Dave Asprey : ON How To Build A Young Brain And Body For Life

On this episode of On Purpose, I sat down with Dave Asprey. Dave is the Founder & CEO of Bulletproof 360, creator of Bulletproof Coffee, and a two-time New York Times bestselling author. Dave will be sharing his incredible transformation from being overweight, tired and unsatisfied to Super-Human. He plans on living to at least 180-years-old and wants to help you maximize your performance. You’ll learn the foods that your brain loves and how to slow aging down! Text Jay Shetty 310-997-4177 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jay Shetty?

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• 0:44Jay Shetty?

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• 1:29Jay Shetty?

  AG1 Next Gen is one of those easy habits to keep. It's the clinically-backed, comprehensive daily health drink that supports your gut health, energy production, and foundational nutrition all in one scoop. AG1's ingredients are sourced from quality partners for absorption, potency, and nutrient density to deliver the foundational nutrition your body needs. And alongside a proper diet, AG1 Next Gen meets 94% of nutrient requirements and it's clinically shown to enrich the gut microbiome. For a limited time, save 20% on your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro at drinkag1.com/onpurpose. That's drinkag1.com/onpurpose.

• 2:16Jay Shetty?

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• 3:00Jay Shetty?

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• 3:09Dave Asprey?

  The idea of hacking is that you can take control of a system, you can manipulate it without understanding what's inside. You test inputs and outputs. So that actually works really well in biology, but it's not what medicine does. It's a different thing. It's what bodybuilders do, it's what the anti-aging community does, it's what Navy SEALs do. And heck, it's what people who own racehorses do to their racehorses. So how do we apply that to ourselves?

• 3:37Jay Shetty?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every single one of you. Thank you for coming back every single week to listen, to learn, and to grow. And you know that my commitment to each and every one of you is to find and connect with guests that I believe can help you increase your performance, your productivity, and live happier, healthier lives. And today's guest is going to do just that. Now, I've been waiting for this conversation for quite a long time. I can't wait to dive into Dave's mind because it fascinates me when I'm looking at it from afar or through common and mutual friends we have. But for those of you who don't know Dave Asprey, here's what I want you to know.

• 4:17Jay Shetty?

  Dave is the founder and CEO of Bulletproof 360, creator of Bulletproof Coffee, a two-time New York Times bestselling author, the host of the Webby Awards. Award winning podcast Bulletproof Radio, serial entrepreneur and global change agent. Dave has dedicated over two decades of his life identifying and working with world renowned doctors, scientists and innovators to uncover the most advanced methods for enhancing mental and physical performance. Today, he'll be sharing what it means to be superhuman, Mr. Bulletproof himself. Dave Asprey, thank you for being here. It's great to finally meet you.

• 4:55Dave Asprey?

  Likewise, I'm super happy to be on your show. Thanks for having me.

• 4:57Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, absolutely. I'm so excited. Today, we're talking about your new book, Superhuman. The book came out a couple of months ago and I'm finally here with Dave. The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever. I love that. So we're going to put the link in the comments as well. So make sure you go and grab a copy of the book. If you enjoyed today's conversation, but Dave, I'm going to start off somewhere probably very different to where people start with you. But you're a keen ping pong player.

• 5:22Dave Asprey?

  You know, yesterday I just kicked Steve Aoki's ass at ping pong.

• 5:26Jay Shetty?

  No way. That's a good story. Okay. Tell us how it went down. Was it a clear washout? Or was it?

• 5:32Dave Asprey?

  It was, he's like, how the heck does a serve spin like that? And but the cool thing was he's a biohacker too. And is at his place. I just did an episode with him. And so he was already like picking up the thing. He got a few shots back, but it was pretty fun.

• 5:47Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. Is there anyone who's ever beaten you? Does your son ever beat?

• 5:50Dave Asprey?

  My son kicks my ass.

• 5:51Jay Shetty?

  Oh, okay.

• 5:52Dave Asprey?

  And it sounds crazy. I started when he was five and I'd play left handed. I'm not left handed, just so we could be fair. And as he improved, kids have neuroplasticity like no one else. To keep up with him, I run an electrical current over my brain with a Halo headset. And if I do that, it slows the ball down, kind of like Neo from The Matrix. And then we're pretty much even. So depending on the day, I'll win half time, he'll win half the time. But I mean, he's a little killer on that and he's 10. So I don't know if when he's 15, if I'm going to be able to keep doing that, but I think so. But I've got a pretty mean ping pong game. And when I test my brain on the neuroscience stuff from my neuroscience company, I have the response time in my brain of a 20 year old and it linearly goes up with age.

• 6:34Dave Asprey?

  And part of Superhuman, the anti aging thing. No, I've got the data. It shows I have a 20 year old's brain and it's awesome because I can keep up. Otherwise, I wouldn't.

• 6:44Jay Shetty?

  That's incredible. I can't wait to test that out. I'd love to see how old my brain is. Whose brain has fascinated you the most that you've tested? Whose brain is?

• 6:52Dave Asprey?

  Well, I mean, a lot of times I, there's confidentiality. This is 40 years of Zen.

• 6:55Jay Shetty?

  It doesn't have to tell me who it is.

• 6:57Dave Asprey?

  Got it.

• 6:57Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, don't tell me who it is.

• 6:58Dave Asprey?

  Okay, so this is a neuroscience institute, five day intensive program in Seattle, custom hardware, software, all this clinical grade stuff to see what's going on in there. And then to performance tune it like a race car for your brain. And I mean, we've had some of the spiritual leaders from South America come through. One of the guys really fascinating, actually, he's public about this, Dr. Barry Morgellon. He's one of 12 living grandmasters of Lao Tzu's oral heritage. And he's spoken at the Bulletproof Conference and just a good friend, been on the show a couple of times. So this guy is Dr. Strange, literally. He went to the monastery. They interviewed him before they wrote Dr. Strange.

• 7:40Dave Asprey?

  And he, he just has these abilities, works with Tony Robbins and works with me before I go on stage and things like that, and some presidents of countries kind of guy. So you look at his brainwaves and you're like, this is not a normal human being. And some guys like him, if he turns it up all the way, he'll fuzz out the gear. Literally, you're looking at brainwaves and all that stuff, and all of a sudden you can't get a clean signal. And this is something intrinsic in our biology. You talk about real superhumans. You look at the people who are way outliers, those are where the most interesting thing happens. Because how do we take you and me, and how do we turn up our abilities to do that? Because we all have that in us. And that was one of the reasons I wanted to write this book.

• 8:24Dave Asprey?

  It might take a few decades, so you're going to need more decades, or you might cheat. That's what I'm doing on the neuroscience front.

• 8:32Jay Shetty?

  I love that. Yeah, no, I'm excited to share because when my books come out, I've got a ton of research on the minds of monks. I know we have a lot of similarities there. And I'm fascinated by how monks' meditations can switch, like you're saying, on and off, like a switch, you know, just from compassion to empathy, to focus, to discipline, without even a second of warm up.

• 8:51Dave Asprey?

  And we've been studying this for 30, 40 years, but traditional neuroscience is all about seizures and surgery and things like that, but. Now, in the neurofeedback category, we know what's a carrier wave, we know what's happening down in Delta, we know what's happening in Alpha. In a meditator versus a monk, and the reason that my program is 40 Years of Zen, is it's meant to replace 40 years of daily practice of meditation, because hurry, meditate faster, there's nothing wrong with that.

• 9:21Jay Shetty?

  That's incredible. And have you, how have you seen the results compare?

• 9:25Dave Asprey?

  It's ridiculous. What you end up with, if you were to spend all that time studying, and I've been to Tibet to learn meditation from the masters. In fact, I first had yak butter tea, which was the inspiration for bulletproof coffee in Tibet, when I was there to learn meditation. And it's like, this stuff is more powerful. Something just happened with this weird mixing tea, or mixing butter and things. But you look at what happens there is, while you learn, you know, there's seven layers of hell, and all this wisdom, and depending on whether you're looking at Hindu perspective, or Buddhist perspective, or, you know, there's other traditional Chinese things, or there's European. So there's all these lineages, inheritors, and shamanic training, and all these things.

• 10:05Dave Asprey?

  And I've had a chance to learn some of those. But there's wisdom, and then there's the felt state. And what you can do is you can achieve the felt state using the tools of breathing, tools of meditation, tools of neurofeedback. And you can be there, but without at least some guidance, you might not know where you are. You just know it feels really different, and you can kind of blow your mind open.

• 10:30Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I've noticed that. I think for a lot of people who come from non-spiritual traditions or backgrounds, a lot of this is great, also just giving them a window into the fact that this exists.

• 10:42Dave Asprey?

  Yeah.

• 10:42Jay Shetty?

  And it's possible. And I think the felt state is a much more tangible experience for them to believe that it's not just some elusive thing, but it's, it's real.

• 10:50Dave Asprey?

  Yeah. I didn't believe any of this. I'm a computer science, computer hacker, weigh 300 pounds, come up from a family of engineers. And anyone who believes this is clearly stupid. That's how I was raised.

• 10:59Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 10:59Dave Asprey?

  And when you feel something, whoa, what's, there's a signal in here that might be useful, and you realize it's actually not just useful, it's hackable, and you can choose the felt state, and you can use that to sense the world around you, and to connect with people and things. It was a pretty big awakening for me, but it's part of the path. And what I discovered, and the reason I went down the bulletproof path at the same time doing the 40 Years of Zen, If you want to do personal development, you want to meditate, you want to improve your brain, doing it on french fries, it doesn't work. You have to get your biology in order. Because if your cells don't make energy, it's subcellular components that drive most of your felt state. And if they're running at half power,

• 11:43Dave Asprey?

  how are you going to have enough energy to wake up, you know, have whatever you have in the morning, take care of yourself, take care of your family, your community, oh, and have time and energy left over to do the deep personal work, to let go of a childhood thing, or, you know, reach a new state of performance? No, you were too tired because your cells didn't work. So eat right and then do the meditative practice and you'll get more results in less time.

• 12:09Jay Shetty?

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• 12:54Jay Shetty?

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• 13:37Jay Shetty?

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• 13:47Jay Shetty?

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• 14:22Jay Shetty?

  And you went through that experience too, right? Because you were twenty-two, three hundred pounds.

• 14:25Dave Asprey?

  I was three hundred pounds, yeah.

• 14:26Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, exactly. Tell us about that journey just before we dive into all of this incredible insight. Tell us about that journey and transition of when you came to the point where you were like, there is more out there, but even before that, this, what I'm doing to my biology isn't good for me.

• 14:41Dave Asprey?

  It's really weird. Anyone who's fat will, they'll tell you at some level, they know they're fat because we have a mirror. You don't need a scale. My pants keep getting tight. What do I do here? And then you say, well, I'm going to try to do something. And trying to do something is already presupposing failure. It's, I call it a weasel word in my books. And what you end up with is you say, all right, I'm going to do what's supposed to work. And anyone who's ever read anything says, oh, we must be meat robots. Therefore, it's calories in, calories out. So I did that. I worked out for an hour and a half a day, six days a week for eighteen months.

• 15:18Jay Shetty?

  Was that hard at that time?

• 15:19Dave Asprey?

  Of course it was hard. And although exercise is addictive when you do it like that, you get the endorphins, you get a rush from it. So it's hard to stop exercising. And there, I know people who are addicted, like, I can't do anything today, I gotta go exercise. That's not a healthy state, right? That means you're stuck with the endorphins, the runner's high, whatever. And for me, I went on a low-fat, low-calorie diet. And at the end of this, I still weigh 300 pounds. I could max out the machines. It wasn't 300 pounds of muscle. I was covered in flab. I still was a 46 inch waist. I'm a 33 inch waist right now. And I, I just, I looked drunk and said, maybe it's because I'm eating too much lettuce. That, that was my math.

• 15:58Dave Asprey?

  It's because I'm not trying hard enough. Yeah. And, and seriously, all my friends are eating double Western bacon cheeseburgers. And I'm eating this salad with no chicken and no dressing. And I'm hungry, just so hungry. And I'm just putting all my willpower into this and I don't care if I'm sick. I don't care if I have final exams, I'm going to go to the gym. And it just a sense of failure, but it became a self-worth problem. And then I said, one day, I'm actually doing all this. And I'm not getting the results. It must be what I'm doing doesn't work. And then you start digging in the research and I started trying all the different variations on diets and went really deep on the corners of the internet. And this is back in the late 90s. So people didn't even use the internet for this kind of stuff.

• 16:41Dave Asprey?

  But I'd find weird researchers and I would just test it all because I was computer science. I'm building the internet as we know it. I'm pretty sure that I'd be able to just hack this dumb meat body. And the idea of hacking is that you can take control of a system. You can manipulate it without understanding what's inside. You test inputs and outputs. So, all right, that actually works really well in biology, but it's not what medicine does. It's a different thing. It's what bodybuilders do. It's what the anti-agent community does. It's what Navy SEALs do. And heck, it's what people who own resources do to their resources. So how do we apply that to ourselves? And I said, all right, I'm going to get over this childhood. I've had arthritis in my knees since I was 14.

• 17:22Dave Asprey?

  And I found out later, when I reverse engineered it all, I lived in a house that had toxic mold. And I poisoned the mitochondria in my body. So I repaired that damage. And I said, wait, there's, there's always new levels, things I can do where I didn't think I'd, I'd look the way I look, I'd feel the way I feel, I'd be able to do what I do. And I can, and I'm continuously getting powerful and younger and faster. My brain works better. I just mentioned about ping pong. To see the actual data and to see the scan, oh, I have 87th percentile hippocampal volume, hippocampus in the brain. Look, I started out fat and sick. If I can do this, I'm pretty sure someone who started

• 18:03Dave Asprey?

  out reasonably healthy with a normal body weight and normal biology has huge advantages. But everyone listening to this right now, you're thinking, okay, how I feel now, how I've always felt, that's pretty much normal. But you're totally wrong. That's just what you've experienced. But if you could feel five times better and 10 times more energy, you would never know, because you've never felt it.

• 18:26Jay Shetty?

  Hundred percent.

• 18:27Dave Asprey?

  So our job is to just teach people, here's the tools to tap into it in the least possible amount of time and money. Because it's there. I know it's there.

• 18:38Jay Shetty?

  And it feels like that's the energy, that experimentation at that stage has led to now this decision or aspiration to live to 180 years old. Like, why 180 specifically? Because I'm sure there's some math behind that, I'm assuming. And why want to live longer anyway? For you?

• 19:00Dave Asprey?

  No, it's at least 180. I don't want to put a cap on it.

• 19:03Jay Shetty?

  Okay.

• 19:03Dave Asprey?

  Important difference there.

• 19:05Jay Shetty?

  Great, okay.

• 19:06Dave Asprey?

  Now, the math is really straightforward. We know we can do 120 because we've seen it. And those people, they drank, they smoked, they went through, let's see, what's happening 120 years ago? It was 1900. There's no cars. They haven't been invented yet. There's no microwaves. World War I, World War II haven't happened. Antibiotics haven't been discovered. DNA, they couldn't even spell it back then.

• 19:35Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. True, true.

• 19:37Dave Asprey?

  The Krebs cycle for magic. We didn't know much at all about how our bodies work. And they still lived 120.

• 19:43Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 19:44Dave Asprey?

  Okay.

• 19:44Jay Shetty?

  But they weren't exposed to as much trauma as we are.

• 19:47Dave Asprey?

  Oh, no, they had more trauma than we did.

• 19:49Jay Shetty?

  Exposure. They had more trauma, literally, in the world.

• 19:53Dave Asprey?

  Yeah.

• 19:53Jay Shetty?

  But not necessarily exposure on a daily basis.

• 19:56Dave Asprey?

  Do you know the odds of having one of your siblings die 120 years ago? The reason you had five or six kids is because a couple of them weren't going to make it. A redundant array of inexpensive kids, they invented it back then. In fact, we invented that in society back then. So people grew up with their family members dying. You didn't know if anyone would come home. You couldn't call them on their cellphone. Someone gets on a boat, they don't come back. You don't, maybe you'll get a letter three months later. People disappeared all the time. It was a pretty shitty time. Oh, we didn't even talk about polio. We didn't talk about all the diseases that just wipe people out that generally don't get us anymore. You go to the doctor, they're going to cut your arm off with a rusty saw. Like, this is the state of people who lived 120 now.

• 20:38Dave Asprey?

  Now, I'm just gonna have to say it. How old are you?

• 20:42Jay Shetty?

  I'm 32.

• 20:43Dave Asprey?

  32, alright. So let's think what's gonna be like 120 years from now, given that we can rely on the internet, we can look at PubMed. I couldn't write these books. Each of the books, the Superhuman book, would have been a lifetime of research in a library using microfishing, card catalogs, all this crap. But the fact that I can pull together this information, and I have the weird brain that synthesizes it, and I could talk to these experts. All of this is enabled by technology in the last 20 years. Do you think that we can't add 50% to the maximum human lifespan over the next 150, for you 148 years? Like, put on your future hat and realize exponential rates of growth. You have a very good chance of living way, way, way beyond 180.

• 21:25Dave Asprey?

  If there's still soil on the planet, if a comet doesn't hit us, right? And if essentially we take care of the world enough.

• 21:34Jay Shetty?

  So that, that's the big one.

• 21:35Dave Asprey?

  That's the big one.

• 21:36Jay Shetty?

  Taking care of the world enough.

• 21:37Dave Asprey?

  But here's the other reason that we need more highly energetic old people. In all societies that I studied, and it's in like the first chapter of Superhuman, I talk about the quest for immortality is something that's happened as long as we've had recorded history. Going back to the Egyptians, going back to the alchemists, going back to the Hindu traditions, the Chinese traditions, the South American traditions, they've all been searching for this. And things like Taoism are tied directly towards that quest for how do I live forever as a highly functioning, highly energetic, evolved person. Well, we've always had village elders. So what would happen is the young monks would go into the monastery and the 80-year-old Lama will look at them and say, "All right, here's what we've learned, and I learned this from

• 22:21Dave Asprey?

  my elders, and I learned it from my elders." In fact, in Lao Tzu's tradition, 5,000 years of unbroken oral history passed down from the elders. Well, elders today, unfortunately, a lot of them, Alzheimer's disease, heart attacks, retirement homes, and we started seeing our elders rather than as sources of knowledge and wisdom, the people who can guide us the best. We started seeing them as tubes, monitors, diapers, wheelchairs, and expenses. And that's actually never happened.

• 22:51Jay Shetty?

  Great observation, yeah.

• 22:51Dave Asprey?

  All of history, it hasn't happened.

• 22:53Jay Shetty?

  Great observation.

• 22:54Dave Asprey?

  So I go out of my way to interview people who are over 90, because, man, they've got 50 years on me. And what did they learn that I'm probably going to learn? And what can they, what pain can I avoid from listening to them?

• 23:06Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 23:06Dave Asprey?

  Would I like them to be 120 and still have fully functioning, vibrant lives so I could learn even more and they could share it? Heck, yeah. Well, the world needs that. Plus, Jay, if you're going to live for hundreds of years more, you aren't going to throw the plastic bottle in the ocean. You realize, "Oh, my God, I better not shit in my own sandbox, because I'm going to be in the sandbox for a very long time. I'm not going to hand it off to the next generation the way currently the boomers are getting blamed." And it's funny, because the boomers are saying, "Well, wait, we inherited World War I and World War II from you old people, but they're all dead, so we can't blame you anymore."

• 23:43Jay Shetty?

  We just keep going back and back and back.

• 23:44Dave Asprey?

  Yeah, and they're saying, "We inherited this from, you know, the Civil War." It just, it goes, it goes back forever. We always inherit this. But the scope of inheritance is going to change. And anyone who has kids is unlikely to say, "You know, I'd like to have kids three times throughout my 200 years." You're going to have kids, you're going to put so much energy and life into them, the way all parents do, right? You're going to enjoy seeing them flourish, but we're not going to worry about an overpopulation problem. And the data supports what I'm saying very, very clearly. Japan, US, most Western countries, the birth rate's gone down, populations are declining, and so is the fertility rate. So we don't have to worry about global population, just wait 50 years, it won't be a problem.

• 24:23Jay Shetty?

  I'm intrigued. I'm fascinated. I'm fascinated. The reason is because it's we're talking about also, and I want to get your thoughts on this because I think we were we were talking about different things there. You're talking about obviously the the physical abilities have increased, but with the rise of mental health.

• 24:38Dave Asprey?

  Yeah.

• 24:39Jay Shetty?

  Even even if it is with less trauma, the way we're able to process traumatic events or tragedy tragedies or challenges seems to be struggling.

• 24:49Dave Asprey?

  It's funny.

• 24:50Jay Shetty?

  I'm just intrigued. I'm just I'm just throwing it out there. I want to get your perspective. I'm not negative at all. I'm just trying to.

• 24:56Dave Asprey?

  It doesn't sound negative. You ever there's a documentary that come out that came out recently. It's called They Shall Not Grow Old.

• 25:03Jay Shetty?

  I've not seen it.

• 25:04Dave Asprey?

  It's about World War One. Oh, my God, the toughness, the resilience of of these guys. It's unimaginable. In the interview, people who are still alive from World War One, but they show footage and they they tell these stories. And you're saying no human walk in the face of the earth today could do what these guys did.

• 25:24Jay Shetty?

  Exactly. So isn't that a challenge in lasting longer? Because if the resilience and grit was so much more higher then that people could lose their family member, their family member never came back from the boat. But they never did. They have the mental health challenge. They never talked about it. They they couldn't share on social media like. Or did they just not? Did they just not feel it? Whereas today, we're overly sensitive and everything.

• 25:44Dave Asprey?

  They felt it, but how you felt just didn't matter as much. It was how you showed up in the world. So they they had crammed it down. I don't know how happy they were. There's war veterans. People knew that people came back from war changed. But there's also there was a community and there's something else that happens. Most of the time, if you took a big hit to the head, you just died. So now we have a lot more traumatic brain injury and people who survive horrific injuries who come back with more trauma. But our technologies for dealing with trauma, even some of the neuroscience stuff, the things that are a big focus for me at Forty Years of Zen. And you you deal with nutritionally, you put them in a hyperbaric chamber, you can heal almost any emotional trauma and so many physical traumas. The problem is when a physical trauma ties to an emotional trauma, it doesn't work. You can also precondition people.

• 26:29Dave Asprey?

  A lot of a lot of times, people just don't know about the research. Something called heart rate variability. It's a core part of what what I teach people. This is how to change the spacing between your heartbeats. When you're relaxed in a meditative state, you have a higher change in the spacing between your heartbeats. Same number of beats per minute, but the pattern of the beats changes. Well, if you teach soldiers to do this before they go into combat, or kids before they get bullied, it doesn't really matter. Your body thinks it's the same thing. You actually don't walk away from that with PTSD.

• 27:02Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 27:02Dave Asprey?

  You can precondition for it. So what we could do is we can teach resilience.

• 27:06Jay Shetty?

  Hundred percent.

• 27:07Dave Asprey?

  And I wasn't necessarily highly resilient, but I am now. And this is just missing from our curriculum.

• 27:14Jay Shetty?

  Correct.

• 27:14Dave Asprey?

  It is a neuroscience state. It's, it's, you can define it, you can measure it, you can quantify it. And then you can put a moral judgment on it.

• 27:23Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 27:23Dave Asprey?

  There, there shouldn't be a moral judgment.

• 27:25Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I, yeah.

• 27:27Dave Asprey?

  You used to be able to, you know, you'd go to church and, you know, you've been bad, right? Or whatever the, the pattern of, of your church was. But people now are abandoning religion. Religion provided some of that, the, the prayer before your meal. You don't have to pray to a specific deity that someone told you had to, but you can provide a sense of gratitude, which is the real nugget there. Without gratitude, you can't do forgiveness. Without gratitude, you stay in fight or flight. So you can program these things in, but what does gratitude actually look like in the brain and in the heart? You can measure those and you can look, I can sit here across from you if you're wired up and I can say, you're actually not feeling grateful.

• 28:10Dave Asprey?

  You said you were grateful and you lied to yourself and hold you accountable to that. That is amazing, right?

• 28:16Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I love that too. And I, and I hope that one day we can all have that next door so we know we're not lying to ourselves. It's fun being a lie detector for other people, but it's better being a lie detector for ourselves.

• 28:26Dave Asprey?

  That's why we have coaches, that's why we have gurus, that's why we have friends.

• 28:29Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 28:30Dave Asprey?

  The problem is that you're very likely to get angry at a friend or a coach when they really call you out on your BS.

• 28:35Jay Shetty?

  Can't get angry at your phone.

• 28:36Dave Asprey?

  Yeah.

• 28:38Dave Asprey?

  Click the data is the data. And that's what I do. It's one of the most important impactful things in my life has been the 40 years of Zen training. Where, when I do that, If there's something that I'm hiding from myself, I'm not gonna know it. I'm gonna look you in the eye, I'm gonna deny it, and you're gonna do the same thing to me. Because our ability to look inside ourselves is very low. But when you have a mirror right here, oh, I have spinach in my teeth.

• 29:01Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 29:01Dave Asprey?

  But you're not gonna know you have spinach in your teeth.

• 29:03Jay Shetty?

  And your friend's scared to tell you unless they're really close to you.

• 29:04Dave Asprey?

  Exactly.

• 29:05Jay Shetty?

  What I love about you, though, when I'm hearing you speak, and I've never, I guess, I guess you don't, when you meet someone, you unearth things differently. And it's like, you really have this great juxtaposition between wisdom and science, which I think is so powerful and beautiful. And you started off there. And I think when it's either or, it can get slightly lost sometimes.

• 29:23Dave Asprey?

  They have to align.

• 29:24Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 29:24Dave Asprey?

  And one of the reasons I created this field of biohacking, and it's now a word in the dictionary. In 2018, they added it to Merriam-Webster's, and my name's in there. And I created this big conference around it. Is I wanted to take the data that we can now get for the first time ever, things about that Hare variability neuroscience, and something called the exposome, which is the measure of all the things you're exposed to in your environment over the course of your life that changes your genetics. This is a data set, we'll never actually collect all of it. It's like a real, a full-sized map of California. Isn't very useful, because it's as big as the state, right?

• 30:01Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 30:02Dave Asprey?

  But we're able to gather so much data that we can now validate things. Like, in the book Before Superhuman, I wanted to test a Taoist equation. The, these guys were looking to live forever, and they say flat out, if you're a guy and you wanna live forever, you should use this equation to control how frequently you ejaculate, because it'll make you old if you ejaculate too much. And I looked at them, and I said, that's complete BS. I have to test it and disprove this BS. And I ended up publishing a year's worth of data, and I interviewed other experts in the field. And it turns out, for guys, there really is an orgasm hangover. Right? And they're saying, what? I'm not saying have less sex. I'm just saying, decide how often you're gonna ejaculate.

• 30:46Dave Asprey?

  I would have said the data would not support that. And what I'm finding is the more I dig deep in shamanic knowledge and you say, how could that possibly work? And then I go and I look at the neuroscience of it like, oh my God, these people couldn't, using our language and our tech, they couldn't explain it.

• 31:02Jay Shetty?

  Correct, for our time.

• 31:03Dave Asprey?

  But they learned by watching for generations and their elders handed it off and handed it off. And one of the coolest things I can think of in this space, the lady who discovered the opiate receptor in the brain, massive transformative thing. Her name was Candace Pert. And I'm sad she passed away right before I could interview her. And in her book, she writes about how after maybe 20 years of her career of just being hardcore Western scientist atheist, just rejecting anything that might be energetic, she started realizing, maybe I have to pay attention to this because there's something else going on. And she met this group of shamans. And she tried to explain to them what the opiate receptors were. And then the guy says something and they all laugh.

• 31:45Dave Asprey?

  And then she asked the translator and the translator said, oh, they're laughing because they said, haha, she thinks these molecules actually exist.

• 31:56Jay Shetty?

  They're both right. Yeah, oh, wow. It's crazy. Tell me about, talking about that, tell me about the, so you did $120,000 stem cell makeover.

• 32:06Dave Asprey?

  Oh, the stem cell makeover. That was with Dr. Harry Allison in Park City.

• 32:11Jay Shetty?

  Break down what that is and why you did it. So that people understand a bit more about it.

• 32:15Dave Asprey?

  And I write about the details of stem cells and what's happening now and what you can get for $5,000 versus, in this case, $120,000 is at the very high end of what's possible. It's the most intensive stem cell procedure that you can do right now. What I did is I laid down. They put you under a sedation, but not full anesthesia. And

• 32:39Dave Asprey?

  They pull bone marrow and people go, oh, it's so painful. I had it done when I was unsedated. It's not that big of a deal. It just feels really odd. I even Facebooked it. A Facebook Live video.

• 32:50Jay Shetty?

  Did you Facebook live this?

• 32:51Dave Asprey?

  Yeah, I didn't. I couldn't do the this procedure because I was unconscious, but the one before that that I did just to see what the components would be. And I've done stem cells, you know, a variety of times, different technologies that are that are out here. And they pull the bone marrow, they pull your own fat, they can get the stem cells out of it. And then they go through and depending on which part of the body, starting at the toes, every joint, they inject stem cells into the joint. So the joints will stay young. I'm going to be around for hundreds of years. So I would like to be walking around under my own power. I've had three knee surgeries before I was 23. And so I want my knee to be highly functional forever. I don't want to be in a cane when

• 33:31Dave Asprey?

  I'm old. And then a Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon who's been on my show, Marcella, she, she flies out for it and she threads a cannula inside the spine. So they drip my own stem cells inside my spine and they are attracted to areas that are inflamed and they turn off inflammation and turn on growth.

• 33:48Jay Shetty?

  Wow.

• 33:49Dave Asprey?

  So they inject every vertebra, they do the face hair, male reproductive organs. And I Facebook live that when they did it another time, too. That was funny, without showing anything you can't unsee. And you wake up four hours later, it's sort of going, what just happened? But the regrowth and the rejuvenation happens six, nine months later, as the tissues themselves turn over and you get younger. That's at the very cutting edge. But if you just have a lot of knee pain or an injury that won't heal, I did all that stuff three years ago with stem cells. I had this thing in my right shoulder. It's gone. All these things throughout my body that you accumulate over time. When we're young, we go, I'll go mountain biking. Sure, you know, I'll play soccer. And even

• 34:32Dave Asprey?

  though there's a piece of bone fragment sticking out my thigh, just one more.

• 34:35Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 34:36Dave Asprey?

  And you pay for it later and then you can reverse it. And that's what I did.

• 34:40Jay Shetty?

  That's incredible. What level of, when I'm hearing that, someone who's not had any of those processes, and I'm speaking on behalf of most of the audience, I guess, who have not done that, what level of risk are you comfortable with? Or have you reset this to so much of a depth that actually, when you do this, you're like, I'm not experimenting at all because there's very little risk? Like, what level of risk do you feel comfortable with?

• 35:00Dave Asprey?

  I talk about return on investment as the primary lens I'm looking, I look for for anything I do. There's how much energy do I put into doing something? And then there's how much time and then there's how much money do I put into it? And then what's the return I'm looking for? And dying is the return I'm not looking for. The problem is that if you just do what you're doing now, your risk is probably 80% that one of the four killers from Superhuman are going to get you. It's cardiovascular disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, or type 2 diabetes. So you pretty much have an 80% chance of doing those. Yeah. And that comes, those all come with 20 plus years of suffering before you die,

• 35:45Dave Asprey?

  and you're not in charge of yourself when you die. So those are crappy odds. Absolutely. The worst odds ever. So how willing are you to take a few risks to avoid that? I'm willing to take a few risks, but they're not stupid risks. Okay, I'm in a room, I've got one of the top trained neurosurgeons out there doing a procedure. The risks are exceptionally low when you have that. I'm not doing anesthesia, I'm doing sedation, so the risks are low. And the returns are more energy now, more energy for the decades more time I'm going to live. And as I age, I will age differently than baseline human models. And that is very

• 36:24Dave Asprey?

  precious. And if there's a risk of one in 50,000 of something really bad happening, one in 50,000, maybe it's one in 10,000, I don't know. But I will tell you that if you're popping Advil right now, you're facing those same kind of risks. We're all facing risks all the time we don't know about because we never hit. Totally. In fact, I gotta go back to those, that bowl of french fries. It causes more inflammation in your body than smoking a cigarette for a longer period of time. You probably ought to not do either one of those, but most people listening to this, yeah, I'm talking to you, french fries taste good, I'll eat them, right? Have you done the risk analysis on that behavior? No, because it's normal. And can we talk about cancer and alcohol?

• 37:03Jay Shetty?

  Let's do it.

• 37:04Dave Asprey?

  Yeah, just go to PubMed, which is the database of all these studies, and look at the relationship between drinking alcohol and cancer. It is not good for you. And you're saying, oh, I'm so worried that I do the stem cell procedure that could make me feel really good and fix that joint or that hip or that back pain that they might want to fuse my spine for. I'm going to go spend $5,000 doing that. Oh, I could never do that. It's too risky, it's too expensive. You spent five grand on wine this year.

• 37:29Jay Shetty?

  Coffee.

• 37:30Dave Asprey?

  Yeah, well, that's coffee's worth it. I mean, come on.

• 37:33Jay Shetty?

  I know, I said that as a joke.

• 37:35Dave Asprey?

  Totally. But that whole thing, okay? You spent that same amount of money on something that we know contributes to cancer. Right? And I'm not picking on wine specifically, just alcohol as it metabolizes increases your risk. By the way, I actually had sake last night. It's not like I never drink. I can tell you, I took supplements that turn off the negative effects of it when I did that. But you can still enjoy life. But people are not very good at doing risk math. And when you look at those two things, you spent the same amount of money on things that are vaguely pleasurable and vaguely bad for you. Or you could have done something that was a step up in your performance. I know what I'm going to choose. I'm going to skip the french fries. I'm going to occasionally have really good wine that's expensive instead of a lot of cheap wine. And I'm going to do the stem cells.

• 38:20Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, no, and it comes back down to what we both know, Thich Nhat Hanh said about wanting familiar pain versus unfamiliar pain.

• 38:27Dave Asprey?

  Yeah.

• 38:27Jay Shetty?

  And we'd rather have familiar pain of everything that our ancestors have had or family members who have had. So we have some familiarity with it, whether that's cancer or Alzheimer's. So we feel, oh, yeah, it's kind of something we've all had. We feel, whereas the unfamiliar pain of, I don't know what that looks like, is so much more scary, even though, like you said very clearly and statistically, that actually our odds are not good anyway. And that's the argument that hits me the most, is that in so many areas of my life, I'm convinced that the way we've always done it is rarely the right way.

• 39:02Dave Asprey?

  One of the things you learn if you go to any ancient practice lineage, look, we're all going to die. And even when I talk to my immortalist friends, you know, the super long joke, I'm going to upload myself to the internet. Newsflash, the universe will collapse in on itself sometime, we're all gonna die. You just have to get used to that.

• 39:20Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 39:20Dave Asprey?

  And a lot of people, oh, I don't want to, sorry, that's just a fact of life. The question is, how much suffering do you want to do before you die? That's really what we're doing. And for me, I actually don't like suffering, it's amazing. But discomfort is different than suffering. So anytime you do something that makes your brain or your body evolve, it will involve discomfort. But suffering comes when you resist the discomfort. And understanding, alright, I'm feeling a lot of emotional discomfort right now, but it doesn't mean I'm suffering, it doesn't mean I'm struggling. It means I'm accepting and alright, it's a signal. So I'm lifting this heavy thing, I'm really sore the next day, that was the cost of growth. Or I'm facing my fears and I'm doing it anyway, and I feel like I'm gonna shit my pants, and I'm gonna do it anyway, and I'm gonna see what happens.

• 40:05Dave Asprey?

  That's how our brain evolves. We're wired to do, to focus on things that don't push us.

• 40:11Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 40:11Dave Asprey?

  Because that's biology.

• 40:13Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 40:13Dave Asprey?

  Well, once you decide you're gonna take charge and you're gonna push yourself, you say, alright, maybe I will live to 180, maybe I'll live beyond 180. Or maybe I'll just, you know, ask someone out who I'm really afraid to ask out. Why the hell are you afraid to ask someone out? The worst they'll do is say no. It's the same as saying, look, do you like pizza or Chinese? Okay, if they say, I like pizza, you're like, darn, I like Chinese, we're not compatible. It's not a judgment on you, but if you don't ask, you don't know.

• 40:36Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 40:37Dave Asprey?

  But people, they have all this crazy programming in their heads. I got rid of most of my crazy programming just through these processes. And I don't think I could have had the power to do that if I hadn't have just gotten my base biology working with food. And so we get wrapped up in all these fears and resistance things. But really, the simplest, lowest hanging fruit here is just eat the stuff that makes your brain work, and then you'll start being comfortable pushing yourself. Otherwise, you're just too tired to push yourself.

• 41:05Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely. Let's talk about, I want to talk about the seven pillars that make us old. But before we do that, let's talk about, because you mentioned it now, some of the foods that are good for our brain, that are basic, that anyone can start doing today. And which ones to remove too, because we've already got the...

• 41:19Dave Asprey?

  The fries out, fries and alcohol. Anything deep fried, and it doesn't matter if it's Brussels sprouts, sorry, especially at a restaurant. And I've got the Bulletproof Coffee Shop in LA. It's a restaurant. I know what happens back at the house. And I, we don't have bad oils there, but the typical restaurant uses the same oil for a long period of time. Oxidized, just plant oils are not good for us. Our cell membranes, and I go through really cool new, new science in, in superhuman, 45% of the cell membranes in your body are saturated fats. And the brain militantly holds that constant, but the amount of unsaturated fat can change dramatically between omega-3, which is more of a fish oil, and omega-6, which is the plant-based

• 42:03Dave Asprey?

  ones. So if you only eat plants, you don't get omega-3s, the kind that come from not plant-based omega-3s, those don't work, unfortunately. You end up changing about 15% of your, of your brain cells into these highly inflammatory things. So you tune the very composition of your being by choosing the kind of fat you eat. You eat french fries, your body will take damaged, unnatural fats that have never been a part of your system, and it'll try to build batteries out of those. And you'll get batteries that make half charge. And then you walk around going, hmm, I, you know, I wonder what's going on. This is just kind of how I feel. Yeah, I got a little bit of a muffin top here. What you really have is you have a muffin top in your brain. So the inflammation happens there. So a

• 42:45Dave Asprey?

  big part of what I do is I'm eating at least half my calories from fat, and usually 70%. But I'm very careful. The fats I eat are undamaged. I eat a moderate amount of plant-based fats. I don't eat omega-6 fats much at all. You're still going to get a lot of them because they're out there. But I'm careful to get fish oil, which is really, really good for you. You can do it by eating fish. If you're gonna eat fish, you want to take something that binds mercury in the fish. And I make supplements that, that have specific kinds of oils that go into the brain. But the real, really good fats that come from plants, macadamia nuts, avocados, and coconut oil is one of those things where you say, all right, it's good for you. It is, to a certain extent,

• 43:26Dave Asprey?

  Every kind of fat, including coconut oil, it's a whole bunch of different types of fats mixed together, different lengths of chains of fats. And people have heard MCT oils, because I'm the guy who put MCT oils on the map, right? It turns out that 52% of coconut oil is MCT oils. So then, an unscrupulous marketer will say, "Yeah, I'm selling MCT oils." Bad news, about 40% of the fat, and that's 90% of the MCT oil, coconut oil, it's legal to call it an MCT oil, but it doesn't have the special powers for turning on your brain and mitochondria. So now, you say, "Wait, this is labeled MCT oil, and this is labeled MCT oil, but they do very different things." So, yeah, you can use some coconut oil as a fat source, as a fuel source,

• 44:11Dave Asprey?

  but you can't eat enough of it. In fact, it would take 20 pounds of coconut oil to equal 1 pound of the stuff that I make. And so it's Everclear versus weak beer. That's an analogy, right?

• 44:22Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 44:22Dave Asprey?

  So, it's important to say, eat some coconut oil, but a huge amount of saturated fat, like from coconut oil, if your gut bacteria is broken, will bring toxins from your gut into your brain, into your body. So then, okay, what else do I eat? It turns out the template for this is called the Bulletproof Diet. It is a plate covered in vegetables. And it's really important, it's not covered in grains, it's not covered in legumes, it's not covered in potatoes, it's covered in vegetables. Okay, green stuff. And it's probably not covered in kale either. And kale has a whole bunch of anti-nutrients in it, and I read about thallium, a toxic metal that accumulates better in kale than any other plant we've ever found.

• 45:05Dave Asprey?

  So, we're talking broccoli, cauliflower, celery, fennel, carrots, stuff like that. And then you cover it in fat, guacamole, grass-fed butter, things like that, nuts, olives, olive oil. And when I say "cover it," you don't have to go liberally, it's not a little bit of sauce. No, you want to soak it in that fat. And then, a moderate amount of grass-fed or wild-caught protein. Most people eat way too much protein from animals. And I'm talking 2, maybe 4 ounces. And the anti-aging numbers, it turns out, you want to eat less meat than you think you want to eat. But if you go to zero meat, I know you're plant-based,

• 45:48Dave Asprey?

  but what you end up finding is that people today... And most people listening to your show, they don't really, they say they care, but they don't really care about where the animal they eat came from. So we are supporting the death of the planet by eating industrially raised feedlot animals. I do not eat those. I never eat those. They will make you old, they'll make you fat, and they'll make you sick. They'll destroy your gut bacteria. And along the way, they're destroying the very soil of our planet. So feedlot meat is off the map. And then people say, but I can't afford it. Like, that's BS. If grass-fed meat is twice as expensive, eat half as much, which is going to make you live longer anyway. So your budget will not change if you do this. But what will happen is you go to a restaurant, and you say, is it grass-fed?

• 46:32Dave Asprey?

  And they say, no. And you say, I'll order the vegetarian. And then you can say, is it grass-finished? And if it's grass-fed and grass-finished, you've done the planet a favor. The animal actually led a life that it was supposed to live, right? And you've contributed to soil, and you eat a moderate amount of that, and you feel really good. And one of the nutrients that's been missing that was a huge game changer for me was collagen. And the reason collagen is cool right now, bulletproof, put that on the map. And we're now the second largest collagen brand out there. The reason collagen is so important is that, for me, I had this arthritis in my knees, and I always had soreness. It went away when I started eating collagen. And on that same trip to Tibet where I discovered

• 47:15Dave Asprey?

  yak butter tea, I'd say I discovered it, it depends, there's a thousand viewers, but I tried it and discovered how I felt on it. I had wrecked my knees. I descended 7,500 feet from the Annapurna base camp area in one day. And my knees were bruised, the cartilage was bruised. I already had pre-existing injuries and screws in my knees and stuff. I couldn't walk. Like, to go across the street to get a cup of coffee, it was like, you know, two canes, and I felt like I was 100 years old. I had seven days until I was going to be able to recover enough to walk 26 miles around Mount Kailash. And

• 47:53Dave Asprey?

  I just asked a guy on the bus with me, I said, all right, can you read this Chinese menu to me at this little Tibetan roadhouse, the only restaurant in town? And I'm looking for collagen because I knew from the anti-aging work I'd been doing, I needed some building blocks just to fix my knees and you couldn't buy collagen powder back then. And plus in Tibet, they wouldn't have it. So I ordered the only thing on the menu that's gonna work. It's a bowl of pigs' ears. Now, I've never eaten that before and I know what it looks like. And it arrives and it's chilled and it's literally a big bowl of maybe 15 cold pigs' ears. And I'm just going, this is really unpleasant, but I'm in pain. So I, what can I do here? I guess I got the soup and I dip them in the soup to heat them up and it's like, ar, ar, ar.

• 48:38Jay Shetty?

  Crunchy?

• 48:39Dave Asprey?

  No, they were soft. They're like steamed and just sitting there. But you know what? The next day I could walk. It was that big of a deal. I just, my body was trying to heal and I did not have the nutrients I needed to heal. And now I want to hear people who add collagen to their diet, whether it's in their coffee, whether it's on their things, on their food, it's a kind of a flavorless powder when it's done right, or it tastes like socks if it's done wrong. What ends up happening is the pain I've had for 10 years in my ankle, my knee, my back, it just went away. And my, my hair is growing stupidly fast. I have to dye it more often and things like that. I hear that from women all the time. They like it though, because they want a thicker hair. They got it, but now that they're going to the salon more than they did. So those are important nutrients. And then you say, all right, there are people who are saying, I want to be plant-based.

• 49:24Dave Asprey?

  And you're one of those. Now, why, why are you plant-based? Is this an ethics thing or a health thing?

• 49:28Jay Shetty?

  Both.

• 49:29Dave Asprey?

  All right, got it. So ethically, as a guy who runs a 32-acre organic farm with turkeys and pigs and sheep, where is the, where's the fertility in the soil that makes your vegetables supposed to come from if we don't have animals? I mean, factory farms for grains and corn and things like that. What they're doing is they're taking these minerals from a mine. And this actually isn't really even a mineral, nitrogen, it's just a nutrient they're putting in the soil. Well, if they had animals that would come in during winter and just crap on the soil the way they do on my farm, the soil would replenish itself and it would actually get thicker. Soil's the biggest carbon sink we have right now. It's getting thinner and thinner and thinner because we're basically overdriving

• 50:12Dave Asprey?

  the soil, but we're running out of the things we use to overdrive it. So when you go to a permaculture model, you don't eat very much meat, but you might say take advantage of ghee or butter. But we're talking about one or two cows on many acres that walk around and do their job. Mother Nature designed sheeps and cows and ruminants to just walk around, munch on stuff and then poop. And it's, and they poop everywhere. It's kind of horrifying as a farmer. But I have pictures showing this part of the, I'll call it a lawn, but with the pasture where they live, it's vibrant and green without any water being added. And right next to it, the part where it was fenced off, it's gray. It's

• 50:53Dave Asprey?

  light brown. The only difference is the poop. So you think about that, go, wow, what does this mean on a global scale? It means that if we go all plant-based, the very ecosystem that has supported farms forever has always been based on animals pooping on the farm. It ends. And then we won't have nutrient-based vegetables. And you can actually pull off a vegetarian diet and be pretty darn healthy. But the people are saying, you know, I'm never eating anything that came near an animal. They haven't thought through the system of it. And having gotten actually quite sick on a raw vegan diet, even I'm pretty well-educated on how to do that. There are some vegetables that don't work for people, right? There are some vegetables that don't work raw, too.

• 51:36Dave Asprey?

  Oh, yeah, exactly. And cooking is an okay technology. So, you know, the nightshade family, things like bell peppers, for some people, they work just fine. And for other people, they will wreck you. Absolutely. Right? And I'm one of those. I don't eat nightshades because I tested it. I feel like crap. Yeah, feel like crap, too. Yeah. And so I would say eat mostly like a vegan. And the fat you put on there doesn't have to be vegan fat. But if it's industrially raised fat, shame on you.

• 52:03Jay Shetty?

  Just put it out there.

• 52:04Dave Asprey?

  Yeah.

• 52:04Jay Shetty?

  That's great. Let's, let's talk about, I, I think that's brilliant. That's it. It's what I love about that is that I think, and this is, this is partly education too. It's the way we make decisions are often not stretched out enough. We're not looking at the societal, community, family. We, we look at things so small in one sense of just like how it affects us and the four people around us. As opposed to how things are affecting them. And I feel like you're stretching our mind, which is wonderful.

• 52:31Dave Asprey?

  The, the idea is we should eat to feel really good all the time and we should eat to be here for hundreds of years. How do we do that?

• 52:37Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And the planet lasting, which was your point earlier of like, everything else that we're doing with factory farms is killing the planet. So there won't be any soil to live, hence we won't last to 180. Tell us about the seven pillars that make us old, some of which you've kind of taught us.

• 52:50Dave Asprey?

  This is interesting. You go back 20 years, I started running an anti-aging nonprofit group. We, we were doing research. We had people coming in, giving lectures in Palo Alto, but we didn't really know why we were aging. We had different ideas. And they've now been so baked in based on really good research, using unimaginable DNA visualization techniques, the ability to, to do things that are out of Star Trek in, in terms of, of seeing inside our body. And we now know there's seven things that are making us old. And this is really important because a lot of times say, what's the one thing I could do to live a long time? It's the same thing as what's the one thing I could do to make my car last a long time?

• 53:30Jay Shetty?

  Totally.

• 53:31Dave Asprey?

  I'm pretty sure you gotta rotate the tires and change the oil. Just, just saying.

• 53:34Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:35Dave Asprey?

  It might be a few other things, fuel filters and all that. So the seven pillars of aging are the things that we now know are the causes of aging. And then the question is, okay, how do you avoid this? If aging is death by a thousand cuts, how do I take less cuts? How do I make the cuts less deep? And then how do I heal them like Wolverine instead of just slapping a Band-Aid on? And if you do that, that's the roadmap to living to 180 and feeling good along the way. So let's look at what the seven pillars of aging are. Okay. And one of the first ones is telomeres. And people have oftentimes heard about this. There's all kinds of tests you can order online that measure blood telomeres, which don't really reflect tissue levels that well. But what we do know is every time a cell divides, it basically takes one off a little string of counters.

• 54:19Dave Asprey?

  And eventually you reach what's called the Hayflick limit. A cell can't divide any more times because its little counter got cut down. Well, all you gotta do is find the enzyme telomerase that lets you lengthen that. And there you go. One of the seven pillars is handled. And in the book, I write about a couple of things. There's a very expensive supplement. There's some lifestyle things. And there's a Russian peptide, a small string of amino acids you can just inject twice a year. That probably has a bigger effect than anything else. I like that one. It's cheaper and it's faster. Now, there's also something called zombie cells. And this is just, just becoming an early trend in anti-aging, although the researchers looking at these, what? The technical term is senescent cells.

• 55:02Dave Asprey?

  And these are cells that don't die, but they stop working. So they sort of sit there and they make free radicals and they don't do anything. And as you age, you get more and more of these over time. So if you can do something like fasting or these drugs, one called rapamycin, that's really coming out from research. And there's a few other compounds being tested. There's another compound from seaweed or strawberries that I write about in the book. That'll tell your body to kill the zombie cells. Get rid of them. And guess what's gonna grow to replace them? Young cells. Who would've thought? There's extracellular stiffening, which is outside of the cells. It comes cellular straitjackets in the book. Okay, what's causing that? Well, we've all heard of beta amyloid plaque as the cause of Alzheimer's. It's a symptom, not a cause.

• 55:47Dave Asprey?

  But throughout your body, when there's inflammation, let's go back to eating industrial meat. Let's go back to eating the wrong vegetables. Let's go back to eating sugar and fried stuff. These things that cause systemic inflammation cause almost cellular level calluses or scarring. And as that builds up over the course of decades, you end up with cells that can't move the way they're supposed to. So you gotta remove the stiffening. And there's a set of techniques to do that in the book. And then we look at what happens when stuff builds up inside the cells. Imagine that inside every cell, there's an incinerator. And his job was to burn garbage. Well, what happens if you have an incinerator and you aren't allowed to pull any ashes out? So you need to burn super clean. And then one day you just decide to stick a bunch of glass and metal in there.

• 56:30Dave Asprey?

  It won't burn, so the incinerator shuts down. Well, this happens inside the cells all the time. And so what if you ate less of the things and did less of the things that clogged up your incinerators? And what if there's a way to get rid of the cells with broken incinerators? There are ways to do that. There's also extracellular garbage. So instead of inside the cell, there's junk outside the cell that builds up over time. And one of the things I just did is I just did a dialysis last week where they pull my blood out, run it through a special filter that gets rid of extracellular garbage, and then put my blood back in after it's clean. This is different than kidney dialysis. It's similar technology, but the filtration is entirely different.

• 57:14Dave Asprey?

  It's an anti-aging technique that's just coming online. I did that up with Dr. Matt Cook, who's been on my show a few times. And so I'm getting rid of this junk. That's a pretty extreme procedure. There's other things you can do, like change how what you eat is cooked. If you're eating burned industrially raised meat, you're so doing it wrong.

• 57:33Jay Shetty?

  Even burned veggie.

• 57:34Dave Asprey?

  Thank you. Yeah, these blackened Brussels sprouts, stop already. You want to cook stuff with water. You want to steam it. You grill it gently if you're going to grill it, and you'll find a difference in how you age, your cancer risk, how you feel, even how you look the next day. And so cooking matters as well as the quality of what you throw on the grill, and the composition really matters. And the science, though, is that it's causing this thing to happen. There's nuclear DNA mutations.

• 58:00Jay Shetty?

  Okay.

• 58:00Dave Asprey?

  And the big one, the one that's funny, because I wrote a whole book, my New York Times bestseller, Sandwiched Between Homo Deuce and Sapiens, that book, is on mitochondria. And that was the one I was missing. So mitochondrial DNA mutation. The power plants in your cells, these things that sense the environment around you, make energy, make hormones, change how your brain thinks. These things mutate over time. And after I wrote Superhuman, a new study came out that Said, oh, when mitochondrial function declines, that they are the things that power the repair of your nuclear DNA. So you have cells that are the building, the building map, the roadmap, the plans for all of the hardware in your body. That's your nuclear

• 58:42Dave Asprey?

  DNA. And then you have the power plants and the wiring for it all. That's your mitochondrial DNA. And these things need to come together. It turns out when your mitochondrial DNA gets mutated over time, it mutates easily, it's no longer able to read and build cells properly based on this blueprint. And it's no longer able to repair the blueprint. So this is a major cause of aging. And the book before Superhuman called Headstrong, I wrote about how forty eight percent of people under age forty have early onset energy decline, this mitochondrial decline, quantifiably measured. And everyone over age forty doesn't make energy as well as a young person unless they hack it. And so one of the big things

• 59:23Dave Asprey?

  that you do in Superhuman, when you're following the plan there, is you say, how do I make energy like a young person? And when you do that, you get the response time in your brain of a young person, and you get better skin, and your cardiac function improves, and you don't get Alzheimer's disease, and you don't get diabetes, and you don't get cancer. And all those risks are actually associated with mitochondria. But it's only one of the seven pillars. So you could say, I have the best mitochondrial function ever, and my cells are in straitjackets, and I have lots of senescent cells. You're still not gonna like what happens. That's why you manage your risk on all these. And everything in this book, all seven of those things, there's, here's what you do that's free, here's what you do that's fifty bucks, the supplement level thing. Here's what the crazy billionaires are doing. And I went out of my way to do all the crazy stuff, even if

• 1:00:08Dave Asprey?

  I didn't really need it, as much as I could, so that I could write about it, and, and talk to the experts, while they were probably injecting me with whatever, and get the knowledge, but also share the experience of it. And what makes me really happy, is right now, people are fortunate enough to go see Dr. Harry and do the hundred and twenty thousand dollar, whole body, six hand stem cell makeover. He's got one that doesn't do the brain stuff that's more affordable. And, you know, I can tell you, if you wait five or 10 years, I'm pretty sure that the costs are gonna come down. But right now, for the cost to come down, it takes the very cutting edge people. And people get really pissed, like, this is just for old, rich people. Look, here's the deal. Cell phones, when they first came out 30 years ago, when you were two years old,

• 1:00:51Dave Asprey?

  you probably don't remember this because you were two, but you'd see the Mercedes 300, the entire trunk was the cellphone transmitter. And this guy, this big old brick on his head, and he's driving down the freeway in LA, talking on the phone, and all the other people in the car, who does that asshole think he is? Oh, my God, these stupid rich people and their cellphones. These are the same people playing Tetris on their phone or whatever. But what happened is, demand comes first. Everything is stupidly expensive because it's the cutting edge of innovation, the fastest computers. When I was eight years old, I had a computer that cost $5,000. It was a hand-me-down from my dad because he worked in the industry. It was before Windows was invented, before DOS was invented. And no one had that when they were eight, but I just was like, I didn't even know what I had. This weird little green blinky thing, right?

• 1:01:35Dave Asprey?

  But now, we all have that. And these anti-agent technologies, over the course of the next 10 years, 20 years, will come down in cost dramatically because they're being funded by people who are willing to basically spend everything they have to get another couple of years of quality life.

• 1:01:52Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely.

• 1:01:52Dave Asprey?

  And all of us, at a certain point in our life, no matter how much or how little we have, if you're facing death, you're gonna say, you know what? I'm willing to make that bargain. And what I want is, I want for everyone listening to the show to benefit from when a few wealthy people do that right now. And it is good for the world, it's good for everyone, and the costs will drop, just like computer processors drop.

• 1:02:14Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:15Dave Asprey?

  Right?

• 1:02:15Jay Shetty?

  Well, I am happy that, and I appreciate the fact that you do go into lifestyle changes here, too.

• 1:02:19Dave Asprey?

  It's free.

• 1:02:20Jay Shetty?

  Like, that's what I mean. And I think that's really, really important. I like both, because I think it is so important. Like, what you're saying, it's, when it's wisdom and science, it's lifestyle and it's these stem cell changes, right? It's both levels, because it's all levels of change. Because if we're not changing our mindset, we're not going to change our behavior. And if we're not changing our biological behavior, we can't change our psychological effects. So...

• 1:02:42Dave Asprey?

  I like to hope that someday, we're gonna have such good and affordable technology that all of us can be, you know, I went on the cheesecake diet for a year, and, you know, I went on, I went on a huge series of inappropriate dates, and I picked up all these weird diseases, and I've got this huge tumor. I'm just gonna go into the doctor, and for five bucks, I'm gonna hit reset, and I'm gonna come out as a seventeen-year-old again. Okay, maybe this will happen, I kinda don't think so. But I would like to think that our technologies are good enough that you could be that stupid.

• 1:03:07Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:07Dave Asprey?

  I also would like...

• 1:03:07Jay Shetty?

  You think it'll make us a bit too reckless?

• 1:03:10Dave Asprey?

  There is data that shows that we adjust our risk. So when seatbelts came out, people started driving faster.

• 1:03:15Jay Shetty?

  Yes, exactly. That's what I mean.

• 1:03:16Dave Asprey?

  But you know what? It's okay that there's risk in life. Who wants to live in a risk-free world?

• 1:03:20Jay Shetty?

  Risk, not reckless.

• 1:03:21Dave Asprey?

  Yeah. So what I think will happen, though, is when you realize, you know what? If I make a mistake like that, I can recover from it. I'm more likely to do something. But how good of a world is that? You mean, I could possibly do something that's more fun, more exciting, more risky, or more worthy? Right? And if I come near dying, I know I'm going to be okay? That's profound. Versus right now, I'm too afraid because I might die. I want to create that world without fear.

• 1:03:47Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:48Dave Asprey?

  But a world that still has risk.

• 1:03:50Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:50Dave Asprey?

  And that's necessary.

• 1:03:51Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, and I vibe with that. The part where I always... And I guess this is always a small percentage of people, but it's the part that it's like, yeah, how much can you risk without hurting anyone else?

• 1:04:04Dave Asprey?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:04Jay Shetty?

  I think that's where pain, to me, is interesting. Because it's like, I'm like that. I'm like, yeah, I want to live to extremes and limits and test the barriers, but never at the cost of hurting other people. And I wonder whether, when you can reset, there's that risk of like, oh, well, they can reset too. You know? And we all know that people, just as people age differently.

• 1:04:24Dave Asprey?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:24Jay Shetty?

  They also age emotionally differently. They also deal with trauma differently. They also deal with tragedy differently, so.

• 1:04:30Dave Asprey?

  It's funny. People over 50 surprisingly show more happiness. And I've studied happiness, given big lectures on it and wrote about it in Game Changers. They actually show, they've actually had enough time to deal with their shit.

• 1:04:42Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:42Dave Asprey?

  Right? And this is the horrible tragedy of being human. If you have children before you're 25, especially as a woman, your lifelong risk of every kind of cancer goes down, your health will improve, your odds of living longer go up. It's actually really good for you. The problem is that for 25-year-olds to have kids, you haven't had enough time to build up a financial base, and you also haven't had enough time to deal with your emotional shit. So now you're going to have kids, and you probably won't be a great parent because you haven't had a chance to do your own work.

• 1:05:10Jay Shetty?

  Yep.

• 1:05:10Dave Asprey?

  Right? You're still finishing separating from all the programming from your parents and all. So you're saying, all right, I'm going to wait till I'm in my 30s, and I have a financial base. But now having kids is harder on my body, right? It's harder on the family. So it's like, you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. And it's one of the reasons that the birth rate is going down. People are saying, I'm going to choose just not to do it. I'm going to choose to wait a long time. And sometimes they wait too long. But part of it is what you just talked about there.

• 1:05:34Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely. Is there anything I haven't asked you today that you're like, David, you're like, Jay, I really want your audience to know this. So I really wanted to talk about this. Whether it's, you know, yeah, it could be anything. I mean, there's so many other places we could go with this, but I just want to give you the.

• 1:05:47Dave Asprey?

  Yeah. One of the things we haven't talked about a lot is cognitive enhancement.

• 1:05:52Jay Shetty?

  Okay.

• 1:05:52Dave Asprey?

  This is something I've done for 20 plus years. Neutropics, the reason modafinil is kind of cool. You look back 10 years, I went on Nightline. I was the only guy who would do without a bag on my head. Yeah, I went to Warden. I was on modafinil the whole time. It's the only way I could even get my MBA and still work full time and all that. And it's one of many things like that. I just want to say, it is well within our current technology to increase your IQ and increase your mental performance across all kinds of, of measures. There's natural plant-based compounds and animal-based compounds you can use that will help you. And I write about this stuff on my blog and daveasprey.com. There's pharmaceuticals that are proven to work. And every month or so, you'll see some big article saying, experts

• 1:06:35Dave Asprey?

  say these can't work. Like experts who didn't read the goddamn research because I put it in my book. And there's five studies that show that you can type 15% faster on this stuff. Like if it doesn't work, how can this be possible? Right? So we know that these things work. And I don't know what's motivating the people who will look you in the face and lie to you and say that they don't work because they do in some circumstances and they might work for you, but they might not. And you owe it to yourself to find out if you want to do that. And then there's technologies, breathing and meditation being the two cheapest and most accessible. And then there's the neurofeedback stuff that I'm doing at 40 years of Zen. And we didn't talk about my funky glasses.

• 1:07:09Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:10Dave Asprey?

  Company's called True Dark. It's a company I founded. And I will tell you, I have doubled my deep sleep by using the glasses I made for sleep. I couldn't buy them anywhere.

• 1:07:18Jay Shetty?

  That's about how that works.

• 1:07:20Dave Asprey?

  You have 5% of the cells in your eyes receive a light signal that you never see. It goes around your visual cortex into the timing system in your brain. And you can look at your body like a computer. There's quadrillion little tiny compute nodes. They're called mitochondria. And they need to work on the same clock. Because if the ones in your liver think it's daytime and the ones in your brain think it's nighttime, they don't match up. So this light comes in and it tells your brain what to do. And it spreads the signal throughout the body. Well, the glasses that I make for sleep with True Dark, it's a patented set of frequencies. These are all of them. It's not just blue blocking. That's not enough. Blue blocking is too much during the day and not enough at night. These are the ones that keep you awake. So you wear these glasses. I can fly to New York. I got no jet lag at all.

• 1:08:05Dave Asprey?

  It eliminated jet lag from my life. And I get more sleep now in six hours, more quality sleep, than the average 20-year-old gets in eight hours of sleep. And I published the actual numbers in here in Superhuman How to Do It. So who would have thought the color of light is a variable that matters? Only by measuring, seeing what works and understanding the fundamental wiring of our body, can you create something like that? So for me, I'm wearing these glasses now. These are called the True Dark Daywalkers. And what these are doing is they're blocking some blue light, which means my brain works better all day because a lot of the interior lighting we have today creates brain stress. So by the 5 o'clock, you want sugar and you're tired. I don't like that. I don't do that anymore. So I'm willing to walk around looking like a rock star.

• 1:08:48Jay Shetty?

  And tell us what sugar does. Because when you talk about fried and fried food, like sugar and...

• 1:08:54Dave Asprey?

  Sugar is bad news. You eat it and it creates something called advanced glycation end products. Guess what clogs up those incinerators in the cells? It's advanced glycation end products. So you're basically browning the tissues in your body. You're increasing your risk of almost every disease, especially cancer and especially cardiovascular. And half of what's in sugar is fructose and half is another kind of sugar, sucrose, actually glucose. Sucrose is glucose plus fructose. But anyway, fructose is what causes non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. So if we were to look at everyone's liver in the room right now, there's a pretty good chance that there's some fatty liver going on. And if you're on an exclusively plant-based diet that doesn't have any saturated fat from animals, your risk actually goes up a little bit.

• 1:09:37Dave Asprey?

  But so you look at non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, it's caused by sugar. So if you don't eat sugar, it doesn't work. And what's interesting, you see this little weird puck shape on my arm? I have a continuous glucose monitor on right now. If I sleep, it won't that much. And we'll see if my shirt's loose enough. It is, so.

• 1:09:56Jay Shetty?

  Now you're showing off your muscles.

• 1:09:57Dave Asprey?

  Yeah, right. So this thing, it's...

• 1:10:00Jay Shetty?

  It's got your face on it.

• 1:10:01Dave Asprey?

  Yeah, I did that. It was a joke. So it didn't have to have my face on it. But this comes on every 14 days. I put it on the other arm. And you can wave your phone or a little device over it and it'll actually tell you what your blood sugar is.

• 1:10:13Jay Shetty?

  I love that. And you created this?

• 1:10:15Dave Asprey?

  No, no, this is something. Type 1 diabetics.

• 1:10:18Jay Shetty?

  Oh, it's okay.

• 1:10:19Dave Asprey?

  But now, I want to know what sugar does to me. So I have this little device and I can wave it over this and say it's at 5.2. That's Canadian or European units. So this is, it's around 100.

• 1:10:31Jay Shetty?

  Okay.

• 1:10:31Dave Asprey?

  And it's the middle of the day and the line's perfectly flat. So I can tell you, I didn't eat something that caused a blood sugar spike. The odds are that if after your next meal, if you had one of these on, you're going to see your blood sugar go up to 140, 150, if it's a typical vegan meal. Now, if you were to say, I'm not a typical vegan, I'm eating a plate of green vegetables and I'm not putting grains on it, I'm not putting a lot of legumes, maybe a little bit, and I'm putting a ton of olives and avocados and seeds and all that stuff.

• 1:10:59Jay Shetty?

  Kind of how we, yeah.

• 1:10:59Dave Asprey?

  Good, good deal. If you're doing that.

• 1:11:01Jay Shetty?

  My wife is the expert on that.

• 1:11:02Dave Asprey?

  You'll see if it works because if your blood sugar spikes, bad news, man. It's not working. So I've been able to tune what is fasting doing and all that.

• 1:11:09Jay Shetty?

  That's so cool.

• 1:11:10Dave Asprey?

  It's data based and now I know what does low blood sugar feel like. I don't get it very often, but when I get it, I know why. And I can also show you, if you get crappy sleep, you will have no ability to control your blood sugar. If you have emotional stress in your life, you eat the same food and your blood sugar's all over. It's crazy. Yeah. So that's the latest hack I'm working on.

• 1:11:29Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely. And I, and I love what you just said there because we know that when we're stressed, we turn to sugars, we turn to carbs, we turn to fats. Like that's what we do. What do you do when you're stressed?

• 1:11:39Dave Asprey?

  When I'm stressed, mostly I meditate on the blood of my enemies. Sorry.

• 1:11:45Jay Shetty?

  What are you, what are you actually doing?

• 1:11:48Dave Asprey?

  I, I'll usually, it depends like the type of stress. It's usually breathing or meditation.

• 1:11:53Jay Shetty?

  Okay. So that's, yeah.

• 1:11:55Dave Asprey?

  There's some energetic stuff that I've picked it up, done all sorts of interesting training in other countries. There's usually some things I can do there and it's, there's this amazing thing you can do. It's called call a friend, if that's where, call a therapist. It's, it's pretty remarkable because then you can talk through someone who really understands the ideology of stress and you can be that for your friends too. It's just hard to see it. I'm not going to see the big picture sometimes because I'm human, unfortunately. No, kidding. But the, the problem is, is that if you don't have someone like that in your life, or your friends are afraid to really tell you, actually, you really are an asshole half the time, but I'm still friends with you. It's really hard to have someone tell you that.

• 1:12:35Jay Shetty?

  It is, huh?

• 1:12:35Dave Asprey?

  So a therapist's job is like, actually, you need to own this 100%. You're blaming the other person. You're just being a childish little jerk and you need to like, put your pants on the right way this morning. And then you're gonna have to do the introspection. So you gotta have someone like that in your life. And so if I'm feeling super stressed and I can't figure out why, that really doesn't happen to me anymore. But if I'm feeling super stressed and I think I know why, and I can't figure it out with friends, I'll call a therapist, I'll call a psychologist. And I don't have necessarily regular sessions, maybe once a month. And I'll just check in and then I'll say, you know, I'm having this hard time with this thing and it's really like, it's causing stress, which is very unusual. I don't experience normal stress like normal people because I hacked all my stress responses. And then we figure out, all right, it's usually, and this is a key thing, it's a false belief.

• 1:13:20Dave Asprey?

  So you are acting rationally and your feelings make sense if what you believe to be true is true. It's just bad assumptions. And those false assumptions lead us to terrorism? I used to think terrorists were crazy? No. If you believe what they believe, their behavior is rational.

• 1:13:36Jay Shetty?

  Is in line with their belief.

• 1:13:36Dave Asprey?

  The beliefs are wrong. And so if your beliefs are wrong, your emotions will be broken. And that's what a psychologist, a really good one, or a therapist can help you see is that you assume something wrong, which is why you got in this, in this jam. So let's change your assumptions and then you say, oh. And then the pain or the stress melts away because you changed the world you live in.

• 1:13:55Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely. I feel like I've been talking to the real life Iron Man. Have you ever been told that?

• 1:14:00Dave Asprey?

  Don't tell anyone.

• 1:14:01Jay Shetty?

  Have you ever been told that?

• 1:14:02Dave Asprey?

  People have said that. I mean, I've got my little blank list. I'm wearing the aura ring and all that.

• 1:14:07Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, it's awesome.

• 1:14:08Dave Asprey?

  I just, I wanna, I wanna feel good all the time.

• 1:14:10Jay Shetty?

  I know, I love, yeah.

• 1:14:11Dave Asprey?

  I was blessed with feeling like I was old and literally I had the diseases of aging before I was 30. High risk of stroke and heart attack, prediabetes, arthritis, all that crap. I don't wanna go back to that. Like, I know what it's like.

• 1:14:23Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely.

• 1:14:23Dave Asprey?

  I, I'm not gonna get old the way, the way people expect, because it just sucks too much.

• 1:14:28Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely. So Dave, we end every interview with a final five, which is a rapid fire question round. One word or one sentence answers max. You ready?

• 1:14:36Dave Asprey?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:36Jay Shetty?

  Okay, awesome. So question number one, what's a lesson you find hard to teach others?

• 1:14:42Dave Asprey?

  How to stop being vegan?

• 1:14:45Jay Shetty?

  It's not hard.

• 1:14:47Dave Asprey?

  Sorry.

• 1:14:48Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. Tell us something that genuinely is hard. Well, maybe it is hard.

• 1:14:52Dave Asprey?

  That actually is a really hard lesson.

• 1:14:54Jay Shetty?

  It's hard, yeah.

• 1:14:56Dave Asprey?

  A lesson that it's hard to teach others is that there are layers of abilities and powers and energies that they have that they've never seen. It's just hard to believe.

• 1:15:07Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely. Okay, second question. What's one thing you were once certain of that you recently changed your mind on?

• 1:15:12Dave Asprey?

  I was once certain that the less you could sleep, the better. Because sleep is such a big waste of time.

• 1:15:19Jay Shetty?

  Oh, yeah. God, I used to have that one, too. I sleep my eight and a half hours a night.

• 1:15:24Dave Asprey?

  Yeah, sleep quality, man. I've become a sleep advocate over the past few years as I looked at the data. I still sleep as little as I can, but my sleep is really good.

• 1:15:33Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:33Dave Asprey?

  So that was a big change.

• 1:15:34Jay Shetty?

  That's a great point. Yeah. Okay, question number three. What's something about you that most people don't know that would surprise them?

• 1:15:40Dave Asprey?

  I was once bitten by a vampire bat.

• 1:15:45Jay Shetty?

  Where?

• 1:15:46Dave Asprey?

  In Colorado.

• 1:15:49Dave Asprey?

  They don't even live there, but I woke up when I was a kid with a vampire bat feeding on my neck.

• 1:15:53Jay Shetty?

  You being serious?

• 1:15:54Dave Asprey?

  I'm very totally serious.

• 1:15:55Jay Shetty?

  Oh, you're being serious?

• 1:15:55Dave Asprey?

  Absolutely.

• 1:15:56Jay Shetty?

  Okay, I didn't believe you.

• 1:15:56Dave Asprey?

  Yeah, no, it's a real species. They hypothesized they came in on bananas. This was pre-internet, but we actually caught the bat and took it to the hospital. It was just like that big, not very big.

• 1:16:06Jay Shetty?

  Okay.

• 1:16:07Dave Asprey?

  But yeah, it was kind of scary. I woke up in the middle of the night, it was feeding, and I didn't know what it was.

• 1:16:11Jay Shetty?

  Oh, my.

• 1:16:12Dave Asprey?

  And I grabbed it and I thought it was a mouse and it wasn't. And I'm like, it had bit me and I threw it down. It never hits the floor. It was really creepy. But yeah, that actually happens.

• 1:16:20Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, wow. I had a bad experience, but it came and literally like it was, I was in India and Pune. And it literally landed on my face. I was nine years old and I literally just pushed it off like it didn't bite me or anything. But it literally flew and landed on my face. It was, it was my Batman moment.

• 1:16:35Dave Asprey?

  They carry a lot of diseases, too, not just rabies.

• 1:16:38Jay Shetty?

  Interesting. Okay. All right, question number four. What's something you once valued that you no longer pay attention to?

• 1:16:45Dave Asprey?

  When I was young, I really valued actually two things. One was being rich. And I made $6 million when I was 26 and I lost it when I was 28. And I could tell when I was 26, I said, I'll be happy when I have $10 million instead of $6 million, which is a super dick thing to say. So that fascination with when I have more money, I'll be happy. I have lost that. And you could say, it's because you have enough. That's true. You need about $74,000 a year. But I can say that that obsession with it, no. Above a certain level, it's just about what would you do with money to make the world a better place? Because you can't spend it. It'd be stupid. So that's one.

• 1:17:25Dave Asprey?

  The other one is it has to do with like wanting to be famous and recognized. When I was 23, I was in Entrepreneur Magazine because I sold the first thing that was ever sold over the internet. And it was a caffeine t-shirt, said caffeine, my drug of choice. The first e-commerce before the word e-commerce was out there. No one knew what a big deal it was historically. For me, it was just being scrappy and trying to pay my college tuition. But I was like, look at me. I'm in a magazine. There's a big picture of me in it, my double XL t-shirt and you know, puffy red face. And I just realized after 15 minutes of that, it didn't do anything. Like, like all of the, oh, I'm going to be recognized.

• 1:18:08Dave Asprey?

  There's no value in that. And I'm going to be enormously wealthy. There's some value in that, but not very much. So for me, it's like the, the rich and famous thing. It's about your mission and those things, whatever.

• 1:18:23Jay Shetty?

  Well, thank you for thinking it through. I love that answer. Okay.

• 1:18:25Dave Asprey?

  Sorry, that wasn't one sentence.

• 1:18:26Jay Shetty?

  It was, it was a great answer. I was happy you went off on it. This is the first time we're ever asking this question as a final five. So you get to answer this. I'm excited to ask you this question. If you could create any law for the world to follow, what would it be?

• 1:18:39Dave Asprey?

  I like be kind would be a really good one. But the really amazing law would be the law that limited the number of words in the entire set of laws in the country.

• 1:18:51Jay Shetty?

  Okay, fair enough. Thank you, Dave. You're awesome. You're even more fascinating person than I could ever imagine. Oh, thanks, Dave. And I really hope, I'm a student now. I actually want to come to you for a million different things and a million different personal questions I have. We'll do some upgrades. Yeah, no, I would love that. I think you've opened up my mind to a whole new set of thoughts and beliefs today. And I've heard people talk about a lot of these things here and there when I've been at conferences and meetings and events and one-on-ones, but you've done something else that's happened today. Thanks, man. So I mean that. So I would highly recommend everyone who's been watching or listening today, please, please go out in the book. We just skimmed the surface, but we dove into a few of the themes and topics that you'll find in-depth in the book and more importantly, the lifestyle points as well. Remember, tons of free advice, tons

• 1:19:35Jay Shetty?

  of things you can start doing right now. Fries and sugar are a good place to start. But Dave, thank you so much. You've been an incredible guest and on purpose. And yeah, very grateful to have you here. Thank you.