151: Dave Asprey | Biohacking the Way to a Bulletproof Life

Transcript for Dave Asprey - Biohacking the Way to a Bulletproof Life (Episode 151)

Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DeFillippo. My friend Dave Asprey is one of the guys that essentially pioneered the biohacking industry. In fact, I don't even think we really talked much about biohacking before he came on the scene. He spent over a million dollars in 20 years. It's probably millions at this point and 20 years biohacking and he scaled that to a nine figure business over the past few years, which has just been incredible to watch. Everyone's heard of Bulletproof coffee. I've gone to a bunch of different countries. Australia, they got Bulletproof coffee. It's just everywhere and today we're talking about brain kryptonite. This is the focus of his new book. It's called Headstrong. By brain kryptonite, I mean we're talking about things like increasing energy in your brain, why this is important and we focus on getting rid of brain fog and being able to stay focused for a longer period of time. I found those skills particularly useful here. I don't do health related episodes, you all know that. Especially because I'm no expert in this area, but I wanted to help get the word out about Dave's work because I think we can all use a bit of a boost in the brain department especially, and if you want to know how I managed to create this network for myself of incredible guests, great friends. Well, I do this deliberately and I created a course that is free for you about how to start that process. That's over at jordanharbinger.com/course.

[00:01:23] All right, here's Dave Asprey. Dave, tell me your backstory because you're one of the guys that essentially pioneered the biohacking movement. Unless I just don't know about everything that came beforehand, which is possible, but I know that in the beginning the on ramp was Bulletproof executive. I don't even know if you still have that brand and then a handful of other people who are doing things that I can't even remember. And then suddenly, I took a nap and woke up and Bulletproof coffee was all over the world.

Dave Asprey: [00:01:51] What happened is I spent 20 years doing research and a nonprofit for anti-aging, talking with all these functional medicine people and other experts in nutrition. And I realized there's a whole bunch of bodybuilders over here in pro-athletes over here and Navy SEALs over here, and astronaut recovery people here, and neurologists, and none of them talk. And I wanted full control, my own biology. And I said, we've got to have a name for this. So I came up with this name biohacking and I wrote it in my first blog post. I made this infographic about it and I didn't trademark the name. And I said, I want this to be a community. I trademarked Bulletproof and Bulletproof Executives. That's my company and it's in the biohacking field. Started the first biohacking conference six years ago, 100 people show up. And last year, we had, I think about 3,000 people, maybe a little bit under 3,000, 2,800 or something. And we're having our next Biohacking Conference in April 5th in LA. And what happened is this year, Miriam Websters added biohacking to the dictionary.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:52] I saw that, yeah.

Dave Asprey: [00:02:53] Yeah. And I’m in the definition too.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:55] Oh, that's pretty awesome.

Dave Asprey: [00:02:56] So they're calling me like on whatever was Fox News or something on the TV, like the Father of Biohacking, which is really cool. I've never been in a dictionary before.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:03:06] Yeah, you know, you can make the Forbes List, but you really, can't really -- making in the dictionary is even harder.

Dave Asprey: [00:03:12] That was kind of a surreal moment. Somebody texted me like, “Did you see this one?” “No!” It's awesome. So the idea is you can change the environment around you and inside of you to get control of your own biology. The first use of biohacking was in ‘92, but it was more about inserting jellyfish genes in your cat, so it'll glow and things like that.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:03:31] Also cool though.

Dave Asprey: [00:03:33]Pretty cool.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:03:33] Yeah. I want to give it a try that on yourself.

Dave Asprey: [00:03:35] I was going to do that to my sister when I was young, but it didn't work.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:03:39] It didn't work. You tried it and it just didn't work.

Dave Asprey: [00:03:40] I just colored her with yellow markers, but I was four, so.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:03:43] Fair, fair, but she's still glowed at least for a little while. I remember when I was taking those glow sticks as a kid that you'd get on Halloween, and I would pour them all over myself and I'd be like, “Look, I'm glowing.” And my mom would freak out because who knows what's in those things.

Dave Asprey: [00:03:54] Exactly.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:03:54] There's no way like it's in a thick plastic shell because you don't want your kid to chew it open.

Dave Asprey: [00:03:59]Right.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:00] But I managed, I’m determined.

Dave Asprey: [00:04:02] I bathed myself in that stuff more times than I should have.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:04] Yeah, absolutely. I can imagine.

Dave Asprey: [00:04:06] I don't think that counts as biohacking, but it was preliminary.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:09] No, I mean it might be the opposite in a lot of ways. You also had to lose a bunch of weight and everything, right? I mean how did you originally get into this? I know it was not because you're like, “I'm still healthy.”

Dave Asprey: [00:04:19] Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:19] Even healthier.

Dave Asprey: [00:04:21] It was sort of the opposite. I had arthritis diagnosed when I was 14 in my knees.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:27] Is that genetic then?

Dave Asprey: [00:04:28] No, it's probably environmental, and no one knew what it was at the time. I was obese, I get 300 pounds when I was about 23, and--

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:39] 300 pounds.

Dave Asprey: [00:04:40] 300 pounds.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:41] For people who are watching us. Do you mind if I ask how much you weight?

Dave Asprey: [00:04:44] I weigh 203 pounds right now, and I'm 9.6 percent body fat and I have 19.4 pounds of fat on my body.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:51] So you used to have like 119.4 give or take.

Dave Asprey: [00:04:54] It's hard to know if it was give or take. It's hard to know how much of that was inflammation versus fat. Like it’s how much weight I lost. But I'm sure that a lot of it is inflammation. But I also, I was at 46 inch waist. I'm a 33 inch waist now. I'm actually lower than I was as a junior in high school.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:10] Wow.

Dave Asprey: [00:05:11] Which is phenomenal. I’m 45.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:13] Not bad.

Dave Asprey: [00:05:14] I also, I got other diseases of aging, so I'm 26 working in Silicon Valley, I mean $6 million and I was 26 is it the company that held Google's first server. I was a cofounder of a part of that company. And we ended up starting the data center in cloud computing business. And I started getting brain fog to the point I bought disability insurance because I wouldn't hire myself because I couldn't remember anything.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:39] Oh man. And you were you coding or what are you doing?

Dave Asprey: [00:05:42] I was more of an architect. I ended up running a program for the University of California to teach engineers how to build the Internet. So it's like how should it work? How must it works? So I was a code originally, but then I became like a technology architect kind of guy.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:53] Probably helps to know how to remember things, things straight in your head at that point.

Dave Asprey: [00:05:56] It was terrifying actually. And also my emotions would just get all over the place. And then I said “Something's wrong.” And I said, “I'm going to just exercise. I'm going to lose the weight no matter what.” And I've had a couple of knee surgeries by then and I worked out an hour and a half a day, six days a week, and after a year, actually 18 months of that, I didn't lose any weight. I could max all the machines and I rose, I eat less than all my friends, and I work out more than all my friends, and I'm fatter than all my friends. And I thought, well it's a moral failing. I actually eat less lettuce leaves or something.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:06:27] Sure.

Dave Asprey: [00:06:27] And what it was, was I was eating the wrong stuff and there were environmental factors that are involved, and I fired my doctor when he told me vitamins C would kill me, and that maybe I should lose weight. When I told them what I did, he just looked at me like he knew I was lying. I was clearly leaving just stuffing Snickers bars out.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:06:42] Oh, right.

Dave Asprey: [00:06:42] And it's very common. Doctors are taught this, and I'm like, “Okay, no one's going to help me. I'm just going to hack this.” Unfortunately, I am a computer hacker, so I stayed up every night and I would just read pub med and I would take, by the way, I lost my $6 million two years after I made it, so I haven't --

Jordan Harbinger: [00:06:59] Oh, classic Silicon Valley story.

Dave Asprey: [00:07:00] It was a great couple of years, but I would just buy anything that I thought would help. And I dug really deep and I learned about electrical currents on the body and the first infrared light for the brain almost 20 years ago, EEG neurofeedback. And then I started running an antiaging nonprofit group that let me talk to people three times my age who were reversing the symptoms I had. I was diagnosed with high risk of stroke and heart attack and prediabetes before I was 30.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:24] Wow. You are super unhealthy.

Dave Asprey: [00:07:26] I was crashed.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:27] Are there people in your family that are that unhealthy or?

Dave Asprey: [00:07:30] No. I mean my mom's side of the family isn't particularly healthy. There's a lot of autoimmunity.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:34] Because how did you get there? You know, how did you get that unhealthy stress and what else?

Dave Asprey: [00:07:39] Stress is probably a part of it, but it was a lot of environmental stress. So there's two big factors. One of them is if you're sympathetic dominant or you have a strong fight or flight response, basically if you're anxious. And for me, we traced that back into exactly where that came from. It comes from two places. It is common entrepreneurs. The most common one is if you're bullied.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:59] Yeah. Okay. It’s like sign up any computer guy for that one.

Dave Asprey: [00:08:02] Well, pretty much. I mean, we go to mastermind talks with Jason or any of these big entrepreneur conferences. You ask around the, everyone in the room was bullied, like that's just how it works. And then you're like, “I got to prove something.” So I had some of that. And also I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:15] Oh, I've heard of a lot of people actually.

Dave Asprey: [00:08:17] Yeah, and I actually got to work with a woman who invented -- for 30 years, she's around the group on this. She didn't invent it, but she documented and progress the science on pre and perinatal trauma. So I came into the world ready to kill, things I was trying to kill me and I never stopped, right?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:32] Gotcha.

Dave Asprey: [00:08:33] And it also affected my ability to make connections with other people because you’re like, “I'm alone. Like nothing safe.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:38] Sure.

Dave Asprey: [00:08:38] And I ditched all that in my early 30s, I did a lot of personal development work, so that was a part of it. But the biggest part, I grew up in a basement that had had a water leak and there was toxic mold in the basement. So in addition, all this weird stuff, auto-immunity, I'd have nosebleeds every day. I had rashes and asthma and just all this weird stuff. And now that I've done a documentary on toxic mold, I've interviewed all the top experts and started a company that helps us solve that problem and even eliminate mold in the Bulletproof coffee beans. I understand exactly the biology of this stuff. And so what happened to me is I got Hashimoto's, which is a thyroid condition. A lot of entrepreneurs have it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:09:13] Yeah, it's so funny. I was just going to say, I know like this seems to be the thing that everyone is either being diagnosed with now and that it's because they didn't know how to find it before or it's more common or it's just a confirmation bias on my part.

Dave Asprey: [00:09:27] I love it that you said that though because I interviewed a ton of people on my show and wrote a book called Game Changers that's just coming out. And one of the rules, these are 46 laws based on my interview and just my love of Robert Greene's work. I know you just interviewed Robert Greene.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:09:43] Yeah.

Dave Asprey: [00:09:44] So a hero of mine, and this idea that what do all of these high-performers do, who I've had on the show and if some of the mutual friends, people who have been on your show, but I ask them these questions. One of the things that came out of it is that, I'm not going to paraphrase. I know exactly right --

Jordan Harbinger: [00:10:03] Yeah, okay.

Dave Asprey: [00:10:04] Memory, because there's 46 of them. But the idea is that if you burn the candle at both ends, you don't get that back. And what happens is entrepreneurs or just high stress people, when you hit a certain emotional or work stress thing and you don't sleep and you're flying all over the place and even if you're over-exercising and especially with environmental insults like that.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:10:24] So my entire life, go on.

Dave Asprey: [00:10:26] Yeah, this is a like in debit.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:10:27] Yeah.

Dave Asprey: [00:10:28] Once you hit that wall and then you get a little car accident or you get a virus or some or a family member dies, another stressor, it pushes you over and then autoimmunity turns on. So people like you and me, we're more likely to have our immune system started attacking our body. And the first thing that gets attacked is your thyroid quite often.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:10:44] Why is that the case?

Dave Asprey: [00:10:46] I don't know why the thyroid is, I think we know why your immune system does that, but the deal here is, is really straight forward from talking to all these people and just having to force myself to do the thinking to structure in the book is that you can push really hard and then recover and you push hard and recover. And what I did, like I'll just turn the volume all the way up and just leave it there. Let's just hold it closer to the floor--

Jordan Harbinger: [00:11:06] We recover, I'm fine, yeah.

Dave Asprey: [00:11:08] Yeah, right. I'll just--

Jordan Harbinger: [00:11:08] I’m young.

Dave Asprey: [00:11:09] Yeah, I'll just push harder. It's a willpower thing and so what you end up doing is you permanently put the brakes on. Once you start doing that, all the energy that should go into repairing yourselves goes through taking yourselves and you can undo a lot of that. And I've managed to turn off my Hashimoto's antibodies, but here's the deal. Just as a thing for high performers, the best people in the world, they push really hard and then they recover like maniacs and they push hard, they recover. And the ones who are running from something, I have to prove I'm good enough. I have to run away from failure the way, I made my 6 million and lost my 6 million. With that kind of a mindset, that's what breaks you and that was a part of my issue. So I had a chemical assault from the toxic mold that was in my bedroom and I had emotional stress. And then you go to work, like “I'm going to push really hard,” and then you'd go through a bad breakup and things like that and all of a sudden your body just starts to betray you.

Jason DeFilippo: [00:12:04] You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Dave Asprey. We'll be right back after this.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:12:09] This episode is sponsored in part by HostGator. Do you have a business card? If you do, it probably lists your website. If you don't have a business card, it's probably because your website serves that purpose virtually. Either way, you've got to have a website. It's 2019, there's no excuse for you not having a website. It should look clean. It should load easily. It should hardly ever go down. So if you want to have your home on the Internet, let our friends at HostGator handle your website needs. It's never been easier in and the best thing is you can start today. You don't have to have a professional developer just because your site needs some bells and whistles. HostGator has plenty of add-ons that'll pump your site full of pro looking features and that's why they've got their website builder, which we recommend.

[00:12:46] HostGator will let you choose from over a hundred beautiful templates. So the site's going to look good on a tablet. It's going to look good on a phone. It's going to look at on a desktop. There's all kinds of add-ons, PayPal, so you can accept payment, SEO plugins, WordPress, you can install with a click. You can get all kinds of cool templates there. And if that sounds more advanced than you'd like, just use the basics on HostGator is easy to use control panel. They guarantee it will be up 99.9 percent of the time. They've got 24/7, 365 customer support and HostGator's giving our wonderful listeners up to 62 percent off all packages for new users, and they've got a 45 day complete money back guarantee. Go to hostgator.com/jordan to sign up. That's hostgator.com/jordan.

[00:13:28]This episode is also sponsored by Intuit. If you could live your most prosperous life, what would that look like? Would you open your own business? Would you buy a new home? Would you go back to college? Maybe pay off your loans and save for retirement? Well, whatever your vision Intuit can help you get closer to that future with financial tools that help you save time and money. Easy to use software like QuickBooks, TurboTax, and Mint, make invoices, budgeting taxes and expenses as simple as possible, from helping you get your maximum tax refund to automating your businesses accounting, helping you manage budgets. Intuit helps make complicated finances easy. With these tools, you can confidently manage your money and work towards a more prosperous future. Your long term goals could be close with anything. Join over 50 million people who are using Intuit’s products to achieve prosperity. Learn more at intuit.com.

Jason DeFilippo: [00:14:13] Intuit proud makers of TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Mint. Don't forget we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of the key takeaways from Dave Asprey. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com/podcast. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. To learn more about our sponsors and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit jordanharbinger.com/deals. If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to jordanharbinger.com/subscribe, and now back to our show with Dave Asprey.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:14:43] Why do we have autoimmune? I never quite understood this. It doesn't -- there's nothing readily coming to me that says, so I'm really stressed out. Therefore my body should attack itself. Like what is the process that's happening here? I realize you're not a doctor, but you know all about this.

Dave Asprey: [00:14:58] I mean I'm a New York Times science author at least, I have a good.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:15:00] Yeah, you should have a good understanding of this.

Dave Asprey: [00:15:02] I have not written about the immune system specifically more about mitochondria, which are the power plants in the cells. My last big book was based on this.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:15:09] I remembered that in fifth grade, biology.

Dave Asprey: [00:15:10] Yeah, exactly. These guys, they're ancient bacteria that sense the environment around you and they're trying to figure out is this a stressful situation or is this not? And they're doing it on a cell by cell basis, and that can roll up into their interpreting stress that maybe you wouldn't think of as stress, but they already got the signal before you had a chance to think about it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:15:29] Gotcha, okay.

Dave Asprey: [00:15:30] And that's definitely a part of it because they're the ones that the first line responders, and we also know based on the work of a doctor named Candace Pert, she's a researcher, who’s passed away, who discovered the opioid receptor in our brain. So a very celebrated figure in science. And she went from this hardcore Western rationalist approach to more of a very balanced Eastern Western approach. And she actually showed in her work called The Molecules of Emotion that your immune system has a memory of its own. And what tends to happen is that in the case of let's say a toxic mold, it creates compounds that causes your white blood cells, your immune system to get hyper aggressive. And it oftentimes sensitizes your white blood cells to the proteins that line say your thyroid or very commonly your nerve sheath called the myelin binding 13.

[00:16:21] And so because these are molecular mimics, you get that. And it's also well shown that if you learn to meditate, if you relax, you increase your heart rate variability, you learn how to not just think you're chilling, but actually chill, that it reduces inflammation of the immune system. The immune system is kind of a mimic of what's going on inside our brain, but the exact mechanisms of autoimmunity, once we crack that, it's going to change the world. In fact, last weekend I was at the XPRIZE Visioneering Summit with Peter Diamandis. And one of the big XPRIZEs that I think got nominated for next year was funding a 10 or $20 million prize specifically to deal with autoimmunity. I believe the number one cause of autoimmunity is environmental toxic mold because I've seen it over and over, and it's such an endemic problem. And the number two cause is it's either hate or stress, they go together.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:17:12] Yeah, they do go together.

Dave Asprey: [00:17:13] It's as a psychological emotional spiritual thing that's part of it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:17:17] I know you've spent like 1 million bucks just, I was going to insert a really crude joke here, but I wasn't messing with your own biology and biohacking yourself over the last 20 years. And I think that's pretty fascinating because a lot of people who are in this field, they will take that sample size of one and then say “Here's all this stuff we're going to do.” Luckily your sample size seems to be enormous right now because I just got back from Australia and every cafe had Bulletproof Coffee.

Dave Asprey: [00:17:44] Some of them are real.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:17:45] Yeah. I was like, is it really the same beans? And then they're just like, “No, just take whatever coffee.” And then we throw some gee in it or some just butter and that's it.

Dave Asprey: [00:17:54] Bulletproof is available in Australia, but not widely. And here's the deal, I thought about this when I first started this. Anytime you put butter in your coffee instead of milk, you are getting more benefits from your coffee than milk because milk steals antioxidants from coffee. So even if everyone in the world switches to butter in moldy coffee, the world is still better off. But it's not Bulletproof, don’t call it that. It's called butter coffee.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:18:15] Sure, sure. Yeah, you can try that. But I think the problem slash the best thing is, “Look, if you invented tissue paper and you call it Kleenex, and then I grabbed a Costco brand, and I say it's a Kleenex. It's not the official thing but like when your brand has made it that far into, what do you call it? The public conscience. It’s pretty cool.

Dave Asprey: [00:18:34] It’s an honor when people want to copy you.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:18:35] Yeah.

Dave Asprey: [00:18:36] But we send a lot of letters to make sure the trademark is well protected.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:18:39] Yeah, yeah, you can, I mean I think that that ship has probably sailed in some countries though especially.

Dave Asprey: [00:18:45] We have global trademarks. But it just enforcement in different countries, you do at different level there.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:18:48] You can go broke in trying to enforce it.

Dave Asprey: [00:18:49] Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:18:50] Yeah. I think it's probably, it's better for your brand to be recognizable than to go after the food cart at the mall in Australia.

Dave Asprey: [00:18:58] I've got the best photo from a remote town in India and there's a little handmade sign, Bulletproof Coffee.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:19:05] Oh, man.

Dave Asprey: [00:19:05] It’s just probably ski or whatever coffee. It was not Bulletproof coffee, and I don't think we can find that guy to just send him a warning, letting them it wouldn't, but I would say if you're thinking about putting coffee in your cafe, we'll happily sell you the beans that are lab tested for mold toxins, brain octane, which is required. It's not MTT oil. It's different and better. And we'll get you some grass-fed butter. That's easy.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:19:23] Nice. Well, okay, look, Silicon Valley's inhaling Bulletproof coffee branded or not David Beckham had it or something. I think I saw that somewhere online.

Dave Asprey: [00:19:32] I think there was something on social about that.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:19:33] And Hollywood loves it, and it sort of spans the gamut of people that -- it went beyond the laughter curtain of why the hell are you putting butter in your coffee?

Dave Asprey: [00:19:43] It went pretty fast actually, and this is a lesson for entrepreneurs listening and it's the opposite of what they taught me at business school. I went to Wharton. Same school as Trump.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:19:55] And Adam Grant.

Dave Asprey: [00:19:55] Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:19:56] In your defense. Adam Grant went there too. A lot of good people went there, a lot of great people outside.

Dave Asprey: [00:20:02] I think it's a fantastic school. The only issue was they didn't have a built in ethics program when I went there. It was the only school that didn't, so we were giving a hard time about it. I think they've since remedied that, but they taught us in one class, “It's cheaper to spend a dollar telling people your product is good than it is making the product.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:20:17] Oh, that's a depressing.

Dave Asprey: [00:20:21] Common in business school teaching.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:20:22] Let’s highlight that though. One more time. It's cheaper to spend a dollar telling people that your product is good than to spend that dollar actually making the product good.

Dave Asprey: [00:20:29] And I fundamentally believe that's unethical and I also believe people are smart enough to buy what works and having an efficacious product. A product that actually does what you say can do, that you can feel and see a difference. So the reasonable if you took off wasn't the brand, although I think it's a pretty awesome name.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:20:47] It is a great name. I thought about stealing it many times, but I like you too much to do that.

Dave Asprey: [00:20:51] Thank you.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:20:51] And I don't want to get sued

Dave Asprey: [00:20:53] Nice, but the honest truth is that people try it and they go, “I thought it was BS, but I actually noticed a difference in how I felt. I think I want to feel this way more.” And then they tell their friends because they want to share something that matters and that's what made it spread. You know, it probably could've called it buttercup or something.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:21:15] Oh yeah. Maybe it wouldn't have been as cool to refer though, wouldn't have done as well on the bro culture, if you think of the name butter buttercup. I remember in the ‘90s there was this, you might remember this, there was like an Arctic expedition. The guys were walking to the North Pole or something like that. And I remember there was this 900 number. Remember those?

Dave Asprey: [00:21:33] Oh, yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:21:33] They call and get updates. So my friend was at -- we are all at some kid's house and we're like, “Let's call this 900 number.” Because it was a bad thing to do, and we'll get updates on the Arctic expeditions. So he called and they were like, “These guys are hiking and here's where they are. They're a hundred miles North of this. And every day they put butter in their coffee and we were like, “That's so disgusting.”

Dave Asprey: [00:21:53] In the ‘90s?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:21:54] Yeah. But I think they just needed the calories. It wasn't like this helps us absorb -- I think they were just starving and they needed the densest thing they could carry, which is pure fat. So they just put that in their coffee.

Dave Asprey: [00:22:06] It's true. Settlers were carried butter and bacon fat or tallow, and like some sort of carbs. And that was about it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:22:13] Yeah. It was because these guys are on foot. I mean there's not a whole lot they could do. And so then when I heard about Bulletproof, I was like, they kind of had this, but it was a little different and you only needed it when you were shivering so bad that you needed 5,000 calories, 7,000 calories a day.

Dave Asprey: [00:22:28] It's kind of funny. The idea for Bulletproof coffee came to me because I had exhausted the Western medicine stuff and I knew I still wasn't happy. And I believe that everybody fundamentally wants to be happy. I was just willing to literally go the ends of the Earth for this. So when I tried to let stuff that was supposed to work and didn't, I said, “All right, I'm going to go learn meditation from the masters.” So I took off for Tibet and I spend about three months in Nepal and Tibet and went to monasteries, meditated and things like that. And I went to Mount Kailash, which is remote Western Tibet, middle of nowhere, five days in a four wheel drive to get there.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:22:59] Five days in a four wheel drive to get there.

Dave Asprey: [00:23:00] 10 hours a day. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:02] Oh my gosh, there's no way to get there on a plane or anything?

Dave Asprey: [00:23:07] No, this is one of the most remote parts of the world.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:09] Wow.

Dave Asprey: [00:23:10] And it's where basically Mount Olympus of Buddhism and Hinduism. So this is where the gods live on this mountain. No one's ever climbed the mountain. And you go and you walk at 26 mile circuit at 18,000 feet elevation around it. Sort of like taller than the mountain. So I'm going to go do this just because it's one of the things that no one's ever done.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:27] Yeah, bucket list.

Dave Asprey: [00:23:28] Well, no one from the West. It turns out a lot of people go there in the middle of summer from India and Tibet. It's just one of those like going to Mecca sort of things. So I said, “All right, I'm going to try this.” But I got there two months late and it was 10 degrees below zero, and there's 30 mile an hour winds, and there's only eight people in this little guest house. You can call them mud on huts on the fire.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:45] Sure.

Dave Asprey: [00:23:46] And I'm feeling wracked because of the elevation and it's cold and then all the way recovered the way I am now, and this little Tibetan woman, I saw a picture of her, she gives me yak butter tea, and I drank it and was like “Game on!” I feel so much better, and it just stuck in my head. I made a habit of noting when I felt amazing, when I felt crappy, so I could just find the variables that caused it, and I drank a lot more of that. And when I came home I decided, “All right, I'm going to start experimenting.” I ended up doing the mold free coffee, grass fed butter because I tested regular butter, it doesn't work. And I added the brain octane from the knowledge I had from the antigen group, but something else happened in Tibet that I haven't talked about very much. I descended 7,500 vertical feet in one day and I completely jacked up my knees, so I already out arthritis.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:30] So like walking downstairs.

Dave Asprey: [00:24:32] Walking down stairs for a mile and a half vertical or something.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:35] Oh, man.

Dave Asprey: [00:24:36] So I for five days could not walk, even with two poles. I can barely cross the street.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:40] It’s massive swelling and inflammation.

Dave Asprey: [00:24:42] And harsh pain. So we're driving to Tibet and I really wanted to go on this walk, but I wasn't going to be able to do it. So we stopped at this little mud building on the side of the road and I asked a Chinese guy on the bus, “Could read the menu?” “Hey, what does it say?” And he read everything. I'm looking for collagen. I know I need collagen and my joints. That's what they're made out of, just to repair them. There's only one menu item that will fit the bill. It was pigs ears.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:05] Oh, delicious by the way.

Dave Asprey: [00:25:07] I've got a bowl of cold boiled pigs ears. It was horrible.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:12] Really? They're kind of good if they're done right. I know you're talking to like the one guys had bowls of pigs ears and I'm like, “You just haven't had pigs ears, buddy.”

Dave Asprey: [00:25:19] You know, I imagine they could be good. This is a roadside without refrigeration middle of nowhere. It was brutal.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:25] Maybe skipped the pots.

Dave Asprey: [00:25:26] I dipped them in hot soups and they’re really chewy, but the next day my knees were 50 percent better. I just needed the materials and like I'm not putting pigs ears in my coffee. So the reason you see--

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:38] That’s my new business idea.

Dave Asprey: [00:25:40] Pig’s ears coffee, you're all over it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:44] Yeah, there's a brand here.

Dave Asprey: [00:25:45] Bacon proof coffee.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:45] Bacon proof coffee, yeah, yeah. Except, it's not quite bacon. I'll make it Latin so it sounds fancy.

Dave Asprey: [00:25:53] Baconoid.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:53] Yeah. Baconoid.

Dave Asprey: [00:25:55] So what I ended up doing when I came back is, I said, “All right, I know from the anti-aging stuff would collagen does biochemically. I'm going to start using it as a performance supplement. And the reason they called you in everywhere right now, it's all because Bulletproof put collagen in on the map. So the original posts about biohacking were, “Hey, the type of fat, this weird Brain Octane stuff, this butter in coffee, the purity of the coffee and collagen protein. And those things helped me to resculpt my body. These are fundamental technologies that were missing from the story. And it's that sort of stuff where you just notice one thing in the environment and then you say, “Wait, why?” And then you dig into your sense of science and then you build a product out of it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:26:33] 48 million cups. I hate to harp on the coffee, but it's really, this is kind of like the flagship product. I know you have a million other things, but I am curious because 48 million of Bulletproof coffee--

Dave Asprey: [00:26:44] That was a long time ago.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:26:44] The guesstimate. Oh really? That was a long time ago. So it was probably like 150 million now.

Dave Asprey: [00:26:49]You know that, yep.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:26:49] Yeah, because I saw that in the guardian and it was like last year. But the articles --

Dave Asprey: [00:26:53] Shows like 2014.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:26:54] Yeah, I think it was 2016. Yeah, but I was just thinking those poor yaks, right? There getting milked raw.

Dave Asprey: [00:27:00] All six of them.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:27:01] Right. Why does it matter where the butter comes from? Because I think, and I don't want to get too into the weeds on this, but I found that interesting because then it's not just the fat, right? Because you can get fat anywhere.

Dave Asprey: [00:27:11] Yeah. It turns out there's super toxic fats. There's fats that do all sorts different things. So you can't say fats good or bad for you. It depends exactly which fat. And when I came back I just bought some butter and it was organic butter. It wasn't grass fed and some tea and I blended it. It just tasted bad it and didn't make me feel good. What the heck? So I ended up trying all these different teas, $100 an ounce tea kind of things, all these different things, no difference. So then I went to the gourmet store. I had 24 different kinds of butter and I just tested them all and I said, “Wait, these two work.” And those are the grass fed butter, and I said, “Okay, it feels different if you use grass fed butter.” So I standardized on that and this was just a process of experimentation and elimination.

And then I tried coconut oil and coconut milk and then I tried MCT oil, which is four different kinds of fat all mixed together, one of which doesn't do anything biologically compared to the others. And I ended up after trial and error, came up with the one of the four kinds of MCT, that's brain octane oil. That was the one that you could feel the kick. It had the most effect. Three years after I launched that UC San Diego came out with a study that shows it's four times more ketogenic. It causes ketones to rise in the body. Even if you had carbs, four times more than coconut oil and twice as much as the MCT oils that even work and probably three times more than plain old MCT with including all the junk stuff that you can buy that doesn't raise ketones at all.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:28:30] I want to switch gears a little to the brain stuff because I actually, I got a little sidetracked on the coffee because I'm interested in. The brain kryptonite and some of the things, some of the ideas from Headstrong are really interesting because there's a lot of people that think they're eating right. Myself included. I mean I’ll be honest, I think I'm eating right sometimes, but a lot of entrepreneurs, they complain, “Oh, I slow down a lot or I have brain fog or maybe I'm burning out.” And it seems like that's probably true. A lot of us are overworked, but I think a lot of us are getting the wrong kind of fuel or we're an environments where things aren't so good. And I know for me, one weird observation that I have is let's say you're wearing way too much cheap cologne and we're on a plane. I it not only am I cranky, you can ask anyone who's been close to me for any amount of years, but I can't do -- I either get ravenously hungry, but I'm craving junk food and/or I can't sit down and do a task. I thought I was just getting distracted by the smell, but there's something else going on.

Dave Asprey: [00:29:30] It's biochemical. Yeah, I've gone through a phase in my life where I had the same problem. It comes and goes, and that is a toxin effect. The reason you're getting the sugar cramping like is your cells are freaking out there. They're interpreting that as a toxic assault, which frankly it is. That stuff is endocrine disrupting is bad for you. But when that response happens, they're sending out an emergency signal and they're saying make a lot of energy, like fight or flight gets triggered. You don't have the energy there. Eat sugar. You got to up your sugar level.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:29:57] Yeah.

Dave Asprey: [00:29:58] And it turns out if you want to nail that when it first happens, what you can do is you can actually have two packets of sugar, just a couple bites of something with sugar. Coffee helps a lot. And there's two different, three different things that I'll take if that happens. One of them is called KetoPrime, and yes, these are supplements I make. I'm not trying to sell them. I make them for a reason that’s what I’m saying.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:30:21] Okay.

Dave Asprey: [00:30:22] KetoPrime makes it so your cells can make energy more easily and make another supplement called Unfair Advantage. So that'll ampule your [indiscernible] [00:30:27].

Jordan Harbinger: [00:30:28] I've had that before.

Dave Asprey: [00:30:28] Yeah. That stuff. In that situation, the cells like, “Oh, I needed that. These are building blocks for energy.” And so the energy amount on your brain just went way through the roof. You're like, okay, here's a little bit of sugar. You can burn it, and here's some stuff that's going to make it so that it burns more smoothly. And then of course, brain octane works, and there's a supplement I also make called Glutathione, which is the primary detoxing antioxidant. So you can stack all those up and then what would have been a, I'm zombify my eyes roll back in my head and I'm cranky and it turns into, okay, I'm back. And I went from times when my life without happening, I just be down for the count for like the whole day.

 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:31:03] Yeah.

Dave Asprey: [00:31:03] Right? And now I generally recover within a few minutes if I just hit it with the right stack and it is an energetic thing in the cells and that's now hackable.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:31:11] Well I liked the idea that coffee helps as well. Although usually I just want to pour it on the person that's wearing all the cologne.

Dave Asprey: [00:31:17] Sometimes really helpful, it washes the cologne right off.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:31:21] It's scalding hot temperatures.

Dave Asprey: [00:31:22] I was in Uber car this morning and--

Jordan Harbinger: [00:31:24] Oh, the air fresheners. I always get out, I got to get out.

Dave Asprey: [00:31:28] I just asked him, I’d say “Could you toss those in the glove box?” And then like “What? Seriously.” But this was guy wearing so much cologne, and it was Uber. I'd go for the whatever the select ones are, because they usually don't have all the crap in the car. That guy was wearing so much cologne. I just rolled the windows down and kind of hang out the windows.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:31:41] It’s the worse.

Dave Asprey: [00:31:42] Yeah, it's gross.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:31:43] It's the worst. Yeah, that's how I knew that something was wrong because I got into an Uber once and I was fine. I was really happy. I was talking to my wife on the phone and I got in the Uber and I immediately got ravenously and kind of danger zone, level of hunger, hangry, hangry.

Dave Asprey: [00:32:01] Hangry is the right word.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:32:01] Yeah, I got hangry, but it was immediate and I said, “Hey man, can you take out the air fresheners?” And he goes, “Sure.” And he pulled over to the side of the highway, which is not what I intended for him to do. And he reached in, you know those drink holders on the side of the car. He reached in on one side with his hand and pulled out seven cube air fresheners and then reached in the other side and pulled out seven more in each door. And then he threw them in the glove box and slam the glove box shut. And I was like, “You have like 30 air fresheners in this car. What are you doing?”

Dave Asprey: [00:32:28] And you know what does that to the driver. That sort of mimics estrogen in the body. It disrupts all kinds of things, including your thyroid. You want to talk about Hashimoto's and thyroid dysfunction. Synthetic fragrances do that. Those things should be banned.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:32:40] Why does that -- what's going on there? I didn't know that you could inhale something and it would trigger that much--

Dave Asprey: [00:32:46] Like smoke?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:32:47] I mean smoke for sure. Yeah. Okay. Now that you put it that way, it make sense.

Dave Asprey: [00:32:51] Inhalation is a very powerful delivery system.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:32:53] Yeah, I believe in college I experimented with the inhalation administering certain things.

Dave Asprey: [00:32:58] It doesn't hit as hard, right?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:33:00] Yeah. Yes, yeah. It just takes longer.

Dave Asprey: [00:33:01] And so I've heard that's right.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:33:02] That's right, that’s right. So I've heard. Good point. Well, I'm going to recover from that somehow.

Dave Asprey: [00:33:08] But let's go back to just being an entrepreneur on that.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:33:10] Sure.

Dave Asprey: [00:33:11] So you're cruising along, you're trying to get stuff done. Something that you didn't choose like that whacks you over the head and now you're still, because you're a good person, you're going to succeed, you're going to grit your teeth, you're going to apply willpower. Willpower still use the electricity like everything else, but your electricity just got stolen. So now you're pushing, but the solar is all the way to the floor. You're not going faster, you're slowing down, and what are you going to do? You're going to get angry. It's natural. So it's our responsibility, especially as entrepreneurs, especially you have a team working for you. Your energy state is reflected in your company. This is something that I've learned. I spent a huge amount of time meditating with electrodes on my head and stuff like that because if I wanted to be able to grow Bulletproof that I wanted to, I have to have my shit together.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:33:51]Yeah.

Dave Asprey: [00:33:51] Right. And that means that if something happens in the world around me that makes me weak, I've got to have a countermeasure or I've got to be able to just remain calm. And it's like usually remain calm and you have enough energy. It's hard to remain calm when you're crashing. So I avoid the crashes and you eliminate toxins or just remove some of them from your environment. You eat, so your blood sugar doesn't crash. You get background ketones by putting brain octane and stuff in your food or in your coffee, whatever. And all of a sudden you have stable energy and that means when you need to make a decision to apply willpower, you have more resilience and resilience is what makes an entrepreneur able to succeed at the end of the day and stops you from yelling at your assistant or your spouse or all that. It's all about the brand. That's why my first book was, what do you eat to feel good and look good and not spend a lot of time worrying about it. The second book was what do you do to make your brain work way more often and longer and better than it normally does, because this is what I needed. These are like my own precious things.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:34:44] You're on your own issues as well. And I think one of the chief problems that I had with all this stuff initially was look, caveman or whatever, or even a hundred years here, 50 years ago, we didn't have all these different oils and all those different things you were putting in. But upon further reflection, we also weren't working 16 hours a day, seven days a week, and sitting in front of computer screens and talking on phones and bathing in blue light, which we'll get into in a second. A lot of things were different back then that we still suffered consequences, didn't know what they were and why they were happening but now it's much more.

Dave Asprey: [00:35:18] The basic rule is this, if you want to get all of your nutrients from your food, make sure you get all of your toxins from mother nature, like try to do that while living on the planet. You cannot do it no matter where you are. Like there's glyphosate in the North Pole at this point, right? So we are now under a higher load biologically on a subsidier level than we ever have. And not to mention all the social media and stuff like that. So of course, if you're going to be able to outperform in a harder department environment, you might want to modify your fuel source.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:35:47] Sure.

Dave Asprey: [00:35:47] It just makes sense.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:35:48] Let's talk about blue light because this is something that actually changed my life quite a bit recently. Both using it appropriately and getting rid of it.

Dave Asprey: [00:35:57] Oh, wow.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:35:57] A friend of mine, I can't remember why we went to, I think we went to China, my wife and I. And a friend said, “Hey, how's your jet lag?” And I said, “It's miserable.” They said, order this light off Amazon. So we did and we turn it on in the morning and it was really, really effective.

Dave Asprey: [00:36:10] Like a blue green light?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:11] It was a some sort of blue disk.

Dave Asprey: [00:36:13] Yeah, it's Phillips makes one and there's some glasses called recharger that do that.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:17] It really, it really worked well and I thought this is really cool. And then I've heard something from guys like you and other friends where at night I was like, “Wow, I'm having trouble falling asleep.” I'll just look at my phone for three hours. And I just felt like I could not go to sleep and I'm pretty good at falling asleep, so I was wondering what was going on and it's just some sort of lifestyle change, some sort of trigger, and then I want to say you or someone else had given me a pair of BluBlockers.

Dave Asprey: [00:36:43] Was the TrueDarkone? The dark one.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:45] This is a long time ago.

Dave Asprey: [00:36:46] Okay, so like 15 years ago, I started doing BluBlockers. It's progressed since then.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:49] They actually looked kind of like what an old lady wears after eye surgery.

Dave Asprey: [00:36:52] Yeah, the UV eyes that one fit.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:52] Yeah.

Dave Asprey: [00:36:52] By the way, people, these are eight bucks online. You can get BluBlockers, but if you block all the blue, you're not going to like what happens during the day and if you block all the blue, it doesn't work all the way at night either. That's the problem. I was overdoing it during the day and under doing it at night.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:37:05] Yeah, there was some issues with what I was doing definitely. But I'll tell you once I started wearing these things, even just in the hour and a half, two hours of watching TV, which I don't really do anymore, which is I didn't realize it, massive source of unhealthy blue light. I would lay down, I would actually either fall asleep while we were watching TV or I would lay down and immediately conk out. And Jen's like, “Wow, you must be so tired now.” And I'm like, “I've always been as tired. I just don't want to keep watching TV for four hours. when I watch for 30 minutes and I'm starting to nod off.” And the blue light glasses or goggles or whatever, depending on my day, makes all the difference. And I've noticed even little things like a, I have an air purifier in our room and there's a blue light on it.

Dave Asprey: [00:37:51] You have to tape it out.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:37:51] Literally an LED.

Dave Asprey: [00:37:52] I have to tell you--

Jordan Harbinger: [00:37:54] This things keeps me awake all freaking night until I taped it over.

Dave Asprey: [00:37:56] So I got so tired of this. One of the companies I started is called TrueDark, and I'm wearing a pair of them right now.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:03] I have a case of those in my house right now.

Dave Asprey: [00:38:04] Do you have the sleep ones?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:05] I have. Are those the red ones-

Dave Asprey: [00:38:07] The dark dark red lights.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:07] That are like gobbly red.

Dave Asprey: [00:38:08] Yeah. Those ones are patented spectral filters. There's four of those. Four different spectrums inside there. Those are the ones that for me, I have eliminated jet lag. Tomorrow I'm flying to New York, I'm getting there late. Sometime I use those there. I'm going to be on Dr. Oz, that’s why I'm going there. And you don't want to have jet lag when you're going to be on TV because you want to be yourself.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:26] You can also look really jet lag on TV.\

Dave Asprey: [00:38:27] Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:28] It's not a good look.

 

Dave Asprey: [00:38:29] No. So you could fly there three days early just to make sure you look good. I don't know have three days, I want to play with my kids, right? So I wear these glasses religiously when I'm flying from West to East, and truly I don't get jet lag anymore, but the BluBlockers didn't cut it, so I had to go one. And if you don't have those ones.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:45] I do. They're the ones that when you wear them you look like a supervillain, right?

Dave Asprey: [00:38:48] Yeah. Or like a Cyclops kind of. But I mean you see people wearing them on airplanes now because they're, in fact, we've measured within 15 minutes shifts in brainwaves and people wearing it. They there as junk light is like corn syrup. And so that's important. And for those little, the flashy light things, I got so tired of this. My house had like electrical tape on everything. So that same company makes these little dots that are, that are die cut. They either block it entirely but soon as you can just see it, they just filtered things all blue.

Jordan Harbinger: [0 0:39:17] The things on, yeah.

Dave Asprey: [00:39:17] Yeah, they filter out the blue. So it's just a dim red light and everything in my house has that. And in my hotel room, those stupid blinking green lights right above your bed.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:39:25] Oh, yeah.

Dave Asprey: [00:39:25] I always get up there and stick one on there because how can you sleep with every five seconds there's a bright green flash?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:39:30] Those things drive me nuts. I thought I was just being high maintenance.

Dave Asprey: [00:39:32] Green is a spectrum that disrupts mitochondria function and talks to somebody called melanopsin sensors in your eyes, which are driven by mitochondria. Then that talks to a party brain that isn't even where vision is processed. It goes straight to your timing system. So your brain's getting a little signal every five seconds. “Hey daytime. Daytime.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:39:50] Oh, God!

Dave Asprey: [00:39:51] And you might start feeling like a zombie. It's just science. And the Nobel Prize was awarded for circadian biology. So I wanted to do these actually in Bulletproof. And then I talked with my team and they're like, “Dave, this is a very big difference from the supplements, the nootropics in the coffee and the protein bars and all that.” “Let's not.” So I actually started a separate company. I don't operate this. I funded it and got the IP organized. That coming is called TrueDark, and I always wear these glasses when I'm indoors because I have my brain on at the end of the day. And I would say for everyone who stares at a phone, there's something that you can do this for you. I'm going to show you right now. It'll take like half a second.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:40:31] Okay.

Dave Asprey: [00:40:32] So watch this. This is a normal iPhone. I want to show you my calendar because you'll cry if you'll see it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:40:38] Yeah, no worries.

Dave Asprey: [00:40:39] All right, so what you normally do is your phone looks like, this is just a normal, like I saw your wins.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:40:44] Yeah, yeah, it's really harsh. Night shift is not on, yeah.

Dave Asprey: [00:40:48] First thing I do, night shift is always on, no matter what. But here's what you can do with a disability settings that are on here. So I have this set up, I can triple-click and I can reduce the white point and all of a sudden it's not as bright.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:41:02] Oh yeah. Interesting.

Dave Asprey: [00:41:03] And you triple click again. I turn on the red filter. Now it's like I'm wearing the red glasses but I'm not. You can stare at that phone in a dark room and it's not as good as wearing glasses, but it cuts out probably 85 percent of the bad light. The settings are there, but they're not designed into the settings. You have to go in and basically do the visual accessibility settings.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:41:24] We can link to -- do you have a video of you doing this online?

Dave Asprey: [00:41:26] Yeah, I think I have video doing that.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:41:27] Yeah, we'll link to that in the show notes because it's otherwise it's impossible to show people what I'm doing. But I also have the accessibility set to do that diming thing.

Dave Asprey: [00:41:34] You know how to do that. Okay, cool.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:41:35] Yeah. But I never seen the red filter before.

Dave Asprey: [00:41:37] I’ll turn it on for you.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:41:38] Yeah.

Dave Asprey: [00:41:38] But what ends up happening like, okay, either we're crazy or we kick ass, right? It's one of those things, if I can get 5 percent more energy by doing this or my sleep quality, by the way, the TrueDark, the red glasses, I double my number of hours of deep sleep when I measure it, if I do that. It works. So yes, I'll squeeze every drop out of every day and if I have to wear glasses or you're not eat the deep fried cheesecake or whatever, it's a trade that I'm happy to make because I love what I do and if I hated my life, maybe I would to see the cheesecake and stare at the screen. I don't know, but I don't like, I feel that way.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:42:13] These little tweaks have made a lot of changes. Now I'm not familiar and I definitely haven't delved into the science of everything --

Dave Asprey: [00:42:19] You don’t need to.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:42:19] Bulletproof otherwise, but I will say things like the BluBlockers, my wife can attest that when I put those things on, it's lights out. I mean she can be reading with a light on it. If I've got the Cyclops goggles on, it's over, and these little lights in your room that you think aren't making a big deal out of it.

Dave Asprey: [00:42:36] They matter.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:42:37] They are absolutely ruining sleep.

Dave Asprey: [00:42:39] Check this out. A study came out in Japan. They looked at 800 people. The amount of light that comes in around your curtains in a normal city, not like with a bright light around it. Just normal light leakage caused a 63 percent increase in depression compared to sleeping in a dark room.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:42:56] It's crazy!

Dave Asprey: [00:42:56] It’s that big of a deal. It messes with your body's sense of when and where you are. So the timing systems, so I'm a computer science guy. Every computer has a clock in it and if the computer doesn't have a clock, no circuit knows what other circuits are doing and it doesn't work. So your body has quadrillions and these little things all try to figure out what time it is and they rely on a central clock. And if that doesn't match, it's no wonder that you don't run as well.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:43:20] Sure. Yeah, it's like having the audio not sync to a video properly.

Dave Asprey: [00:43:23] Well said. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:43:24] Yeah. Dave, thank you very much, man. Really appreciate your knowledge and the coffee.

Dave Asprey: [00:43:29] Thanks my friend.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:43:33] Great big thank you to Dave Asprey. The book title is Headstrong, and if you want to know how I managed to book all these great guests, manage my relationships using systems and tiny habits to create friends like Dave who can help me hack my brain and body. Well, check out our Six-Minute Networking course, which is free over at jordanharbinger.com/course. Don't kick the can down the road. Don't say you're going to do it later. Don't put it on your plan for next month. I get that all the time. It's ridiculous. You're not doing it. You're just lying to yourself. The number one mistake I see people make as postponing this kind of thing and not digging the well before they get thirsty or not seeing the value in creating and maintaining relationships. Once you need these relationships, you are too late. These drills are designed to take a few minutes per day. This is the stuff I wish I knew 15 years ago. It is not fluff. It is crucial and you can find that at jordanharbinger.com/course.

[00:44:22] And speaking of relationships, tell me your number one takeaway here from Dave Asprey. I'm @JordanHarbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. This show is produced in association with PodcastOne, and this episode was co-produced by Jason “The Butter Man” DeFilippo and Jen Harbinger. Show notes by Robert Fogarty. Worksheets by Caleb Bacon. And I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. The fee for the show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful, which is hopefully in every single episode. So please share the show with those you love and even those you don't. Lots more in the pipeline. Very excited to bring it to you. And in the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time.