[00:00:00] Dave: I'm Dave Asprey, and this is the Life Stylist Podcast. 

[00:00:03] Luke: This here's Luke Storey coming at you from lukestorey.com. Today's guest is none other than Dave Asprey back for his third appearance. Show notes and links for this one are located at lukestorey.com/asprey. A true pioneer of the biohacking movement, Dave's devoted his life to elevating human performance using the latest scientific research combined with ancient healing traditions.

 His mission here today, and in his life, is to share with the world the latest discoveries in health and wellness to help you break through mental and physical barriers, to accomplish the unimaginable, to be superhuman. And based on all the stuff he gets into, he's probably going to be the one to do it.

Now, it's been a couple of years since Dave and I dropped in, so it was fun to catch up on the latest and greatest in the world of biohacking. But since we've already done two episodes on that topic, and God knows I've done many more, I wanted to stray a bit here and get into some spicier stuff this time.

And as you might know, Dave does a ton of podcast appearances, but I assure you this is not your run of the mill Dave Asprey interview. Here's a little taste of some of the mischief we get into on this episode. Dave's moved to Austin on the heels of his recent divorce; the perils of living on an island in Canada during a three year period of tyranny; his unique perspective on experimental vaccines; how he managed to get his contrarian info out despite censorship and warnings from the government; the rarely discussed and unglamorous challenges of having your own farm; how a vegan diet wrecked his health and his teeth, and why he doesn't recommend it.

We also discussed the ethics of eating meat and the horrors of factory farming, both of the animals and plants; and the ancient soul between humans and the animals we eat; the backlash he gets from internet trolls when he debunks the calories in calories out theory and why that won't help you lose weight; and his thoughts on why so many fitness crazes like cardio are a waste of time. And we, of course, spend some time exploring his new books, Smarter Not Harder, which is essentially about embracing laziness as a way to cultivate more energy. So I was definitely on board with that.

Now we get into some really cool stuff like electrical stimulation and neurofeedback for enhanced brain function, and why spirituality and emotional healing is critical to overall wellness, and dealing with self-obsession and escapism by biohacking. We also got his current thoughts on EMF and what to do about it. And then we get into some of the deep cuts in the smart drug realm, discussing things like Phenibut, Modafinil, Depranil, and even microdosing psychedelics.

And Dave shares why he's no longer repping Bulletproof, the company he founded. And finally, the nitty gritty on moldy coffee and why he infused trace minerals into his new Danger Coffee to make it even more potent. And by the way, he brought me a couple bags of this stuff and, uh, no joke, it's pretty incredible. And if you want to check out the Danger Coffee for yourself with a 10% discount, go to dangercoffee.com/luke and use the code lUKE.

[00:03:01] Luke: This one, my friends, was a wild ride. So strap in and hang on as we welcome Dave Asprey back to the Life Stylist Podcast.

Uh, Dave Asprey, here We're for our third conversation on this show. Welcome back, dude.

[00:03:14] Dave: I'm happy to be back this time in person in Austin. That's cool.

[00:03:17] Luke: Yeah, the first one we did was on Zoom, which was common when I started out and I was living in LA because I didn't have the clout to get anyone to actually come over at that time. Then we did one in London when we were both speaking at, uh, a conference there. 

And then I found out you moved to Austin.

[00:03:34] Dave: Makes it a little, doesn't it?

[00:03:35] Luke: Yeah, and I'm stoked. It's one thing I love about living here, is I get to actually sit with people in real life and give them a hug and breathe their non-masked air and, uh, I'm actually having pretty good podcasts.

[00:03:46] Dave: I'm projecting my microbiome right now for you.

[00:03:48] Luke: Good. It's probably very healthy. 

[00:03:50] Dave: It should be at this point anyway.

[00:03:53] Luke: Uh, so what, uh, prompted the move here.

[00:03:55] Dave: Uh, well, let's see. There's this weird nutrient called sunshine that is available in Texas that is not available in Canada. There's another weird element available in Texas that's not available in Canada, uh, called vitamin F. Do you know about that one? 

[00:04:10] Luke: Vitamin freedom?

[00:04:11] Dave: Yeah. It's so weird.

[00:04:12] Luke: I hear that that is, uh, that's a non-negotiable nutrient.

[00:04:16] Dave: Things got a little weird up there. Um, but it was still manageable. The big thing though is for me to show up the way I like to show up just even for my family and in the world, it's nice to have community. And when you live on a small farm in the middle of nowhere, there just aren't enough people. And so I just needed to be around a vibrant community with sunshine and be in the middle of the country because I fly around, I speak on a lot of events and I'm just working on making biohacking bigger and bigger. So it just felt like the right place.

[00:04:48] Luke: Uh, this a good central location. It took me a minute to figure that out. That it's not that hard go to Florida, for example. 

[00:04:54] Dave: Yeah. 

[00:04:54] Luke: When you live in lA, going to Florida is like going to Bali.

[00:04:57] Dave: It's so far away.

[00:04:59] Luke: Yeah. And I have enjoyed that the accessibility here, I've always lived on the, uh, well, for the most of my life on the West Coast, so--

[00:05:06] Dave: Yeah, me too.

[00:05:07] Luke: I forgot about that. Um, but the community piece is really something I'd like to tap into because think when the past three years happened, whatever we want to call it, I have a lot of names for it. None of them fit the official names. Um, and a lot of people want to go live off grid and homestead live in the middle of nowhere. And I've had that, not necessarily to be off grid, but just to live remotely and not have neighbors. But then I think who am I going to hang out with?

[00:05:32] Dave: I did that for 12 years. I've built an organic farm that wasn't a farm when we moved to the land. We have our water catchment, uh, 25 pigs, 25 sheep, three cows, a bunch of chickens, uh, three or four acres of plants growing that you can eat sometimes of the year, all of that. The separate farm building and tractors, the stuff that people dream of. The reality is that it is a full-time job in it. 90% of small farmers have day jobs. And let me tell you, running a 30 acre farm, even though much less than 30 acres is in production, is a full-time job.

So if I didn't do what I do in the world with the biohacking conference, and with Danger Coffee, and all the stuff we've done with Bulletproof, I couldn't have afforded to have a farm manager do it. And there's no way I could have been the entrepreneur I am and run a small farm. But the secret to those types of environments, it's actually having a community around you.

So there was a community where I was in Canada and actually really nice people. And so everyone knows who has this kind of tractor and we all help each other, and that's really important. For me though, I am the leader of the biohacking movement. There were no biohackers up there. The evolutionary work that I'm doing in the world, that's not what we do up there in remote parts of Canada.

[00:06:59] Luke: Yeah. You were in Vancouver Island?

[00:07:01] Dave: Bangka Island. Yeah. So I mean, we might talk about the Eagles and the Salmon--

[00:07:07] Luke: How are your hands--

[00:07:08] Dave: Hockey game. Right. Yeah. It's not my speed. Uh, so this is more my speed.

[00:07:13] Luke: Does your, uh, your ex-wife and your kids still live there?

[00:07:17] Dave: Yeah. My former wife is there and we did a conscious uncoupling. We're still good friends, we're co-parents. It wasn't like anyone cheated on anyone and there was a big fight and all that stuff. But sometimes when a relationship has played itself to where it needed to go, it's time. And so we both agreed, and it was actually a very peaceful, uh, situation. And yeah, they're up there. It's great. Kids have clean air, and clean food, and, uh, good schools. And so we'll see where they end up after they graduate. That's up to them.

[00:07:46] Luke: Yeah, yeah. Well, I can say as a kid who grew up just running wild in the woods, it's a good way to grow up.

[00:07:52] Dave: Yeah. It's very rare these days. I don't know how they're going to fare because if a lot of their friends, you haven't seen a smiling face in two or three years because they had extremely crazy mask laws in Canada, um, that made Fidel Castro look like the father of the lead of Canada. Oh wait, he actually was. So near this, a bad example.

[00:08:14] Luke: Oh, that was good.

[00:08:15] Dave: Um, but it was a little bit weird. Um, but on our property it wasn't a big deal because, well, we forgot our masks and we're on a farm. The problem is though, if most of your peers are highly anxious, highly social media addicted with cherry vapes, and you're like, why are you afraid? It's just a bug. The gap kept getting big.

[00:08:37] Luke: Right. 

[00:08:37] Dave: Far both of my kids have friends, uh, lots of friends, and they just think at peace as much as you can be as a teen. So I'm super proud of them. And-- 

[00:08:45] Luke: Right on. Yeah. Watching the situation in Canada, and I've done so many podcasts blowing the whistle on all of these things, and I'm sure myself and everyone else are sick of hearing it, but observing the way of life interruption in Canada over the past three years is terrifying. I mean anyone that-- and I've been there a few times. It seems like a great country with lovely people. So when I say, wow, ouch Canada, I don't mean like Canada bad, I just mean the people running it seem to be extremely tyrannical.

[00:09:16] Dave: Oh, the people running it are completely out of touch. In fact, I would say that they've lost their leadership of the country. I don't know anyone who really likes, uh, what's going on. They just tried to take everyone's guns and that got shut down by the population, just like the other tyranny got shut down by the tracker thing.

Having lived there and watching the way it was portrayed in the media versus the way it actually came down, there was a lot of real angry people like, we've had enough. Because the thing about Canada is Canadians are really nice, but they're also really tough. There's harsh winters in Canada and so they're polite, and they're kind, and they're good to be around, and they're neighborly. And the first thing I noticed when I moved to Canada a dozen years ago was people you don't know, when they ask you how you're doing, they actually care. It's so weird compared to LA.

[00:09:59] Luke: They listen the answer. 

[00:10:00] Dave: Yeah. They're like, oh really? Okay. They want to know like, how can I help? That spirit. So I appreciate Canada in many different ways and I was finding it increasingly difficult to live my life and to do the kind of travel that I do. Because every time I came to what used to be a peaceful border, it's now militarized in both directions. But I just wanted to go home. And it was taking me an extra 24 hours of travel just to deal with delays in bureaucracy.

[00:10:25] Luke: Oh man.

[00:10:26] Dave: I'm like, you know what, guys, we can all chill here. Um, but I think Canada has a lot going for it and will for the next a 100 years. Because you think, they have more land, they have more water, they have more clean air, more food, more gold, more oil, more natural gas, more timber than most countries.

Wow. It's 

[00:10:47] Luke: interesting. 

[00:10:47] Dave: It like a nice country to have a passport in. That was the only reason I moved there was so my kids could have access to a beautiful country. Um, but things will probably change the next election, if the next election is allowed to happen.

[00:11:00] Luke: Yeah. I like to think that these things are cyclical. Even though I was ready to leave California, I think anyway, because I just wanted to live with more space essentially, but having lived through a few decades in different places in California, I've noticed the cyclical, uh, nature of it. When I moved to Hollywood in 1989, I mean, it was a shit hole. It was just gang activity everywhere, dealers on the street, prostitutes on the street. I mean, it was really in a downturn. And like New York City around the same time. 

And then it started coming it got safer and cleaner and cool, and more conscious people started moving there, great community formed. And then when this thing happened, it just went totally haywire. And the whole state is being, I don't know if it's even being run, it's just being run into the ground and it's such a beautiful special place with such incredible people. But I think in 10 years or however long it takes, it'll be a rebirth of California and a rebirth of Canada and all these places that have been ruined by bad leadership.

[00:11:59] Dave: There's a sine wave that all life does even at the micro brain wave levels to the monthly, to the annual, to the 100 year cycles. And I think societies and towns do this as well. Uh, and right now, um, Santa Monica where I opened the world's first biohacking lab, Upgrade Labs, and we're franchising those everywhere, but that's the birthplace of it. And right now a lot of that city looks like the set from the Walking Dead.

[00:12:26] Luke: I know.

[00:12:26] Dave: I mean, the amount of homeless and people who are on drugs and mentally unwell and need treatment, uh, it's not okay. And, uh, for the amount of taxes people pay there, you should expect a manicured park for the entire state because that's what you're paying for. And someone's taking that money and I don't know what they're doing with it, but it's not good.

[00:12:45] Luke: Yeah, when I, um, after I left, I really, I don't know, I just felt complete. I mean, I was in Hollywood 32 years. I mean, if that doesn't complete you, I don't know what will, but when I came back for your biohacking um, conference, the last one in Beverly Hills, which was fantastic by the way, per usual--

[00:13:02] Dave: quick plug, biohackingconference.com. June, 4,000 people. Biggest conference ever in Orlando.

[00:13:08] Luke: In Orlando. Cool. I like Orlando better. When I went to LA I was like, ah, this feels weird. I haven't been back here. I haven't felt the need to come back here. But I really wanted to attend the conference and, uh, I'm glad I did, but I into LAX, got in a car and was going up to 405, just looking at the encampments and the graffiti and just the degradation of the city. And then I, um, one of those road signs where it states who donated the cleaning up of that portion of freeway. It'll be the Elk club or whatever and it said a portion of freeway was, uh, maintained by the Los Angeles, uh, Satanist society. No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm sorry wasn't the Satanist. No. It said the Los Angeles Atheist society. And I was like--

[00:13:49] Dave: Oh my God.

[00:13:50] Luke: This is what atheism gets you, in my belief at least. Anyway, enough ragging on all that. Um, I'm curious, and there's a bunch of stuff I want to into in your book. I have the galley copy and so I did a speed read of it and there's lot of good stuff in there that I want to share and encourage people to, of course, get it. 

But I've been watching people in our field, people that have podcasts and do independent media throughout the past three years. And it's been interesting to see those that have been outspoken about their opposition to the official narrative on all of this. 

And I was curious to see how you were going to unfold with it, because I think you're a really bright guy. I've known you for a few years, you understand biology pretty damn well. Um, and then I was pleased to see that you seem that you found a way to state your opinion on things, but it seems like you've been able to do so without being unpersoned by the big tech powers that be in social media. Did you experience censorship or did you have to temper your message to kind 

[00:14:55] Dave: I got government warning letters, had to pull down the--

[00:14:57] Luke: Really?

[00:14:58] Dave: Oh yeah. I did a post the second week of the pandemic saying, hey guys, here's IL-6, Interleukin 6, this is the inflammatory cytokine that goes crazy with any viral infection. Here's a list of 40 supplements, all natural, that reduce IL-6. I know because I've had toxic mold and I've had to deal with excessive, uh, cytokines in my own biology for years and I've helped, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of people figure out how to do this. So, um, then I got a warning letter about the post and had to take it down.

[00:15:29] Luke: A letter in the mail or an email or email something?

[00:15:33] Dave: I think that-- they probably FedEx-ed it, I don't know. They reached out to my team.

[00:15:36] Luke: Wow. See you have a much reach. To me, they just will shadow me or something.

[00:15:42] Dave: Yeah. Oh no, I got that too. But what's interesting, they didn't take my accounts down because here's the deal, I will fight to the death for your right to inject yourself with stupid shit. And this might be triggering for you because I know you have history with addiction. 

I think it's the only ethical and moral a approach is to make sure that people have the right to purchase what they want to put into their own bodies. Because you own your body. So you have to have the right to do things that are harmful to yourself in order to have the right to do things that are good for yourself. You can't outsource that to someone else.

And so my take on the whole situation was, there might be a case for you to work with your medical professional and to choose whatever treatment it is being marketed right now for any condition, uh, in the world. And in fact, the case is you should always do that. 

And it's just not the government's job to force you to take their solution for a problem when you can't do that. So what I did is I thought, well, I actually believe that the tetanus vaccine probably helped to save my life. I actually got tetanus, the kind where it'll kill you within 24 hours from stepping on a rusty nail on a farm.

That's the other part of farm life they don't talk about. Probably should have kept my tetanus up to date, but tetanus comes with three other things. So they had to fly in and ambulance to save me, and I got my tetanus booster without all the other crap in it that I didn't want. And I don't regret it. I think I'm okay, the safety profile, and that's reasonably high. Now there, people tell me I am going to hell because I did that and now my micro chipped and aliens are rectal probing me or something. I don't know.

[00:17:22] Luke: Your thoughts are being monitored now.

[00:17:24] Dave: Right. So here's what I came up with during that last three years. I said, look, um, some of my friends will let you stick anything in them with no standards and other friends will never let you stick anything in them no matter what. And neither one of those feels authentic to my true self.

So in order to really be who I am in the world, I decided that I was going to come out of the closet as being vicarious. It's vaccine industry curious, which means, you have to allow me to have my own identity because to do anything other than that clearly is an act of oppression. Um, so this is my new identity. I haven't figured out my pronouns yet, but something like, fuck off. Uh, I'm sure, but whatever they are. The--

[00:18:13] Luke: I like that, that's favorite yet actually.

[00:18:16] Dave: But yeah, I'm vicarious. I don't think all vaccines are bad. Before the pandemic, I had someone creating mRNA vaccines for anti-aging on my show to talk about this. Even that specific technology isn't necessarily good or bad. It's a technology. A shovel is bad if you use it to poke the eyes out of puppies.

And a shovel is not bad if you use it to dig a hole to plant something. So don't blame whatever's in the needle. Don't blame the needle. You blame who used it, who put stuff in it and what they did with it. So I'm completely agnostic about this stuff. Now, did my medical care team, including me, who's the leader of my medical care team, did we agree with other people's opinions?

Probably not, but everyone has a right. And if I was 90 years old and at high risk, would I have maybe considered it in the first year before we had data from the world's largest, uh, trial? Um, maybe I would've said it made sense. And I support everyone who got it because they thought it made sense.

And I support everyone who's very angry that they got it when they knew it didn't make sense because they had to eat. That was a crime against humanity. And one of two things will happen. Either 25 years from now they will write that it was a crime against humanity, or they'll write how it saved the world. And I have the books written by both sides from the original first time they had mass-forced vaccines. And, um, these are actually out there.

 And it turns out something very similar happened. There was a large group of people who were like, this isn't going to work. And they didn't do it. And then they were forced to. And like, we actually repeated the pattern we did now in whenever the smallpox vaccine, uh, happened. So there's a business model behind vaccines, and that one got me really, really, targeted. Um, it's cool. One of my big claims to fame, uh, is that I really, really wanted to be in Quackwatch, uh, which is a website. It is run by this angry dude and every doctor who's ever changed the world, my most favorite people, the best healers ever, they all get an honorable mention on this site.

[00:20:18] Luke: Is Mercola-- 

[00:20:20] Dave: Oh yeah, he's on there.

[00:20:21] Luke: The grand daddy of it? 

[00:20:21] Dave: The thing is, I'm not a doctor, so I don't really qualify to be in Quackwatch, but this is all my 20 year career goal, so I finally got in there.

[00:20:27] Luke: Congratulations.

[00:20:28] Dave: Which was awesome. Thank you, Steven Barrett. You're a gem of a man for giving me a list of great doctors. And so there's that, but then there's a new FactCheck.org, which is like the new version of that. I got a listing on there because I read about the pandemic business model where every four years, um, a government usually backed by a certain couple, like one guy who's done trillions of dollars this way, whose name starts with F, uh, anyway, uh, every four years it seems like they come up with something that has a five or 10% death rate. They scare everyone. They spend a few billion dollars that they mandate other countries spend buying things like Tamiflu, if you remember. 

[00:21:06] Luke: Mm-hmm. 

[00:21:06] Dave: Then they quietly announce two years later that the actual death rate was one-sixty fifth of the first one.

[00:21:13] Luke: One-sixty fifth?

[00:21:14] Dave: Yeah. And that was an average across the previous five pandemics. So I'm like, guys, my prediction is one-sixty fifth because this happens every four years, like clockwork, and every time people on the inside make billions of dollars. Yeah. That one got a headline. Businessman, uh, does misinformation about blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, man, I'm winning. I got FactCheck and Quackwatch? Oh, I am a rockstar amongst rockstars if you can get a-- it's like winning a double Emmy for doing shit that matters in the world. So thank you, FactCheck. Thank you, Quackwatch.

[00:21:46] Luke: I mean, I think it's-- everyone always thinks they're on the right side of history. But I really think with this situation that, uh, that you and many others are. And I also like your perspective of, do whatever you want, just don't talk me what to do. That's the only time I agree.

[00:22:01] Dave: Only side of history. The only side of history is I didn't force other people to do stuff they didn't want to do. That means I can't force you to eat a healthy diet, and I absolutely support your right to live on Cheetos and Diet Coke and see what happens. And that's how it works. And if you do anything to force another person to speak something they don't want to speak or to do something they don't want to do, you are committing an act of evil. You just don't do that. That's how the world works. And so if you want to be on the right side of history, you support the right of people to disagree with you. Like the ACLU from 25 years ago.

[00:22:33] Luke: Right.

[00:22:33] Dave: Now they're against free speech. It's really weird.

[00:22:36] Luke: We live in upside down world.

[00:22:38] Dave: I can't explain it, but I stick to those values and I always have since my first blog post, like, hey, here's knowledge. Maybe I'm wrong. Here's my evidence. Here's how easy it's to try it for yourself. And the good news is that despite all of the distractions in the media, we've done so much good science in the last 20 years in the field of biohacking. 

The fact that we have all these wearable devices now, uh, this is something I could only dream. Uh, way back before I started, uh, Bulletproof in the original blog, before I started my podcast, I was CTO and co-founder of a company called Basis.

We were the first company to get heart rate from the wrist, the way your Apple Watch does. It's very common now, but we did it and ended up selling that company to Intel for a $100 million dollars and they shut it down and all, whatever. Big companies buying small companies do that. But I was thinking, what would happen, when we had heart rate data in real time from a 100 million people?

We're going to find all these cool patterns in society and we're going to learn all these things. And so as the cost and availability of all these sensors changed, the world of biohacking changed because now things that people would argue about, well, the full moon doesn't affect people, I'm like, oh yeah.

[00:23:50] Luke: Oh my God.

[00:23:52] Dave: Uh, it does.

[00:23:53] Luke: That's funny you bring that up because I was talking to someone a couple days ago, because I never really believed in it.

[00:23:57] Dave: It totally does. 

[00:23:58] Luke: And then living with a very intuitive wife, um, who's tapped into that kind of thing--

[00:24:03] Dave: is it cool to outsource your being intuitive?

[00:24:05] Luke: Yeah, it helps. I don't have to work as hard, but I'd have a bad night's sleep and she'd go, well, honey, it was a full moon. I'm like, yeah, yeah. Then over time I started seeing, wait, I'm going to check. And I look on the app, and I'm like, holy shit, it was a full moon last night. Always the craziest dreams and interrupted sleep. I can sleep, just not continuously. There's, wake up, fall back asleep, wake up. And the other night I was walking the dog at night, we had a full moon and I was like, don't want to nocebo or placebo myself but I'm just noticing there's a full moon. But going to do all my sleep protocols hardcore tonight. I'm going to really stick to the plan and do everything I can to get great sleep. And like you said tracking, the Oura Ring, things like that are incredible because you can gamify it and go up and cheat, uh, compete with yourself. So I did all the things right, and sure enough, craziest, almost nightmarish dreams, all night, a bunch of different ones. Slept poorly. There's definitely something to that.

[00:25:04] Dave: But yeah, we also had porn that night. 

[00:25:05] Luke: No, I didn't, thankfully. I would've really had bad dreams if I did that. I would've had an entirely different hangover in the morning.

[00:25:13] Dave: Here's what happens. We all notice these things and we think maybe it's just me. I'm probably crazy because that's not supposed to happen. Because I learned somehow that only crazy people think the moon does something. But then if you talk to practitioners, what's called clinical evidence, which is just as valid as double-blind, placebo controlled, stuff like that. Um, it's just a different form of evidence. So if you talk to practitioners, this is police officers and emergency room doctors, you ask them, "Does the full moon change things." 

And they'll universally go, "Oh my God, yeah, every full moon we have to staff up and that's when all the crazies come out. "They know it because they do the work. And same thing in medical practice. Doctors know what's going on because they see patients all day long and they know what works and what doesn't work long before there's a trial. 

So you can ask them, and they know it. And the drug companies hate that because they only want to be able to say that what they have works, so they try to denigrate clinical evidence.

What I've learned as a leader in the anti-aging movement is that you ask the most successful anti-aging doctors what works, and they're always years ahead. And you ask the biohackers like me, what works, like you, we're going to be ahead of the curve and there's a lot of people who believe it can't work. But the idea that we can now get all this data from our devices and we can sum it up, it means suddenly we can find new ways to hack into human biology. 

And that's why I wrote the new book, Smarter Not Harder, because we know a bunch more stuff that sometimes I would talk about 10 years ago. Um, things like cold exposure or high intensity interval training, to you and me and maybe to some of your listeners, those are old hats. Yeah, we've all been doing that, but to the vast majority of the world, if you would get in an ice bath, you're crazy

[00:27:03] Luke: I forget that sometimes. Yeah. 

[00:27:04] Dave: Yeah. And what do you mean? You want to skip breakfast? You'll die. Don't you know? I'm trying to get my-- I have to say y'all in there somewhere because I'm in Texas, but--

[00:27:13] Luke: It'll happen. yo k Give it time.

[00:27:16] Dave: Uh, it's one of those things where, so you and I, we know this, but it turns out we don't know as much as we think we know about these protocols because now we're having more data. And that was one of the reasons I started Upgrade Labs because, um, and you've been there, in Santa Monica. 

[00:27:33] Luke: Many time. I miss it, man.

[00:27:35] Dave: Oh, well we're opening three of them in Austin.

[00:27:37] Luke: Are you really? 

[00:27:38] Dave: Yeah. 

[00:27:38] Luke: Oh, I hope there's one toward Hill Country.

[00:27:40] Dave: Uh, we'll find out. You can go to ownanupgradelabs.com and you can actually open a franchise anywhere in the country. So we're opening dozens of them right now.

[00:27:47] Luke: Wow.

[00:27:47] Dave: This is my next big change for biohacking.

[00:27:48] Luke: I remember you talking about that a couple of years back I was like, man, I hope that happens.

[00:27:53] Dave: It is in the middle of it. 

[00:27:54] Luke: I mean, think about having a gym. I mean, I hate gyms. I had one membership once at a gym in LA. I think it was Hollywood Fitness on Hollywood Boulevard. Um, signed up and I lived right up the hill. It was eight-minute drive, probably down to get in the parking lot, get in there. Signed up, at least one, if not two years went by and I saw it on my credit card statement, and I did not go one time. It was just the plastic smell, the off gassing, the LED flickering blue light, the weird posturing.

[00:28:25] Dave: The mold, rebreathed CO2-rich air, full of methane.

[00:28:30] Luke: Yeah. So when Upgrade Labs happened, I was like, now this is how you do a gym, dude. The dry float tank, the oxygen contrast, training bike. I mean, just shit that actually works and works fast so you're not in there all day, and everything is biologically supportive. It's just a way cooler model. So give us that link again. We'll put it in the show notes.

[00:28:53] Dave: It's ownanupgradelabs.com. So you can literally go there and say, oh, I want to open one in my community, and it's a franchise. So this is meant to be the next orange theory, uh, where it'll be all over the place. And it is happening right now. Uh, like I mentioned, three of them, um, here in Austin.

And, um, there's lots and lots of cities still available. And the reason I'm talking about this now though, is that this new book, Smarter Not Harder, it's informed by that because what we do when you walk in is we get thousands of data points from your body, medical grade data points, without having to draw blood.

And then it turns out different people want different things. Most say, I want to be healthier. But no one even knows what that is or how to measure it. So what I realized is there's five big goals that members have asked for, and that's what I'm writing about, uh, in the book is, okay, let's help you pick a target. 

And once you pick a target, what are the techniques? What are the technologies? What is the new knowledge that comes from having all of this data that's going to get you there in the least possible effort? But I want to go back to something before we get into those. You're not alone with your gym membership. Every year in the US there's 400 million worth of ghost gym memberships.

[00:30:09] Luke: Of course.

[00:30:10] Dave: Now, why we do that is actually the first part of Smarter Not Harder. Do you know why we do that?

[00:30:16] Luke: Because we have an intention, we want to be healthier and more fit, but-- I mean, for me it's--

[00:30:23] Dave: What gets in the way? What do you think?

[00:30:24] Luke: Well, for me it's a lot of-- it's the environment. I mean, but that's just because I'm more sensitive than your average person. But I think it's just the inertia of habit. Even now I have got the Carol bike and, uh, I want to get an ARX machine because I actually will use that. But I have my, uh, X3 Pro resistance band. I mean, I have enough stuff here to stay fit, but I still won't really workout workout, not hardcore. So I think in my case, why they would be making all this free money is just a lack of discipline and actually not wanting to be in the environment.

[00:31:00] Dave: I love it, a lack of discipline. Well, I would even argue that not wanting to the environment, which is valid, but some of that is amplified. Here's what's going on. Here's what I'm explaining in Smarter Not Harder.

[00:31:13] Luke: That it's okay to be lazy. That's what I got from the book.

[00:31:16] Dave: Yeah. Pretty much.

[00:31:16] Luke: One of the things. Yeah.

[00:31:17] Dave: It is. But the mechanism for laziness and the reason for it is important, because you're like, well, it's a lack of habit and a lack of discipline. We are taught that we use habits and discipline to overcome laziness because laziness is a bad thing. I mean, everyone's taught this. You learn it in a church, you learn it from your parents, you learn it at school, uh, you learn it in media, everything. Your job is to overcome this.

But if you're a biohacker, well, why are we doing lazy? Is it because we're bad people? Is it because we're weak? And I would just raise my hand and say, yes, I have eight companies, I've built a $100 million company and hundreds of millions of podcast downloads and hopefully my fifth New York Times best seller, it's because I'm lazier than you. Straight up, I'm lazy. What lazy really means is that your body, not you, but your body wants to spend less energy to get something done. 

And that has been the driver of all human progress. Yet we're taught to feel guilty about it. No, no, no. But lazy is sacred. Lazy is exactly why say, how do I get it done better? The constant improvement, even though the whole thing behind the biohacking movement, it's like, I want to show it better as a human being, all of that is driven by ultimately laziness. Because if you weren't driven to improve, what would you do? You'd sit on a rock and do nothing. So we have this weird self-hate over the fact. It's shame and guilt-driven.

It's trauma over laziness. But let's look at how the operating system works so we can hack it properly. Okay. Inside your body, there is an entirely invisible system that sits between you and reality. And in the book, I call it your meat operating system. Just like the macOS. You install apps on it, but it runs on the computer and it makes sure the camera works and stuff like that. Well, who's making your camera work? It's not you, it's something that's in there. Well, we know that it's in there. And the way we know is, uh, a measure. 

This is something that, I know about because of my work with 40 Years of Zen, the neuroscience high-end brain upgrade thing. It's called P-300D. This is a measure of how quickly your brain gets a signal when something happens in the environment. 

So, Luke, I can do this, clap my hands, and you see it right away. And the intelligent part of your brain says, yeah, well, there's speed of sound. I didn't hear it until it got there and my eyes saw it slightly faster, because the speed of light is faster than the speed of sound. But I saw it almost in real time. But in reality, if have an average brain for your age, it's about 350 milliseconds. A third of a second after I clap my hands, the first electrical signal hits your brain.

There's something else. Taking a third of a second all of the time, doing shit you can't see, including filtering out things you might want to see, and it erased its existence so you can't see it. I can't see it either. Now, I don't have a third of a second, I only have a quarter of a second because I still have an 18-year old response time in my brain because my brain is extensively hacked and upgraded and I'm weird. 

So that said, there's still a lag time. That's scary. There's something hiding reality from you. You cannot see it. Another thing. Do you see the little dime-sized blind spot in the center of each eye? You know about that? 

[00:34:37] Luke: Uh-uh.

[00:34:38] Dave: So we have this, all of us have it. And there's certain diagrams you can look at if you go to an ophthalmologist where suddenly there really is a missing circle in the middle, but you can't see it. The reason you can't see it, that same system edited it out of your body. We have a blind spot right freaking here, and we cannot see the blind spot. Isn't that why they call it a blind spot? You can't see it. So this is the system that is responsible for laziness. And it is the system that before you can think, provably, before your brain gets the signal, it gets to decide which signal gets through and how much emphasis to put on it.

And that part of the meat operating system, it cares about the four Fs that are a through-line in my work. The number one thing is don't get eaten my tigers. That's fear. The number two thing is food, eat everything. And the third one is, have sex with everything else to make sure the species survives. And the fourth one is friend. Build a community because that's what all life does and support the planet and stuff like that.

So this is what your body does before you can think. Only problem is part of the food one, it's not really food, it's, don't run out of energy, which means spend less energy and eat more energy. That's what it wants you to do. And this is why you see those calories in calories out angry trolls who are bullied or abused as children or something, and they're still online going, diet sodas and Snickers bars cancel each other out and they just yell and they bully and all that. Whatever, guys I love. You get a therapist. You can be saved. Anyhow, I get distracted sometimes because they're so much fun to troll themselves. 

[00:36:09] Luke: Well, that piece right there, I'm trying to think. I think you were the first guy that I ever heard talk about that. And I wasn't really into fitness. I've never been, terribly overweight, so I never worried about calories. But when I started drinking Bulletproof coffee back in, I don't know, I think when you still had-- when it just came out. You had the--

[00:36:27] Dave: 2013 or something?

[00:36:29] Luke: The Bulletproof executive blog. Around then. And that was the thing that I found so weird. I'm like, I'm eating, I mean, drinking so many freaking calories with this fatty coffee. And then I don't want to eat the whole day. And I was still like, well, why am I not getting fat if I'm eating so much fat, because then I was loading up the ghee and just eating more fat in general. And then I heard you or people that were probably informed by the stuff you were doing with the, um, the Bulletproof Coffee that that whole model of calories in calories out is actually a fallacy. Can you explain that? I mean I know the trolls disagree with you, but for people-- 

[00:37:08] Dave: Oh, yeah.

[00:37:08] Luke: For people that are curious and open-minded and want to understand how that works. Sure I spend four hours in the gym like you used to do and you were still 300 pounds.

[00:37:15] Dave: Well, I could definitely talk about that. It's funny. Um, that system in your body that's designed to make calories in feel more attractive, uh, than they are, and to make calories out feel harder than they are, that's there to keep you from dying in a famine. Don't burn more energy than you need. So we have these invisible amplifications of the signals. Eat everything, don't do anything, is what your body wants you to do, just in case.

[00:37:41] Luke: Word. I hear that.

[00:37:41] Dave: And the calories in calories out, people are so bothered by that that they try to flip it on its head and say, all you have to do is manipulate those two things. That's not how it works. So the Bulletproof Diet and Bulletproof coffee, at this point, people have lost at least 2 million pounds on the Bulletproof Diet. It looks suspiciously similar to many of the modern carnivore diet that allows fructose in the form of fruit or honey, and raw dairy, and less inflammatory vegetables. I'm like, yeah. Thumbs up.

That's where I ended up as well with a Bulletproof Diet. So it has lectins, and oxylate, and phytic acid in the first chapter. These are modern topics, um, all summarized. Um, and that diet has just proven it's not about the calories in. And there's drugs that they give cows right now, that make the cows fat on one-third less calories.

It's a mold toxin derivative that's called a xenoestrogen. And it just makes you fat on less food. And if that drug can exist, you can just unfollow all of the calories in calories out people. They are either lying to you or they are blind to the fact that they're wrong. There's too much science that says if your thyroid hormone's off, you will or won't gain fat. If you eat food at midnight, you will or won't gain fat. There's just too many cases that prove that model doesn't even work very well.

[00:38:58] Luke: And the model you're talking about, the way I think about it in an oversimplified way, as I eat a pint of ice cream that's X amount of calories, then the next day I'm like, oh shit, I ate, what, say 800 calories or whatever, so I need to go on the treadmill and monitor the calories number to get past that 800.

[00:39:16] Dave: It's pure fantasy because it--

[00:39:18] Luke: That's brutal. That's--

[00:39:20] Dave: It's just mean-spirited because the reality is if you do that on the treadmill, your body will just tell you to eat more. And on top of that, half the calories every day come from stuff that you can't measure on a treadmill. So you can't measure the body warmth unless you're in a calorie chamber. There's the warmth of the body. There's, uh, respiration. The amount of of CO2 in your exhaust gas makes a difference. The amount of water in it. And all of these different variables. Even how hard you think changes caloric demand.

Yet we'll just ignore all of those and pretend like you have to balance out your calories on a treadmill with the number of potato chips you ate. I did that. I did that shit for 702 hours when I weighed 300 pounds. I believed it fervently. That's why I wrote Smart Not Harder. It's other side of that. So I've already shown people, look, calories don't make you fat. Obesogens make you fat. The wrong calories can make you fat. But this is just known, and everyone knows this who has paid any attention to it. That no matter how loudly you bully people about it, that cat's out of the bag.

[00:40:27] Luke: I wonder if people are hanging onto it because of the personal trainer occupation. Because then--

[00:40:34] Dave: I wouldn't blame trainers for it. Trainers are really valuable.

[00:40:37] Luke: Who are the people that are hanging on to this then?

[00:40:39] Dave: Uh, they're mostly people who've built their self-identity around deprivation.

[00:40:43] Luke: Oh.

[00:40:44] Dave: These are highly traumatized people and they tend to be bullies anyway. And if you look at the calories in calories out, uh, dynamic online, it's pretty brutal. Uh, and it's unkind to the reality of being a human, which is that willpower is powered by the same system, uh, that you're burning up on the treadmill.

So what I did is I said, I got to lose this a 100 pounds. I'm 300 pounds. I don't want to have a third knee surgery. I'm going to go to the gym. I'll do it six days a week. I'll do it 90 minutes a day, halfway tough cardio. And I'm going to do this if I'm sick, I'm going to do this if I have final exams, this is when I'm starting my career, I'm going to do this even if I'm dating. I will miss a date before I will not go to the gym. And after, I did this for 18 months, I looked down, I still had a 46-inch waist.

[00:41:32] Luke: Oh, that's brutal.

[00:41:34] Dave: I could max out all the tool and machines at the gym. I was on the treadmill at a 15-degree incline wearing a backpack. I had a bad knee, I couldn't run, but I was walking as fast as I could walk, with weight.

[00:41:44] Luke: That's crazy.

[00:41:46] Dave: So I thought to myself-- I've also gone on a vegetarian diet for part of that time. I was on a low calorie diet for much of that time because I knew all I had to do was just starve myself. So I got used to that gnawing hunger feeling when I'm just going to stand up to-- I just revel in it. Just be like, yeah, that means I'm making progress. That's called over-training and undereating and it makes it hard to lose weight. And it broke my thyroid.

Uh, probably wasn't very good for me. Um, but man, I use my willpower. I use habit. I use every trick in the book, and I was so motivated, and I'm finally sitting at a Carl's Jr with my friends. Okay. I exercise more than all my friends combined. I could probably bench press all of my friends combined. I mean, I'm strong, but I'm fat, and I eat less than all of them. And they're ordering double western bacon cheeseburgers and fries. And I'm like, I'll have the chicken salad, no dressing, oh, and no chicken because, too many calories. 

And this is what I-- so I believed those calories in calories out people so fervently. And I just remember thinking, I must be eating too much lettuce. It's got to be me. I've got to cut back even more. 

[00:42:47] Luke: And you just lean

[00:42:48] Dave: And what you do is you lean into the point of breaking your biology. So Smarter Not Harder is here because if I'd have had this knowledge when I weighed that much, I would've said, oh my God, uh, here's how to do it in a few minutes. And I wouldn't have had to spend $300,000 fixing my metabolism.

[00:43:07] Luke: I think that's the thing about all of the biohacking and health optimization stuff that appeals to me is it's my borderline OCD need for efficiency. If something is done in a wasteful way or a redundant way, it just bugs me. Taking the long way to get where you're going when you look on the map and you're like, I could just go right there. Straight shot. 

And so the idea of stacking things and quantifying things and I love your perspective in this book and just your general message that getting the biggest bang for your buck and the most yield results with the least amount of effort. And I've never really thought it as laziness. I just think I want as much time as possible to do good things in the world and with my life--

[00:43:55] Dave: How dare you?

[00:43:55] Luke: I'm not going to spend the 700 hours that you did on a treadmill or a stair stepper or whatever. 

[00:44:00] Dave: You're supposed to struggle and suffer. That's what makes you a better person.

[00:44:03] Luke: I want free time, but I also feel good.

[00:44:06] Dave: I'm going to have to end the interview. That is so offensive that you would want some free time. How dare you? Don't you know that if you just suck it up and have some grit, and just work really hard, wake up at 4:00 AM and spend three hours sweating on yourself and taking pictures of you for social media that you'll be a good person and then you'll loved? You didn't get that in church?

[00:44:27] Luke: When dudes post pictures of their sweaty kettlebell and stuff, I was get grossed out. Just heads up I don't know if the ladies like that, but this guy certainly doesn't. Uh, and know what, I got to say, I mean, I see the point. It's self discipline and inspiring people to do good work, hard work, whatever. But I just--

[00:44:44] Dave: It's true that--

[00:44:45] Luke: I don't like suffering. I think I'm more in your camp. What's the least amount of shit I can do to how I want to be?

[00:44:51] Dave: I actually adore suffering because suffering resets your dopamine sensitivity. I just want to suffer at the right amount for the least possible time to make my body know who's in charge and do what needs to happen. It turns out the probably probably most effective way to turn on suffering that improves you as a human being is to do a five-minute cold plunge. There. I got my suffering in for the day, now I can go get shit done. 

[00:45:15] Luke: I must be sick because I enjoy the ice bath. 

[00:45:18] Dave: Yeah. You're a pervert.

[00:45:20] Luke: Maybe the first 10 seconds it's little like, ugh, why am I doing this?

[00:45:23] Dave: But it's called masochism. It's okay.

[00:45:25] Luke: But I don't know. I crave that thing.

[00:45:28] Dave: But no.

[00:45:28] Luke: But like you said, you--

[00:45:29] Dave: Everyone who learns to do it does crave it.

[00:45:30] Luke: You get habituated though in your life way because you reminded me earlier that two of the vast majority of the population, they would be tortured by even the idea of sitting in an ice bath for 30 seconds. I'm the guy that's like, oh, I got to get out. I'll probably do one between our interviews today. I got to do it. If I feel off in any way, that's my medicine.

[00:45:53] Dave: Well, you also have a history of addiction. 

[00:45:55] Luke: Yeah.

[00:45:55] Dave: And you've been super public about that. It turns out people who've been addicts even into something that's not a chemical, whether it's a work addiction, sex addiction, a gambling addiction, all that stuff--

[00:46:07] Luke: I've had two of those also.

[00:46:08] Dave: The travel impacts, right?

[00:46:11] Luke: Yeah. 

[00:46:12] Dave: Uh, so any addictive thing like that, it's a dopamine signaling problem. And it turns out that exposure to pain, whether it's from, uh, grinding it out on a Cannondale, a road bike, this used to be one of my things when I was much younger, trying to lose weight. I'd get on a road bike and ride hills and it hurts and you're just going to push, um, or cold plunge, or eating spicy peppers or old spiritual practices of self-flagellation where people would whip themselves. Today we just eat kale. It's almost the same thing. 

[00:46:46] Luke: Oh God.

[00:46:47] Dave: But those all affect dopamine signaling in the brain in a beneficial way. So the number of addicts who have healed their addiction, who practice cold therapy or some other way of intentionally, briefly feeling a pain signal in the meat of the body, which regulates their dopamine for the rest of the day, it's very high. And it's actually a normal practice for resilient humans. 

They just have to come about it from a certain way to realize, oh, this helps me not have cravings because now my dopamine receptors are sensitized. But if I didn't have my cold exposure or my habaneros on my burrito, whatever your kick is, that's actually part of it. 

So suffering is okay, but because our brains are also lazy, instead of thinking things through in order to save electricity, our meat operating system is like, oh, you don't have to actually think about it. Let me just either give you a feeling that you believe is true or let me give you an intellectual shortcut. 

So the biggest intellectual shortcut we make is, if something is bad, none of it is your best situation. And if something is good, you should do more of it. Very simple. It's obvious on its face, except it's stupidly wrong, even though it's obvious on its face. 

The part of you that said that was obvious is your meat operating system. The part of you that goes, actually, come to think of it, that doesn't make any sense, that was your active brain, but you didn't take the electricity to think about it because you already knew it was obvious. 

This is all invisible to us, but it's part of what keeps us from wasting energy so we don't die of a famine. So what that means is that if a little suffering is good, more is better. And we know that exercise is good, therefore, like me more exercise is better. 

And if we know that sometimes having an empty stomach is full, like intermittent fasting is good for you, I'll just never eat again. And there are people who over fast and become gaunts and things like that.

So we tend to go to extremes because it's intellectually easier to do an extreme than it is to actually figure out the right dose. Smarter Not Harder is about telling you the right dose to get to the goal you want. 

An example here is, uh, with high intensity interval training versus chronic cardio. What I believed was if I just do my 45 minutes of cardio on the treadmill, I'll work really hard, I'll be exhausted when I'm done, I'll be all sweaty, therefore I've worked hard, I've struggled, therefore I'll get my results. And that's what they teach us to this day. It's not real. 

Here's what the meat operating system actually responds to. If you do something at full exertion as much as the meat can handle for a relatively brief period of time, then the body says, okay, I faced a challenge. And then it says what do I do next? And it has to make a decision. 

And remember, it's doing this without asking you. It doesn't even really even like it that you're in there. This is your body doing its thing. It thinks it's in charge. So it's going to say, well, I could go in and I could make the system stronger in case I have to do that again, but I got to look at what's happening right now. 

So case in point, you might go to the gym, get on the treadmill, warm up for five minutes, get your blood flowing and then hit your first big hill and sprint really hard. Now the body's like, I don't know why I'm moving this much. I don't really like it because I wanted to sit on the couch and watch Netflix. 

But then, okay, heart's raising. It said, all right, fine, here's some adrenaline. And then the tiger actually tries to kill you and that's why you're running up the hill. You're doing the hard stuff. But then if you were to get away from the tiger, like, oh, that was awesome. I'm just going to sit down and chill.

But instead you know more is better, so the person at the front of your spin class, like, okay, everybody, now let's stand up and I'm going to turn up the Britney Spears or whatever the hell they listen to. I don't do that class. And Brittany, thank you. You're awesome. Uh, anyway, we're going to turn this up and we're all going to be like sweating on each other. 

And what you're telling the body is a tiger almost caught me. And then I got away, but it's still hunting me and it's hunting me for 45 minutes. And the body's like, I'm not going to adapt. All of my resources just went into an emergency. And even worse, if you're like me, oh, and by the way, there's a famine because I wasn't eating enough.

Well, is it any wonder that the body is a little bit reluctant to invest very hard to come by resources to becoming stronger and faster and having more muscles and having more VO2 max and building more mitochondria? Of course it's not going to do that. It's not dumb. There was a hunter hunting you and it was hard to get away and there was no food. 

If instead you're like, oh, something almost ate me, but now I'm going to take a nap, and you return to baseline. This is a fundamental principle in biohacking that I've introduced, and it works on almost everything, but not everything. And it's Smarter Not Harder. I call it slope of the curve biology.

And what that means is that the body doesn't listen to how much work you do underneath the curve. Like, oh, I did an hour of training at 50%, look how much volume of work I did. I burned a 1,000 calories. No, no, no. It doesn't care. In fact, that's probably bad. What it wants to know is how much of my full output could I get to quickly? And how quickly can I return to baseline? 

What that means is that the slope of the curve, how quickly we recover, is the major signal to the body that it's safe to adapt. And with that, you go to an Upgrade Labs, uh, we've got a modified version of REHIT on an exercise bike. REHIT is reduced-exertion high-intensity training. The latest studies, five minutes of training three times a week gives you six times better results than doing an hour of cardio five days a week. 

[00:52:30] Luke: Is that similar to the Carol bike?

S 

[00:52:32] Dave: Yeah, yeah. We work with to the Carol bike, but we've gotten modifications to it for Upgrade Labs. And what we're doing at Upgrade Labs that's cool is we're actually using all of the data we're gathering to give you a prescription for what to do when. Because I mean, let's face, anyone can buy a bunch of the different gear that I've popularized and that you've popularized over the years. You're just not getting the results you need because depending on your goal, and depending on your, uh, where you are now, both overall and where you are today, now, um, are you more inflamed, less inflamed, things like that. Uh, and depending where you want to go, your path through all these different technologies is radically different. We've got the data to do that.

[00:53:08] Luke: That's very cool. Yeah.

[00:53:09] Dave: We are the only people in the world who have that data.

[00:53:11] Luke: That's really cool because even with something like the Carol bike, which as far as exercising hard and getting your heart rate up, it's the most tolerable for me. But I guarantee you, if I have a screen of choices on there and one of them is 20 minutes long and you do 30 sprints, and one of them is 10 minutes long and you do two sprints, every goddamn time I'm going to pick the two sprints.

[00:53:34] Dave: Why would you strain more? 

[00:53:34] Luke: But if I was getting the data back and you're like, ah, Luke, man, you're doing really good, the algorithm or a person that's telling me that you, man, if you just do one day a week of this longer harder one, you're going to see these benefits, then I would actually do it But if just up to me and I don't really know-- 

[00:53:50] Dave: You won't do the harder one.

[00:53:50] Luke: And I'm not getting much feedback, I'm definitely going to do it. Maybe not the very easiest one but probably the second easiest one.

[00:53:56] Dave: Well, the cool thing is I'm not going to tell you to do the harder one unless it's in alignment with your goals. For the vast majority of people, it's like this, I have 37 minutes right now because I came into Upgrade Labs, I got to leave it this time. What can I do right now that's going to give me the most movement in the direction of my goal? And everyone has five big goals. And everyone has at least one that's at the top, and usually a secondary that's pretty important. 

And based on that, we actually have the ability to say, okay, for you, given that you look like this biologically right now and that this is your goal, you're going to do this much of our modified REHIT. You're going to do maybe cold, maybe not cold, maybe strength, maybe not strength. And we've got a whole neurofeedback system from 40 Years of Zen where we're doing short intense meditations. 

So if your goal was stress recovery, which is one of the big five goals, and cognitive function, your workout's going to look entirely different than if you were to do something that said, look, I just want my muscles back. 

[00:55:02] Luke: Yeah.

[00:55:03] Dave: Muscles still matter, but look, if you're there for cardio, it's just going to be a different day. And we're not going to tell you, you pick cardio versus weight days, because you won't do it right. You tell us your goals and we're going to tell you exactly what to do to give you the most time. 

It's like having a recipe that changes each time for dinner to give you exactly the right food. We build the recipe based on who you are and what you want to do, but I'm teaching people how to do that for themselves as best I can with that all of our AI algorithms and everything.

[00:55:35] Luke: Well, something in the book I wanted to point to because I understand not everyone has the resources for all of the really high tech stuff. 

[00:55:43] Dave: Most of our stuff--

[00:55:44] Luke: Carol bike, five grand. I mean, a lot of the cool stuff is five to $150,000 and more.

[00:55:50] Dave: You don't have to buy anything to use Smarter Not Harder, that's part of the goal.

[00:55:53] Luke: You broke it down, I think, in a really cool way. Because I'm always trying to do this for people when they say, well, listen, I'm on a limited budget, single parent, whatever, what can I do? And for me it's always, get in cold water, get sunshine, breath work. I pick all the-- meditation, free things that'll really move the needle. But I like how you broke it down to, there's a recipe or recommendations starter, mid-level and advanced tags. And then the advanced ones I notice are typically ones that are going to cost you some money.

[00:56:21] Dave: They're either at Upgrade Labs or you're going to spend, five or 10 grand or a 100 grand, and most people aren't going to do that. The reason I talk about those is some people are, or you can share that with your whole neighborhood. Um, but if it works at that level, it illustrates that there's a principle that we can learn about.

And if we know about a new principle of how to hack our bodies, you can get a signal in. And really it's just telling the operating system to change in the way you choose instead of the way it chooses, because it's trying to interpret reality. It's just stupid at interpreting reality. So you're just going to trick it into believing your version of reality. And when it does, it'll modify itself. And, uh, an example there, most of us aren't going to go buy a $5,000 bike, but you can't get a membership at Upgrade Labs, or you can do what I describe. 

Every one of these principles has a free version. You can go to the park, and I've talked for years about it, you can go do HIT at the park, high intensity interval training, when it first came out. Uh, but this is even worse if you're worried about being embarrassed. Because you basically go to the park and you act like you've eaten three THC gummies. So you're walking so slow, you're looking at the grass and it's boring, and you're like, people are looking at me. I feel so dumb. And you meander like the walking meditation. You're so slow. 

And then boom, run, ah. Now you're really on drugs. Okay, you'd fit right in Santa Monica. Just run like crazy like you're going to die for maybe 20, 30 seconds. And then now if you want to get that signal in, how do you tell your body that you're safe?

Drop. Lay on your back and start doing breathing. Deep breathing, slow rhythmic twice as long outbreath to activate parasympathetic. Calm down. Calm down. Now, if no one tries to give you mouth to mouth, you'll adapt as quickly as you possibly could. It just looks pretty funny and it's better to do it at an Upgrade Labs, um, or with some tech, but you can't do that on a treadmill. You can't do it on a normal exercise bike because you can't go from zero to I'm going to die in one second. And that's what your body has to understand. It's the slope of the curve.

[00:58:28] Luke: Totally. That's such an important piece too, is building in the recovery. Do you know about NuCalm? 

[00:58:34] Dave: Yeah. 

[00:58:35] Luke: New acoustic software? I'm obsessed with that software. I use it all the time because it's-- yeah, I mean, I meditate too but if I meditate with that, it's going to drop me into a deeper state.

[00:58:46] Dave: Nice.

[00:58:47] Luke: And so I I love working for two hours, just, ah, just grinding, doing a podcast, whatever it is, working around the house, working on the computer, using a lot of brain energy or working out, and then dripping into that or going to a float tank. I that diversity you've described of going to the park.

[00:59:04] Dave: It helps.

[00:59:05] Luke: Deeply relaxing then going hardcore. Because all of my life, the times I just went hardcore and didn't build in the recovery, I got burned out. Period. And then I don't want to do any of it. So that's a really important distinction for people, I think, to take away. Because everyone knows by now, oh, meditation's good for you. But there are other ways through breathing as you mentioned, and different software and things that can really drop you into a really relaxed state.

And to punctuate one's day with that, to me that's the secret sauce. That's just to continually take little, even a 10 minute break to re-energize and give your body, as you said, that signal that it's safe. And then go hard again. That for me is the longevity recipe of, wow, maybe I could be doing that when I'm 80 or you're 180.

[00:59:54] Dave: I think you can be doing that. And that's why towards the end of the book, I talk about cognitive function. I talk about technologies and techniques that put your brain in certain states and improve your brain faster than doing crossword puzzles. That's the old way of doing it. 

And then even for the chapter on meditation, in stress resilience, and I call it spirit spiritual hacking, it's any spiritual path that you're on that feels good to you, do it. And part of me is called, well, I'd love to go back to Tibet and just stay in a monastery for a year and not talk to anyone and just, well, it'd have to be a non-vegan monastery because I can't fart and meditate that much.

But I could do it. It would be great. Unfortunately, I have other things that are also great. I have a family. I have a responsibility to the biohacking community, um, that I've built and that I hold energy for it. I don't want to check out, but that's what you do if you really want to go do that. So maybe I could also say, well, I could make space for two hours a day of meditating. I could and it would come from something else.

So if I can get the results of that in a half hour, that's lazy. I mean, it's straight up lazy. And some people get really angry. What do you mean hurry and meditate fast? I mean, don't you have work to do in the world? If you can get the results in less time, you owe it to yourself and to your family and your community. So take that precious time, that precious energy and use it to help somebody. Use it to grow your compassion. Use it to meditate even. You managed to get two hours to meditate. I'm going to take, oh, I don't know, 15 minutes or a half hour of that two hours, and I'm going to use technologies that got me a ton of meditation. 

And then I spend the other hour and a half meditating on top of that, you're still going to do better. It's just wasted energy. So meditate in any way that works for you, but consider the fact that breathing, doing breath work with meditation just works better in studies and in practice. 

So you owe to yourself to not do a half-ass job of meditating. Get all the way in there. For me, I glue electrodes to my head and I've spent six months of my life with electrodes on my head meditating. And I run a facility that does that for executives. That's not accessible to everyone. But in the last year, 40 Years of Zen now does at home training where we'll send the gear to you.

I can't do all of the upgrades, but I could do a good portion of them and it costs half as much or thereabouts as the whole program. And I'm putting 20 minute snippets of that even into Upgrade Labs. I just want all of us to say, if I have 10 minutes to calm my nervous system and make my brain work better and to get into the best altered state for me, how do I do it so I can get there? 

Because we have work to do in the world and it just matters. And you could call it lazy. You call it sacrilege because I've had following in ancient lineage that tells you-- I've trained with many ancient lineages. I respect the hell out of them. I don't have time for them.

m 

[01:02:49] Luke: Well, also what's great about stacking things, when you can take that finite period of time, a half an hour. I mean, I'll lay there on a PEMF mat under the Lucio light with the NuCalm thing on, and probably the Apollo on my wrist. I mean, I don't always do everything, but that's good for me, that's going to make me feel good, whether it's recovery or not, I'll just do a bunch of those things at the same time. Stand on the vibe plate and do the red light and then also hang and do some pull-ups at the same time. And then that 10 minutes got me in net result much more so than just doing red light or just vibrating, or just doing a couple pull-ups. 

[01:03:27] Guest: Yeah.

[01:03:27] Luke: I think this is another piece that's really fun too, is start learning some of these things, whether they're expensive or not, and whatever you can afford to do, but you can stack a bunch of stuff at once, and then again, like you're saying, have more of that free time to actually be creative and accomplish something to share your gifts with the world. Something you talked about in the book, uh, is vitamin DAKE, D-A-K-E, I don't know if you pronounce it that way.

[01:03:52] Dave: How'd you say it? 

[01:03:53] Luke: DAKE.

[01:03:54] Dave: Yeah, DAKE. I like DAKE. I thought you said it a different way since--

[01:03:56] Luke: Dick.

[01:03:56] Dave: It's a vitamin too for some people. 

[01:03:58] Luke: But one thing you-- uh, I want you to just break that down real quick. I'd love you talked about real vitamin A, retinol.

[01:04:04] Dave: Sure.

[01:04:06] Luke: A lot of people that recommend vitamin A talk about just drinking carrot juice, and since I, within the past couple years started being mindful about just getting more retinol in, I mean, my energy is--

[01:04:18] Dave: Huge difference. 

[01:04:19] Luke: Noticeably higher.

[01:04:20] Dave: I take 20,000IUs of retinol every day.

[01:04:24] Luke: In a supplement form?

[01:04:25] Dave: Yeah.

[01:04:26] Luke: Oh, okay. It's more fun than eating raw liver.

[01:04:29] Dave: Oh, that's for sure.

[01:04:30] Luke: Or cod liver oil. 

[01:04:31] Dave: Uh, vitamin DAKE is one of the two non-sexy supplement recommendations that I make in Smarter Not Harder. You and I both are all about nootropics and supplements that increase sex drive and you can do all kinds of cool stuff with supplements. The anti-aging world with Spermidine and all that stuff. I introduced those things as best I can, um, to myself and just talk about on the show. 

The stuff that that doesn't get any love, but drives everything is number one, minerals. We become mineral deplete. We don't get minerals in our food anymore because our soil has no minerals because of glyphosate and because of over farming. 

So suddenly looks like a piece of celery, but it doesn't have the minerals that you think it has. And it looks even like a piece of chicken, but the chicken grew in six weeks instead of six months, and didn't eat very much during that time, and it's devoid of minerals. And on top of that, all these plant-based foods that are peasant foods that are being sold as healthy foods, uh, those steal minerals from your body.

And I warned about this in the first chapter of the Bulletproof Diet, but I talked about lectins. I talked about oxalates. I talked about phytic acid. I talked about Omega six. I talked about history and it's overwhelming. This book, I'm just talking about specifically phytic acid, which is a compound in beans, and nuts, and seeds, and grains that suck minerals from your body. 

Look, if you don't have enough minerals, your workout won't work. If you don't have enough minerals, your meditation won't work. It affects everything. It's foundational. And since we're eating a bunch of foods that suck them from our bones and the foods we eat, don't put it back in our bones--

[01:06:08] Luke: This explains why my teeth all rotted out of my head when I was a vegetarian.

[01:06:12] Dave: Right there. Same happened to me when I was--

[01:06:14] Luke: Are you serious?

[01:06:15] Dave: Yeah, when I was all vegan, I cracked two teeth. Literally they cracked in half, not from eating crunchy foods even, and they would always be really temperature sensitive and sore. This is mineral deficiency.

[01:06:26] Luke: It's crazy. Dude, I made it through 15 hard years of drug addiction with perfect teeth. Got sober and thought, oh, now I need to get healthy and I'm going to become a vegetarian. And all my teeth rotted out. I mean not all of them, but to the point where I just had to-- in the process of replacing all of them because they're just done. Yeah. And it happened when I was a vegetarian. 

[01:06:48] Dave: So when you were a vegetarian, you stopped getting vitamin DAKE, D, A, K, and E. Let's see, those are all animal based. You can get, uh, a little bit of D if you take, uh, shiitake mushrooms and turn them upside down and give them a sun tan, you'll get trace amount of vitamin D. Other than that, there's no plant-based vitamin D. Uh, vitamin A. People say, oh, it's plant-based vitamin. No, it's beta keratine. It doesn't turn into retinol in the body very efficiently, if at all, depending on who you're, so there's that. And vitamin K2 is from butter and cheese, and there is a little bit in natto, if you like snotty, fermented soy that tastes-- 

[01:07:27] Luke: And Spermidine too. 

[01:07:28] Dave: Uh, a little Spermidine in there too. 

[01:07:30] Luke: Natto is not for the faint at heart.

[01:07:32] Dave: Yeah. Natto is a super food.

[01:07:33] Luke: I eat it, and I don't mind it, but I'm weird. I don't know.

[01:07:36] Dave: Yeah. It is a super food.

[01:07:38] Luke: But if I open in the house, no matter where Alyson is in the house, she's like, oh my God, you open the natto again. It wreaks up the whole house. 

[01:07:46] Dave: Oh yeah.

[01:07:46] Luke: Like a corpse's socks. 

[01:07:48] Dave: Oh, great visual imagery.

[01:07:51] Luke: Yeah. I mean, it's bad. 

[01:07:52] Dave: You sold that hard. Um, it is a super food. I don't eat it. It's gross. I can get it in much better things.

[01:07:57] Luke: The consistency too.

[01:07:58] Dave: Yeah. 

[01:07:59] Luke: I mean, it's very snotty.

[01:08:00] Dave: It's like eating a bowl of rotting mucus. Pretty much. But some people love it. They say it's nutty. I'm like, okay.

[01:08:06] Luke: I've grown to like it, but I do cheat. I'll put a little hot sauce or something on it.

[01:08:10] Dave: It doesn't count.

[01:08:10] Luke: So I'm not a purist.

[01:08:13] Dave: Um, it's the same. You can take a bite of raw liver if you really want to, and I've done that very early on when I was writing my pregnancy book. I tried, I was like, okay, um, uh, lamb liver, raw, put it in my upside down NutriBullet thing and grind it up. like, I got to do this. Put some water in there. Ugh. And I tried to drink it and it was so horrible. Uh, and then the stringy bits of liver, one of them gets caught in my tooth and there's liver hanging down my throat. I'm like, I'm going to die. This is the worst experience in my life. 

So I just actually take liver pills. I have for 15 years. I guess now they're cool, but you'll need to an ounce a day more than, that's probably not going to do good things for you because your purine lumps go up. So I talk about that in the book too. It's a good source of minerals. It's one of the ones that we used to get that we don't anymore.

[01:09:00] Luke: The liver?

[01:09:01] Dave: Yeah, liver. Especially for copper.

[01:09:03] Luke: Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Uh, also I feel that copper is vastly underrepresented too. People don't talk about copper, and I'm like, dude, how does your mitochondria work without copper and retinol? How do you make energy?

[01:09:17] Dave: You actually don't. And so it's no wonder that we have problems when we go plant-based and you're not getting copper except-- there's an exception there. If you eat about a whole bar of dark chocolate every day, which I do actually, I like chocolate, uh, it does contain a substantial amount of copper, enough that you might get small amounts, not enough. I take copper supplements too, but dark chocolate, you have to watch out because it tends to have histamine and it can have oxalic acid and, um, it can also have phytic acid.

[01:09:48] Luke: I got a new business idea for you since you like starting businesses every month.

[01:09:53] Dave: I think I over start businesses. I got to stop that.

[01:09:55] Luke: What about, uh, I mean, obviously a mycotoxin free chocolate, but one that is tested for lower oxalic acid? Because there's no way of telling. You can get the best handmade Peruvian cacao. My wife gets this beautiful cacao from South America and it's organic, sometimes biodynamic. I mean, I'm assuming it's not mold, it's high altitude. It's prepared carefully. But you don't know the oxalate level.

[01:10:19] Dave: Here's how you know. Okay, take a piece of raw spinach. It's probably easier than raw kale. Uh, and then you put it in your mouth, chew it up and swirl around a little bit it and you can spit it out or swallow, whatever you really want to. And then rub your tongue on your bottom teeth. You know that feeling you get from spinach?

[01:10:36] Luke: Yeah.

[01:10:36] Dave: That's oxalic acid. Now you know the feeling. Take a bite of whatever chocolate you want to test.

[01:10:43] Luke: I like it.

[01:10:43] Dave: Melt it around. Just a little tiny bite. Melt it around. If you have that fur on the back of your teeth from spinach, that is oxalic acid, you can feel it.

[01:10:50] Luke: So you can self-test your own chocolate?

[01:10:51] Dave: I do. Absolutely. And there's times I open a bar, I'm like, ah, damn it, I'm not getting that bar. You're right. We should start something.

[01:10:58] Luke: I mean, because--

[01:11:01] Dave: That was the same thing with Bulletproof coffee in the early days. I'm like, I drank this $20 bag of coffee. I drank one and it punched me in the face. It made me tired and I got a reaction to the mold toxins in it. Okay, I'll get rid of that. And I buy another likely to be mold-free. And I'd hit a good one and, oh, thank God. Now I can drink the whole thing. And it was-- I do that with chocolate right now, so it's an interesting idea.

[01:11:20] Luke: Yeah, well, the world needs it.

[01:11:21] Dave: I don't need another company. Please no.

[01:11:24] Luke: Even normies like chocolate. 

[01:11:26] Dave: Normies.

[01:11:27] Luke: You don't have to be a health nut to enjoy. Yeah, I mean, we call it cacao, but I mean, everyone likes chocolate. Come on.

[01:11:33] Dave: We all like chocolate and it's, uh, it's funny. Chocolate, it is a super food. I think coffee and chocolate are the two most important foods that we can consume outside of red meat.

[01:11:42] Luke: Dude, I think I could drink coffee, and I'm not trying to-- 

[01:11:46] Dave: I quit it for five years too.

[01:11:47] Luke: I'm not trying to make this like a commercial for Bulletproof Coffee. You have a new coffee now. But I literally-- because I would go to Starbucks or Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. There's a chain they have LA and um drink a bit coffee, and I would be--

[01:12:00] Dave: Yeah. You get shakes.

[01:12:01] Luke: A nervous wreck. And so thought, oh I'm sensitive to caffeine I just can't do caffeine. I can't do coffee. And then when I drank coffee without mold and pesticides and mixed it with fat, like you uh promoted, I was like holy shit, I feel amazing on coffee.

[01:12:17] Dave: Makes you feel happy.

[01:12:19] Luke: Interestingly, I mean to live a life without coffee is a tragedy, know what I mean?

[01:12:23] Dave: I went five years without coffee before I started Bulletproof. I had the same exact thing. Coffee, I drink it, I like it for a little while, then I feel shaky and jittery, I feel anxiety. And I don't know. 

[01:12:32] Luke: And hungry.

[01:12:33] Dave: Yeah, super hungry.

[01:12:34] Luke: Shitty coffee makes me want to eat bad food that is not good for me too. 

[01:12:37] Dave: Your body says give me sugar so that I can deal with all these toxins

[01:12:41] Luke: I also find-- interestingly, I am never-- and I would say I have a pretty addictive personality based on my past. I don't ever feel addicted to coffee. There's days I don't drink it. I just have a lot of energy, I think it'll be overstimulating and I don't drink it and I used to be very addicted to it when it was the shitty coffee. So I think when you're drinking good coffee too, I don't know, you become less dependent on it. It's a little bonus in cognition and energy but it's not like you're going to die without it. It's a different relationship, I find

[01:13:11] Dave: It is a different relationship. And it's funny. I'm still the largest shareholder of Bulletproof and it's my baby I am not on the board, I have no, uh, operational relationship. 

[01:13:22] Luke: Yeah because changed the name of your podcast and the conference.

[01:13:25] Dave: Yeah. That was at their request.

[01:13:27] Luke: Oh okay.

[01:13:27] Dave: Yeah. Uh, the board of directors and the CEO wanted me to note it that way.

[01:13:31] Luke: So you're still shareholder but you're not directly involved. 

[01:13:33] Dave: Yeah. So a lot people think I sold. No, I haven't sold Bulletproof. I really want Bulletproof to succeed. Um, and, uh, but I'm not, uh, not involved there. But yeah, I do--

[01:13:43] Luke: Did they didn't get pissed when you made a new coffee company?

[01:13:45] Dave: Um, it's weird because my plan was like, look, I need a functional coffee at Upgrade Labs. Um, and it's necessary for people to do the some of the hacks that we're doing. This is a franchise that's opening all over the country with dozens of locations.

[01:14:00] Luke: What's the timeline on that, by the way?

[01:14:01] Dave: Oh, it's already opening. We have, uh, the ones in LA and I don't know exactly which cities are going to open first, but there's-- 

I don't know the exact number, but it'll say at least a dozen lease applications going in around the country for people who are in the process of opening.

[01:14:15] Luke: Oh, cool.

[01:14:15] Dave: And we've got, every day more people are going to ownanupgradelabs.com and they're saying, I want to do one in my city. What's it going to take? And we're having-- I have the whole team. In fact, my employee there opened the first several hundred Orange theory locations. So I have a very experienced team who knows how to do it. 

Because it's hard to run a biohacking facility. Lots of people were inspired by Upgrade Labs in LA and so it'll just buy a couple pieces and open one. It's very hard to make money doing that. It took me about eight years to be comfortable to franchise it, but I feel really good about it now. So going back to coffee.

So I wanted a coffee there and it was actually Bulletproof's request. They, uh, they said, uh, we didn't want your Bulletproof coffee there, uh, or, uh, or Bulletproof supplements, and I was a little surprised. Um, but I honored their request. . Still I needed the Upgrade Labs' supplements and the coffee. 

So, um, I went in a different direction anyway. This isn't a knockoff coffee at all. I drink Bulletproof decaf. I'd use Bulletproof MCT Oil and collagen and Inner fuel and all that stuff still. So, um, what Danger Coffee though is it is tested to my current top mold testing and it says right on the bag, mold tested. And you should check whatever brand you're into to see if it says mold testing because some companies have started just saying clean, but you don't necessarily know what clean is. 

[01:15:36] Luke: Um, and also even if a batch of coffee was tested, if it's not tested continually, then the farm down the road could have had some extra beans and not dried them right or whatever, and created mycotoxins and you're just going to bag it up and--

[01:15:50] Dave: Yeah, you have to do the right amount of testing and all that stuff. Um, but what's very different and actually filed a patent on this, uh, with Danger Coffee is that it has a very large dose of trace minerals and electrolytes in it. 

[01:16:06] Luke: Oh, cool.

[01:16:06] Dave: So when you do that, you drink the coffee, it changes how the coffee goes into the body because of the electrolytes. And your meat operating system, it has an invisible detector for minerals and food.

I 

[01:16:18] Luke: I 

[01:16:18] Dave: can smell 

[01:16:18] Luke: it through the bag. So we got to make a coffee in between recordings.

[01:16:22] Dave: I'm down.

[01:16:22] Luke: I'm going to try it out. All right, carry on.

[01:16:24] Dave: So your meat operating system says, okay, uh, there's minerals in this, minerals that I can absorb because they're in an ionic form. And then it says, drink it. And it's a weird thing because it's not a flavor, it's a feeling.

[01:16:38] Luke: And they don't change the flavor profile?

[01:16:40] Dave: Not even a little bit.

[01:16:41] Luke: Wow.

[01:16:41] Dave: This is extremely well-graded coffee. The quality of the coffee is so good. It's expensive to make, but it has to be something that is joyful to drink. The minerals increase the joyfulness, I feel when I drink it every morning. I'm like, ah, there's something in this. So it's a different vibe. You can put butter, you can put, uh, C8 MCT, like I said, I use Brain Octane for that. You can put it in there. Um, and it works. But this is just a different animal.

[01:17:10] Luke: Cool. Congratulations. I can't wait to try it. 

[01:17:12] Dave:  In fact, I don't think you have-- can I give a code? It's just a discount code for a Danger Coffee.

[01:17:18] Luke: Yeah, dude, because I've only had one cup at the conference. And we're going to have some right now, but I'm sure people listening want to get mineralized and not drink mold.

[01:17:26] Dave: We didn't plan this. Uh, let's make it LUKE. So go to dangercoffee.com, use code LUKE, and, uh, you'll save some money and we'll work it out, whatever it's going to be. But discount for your listeners. Guys, thanks for listening.

[01:17:37] Luke: Yeah, thanks. I appreciate that. I like it when people come on the show and if they promote their shit that they at least hook up the audience.

[01:17:43] Dave: I make people do that on my show. And if you come on my show and you're going to talk about your product, you better give listeners a discount. You should do something.

[01:17:49] Luke: Yeah, I do.

[01:17:50] Dave: So there you go. There's discount. 

[01:17:51] Luke: I don't think most people slip through without getting some discount. So thanks. 

[01:17:53] Dave: All right. Well, hold me accountable.

[01:17:55] Luke: I'm stoked. Thank you.

[01:17:56] Luke: What's your take on Shilajit? Are you a fan?

[01:18:02] Dave: Um, Shilajit, terrible saxophonist. This is the sister of Kenny G? That one?

[01:18:07] Luke: Yeah, exactly.

[01:18:09] Dave: By the way, dad jokes her a sign of high intelligence.

[01:18:11] Luke: Hey man, we have plenty of dad jokes. Sometimes we keep it clean, sometimes we don't. We like to mix it up,

[01:18:16] Dave: All right, so Shilajit.

[01:18:17] Luke: But love Shilajit. Uh, again, one of things you want to make sure is tested because--

[01:18:21] Dave: I was going to say, I have some issues with-- I've tried it over the years and there's two ways of getting trace minerals like that. Uh, one of them is through humic and fulvic, uh, extracts that mostly come from compressed peat moss. And the other one is Shilajit. And Shilajit is-- we're not quite sure where it comes from, but it squirts out of rocks in the Himalayas and a couple of other places.

But there's widely varying compositions of it and widely varying amounts of heavy metals and things like that. Um, so I've found that you get a broader spectrum from using humic and fulvic, uh, biomass from peat than you do from getting Shilajit, and I think the supply is much more accessible there. Um, but I think either way you want to get your trace minerals. And years ago, when I started Bulletproof, I've tried every performance enhancer on the planet, basically, that's not highly dangerous. I could never get the kick from the different brands that I tried.

[01:19:22] Luke: Of Shilajit? Really, that's funny. I find it noticeably--

[01:19:28] Dave: You do.

[01:19:28] Luke: Potent. Yeah.

[01:19:29] Dave: That's because you were a vegan. Seriously?

[01:19:31] Luke: I wasn't vegan. I didn't have that discipline.

[01:19:33] Dave: Oh, you're a vegetarian?

[01:19:34] Luke: I basically live off pizza and pasta for 10 years.

[01:19:36] Dave: Well, whatever you did that rotted your teeth, may just still be mineral, uh, deficient and you're still getting your sufficiency out of it.

[01:19:42] Luke: Yeah. Another thing that's weird about Shilajit, and I heard this in the rumor sphere, um, was that it will potentiate, uh, any psychoactive substance that you take. And so using it in conjunction with microdosing, uh, psilocybin, LSD, etc. You really do have to be mindfull because it does potenti-- I don't know the science on it, but uh, it said if you take some Shilajit if you're going on a journey or something, it potentiate. I haven't done, but I have noticed in microdosing that it takes less of the substance to stay sub-perceptual. You can go above perceptual if you take a grip of Shilajit with a microdose.

[01:20:23] Dave: You said something important. So Shilajit potentiates psychoactive substances. They're using a compound similar to Shilajit.

[01:20:33] Luke: Oh, interesting. 

[01:20:34] Dave: But one that I find is a little more effective, humic and fulvic in Danger Coffee, which potentiates the effects. So you're not far off track there. 

[01:20:40] Luke: Okay, cool. Because you hear stuff in the endless information online and on podcasts, and I think people just say shit, and then it's like the telephone game and it just becomes a thought meme.

[01:20:51] Dave: Yeah.

[01:20:51] Luke: So with that particular thing, I thought, I don't know, I'm going to try it and see. And I was like, God damn, they're right. You got to be mindful. The Shilajit will pump you up with whatever you mix with it. All right, I want to cover a couple more things. Oh, back on the trace minerals. What are your thoughts on, uh, Quinton minerals?

[01:21:07] Dave: Oh, like seawater? It's actually, uh, really cool. It's an unusual and relative expensive delivery mechanism. And for, uh, for listeners, if you've never seen the Quinton minerals, it's a glass ampule that you snap the end off of and uh, and drink as a shot. And it's purified and, uh, sterilized seawater.

And it's funny because your body is made out of seawater. You have exactly the salinity of the ocean. And the ocean has exactly, at least the unpolluted ocean, uh, has exactly the right ratio of trace minerals for your body. So this is another way of getting trace minerals in. And, uh, it's also a way of getting electrolytes in. You'll find a similar feeling if you do something like Danger Coffee, anything that's getting trace minerals in a form you can use, which is why Quinton is interesting.

[01:21:56] Luke: Versus dissolved rocks. 

[01:21:58] Dave: Yeah. Dissolved rocks. 

[01:21:58] Luke: I sometimes they go to CVS or something and I try to avoid the supplement section. I mean, thank God it's there. People are trying. But you see the mineral section and it's just ground up rocks basically.

[01:22:10] Dave: Calcium carbonate. Yeah. That's not going to work. You know what though, I actually am very happy to buy calcium carbonate at CVS.

[01:22:17] Luke: To clean your dishes or something?

[01:22:19] Dave: No, it's because it's what binds with oxalic acid to form oxalate crystals. So if you were going to cook kale or spinach, you need to put a couple of those in there and melt them into the water to crystallize out the oxalates, so then you can eat the green mush that's left, which by the way costs more per calorie than Wagyu ribeye

[01:22:38] Luke: Wow. Yeah. I've heard you talk about that and something I've talked about with Daniel Vitalis, and I don't care if people eat animals or not. Like we were talking about in the beginning, whatever makes you happy if you're not hurting other people, go nuts. If you think about an acre of land, the deaths per calorie, to grow enough kale or potatoes or whatever it is, how many creatures have to be killed to get a plate full of food that's equal in calorie to a steak versus that one death? 

[01:23:08] Dave: I'm pretty sure--

[01:23:09] Luke: It's really interesting. 

[01:23:10] Dave: I'm pretty sure I introduced that concept. I'd never saw it written out before. 

[01:23:14] Luke: Well, it's a good good concept.

[01:23:15] Dave: Well, it wasn't that I invented it, it was that on that same trip when I first had yak butter tea, that was my introduction to what became Bulletproof coffee, I was studying at monasteries with monks, and one of the rules was no killing. And so I asked the head Lama. Tibet Buddhists love arguing, it's how they learn, and it's how they maintain calmness in the nervous system while being challenged. That's part of the estate they're looking for, equanimity. So I'm like, hey, you say no killing. You have on your prayer poll a yak skin.

So you're a hypocrite. And he starts laughing and he goes, one death feeds everyone. And I had just gone off being a vegan, a raw vegan before that trip. I'm not going to be a raw vegan in Tibet eating raw yak. There's nothing to eat here. So it was his conversation with me that inspired me to write that first post about deaths per calorie and to talk about deaths per calorie.

[01:24:04] Luke: Oh, you have a blog post about it?

[01:24:05] Dave: Yeah, it was on the Bulletproof Diet. The death per calorie here is the lowest anywhere. And I have not seen it written about before then, but maybe someone did. Uh, and I've been hounding on that drum forever because I care as much as vegans do about animal welfare. I just understand that something's going to die for me to eat and I would like the thing that died to have had a good life and to have contributed to the environment instead of taken from it. 

And when you look at what happens with grass-fed agriculture, having been a farmer and done the work, there's no table scraps in my house. They're chicken food. Right There's no waste in anything. The extra lamb, the fat from the lambs that you can't eat because there's too much of it and it's too strongly flavored, it gets fed to the pigs and it makes the pigs fat. Pigs are healthier and then their fat is healthier. Everything is a cycle and all of it is about making thicker and thicker and thicker soil.

[01:24:58] Luke: That's so true, man.

[01:24:59] Dave: I can get down with that. But the idea of just mowing down a bunch of little cute bunnies so I can have a fake burger sponsored by Monsanto, screw that noise. That is bad. 

[01:25:12] Luke: We all know factory farming is horrific. In fact, that was one of the main impetus for my becoming a vegetarian. I watched this film, it was narrated by Joaquin Phoenix. Oh God. It was a very militant--

[01:25:25] Dave: Oh, the vegan propaganda ones. There's a bunch of them.

[01:25:27] Luke: Well, this is OG. I mean, this back in the late '90s early 2000s. And it's was all of this, um, hidden camera footage from slaughter houses and stuff. I mean, just horrific nightmarish abuse of these animals. And then I was out. I'm like, I can't participate in this. But I didn't know that-- I mean, maybe regenerative agriculture then was just random farmers here and there that were old school. It wasn't a thing. Thankfully is becoming now, but that was the turning point for me where I can't do this. And then I got sick and realized, wow, it's either me or them. 

[01:26:00] Dave: Yeah. 

[01:26:01] Luke: But I think many of us don't think about just that factory farming is not only in the animal sector. Factory farm also make vegetables. I mean, if you go in central California, we have this drought because of all the almond trees.

[01:26:15] Dave: Yeah.

[01:26:16] Luke: And all the nut trees.

[01:26:17] Dave: I went to high school in central California there. A huge drought. The nut trees, and also, I mean, there are vegans who won't eat a fig because it turns out that a wasp dies inside every fig that you eat-- 

[01:26:30] Luke: Really?

[01:26:30] Dave: In order to fertilize it. Each species of fig has its own species of wasp, but that's what fertilizes it. And it crawls in there and it dies carrying-- it's part of the lifecycle of the wasp and the fig. But for some reason that makes figs not vegetarian enough. But it's okay.

[01:26:45] Luke: Are you being serious?

[01:26:46] Dave: I am being a100% serious. 

[01:26:47] Luke: Oh man.

[01:26:47] Dave: This is how militant the vegan move-- I was a vegan. Okay. I wasn't one that said no figs, uh, but I was very careful with being a vegan when I was just enthralled with a story that wasn't reality. And also it's okay to eat almonds even though, uh, billions of honeybees are enslaved and die to make almonds. They have these crates of them that are really abused and just moved around instead of being treated in a much better way. And it affects the bees, stress and all this. That's okay because bees aren't as cute as bunnies. I don't understand it.

[01:27:24] Luke: Well, this is the thought experiment, and people listening are probably like, I know we've heard this, Luke, but there'll be some new people that haven't. But it's interesting. I love the psyche and just what makes us tick is that we have an arbitrary hierarchical system for animals, in the terms of the suffering we're willing to cause for our own sustenance. And it seems to be that the closer the animals are to humans, the more killing them bothers us. 

So we don't care about killing a bunch of grasshoppers, and snakes, and gophers, and stuff to grow some vegetables. And we won't kill our dog or a cat because they live with us and we're habituated to live alongside them. But the idea of killing a bear is the one that probably triggers people the most. And bears are probably closest to a dog and closest to us. So it's weird how we put this arbitrary value system on what we're willing to kill or not.

[01:28:18] Dave: It's not arbitrary. 

[01:28:19] Luke: What is it?

[01:28:19] Dave: I would think you would know this because you're a metaphysical guy. Okay. Now I'm going to take off my only biohacking hack because spirituality, it's a part of the world of biohacking. It always has been from the genesis of the idea for it. Every species has an information field. This goes back to information field or morphogenic fields. We have a sacred contract with farm animals, and a spirit contract with other animals like bears, and wolves, and eagles. And we all know it. And we know it, not because we thought of it,  we know it because our meat operating system that operates in those realms knows it.

And that's why it feels wrong to do it. And because it feels wrong, we make up all sorts of rational stories to match the feeling. Now, it just feels wrong because we made an agreement with wolves, probably 400,000 years ago, that we would nourish them if they nourished and protected us. And we made the same agreement with cows, and with sheep, and with pigs, and with other food animals. And they signed off on that contract the same way that we did. 

And we are in violation of that contract when we mishandle, when we mistreat, when we torture those animals. That is wrong. It's also wrong to not allow those animals to do their sacred duty to nourish us because there would be no domesticated pigs, there would be no dogs, there would be no house cats. So this is a relationship that species are in.

[01:29:47] Luke: I like that. You sound like my wife. I don't know if you know, she has a book called Animal Power.

[01:29:51] Dave: Oh, really?

[01:29:51] Luke: I'll get a copy. 

[01:29:52] Dave: I've done a initiatory shamonic training. I've done high level--

[01:29:56] Luke: I never connected those too though, the contact, and just how we've evolved in these agreements with animals. Because it's interesting to your point, we won't eat a horse but they're a utility partner animal for humankind. I mean, we call power horsepower.

[01:30:12] Dave: We'll eat horses if we're really hungry, but we don't like it. And some places you can use tradition, or habit, or culture to override those feelings. Like in France, horse's actually something that you eat.

[01:30:25] Luke: Really?

[01:30:25] Dave: Yeah.

[01:30:25] Luke: Oh, I didn't know.

[01:30:26] Dave: Yeah. It's considered a food animal.

[01:30:27] Luke: I mean if you think about weed, deer, elk, moose, horse is pretty close to that, and most cultures are like, no, don't touch the horse.

[01:30:35] Dave: That's because horses serve us and we protect horses.

[01:30:37] Luke: Yeah. We have different agreement. Yeah, that's cool.

[01:30:40] Dave: But in some cultures, the force of culture can outweigh the contract we have with that animal. And some people listening are saying," Dave, I thought you were a computer science guy. What do you mean? Show me the writing on the contract."

Take the right plant medicines, do the right neurofeedback, or study the right lineages, fast in a cave, do a sweat, be curious, and maybe you too can become aware of this. Or you could do what I did. Maybe you should make a regenerative agriculture farm and you should tell the sheep that it's time and watch them walk towards where they're going to be butchered without having to be led, and you tell me that that's not real.

[01:31:12] Luke: Wow. Damn, son. Um, I want a few more things covered here in this conversation my friend. There's a bunch of things I just want to catch up with you on, I'm going to save till the end we have time, let me check my time. Okay. We're getting good and they'll be fast. Just shit that I learned from you. Modafinil and stuff. I want to just get your current take on a couple of those.

But I do want to ask something about, you mentioned the mindset piece and the spiritual piece of this, that we're not just a machine in our meat OS, that if we want to truly be fulfilled and live a life of purpose here, that we're invited to have an internal wellness also, which is a lot of what I like to talk about. 

Something I've, um, observed over the years within myself and I've worked on and I think made a lot of progress with is, in terms of all of the physical biohacking stuff, is the tendency to self obsess and almost use all of the practices and habits and hacks as a form of escapism from not wanting or being able to actually just be truly present with oneself or deal with the deeper underlying issues that we have emotionally. 

So example, if something' on my mind and I know that it needs to be resolved, say in a relationship or just some emotional thing that I need to work through, I mean, I hopefully don't do this anymore, but at a certain point I became aware that I'll essentially run away from the things that I don't want to deal with their face by going on the exercise in light red light thing, taking an ice bath, taking a sauna, doing all the things, taking all the supplements, making the smoothies, making a meal, all of this time and going into the fortification or preservation of the body, which in and of itself is a positive thing. What about when those start to become an escape? Does any of make sense?

[01:33:09] Dave: It makes great sense. What part of you is doing the running away?

[01:33:13] Luke: Yeah. I'm not doing it currently, because--

[01:33:16] Dave: What part of you became aware it?

[01:33:18] Luke: Yeah, I think, uh, just not wanting to feel discomfort. 

[01:33:22] Dave: Okay. So when you say you--

[01:33:24] Luke: When I say there's some something on one's mind, there's, uh, a conflict in a relationship or something unresolved and it's like, oh, we don't want to think about that because it's an uncomfortable, maybe negative emotional state. That kind of thing.

[01:33:39] Dave: When you say you became aware of it, what part of you was hiding it from your awareness?

[01:33:45] Luke: Uh, I would say the ego. The operating system that is trying to keep the body alive.

[01:33:52] Dave: There you go.

[01:33:52] Luke: And doesn't want to feel anything uncomfortable.

[01:33:54] Dave: Both of the things you're describing--

[01:33:55] Luke: It doesn't want to be threatened by that.

[01:33:57] Dave: Yeah. It's the meat operating system both times that was causing it.

[01:34:00] Luke: Oh, right. 

[01:34:02] Dave: The escapism, that not being aware of it and then not wanting to face it, those are basic survival mechanisms from your body. Your body's saying it takes energy to face these things. If you use energy, you might not have enough energy later. You're lazy. And it feels like there's not enough energy because your metabolism doesn't work very well, because you're eating the wrong stuff, because you're out of shape, etc. So it makes doing the awareness work feel as hard as going to the gym, which is why we don't do it.

[01:34:33] Luke: Right.

[01:34:34] Dave: So there's a couple of ways you can make the operating system desire to do this. The easiest way is the laziness principle and Smarter Not Harder, where you are like, oh, the operating system likes lazy stuff, I'm going to remind it that I'm saving a bunch of time with this more effective method therefore, it'll want to do it because it looks at savings as being more effective than work. That's why coupons feels so big. Look, it was on sale. It's a 100 bucks. It felt like you saved 500 bucks, but you only saved a 100 bucks. It's the feeling there that matters. So what's going on with all that stuff, yeah, it's easy to use this as a distraction, but the cool thing is, do it anyway.

So here's what happens. If you make biohacking your distraction instead of Netflix, over time you will increase your body's resilience and energy production capacity. One day you're going to wake up and your body's going to have so much energy that doing the awareness work doesn't feel insurmountable and then you'll do it. And then you'll realize, oh, that's a pattern. And then you'll do the work to fix it and you're on a different path. And that's why the last couple chapters of Smarter Not Harder are about spiritual stuff. The thing that most effective is that.

[01:35:44] Luke: I noticed that. I was hoping you're going to wrap it in there and you did, thankfully.

[01:35:49] Dave: You got it. I was reading your mind using my-- 

[01:35:51] Luke: Yeah. 

[01:35:51] Dave: My cow brain waves earlier. 

[01:35:53] Luke: of us have been around for a while, you realize you can get abs and still hate your life. You know what I mean? It's just like being physically healthy in and of itself, aside from the, uh, extra energy that you just described, that you get to then do the work, but there's no amount of health that in and of itself makes your problems go away, emotional problems.

[01:36:16] Dave: It just makes it easier to face them or it makes you-- like Modafinil, which you also wanted me to weave in. Uh, I've warned people when you take Modafinil, it makes you more of what you are. So if you're a dick, then you're going to be a big dick on Modafinil, for real. 

So if you're also working on your awareness and patterns like that, it'll make you more aware. So you have to be careful because if you're just a total jerk, you're just going to be a big jerk. And the same thing comes with, if you're just absolutely trauma-driven and obsessed and reactive, and you use that to get in good shape and to have a ton of energy, by the way, most people don't have a ton of energy when they use trauma to get in good shape. They're burned out.

But let's say that you're one of those people who have lots of energy and you're still traumatized, you'll be a high energy chaos machine, and it's not going to end well. What happens usually is, as you well know, at a certain point, you hit rock bottom. This happens with addiction. I have a friend, um, in the space who's going through it right now, has been arrested multiple times and it's like at a certain point, you hit a rock bottom that's hard enough that your meat operating system realizes it's a survival thing. And then it grudgingly parts the veils of awareness and shows you what's really going on, and then you do the real deep work to heal the trauma that was behind the addiction.

And it's hard because until that happens, and you know this because you've been an addict and you have friends who've been addicts, they'll look you in the eye and they'll lie. It's not even them choosing to do it, it's their meat operating system tells them whatever needs to be true for them to get more of their substance, and then they believe that story and then they tell you, right to your face, and you know they're lying.

[01:37:58] Luke: It's tragic. Yeah.

[01:37:59] Dave: And it's easy for us to think they're a bad person. They're choosing that. They're not choosing to lie. Their operating system lies to them and they believe it, and they make up a story to make it true. And they tell you the story and they fervently believe the story. It's the same thing narcissists do. It's different than what sociopaths do though. It's sad.

[01:38:15] Luke: The sociopaths know they're being evil.

[01:38:17] Dave: Oh yeah. They're choosing it.

[01:38:18] Luke: But they do anything.

[01:38:19] Dave: And they get off on it. Yeah. That's why we make wood chippers.

[01:38:23] Luke: Yeah, exactly. 

[01:38:23] Dave: We're supposed to put sociopaths in them. 

[01:38:24] Luke: What's your current take on the topic of EMF in general? Is it worse than the general public thinks or not as bad as us that are for EMF safety thought?

[01:38:36] Dave: I think EMFs are like medical procedures. They're unavoidable. Over the course of your life, you're going to go to the dentist sometimes, something's going to break, you're going to get to choose which medical procedure. You might do some preventative medical procedures, um, but they really shouldn't be forced on you.

Uh, EMFs are terribly useful. They have absolutely improved the quality of life on the planet in a huge way. All of Africa has access to the world's information because of EMFs. That's cool. We can look at other galaxies because of EMFs. 

So could it be that each EMF or each use of EMF has pros and has cons? It's actually real. And so you will find people who are terrified of EMFs because they forgot the pros. And you will find many, many more people, especially in big tech companies who are completely blind to the cons because if they admit one con, they will be sued as much as Monsanto is being sued right now.

[01:39:39] Luke: Right Totally. Like the people that make the AirPods that shoot Wi-Fi through your brain.

[01:39:44] Dave: Yeah. I don't happen to own those because I don't think the risk reward is there. But I do use a mobile phone. I just put on airplane mode when I'm asleep and I don't carry it near my balls. Going back to the very start of my blog, this is 2011 now, so this is 12 years ago. And long before that even, I put my, uh, my cell phone in a pocket in a, uh, in cargo pants, uh, against my right femur.

And I never carried it in my front pocket next to my junk because that just seems-- well, the studies are there, it's just a bad idea. Uh, and what I found though, when I did my first, um, what's it, a DEXA scan, MRI, I don't remember, a while ago, the part of my femur where my phone sat, turned on all the time, was 10% less dense on my right leg than my left leg.

It actually drove a reduction in bone density from that much EMF exposure. So now I make it an effort to-- where's my phone? It's around her somewhere, but it's on airplane mode because I'm not going to be using it during things. So I don't care if it's behind me because there's very few EMFs coming off of it. 

So I am not afraid of my phone. I also choose to not bathe myself in it. Do I have Wi-Fi at the house? Yeah. Do I unplug it at night? Yeah. Do I not turn it on during the day unless I need it? Yeah. But my neighbors have some Wi-Fi. I have not yet covered my house in aluminum foil

[01:41:03] Luke: I have. 

[01:41:04] Dave: Uh, by the way--

[01:41:06] Luke: All the bedrooms at least.

[01:41:07] Dave: Okay. Um, I did, when I lived in the Bay Area, I had built a Faraday cage where my office was at, uh, which is what you're describing. Uh, in a neighborhood with a lot of Wi-Fi, I would. Or if I was in a high-rise, God, hell yeah, I would do EMF blocking paint. But you have to look at your total exposure. Where I am now, I only see one other wireless signal. It's not that strong. I just don't care. I'm getting wireless from the sky. There's HAARP going on in Alaska. It's unavoidable.

[01:41:34] Luke: How you know about HAARP? That's funny.

[01:41:36] Dave: Oh yeah. I know about all the crazy stuff. Known about HAARP for 20 years.

[01:41:39] Luke: I didn't know you were a conspiracy theory--

[01:41:42] Dave: That's not conspiracy. That's called science.

[01:41:43] Luke: I mean, it's a reality.

[01:41:44] Dave: Anyone who labels that as conspiracy is just--

[01:41:47] Luke: Well, it's not HAARP exists because you see it--

[01:41:50] Dave: It does exist. Yeah.

[01:41:51] Luke: It's like, what is their purpose of building it and using it. That's where it gets into conspiracy.

[01:41:55] Dave: I'm not claiming I know the purpose. Unless you've read some documents, I haven't, I don't know the purpose. What I do know is that it has biological effects because, well, we can measure it and because we know how the system works. 

So, um, and that's the difference between a conspiracy theory and like, I know it was the Illuminati's uncle. And actually you don't know that. You're getting into the land of paranoia. And this is something that people who are doing nefarious things, they rely on that part of our operating system to go in that direction. So they'll feed stupid stories so that you'll look like idiots. 

The reality is there's something here that's anomalous. We don't know necessarily why or who, we can make educated guesses, but instead people jump to conclusions and we end up going to pizza joints that don't have basements and bad things happen.

So, um, what you can do is you can say there is a very large low frequency antenna array in Alaska that's been used for some military reason, we don't know what. Some people think it's this, some people think it's that. The military hasn't said. So it's hard to say exactly what it's for. Uh, and we know that it generates waves, EMF waves that affect biology and the ionosphere of the planet. Those are provable facts.

[01:43:09] Luke: Also you can see them, the waves in the sky, literally in the clouds, or oftentimes the fake clouds. When I was a kid in the '70s, clouds didn't look like that. They weren't like waffles.

[01:43:19] Dave: Yeah. Clouds sure have a lot, and so what they'll just say is conspiracy theory stuff. But you just have to understand the fact that something's happening that's anomalous is different than knowing exactly what it is. And when you claim to know, you're feeding the bad guys.

[01:43:34] Luke: Totally. Absolutely. That's the whole qun on fantasy world conspiracy. Me personally, I just have a gut check on certain occurrences. 9/11 was probably the big one for me. I don't know what happened, but I do know for sure because I have a brain inside my head that's somewhat functional is that what we were told happened is not correct.

[01:43:56] Dave: Yeah. And that's the big thing. And to say you know is crazy. 

[01:44:00] Luke: When actually you were in on it, you really don't know.

[01:44:02] Dave: Yeah. That's the thing.

[01:44:04] Luke: And if you on it, you're a bad person.

[01:44:06] Dave: Yeah. Or maybe you're not even a bad person, they just have your family hostage. We just don't know. People do bad things. And it's really weird because what I know is that buildings don't fall down by themselves. And the one building that fell down wasn't hit when all the other ones were, okay, bullshit. Okay. That's all we need to know. And we have a government, they're not doing their job because they should have investigated.

And the same thing will happen with other things. And I mean, even with uh, um, the JFK assassination. Pretty much recently, all the papers that came out, it pretty much is as good as the CAA is saying. "Yeah, yeah. We did it." Okay. And heck, I had a guy on my show. Um, this is one of the most profound things that ever happened in a 1,000 episodes.

This guy's the father of attachment theory named Daniel P. Brown. He's also Harvard's leading expert on hypnosis. And I'm just interviewing him about attachment theory and he's like, oh yeah, I spent a hundred hours with Sirhan Sirhan, which is the guy who killed, that was RFK, I think.

[01:45:01] Luke: Yeah.

[01:45:02] Dave: And he said, Dave, and okay, this is near the end of Daniel's, academic career. He is getting very old. And he said, "I know that he was hypnotized, because when I did the standard hypnotic induction, he dropped into a crouch automatically and started talking about hit points on people and how long it would take to bleed out." He's like, he was programmed, the Manchurian Candidate is real. 

This is Harvard's top hypnotist. You can't make us up. He's talking to me. And he goes, we know when it happened, we know who did it, we know where it happened. And I'm mind blown. They should do a documentary. He goes, "They did. They did a documentary in the '80s. They took out my eight minutes in the documentary and they audited my taxes for seven years."

[01:45:43] Luke: Oh my God. 

[01:45:45] Dave: I'm pretty sure something other than what we've been told happened. I don't know what it is, but that was direct evidence, as direct as I know how to make it. Okay, there's all sorts of stuff we don't know about in the world. There's bad people doing bad things. There's also good people doing good things. Some of which are visible, thanks for the stuff you're doing, and some of which is entirely invisible. And I know some of those people too. 

So yeah, the world's always been like that. There's bad people, there's good people. But don't be someone who feels like you know more than you know, because that's dangerous.

[01:46:14] Luke: Yeah. I like what you said too, that it discredits people that are making honest and legitimate inquiries to find out what's happening. It's like if-- and this is the whole CIA thing, when they came up with that term conspiracy theorist, it's so brilliant because they can just label that on anyone now that is just simply asking questions saying, hey, this doesn't add up. Excuse me, could we clarify X, Y, and Z? Conspiracy theorist shut them down.

[01:46:42] Dave: I just thought of something interesting

[01:46:43] Luke: What?

[01:46:44] Dave: The counter words for that. It's reality theorist. So someone, you're a conspiracy theorist but you're a reality theorist.

[01:46:51] Luke: That's good. You know I use? Conspiracy analyst.

[01:46:53] Dave: That's an interesting one.

[01:46:55] Luke: Yeah. Look at the data and know that you'll never truly know, but you can put some clues at the end of the day too, especially after the past three years, it's like these things are so easy to obsess on because, for me, they're just so fascinating. Just the human condition. And that the weird shit that humans do, especially the ones control other humans, it's just bizarre and interesting to me. 

But the fear side of it is where I think it gets deleterious to our wellbeing because these things that we're theorizing are totally out of our control. You're not going to stop the CIA from doing MKUltra because you post about it on Instagram.

[01:47:32] Dave: You think? Well, I guess, yeah, given that they're probably running it.

[01:47:35] Luke: Oh, I still do that until I get shadow banned and then I move it to Telegram.

[01:47:39] Dave: I think the Elon stuff that's coming out at Twitter--

[01:47:43] Luke: That's pretty cool. 

[01:47:44] Dave: That's happening at every social media company. I felt it during the last couple years. Even though I'm vicarious, they didn't honor my true identity.

[01:47:51] Luke: I saw, um, on Twitter last night, uh, some of these hearings that are going on with some of the ex Twitter staff, I mean, it was very satisfying to just see squirm and just get grilled. Now who knows if there's actually to prosecution and any accountability?

[01:48:05] Dave: They can't prosecute them. They're indemnified for the work they did at Twitter, and basically they were bad people doing a bad job not being held accountable. That one lady who just did whatever one political party wanted because she had the powers of the company, that is a bad human being by my measure of good and bad. And she probably thought she was getting even with someone or some trauma response. I don't know what it is, but that was a destruction of basic human liberties. On a scale, it's disturbing.

[01:48:34] Luke: Very disturbing.

[01:48:36] Dave: But all of the stuff about conspiracy theory, you could be like, what does it have to do with your book? The reason conspiracy theories work is they're taking advantage of your meat operating system. There's now enough evidence to understand your body will make some things look and feel bigger and better than they are, and it'll make some things look less attractive than they actually are. It modifies the reality that you see and feel based on what it wants you to do.

But if you have enough energy and you have the training, you also as the slower but wise human sitting inside the system that's doing that to your reality, you have the ability to choose, if your energy is high enough. And if your energy is low enough because your mineral depleted because they just took away the most important animal foods on the planet, by the way, that if they succeed in trying to remove--

[01:49:28] Luke: Why are they trying to go after eggs?

[01:49:30] Dave: Oh, because it's a cheap source of protein. If you starve people of protein and minerals, they're highly programmable because it puts the meat operating system in charge instead of the human. 

[01:49:39] Luke: Got it. 

[01:49:40] Dave: That's why it's called Danger Coffee. Because who knows what you might do when you have enough minerals. You might tell a bureaucrat that you're going to eat eggs even if they don't want you to. And if that fails, you might eat the bureaucrat because they're made out of protein. That's why they don't want you to have eggs because you might do what you want to do. 

And so I am all over people understanding you have a system in you that runs for a third of a second before you get to sense reality, and it changes the reality you sense, and it's not always right. Government agencies and marketing firms have known this for a long time, and they call it PR, and they call it marketing.

And you can use marketing for you and you can use marketing against you. The laziness principle in here is using marketing for you that you're in charge of. Hey, save a hundred bucks on this pair of shoes, meanwhile really spending $300, but the savings was so attractive you did it. Well, why don't you do that for your workout? This is biohacking. What hackers do is we take closed systems that are probably doing bad things you don't know about and we rip them apart, we break them, and we make open systems that put us in charge of our own stuff. 

And that's why it's called biohacking, not something else, because I'm a computer hacker. We did that with operating systems. Linux is actually enabling this conversation right now. It's open source from one man, Linus Torvalds, who got pissed off that Microsoft wouldn't tell him what was going on in their software, so he wrote his own. And he got hundreds of thousands of people to help. This is what we're doing in biohacking right now. That is why it is called biohacking. That's why I named it that.

[01:51:09] Luke:  I want to ask you a couple closing questions that are just things that I could probably ask you at dinner, but then no one else would hear it. So you were one of the first guys, maybe the first guy I ever heard used the term "smart drugs". And--

[01:51:24] Dave: Oh, no, no. I cannot take credit for that. Um, Steve Fowkes was probably the first one. He wrote a newsletter-- 

[01:51:30] Luke: But I heard him on your podcast.

[01:51:32] Dave: Yeah. But he wrote a newsletter that you would buy through the mail because there was no internet. It was called Smart Drug News in the '80s. And in fact, I found old versions of that on the pre-Google internet on Usenet. And I downloaded it and it changed my life. 

If Steve Fowkes had not written all those articles, I would not have spent $1,200 on European smart drugs that turned my brain on enough to save my career. And I've thanked him for it personally. And when he got to be my mentor, I was like, "Holy crap." Steve Fowkes, F-O-W-K-E-S

[01:52:00] Luke: And you've got, what, at least two episodes, I think, on you show with him.

[01:52:03] Dave: Maybe three.

[01:52:04] Luke: Back in the feed. Yeah.

[01:52:04] Dave: He's different.

[01:52:05] Luke: He's an nteresting guy. But getting tapped into that also probably made my productivity and just success in general grow exponentially.

[01:52:17] Dave: So good. Luke, I remember we talked about that when we used to our do coaching calls together. Yeah.

[01:52:20] Luke: Yeah, because man, it's like I did a lot of damage to my brain. I mean, I started using drugs when I was in elementary school. I mean, real drugs, not just smoking weed. I was fucked when I got sober. I couldn't put words together. Still sometimes I struggle with that. But Modafinil. But things like, uh, Modafinil, I'd never heard of that. So I'd go online and get it from India or whatever and found a good dose, which for me is a quarter tablet--

[01:52:48] Dave: Only 50 milligrams is good for me. Yeah. 

[01:52:50] Luke: Yeah. 25, and I've never gotten addicted to it. I forget about it. Sometimes forget about it and go, oh I should've had a Modafinil. I need it to really be focused. But there's something else that I learned about from you and Bulletproof used to make it, and I forget the name of it, but it had--Phenibut.

[01:53:07] Dave: Yeah.

[01:53:08] Luke: GABA, uh--

[01:53:09] Dave: It was called GABA wave.

[01:53:10] Luke: GABA wave. I loved that stuff. And then you guys, I think it was not appreciated that you were selling it or something.

[01:53:20] Dave: It was a regulatory gray zone where it's legal, but they don't-- it's not illegal, but no one has expressly blessed it. So the regulatory view towards that had shifted from when I first launched it. So, uh, it didn't make sense for us to do it anymore. 

And since that time, some more info's come out about this, um, Phenibut is what it's called. And it's just GABA, the amino acid that is also a neurotransmitter that's responsible for calming the brain. But when you add a phenol group to it, which is a basic biochemistry molecule, it makes it much longer lived and it crosses the blood-brain barrier, especially the formula that I made. It was liposomal. So it was--

[01:53:58] Luke: Oh, that's why works so well. 

[01:53:59] Dave: It was magic.

[01:53:59] Luke: Because I have big jug of the powdered Phenibut. And it's nice. I only take it every once in a while. I've noticed if I've taken it too often or take too much it has side effects. But I didn't know yours was liposomal, that's why it was so good.

[01:54:14] Dave: Yeah. It also tasted like ass. Did it not?

[01:54:16] Luke: It wasn't great.

[01:54:17] Dave: Okay. There's a reason for that.

[01:54:18] Luke: But it felt good.

[01:54:20] Dave: It did feel good. But here's the issue with Phenibut, is that the half-life is something like 72 hours just from memory. So this means if you take it every day, it's not going to work. So that was why it came in individual vials, and you only got enough to take it every other day. It was really carefully dosed. 

Um, and when people take it every day, it tends to build up and build up and build up. Because you realize it's there for three days, so if you keep taking it, you just get more and more and more. Um, because half life doesn't mean it's gone in [Inaudible] it means half of it's gone. So you end up getting incredible doses. And that, I've seen some at least anecdotal occurrences is that that's not a good deal.

[01:54:56] Luke: I've heard stories of people. 

[01:54:58] Dave: And you could get hooked on it. So I don't want that to happen. So once that data came out, I was like, you know what, this is something even though I've put some protections in place to make sure that people use it responsibly, when the regulatory issues change I said no. So I just warned people. That's one that can radically improve your sleep, but it's like a once a week thing. And if you're starting to rely on it every night, you might have a problem.

[01:55:19] Luke: I agree. Thank you for tapping on that. And if you ever make any of the good stuff on the down low, let me know. Another thing I heard about from you was, uh, Depranil.

[01:55:28] Dave: Oh, that's an old line smart drug. It's so good. Right?

[01:55:31] Luke: Yeah.

[01:55:31] Dave: But not if you're on ayahuasca, very important. You could die from that.

[01:55:36] Luke: Noted. I don't have any around, but I was using it periodically for a couple of years. Yeah it was very mood elevating. What I understood about that is that, um, it was a Parkinson's drug and basically increased your dopamine production. I just noticed it put me in a good mood I mean, that's it.

[01:55:52] Dave: It It hasn't used for Parkinson's. It's actually an antidepressant, an old school antidepressant, an MAO inhibitor. 

[01:56:00] Luke: That's why you don't mix it with DMT. Yeah.

[01:56:02] Dave: DMT has enough MAO inhibitors in it. But if you fully inhibit MAO and you say DMT, you get a serotonin crisis, and literally it could kill you. Rapid heart rate, exploding arteries. Bad stuff. So you have to be really careful. But low-dose Depranil, microdosed almost, is something I wrote about in my anti-aging book in, uh, Super Human. 

It's something where it increases, um, the receptivity of the dopamine receptors in your neurons, which is great. But that's why you liked it, because you have a history of addiction. So you already have issues with dopamine receptors. So the reason you like your cold plunge so much is because you have a dopamine problem.

[01:56:41] Luke: That why I do it more than any person I know. And I'm in Austin where everyone does ice baths.

[01:56:46] Dave: Totally. And you're 52. So what that means is if you were to do, um, in your 50s, either two or possibly three drops of liquid Depranil a day, it's going to be a profoundly effective neurologically protective thing for you that makes you happier and makes you live longer. So it's one of those anti-aging drugs that few people talk about. The generic is Selegiline, but it's super important.

[01:57:10] Luke: It's also of one of those gray dark web things. You can't go on-- 

[01:57:14] Dave: It's prescription. You get prescription Selegiline. 

[01:57:16] Luke: Oh, you can?

[01:57:16] Dave: Yeah 

[01:57:16] Luke: Oh. Well, I went on the dark web and got it.

[01:57:19] Dave: Yeah. It's easier.

[01:57:21] Luke: I forgot about it when I was prepping my notes for you. I was like man I learned super cool shit from him way back in the 

[01:57:25] Dave: Yeah. We used to have have every-- two weeks you'd have a have coaching call me when you were learning about biohacking. Yeah.

[01:57:30] Luke: Yeah. Um, and then what about, uh, I know you've been for a long time big on the Spermidine and Urolithin A. Uh, are you still into those?

[01:57:41] Dave: Oh, totally. So I couldn't buy Spermidine, and I knew all the studies on anti-aging. I mean, it is a big thing. So when I was writing Super Human, you couldn't buy Spermidine in the US but you could buy probiotics from Japan that raised Spermidine. 

So I bought those and they don't even have English writing on them. I was taking that, and I had some lab grade Spermidine that tasted like its name. It was gross. Uh, so I was trying to raise that so I could live longer. Uh, and then finally after the book came out, a company came around, uh, that marketed Spermidine in a concentrated form in the US, which is really, really cool. 

And even now, Bryan, uh, from Kernel has been making the waves lately talking about his radical anti-aging program. I'm like, oh, there's Spermidine and collagen protein in there. Like, yeah, go Bryan. This is amazing. Um, so, uh, what you'll find is that Spermidine, it's a mitochondrial enhancer, so it makes you actually perform better and it makes you live longer.

So, okay, I'm down. I will take Spermidine most days for the rest of my life because I want a very long life, and I want to feel good the whole time. And I can afford it. It's not cheap. It's not expensive compared to what it used to be. It was 200 bucks a vial when I started taking it. Now it's like, whatever, 50 bucks for a month's supply.

But then we have Urolithin A, same thing, 10 plus years of research, massive studies. You cannot eat enough pomegranates, and even if I ate the pomegranates, I don't have the bacteria that makes Urolithin A. But it improves mitochondrial performance. Improves cognitive performance. It's neuroprotective. These are just novel ingredients that magically do things in the body. So I love them both. They're part of the world of biohacking and I helped to usher them in, but the people who did the work were hardcore university scientists working for more than a decade to understand these molecules.

[01:59:28] Luke: Yeah. Cool.

[01:59:29] Dave: It's what the drug industry should be if the petrochemical industry hadn't taken it over 80 years.

[01:59:34] Luke: Yeah. No, shit. Well, that's good. I wanted to get updated on those because I take both of them, I feel great on both.

[01:59:39] Dave: It's not cheap. I mean, let's face it. You could spend all of your money and time on biohacking. The reason I wrote smarter Not harder is to tell you if you only have 50 bucks or 40 bucks to spend, vitamin DAKE, a multimineral and your trace mineral's biggest bang for the buck of anything you can take.

[01:59:54] Luke: Well, that's why you put that, uh, what was it called? The starter after each chapter. There's recommendations on the categories. I think that's important. Last thing going to ask you here. What's your current-- 

Um, perspective on microdosing, psilocybin, LSD, this kind of thing. Are you into it personally? Do you see people deriving benefit from it? 

[02:00:15] Dave: Oh, a long time ago. I've read a blog post for Bulletproof for this. I was an early voice chatting about that. I remember these huge debates with, um, with my team probably in 2014. I'm writing this article about microdosing and one of the employee is like, you can't write about that. That's the same as being a drug dealer and it was really triggering for this person. And I just--

[02:00:35] Luke: They probably needed to microdose psilocybin. 

[02:00:39] Dave: No comment. Maybe they're listening, but the idea there was actually, I was like, well, here, Fox News is talking about it. This is something people are doing. And James Fadiman's work, um, I was aware of it and so I decided I would just do it every day for a month, which is a little bit aggressive. And, um, since then it's become more and more popular. It does increase, uh, synaptogenesis via increasing BDNF in the brain and you build new, uh, synapses in the brain. 

However, there are many ways to raise BDNF. That's why I have 40 Years of Zen. You can use the electricity. You can use exercise. You can use cold exposure. You can use a variety of smart drugs to do it. What I found was that for performance enhancement, I would rather have Aniracetam, Phenylpiracetam, and maybe a little Modafinil, and maybe one milligram of nicotine and a cup of Danger Coffee. And I am a great golden writing god and I will write a New York Times bestseller. I will write.

[02:01:35] Luke: It's like, hey, cranked out all these books? We had a call about that the other day. I'm like, dude, I've been working one book in on time you wrote two books. 

[02:01:41] Dave: I also run electricity over my brain to get into a certain state and then it just flows in. It's really magic. 

[02:01:47] Luke: I forgot about the racetams. I heard about that from you too. And, um, I find my secret sauce is Piracetam.

[02:01:55] Dave: You just like the good old school Piracetam. 

[02:01:57] Luke: Yeah. It's--

[02:01:57] Dave: There's a class of people who love that.

[02:01:58] Luke: I mean, it's-- yeah, I did Aniracetam and a couple of the other ones, but I have a big jug of Piracetam, and before interviews I'll do like a teaspoon of that in water. And it absolutely gives me better verbal acuity and word recall, undeniably, without being stimulated. I don't find it stimulating. Those words that I'm like, um, uh, where is it? Where is it? It's like, oh, I'm right here. Much more easily.

[02:02:24] Dave: Every brain responds differently to different racetams, and, uh, I started out with Piracetam for years. It was my favorite one. And then, uh, I tried all the Pramiracetam, and Oxiracetam, and all these different flavors. And I ended up on, if I want extra energy, Phenylpiracetam is very solid, but not as good as Modafinil.

But it works very effectively. And Aniracetam increases memory IO. So for me, those two, with or without Modafinil, and I'm like, I am dialed in. And everything is at my fingertips. And I take a bunch of other cognitive enhancing herbs and stuff I've made, and all this stuff. But when I do those, the words come, I can see the pictures in my head and it's just better.

But I also have a highly trained brain with six months of 40 Years of Zen behind it. That's a part of it. I've run electricity back and forth across my ears enough time to enhance the lining of the nerves in my brain. And I do my best to share all this stuff with people, but it is a lot. I have 3,000 articles on my blog and a 1,000 hours of video. 

And I just do my best to make it searchable because, yeah, there's a lot. And that's why I write the big books like this. Most of what I'm talking about is in head, uh, yeah, Head Strong is my brain book, to try and make it absorbable because it's overwhelming for the average listener. And I get overwhelmed and I know my stuff. 

[02:03:48] Luke: Yeah. Well that's when it back to the starter level of just starting with the basics, because for a lot of people just getting sun in their eyes first thing in the morning is such a huge game changer. I mean, that will change your life just doing that. And talk about free, I mean, depends, how cloudy it is. But even on a cloudy day you still benefit. 

[02:04:09] Dave: You have to move out of Canada.

[02:04:11] Luke: Or San Francisco probably. Yeah. Um, all right. Very last question here. Um, I just covered some niche substances and stuff there. What am I missing? What's the latest and greatest or what's coming next in terms of smart drugs, or any other hack that maybe I or other people aren't aware of and that you're privy to because of your position of finding a lot of this stuff first?

[02:04:36] Dave: There's a couple cool things, uh, going on. One is AI is starting to pay dividends for biohacking. Uh, within the realm of what we're doing at Upgrade Labs, uh, even within 40 Years of Zen, we just have enough data, according to my neuroscientists, uh, we have the largest high resolution, uh, brain scan database of high performing brains and a lot of other lifestyle information around it.

So we can start correlating behaviors with brain patterns in an unprecedented way. And now the tech is there quickly enough to do it. So on the neuroscience front, there's an explosion of neuroscience companies. Um, I'm meeting with a guy in a couple of days who finally is commercializing HEG, which is a way to move blood to the front of your brain consciously. I've done a lot of the training.

[02:05:26] Luke: Is this the Mindy?

[02:05:27] Dave: It is. Yeah.

[02:05:28] Luke: Oh yeah. I just got one of those.

[02:05:30] Dave: So I launched at Bulletproof the first year I started the company something called the Upgraded Focus brain trainer that used that tech. And I always wanted to commercialize. I didn't have time, so Mindy is doing it, which is really, really neat. I bought one of the first 100 that came out of Kickstarter, whatever it was. 

[02:05:45] Luke: Awesome. Yeah I met, uh, Mohan, I think was his name. 

[02:05:48] Dave: Yeah. Moho. 

[02:05:50] Luke: At a diner the other night-- yeah. Moho. Yeah And he's like, "Yeah, we'll send you one." And I text him, I was like, "Were you serious?" And they sent me one. It's on my desk.

[02:05:56] Dave: You got to give it a try. 

[02:05:58] Luke: Sounds really impressive though. I mean, he's not a scientist but he is like, oh, we're working with Stanford and here and there, and I mean, there's a lot of data to support its efficacy.

[02:06:07] Dave: I spent a 100 hours doing that type of training with a rinky dank $1,200 system hooked up to a laptop that was, a blue-- there's old pictures of it, a blue headband. And it actually, uh, does work especially for ADHD.

[02:06:24] Luke: Awesome. 

[02:06:24] Dave: So the ability to pay attention with that.

[02:06:25] Luke: I'm going to throw that thing on when I write.

[02:06:27] Dave: Yeah. Uh, no. 

[02:06:28] Luke: Do you wear it while you're doing these things?

[02:06:28] Dave: No, no, no.

[02:06:29] Luke: Oh, okay.

[02:06:30] Dave: You play the game, you pay attention, and you might actually be a little tired afterwards. You're training yourself with a new skill. It's another form of training. So that's not for that.

[02:06:39] Luke: When I did 40 Years of Zen, I mean, who knows because of the sleep deprivation model there, but--

[02:06:45] Dave: At the time, we don't have that anymore. It is so radically faster than before. Yeah. 

[02:06:49] Luke: I would be really tired after the training. My brain was just done. I enjoyed it though. I mean, I like going all in like that. And it was in Sedona. We had a little cabin on the creek and it was-- 

[02:07:00] Dave: We stopped the sleep deprivation thing and right now--

[02:07:03] Luke: So you don't have the windows covered? That was the other thing, you tell you couldn't tell if it was day or night or long you've been in there. 

[02:07:09] Dave: That's old school. So where we are with 40 Years of Zen is a complete hardware and software rewrite from what we did back then. People typically hit their peak on the third day, whereas before it took five days out of a seven-day program. So we cut the program to five days. But it's five days with more results, more quickly and more total results. Uh, and we're doing a variety of technology, so it is very different than when did 40 years.

[02:07:35] Luke: Oh, cool. Are you still trying to upregulate Alpha or are you doing different brain wave stuff?

[02:07:39] Dave: Upregulating Alpha is a very old way of looking. It's just the easiest thing to measure in the brain is Alpha. The first thing we ever noticed in the brain. So what we're doing instead of upregulating Alpha is we're choosing very specific ranges of Alpha that do different things and teaching your brain to do those in the right order. So it's like saying, "Oh, is your music based on the C Note or the B note? And like, well, actually, it's a song. It's Afro-Caribbean, or it's whatever it is. 

So it's like, how do we teach the brain to do that instead of just make a note? So Alpha training is a '90s technology because at least raising the amount of C Note was good. Now you can make a louder note, but maybe you should be playing the keys on your instrument while you do that. 

That's where it is now in terms of the mathematical models. We've got seven patents on new technologies for neurofeedback. Um, and it's, uh, that's a different experience than the one did. What you did was very primitive, and that was how I started the program.

[02:08:35] Luke: I still benefited.

[02:08:36] Dave: Yeah. It worked. I wouldn't have built the program if it didn't work. 

[02:08:40] Luke: Yeah. I've benefited a lot from neurofeedback. I mean, it's definitely been one of the things that really--

[02:08:44] Dave: Me too. 

[02:08:44] Luke: Got me back online. All right, dude. Well, we did it. Thank you so much for your generosity of time. I have, always, so many things to discuss. Thank you for just giving me the download on all the things. I want to encourage everyone to go get Smarter Not Harder. 

And what I noticed about that, I always feel cheesy, plugging someone's shit, but I really like to support the guests, buy his book. But I like that someone who has a lot of experience in this realm can still get something out of it because I was learning things and picking things up in there and I'm pretty sure I'm familiar with a lot of them.

[02:09:13] Dave: That makes me feel good. You did coaching with me when you were getting started. You know, a lot of stuff. Maybe more than many. Yeah.

[02:09:19] Luke: But I think someone who knows nothing about any of this could also pick up the book and have a way to navigate making some big changes, so it's for--

[02:09:28] Dave: It's written for that person. 

[02:09:30] Luke: Yeah, so thanks for cranking out the books like you do. You're inspiring to me and so many people.

[02:09:35] Dave: Thanks, Luke. 

[02:09:35] Luke: So based on your productivity alone, you must be doing something right. Because you got a lot on, so I appreciate it, dude.

[02:09:45] Dave: All right. Thanks, man. 

[02:09:45] Luke: All right. Well, that one was a trip, huh? I told you we covered a lot of uncharted terrain on this one. And I had a lot of fun shooting the shit with Dave. And I got to say, I respect his tenacity and prolific approach to content creation. And I'm glad we got to drift off script a bit here. And I trust that you are too.

If you want to snag some of Dave's new coffee, it's definitely worth checking out. I did, uh, an experiment today and had a morning cup followed by another at noon, and uh, man, my brain is smoking. I'm super into it. So hit up dangercoffee.com/luke, and use the code LUKE to get 10% off.

[02:10:24] Luke: Now, in keeping with the tradition of contrarian guest views, next week's episode welcomes back JP Sears to the show for Episode 463. It's called Finding Humor in the Horror and Turning the Great Reset Into The Great Awakening. If you know JP's work in the comedy realm, you're going to love next week's drop in. We get into the weeds of psychology, spirituality, and why in the hell he's so in love with freedom.

And the JP episode does of course offer a healthy dose of comic relief, but I got to say, JP can really bring the heat in terms of understanding the human condition as well. And I really enjoyed getting to know the deeper side of him and his work during that interview. 

And I'll also add, if you're someone who finds JP's work triggering and opposed to your perspective, I encourage you to tune in even more because we get to see a side of him that isn't front and center in his comedy content. You never know. You might just learn something.

So you know what to do now. Hit that follower or subscribe button on your podcast app so JP's episode hits the top of your feed next Tuesday. And until then, may you be blessed in every way. And thank you so much for joining me on this journey called The Life Stylist Podcast. 

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