You've Been LIED TO About Calories & Losing Weight! (TRUTH BEHIND DIET & LONGEVITY) | Dave Asprey

foreign [Music] welcome back to the show Tom I love being here in LA and just checking out your awesome set thank you man so you've got the new book smarter not harder you talk in the book about how when you were younger you did things not in the most intelligent way I'm curious with all of the hacks and stuff that you've put together that you document in the book for somebody that's at the beginning in their journey and they want to do that basic like I just want to lose weight as a proxy for other things but let's start with that what's the most potent hack that you have for somebody that wants to to Really trim down if you just want to lose weight the most important thing you can do is you can do intermittent fasting that was our last interview the problem is that sometimes it doesn't work so most people will go out and do what I did when I was in my early 20s I weighed 300 pounds I said I'm going to lose weight and it's the most important thing in my life and I was an early adopter of being obese but right now it's more than half of people so I did my whole family was early adopters it's crazy I remember as a kid thinking my family is different right because they were all obese and I didn't have that word back then you can guess the word that was floating around oh yeah but I remember thinking wow this is weird why is my family so heavy in other people's isn't it was a strange thing obviously that becomes a huge part of what pushes me at Quest but being an early adopter of that then because you one of the things I found interesting and I'd heard you say this before but in the book you detail it out I think a couple times where you like I was a size 46 waist I was going ham I was working out I got really strong but I was still a size 46 waist yeah now does have to do with the energy metabolism there are several things that cause that to happen and one of them was over training over training you can't lose weight when you're over trained because you can outrun a bad diet or because you're breaking horizontally your cortisol goes through the roof and it perhaps the fat it absolutely does there are tons of people especially women today who make they do the same thing I did and they say I'm just going to work out every day and I'm going to eat less and I know I'm going to lose weight because calories in calories out and then they don't it just doesn't work and then they get frustrated so then they work out even harder and they do what I did oh I'll take the chicken off the chicken side are they not in a caloric deficit because so this is one of the most fascinating arguments around calorie in calorie out so are you saying so there is for sure for sure complexity yeah that we'll get to in a second but I want to I want to attack this head-on so do you have to be in a caloric deficit in order to lose weight no and if you are in a caloric deficit is it possible to maintain your body fat percentage and or increase your body fat percentage if you're in a caloric deficit you probably won't increase it however the studies show that when you're in a caloric deficit for long periods of time you go crazy and these are studies that were conducted you know in caves with people where there was really no level of control the guy who wrote about them with the most detail was Gary Tobbs and his classic good colors bad calories so the idea that you're going to just use willpower to stay in a caloric deficit forever it actually is cruel and it doesn't work if it did we would all easily lose weight when you say doesn't work though what do you mean it does it break because people just get fed up and they're going to go eat yeah people will do that in fact the number of people who are breatharians who wake up with empty candy bar wrappers next to them it wasn't me it happens and what happens is the meat operating system takes over and says you're going to eat and if you want me to pretend you didn't eat that's no problem there's a separate intelligence that runs your meat it's what I call the meat operating system in the book it does stuff before you can think about it and if you've ever caught yourself reaching for a cookie that you said you wanted to eat who the hell reads for the cookie it wasn't you dude that's one of the most surreal things that happened to me so I would be a stress eater if I hadn't done a lot of work so we were just talking before we started rolling there was a period this last year was working 120 hours a week no one should do it it's terrible I don't want anybody to be impressed it was out of poor decision making that I ended up working that much but it was the first time in my life where I suddenly I actually understood how people end up eating out of stress because I would find myself walking to the cupboard opening it up to get something because I only eat what's on my meal plan right and I was like what is happening so I would have gotten set my computer down gotten up walked across the room reached for the cabinet all before my mind kicked in and I was like whoa some part of me knew the way you're feeling will be alleviated by eating this thing it's a very discomforting feeling of how much I could do sort of in zombie mode uh it's worse than that we are all in zombie mode all the time because when I snap my fingers right now you picked it up right away right except if we were to put electrodes on your head and measure your brain waves it takes for the average person about a third of a second before the brain gets the first electrical signal that something happened so what was happening in the third of a second between when it actually happened and when your brain got a signal and then you had to think about the signal to figure out what it was so we're all running with a third to a half a second lag time on reality but we can't see it and there is a system in our body that is very much faster than our brain and it does all sorts of things to you and then you take credit for it and a lot of what is in smarter not harder is how do we get a signal into that automated system it's actually a separate intelligence that keeps your meat alive if you removed all of your human stuff who's making you breathe who's making you pull away from heat and things like that there are reflexes in there would it be true to say this is the difference between the conscious and unconscious mind or are you trying to delineate something else it's something else the unconscious mind is a part of that system but there's a distributed system of decision making throughout the body each mitochondria and probably some of the other subcellular parts is an environmental sensor in and of itself it's a tiny little computer that picks up a signal from the world around it and then it decides what to do and it does that and it talks to its other little friends they have a little system called Quorum sensing which is like voting it's similar to the way crypto algorithms work so your little things are deciding what's going on in the tip of my finger right now your brain is never going to get that signal yet this is a part of your meat and if they decide that there's something hot there they're going to send a little alarm signal up and eventually all these different systems that are made of tiny little compute nodes come up with a consensus and eventually it makes its way through your nervous system up to your brain and then your brain figures out what to do with the signal and it's that lag time where well the hand moved away so we've all accidentally rested our hand on a hot surface and we Jerk It Away good thing I pulled my hand away before I got burned you didn't your automated system pulled the hand away and you took credit for it so if we could acknowledge that there is absolutely A system that does things before our brain can do it and the measure in the brain here is called p300d and it's just how quickly can your brain sense reality around you how fast is your nervous system young people say an 18 year old is usually around 250 milliseconds and people in their 30s 40s 50s gets a little slower with age you get to about 350 milliseconds I'm still at 250 milliseconds because I've hacked my brain I do all the weird stuff that I do so my nervous system and brain's ability to sense reality is a you know about 0.1 seconds faster than average for my age but even so I have a meat operating system it does things and a lot of our anxiety that we think is emotional anxiety it's actually physical anxiety something's wrong in the system the system maybe doesn't even know what it is because it's some weird toxin that didn't exist in nature or we're eating the wrong stuff or we're in an endless caloric deficit yeah so I want to anxiety is interesting and we'll definitely come back to that um to to wrap the calories in calories out oh yeah so this is like one of the most hotly contested things sort of like it seems like it's getting more and more narrow so what I want to understand from you because as far as I can tell the people that um get really agitated when you say that it isn't just a simple math equation I think what they're saying is effectively that if you put a bit of chicken breasts in a um a bomb calorimeter that it is going to give off however many kilojoules of energy when burned fine like that I I don't have a beef with that I don't know if that's just plain physics unfortunately it's not how biology works but it's physics we'll get into the statement it's not how biology Works in a second so first I want to see if I can neutralize some of the people in this so what I would say is okay cool I'm with you on that the body however though is a chemical processing plant that's influencing what you're calling the meat operating system which can do things like get people to do things subconsciously uh and maybe that one is even less interesting or controversial than the idea of at a cellular level they're coming up with a quorum they're deciding what to do and they're turning things on and off we had talked about I think it was in our last time together where mitochondria will actually become less efficient depending on the type of calorie that you consume and so getting into the complexities of that so I'll be interested to read the comments and see if we just alleviated some of the yes if you put it in a bomb calorimeter it's going to kick off that much when you burn it cool yes if you are chronically in a caloric deficit you are going to lose fat but once you get into the day-to-day realities of living a life the the one last thing I will plant while you're here to steer me if I go wrong is there are certain drugs that you can take no even before we get to drugs if you're a type 1 diabetic you can eat and eat and eat and starve to death because you can't store fat that's the one that I I never I haven't seen the argumentation I'm sure it's out there and people will forgive me for my current ignorance so all right with all of that laid down so the people hopefully argue with you if they see differently that it's a slightly deeper part of the argument so did any of that strike you as untrue none of it struck me is untrue the bomb Colorimeter thing is interesting because if you put a piece of chicken in a in a chamber and you heat the chamber with a known amount of heat until it incinerates and then you measure how much additional heat you got that's great put the chicken in there with some non-caloric flame retardant and it's going to require a lot more heat to get the heat out of the chicken but they never talk about that what does that mean you're saying that there's the equivalent of that in the human body yeah if you put a flame retardant on the chicken it's hard to burn but they don't question how much energy it takes to burn the chicken they only question how much energy they got from burning the chicken so isn't it reasonable that there are things that inhibit metabolism even if you eat X number of calories and there's three things that absolutely destroy all of these calorie trolls and the calorie trolls are generally people who've never been fat or people who have fetishized starvation and they're unhappy people they're usually people who spend an enormous amount of time in the gym and genuinely believe that you can cancel out our Snickers bar with a Diet Coke they are wrong and when they perpetuate that stuff they're actually causing a lot of harm to normal people who are trying to lose weight and follow bad advice I went to the gym for 702 hours and went on a low-fat low-calorie diet when I didn't lose 100 pounds and the entire time I thought I was eating too much or I wasn't working out in that 90 minutes a day of half weights and half cardio it's not reasonable it may work for some people here's three arguments why colors and calories out don't work number one if you eat X number of calories from Y type of food at noon you'll get one biological response eat it at midnight you'll get another why because of circadian biology the body does different things with the same exact number of calories based on when you eat it because that nutrition partitioning meaning it's gonna burn it or store it as fat or it'll store it as fat you're more insulin resistant in the middle of the night melatonin makes you insulin resistant okay so your blood sugar response varies greatly based on that the fact that you can gain weight from the same number of calories depending when they're eaten destroys calories and calories out it's an oversimplified lazy way of thinking about weight loss and it's actually cruel to fat people the way I was the second thing is the uranium has a million calories per gram actually more than that I found the math on it once so if you ate a gram of uranium you should be really fat and be fine for years right you mean you can't process uranium you mean oh how about coal Coal is a lot of calories in it oh you can't process coal oh so it apparently isn't about calories and colors out it has to be the right calories that go in not the so wow different colors do different things who would have ever admitted that in a blind calories and calories out sort of world the third destruction of the calories in calorie count myth is a drug that's used in animal husbandry it's called xerinol it's an extract of zorena zarellanone which comes from toxic molds it's a synthetic bio xenoestrogen that's a thousand times stronger than human estrogen they concentrate this toxin they put it in a cow's ear so it'll enter through the skin where it's thin in the air circulate throughout the cow and the cow gets fat on 30 less calories it says Ranchers a lot of money what's it doing what's the it drives up estrogen which causes you to gain weight on less calories so if this drug can exist and if they use it today to increase yields in agriculture and if farmers who are making hundreds of millions and actually billions of dollars can measure feed efficiency to see whether x amount of calories from this food makes the animal fat or not the calorie and calorie out people are gym trolls and nothing else okay that was very pointed so let's take these one at a time so the first one nutrition partitioning so the body is making a decision as to what to do with the calories that it's in taking and so you have a lever that you can pull there so the example that you gave is timing of eating I'm sure there are others that's probably the biggest one this is based on Sachin panta's work at the Salk Institute and I've gone down and visited his lab interviewed him a while ago in fact you should have them on the show he's a fascinating guy and he writes about how his mother in India just stopped eating when it was dark and in about 90 days her type 2 diabetes went away she lost a ton of weight just from changing windshield she didn't change what she ate at all right so the body has a system that says during the day when it sees bright light directly overhead it expects the largest number of calories and this goes back to billion years to when we're basically bacteria floating in the ocean you have the most algae to eat and the most sunlight and we're trying to figure out a timing signal to synchronize all the systems in the body so when we are single-celled organisms and we want to start working with others of our little single-celled species we all needed to agree on what time it was so to this very day there's a timing system in the body called the scn in the brain that's primarily controlled through five percent of the cells in your eyes and when it turns on melatonin because it's dark outside melatonin makes you insulin resistant and when you're insulin resistant what you do with calories is different you don't take blood sugar and put it in to burning it to make electricities make ATP and turning ATP to ADP the things that we do you'll actually take into storing fat and that's how it works okay so very very complex process it is a complex process it's not just nutrient partitioning but it's circadian biology there was a Nobel Prize for this kind of work that was uh rewarded for I think the clock or awarded for the clock Gene sometime in the last five or six years it's relatively new science but circadian biology really does show the timing of food changes everything um okay the second one can't process certain nutrients is this where we get into kale and things that have anti-nutrient properties like would there be a way to eat so that I could cancel so if it's not a Diet Coke that cancels out my candy bar are there things that I could eat we had on the glucose goddess she'll have to Jesse I forget her last name she's interesting uh and she basically talks about that that hey if you eat your now I don't remember if she said that it would impact your fat accumulation but assuming that there is a positive correlation or a causation between the amount of glucose in your bloodstream and the amount of fat that you store she says that you can blunt the glucose response by eating your vegetables your I would assume high fiber items prior to the things with that would otherwise have a high glycemic load that's using protein first actually and fat just you have have dessert for dessert not for your appetizer and you will have less of a blood sugar Spike which probably will cause you to put on to put on less fat but not always if you have a blood sugar Spike and you've just worked out then that drives something called insulin which is similar to insulin like growth factor which is related to human growth hormone so bodybuilders actually will do a heavy workout then they'll drink a bunch of maltodextrin to spike their blood sugar so they can put on muscle more but that's because there's high demand for it if you're in a system where there's not a high demand for glucose and you spike a blood sugar you're likely to store fat okay and how far do you think that we can push that so if I wanted to eat junk food let's be honest that's what I would want to eat sure but I want to pretty dramatically blunt that effect yeah let's talk about that this is another great example for calories and calories at you could take something called olestra have you heard of this isn't that what makes you not metabolize fat yeah oh yeah leaky anus or whatever it was in the packaging of potato chips and I was like I do not want anything that's leaking anus but it does block fat digestion you can also take various carbohydrate blockers some of them are plant extracts and they're basically blocking any of the enzymes that break down carbohydrates to release sugar so now you've eaten calories but you didn't digest them and I guess I guess we're not bomb calorimeters oh right if such a drug is possible in calories in college out also doesn't matter and then the trolls will say oh but those colors don't really count because you ate them but you didn't absorb them so I'm like oh so it's about calories absorbed and calories out but they don't ever talk about that they don't care about what you put in your mouth so yeah you can also take binding things like citrus pectin and some other things that slow digestion or even prevent digestion I don't think it's a good idea to take a carbohydrate blocker a protein digestion blocker and a fat blocker because then you're going to have undigested food that makes it through your system and you're going to be pooping out pieces of food oh you could just drink alkaline water it'll do the same thing if it's alkaline enough because it stops stomach acid from working but whatever it is you can control whether those Foods even get digested and absorbed and the scary thing is Mother Nature knows this and this is part of what I'm writing about and smarter not harder plant proteins generally come packaged with the protein blocking agent striptase Inhibitors and they do this why would that be a plant protective mechanism so assuming that all the weird stuff that plants do is because they don't want you to eat them is it to get the consumer to be malnourished yeah so that you can't use my plant-based protein so you won't eat me so most of human plant eating throughout history has been this is a great way to stop a famine so I don't starve to death how do I remove the most toxins from this plant so it causes the least harm and provides the most calories as apart from the most nourishment because those are different things Define the difference please calories are something you burn to make energy nourishment is things you use as building blocks for your cells you need minerals you need polyphenols you need specific lipids and you need specific amino acids you don't really need specific carbohydrates to build cells less than half a percent of your body is carbohydrate at any one time okay so plants I when I get this far in our conversation we will get to the third one here in a second but when I get this find the conversation with you I always feel like you're going to say Don't eat plants but you don't no I do not believe that not eating plants is smart and the carnivore guys I actually predicted this at the beginning I said you guys are going to end up eating less inflammatory plants because very few people do well over long periods of time on a carnivore diet or on a vegan diet I did the carnivore thing when I was riding the bulletproof diet book I went three months with no carbs just ate meat and eggs and I did have butter which some people would say isn't carnivore some people would they can't make up their minds I gave myself autoimmune issues I didn't have in food allergies I didn't have because I gave myself leaky gut because I was having no soluble fiber and it's not a good solution My Sleep Quality went down and down I wouldn't push on that so why is no soluble fiber going to break the tight junctions and the epithelial lining of your gut it's because of bacteria that eats the mucus in the lining of your guts acromancia okay so you get rid of the bacteria that stops them from doing that no the bacteria doesn't have any mucus to eat anymore because mucus is made out of carbohydrates So It Goes to Town on your gut lining interesting okay so what I would say is is going carnivore for 30 days a great idea the truth is hitting your career goals is not easy you have to be willing to go the extra mile to stand out and do hard things better than anybody else but there are 10 steps I want to take you through that will 100x your efficiency so you can crush your goals and get back more time into your day you'll not only get control of your time you'll learn how to use that momentum to take on your next big goal to help you do this I've created a list of the 10 most impactful things that any High achiever needs to dominate and you can download it for free by clicking the link in today's description alright my friend back to today's episode hell yeah reset your gut bacteria get rid of all the Bad actors in there it's it's great and if you wanted to increase butyric acid formation which is one of the most important things your gut bacteria doing you could eat lots of collagen and I'm going to make collagen a billion dollar industry I'm kind of a fan right collagen can ferment in the gut to become butyric acid it doesn't always depending on what gut bacteria you have they call that animal fiber so if you're going to go carnivore you should be just eating a lot like a lot of collagen along with your steaks and your organ meats and after a month of that you're going to do where it goes oh I guess I'll have some carbs just have less less inflammatory carbs there's a great argument for herbs and spices as being Mother Nature's original multivitamins that's why we had first salt trading Roots through Asia that's because salt is where minerals come from rock salt and that was all we had as supplements and our we are made out of salt water like is in the ocean so getting enough of that salt was precious the next thing they added on top of that was spices and herbs so they were trading these not just because they tasted good their training is because these were sources of Rare Minerals that you couldn't get otherwise and polyphenols that were useful for it so all of herbal medicine is based on those two things and I think eating no plants at all is a bad idea I also think eating a wide variety of rainbows without looking at the pros and cons of each one of those plants is a Fool's errant and there is no historical record of humans ever doing that we did not have frozen blueberries from Peru when we were cavemen we just didn't and we ate what was seasonal what was around us and there were a few precious things that we traded with people who lived far away for that provided things like manganese or zinc or something that we needed and those were herbs and it's so interesting I don't know how people figure this stuff out so okay you're you're back in the day and you are just absolutely slaughtering people to get their spices yeah and what we're saying is there was uh ancient wisdom I don't know what else to call it around ooh eat these things feel better or something and you're saying that that is because you go there's actually two sections of smarter not harder that talks about minerals so you're like load up on Raw minerals and then charge up on Raw raw minerals so can I not get minerals from eating animal flesh you don't get very many minerals from animal flesh you'll get some iron but most of it is in the organ mates and because that's just as it processes carbohydrate let me see if I understand the process I don't know how I don't know how the minerals end up in in the soil other than through excrement so this it becomes a chicken and egg problem but let's just say for a second that we're at the level of healthy soil so the soil has minerals in it the minerals get absorbed by the plants certain plants yep we eat those plants we thusly get those minerals are from an evolutionary standpoint our body has grown expectant that we will eat these sources of carbohydrate that do have these minerals in them or from an evolutionary standpoint so that that's option a option b is same scenario up to the animals eat uh the stuff with the minerals so they eat the the plants we then eat nose to tail so we're eating the organs the organs and processing the uh carbohydrates that it ate retain trays minerals from what they ate they use the trace minerals they don't just retain them they have the minerals in them because they need those minerals to do their function as organs do we store minerals in do animals store minerals and body fat not very many we store toxic Metals in our body fat but there's not a lot of of any metal in your body fat that I'm aware of I don't want to derail on that but is that to trap it uh yeah it's a trap it so when you biopsy body fat from people does poison get stored in body fat absolutely okay it's one of the reasons that I read about rapid I have a protocol on Dave asprey.com where I talk about the rapid fat loss protocol and it's how to lose weight fast and you're supposed to and it's got all these warnings um I had a guy lose a pound a day for 75 days and you just start releasing well you have to take glutathione and charcoal and all these toxin binders because otherwise you get profound brain fog because you're dumping metals and pesticides and your fat is full of that stuff it's ridiculous fat also though creates estrogen it turns testosterone into estrogen and I'll show you some pictures actually I just found him when I was moving to Austin a couple months ago there were Polaroids from a photo shoot I did for Entrepreneur magazine when I was 23 when I weighed 300 pounds and I can't believe I wore a double extra large t-shirt but my estrogen was so high and my testosterone was so low because of the body fat and toxic mold that I'm very androgynous in the pictures that's weird and that's what happens from fat but the fat was storing mold toxins estrogenic mold toxins rather than sticking it in my liver and my brain okay super interesting going back to the organs are using the minerals in just cellular function yeah so a lot of biological processes use enzymatic reactions and this is why bomb calorimeters are a poor model for this is in Biochemistry we take a reaction that would have required a lot of heat and we do it with very little heat using what's probably Quantum tunneling but using enzymatic reactions so enzymes allow a chemical reaction to happen with a lot less energy than otherwise would be that's why biochemistry is different than physical chemistry or just normal chemistry and the people who are saying well if I burn it in a chemistry well if you wanted to get something done chemically with just raw chemicals so you want to break some down you pour some acid in it it requires a lot of heat but if you're in a biological system and you don't want a lot of heat there are more elegant solutions to do this and they're almost always based on enzymes and enzymes are almost always based on something like Boron or zein is that because it's a facilitated chemical reaction we believe and this is outside my official pay grade I don't have a degree in this I haven't studied like the wing it with me yeah I haven't said like the materials science elements of enzymes so you know guys if you're a PhD please help I'm actually interested but as I've had it explained from people who are these kinds of people when we're doing a reaction in the body say to make body heat or something like that we're not using it with a Bic lighter and Flame and burning something and oxidizing it at all we're using a more elegant approach that requires moving electrons around and we do that with enzymes so that it doesn't make as much heat so that it's the most elegant efficient system that well probably that you can evolve and it just works Works differently than burning stuff so burning stuff is a model for physical chemistry but you actually take classes in biochemistry because we don't do it the same way in life right there's a there's a required Elegance if we had to light ourselves on fire to do stuff we wouldn't work very well we're not steam engines that's really interesting so I know nothing about chemistry but as you were saying that that was sort of my guess is I think of the body I was going to be debated as to whether it's conscious and intelligent I don't think of it as conscious and intelligent but I do think of it as they have their own agenda they've got programming and they run that programming and so if you need something like a if a raw physical chemical reaction is just two things Collide and they will do the same thing every time versus putting it in a system that has little workers that move things around and take care of they facilitate that reaction okay that makes intuitive sense to me though I'm sure I'm way off the reality so I want to really understand this using of the the minerals so our our organs all animal organs are using the minerals to facilitate these trans chemicals that allow life itself to happen but you need those minerals to make all of that work yeah you need minerals to make your mitochondria work if you don't have magnesium and calcium and potassium at all in the body you don't have a body you just have a lump of gooey stuff like you actually they're required for life and they're required for thousands of different reactions in the body and what is elegant and I would argue intelligent in your meat your meat is is blindingly fast and blindingly stupid and we are blindingly slow we have that's like third a third of a second delay we don't even know we have it right but we're incredibly intelligent so we have these these two opposing systems which worked well in unison to keep you from getting eaten by tigers and to keep it from starving to death because you saved some food for winter right so it's kind of it's been a successful system there's eight billion of us floating around but you were asking about some other aspect of that around no just I'm trying to understand minerals because I know it becomes a big part of your the overall thesis of the book but we I got it here's what what's happening it's stupid but it has a stack ranked list of important processes and a signal for each one so it says I have a thousand things that need magnesium but this guy's only taking 200 milligrams a day and he needed 1.2 grams so what do I not do right it's kind of like you know you're playing with SimCity or something and you're like okay I don't have enough resources do I allocate it towards building a muscle or do I allocate it towards you know making more mitochondria towards making the brain work better we don't generally get to say what happens there but what the body will stop doing is getting rid of old burned out zombie cells it doesn't need to do that to stay alive now because it cares about the now but if you give it enough minerals it will do that as long as it gets a signal that it's worth the work the thesis behind smarter not harder is that our systems are elegantly lazy and that we are lazy as a result and that there's nothing wrong with that in fact laziness has driven all progress in humans yeah I'm going to paraphrase something from the book which I found interesting so when people come to me in my sort of Realm it's always why do I have this Grand ambition but I feel super lazy yeah and I explain something similar to what you go into in the book obviously have a lot more detail but that Evolution has given you two impulses one go hunt and make sure that you provide and the other is make sure that you don't use more calories than you absolutely need to otherwise you have to go hunt too much it's too risky um in the book you talk about how that's actually embedded down at every single cell it has that impulse which I thought was a pretty useful Insight it's what you open the book with why does this matter so much how do we integrate it um yeah it matters so much because certainly when I was overweight and just hitting at the gym and all that I it constantly was I'm not trying hard enough I I'm lazy right something must be wrong with me because I don't want to do this but when you understand that that laziness motivates you to do things better we have cars because we were too lazy to walk we have fire because we were too lazy to shiver under a blanket we have blankets because we were too lazy to shiver without a blanket like everything we've ever made that makes life good is because we didn't want to do something yet we blame ourselves for that have you ever had someone come home and say I just saved 400 on a pair of shoes no no never not have that particular one sure I get the idea okay good deal how many times would that same person not naming names say I just spent 300 on the shoes of the handbag we don't focus on what we spend that's effort we focus on what we save and it's incredibly motivating and companies know this save five dollars is actually more important to us than spending fifteen dollars like what the hell so you're unconscious and your meat operating system values saving time and money and energy because it's lazy so why don't we use that as our motivator and what I teach people to do and smarter not harder is to say well the history of let's take exercise is one of the domains you pick up rocks or you run away from Tigers all exercises is some type of that but what if there was an AI driven system like when we have at upgrade Labs that allowed you to get six times better cardiovascular Improvement in a tiny fraction of the time of going to a spin class would you do it and the answer is most people say heck yeah I only have to spend five minutes three times a week and I get more results than going to an hour class five times a week I'm in well there is such a system it's driven by AI it's customized for each person and all that but when you do it you're still not motivated to go do it because no one's motivated to go to the gym you could say I'm going to use my willpower and form a daily habit I'm going to Pat myself on the back and say I'm a good person or you could say you know what I saved 55 minutes today and you focus on how much time you saved and that strangely motivates your hardware and you're like oh I'm gonna do this I'm gonna go save an hour so you're willing to go do five minutes but if you said I'm gonna go spend five minutes you wouldn't have been willing to do it and that's the laziness principle and just understanding it's a good thing that you don't want to waste your life doing stuff that doesn't work very well and the reason that I spent a portion of my life writing the book is that I want people to have their time and their energy back I am not happy that I spent 702 hours not losing weight at the gym following bad advice because there are things that are so much more effective than what people do so most of us buy a gym membership and we don't go and we say well I have it I know that I could go I know that someday later when I'm not feeling this lazy I'll probably go and this is why there's 400 million dollars a year of gym memberships that no one ever uses I want to close the loop on weight loss so the third thing just because I said that we would cover it was the zoronal those are well known yeah so you've got the cows getting fat on less calories yep um so we're able to what's the what's the mechanism that's breaking down is it just the increase in estrogen and estrogen's job is to signals fat storage and oh God okay so now I'm way beyond what I actually understand but uh okay so obviously women have women actually have more testosterone than estrogen but they they have way more estrogen than men have correct it is my understanding that women store more fat than men on average and it is my understanding that the reason they do that is if you think about fertility they would need to have extra resources around to be able to carry a child nurse a child Etc so it makes them store more fat they store more EPA and especially DHA especially in their thighs brain development for a child yes that's where the first child has a higher IQ in part because it got all of Mom's fish oil that was throwing her fat for the baby my first book was on fertility so I went really deep on this okay super interesting so uh so we'll put that in the bucket of hormonal effects yeah so in fact going back to just calories not a calorie am I correct that if you were to put a woman on artificially high levels of testosterone that she would begin losing body fat she would absolutely begin losing body fat if she'd put on muscle mass as well too right she might also get a little voice and body hair if you did too much of it but body composition is massively controlled by the amount of testosterone you have so you get these usually it's the same calories in calories out people and they're saying well if you just work out hard enough then you'll somehow grow testosterone even though testosterone is related to the quality of your sleep and eating enough saturated fat but saturated fat has calories so they're oftentimes opposed to that and you're supposed to somehow eat low fat things and gain muscle mass and raise your testosterone it doesn't appear to work that way at this point on a high saturated fat diet with grass-fed protein inadequate protein it's very important if you're trying to lose weight it helps with the toxin flushing out thing from the fat it helps with protein helps with cell membranes and people have lost more than two million pounds on the bulletproof diet and yet pissed off all their calories and calories out people but it's a lot easier to not be hungry all the time and to lose weight and that's what I want people to understand is if you're hungry all the time you're probably doing it wrong there's nothing wrong with being hungry every now and then you should teach yourself to not feel like you're going to die when you're hungry that's what fasting is for but when you eat it's getting enough usable protein and something we haven't talked about that's also in the book plant-based proteins have a lower biological availability than animal-based proteins so if you eat a piece of steak that's at the very high end and you eat eggs it's in the middle and milk is about in the middle and plant-based proteins like rice protein and soy protein and all those things are much much lower so a gram of plant protein is not the same as a gram of animal protein when you're looking at putting on muscle or losing weight okay so from putting on muscle perspective I'm assuming this is an amino acid profile question availability and profile they're different okay it's called diaa is the the measure of that but especially digestive I'm going to butcher whatever it stands for Digestive digestible available um amino acids something to do with digestion yeah I just remember what the acronym stands for but you can look it up okay what what you'll find there is that just because they're amino acids in something if there's something that blocks your body's ability to break the protein down into them it's not a digestible protein right and if if you don't believe in your hair is made about protein like have a hair solid you can't digest it it doesn't do anything so like we know intuitively that what I'm saying has truth in it but what we don't know is why can't you digest hair if you don't have the enzymes to break keratin down interesting yeah but if I did I could eat hair I'm sure there's an animal out there probably a worm or something that is totally happy to eat hair otherwise or cockroaches otherwise we'd have piles of hair built up like we do artificial fur fibers everywhere nothing can eat that wow okay that's super interesting uh okay so now we I think have a pretty neat container on fat loss but now talk to me about why why can't I work out hard enough that I can meaningfully lose weight like if I had a reasonable amount of calories I'm I'm maybe a tiny bit over maintenance we know it's not as simple as I eat a hundred extra calories therefore exercise 150 calories and you're gonna lose weight so we know there's complexity in there but why like if somebody came to me and said Tom in the next six months I have to lose weight and I can either exercise or die I'd be like all day diet amen right just just I know and be able to explain why it works like you can but it is certainly anecdote totally just obvious to me in terms of what I've done with myself my wife everybody that I know it's like if you clean up your diet you're gonna be way better off but why like if I like when I think about a marathon runner or somebody that's uh and in fact let me make a statement I believe to be true and maybe it's not but um I used to have an employee that was an Olympic level swimmer so you know I went to the Olympics but he was like one place out from both right and he said that he would just eat an unimaginable amount of junk food and McDonald's french fries all of it and he was like I forgot I could be misquoting but it was something like 10 or 11 000 calories a day and he said tell them I had six pack abs at all times but he was like the amount of swimming I had to do was so insane that's why so is it just that oh you can get there but you're gonna have to be professional athlete level of working out or is he lying wrong whatever if you can do that level of exercise you're already reasonably healthy so you can keep up that regimen until you can't anymore most people today are not metabolically healthy enough that even if they had all the willpower in the world that they would be able to do that amount of exercise were that unhealthy but I have to ask a pointed question on that I know you're going somewhere but uh if you have somebody like that so they're metabolically healthy they're eating terribly but in my assumption here is because their muscles are screaming for glucose because you've just beaten the life you've used them so much it is my understanding that when your muscles are in need of glucose you don't actually need insulin to get the glucose into the muscle tissue which means your glucose levels would remain low and whatever damage glucose does to this or sorry insulin does to the system making the cells insulin resistant making it harder for you to put the fat on making pre-diabetic so on and so forth if I'm right about that that would be why that person doesn't be become metabolically unhealthy even though they're processing a lot of food that would make somebody else metabolically unhealthy because the way this guy described his diet if I wanted to break somebody's metabolism I'd say eat 10 000 calories a day of McDonald's like just go God I can feel the comments Lighting on fire generically meaning you're eating all the fried food the bun the like everything everything so maybe now you need either if anything I just said is incorrect let me know okay so you're just saying if you swim a lot like an absurd amount yep exercise yeah exercises I think swimmings in particular an important part here because of all the he's basically teaching his body to make more body heat by being in a cold environment so swimming is is actually a form of cold therapy as well as exercise and you can get cold therapy without exercise that does that when you drive more thermogenesis that way it's called mitochondrial uncoupling there's a metabolic benefit to that but the reality is this is a person who has enough thyroid has enough testosterone at the start and probably has one of those genetic profiles that's less susceptible to toxins in the environment but they're not bulletproof I had a friend who's like that he was a semi-professional cyclist you know friends with Lance Armstrong you know wrote The 100 miles a day sometimes for fun just hardcore Pizza beer hot dogs junk food 10 000 calories a day he wasn't doping he was just a semi-pro cyclist okay um no he wasn't actually competing he just rode with all the guys competing and just just an amazing guy he was also an early inventor of Blade server technology it was a foundational internet thing so he died on Sandhill Road at 46 of a heart attack with abs this is not uncommon for people who exercise at that level who we junk food if you exercise at that level you have to eat even better because you're putting an extra load on your system and if you are blessed the way I was not and you were not with a system that's resilient to Mercury and resilient to mold doesn't have systemic inflammation doesn't have extra blood blood clotting isn't susceptible to pre-diabetes all of which I have if you're blessed with one of those you shouldn't abuse it you could probably live a really long time if you were to use a little bit of biohacking techniques and you were to apply the right amount of work for your body to feel good and get the muscle you wanted you'd also probably have a lot of extra time left over but if you love swimming for four hours a day and it's not just endorphins driving you then then you should do that but if you do that and you combine it with junk food the fact you can eat junk food doesn't mean it's not harming yet the fact you don't get fat from it doesn't mean it's not harming you you look at the labs of marathon runners of triathletes these are not the labs of healthy people they're Labs of people who can be profoundly healthy if they weren't over training and pushing themselves over the limit so if you want to run a marathon do it but don't convince yourself that you're doing it to be healthy you're doing it to prove something to yourself and that's valuable the first guy I ran a marathon died that's why we celebrate the marathon yeah yeah yeah no it's interesting you talk about that in the book if I remember I think I do yeah um okay so we won just to to ask directly am I off base with the if you use the muscle you need less insulin to get less insulin I don't believe you need no insulin because a no insulin person is a dead person and so it's kind of important that's very important so absolutely and if your muscles are screaming for insulin or sorry screaming for blood sugar um they will need less insulin to get the blood sugar in and they'll absorb it quickly and this is why you know you can eat some sugar and then do 20 squats just air squats and your blood glucose won't Spike yeah I I really have tested this so this is really interesting in fact let me I'm going to run something by you so maybe you'll even know what's happening okay so uh I was working 120 hours a week I start getting dizzy oh yeah and I'm like well clearly a brain tumor go to the doctor oh [ __ ] you should have called me and uh got some salt already yeah the the doctor was like no no this isn't uh do they do all the scans and everything don't know don't know don't know exactly it was like hey are you by any chance um stressed and I was like yes and he was like okay it could be that like try to relax and see if it goes away uh to say that I relax would be alive but maybe push you know meditation a little bit more try to one just know knowing that it wasn't a brain tumor that also helped and so it slowly goes away and so I'm like okay cool uh Christmas time this Christmas had just passed comes along and I have learned the lesson that you were just talking about that I can regulate my blood glucose by working out and so uh 98 of the Year I.E clean but during Christmas I let myself eat whatever I want regulate it only by discomfort with having a body that I no longer recognize is mine right and so this Christmas I thought oh I'm going to run an experiment I'm going to wear a continuous glucose monitor the whole time and I'm going to keep my levels below 100 and see if for the day yeah so for the day if I keep my my average in the mid 80s how do I do so I keep my average in the mid 80s I'm like this is I have found the cheat code to eating badly I'm like this is amazing one I'm maintaining my physique because I'm working out two I normally would resent working out over a holiday like that but because I had a goal it made it fun right and so I was like wow this is really cool I cannot believe this is working and then I got dizzy and I was like whoa and I was keeping my blood sugar in the on average for the day it would have spikes but on average for the day I was at 84.85 so it's like this is amazing and then I started getting dizzy again and immediately I always ask the question I've had the scan so I know it's not a brain tumor and if somebody if I have a symptom I always say what would I tell somebody that came to me and I'm like 100 at something you're eating so I'm like okay well I'm I know I get this when I'm really stressed I'm eating food that's clearly stressing my body in some way will this go away if I stop eating the junk food I stopped eating the junk food and it went away and so I'm like okay what what is actually happening like what's the is it paralyzing the Cilia in my ear like what's going on you had adrenal dysfunction because your adrenals couldn't make enough cortisol to keep your blood pressure high so there's two reasons people get dizzy that don't have to do with the inner ear and it's usually not the inner ear if it's vertigo or like that weird thing you get from swimming and standing upside down with it it wasn't that it was imagine drinking yeah and then when you lay down the world spins low blood pressure really yeah so one thing I didn't yeah when you get stressed your body loses the ability to make enough cortisol and adrenaline to keep your blood sugar I wasn't lightheaded right it's different it's it's a dizzy feeling I know I've had low blood pressure my entire life it's a genetic thing interesting so the spinning feeling like that so if you would have had a big glass of water with some salt in it or better yet some electrolytes like that I'm gonna test this which would have increased you're so skeptical right now that seems impossible that that would be because I've had low blood pressure where you stand up and you're like whoa it wasn't that it wasn't that at all so if if you've had that but you've never had chronic low blood pressure that's low even when you're sitting there not that I'm no of no what I think would have fixed you I have high blood pressure when I'm stressed it turns out you can have both at first you get high blood pressure but when cortisol stops working and your adrenals run out of the ability to do this by the way they need minerals to do that you might have been low in minerals but then your body says all right I can't do this anymore and that's burnout all right so stress is high blood pressure adrenals you say let's just burn out of a person but yeah you get adrenal burnout so because I didn't feel burned out over Christmas let me tell you I felt [ __ ] awesome [ __ ] awesome all right I mean other than I'm having a lot of sugar so maybe it's a joint pain but I mean if you're not experiencing low blood sugar at all I definitely wasn't low blood sugar okay good so you don't have a low blood sugar that's the thing to rule out the next thing to look at is low is blood pressure you can get a blood pressure cuff but when people are doing 120 hour weeks or even when you're just dealing with jet lag which is also profoundly biologically stressing those little cells in your body don't understand you just move five time zones and then they they send you feel like crap signals what works remarkably well is supplementing your body's ability to handle your adrenals so step one would be licorice root you take a couple little licorice root capsules that help support healthy levels of blood pressure can I eat licorice it's full of gluten and sugar but if you could find something that's free of gluten and sugar like little tiny black ones that are really strongly licorice flavored those work as well if you get too much of it it's probably bad for either liver or kidneys I don't remember but licorice root itself is is a good herb for that the second thing would be adaptogenic herbs to help your body turn off stress and the third thing would be actually adrenal glandulars which is what I actually adrenal glandular it's extract of the adrenal gland of animals just like you would take liver liver powder this is adrenal powder when you take that it lets your body's adrenals work better I promise you that if you're working 120 hours a week you're pushing Way Beyond your biological capacity so what you do then is you supplement your biological capacity the fourth thing you would do which is what I also do if I'm going to be traveling to Dubai or somewhere overnight and wake up and feel normal is you take a small amount of bioidentical cortisol like you would thyroid hormone cortisol is not a bad hormone over the counter no it's prescription it's called cortef it's a drug that's been around for just like 70 or 80 years and you take a very small amount five milligrams of that and you might feel a little angry for a minute or two as it metabolizes and then you get your energy back so this is how you take someone who's reached burnout and you you allow them to recover faster from burnout and you allow them to perform so you can stand up on stage even when you've been flying for 32 hours because of a flight delay and you still want to show up and be yourself you can do that but you better manage your adrenals starts with salt actually before salt s for the blood pressure yeah and your adrenals need extra salt so minerals yep so you would use salt and trace minerals so like here's what I do I land in the morning somewhere else on the planet where my body has no idea what time it is I have this is going to sound like a plug but it's not I have danger coughing because you need coffee to raise your cortisol to tell yourself it's morning that's normal and I need the minerals anyway or I could take a mineral supplement actually and I take a mineral supplement then I take my licorice root then I take five milligrams of cortef and I take an adrenal glandular and I take adaptogenic herbs and when you do all that your body's like I got this stress I can handle this and you can move the wall way out you can still hit the wall but you can get a lot of speed before you hit the wall so if you're working 120 hours a week and you do this to push through and to get the product to launch and you do that for three weeks it's going to cost you but it's going to be a high performance three weeks and it's going to cost you less than if you just did it with willpower alone there are tools for managing our our state and the world and for making our meat handle way more stress than it thinks it can without taking damage our might handle yeah your meat has to handle more stress literally your meat is doing this it's not you got it yeah okay fair okay so coming back one more time to why can't I work out enough to beat a bad diet well there is such a thing as an obesogen something that's just pro-fat story that makes you store fat an example would be MSG so MSG when you eat it will raise restaurant revenues by 30 because people who get MSG get profound sugar cravings and then they order more soda more alcohol and more dessert so if you're eating some with MSG all the time you're going to eat more it's just how it works MSG also affects your ability to regulate your blood sugar effectively so that's an example of one of those things and when you get some of these other things like artificial colors artificial flavorings they have an effect on the gut bacteria and that's another thing that the calories in colors out people absolutely hate and I read about this in the bulletproof diet my big diet book there's actually a contagious form of obesity and I wrote about a couple cases of it also on my blog where people would get scratched by a chicken and a certain kind of bacteria gets into their body and you can't lose weight no matter what from I said bacteria it's extra virus as I recall but it's treatable right it is a condition though that you can pick up that is infectious that should not be possible I don't know how that one works but the cases of it are crazy people like I was completely normal weight and then I got this scratch I got an exposure and then I just got fat and I stayed fat there's also very clear evidence from mice and humans you can take gut bacteria from thin people who are usually calories in calories out trolls because never had to deal with obesity you take their bacteria and put it in a fat person and magically the fat person starts to lose weight in fact they can lose all of their weight from a fecal transplant you can then take the fat person gut bacteria Which is higher in firmicuties versus bacteria deities what the hell is two different phylum of stuff in your gut bacteria but basically the ratio of these two controls whether your body is likely to gain more weight or lose more weight so you take the fat person's got bacteria put it in the thin calorie roll and then when they can't lose weight no matter what they do then they have to face reality that it's not the way they really really want it to be no matter how much their mothers yelled at them when they were young which made them growing up bullied I have a feeling you've spent a lot of time with people talking about calories and calories out uh okay so what then if I have a person whose diet is like on point so they're not they're literally following every bit of guidance you've given at that point is exercise going to be beneficial in losing fat or is that always just a look it's you work out for something else completely don't even think about it for fellows it might be mildly beneficial it and people say oh you know do lots of cardio for fat loss um the only type of exercise that I would recommend for fat loss specifically is something I write about in in the books it's not like just running running good more running better is kind of the way we think about it but any sort of cardio there's very different patterns you could you could make and the best analogy is music okay we could have just a bunch of static or just like city noise and it's just random right well noise is bad for you but then you take that same pattern and you rearrange it into a beat and all of a sudden oh that's not noise that's music it's the same amount of energy it actually is energy in the sound right but magically how you order it how you arrange it changes things it's the same with cardio so there's something called zone two training which you can really only do with a heart rate monitor and there's an equation in the book and I don't have it memorized off the top of my head but there's a very narrow window I think it's around 70 of your maximum heart rate and when you work out at that level which is pretty much you could have a comfortable conversation without being winded but you're almost winded but you're probably not going to be able to feel yourself there you have to have a monitor this is a rate where your body will burn fat and it drives your metabolism it's metabolically very beneficial for you and that's a steady state it's a steady state but it's at a very specific narrow band if you exceed the band it's not beneficial for fat loss if you go underneath the band it's not beneficial so there's studies that show I think it's an hour and a half of that a week has good effects on fat loss and on metabolic function but an hour and a half a week is a pretty big investment of time I prefer what we talk about in the book as rehit reduced exertion high intensity interval training and the big thing how does that differentiate from Hit high intensity interval training with high intensity you basically Sprint for a minute and then you walk for a couple minutes then you sprint for a minute walk for a couple minutes you do that three times four times when I looked into that the guys that like swore by it were shredded oh yeah it totally works uh it works right and it gives you uh conditioning and less time and it's metabolically really beneficial for your mitochondria what rehit does though is it takes give me those initials again rehit r-e-h-i-t reduce r-e-h-i-t they dropped an INF for some reason but it's reduced exertion high intensity training and what it is is an AI driven algorithm and by the way upgrade Labs you can go to own and upgradelabs.com if you want to open a facility that does this and all the other bioacts in here but what's interesting with rehit it's only 10 seconds of high intensity exercise but the principle that drives that is a principle that supports every one of the biohacks in the book it's that there's a way to get a signal into your meat operating system to make it change and if you can drive the signal in very quickly and then take it away very quickly you adapt but if instead you push the signal on and you leave it on for a while the body doesn't adapt very well just gets stressed so that as you play with the edge and then return play with the edge and then return what most of us do though is we maybe go to the edge and then we hover around 75 of the edge as long as we can until we feel like crap and then we're all sweaty we get endorphins and then we go about our day and think we did the good thing what is up my friend Tom bilyu here and I have a big question to ask you how would you rate your level of personal discipline on a scale of one to ten if your answer is anything less than a 10. I've got something cool for you and let me tell you right now discipline by its very nature means compelling yourself to do difficult things that are stressful boring which is what kills most people or possibly scary or even painful now here is the thing achieving huge goals and stretching to reach your potential requires you to do those challenging stressful things and to stick with them even when it gets boring and it will get boring building your levels of personal discipline is not easy but let me tell you it pays off in fact I will tell you you're never going to achieve anything meaningful unless you develop discipline all right I've just released a class from Impact Theory university called how to build build Ironclad discipline that teaches you the process of building yourself up in this area so that you can push yourself to do the hard things that greatness is going to require of you right click the link on the screen register for this class right now and let's get to work I will see you inside this Workshop from Impact Theory University until then my friends be legendary peace out it turns out with rehit it's how quickly can I Spike My intensity without going over and then what's going over it going over is when you produce a state of disequilibrium where you actually destabilize the systems in the body so you create stress that's long lasting but you you have to do this very quickly so you're writing on this bike and it's like really slow and there's an AI algorithm reading or high rate and it's like no you're going too fast and you're like bored and all of a sudden it's like Terror and then it gets really hard to pedal and you have to Pedal as hard as you can for exactly 10 seconds and then and this is where it gets really interesting there's a voice in your head looking at your heart rate it's like okay you made it and then as rapidly as you can you return to normal heart rate and it's the speed that you return from stress to normal that tells the body that it was safe so okay past that fast so all right I create this peak I get good either using the AI or whatever at knowing I need to come right back down but the amount of time it takes me to get back to neutral is going to have a lot to do with my current level of Fitness so and your current level of behavior tell me more that violates what I think I know if you were to go for 30 seconds or a minute like you would in high intensity interval training what you said is true well you're doing a 10 second Spike like that it it dumps a lot of glucose right it causes an immediate response but it doesn't destabilize the body the way running for a minute would and so then what you're doing is you're telling the body you have to be able to do something really difficult but then as soon as it's done you're safe and you can return if you wanted to hack this instead of doing normal high intensity one minute intervals and I write the full instructions in in the book and smarter not harder what you do is you can't do this on a on a treadmill because you can't make the treadmill go fast enough and be steep enough we'll use you'd go to a park and you'd walk so slowly like you're bored like you're like kicking an acorn level board and then you would Sprint with every fiber of your body as if you are going to die for 10 seconds and then when you're done you'd probably lay on your back and just like do deep breathing relaxation exercise as fast as you can drop your heart rate and that is more effective when I say more effective Tom more effective at losing fat no at VO2 max increasing which is correlated fat loss if you were to do five days a week spin classes over six weeks you'll get a two percent VO2 max Improvement if you were to do re-hit three times a week for five minutes you would get a 12 Improvement it is six times more Improvement in a tiny fraction of the effort and time it's that big of a deal it's a hack it's a little window to tell the body to do that so what what is it about the rapid reduction in exertion that tells the body get better at this it just it's so counterintuitive it's one of the foundational principles in the book I call it slope of the curve biology we like to think using kind of our lazy algorithms in our brains that it's area under the curve it's the amount of work you do that that's what has Merit like that's the struggle that's the strive but what the meat operating system is listening to is how much work could I handle and still be okay so it doesn't like the grind it's lazy but it will listen if you tell it oh look you can do this and still be safe but if you tell you can do this and go into the danger zone and be in a state where you're not safe and then you're just going to grind it out using your willpower over time your body can do that it just doesn't adapt as well man this doesn't make sense to me yet I understand what you're saying it doesn't it breaks something intuitively so to the area under the curve okay I've always had the thought when it comes to the transformation I put my own body through I always thought of it as I have to give my body the impulse to adapt or die right and so I put it under massive amount of strain and I say I'm not going to stop so you better get good at dealing with this and that feels like and again I I could just be wrong but it feels like that was exactly how I added muscle and loss fat was by really putting myself in a sustained difficult position it works I when I did my 702 hours in the gym I could max out all the two of the machines I got stronger didn't lose the weight but I got stronger it just was not very efficient for the amount of time it took to do that but what I I get the impulse though if the if the meat suit is like oh man we're really going to be under these intense periods where I have to run really fast for a long period of time or whatever and if I don't I'm not going to survive I get why it would adapt if it's like oh I can handle that and all is well why does it adapt why it changed because it's all what I what I think you're saying and it may just be that I'm misunderstanding is that you're giving it a peek that it knows it's fine it can handle that but if it knows it can handle that why change what the AI system is doing at upgrade Labs is we're driving you to the edge of it so the body is concerned that it's going to die but it didn't and if you take the body to the point where it's concerned it's going to die and it stays there there's a name for that it's basically Terror but it's cellular Terror the cell danger response all these things happen right and the body takes a long time to adapt and then you spend a lot of your electricity on a stress response not on an Adaptive response what we're doing is we're turning on a very specific signal that tells the body adapt without all the stress got it so to put it in my language I'm giving it a very acute adapter die uh impulse but I don't sustain that so that it becomes a stress response which somehow mitigates or slows down the adaptation exactly every bit of electricity and and building blocks and minerals and calories and everything else that you put into a stress response that wasn't an Adaptive response or your body getting stronger it's actually wasted so what I believe is that the vast majority of people listening to the show wants to want to exercise but they don't actually want to exercise because we live in lazy meat suits right so what do we do about that well one thing is you could say I'm just going to teach you how to just grit your teeth and build a habit and force yourself to do it and read some books about grit and and fetishize waking up at four in the morning sweating on yourself you can do that and it works it's just very expensive what I'm arguing is that for everyone who's not going to do that and kind of replaces that by looking at Instagram videos of people doing that who probably aren't actually doing it but they recorded it all one morning and now they're eating french fries well maybe if you just use the techniques in here and did something for 10 or 15 minutes a day that saved you 45 minutes a day and you were motivated by Saving 45 minutes you'll probably be a lot more likely to do it and I know that in if you give me an hour at an upgrade Labs even once a week I can fix your cardiovascular I can give you enough muscle mass that you won't deal with the problems of not having enough muscle as you age enough to have a working metabolism we can work on your brain and make it work better with neurofeedback and we can work on your cellular metabolism so you become better at turning food into electricity instead of fat and we can also train your stress response so that your body doesn't go into that cell danger response into that Terror mode into the anxiety thing that we're like I don't know what's wrong something's wrong I don't know what it is it's probably my spouse it's probably this all that anxiety that we have that's also trainable you can do all of that in an hour or you could go to a spin class and have someone yell at you will use sweat into spandex I just think our time is more valuable than that all right proprioception oh yeah is that the word for what you were just describing about the the meat suit saying I either am or am not in danger no proprioception is a sense of your body knowing where it is in the world and your mind's knowing where your body is so it's proprioception allows you to catch a ball and someone throws it at you and if you didn't know your hand was in the world and really if your hands didn't know where it was in the world it has its own distributed intelligence then you'd miss the ball or smack you in the face it's what allows us to know our bodies upright and things like that it's also something though that measures the amount of stress on a joint and decides how much your muscles are allowed to do to keep you from being injured one of the hacks in smarter harder actually about four or five of them involves hacking your proprioceptors so your proprioceptors are measuring what's happening I'm just going to do the example of a curl here right so if I'm holding a dumbbell actually I need something to hold here danger coffee all right so now I'm going to do a curl and there's a lot of minerals in here so it's heavy but what I'm doing with this weight in my hand is the weight is accelerating at gravity speed which is 9.8 meters per second squared which means that when I throw it up when I catch it it actually physically weighs more and when I wobble like this it weighs more from the wobble my smart wrist my hand my elbow my shoulder they all know that I'm wobbling and they know that this weight May weigh more than it actually weighs so they know hold back because if you wobble then it's going to weigh more so you can't possibly do all of the force necessary here because you get injured If instead you have an artificial intelligence driven machine that's putting weight on the arm that has no gravity at all all of a sudden then I can actually use all of the muscles in my bicep to do the exercise and I'm going to fight really really hard and it's going to feel insane but I'm going to be able to put more foot pounds of pressure because my proprioceptors didn't worry about gravity so I talk about how to remove Gravity from resistance systems either with tech or just with you know resistance bands even so this is also the slope of the curve biology how do I show the muscle that it's capable of doing something that it thinks is dangerous and once you do that it's like oh I guess I could do that and then it adapts really rapidly and what we use at upgrade Labs is well we have a big machine that's driven by AI that does it but at home there are some things that work better than others so for very basic weightlifting stuff you don't even buy elastic bands just knowing that lowering a weight slowly is important versus flopping weights up and down you get more return on investment from a slow eccentric movement it's just how it works so I talk about the things that are they just work better than lifting rocks and running away from tigers in the book yeah so it's the idea of the body being willing to not even necessarily what I was going to say is being willing to adapt because it's getting the impulse but it's really the difference between the what we talked about earlier if you give it a sustained impulse that stresses it out you have to deal with all of that if you give it a from a weightlifting perspective an additional variable of gravity where it has to hold something back you're not able to give it the the peak this is easier because I've seen the graphs in the book yeah where you talk about how by removing the um the read on gravity or the body's need to account for the potential increase in weight based on wobbling or momentum or whatever that you can actually push that Spike higher but bring it down a lot faster it's very interesting so is this only possible with AI and finely tuned equipment or are there things that we can do at home that are going to allow people that same rapid onset of adaptation everything in the book has an at-home version that you can do what we're doing is we're using AI to discover new principles like that narrow band of exercise that causes you to burn fats and you can't go above or below or the idea that you can have a certain slope of resistance curve that's driven by AI you have to go to an upgrade labs for that and own and upgradelabs.com I'm seriously rolling these out across the country people have signed up for dozens of them but in the meantime every one of the chapters the part on the brain the part on like spirituality and meditation the part on cardiovascular the part on muscle part on stress resilience for each of those I talk about techniques that work better than what we've always done and many of them are free and some of them are low cost and then some of them are the examples of the highest level Tech that demonstrate that it's possible the fact that you can get six times more Improvement in VO2 max in six weeks is unheard of it's it's just it's shocking and there's several university studies backing that up so given that it's possible maybe you can do better at home even if you don't have all the equipment just because we know it can be done and I I'm still resentful of my 702 hours of eating lettuce and going to the gym all the time and not losing weight because I didn't know all this stuff What in in everything that went into writing smarter not harder what was the what was the biggest game changer for you in real life where you're like whoa this one has just a disproportionate effect on your life or Cuts back the time whether it's sleep diet exercise it was actually the laziness principle right so I I just finally identified that I'm lazy and you and I have both built 100 billion dollar companies I have eight companies right now and everybody a New York Times bestseller every couple years but I'm profoundly lazy right and I used to kind of feel guilty about that and when I just realized it's in it's in my meat it's a part of human progress and you could even argue that I did all those things because I was looking to avoid doing something else but did that just let you let yourself off the hook and not beat yourself up for being lazy or did it actually inform I actually love being lazy I I freely met no I don't want to do it I don't want to do more work than it's necessary to get that done I want someone else to do that and it makes me a more effective person and it makes all of us more effective to identify the stuff that takes our energy stuff we don't like to do and to remove it from our lives however we can and I'll be straightforward I like going for hikes but I don't really like going to the gym compared to playing with my kids right I will do it if it's necessary I just don't want to and instead of feeling like I'm a bad person for that recognizing that okay I don't want to so how do I get the results and just being at peace with that and then motivating myself with savings and being excited about not about the money I saved or the time I saved instead of the time I spent it makes it a lot easier to stick with things so just say I'm going to do something hard because I'm a good person I'm going to grip my teeth and do all that yeah clearly I I've done that right I just don't have to anymore in the book you go into spiritual hacks yeah talk to me about that the you also you're careful to delineate different kinds of spirituality so it isn't just the meditation monks uh Himalayas all of that so what is spirituality for you how do we hack it and why does it matter we'll say the definition of spirituality is kind of like the Supreme Court definition of pornography I can't Define it but I know what it is when I see it right and can you say that a specific state of bliss that someone experiences is a spiritual experience or a blissful experience the answer is I'm going to ask them they'll tell you right and and that's okay because the way we perceive reality is actually valid and we also know that different people have different lenses on reality we have different filters that we either teach ourselves or that Society teaches us and at a minimum with spirituality there's a sense of inner peace a sense of Happiness a sense of equanimity which I talk a lot about in the book in Buddhism there's three levels that that we talk about there's the lowest level of spiritual growth which is having empathy for other people some people just have no empathy right and you start waking up right so I can feel other people's pain but there isn't that particular enlightened because having to feel other people's pain even when there's nothing you can do about it you don't really want to isn't always a good thing so you go from there to compassion which is wishing well for others even if you don't take on the pain of having empathy with them you can have empathy but you don't have to when you have a state of compassion so you can you just it's a feeling it's an actual thing and you can measure compassion with neuroscience and that's what one of my companies does but this the state above that is called Equanimity and this is where you can choose your state and maintain your state no matter what is happening in the world around you so even if you have empathy and you have compassion if you have Equanimity you can be the monk who meditates in the middle of a hurricane and nothing can take you from your chosen State and that is a pretty powerful side of spirituality and it's actually profoundly dangerous that's why it's named danger coffees like who knows what you might do when you are unprogrammable when you will always do the right thing and no one can sway you from your chosen State you are an enormously powerful person who's capable of great Deeds of kindness and peace what does it take to get there I believe that the fastest path for that is starting at your cellular biology and working your way up it's very hard to teach yourself to have that state when your body can't make enough energy when you're getting this signal from your meat operating system that's like something is wrong something's profoundly wrong I don't know what it is and what it is is you're swimming in toxins that are inhibiting your body's ability to do it so when the body he feels like it's nourished and safe it's just easier to do the hard work and then you start looking at things that are mostly I'm going to call it in our emotional body so you work on your emotional stuff trauma resolution and things like that and once why do you call it an emotional body it's a word from transpersonal psychology I don't know what that is that's a field that was started in 1956 by a guy named Stan Groff Stan was a Freudian licensed psychologist in Czechoslovakia which is what it was called back then not the Czech Republic and he used LSD which he purchased from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals with a license to treat 3 000 patients and had profound effects things like this Freudian stuff doesn't work very well but this other stuff does and I had the great honor of interviewing Stan on my show and hosting an event with him when he was 94 years old well he's the inventor of holotropy breathing which you may have talked about on the show before so Stan ended up creating the field of transpersonal psychology which is where a lot of the trauma resolution stuff that you hear about you'll hear Gabby Bernstein who's become a friend to talk about ifs internal family systems therapy you'll see a lot of the trauma resolution stuff came out of Stan Groff's observations of what happens to people just early on in their life but does this intersect with a meat suit are you saying that it's almost stored in the body okay stored Define that please well you can ask most women um what happens if they get a really deep hip massage and the vast majority like 80 percent of women they don't know why they just start crying like like strong emotions come out because women store emotions in their hips uh women store emotions how so tell me what a an emotion is at a biological level so you were just saying you can measure compassion so I imagine you okay it's brain waves like there's a signal that we can pick up on from the body so what is the signal of an emotion you push on that part of the body yeah and a strong feeling happens a really strong feeling because there's serotonin stored in the gut is there a neurochemical stored in the hips it's so now you're making an assumption that we're chemical based systems when we're not oh we're about to go off the rails I love it take me there but this sounds crazy so what if we were not chemical based we're not exclusively chemical based okay that's very different okay so we are simultaneously chemical and electrical and I could go get my electrical stimulation thing yeah okay I'm with that so our chemical we're electrical we're also provably with hard science Quantum okay I knew that you'd love this one so this is is there more yeah so we have a chemical electrical Quantum we also have magnetic and light signaling inside the body okay all of these we can prove the existence of with physics measurements is that it uh the chemical electrical Quantum magnetic and then light yep that's all that I know of okay fair there may be some vibrational like physical vibrational thing in there as well but hell I don't know okay so we'll and the possible unknown very wise like sound vibration probably does something so let's zoom in on Quantum when you were saying that we're not just chemical is that the one that you were aimed at yep okay well actually no I was named it electrical because I mean if I touch the hip and I get an electrical signal it's a lot faster than a neurochemical system yep I'm stored is the word that I'm going to be zooming in on that's the part where I don't know I don't know yeah hey I love expanding my mind and realizing new things the thing I'm always optimizing for is my brain is a prediction engine I want to make its predictions better and better um but storing emotion in the body I cannot yet meet with anecdotal evidence okay of my own give me your gut instinct maybe this isn't the area you feel when you say stored it is that there's uh information sensing proprioceptive pattern here and when something bad happens information sensing information field so yeah information sensing everything in the environment's information okay the proprioceptors information Fields something I should have you define because I don't know what that is yeah so probably the most accurate reflection of how the universe works is information field Theory okay which is that everyone is actually just a field of information everything is a field of information that all intersect it's extremely quantum physics but it's like hard math quantum physics stuff so information field Theory I'm just going to say even if we get out of the hard physics side of that we just say that that there are parts of your body that have their own ability to sense being injured right so the elbow got injured so now it hurts whenever you try to do something that's going to cause the injury again you can treat that with the electrical stimulation and I write the stories in the book of like what I did with Stephen collar so you put electrodes on to force the body to do it anyway because there's electricity making the body do what it thinks it can't do and as soon as the body does it and it doesn't get injured it's like oh and then it doesn't hurt anymore and the pain just goes away well there was actually a little decision made in your elbow about that where it thought it couldn't so it sent you pain to make sure you didn't well what other parts of your meat operating system are making sure you don't it turns out there's a lot of them in there and one of the things that happens is when would that be in the hip though you know why it's in the hips and ways why isn't it in the brain like the heart you you still think that you're your brain and I would just argue like what would happen if your entire body was a prediction machine not just your brain because there is clearly a distributed intelligence throughout your body yes so sure so let's dive into that so Phineas Gage I'm sure you know the story yeah working on the railroad for those that don't know a a like five foot three inch diameter tamping Rod shoots up through his under his chin out through the top of his head I don't think it was three inch diameter this thing was [ __ ] it was Big Radius radius uh and no it would be diamond yeah it's a diameter not radius yeah that's big no no it is Big it comes around it goes yeah it's not small big when I said because they I mean he went on tour with this [ __ ] thing it's big however big most people are thinking it is bigger than that it is crazy never loses Consciousness but he loses a teacups worth of brain which I just I just can't even fathom anyway changes his life forever and he's never the same people say it fundamentally changed his personality or just a total [ __ ] show so if you damage somebody's brain what we think of as them while maybe only ultimately a small part of what the universe thinks of is them because there's all the intelligence in their fingertip and all that I totally acquiesced to that I have no problem with that whatsoever but the when when I think of me I think of the way that I process data I think of the voice in my head all of that I think of my ability to control emotions all of it if you damage my brain that is gonna radically alter now to your point if you wildly disrupt my microbiome it could wildly affect my moods and so I would feel like a different version of myself so I I am totally in that camp but when you damage the physical structures of the brain certainly there is a profound change in you which I'm putting in air quotes Okay any disagreement so far there's a profound change of your behavior and if you identify yourself as your behavior then what you say is true depends on how far you're going to push Behavior so if if the way that I think through a problem is behavior sure if my ability to process what I call processing data like I can't do math in my head but some people can and they don't even understand someone like me for whom numbers just don't appear like I don't I don't understand people that are like oh the answer is just a bit what do you mean that is so surreal to me so anyway I could go from either not being able to do it or something happens and now I can because so much of our talent is something that was being tamped down stops being tamped down right um so again here's another example that what I call it Behavior I don't know that I would but maybe it falls in Behavior Uh the brain two hemispheres connected by something called the corpus callosum I know you know but for people at home that don't if you sever that the person will now have two distinct personalities one of them can be a devout atheist and the other is a Believer and they'll they'll sit there and argue and if you cover one eye you'll get obviously it's cross so if you cover the right eye you're talking to the left hemisphere if you cover the left eye you're talking the right hemisphere you will get different answers from different sides of the brain you can hide things from one half of the brain it's bananas my mom's purpose Blossom was covered really what what happened it was for epilepsy it's a treatment it's a barbaric old treatment for Appalachian indeed it is yeah so you know this first hand would you call that behavior certainly it affects Behavior it does 100 brain injuries I'm let's the easy one is traumatic brain injuries I mean I took a titanium needed ahead at Burning Man a while ago and I mean I I uh sometimes knee to the Head yeah Thunderdome you know the like Mad Max Thunderdome they have one of those at Burning Man okay so I was with a friend and we were trying to hit each other with uh big Q-tips and uh her titanium knee clocked me right in the head when we were like flying through the air and I was oh like seriously adult for probably a couple months to the point I remember I I got really mad at Tim Ferriss for something he didn't do instead of an angry email and I apologize later I was like sorry too hilarious but it I mean I was swearing all the time I couldn't play go fish with my kids right so my perception of myself change but did I really change I don't know I did some I would say yes 100 that you know in certain terms interesting as a result of the physical structures of your brain just getting rocked yeah but then why did I change back when I did Hyperbaric and I did all the other neurofeedback stuff I mean the oversimplify it because you healed and so the way that your brain was processed why didn't you change into something else completely well I I've been editing myself my entire life with as much Consciousness as I know how that's what the whole upgrading yourself part of biohacking is I'm consciously changing do you feel that you're limited by the physicality of your brain not yet not at all this is so interesting okay wow oh uh I have a whole company that does brain upgrades on people like like software upgrades for the brand neither of us disagree with that but so like you can totally change I'm saying that you're what you're changing is the physical structure of the brain you're saying maybe it's not that you can change software without changing physical structure agreed so okay we're miscommunicating because I agree with that but I believe that the behaviors are born of the physicality and that if you were to talk to uh a worm it would be perceiving and processing the world in a way that would be so uh Alien to a human that we just you're like a phrenologist that is an interesting way to interpret this okay not just for people listening oh yeah there are people who believe that you could tell what someone's brain was doing by where the bumps on their head were because like this part of the head would do this but you have this so mapped out physically but all the data that I have from brain scans I have the largest database of high performance high resolution scans in the world right now for 40 years of Zen yeah and it's actually Network Behavior within the brain it's not at all the physical structure and the network behavior of the brain is not correlated to the physicality of the brain If parts of the brain aren't there it's not going to work but a part of the brain can be there don't rush past that if that's true it feels like we're in agreement so okay uh this table right I would pause it because I'm a physicalist I don't even know what they call it uh I don't believe I don't believe that this table could ever possibly contemplate the universe in the way that you and I do I think that there would be a lot of similarities between you and I know there are differences I don't think the table's thinking because of the structure of our brains that the table won't have because it doesn't have that same structure do we agree on that I believe well I I don't know that it's because the table doesn't have the same structure interesting it may be entirely possible I don't know but it may be entirely possible that if we took a group of monks and it's going to piss her off that's kind of why I'm saying no I love it I just want to take a group of monks and uh and divine goddesses and we sit around the table and we love the table for six months straight and just Infuse it with the best possible energy yep will the table become conscious I kind of don't think so but I'm not gonna claim to be an expert in that and that's interesting okay so do you have a thought around what it's anchored to so for me I and I get this is a very high level it's a very important to what our Consciousness uh it probably will ultimately boil down to that so let's just start there I think your Consciousness is anchored to all of your body not just your brain we agree on that okay so that's why if you are one of those people thinks that you can bring yourself Back to Life by freezing your body don't freeze just your head freeze your whole body you're gonna need that that's a really important Point well so here's an interesting thing I think if you did that you could bring back a lot of what you think of as you but all of a sudden it wouldn't feel right there'd be problems but that the 90 of who you think of as you would still be there is my gut instinct the irony that I would say gut instinct while saying that is is not lost on me I'm glad you caught that but yeah I have a feeling that the vast majority of of who we think of as ourselves is that but I I agree with you so violently like on your list here we haven't talked about Quantum biology yet we haven't I still have it this is why I don't freeze my body and I have some friends who I have no and respect to which is like Joe polish is a good friend who's yeah I'm all in might as well it's a backup plan Ray Kurzweil same thing we know now because of a very recent study we only just figured out how to look at proton spin in living systems and what they found is that all of the protons in your brain change their spin exactly in conjunction with your heartbeat and if proton spin is changing in a coherent manner throughout your system based on your heartbeat your Quantum system if the protons were not changing their spin all in unison they would not be Quantum coherent with each other so this is something that that I think I hit it up on my Instagram page but it's something that most people just it's like an advanced physics paper but literally if your heartbeat is controlling proton spin throughout your entire system your Quantum and that's how it works so there are quantum effects that we actually just don't know much about that allow a lot of the realm of the truly Advanced spiritual practice that's been written about all over the planet for thousands of years all this weird stuff that I kind of don't like seems to be happening repeatedly can you give me an example um oh the ability to read someone else's mind like why do we keep talking about that if it isn't possible and why do I know people who can do scarily good stuff at that stuff well probably it's some kind of quantum thing I don't know the mechanism of action this is where I think you and I start to disagree so when I don't understand I just stop it I don't understand Yeah but I get uneasy when people are like that I don't understand is a fill-in for all the magical claims that people make are probably really real and we just don't understand them yet you and I talked about this last time otherwise I'd go into it the whole um spoon bending banacheck it thinks it's interesting but let's stick with Quantum for a second okay so um that I I think you have some I think you have your finger on something that either I'm just so ignorant that I think it's self-evidently is just obvious or I'm bang on so here's how I look at that okay if if it is true that the world is the universe is quantum which I don't know enough to challenge that so I've just always assumed uh at Quantum we don't understand how it functions yet but or or at least how the macro and the quantum connect but we know that the quantum mechanics is there and it helps us uh do things like GPS So Okay cool so I certainly believe that we live in a Quantum world so if that is true then it seems self-evident to me that of course every system whether it's a planet or biology is a Quantum system and this table is a Quantum system too 100 which is why I'm not sure if it can think but I don't think it can so but that and I think that's where I our frames of reference are so different I don't that felt like a non-sequitur so to me quantum systems and Consciousness are in no way shape or form related like they're just you know there's two I I in in as much as if I say that um my Consciousness isn't tied to blood flow of course without the blood flow I cannot have Consciousness so without the quantum everything I'm sure just falls apart or whatever right uh thing that I can't understand or predict but it isn't the same as oh well if this all exists at the quantum State then the physicality doesn't matter so I I'm going to start making predictions okay you tell me if these predictions are active I'm going to predict your your belief system okay this is interesting if this starts to break down then I'll at least understand why that felt like a non-sequitur to me okay so quantum entanglement seems to be the part that non-physical lists I'm making that word up uh grab onto and say okay information Theory quantum says that you can have yeah well no no this is my understanding of why people are interested in information Theory and how it relates to Quantum Mechanics is the following that you can have two um particles I forget which ones separated by the the entire universe and if they are quantum entangled they will instantaneously communicate to each other and and communicate they won't um now there's some people that say even information cannot travel faster than the speed of light they're not actually communicating they're simultaneously changing which is a form of communication but there isn't a signal going between them that we know about uh yes I'm rounding that to communicate I don't know what word you would slide in there they're just always in the same state without communication I'm going to push back on that we're I just want to acknowledge for everybody in the comments to understand us but I find this really interesting so I'm going to keep going um so the the tests that they've done show that that until one so you they're quantumly entangled you shoot them in opposite directions they are now the universe with the cross when you look at the first one you create its state so it was in in a Quantum superposition until it was measured therefore it's not like oh I just have like let's say it's red it's I forget up and down sure I think or left and right whatever up and down let's say so I look at this one it isn't just that you're now recognizing that it is up and that the other one is down you can actually do something that makes this one up and thusly then instantly my word communicates yeah that that one is down across the entire universe okay we are now at the edge of even what I can yeah sounds like quantum entanglement to me cool they're making a physics major who tells us that we missed some important point but I don't think so we're close so my prediction is because of that is why you're saying that the way our brains work or the way that we view ourselves Consciousness can't be physical or at least can't be purely physical is that an accurate assumption it's not because of that okay so what is what leads you to the statement that we're not the physicality of our brains or at least not just well there's the physicality of your brain but there's also the signal in your brain if you're the physicality of your brain then if you don't breathe for three minutes why do you stop being you why do I stop being yeah in other words if your brain physical structures are there but there's no electricity flowing in them you're not there so the model that I find works best is that parts of your Consciousness are not local and that you have amazing antenna systems throughout your body they're called DNA and they're called mitochondria and they actually do act and so they've been structured to look like antennas and so I I think that there's a part of you that is non-local and there are computer scientists who would absolutely non-local meaning I could blast the mitochondria off into space and I would maintain my current I would be exactly the same what we get into here becomes the realm of philosophical and spiritual stuff but the definition of what is you right then you have to start talking about how do some of these people talk about all of the spiritual things the yogic cities that we talked about last time um how is some of that stuff cities s-i-d-h-i these are defined superpowers that have been documented in rare humans throughout recorded history like being able to read somebody's mind sure right I'm gonna need to see that documentation so you sure just just Google it yeah it's a good book it's like a good translation of yogic studies he's a shaman um who's uh who's a good friend if you even wrote a book with uh Dr Perlmutter who's a brain scientist who's also a good friend but what level of mind reading do you think is capable depending on the person um who has the skills I've met some people with profoundly strong abilities and we know the military has been working on this stuff since at least the 60s doesn't mean that it's going to work no but yeah but I will say and I don't know if this if this proves what you're saying or contradicts it but I have a feeling that once we're able to get a fine enough level of detail from the brain whether that is uh neuralink or whatever that we will be able to they can already do rudimentary thoughts to pictures or brain waves to pictures kernels we had Brian's company k-e-r-n-e-m was a guy who was a founder of Braintree yeah I had him on the show oh you had him on the show cool I haven't had one on my show though he's a smart guy but he's put 80 million dollars of his own money into a really good brain scanner he's I think way further ahead than what's he trying to do he's trying to get a sense of every single signal happening in the brains simultaneously and so is it that you think there are some people that can pick up on those signals that there is some sort of because I can get how in some way our brain our our ecos the human ecosystem not to over localize it to the brain I can get how some of that is using quantum entanglement to communicate between cells maybe I don't know um but I don't get how or why two different people would be momentarily quantumly entangled maybe because your power of observation looked at their Quantum bits I'm totally making this [ __ ] up but it's just a supposition look at their Quantum bits and then maybe you can just entangle with another quantum thing it will like we this what's happening with the whole Realm of the quantum biology stuff and this is like hardcore Quantum like we can make quantum computers this isn't like the quantum Wu field there's an entire system that's controlling some of our biology it's controlling some of life and some of the world around us that we know almost nothing about what's doing it the quantum the quantum the realm of the quantum Quantum biology Quantum effects are controlling reality in a way that we barely understand so if you're looking to do biohacking and you're saying well we know we have this this black box I know that if I do these things I get this response way more than statistics would predict and we don't know why it's happening yet that's where science is The Cutting Edge of science always is wow that shouldn't happen based on what I believed I'm going to have to go dig deeper on that and the realm with the most fertile territory for exploration around Consciousness right now around spirituality is actually Quantum science and the earlier Realm of the realm I'm spending most of my time on that is actually looking at the electrical and magnetic into a certain sense blood flow of what's happening on the brain so that we can tune the brain so that it works better but we don't tune it by adjusting physical structures we tune it by adjusting connectivity between physical structures so that we're saying this part of the brain the brodman's area or something needs to talk to this part of the brain but this brain isn't speaking the right language or the volume isn't loud enough at this certain frequency so let's show the brain what it's like to do that and the Brain goes oh and it adjusts its electrical Behavior without adjusting its physical Behavior and the second profound effects on how you feel how you treat other people and why don't you think that's physical why do you use why is electrical flow non-physical well this show is going out to people over a combination of fiber optics and probably some copper signaling and some Wireless now we don't have to change the copper to change what we say right so the different sounds same physical infrastructure wouldn't your brain do the same thing um yeah I just uh it I suppose is a definitional adjustment I have to make to make sure that I'm tracking what you're saying okay so the physical Hardware of the brain can carry different thoughts without changing its Hardware each time you have a new thought so why don't we teach the electrical stuff to send signals in a different order that change your emotional state or your spiritual State and whoa okay I was with you until you said spiritual state so Define you have an aversion to spiritual stage no no I want to understand it all right so I understand uh obviously thoughts but when you say a spiritual State what does that mean or earlier you called spirituality a feeling yeah there are feelings right so right now is it the same to say emotional state and spiritual State usually not because some emotions are spiritual emotions and some of them are not interesting tell me which is a feeling of Oneness and connectedness and the pure love of God which if you've never experienced that would probably sound like a bunch of [ __ ] but people have experienced her like I don't know what that was but that was something different and it was new and they're they're trying to it's like if you were colorblind and someone's trying to say no that's blue and you're like it's not blue it's the same color as that and you could argue to the ends of the Earth because they have it so it's an emotion that's transcendental uh it's probably depth transcendental is a good name it these are things that people can train their brains to pick up and this goes down to the idea that we all have filters on reality and when you start undertaking spiritual training you start realizing that there's more that your body can pick up and your mind can pick up in the world around you including some amazing spiritual States so do you think it's that we're so is a spiritual State a tuning into a broadcast yes it's tuning into a field interesting and one of the lower level but beautiful spiritual States is love and you say well love doesn't exist how do you prove love exists and then we could talk about Quantum entanglements of hearts or something well so now let me ask then so love feels very localized to me but if what you're saying is accurate and spiritual feelings or Trends and dental feelings and it's tuning into a broadcast are you saying that love is being broadcast I am broadcasting love right now from right here and I'm doing it because I've trained myself how to do that what's unrequited love that's a very interesting and odd question so this is when you let me tell you why I'm asking that yeah it's it's yeah I love some context because one required loves just love where you send love and you don't get love back the reason that I'm asking that is as you were saying that I thought okay my wife and I love each other it's a really awesome feeling it's sustained over time it's a back and forth and then I thought okay if if she's picking up what I'm broadcasting and I'm picking up what she's broadcasting and that is love then are you the there is a really strong and horrible feeling when you like something that doesn't like you back it doesn't have to be that's just trauma interesting so well first before we go off on another tangent on that so if if spiritual states are receiving the broadcast is there just messiness it's both receiving it and the way that you feel about what you're receiving or lack thereof yeah okay so every time you experience a physical or an emotional trauma you your body your meat operating system automatically puts a filter in place so you don't do that again you don't feel that again you're not vulnerable to that again you won't surrender to that again you won't experience it again so over time you get more and more and more High bound and crusty and angry and bitter and mean and unkind because you're no longer receiving the broadcast you no longer receiving the broadcast you're no longer feeling it and then when you start doing trauma work you start doing emotional work you start losing wow a lot of these emotions don't make sense because if I love something why do I have to feel pain if it doesn't let me back why why is my body doing that to me and then you do the inquiry work and you do the emotional work on that stuff and eventually you're like wow I can turn on this love thing and I can do it at will and I can do it are you turning on the love thing are you receiving the broadcast you can do both you can broadcast and receive and I want to better understand if I'm broadcasting this is interesting I'm going to ask a question that a spiritual person like yourself is probably going to hate but you won't offend me is no no not like that just so you'll think I'm approaching it from the wrong direction so broadcasting love and receiving love I as I try to adopt your framework don't feel like they will be experienced in the same way their separate skills actually you can broadcast love without being able to receive love and vice versa interesting and so from a well-being standpoint um let's say that I'm really good at broadcasting but I'm not really good at receiving or vice versa which of those two curses would be the better so my own path I I wasn't good at either one um then I learned how to broadcast love um be a combination of spiritual practice neurofeedback all the different experiences but then I had to do additional work on being able to receive love because a lot of people learn that it's not safe to receive love early in life where you're you're actually desperate for love when you're a small baby or when you're really little and then something bad happens something maybe that wasn't even anyone's an on-purpose thing and then some party realized as well I wanted I felt like I was going to die if I didn't get it I didn't get it therefore I'm going to close myself off to it so yeah receiving love receiving gratitude those are different skills than feeling them and their trainable skills and their trainable skills with electrodes and that's why I wrote you know a quarter of smart and harder is about the things that let you access spiritual States more quickly than sitting in a cave and meditating which is how we used to do it so what does let you receive it well one of the easier things to do is breath work in conjunction with meditation it just works faster to put you in certain States and those certain States yes you can measure those states with electrodes um so they're they're real States one of the easiest ways to start working on that is heart rate variability training you ever tried that I have only ever tried to adjust my HRV through exercise okay so you can do exercise and sleep and diet to to do your whole night HRV in 2008 I joined the Advisory Board of a company called heart math and they were the first company to realize you could train this as a feedback signal so you put a little clip on your ear and you had a little now it's an app on your phone and then you breathe in and you make the light turn green but to make the light turn green it doesn't just turn green when you breathe in you start doing something and there's no word for it and what you're doing is you're changing the spacing between your heartbeats to make it more complex but also more rhythmic so instead of having an even heartbeat your heart beats so it doesn't match between each one so I don't know how to tell you to do that except well breathe and just make the light turn green and as you learn to do this stuff starts to change and the way you feel the way you connect to the world changes and what you're actually doing is you're editing the amount of parasympathetic rest and reset versus Paris parasympathetic versus sympathetic or fight or flight so this is a something that I talk about that it's probably not harder it's one of the many different technologies that allows you to have more control of your nervous system so you can better sense reality and so you can better choose your state because if you don't do that you're not going to feel that sense of heart opening which is probably in fact not just probably but is mathematically related to what the Buddhists are called loving kindness so okay I can change the spacing between my heartbeats at will and if I find my body going into sympathetic fight or flight I can say stop it and then I can turn it back and I took uh let's see this is one of my one of my favorite stories I was working with the Silicon Valley hardware software engineer hardcore rationalists probably a little bit Asperger's like I used to be and I got him to do this training and he after about eight weeks he said Dave I I got it to the hardest setting I learned how to do it and I I did it for an hour I know you told me just to do 20 minutes so I did an hour and so I I think I experienced Bliss and I started laughing because in my entire career in Silicon Valley I've never heard an engineer use the word bliss before like that that's not what Engineers do and he did that just by altering his heart rate variability yeah but he was consciously altering it not just trying to like eat a food that made his body more resilient because total heart rate variability is a measure of resilience but your ability to go from my heart is not highly variable and then do that thing the thing that I can't tell you the words for but turn the light green and I'm doing it right now and it changes the variability part right you can also change the amplitude the strength of your heart rate some people are stronger broadcasters than others and when I go on stage and Tony Robbins or somewhere there's an audience of 10 000 people do I before I go on stage intentionally adjust my heart rate variability so that it is high and turn up my amplitude as much as I'm capable of so that I can feel the audience and they can feel me yeah is there math that says this is real actually yes there is there's a magnetic field around your heart it's tipped at eight degrees to the left is shaped like a big donut a Taurus and we know which direction the fields on it move because we can measure it with sensitive physics detectors we also know that magnetic fields continue infinitely into the universe and we know that systems will pick up each other's magnetic fields no Quantum required when you have high heart rate variability and you walk into a stall with a horse the horse will match its heart rate variability to you and if you're tweaking and you walk into the stall the horse will let you ride it because it picks up your heart this is why they use horses as therapy animals because their biofeedback machines for heart rate variability so is what I'm doing here some sort of weird manipulative Tech Wizardry no you can do heart rate variability just by learning basic meditation I just found a faster way because I'm a nerd I think it was in the book and then you've said it here today you used to have Asperger's yeah used to how did you stop well first you address cellular toxins and things that are causing neuro inflammation so your nervous system is uninflamed then you retrain the nervous system to do what it never learned to do when you were young in my case it involved learning social skills it involved retraining my auditory processing systems it involved retraining my vision systems and I'd say I'm 70 of the way that I'm training my proprioceptors because when you have Asperger's Syndrome you're getting so much environmental input that is not filtered properly by your nervous system that it's very hard to pick up on what's important and what's not important so you become stupidly good at pattern matching and recognizing systems because you're dealing with an enormous volume of data and most of it's just static in your system so when you remove the things that are causing the static and then you do the work of becoming aware of all the signals you never learned to do before um then at some point say well this person no longer meets the criteria for asperger's syndrome I used to live everything was from the neck up like I'm a rational being on the meat robot and I just realized that's actually not how the system seems to work I am simultaneously rational as in I have a green information systems and Ai and an MBA and I you know I do truth tables and irrational and that I have feelings and I can simultaneously hold both States we're all like that we just it's actually scary to consider the fact that you have an irrational being in the same meat suit as your rational side I just got comfortable with that and decided to tame it um is there a a process that people can I can only imagine how many people especially now as the rates of people being on the Spectrum are skyrocketing that would love to know if there's a system that they can use to do that the most that I've written about that is in my book called headstrong and this is a book about how to fix your brain and how to make your brain work better than it did before if you were to do the recommendations in that book and you were to do some additional neural training that I probably touched on in there you could um you could get a lot of results there the stuff I just mentioned here I'll just tell you the resources for it Vision training is something you can do with a variety of things but look for a developmental ophthalmologist and these are people who study how the eyes and the Brain work together with proprioceptors in the body I spent six months doing really difficult Vision training exercises learning how to move my body again you can look for somatic therapy to learn how to get the systems in the body wired into the brain I still do that today and then you could look at auditory integration training or AIT therapy for every one of those there's probably a Wikipedia page which is the new Snopes that says that they don't work Wikipedia you suck there Wikipedia is the new Snopes yes it's entirely run a big Pharma companies have a big big influence on there and there's there's about 200 trolls who run Wikipedia and they fight with each other to see who's the biggest troll it's fantastically beautiful and it's anger that's hilarious I used to have a Wikipedia page and then for some reason they removed it I still do but it's super uncomplimentary right now but there's like Wars it'll be because you're calling them trolls uh it could be Dave where can people follow you go to Dave asprey.com you can find all my books all the cool stuff podcasts 40 years is in and own and upgrade Labs it's all there so Dave asprey.com is the single hub for all the Davis I love it guys if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace if you want the secrets to reversing aging and looking younger be sure to watch this episode here 66 of women will die on their first cardiovascular event with zero symptoms or warning signs they don't even know they have a cardiovascular disease why because of the cofactor of estrogen toxicity

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 149,830

Keywords: Dave Asprey, Smarter Not Harder, Bulletproof, Upgrade Labs, Tom Bilyeu, Tom Bilyou, Impact Theory, Health Theory, Conversations with Tom, interview, health tips, longevity, diet and exercise, biohack, optimized health, plant based diet, carnivore, vegan, raw vegan, eat plants, stop eating meat, circadian biology, fasting, biohacking, lifestyle hacks, intermittent fasting

Id: kBC7qyUSRc0

Length: 120min 19sec (7219 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 28 2023