch Limitless, every time he's on the drug, everything turns kind of green. There is a shift in color perception from it. And I warn people, if you're a dick, modafinil will make you a faster dick, right? It makes you more, and it makes it easy to focus and to get things done. But it's not a stimulant, even like coffee or like Adderall or something. It's a different feeling. And it is one of the most studied drugs. It actually does raise IQ. It increases reaction time, or sorry, decreases reaction time, makes you faster. And it has very few side effects. So if it works for you, 20% of people don't really feel it. But if it
1:03:45 Speaker 01 works for you, it's kind of magic. And I've been on a low dose of that stuff pretty much every day for 20 something years now. And it's totally worth it.
1:03:56 Graham Stephan? How do you, is it, it's safe?
1:04:00 Speaker 01 Well, we've known about it since the mid 90s. It's been very well studied. It has very few side effects. It's much safer than statins. It's safer than antidepressants.
1:04:09 Graham Stephan? So why isn't everyone doing it?
1:04:11 Speaker 01 Well, there are a lot of people doing it. How many entrepreneurs do you think are not on it?
1:04:14 Graham Stephan? I don't know a single person is. I mean, maybe just they do and they just don't tell us.
1:04:19 Speaker 01 So I was concerned about that. So at Wharton, I'm like, guys, I don't want to be accused of doping. So I would actually put my modafinil and my prazetam, my other smart drugs. Cause cognitive enhancing drugs really do work. And so do the supplements. I make them today, but I'd put them on the desk in front of them. I'm like, guys, I'm not breaking any rules, but I'm on these substances. And I don't think I would have graduated from business school without nootropics. It really made a difference.
1:04:40 Graham Stephan? What do you think of Magic Mind?
1:04:43 Speaker 01 Boost energy and focus, crush procrastination. See what's in here? Nootropics, matcha, adaptogens. I love adaptogens. This is really small. Um, let's see, some olive oil, cool. Ashwagandha, I like that. That's good stuff. Bacopa, really good for dopamine. Rhodiola, one of my top all time adaptogen favorite things. Got some turmeric, lion's mane, fossil serine. I like this ingredient list. I just don't know how much of it's in there. Like, how much rhodiol are you really getting? I do a couple of capsules of it and lion's mane can be really powerful. Um, L-theanine, natural caffeine, vitamin C. So I, it looks like a great list.
1:05:26 Speaker 01 Saffron, I just want to see the amounts of each one. Like saffron is better than antidepressants.
1:05:32 Graham Stephan? So I've heard the same thing as you. It really comes down to the amounts. And I've, I've heard maybe something like they don't share the amounts because they don't want other people to, to copy their exact recipe of how they do it. I've been drinking these usually before the podcast. It's like an energy shot and then they sponsored us and I've just been curious about it.
1:05:50 Speaker 01 It's got natural caffeine in it. It's going to make you feel good.
1:05:52 Graham Stephan? Yeah.
1:05:53 Speaker 01 Unquestionably. And since you don't know how much caffeine, it could be 200 milligrams.
1:05:56 Graham Stephan? This is 60, 60 milligrams.
1:05:58 Speaker 01 So it's about a shot of espresso worth.
1:05:59 Graham Stephan? Yes.
1:06:00 Speaker 01 So that's going to help you on a podcast. I understand the desire to have proprietary blends and I've done it myself. Uh, because you're so tired of these knockoff clowns doing it at the same time. A serious biohacker. Like, I know how much rodeo I take every day. And given the volume of that thing, unless it tastes really bad.
1:06:21 Graham Stephan? Some people don't like it. I like it, but I like bitter things.
1:06:24 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:06:25 Graham Stephan? So I would say it's kind of like a mixed bittersweet.
1:06:28 Jack Selby? I like it. It tastes very, like, kind of a little sour, like very probiotic.
1:06:31 Graham Stephan? Punch it.
1:06:32 Speaker 01 Okay, I would like that kind of a taste. And so it's a great ingredient list. I would just want to know, am I taking too much of one of those with all the other stuff I take? Or is it the right amount? So what I would like to see them do is if someone reached out to customer support or something, most companies will say, all right, here's what's in there. And guys, if the people making Magic Minds see this, anyone who wants to copy it can take it to a lab and break it down easy enough. So like, it's a, it's a pro and con thing, but for people who are going to be taking things, I worry, like, people throw vitamin B6 in everything. I didn't see B6 in that, which is good. The form of B6 that we use is not even good for you. It creates problems for people because it's an unnatural form. But if it's in every supplement and every energy drink,
1:07:17 Speaker 01 you're going to get like numb feet and hands from that because you don't know how much you're getting. So I like to know what I'm taking, but I really like their ingredient list.
1:07:24 Graham Stephan? Cool. Yeah, we've been taking this. I usually take it with us when we travel. It's a part of the podcast. So if you guys are interested, we do have a link in the description and I'll reach out to them. I'll see if we can find out the doses.
1:07:35 Speaker 01 It's a good idea.
1:07:36 Graham Stephan? I like it.
1:07:36 Speaker 01 And I understand not putting on the bottle. Just if someone asks their customer support, I would hope that they would, they would say what it was. And just third time saying it, it is, I didn't see anything on there I don't approve of on the ingredients list. So it looks like it's a good combination.
1:07:49 Graham Stephan? What's the craziest biohack that you've tried?
1:07:52 Speaker 01 Hmm. I've had my bone marrow taken out while I'm awake to get my stem cells.
1:07:58 Graham Stephan? How painful is that?
1:07:59 Speaker 01 It's not very painful.
1:08:01 Jack Selby? I've heard that's like the most painful thing.
1:08:04 Speaker 01 They put lidocaine on it. The reason people say it's painful is it's scary, but it's not really painful. So like being burned is painful. This isn't like that. The weird thing is, you know that, that fingernails on a blackboard sound?
1:08:16 Jack Selby? Yeah.
1:08:17 Speaker 01 Imagine that coming from your skeleton, all of your skeleton. It's so creepy, but it's not pain. It's just the weirdest sensation you've ever felt. And you could easily like freak out about a weird sensation. But it's, wasn't that, there was that. I also.
1:08:30 Jack Selby? What did you do with the marrow?
1:08:32 Speaker 01 Blended into my coffee, obviously. No, I got the stem cells.
1:08:36 Graham Stephan? Put on top of the steak.
1:08:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, I got the stem cells out and injected them into old injuries for longevity.
1:08:41 Graham Stephan? And did it work?
1:08:42 Speaker 01 It helped. However, there's much more powerful stem cell stuff. I go down to a place in Costa Rica called RMI now, and they're the ones who reset my central aging clock. And I've had every joint in my body injected with stem cells twice. Because I would like to have those same joints when I'm 180. So preventative main.
1:08:59 Graham Stephan? When is the right time to start injecting stem cells?
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1:11:31 Graham Stephan? When is the right time to start injecting stem cells?
1:11:35 Speaker 01 The right time to harvest and bank your stem cells is right now. Because if you get your stem cells and you freeze them, they can grow new stem cells from your 35 year old stem cells. And then when you're 135, you still have young stem cells. That is a gift if you do that. And do you need to do it? If you have an injury, you should start, you should use the stem cells to heal the injury. So most of the time you're 35, there's a time you're playing soccer or biking and your shoulder got injured, your knee or something. Those things that are just like annoying now, if you don't do something about them, if you wait 15 years, those are the things that are likely to stop you from having functional movement over time. So you've got to really be aggressive about healing.
1:12:14 Jack Selby? How many times do you need to collect stem cells?
1:12:17 Speaker 01 Just once if you bank them.
1:12:19 Graham Stephan? And what does it mean banking?
1:12:20 Jack Selby? How much does it cost? Where do you go?
1:12:22 Speaker 01 You go down to RMI. The reason that I go there is that procedure where they suck it out of your marrow. That is a big deal. RMI developed a procedure where they can use a pharmaceutical that causes the stem cells going to your blood and they just take them out of your blood. So I have 2 billion of my marrow cells banked, which is way more than we could have sucked out of my marrow anyway. And we'll be gene editing those and reintroducing them with superpowers so that I can get even younger and more powerful.
1:12:48 Graham Stephan? That sounds expensive.
1:12:51 Speaker 01 It's gonna, if you wanted to inject every injury you had and do your brain and do your face and while you're at it, might as well do your dick. It's going to run about 50 grand.
1:13:00 Graham Stephan? For everything?
1:13:02 Speaker 01 Yep.
1:13:02 Graham Stephan? And you said they can take it from blood?
1:13:05 Speaker 01 They can now, yeah.
1:13:07 Graham Stephan? So they don't need to drill in a bone, they could just-
1:13:09 Speaker 01 No, the drilling in the bone was definitely inexperienced.
1:13:12 Graham Stephan? Is one more or less effective than the other, like marrow versus bone or versus blood?
1:13:17 Speaker 01 Those actually are marrow cells in the blood. You can also get stem cells from your fat. It's just a different kind of stem cell. So if you go down there in one week, it's actually five days. They do all of that stuff. They'll get your fat cells, they'll get your marrow cells without going into your marrow. So you take a drug, makes your bone marrow spit the stem cells out into your blood. Then they just harvest them from your blood, which is easy. They filter it out.
1:13:38 Graham Stephan? Not safe?
1:13:39 Speaker 01 Oh, it's totally safe.
1:13:40 Graham Stephan? It seems like that's not safe to like have your bone marrow excreting stem, like stem cells into your blood while they extract that.
1:13:47 Speaker 01 Oh, it's totally safe. Increase, so your, your bone marrow is supposed to be making stem cells all the time. That's its job. So they just have a pharmaceutical protocol with a well-known drug that does that.
1:13:57 Graham Stephan? Can you use someone else's bone marrow, not bone marrow, but stem cells?
1:14:01 Speaker 01 It's really sketchy to do stem cells in the US because they usually take umbilical cells from like eight random women. And they say, oh, we tested them. And I know someone who's active in that industry who used his own product and almost died. Couldn't walk for six months. So I'm concerned about viral stuff. So I don't use other people's stem cells unless it's from a single person and it's culture expanded. And that's illegal in the US. The FDA won't let you do it. So I go to Costa Rica and I get it done.
1:14:30 Graham Stephan? Why is it illegal in the United States?
1:14:32 Speaker 01 Because the FDA hates you and wants you to die. At least they did before RFK came in.
1:14:35 Graham Stephan? Why? What's the benefit for the FDA not to allow or-
1:14:40 Speaker 01 As a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Pharma, the FDA does not want things that work. They want things that drive you to buy new drugs instead of old drugs or natural cures. And it's been that way for a very long time.
1:14:54 Graham Stephan? So what do you think are the most over- Or prescribe drugs right now?
1:14:57 Speaker 01 Statins and antidepressants.
1:14:59 Graham Stephan? How could you cure depression?
1:15:01 Speaker 01 Well, one of the easiest ways to cure many types of depression would be darkness. Get rid of bright lights at night and get some sunshine in the morning in your eyes. Circadian disruption is behind a huge amount of depression. And the second thing would be ketamine, which is one of the chapters in Heavily Meditated. Even a single dose of ketamine under medical circumstances with integration, it works on treatment-resistant depression. That's why about almost a year ago, we added ketamine to Forty Years of Zen. It's the world's first psychedelic-assisted neurofeedback program, where optionally you can come up, spend five days. We use a little bit of ketamine to create neuroplasticity in the brain.
1:15:42 Speaker 01 So your brain can form new connections more quickly while you're doing this training to reset your operating system.
1:15:47 Graham Stephan? So I want to give you some biohacks and I want you to tell us how effective they are from one to 10. 10 being very effective, one being not at all, it's not even worth it. Infrared light therapy.
1:15:59 Speaker 01 10.
1:16:00 Graham Stephan? Keto diet.
1:16:02 Speaker 01 Six.
1:16:03 Graham Stephan? Sleep tracking.
1:16:04 Speaker 01 Just tracking it? Hmm, four, but hacking it's a good thing.
1:16:08 Graham Stephan? Grounding.
1:16:09 Speaker 01 That's surprisingly a seven.
1:16:12 Graham Stephan? Stem cells.
1:16:12 Speaker 01 Those are a 10 if they're done right.
1:16:14 Graham Stephan? Cryotherapy.
1:16:16 Speaker 01 That's about a seven.
1:16:18 Graham Stephan? Electrodes in your head for neurofeedback.
1:16:21 Speaker 01 In your head or on your head?
1:16:22 Graham Stephan? On your head.
1:16:23 Speaker 01 Okay, yeah, so not Neuralink. So neurofeedback, if it's the right protocols, like the stuff that we've been doing, that's 10 out of 10. It's the most effective thing I've ever done. But there are some types of neurofeedback that don't do anything.
1:16:33 Graham Stephan? Meditation.
1:16:35 Speaker 01 Four and a half.
1:16:36 Graham Stephan? IV drips.
1:16:38 Speaker 01 Depends what's in it, but they can be 10 or they can be one.
1:16:41 Graham Stephan? Cold plunges.
1:16:43 Speaker 01 Seven.
1:16:44 Graham Stephan? Intermittent fasting.
1:16:45 Speaker 01 That's probably an eight.
1:16:47 Graham Stephan? If someone wants the 80/20 and just get 80% of the results with 20% of the effort, what would your recommendation be in terms of biohacking?
1:16:55 Speaker 01 All right, a little bit of self-serving here.
1:16:57 Graham Stephan? Yeah.
1:16:57 Speaker 01 You should come into Upgrade Labs. This is my company that does that. We've got 30 locations opening, nine already open across the US and Canada. And we have someone come to your house and draw blood and get your labs. And you come in and we get 187 million data points over the course of the year. And based on what your goals are, which are different for different people. And based on the state of your biology, we recommend a bunch of different biohacks in the right order to get you the results. A combination of supplements and red and infrared light therapy with specific frequencies or cryo or a bunch of things people haven't even heard of. And the results we're seeing are profound. It's just, it's not the same for everyone. Like, here's an example.
1:17:42 Speaker 01 If I were to ask you, what does it mean to be healthy? What does it mean to you?
1:17:47 Graham Stephan? I would say waking up energized, feeling happy and energetic throughout the day, and then falling asleep quickly at night.
1:17:56 Speaker 01 So for you, it's energy and sleep?
1:17:57 Graham Stephan? Really, yeah.
1:17:58 Speaker 01 Okay. What does healthy mean to you?
1:18:00 Jack Selby? I would say motivation and energy levels.
1:18:05 Speaker 01 Motivation and energy, got it. So if I were to ask another person, they'd say, I just want my knees to stop hurting. Right? And for someone else, it could be, I want my libido back. And someone else, I need to manage stress better. Or I want to lose the weight, or I want to put on muscle, or I want cardiovascular endurance. I don't have that anymore. And it turns out that after starting the first biohacking center under Arnold Schwarzenegger's office about 11 years ago now, which is now Upgrade Labs, there's buckets. And we use a survey. Because the problem is, if you wanted to buy a laptop right now, you want a laptop with a 500-inch screen that weighs one ounce and has a two-week battery life and infinite memory.
1:18:50 Speaker 01 But it's not possible, right? So we all want all of those goals, but you want some of them more than others, and you don't know which ones you want more than others. So we use statistical analysis and AI to Figure out your actual stack of prioritization and we use that as the inputs to say, okay, if your true goals are these, what are we going to do to personalize it? And since you're both different biologically, right? Your starting points are different and it's the personalization that makes it happen. So it could be that for your energy, we're like, oh, you've got some nutritional stuff that was easy to pick up. So let's get you on some vitamin D and some minerals and all of that. And then we're going to affect your energy with one set of technologies.
1:19:32 Speaker 01 And for you, we might say, you know, you actually have pretty good mineral levels right now. We don't need to worry about that for you. So we're going to do this tech and then this stack and you're both going to get your goals, right? But if yours was more motivation, we're going to recommend something like I have a dopamine supplement called motivation 101. I'd be like, that should be the one for you, for you. I'm not going to do it because of what we talked about earlier. I'm going to put you on brain 101 because you're working more on your memory. So different goals, different starting points and this rich set of technologies. So for people listening, you'll never do all of the bio hacks. I have done almost all of them because it's my job and because I'm willing to spend unlimited amounts of money on this. And what I want people to understand, you read any of my books, especially heavily
1:20:16 Speaker 01 meditated, you're going to go through it and go, yeah, there's like 75 different things here, but that one stood out. And that's what intuition is about. You're going to say, oh, that makes sense. I want to do that. Right? So for you guys, I'd be like, you better get your testosterone and your thyroid levels. Everybody needs those just as a starting point. That's probably the easiest thing to do for most people. The amount of people with subclinical hypothyroidism right now is insane and that means your body won't make enough energy. No wonder you're stressed and tired and anxious and you can't sleep. Your thermostat is turned too low and you try to push the accelerator and there's nothing in there because you're limited. So you fix that. And then we look at your testosterone. Oh, that's low because you're alive for almost all of us is low. So then we fix that with lifestyle or with medications or with nutritional supplements,
1:21:01 Speaker 01 whatever it takes to get your levels where they should be for a healthy 25 year old. And we pin them there. So when you're 125, you still have a 25 year old's level of energy and motivation. And from there.
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1:22:08 Speaker 01 This guy's the limit. Do you want to train your brain? Right? Do you want to train some other thing in your body?
1:22:13 Jack Selby? Let's just say, though, that you're a viewer with maybe like 200 bucks and you're like, you know what? I really just want to spend some money to get the right supplements, to get a red light or maybe a sleep mask.
1:22:24 Speaker 01 Gotcha. Okay. $200 budget. First thing you do is you go to Amazon and you buy some cheap red LED light bulbs. And then at night, as soon as the sun goes down, the lights in your house are red. And you take another 20 bucks and you buy blackout curtains. And in your bedroom, it needs to be pitch black, no light leaking around the curtains and no LED lights. Tape them over inside your bedroom. There's a study out of Japan that shows that the amount of street light that leaks around curtains in the average city increases depression by 69%. So we have a circadian problem. These are one-time changes you make. Okay, I have dimmer switches and/or red lights in the evening and I have a blacked out
1:23:08 Speaker 01 bedroom and you will find your entire life changes because now when you sleep, your body actually does what it's supposed to do. And right now, if you look at a bright screen, you have the bathroom lights on for five seconds, it doesn't matter. The timing system in your brain, in all of history, there's never been bright white lights in the middle of the night. We had a full moon and we had fire and that was it. And so when you turn on those bright kitchen or bathroom lights or whatever. The timing system goes, it must be daytime. And then it starts turning things on that are supposed to be turned off. And it's driving depression and anxiety and drops in hormones and all kinds of weird stuff. It's easy to fix and it's way less than 200 bucks.
1:23:46 Jack Selby? So you're saying optimizing sleep, basically?
1:23:48 Speaker 01 Optimizing light is more important than sleep. And don't wear sunglasses during the day outdoors. They're bad for you.
1:23:54 Jack Selby? And that's just because you don't want to trick your brain into when being, when you should be on or off or alert or not?
1:23:59 Speaker 01 Light is a nutrient that's as important as food. And it's like, we just put junk lighting everywhere. It's like we replaced all of your food with Twinkies and that's what LED lights are.
1:24:08 Jack Selby? Why did you say that people that sleep for six and a half hours live the longest?
1:24:12 Speaker 01 Cause that's what the data shows in three large studies of more than a million people over multiple years.
1:24:16 Jack Selby? How would the data show that? A lot of, like, I feel the best when I get like eight and a half hours of sleep. Maybe nine hours of sleep. Like the next day, my mental acuity, my CPU is functioning at a quicker pace and I just feel better. I can hit the gym harder.
1:24:35 Speaker 01 That makes absolute sense. I am not recommending that you cut your sleep to six and a half hours. That's terrible. What the data really shows is that healthy people need less sleep to recover. So if you wake up fully recovered in six and a half hours, great. If you need eight and a half hours to fully recover, either you're working out really hard or some systems aren't optimized. So if you just wake up fully refreshed, feeling like your CPU got the upgrade and you did it in six and a half hours? That would be better than eight and a half, right? That would be the goal, but do not cut your sleep back to try and live longer. That's a terrible strategy. The data is very clear though.
1:25:09 Jack Selby? It's more causation then? Is like, if you are healthy, then you just need less sleep.
1:25:14 Speaker 01 Correct.
1:25:15 Jack Selby? The sleep is kind of the metric that they use to reverse engineer.
1:25:18 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:25:19 Jack Selby? Okay.
1:25:19 Speaker 01 Right? The data is very clear though. People who sleep eight hours, eight and a half hours, they die more from all cause mortality, meaningfully more than people who sleep seven hours.
1:25:27 Jack Selby? So how do you get the perfect?
1:25:28 Graham Stephan? Perfect night of sleep.
1:25:30 Speaker 01 This is awesome. The short answer that is free, it's just go to sleepwithdave.com. And everything I know about sleep is there. I just needed a URL.
1:25:40 Graham Stephan? What sort of website is this?
1:25:41 Speaker 01 It's my OnlyFans. No, it's a, it's just the most memorable marketing URL of my entire life and it makes me laugh every time I say it. But yeah, sleep with Dave has all this stuff on it. And again, I'm not selling anything.
1:25:50 Graham Stephan? Jack has sleepwithjack.com.
1:25:52 Speaker 01 Nice.
1:25:53 Graham Stephan? It's just a form you can fill out.
1:25:53 Jack Selby? Ten bucks, guys.
1:25:54 Speaker 01 Nice. The, um, the short version to get good night's sleep, have dinner before the sun goes down. That's critical. Don't have any calories after that. And then have darkness after the sun goes down. And I'm staying in a hotel here in Vegas, so I have glasses that we created for sleep that tell the brain it's nighttime, even though we can see it. So I was at a, uh, out at a casino last night. I'm wearing glasses there. They look like they're red, but there's multiple layered optical filters. It's called True Dark. And those things we published in a medical journal that 15 minutes of wearing those shifts the brain into the same state as advanced meditation.
1:26:34 Speaker 01 So if you want to go to get a good night's sleep, you need darkness or red light before bed. You need a lack of food before bed. And when you lay down for sleep, you want to set your thermostat to 68 or less because cold is a signal to tell your body that it's time for sleep. And then you want to take a few deep breaths before you go to sleep and your out breath needs to be twice as long as the in breath. So you fill the lungs completely like, and then another one. So it's really full. And then you breathe out through the nose really slowly and do that three or four times. And that will cause your heart rate variability to be higher at night. If you do those things, you're probably going to get a good night's sleep.
1:27:15 Speaker 01 And there's a handful of sleep supplements that I talk about on that site that work for some people more than others. If you wake up at three or four in the morning routinely and you can't go back to sleep, you have a blood sugar issue, a little bit of raw honey and or MCT and or collagen before bed will fix that.
1:27:29 Graham Stephan? Yeah. So I was about to ask, I get up, it seems like almost every single night at like two to 2:30 in the morning. And it's usually, I gotta go pee.
1:27:38 Speaker 01 Yep.
1:27:39 Graham Stephan? And or I'll wake up briefly and I'm thinking to myself, I would feel better if I just went to the bathroom. To think about having to go to the bathroom and then I do and I go back to bed. But it's such a recurring thing. Why is that?
1:27:52 Speaker 01 When you go back to bed, uh, do you have racing thoughts or you just go back to sleep?
1:27:56 Graham Stephan? Usually go right back.
1:27:56 Speaker 01 Okay, good. So you just have a pee problem and you may have a little bit of prostate inflammation. So one thing is don't drink so much before bed. That would be a good thing, right? That could solve the problem, right? And in order to do that, having electrolytes in your water, having more salt.
1:28:10 Graham Stephan? Yeah. So I do L, uh, LMNT.
1:28:13 Speaker 01 Good.
1:28:14 Graham Stephan? In my water and I do one of those hydrogen tablets.
1:28:16 Speaker 01 Perfect.
1:28:17 Graham Stephan? Mixed with creatine.
1:28:18 Speaker 01 Great. Oh, that might be the issue. Creatine before bed is a big problem for some people.
1:28:23 Graham Stephan? That's usually when I do it.
1:28:24 Speaker 01 It's too stimulating. So I do creatine in the morning and there's great evidence for creatine.
1:28:28 Jack Selby? Creatine does wake me up a little bit.
1:28:29 Graham Stephan? Really?
1:28:29 Jack Selby? Yeah.
1:28:30 Graham Stephan? Usually I forget.
1:28:31 Jack Selby? If I take it before the gym, it can actually hype me up a little bit for the gym.
1:28:35 Graham Stephan? So I was looking online and said, nah, there's not really any correlation between when you take, as long as you take it.
1:28:39 Jack Selby? Depends on the person.
1:28:40 Speaker 01 It's funny when they do correlation studies versus mechanistic studies, I tend to like to know how things work. So because you have more ATP, what happens with creatine in many people, but not all, is it reduces sleep drive? So if I take creatine, I'm going to wake up at four AM and I don't want to go back to sleep and I get up. Now, that's not a good thing unless I got enough sleep, but if I don't take creatine that night, I won't do it. And there's ways to overcome that with supplements and things like that. But just shift your creatine timing, drink less water before you go to bed.
1:29:13 Graham Stephan? Usually what it is, not all the time, but usually between eight to 10 PM, I'll realize I didn't drink any water throughout the day.
1:29:20 Speaker 01 Oh, okay.
1:29:20 Graham Stephan? And so then I have a big glass, but it's not, but it's not all the time. And so even when I don't do that, I'm still waking up at two something.
1:29:27 Speaker 01 What you may find is that if you're waking up some nights having to pee urgently, not others, there's two things that are causing that. Uh, one of them is if you're eating plants that have high amounts of oxalate. Oxalate causes razor sharp calcium crystals in your urinary tract and it makes you have to pee. If you're getting toxins in your food, your body's like, let's eliminate those. So it makes you have to pee when your bladder's not full. So if you wake up and you have to pee and you only pee like a cup, that was dumb. That was your body getting rid of toxins. If you wake up and your bladder is full, then that was really having to pee. So toxins are what makes you have to pee before you really have a full bladder.
1:30:06 Jack Selby? I always experience like, like I feel like I have to be so bad. And then I go and I like hardly pee. I'm like, okay, this is weird because. That happens all the time. Every road trip we take, he's gotta pee like twice. True. On the road trips, it's because I just, I just, I'm always drinking something.
1:30:21 Speaker 01 So you're like the woman on the road trip.
1:30:23 Jack Selby? That's, that's not true at all. He's, he's worse because he doesn't drink anything. Like he's like a camel. It's actually, the amount of things this guy needs to survive is incredible. Very little. Yeah. He maybe, he could survive probably on like 700 calories and like half a pint of water a day.
1:30:39 Jack Selby? It's probably true. Yeah.
1:30:40 Speaker 01 That's hilarious.
1:30:41 Jack Selby? But for me, like, so it's, you're saying it's releasing toxins?
1:30:45 Speaker 01 Well, if you were to drink moldy coffee, let's just say, so I'm kind of famous for making coffee without mold in it. The mold that's found almost universally in American coffee is called OTA. It's the toxin. It survives roasting and brewing. I got 36 studies I didn't pay for that support what I'm saying. So that makes some coffee people mad. Sorry, guys. So if you drink coffee and then you have to pee an hour later and your bladder is empty. It's because OTA is a specific toxin for the kidneys and bladder. And the body is pulling water out of your blood. And it's diluting the toxin and it's giving you a signal to pee. And then you pee and there's nothing in there. Right? If you drink coffee that doesn't have mold in it, you don't have to pee afterwards. That's your signal. So one of them is mold. The other one is this oxalate thing.
1:31:30 Speaker 01 If you were to eat two big bowls of raspberries, some almonds, some spinach and kale. You're gonna have to pee really urgently because you just sliced up your urethra. And I've worked with so many people who have this problem. And it happened to me too, back when I was a raw vegan. I was eating one or two baskets of raspberries every day. I had to pee 20 times a day urgently and it drove me crazy. I went to a bunch of doctors, finally one stuck a camera in a place where cameras should not go on men. And they're like, we don't know. And I tracked it down after a year. It's oxalate in raspberries. So this is a common plant toxin and all these superfoods that people are eating, they're not superfoods. I'm very suspicious of plants. I do eat some plants.
1:32:11 Speaker 01 I just know which ones don't have the ability to make razor sharp crystals inside my urethra, because that sucks.
1:32:16 Jack Selby? So what are the worst foods that people could eat or that do eat?
1:32:20 Speaker 01 Aside from ultra processed nonsense and omega six oils and all that. Beets, spinach, most nuts.
1:32:28 Speaker 01 Kale, raspberries, and this pains me because I love them, sweet potatoes and white potatoes.
1:32:34 Graham Stephan? Why? Why sweet potatoes and white potatoes?
1:32:37 Speaker 01 They're high in oxalate and white potatoes are high in lectins. And unfortunately, sweet potatoes are better than white potatoes, but they're both very high in oxalate. So if you're going to eat a little bit of those on occasion, fine. But most people get such a large burden. Oh, and green tea and dark chocolate are also very high in oxalate. So most people are taking in so much that it's building up crystals throughout their bodies. Like, oh, my body hurts all the time. My muscles hurt. Eighty percent of people at autopsy today have calcium oxalate crystals in their thyroid. So this is something I wrote about this in the Bulletproof Diet in the first chapter. I under-indexed how important this is for aging and for function, for cognitive function, for having joints that work. So calcification of your tissues over time is something that's crappy as you age.
1:33:23 Speaker 01 This is a major driver of that, and it's easy to fix. Don't eat so many stupid plants.
1:33:27 Graham Stephan? So what's the best food for someone to eat if they're going to have a diet seven days a week?
1:33:32 Speaker 01 Crass fed ribeye. So I'm not a carnivore supporter in that I don't think most people should eat only meat for long periods of time. But I would say for someone listening, if you were to go carnivore for two to four weeks and watch all the things that improve in your life, that's a pretty clear signal that some of those plants are not good for you. So what do you do? Then you ask your favorite AI tool, which of the plants are lower in oxalate or other plant toxins? And it'll tell you. So I'll eat arugula. I'll eat lettuce. I'll eat some celery, but not too much, right? And I'll eat white rice, which has very low toxins in it.
1:34:11 Graham Stephan? What about broccoli?
1:34:13 Speaker 01 Broccoli's okay. I wouldn't eat massive tons of it unless you have a problem with sulfur metabolism, which a lot of people do. So if you eat broccoli and it doesn't make you fart, you're probably fine.
1:34:22 Graham Stephan? What about things like peppers, mushrooms, turkey, chicken?
1:34:27 Speaker 01 Peppers, I wouldn't eat them. They're delicious, but they're a nightshade vegetable. They have oxalates and they have very high levels of lectins. Some people tolerate them better than others, but they're not an ideal food. In fact, for most of recorded history, we believe that peppers and even tomatoes were deadly to even touch. So they were ornamental plants. Oh, we can eat those. So the cool thing about being human, you can eat all sorts of crap and survive, which is great during a famine. But if you regularly eat famine foods, toxins build up in your body and it takes a toll over time. I prefer to have animals detoxify the plants for me and then I eat the animals. So grass fed meat should be number one. Dairy protein, if you tolerate it.
1:35:11 Speaker 01 I do sheep because I don't tolerate cow very well. Dairy fat, olive oil and some plants. And like I just listed some of the common ones and some carbs. Eat some fruit, but not all fruit's great. Raspberries are not good. Blueberries are very good. Pineapple's not a great choice because of oxalate. Kiwi's not a great choice. If you eat one of them, it's probably not a problem, but a lot of people are eating huge amounts of fruit that never existed in all of human history. They're moderate in oxalate, relatively high in starch. They're not great.
1:35:42 Jack Selby? So it sounds like the ideal diet is really just grass fed beef with rice, blueberries.
1:35:50 Speaker 01 Some, add some arugula.
1:35:51 Jack Selby? Lettuce.
1:35:52 Speaker 01 Add a bunch of oregano and rosemary and herbs that are really good for you. If you ate that, you would live a very long time and be very happy.
1:36:00 Jack Selby? What about, I would say 75% of my days, I eat, I go to Chipotle. I get a bowl with white rice, black beans, double chicken, pico.
1:36:14 Jack Selby? Cheese and lettuce. That's it.
1:36:18 Speaker 01 Ditch the black beans. They're full of omega six fats.
1:36:23 Jack Selby? What about Pinto? Can I get the refried or the Pinto?
1:36:25 Speaker 01 Pinto are better than black. Black beans are one of the highest plant toxin forms of beans. I would say away from those, but I wouldn't want to eat very many beans either. I don't think they're pressure cooking them, are they? If you're gonna eat beans, they need to be pressure cooked, otherwise they just shred your biology. Most restaurants do not know how to cook that stuff. And beans are poverty food. They're great to survive on, but look at where beans were invented. Go down to Peru. I've been down there. The average height is like five feet because like you can survive on it, but it it's not enough protein. It's not a complete protein. I like your double chicken, but I'd rather do double steak.
1:36:57 Jack Selby? Have you ever done anything that was dangerous in terms of biohacking that you later found out or maybe wanted to push the limits a bit?
1:37:05 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. I've almost died a couple of times.
1:37:09 Jack Selby? How?
1:37:10 Speaker 01 Um, well, one time I did something called a hydrodissection of my vagus nerve. It's when they inject lidocaine around the vagal nerve in your neck and it floats it so it's not stuck to your tissues. And this is good for your sympathetic nervous system. But on, I will say the doctor had me leave the clinic much earlier than I should have. And on the way to the airport, I seized up in the back of an Uber, passed out and would have died if I didn't have an ER doctor riding the car with me who stabbed me with an EpiPen and saved me. And yes, I did pee the Uber seat. That was uncomfortable.
1:37:46 Jack Selby? What about anti-aging products? Are those mostly a scam or what's good? What's worth it?
1:37:52 Speaker 01 When you look in the world of longevity and anti-aging, I mean, I've, I've run a longevity nonprofit, I think from about 27 ish till about 32 in Palo Alto, learning from like the masters of the field before, before longevity was as big of a thing as it is now. There are enormous numbers of products that really work and there are enormous numbers of products that work for some people, but maybe not for you because of the personalization. And there are a bunch of scammers out there making stuff. So. You really can't say anti-aging products is like saying, does breathing work? Well, are you breathing exhaust or are you breathing clean air? They're different things, right?
1:38:32 Speaker 01 So I would say that there are profoundly effective longevity products with clinical studies that back them. One of my favorite companies there is called Qualia. And Qualia has way more researchers and scientists than most supplement companies. And I've held on some of their formulations and their stuff works. I mean, take it, you measure it and they only launch a product after they have clinicals that show it works. So I'd say there are legitimate products that truly work. And there are some people who are saying, well, I threw this crap together and I have a third party white label manufacturer, and I'm going to pretend like it's a good product. And this is a problem in every industry. Somebody makes something good and then somebody makes a crappy disposable version of it that looks about the same and sells a knockoff.
1:39:17 Jack Selby? And so what's, what's worth it for people to buy then? Like what specific things they want to either stay or reverse aging?
1:39:26 Speaker 01 What age are you?
1:39:27 Jack Selby? Me?
1:39:28 Speaker 01 Well, I mean, the first I'm asking for, because someone who's 65 and someone who's 25 should allocate their resources very differently. Right? So the lowest return or the lowest cost, highest return investment would be put some sea salt or some electrolyte in your water and have some creatine, because those are so cheap. Take vitamin DAK and that's vitamin DAK.com, D A K E. And that's a specific mix of fat soluble vitamins that direct minerals into yourselves. And on that same site, take minerals 101, because if you're deficient in minerals and fat soluble vitamins, nothing else works. You go to the gym, you can't make muscle because you don't have zinc. Right? So you just need to get these as foundational and everyone is deficient in minerals today because our soil is deficient. And because superfoods suck minerals out of your bones and it's dumb.
1:40:14 Speaker 01 So those are foundational for every one of those are cheap. Right? And you're saying, okay, what am I going to work on next? So you might want to look at a cognitive enhancing supplement like the brain 101 or like the Qualia product called Qualia Mind. Right? And then you might want to look at a sleep product, right? Because what is it you're trying to optimize? And the mistake people make is they just say, oh, I'm getting overwhelmed. There's just too many things to do. Pick a goal and work on that. Right? And take some supplements that do that. If you want foundational longevity stuff. My book, Superhuman, goes through the seven different systems in the body that need maintenance, if you want to live a long time, and which supplements or practices to use for each one. But some of them are very cheap, like intermittent fasting.
1:40:58 Speaker 01 It's cheaper than eating breakfast, so not eat breakfast. There you go. That's going to create autophagy in your cells. Right? So I'm very respectful of the amount of energy, the amount of suffering, the amount of time, and the amount of money that people are willing to do in order to get a benefit.
1:41:12 Jack Selby? And what about when it comes to something like tap water? When you're at a restaurant and they say, do you want tap or bottled?
1:41:19 Speaker 01 I just say, I want the glass bottle bottled water, because that has no microplastic in it to speak of.
1:41:26 Jack Selby? How bad is tap water for you?
1:41:28 Speaker 01 It's really bad.
1:41:29 Jack Selby? I've always been told it's good for you, because it has like, all the minerals in it. It's not like totally filtered. It has things in it that would be beneficial for you. I've always just drank tap water.
1:41:41 Speaker 01 So if we were to measure the tap water you're drinking, it does have dissolved minerals from 100-year-old plumbing with lead in it, with all the stuff from the PVC. There's abundant levels of atrazine, which basically makes frogs into hermaphrodites, and it messes with your testosterone in a major way. It has birth control pill residues left in it. It has antibiotics left in it.
1:42:07 Jack Selby? But are those in any amounts that will actually make a difference to you?
1:42:11 Speaker 01 Unfortunately, they are.
1:42:13 Jack Selby? So why can't that just be taken out by these tap water companies and just like run it through a filter?
1:42:18 Speaker 01 If they take it out at the central plant, it'd be very expensive. And then the pipes are not at all clean. So the best thing to do is get a reverse osmosis unit and take it out before you drink it. If you go to a restaurant, that's one of the many reasons not to go to restaurants. But if you're going to go to a restaurant, don't drink the tap water. Right? Either don't drink any water, which seems to be your thing, or drink bottled water.
1:42:40 Jack Selby? I drink very little water, but then the water I do drink is tap water. So is that, is that worse?
1:42:45 Speaker 01 It, it's not a good call to do it that way. Drinking water is good, but most people like eight glasses a day. Did anyone ever tell you how big glasses are?
1:42:54 Jack Selby? I was assuming it would just be like a cup.
1:42:57 Speaker 01 They never tell you. It's complete made up bullshit. And many people, they drink water because they think they're supposed to, and they're actually harming their performance. I don't drink water without salt or minerals in it ever. And it means I need less water and it means my brain works all the time. But if I drink two big glasses of water with no electrolyte in it, I can feel a difference in my performance. My body's like, you bastard, you just diluted all the salt in my cells and we're essentially salt batteries. So salt is profoundly good for you. And if you're gonna drink tap water, you should filter it, man. Like, why take the toxic hit?
1:43:27 Jack Selby? What do you think of Brian Johnson?
1:43:29 Speaker 01 You know, I knew Brian before he got into longevity because of his work with Kernel and neuroscience. And it's funny, my big campaign for my longevity book was I spent $2 million to reverse my age by 20 years. I'm gonna live to 180. And he's come out and I'm, I'm very happy that he's spent, reports say, $25 million on marketing the longevity movement. We need lots of voices in longevity. So generally, I like Brian. I don't do all the things he does. And I don't know that I like all the metrics he uses, that I have some different ones. But generally, inspiring people to do things that make them live longer is a really good thing.
1:44:09 Jack Selby? How do you eat when you're traveling?
1:44:12 Speaker 01 I bring 100 grams of animal protein powder with me when I travel because it's hard to get enough protein on the road. And then I usually intermittent fast in the morning. I make danger coffee in my own hotel room. And I have that for breakfast. Sometimes I'll put protein in it, which doesn't taste great, but I don't care. And then I'll eat one or two meals a day. Like today, I've had nothing but coffee. And it's, what is it, like 2:30? So.
1:44:39 Jack Selby? I've had nothing. Coffee today too.
1:44:41 Speaker 01 Before I get on.
1:44:41 Jack Selby? Nothing but a new tonic today.
1:44:43 Speaker 01 There you go.
1:44:43 Jack Selby? There you go.
1:44:44 Speaker 01 Before I get on the airplane, I'm gonna find somewhere that has steak and I'm gonna go eat probably a pound of steak and I'll get on the airplane and fly home. So that's my most important food is protein and fat and everything else is optional.
1:44:56 Jack Selby? How bad is alcohol for you?
1:44:58 Speaker 01 Alcohol's really bad for you. It is so pro cancer, pro aging. It's, it's just not a good choice. So I have a rule for alcohol. I only drink alcohol that's older than I am. That means it gets progressively more expensive and harder to find as I get older. So it's rate limiting. The reality though, like if I'm going to have sushi and I have a couple shots of high end sake with it, who cares? But if you're having it once a week, it's actually affecting your performance for multiple days. And everyone I know is like, you know, I'm gonna go a month without it. Like, wow, my life really did get better. But if you're gonna drink, there's a bunch of stuff I've put out there over the years. I put out a big infographic on alcohol.
1:45:42 Speaker 01 Distilled spirits are much less toxic than wine and beer. Because you're relying on technology to get out the impurities, but wine and beer, you're relying on your liver and kidneys to do it. And if you're gonna do it, you want to take glutathione, which is a supplement that protects the liver from alcohol induced toxicity. 20% of the toxic byproduct of alcohol comes from liver metabolism. The other 80% comes from your gut bacteria. To fix that, there's a genetically engineered probiotic called Zbiotic. And you take a little shot of that and for 24 hours. After you take that, your gut bacteria won't make those toxins from alcohol. So if you're gonna drink, number one, it's not a great idea, but drink the hard stuff.
1:46:24 Speaker 01 Take Zbiotic, take glutathione and take some extra electrolytes and you'll be fine.
1:46:29 Jack Selby? You do that after you drink?
1:46:31 Speaker 01 You do the Zbiotics ahead of time. You do the glutathione before, during and or after. And the electrolytes should be before, during and after.
1:46:39 Jack Selby? And how much of this is in your control?
1:46:43 Graham Stephan? Versus genetics. Cause some people just seem to have zero effect on alcohol. They they could just drink whatever they want to and they are fine the next day.
1:46:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, they call them alcoholics. So with those people, I mean, there are people like that, like they can't function without, you know.
1:46:58 Graham Stephan? Oh, no, I'm not saying can't function without, but like if I have more than two drinks.
1:47:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:47:01 Graham Stephan? I feel it the next day. I am tired. I'm lethargic. I I lose my motivation. It's not worth it. But other people could have 10 drinks and.
1:47:09 Speaker 01 When you were 26, could you do that?
1:47:12 Graham Stephan? Um, not really. It really started affecting me early, like way earlier than anyone else.
1:47:18 Jack Selby? I still feel fine. Like I maybe get hung over one out of every 10 times I drink.
1:47:27 Speaker 01 Most people until their mid twenties handle alcohol really well. It's still ruining your brain and there's plenty of studies about that. But you don't feel it yet because you have just a lot of resilience. So.
1:47:39 Speaker 01 There is a genetic difference. And there's also just a how good is your body at clearing toxins? And some of that's genetic, some of that is what else is in there? So let's say you stopped drinking tap water and you rehydrated your body so that your cells are better. Like if you came into upgrade labs, we'd look at your cell hydration and be like, ugh. And we'd show you what was going on and make it a a performance enhancement goal for you. So let's say you start doing your electrolytes in water, you know, three times a day. You might be much more resilient to alcohol. So there's a lot of environmental variables, but you might be Asian. You're not going to tolerate it because there's an Asian gene that makes you not do it. You might have MTHFR, which I do, or some other things that make it harder to process toxins. You could have a leaky gut. So the more problems you have, the worse alcohol is for you.
1:48:23 Speaker 01 But you have no problems to drink alcohol. It's still causing damage that we can prove and increasing your risk of cancer. So I would say instead of alcohol, you should do what we do in Austin. Like eat half a gram of mushrooms at a party. It's probably good for your brain. It's certainly better than alcohol for your brain and has much less of a downside.
1:48:41 Graham Stephan? How bad are fried foods for your brain?
1:48:44 Speaker 01 Depends what you fry them in. If they're fried in canola, soybean and corn and vegetable oils, they are so bad for your brain. I would actually smoke a cigarette before I'd eat a plate of french fries. Because the cigarette, even though it's burning stuff and is bad for your lungs, that only creates about eight hours of inflammation and you're going to get two days of inflammation from the french fries. I just don't eat fried stuff unless I fry it in my own oils.
1:49:07 Graham Stephan? But why are so many people using this sort of? Oils then.
1:49:10 Speaker 01 Cause they're cheap, right? Back in about, was it the early nineties? There's a big campaign from the canola oil and soybean oil companies like Crisco. And they're like, let's compete with tropical hard fats. Everyone used tallow because it was a very stable oil and tallow is really good for you. It gets rid of fatty liver. So all the french fries were made with that and people were fine. And they switched to these crappy oils and the obesity rates has been going up ever since. So they do it because it's cheap. I invested in a company called Zero Acre Farms about five years ago. That's doing a fermentation based oil that's entirely heat stable. That costs less than, um, costs less than soybean and canola oil.
1:49:54 Speaker 01 And assuming that their plan works, we should be able to free up millions of acres of prairie land in the U S. And return it back into just being nature instead of being row after row of corn with dead soil. So we have a big challenge ahead of us to fix our food supply. And one of them is we need a source of oil that doesn't go rancid when you cook it. And that means it needs to be saturated or at least monounsaturated. And we can do it with tech. We just have to have the motivation, which means we talk about the problem. What the big food industry does, they just try to say there's no problem despite all the evidence. And thank God there's enough other people sharing this. Vani Hari, Food Babe's a good friend. RFK is out there doing this.
1:50:34 Speaker 01 Cali Means, Jason Karp, these are all friends and we're out there changing the food supply right now. They just pulled all these petroleum dyes that had no business in food. They just announced they're going to fix that. So I'm a part of that small group of people who's just pushing and pushing and pushing on how do we fix this? And that oil has to change.
1:50:53 Graham Stephan? Yeah, I saw that bill that they're trying to ban food dyes.
1:50:56 Speaker 01 No, just petroleum based food dyes and some other toxic ones.
1:50:59 Graham Stephan? What is that?
1:51:00 Speaker 01 Nicotine.
1:51:01 Jack Selby? What is the, I, you know, it's so funny. I see a lot of people like Alex Hormozi. Yeah. He likes chewing nicotine gum because he says it, it helps him. Focus. Like, it's so funny because growing up, everybody learns that nicotine is like, well, maybe not nicotine in a vacuum. But like, you know, the way by which. Yeah, we all assume that nicotine is just really, really bad. So what do you have to say to like that?
1:51:27 Speaker 01 10 years ago, I found a guy named Dr. Nicotine, at least that's what I call him. His name's Andrew. He's from Vanderbilt University. He published the first study in 1986 showing that pharmaceutical nicotine, but not smoking, reverses Alzheimer's disease. And he's come out with like a dozen papers since then. And I've been sharing on the podcast, it's in my brain book, it's in my longevity book. Nicotine is neuroprotective. Nicotine mimics exercise in the body by enhancing PG C1 alpha. Nicotine was protective against COVID for a very specific reason. Nicotine helps with pericarditis. Nicotine reduces your risk or treats Parkinson's and MS in addition to Alzheimer's. It's a mitochondrial stimulant.
1:52:11 Speaker 01 And if I was going to get another tattoo, if this one's caffeine, this one would be nicotine. I don't smoke. Tobacco's not good for you. A low dose pharmaceutical nicotine is an amazingly effective longevity molecule and it's a major nootropic.
1:52:26 Jack Selby? Are there any downsides? Yeah. And do you feel like addicted to it? Like if you don't chew nicotine gum for like six hours, you're like, ah, you know, I kind of need to get my nicotine gum out. The scratch.
1:52:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:52:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:52:41 Speaker 01 So cigarettes are terribly addictive. And that's because they add a bunch of different compounds that increase addiction dramatically. Nicotine itself in multiple studies has a three day physiological washout period, same as caffeine. So you will feel physiological brain fog and nastiness if you're used to taking nicotine and you just stop cold turkey. If you want to stop, you just taper down. And I've done this, I don't know, five or six times, I go off it for a couple of months. My brain works so much better with nicotine. I love the stuff. And I consider it just part of my performance enhancement stack.
1:53:13 Jack Selby? So I don't do nicotine. I've never really tried nicotine.
1:53:16 Speaker 01 Want to try some now?
1:53:17 Jack Selby? No. There was one time where, where I was like, I was at a party and someone had this thing called snus.
1:53:24 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:53:24 Jack Selby? And they offered me some of that and I tried it and it was just way like, like it. I took it out after forty five seconds because it felt like it was burning a hole in my lip.
1:53:33 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
1:53:34 Jack Selby? And then I felt nauseous, like I felt like I was gonna get sick. And then I kinda started getting nervous and it was just a horrible, horrible experience.
1:53:42 Speaker 01 That's hilarious.
1:53:43 Jack Selby? And so like that's coming from someone I've never tried a zen, never had a cigarette. Like I've tried a couple cigars and stuff, but it was way too much and every experience that I've had really with nicotine, like it's not been a pleasant one.
1:53:53 Speaker 01 You may be someone who just doesn't benefit from it. Um, there are a few people like that. Um, it's also dose dependent and snooze is just, that's just a pouch.
1:54:06 Speaker 01 It's just the Swedish or Norwegian word for it. And.
1:54:09 Jack Selby? I got it from a Swedish person.
1:54:11 Speaker 01 There you go. I was married to a Swede for a long time, so. What's going on with that stuff is you're probably getting six or eight milligrams, which is a big dose for a first timer. And what I'm using right now is a three milligram. And I take half of it. So I'm getting one and a half milligrams of nicotine. A cigarette has up to twenty milligrams in it. So this is low dose. And if I quit taking it, I would feel tired for a few days. And my brain likes it. It, it literally protects your neurons.
1:54:41 Jack Selby? What do you think about taking small doses of Adderall?
1:54:45 Speaker 01 That's really not good for you.
1:54:46 Jack Selby? Why?
1:54:46 Speaker 01 Microdosing Adderall is just gonna mess with the neurotransmitters. It's just not a good beneficial drug. You're much better off to use modafinil.
1:54:53 Jack Selby? Where do you buy it?
1:54:55 Speaker 01 Modafinil?
1:54:55 Jack Selby? Yeah.
1:54:56 Speaker 01 Um, it's a prescription drug, so you go to the doctor and say, I have shift worker's sleep disorder because I have to stay up all night for my podcast. And can you please write it? And a good doctor will do it. If not, you just buy it from India, like everything.
1:55:06 Jack Selby? That's safe? Why do you buy it from India? Like go to, like.
1:55:10 Speaker 01 No, no, you can buy any pharmaceutical you want online.
1:55:12 Jack Selby? From India?
1:55:13 Speaker 01 Well, though India or Canada or somewhere, there's multiple sites.
1:55:16 Jack Selby? How do you, like, doesn't it get, you know, don't they stop it at the border and?
1:55:20 Speaker 01 The law in the US says really clearly, you can import a ninety day supply of any medication that's not illegal for personal use from anywhere on the planet.
1:55:29 Jack Selby? So it's not illegal for
1:55:31 Graham Stephan? It's it's I think it's more of a quality issue. I looked at this when I was getting finasteride. And I looked at how much it costs from India. It was like a fraction of what they're selling it for here. And I never wanted to do that just because I'm like, well, I'd rather pay more and at least know I'm getting
1:55:46 Speaker 01 Right.
1:55:47 Graham Stephan? The actual thing and not like, because I'd have no idea.
1:55:50 Jack Selby? You could have got some like thick Indian hair. That would have been nice.
1:55:53 Graham Stephan? Maybe that would have been a good thing, man.
1:55:55 Speaker 01 I gotta warn you about finasteride. Do you know about the side effects there?
1:56:00 Graham Stephan? I've seen some of the side effects, but I've not experienced a single thing.
1:56:03 Speaker 01 So I'm glad you're not experiencing them. A meaningful percentage, maybe as high as 5% of people who go on that stuff, get chemically castrated, like their sex hormones just go away. And it doesn't come back when you quit taking it. So.
1:56:18 Graham Stephan? Yeah, see, I've I went down that rabbit hole.
1:56:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:56:21 Graham Stephan? I tried it.
1:56:22 Speaker 01 And you're fine.
1:56:23 Graham Stephan? Zero difference.
1:56:24 Speaker 01 So I would just say topical minoxidil and caffeine is probably a better choice. And there's a new thing called One Skin that has a new peptide. They just launched it like I interviewed them about it two weeks ago. Forty percent more hair and 40% thicker hair in six months from their peptide that you just put on topically.
1:56:46 Speaker 01 So I would just be careful. When I, years ago, I tried a finasteride derivative. And I used it just topically on my hair for two weeks. Total ED after two weeks. I was like, what? I didn't know what it was. I'm like, what is going on here? And so I stopped it and took about six months to come back. It was it was scary. I was like, is this ever gonna come back? So just for anyone listening, if you try finasteride and you have any changes in your actions, you should stop that right away. Because you just don't want to be one of those 5%. There's whole Reddit forums full of people who are damaged by that. So it's risky.
1:57:22 Graham Stephan? Yeah.
1:57:22 Speaker 01 You're okay.
1:57:23 Graham Stephan? I went through the same thing, the same Reddit stuff. And then I talked to so many people who said they're on it. And not a single person knew anyone that had a side effect.
1:57:31 Speaker 01 Yep.
1:57:31 Graham Stephan? And it's just these online stories.
1:57:33 Speaker 01 Oh, it's hap- it does happen. It's actually documented in clinical studies. Like, I know doctors have treated people like that and I had that effect happen. It's real. And the actual incidence, it's hard to know the reporting. So up to 5% seems real. So if you know, if you know 100 people on it, do you think you even know that many people on it?
1:57:53 Graham Stephan? Probably twenty.
1:57:54 Speaker 01 Right. So maybe one person, right? Maybe that's me, right?
1:57:58 Graham Stephan? Could be that one.
1:58:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'm just, I'm just saying like, that's a hellish side effect. So for anyone who's listening, you should probably start with minoxidil and caffeine and adenosine. There's a bunch of stuff or one skin to put on your head. And then if it's still not working, add, add that new finasteride and then see if you have any changes.
1:58:19 Graham Stephan? It's called one skin?
1:58:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:58:22 Graham Stephan? And do you just buy that over the counter or is it like an India?
1:58:25 Speaker 01 No, they mail it to you. It's not even prescription, but the, the research is incredible.
1:58:29 Graham Stephan? And that's safe?
1:58:30 Speaker 01 Oh, it's totally safe. It's a peptide. Like it's a signaling. Very safe.
1:58:35 Graham Stephan? So why aren't more people using it?
1:58:36 Speaker 01 Cause it just got launched two weeks ago.
1:58:39 Graham Stephan? So then I feel like I'm being a guinea pig for this thing that just got launched.
1:58:42 Speaker 01 It's been in testing for two years and the peptide they're using has been used topically for about five years now. And I've interviewed their PhD biochemist a couple of times on my show. Over the years and what was happening is there's all these breakthrough innovations in longevity. And you just don't hear about it, but they're happening as all happening at the same time. So for that peptide to be discovered, they used AI. And they used just their background in biochemistry. They came out with 600 candidate molecules for stimulating collagen synthesis. They tested them on gene cell chips, like where they have actually skin cells growing on chips to see what happens when you do this. And they found this one peptide that they predicted would work was the top performer of 600.
1:59:27 Speaker 01 Then they ran clinical trials for a couple of years. Then they launched like facial stuff and body lotion. And then they ran clinical trials for two years on hair. So the best longevity companies are treating this almost like a pharmaceutical dev process. But they're not the only one. There's like dozens of companies looking at doing this internally, doing this all over. That's why this is the renaissance for longevity, for cognitive enhancement, for, for biohacking. Right? And that's just one little example. And if I can get a peptide with 40% more hair and 40% more thickness or a drug that might chemically castrate me. Well, the drug industry is going to be pissed. I don't want their drug, right? But I'd rather do a peptide. And so this innovation is just being unlocked. And then when it comes to the drugs. Why do you have to go to a doctor to get a permission slip for something that you
2:00:12 Speaker 01 already want or that you already take? And you pay the doctor and you're inconvenienced and the doctor's inconvenienced because it's a waste of their time too, but at least they get paid by the insurance company. Then you go to the pharmacist and beg for permission for the pharmacist to agree with whatever the doctor said to give you a little bottle of shit that you could have just had sent to your house. So right now, we're just breaking the chains of medical mafia behavior because you have a right to buy any drug you want because your biology is yours and you don't need your daddy or your mommy to tell you what you're allowed to take. Like that's, that's absurd.
2:00:41 Jack Selby? How important is strength training or cardio for longevity?
2:00:45 Speaker 01 Strength training is really important for longevity. VO2 max is important for longevity, but VO2 max doesn't mean you need to do cardio. And that's
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2:01:26 Speaker 01 It's a little bit weird. What I do for cardio is based on AI. It takes 15 minutes a week and that's three, five minute sessions. And in them, you never sweat. It's not hard. That gives you six times better results than an hour a day of cardio. So cardio respiratory fitness is important, but not as important as muscle strength and then muscle mass. Right? And there are some people out there saying, oh, VO2 max, you have to do zone two training for six hours a week. And those are actually the same people who take statins still for longevity, which is nuts. So what you'll find is that raising VO2 max is simple if you know the algorithms and we use AI for that. And strength training, once or twice a week, put on some muscle mass, be strong.
2:02:11 Speaker 01 And those are really important, but going to the gym for an hour a day every day is probably not even good for you. Most people overtrain and go to the gym every day. I see it over and over. This guy's like, I've been going for 20 years and I've had both shoulders replaced and I have a big pot belly. I'm like, yeah, that's a cortisol.
2:02:27 Jack Selby? I think that's a very small percentage of people that that go to the gym that often like that actually, you know, break down their muscles and.
2:02:34 Speaker 01 Oh, it's not because very few people go to the gym that often. The ones who do, that's what happens. Right? That happened to me too. I went 18 months, six days a week. At the end of it, I'm still fat. Right? And so overtraining is a major thing. So people either under train or they overtrain. And one of my, my goals here is to tell people, here's the minimum effective training that you can do in an hour or two a week that hits all of the things for longevity, including training your brain, training your strength, training your cardio in very small amounts of time. And it's all powered by AI. That's what Upgrade Labs does. Cause I don't want to spend my time in the gym. I got, I got shit to do, but I will if necessary.
2:03:11 Jack Selby? What about doing a dopamine detox?
2:03:13 Speaker 01 Oh, those are fun.
2:03:15 Jack Selby? Is there actually a benefit to doing this?
2:03:17 Speaker 01 Yeah. The guy who invented that is a friend, Cam, who runs Maximus, one of the testosterone enhancement companies. And manipulating dopamine is one of the things in heavily meditated that's particularly important. You could do no caffeine, no nicotine, no spicy or delicious foods and no stimulation for a week. You might as well go fast in a cave if you're going to do that. And there's benefits to it. But there's another hack that's new to the world of biohacking that I'm introducing in heavily meditated. And it's called bicep. And it's not like this kind of bicep on your arm. Brief intentional conscious exposure to pain. And this might be better than a dopamine fast. Monks used to whip themselves. Self flagellation. Have you heard of this? Yogi's lay on beds of nails.
2:04:02 Speaker 01 And I used to think, well, the monks think they're sinners. They're punishing themselves. The yogis are laying on beds of nails to prove they're good yogis. That's not why they do this at all. It's because. Brief intentional conscious exposure to pain for one to three minutes. If you do that without harming your body, it resets your dopamine sensitivity by about 250%. It means it takes less dopamine to motivate you for the rest of the day. So the monk was self flagellating because it made it easier to stay in monk mode. And the yogi did it because he was a better yogi because it took less dopamine to motivate him. And biohackers, we take a cold shower, get in ice water. Or Texans, which I also am, you eat some spicy peppers. Humans have been doing this forever and there's a rich history in all the different lineages I've studied.
2:04:47 Speaker 01 So doing something that's painful for two or three minutes, it works.
2:04:50 Graham Stephan? So is your recommendation the cold plunge of like something painful? Or should you like actually just be like to whip in yourself?
2:04:58 Speaker 01 Um, I like to hire people to whip me because it really just is more fun that way.
2:05:02 Graham Stephan? You're not, yes.
2:05:03 Speaker 01 You ever tried that?
2:05:04 Graham Stephan? How do you, are they a type one or two person?
2:05:07 Speaker 01 Um, you definitely want a win win scenario there. So you type one, I just ask my girlfriends.
2:05:12 Graham Stephan? The win loses.
2:05:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, the, yeah, if you have a friend who can help, no. Um, there's other benefits from cold plunges. There's metabolic benefits and there's a separate dopamine benefit that no one's talked about in cold plunges. So if you're like, I'm not motivated today, do something that hurts, right? Intentionally hurts. And it's funny, cold plunge is a great way to do it. One tribe even uses eye drops that are super painful. And you put them in like, ah, really hurts. And then you get really clear vision from it. But the exposure to pain is what caused the neurochemistry to change. So eat a hop and hero, like do whatever's going to work for you.
2:05:51 Graham Stephan? Would you ever want to freeze yourself if they had the ability and then come back 500 years from now?
2:05:56 Speaker 01 You know, I saw the movie Idiocracy. Have you seen that?
2:05:59 Graham Stephan? No.
2:06:00 Speaker 01 Oh God, you have to see this. It's the best documentary ever. Uh, it's about a guy who does that accidentally and he's the dumbest guy on earth. But when he comes back a hundred years later, he's the smartest guy on earth. And it's just incredibly, incredibly predictive. But no, I don't want to freeze myself. I have a lot of friends who do and I have no fear of death. I understand what happens when you die. I know that people come back. I didn't believe in afterlives or reincarnation until I started doing the work. And even if I'm wrong about it, choosing to believe in reincarnation is the only rational thing to do.
2:06:36 Graham Stephan? All right. So what happens when you?
2:06:38 Speaker 01 Die. Well, let me finish the point about why you should choose it. No, I'll tell you what.
2:06:45 Speaker 01 The reason you want to choose it. If you're right, you're going to live a good life, but you'll be less afraid of dying. If you're wrong, you'll be less afraid of dying. And you'll live a better life with less fear. So it doesn't matter whether reincarnation is real or not. Just choose to believe it because it turns down the amount of energy your body puts into fear of stupid shit. You're going to die because you're alive. Like being born is a life threatening condition, period. The planet will come to an end. The universe will come to an end. We will all die. And losing your shit about that is dumb. So let's just tell ourselves a story that reincarnation is real.
2:07:20 Speaker 01 But is it real? I think so. I've had plenty of esoteric mystical experiences and I've worked with hundreds of people who have them. When they just turn off fear like, oh my God, like what's going on? So what happens when you die? Your energy continues. And if you want like a really good scientific base perspective on that, read a book on bio centrism. Have you heard of this? Bio centrism is something that comes out of the field of quantum physics. And Mark Gober writes some really good books about it. Robert Lanza does. But you can look at quantum physics and prove that time is a fantasy that we make up in our meat bodies.
2:08:00 Speaker 01 Right? And the implications of this, which is provable with hard science, is that death is also just a change of state, but it isn't the end. So your energy has to go somewhere. And the perspective that we have is you go to what in Buddhism we call Bardo, called the afterlife. And you kind of review what you did. And then you come back if you're dumb enough to come back.
2:08:24 Speaker 01 And that's my perspective. Now, I've trained in shamanism. I've studied with gurus from many different lineages and all that sort of stuff. There's some disagreement about small details there, but that's what most of it is. And the Christians will say, you know, you go to heaven or hell or things like that. Those are.
2:08:42 Speaker 01 Those are reflections of a similar system. We'll put it that way. You know, in the Buddhist teachings, they say, oh yeah, there's 74 kinds of hell. Actually, I've got 72.
2:08:52 Speaker 01 But there are different hells, right? So you can get stuck when you die. But when things work, you don't get stuck. And when you get stuck, you get stuck. So there's all kinds of stuff that isn't readily apparent to most people. But there are some percentage of people who regularly see things like that. And they agree. So I don't believe any one person. But when you have someone who says, you know, let's take 100 people. Let's teach them how to leave their body at will. Let's not have them talk to each other. Let's have them all go out and explore the world they see in these altered states and come back and compare notes. If they all see the same thing, I think the word for that is science. And there's multiple people who've done that kind of experiment all over the world. And they come up with the same results. So I'm just going to go with what the data shows.
2:09:36 Jack Selby? What's a question that you wished more people would ask you?
2:09:39 Speaker 01 Not a lot of people ask about like, why I do what I do. I think they think that it's because of money or because of some kind of like an ego thing.
2:09:53 Speaker 01 And I'm not motivated by like, I want to feed a billion people or whatever. I started my blog and started sharing all this information. I just wanted five people not to go through all the suffering I went through. And that's been my motivation. I didn't make a list. I didn't do any of the stuff you're supposed to do. I'm like, I'm just going to share this stuff because people need to know. And it was like two decades of accumulating all this knowledge, both the spiritual stuff and heavily meditated, as well as all the physiological longevity stuff. And that's still what motivates me today. And I can probably stop it. I'm like, so many people are just walking around feeling like shit and treating each other like shit because they don't know how good they could feel, right? And sometimes it's a harder problem. Sometimes it's a softer problem.
2:10:37 Speaker 01 It's just not that hard anymore. So I'm motivated because I think we need an upgrade as a species. And that it's not that hard to do it. So I just keep doing it because I think it matters. But it isn't because I'm seeking recognition. Like I tried the fame thing in my early twenties and it doesn't do anything. It's actually inconvenient. So yeah, that the motivation thing is really interesting. It's just I I have suffered greatly and I would prefer other people not go through all the crap I went through because it's it's not fun and it's totally avoidable. So that that's why I do what I do.
2:11:10 Jack Selby? So why do you think a lot of the claims that you make are so controversial?
2:11:14 Speaker 01 Everyone has a lens on reality that is functional for them and we do that to make ourselves feel safe. So anytime someone penetrates your lens on reality, it creates cognitive dissonance, which makes you feel unsafe and doesn't make you think you're unsafe. It makes your body feel unsafe. Like, oh, that that shifted my worldview. The number of people who got outraged when I told them to put butter in coffee is insane. Okay, butter is a safe food, but people literally thought they were like putting it in the blender like, oh, my God, can I really do that the first time? Like, I'm walking on, it's like, what? We've been programmed. So the other thing is people get really mad when I say I'm gonna do something that hasn't been done before. You know who else
2:11:57 Speaker 01 really piss people off? The Wright brothers. We're gonna fly. And then, in fact, I have a video I made where you have all these people saying it's never gonna happen, then they do it. In fact, every great leap in human capability starts with the people who are from the old generation saying it can't be done. I have the audio of the chairman of the FCC saying that satellites will never be used for communication. We have Einstein saying that the power of the atom will never be harnessed to make electricity. Right? So what happens is humans are usually backwards looking and it's always been that way. But we are entering a world where it's not just
2:12:41 Speaker 01 exponential, it's double exponential. So the future looks very different than the past and people get mad because there are rules that they've been following their whole life. And some of those people, their whole career is based on enforcing rules that are bad for humanity. And how dare this computer hacker come in and say something different? And I'm like, how dare you not be curious? Because the way science works is if you have one data point that disproves your theory, the theory is still useful, it's just not accurate. But what's happening in the world now is You have this belief that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence? That's anti-science.
2:13:22 Speaker 01 Science says a claim requires the same amount of evidence, no matter if it's extraordinary or not. If you think it's extraordinary, maybe it's because you're an idiot, right? No claim is extraordinary. The data is the data. So when I come up there and I say, I have data that if you blend butter in your coffee, it really does something for you. I was right. It works. About seven years later, I funded research at the University of Washington with Dr. Gerald Pollak for 50 grand. And he's been studying basic water chemistry inside cells. And he said, huh? We just determined that butter oil and MCT oil create the largest amount of structured water called exclusion zone water in cells. Now, there's a whole bunch of nonsense structured water stuff that's out there. This is stuff you can see on a microscope.
2:14:06 Speaker 01 For your cells to function and make ATP, they need to change the viscosity of water a little bit. It turns out the Tibetans who came up with this idea, they would churn butter and tea in a butter churn for a while before they would drink it. And I'm like, why would they do that? Well, it doesn't work if you don't blend it. So could I make the claim based on an observation and a testable observation without knowing why it works? Yes, I could. Why did it make people mad? I don't know. But I think it's because they felt unsafe because the world might've been different than the safe little story they had. The reality is our bodies cannot sense 99.99999% of the actual reality happening out there. You gotta be comfortable with that.
2:14:43 Jack Selby? So if you're to explain in 30 seconds, someone with an unlimited budget that feels fine, that wants to just go out and get every single piece of data that they can possibly want to improve their health, what should they do?
2:15:03 Speaker 01 Well, you're going to spend about $10,000, maybe even $50,000 on lab tests just to get all the data, right? You'd want to do a whole body MRI for sure. You want to do a full genetic, a full human genome, not just the 23andMe stuff. And then you want to get your cardio respiratory fitness and things like that done. And once you have that stuff, you want to get a QEEG, which is part of what we do at 40 years is in, to what's going on inside your brain. And the combination of those things are going to give us a really good picture. You have your toxin load, your mitochondrial function, your hormone levels, your inflammatory molecule levels, whether you have an aneurysm or any other thing going on in your body that you don't know about, early stage cancer.
2:15:46 Speaker 01 And based on that, what are your goals? And once we have the data, we're going to sit down and say, okay, is your goal? You want a brain that's way better, right? Do you want more stress management, more capacity, more resilience? Do you want to live longer? Do you want to increase your bone density? Whatever it is, there's a path to doing that that we understand now that we didn't understand 10 years ago. And it's ridiculous what's possible. I had surgery on my foot for an old yoga injury and they had to cut through the bone on the foot all the way through it. And so I was awake for it because it was interesting and it was numb anyway. And you hear the bone saw, it's like, and the doctor looks and he goes, I'm having a hard time cutting through his bone. Like, is this guy even human?
2:16:31 Speaker 01 And I did a podcast with him about it. And afterwards, he's like, Dave, what, what is up with your bone density? I've never seen this. He said, I operated on someone half your age and their bones cut like butter and I can't even get through your bones with my saw. Well, that's biohacking. Bone density is one of the biggest indicators of a healthy metabolism and they're going to live a long time. And it comes from the right nutrient intake, avoiding toxins and then exposing the body to things that make it harder and stronger. So if you have a big budget, you can totally add 20, 30 years to your lifespan and they'll be really good years. And you see these cowardly people in the field of longevity saying, oh, it's not about extending human life. It's just about health span.
2:17:12 Speaker 01 You're going to die at 86 the same way you were, but at least you'll be healthy until you die. And I'm like, why? Like, how dare you call yourself a longevity doctor and say you can't extend human life? The goal is to extend our life and to extend our quality of life, both. And people say you can only extend the quality of your life and you're going to die at the same age as everyone else? Why? They never have an answer. So let's set the goals right. Double lifespan and feel way better when you're 150 than you do when you're 50. Why not? We have the technology, we have the tools. It's possible, and there are people doing it, including me.
2:17:49 Graham Stephan? I love it. Thank you, man.
2:17:51 Jack Selby? Dave, thank you so much for coming on the show.
2:17:53 Speaker 01 Thanks for the long interview. That was fun.
2:17:54 Graham Stephan? Yeah, absolutely. We'll link to your information down below in the description.
2:17:58 Speaker 01 And check out Heavily Meditated. This is my most important book of all the ones I've written. It is just coming out now, and people spend $20,000 to spend five days with me to learn this stuff, and I put it in the book.
2:18:07 Jack Selby? Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you to everyone for watching this show. It means so, so much.
2:18:13 Speaker 01 Until next time.
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