Relationship Hacks For Dealing With Conflicts, Monogamy, Sex & Communication With The Opposite Sex – Neil Strauss – #406

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Recently, self-made millionaire, serial entrepreneur, and best-selling author James Altucher gave away all of his earthly possessions and decided to live the life of a nomad with no place to call home. Why? In order to attain the one thing money can’t buy: happiness. James tells Dave how his nomadic lifestyle has allowed him to increase his creativity, mental well-being and how it’s allowed him to find something that’s alluded him his whole life: contentment.

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Speaker 1:                           Bulletproof Radio. The state of high performance.

Dave Asprey:                     You’re listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey.

Today’s cool fact of the day is that there’s a direct relationship between the bacteria in your gut and the myelin, this is the insulation on the nerves in the front of your brain called the prefrontal cortex. The more insulated the nerves are the better they work, and it appears that some gut bacteria actually inhibit neuron function and basically, they can make you stupid.

Today’s guest is none other than James Altucher. James is a successful entrepreneur, an angel investor, chess master, prolific writer, he’s started and run only like 20 companies, which jeez, only 20. Of those, 17 have failed and 3 have made him tens of millions of dollars, so he’s a global playboy … Oh, okay maybe not, but-

James Altucher:                No, I stay home.

Dave Asprey:                     Yeah, exactly. Well, one of really interesting guys’ that I know, and his writing’s been all over the place, like Wall Street Journal, New York Observer, Tech Crunch, Financial Times, Yahoo Finance, and he runs the well known podcast, “The James Altucher Show”, and if you haven’t heard the show, you owe it to yourself to check that out. It’s a good show.

James Altucher:                Particularly the three episode that a young man named Dave Asprey has been on.

Dave Asprey:                     Yeah, those were my favorite episodes, I have to say.

James Altucher:                Yes.

Dave Asprey:                     It’s … You should also read his blog, James Altucher dot com, which has had about 20 million readers. You’re the author of 18 books, including the Wall Street Journal’s best sellers, “The Power of No”, “Choose Yourself”, and “Reinvent Yourself”.

James, welcome, and this is not your first time on Bulletproof Radio.

James Altucher:                Well, Dave, thanks for having me on the show. I’m so excited. I’m a big fan, obviously.

Dave Asprey:                     Well, and likewise. I appreciate what you’ve done and what you’re doing; just the way you think about stuff. You’re very purposeful in what you do, and today, I want to interview about something that is intriguing to me. We’ll call it the “Anti-minimalism Podcast”.

James Altucher:                Okay.

Dave Asprey:                     I just did an interview with The Minimalist Guys, and it went really, really well. It’s fascinating.

James Altucher:                Good guys, and I like them. I’m not … When I say anti, it’s not a judgment, right.

Dave Asprey:                     Yeah, not at all.

James Altucher:                Everybody has their own philosophy of life that makes them happy, and I think rather than subscribe to any one other person’s philosophy, you should sort of choose the one that fits you.

Dave Asprey:                     Okay. What you did over the last year is a little bit nutty, I would just say, where you got rid of most of your belongings and you started living out of Airbnb’s.

James Altucher:                Right, so a little over a year ago I threw out, not some or most, I threw out all of my belongings, maybe I left myself with … What I did was, I was away and I had a lease coming up on two different apartments that I was renting, one in the city, one in the town by my kids, and while I was away I had a friend of mine I paid to go to both places and either sell, keep, donate, or throw out 100% of the items.

I don’t want to ever go to those apartments again. I don’t want to deal with the almost fatigue of trying to figure out, once again, how to manage all of these objects and possessions, and most people don’t realize … Most people don’t realize how many object they have.

Dave Asprey:                     It’s crazy.

James Altucher:                Like, if you take all of your object and kind of put them in garbage bags, and I know this ’cause I’ve seen the photos now of my own objects, it’s like a hundred garbage bags worth of stuff. I wasn’t really living a Maximalist life before, but you just accumulate over years and decades all of this stuff.

So, I got rid of everything, and I didn’t want to deal with renting again because renting also is kind of extra work I don’t want to do.

Dave Asprey:                     It’s high friction.

James Altucher:                It’s high friction. It’s all these credit checks and references and last time I rented I had to do five references. I had to call people and ask them to write letters, five people, and then I had my lawyer write a letter, then my accountant write a letter. Then because I’ve never been in debt in my life, I’ve never had a credit card, my credit score was wacky so I had to meet every single person in the building and explain why I didn’t live life the normal American and accumulate all this debt that I would then pay off for years for-

Dave Asprey:                     Here’s the companies I’ve sold, you know, wave your bank account balance. Like, how do you even have that conversation? That’s hilarious.

James Altucher:                It was hilarious, and everything went fine, but I just … And then of course because of that I still had to put down two months security deposit, first month’s and last month’s rent, and then you have the normal thing where when you rent a place you have to buy all sorts of furniture and maintenance and all this … So, I figured, “You know what, I’m just gonna do Airbnb’s.” So I could experience other lifestyles whenever I want or I could stay in places for longer if I want, and I can vary it up a little and see how other people live and not worry about all of the maybe hundreds mini decisions that used to kind of follow me around from place to place.

I’ve been doing this now almost a year. A year almost to the day.

Dave Asprey:                     I’ve written a lot in Headstrong and the Bulletproof Diet about decision fatigue, and just how making dumb decisions takes your life. I religiously avoid as many of those decisions as I can. Like, I don’t know what day of the week it is. I don’t know where I’m going next, it’s all on my phone. Like, anytime I can outsource that, but I got to say running a house is a pain in the ass, whether is rented or even purchased, which is another huge amount of friction.

You adjusted your life to just reduce friction rather than to be minimalist.

James Altucher:                Right. In many of your books, you talk about your story and how you were sensitive to these mycotoxins. These small toxic materials in the environment. I will say I wanted to avoid kind of almost the decision equivalent of mycotoxins because-

Dave Asprey:                     They float around everywhere and each one makes you a little bit weak, right.

James Altucher:                Right, like of course there’s big decisions like, “Who should I be in a relationships with? Where should I live?” And all that stuff, but then there’s just thousands of mini decisions where, “My wifi is down, who do I call to fix it?” Or little things like, “I gotta buy a chair for this.” Or “I’ve gotta maintain this.” There’s all these little decisions you have in maintaining possessions and maintaining a house and I wanted to avoid all of them.

What I wanted to do was make a larger percentage of the day … Every day let’s say we make ten thousand choices, big and small, so I wanted to make a bigger percentage of my choices about what I really want to do as opposed to things that I have to do or choices that I have to make. You can’t be 100%, but you can get fairly close or you can get higher and higher.

For instance, this podcast is something I wanted to do. I choose to do it. I wake up in the morning, I didn’t have to buy the bed, I didn’t have to buy a place with my view, I picked an Airbnd and picked the ideal place, there for two weeks, and this is where I’ll be. It’s an easy decision. I can change views later. Change furniture later.

Dave Asprey:                     What about packing up all your crap?

James Altucher:                I have three outfits in one bag, and I have another bag with a computer and a tablet and a phone, and I have right in front of me your book Headstrong, and I have a pen and a waiter’s pad.

Dave Asprey:                     Wow. What do you do with my book when you’re done reading it?

James Altucher:                Oh, I’ll give it away.

Dave Asprey:                     Cool.

James Altucher:                Because I read a lot of books for my podcast and I have to give them away, unless I get them on my Kindle, but I have to give away-

Dave Asprey:                     The physical copy, right?

James Altucher:                Yeah. By the way, I love physical copies of books. This is not about being 100% happy. People kind of think, “Oh, I need a philosophy that’s gonna make me 100% happy.” I love physical books, but I-

Dave Asprey:                     It’s not worth it.

James Altucher:                I’m making a philosophy that I’m just gonna have my books on my Kindle so that I can minimize the things I carry around. I miss things. I’m sentimental for some of the things I’ve thrown out, but it’s not about being perfectly happy all the time. It’s about, today, making as many choices as possible that I want to make.

Dave Asprey:                     I absolutely love what you’re saying. In my travels, especially with Bulletproof, I’ve had a chance to meet some fantastically wealthy people with tens to hundreds to even billions of dollars, and to help them with their cognitive performance by hiking stuff, and one thing that a lot of them have is nice houses, but they also have like a household manager. This is someone who makes between 40 and probably 100 thousand dollars a year whose job it is to do, probably more in New York or something, but their job is to run the house. So, “I don’t know where groceries come from. The grocery fairy bring them. The smoke detector has a problem? I don’t know, the smoke detector fairy does it.” This is the fairy conjurer person.

James Altucher:                Yeah, so the first time I sold a company … Sorry to interrupt, but it just reminds me … The first time I sold a company, this is 1998-

Dave Asprey:                     This was Reset, right?

James Altucher:                Yeah, yeah, and then all of a sudden I bought a house and I bought a really nice place, and suddenly the next thing I realize I was never alone in the house, there was always people there. I wouldn’t even know who they were. There was always people around doing things, and that’s a stress also, like, I don’t need to deal with any of that right now. I really wanted to avoid it.

Another thing I wanted to mention is the groceries. So, I never shopped for groceries. I’m gonna call it the Airbnb diet, maybe you’ll appreciate this, but I have no food in the house, and the reason is I … You can’t order delivery from a restaurant and say, “Okay, I’ll have a bag of Doritos for dessert.” Like, there’s no restaurant menu will have a bag of Doritos on the dessert menu, so the worst I can do is a slice of cake; is the worst thing in my diet.

In general, I won’t order the desserts then ’cause I know … I won’t be exposed to anything that I know I won’t have the will power to avoid, particularly at night. I’ll just order what I think is healthy so I’m not exposed to the things that are not necessarily healthy. In the past year I’ve probably lost between 50 and 20 pounds just from doing this.

Dave Asprey:                     Nice. Even though you’re eating out all the time?

James Altucher:                Even though I’m ordering delivery all the time. I don’t really like to leave … Once I’m in these beautiful apartments that I’m Airbnb-ing, I don’t like to leave them too much.

Dave Asprey:                     Okay. You’re a bit of an introvert.

James Altucher:                Bit of an introvert.

Dave Asprey:                     All right. Now, I was gonna say why didn’t you consider a household manager. Did you have one when you made all your money? I know you lost it, but that’s part of what we have in common. I made six million and lost it. You made like ten of fifteen and lost it.

James Altucher:                Yeah, yeah. I had … You know, I had everything under the sun. It’s just crazy. It’s crazy what you can do with money, and then you do it. Now, the other thing is that I have a discipline in the sense that, “Oh, okay. I thought …” The other day I thought about getting a new kind of camera so I could do Facebook live easier, but then it was like, “Okay, it’s not in my discipline to have an extra device.” So, I don’t buy it. It’s an easy decision. All the time I want new things, but it’s an easy decision. I don’t buy anything new.

Dave Asprey:                     Wow, just don’t buy anything new. It’s pretty different from what I do. I’ll run an organic farm. I just say it more accurately-

James Altucher:                You’re a farmer.

Dave Asprey:                     More accurately, I live on an organic farm that provides all of my food, and I fund the organic farm. I’ll pull weeds on weekends with the kids, but for the most part we have gardeners and my wife is kind enough to organize all that stuff. She does some of the management and I have another guy that helps me out, and like, between running a company where you have assistants all the time and running a complex, a farm, it basically is another business … Yeah, there’s always people around and things like that.

Then, because I’m a professional buy-backer, I have a giant laboratory full of huge things. There is a cognitive burden just having all this crap that needs maintenance, even though it’s useful crap. I like the idea of being able to just use what you want when you want to use it, even if it’s someone else’s and they manage it. This [inaudible 00:12:46] like health clubs. You can buy a universal machine at home, it’s a clothes hanging rack, or you could just go to the gym the once a month you’re actually gonna go do it.

You’re sort of doing this with everything in your life.

James Altucher:                Right, so we sort of live in this … Let’s not call it the sharing economy, let’s call it the access economy. What you just described with the universal health machine or universal fitness machine is that you don’t want to own it, but you want to have access to it. That’s why you get a gym membership to have access to what you need for health.

What I want to do is have access to anything I need to make a living, to live, to be productive, and so on, but I don’t want to own anything. I kind of feel, in general, we’re moving towards that as an economy where the need … Unless you kind of have a fetish for luxury, which of course many people do, you don’t really need to own as many things. You can just have access to them.

For instance, why would I spend let’s call it 100 thousand dollars for a nice SUV when every day I can take a 10 dollar Uber when I need one. Why would I buy let’s say New York City a two million dollar, one bedroom apartment, which is what they cost in New York, when for 300 bucks I could stay in one without putting down 200 thousand dollars and getting into massive debt.

All of these decisions become a lot easier. Like, scary financial decisions become easier, and then the smaller ones as well, like what we were saying about the groceries.

Dave Asprey:                     Do you think that what you’re proposing is something that someone with a normal paycheck could even consider?

James Altucher:                Yeah because I would say … You know, the Airbnb’s a little more expensive than renting, but A, Airbnb often … Many apartments on Airbnb offer a significant monthly discount if you stay for a month, which translate to almost rent. Second, you’re not buying furniture, you’re not buying any kind of renter’s insurance, you’re not paying extra electricity bills or air conditioning bills or whatever. Now, presumably that’s baked into the price, but that’s fine; it’s baked into the price. So, I just don’t have to think about all these things. It’s like consolidate into one price on Airbnd. Usually, when someone’s renting an Airbnb for a month or more, they’re living someplace else and they just want to kind of break even on the Airbnb or make a little bit of money, which is fine. I’ll pay for that, for them to make a little bit of money so I can avoid all these extra hassles.

Dave Asprey:                     You don’t have to pay your bills, and that’s actually worth a lot.

James Altucher:                Yeah, like who wants to sit down once a month and write 10, 15, 20 checks out. For me, that’s a stress. I have-

Dave Asprey:                     Oh, huge stress.

James Altucher:                I have all this stress about money. I don’t want to deal with it, so this is like … Everything happens through … And this doesn’t have to be Airbnb, although that’s what I use, but there’s many different websites and ways to do this. Sometimes if a friend’s going out of town for a month, I get a month free in their apartment. Nice or not nice; doesn’t matter to me. I just need to … I like to write as much as possible. I like to do my podcast. I run a business, but I work with somebody who manages the employees, and so I don’t have to deal with the day to day business decisions. Unlike you, you’re more involved day to day in your business, and so you have to be there, but I focus on the writing and the content part.

Dave Asprey:                     Yeah, I’m working on focusing more on podcast and writing and content because that’s where I add some unique value, and just hiring really good operators to help scale stores.

James Altucher:                If you hire really good operator, not only does your business become better, like, I’m not the best operator, I know this-

Dave Asprey:                     Yeah, neither am I.

James Altucher:                It’s better for me to hire a better operator, who is someone whose passionate about operating, and for me to focus on the things I love and I’m good at. Again, it’s about what percentage of your day are you making choice that you like. Now, if you have … I divide time with my kids with my ex-wife. If you have kids … When my kids are with me, they travel around with me from Airbnb to Airbnb.

Dave Asprey:                     I was about to ask you that. How old are the kids?

James Altucher:                18 and 15.

Dave Asprey:                     Okay, so they’re old enough they can totally chill, they can take an Uber by themselves and that works.

James Altucher:                Right, and I think if they were babies I wouldn’t be able to live this lifestyle. That’s why I’m saying I’m not recommending this for anybody, and you know, there’s two branches of minimalism. There’s the minimalist you’ve spoken to who-

Dave Asprey:                     Yeah, good guys.

James Altucher:                They have a documentary on Netflix. Good guys and they’re … They buy few things, they keep simple lives, and they’re very good guys. Then there’s the kind of Marie Kondo branch, which is like, “Oh, I’m gonna put every object on the ground, and then I’m gonna hold it to my heart and if I love it, I keep it.” That’s a lot of work. I can’t do that.

Again, it’s not about being, like, just having around all these objects that I love. Why is she so much in love with all these objects?

Dave Asprey:                     Have you had her on your show?

James Altucher:                I haven’t, no.

Dave Asprey:                     I want to interview her, and maybe she won’t want to interview me or she won’t want to do it ’cause I just have to say this, so I read her book and I found her book fascinating-

James Altucher:                Yeah, it’s a great book.

Dave Asprey:                     It’s really well written, and she deserved to be on the New York Times list for like a gazillion years because the book is worth a read. Unfortunately, my wife Lana read the book and I have now renamed Marie Kondo to Marie Komodo, as in Komodo dragon because it caused my wonderful wife Lana to try and hide my coffee maker and all of my coffee paraphernalia under the counter, which is unacceptable as a human being to not be able to make coffee every morning. Pretty soon I’m like, “Our house is a beautiful, expansive living emptiness, and I can’t find anything I do.” So, the amount of time it takes me to do anything just quadrupled. I was wasting all my time making sure the house looked all empty, and it just made me want to bang my head on the wall.

James Altucher:                Right. That’s a stress.

Dave Asprey:                     It totally was.

James Altucher:                I find some kind of minimalism to be stressful. I’m not criticizing them, it’s just not me.

Dave Asprey:                     Yeah, it’s what works for you. Right. I hear you.

James Altucher:                I call it more choicism. I’m-

Dave Asprey:                     I love that name.

James Altucher:                You know, make … Eliminate as many difficult choices, even minor difficult choices, as possible, and just make it as easy as possible. Life is hard in general, like every day of life is hard and make it as easy as possible to make the choices to do the things you love to do. It’s not always possible to do that, but you just want to increase your odds.

Dave Asprey:                     That is … It’s a very interesting way of looking at it and you’re the first person I’ve come across whose taken it to this extreme, and I share your absolute aversion to making useless decisions. I find things like self-service to be irritating, like, “I’m sorry, you should have someone to handle that because that’s your job; you’re the company.” Like, “Don’t ask me mister credit card company to make me do extra work because you didn’t want to pay your people to do it.” Like, how bout this, “I’m not gonna do it.”

James Altucher:                Right … Or I don’t have voicemail, for instance, on my phone.

Dave Asprey:                     What’s voicemail? It’s like a fax, right?

James Altucher:                But a lot of people do have voicemail on their phone and you call … They would call and then I’d have some message, “Don’t worry, I’ll call you back soon.” I’m not calling them back ever.

Dave Asprey:                     Yeah.

James Altucher:                Now, nobody can leave message. I don’t pick up the phone either.

Dave Asprey:                     Same here.

James Altucher:                They can text me, but you’re not necessarily obligate to return texts, but voicemail I feel like there was that obligation.

Dave Asprey:                     Wow, I went through this, maybe I was an early adopter of “the voicemail is evil” and when I was working in Silicon Valley I did this, I’m like, “I’m spending two hours a day checking, transcribing voicemail.” Before they had transcription services, like, “This is horrible.” So, first it was, “Please, just send me an e-mail. Really, like, here’s my e-mail address. I probably won’t check this very often.” And now, where I live I’m in a relatively small town and Canada is a little bit technologically behind the U.S., to be perfectly honest, and I love Canada … I’m grateful to be living there-

James Altucher:                Are you from Canada originally?

Dave Asprey:                     No, I just … I’m a permanent resident, I’ve been living there for eight years.

James Altucher:                Okay.

Dave Asprey:                     And I live on an island in a small town, and it’s lovely. Bald Eagles and I look out over Salisbury Island and grow my own food and I’m close to an airport, like, it’s perfect for young kids. The problem is everyone wants to call you and leave you a voicemail, and finally, I had to turn … They didn’t know what to do when they didn’t get a voicemail, so I turned it back on and was like, “Listen, there is no chance ever that I will listen to or return this voicemail. You must not leave a voicemail. You have to send a text message or I will never get this.”

James Altucher:                Yeah, it works.

Dave Asprey:                     That strong of language, and it works half the time. The rest of the time they’re like, “I tried to leave you or I left you a voicemail.” Like, “I don’t know.” You can never pay me enough, you will never get me to check my voicemail for the rest of my life because anything I do has higher value to me than checking voicemail.

James Altucher:                Here’s another thing related to that and people are, particularly given the recent election cycle, people are somewhat critical of this, but I never read the news. I don’t read any newspapers, I don’t go to CNN dot com-

Dave Asprey:                     That’s worth a high five right there.

James Altucher:                Because like what are you going to read today in the news that will make your life better? There’s almost nothing. I’d rather read a book. We have your book “Headstrong” right in front of me, I’d rather spend … You only have limited amount of time, so I’d rather read a book that … This was two or three years or twenty years of your curated thoughts boiled down into 400 pages or 300 pages that I could read and learn from, as opposed to reading about, I don’t know … Whatever, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West might get a divorce, which I hope they don’t, but you know … I don’t read, and you know, the same goes for the Twitter feed and the Facebook feed. I don’t go down that at all.

Dave Asprey:                     It’s an interesting one, there’s a plug in for Facebook now that you can get on your browser that actually takes out the newsfeed-

James Altucher:                Oh, interesting.

Dave Asprey:                     You can still use Facebook to communicate, but you don’t ever see the feed, which is kind of cool. I’m not remember it’s name right now, but if you Google for it you’ll find it. It’s like “Don’t bother me” or something like that.

James Altucher:                But I just don’t hit home on the Facebook page.

Dave Asprey:                     Yeah.

James Altucher:                I’ll see my timeline and I’ll see my messages on Facebook, but that’s actually the main way people message with me right now is on Facebook.

Dave Asprey:                     Is on Facebook.

James Altucher:                But I don’t use … I don’t look at the newsfeed because, again, I’d rather read a book. I’m very … We’re both 49 years old, so there’s only-

Dave Asprey:                     I’m only 44, I just look 49 … I’m just kidding.

James Altucher:                I figure-

Dave Asprey:                     We’re about the same.

James Altucher:                I’ve, give or take, 15 thousand days left to live.

Dave Asprey:                     Yeah.

James Altucher:                A third of those-

Dave Asprey:                     We could give you more if you wanted.

James Altucher:                I know you’re trying to live to be 180, I don’t even want to live to be 180. I’m fine with 90.

Dave Asprey:                     I hear ya.

James Altucher:                5000 … A third of my life I’ll be asleep, so I-

Dave Asprey:                     Live on less sleep, man. Come on.

James Altucher:                I know, I gotta-

Dave Asprey:                     I’m just kidding.

James Altucher:                You do 5 to 6 hours, I sleep 8 hours. Maybe I’ll get down to-

Dave Asprey:                     I keep interrupting your point, I’m just giving you a hard time. Keep going.

James Altucher:                No, maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m gonna start taking the advice in “Headstrong” and I wouldn’t mind sleeping 5 to 6 hours, but right now I need 8.

Dave Asprey:                     Yeah, I hear ya.

James Altucher:                And you only have limited time. Do you read Donal Trump’s Tweets or do you read a good book?

Dave Asprey:                     I’ve struggled. I’m glad we’re talking about this, this is more of like a two way thing than I often times do in these interviews. I’ve struggle with that thing, I don’t watch the news. It is toxic to your nervous system. You want to put yourself in fight or flight, have your mitochondria tweaking all the time, it’s like a constant barrage of threats and bad things that happen to other people that make you think they could happen to you.

James Altucher:                And by the way, they specifically do the news to trigger fight or flight.

Dave Asprey:                     Yeah.

James Altucher:                Right, because it’s really fight, flight, or freeze. They want you to freeze, just keep staring at the news.

Dave Asprey:                     Yeah, it’s good for selling ads. There might be valuable stuff in the news, but the signal to noise it terrible. What I ended up doing is a little different than you on Facebook, I spend time training the Facebook algorithm, so I go through, “Show me less posts like this” and I managed to get all the political crap out of my feed. Like, it’s just gone.

James Altucher:                That’s good.

Dave Asprey:                     And yeah, it takes whatever, a couple hours of, “No, no, no, never show me this person’s random rants again. No, no, no.” And now, I actually rely on my friends, and to a certain point, a couple other algorithms because there’s the program on Facebook mentions the influence or … You have to have a lot of followers or they don’t even give it to you, but what it does is it intelligently let’s my friends tell me what matters.

So, when I post on my Dave Asprey page, I’m finding all this amazing, cool research and stuff, but I’m not the sole source of that. It’s all the people who are my friends who talk about cool stuff, and then algorithmically it’s filtered. For me, that serves as the equivalent of news because it’s carefully curated.

James Altucher:                I could see that. I mean, what I typically do is … ‘Cause people say, you know, “It’s shameful if you’re uninformed about what’s going on with politics.” Particularly today’s day and age-

Dave Asprey:                     It’s not shameful. It mean that you have a life.

James Altucher:                Right, and also, the way I view it is the news, at best, is the rough draft of history. I would rather see kind of a more final form, like there’s this whole debate on what’s fake news, what’s real news, we don’t even know-

Dave Asprey:                     It’s all fake news.

James Altucher:                Right.

Dave Asprey:                     Every single bit of it, whether it’s partisan or not, it’s all fake news. It was crafted for you to listen to it and not necessarily based on what happened.

James Altucher:                I mean, I used to go on a lot of news shows, particularly when I was running a hedge fund, I was more involved in the financial space and I remember a producer once telling me, “All we’re trying to do is fill the space between ads.” And that’s coming from the producer of a major news show.

Dave Asprey:                     Wow.

James Altucher:                It just … Kind of right there and then I stopped with TV news, and then later on I decided, “You know what, I could be reading the New York Post or I could be reading like a great short story and book.” And I’d rather read the book.

Dave Asprey:                     Do you read some of the more longer, more thoughtful New Yorker articles or Atlantic or the …

James Altucher:                I don’t, but I might read what comes out once a year, The Best American Essays, of the prior year, and then I’ll get … Or is someone really says, “You have to read this one essay.” And these things, but in general I just stick to books that I think are gonna both educate and entertain me.

Dave Asprey:                     Interesting. You’re really on the extreme there. I’m thinking like, I said I don’t watch news, I don’t watch unfiltered news, but because I have the friend filter set up I’ll watch … And I’m totally nonpartisan, I’m like, “Whoever’s in office, if you’re attracted to be in political office you’re probably a bad person.”

James Altucher:                Demented.

Dave Asprey:                     Right, so like I don’t really care what flag you wear or whatever, like you felt a need to do this so whatever, and sorry if you’re a politician listening, you might be a good person, I just have never met you. Just kidding. I’m pissing-

James Altucher:                That was … A little bit of humor in that. That’s funny.

Dave Asprey:                     I know, but now I’m pissing on … I have friends in all sorts of things, but I don’t think they’re all bad people, I’m just ranting. What I do know if I will see clips from Fox News, I’ll see clips from CNN, I’ll see clips, but they’re usually one minute clips and usually filtered by someone and said, “This is totally interesting.” And at that point, someone else spent 100 hours looking at news just to find the clips, so I don’t want to throw it all out entirely, but I’m not willing to search for the occasional nugget. As long as someone else does the search, and if their nugget detector isn’t very good, like, “Never follow that again.” And so rapidly you get to see the one minute clip of like, “Oh, that was inspiring.”

James Altucher:                Yeah, and I think that’s a good way to go. Again, I probably take an extreme.

Dave Asprey:                     I like your extreme.

James Altucher:                Which to relieve that kind of decision stress, I just know I’d rather read a book than … I just always default to that, I’d rather read a book than watch the rough draft of history, but often I write, I want people to read my things, but again, a book, like you say, it’s so curated. Like, how many decades of knowledge went into the “Bulletproof Diet” and “Headstrong”? Like, four decades of knowledge.

Dave Asprey:                     It’s been … I just look back at the amount of time and [inaudible 00:28:45] field and it’s been my life’s work in addition to all like building early Internet infrastructure that mattered greatly at the time, but now I’m like, “This is what matters to me.” Yeah, and “This is my best work that I can possibly do ’cause if a hundred thousand people read this book and I fill it with crap, I’m a mass murderer.” Like, four hours times a hundred thousand that’s like multiple human life times, right?

James Altucher:                Right, so I’ll take it one step further. People say if you’re uninformed about the news you won’t be able to vote. Now, let’s say you lived in California, for instance, the votes already, for President at least, is already predetermined. Like, California is going one way, Texas is going another way. Like, that’s predetermined, but, I guess in general … I don’t even know.

Dave Asprey:                     Do you vote?

James Altucher:                I don’t vote at all. No, I have never … I have never voted, but-

Dave Asprey:                     You just pissed off everyone, right?

James Altucher:                I know, but here’s the thing. You spent your time doing something … Here’s how I would argue if I were you, and I had never voted, I would say, “I spent these decades doing something that’s gonna impact millions …” How many people have had a Bulletproof cup of coffee? How many cups of coffee have you sold?

Dave Asprey:                     Last year was 48 million, yeah.

James Altucher:                Okay, how many million cups of coffee do you have to sell to out weigh, “Oh, I didn’t make one vote in California?” Like, probably 10 cups of coffee is enough to out value, to out weigh one vote. You sold 48 million.

Dave Asprey:                     There’s people who say, “People died for the right to vote and you’re not even using it.”

James Altucher:                People also died so that you could write any book you want. People died so that you can create a company that can solve massive health problems. People dies so I could write and focus my energies where I could have the most impact, positive impact on people. Voting … People kind of say … They kind of outsource their positive impact to a vote once every four years. I’d rather every day try to have positive impact.

Dave Asprey:                     I think it takes a lot of balls to say that.

James Altucher:                I get hurt by it. Like, I get hate mail.

Dave Asprey:                     You’re inspiring me to get hate mail because I’m gonna talk about something I really haven’t talked about publicly, but what the hell.

All right, when I was 18, I studied all of the political stuff. I was like every ballot, measure, all this stuff-

James Altucher:                Why?

Dave Asprey:                     Well, because I thought it was my civic duty. I’m like, “I have a right to vote.” All this stuff, “I should go exercise this.” Besides, I was 18 what the hell did I know? I went out and I voted. Every single person I voted for, the first thing they did when they got in office was the exact opposite of what they promised to do, and it didn’t matter whether I voted for a ballot measure or not because your vote is essentially lost in a huge sea of votes. So, I looked at that and said, “You know what, there’s no point to this.” I spend probably 20 hours preparing to become an informed voter, and it didn’t matter because there were liars who I voted for and because the ballots, they’re also poorly written and they’re all specialized groups, and I just said, “This is a huge waste of time. I’m not gonna do it anymore.”

And I resolved at that point I’d rather do something that matters, and it could matter to me or, at this point, matter to someone else. See, I don’t vote either, and I don’t vote either because also I’m a computer hacker by training and I can show you which major elections were hacked and exactly how, and God dammit we know that. This isn’t a conspiracy theory or anything like that, it’s just math.

James Altucher:                So between hacked elections and lying politicians, I don’t understand why people get so upset about the voting thing. Again, there’s so many ways … Help an old lady across the street every day for a year and you’ve done much better than that vote.

Dave Asprey:                     One meaningful act of kindness does more to shift the country than voting. It does. I mean, one. If you do one every day, you have completely moved the needle in a way that you will never do in a lifetime of voting.

James Altucher:                Plus, there’s all sorts of evidence that doing that is healthy.

Dave Asprey:                     It helps you to help other people. It feels good, and acknowledging that you help other people as a selfish act is not a bad thing either, but it makes the world a better place. Like you, I just fundamentally believe I can do more with that time to serve others or just to be a good father, to be a good husband, than worrying about that. Thinking and worrying and stressing, and I know some amazing people who are top of their field who are losing sleep and like experiencing true anxiety, whether they’re liberals or conservatives, just over this election. I’m like … you never had control.

James Altucher:                Yeah, people getting depressed.

Dave Asprey:                     Yeah.

James Altucher:                People getting angry, you know, friend versus friend. Like, it’s a Civil War in the streets.

Dave Asprey:                     Right, and it’s not like there’s only two decisions, like there’s tens of thousands of variables and just lumping it into two things so you can be black or white, I just don’t get it. I share values with people on all sides of political fences, and so just to decide, “I’m not gonna be stressed about that. I’m not gonna be unaware, but I’m going to focus on the things that deliver the most value and I’m gonna be okay with what happens, and if it’s really not okay, they’ll be many other people with pitchforks in line ahead of me.” Like, “It’s okay.”

James Altucher:                I have to ask you one piece of advice before we close this podcast, and it’s related to your “Headstrong” book, even though I know you’re probably tired of speaking about it now-

Dave Asprey:                     It’s a great work of many hours. I’m happy to share it, what is it?

James Altucher:                In my approach of I want to make as many fun and good choices for myself as possible, I decided this very evening I’m gonna do stand up comedy to get myself out of my comfort zone-

Dave Asprey:                     Did you really?

James Altucher:                Yeah.

Dave Asprey:                     Good.

James Altucher:                I knew a guy who runs a club and I’m going up and I’m not Tweeting about it or Facebooking, I’m just going up like all the rest of the comedians, not like a talk based around me, and but now, I’m starting to get scared about it. What headstrong thing should I do between now and 9:00 p.m. to get my energy levels high, to be calm, and to be good?

Dave Asprey:                     I’m going to answer this for you, and as part of the answer, I gotta tell you, I did exactly this for “Headstrong” because pushing limits is important. I recorded my first rap.

James Altucher:                Okay. That’s good.

Dave Asprey:                     I have zero skills and my friend Craig Handley from ListenTrust was like, “Dave, I was invited to go on tour to 300 cities with a really big rapper.” He goes, “You wouldn’t guess that I’m a power lifter, but I can rap.” So, we went down … He laid down lyrics and like I … I have no skills at all-

James Altucher:                That’s pretty cool. I want to do that.

Dave Asprey:                     It was a little stressful, but it was also like really kind of fun because I dealt with the stress, so I wasn’t feeling anxiety when I did it, it was just like joy and a little bit of mirth and self deprecating humor, but we’re putting a video out for “Headstrong” and it’s one of the lines is, “You got muffin top in your crop” and like it’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever done, there’s a video and all that stuff.

This was way outside my comfort zone because I’m like more of a university lecturer by training. Like, I could give a good speech, but … I feel what you’re doing is, literally over the month I’ve been like, “Did I really just do this?” So, first thing you want to do is you want to do some deep breathing exercises. Do you … Have you ever done the heart rate variability stuff that we’ve talked about before?

James Altucher:                No.

Dave Asprey:                     All right. Normally I would tell you … In fact, you have an iPhone, right?

James Altucher:                Yeah. No, I have an Android.

Dave Asprey:                     An Android. Oh crap, that’s not gonna work. I was gonna say I could loan you my heart rate variability thing, but if we have time at the end of this I’ll actually hook it up to your ear and you can do this, and I’ll tell you, for 99 bucks you can get a heart rate variability sensor. It’s very small. It will fit in one of your three outfits pockets. You need to do this for 20 minutes a day for 6 weeks until you learn how to get conscious control of your fight or flight response. ‘Cause what I do before I go on stage … And I was on Tony Robbins’ stage two weeks ago in front of 9000 screaming people. It was really epic. Not a drop of stress, not even a little bit.

The way you do that is you take a deep breath, and I’ll walk you through this, but it’s easier when you have a sensor telling you, you got it right. What you’re gonna do, you’re gonna do this before you go on stage, you can do it a couple times before then. Close your eyes and you take a deep breath in for about five seconds and you focus on the center of your chest, like, right in your sternum. Imagine what it feels like there, not what it looks like, but actually the sensations, the tingling, like someones almost touching it, you might want to touch your chest when you do it, and as you breathe in focusing right there and then fill a balloon. It could be as big as your body, as big as the world.

James Altucher:                While your inhaling?

Dave Asprey:                     While your inhaling, so like you filling this balloon. When the balloon is full, then you imagine puppies. It could be puppies, it could be the first time you met your wife, you know, a hug with your mom, the most emotionally joyful, amazing experience, like maybe the first time you held one of your kids, like really intense, but imagine what it felt like on your skin, in your body, it’s the felt sense that gets deep in your tissues.

As your balloon is full, you just breath up and out, and let that just come down around you. Do that over and over, five or six times. Do it for even 10 minutes. What that does, that turns on that deep sense of just gratitude and joy, and it absolutely pummels the anxiety, the fear, and the stress. When you do that it actually can help other people and train their nervous system to you, and this is something I do before I go on stage.

James Altucher:                You inhale for five seconds, you do the various visualization …

Dave Asprey:                     Mm-hmm (affirmative). Then you breathe out for five second.

James Altucher:                How long do you hold the breathe in?

Dave Asprey:                     You can … If you’re doing a box breath, you do five seconds, but with this kind of breathing just breath in for five, release, and as you release just breath out for five. Doing it through your nose is better.

James Altucher:                Now, you say six weeks. I’m talking about tonight, will this work for tonight?

Dave Asprey:                     Yeah, this will work for tonight, but if you do this every day with a sensor for six weeks you’ll actually develop a new control system for your nervous system that allows you to feel when you switch out of this mode, which is now my native space. This is the native gratitude and just openness. This is a parasympathetic dominant mode, so you can think on your feet and still be funny and still connect with people without bypassing your thought and going straight to your amygdala. This is gonna really help you.

The other thing you want to do is you want to have lots of energy when you do it, but not like jittery, cranky energy. If coffee helps, fine. It’s gonna ruin your sleep if you do that, so I would say you want to have to brain octane, you want to have some mitochondrial stimulants. What do you normally have for dinner?

James Altucher:                Fish.

Dave Asprey:                     Fish. Okay, cool. Do you feel better after you eat or before you eat?

James Altucher:                I don’t know. I’m not really that-

Dave Asprey:                     You’re not really that sensitive. Okay, cool. Then have a light meal with fish and lots of veggies, and do it probably an hour before.

James Altucher:                All right.

Dave Asprey:                     If you do that, you’re gonna have some energy there and I would, before you go on stage, a few short term energy enhancers, whatever works for you.

James Altucher:                What’s a-

Dave Asprey:                     I’ll give you some unfair advantage, like …

James Altucher:                All right.

Dave Asprey:                     Like, literally that is the best stuff before stage.

James Altucher:                I need an unfair advantage.

Dave Asprey:                     I’m not trying to pitch my stuff at all here, I’m just telling you that’s what I do before I go on stage. Just be calm and before you walk out there, this will sound goofy, but just feel love for the audience. Don’t think about love, feel love, and just send it out of you and connect with them that way. Like, you’ll do well.

James Altucher:                Excellent. All right. Well, thank you, Dave.

Dave Asprey:                     That was fun.

James Altucher:                Yeah.

Dave Asprey:                     If you like this episode, you know what to do. Head on over to iTunes and subscribe to the James Altucher Show because you can tell this guy is really, really amazing, even though he doesn’t vote, which makes him a bad person. Let’s see, you should also leave him a five star review, leave me a five star review, pick up a copy of “Headstrong” if you don’t have it yet. It just hit number, I think, it was number six of all books on Amazon this week, and it’s on number one of the new releases, so I appreciate your support if you guys pick up a copy of the book it’s really, really meaningful.

Thanks James.

James Altucher:                Yeah, thank you, Dave.

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Why you should listen –

Climb Everest in a t-shirt & shorts. Survive submersion in freezing water for hours. Control Your Mitochondria with your mind. These are just some of the amazing feats accomplished by Wim Hof. In this episode of Bulletproof Radio Dave gets the “Dutch Daredevil” to reveal how achieved the superhuman abilities that have stunned the scientific community and changed everything the world’s smartest scientists thought they knew about the human body.

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Intro:                       Bulletproof Radio. A state of high performance.

Dave:                        You’re listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today’s cool fact of the day is that, do you know you have brown and white fat and that cold showers can actually help you lose weight? White fat is the fat you get when you don’t have mitochondria that work very well or you eat a lot of inflammatory foods, a lot of sugar and things like that. Brown fat is good fat that keeps you warm and protects you from cold. What makes it brown is that it has more mitochondria. A study recently showed that exposure to really cold showers ramps up your brown fat activity by only 15 times, and that could translate to about nine pounds a year. As you know, I like to foreshadow the guest. I just talked about cold. You probably could figure out who the guest is. But while we’re doing that, we’re talking about mitochondrial function. Somewhere around here I have my stuff.

For today’s product mention, which you can expect. Hey, after all, I make good stuff. I just came out with a couple different methylated B vitamins. It turns out that just about everyone can use methylated B vitamins, but a lot of us, about a third of us, don’t handle B vitamins that are not activated this way. Methylfolate for your heart and neurons and methyl B12, which is really important for all sorts of neurological function. These are things you can take and things that I take every day that improve the ability of your body to do what it’s supposed to do. If you’re going to do the stuff we talk about in today’s show, which has a lot to do with cold and with having more control of your breathing, then you’re definitely going to want to make sure that you give yourselves the building blocks to have healthy neurons. Methyl B12, methylfolate, these are things that I take every single day, have for years, on the Bulletproof Top 10 Supplement List, they’re now available from Bulletproof.com. On to the show.

Today’s guest, if I didn’t already give it away, is none other than Wim Hof, also known as “The Iceman.” He’s one of the world’s most famed multicellular extremophiles. An extremophile is a single-celled organism that lives near a volcanic vent or at the bottom of a frozen ocean, and they tend to be ugly bacteria. Wim Hof is not an ugly bacteria at all. He’s a very attractive man, but one who’s climbed Everest I think was it naked carrying ice bags? Not quite. But in shorts? He’s developed a breathing meditation technique that’s awesome. It’s one of those things. He’s pretty famous for it. If you’ve ever seen the ads of a guy diving into cold water and swimming with seals and things like that. Wim has control of his biology in a way that makes the rest of us blush. But on top of that, he works with scientists and doctors and he’s on a mission to just unlock our evolutionary potential.

I met Wim for the first time in person when our mutual friend, Rick Rubin, brought him to the Bulletproof Conference two years ago. It was a guest appearance. I hadn’t planned it. Wim came up on stage and said, “Dave, are you going to do this? My breathing technique.” He has me hyperventilating and holding my breath empty and doing pushups right before my keynote presentation to the point that I’m starting to hallucinate a little bit, which happens. I gave my talk after Wim basically put me through the wringer, but it was awesome. Wim, welcome to the show. I’m so happy to have you on.

Wim:                        Thank you. Thank you, Dave. Thank you for welcoming me on your show.

Dave:                        You’re welcome. Wim, for people listening, and probably a couple hundred thousand people hear the interview the first few weeks of this, some of them don’t know who you are. How did you get to be The Iceman? You do stuff that’s weird even by my standards, and that’s a compliment by the way. But how did you get to be this way?

Wim:                        There is more than meets the eye, only I felt it but I did not know what. If that feeling is nagging you from the inside, you become a soul searcher. It brought me into all kinds of disciplines, esotericism, religions, traditions, cultures, many countries and travelings. But I couldn’t really match up with that feeling until I met the ice cold water just in my backyard in wintertime. That’s in Amsterdam when I was 17, which is 40 years ago. I went in, and then I knew. The soul search was really on track there. I felt a connection, deep connection. From there, because it made me feel so good inside, mind-body, I came back and did it again and again and it became a regular practice.

Soon I found out that the ice cold water makes you breathe different. To become effectively against the exposure of the ice cold, you have to breathe deeper into the tissue, bring oxygen, change the chemistry, become alkaline. Then suddenly the mind is able to influence into the body and resist the ice cold, which is an impact. From there, it made me feel so good, and that all on my command. I began to challenge my body even more, see where’s the limit. But the limit really is far, far ahead. We lost that. We lost the ability to connect within, to change our chemistry in the depth of the tissue. Therefore, there is a slight acidity going on in our tissue, past the blood in the tissue.

If that stays day in, day out, for 10 years or 20 years, then of course we will get these autoimmune diseases, inflammation, deregulated DNA. That’s logical, because the garbage has never been cleansed. This is what breathing does. Deep, right breathing the way I learned it has shown its effectivity in the ice cold. There I did 26 world records.

Dave:                        Wow.

Wim:                        It only showed, if you have more control inside over your chemistry through the right way of breathing, then, yes, you are suddenly able to survive in situations or to endure extreme impact not only of cold, but also of oxygen deprivation, like Mount Everest in shorts, or the heat, like not drinking a full marathon without a meter of training or a yard of training. I’m not a runner. But if I want it, I can run. I can do anything because I command in my body. That’s my little intro story.

Dave:                        It resonates really deeply with me. My new book, “Head Strong,” is about the mitochondria in our body. I’ve come to believe that these little tiny bacteria that became basically the batteries in our cells, that they’re calling the shots a lot more than we like to think they are. They’re the ones who say, “Stop! You’ll die!” Because they have this bacterial level of consciousness that’s like, “If you push too hard, you’ll die!” A lot of our inner conversation about controlling our own biology is actually getting them to make more energy or getting them to vibrate the right way or to do what they’re supposed to do.

First question for you there is, do you believe that we’re communicating with our body down at that level, or is this more of a mental game that we’re playing with ourselves?

Wim:                        Yes, exactly. Very good question. Very deep. We are able to program by the neurology of the brain as long as the body is alkaline into the DNA, into the genomes, into the mitochondria, influence in the mitochondrial processes by aerobic dissimilation, creating much more ATP. You know the ATP. The molecules with the energy. That’s your work too. I do it through breathing and food, of course. It’s also chemistry. Food must be food and breath must be deep. If they go together, then suddenly the mind, the neural activity of the mind, is able to reach by neural activity directly into mitochondrial activity, into DNA expression. It’s all there.

You know what? I just three weeks ago was in Michigan in their Wayne State University to do neuroscience. They had me hooked within a fMRI to see what’s happening in the brain while I’m exposed to cold.

Dave:                        Cool.

Wim:                        Yes. It was cool. You got to listen to this. Day two. Day two, they had me fMRI and exposed by wetsuit with all kinds of tubes wherein ice water was being poured and flowing back and forth. It really had to go many times, because I was warming up the water. Really. Yeah man. The power within us is big, is great. But something very new, groundbreaking happened. The second day I was there, I was not allowed to do anything, not with my mind, and I was only able to do something with my mind but I did do nothing. They had me hooked with a temperature sensor on the skin to see if my skin temperature was going down when exposed to ice water. Yes, it went down drastically, like two times. Two times seven and a half minutes. Then it went up because then they stopped with the ice water.

But then, day three, I went in and I told myself, “Today, I’m going to show the difference of what a thought, what a neural active flow, commanded by me, is doing within my body related to the skin temperature when exposed to ice water.” It has been shown four times seven and a half minutes that the skin temperature was not going down because I programmed it to do so, and that only by a thought. What I did before was breathing to make my body alkaline. Then the neural activity of the mind is suddenly able to go at light speed through the body into the genomes, into the mitochondria activity, into the adrenal axis, and do it. Very straight.

This shows that the sending neural activity flow after the intervention of the mind and receiving an ascending neural activity, like cold, comes in, then I decide, “No. I don’t want you to interfere with my bodily processes.” Then, suddenly, this intervention of my mind is able to command the descending neural activity flow to the body to ignite the right amount of epinephrine, adrenaline to influence into the hypothalamus, the thermoregulation, and thus the skin temperature is not going to go down. This is a huge potential. I’m waiting now for the results, but they already saw these outcomes, the professors over there. This will show new light on what the mind is capable of. That means, placebo no longer. Nocebo no longer. Just positive thinking, your own, which is very powerful and able to go into any process of the body. That’s the way nature meant it to be. What do you say related to say mitochondria are we able to go inward by neural activity? Absolutely yes. A whole lot more will come from there.

Dave:                        You talk about alkaline in breathing, which is relaxing to me, because so many people talk about, “Oh, if you eat meat, you won’t be alkaline, or if you don’t drink alkaline water,” or some other kind of BS. In about 1999, I got a feedback machine that taught you how to control how much CO? or oxygen you were breathing out. It was a feedback loop for your breath gas. The biggest driver of alkalinity is breath, because you can hold onto carbon dioxide, which increases acidity, or you can breathe it out, which increases alkalinity. But this isn’t talked about in the world of health, where we’re drinking these fancy water machine things. What’s your take on alkalinity from food and water versus air?

Wim:                        Food, water, air shouldn’t be polluted, but it is. It is processed. We actively and consciously need to intervene. If we breathe better, the way we do it, yeah. I do everything through science. It has been shown in a recent study that’s completed with 48 people. It showed the average alkalinity was raising to a peak level of 7.8, which the normal natural standard should be 7.3, 7.4, where most of us are lower because of processed food and the chemistry and the fine dust in the air and all what we are doing as a society. We have to learn to deal with that. It showed that we, in this study, with the right way of breathing, are suddenly very capable to bring back the natural standards for alkalinity.

Dave:                        Just with air, you’re saying? Without any of the other stuff?

Wim:                        Yes. Just with air.

Dave:                        Yes.

Wim:                        Of course, if you drink polluted water or if you drink or eat processed food, then the body is not built to take that on. It needs to break it down, bring molecules, supplement it. It’s a whole way, and that takes a lot of energy. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of stress, because there’s all sympathetic nervous system activity. Thus, stress comes into the body, begins to oxidate, and it is no good. Breath is one way. Food should be food, and water should be water. The rest is positive thinking. You are able within your body by not only positive thinking, it’s your neural activity. You know how to maintain balance. You can feel it. Your mind is a big player there. We will show this together with neuroscientific new studies together with, say, Stanford, Michigan, Germany, Hanover Universities. They all go into these matters like emotion and things. Yeah man. We are doing it. Yes.

Dave:                        I run 40 Years of Zen, which is the highest in private applied neuroscience brain training facility for executives in Seattle. If you’re ever in Seattle and I can get you for a day, we can put clinical-grade EEG on your head and quantify these states and actually even make them more trainable. If I can ever lure you there for a day, I’ll give you some feedback using custom hardware and software available nowhere else.

Wim:                        Very soon. That is in LA, isn’t it?

Dave:                        This is in Seattle.

Wim:                        Oh, Seattle. Seattle, I don’t know. I’m doing an American tour very soon. Thing is, they already measured with another equipment these breathing techniques, that they are well exercised. They bring about theta, delta, and gamma.

Dave:                        We actually train those exact states. There’s some nuances. Because of the custom-developed hardware we’ve got, where we can quantify them, but also then make them more teachable so that we can take someone and say, “Well, this is the type of delta that you are targeting, so when you do something that’s closer to what Wim has done we’ll give you a reward for it.” When someone wants to tighten their Wim Hof Method, we could actually show them the brain stage, give them a beep when they do it right, which can speed training.

Wim:                        I would love it. I would love it. I think we are able to make it.

Dave:                        We can coordinate that.

Wim:                        We are able within seven, eight minutes to get in a deep state of meditative state, normally.

Dave:                        We’ll measure that. Here’s another question. One of my buddies, Dr. Barry Morguelan, a UCLA surgeon, studied for 20 years with a Chinese lineage that was the root of the Shaolin practice. He actually trained it with cover yourself in wet sheets and melt a hole in a glacier by meditating, and wrote the mitochondrial meditation that’s in “Head Strong.” There’s 12 living grandmasters of that tradition right now. I’m wondering, did you look at ancient Chinese or Tibetan or Hindu or Shamanic, these various states, when you were learning this? Or is this entirely just self-taught because you were paying attention?

Wim:                        In New York they call me a [pretalk 00:19:56] Buddha. A [pretalk 00:19:58] Buddha. Somebody who has become enlightened but out of the tradition of Buddhism. I say boo! The Buddha is in you. The Buddha is in everybody of us. It doesn’t matter. I never had the money to go to Tibet or to China in those days, when I began to do the cold practice. I just began to do it by myself. I found out that the cold is my teacher, my guru. Then, five years ago, I met [Areen Pochey 00:20:37], who is an expert in tummo. I told him about my practices I teach. I think it’s very nice. There are 12 masters.

But what I bring to the world is actually the essence of Buddhism, and that is compassion. Compassion is love. Love is composed now and scientifically endorsed as being happiness, strength, and health. Those are related to the endocrine system and the immune system. Now that I have translated into data and without speculation, everybody is very able and it is very accessible and very effective in just a couple of days to get into the autonomic nervous system level, which makes it where normally those practices take years. That’s what we needed, because we have a different lifestyle, a different way of our mind works different in the West, yet it is very dominant. It takes over all the world but has no peace within itself.

We have shown now how to effectively in the rhythm of our Western mind how to control the parasympathetic nervous system, the peace-bringer within, and the sympathetic nervous system, which is more related to our daily actions, the neocortex. The deeper limbic system and brainstem is within our control. Parasympathetic nervous system, the peace in all, it is being controlled, entered, as well as the sympathetic nervous system. When those two systems are able to be tapped into, then you have more sense of control, absolute more sense of control, over your life, over your energy management, over health, happiness, and strength. I know those people. I’ve been doing kung fu, karate, zen, [foreign language 00:22:59], Pencak silat. All those disciplines I went into wholeheartedly.

Dave:                        Yes.

Wim:                        But the cold … Yes. As you say, nice. I say ice. Ice is nice. That’s where I got it. I have to say, respect and chapeau for what you have done.

Dave:                        Thank you, Wim.

Wim:                        But we have to, in linking up together, together we are stronger. I love it.

Dave:                        The definition of enlightenment is something that I’ve been interested in for a long time. I have been to Tibet. I was fortunate to get three months to travel around to learn meditation from the masters and to freeze my ass off at 18,000 feet on Mount Kailash and to push my limits. We’ll put it that way. The definition of enlightenment that I ended up with is that it’s when you have full awareness of and control over every single cell in your body, because the cells themselves sense the world around you and they’re connected to the world, they’re connected to the earth, they’re connected to other people. It’s getting rid of the lies you tell yourself and the beliefs you have, the self-limiting beliefs, that sit between you and this level of awareness and control.

I’m nowhere near where I think I can go and would in no way call myself enlightened, but I can see that there’s a possibility of having that and I can see what cold does. Thanks to your work, I have a digitally-controlled cold tub downstairs so I can dial in the temperature and it’ll hold it there. I have a cryotherapy machine. I’ve got oxygen restriction things and atmosphere pressure changing chambers and all this crazy stuff, because pushing your cells seems to do something to your brain. But I don’t know that I really know all the things it does. It sounds like you may have more data on that than the average person by a long shot. What do you think of that definition of enlightenment? Is that in alignment with what you’ve seen, or do you even have a definition of it?

Wim:                        The natural tendency of the mind is to gather and to attract matter. If we learn how to disassociate with matter consciously, then everybody becomes not burdened with the heaviness of matter and becomes enlightened while being. It’s just physiology. Now I’ve shown in Michigan in the fMRI how to disassociate from ice cold on your body, and thus have control over the ice cold. Everything we come across in our lives is impact. Impact could be heat, cold, oxygen deprivation. It could be grief. It could be Bacillus, bacteria, virus. It could be stress. It’s all translated into matter. Matter and impact on our body by a resonance non-seen and seen. It is all impact on our body, on our nervous system, on our neurology. There in the neurology we have the capability to disassociate from the impact on our physiology. I just proved it. It’s going to be a new dimension where people learn the ability, the natural ability, to disassociate or to become enlightened as a physiological entity within our power.

Dave:                        This will happen in our lifetime, just for people listening. Wim, I fully endorse what you’re saying. It’s doable. Your body will tell you 10,000 times a day, “You’re going to die if you do that,” and it’s always lying, unless you actually die. You have so much capacity before you get to that point that it’s the fear that’s holding you back. You’ve done something weird, where everyone I know who knows you, including me, says the same thing, “He’s crazy.” We always say that as a compliment.

Wim:                        I am. I am.

Dave:                        And that you’re fearless.

Wim:                        Yes.

Dave:                        That’s what we mean, is that you’re fearless. Not crazy. But we always say crazy, because it makes the things you do appear crazy. But you’re not at all crazy. You’re smart. You’re just unafraid in a way that I don’t know anyone else is. How do the rest of us get to that level of unafraidedness? If that’s a word.

Wim:                        Unafraidness, fearless, or crazy about life.

Dave:                        There you go.

Wim:                        Remember the mother lifting up a car because her son is underneath. Their love, real love, is stronger than the universe. Real love, you will find if you go into yourself, into the real essence not learned in the schools, but learned within ourselves. It’s there. As it is not in the schools, we are changing the books in the university and we already did on biology and physics. We showed that the autonomic nervous system can be influenced together with the endocrine system and the innate immune system, all considered to be not influence-able by human will. Now it is. Now we are showing by scientific research that we are able to get into the brain and go into a direct essence, the soul, experience it, be it, pure awareness. Disassociation from meta, as I explained before, then become awareness.

That awareness is so beyond fear, is so beating and feeling, you to be in the essence, being at home, nobody can damage you. If you just hold a little of that within you, you know it’s love. You know it’s stronger than the universe, and you can challenge yourself in a number … I’ve been in thousands of situations, challenges, and I always have this connection with my essence, with my soul.

Dave:                        You’re using love to turn off your fear.

Wim:                        Yes sir.

Dave:                        In the work that I’ve done, and the work especially with the neurofeedback, I focus on gratitude first as a gateway to enable you to forgive harms so that you’re more capable of love. In your view of the world, how important is the sense of gratitude versus the sense of love, and where does forgiveness come into play for you, or does it?

Wim:                        Gratitude I have every day for when I rise. It’s what a yoga, the surya namaskar, it all begins with that. I just have a natural, the sun is so beautiful, the surya they call it in Sanskrit. It doesn’t matter. The energy is there. We can link up. We can fulfill our purpose. You know what? Forgiveness, there is no good to get if you hate people. Because then you become negative in your thoughts. They will go back into your mitochondria, your DNA, your genomes, and they are destructive. You better be positive and in line with love. Then the soul will express itself.

Dave:                        How much time do you spend worrying about politics?

Wim:                        To me, I don’t see politicians. I see people who are eager to deal with their own insecurity going into power. If I get the chance to get into healthcare, and we will, we are into regular healthcare, getting into it, then that’s power beyond politics. Politics was about debating who is the best and what is the best. I do it by science. Actually I’m a politician. I’m a cold-hearted politician showing with facts and data nonspeculatively the best way. We are into it.

Dave:                        I like that. The reason I was asking about that was more from a personal perspective, because you talk about how hating other people costs your mitochondria, causes genetic changes. We know this. It’s called epigenetics. That science is done. We don’t know all the mechanisms. In fact, I think mitochondria are the gateway to epigenetics. But we know flat out, you hate, it costs you biologically. The reason I’m saying that is there’s a lot of people listening on both sides of the political divide in whatever country they’re in who are spending a lot of time worrying and hating about politics, which is affecting them genetically. I’m guessing that you spend almost none of your cycles even paying attention to that stuff, much less worrying or thinking or hating. Just looking for a little, what do you personally do?

Wim:                        Politics, bollocks, almost the same.

Dave:                        There you go. They’re bad for your mitochondria, right?

Wim:                        Yes. We need to unify the world and not be different political parties. Controversial thinking is creating tensions, and one wants to be better than the other. It’s like the Islam wants to be better than the Christianism, Christianity, and the religions. Now it’s politics. It’s the same thing. They go past the real essence, the soul. You know what I think? We should be able to guarantee for every mother in the world that to be able to guarantee happiness, strength, and health for her kid, regardless of nationality, culture, background whatsoever. That the most essential of our planet is getting back from happiness, strength, and health, harmony with nature is a logical step. Then we have the problems solved.

Another thing about food. When food is food and we don’t eat too much, we breathe more. I want to do scientific studies on how much more ATP is being produced because are caused by the right way of breathing and then the food, the intermittent fasting, things like that. I do it already 40 years. To me, it was a natural thing. It brings about the right way of energy. It makes the body go into the digestive processes then get into a fast. Then the mitochondrial activity is being optimized. Your serotonin in the body, which is cycled in the brain. They get the ketones. It’s all there. We have to go back to simplicity. That’s what we do right here, right now. Thank you.

Dave:                        I’m going to ask you a question I’ve never asked on Bulletproof Radio in 360 or so episodes. Do you believe in reincarnation?

Wim:                        Yes.

Dave:                        You do.

Wim:                        It doesn’t end. Absolutely. It didn’t begin with our birth and it doesn’t end with our death. It’s just coming into a body which needs a preceding power and then being able to get into a body, and when the body is not functioning anymore, then it really is not stopping. It’s just soulless. Then the body is not necessary anymore. Yes. There is afterlife and beforelife. It all has purpose. It is also Buddha or Rumi who is saying, but I can tell you the same thing, “All good deeds will stay and all bad deeds will be no good on your record.” Whatever the way we understand it, the good is the good and will always remain good. You better be good.

Dave:                        I like that. The reason I’m asking is that I’m trying to figure out a rational explanation for why you, even at a young age, you’re 17, you’re doing all these things, and for 40 years you’ve practiced intermittent fasting even though no one taught you that. Either you magically just figured all this stuff out or you came in with it. I’m not going to say that I know the exact answer there, but it sounds to me like you had a good start at least, just from an external perspective. Thanks for going there and answering that question. That’s always controversial, at least for some people.

Wim:                        I can imagine.

Dave:                        I want to make sure that listeners who aren’t familiar with your work get at least a quick understanding of the three pillars. By the way, everyone listening, you need to read Wim Hof’s book, “Becoming The Iceman,” that will tell you all the stuff you need to know about this. But can you walk us through the three pillars of your method?

Wim:                        Yes, of course, Dave. That is breathing. Breathing is caused by the cold. The cold as well. Breathing into the tissue is number one. Number two, the cold is training the vascular system to optimize the vascular system to its natural beautiful standards. Then, the last one is the mind. Mindset. We are doing scientific research on all of those limbs. They appear to be very effective and very accessible for everybody in just a very short period of time. That means a couple of days to learn to tap into the autonomic nervous system, relate it to the innate immune system and endocrine system. That means happiness, health, and strength is guaranteed. It’s up to you to do it. People are able to get into the science, read up, and see, “Oh yeah.” In those populations, it’s just a matter, are you going to do it? Then this happens. If you don’t do it, you’re all free, it’s no dogma behind.

The three pillars, breath, cold exposure, gradual cold exposure, and mindset, those are the three pillars of this method. They have been exercised 40 years of fieldwork in all kinds of extreme conditions like the North Pole, Polar Circle, on the highest mountains of the world, and all in shorts. That’s exposing myself like a guinea pig. Then I passed it on to laboratory settings and they found out that we are the first ones to get into the autonomic nervous system and all the other systems going so deep more than ever before or scientifically in the scientific history written. Three pillars: breath, cold, mindset.

Dave:                        To do the cold therapy, for someone who’s listening, they’ve got 20 extra pounds of fat, they probably aren’t in very good shape, what’s the first step to getting used to cold?

Wim:                        The first step is your mindset. You have to know that by now, or otherwise you get into the scientific studies, we are able just in a couple of days. The first test group I took, the first 18 people I took of a scientific study without prior experience in the cold, four days later they were able to endure for five hours in their shorts outside in wintertime in a Polish mountain from minus 10 Centigrade, which is really cold. Four below Fahrenheit is like minus 20 or something, and go into minus 28 in a period of five hours. They all were very able to do that, that only for four days. Actually nobody, if he has a gut, a real serious condition, then all people will only benefit from gradually go into the cold.

How it is done? By taking, after your hot warm shower, you take a cold one for 30 seconds for one week. Then the vascular system, which is 80,000 miles in each and every one of us, is being optimized in its condition. All the little primitive muscles plus the reflexes of the capillaries, they’re all optimized. Then suddenly you are able in day eight, you can feel it, you are able to go directly into the cold for, say, one minute, no problem. You know what happens? A whole lot more activity because all of those little muscles, all those reflexes of the vascular system related to the autonomic nervous system, it’s all working the way nature meant it to be. They are bringing the oxygen a whole lot better to the immune cells. Heartbeat is going to go down with 30 beats a minute, 24 hours a day, a lot less stress thus. It’s all logical. A cold shower a day keeps the doctor away.

Dave:                        I love it. I definitely echo that advice in “Head Strong,” in my book, saying, “Look, this is free. It’s not that hard to do.” You have a beard, so I don’t know the answer to this, but if I put cold water on my face and chest it makes shaving really difficult. I haven’t figured out that.

Wim:                        It’s because the capillaries close.

Dave:                        This is just a random maybe guy-only question. If I do my 30 seconds to one minute of cold water that I do in the morning, if I put the warm water on again just enough to soften my beard so I can shave, am I losing the good effect? Because I don’t know the answer to this.

Wim:                        No. Absolutely not. The skin is the biggest organ. You know Paul Newman?

Dave:                        Yeah.

Wim:                        Every time before he got into a performance, he held his head, his face, for 30 seconds into ice water. Made him feel good.

Dave:                        For the dive reflex.

Wim:                        Yes.

Dave:                        I actually for a long time when I was first writing “The Bulletproof Diet,” every night I had a pan in the freezer that was half full of water. I would just add tap water on top to what was frozen and I’d use a snorkel and I had two minutes of freezing face.

Wim:                        I want to see that picture.

Dave:                        It totally works. It’s so ridiculous. Just cold face is … It changes your whole brain. People don’t believe it till they try it. It’s real. I got out of that habit just because I have bigger gear. Have you ever played with a Vasper System? This is where you exercise doing cardio sitting on running ice water with ice water compression around your arms and legs and even on your head. I have one of those downstairs. I’ve been doing it, and it’s interesting. Is this the type of thing you’ve ever played with?

Wim:                        I’ve never played with any device, but I always washed my face with ice water. I loved it. I know the refreshing experience of that. Good. Good.

Dave:                        What you’re saying about this five hours in cold reminds me. When I was in Tibet, on Mount Kailash, I had a porter. I was traveling with this attractive young woman. This young Tibetan guy, who was maybe 100 pounds, he was walking around. It’s 10 degrees below zero. He’s walking around in thin blue jeans and fake Nike tennis shoes and a little leather jacket. I’m wearing a parka. I’m trained in high-altitude mountaineering and hypothermia and all that. This guy is showing off for the girl, so he jumps on a frozen river and falls in up to his crotch. Now I’m thinking, “It’s a 30-mile-an-hour wind, it’s 10 degrees below zero.” I look at the guy. I’m like, “God, this guy’s going to die. He’s going to get hypothermia.”

I had an extra parka. I take it out of my bag and I hand him the parka. He just looks at me, thinks I want him to carry it, takes my jacket, and puts it in his backpack and keeps walking. I was like, “I am so shamed by this guy.” He’s 10 times tougher than I am. He can carry twice what I can carry. He weighs half what I weigh. He’s impervious to the elements. He’s just this little Tibetan guy, maybe 22, 24 years old. I was humbled by seeing that. But that’s an example of what we’re capable of just when that’s what you do. Just a proof point to what you said.

Wim:                        Yes. It is. I got also the first time I went to India with the soul search, I thought India was going to be great and very excited. But the man who impressed me most was a little guy sitting in New Delhi somewhere in the traffic all day long cross-legged. He made me a little, I don’t know, looking like a cigarette but it’s not cigarette. It’s just some herbs. He gives it to smell. It took him a quarter of an hour and he asked me a fragment of a rupee. Such a dedication. Such a peace. Such a serenity. We, with our Western minds, we never expose our bodies to, say, the ice cold or the heat or sit down all day long and have such a patience, such a resilience, while we all have it. That’s a piece of physiology. We better get equated a little bit with that again and become aware that we are able to tap into those systems, because we suffer too much of autoimmune diseases, cancer, depression, and all that. That’s because of our way of thinking.

This beautiful example you just gave of the parka and he puts it in. He’s got a different mindset altogether. Like this little man in the middle of the traffic. Those were the people who impressed me most, not the gurus, not the sadus, and all those people who are exhibiting what they are capable of. No. I want to go into the depth, which is simply there. Those people have it still paired with humbleness. That’s beautiful.

Dave:                        It is. It is beautiful when you are lucky enough to experience that. I think a lot of times when you’re in the West you don’t see it, or if it happens around you you’re not paying attention to it. Even if you could have seen it, you weren’t practicing awareness so it wasn’t present for you.

I have another question for you. I spend a lot of my time, and I realize my brain wasn’t working as well as I wanted it to in my mid 20s. I used to weigh 300 pounds. I’ve lost about 100 pounds of fat. I’ve really changed my brain and my awareness levels. But I started really pushing on the personal development and meditation and spirituality and just learning those parts of myself. But I was fat and tired all the time. I’ve come to the conclusion, and I don’t know if you’re going to agree with this. That’s why I’m asking you. I concluded that it’s easier to become more aware and to have that personal growth when your cells work better, that fixing your hardware is something you should do before you work on your software. Because it’s easier to work on your software there. But what you’re saying is, if you get your software right, your hardware will just fix itself. Which is it?

Wim:                        I say just go back to the way naturally we are meant to be. Our happiness, strength, and health, that should be the guide. Whatever it takes. Not everybody needs to go into weight loss to be happy, strong, and healthy.

Dave:                        Correct. The Buddha was kind of thin.

Wim:                        Yes. Laugh your belly off. Being slim or being fat, it doesn’t matter. Being strong, happy, and healthy, that’s the thing. That’s the guide. If you are happy, strong, and healthy, you radiate the right energy. That’s love. Because you resonate, you have people resonate with your energy, which is a good one. Just become happy, strong, and healthy. Very simple. Then the soul is expressing through you. You’re radiating energy like the sun. We keep it simple. Then, if you’re not happy because you’ve got too much weight or if it is only a concept, no. Just, once again, keep it simple. Happy, strong, and healthy. That it is. We are built to be able to do that. That’s it.

Dave:                        You’ve reversed autoimmune conditions like lupus, asthma, Parkinson’s, arthritis, Hashimoto’s I’m guessing, using cold and mindfulness, which is pretty profound. What’s the most profound reversal you’ve seen using the Wim Hof Method?

Wim:                        Depression is also a big one. I want to tackle all these things. The anxiety together with the Stanford University, or the soul, the mind power, together with the Michigan and emotional reactivity in Hanover. But I see it every day. We’ve got a community of 35 or 40,000 people who are actively doing this with all kinds of conditions, yes or no. I see miracles happening just because people get back again into the simplicity. Breath work. Cold exposure is exposing yourself to the natural elements. We’ve got a body that is able to balance out with that and then become optimized. That’s logic. The mindset should be positive. Then incredible cures come about.

If the body is able to get into its own balance, into its own plasticity, into its own mitochondrial surplus, then it directly heals itself. But we all go so fast that we consume all the energy and we keep on the sympathetic nervous system activity, thus the body hasn’t got a moment of relief. But if we learn consciously to bring the body from anxiety into relief modes, it works on the cell level, the mitochondrial level. ATP comes free. Plasticity in the body and neuroplasticity in the mind is a fact. All these diseases you just mentioned, they are cured. The body has the power to cure itself. We need to make the body able to cure itself.

Now we got this method and together with food then it’s very able to find miraculous, almost seemingly miraculous cures. Mother Nature knows. We have to just go back to Mother Nature. Because it sometimes looks like, “Yeah, we can cure everything and cancer and this and that.” No. I go through science. But I see miracles happen every day. I got people to thank me, mothers who have a depressed son and they lose their depression. You make people happy. You become enlightened only because of that. Or people with arthritis for 20 years and having 15 medicines, no medicines anymore. No pain. Fully back in control. Being able to do anything with their body. It’s a miracle. That’s life. We bring people back to the life, and that’s a miracle. From there, a new journey starts. That’s what we do.

Dave:                        You do it really, really well and in a way that is fantastic. You have the Wim Hof Academy. How many people a year are you teaching now?

Wim:                        We select the people on their schooling, educational and schooling abilities, because we want equality. It’s all at the beginning. But anybody who’s motivated can join this academy. There are doctors, psychiatrists, but also carpenters. It doesn’t matter. As long as you are into humanity, into freedom, into belief, and you’re able to digest all the physiology. Being a doctor or a carpenter, it doesn’t matter. You have the healing capacity and ability if you’re just righteously in the essence of yourself. We hand over a couple of tools backed up with physiology and educational skills.

I just last weekend had 40 new Dutch teachers, upcoming teachers, instructors. In America, we do it here too, and in Australia. Next week I go to Australia. There we will do a training school as well. It’s really spreading. Actually, we are too little to take it on all and selecting. This is going to be, through this science, it needs to be spread throughout the world. It’s something so accessible and so simple. I want to join up with the right people, like yourself, to bring back nature, the essence, the soul, the noncomprehensible, bring it back to simplicity, cold water.

Dave:                        Wim, you’re connected with some of the most influential and good people that I know already. Certainly I’ll help you. I definitely give you credit in “Head Strong” and talk about your method just at a high level and recommend it. For people listening, if this conversation inspired you, and I hope it did, then you should check out the Wim Hof Academy and at a minimum read Wim’s book, because there’s some great knowledge here. This isn’t something that takes you 20 years to do. That whole idea of taking decades to do something, it doesn’t make sense in the world we live in right now when you can do it in weeks, months, or a year and radically transform what your brain could do. That’s certainly my path. That’s Wim’s path. There are many others working on solving this problem. It’s an honor to have you on the show, Wim.

I have a question for you that I’ve asked every guest, and I have no idea what you’re going to say. If someone came to you tomorrow and they said, “Wim, I want to perform better at everything I do in my life. What are the three most important things I need to learn?” What would you tell them? How do you summarize all of this in just three points?

Wim:                        Cold shower, deeper breathing, belief.

Dave:                        That was predictable.

Wim:                        Sorry. It is. I said, but it is.

Dave:                        Great. Great answer. I appreciate you being on Bulletproof Radio. Is there anything else you’d like to share, URLs you’d like to send people to, or any other thing like that?

Wim:                        I just love everybody. That’s one. Two, a lot of greetings to Rick and his wife.

Dave:                        In fact, he was teaching me your breathing methods, because I’ve done [inaudible 00:58:38]. I’ve done a bunch of different breathing methods. I actually was doing your perfectly done method with Rick in Hawaii not that long ago. We were talking about you. It’s kind of funny to bring it full circle.

Wim:                        Full circle.

Dave:                        It is indeed. Wim, thanks for your time and thanks for your energy and for your love and passion and for sharing all the good stuff you do. I am definitely a fan and an admirer, and I will help you spread the good word.

Wim:                        Dave, thank you very much. Made me smile.

Dave:                        All right. Enjoy your day.

Wim:                        Thanks. Thanks, man.

 

 

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Why you should listen –

The U.S. Healthcare System doesn’t want you to get better, in fact, it wants you to get sicker. Dr. William Davis joins Dave on this episode of Bulletproof Radio to talk about how the U.S. Healthcare system wants to increase the trillions in money it’s making every year by restricting access to life-saving preventive care. Dr. Davis reveals how the drugs and medical procedures we don’t need aren’t just making us sicker, but in some cases, killing us.

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Speaker 1:                           Bulletproof Radio, a state of high performance.

Dave Asprey:                     You’re listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today’s cool facts of the day is more actually troubling than cool. It’s that gluten reduces blood flow to the brain, and it interferes with thyroid hormones that you need to make ATP to maintain insulin on your nerves called myelin and just have mitochondria that work really well.

Did I mention mitochondria? That’s the subject of Headstrong, my new book. If you had to order Headstrong.com, you can pick up your pre-order copy of it. Headstrong teaches you about how to make your mitochondria sing and actually just have more energy because if you have more energy, everything you do is easier. So, gluten is not going to help your mitochondria.

All right. Today’s guest is returning to Bulletproof Radio and knows a thing or two about gluten. He’s here to tell us why gluten should be in all of your smoothies. No. It’s actually the opposite of that. This is none other than Dr. William Davis who’s a very well-known cardiologist, author, health crusader, and he’s written extensively about gluten but his new book, which is what is on the show to talk about is called Undoctored: Why the Health Care System has Failed you and How You Can Become Smarter Than Your Doctor.

Welcome back, Bill. It’s a pleasure to have you on Bulletproof Radio again.

William Davis:                    Thank you, Dave. Glad to be back.

Dave Asprey:                     What made you write a book instead of about the evils of grain to switch gears and talk about actually health care? It’s a tough thing to a write about because it’s kind of boring. What made you do this?

William Davis:                    What I saw unfold with the Wheat Belly message of this past almost six years since the first Wheat Belly Book came out was I started this conversation about wheat and the gliadin protein, all of the other indigestible proteins of wheat and related grains, I expanded that conversation into all grains because it became clear that all seeds of grasses share characteristics and you get even further benefit by going completely grain free.

But then I took it even further. You probably already know that grain consumption causes ironically, Dave, causes numerous nutrient deficiencies for a variety of reasons. Among the reasons are the phytates of grains. The phytates block absorption of minerals. Most people start out with pretty profound magnesium deficiency for instance, many with iron deficiency and zinc deficiency, and there are other common deficiencies that we can’t blame on grains like iodine as you know. So, I started correcting those deficiencies also.

You know what I saw, Dave? I’m sure it’s similar to your experience I started seeing extraordinary transformations in health. It started with this notion of wheat and grain elimination. That alone is very powerful. You fold in some of these other strategies like vitamin D, magnesium restoration, and most recently cultivation of bowel flora. I started seeing hundreds of thousands of people who had come back to me and say, “You know what? I don’t have diabetes anymore. I don’t have rheumatoid arthritis. All that pain, joint pain is gone. The swelling is gone. My acid reflux, my irritable bowel syndrome is completely gone. My ulcerative colitis is gone, and my doctor told me it was stupid.”

In other words, people were getting better across hundreds, literally hundreds of health conditions in spite of their doctors, Dave. I’m sure you’ve heard some other people. What we’re seeing is an extraordinary shift in the way people are managing their health. Dave, they’re doing it themselves. So, you and your audience, you’re not a bunch of scientists and doctors talking about procedures and drugs. You’re talking about things that are intrinsic and natural to human experience and we’re seeing disease reversed.

That’s why I came to put this whole thing together and I called it undoctored. It’s health in spite of your doctor. It’s health because the health care system has nothing to do with health. I say the enemy of the health care system is healthy people.

Dave Asprey:                     There’s probably 10 to 20%, we’ll call them medical professionals, not all doctors who listen to Bulletproof Radio. It’s way higher than everyone would imagine, but because we crossed the line between epigenetics and change in the environment, and getting highly compliant interested patients and just people who are motivated because the doctors who I know like at the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine … I gave a keynote there this year.

These are people who are only motivated by helping and of course most of them have got their patients off of whole grains and non-whole grains as well in alignment with what you’d recommend and what I’d recommend, but they generally want to do this. Then I’ve heard many stories from them where they say, “Well, people come in and they’re so hostile to me because I’m a doctor and they think that I’m going to be the same as the three minutes, and here’s some drugs kind of a model.”

Are you looking to drive a shift towards that or are you worried about people being even more hostile towards their doctors?

William Davis:                    You know, I feel bad for the early adopters among my colleagues, the ones who truly do understand that health care is a corrupt system, that these exceptions that you know are the ones who are truly dedicated to health. They’re out there, and I agree there’s probably … I’m not sure what percentage. No one’s ever made that assessment but it’s probably 5%, maybe 10%. I’d be [inaudible 00:06:46] more than that, but they’re out there.

Dave Asprey:                     I think [crosstalk 00:06:47].

William Davis:                    Yeah. I’d be surprised actually if it was more than 5%. If you just go out to any hospital where the conventional people, conventional practitioners hang out, not going to a conference where all be forward thinkers congregate.

Dave Asprey:                     My sample size is biased. I’ll give you that.

William Davis:                    Yeah. Or even worse, Dave, if you go to a hospital staff meeting or behind closed doors meeting with management and the administration, you’ll get a real taste of what’s going on in health care and you’ll see that mainstream, not the exceptions, not the early adopters among my colleagues, but the mainstream, the guys who work in hospitals, the guys who were employees of hospital systems, the guys who place money ahead of patient welfare or at least your health. This is exceptionally common.

I can’t tell whether it’s 80, 90 or 95% of my colleagues but it is the vast majority. It’s those people who are driving revenues, health care costs, ordering MRI scans, telling a nice guy like you that you needed an implantable defibrillator for $90,000. Those are the people I’m aiming my criticism towards.

Dave Asprey:                     That’s it. I’ll take two.

William Davis:                    A quarter of which by the way, Dave, it’s quite clear, a quarter and it’s not my data, these are published data. A quarter of implantable defibrillators are nasty, nasty thing. They’re huge, they stick out. 25%, almost a quarter of them are implanted without cause.

Dave Asprey:                     [inaudible 00:08:15]

William Davis:                    Because it pays so well. If it paid poorly there’d be almost no unnecessary procedures but it pays so well that a quarter of the implantable defibrillators are unnecessary. We have a healthcare system who puts profit. When I say health care system by the way, Dave, I don’t mean just the doctors. Obviously, there’s a lot more then doctors. I’m not really talking about the technicians and the orderlies. I’m talking about hospital administrators and Big Pharma, the medical device industry and multinational corporations, the real power holders in the health care system. They don’t put health first. They put health care first that is generating revenues to profit the insiders.

Dave Asprey:                     It is definitely happening and you see it in insurance. I remember years ago when I decided that I was going to just take charge of what was going on. I went to the doctor and I’m like, “Man, I feel like I can barely work. I’m tired all the time.” I’ve gained 30 pounds. I weighed 300 pounds. I’d come down to somewhere 240, 250 and then I just ballooned up again over the course of a couple of months. I felt like something was poisoning me.

So, I go to the doctor and he goes, “Maybe you should lose some weight.” I’m like, “I’ve been fat for a long time. You think I don’t know that?” It kind of made me mad. I’m like, “So, maybe you could tell me out.” He goes, “You should just eat healthy and eat less.” I’m like, “And what does eating healthy means?” He goes, “Low fat …” and kind of mumbled. He said maybe I have high blood sugars. So, I bought a blood glucose meter back then and I stuck my finger a dozen times a day, and I said, “You know, it’s not …” My blood sugar isn’t that high. It was prediabetic but it wasn’t like into the world high.

He said, “Well, basically, I don’t know.” I said, “Well, let me tell you. Vitamin C seems to make me feel better.” He goes, “How much do you take?” I go, “I take three grams a day.” He goes, “Stop. It could kill you.” I looked at him and I said, “What about Linus Pauling. Linus Pauling is the founder of orthomolecular medicine which is the grandfather of functional medicine as we know it today. I’m saying that for our listeners. Obviously, you know this.

Linus Pauling took 900 grams of vitamin C a day and was famous for this stuff. Two Nobel Prize kind of guy. I [inaudible 00:10:30] my doctor know who it was, so I looked at the guy and I said, “You’re fired.” I walked out of his office. I never paid any cent to collections. I said, “No service was delivered.” Okay. I was an angry toxic guy living … It turns out I was living in a house with toxic mold in the walls which is why I gained weight and why I was having all these symptoms of being poisoned because I was being poisoned.

The experience left me so angry and just upset, I didn’t see a doctor for four years, and when I came back, Bill, I had a list of seven possible diagnosis all from Dr. Google and things like that. I’ve read textbooks about each one and I said, “I want this test from this lab and this treatment plan or this test.” The poor doctor fortunately was a functional medicine doctor and was like, “Who the hell are you? And okay, we’ll test you for all this but do you mind if I pick the order because I could probably tell you?”

For me, that was a wake-up moment, and this is why I think your book is cool. It is a wake-up moment that there are people out there who will work with you and will listen to that stuff, but they’re not the people that you’re writing about, right?

William Davis:                    No. Absolutely not. But you Dave Asprey are perfect example of what’s happening. Now, you’re an early adopter. You’re at the front of the line but there’s more and more people who are following your lead and that is if I had Dave Asprey, a conventional primary care doctor in the same room, who knows more about health, about nutrients, nutritional supplements, healthy eating, exercise, et cetera. Who knows more? You as a doctor.

Dave Asprey:                     Bottom line is-

William Davis:                    Dave Asprey knows a ton more.

Dave Asprey:                     I should be cooking, and if my arm is broken, you should be setting it. We have our specialties, right?

William Davis:                    The things I want to expose is that health care puts on a charade that they know everything there is to know about health and you don’t you know anything. You’re this helpless ignorant consumer of health care and they know everything. They hold the purse strings. They have all the knowledge, and you and I know that is complete nonsense. The doctors know almost nothing. When you ask those doctors about nutrition, you’ll found how thin their knowledge was. It’s almost non-existent.

If you were to talk to a doctor even about something as pedestrian and common that was vitamin D, you’re going to find a very, very superficial understanding 99% of the time. These are crucial issues for health. So what I see happening is Dave Asprey and all the people around us are saying, “Health care seems to be the system that just wants to squeeze me for money. I can use them when I have car accident or I bust my femur or I have an infection when I come back from Costa Rica, but just for health, for weight, nutrition, restoration of nutritional deficiencies, and the diseases of lifestyle, diabetes, Type II diabetes, hypertension, acid reflux, even autoimmune disease, the hundreds disease that are common around us, the non-catastrophic, non-injurious, non-infectious, common diseases around us can be managed by people themselves.

You know what, Dave? You are a living example. The results you obtained are superior to what the health care system and the doctors could attain. What I’m seeing is we have the means. If we give people just benign guidance, we have the means to take health out of the hands of health care and put it in the hands of people. That’s why I call it Undoctored book.

Dave Asprey:                     It’s a great title, and it’s happening in part because of the internet and because of social media. When you look at what happens, you get a guy like me who loses 100 pounds and starts to look younger and all that. I’m willing to talk about it and willing to tell people, “Oh, this thing like ketosis really matters when you go into fat-burning mode.” Pre-internet, if I would have said four years ago, “Hey, you should try putting butter and this Brain Octane Oil in your special Bulletproof Coffee, it wouldn’t have gotten anywhere.

[inaudible 00:14:43] national Wall Street Journal or ad campaign or something for tens of millions of dollars, and no doctor would have talked about it. Last year, there are 48 million cups of Bulletproof Coffee served.

William Davis:                    That’s great.

Dave Asprey:                     That’s social media and each of those boosted people’s ketones which had an effect on their mitochondria, and there was a shortage of grass-fed butter and a lot of people saying no to grains because of your work and because the speed of this change is there and people can see the results on a day-to-day Instagram account. You just couldn’t do that even 10 years ago. I think you must be feeling kind of vindicated because you came out with Wheat Belly at kind of just the right time to really take advantage of people sharing what works.

William Davis:                    Just as you have, I think we’re all participating in this large worldwide conversation because health care has not done its job. It’s really charade. Imagine the prison system. Imagine the US prison system calling itself the good behavior system purporting that if somebody goes through 10 years of incarceration, they could come a good citizen. That of course is absolute nonsense, right?

Dave Asprey:                     Yeah.

William Davis:                    Prison is for the most part a place to learn how to be a better criminal. Health care puts on this charade of providing health. It does not provide health. If health care provided health, those doctors who gave you terrible information would have given you real … They should have said, “Dave, let’s talk about your home, what it looks like. What’s your nutrition look? How do you sleep? Let’s take some basic labs, look at your thyroid status and your hormonal status and potential for nutrient deficiency.” That was what the conversation should have been. Instead, it’s this brief superficial search for what drugs do you need, what procedures do you need because that’s the stuff that drives revenues and also covers their ass, right? Because it identifies a catastrophic stuff they can be held liable for.

The health care system forgot to give you health. So, I lost faith, Dave, that health will come from the health care system. I’m grateful there are early adopters among my colleagues, the ones that you know and have talked to, but when we talk mainstream health care, the administrators, the doctors, drug industry, the medical devices industry, those people don’t give a damn about health. They give a damn about their bottom line.

In the US, health care consumes 17.5% of GDP. What they don’t tell you, what health care insiders don’t tell you is they want to be 19%, 20%, 21% because that money is your money going into their pocket. It’s a huge wealth transfer. How else can you justify one drug like for Hepatitis C for $94,000? 120 tablets in one vial. It means you go to the pharmacy, you fill your prescription, you get one bottle with 120 tablets for $94,000. That’s what we’re up against. It didn’t cost 94,000. You know how much it cost to manufacture those tablets?

Dave Asprey:                     [20 bucks 00:17:59]

William Davis:                    $37.

Dave Asprey:                     [inaudible 00:18:00].

William Davis:                    That’s right. A few dollars. That is the mark up. Now, they have to recover R&D but the money they recover charging 84,000 to 94,000 per person is far beyond what they deserve recovering R&D. That’s an example of the kind of mentality, the mindset that goes on health care. It is raw profiteering. That’s okay. It’s a business. They are entitled to run a business and make a profit, but what gets my goat is that they pretend to say that they’re on your side, they’re your friends. “We’re here to help you.” No, they’re not.

They’re nowhere on your side than going to the grocery. They’re going to department store. It’s not a charity. It’s a business. They’re in business so they should stop acting like they’re a charity or they’re doing benevolent work. They’re not.

Dave Asprey:                     I learned a long time ago that any time anyone tells you that they’re doing something for your protection or your own good, they’re pretty much trying to take money from you every single time. Now, I got to ask you this question. I find it morally repugnant that I need a permission slip to get chemicals to control my own biology. It’s my body and I’ll do what I want with it. Now, my wife is a physician who runs an-

William Davis:                    No kidding.

Dave Asprey:                     Yeah. She’s Karolinska trained. She ran drug and alcohol emergency centers in Stockholm so she’s dealt with hard core people dying of heroin overdoses and all that. Now, she does fertility consulting. We wrote a book together on epigenetics, our first book. Now, she’s not in that field anymore, but every time I tell her prescriptions are repugnant to freedom and it’s not okay, she gets mad at me and then makes me cook dinner again.

What do you think on this one? I mean on its face, I got to go and then spend a couple of hundred dollars to see a doctor to get a permission slip to get the thyroid hormone I’ve been on for 20 years since I got Hashimoto’s. By the way, I’m down 75% from my previous dose as my system gets stronger. But I still have to wait in line, give money to some guy in a lab coat, who’s actually a friend of mine now, and then go to another lady and give her my permission slip and then give her some more money for something I should be able to order on Amazon. Do you find that system broken or is that still for my best interest?

William Davis:                    I think it comes from the paternalistic attitude that the doctor knows best and you don’t know anything, but as you see, that’s completely falling apart. As you have learned, a guy like Dave Asprey knows a lot more than the doctor when it comes to health. We’re entering an age where you can actually get a lot of your own blood tests drawn on your own.

Dave Asprey:                     [inaudible 00:20:44]

William Davis:                    Yeah. So you [noticed 00:20:45]. Now, there are states that prevent you from doing that. That by the way is because the hospital lobby wants to protect its business. It’s meant to be a business.

Dave Asprey:                     Yeah. New York, we’re looking at you right now, New York has the worst lab testing laws of any state in the country.

William Davis:                    That’s right.

Dave Asprey:                     It’s a little know fact but my wife and I started one of the first medical lab testing companies that allowed you to order a test at home without a doctor. It was a special test called the MELISA test for mercury and lime and mold and things like that back in the mid-2000s, but yeah, the regulatory stuff is insane on that front.

William Davis:                    So you’re part of the movement to reject that notion that people need to have the permission of your doctors to get blood work drawn. It’s crumbling.

Dave Asprey:                     Well, it’s my data. Who owns my data? It’s not you. It’s me. Or Facebook. I guess they own everything, right?

William Davis:                    Yeah. Right. It is crumbling. It’s going to take another several decades before you can just walk into a lab willy-nilly. Now, maybe you have to pay for it yourself. Maybe the doctor is right in saying, to some degree, I need to determine what’s truly necessary for health care rather than [inaudible 00:21:52] or just order any test they want and I have the cost be borne by health care insurance. I think if you just want it off the books, off the health care insurance, you should be able to get anything you want. I agree with that, Dave. That is happening though it’s spotty still. New York, New Jersey, California still block it, but it is happening.

By the way, you can still get around that so I’ve had to produce such things as this. They order a CRT test kit for instance which is of course a finger stick test kit. They’re really cool little test kits. You test a whole bunch of stuff. But you’re in say New York and you can’t have it shipped to your cousin in Indiana and then have your cousin ship it to you in New York. So, it’s an extra hassle in some postage, but you can get it done.

Because you and your listeners know a ton about health, and if you just want to know what your free T3 is, your thyroid hormone and your doctor says, “That’s stupid. You don’t need to know that.” You just say, “No, I don’t agree. All the reading I’ve done suggest it’s actually a critical marker.” The doctor says, “I’m the doctor. You’re the patient. Who went to medical school here?” You say it as you did, “You’re fired” and you go get it done yourself.

We’re entering that age, right? It’s going to happen and people are more and more … I mean compare how this will happen just 40 years ago where a nice guy like Dave Asprey walk into the medical library because there was no internet of course. Walk into the medical library and the medical librarian will look you up and down and wonder if you’re a pervert because you want to look the naked pictures of people in medical books. That [inaudible 00:23:18] is getting medical information back then by a consumer.

Now, you, me, your [readers 00:23:23] have access to an extraordinary library of information, worldwide access to information, experts, studies, data, and this idea that only doctors are able to understand and access necessary information is complete malarkey now so we all have this leveled playing field of information. It’s still early, but over the next few years and decades, we’re going to see armies of people armed with their apps, their health apps, their health measuring devices, these sorts of websites that empower you like patientslikeme.com, and I hope the Undoctored website proves to be that kind of a tool also.

Your website, your online presence are empowering people to say, “You know what? I don’t think I need the doctor to help me with my blood sugar, weight loss or my acid reflux symptoms. I think I can do this on my own.” I can tell you having witnessed this many, many times, people do a better job of it than their doctors and get better results.

Dave Asprey:                     In your book, Undoctored, you have basically an approach for how to take control or how to DIY, the home depot of taking care of yourself so to speak. I fully support that, but there are times when you want to go to an expert. I can tell you that if my natural gas is leaking, I’m probably not going to wrap some duct tape around it because it might just end poorly for me there, right?

William Davis:                    Yeah.

Dave Asprey:                     I know my limits for home repair. In fact, they’re quite low. That’s not where my strength is. I also maybe don’t know my limits for controlling my own biology. What are the conditions that work best for people to do your Undoctored [inaudible 00:25:05].

William Davis:                    Let me flip that around for a bit.

Dave Asprey:                     Okay.

William Davis:                    When I first started contemplating how to present this information to everyone, it seemed impossible, right Dave?

Dave Asprey:                     Yeah.

William Davis:                    Because we’re talking about do we “Okay, if you have Type II diabetes, read this or go here. If you need to lose 100 pounds, you can go over there. If you have polymyalgia rheumatica, you could read that chapter. If you have acid reflux or ulcerative colitis, go over here.” In other words, it would become completely unmanageable. The information [inaudible 00:25:42].

So, I did this instead. I borrowed from what I saw in the evolving Wheat Belly experience. I said, “You know what? When we put all these pieces together that evolved overtime, that is elimination of wheat and grains, restoration of vitamin D, correction of iodine deficiency and correction of most common endocrine disruption of all hypothyroidism, magnesium restoration, cultivation of bowel flora. Those are the core strategies. What I call the wild, naked and unwashed program in the undoctored program.

Do this. I don’t care if they labeled you with rheumatoid arthritis or if they labeled you with obesity or labeled you with Type II diabetes. I don’t care. Everyone starts with the same basic program and more often than not, you won’t have those conditions anymore. Sometimes it takes more than a few days or a few weeks. As you know, autoimmune conditions can take weeks to months to reverse, but everyone does the same basic program.

Then see what you have left. More often than not, you’ve got nothing left. You’re off your 10 medications. You’ve lost 57 pounds. Your hemoglobin A1C and blood sugar are now down to normal or ideal. Your rheumatoid arthritis is receding or is gone. Your joint pain is gone. So, we don’t have to worry about giving a program that’s unique to every specific disorder. Start with the same program and then deal with anything that is residual, and more often than not, you won’t have anything left.

Dave Asprey:                     What’s happening is that we’ve been taught because of the reductionist perspective or I’m a kidney doctor. Maybe it had a lot to do with your skin, just saying, but you’re not a dermatologist but those skin tags tell you what’s going on in your kidneys. The whole system of what’s going on in the body matters and what you’re doing is you’re going out from a systems perspective and saying, when you do this, it doesn’t really matter if you got migraines or if you got autoimmunity. The triggers are probably similar, and so let’s just pull those out.

William Davis:                    Absolutely. There’s also a very peculiar synergy they don’t fully understand among all the basic strategies that is like vitamin D and grain elimination. You leave one component out and the whole suffers. I learned early on in the Wheat Belly experience, if all you did was eliminate wheat, you get a ton of health benefits. If you go grain free, you get even more benefits. If you fold-

Dave Asprey:                     Amen. Say that again. Everyone listening, this is why the Bulletproof diet says don’t eat any grains same as your books because grains … It’s not about gluten free like garbanzos amaranth toast is still not a good choice. Anyway, you can say that till the end of time and people [inaudible 00:28:35] more.

William Davis:                    What we’re talking about is the seeds of grass. That’s what’s grains are. People don’t think of them that way. I tell people if you try and go out and eat your grass in your lawn, you’re going to get very sick. You can’t eat the blades. You can’t eat the roots. You can eat the seeds because humans don’t have a digestive apparatus to consume the components of grasses even the seeds. You can make them edible but you can never make them fully digestible.

That’s a big part of the reason why the proteins, specifically the proteins or the seeds of grass, whether we call it wheat or rye or barley or millet or sorghum or rice or corn, the proteins are either indigestible or only partially digestible. That’s why they had very peculiar effects like opioid effects, inflammatory effects, mind effects, emotional effects, all kinds of effects.

Ironically, there is one very digestible component in grains. That’s amylopectin carbohydrate. That’s the component that is responsible for sky high blood sugars. That’s why grains make you fat and make you fat and diabetic. It is extraordinary, Dave … isn’t it? … that national guidelines from our own US Department of Health and Human Services, the US Dietary Guidelines for Americans tells us that our diet should be centered, based on grains [inaudible 00:29:58].

They have given us a diet that guarantees obesity, Type II diabetes and other health conditions. It’s no surprise. I know it’s not you or your listeners. It’s no surprise that the US is among the fattest nations on earth with an incredible amount of Type II diabetes. This was manmade, much of it created by national guidelines. It is an unforgivable horrible mess and it takes you and me because the doctors aren’t rejecting it.

If you went to [John Q 00:30:33] Primary Care, he won’t say, “Dave, you know, I rejected the US Dietary Guidelines for Americans years ago. Let me tell you what I think you really should do.” I doubt you’ll ever hear that from a conventional thinking doctor. You’ll get the usual crap, right? “Cut your fat. Cut your calories. Less in, move more.” All that nonsense that is quite clear [inaudible 00:30:57]

Dave Asprey:                     Stuff that made me fat. It made feel like a failure for not trying hard [inaudible 00:31:01] pounds.

William Davis:                    Me, too. Me, too.

Dave Asprey:                     I remember that. I think a lot of us do who are free from that. Something happened when you started talking about don’t eat grain. When I started campaigning really hard for grass-fed dairy, there was a national shortage of grass-fed dairy that resulted in more grassland being put into production and less cornland and wheatland being taken out of the environment and put into industrial production for agriculture. It actually created a shift in the supply.

When people read Undoctored and they go to their primary care physician and they have one of the bad ones who’s unwilling to engage in a discussion or unwilling to take the steps to continuously educate themselves on what we’ve discovered in the last few years versus 20 years ago. They’re just going to stop seeing the doctors the way I did and they’re going to find the … I see an increasing number of doctors even you probably have them, too, guys who are cardiologists who hand out your book or hand out the Bulletproof Diet to their patients say, “Try this instead of statins.”

I get emails from those doctors and these are doctors working in hospitals but they want to create change. They’re terrified they’ll violate the standard of care and they’ll lose their livelihood from the medical mafia. But when no more customers are coming to them because they are following the standard of care that is wrong and no one wants, are we going to see a wholesale shift of doctors opening up to your ideas and just to the functional medicine world or are you less hopeful than that?

William Davis:                    I think there’s going to be a percentage who do that, who embrace your message, my message, the messages of others, but I think it’s still going to still .t. The majority still will not because money is involved, Dave. In other words, I see many of the colleagues around me the same as they come to you, they go into a functional medicine mode. What they find is they don’t make much money at it, and so it’s very tough to convince the $1.4 million a year dermatologist or the $2 million a year ophthalmologist or the well-paid orthopedic surgeon or et cetera.

It’s very tough to persuade them that you should really just sit down with your patients and talk about nutrition, diet and nutrition [inaudible 00:33:19] and nutrients because they’re going to find that their income is slashed by 90%, and so the healthcare system is simply not equipped and my colleagues for the most part are not prepared to suffer that kind of financial hurt. So, I’m skeptical that the guy who’s got that fancy 550 Mercedes is going to do this. That’s why I say it’s …

The irony, Dave, is what you can achieve because you’re an example of it. Your listeners are examples of it. What you can achieve on your own without a doctor is not a little bit. You can achieve extraordinary things because I see this play out every single day. “I got slender, healthy and got rid of 14 medications in spite of my doctor. When I went back to the doctor, the doctor said, ‘Well, um, I don’t understand it, but just do what you’re doing.'”

That has happened once in a while but rarely do they say, “What did you do? Tell me more. I need to understand what it is you did so I could … Maybe I’m overlooking something.” I hope there are ones saying that, but as you know, that’s the exception rather than rule.

Dave Asprey:                     Right. My dad went in for surgery a few years ago and I put him on the right vitamins and said, “You know, you’re old enough, dad. Maybe you should just be on a little testosterone and growth hormone for your recovery period because you’re deficient in both of them anyway.” So, he got the appropriate ability to do that so he goes in post-surgery with profound healing, twice as fast as they’ve ever seen before. He asked the surgeon, “So, do you want to know why is this happening?” He says, “No.”

William Davis:                    Exactly. Yes.

Dave Asprey:                     It’s complete disinterest. The clinical observation is where innovation happens in medicine and I was maybe less experienced than I am now. This is 10 years ago when I think about it. I was just [inaudible 00:35:13] how could he not want to know? Would you want that for every patient? But there was no curiosity there which really surprised me.

William Davis:                    Because no money changed hence. My son did the same thing. He shattered his wrist in playing hockey and he had to have reconstructive surgery, several pins, et cetera. I told him “Boost your D way up. Get on a high dose of D in preparation for surgery and then through surgery.” He followed up after surgery. The orthopedist said, “I have never seen anybody who healed as fast as you.” Bill said the same thing, my son. He said, “You want to know what I did?” He says, “No.”

It was one of many tens of thousands of examples, Dave that I just saw, and my behind the closed doors experiences in hospitals and hospital meetings over many years. I realized that the solutions are unlikely to come from within health care. Just like Kodak. Kodak had a $40 billion a year business. They’re on the New York Stock Exchange for 70 years, 140,000 employees, very smug, and when someone invented digital photography from within, they scrapped it and hid it because they thought it would cannibalize their conventional business.

We know what happened after that. Digitization occurred outside of Kodak and it almost closed them down completely. Now, they’re almost forgotten. I want to see something like that happen to much of health care, I want the curtain pulled back that the system that operates for profit, not for health for profit, is largely unnecessary. We do need hospitals for busted legs and car accidents, and in fact, we do need the health care system. What we don’t need this bloated profit-making system that we have.

This system could be shrunk down to a fraction of its size. Your health care insurance should be a fraction of what it is and people should be healthier, but that message would never come from the health care system, from the hospitals, from the drug industry. It’s got to come from you and me and our online conversations and social media, books, websites and podcasts.

That’s why I celebrate these kinds of things, Dave, because what you’re doing is you’re saying, “You know what? I have a lot of information here that is superior to what your doctor will give you, superior what you’re going to get from a hospital.” And it is because people follow your program, listen to you and they get healthy and they get informed about how to stay healthy. That’s what excites me. We’re part of this massive movement of knowledge information, all while the health care system thinks it’s silly.

Dave Asprey:                     You’re definitely on to something there. I have a couple of questions for you about something you said earlier. When we’re talking about eliminating grains as one of the primary things to do, you mentioned rice. I recommend when people wants a source of carbohydrate in their diet that white rice seems to work in moderate amounts with a meal full of vegetables and protein for people who are eating carbs.

I don’t recommend to eat carbs a lot or all the time, but as a relatively clean source of starch not as source of vitamins or anything like that, removing the toxic outer parts of it, but it is technically a grain. My experience personally with tens of thousands of people is that generally they handle white rice. They don’t handle brown rice pretty well. Is white rice still a problem?

William Davis:                    You’re right. Rice is at the most benign and at the spectrum for grains but it’s not entirely benign. There are people who can consume it and seem to get away okay. There are some people who are very sensitive to the wheat germ agglutinin protein. There’s lectin protein in wheat, rye, barley and other grains. It’s called wheat germ agglutinin. Even though it’s in rice, it’s still called wheat germ agglutinin because the structure is identical to that of wheat.

It’s present only in small quantities because rice is mostly starch as you know and less than 1% protein. So, the wheat germ agglutinin component is present on only small quantities, but some people do have gastrointestinal distress and inflammation to have rice.

Dave Asprey:                     You’re right.

William Davis:                    That’s one issue. Another issue is there is a lot of starch. My background of course is heart disease and despite doing 15 years or so of heart procedures the last few years, all I did was heart disease prevention including advanced lipoprotein analysis. That’s as you know the test we do for more insightful look rather than the stupid test called cholesterol testing. When you do advanced lipoprotein testing, you’re quickly sobered on how easy, how readily to provoke this small LDL particle abnormalities. That’s of course, the most common abnormality of people with heart attacks and heart disease is an excess of small oxidation-prone LDL particles.

Large LDL particles produced by fat consumption lasts about 24 hours then they’re cleared by the liver. Small LDL particles provoked by carbohydrate consumption, starch consumption lasts about five to seven days sometimes longer. In other words, one carbohydrate indulgence is sufficient to give you heart disease risk for about a week. So, I’m very, very mindful of starch exposure because of the small oxidation-prone LDL particle that is uncommonly long-lasting.

Then there is this new issue that the US government raised and that is the arsenic exposure issue. Now, consumption of small quantity is probably not an issue at all but with frequent exposure, it’s not quite clear what hazard that places. That still remains to be seen but there is at least, in India and Bangladesh, there are instances of arsenic poisoning though it seems to be brought out by having even further arsenic exposure through their drinking water. We have-

Dave Asprey:                     [inaudible 00:41:07] brown rice having 80 times more arsenic than white which is why I’m like, “Don’t do brown rice because arsenic is an issue.”

William Davis:                    Okay. And the fibers, the fibers which people have also … That’s another fiction of course that we need cellulose fiber. That’s, of course, an absurd misinterpretation of the date. If we need fiber, we need prebiotic fibers. That’s quite clear. We don’t need cellulose. If we needed cellulose, you could health from eating saw dust. Of course, that’s nonsense.

Dave Asprey:                     Eat the newspaper when you’re done reading it.

William Davis:                    That’s right. That’s right. Very good.

Dave Asprey:                     Now, I guess it depends on what newspaper. Some of them are more full of contaminants than others, right?

William Davis:                    That’s right.

Dave Asprey:                     Now, in your book, Undoctored, you talked about wild, naked and unwashed as your program and it’s pretty different from paleo which is interesting, but you include legumes and tubers, yet you were just talking about lectins. It seems like a lot of people respond to the lectins. Lectins, for our listeners, are these little proteins that are present in us and in most biology that stick to kind of sugars in your body and can cause rheumatoid arthritis or gastric distress or other things like that.

Why legumes? I know so many people don’t handle them well. It’s probably more than don’t, but to be opposed to say white rice, but to be in favor of legumes, what you’re thinking on that? I know you have thinking on it.

William Davis:                    Yeah. Here’s what I think I’ve seen. If you add legumes like let’s say kidney beans or chick peas, and you have an adverse effect, nearly all those people in my experience have dysbiosis. I mean as you know, we all have some degree of dysbiosis. If our comparator are the Hadza or the [Matzas 00:42:55] of Peru, the people who live truly untainted hunter-gatherer lives, their bowel flora of course is completely different than the rest of the world yet their bowel flora one in Africa, one in South America so they’re not talking to each other and not sharing [pooping 00:43:09] organisms. They have almost identical bowel flora.

Is that what our bowel flora should look like? Well, nobody really knows but it’s clear that modern people have completely different bowel flora, and it’s probably some measure of dysbiosis. Of course, dysbiosis has become so incredibly common. If you give a person with dysbiosis a legume, the prebiotic fiber, the galacto-oligosaccharide prebiotic content, fiber content of legumes will cause horrible things. It will cause bloating, diarrhea, abdominal pain, inflammation, joint pain, suicidal thoughts, depression, all kinds of crazy stuff.

Here’s what I think I’ve seen. If you correct the dysbiosis, which is a [inaudible 00:43:54] conversation of course, and then you fold in prebiotic fibers whether it’s from a green banana or raw potato or inulin or fructooligosaccharide powder, or legumes, the galacto-oligosaccharide prebiotic fiber of legume, they seem to tolerate it and I just don’t see a lot of the lectin, presumed lectin toxicities. That’s kind of in for anecdotal observation so I’m still open to change my opinion on that, but I’m seeing a lot of people get by fine with small servings of legumes despite lectin.

Dave Asprey:                     Yeah. I put them in the suspect foods on the Bulletproof Diet where there’s foods that always cause problems down here like gluten and grains, foods that cause problems for segments of people but you don’t know until you try, and then foods that generally work for everyone. So, I’m always going back and forth. The two big questions are rice and legumes, and I end up on don’t eat the brown rice, eat the white rice in moderation with other foods if you’re going to do it and if legumes work for you, great, but it’s okay if they don’t.

The dysbiosis thing is certainly something that I was challenged with for a long time. It’s something that I don’t have evidence of right now and we use the kind of fiber, the inulin fiber in the Bulletproof Collagen Bars. You’re getting collagen. You’re getting the Brain Octane that raises ketosis and you’re getting fermentable fibers.

William Davis:                    That’s great.

Dave Asprey:                     Some percentage of people with that kind of fiber, they do have dysbiosis and then they eat the bars for a little while and then they have enough fermentable fiber, itself corrects. Other people are like, “I don’t want any fiber in my diet ever again because I have dysbiosis,” and they need to see a doctor for that I would say.

William Davis:                    You know I think things like this are clarifying over time with more and more people who do this. The more eyes we have, we can get the issues. If I know Dave Asprey is looking at these issues, I know we’re going to find answers sooner. So, I mean just think back 10 years ago, we weren’t talking about prebiotic fibers and lectins and now we are. It become a common discussion. We’ve gotten much smarter really fast.

Dave Asprey:                     Yeah. It’s because of Big Data. It’s because of social media. It’s because we can all Google the studies on PubMed right now and you can see, “Well, here’s evidence that supports what I noticed, and a lot of what you do because you’re clinical, you see people in a clinical practice or in just … You have seen them so you can then go, “Is there evidence that supports my observation?” which is something that would have been really hard to do before we had information the way we do now.

Then you realize well, there isn’t a study about this but there’s 15 studies that support … that are all around this one and this is an observation and it’s repeatable. They want to take people off all grains instead of just gluten-containing grains then I see improvement therefore, I’ve got something here that’s worthy of trying because the risk of going grain free is pretty low.

William Davis:                    I’m glad you brought that up. Exactly. We’re not talking about exploratory laparotomy. We’re not talking about a frontal lobotomy, right? We’re talking about just a shift in food choices and more often than not, people will be surprised of course what happens when you just make this little change in your shopping and eating habits though it may take longer for some conditions, but more often than not, people are shocked at what happens.

Doing the opposite of what the US Dietary Guidelines for Americans, Health Canada and for the most part your doctor told you to do, doing the opposite, that, to me is an astounding thing to say that if we go against, sorry, the grain of conventional wisdom, we become healthy and slender and get off medications. To me, it’s an [indictment 00:47:47] of the health care system that they got it so wrong, Dave. They got it so wrong.

Dave Asprey:                     They did and they weren’t tracking the variables that matter. One of the concerns that I have now is that in the next wave of epigenetics here, we aren’t tracking other variables that matter like the amount of light you’re exposing laboratory animals to. If you imagine you’re doing a feeding study on mice and you put them under fluorescent lights that are shown to change the way your body produces glucose, you can induce Type II diabetes-like symptoms with bright blue light over long periods of time and disrupting the sleep cycles of nocturnal animals.

We have all this stuff where no one ever talks of control for lights or electromagnetic frequencies or temperature or vibration because the mouse is next to the refrigerator, but all those things are like environmental inputs and so we say we control for all the variables and we’re smoking our pipe when we say that. Everything is a variable and we don’t know how important a lot of them are.

How do you think that’s affecting the future of what you’re doing with this stuff in clinical practice versus in university research?

William Davis:                    I think we’re witnessing armies of people who are wearing their Apple Watch, who have a Whitings Sleep Device or blood pressure device or a pulse wave velocity scale, the proliferation of health apps, of people who track their health data and can make observations that no one else can make. If you yourself observed that your blood pressure goes up after you eat a certain food or that some measure of inflammation goes up after you eat a certain food, only you can do that or as you did, check your blood sugar response to various foods.

If you have something to track, some kind of feedback parameter to track, it makes you really smart, really effective, really fast, and no doctor can do those kinds of things, and the tools are getting better and better every day. These are wonderful direct consumer tools that you can implement on your own. So I love this do-it-yourself at home tests. One of my favorites is oral temperature and with a digital thermometer when you first awaken. We don’t have a lot of data supporting it, but I’ll tell you in real life, it is an incredibly effective measure to check your own thyroid status and to track your response to such things as iodine.

My next door neighbor came over and he told me about his hypothyroid symptoms and I told him, “You probably have iodine deficiency. Start iodine.” He start out with a temperature of 94.5, I believe, degrees Fahrenheit. He was hypothermic. Within two weeks, it was up to 96.5. We’re aiming by the way for 97.3 oral temperature upon rising. Not only does it identify hypothyroidism, you can track it and see how much your … because if doesn’t go all the way back to 97.3, you have an impaired thyroid in addition to iodine deficiency. It’s a great tool so we’re having these tools come out that people can implement on their own and track on their own. It’s going to take away a lot of those variables that have been overlooked like the light in the laboratory.

Dave Asprey:                     It is totally true. I was CTO of one of the wristband companies on Basis [inaudible 00:51:11]. I wanted to do that because we get heart rate variability from the wrist, and the only track I’m wearing right now is this ring which has actually the same stuff that [inaudible 00:51:20] in a wristband. It’s called an Aura Ring. I’m not sure. I’ll keep it but it seems like a cool thing for now, but it’s tracking sleep and heart rate and even temperature fluctuations throughout the day, but it’s small enough that it’s getting less irritating.

The next generation will be so tiny that it’s probably actually worth wearing for most people because it takes no energy and no effort and no attention to get the data. Whereas you go back five years, there’s a lot of work and most people won’t do the work. But when it’s [inaudible 00:51:46] when you’re phone just knows what’s going on because you can see … Actually, this is … I’m sure your Xbox camera already can do this. It can see the micropulsations of the veins in your forehead and get your heart rate just by looking at you on high resolution video.

It’s so cool and we’re barely scratching the surface of that so I look forward five years from now, and you’ll be able to know all sorts of stuff about you. The big question is will you be required to share that with your social media company. Maybe that’s not a good [inaudible 00:52:16].

William Davis:                    Right. You’re right these tools are coming out so fast it’s hard to keep up. It’s an exciting time where people have access to incredibly effective tools to measure health.

Dave Asprey:                     In your book Undoctored, you actually mentioned, and the reason I’m going to there is you mentioned some of the resources for self-directed health where people can get lab tests at home and things like that. I want people who are listening, all of whom are interested in this kind of stuff, to know that you put that in there because it’s a helpful resource.

William Davis:                    And it’s fun stuff. As you know, this is fun stuff. It’s a really a blast to track some of these measures and you learn new lessons, but don’t tell your doctor because your doctor will make fun of it because he doesn’t understand it because it’s about health not about revenues for the health care system.

Dave Asprey:                     I would encourage people. If your own lab test show you that you’re deficient in testosterone or thyroid, whatever it is and you take appropriate lifestyle stuffs like eating more undamaged fat in order to improve it and you still are deficient and you go to your doctor and your doctor says, “No, I won’t prescribe that” you’re within your right to say, “Excuse me. I’m paying you for a service. I would like you to prescribe this for me, please.”

If the doctor refuses, you don’t have to leave his office. If you don’t leave his office, he can’t see another patient. If you resist, it’s not going to go well. They’ll force you to leave, [crosstalk 00:53:40] but if you are polite and kind and nice and like, “Doctor, no, I need this” and you say, “I really need this. I really need this. Don’t say no. Don’t get mad.” Eventually, you’re probably going to get that prescription. Otherwise, you say, “Doctor, I’m afraid I can’t pay for this. I came here for this. The data is clear and I understand you don’t want to write it but I don’t want to pay so could you please refund this entire payment?”

I’m telling you, if you only a few people do that, you have a right to get what you came there to get. I’m sorry if you’re one of the physicians listening to this and you don’t agree with that. You’re allowed to filibuster your doctor if your doctor is not serving you and you’re kind and polite when you do it so [inaudible 00:54:16].

William Davis:                    That’s great. That’s great [inaudible 00:54:17].

Dave Asprey:                     I’m kind of going up on a little bit of a [soapbox 00:54:19] there. You clearly know this but just know you are the guy writing the check. You are the customer and you have a right to say, “No, I want the standard of care that I want and if I want try Modafenil, I want to use testosterone, I want thyroid hormone because the data says this is going to help me,” it’s okay to ask and it’s okay to not take no for an answer.

William Davis:                    I agree absolutely. If a doctor won’t comply and you have a heartfelt genuine desire for this, find another who will. Sadly, we still have to rely on prescriptions. By the way, I ordered my thyroid from England because I [inaudible 00:54:55] because I know if I see … And my colleagues will poke fun of me taking thyroid so I just order … I go around them by ordering it directly without a prescription.

Dave Asprey:                     Yeah. You can order almost anything you want without a prescription and it’s amazing. Sometimes you might have quality issues with it, but I would just encourage people listening especially if you’re on a budget and going to the doctor is hundreds of dollars and going to your pharmacy, hundreds of dollars or it’s 20 bucks for the same medication online. You might want to do it.

In fact, I had a brain eating amoeba infection recently for four months. That was really a problem. What was the thing called? Was it hystolytica? Anyhow, I had Giardia and that. No one could diagnose this with lab tests and I finally saw an amazing guy in New York who’s an 80-year-old physician who’s written eight textbooks on tropical diseases and he’s like, “Oh, yeah, lab tests don’t work for this kind of stuff. You have to actually look at the problem.” He went in and diagnosed me with a live microscope thing.

The problem was the prescription or eight pills was … Let’s see … $1300 which is patently offensive. It should have been covered by insurance but my insurance company turned it down, and so they wanted, 10 hours of bureaucracy. I’m like, “I’m New York. I got to fly home. So I paid out of pocket, but I’m fortunate that I was able to do that on that trip but I could have, if I was going to take another week out of those months of discomfort, I could have probably ordered that stuff from Indiana for pennies.

I want people to listening to this to understand economics do play a role but if you know what it is that you’re looking for, you can get the test for cheap, you get the data for cheap and you get the drug for cheap if you need them or better yet, just eat the right stuff and you won’t eat the drugs.

William Davis:                    I also remind people that you’re not in our own. You may try things without your doctor but you have lots of resources now like the Bulletproof conversation. The Undoctored conversations, patientslikeme.com, lots and lots of other websites, forums, discussion groups, social media to get feedback. Just because somebody tells you something doesn’t mean you have to believe it but you can factor it into your thinking and you can make your own decision. You can read the studies. You’re not alone. There’s lots and lots of help. Help is getting better and more sophisticated every day.

Dave Asprey:                     It is indeed. Dr. Davis, I want to ask you the question for Bulletproof Radio that I ask all the guests. If someone came to you tomorrow and they said, “I want to perform better in everything I do in my life. What are the three most important piece of advice you have for me?” What would you tell them just based on your entire life experience not just being a doctor?

William Davis:                    It would be the same thing I tell people through the Wheat Belly and now the Undoctored message that is eat no grains and so many problems go away just with that. You get a two plus two equals seven effects if you combine that with restoration of vitamin D. While there’s more to health than just this, then restore bowel flora. That’s a work in progress. It takes its most [inaudible 00:58:07] but that alone as you know, Dave, is a huge piece of health. There’s more, but those three I would wager reverse 80 to 90% of all common chronic conditions. It may not address a 100%, nothing does of course, but that alone would be a real powerful combination.

Dave Asprey:                     It sounds really powerful to me. Where can people get a copy of Undoctored now? Just at our favorite online retailer? What’s the bet for that?

William Davis:                    All the retailers have them preoffered like Amazon. This will come out officially till May 9th so right now, it’s just available on preorder. I’m still building the website, the blog, et cetera, which the blog I’m hoping launches in the net few weeks. The website probably not till April or so. It’s a very big ambitious website that has lots of incredible new things. It’s taken a lot longer than I thought but I want to create a space also where people can have these kinds of Undoctored conversations where it’s not a scary place to say “My doctor refused to help me so I told him to get lost, and I’m looking for a doctor who will help me. In the meantime, I need a little bit of help with cultivating my bowel flora.” So, I want to create that kind of space like what you’re doing with your Bulletproof conversations.

Dave Asprey:                     There’s plenty of room for these conversations out there. If you have a reliable fecal transplant swap system.

William Davis:                    Okay.

Dave Asprey:                     I get that question a lot. People are saying, “We’re going to get [clean proof 00:59:37].” I’m like, “Guys, I can’t answer that for you and I have no idea.” There are communities out there even going that far. So there’s so much conversation and something that you’ve clearly glommed on to. I believe that we’re fundamentally wired to help each other. That’s what feels good as human beings especially people who are healthy, who have eaten the right foods, who aren’t in brain fog land.

They always want to help, and there’s always 2 or 3% trolls. You just ban those guys. The rest of the time, on a community like that, you go in there and you’re like, “I have this problem” and there’s 25 people who know a ton of stuff and they’ll just help you because it feels good because they don’t want someone else to go through what they went through. I’ve been helped by people like that so much. To this day, they help a lot more people than you or I do as individuals even though we have a big reach so that’s cool.

William Davis:                    Yes. Absolutely. I’ve seen the same exact thing.

Dave Asprey:                     Awesome. Thank you very much for being on Bulletproof Radio again. I’m a big fan of what you’re doing with Wheat Belly, and I like your perspective on Undoctored and I’m forgetting the words. Naked, lewd and … What was it?

William Davis:                    Wild, naked and unwashed.

Dave Asprey:                     [inaudible 01:00:45] Wild, naked and unwashed program. All right, Dr. Davis. Thanks again.

William Davis:                    Dave, thank you. You’re doing great work.

Dave Asprey:                     If you enjoyed today’s episode, there’s two things you should do. Number one, head on over to orderheadstrong.com and preorder Headstrong, and while you’re at it, you can preorder Dr. Davis’ book, Undoctored. There’s your two things. If you wanted to say thanks at no cost to you, just leave a five-star rating on iTunes. We’re about 1,500 five-star ratings. This is a Webby Award-winning podcast. As CEO of a rapidly growing company, as a dad, as a New York Times bestselling author, I put out two of these a week for you, and because I have fun doing it. But also easiest way you can say thanks, just leave a good review so someone else can find the show and get some value from it. Have an awesome day.

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