Brian Rose from London Real: It Is About the Journey

In this episode you’ll hear Brian Rose, an American expat and founder of the wildly popular podcast, London Real, an interview series with a stated mission to provide great information, and put BBC TV out of business in the process. You won’t want to miss this kickass talk about sleep hacking, Ayahuasca experiences, and Brian’s favorite biohacking tools.  Plus, at the end of the show you’ll hear Brian answer his own three questions he asks every guest at the end of his own show. Follow Brian on Twitter, @LondonRealTV.

Brian Rose is a former derivatives trader on Wall Street and CFO of a .com startup, with an engineering degree from MIT, and a propensity for pushing the edge. He quit his job as a banker and moved to London to start the podcast London Real. He also hosts Silicon Real for London-based startups. He serves every guest on his show Bulletproof Coffee and says it has a 100% approval rating so far. Enjoy the show.

Bulletproof Executive Radio at the iTunes, App Store, iBookstore, and Mac App Store

What You’ll Hear

  •   0:07 – Cool Fact of the Day!
  •   1:07 – Welcome Brian Rose
  •   6:40 – Glow time after the show
  •   9:00 – Career change from banking to podcasting
  • 17:10 – Sleep hacking
  • 20:04 – Ayahuasca and diet
  • 29:44 – Biohacking tools
  • 35:50 – Smart drugs
  • 37:20 – Using devices for biohacking
  • 44:45 – Being in the psychedelic closet
  • 47:29 – Brian answers the three questions he asks his guests on London Real TV

Featured

London Real

Silicon Real

London Real on Facebook

Twitter – @LondonRealTV

Dave Asprey on London Real

Resources

Flow Genome Project

Institute of HeartMath

40YearsofZen.com

Bulletproof

Bulletproof Coffee

Better Baby Book

Brain Octane™ Oil

Bulletproof Sleep Induction Mat

Sleep Cycle App

HRV Sense App

Transcripts

Click here to download a PDF of this transcript

Dave:             Today’s Cool Fact of the Day is that in a recent study, 19 baseball players from UC Riverside trained using a visual program for 25 minutes a day for only a month, for 30 days. The basic idea was they were going to train their visual cortex to process information quicker and more clearly. What happened is that the players had less strikeouts and they created more runs and they were able to increase their overall visual acuity but 31%, which is kind of cool. I’ve done some of my own vision hacking and I’ll be writing some stuff about that coming up here. The bottom line is that you can train yourself and train the lenses and the muscles in your eyes to focus better. I went from 20-60 back down to 20-15 in both eyes and this is after having had Lasik many years ago. It turns out you can really do things in a relative short amount of time just with the right exercises, so it’s not like you should just be doing CrossFit for your arms, you should be doing CrossFit for your eyes.

Today’s guest is from London. I’ve seen a lot of things online about how people would like it to be easier to find Bulletproof products in the UK. I’m working on making it easier to get them all over Europe and in the meantime check out Xbrain.co.uk. They’re expanding and you can get Bulletproof coffee beans, Brain Octane Oil and all the other upgraded stuff you’d expect to get.

Speaking of London, today’s guest is Brian Rose, the creator and host of London Real, a weekly talk show exploring human experience and challenging the status quo. He’s also the guy who started Silicon Real, a show dedicated to the London tech start-up scene. You guys may also know I’ve been on Brian Rose’s show before, last time I was in London and Brian’s just a cool dude. Brian, welcome to the show.

Brian:           Thanks, Dave. Thanks for having me. You know, this is, I think, the second podcast I’ve ever done, so you’re lucky to have me. I don’t do any media typically.

Dave:             That’s because you’re always on your own camera, right? You’ve got some pretty amazing …

Brian:           I never have to answer the hard questions. I just get to ask them, which is pretty easy, so this should be fun.

Dave:             Well, you’re kind of an interesting guy because you live in the UK but you’re a Californian. You’re also an MIT engineer by training, you’ve been a CFO at a New York start-up and you’ve been a banker, one of those one percent guys. You’re into Brazilian Jujitsu and you’re basically kind of a crazy guy. Is that an accurate way of describing your career path?

Brian:           I guess no one thinks that they’re that interesting, but now that you give me that CV, I guess it does sound kind of peculiar. Yeah, all that’s true. It’s weird because, you know, London Real is hosted by an American, so it’s kind of a weird thing, but I’ve been here for 12 years now. I’m a dual citizen, so I’ve got a passport, British and an American. Yeah, I’m here to stay. A lot of Yanks, when they come over here, they kind of want to get back home sooner or later, but I came here for finance, originally I think in ’97, and then back for good in 2002. It’s kind of morphed into, now I guess I’m a talk show host, I guess you would call me. It’s hard to figure out what my role is.

I have been a CFO, I was in the dot com bubble in New York City in 1999 to 2002. Yeah. Brazilian Jujitsu Black Belt, I’m sorry, Purple Belt, Black Belt some day maybe. Silicon Real is now the show about London technology start-up scene, so we’ve just shot our 42nd episode there. It’s kind of like a mini London Real, but just tech start-ups. We say it’s about the people, so it’s like about the people behind the tech.

It’s busy over here. We do two shows a week just like you. You’re a busy guy.

Dave:             You know how hard it is to do two shows a week, but you do them live, too. I record and then broadcast, but just setting it up, doing the research and all that, I find it’s a full-time job almost, to do two shows. How much of your week do you spend on podcasting, not just the actual act of talking like we’re talking right now, but going out there and just making your brain ready to ask intelligent questions. You’ve had Richard Branson on there, is that right?

Brian:           We didn’t have Branson on. We’ve …

Dave:             Soon, man, soon.

Brian:           Yeah. We had Neil deGrasse Tyson on recently.

Dave:             Peter Sage, guys like that.

Brian:           Peter Sage, yeah. Neil deGrasse Tyson was here and then a week later he’s posting a selfie with President Obama on his Twitter feed. I’m like, okay, I guess I’m one degree of separation away from the White House. We’ve had some fun names, like Tim Farriss and Graham Hancock. It’s weird because if you’re a person, I can probably mention a guest that you’ll care about because we probably had someone on that you’ll find really interesting.

When we first came out, we actually said to anyone in the world, if you want to start your own podcast, you can call it your city Real, we’ll try to help you out, just send me a pilot. And we got a bunch of people that started. There was a Melbourne Real, there was a Midwest Real that’s still around, LA Real, Limerick Real, all these other Reals and I think what people found hard after the first few weeks is just booking the guests and keeping it going. It takes a lot of time and a lot of prep, which I’m sure you know.

Dave:             Yeah. Bulletproof has passed about 110, 115 episodes now. It’s a lot of work, but London Real, where are you guys in terms of …

Brian:           We are at 145 on London Real and I guess 42, 43 on Silicon Real, so yeah, they just keep, I mean, I’ll have a hundred people in this studio this year and I’ll get to sit down and really meet them. It’s weird, when you have a podcast with someone, I think it’s like knowing them maybe for like four weeks or going out with them maybe 10 times. I can meet a guy and then I sit him down on the show, we’ll turn the cameras on and I can ask him the most intimate questions about himself and he has to answer them. You get this real bond and I call it, when the podcast is over, I turn the cameras off and we end up having this conversation, and it’s kind of like glow time. I’m not comparing this to after sex, but it’s kind of like after the show then you can have this real conversation where they’re like, “Yeah, this is what I think and this is what I couldn’t say on camera and this is…” You end up building some really important relationships. You were here just under a year ago. You were here in May of last year and on the back of that, we’ve become partners and …

Dave:             Oh, yeah.

Brian:           Big friends of everything you guys are doing. It’s funny, that all started really from the show and we probably would never have had that connection if you hadn’t have been here in the studios and hung out with us for a couple of hours.

Dave:             Yeah, the honesty, sort of the idea that you’re just going to say things as they are, a lot of people didn’t know it, but after I finished the show with you I was kind of wiped out. I’d been in London for a whole week. I was meeting eight or nine people a day, giving them like a one-hour talk, mostly investment bankers and guys like that. I was coming off of like five days of intense, like literally, have a meeting, run down the stairs, go to the next meeting, talk about Bulletproof Diet and mental performance for these guys with lots and lots of zeros in their bank accounts, and it was just like rinse and repeat. I was kind of thrashed, I was using a little bit of nicotine as a lozenge and on Bulletproof Coffee and all this kind of stuff and it’s like, man, that’s cool. I was, I thought, holding it together pretty well. I was a little tired, but afterwards I remember we were chatting and I’m like, man, all right, I think I’m about done, because it was the end of this crazy week. Yeah, you’re right. You just say the things that you wouldn’t have said on the air.

Brian:           Yeah, it’s a real hour of honesty. People have said it before, you can’t really fake 90 minutes, because sooner or later, you can script eight minutes or 15 minutes, especially if you edit something, but if you’re here in my studio, I’m going to ask some hard questions. You get the essence of someone. Your show, people still watch your show, people still Tweet me about your show. The shelf life of your show is going to be years from now, people will be watching that. It’s a really interesting medium. I think we’re only starting to understand it right now.

Dave:             Well said. One of things I wanted to ask you about, on this show we have somewhere around right over five million downloads for Bulletproof Executive Radio. A lot of times I’m talking about the latest in ketosis or butter or nutrition or human performance, but not as much about some of the career stuff. You and I have something in common, that we’ve both come from one industry, in my case tech, in your case I guess tech and then banking, and gone into like a totally different life, really, as podcast hosts and bloggers and sort of this weird online media thing. A lot of people ask me, “How did you do it?” There’s like this huge overhang of people who want to do the same thing, so what was it like when you went from going banking to podcast host? How did you do that? What made it work?

Brian:           It was pretty terrifying. I was nine years at the same company here in London, it was called ICAP PLC, it’s a FTSE 100 company and I was on the phone everyday connecting different major banks, so I would close a deal between Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan in a credit derivative instrument and I would do 30, 40 of those a day and it was kind of a 12-hour day. I would entertain guys at night, we’d go on weekends. In retrospect I could make it sound glamorous but after a while it gets kind of tough. I went to the best restaurants in London and I went to the Monoco GP and skied in Verbier and da da da da da da, but at the end of the day, it wasn’t very creative.

I think a lot of people say that in finance, is it’s not very creative. You know as you work for a big company, it can be in any sector, after a while you’re not being creative anymore and I just had enough. When I told my clients I was leaving, I was like, “I’m not really feeling this anymore, ” and one of my clients said, “Brian, you haven’t been feeling this for two years.” I was like, “Really? It shows?” They know. Most people can tell. I was just phonying it in, I was dragging myself to work everyday. I quit. When I look at it in retrospect, it was actually about four or five months after I started meditating twice a day and I don’t know if that had something to do with it, I don’t know if my subconscious brain was taking everything in, but I walked out of there and I really had no idea what I was going to do. I was just completely done with the industry for a while.

I didn’t plan on doing this, I didn’t start doing this. About nine months later my Brazilian Jujitsu instructor and I were hanging out during the day because no one else hangs out during the day except for martial arts instructors and unemployed bankers, and I was listening to a lot of podcasts and we’d walk around the West End of London and we’d talk about philosophy or about girls or about health or whatever. We’d have a great conversation for two hours and I’d say. “That would make a good podcast.” I remember saying, “We should start a podcast,” and he was like, “Yeah. Let’s do it. Let’s do it.” I was like, okay, as soon as I start a podcast, I have to finally tell people I’m not an ex-banker, I’m now a podcaster out of my house. I really had to get my own self-dialogue, I had to get it in my head at one point just to go out and do it. We started the show October, 2011.

Dave:             Well, congrats. It’s been a successful transition for you. London Real has become, I think, a very respectable and respect-worthy podcast. It’s cool. I love it, too, that you’re in an international city so you get all these guests. I’m up here on Vancouver Island and I’d love to do some live stuff, but that aren’t that many people who come up here except for vacation. I’m in the process of building a biohacking facility, so I’ll be able to lure good guests up here.

Brian:           Okay. Oh, up where you are.

Dave:             Oh, yeah. I’ll be like, “Come on over and we’re going to hack the crap out of your brain and then we’ll do a podcast. They’ll have electrode glue left on their face. It won’t be that bad, but I’m hoping I can get some live guests. In the meantime, Skype is awesome, right?

Brian:           Yeah, Skype is awesome and you can get some great flow with Skype. Definitely. I’m curious how you find it when you get people up there, if you find the dynamic in the studio is different and you can have both, obviously. We’ve always done shows being with people live in the studio and I remember the first Graham Hancock interview we did. It took us like five months to get him here or six months, and he lives in Bath, which is nearby, but he wanted to do it at his house and then he wanted to do it on Skype. We were a new show and I kept having to say no, it has to be here, it has to be here.

Once he got here, he really opened up really well. It’s worked out well for us, but we’re lucky, we’re in London. We can get flows of people. We can also be lucky because if you’re an American and you’re coming to London, then you’re kind of out of your element. It’s not like I’m competing against FOX and CNN and things, and so when they’re over here it’s kind of novelty and they’ll be like, “Oh, yeah. We’ll drop by London Real.” It’s been really lucky to be that kind of an international city, but it’s hard. Midwest Real is one of the shows that started kind of with our Real name. They’ve done a fantastic job, but it’s hard. I mean, how many people are rolling through the Midwest on a regular basis?

Dave:             Yeah, they don’t call them the fly-over states for no reason. No offense, my friends in the fly-overs states.

Brian:           Yes. Yeah.

Dave:             I’ve had two guests come up to my house up here. Abel James came up from Fat-Burning Man and Chris Ryan, the guy who wrote Sex at Dawn, a book about …

Brian:           Oh, yeah.

Dave:             Pollution and polyamory and things like that. I prefer hanging out with people live because you get that nice post-interview discussion and you really get to connect. I prefer to do it live and if people are going to be up in sunny Victoria, especially during summer, I wish you would be guests. I’m always game for doing that. I just have a camera guy come out. Part of that, too, is you’ve got a whole studio and I don’t have a studio right now. I’m working on making more of one.

Brian:           Well, if you had that biohacking facility you can lure people up there. You might be able to lure me over there.

Dave:             That’d be cool. I’m actually really excited, so I’m working on making that a reality. Give me another few months and I should be able to give people a reason to come up here.

Brian:           You guys aren’t slowing down, man. It’s funny because some people ask me, today someone said, asked me about Bulletproof, and they’re like, “Yeah, that’s that coffee company,” and I was like, “You know what? They’re a lot more than a coffee company. There’s a lot going on over there.” You guys have so many new things, new products, podcasts, all this crazy stuff coming out. I don’t know, it’s been a lot of fun to be kind of a part of it over the last, what, 12 months or so.

Dave:             I appreciate the way you demo the coffee for people and all, and it’s cool. It is more than coffee and it’s human performance is what I’m most interested in, largely for my own sake, so I like to help others. If it helps you perform better, it’s something that I’m going to be interested in, but it also kind of confuses people because, they’re like, “Wait. How is the relationship between whole body vibration, brain hacking equipment that sticks to your head and coffee?” There’s a common thread in there, it’s just not one you probably thought about before. It seems to be working, helping people. This company wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the Internet, because in what single place would you find people who are looking at all these different angles? There’s a community, a pretty strong one, of people who really are dedicated, not just to feel-good self-improvement, but quantitative, measurable stuff like that.

You’re one of those guys, so what is your next thing? How are you going to grow and develop professionally or personally coming up next? How’s biohacking fit into all that?

Brian:           Yeah, it’s a great question. I guess I’m pretty new to biohacking. I mentioned that meditation piece about three years ago. I’ve been training for a long time as far as martial arts and kind of fitness for maybe ten years, but I wouldn’t call that biohacking. I was experimenting with my diet, but I wasn’t doing very specific changes and trying to get that feedback loop. I started the meditation about three years ago, I’ve been on Bulletproof now for about a year as far as the coffee, and I’ve been doing a lot of sleep hacking pieces on the back of what you guys have done, and speaking with Zack Garcia, your head of marketing. He put me in touch with the sleep cycle app and now I’m using the sleep induction mat every night.

Dave:             Oh, that’s cool.

Brian:           Yeah, I love that thing. I was on it last night and, we did a sleep hacking video with my step-daughter and my girlfriend and my ten-year-old tracks her sleep at night and I do and my girlfriend, so three people are tracking our sleep on our iPhones every night. The little one loves it. She’s always comparing her percentage to mine. She sleeps 11 hours, so she always gets like 96%.

Dave:             That’s like cheating. It’s like stuffing the ballot box.

Brian:           I told her that. I’m like, “This is a total fix,” but she wasn’t feeling that. People really like that stuff and so I’ve been really enjoying the sleep hacking. Based on the the Ayahuasca I did a  couple years ago, I kind of went gluten-free on the back of that and so I’ve been kind of  trending toward a lot of your Bulletproof Diet stuff. Every time I hear different things you’re doing, I think more about that and incorporating different pieces of, choosing the right foods and I’ve read your Better Baby Book and all these different things. Zack tells me he takes your Brain Octane Oil to the sushi restaurant with him instead of soy and he puts sea salts on that or Himalayan salt. Little things like that.

Dave:             I think I taught him those things.

Brian:           Yeah.

Dave:             It’s like the lifestyle tweaks. We’re like, wait, what was the difference in the quality of my consciousness from putting on this stuff that contains excitatory neuron transmitters, the soy sauce as well as quite a lot of histamine, usually. So you’re like, did I feel differently when I had this really good piece of sushi that now tasted more like sushi or more like soy sauce? I would have never have thought there was a difference but there was. So you’ve gotten into that, right?

Brian:           Yeah, I’ve gotten very much into that and I kind of want to keep expanding. I just feel like I’m getting a little bit better. I think it helps with age. I wish I’d started earlier. I wish I’d started in my 20s. There’s a lot of recklessness, as I remember, in my mid-20s, you know.

Dave:             What you can remember of your mid-20s, you’re saying?

Brian:           Yeah. I just remember it, I don’t know if I was trying to push my body to the limits or if I was trying to, some days, kill myself or I don’t know what I was trying to do, but I don’t remember thinking about ways I would biohack myself. I believe if the information was out there, I would trended toward it a bit sooner, maybe by the time I was 30 as opposed to by the time I was 40. I know you’ve talked about that before, too. I think it’s just something, it’s interesting. My ten-year-old, she’s thinking about her sleep now, so what’s that going to do to her in her teens and 20s? She now knows that eight hours of sleep is important. These are big steps. Or gluten-free, she’s now thinking about gluten in her diet.

Dave:             It’s a gift to give that to a kid. But how did you go from Ayahuasca to gluten? Just so people who are listening know, Ayahuasca is a hallucinogen that’s used as a sacrament with shamanic medical traditions. It’s a pretty strong hallucinogen related to DMT, which is the active ingredient in it. Just if you’re getting caught up on that, and just in the interest of full disclosure, I’ve done Ayahuasca in a shamanic ceremony in South America about a decade ago, and it does tend to do things to you. Oh, yeah.

Brian:           Yeah, I think I missed asking you that when you were here, and I read it in your bio later and I was like, “Damn, I missed that.” You’d be surprised how many people have done it. I had Dorian Yates here, who was the six-time Mr. Olympia, almost one of our biggest episodes ever, it’s been viewed almost 300,000 times.

Dave:             Wow.

Brian:           An hour into the show, he’s blowing my mind when he talks about, I mean, let’s be honest, his own biohacking …

Dave:             Yeah.

Brian:           To become Mr. Olympia. He said he would never go out past 11 at night. Obviously his sleep, his diet, his training, everything, and then he’s like, “Oh, yeah, I went on an Ayahuasca ceremony in Brazil,” and I was like, “Dorian Yates is in my house talking about Ayahuasca?” You’d be surprised. I’ve had other people tell me off-camera that they’ve done it and they’re going to do it, so it’s interesting. Typically people go to Peru and do it, it’s a brew that’s been used there for, I think they’ve proved thousands of years, based on some archaeological evidence. It’s something that we did early on, on London Real and it was controversial.

To be honest, Dave, before I did that episode I was like, am I ever going to be allowed back in the banking world if I want to go? It was one of those pieces where I was like, okay, is the financial services authority going to be, eh? Am I burning bridges? Ultimately we had to do it and we did the ceremony in the UK and we were quite open about it. We did a before and after and it was, to date, one of our best episodes. I think people really like to see when you put yourself out there.

Part of the ceremony was going on a diet and the diet was really restrictive. Part of that was gluten-free, sugar-free, caffeine-free, alcohol-free, drug-free, spice-free. It’s pretty limiting. I think it might be a bit of an extreme case, but it was great to do for ten days as a test. Once you drink the Ayahuasca, you come out of it, part of you tells you that, I don’t know, maybe you should stay away from those grains. It was weird, Dave. I could have gone right back on it, but since then I’ve really steered clear of it and I’ve been a much happier person since.

Dave:             With biofeedback, with the kind of internal awareness that you get from using Ayahuasca in a ceremonial, spiritual context, not as a recreational drug, which it’s not. If you develop that certain sort of self-awareness, some of that goes into the Bulletproof Diet. People are always complaining, like, “Dave, why do you say no garlic in the Bulletproof Diet?. Well, I go like, there’s some historical precedent for it, but I can see it on an EEG what it does to my brainwaves, but as someone who’s learned to achieve some advanced Zen states from 40 years a Zen and all that, my brain won’t do what I can normally do with it when I eat garlic. It’s just like that. Garlic’s a powerful medicinal herb and we should use it in such a way, but if you’re medicating with it every single day, you might be missing out on some of the nuances of  what your consciousness can do.

I don’t necessarily want to be restrictive the way a shaman would be, but I’d like to do is map out, how much mental clarity and focus do you want? Let’s move your diet in this direction. Maybe not go all the way here, you might just be in the middle, but at least you have a direction, you have a road map to follow. You want to address inflammation, you want to do all these things, so I was intrigued when  I first learned the dietary recommendations that come from practices like Jainism and things out of India, things out of Tibet and then things out of the shamanic things happening in South America. There’s some interesting common overlapping threads around over-agitating the body, which effects the mind. I’m impressed that you picked up on the gluten thing as a result of using Ayahuasca. That’s pretty cool.

Brian:           Yeah. From what I understand, you’re all about feedback.

Dave:             Yeah.

Brian:           That’s what you’ve done. I know from your early days the feedback was, when I drink this coffee, I feel ill. When I eat gluten, I know you’re very sensitive to these things. That’s kind of why we’re even talking about Bulletproof is because you’ve managed to identify these sensitivities you  had. There’s  so much going on in our subconscious about, well everything around us we’re looking at and then, obviously, ingesting, so it is about that feedback and we might not be able to explain maybe today why a specific substance makes you do something, but if the feedback is there, and [inaudible 00:24:47] said, thousand of years of multiple traditions around the world have tended to trend in the same way, then we can probably get some information from that and kind of act on it.

The Ayahuasca, I have a scientific mind, I have a mechanical engineering degree from MIT. I was taught, if it’s not on the paper, then if it’s not science and proven, then it can’t happen. I’m here to stay that I just avoided a lot of foods after that Ayahusasca ceremony and gluten was one of them, certain pork products and other meats that just didn’t feel very clean, I’ve avoided as well. I don’t know, there’s something there, even though I can’t explain it.

Dave:             That says a lot. It’s actually harder for engineers to do that. At a certain point for me, I just realized, okay, I’m doing all the hard science things that should result in, my case, weight loss and other things like that. I’m like, they’re just not working. That was kind of a scary thing because I followed the rules, I did what science says I should do, and it turns out the science was accurate but the assumptions behind the science were wrong. In my case the assumption that the calorie in equals X amount of weight gained and this sort of calories in, calories out thing. That assumption was wrong and that is not the way to sustainably gain or lose weight. You can certainly induce a famine but it doesn’t work as a long-term lifestyle. In fact, it’s highly destructive.

It’s fascinating when you take those things and you deconstruct the assumptions and you figure out  what happened. It sounds like Ayahuasca for you might have changed some of your assumptions, which the first was, it has to be on paper and when you were done with it, you’re like, I have to feel it and see it on paper. Am I reading that right or you’re just more, I have to feel it and hopefully see it on paper?

Brian:           I think that’s true. I think it’s kind of both. I think part of me just kind of was repulsed by the certain of the foods and then as I research a bit more and look past, you have to remember, I grew up in the ’70s and my mom gave me skim milk …

Dave:             Mine too.

Brian:           In California.

Dave:             Oh, yeah.

Brian:           Yeah, you, too. It was all about low-fat, non-fat and all this whole mantra of kind of the ’70s and maybe the ’80s. We look back on that now and it’s, well, especially from the Bulletproof Diet, it looks ridiculous. Now I might not understand why I’m staying away from these foods, but we’re getting more information now and you publish a lot of that on your site, and we’ll probably have some more in the future. Once I’ve lived through one of these diet cycles, and we’ve seen them all, whether it Atkins or Paleo or this or that, you kind of see as a society we necessarily kind of get on the band wagon. I guess you’re a contrarian, kind of, in what you’re doing, but you probably feel very good about it based on your research, right?

Dave:             I’m a contrarian, although it’s becoming more mainstream. Sweden just changed their recommendations, so now, oh, you should eat a high-saturated fat diet, sorry, we were wrong. When things like that happen, I’m like, I like to think that I’m a thought leader there, but I’m also sure, my email signature says I guarantee that something I’ve said on my website’s wrong. I don’t know what it is, I’m saying all the things that I know to be true to the very best of my ability and the ones that are super scientifically rigorous, I’d cull those out, the ones where it’s like garlic, there’s a whole lot of hints and there’s a lot of observation there and there’s an EEG experience with more than just my head, I’m like, okay, it’s good enough for me to make that recommendation. If you love garlic, just do it.

It’s one of those things where there’s always going to be improvements in our knowledge and our practice, and there’s the whole genetic thing coming in. I just wish when I was, you know, 20, that someone had told me all this stuff, because I was 300 pounds and unhealthy and my brain wasn’t working and I was angry all the time and all that stuff. Literally, that’s the whole reason I’m writing this is like maybe if a couple people read it, it would help them. Then they could avoid all the crap that I went through. It’s kind of a win no matter what from my perspective if ten people read the blog.

Brian:           Let me ask you a question. You live in America, I’m over here in the UK, but we read about the obesity issues and Americans’ health and right now, the equivalent of you,  has all this information from where you were, say, ten years ago or 12 years or 15 years ago, that people have all this information but will they use it? Will they act upon it? Or do you find that the trend is kind of going the other way?

Dave:             I live in Canada and I travel to the US all the time. I have people down there and I do my work in the US. People always have access to more information than they’re going to act on. In fact, if you looked around me and you could see all the crap stacked up here, biohacking stuff. I have this new temperature control, cold control glove that’s been sitting here for like a month and I haven’t had a chance to play with it, but I’d like to putting my hand in ice water with basically a way to turn my temperature down on my body pretty heavily before I go to sleep. It’s like an athletic recovery thing but I want to use it for sleep hacking. I just don’t have time. I have over here like an exercise prescription for basically changing the balance between the hemispheres of my brain, and I’m supposed to be turning off my right eye and changing my sensory input in my right nostril and then doing things with my left hand. Honestly, I know that I would probably benefit from that, I just don’t have, I don’t even want to say I don’t have the time, I just have a lot of stuff and I’m going to pick and choose.

The goal behind the recommendations I’m making on the site is, I’m trying to identify the lowest hanging fruit so that when people, if you have five minutes to spend on doing something good for yourself, what would you do? How would you stack rank it? If you have six minutes, what do you fill the next minute with? That is a big challenge and some of it’s personalized, but even the diet itself, it’s a spectrum, right? Don’t eat perfectly, but you have a choice between squeeze margarine and coconut oil. Well, I’m pretty sure coconut oil is a better choice and if you like them both and it didn’t cost you anything to choose one versus the other, just having the knowledge of which one is superior is going to change the quality of your day. It’s building and ends what’s painless, that’s kind of the challenge for me and that’s where I’m trying to take the Bulletproof blog so people can just go, “Oh, that’s just an obvious move. I’ll make that.” That make sense?

Brian:           It totally makes sense. I was wondering, like when I think about Bulletproof Coffee, it seems like the Trojan Horse. I was wondering if this was by design. I’m guessing it wasn’t, but it’s funny because if you tell people about biohacking in a general sense, they might start to go the sleep, but if you say, “Try this coffee that tastes brilliant,” as we would say in the UK. I serve it here on the show pretty much to every single guest and I’m at 100% approval rating. People are like, “This tastes awesome.” This is when I make it in my kitchen, I put butter in there and I show them the MCT oil and I get some funny looks from people. They’re like, “Um, are you sure?” Once they taste it, they’re in. I was just curious if you ever thought that that would be maybe the Trojan Horse to get people, because once they taste something that makes them feel good and it tastes good, it seems like it would open their mind to explore other pieces of hacking their bio. I guess I’m asking, was that always a plan with you, or was it kind of a, I don’t know, serendipitous …

Dave:             The goal for calling it Bulletproof and the state of high performance is that I really want people to just once experience how well their brain can work, how good they can feel, how much energy they can have. There’s lots of ways to do that. I’m working with the Flow Genome Project on a couple things right now. You could try an extreme sport, there’s all these different things, but if you want to really reliably put someone in that, “Well, I’m liberated from food cravings and I just got this massive, my brain works for the first time, ” stacking the stuff the way I designed it in Bulletproof Coffee where you’ve got the different lipids and you’ve recreated these [mycells 00:32:54] and you’ve done these things. You’ve eliminated the toxins that are common in coffee that have an anti-effect compared to what you want.

Just getting them to feel that one precious moment of clarity, like, “Oh my God, that’s what I want,” and that turns on the desire for biohacking, because you want to feel that way every single day. It’s not like being high or something, it’s just like I feel like I’m fully myself and all of my faculties are there. That’s it. I would use electricity, I would use electromagnetic frequencies or color therapy or anything else. This is just the fastest way I know of to be, like, there, that’s how you’re supposed to feel. Now what are you going to do to feel like that all the time?

Brian:           So, it just works. It is the one thing you can do in an instant to get people to, I guess, understand what you’re talking about as far as their own personal performance. Potential biohacking.

Dave:             That’s what it’s there for and there’s a lot going on from a biochemical perspective. When they get the grass-fed butter and when they get the additional energy in the brain that comes from burning fat even though they’re still consuming carbohydrates and the way we’re blending it and the fact that it’s these MCTs and really, with the Brain Octane Oil, it’s even not MCT oil, it just one of the oils out of coconut. It has that strong brain-boosting effect and they’re like, “Not only am I thinking really fast, I got all my work done, but I wasn’t tempted by the bagel.”

In fact, one of my friends in the UK, she was such a food craver that she didn’t have any food in her house and she’d go down the street to Tesco and get one of the little pre-made meals they have and she’d go to work and she’d know all the candy drawers so she could go and get a piece of candy. She tried Bulletproof Coffee while I was there for the first time and she was like, “I went all day and I didn’t have any candy,” like it was a whole different world for her because her biology was so primed for that. For her it was the experience of no food cravings, like owning her life, that happened in a day. I just want people to feel that state where, they’re like, “Wow. What do I do with all this?” When you start asking yourself that question, you’re going to be nicer to the people around you. That was kind of what was behind it and when I started making them like, “I want coffee that makes me feel like this all the time. What’s wrong with other coffee? Why do I feel like a zombie some days?” There’s a lot of biohacking there. It’s an interesting question.

Brian:           Yeah, when you talk about that, like not craving sweets, in fact, there’s another thing which, I don’t even know if you can quantify the science that makes it not happen, but it’s funny because you don’t even notice some of the things that you’re doing differently. She obviously noticed because she could probably watch herself all the time picking up those sweets. It gets a lot like meditation, a bunch of these other things, is that you know doing them makes you behave in a much better way, you’re just not always able to quantify exactly what it is.

Dave:             It’s like that with smart drugs, too. I first learned this with Piracetam a long time ago. This is one of the very safe smart drugs I’ve been taking for a long time. I took it and I’m like, “Piracetam doesn’t work,” it’s no good, so I stopped taking it. Then the next day I’m like, had to think of a word. It didn’t come to me automatically, and I realized my memory wasn’t quite where I wanted it and then I took the drugs again. I realized when things work, it feels so natural that it’s not obvious. Like, “Oh, yeah, this is how I’m supposed to be feeling.” You’ll notice a degradation in performance more easily than you’ll notice feeling like you’re supposed to be feeling all the time because it’s just so natural.

Once you get used to being in the Bulletproof State of High Performance, you’re like, “Okay, this is how it is,” and when you’re not in it, you’re like, “That’s irritating. I had to stop and think and I didn’t have the endurance I expected, I couldn’t stay awake, whatever else, my focus drifted, because that just doesn’t happen.” I’ll tell you, if I can’t find a word, I’m digging and it doesn’t come to me automatically, I make note of that because that means I did something wrong in the previous 24 hours. Especially coming from where I used to be cognitively, I’m amazed to always have access to that, my memory [inaudible 00:36:56] works all the time. If not, it’s a bug, it’s a glitch and there’s something wrong and it can be hacked.

Brian:           Right. Right. As we, when humans experiment on themselves, because by definition we taint the experimental result, and I was wondering if you, after all these years, are pretty good at monitoring your own well-being, memory, all these little pieces, or do you sometimes get  it wrong, or do you sometimes have to use like a device, whether it’s your heartbeat or a temperature feedback or something, to make sure you notice reactions when you try to hack yourself?

Dave:             I use devices whenever it’s possible and convenient.

Brian:           That’s the purest form, scientifically, right?

Dave:             It is the purest form scientifically, but there’s some things we don’t know how to measure. Take heart rate variability, which is something that you’ve done as well, right?

Brian:           Yeah.

Dave:             After we talked about it and all. Heart rate variability doesn’t algorithm. Someone had to figure out that it’s useful to know the spacing between your heartbeats and to map the spacing of the last heartbeat with the one before it and to compare those. There’s math in there. That’s why they call it heart math, right?

Brian:           Right.

Dave:             The problem is, before that math you could also sit and do the breathing exercises and practice forgiveness or open-heart meditation, you could feel it in your body and you could know when you’re doing it. It was just, it took years of teaching to do it. Meditation, going back to the Buddhists and all that, is really the art of becoming your own biotic instrument where you don’t have to have external sensors. It’s just easier and faster with sensors because when the sensor beeps, you know, like, “That beep corresponds with a twitch in my left shoulder. Wait, that twitch in my left shoulder is correlated with the brain state, so this is a reliable indicator.” I’ve found that my own awareness went up very rapidly when I did 40 Years of Zen and heart rate variability training, other forms of neurofeedback and  all these things, much more rapidly than they would have if I just sat and meditated and did yoga, which I’ve also spent a lot of time doing.

Brian:           I know you’ve done the 40 years of Zen. We could probably talk an hour just about that, but I was wondering if you found any correlations between, say, Ayahuasca ceremony, 40 years of Zen and maybe like heavy meditational or like a year or two?

Dave:             There’s huge correlations. Forty years of Zen, for people who are not familiar with that, it’s a A-channel EEG neurofeedback done over the course of a week that teaches you to put your brain in the same state as someone who’s done 20 to 40 years of daily Zen practice. It’s correlated with increases in intelligence and creativity and focus. I’ve been through five and a half weeks of this training, and am about to do another week of it. I bring some of my clients through it. I can tell you I’ve had more hallucinations with neurofeedback in 40 Years of Zen than I have on Ayahuasca or DMT or psychedelic mushrooms used in a spiritual ceremony. I’m not a super heavy psychedelics every weekend kind of guy.

Brian:           I don’t know anyone that does that.

Dave:             Yeah, you have to be really kind of messed up for that, but once a year in the right setting with the right intent  I think can be beneficial. There’s actually really good evidence for Ayahuasca and even more so for medicinal psychedelic mushrooms, where they treat PTSD and they do some other things that are really cool. Not being, you know, “Hey, let’s all get high,” at all from that perspective, I’ve had more progress from holotropic breathing, which is another hallucinogenic thing without drugs and from 40 Years of Zen than I have from Ayahuasca or DMT or mushrooms, but I think they’re all valuable and even sitting in a dark room for ten days in Vipassana, we’re all circling the same basic truths and the same basic knowledge and self-awareness. There are many paths to get there but I  think there’s definitely some relationships and some correlations there. What’s you take? You’ve done a lot of meditation, you do martial arts, you’ve done Ayahuasca. It’s almost like I could ask you the same.

Brian:           It’s an interesting point you make. I think also you’ve probably  trained your mind over the many, many years to where when you go into 40 Years of Zen, you’re ready to go to different places and you can relax your mind to go to these places, where I would say a newbie or a first-timer, I’m sure they would have some break-throughs but maybe not from the hallucination standpoint. Maybe so. You know, all the experts that I’ve had on the show, whether it comes to Graham Hancock or people on DMT or psilocybin, all of the smart guys, even Tim Farriss, does what he calls an ego reset every year where he goes and takes a large dose of psilocybin. He’s been talking about that for years.

Dave:             He’s a cool dude.

Brian:           He’s a cool dude, yeah. He was great when he was on here and I know you guys are in touch. He was saying that before it was something being popular to be said. All the people I know, including myself, it’s something that you go, you take a look at what’s going on, you try to get some lessons. I think any more than every three or six months, I wouldn’t even understand it. I think it’s too much information to process. Its probably, after you do 40 Years of Zen, you want to come back and then observe and process all of that kind of new information and the just see how your own subconscious mind and self is changing, because a lot of times you don’t even know what you’ve learned. It’s applying that.

I find sometimes with psychedelics, people can get really caught up in this new world or  these visions or these speaking with aliens, but ultimately we all live in this world and this quote-unquote real world and we all have to deal  with each other in this world. I think you have to bring those lessons back here. I think psychedelics can be great, especially for people that have no idea that they even have a consciousness, that they have no idea that everything is just a signal and it’s nice to just perturb it, as Terence McKenna would say or Graham Hancock, to where once you’ve perturbed it, you know that you’re in something, kind of like a fish doesn’t know what water is, and you don’t know what your conscious is until you give it a bit of a twang.

Then maybe you can start looking at things differently and starting to understand that maybe you’re  not in charge of your brain. Maybe you’re not in charge of everything you think you’re in charge of. I think that’s of bit of what biohacking is as well. I think biohacking in a way is saying, “Wait a second. My body and my mind might be doing it’s own thing that I’m not completely aware of, so let me just do these things. Let me meditate. Let me eat this, let me do that.” And then oh, all of a sudden, “Wow. It’s great. I can now control things so much better.” It’s kind of all interrelated. I ask a lot of people here, whether they’re health people or business professionals or guys that preach success, sooner or later I ask them if they have touched psychedelics because there is something about questioning your own being or your own wants and desires that ultimately is related to consciousness. It’s been a theme of our show, but by no means what we’re about.

Dave:             It’s interesting that we have that in common, and so many of the high performers I know, if I’m just willing to drop a hint about are there smart drugs or hallucinogenic stuff, they’re willing to talk about it. In the very early days of LinkedIn, I was one of the first Silicon Valley guys to embrace that. I put modafinil and yoga and meditation in my LinkedIn description [cross talk 00:44:23] which you just wouldn’t do back then, right? All of a sudden people started opening up, so I think it kind of takes a certain set of balls to ask a guest on a show, “Do you use hallucinogens, what [cross talk 00:44:34]

Brian:           The trick is, it’s kind of the psychedelic closet and it’s really weird. We’ve had a lot of people on the show and it’s like, what can people do? Should they ask their politicians to legalize this, legalize that? Most people say the biggest thing is to come out of that closet, so whether that means that you talk openly about smart drugs, which is something you did early on, something Tim Farriss was quite open about when he was on the show, or just to come out.

We’ve had the UFC fighter in here, Dan Hardy, and he was openly talking about his Ayahuasca experience, his mushroom experiences, and afterwards, I was like, “Dan, what are you doing?” He’s a commentator now for the UFC. He’s in international shows over here and that was a year ago and he’s like, “Brian, you know, I have to be honest about everything.” He’s like, “That’s the way I’ve found the best experiences, I’ve met the best people,” so he’s like, “I’m just going to be open about this.” The more you see people doing that, I just think we get bigger and bigger. There is the occasional guest that doesn’t want to go on record, because there are still some stigmas to it and it might take away from their message if they start mentioning that something else is involved.

Dave:             There’s also some risks, too. I think some people are concerned. I know a lot of people will use hallucinogens recreationally. I think that’s outright dangerous and I’ve seen people harm themselves that way. If you’re too enthusiastic about it, especially for younger people, I think you really can do some core damage that requires a lot of repair if you’re not careful. There’s that kind of precautionary thing like, let’s talk about it but maybe not overly encourage it, because it is a dangerous thing even though it’s a very beneficial thing, too.

Brian:           Yeah, and I think I probably, I’m lucky or I’m a bit restricted here because I get all these people that come through that have thought long and hard about these things and written books. They’re usually not those people, but something Dan Hard said when he was here is that, he’s like, “In Vegas I get a lot of people that are serial DMT smokers and they’ve done it like a hundred times.” For the record, I’ve smoked DMT once, it’s our biggest episode ever, for some weird reason over 300,000 people watched it on YouTube. I did it once and that was enough. Dan was alarmed. He was like, “These people do it a hundred times and they’re really trying to get to this place.”

There’s something there to be concerned about and that’s a whole other question, whether we restrict that. I think it’s a great conversation to have so people know it’s something to think about. I never understood that side, but I never got into this until I was a bit older.

Dave:             Yeah, that’s a big difference. If I’d have been doing it when I was 16, I don’t know that it would have been a positive thing. Maybe it would have. Who knows?

We’re coming up on the end of the show, Brian, and I’m going to do something that I haven’t done before on the show. I always ask, what are your top three recommendations for performing better and being more bulletproof and kicking more ass, but I’m going to turn it around on you because you’ve got some questions that you ask at the end of your own show, on London Real.

First one, if you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old you, what advice would you give?

Brian:           Oh, man. I wasn’t sure if you were going to hit me with this. It’s funny because I rarely even think about the answer to that, but if you don’t know, that’s a question I pretty much ask every guest here on London Real.

Dave:             That’s why I’m doing it to you.

Brian:           Dave’s turning it around on me. The 20-year-old Brian was a sophomore, a junior at MIT. He was in a fraternity. He was studying really hard. I was having a good time, but I was about getting that 5.0 GPA or a 4.9 and I had to get everything right and I was looking at a career on Wall Street afterwards. I was super motivated, I was really intense. Quite honestly, I was really selfish, too, in retrospect. I think my first ten years, to a certain extent I was trying to put a square peg into a round hole. I needed to get out of my own way sometimes. Also I think I needed to give a bit more. Something we do now, it’s like the first thing I do, like when I met you, it was like, “Dave, come on the show and let’s do a show about you.” I get this great reaction from you, because you’re like, “Wow, I love these guys.” I wish I had done that sooner. I wish I had just thought, Brian, couple of things, two things. First of all, take it down a notch and maybe just try to get out of your own way, because you’re doing all the right things but then you’re ripping yourself down here and there. The second thing is, is try to help some other people and try to get a little back, because humans respond to that energy.

We had a guy on here by the name of Adam Grant and he’s the youngest tenured professor at Wharton Business School at U Penn. He has a book called…

Dave:             Go, Wharton. My alma mater.

Brian:           Oh, is it really? Oh, fantastic. He’s a really cool guy and he has a book called Give and Take and he said you can classify everyone into givers or takers or matchers, that are people who always kind of match up favors. Anyone who’s a giver hates a taker, and you’ve met a taker before in your life, and we’ve met takers. No one wants a taker because they want everything they can get out of you and they want to move on. I’ve got to think that maybe I was a bit of a taker when I was younger and I just think that I got a lot of that negative energy back at me. I got where I wanted to go, but I think it was just much harder. I think that’s the advice I would give to the 20-year-old and I definitely would not have taken that advice at 20.

Dave:             That’s the rub.

Brian:           Yeah, I would have told me to fuck right off.

Dave:             Damn hippies.

Brian:           “Shut up, old man.” That’s what I would say.

Dave:             What’s the best advice you ever have received? Another question you ask people.

Brian:           Wow, that is another one. You’re really hitting me cold here with this stuff. The best advice I’ve ever received, I’m trying to think of if I have an epiphany to be yourself or any of that thing. I think some of the best advice I’ve received, and this a weird way of putting it, I grew up with both of my grandparents were farmers and ranchers in, say, Colorado, Arizona. These guys grew up basically working the fields or working the ranch and there was no option to quit. I remember I interviewed my dad, which was like the precursor to London Real three of four years ago, and I interviewed him one time just with some cameras. I said to him, I was like, “Dad, did you ever think about quitting,” because he went to Cal Tech when he was younger and he got really horrible grades and almost flunked out, and I was like, “Did you ever think  about quitting?”

He’s like, “Brian, on the farm you don’t quit, because if you quit, you die.” You literally die. I think I grew up around these grandparents and then these parents where they never told me, “You can’t quit,” but it was in their DNA never to quit, so you would never, ever consider quitting. I think we just grew up watching these hard old men, grandparents, like the hard farmer’s hands. Nice guys, but it was never in their DNA to quit. I think I got that message subconsciously. For a young kid like me, that’s the only way I could have got that message. If you would have sat me down and told me that, I would have told you to fuck off. In a weird way, that’s probably the best advice I’ve ever gotten.

Dave:             That is an amazing answer, Brian, and you must know the last question I’m going to ask you for the end of the show. For young people watching, what advice would you give them if they want to not have a soulless career and then go off and be a broadcast host?

Brian:           That’s a great question. It’s funny. When I left finance I was like, oh, finance is the devil and it’s a horrible thing and all these kinds of things. Now that, I do this show now, Silicon Real and so I talk with start-ups every week. Some of these guys have three employees. Instagram had 15 people when it was sold for a billion dollars and so you get these companies where they scale so fast that you three guys out of college are making these big companies. I still think there’s real value in kind of going a traditional route and going and working for a big company and earning your stripes and being told what to do and not liking it.

I remember when I had my first week on Wall Street. Man, I got into this trading floor and there was 300 people on this floor. It was just a big intimidation place. It was like, “I’m going to sell these bonds and I can sell more bonds than you and my cock is bigger than you.” Everyone was dressed into really pretty suits and they were swearing like sailors. I didn’t know what to make of it, because no one ever taught me this at MIT. No one ever talked about posturing and politics. It was really hard to deal with and it was just ego-crushing on a regular basis. I saw people dressing other people down and yelling, but it was a great maturing process for me. I got tough and I got to know when someone was gaming you in the head. Now it’s really hard for people to kind of intimidate me on that level or even if a guest challenges me and calls me out,  I’m like, okay, I get it.

I think there is something for going that traditional route and so I don’t think there’s anything wrong with going to university, getting out of your hometown, getting away from Mom, because it gets you out of your comfort zone, go work for a big company, go pay your dues a bit. After that, I think, open your mind a little bit and go see what’s out there. Then go try to create something and build it yourself. I guess that’s my advice to people out there. I do think starting your own thing, whether it’s a blog or a podcast or even a business on the side, you’re going to learn so much. I’ve learned so much on this show, I’ve transformed notably. My own persona  has transformed so much just by having people over to a studio and asking them questions every week. It’s been great for me and if you can learn something from that, then God bless.

Dave:             Amazing answers to your own questions. For young people listening, double down on that last answer. I would not be where I am today if I hadn’t had some kind of unpleasant jobs where I got beaten down a few times and learned a lot from people who’ve spent 30 years learning. That whole mentoring thing or apprenticeship thing that Robert Green likes to talk about in Mastery, it really comes down to that. I know a lot of the things I know because I worked for some amazing people who imparted their knowledge and wisdom on me, even if I was resistant to it.

Your answer is spot-on and I wish I had understood the importance of what I was going through when I was younger. Like you said, you learned a lot that way, so it’s not that you want to avoid a career, you want to wring every drop of knowledge you can from people who have a lot of experience, and that that’s at least as viable as your salary. That sets you up to go off and do your own thing when you’re ready.

Brian:           Yeah, and you can’t get that from a blog. You have to be in there taking the hard hits. Well said. I’m sure I could ask you a lot more questions about you, but thanks for asking me those, Dave. The London Real community is going to love you for asking those things. Put me on the spot.

Dave:             No  problem, man. I’ve  had a few people do that to me. I’m like, “It’s finally my turn to put someone else on the spot.” It’s cool.

Hey, Brian, I’m a fan of your show. I love what you’re doing there. I’m jealous that you get to have all these people live versus on Skype. I’m really looking forward to the next time I’m in London. I’ll be sure to stop by the studio and we’ll do it again.

Brian:           Yeah, love to have you Dave. Just want to say, big fans of everything you guys are doing at Bulletproof. Your team is awesome, like everyone I talk to, and I’ve talked to a big chunk of your team. So positive, such cool energy. They really feel like they’re doing a higher mission and you guys are. You’re making the world a better place. People go to your website and it’s like free information, like rafts of it. I think you guys are paying it forward, like we try to do. Put out all this great information and then that’s what you do first. Yeah, big fans of you guys and it’s all good. Thanks for having me on, Dave, and definitely come back when you’re in London.

Dave:             You got it, Brian. People, when you’re listening to this, if you want to check out Brian’s podcast, LondonReal.com. Got that right? Or is it dot-co-dot-uk? I can never …

LondReal.tv, but if you type in London Real on YouTube or iTunes or whatever, you’ll find us.

Brian:           Beautiful. Brian, thanks, man.

Dave:             Dave, as we say, it’s about the journey. Peace to you.

Brian:           If you’re looking for a way to know which foods are making you weak, check out the free app that we just released, called Bulletproof Food Sense. It works by using the phone camera in order to get a measurement of your heart rate, or you can just type in your heart rate if you know what it is from some other monitoring device. You do this before a meal and you do it after a meal a couple of times. Based on changes in your heart rate, the application can help you to identify which foods are causing an immune response in your body. Based on that, you can choose to avoid those foods and you’ll find a huge boost in your performance just from not eating the foods that you have sensitivities to.

You’ll also find that you can lose weight much more easily when you’re not eating foods that cause you to feel foggy and inflamed all the  time. This app is free. It’s called Bulletproof Food Sense and it’s available on the iPhone Store.

You could also take a step further. Check out Bulletproof HRV Sense. That stands for heart rate variability sense. Bulletproof HRV Sense goes a step beyond Food Sense and it works with a wireless heart rate monitor that goes around your chest. You wear the heart rate monitor and it’ll talk to your iPhone or your tablet and it’ll show you your stress levels throughout the day. It’ll help you know whether you’re over-trained, over-stressed or even just help you know which meetings are causing the most stress in your nervous system so you can learn to take control of that stress.

This is an awesome app. Number one, Bulletproof Food Sense is free and number two, Bulletproof HRV Sense is a few dollars and it makes a huge difference in how you manage and control your stress.

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