Why you should listen –
Best selling author of the wildly successful book, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, John Gray comes on Bulletproof Radio to discuss causes and natural remedies for ADD, flow states and addiction, gender differences in relationships, and Taoist principles of sexuality. Enjoy the show!
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John Gray is the best-selling relationship author of all time and the most trusted voice in relationships today. He is the author of 17 books, including The New York Times # Best-Selling Book, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. His books have sold over 50 million copies in 50 different languages around the world. For more than 35 years he has conducted public and private seminars for thousands of participants. He is a popular speaker and has appeared on Oprah, The Dr. Oz Show, Good Morning America, The Today Show, The CBS Morning Show, Live with Regis, Larry King Live, CNN and many others. John’s purpose is to create a world where men and women understand, respect, and appreciate their differences and ultimately work together.
What You Will Hear
- 0:14 – Cool Fact of the Day!
- 1:10 – Welcome Dr. John Gray
- 2:30 – John’s shift from relationships to brain health
- 5:40 – The 4 types of ADD
- 9:37 – Natural remedies for ADD
- 11:50 – Sugar, video games & porn
- 14:50 – Flow states and addiction
- 22:30 – Recovering with superfoods and nutrition
- 26:00 – Supplements to heal insulin resistance
- 37:54 – Gender differences
- 46:18 – The rubber-band effect
- 49:30 – Taoist principles of sexuality
- 56:26 – Causes of ADHD
- 1:02:49 – Top three recommendations for kicking more ass and being Bulletproof!
Featured
Staying Focused in a Hyper World (Book 1)
Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus: Practical Guide for Improving Communication
Soul Mate Seminar with John Gray
Resources
Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD)
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD)
Gamma-Aminobutyric acid (GABA)
The Doctor Who Cures Cancer by William Kelly Eidem
Men are Just Desserts by Sonya Friedman
Primal Egg Coffee (Mark’s Daily Apple)
Bulletproof
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Transcripts
Click here to download PDF of this transcript
Dave Asprey: Hey, everyone. It’s Dave Asprey with Bulletproof Radio. Today’s cool fact of the day is that if you are a woman or maybe a man looking to pick a good guy, you should look for a man with a shorter index finger and a longer ring finger, because the finger links actually are from different hormones that you’re exposed to in the womb, which also seems to cause these men to be nicer to women and have more children. It turns out my grandmother is really interested in this. She’s a nuclear engineer by training, worked on The Manhattan Project, and believes that she has more testosterone than average women in part because of that and just because she has this huge math brain.
The last time I visited my grandmother, which was about a week ago, in Washington state, I walked into the retirement home where she lives and she was watching a YouTube video about differential calculus. Maybe that’s testosterone related, maybe it’s not. Who knows? But anyway, that finger length trick could be kind of interesting to know. Today’s guest is a guy that I met probably about 5 years ago, who’s just an incredible guy. One of the first people to really look at what you can do to this environment around you to change yourself. He’s also the number one bestselling relationship author of all time.
He’s been a number one New York Times bestseller with Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, which is actually true. He’s written 17 bestselling books, sold 50 million copies of his books in 50 different languages and you’ve seen him on Dr. Oz, Oprah, the Today Show, Good Morning America, and every other person you ever heard of, and has been profiled in masses of magazines. In other words, the guy’s an absolute stud, although I don’t think he calls himself that. I’m talking about none other than John Gray. John, welcome to the show.
John Gray: Thank you.
Dave Asprey: John, you and I met when you were so kind as to visit the Silicon Valley Health Institute, the anti-aging non-profit that I run in Silicon Valley, and to give one of the best talks we’ve ever had. To have a chance to sit down and have dinner with you was really cool and I’ve written a blog post or two about your work because looking at oxytocin and hormone levels as they point to relationships is really groundbreaking stuff and you’re one of the first people to really do that, to make it accessible to the world and I’ve got great value out of your last book.
You’re on the show today to talk about a new book that just came out that I think is maybe more important. I’m holding it up right now. If you’re driving, you’re not going to see it, but if you’re watching on YouTube or on iTunes, you’ll see it. It’s called Staying Focused In A Hyper World: Natural Solutions For ADHD, Memory And Brain Performance. You’re speaking my language, John. Brain performance? I don’t know any entrepreneur who’s not ADHD or at least ADD, so what made you pick this? Given all the relationship stuff you’ve done, why did you write this book now?
John Gray: Well, about 15 years ago, I shifted from my main focus being relationships to relationships and brain health, because my own personal life had a crisis, started experiencing early stages of Parkinson’s. Rather than go the normal route of taking certain drugs for that, which only treat the symptoms, I discovered the cause for me, and was able to reverse it. In doing that, I also healed something I didn’t even know needed healing, which is my whole life I’ve had basically ADD, Attention Deficit Disorder. So many creative, expressive, entrepreneur-type people can get into that mode, and I had a great relationship with my wife.
That’s why I wrote these books as I’m learning how to have it, but suddenly my relationship became super-easy when I addressed the issue of ADD. What my wife said was little things. She said, “You’re more relaxed when I talk to you. You’re not in a hurry. You’re not always jumping to the next point. You’re not procrastinating doing things.” These were just things that were just part of her husband, me. That’s who I was and that was okay, but there was a shift that took place and she pointed it out. Then I started realizing these were the typical symptoms of ADD and I had a lot of them.
You might ask where did I get that, because there’s causes for these things, which is why I wrote this book. For me it was a concussion in 2nd grade. Concussions can exemplify or exaggerate these tendencies of hyper-focused, hyper-distracted, hyper-sensitive or hyper-compulsive, which I’m calling the 4 different aspects, depending upon your temperament, where if you have this condition, which we’re all kind of having today in this hyper world. Our natural temperament becomes exaggerated and it can affect our relationships.
Dave Asprey: How do you know that this came about from a concussion in 2nd grade?
John Gray: Well, I just guess about that.
Dave Asprey: Okay.
John Gray: Basically what we’re seeing is that many people who get concussions, now I’m born a creative person, okay? That’s who I am, but what I’m saying is what happened around that time is it was really hard for me to follow through on things. There were times my mother had to come in and pour water on me to get me out of bed. I didn’t have Bulletproof Coffee to get me going in the morning.
Dave Asprey: I will tell you that my 2nd grader this morning was hitting me up for a refill on her Bulletproof Coffee, but her cup is a 1 oz. Espresso glass, so she gets a half a refill. I’m fine with that. It does get them out of bed, doesn’t it?
John Gray: It does and I’m just so happy that you just shared that. I don’t know how much you share that, but in my book I talk about natural solutions for ADD tendencies. We’ll call it that. Sometimes people ask me, “Well, don’t you think this whole ADHD thing is just blow out of proportion to sell drugs?” I’m not saying, if you ask me should we be giving drugs, no. We shouldn’t be giving drugs because there’s natural solutions and yes, the condition is actually bigger than most people suspect.
Because they’re just looking at hyperactive and hyper-distracted as opposed to hyper-sensitive and hyper-compulsive. These are 4 different types that I see showing up in children and young adults and aging adults and so forth. It shows up a bit differently as our brain develops and changes. What I was saying about Bulletproof, I’ve been saying for years. I didn’t know about your great formula, which I love.
Dave Asprey: Thank you.
John Gray: The parents will go to a doctor and a doctor will describe Methamphetamines, basically, Ritalin or Adderall. I tell parents, “Why don’t you just try giving them a cup of coffee?” The parents will say, “Oh, I can’t give them coffee! Oh, you can’t give a child coffee.” But you can give them Methamphetamines? Crystal meth? The same effect on the brain as cocaine?
Dave Asprey: Yeah.
John Gray: It’s really, it’s horrifying. Now, I’m not saying every parent should be giving their kids Bulletproof Coffee, but they should try. If your child has hyper tendencies, what that hyperness is, this is what’s confusing to people. If your child is hyper, hyper-sensitive, hyper-focused, hyper-distracted, hyper-compulsive, that means they’re pushing too hard. Why do children today and adults push too hard? We’re looking for stimulation, dopamine stimulation.
That was sort of the paradox when they discovered that giving kids that were hyper, giving them speed, which is Methamphetamines, would actually calm them down. To this day, the doctors say, “We don’t know why.” Well, it’s actually very simple to understand why, is that dopamine stimulates us and if we have low dopamine function, then we’re seeking always more stimulation. If you give the brain more dopamine or allow the brain to make more dopamine, then suddenly you feel calm, relaxed and focused.
Dave Asprey: A lot of people don’t know this, but when I was a kid I had all the symptoms of Asperger’s. If you take the very basic Asperger’s test, I scored up there. I wouldn’t make eye contact, OCD, ODD, and it wasn’t until I was about 29 or 30, I was getting my MBA while working full-time. I was like, “Wait a minute, something’s wrong, because I know I’m smart. I’ve had this successful career, but I am completely failing.” I sit down to take a test and I get 100% on the first question, 70 to 50% on the next one and after that, it’s like my brain’s gone.
John Gray: You just space out. It’s like spacing out, yeah.
Dave Asprey: Yeah. I was like, “Okay. Maybe I’m just stupid.” But something wasn’t right and I went and I got a spec scan, I did a bunch of tests and sure enough, I had actually a whole bunch of weird brain stuff going on, but specifically, they said, “Yeah, you meet at least the specifications for ADD with some other weird stuff,” which is I think a technical, medical term. Knowing that though, was kind of liberating, to be like, “All right. That’s something you can work on.” I actually did for 3 months try Adderall, which was really an unpleasant experience for me.
It’s one of the reasons I like Bulletproof Coffee. If I want to get my brain metabolism going, there’s a sense of ease and everything and I don’t do that, the pushing too hard thing, but the creativity and some of the other skills that come with those brain states are intact. Every entrepreneur I know, who’s really outperforming, has these tendencies, whether or not they were diagnosed or not. It doesn’t seem to matter. There’s something that happens that maybe isn’t all bad when you manage it right.
John Gray: Well, basically, you’re managing it very effectively when you’re taking Bulletproof Coffee with the butter and the coconut oil and so forth. The whole function there is why somebody who was scattered would become more focused. Coffee works through a different pathway than cocaine and Methamphetamines and sugar. These are all high dopamine stimulators. Coffee works through another pathway. It’s an herb. It’s a healing aspect and it doesn’t over-stimulate as long as you don’t do too much. I think that’s the magic of when you put your butter along with your coconut oil or the MCT oil, is it keeps it from spiking so much.
Because whenever you spike dopamine, and this is one of the first things in my book I explain is, helping parents understand what’s happening to our kids today, it helps us understand ourselves as adults. What happens in the brain, if you over-stimulate the brain, something gives you a lot of pleasure. You get really excited, that’s a lot of dopamine. Dopamine is pleasure, it’s motivation, it’s focus and it’s interest. Whenever you hear something new and you’re interested in it, huge amounts of dopamine gets produced.
Pleasure produces dopamine, so when you have this spike in dopamine, if it goes above a certain amount, then the brain responds and gives you less dopamine receptor sites. Literally we have these little receptor sites and before we feel pleasure and focus and motivation, dopamine gets transferred into the receptor site and then we go, “Wow. That felt good.” Then it’s gone, so we have to do it again and again. If we over-stimulate, then you actually lose receptor sites.
If someone was to take cocaine, the first use of cocaine, they would temporarily lose 30% of their receptor sites, which basically, they see this. Basically what that means is that life is 30% less interesting, life is 30% less pleasurable and life is 30% less focused. What they now need in order to feel alive is now I need my cocaine again. Basically it’s an addiction to higher stimulation. The major aspects that’s happening to kids today to get this shot of high dopamine is sugar, carbohydrates. Once you go into sugar burning, you now are spiking your dopamine levels, that would be one.
Another one is video games for teenagers and young adults, or any age adults. Pornography is a major high dopamine stimulator. Let me explain how this affects a relationship. If a guy gets off on pornography, what he’s just done is he’s probably produced about 10 times more dopamine than sex with his wife. He just lost a good portion of a receptor site, so being with his wife is no longer going to be as exciting or as interesting.
If you find that you’re enjoying porn, for example, but you’re not getting off with your partner, you’re finding them less and less interesting, this is because you’re losing dopamine receptor sites. What it takes is you have to fast from the whole pornography thing until you get really, really horny, and then have sex with your wife and it will come back. The idea there is when you are hyper-stimulated, you lose receptor sites. If you take away the hyper-stimulation, your receptor sites come back up to function normally.
Dave Asprey: Now, when you were the assistant to the Maharishi, meditated for 14 hours a day, but you were also celibate for much of that time, right?
John Gray: Yes. 9 years. 9 years.
Dave Asprey: 9 long, long years.
John Gray: I loved that time. It’s hard to imagine now, but I had a spiritual practice, I had a mission in life, I had a purpose to become enlightened. I had a good example of a good guy, enlightened guy, and I was dedicated. What happens in meditation is you’re just channeling that energy in another way.
Dave Asprey: Yeah. And I did an experiment I was pretty public about, not 9 years, but certainly controlling that aspect. It does increase a lot of the energy that you have and all, but the reason I brought that up is, in the context that we were talking about, if you’re into porn, you’ve got this dopamine resistance or a loss of dopamine receptors. Then, so you basically stop watching porn, you wait until you’re really horny, is there some amount of, “Okay, I’m going to essentially be celibate for awhile,” not just avoid porn, but just avoid any kind of stimulation whatsoever in order to reset the sensitivity?
John Gray: Exactly. You reset. Any time you deprive yourself of a dopamine stimulator, you’re going to reset the sensitivity. That’s why I think it’s really critical, even with eating food, is that people need to stop eating food for a day at least, and then you come back to really enjoying healthy food. As soon as you start eating junk food, what happens is you become desensitized to the pleasure of normal foods which aren’t as stimulating, dopamine in the brain.
Dave Asprey: What about these extreme sports people? Steven Kotler’s come on the show. He spoke at the Bulletproof conference. By the way, I’m going to try to get you to speak at the next Bulletproof conference, but we can talk about that later. Steven talked about flow states, and how in order to get into a flow state you need a dopamine spike, and how these extreme athletes are able to do superhuman things in part because dopamine is one of 4 other neurotransmitters that they balance that happens when if you make a mistake you die.
You get the hyper-focus, but also this expansive awareness that allows you to do things that are basically not possible for people who are not in that altered state. Is intense exercise, other things that raise dopamine like that, is that also going to cause trouble when you’re trying to reset your dopamine sensitivity?
John Gray: Well, I don’t know his personal life. I’d have to know his personal, what his wife says about it.
Dave Asprey: Steven’s just studied and written about the flow state.
John Gray: Flow state is not over-stimulating dopamine. I think it, no.
Dave Asprey: It’s not. Okay.
John Gray: When I write, for example, I’m in a flow state. I’ll just go, go, go, go, go.
Dave Asprey: Me, too.
John Gray: Without a question about that. I think if there’s a mixture of gaba and serotonin and acetylcholine and dopamine, when you’ve got the whole mixture going for you, you’re in the flow state. I’m in flow state. I learned that through meditation and write my books. When I wrote Men Are from Mars, I was in flow state the whole time. It was the easiest book in the world for me to write. I sat down, I’d write in 3 months. I wrote 6 hours a day, I’d babysit my kids, other ones I took to school, then I would write and then I’d … It was a magic time. It was a good consequence I’ll say. Flow state, this is what could happen when you’re in flow state for days and hours, is you can easily deplete your brain of minerals and nutrients.
Any time I go into flow state when I’m really on a project, or when I teach a seminar, when I’m doing this interview, that’s flow state, total effortlessness. I’m wondering what I’m going to say next just like you’re wondering what you’re going to say next. There’s no plan, it’s just flowing. In that flow state, you are like a race car and you do use up fuel. I don’t think you’re down regulating receptor sites, but I do know that you can deplete yourself of nutrients.
Dave Asprey: It’s metabolically intensive to do this kind of thing because, you’re right. I go into flow state when I interview and people ask, “Why are these interviews so good?” I think it’s because I’m in a flow state and I’m not planning ahead. I’m just doing what feels right in the moment and obviously, when I interview, you’re the same way. We didn’t do a lot of prepping and all that, this is just wherever it’s going to go.
I love that you’re talking about dopamine resistance because this is something that certainly was a factor in my life and you have drugs that can change the dopamine receptors. You have behaviors, like eating a lot of junk food. You have porn. What are other things that are likely to mess with your dopamine levels? Do you have other things on your list of things to watch out for?
John Gray: Well, at different ages, drama. Couples start getting in arguments and fights. Any time you’re in danger, you produce higher levels of dopamine. Dopamine is an addiction if you don’t have a lot of healthy dopamine stimulation in your life. For example, you are a successful person. I’m a successful person. I just wake up in the morning and I know I’m going to be successful at something. Therefore I have a steady supply of dopamine. Success stimulates dopamine. Danger stimulates dopamine. Let’s say that I’m a kid who doesn’t really have a lot of belief in myself and family support and opportunities to be educated and be successful.
How do I get my aliveness? Well, just join a gang and I’m suddenly in a dangerous situation and that becomes my addiction, so to speak. I’m looking to do things which are dangerous, which I don’t want anybody to find out about. Arguing and fighting, yelling, is a big dopamine stimulator. You’re in danger at that time. That’s the only reason we yell is fight or flight. Some people are addicted to the danger.
Quite often women, and some men, get addicted to over-giving. Basically it feels good whenever you give to somebody, right? If you don’t have a steady supply of dopamine, or you have the dopamine resistance as you’re putting it very nicely for people that understand that, is now I need higher levels of stimulation. Before I could make cookies for my kids. Now I got to make cookies for the whole school.
I need to have recognition from everybody. One of these ADHD symptoms for women is over-giving. They feel overwhelmed, they can’t give to themselves. They’re busy giving to others. It’s literally like you eat one cookie, I have to have another cookie. I feel responsible for you, I have to give to somebody else, I have to give to somebody else. Here’s a mind blowing stimulation of dopamine I’m about to talk about, which is grieving.
Dave Asprey: Oh, wow.
John Gray: Now, this is amazing, and I couldn’t say this out loud because I’m an expert in teaching people how to process feelings and grieve loss and so forth, but you can become addicted to it if you don’t have the right nutrition. Because any time you’re grieving, it’s a super high dopamine level. When you’re feeling pain, huge amounts of dopamine gets produced, and at that time, you start depleting your body of all these nutrients and now you crave that stimulation again and again. They did a study at UCLA of parents who are chronically grieving the loss of a child. Now that’s the most devastating thing I could imagine is to losing a child. You’re going to go through a grieving process.
What they found is that many never get through the grieving process. They’re chronically feeling depressed and hopeless. They’re on medications. They just can’t get over it. They can’t come back to being happy in their lives and fulfilled in their lives. They did brain scans on these people and they found that the same part of the brain when they show pictures of the missing child, the lost child, the parent would start to grieve and they would see the same part of the brain light up as if they were taking cocaine.
This is this dopamine stimulating part of the brain so it can become addictive. Any of these high dopamine stimulators can become addictive if we don’t have the recovery from it where our receptor sites up-regulate. Part of it is we need, quite often, if we’re over-stimulating ourself a lot, or if we’re in the flow state a lot, we need to make sure that the food we eat is super foods, nutritious foods, to replenish the body. Also, if someone has done antibiotics for example, often they don’t have the good gut flora that can make a lot of the nutrients for the brain.
This is why pro-biotics are so important as well. Supplements are important. All of these extra-nutritious things, I believe, if you look back in the past, all of your great entrepreneur geniuses, your artists, your writers, your government leaders, there’s so many cases that they were bi-polar. They were schizophrenic. They had their highs and they had their lows.
This is so common throughout history. Mozart would hear the angels, write it down, and then he would crash and become an alcoholic and take drugs for awhile until finally his body would gather enough nutrients to rise back up again. If you’re going to be in flow, you have to make sure that your diet supports you with extra nutrition. The irony today is that most of the food people are eating are empty calories, so the smarter you are the more crazy you can become.
Dave Asprey: If someone was to say, focus on eating tons and tons of raw green vegetables, get all the super food nutrients in there, what’s going to happen if that’s mostly what they’re eating?
John Gray: Well, I’m not just a vegan. I believe in healthy meat, and there’s so many good nutrients that people have been getting from meat. I don’t know if a vegan diet can actually provide long-term nutrients for the brain. Maybe it can. I just don’t know. I know that there’s lots of good supplements to compensate for what might be missing in your vegan diet, but I’m not a vegan. I just don’t eat the junk food, basically.
Dave Asprey: Yeah.
John Gray: I laugh and say I’m a vegetarian and I’m a … What is the diet where people eat primarily meat?
Dave Asprey: I’m a lacto-ovo-beefo-porko vegetarian.
John Gray: Okay. Anyway, I lead a very balanced life in terms of my food and I don’t demand perfection. That’s the great thing is I’ve seen this concept where people go on extreme diets and I go, “Anything to an extreme really doesn’t work out.” To be married to my wife, for example, to expect perfection all the time would make us both miserable. The same thing with health. The body doesn’t have to have perfect circumstances, but we do need to be somewhat smart about it.
Dave Asprey: If you expect to perform at your high level, I absolutely agree that being in a flow state or just doing a lot of stuff, whether it’s lifting heavy things or whatever else, it takes more calories and it takes more zinc and more copper and all those micro-nutrients. I found, I spent some time as a raw vegan, that I felt great for a little while, but I couldn’t bring it. The idea that you can tune your diet so you always have the energy to bring it, whether it means bring it for a flow state or bring it in the bedroom or bring it to stay calm when you’re in a fight with your spouse, it’s energy and nutrient intensive. It seems like we could be better people when we have adequate nutrition because we have that ability to regulate our emotions with our pre-frontal cortex.
John Gray: That was the answer to the first question you asked me, which is why as a relationship expert do I focus so much on nutrition now and cleansing the body? We just got to do it, otherwise so many problems in relationships come down simply to nutritional deficiency and unstable blood sugar. Unstable blood sugar is a real key thing. Dr. Atkins, I love that kind of program. He had a very balanced perspective on things. Dr. Atkins was a revolutionary guy like you. He was really on the cutting edge. So many things he discovered that most people don’t know about. He’s just famous for diet.
The guy was brilliant, and one of the things he found, he would test people. He said any person who has anxiety, who has depression, who has problems sleeping, who has marital distress, who’s bi-polar, who’s schizophrenic, who has dementia, any person all has blood sugar issues. It’s fueling the brain and you start getting insulin resistance and your relationships go haywire. What we do is, what people have to understand, is just like you get the dopamine resistance, sugar goes right in hand with it as well, because suddenly we’re getting the sugar resistance which is insulin resistance. The sugar’s not being absorbed. Now we’re craving more sugar.
It’s the same phenomena where we’re going out of balance. We have to restore the receptor sites and for sugar. What I found, Dave is, I have many friends who’ve given up sugar. They have insulin resistance and they gave up sugar, but they didn’t heal the insulin resistance. It was literally, they weren’t being affected by it but they couldn’t eat sugar. If they ate any sugar, kabang! It was, they were falling asleep. Their blood sugar would spike and it’d crash down, so there’s 2 supplements that I recommend for that.
One is, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Dr. Nieper from Germany, but he has a product called Membrane Support, which he bonded calcium, magnesium, potassium into something called 2-AEP aminoethylphosphate to restore the cells. I’ve seen that clear up blood sugar issues just this mineral support. I guess you’re laughing because you’ve heard of it.
Dave Asprey: I’ve been on Calcium AEP for almost 15 years as a cell membrane stabilizer and kidney protectant because I have only one kidney. You’re the only guy ever to mention this out of more than 200 episodes on Bulletproof Radio, and it’s on my advanced list of supplements for bio-hackers, it’s been on my basic list. I had no idea, John, that you were into that stuff. That was the coolest thing ever.
John Gray: I’m totally into that. It’s like a magic … Nobody knows about this guy. Everybody should be taking that to stabilize their blood sugar. It’s such a basic thing because all of this stress that I see married couples happening, their kids happening, it all comes, one aspect comes down to the unstable blood sugar. What we’re discussing as well is the unstable brain chemicals, but a lot of this craving for the dopamine is actually coming from the unbalanced sugar levels. We’re craving the sugar, which now spikes the dopamine, which down-regulates the receptor sites. Now we crave more sugar to balance the dopamine levels up and then we have a society of people all becoming pre-diabetic and diabetic.
Dave Asprey: It’s happening and getting stable cell membranes is so important because people sort of forget that your cell membranes are made out of droplets of fat, right? If you’re eating bad fats like margarine and a bunch of seed oils, you lose that membrane stuff, but Calcium AEP actually helps you to maintain flexibility and stability there. When the membrane works you can express insulin receptors through it and also, if you eat good fat, it takes 2 years to replace half your cell membranes.
Which is why when I started doing Bulletproof Coffee, seriously, I was doing 6 tablespoons of butter. “Ah, I just can’t get enough!” After 2 years, I’m like, “You know what? A tablespoon, 2 tablespoons, I’m fine with that.” I think my cravings and just my strong desire for that food changed to the point that now I had the raw building materials in my cells because it takes a long time to do that.
John Gray: It does take time, and that’s the key thing we’re hitting on here is that just if you’ve been eating the wrong things, when you stop eating the wrong things, you don’t necessarily heal. We need to have extra things to help us to find that balance again. That’s where the 2-AEP comes in great. Now, one is Calcium 2-AEP, but there’s also Calcium, Magnesium and Potassium 2-AEP. That’s the one that I take regularly as well. It was membrane support. It was a later version that he came out with, but calcium as well is spectacular. There’s something else that has to do with calcium.
Calcium regulation is essential in the body. Anybody who’s depressed, what’s happening is their brain’s generally not making enough gaba because there’s a problem with calcium regulation in the body and in the brain. We know that heart disease and everything is the inability of the body to remove the calcium so the veins become stiff insomuch. We want to regulate the calcium and what we want to get for that is we want to have K2, which is why butter, yellow butter, is rich in vitamin K2.
We have to have vitamin K2 to regulate the calcium and not only does it help us for heart disease, but it also helps the brain receptor sites to remove the calcium so they can regenerate. This is such a key thing with the butter, which has always been an amazing thing for people to eat. People go, “Oh, butter’s bad, margarine’s good.” That was a really crazy time. Now, the other thing, when we talk about the calcium and vitamin K2 and so forth, we’re also talking about when people eat sugar, one of the number one minerals that they lose is lithium.
One of the functions of lithium is also to regulate calcium in the brain receptor sites. They’re trying to figure out why lithium would be so helpful for bi-polar people. The truth is we’re all a little bit bi-polar. This is our society. We go up, we go down. We are the reflection of the stock market. It goes up, it goes down. Couples fall in love, then they hate each other. They get divorced, they fall in love again. There’s this extreme high dopamine stimulation, then receptor sites disappear, we crash down. We feel somewhat low, then we seek out the high stimulation again.
This can be corrected very quickly when we realize the power of lithium. Now, not lithium carbonate, which is what the psychiatrists give, but something Dr. Nieper figured out, which is bond lithium to mother’s milk, lithium orotate, oratic acid is in mother’s milk. It bonds with minerals and takes them across the blood-brain barrier. All you need is a low dose lithium to be beneficial for anybody who eats carbohydrates in their life or is experiencing high stress levels.
What happens, if you look at in nature, where lithium exists. Lithium’s in our food. Of course, our food today is greatly mineral deficient, but the food that has the most lithium in it is beets. Now, where do we get our sugar from? Beets. When you have beets, what happens, sweet beets, you would normally have all the fiber when you eat a beet, which would slow down the release of glucose, but also you would get the lithium. When people eat sugar, the number one mineral they lose is lithium.
Normally we wouldn’t need supplementation. We’d get it from our food, but today, because we take away the lithium that comes with the sugar, when you eat the sugar, the body utilizes its own lithium in the metabolism of sugar and we become depleted in it. That’s another one of the miracle things like 2-AEP, you suddenly get the lithium orotate in little doses. It’s a very inexpensive supplement, can make a world of difference for people.
Dave Asprey: John, it was your lecture at the Silicon Valley Health Institute that first turned me on to lithium orotate. I do it 2, 3 nights a week. I throw it in the stack I take before I go to sleep just to make sure I have adequate levels of it. I don’t eat a ton of sugar at all, but I do think it’s …
John Gray: But you’re in flow state.
Dave Asprey: Yeah, I’m sure I use the stuff, especially when I travel I tend to take more of it. Thanks for that because I think your lecture was 7 years ago or something, but I’ve been on that on and off, mostly on, ever since then. Thanks for spreading that. I know that was from Hans Nieper. If you’re listening to this and you’ve never heard of Hans Nieper, there’s these incredible savant genius guys when it comes to nutrition. I think Atkins was one of them, and Hans Nieper was one, and there’s some others floating around out there.
You come upon their work and you’re like, “These guys knew about this.” In fact, in the case of Atkins, his first book came out about the year I was born. I have the first print run of the Atkins book and I bought it early on because I was so pissed off that I was 300 pounds, and so mad that this knowledge existed when I was born and I didn’t have access to it.
That’s one of the reasons that I’m interviewing you right now, John, is because when this kind of knowledge gets out there, people can very quickly change direction. For me, I struggled for about 30 years before I figured this out just through lack of information. Who else, besides Nieper and Atkins would be on your list of top 5 most interesting health savants that no one’s ever heard of?
John Gray: Well, another one is Dr. Revici. Did you ever hear about Dr. Revici?
Dave Asprey: I’m not sure.
John Gray: There’s a book on Amazon. He’s the doctor who cured cancer. The unfortunate thing is none of his products are available to the public. The Congress and FDA shut it all down. You can’t get it.
Dave Asprey: How do you spell his name?
John Gray: R-E-V-I-C-I. R-E-V-I-C-I. He, for example, has one product that I used to have, but then now became illegal to sell. I’ve got a lot of good products but his, it never really made it in the market because everybody was concerned. He went before Congress in, I think it was in the ’60s, and said, “I went to Harlem and I gave out my supplement, which was a form of sulfur and selenium. I gave this supplement to 2000 people who were addicted to heroin and they all went off their heroin within 3 days and they had no side effects except some tiredness in the process.”
Now imagine you have a supplement that will take away all the withdrawal symptoms of going off of a heavy drug like heroin. He went before Congress and said, “I’d like you to fast-track and approve this.” They said no. It would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to fast-track that as a drug. What he did is he was the forerunner of something I think is fantastic, which is the liposomal vitamins. That’s the vitamin of the future, liposomal.
Before there was liposomal, he was taking a sesame seed oil and other oils and heating them up at a certain temperature and adding minerals to it or sulfur to it or certain ingredients. Then they would become fat, they would become lipid-based and be absorbed by the body. He was able to give the body very high doses of selenium if it was embedded in fat. That’s how he got the guys off of their addictions is the selenium was necessary for the up-regulation of the brain receptor sites so they had no side effects.
Dave Asprey: This was a selenium salt, not Selenomethionine, right?
John Gray: I’m not sure which one he uses. The only person left is a few doctors that still use his ideas, his niece is available in New York City. I’m good friends with her, but it’s very hard. They can’t manufacture it and sell it because of all the regulations because these things … They have patents on it all. It can help you stop smoking, help you stop any sort of addictive craving.
I believe it’s the sulfur, which assists the brain up-regulating those receptor sites. The best I can do for people, I’ve got a big gallon jug of his stuff at my house, but I can’t give it out. MSM, which I’m sure you love as well, is fantastic and it’s also fantastic for dealing with the up-regulation of these receptor sites. The body needs the raw materials to actually do it along with good gut bacteria as well.
Dave Asprey: One of the things that I’ve been exploring lately is the role of specifically sulfate as a short-lived signaling molecule in the body. There’s one mineral water that has a lot of sulfate in it. It’s San Pellegrino, which is owned by Nestle, which thinks you shouldn’t have a right to drink water, slight problem. This is a healing spring from going back 1000 years, people would drink there, and I believe that the reason that it works so well is because of this high sulfate level, which gives the body a form of sulfur that’s even different than MSM.
The idea that these little bits of sulfur, which is really common in the body, could change how your cells communicate or it could change other things. It’s well borne out by science. It’s just that no one talks about it and then no one links it back to how you behave in your relationship. That’s why I just love talking about that. I could talk to you for all day because you’ve drawn the connections between these little things and then these behaviors that bring you up and bring you down, and tied that first the relationships, and then now to just overall, I would say, ADD kind of stuff.
John Gray: Well, here let’s bring it back to relationships for a moment, but I wanted to talk about other really great guys. I want to talk about a guy from Italy as well. He’s got some amazing things I’d like to share. When it comes to the up and down, this is what goes on in marriages all the time. A woman has a much greater tendency to go up and down than a guy. A guy will tend to open up and close. We come on strong and we shut down really tight and then we open back up like nothing happened. Women will go up and they’re feeling like, “I love you. You’re great,” and then they crash and they’re just in an awful mood. All they can remember is the problems and the mistakes you’ve made in the relationship and then they’ll rise back up and act like there’s no problems at all again.
This is very, very confusing and it’s a natural difference between men and women, but it comes exaggerated with this ADHD type thing we’re talking about, when people don’t have the right nutrition for the brain. One of the symptoms that I’d like to suggest to men is that when your wife seems to go crazy, okay, because men think that at times, what’s happening is she’s having, her brain is being flooded with emotion. It’s not a linear, logical state when she’s filled with emotion. You shouldn’t accept it as that, but realize it’s like she loves you as the sun’s shining. There’s a cloud in front of it for a little while. The cloud will pass as long as you don’t resist the cloud.
If you try to talk her out of what she’s feeling, she has to now justify it and rationalize that which is irrational and it’s very confusing to everybody. To understand it, under moderate stress, the way women’s brains are wired up, is they’ll have 8 times more blood flow to the limbic system. They’re going to have an emotional reaction. It’s not logical. It’s an emotional reaction to a small stressor. Now a man tends to misinterpret that because men will have a flood of emotion when the problem is big or it’s a problem they can’t do something about and it’s a significant problem. When women have an emotional reaction, men tend to misinterpret and think that she’s saying this problem is big and she’s saying that she feels hopeless, when really it’s a passing cloud if you don’t resist it.
The problem with ADHD type symptoms is those clouds are bigger and the rain is bigger and his tendency to get knocked down by it is much bigger because what happens is we’ve got these things called mirror cells in the brain. When somebody gets emotionally upset, we mirror back, but when men get that emotional it’s like it’s a big problem. For a woman can get emotional, she really can move through it quickly if no one resists her. It’s like understanding gender differences is so important. Add to it this nutritional stuff we’re talking about, it can make the problems escalate much bigger.
One of the key things to know about women’s blood sugar is different from men’s is that women are designed differently. Men are more athletic from the point of view we could go for long hunts before we would eat, so we regulate the whole cycle of lactic acid turning back into sugar. Men are much more efficient in that, so we can go longer without eating. Women, when they get hungry it’s a sign that their blood sugar has already dropped. They don’t have much warning for it and it drops much further down than a man’s. That’s what the research on this has shown.
Dave Asprey: Oh.
John Gray: Basically, when your blood sugar drops way down, your body goes into an emergency stress response. Your brain is flooded with emotion and you have temporary amnesia and you forget any good thing that’s going on in your life and you remember every mistake your partner’s ever made. It’s hyper memory at that time, and what you have to do is realize get her some food. Don’t try to talk her out of her feelings.
Dave Asprey: Now, you could get her a piece of fruit, you could get her a Snickers bar or you could get her an avocado. Now some of those raise blood sugar more quickly than others. What’s the best … All right, I’m just going to ask it and I’ll be yelled at on social media for this, but when your wife is acting super bitchy, what’s the best food to feed her?
John Gray: I think most women know that women can be that way. They’re not that way all the time. I adore my wife. I love her. She’s wonderful. We all have our ups and downs, but I’m sure somebody would give you trouble for that. The “B” word is not easily heard by women. Although the “A” word, men have no problem with it. That’s a difference between men and women. It’s another difference there. What was the question? Without saying it all.
Dave Asprey: When your wife or your partner’s acting super bitchy, what’s the best food to feed her? If we assume her blood sugar dropped, now she’s having an adrenal response, and I love the way you’re phrasing on this stuff. It makes so much sense. She has an adrenal response. What do you feed her? Is it an avocado? Is it a piece of butter? Is it a candy bar? Is it a piece of fruit? Is it some low glycemic white rice or something? I don’t know. What would you recommend?
John Gray: I’d recommend anything that has a little carb in it, just a little carb. Nuts and goji berries is the best trail mix.
Dave Asprey: Just a little bit of carbs, right?
John Gray: Just a little bit.
Dave Asprey: And some fat to slow it down.
John Gray: What you need to do is, what’s happening is when your blood sugar crashes tremendously, if she was a fat burner, then that would be fine. When the blood sugar crashes, one of the functions of cortisol is to raise blood sugar again. What the body will do is, blood sugar crashes, cortisol goes up, so she’s actually feeling like a bear is chasing me and you’re the only guy around.
Dave Asprey: It’s phenomenal. I gave a talk at David Wolfe’s raw vegan conference and at Paleof(x) last weekend where I diagrammed the cycle you’re talking about. It’s so cool that as a relationship expert, you’ve mapped out these behaviors all the way back to blood sugar levels. I don’t know anyone else who looks at relationships the way you do, John. It’s so cool to chat with you.
John Gray: I love doing it. Since I came out with Men Are from Mars, always the biggest opposition was people saying, “You’re just saying that. It’s your point of view.” My experience was 10 years before I came out with that book, of listening to women talk for 8 to 10 hours a day. I’d hear the same thing, the same thing. From my spiritual perspective I was able to understand it in a positive way and understand men in a positive way.
Still people would go, “Where’s the research? Where’s the evidence?” What was so exciting is in the ’90s we got these brain scans and the 2000s now all this hormone information, blood sugar information, and all I want to do is understand well women are this way and men are this way and then we can make sense of each other better. It’s such a good thing.
Dave Asprey: It’s phenomenal and by the way, I should sort of plug something for you here. You do the Soul Mate seminar for singles and couples, which is part nutrition-based and part relationship-based based on your first book. I have several friends who have gone, just transformative stuff there, and Lana and I are going to go to one of these things coming up here with you. Just the idea that in the process of selling 50 million copies of your books, you’ve also found time to put together a way to teach people the high level this is the behavior and to go all the way down to how do you modulate your behaviors to account for differences in the brain and neurochemistry of these people?
All the way down to how do you change your own by having stable energy levels in the body? Whether it’s ketones or sugar or whatever else. I don’t know anyone else who looks at the world the way you do there but it is an incredibly complex thing to do to map out a behavior that’s up high where I scream at someone on Day 22 of my cycle. Whatever else, to trace it all the way back to, “Oh, you’re actually having more blood sugar swings because your progesterone levels are low and your cortisol’s too high.” You’re not medically trained, right? How do you do all that?
John Gray: Well, like you, I’m just like you. We’re researchers. We love gathering this information. Everything comes from your reference point, and I have a very broad reference point, having been one of the few real experts on gender differences for 20 years. Then suddenly nutrition and all that comes into the thing, I’m able to constantly sort it out for women, for men, for women, for men. The nutrition and the brain function and then hormones explains all the ideas that I would observe.
Let me give one for a moment because this is such a wonderful … One of the big issues that women have with men is that a man will be so loving and he’s so present and then suddenly he’s completely ignoring her. You spend a weekend in Veg-, I said Vegas, but a weekend in Hawaii and you’re having this wonderful, intimate time together. She’s feeling, what she’s feeling is, “Oh, our relationship has gotten to a new level. Now we’re going to have so much more eye contact and affection and interest with each other.” He’s feeling, “Okay, I did that. Now I’m going to go back to work.”
Dave Asprey: No, really?
John Gray: It’s hard for her to understand that, but here’s a dynamic. In Men Are from Mars I called that the rubber band effect, which is that men want to get close to woman. We want to go inside her. We want to become one with her. We want to unite with her. Then we need to pull away. That pulling away is like a rubber band. He’s pulling away, but once he’s fully pulled away, he’ll spring back. Then he pulls away and he springs back. If while he’s pulling away she runs after him, he’ll keep pulling away the rest of their marriage. He’s always trying to get away from her.
If she would just not always be looking to him for everything, give him some space to come back to himself, then he’ll miss her. He wants to be with her and he literally comes back to her. Now, it was so wonderful when I started understanding hormones and understanding this whole oxytocin-estrogen thing. Estrogen is where women, where we feel dependent on someone. Here she is, her estrogen’s up, she’s in a relationship. She’s feeling nurtured. Her oxytocin levels go up, he connects with her, his oxytocin levels go up. Oxytocin is the love hormone, connection hormone, bonding hormone.
As a man goes into the oxytocin whirl with her, you feel great, but oxytocin lowers testosterone. After he’s entered into her world for awhile and particularly with sex, if he’s climaxed, his body is washed with oxytocin. He needs to pull away. There’s a natural pulling away to rebuild testosterone because testosterone only rebuilds when you feel alone and separate. If you’re feeling connected, estrogen is increased and estrogen suppresses testosterone.
There’s this natural sort of dance with guys. We get close and then we pull away. It’s not like we’re upset with her, we’re mad at her, whatever. We just need to go do something else for awhile. Sometimes women say, “But why? But why?” I say, “It’s kind of like eating a meal. If you’re really healthy and you eat a meal, you don’t keep eating.” You satisfy the need and men’s tendency to pull away, then a woman goes, “What am I supposed to do?” You’re supposed to fill your life up with things that you love to do as opposed to depending on him as your major source of fuel. Think of a man as dessert.
Dave Asprey: Yeah, like go get some friends already or something.
John Gray: Get a life. Have a life which is fulfilling to you and he just adds something to it. There was once a woman, a feminist woman who was actually kind of saying it in a dismissive way, but I took it as a compliment. She said, the name of her book was Men Are Just Desserts. I went, “Okay. I’m okay with that.”
Dave Asprey: I notice something. This dynamic is phenomenal and it definitely matches my experience of relationships throughout my life. When I was testing Taoist principles about frequency of male ejaculation, if I ejaculate during sex, there’s a 3-day hangover period. Just give me some space. I’m going to go do my thing. If we have sex but there’s no ejaculation, then that window it’s like I’m happy the next day. I’m happy to be connected, I’m happy to not be connected, but it was much more even.
This wasn’t about celibacy at all. It was just about not ejaculating all the time. It seemed to work because I was more satisfied with life in general versus disgruntled for the next day or two. It also meant that the frequency of interaction would go up and maybe the distance of separation or maybe the amount of time between separations was less. It definitely had interesting relationship effects. Any thoughts about that?
John Gray: Yeah. As we mentioned briefly I was a celibate monk for 9 years, so I learned how to send my energy up. Then when I came out to the west to do my own thing, it was my brother was bi-polar, and I tried to help him with yoga, with meditation. It helped a little, but it didn’t do the whole thing. Here I was sort of really fulfilled in my life as a meditator and teacher of transcendental meditation, personal assistant to the Maharishi, but my brother was suffering, so it was time for me to go. I went back to California to study psychology. That’s how I got into this whole relationship thing, to find a way to help my brother.
Psychology didn’t help him either, but in the process of going back to psychology, it helped a little bit, that’s how I discovered how to talent for relationships. It really emerged from the foundation of being full within myself, feeling self-sufficient, that I have a source of happiness inside of me. When you come to a relationship with that, then everything you get in the relationship is bonus. It’s not there to fill you up. It’s there to take you to a higher level.
The first course I was teaching was called Enlightened Sexuality or Tantra. This was back at the beginning of the tantra thing and I was teaching men and myself how to have sex without ejaculating. Certainly you’ll stay in this heightened state and for me, personally, after many years of that I got Prostatitis and my wife also actually enjoys when I come. That’s how we do it, and I’m okay with that. I have a good sleep afterwards. If I have sex without ejaculating, I’m so in my head, I’m like a sunshine. I kind of like this altered high state, a little bit hyper and she likes it when I just go to sleep, basically. I’m not saying what’s right or wrong here.
Dave Asprey: Me either.
John Gray: What I’m saying is I have friends who teach the Tantra courses now, and they teach how women have can extended orgasm and go on and on and on and have many, and how many orgasms can she have? From my point of view, this is my point of view, one’s enough. I like to have it and I’m done. It’s like I have the meal, I’m totally satisfied, I can move on to other things. I could see when I was younger, I really loved the whole thing of how far can we go with this and so forth. It was all very exciting. I’m in my 60s now and I just love good sex, great sex, and it’s ecstatic.
Dave Asprey: Yeah.
John Gray: You can be in flow state, but there’s so many other places to be in flow state then just sexuality, so I’m not really into the extended orgasms and the … I’d like to have sex last for awhile, that’s for sure, but it’s not like this big performance thing. It’s more like a falling in love thing and being caring and nurturing.
Dave Asprey: It’s awesome that you’re just totally open to talk about that stuff because these are things that everyone questions in their relationships, but it’s something that’s almost never talked about. It’s cool that you write about it and just can talk about it.
John Gray: It’s very nice of you talking about it. Here I was as a yogi, celibate yogi, and for a year I just went around and had sex with lots of wonderful women. I was so interested in what made a woman happy, so I felt like I learned all this stuff that I didn’t learn as a teenager. That’s what my first courses were. This is what I learned in a year of interviewing women on what makes them happy and the courses were everybody just talking about what they enjoyed most about sex. That was really the foundation of Men Are from Mars. I didn’t know it at the time, but here’s what most women don’t know is that when I have men talk about what is most fulfilling for them in sex, it was always her experience.
If she was totally satisfied and making sounds and orgasmic, that was the man’s major fulfillment. That’s when you felt really accomplished and “Boy, that was great.” If she’s just having sex out of obligation and she’s not into it, that’s totally boring for a guy and it will kill a marriage. One should never have sex out of obligation. At the same time, one should be having sex. What are the obstacles to having sex? I wrote a whole book on that one called Mars And Venus In The Bedroom. These are the kind of things I get to talk about at my Soul Mate seminar, which you’ll enjoy a lot. We spend a whole 3 hours on doing talk and sex. You think how can you talk about sex for 3 hours? Well, you’ll have to come to the seminar and see.
Dave Asprey: I’m really looking forward to coming to the seminar and I can really without reservation recommend to people listening, if you haven’t ever read one of John’s books, it’s not what you think it is. As a young guy, Mars and Venus has been out for more than a decade now, right?
John Gray: 2 decades.
Dave Asprey: 2 decades, right. I remember when I first … I’m like, “I’m not reading this book. This is one of those dumb relationship books.” This is the 22 year old me, right? I’m not going to read that. I don’t think I read it until … In fact, I know when I read it. It was when you spoke at Silicon Valley Health Institute. I read the Mars And Venus Collide book and I was like, “Oh my God, he totally gets all this neurotransmitter stuff,” and then I went back and read the first book and it wasn’t what I thought it was.
I can tell you even if you’re a little skeptical of one of these personal development-relationship things, this is real science. It’s actually actionable science, so any of your books is worth reading. I got to say, the Sane Folks in a Hyper World isn’t the relationship book. It’s a brain-hacking book by someone who spent 9 years as a monk, meditating, doing those things that make you very keenly aware of the inner workings of the mind and then applying biochemistry to it. This is a work that’s just worth reading. However, read all of John’s books if you really …
John Gray: Well, thank you.
Dave Asprey: I’m not just saying that. Really, you have a new level when you write. I really appreciate it.
John Gray: Well, Dave, thank you. When you’re holding the book up, it reminded me of, there’s something I just feel impelled to say, which is I talk about many of the causes. You asked about when I hit my head on the ground, if that caused ADHD. There’s many, many causes of ADHD that I talked about in the book. The basic model that I have is if I had a pill that I could give you to take away a headache, let’s say it’s a natural pill and there are no side effects and I gave you the pill for a headache and it works. It wouldn’t work if you keep hitting yourself in the head with a hammer.
This is what people have to know is they’re taking extra nutrition. Sometimes they say, “Well, that didn’t work for me.” I had somebody write to me the other day and he says, “I’ve been on anti-depressants. I went off and started doing the lithium orotate thing that you recommend and I’ve been feeling great. Then I got really tired. I went back to my doctor and he said, ‘Well, you shouldn’t take that. You should go back to taking the drugs.’ What should I do?”
I said, “Here’s the understand it. If you make a change to help your brain go into flow state, or high performance state, very quickly if you don’t have other nutrients as well, you will become deficient in them.” What I told him, “What you have to see is that you’ve been taking lithium orotate, it worked for you, but it also depleted you of your Omega 3’s. It probably depleted you of your Vitamin C. You need to get some extra supplements in there to sustain that high flow state.”
That’s really important. People will sometimes make a change. They feel better and then they feel worse, because whenever you feel better, it’s going to pull on all of these other nutrients that we need in order to be healthy and have optimal brain function. Some of those causes, those hitting ourselves over the head with a hammer, I’m saying this for parents that are listening. Because the big discussion about vaccinations, which clearly this is not our topic today, but if your child has a vaccination and you have a fever, my recommendation is don’t give your child Tylenol.
Dave Asprey: Yes.
John Gray: Tylenol is suppressing your fever. Your fever is there to protect the body from the oxidative stress which is being caused by the vaccination. Your fever is your body’s natural healing response. When you take Tylenol it shuts down your liver’s ability to make Glutathione, which is what’s going to protect you from the neurotoxins that are in vaccinations. This is so important and parents don’t know this. They think that the fever is dangerous and up to 105 degrees, even for days at 105 degrees, has never injured any child’s brains.
It can’t injure the brain. This was controversial before, but now it’s very well established that fevers don’t cause injury to the brain. The hospitals and the nurses and the doctors, they’ll give you a vaccination and then say, “Go ahead and take this Tylenol so you won’t get a fever.” Oh my Gosh. “And if you have a fever, take some more.” This is not the way to go.
Dave Asprey: Yeah. Tylenol is a scary drug and in fact, John, you probably don’t know. I manufacture a liposome with lactoferrin glutathione so it absorbs throughout the GI tract instead of just the top. Glutathione’s so important for cognitive function and for liver health. To give kids something that takes away glutathione in the liver and puts them or adults at risk, it seems like it should be a prescription drug, to be honest, not an over-the-counter substance. It’s a scary drug.
John Gray: It’s a very scary drug. The other one that is the most powerful, it’s Tylenol which has acetaminophen, which is also in 600 other over-the-counter drugs. People need to look out for acetaminophen, is Lipitor. Lipitor also is the number one drug in the world. It’s also the number one suppressor of glutathione and unfortunately only about 5% of the population even knows that the word glutathione is.
We’re helping to bring people to be aware of that. Glutathione is your body’s ultimate anti-oxidant. When people have ADHD, when they have brain injury, when they have dementia, when they have problems with their memory, when they have problems with Alzheimer’s, all those things if you measure their body, their body’s not making any glutathione.
Dave Asprey: Yep.
John Gray: Glutathione is our protection against all the stress and the oxidation and the free radicals that our life is giving us. We need to be able to make it. That’s why taking glutathione supplements is so important. I’m really glad you have that one. For me it’s always been, and this is how I helped deal with my Parkinson’s, which was oxidative stress in my brain. I wasn’t making enough glutathione to neutralize the oxidative stress of being a high performing person.
Dave Asprey: Yeah.
John Gray: We talked about high performers. When you’re producing a lot of energy, your brain is very vibrant in your flow state, you are making free radicals. People have to understand that. Your body needs to make the anti-oxidants to neutralize it. Then it’s all cool. For me, I wasn’t making enough glutathione and a big part of that was undenatured whey protein.
When dairy products are not cooked they’re good for you and undenatured whey protein is magnificent for producing glutathione, helping your body make glutathione. These are like the magic formulas for people. I started doing this wonderful shake every day along with goji berries and this was before the goji berry phase. I helped found Himalayan goji berry and brought it to the west.
Dave Asprey: Nice.
John Gray: I was in Tibet climbing a mountain, almost died of hypothermia, and the people that rescued me were all drinking this little goji berry tea. They’re big vibrant people and I went, “What is this stuff?” It’s an amazing substance, a tremendous adaptogen, helping the adrenals. It has such concentrated Vitamin C is just one of its properties. That is something that anybody can benefit from is putting those super foods in your shakes is goji berries.
Dave Asprey: Well, John, I feel like I could talk to you for about 5 more hours and we’re coming up on the end of the show. There’s a question I’ve got to ask you because I’ve asked everyone on the show and your answers are going to be unique I think. If you had 3 pieces advice given everything you’ve learned in your life, the most 3 important pieces of advice for someone who wants to perform better in life, perform better at whatever they’re here to do. They might be a mom or a dad or an artist or a professional athlete, doesn’t matter. You want to perform better, these 3 things matter most. What are they?
John Gray: You need to have your basis in yourself, some form of meditation, some sort of activity to calm and find an inner fulfillment inside, which frees you from over-dependence on others to find your fulfillment. It’s a basis. You’ve got to have some practice which is your basis. The second is love, is that we need to be experiencing love in our lives and in an intimate relationship if you can have that love, it can take you to the highest level. Having children of course takes you to another level, but the challenging one is intimate relationship.
In that relationship you learn if it’s going to be successful. The second point is how to give freely without blame when it doesn’t come back, but taking responsibility for how can I adjust what I give to get back what I need. It’s a sharing relationship, but we tend to blame out and you can let learning how to explore how did I bring out the worst in my partner rather than how can I bring out the best in my partner?
This is a whole trajectory of learning. It’s a lifetime lesson of how to keep bringing out the best in others and give your love in that process. One is your own connection to your true self and following your dream, following your truth, being authentic. That’s the foundation. Then comes love and then comes the third one, is being responsible to your body and your brain. It’s such a priority today. In the Eastern ideas of enlightenment, you could follow these paths of enlightenment.
Nobody had to worry about nutrition because they were all eating organic foods. The milk wasn’t polluted, the water wasn’t polluted, the air wasn’t polluted. There wasn’t mineral deficiencies, so people didn’t have to worry so much about diet in those days. They just needed to find their inner self and they could be more loving in their relationships. Today we have so many more challenges, but the benefits can be so much greater with the higher consciousness that we have available to us.
Dave Asprey: Awesome, amazing answers as I would have expected. Tell people where they should go to learn more about your work and specifically to get Staying Focused In A Hyper World because this book is not like your other books and it’s worth reading first.
John Gray: Well, thank you very much. Staying Focused is, you can go to Amazon. It’s only available on Amazon. It’s an easy e-book or you can get the actual book there, paperback. You can also go to my website, marsvenus.com. I’ve got hundreds of blogs on relationships and all the kind of health issues. I also do blogs on those, little 10 minute blogs on how the body works, the brain works, the hormone works, and different kind of supplements and nutrients that can help us. I just want to say as we’re closing here, I’m a big fan of Bulletproof Coffee and I have my Bulletproof in the morning and my butter with it, my coconut oil in it. I also, I add egg yolks to mine. You can also … Have you ever tried that?
Dave Asprey: Absolutely. I’ve done that on and off for a long time to get the lecithin in. Mark Sisson also has written about, I forget what he calls it, something about egg coffee, primal egg coffee.
John Gray: That’s right. Egg coffee. Yeah.
Dave Asprey: Yeah, and it sounds gross, but it’s actually like ice cream when you do that. It’s really good.
John Gray: It’s delicious and one of the benefits of it is the choline, which many people are not getting enough choline for our memory. Particularly at my age memory’s a really key thing, to keep that fast. If you’re just stimulating dopamine, it does improve your memory, but it’s also depleting you of acetylcholine in the brain, so making sure that you’re getting lots of choline and egg yolks are a really good source of choline.
Dave Asprey: That’s why if someone says they want the egg white omelet, you just raise your hand and say, “I’ll take the yolks.” Then everybody wins.
John Gray: That’s right. That’s right. My favorite, egg yolks. They’re heaven’s gift. Yeah, that’s all at marsvenus.com. Thanks for letting me talk about it, and people can find out more information about my Soul Mate seminar there as well.
Dave Asprey: John, it was an honor to have you on the show and just a great pleasure to chat with you and I look forward to seeing you at your next seminar. Maybe not the next one, but the next one where I can arrange to be there.
John Gray: Very cool and I’ll look forward to being at your event as well. Thank you.
Dave Asprey: Thanks. Bye. If you enjoyed today’s episode, you know what to do. Go out there and check out Staying Focused In A Hyper World. I don’t have just anyone on the show. I have amazing people on the show and this is one of the most amazing guys who knows about relationships, knows about your brain. He’s not a doctor, he’s a bio-hacker, even if he doesn’t call himself that. Thanks again, John.
