The Nine Essential Steps For Peak Brain & Body Performance – Anat Baniel – #394

March 10, 2017 by Dave Asprey

Why you should listen –

Growing new neurological pathways for peak brain and body performance can be achieved in 9 steps according to world-renown psychologist Anat Baniel. These 9 steps are part of the Neuro- Movement approach called the Anat Baniel Method, a system used by over 1,000 practitioners around the world to treat a variety of neurological problems ranging from autism to traumatic brain injury. Anat has helped small children and infants with developmental disabilities lead better lives, world class athletes and musicians overcome repetitive and traumatic physical injuries, and 90-year-old adults regain control of their minds and bodies. Now, Anat wants to do the same for Bulletproof listeners by revealing some of the simple steps that can be taken to completely change lives for the better.

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Using Humor & Sarcasm To Improve Your Life, Revitalize Mitochondria, & Defeat Self-Sabotage – JP Sears – #393

March 7, 2017 by Dave Asprey

Why you should listen –

Improve your life and revitalize your body with a healthy dose of sarcasm. Health coach JP Sears dives head first into the science behind humor and why it has such a powerful healing effect on the mind, body, and spirit. JP and Dave reveal why not taking yourself too seriously is a surefire way to defeat your self-sabotaging ways, and why you probably aren’t your own worst enemy, your own mitochondria are!

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Dave Asprey: About 1/4 of Americans don’t get enough vitamin A in their diet. Vitamin A is essential for the human body, and it’s been shown to help with inflammation, immune system, maintaining strength and integrity of your bones, and it’s part of having a healthy sex life. One of the best sources of vitamin A is the type of cod liver oil that Daria imports called Dropi. Dropi is one of the purest cod liver oils on the market today. It’s made exclusively from wild cod that’s caught and processed in the oldest fishing village in Iceland. It’s cold processed, which preserves its natural fatty acids, including omega-3, and vitamins A and vitamin D. It also, because of the way it’s processed, qualifies as a raw food instead of a processed food.

The people over at Daria are really passionate about wellness and peak performance. One of their guys, Ash, is now working on becoming a Bulletproof coach, they’re so passionate about being bulletproof. You might want to check out the new cod liver oil called Dropi, and just in celebration of Ash’s hard work becoming a coach, my friends over at Daria are giving Bulletproof listeners 20% off any order. Head on over to dariaimports.com/bulletproof and check out all the cool products they’ve got in the cod liver oil space, and you’ll save 20%. Don’t wait. This is a limited time only offer. Just go to dariaimports.com/bulletproof.

Speaker 3: Bulletproof Radio, a state of high performance.

Dave Asprey: Are you feeling all spiritual?

JP Sears: I’m sorry. I wasn’t listening. What?

Dave Asprey: I’m not sure, but I can tell that you’re very focused, grounded, and yet ephemeral, all at the same time.

JP Sears: Ephemeral. That’s my favorite artery, out of all of them.

Dave Asprey: That was a legitimate pun right there. You just scored points for that one, man.

JP Sears: I kind of lost points. I think puns are sort of like, “Eh …”

Dave Asprey: The lowest form of humor, that people laugh at.

JP Sears: Some would say sarcasm. Some named Mr. Wilde would say it’s the lowest form of humor, the lowest form of wit, but highest form of intelligence.

Dave Asprey: I would buy that. I don’t know if that was our show opening, in which case, that would be the first time that I’ve never said, “You’re listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey,” but that might be a better show opener, so we’ll figure that one out.

In today’s 24/7 world, you might find yourself feeling a little bit less bulletproof than you like some days. It certainly happens to me. I have a really busy travel schedule, including a lot of time on toxic airplanes full of bad air and questionable food, although I frankly skip the questionable food. One of my top hacks for maintaining that mental performance, and just to feel good and not be too swollen, is to get rid of toxins through my Sunlighten Sauna. In the Bulletproof Biohacking Labs Alpha here on Vancouver Island, where I live, I have a Sunlighten 3-in-1 Infrared Sauna. Why? Because their patented 3-in-1 technology has near, mid, and far infrared, which do different things all in one place. I can get the detox effects, the energy and the weigh loss, and the other things that infrared does for the water in your cells.

When I do that, I’m getting access to a bunch of different health programs. There’s one for detox. There’s one for cardio and for anti-aging, so you can actually control the type of waves you’re exposed to. The near infrared LEDs are important for cell health and anti-aging results. It is controlled with a little Android panel that actually lets you watch Netflix while you’re in the sauna, which is kind of cool. It’s eco-friendly, hypoallergenic basswood and premium craftsmanship. You don’t want some of the toxic woods that release natural, like Mother Nature’s toxins. They don’t use that kind of wood. You can actually access the sauna from the cloud, so you can turn it on before you leave the office, and it’s ready when you get home, which is super cool.

It even includes something called acoustic resonance therapy, where there’s things that shake the seats according to the music you’re listening to, and it turns out that vibration in one of the signals mitochondria in your body listen to, so it’s kind of a cool deal. If you want to check one of these things out, sunlight and infrared saunas are the most effective ones I know of for deep cellular sweating, and you go sunlighten.com, that’s S-U-N-L-I-G-H-T-E-N dot com, and check out the far infrared and full spectrum saunas. If you mention Bulletproof Radio, you get a free set of bamboo carbon towels, and trust me, you’re going to need towels if you start using an infrared sauna. It’s a limited time offer, only while supplies last. Just go to sunlighten.com and mention Bulletproof Radio, or you can also call 877-292-0020, sunlighten.com.

In case you haven’t noticed, if you’re watching on YouTube, you might have figured this out, I have a guy sitting next to me here, who is pretty well known, at least if you’re on the internet, whose name is JP Sears. He’s here at Bulletproof Labs, at my house. We’ve been having to do all sorts of cryotherapy and other crazy biohacking stuff here, and I’m actually going to interview him today about some cool stuff that you might not know about JP Sears, and he might actually answer at least one question without a humorous response, but I’m not sure.

JP Sears: Well, that’s a might with a capital M, and I’m looking forward to getting into things that I don’t know about me.

Dave Asprey: Well, here’s something about the cool fact of the day, which is something that I’ve had in every show, and it says, according to this guy, Oscar Wilde, “Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but the highest form of intelligence,” but you just stole my cool fact of the day. Did you say you did that?

JP Sears: You’re welcome. Is there anything else I can do to steal your thunder?

Dave Asprey: I’m sure that you’ll find something, JP, but that’s all right. You know what? My thunder was really just like a drizzle today.

JP Sears: I feel like your self-esteem is getting lower.

Dave Asprey: I’ve been wanting to upgrade my self-esteem. Is that possible?

JP Sears: Yeah. Mold-free coffee is the best self-esteem upgrade possible. But I will say this, you are ridiculous in the best way possible. I love it.

Dave Asprey: Thank you, sir.

JP Sears: You mention Oscar Wilde. He has another thought that I absolutely love. He suggests that life is too important to take seriously. One of the reasons why I absolutely love hanging around you, and I tell this to everybody I know when I’m talking about you behind your back, but saying good things behind your book, is you are like a giant child with a very intelligent brain, but I think one of the reasons why you have such a magnetic charisma around you is you exude playfulness, and to me, you embody the idea life is too important to take seriously, which is ironic. You do very serious stuff. You change the world, you change lives, and you do it with a playful mindset. That’s something that’s incredibly inspiring to me.

Dave Asprey: Wow. That’s a massive complement. Thanks, man.

JP Sears: You’re welcome.

Dave Asprey: I appreciate that. I keep going into this cool fact of the day stuff, and we just keep talking about all this other stuff, like me. No, I’m kidding.

JP Sears: Fact of the day, Dave Asprey is cool.

Dave Asprey: You’re rubbing off on me. I’m becoming more egotistical just sitting around you, JP.

JP Sears: You are, but I’m a little more humble than you. I’m the most humble person I know.

Dave Asprey: If you guys don’t know JP Sears’ work, you’ve got to check out his YouTube channel. He’s done basically … I don’t know what to call them, roasts, is maybe an appropriate thing, just hilarious things about Paleo, about biohacking, about vegan diets, about pretty much any sacred cow or sacred vegan cow that you can find, he has slaughtered in the most self-deprecating, hilarious way possible. You must have a YouTube URL or something like … Where do you sent people to find your stuff? Because if you haven’t seen at least some of his stuff … You probably have seen it. You don’t know you’ve seen it, but where do people go for this, because it’s awesome.

JP Sears: Awaken with JP. That’s where you can check out all my stuff on YouTube and Facebook. Of course, if you find me incredibly offensive, then those are the places where you want to avoid going.

Dave Asprey: Well, let’s talk about sarcasm for a minute here. There’s actually real research on sarcasm. The research says something, that it improves creativity and cognitive function. This is neuroscience level stuff. Basically, thinking of it does one thing, and delivering it does another thing. But on the flip side, the stuff that I teach, especially at the 40 Years of Zen, when we’re looking at these advanced ego awareness sort of things, pretty much whenever you’re using sarcasm, there’s an element of anger that’s behind it, like you wanted to say something, so the idea of act with kindness and things like … I have a very sarcastic wit. People listening probably wouldn’t believe that, but-

JP Sears: I’m sure they wouldn’t.

Dave Asprey: I actually toned it way down, because I realized even if I was meaning to be humorous, sometimes, I was hurting people’s feelings. I want to progress through the world with be kind to others as a primary thing to do. Then, it is kind of fun to be a little bit unkind to someone, just because they needed it. Your form of sarcasm is usually, though, not … You’ll make fun of something that I would say needs attention on it, but you end up redirecting it back to yourself at the end of the day. You’re sort of the butt of the joke at the end of the day, versus the person whose belief system you’re insulting, slaying, and otherwise poking holes in.

JP Sears: Yeah.

Dave Asprey: Is that on purpose?

JP Sears: Yeah. To me, it is. I think sarcasm … I hadn’t heard that research, but I totally vibe with it. I do think at the root of all sarcasm … I mean, listen to the word sarcasm, scarcasm. I think it really does have its roots in pain, and I know my humor, it comes from my pain. When I was a child, the way I survived, psychologically, is I learned to make people laugh. The idea of, “If I can make someone laugh, I feel like I matter to them,” so that helped me cover up my sense of insignificance inside with a temporary four or five minute bout of significance coming from the outside. My sarcasm became a way of covering up my pain, so when it comes to expressing humor with sarcasm or satirism, which I think comes from Saturn …

Dave Asprey: Saturn? No. I think that comes from those half goat, half horse … Isn’t Saturn like a-

JP Sears: You’ve offended all the vegans out there already.

Dave Asprey: It’s almost a dish. It’s like half goat, half tofu, and you mix it all up.

JP Sears: That sounds disgusting, but nonetheless, when one expresses their humor, yes, I do believe there’s pain in it. Are we projecting that pain onto someone else and hurting them, or are we essentially owning our pain? Therefore, I think shining the light to help other people get in touch with their pain, rather than having the humor inflict pain on them, that’s why I think self-deprecating humor, I think with a compassionate consciousness toward self rather than using self-deprecating humor to shame self and just hurt our pain even more, I think that’s important to be aware of, so that humor doesn’t become a way of just hurting other people, which to me, it absolutely can. Humor is a powerful energy, powerful psychological energy. Light side is, I think it can be an alchemist of healing and self-awareness, and shadow side is, I think it can be a knife that cuts into people.

Dave Asprey: Well, I mean, there’s the sort of dick joke comedians with three hour podcasts, where it’s mostly just chewing on stuff, where sometimes, it’s funny, but you kind of feel a little dirty when you’re done listening to it. There’s another side of it, where you’re like, “Okay, it was damned funny, but I feel uplifted by that, instead of angry.”

JP Sears: Yeah, for sure. I think listening, if I can use a big word … Listening. That was tough. Listening to our bio-feedback, like how do you respond to humor that you’re using or someone’s using around you? If you hurt, our feelings don’t lie. I think Carl Yung said it best. Our feelings are the language of our soul. I think they come from a very deep place of truth inside of us. If we feel worse, and heavy, and fatigued from a conversation or listening to people joke, it’s like, “Wow, that was probably hurtful humor.” We can be amused. We can be laughing, but laughing is a form of weeping. It can be us emoting pain, because we’re experiencing pain being inflicted on us with humor.

To me, the light side of humor, it’s one of my favorite. I would honestly call it a psychological biohack. I really would. I think when we can laugh, not at ourselves, but with ourselves, and with other people, you get the whole shot of endorphins. It’s a uplifting experience, and I think also, another angle that humor is a powerful biohack is it helps us not take ourselves so seriously. I’m a big fan of have beliefs, but don’t believe your beliefs. I think when we can use humor as the force of detachment, so we can have our beliefs, but not be so attached, and just believe our beliefs, to me, that’s one of my favorite psychological brain biohacks.

Dave Asprey: So you’re saying humor can make people maybe less tribal?

JP Sears: Absolutely.

Dave Asprey: At the same time, if it’s applied wrong, if you’re only making fun of the other side and not of yourself, then it actually increases tribalism, right?

JP Sears: For sure. Actually, just so I’m clear, what do you mean by tribalism?

Dave Asprey: The way I see tribalism, it’s always an us versus them thing, so okay, I’m Bulletproof, and McDonald’s, they’re bad people. You sort of build walls between people, but end of the day, what those walls do is they make you stop thinking about what you’re doing, about what they’re doing, and make it about good versus evil, which is just a straight-up way to stop thinking and use your emotions, very old, primitive emotions, instead of actually using your rational brain and just realizing, “Oh, maybe we just disagree about what to put on our Goddamn plate for …” Does it really matter?

JP Sears: Yeah. I don’t know who it is, like the Zen people. They don’t make me sound intelligent if I say this is a Zen quote. The Buddhists said this, too, whoever else is dead, whose attorneys aren’t going to sue me for misrepresenting them. The Buddhists said this and whoever else, Abraham Lincoln, probably. They suggest that the source of all disease is a sense of separation. I know that really oversimplifies things, yet I think it’s also a very helpful consideration. If we’re increasing tribalism, us versus them, that separation … And to me, part of the beauty of humor, the light side of humor, is it’s a form of communication, communion, so it decreases tribalism, increases our sense of connection, so if all disease is created by a sense of separation, then maybe health and healing, and an increased quality of life, comes through more connection, connection with thyself, and connection with our community.

Dave Asprey: Well, you definitely cracked the code, because a lot of people, in fact, I think most people who’ve seen your work have no idea that you’re a Holistic Coach Advanced Practitioner. You’ve actually done a lot of your own work on that front, and that translated into a hundred million views on YouTube, which is an insane number. I believe that I have five million, so I’m sort of feeling insignificant.

JP Sears: Who’s the real man?

Dave Asprey: I have no idea what my numbers on YouTube are, but that seems about right, whatever. You’ve definitely done something different, because the virality of the stuff that you say, like when you put together a video like that, people just share it, because you did something that wasn’t maybe as hurtful as just a rant. We certainly see hurtful rants shared sometimes, but it’s a different energy to it, and I think it does get shared more. I don’t know if you or anyone else has done quantitative analysis on that, but there’s something, a different vibe in what you do that I haven’t really seen from other comedians. That was why I wanted to have you on the show, plus, we just got to be friends when you started making fun of biohacking, and I was like, “You have to be on, ’cause …”

JP Sears: Yeah. I love to make fun of what’s important to me. Yeah. When someone’s on social media, and they click share … I’ve been very blessed by whoever’s up there blessing people. I think it’s Santa Claus, still.

Dave Asprey: He’s one of them.

JP Sears: Yeah. He’s my favorite saint, Saint Nick. When someone clicks share on social media, I think, at a deep level what it means is they’ve just seen something about themself that they weren’t aware of. Something that’s very important to me in the work that I do, including the comedy work that I do, is facilitating increased self-awareness. I think the purpose of our lives is to live our life, and I think a lot of us walk around, and we are just a stranger to ourself. We don’t know who we are, but we sit here, and we think we know who we are. Then, we become convinced that we are who we think we are, but I think who we are, the true being inside Dave, the true being inside JP, we’re far more expansive than what we can comprehend.

One of the reasons why I love facilitating increased self-awareness, even if it’s just a little reflection of self-awareness, like you watch a comedy video, you see something about yourself that you didn’t know was there, and you like it, you resonate with it, so you hit share. To me, that self-awareness helps us step deeper into truly living the miracle of who we are, rather than treating ourselves like a stranger while we’re just trying to be who we’re expected to be, who we think we’re supposed to be. I think life is too short to be someone other than ourself.

Dave Asprey: When you decide to share something on social media that’s not your own work, what thought process goes through your mind before you decide whether you’re going to share something or not?

JP Sears: Yeah. That’s a great question. I think a couple things, one, that I receive benefit from this. If I receive benefit from that, that’s a great green check mark, green means go. I think the other thing is, is this a message that’s kind of congruent with my brand? My brand, the comedy, as well as just sincerity, are too components of my brand. I think the comedy’s more well-known. It’s if a congruent message, awesome, but just because something’s a great message, and I receive benefit, doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to share it. Someone might have these amazing orthotics for your shoes. I’m like, “Wow, that’s a beneficial message,” but I’m probably not going to share that.

Dave Asprey: Orthotics aren’t funny. Is that the deal?

JP Sears: Not yet, as far as I know.

Dave Asprey: I think you can break through that glass ceiling for orthotics.

JP Sears: If I can make orthotics funny, then I’m really making … I’d be curious, if I’m allowed to turn that question back on you, what makes you share something on social media that’s not your own content?

Dave Asprey: I have kind of a religious thing, and I’m always working to share this with the staff at Bulletproof, and with the team who support our mission, and it’s just this simple question, what’s in it for you? I don’t mean for you, our staff. What’s in it for you, the audience? My filter is I read the thing, and then is it worth the time that I’m asking someone to invest by looking at it? Will it add more than it takes away? I did a math equation a while back, and it was a really hard one. It had algebra and stuff in it. It was what’s the dwell the time on the website, when people read Bulletproof content, and then what’s the around 50 million downloads on Bulletproof Radio. 50 million hours divided by the number of waking hours is hundreds of human lifetimes.

JP Sears: Wow. That’s so-

Dave Asprey: You, by the way, are at a bigger number than I am, with 100 million YouTube things. I don’t know if you look at your average listen time, but that means that if we’re not adding value with what we do, we’re actually mass murderers.

JP Sears: Wow. I like that. That’s gruesome, but that’s a powerful way of looking at it.

Dave Asprey: Yeah, and that is how I view it. I’m not going to share something if it takes away more than it gives, whether it’s something I wrote, or whether it’s something that someone else did. I see all sorts of shit on Facebook, and I’m like, “No, I’m not going to share that,” even if it might be mirthful, or a little funny or whatever, so that the people who come and follow me on Facebook, or on Instagram, or wherever, that they’re like, “Okay, this was valuable,” and then they become engaged. The engagement levels for Bulletproof people, the comments and likes and things like that are very high as a ratio, because they’re real followers, versus bots or something. It is that constant what’s in it for you, not what’s in it for me.

A lot of times, I think that the unconscious sharing of we’re just going to throw stuff up on Facebook, like what’s in it for me? What’s this going to make me look like? For me, it’s like, “Will this serve you, because if this serves you best, it’s actually going to make me look good, anyway.” I honestly don’t really care if it makes me look good. I get these people who are like, “This offended me, therefore I’m going to unfollow.” The response, and I’d offer this to anyone who doesn’t like this show, same thing, “The unfollow button is right here,” and I draw a little arrow. I’m like, “It’s okay. If this isn’t serving you, I want you to stop listening.”

JP Sears: Yeah, go live your life. Don’t detract from your life just to mindlessly listen to that.

Dave Asprey: Yeah, and don’t hold me hostage by un-liking me. Trust me, I won’t notice.

JP Sears: That’s so true. I love your … I mean, that’s a very caring view. Are you going to just rob minutes, hours from people’s life? If so, wow, that’s taking life. That’s murdering. That gets your attention.

Dave Asprey: That’s the center of marketing.

JP Sears: Or [crosstalk 00:22:43], for sure. There’s some Facebook pages that I personally used to follow, used to being the key word. These become the pages where they’re just doing the constant, like every single hour, we’re going to post something. They’re playing that game. Nothing wrong with that, but what they’re posting, is it adding, or is it subtracting? Unfortunately not all, but some of them detract, so I’m really quick with the unfollow button.

Dave Asprey: Yeah. I am, too. It’s like, “Show me like less posts like this.” I’ve managed to get most politics out of my feed. What pisses me off now is-

JP Sears: Politics, is that a thing now? I didn’t notice.

Dave Asprey: It’s like a religion, but different.

JP Sears: Okay.

Dave Asprey: Because people fight wars over both of them, but I think the order of operations is different. I don’t really know.

JP Sears: I think with politics, they worship more people than just the one guy or gal.

Dave Asprey: Yeah, and neither one of them has anything to do with money.

JP Sears: Nothing. It’s just caring about human nature is at the heart of both of them.

Dave Asprey: This just turned dark, didn’t it?

JP Sears: It did. Dave, why do I have so many unfollows on my channel right now?

Dave Asprey: No. It’s really kind of funny, because I posted something about the FDA recently. It was basically one of Trump’s picks for the FDA is actually a board member of one of the most aggressive anti-aging research institutes out there. I’m like, “This is the coolest thing ever, because if we get like a libertarian anti-aging radical dude running the FDA, maybe we’ll be allowed to have access to therapies that they’re already doing in China and Japan, that are not even on the radar here.” Immediately, people were like, “Oh, welcome to the Trump train.” I’m like, “Jesus Christ, guys. The fact that I like some things a president does, and I don’t like some things a president does, it doesn’t mean that I support the office. It doesn’t mean I support a specific candidate or a specific president. I only care about what they do, and I’ve actually never found a politician who does anything close to what they promise to do. They all do the opposite or whatever’s in their best interest once …

JP Sears: For sure.

Dave Asprey: … they’ve bought your vote by lying to you.” How’s that for dark? They’re going to do whatever they’re going to do. Once I say something, either pro or con, then the tribalism and those religious behaviors come in, and here’s the deal for people listening, like, “Dave, you’re a leftie,” or, “You’re a libertarian.” I’m like, “Actually, here’s the deal. You cannot take the probably 10,000 different facets of things that you believe would make the best system and conveniently separate them into two buckets and say, ‘This is my bucket.’ That’s anti-thinking. Here’s the deal. Think for yourself, and yes, there are times when I absolutely support a decision, and there are other times where I absolutely don’t …

JP Sears: For sure.

Dave Asprey: … and so to try and simplify things into there’s only too sides, oh, for God’s sake. That’s so boring.”

JP Sears: To me, that’d be like saying your body only has two cells. It’s like, “Well, I think we’re a little more complex than that.” That’s part of what adds the three dimensionality to life, and the psychological experience of our social environment, politics being part of it. I’m routinely fascinated with politics and religion, how … And I’m going to see present company included with what I’m about to say, just so you don’t get too offended at me, or get offended. Now, you’re offended that I’m trying not to offend you. “JP, you don’t think I can handle it?”

Dave Asprey: You insulted everyone now, including yourself.

JP Sears: I hate myself right now, Dave. Do you have a biohack for that?

Dave Asprey: We do.

JP Sears: I am absolutely fascinated by the emotional nature of humankind and how our emotions can completely override our prefrontal cortex. We can have a very intelligent person in a discussion, and the name Trump is brought up, like you just said, and all of a sudden, the prefrontal cortex is completely shut down, and there’s just this emotional reactivity. There’s no logical, rational thought happening. It’s just an emotional outpouring, which is fine. I think we need to feel our emotions. I think if you try to suppress them, it progressively kills us, but when we don’t know we’re in a state of reactivity, and we’re trying to solve our emotional reactive issues in a logical discussion about politics, I think most discussions about politics aren’t about politics. They’re too very wounded inner children inside just getting angry, because they’re really afraid inside.

Dave Asprey: That matches my reality. In fact, in Head Strong … And yes, did you see that? I just conveniently worked a plug for my new book in there, because-

JP Sears: It is graceful.

Dave Asprey: The reason I brought up Head Strong is exactly because it’s relevant to what you’re saying here. There’s these three behaviors that I wrote about in the Bulletproof Diet. I call them the Labrador brain, but in Head Strong, it actually goes deeper than that. The three behaviors are what every life form has to do, and it works for mammals, but it turns out, it also works for bacteria, and your mitochondria are bacteria. These are three things you’d be very familiar with and comfortable with. The Labrador Brain, it requires you to eat everything, so you don’t starve to death, because then the species can’t reproduce, okay? Then the one that we’re talking about right here, which is run away from or kill everything that might be a threat.

JP Sears: Wow.

Dave Asprey: This is why dogs bark at random crap. It’s just an inborn behavior. This is the algorithm for anything to stay alive, including a plant. They can’t run away from, so they grow spines to kill you, or they grow poisons to kill you, so you won’t eat them, right? Because otherwise, those species can’t reproduce. The final thing involved in reproducing a species is the Labrador goes, “Oh look, a leg. I’ll go hump it,” so there’s the actual act of reproduction. I’m just trying to figure out, is there anything in your life you’ve ever done that you’re ashamed of, that didn’t come from one of those three behaviors?

JP Sears: That’s a great question. I would guess it’d probably be hard to find something outside of those behaviors.

Dave Asprey: Right, and all of the emotions we’re talking about in political discourse, in religious disagreements, even pro sporting, like, “That’s not my team!” Just those deep emotions, those emotions come from the lowest level bacteria that are running our bodies, which are mitochondria.

JP Sears: Welcome to the club of thinking like a low-level bacteria. What that means to me, to me, that sounds like all self-preservation. If you are different than me, psychologically, something’s different than me, I see it as a threat, so I want to kill it, fight it or flight it. To me, yeah, that’s a very self-preservation mentality, and I think self-preservation’s geared around creating more quantity of life, live longer, don’t die, but to me, self-realization is what gives us quality of life. I think self-realization isn’t about kill what’s different from me. I think self-realization is understand what’s different from me, because I get to expand. I don’t like hanging out with only like-minded people. I don’t grow. I don’t get challenged. I love hanging out with like-hearted people, but preferably like-hearted people, so there’s a acceptance-based relationship. It’s a safe space. But like-hearted people who are also, at least at times, different-minded, not just like-minded. I think when everybody agrees with each other, it’s like, “Okay, I feel more sense of certainty. I feel safer, but I’m not growing. I’m not getting challenged.”

Dave Asprey: That sense of safety there, from a mitochondrial and nervous system, ego perspective, that’s, “Okay, great. Now that’s all safe.” If you look at what these bacteria did when they colonized our cells and essentially took over, like, “Oh look, a mobile Petrie dish. That’s the coolest thing ever. Let’s just move right in and take over, and we’ll decide when a cell dies, when a cell replicates, and we’ll decide how much energy the cell gets.” That’s what they’re doing, so when you allow them to be in charge … It’s like letting the battery in your phone determine what your phone’s going to do. That’s the wrong way to do it. You should be in charge.

Okay, now I organized all these cells full of me, these bacteria, which are in almost every cell in your body. Now, you’re basically a walking biofilm with lots of complex systems in it, and they’re like, “Okay, you need to hook up with other biofilms like me for defense,” which is why you would surround yourself by like-minded people who are the same as you, because you basically formed a distributed biofilm now, and then you’ll reproduce with some of those people, and there you go. Now, you’ve got a tribe, right? Then, if you see someone who’s different, you’re like, “That’s a threat. That’s not a tribe,” but those things are coming from the very lowest level, emergent behaviors in a really complex system.

When you realize that, when you see a like-hearted person, my view on all this is that okay, these scared little stupid bacteria, none of which has much intelligence, but when you put a quadrillion of them together, and they keep doing these behaviors, civilization emerges, right? It’s kind of cool. The self-awareness component of that is that okay, now I see that I have these behaviors, and rather than letting these behaviors happen, I’m going to either reprogram the behaviors so the mitochondria chill the hell out, which is what meditation does, or I’m going to take more control, which I’m going to use my willpower, my energy to rationally catch myself in the act of flipping the guy off in traffic and going, “Actually, I believe my own story, that he cut me off because he thinks he’s better than me,” and I replace it with, “He cut me off because his wife is pregnant in the back of the car, and they’re going to the hospital.” You don’t know. Make up a story that makes you happy, right?

JP Sears: For sure.

Dave Asprey: It doesn’t matter. The story I usually make up is that he robbed a bank, but the bank had bad money in it, so he’s getting away, and that’s really good. No, I’m kidding. I don’t make that up. The bottom line, it doesn’t really matter. It’s all a story, and none of it has any bearing on reality. The like-hearted thing you’re saying, I think, is when you go beyond the survival emergent bacterial consciousness that we identify as our own behaviors, which they really aren’t. Those are low-level operating system things.

JP Sears: That we carry, but they’re not us.

Dave Asprey: Yeah. Yeah.

JP Sears: Yeah. To me, a biohack … And when I’m around you, I call everything a biohack, but to me, truly it is a biohack. When there’s something we disagree with, the biohack is seek to understand it, not disagree with what we disagree with, just creating more resistance, more division, but understand that which we disagree with. Not for the sake of coming to terms of making ourselves agree or disagree, but aiming for the space in between, which in my opinion is just understanding. To me, that’s tolerance. That’s, “Oh, you’re different than me. Let me understand you.” Now, we have peace between you and I at the micro level. I think even parts of our own ego, parts of our personality, disagree with each other at times. I think if we can find that sense of understanding rather than just disagreement and self-conflict, man, then our world becomes a little bit more of a graceful place to live in.

Dave Asprey: Although, inner conflict is where most of us spend enormous amounts of energy.

JP Sears: No, we don’t.

Dave Asprey: Perfect. The inner equation that I worked out, and I certainly had a lot of voices in my head for a long time, is that the more voices in your head, the more energy it takes to create the voices, and then to manage the voices. It becomes overwhelming. When you can resolve an inner conflict, it frees up the energy that was creating the conflict, and when I say frees up energy, I mean literally electrons in your head for thinking or willing.

JP Sears: For sure.

Dave Asprey: But then, also, the amount of management of rational thinking about this conflict goes down, and you’re like, “Wow. I feel freer,” but what you actually feel is more energy, which equals freedom.

JP Sears: I love that, yeah. I love that. I think a lot of us, we don’t give ourselves permission to actually be conflicted. Instead, we have conflict about our conflict. That’s sort of like natural conflict. I think we inherently don’t allow that to just be, in the sense of, “Oh, I disagree with you,” or, “These two parts of me disagree with each other, and that’s okay.” All of a sudden, if we can do that, that’s okay kind of thing, our conflict creates a sense of peace and connection inside of ourselves. It’s a bit of a paradox, and I think it’s a beautiful thing, just like nutrition comes from compost. The raw sewage creates something that gives you life.

Dave Asprey: Like tofu.

JP Sears: Like tofu, tofurkey, and I like the big game tofanimals, like tofiger, tofuna, tofelephants. I love big game hunting. The tofu animals are also easier to kill, in my opinion, as well.

Dave Asprey: They don’t run very fast.

JP Sears: No. They are very toslow. Anyway, I think when we have this mentality inside of ourselves and in our outer relationships, that it’s not okay to be conflicted, that it’s not okay to disagree, we’re conflicted about our conflict, and that’s where we just really get hung up, but when we can say, “Oh, we disagree about this, and that’s okay. I don’t need to change your mind, you don’t need to change mine, but maybe we can have understanding,” and of course, there it is on the inner world, as well. Man, just like you said, how much more energy do we reclaim when we’re not just fighting our conflict all the time? It’s massive.

Dave Asprey: There’s another side to that, too, which is that if I don’t have an explanation for that, I’m not safe. That’s the source of science trolls. “There’s no rational explanation for that happening, therefore, it didn’t happen.” Sorry, show me a rational explanation for love, right?

JP Sears: Well, I don’t know that love exists, at this point.

Dave Asprey: Right. There’s that point, that it doesn’t exist. The point that I’m trying to make here is that people will oftentimes reject, they’ll literally tell themselves something that clearly happened didn’t happen, because it would require a change in thinking, which creates a sense of lack of safety, which goes right back to those bacteria saying, “Run away from things that are scary.”

JP Sears: For sure.

Dave Asprey: If I was wrong about my beliefs about the way biology works or whatever else, therefore, it’s not going to work. They come in, essentially, with guns blazing, “You’re an idiot. Here’s a study that proves you’re an idiot, because it disagrees with what you said.” That’s all fear, like you were saying earlier, and the question is whether people are able to simultaneously say, “This is the hypothesis that I’m going with right now, which is that things work this way.” This may violate the hypothesis. It may not. It may be a bad data point. It may be a whole new exploration. Whatever of those it is, it’s cool, and if someone else thinks it’s something different, let them do the research.

But you see these crazy people that are out there like, “Let’s ban research on this, ’cause it’s already been proven not to work.” You’re like, “But actually, that’s not how science works.” You don’t ban research on stuff that you think doesn’t work, because then you don’t learn, like we just learned, “Oh, it turns out the immune system does connect to the brain, we just didn’t see it, ’cause it was running next to a blood vessel all this time.” If we had banned research on that because we knew how it worked, holy crap. I kind of get stuck on that.

JP Sears: Yeah. For me, that whole fear-based mentality, I think it becomes human nature, or bacterial nature, within the human, to become addicted to the familiar, and to fight things that threaten my construct of what is familiar. To me, where our exhilaration is in life, it’s not in the familiarity of our comfort zone of what’s familiar. That’s where we have a sense of safety. I don’t even know if it’s safe, but it’s where we have a sense of safety. But man, the exhilaration is when we’re in the mystery, when we’re walking through the proverbial dark forest, when we’re stepping off the cliff, and we don’t know exactly what we’re going to land in, when we’re going to land, if we’re going to land.

Dave Asprey: Oh, you’ve been doing mushrooms again?

JP Sears: I’m doing the mushrooms that make me hallucinate, but I’m not doing mushrooms, so at this point, I’m confused. In my opinion, an ingredient for a great life is we have to be willing to scare ourselves to death in order to actually live, not survive, but live. I think when we’re not willing to scare ourselves to death, what that means is, “I’m going to sit in this coffin of my comfort zone, stay with what’s familiar. I’ll repeat the same patterns of my relationships, same repetitive patterns of my health, same repetitive patterns of my thinking about who I am and what the world around me is.” If we can break out of that coffin and actually embrace the mystery, embrace the unknown, embrace what we fear the most … I think it was last week you posted this awesome video to Facebook, the people on the high dive.

Dave Asprey: Oh, that was so cool.

JP Sears: It was so amazing. You guys, you got to go check out this video on Dave’s Facebook page. Scroll through it, you’ll find it. It was a 15 minute long video, and I don’t even think you have to watch the whole thing, but people on the edge of this-

Dave Asprey: It’s like a 10 meter high dive.

JP Sears: Yeah, a 10 meter high dive, and you watch these people struggle. Some of them just wouldn’t jump. Others were up there for a few minutes. Then, they finally did, and man, is that a metaphoric representation of how we are relating to our comfort zone and resisting the mystery all the time. If we can break through the membrane of the coffin of our comfort zone into the mystery, man, the free fall, that’s where life is at, in my opinion.

Dave Asprey: There’s a struggle that was … The reason I liked that video is you could see the struggle on their face and in their body movements, and the meat operating system, the mitochondria …

JP Sears: Yeah, really.

Dave Asprey: … they’re like, “Do not jump. End of species. If you go down that far, we know, as dumb little bacteria, that you’ll probably die.” The rational brain’s like, “I know I’m not going to die.” It’s the struggle of the rational brain deciding to take ownership of the primitive in order to cause you to jump over. When I watched this video, the reason I actually posted it was you see these grown men who are like, “I can’t do it.” Then, you see this maybe, I’m guessing she was a 17-year-old girl. She looks at the edge, and she looks down. You can tell it scares the shit out of her, and she takes like three steps back. She goes, “All right, let’s do this.” Bam! She just jumps. She had the most balls of anyone who went up there. It was just so cool to see that.

JP Sears: For sure. That video is very inspiring, I think inspiring in two ways, like one, seeing a girl like that, and two, inspiring like having the reflexive, just reactive seizing up and addiction to comfort. It’s inspiring to see that, be like, “Yep, I have that, too.” I want to recognize how that plays out in my life, so I won’t be a bacterial … I won’t be a slave to that bacterial master.

Dave Asprey: I’ve come to the point and have struggles about how do you hack the bacteria, or the mitochondria, which were bacteria, so that you have more energy every day, which lets you have more energy to manage them better, and then how do you change the environment so that you get a battery upgrade? The end result of all this research is I just believe that our ego itself is an emergent phenomena of mitochondria. My career in tech has been managing complex systems and correlating events, and you don’t mean to create huge spikes in the internet when you just change one little bit here, but you make a quadrillion or a googolplex of decisions using these tiny little rules, and you get these incredibly complex, beautiful patterns that no one would predict.

Stephen Wolfram invented a whole new field of mathematics around information theory, information fields, and he’s like, “You want to understand how we make almost anything in nature?” You take these tiny little rule sets, like dumb little rules, and just do them a kabillion times, to use a technical terms, and you get a flower, and you get almost everything you’d expect. The most complex, beautiful things are not that complex. They’re emergent from tiny rules. I believe that a lot of our egoic behaviors, the ones that we’re most ashamed of, are emergent from these tiny little things that are constantly sensing the environment and judging what’s going to keep this Petrie dish alive the longest, even though, quite often what they’re telling you the do is totally not in your best interest, and that the act of becoming self-aware is learning how to feel when that happens, and then deciding whether to use the information from the feeling, or whether to become the feeling, and then act without conscious thought.

That, for me, has been a really big skill, and one I wouldn’t really be very good at without having stuck computers to my head, to have a lie detector test to see when I’m lying to myself. My powers of self-deception are legion, as are everyone else’s.

JP Sears: Me, too, for sure. I love what you’re saying, to me, that’s such a great way to articulate an upgraded consciousness, like being conscious over the unconscious, reactive, self-preservation, mitochondrion bacteria inside of us. I think that’s amazing.

Dave Asprey: You, in your book How to be Ultra Spiritual, which is something that we’re here to talk about, in addition to all the other stuff you’re doing, which just keeps me laugh, you talk about vulnerability. When you’re taking off your comedian hat, but I suppose when you’re acting as a comedian, too, you have … We all have this idea of self-sabotage, that we do things that get in your own way. I want to know what you do to self-sabotage, and then what’s your take, as a holistic trained coach, thinking about self-sabotage. Just walk me through your thinking about that.

JP Sears: Yeah. You know, sometimes the worst form of self-sabotage I do is not recognizing the self-sabotage that I’m acting out. That’s probably the worst thing I do.

Dave Asprey: Recursive self-sabotage, you’re saying.

JP Sears: Recursive, like as opposed to printing?

Dave Asprey: So you’re saying self-sabotage of your own self-sabotage, or blindness of self-sabotage?

JP Sears: Yeah, blindness of self-sabotage. To me, it’s kind of like the idea you can’t get out of a prison that you don’t know you’re in. If you’re self-sabotaging-

Dave Asprey: Like Facebook.

JP Sears: Absolutely, but we know we’re in Facebook. But I got to check Facebook real quick. Do you mind if we pause this for 20 or 30 minutes?

Dave Asprey: I should do the someone thing, too. We’ll just …

JP Sears: But aspects of my self-sabotage that are common, overworking. I find a lot of purpose, playfulness in my work, and there is a part of me that overworks for the sense of chasing a sense of value that isn’t going to be found through work. Yeah. I can really deplete myself burning the candle at both ends. To me, self-sabotage is typically a symptom, so whether we’re self-sabotaging psychologically, so it’s like reoccurring patterns of depression, sadness, anger, disconnection, or we’re acting out behaviors of self-sabotage, overworking, eating foods we shouldn’t, hanging around people that don’t serve us. To me, self-sabotage is always a symptom, and from my delusional perspective, it’s a symptom of unresolved emotional pain and/or disempowering beliefs of ourselves. I think our self-sabotage, it’s an expression that validates a disempowering belief of self or a pain of self.

Dave Asprey: That’s pretty deep. For you, you’re saying you basically burn yourself out when you’re self-sabotaging.

JP Sears: Yeah.

Dave Asprey: Okay. For people listening, do you have a tool you recommend or some way for them to identify their self-sabotaging patterns, the ones they’re not aware of?

JP Sears: Well, there’s a line of … A question, and a simple question, that I love to ask people is, “Okay, what do you do?” Recognize your self-sabotage. That’s question number one. Question number 2, which I think is so much more important than what do you, but it’s why do you do what you do? If you pretend that whatever your sabotage is, there’s a part of you that has a damn good reason why it acts out that self-destruction. Sometimes, we make up the story like, “Ah, I’m doing this thing, and it doesn’t serve me.” Well, I think we’re intelligent people. We wouldn’t be self-destructing if it didn’t serve us in some way, by serve us meaning it kind of compensates. What do you do, and then get curious, why do I do this?

Question number three is how does part of me benefit by doing this? Okay, I might say, “I’ve been in a relationship that’s just … We’re always fighting, and it’s just obvious. This relationship died three years ago.” Okay, so that’s my reoccurring patterns of relationship dysfunction. Why do I do this? Is this replicating a sense of familiarity from my childhood? Do I feel like I’m just perpetually not good enough for her? Then, the third question, how do I benefit from that? Do I find a sense of comfort in the discomfort of the incessant conflict, for example? For me, a curious mindset is very important to get to the story under the story of our self-sabotage, get beyond the symptoms to the root in our heart of why we do what we do.

Dave Asprey: I’ve looked at my own things, certainly burning myself out is something that I’ve been a professional at for a long time. That’s one way to avoid dealing with feelings is, “I have to work more. Just one more email. I’ll be fine.” Then, you collapse, and then you rinse and repeat. Oftentimes, at least when I was really motivated in my 20s, it was more fear of failure than anything else, but I made $6 million when I was 26. That’s a pretty good motivation, if you equate failure with death instead of learning, you’re going to go down that path. I certainly would do that. I came across a tool called the Enneagram. Have you ever looked at that?

JP Sears: Yes, I have. I don’t know much about it. I’ve got a book on it. I haven’t read it. I’ve had other people do … But I’d love to hear how that’s worked for you. I don’t know much about it, at all.

Dave Asprey: I can tell you that I don’t remember my Enneagram number, which means to me-

JP Sears: My intuition tells me you’re a six.

Dave Asprey: Sure. I don’t even remember what the numbers are, but when I read the book and did the test for the Enneagram, it was really insightful. It was the only Myers-Briggs style scoring system that had the psychospiritual component, but what it said is it said here’s how you manifest when you’re doing things in the good place for you, and here’s how you can tell that you’re starting … Like here’s your self-sabotage patterns. It actually would tell you step one, step two, step three, step four, with shocking precision.

JP Sears: Oh, is that right?

Dave Asprey: It’s E-N-N-E-A-G-R-A-M, for people that are listening. I’m not trained in the thing. I read the book. I did a workshop with it a long, long time ago. I just remember thinking this the most complete, so if you’re looking for self-sabotage, like why do I do that, I can tell you, self-sabotage is a major issue for almost everyone, and it’s going to be invisible, because what you’ll do is you’ll say, “I’m doing it for a reason,” which is a story that you made up, or you’ll say it’s someone else’s fault, like, “They’re making me do it.” That’s that inner awareness thing, which can only really be released by reading How to be Ultra Spiritual by JP Sears. I worked that plug in seamlessly for you, didn’t I?

JP Sears: Yeah. It was graceful. I think you redefined grace. In fact, I think I can hear classical music playing right now, even though it’s not playing.

Dave Asprey: You know, we’re going to cut some in, so it’s actually playing later.

JP Sears: Ah, very cool.

Dave Asprey: So you [crosstalk 00:51:50].

JP Sears: Please cut this part out, where we’re talking about we’re going to cut in it, just so people-

Dave Asprey: It’s called the third wall. We’re not supposed to violate the third wall, but violating third walls is part of your kitsch, isn’t it?

JP Sears: I don’t know what it means, but the answer’s definitely yes.

Dave Asprey: I think they call it … It might be the fourth wall. I get my numbers wrong, but there’s some sort of wall between you guys watching and listening. I’m not really a TV guy, but I heard someone say it once, and it made me feel smart.

JP Sears: Then, it’s true, if it made you feel smart.

Dave Asprey: Your weird humor is rubbing off on me, and it makes me feel dirty.

JP Sears: Oh, you’re welcome. I appreciate that compliment. It’s the nicest thing anybody’s ever said to me.

Dave Asprey: Speaking of compliments, I do have a copy of your book, pre-released copy of the book, and I turned over the book to the back of the book, because what I found is that if you look at the cool picture on the front with the flower in your hair, and you look at the back of the book, you can actually say that you’ve read the entire book, because you just pretend like you didn’t even have to open it. Okay. I’ve actually read it, read the book. The back of it had an interesting quote from a guy I’ve heard of, “Loaded with laugh-out-loud humor and intelligent exploration of the spiritual delusions many fall prey to. Enjoy JP’s perceptive underlying insights while you laugh beyond all understanding,” from Tony Robbins. That’s pretty high praise. Tony gets asked to say stuff about books every five seconds of his life, I imagine …

JP Sears: I’m sure.

Dave Asprey: … and doesn’t really respond to those emails, I would also imagine. I’ve never asked him to say anything about mine, but he once said something nice about Brain Octane. I was like, “Holy shit, Tony. That’s amazing.” You had some other people on here that I wanted to quote, because I thought some of these were almost as impressive-

JP Sears: They’re all high-vibe people, yeah.

Dave Asprey: “Combines the wisdom of bearded Jesus with the playfulness of baby Jesus,” and that was a quote from, it says here The Holy Mother of God.

JP Sears: Yeah.

Dave Asprey: Wow.

JP Sears: That’s a powerful endorsement. It almost rivals Tony’s endorsement, but that’s powerful, in and of itself.

Dave Asprey: “It’s funnier than the Law of Karma,” The Universe. This is high praise for a book. It really is a cool perspective. It is a funny book, and the idea that you’re working this stuff in, where people can pay attention to their weaknesses, they can look at what’s going on, but through the lens of humor. It’s actually a hard achievement to do. You pulled it off, which is cool.

JP Sears: Well, thank you, my friend. I appreciate that. To me, humor, it’s a language, and I think it’s a language that we tend to have our mind’s defenses surrendered when we’re talking about humor. Like if I start talking, you and are talking in the serious, “Yeah, we’re going to get a little bit resistant,” especially if you start sharing new perspectives with me, like we were talking about earlier, like, “Ooh, that’s different. Let me resist that.”

There’s something about the energy of humor. There’s a non-threatening energy, so I find that the human psyche tends to be relatively less defended when we’re talking in the language of humor, so if we embed deeper messages in humor, which from my bias perspective, I do my best to do that in my book and my videos, then it’s like we can bring the messages into our psyche. They can penetrate deeper, and we can consider them, because we’ve been undefended. We haven’t rejected them before we’ve even considered them, like we might do with new ideas, new perspectives that are essentially told to us through the language of seriousness. I know humor is not the only language, but to me, it’s a very powerful language, underused language.

Dave Asprey: It maybe makes people feel safer about facing some of these. I remember when I was first getting into the personal development side of things, I’d done a little bit of performance-oriented neurofeedback, but I hadn’t don’t any EMDR. I hadn’t done [inaudible 00:55:25]. I was basically in this place where, “Yeah, I’m pretty angry most of the time, but any other emotion, there’s no other emotion. Eff all that, right?”

I went and I did a lot of personal exploration around those things. I wouldn’t look at anything other than through a rational lens, and a lot of people, who are actually suffering the most, have learned that if you just make everything go through the slowest part of the brain, which is the thinking part, even though it takes a lot of energy to do that, then everything works, and then you just kind of ignore everything underneath that. This is metabolically expensive. It will cost you, but it’s an invisible cost, and it burns a lot of energy in a way that isn’t making you stronger. It just wastes it, and it’s energy that you could use just to watch Breaking Bad reruns over and over. It’s just free energy that’s just sitting there.

For me, it was definitely anger, but behind anger, there’s always fear, but I was really not open to hearing any of that crap. But when you look at it through humor, all of the defensiveness goes away, because who can be defensive around the right kind of humor, anyway? That’s a cool way to maybe make people face things. One of the people I had first started working with said, “Oh, you need to read this book called Heal the Shame That Binds You.”

JP Sears: Oh, by John Bradshaw, love the book.

Dave Asprey: Famous book, right? But I was like, “I don’t have any shame. Screw you guys.” Toss the book to the side. What kind of a weakling would have shame?

JP Sears: Exactly.

Dave Asprey: Like, “I got nothing to be ashamed of. You know how successful I am?”

JP Sears: Shame is for small children, not real men.

Dave Asprey: Exactly.

JP Sears: Dammit.

Dave Asprey: Totally. I remember that. In fact, I still never read that damn book. I’m kidding. It was one of those things where that wasn’t accessible to me, because I was very cognitive. It’s not that you stop thinking for yourself. I got to the point, and I’m still at that point, where I’ve an engineering brain, studied a subset of artificial intelligence and computer science and all that. There is a completely rational part of the world, and part of my inner world, and there’s also a completely irrational part of it, and the inner conflict that comes from those, I don’t have it anymore, because I’m like, “Look, there’s these stupid bacteria at this operating system of the body that’s irrational.” It’s an animal. It doesn’t follow logic. It doesn’t have context, and at the same time, there’s a rational side of me, which I like to identify with more, but the fact of the matter is there may be a complete gap between those things, and it doesn’t matter.

JP Sears: Yeah.

Dave Asprey: I could do things that make my animal happy, that make no sense. “Yes, I’ll sit in a drumming circle.” There’s no double blind studies in rational reason, that you should do almost all the things that you like to do. That was my perspective just on maybe why humor works, because it can let you get past that resistance to looking at yourself.

JP Sears: Yeah, and part of what I heard you say is humor can be a bridge. It bridges the … It can be a massive canyon. The 18 inches between our head and our heart can sometimes be just like 10,000 miles of distance, essentially. I heard you say humor can be that bridge. My delusional perspective about you is you’re a very intelligent guy. Maybe that’s not so delusional. I think you could crush Forrest Gump in an IQ competition.

Dave Asprey: I’d work hard.

JP Sears: I think for a lot of high-cognitive functioning people, there might be a couple thing that happens. One, I just wonder, did you develop your high caliber cognitive function essentially as a compensation to escape the pain in your heart, and/or maybe that was just there, and it was going to be there all along, but it becomes an easy escape mechanism, and to me … I just get curious about that. I don’t know if any of it’s true, but to me, the most beautiful thing is you have taken painstaking efforts to bridge that gap. I would imagine you could just be in your head all day. Life would seem pretty good, but there’s something that’s called you to the adventure of your heart, and you’ve bridged the gap. It’s beautiful.

Dave Asprey: Oh, thank you. I don’t know how other people feel, if they live all in their head, but I think that there’s usually kind of a background screaming going on, that you’re living in your head to avoid, that you’ll eventually be called to pay attention to. Otherwise, you’ll be miserable.

JP Sears: Yeah. On that note about how other people might feel who live in their head, to me, one of the potential feelings, because I’ve spent so much time in my head in my life, the worst feeling is the feeling of not feeling feelings, numbness. To me, it’s the most tormenting sensation, so when we’re walking around numb, it’s like we see life, we know life is going on, but we’re not experiencing life. I think our emotions are inside of us for a reason, to give us the three-dimensional experience of life, rather than just knowing about life.

Dave Asprey: Well, numbness is a perception, unless you actually have a severed nerve. What’s going on is the mitochondria that sense the world around us on a microsecond by microsecond basis, they’re still taking all that in, and then they communicate it at the cell level, and some of those cells communicate it at the nerve level, and all this environmental stuff changes in the body, and you’re capable of sensing all those. What the numbness is is actually a full on disconnect. Your sensation of numbness is that either you intentionally cut off, or you decided on some subconscious level that that is noise, not signal, and that you’re just not going to listen to it.

JP Sears: So it’s there, you’re just not paying attention.

Dave Asprey: Yeah, and people who are more on the autism, ADD side of things, the signal to noise ratio isn’t where you want it to be, so they already have a hard time figuring out what the signal is from their nervous system, versus just random whatevers. So they just toss all that crap. It’s too much work. I don’t want to deal with it. The idea is if something feels like too much work, well, what if you had something that was capable of putting out a lot more power? Then, it wouldn’t feel like too much work, and that’s why Head Strong, the whole thing of hacking your mitochondria, is what if they just made more energy? Then what felt like a lot of work wouldn’t be a lot of work. It’s just the fundamental laziness, but it applies even to something like being aware of where your numbness comes from.

See, I didn’t think we’d go quite this deep. This is kind of cool. I want to know, though, you’ve got a hundred million YouTube views. You have your Ultra Spiritual book. You have your, actually, your friggin’ hilarious the-shirts, spiritual as hell and all those things. You’re a creative guy, and I’ve seen you on stage, a couple different times. There’s a creative process. I haven’t done it on film before or on Bulletproof Radio, but I’ve asked Stephen Jenkins from Third Eye Blind, like what do you do to prepare for a concert before you go onstage? He promised he’d come on one of these days and talk about that, so I’ll get that on air at some point. I’d like to know, what do really successful performers do in order to make your material? What’s your process to get into JP Sears with a flower in your hair?

JP Sears: Yeah. You know, I think there’s a few different phases of the creative process. I would say the most raw of the creative process is coming up with the video ideas and then developing a script, or writing the book.

Dave Asprey: How do you come up with an idea? The creative process is hard.

JP Sears: Bringing in the raw materials, that process is seemingly random, like the creativity comes to me when I’m not trying to be creative. Airplanes, for me, are a big source of creativity, or a big … It’s a time when a lot of creativity happens. I don’t know why. It might have something to do with I’m somewhat uncomfortable, but just ideas flood to me when I’m on airplanes.

Dave Asprey: You want to know why?

JP Sears: Yeah, let’s hear it.

Dave Asprey: At least in the model that I use at 40 Years of Zen, and in my own life, the fount of creation is theta state. It’s where you go for dreaming. Intuition and creativity sit there, and most of the time, when you have a dream, you don’t remember it.

JP Sears: Right.

Dave Asprey: There’s actually software that I use, called NeuroMinder, that trains you to remember what happens in that state, but when you go on an airplane, you’ve got relatively poor quality of lighting, but you’ve also got white noise, like all that stuff going on, and you are relatively uncomfortable. You’re so uncomfortable that you can’t go to sleep very easily.

JP Sears: Right.

Dave Asprey: What’s happening is you’ve got white noise and essentially a background annoyingness that helps your body drop into a theta state, and you’re uncomfortable enough that you don’t fall asleep, where you won’t get all the value from it. It pops you into that mode.

JP Sears: Fascinating. So yay. Luckily, I’m on airplanes enough that I get to take advantage of that. That’s where the eQ materials come from, and then the next part of my creative process is taking the big idea and filling in the microcosm, if you will, of that idea. For me, I dedicate the first one hour of my day, after my morning routine, and I’m woken up, the first hour of my workday is devoted to writing, so scripting-

Dave Asprey: Like the artist way, just getting it out of your head writing, or more focused work writing?

JP Sears: No. It would be like making a video script, writing the book, but something that I’m really applying my creativity to a project that’s got material to it.

Dave Asprey: I find it kind of irritating, Naveen Jain, when we was on, who … By the way, Naveen Jain is the founder of InfoSpace, and the guy who’s behind Moon Express and the new company called Biome. He just invested in Bulletproof this week, which is cool.

JP Sears: Right on.

Dave Asprey: Well, this week when we’re recording, but anyway, now I have this cool billionaire investor guy on board, which is awesome, joined our advisory board. Naveen, when I interviewed him, I’m like, “What are your morning habits?” He goes, “Why the heck would you want to know my morning habits?” I’m misquoting him, but he’s like, “Only a loser would want to follow someone else’s morning habits. You know why people do the habits? It’s the thinking that matters.” I kind of want to ask you about your morning habits, but I also don’t want people to think, “Oh, I’ll be just like JP Sears if I just follow his habits,” because your habits work for you, but your habits might not work for them. That said, what are your habits? No. You said your first hour, but you don’t wake up in bed and write, do you?

JP Sears: No. No, I don’t. First thing I do is I take a cold shower, that is so stimulating.

Dave Asprey: Hot then cold, or just cold?

JP Sears: Just cold.

Dave Asprey: Wow.

JP Sears: Yeah, hardcore-

Dave Asprey: Viking.

JP Sears: Yeah, brother. Then, from there, I do some gratitude journaling, so I write down … Actually, this is a dimension of the routine I got from Tony Robbins, three things I’m grateful for, but to bring it just from head, and integrate it to my heart, feel the feelings of gratitude.

Dave Asprey: The sensation of gratitude. Well said.

JP Sears: For sure. Then, I write down three creative projects that I’m working on, to just energize what’s important to me, creatively. Then, I take a 30 minute walk. I come back and make Bulletproof coffee. I’m not just saying that because I’m talking to Dave. I’ve been on Bulletproof coffee. I love it.

Dave Asprey: Awesome.

JP Sears: Yeah. Getting into ketosis or close to it, I don’t measure my blood, but-

Dave Asprey: You don’t need to. If you just burn Octane, you’re getting some ketones just by definition.

JP Sears: Yes. I use a crapload of Brain Octane, grass-fed butter … Like I’m telling you what’s in Bulletproof coffee. Do you know about Bulletproof coffee? I do find it makes a noticeable difference for my mental sharpness, my brain energy, and my physical energy. Typically, then I’m not eating my first solid food until one in the afternoon, at the earliest, sometimes two. Yeah. Then, I take my coffee, and I start my creative writing, whatever the one hour of creativity is.

Dave Asprey: Do you take any other smart drugs?

JP Sears: No.

Dave Asprey: I’ll give you some before you go.

JP Sears: Okay.

Dave Asprey: There’s some that can help.

JP Sears: Is crystal meth a smart drug?

Dave Asprey: No. It’s just a stimulant. We have real smart drugs.

JP Sears: No. No other smart drugs.

Dave Asprey: If you’re open to it, I will give you some. I make neutral [inaudible 01:08:17] that are not drugs, some of the Bulletproof stuff, but I mean like an actual pharmaceutical smart drug sort of thing, that is legal to give you, because they’re over-the-counter stuff.

JP Sears: Interesting. Those kind of scare me, and I’m not educated on them, but I’m curious. What would be the one you’re thinking of?

Dave Asprey: Aniracetam. The ones in the racetam family are exceedingly safe, and they increase memory I/O, at least that one does, and they don’t have addictive things, at all. They’re not stimulants. The biggest side effect, they amplify caffeine a little bit. Some of them, they reduce acetylcholine, the neurotransmitter. They use more choline, because your brain works faster. They’re essentially neuroprotective. Your chances of living longer when you take them are higher, so I’ve been on this stuff almost every day for nearly 20 years now.

JP Sears: Oh, wow.

Dave Asprey: Yeah, and there’s different varieties in that family. If you want to try some, I’ll give you some, and then I’d just say take it with your Bulletproof in the morning, when you want to really create something amazing, and just see what happens. Your risks are relatively low on these, and these are things … And anyone can order online. I don’t sell any of them. I can’t tell you where the safest place to buy them is, because there are always sites-

JP Sears: Probably Tijuana, Mexico is the safest place to buy anything.

Dave Asprey: I usually get a smoothie made out of them there. They just put a few Viagra, a few aniracetams, blend it right up with some cactus.

JP Sears: [inaudible 01:09:42]. Yeah, I’m fascinated. I’d love to learn more about that.

Dave Asprey: All right. I’ll get you some. Some of the most creative people I know, they do get the boost from having … It’s not just ketones, like Brain Octane and all that, but nicotine can help, too, even if you’re not a smoker. I wrote a few blog posts about how you can use nicotine as a smart drug. When you think about it, almost every great work of literary fiction was written with copious amount of coffee, nicotine, and sometimes alcohol, which is not a performance enhancer. There is something about that, so I’m a huge fan of microdosing nicotine. I’ve never smoked. Smoking is bad for you. I would never smoke.

JP Sears: Sure.

Dave Asprey: But that one compound is better studied than caffeine. If I was to pick the most studied smart drug on the planet, it’s nicotine. Maybe I’d take modafanil, which I took for like eight years, and also will blow your writing away, but it’s a bigger gun. For you, that’s probably too big, but-

JP Sears: Are you saying I can’t handle it, Dave?

Dave Asprey: I’m just saying you don’t want to handle it.

JP Sears: Okay. Thank you. I feel better about myself, now.

Dave Asprey: I can’t imagine that calm, the kind of calm, centered voice on modafanil and some caffeine. It’d be more Beavis and Butt-Head, and just less JP. I don’t know if that’d be the right vibe for you.

JP Sears: Yeah, that changes my character, my personality, like, “You are someone different.” Yeah.

Dave Asprey: The one thing that a lot of people tell me about modafanil, not nicotine, is … And something I felt, as well, your mind works so fast that it’s irritating, because people are talking so slow.

JP Sears: Is that right?

Dave Asprey: You know what they’re going to say. If they could just finish saying it, then you could go onto what’s next. You actually have to manage that. It can be, especially the first couple weeks, it can be almost like a sense of rage.

JP Sears: Is that rage?

Dave Asprey: Because, “Why is everyone around me so Goddamn slow?” I took Adderall for about a month. I had a prescription for it a long time ago, just to try it. It was a horrible drug for me.

JP Sears: Was it?

Dave Asprey: I was taking small doses, and like, “Please don’t touch me.” It was not good. It’s not ampy like that, but it’s just like everything is fast. At least you’re fast, but everything else is slow, and that’s not a good feeling until you just get used to running at a high speed.

That said, I did give … I didn’t give. I explained how this worked to a guy doing a really long, detailed proposal for the Dalai Lama. Another guy, who’s written a very successful book about the global brain … In fact, he was on the show. I think he talked about this. I hope he did, Steve Omohundro. Sorry, Steve. I think you did talk about that in your blog. Steve’s a friend and AI researcher, and another person, who’s a clinical hypnotherapist. Each of them had 100mg of modafanil for the first time. I just told them how the stuff worked, and they had their own doctor prescriptions and all that kind of stuff. Then, they all came back a week later, like, “I just took that one dose,” and the Dalai Lama guy’s like, “I finished the proposal I’ve been working on for weeks and weeks. I finished it all at once, and it’s the best writing I’ve ever done, and they accepted my proposal.” Steve’s like, “Two chapters of my book!”

JP Sears: That’s awesome.

Dave Asprey: So for creative stuff, I haven’t taken the stuff in about four years, because I measured my brain. After eight years of being on it, my brain runs at that speed without it, as long as I follow the Bulletproof Diet. If I go out and eat inflammatory foods, I’m back to my slow, normal self, but on university grade levels, you can’t do that, so if you’re writing your opus, I’d say go for the racetams, add in some modafanil, a little spray of nicotine, and a double Bulletproof coffee, but just don’t go on stage the next day, because you wouldn’t be yourself.

JP Sears: I might develop a new character.

Dave Asprey: Angry JP.

JP Sears: That’s fascinating. That guy got all hopped up on all that, and then he did a marriage proposal to the Dalai Lama, and the Dalai Lama said yes. Is that the moral of the story, that I gather?

Dave Asprey: It’s the moral of the story.

JP Sears: I’m a good listener.

Dave Asprey: After that, he was one with everything. That was pretty good. You got to give me credit for that.

JP Sears: I digress. Did you hear the joke about the Dalai Lama ordering a hot dog?

Dave Asprey: I already know the punchline.

JP Sears: Yeah. It’s just going to be a terrible joke. I won’t even say it ever, but you’ve probably heard it. If you haven’t, it’s not really worth listening to, certainly by Dave and JP.

Dave Asprey: All right, so I interrupted you by suggesting an upgrade to your Bulletproof coffee there, which was terribly rude as the inquisitive questioner here.

JP Sears: Yeah, and I’m offended.

Dave Asprey: I’m just trying to add some value to your otherwise valueless work. See, that kind of thing, it doesn’t feel good to say it, because I know you don’t take that seriously, but even so, I don’t like to say kinds of things. When I said that, I felt bad.

JP Sears: I love that you felt how it felt to you. Was is sarcasm? Yes. Did it hurt me? No, but it hurt you, and I think it’s so awesome you could feel that, be like, “Oh, coming from that angle, I don’t want to do that again.”

Dave Asprey: Yeah, but it was still kind of funny.

JP Sears: Yeah. I think the funniest jokes are the ones where you have to tell other people that they’re funny.

Dave Asprey: I got to master the one eyebrow raise. You’ve kind of got that pretty well …

JP Sears: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dave Asprey: All right. If you’re watching this on YouTube, that was funny, because we were having a little eyebrow war there, but as it was on your commute, you’re like, “These guys are kind of weird.” All right, so we talked about your morning. You do the Tony Robbins gratitude journaling. You use Bulletproof. You don’t eat until two, which is very similar to my morning, although I don’t do the gratitude stuff in the morning. I have children, so my gratitude practice involves, “Put on your shoes. Put on your shoes. Put on your shoes. Get in the car,” and you just repeat everything five or six times, and eventually, it happens, and then you’re grateful that it happens.

JP Sears: Yeah. It’s like a mantra that actually works.

Dave Asprey: Then, I come back, and I do biohacking stuff, so I’ll do the gratitude stuff in the evening. Okay, so you do that, and you structure your writing so the first hour is essentially new scripts, like your most powerful writing is the first hour, and then you go into work mode after that?

JP Sears: Yeah. Yeah, so work mode. My writing is part of my work, but I don’t even like to call it work. That’s why I call it the creative time. Yeah. Then, I’ll go into work, so it might be interviews that are scheduled, clients, meetings, filming videos.

Dave Asprey: Okay, cool. When you are going to be either shooting a video or going live on stage, what do you do to get in the zone for that?

JP Sears: Very different. With a video, like calm down, just find my center, breathing like meditation, like I just need calm and slowness. When I’m going onstage in front of an audience, it’s just the opposite. I want to get hyped up. I don’t go onstage yelling and screaming-

Dave Asprey: You don’t seem hyped up in front of audience. That’s your character.

JP Sears: Yeah, but I like to just really raise my energy, even though I don’t project my voice loud and move around with a lot of dynamic motion, but I just love to enter the stage being kind of like as high frequency as I can. Also, part of my go onstage practice is remind myself, “I am here to give. This isn’t about me.” I find when I try to make this about me, “I want this to go good, so everybody’s pleased, so I feel better about myself,” that’s when I start to feel a little anxiety, a little nervous. It just takes me off my center, but when I remind myself, “I’m here to give. This is for the audience,” it just puts me in a much better state, similar to what gratitude journaling would. It puts me in a giving frame of mine.

Dave Asprey: It’s interesting. Being of service of others is one of the things that reliably gets some people into a flow state. Some people have to be in fear of death, of falling down a mountain with a failing parachute or something to really get in the flow state. But for the rest of us, who aren’t going to get mortally wounded, it’s a pretty reliable way to do it, so for you, just that mindset. Same thing, I don’t have any stress onstage, because I’m like, “I’m here to give,” but if I’m like, “I’m here to take,” I might have anxiety, but I don’t know. That’s just not what I do anymore. I hear you there. You get super hyped. You do some breathing before you go onstage. Then, you just go on, and you deliver.

JP Sears: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Asprey: How conscious are you while you’re delivering it? Are you doing the memorize thing? Are you thinking of everything? Are you watching the audience? What do you do with your mind?

JP Sears: Yeah. I’ll give you a couple answers. If I’m going onstage to do comedy, typically, my stage time, I’m either doing comedy or I’m giving a sincere discussion from my heart. When I’m doing comedy, much like the nature of a lot of standup comedy, I do have it scripted. I’ve got my quote unquote “routine”, but I like to be so solid on that, that it’s something to launch off of, so I love engaging with the audience, just improving, when there’s little interactions. To me, it’s so beautiful, so being able to be present with people, essentially have the routine so ingrained in my nervous system that I don’t have to think about it, so I can be more present, and I just love that feel. I think it gives a better product, if you will.

If I’m going onstage to deliver more of a sincere discussion of my heart, whether it’s about authenticity, healing, growth, whatever it might be, I’ll know the topic that I’m going to talk about, I’ll probably know some key points or principles, but I like to be very unscripted. I like to be very spontaneous and get into the flow state, connecting with the audience, so it can be a true communication, not just a monologue. Even if I’m the only one talking, communication, to me, is different than a monologue. It’s like I’m feeling, I’m receiving, I’m looking at the body language, and sounding airy fairy, but feeling the energy of the audience.

Dave Asprey: Any effective presenter and any effective teacher in a live setting has a sense of the feedback from the room. It’s probably electromagnetic, because we know that your heart rate variability will change in response to those around you, and theirs will chance in response to yours. I became a more effective speaker when I learned to train my heart rate variability. I have a higher amplitude heart rate variability, and it’s called coherent, so it’s non-chaotic. People are like, “I don’t know why, but it feels calmer.” The room will resonate with you if you do it right. I think you have to be in a flow state to do that, as well.

JP Sears: Very cool.

Dave Asprey: Then, when you’re aware of that, if you say something that takes you out of the zone, it’s because it probably took the audience out of the zone, and you’re kind of at one with them, in some sense. Is that a description of what you’re doing?

JP Sears: Yeah.

Dave Asprey: You may not be doing heart rate variability exercises, but does that sound the same?

JP Sears: Yeah, 100%, absolutely. It’s just like if you’re dancing, you’re going to be paying attention to your dance partner, and the dance will go well. It’ll be enjoyable. It’ll be graceful. It’ll be a beautiful, artistic expression if you’re paying attention to your dance partner. To me, being on stage, you have a dance partner. It’s not a one person thing. It’s a collective consciousness of everybody that’s in there, so man, I think half the talk is receiving what the dance partner’s giving you.

Dave Asprey: Very well said. Wow, I never thought about dancing with my audience, but maybe that’s because your audience is more attractive than mine?

JP Sears: I actually have a very attractive audience. Thank you guys very much.

Dave Asprey: That’s [crosstalk 01:21:33].

JP Sears: Dave, let’s get to the bottom of this. Are you saying your audience is ugly? Are you saying fans of Bulletproof Radio are unattractive?

Dave Asprey: I was implying that, but I didn’t actually say it, but it was an alternative fact, so it was okay.

JP Sears: You love Donald Trump. Conversation’s over.

Dave Asprey: Oh, man. Now, you’ve polarized everyone. The problem is, I don’t know which pole I’m on. I’m very confused now.

JP Sears: Yeah.

Dave Asprey: I’m going to do some self-sabotage right now.

JP Sears: Dave loves you guys. He does, I promise.

Dave Asprey: On that note, I can’t think of a better way to end the show. You guys should check out How to Be Ultra Spiritual, JP’s new book, and no, actually, JP didn’t pay me or twist my arm to say anything about his book. I’m actually just saying things because I always bring authors on who write good stuff, because I’m assuming if you’re willing to spend an hour of your time listening to Bulletproof Radio, that you probably care about what’s in your head, so I will suggest things that you might want to put in your head. This is a good read, and it’s funny, and hey, Tony Robbins agrees, so who’s going to argue with Tony Robbins? He’s like 99 feet tall or something. He’s taller than me. Don’t argue with that guy. He’ll pound your face.

JP Sears: Thank you for the beautiful words about the book. I so appreciate you.

Dave Asprey: You’re welcome. I appreciate you coming up to the Labs and hanging out for a day. We’ve cryotherapied you and done all sorts of other crazy stuff for you.

JP Sears: Yeah. A hardcore workout in four minutes? That is amazing.

Dave Asprey: I noticed you’re looking a little bit less weak than normal.

JP Sears: Oh, Dave, I didn’t even know that you would notice. Ah, I’m getting tired. By the way, you’re looking less weak than normal, too. You’ve got some girth on your arms, brother.

Dave Asprey: I’ve been doing SERMs, Selective Engine Receptor Modifiers. I wrote a post about it, and I tried a stack of them a while back. It didn’t take that much, so I added another one, and I put on 19 pounds of muscle in a month.

JP Sears: Wow.

Dave Asprey: I did four workouts, so that was-

JP Sears: Only four workouts over the course of a month?

Dave Asprey: It was stupid. Yes. I wasn’t trying to put on 19 pounds of muscle. If you guys ever see me in person, I’m not a small dude. I’m 6’4, and I’m already imposing enough. New York Times said I was almost muscular. I’m like, “That’s what makes you live a long time, is when you’re almost muscular,” like enough muscle mass, but not enough to stress the heart. My shirt barely fits. I had to buy a new suit. I’m like, “This sucks. I don’t want to be Hulking out of my clothes.” But it was nice, because I lost some fat at the same time, but I cannot claim it was just that exercise. I did one electrical stem and three of the computerized resistance training ones that you just did downstairs, and a couple yoga classes in there, too. It was like … So I’m going to be doing another round of those at some point, just for fun. I don’t want to get any beefier than this.

JP Sears: [crosstalk 01:24:28]. Yeah, watch it. I digress. The last thing I’ll say, one of the effective workout routines that I’m doing is I take my shirt size, and then I wear a shirt two sizes smaller than that. I can’t say enough for how much bigger that makes my muscles look.

Dave Asprey: It’s working for me right now.

JP Sears: Yeah.

Dave Asprey: I washed this shirt in hot water, and I gained five pounds of muscles.

JP Sears: Yeah, so wearing your wife’s shirts, I think is working so well for you.

Dave Asprey: Yeah. The back straps are particularly attractive, I think.

JP Sears: I think they are. Thank you for having me on, Dave. This has been a treat.

Dave Asprey: It’s been great fun, JP. I look forward to hanging out next time we get a chance to hang out, and hopefully, you’ll be at the next Bulletproof conference. We’ll see if we can get your travel to line up.

JP Sears: I’d love to.

Dave Asprey: Before we sign off, How to Be Ultra Spiritual, where do people go to get this? Are you doing some sort of a book launch? We didn’t plan any of this. I just [crosstalk 01:25:21].

JP Sears: Yeah. You can really get it anywhere books are sold, Amazon, Barnes & Noble. You can also go to howtobeultraspiritual.com, but really anywhere you want to get it online is the best place.

Dave Asprey: All right. Have an awesome day, and since you’re listening, and all of that, if you liked the subset, which I got to say, we went places that I don’t normally go in these episodes, a lot of personal development stuff from someone who’s both trained in professional development and comedy, which is cool. Go to iTunes, take five seconds to express some gratitude, and just leave a little five star review, because it really helps people know that this is a good podcast and that it’s worthy of their time. Then, just share it with a friend. Say, “Hey you should subscribe to this.” That’s one of the biggest things you could do to say thanks to an author, is you buy a copy of their book, or you tell someone else about them, and that’s what lets good ideas spread. Thanks for doing that. Before we sign off, got to ask you the Bulletproof question. You’ve heard enough episodes of Bulletproof Radio. You already know the question, don’t you?

JP Sears: I’m going to pretend like I don’t know.

Dave Asprey: Oh, awesome. Fake sincerity, that’s so cool.

JP Sears: Actually, I don’t know. I haven’t been taking enough Brain Octane.

Dave Asprey: So you haven’t actually ever heard the show before. Is that what I’m hearing?

JP Sears: So you’re saying you do have a podcast?

Dave Asprey: Lovely.

JP Sears: I thought all this equipment was just for show.

Dave Asprey: Here’s the question, if someone came to you tomorrow and said, “I want to perform better at everything I do. What are the three most important pieces of advice you have for me?” What would you tell them?

JP Sears: Great. Make yourself intentionally uncomfortable every damn day, just like we mentioned, mediate, and then practice the living heck out of whatever it is you do. I am into hacking the system, and I also am a fan of kind of like the old cliché 10,000 hour rule to mastery. Man, I think that deserves respect, so practice your craft.

Dave Asprey: Love it. Thanks, JP.

JP Sears: You’re welcome, brother.

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Head Strong Q&A – #392

March 3, 2017 by Dave Asprey

Why you should listen –

In this episode of Bulletproof Radio, we’ve selected the best questions that Bulletproof fans submitted through our voicemail, Facebook and the Bulletproof® Forums, for a great Q&A. Listen to Dave and Bulletproof Coach trainer Dr. Mark Atkinson talk about hacking anxiety, brain fog, & mitochondrial dysfunction. Enjoy the show!

Enjoy the show!

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Creating A Healthy Gut For Beautiful Skin – Dr. Trevor Cates – #391

February 28, 2017 by Dave Asprey

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Dave Asprey: If you’re a longtime listener, you’ve probably heard about my history with toxic environmental mold exposure and the countless stories I’ve shared from friends and family, and coworkers, and even in the documentary, ‘Moldy,’ that I filmed. Hopefully you had a chance to stop by the Air Oasis booth at the 2016 Bulletproof Conference. What I found is that the Air Oasis technology provides the most advanced protection that I’ve been able to find against mold and other environmental contaminants that are airborne. Unlike the conventional air purifier, Air Oasis sanitizes the air and surfaces, like door handles, countertops, and even your iPad screen. It neutralizes micro toxins and mold spores in air, and prevents mold from replicating on your walls and surfaces. It removes about 99% of aerial allergens, odors, bacteria, and viruses.

The way it does this is pretty cool. It’s based on a NASA technology that was designed for deep space missions. It’s compact. It’s really low maintenance, and it’s energy-efficient. There’s about 10 years of university, lab, and field studies backing it up. They currently sanitize 100 million square feet of occupied space, including the tallest building in the world, hospitals, and professional sports teams. It’s not an ozone generator, so you’re not breathing ozone, which isn’t good for you; although injecting ozone might be. It’s made right here in America, so you know it’s the highest quality. Head on over to AirOasis.com/Bulletproof20 and you’ll get 20% off and a special offer on an indoor air quality test kit. That’s AirOasis.com/Bulletproof20.

Speaker 2: Bulletproof Radio, a state of high performance.

Dave Asprey: You’re listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today’s cool fact of the day is that the most common problem people have with their skin is acne; which affects about 40 to 50 million Americans, and countless more people outside of America. About 85% of us have acne at least once in our life. Babies can even get a form of acne. Studies show that baby acne is caused by the mother’s hormones that remain in the baby’s blood, so you can thank your mom for your acne. At least, if it happened when you were still nursing.

About a quarter of Americans don’t get enough vitamin A in their diet. Vitamin A is essential for the human body, and it’s been shown to help with inflammation, immune system, maintaining strength and integrity of your bones. It’s part of having a healthy sex life. One of the best sources of vitamin A is the type of cod liver oil that Daria Imports called Dropi. Dropi is one of the purest cod liver oils on the market today. It’s made exclusively from wild cod that’s caught and processed in the oldest fishing village in Iceland. It’s cold processed, which preserves it’s natural fatty acids including Omega-3 and vitamins A and vitamin D. It also, because of the way it’s processed, qualifies as a raw food instead of a processed food.

The people over at Daria are really passionate about wellness and peak performance. One of their guys, Ash, is now working on becoming a Bulletproof coach; they’re so passionate about being bulletproof. You might want to check out the new cod liver oil, called ‘Dropi.’ Just in celebration of Ash’s hard work becoming a coach, my friends over at Daria are giving Bulletproof listeners 20% off any order. Head on over to DariaImports.com/Bulletproof and check out all the cool products they’ve got in the cod liver oil space, and you’ll save 20%. Don’t wait. This is a limited time only offer. Just go to DariaImports.com/Bulletproof.

Before we get into today’s show, which may have something to do with skin. See how I like telegraph that for you guys? If you don’t know about Bulletproof collagelatin, you ought to. It’s really hard to use gelatin in cooking because you want the health benefits of eating the protein that’s in gelatin, because that’s what your skin and hair, and frankly, your bone matrix are made out of. The problem is that that collagen, it’s really gummy in gelatin. You put a tiny teaspoon in, and then you have a really thick dessert. What if you wanted to double the amount of protein that you had in your desserts, and in your thickened dishes? Collagelatin is there for you to be able to put it into something and thicken it, but get twice the protein.

You can use the Bulletproof collagen protein if you just want something that doesn’t thicken at all, like I have in my Bulletproof coffee right now. Which by the way, if you’re watching on YouTube, that’s Bulletproof.com/YouTube, find the link. My coffee is a strange green color, because I’m experimenting with adding weird crap to it, and it doesn’t taste very good today at all. No, that’s not kale in my coffee. Anyway, Bulletproof collagelatin wouldn’t have been good in here, because it would have been too thick; but it would have been good if this was pudding.

All right. As we get going, if you’re listening on iTunes, do me a favor real quick. Leave a five star feedback on iTunes. When you leave feedback, it tells everyone else on iTunes that this show is worth their time. If you have heard this before, I apologize. The number of downloads we’ve got is equal to 100 human lifetimes of listening time; which means either I’m a mass murder if my content isn’t useful for you. Or, I’m doing the world a solid and my intent with Bulletproof Radio is actually to provide real value.

Today’s guest is someone who is going to provide real value. She’s someone who’s a personal friend, and extremely knowledgeable. She’s the first female naturopath in California. She’s known as the Spa Doctor because she’s actually a licensed doctor who’s worked at one of the largest spas that you can work at. Let’s see, she was appointed by former governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to California’s Bureau of Naturopathic Medicine Advisory Council. In other words, she knows what she’s doing in multiple ways. She’s spent her career looking at natural organic anti-aging skincare; and is coming out with a new book. I’m talking about none other than Dr. Trevor Cates. Trevor, welcome to Bulletproof Radio.

Trevor Cates: Thank you, Dave. It’s great to be here. Can I just add something to your fun fact of the day?

Dave Asprey: Please.

Trevor Cates: Acne is actually the eighth most common, most prevalent disease worldwide. The eighth most prevalent disease worldwide.

Dave Asprey: I thought you were going to tell me it was like the eighth most common cause of death, and I was totally going to believe you. I’m really happy it’s just a common disease.

Trevor Cates: Right, so no, it’s not a common cause of death; but it is really, really common worldwide. I don’t think people, often times they don’t think of it as being so common and such a big issue.

Dave Asprey: Well, I definitely want to talk about acne. I think everyone listening is going to want to hear that, because we’ve all dealt with it at some point or another. If we’re not dealing with it, someone in our family, or a niece, or a nephew, or some other family member is. It’s certainly something I dealt with a lot when I was a teenager. I was kind of fat and pimply.

I also want to make sure that people listening know that we’re going to talk about how to keep your skin looking young. I am planning to live to 180, and I don’t want to look like a turtle when I’m 180. I’m actually paying attention to my skin, maybe more than I would have in my 20s.

For guys, skincare is, “I rub some sand on my face.” Like, “Ugh!” It’s generally not considered masculine to take care of your skin at all. It turns out skin’s like an organ, it’s useful. If you are planning to look, and feel, and even function at your best, I think caring for your skin is something maybe guys should do more of. We’re going to get to that, but let’s talk about acne since we’re already on the acne thing. What the heck causes acne?

Trevor Cates: Well, the thing about our skin is that it is our largest organ, like you said. It’s right on the surface of our body, so it gives us a lot of information about our overall health. First of all, I want to mention that my approach to skin is really different than the typical approach. A lot of us with acne, the approach is to just cover it up, suppress it, use a topical steroid or something that’s just going to make it disappear quickly. The problem with that approach is that the common medications used for acne have a lot of different side effects, and it’s not addressing what’s really going on behind it. What is the root cause of the acne?

With any skin issue, it’s a sign that something’s out of balance in the body. We need to find out what that root cause is. It’s great that you’re asking what causes it. It’s not a matter of just covering it up. If you’re a woman, just covering it up with makeup, or just putting a topical treatment on it. It’s a matter of what is the root cause behind it?

One of the big root causes behind acne has to do with the gut, the gut microbiome. Our skin has it’s own skin microbiome. There’s microorganisms that live in and protect our digestive system, that’s the gut microbiome. What we do internally with the gut is then going to directly impact our skin health, and that includes breaking out in acne. Our skin also has very different microorganisms that live on it and protect it. When it gets out of balance, whether it’s from internal, from the gut, or from external, from what we’re putting on our skin, then that skin microbiome gets out of balance. Then, that can cause overgrowth of p-acne bacteria, or other bacteria that trigger people to break out in acne.

Dave Asprey: It’s a gut biome problem. One of the things that used to just plague me before I figured out how the environment was changing me is that I would get these … I would call them “subterranean pimples,” even like in my mid-twenties. This was an issue, and to this day, I’ll still get them, very rarely. What the trigger is, if I spend time in a water-damaged building. This is something with environmental toxic mold, it triggers a change in your gut biome, because the bacteria, …

There’s antibiotics from this mold floating around in the air. They get all aggressive. They get inflamed. My body gets inflamed, and you get inflammation on a very low level of the skin. Then, I end up with these pimples that three days to emerge, and just paint your face bright red. It’s horribly annoying, and it’s totally repeatable. It’s a sign. Something I did three days before caused me to get a pimple now. When I was younger, I think it was more like fried foods and things like that. I always hear ‘fried foods, bad fats.’ Those cause skin inflammation. So which is it? Is it fried foods, or is it gut bacteria?

Trevor Cates: Well, what you eat is going to impact your gut health; so certainly your diet plays a role in developing acne. There are certain foods that are going to trigger acne. A gut microbiome is not the only cause of acne. It’s one of the big root causes, but also there are hormone imbalances can play a role in that. Part of that has to do with the foods that you’re eating. If you eat a lot of sugar or foods that turn to sugar, things that are high on the glycemic index, they’re going to increase your blood sugar, which causes a spike in insulin, the hormone, insulin. That increase actually triggers sebum production, excess sebum production, so the oils in our skin, plus excess androgen activity. That combination is one of the big triggers for acne. There have been research done on this. Also, skim milk is another one that’s been shown in the research to be a big trigger for acne.

Dave Asprey: [crosstalk 00:11:01] Did you skin milk?

Trevor Cates: Skim, skim.

Dave Asprey: I was like, “what the heck is?”

Trevor Cates: Sorry, my southern accent.

Dave Asprey: “Skin milk” sounds disgusting. I don’t want to drink that. It’s like nut milk, but even worse. No, we’re not going to go there. You just slough off your loofa, and make a little milk out of that. That’s disgusting, Trevor. I can’t believe you.

Trevor Cates: Skim milk’s pretty gross, too.

Dave Asprey: Yeah. Skim milk is horrible, and I used to drink that stuff because I was on the low fat bandwagon. The reason that would cause this is that they add extra powdered milk to skim milk, so it’s not just like a gray water. That powdered milk is spray dried, so you have oxidized fats. You get damaged, cooked casein, which is this protein that is totally kryptonite on the Bulletproof diet. You don’t want damaged casein or pretty much any casein, to be perfectly honest. It’s correlated with some increases in cancer. Yes, bodybuilders might take casein, and there are different forms of it. As a general rule, minimizing gluten and casein in your diet tends to make everyone better. Unless some people tolerate it better than others, but the link to acne, I would believe, would be the damaged fats. There’s still some left, as well as the damaged casein. Am I getting that right? Or, do you have a different theory?

Trevor Cates: Well, probably, no. This is what the research shows, and the research journals, they don’t say why that is. My feeling has probably, it may have partly to do with what you’re talking about; but also because skim milk is lacking in the fat that’s normally there. It’s going to be more of a higher glycemic index food. So because of the lactose being a sugar, milk sugar, that could actually spike people’s blood sugar and cause the same kind of issues that I just mentioned.

Dave Asprey: You’re thinking it would be sugar-based. All right, people who are watching on YouTube are going to enjoy this. I am a cyborg this week. See that thing on the back of my arm there? It’s kind of cool. This is an implantable or at least stick-on with a needle in my arm, 14 day blood sugar near field meter. I can actually wave my little device over it, and it tells me my blood sugar; which is 5.4 millimoles per liter right now. I’ve been tracking my blood sugar, and it’s always lower than the normal range. It’s always a flatline, so apparently this Bulletproof diet thing, even though it’s entirely not backed by science and all that, that all the Western medicine people will say. It seems to keep your blood sugar pretty damn stable. At least, that’s what my data says.

Trevor Cates: That’s great.

Dave Asprey: What blood sugar levels would a typical person have to hit in order to start risking acne?

Trevor Cates: Well, I can’t say that there’s been a lot of research done on that direct correlation of a specific blood sugar and breaking out in acne. In general, I tell my patients to try and keep their blood sugar 80-85 or lower, somewhere in that range; rather than the typical [crosstalk 00:13:36]

Dave Asprey: Is it fast or morning blood sugar?

Trevor Cates: Fasting blood sugar. Sorry, fasting blood sugar. The typical range is you want it to be below 100. That’s what most doctors will say; but I like to see my patients more 80-85, or a little bit lower so that we know that it’s not going to trigger all the issues that we know that increased blood sugar can cause, like glycation issues. That’s part of what speeds up the aging process. When we have glycation issues, when our blood sugar increases and it’s elevated, then that can cause glucose to bind to proteins in our body. In the case of skin, it’s the collagen on our skin. Collagen helps give it that texture and helps keep us looking young. When glucose binds to it, it makes it rigid and less elastic. That’s going to make us wrinkle and have more sagging skin, which we definitely don’t want.

Dave Asprey: Spikes in blood sugar are a problem. Anyone listening, for about 30 bucks, you can go to your drug store, you can buy a blood glucose monitor. Then in the morning, when you wake up, you stick a little lancet in your finger. It doesn’t hurt as much as you think, but it’s not pain free. You put a little tiny drop of blood on the monitor, and then it gives you a reading. What I’m doing that’s different is I have this thing in my arm. This is, I think like 400 bucks. You have to order it from Europe because these aren’t approved in the US yet, oops. What I’m doing is before and after every meal. Your fasting blood sugar is one thing. What’s called your postprandial blood sugar, which is what happens right after you eat, is another thing. Some people who have really good fasting blood sugar in the morning, they’ll get a huge spike to 140 or 200 after a meal. That means you need to change what you’re eating, or that you’re actually insulin resistant and you don’t know it; even if your fasting blood sugar is good. There’s two variables there.

One of my concerns is that people get candida, this yeast, which also is associated with acne. At least in my understanding. If you’re getting big amounts of blood sugar, then you’re feeding yeast throughout the body. That yeast is correlated with all kinds of autoimmune conditions, and cancer, and basically looking like a toad. Did I get that right?

Trevor Cates: Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, and certainly candida leads into the gut dysbiosis issues, and the gut microbiome, and the skin microbiome. It’s all connected there. One other thing I might suggest with the blood sugar is that if people … One of the things you can ask for on your blood work is a hemoglobin A1C; because hemoglobin A1C is going to tell you what your blood sugar has been doing for an extended period of time, rather than just the moment that you take it. That can be give some great information about what your blood sugar’s doing over a longer period of time. Now, there are some concerns about hemoglobin and A1C being correct for certain people, like African Americans. There’s been concerns about that because the healthy range is more for white people, so something to take into consideration. In general, hemoglobin A1C can be a good indicator.

Dave Asprey: That’s so interesting. I did not know that there was a racial difference. Is it just because of melanin? Do we know why?

Trevor Cates: I don’t know why, but when they tested the healthy range for what they think it should be and created that normal range, it was based upon a group of white people. They unfortunately, didn’t include African Americans, people of color, in that. Now I think they’re might have to redo their range and assessment of that. I don’t know why it would be different.

Dave Asprey: In my new book, and I know you have a new book that’s actually coming out a little bit before mine. We’re going to talk about yours is ‘The Skin From Within.’ In ‘Headstrong,’ I did a lot of research on melanin, which is the stuff that makes people with dark skin have dark skin. It turns out that melanin has the ability to, in the presence of sunlight or vibration, or heat, it has the ability to break water into free electrons and free oxygen; which is something that is not mentioned in almost any literature. Some researchers down in Mexico looking at how our eyes work finally discovered this, after like ten years of trying to figure out why there’s too much oxygen in our eyes.

I would not be surprised if there were just core physiological differences that come from being optimized to work with more sunlight at the equator, versus white people who are … We kind of live in caves, that would be Northern Europe. There’s just no sun there, so our physiological stuff could be really different. It’s fascinating. I suspect we’re going to learn a lot more about this. I also think if you take a really tan white person, that their blood sugar levels might be different; at least their healthy blood sugar levels might be different than someone who’s a ghostly pale and lives in Canada. I can’t wait to see big data tells us over the next few years. I think it’s going to inform your science as a naturopath, and mine as an unlicensed biohacker.

Trevor Cates: Now, we certainly know that vitamin D changes what people’s pigmentation and their skin. Certainly other factors can be playing a role, too.

Dave Asprey: All right, so we talked about your book, ‘The Skin From Within.’

Trevor Cates: ‘Clean Skin From Within,’ Dave.

Dave Asprey: It’s called “Clean Skin?”

Trevor Cates: ‘Clean Skin From Within.’

Dave Asprey: My notes say ‘The Skin From Within.’ All right, ‘Clean Skin From Within.’ One of the reasons I wanted to have you on is that I’ve spent a lot of time with you, and I know that you really go deep on this stuff in a way that a dermatologist wouldn’t, because you’re a naturopath and because you look at the system of this. I always had pimply, not pleasant skin whatsoever. I’ve been getting a lot of comments over the last, really, three, four years.

Like, “Dave, what are you doing for your skin?”

I’m like, “Butter.” It’s what you eat. It’s not just butter, obviously, but it’s avoiding the inflammatory stuff, which comes from food and other lifestyle things. Then, there’s also some amount of topical care; but really, it’s mostly like you eat the right stuff and you don’t … You look younger. That’s why I think your book is really cool. Where can people learn more? I know you have a free book thing. Why don’t you mention that now? Everyone who’s listening knows this is the opposite of an infomercial, but if you’re interested in Trevor’s work, Trevor, where can people get your book?

Trevor Cates: Well, I do have a special offer for my book for your audience. It’s TheSpaDr.com/Bulletproof. “Doctor” is abbreviated “Dr.” TheSpaDr.com/Bulletproof. What I’m doing is offering it for free, free book, and all people have to do is just pay for the shipping for that. They get a couple bonuses, too. They get my best and worst foods for skin cheat sheet, and they get a video series; so great bonuses that come along with it.

Dave Asprey: All right, and here’s the deal, guys. I just found out about this affiliate code right at the beginning of the interview here, because we didn’t plan it ahead of time. Apparently, I have some backend cut. If you don’t want to give that to me, that’s cool, just go to … Tell me the URL again, without slash Bulletproof on it. I’m cool, I don’t do the podcast to get affiliate codes, so I’m cool either way. Where can people go if they just want the book without any Dave/Bulletproof stuff in there?

Trevor Cates: They can just go to my website, TheSpaDr.com.

Dave Asprey: All right, there you go. You can go there if you don’t want to support the show and if you want to support the show, it was? What was the one with slash for- [crosstalk 00:20:51]

Trevor Cates: TheSpaDr.com/Bulletproof.

Dave Asprey: All right, that’s easy. TheSpaDr.com/Bulletproof.

Trevor Cates: It’s easy.

Dave Asprey: All right, there you go. Anyhow, I do the same thing with my book, OrderHeadStrong.com. If you go there, you get a bunch of freebie stuff. This is something that most authors, at least successful authors, are doing today. We’re like, “Okay, if you’re going to support us by buying our books, we’re going to give you free stuff that we want you to have.” I just want the knowledge out there, just like you. When people have knowledge about what to do for their skin, it’s worth something intrinsically, because people feel better. When you look better, you feel better, and things like that.

Trevor Cates: Absolutely.

Dave Asprey: Let’s talk about old skin. I don’t want to have old skin. I’m like in my mid-forties now. Can you believe that? I shouldn’t even trust myself, I’m over 30. My skin is looking pretty damn good. I have done all sorts of crazy stuff, like I’ve had skin cells from my butt injected into my face. All the seventh grade stories about being a butt face are actually true. I eat clean stuff and all that, but I think maybe I’m an extreme example.

For someone who’s listening to this going, “All right, I want to have better skin than I have now.” There’s probably a set of behaviors for women, because women have different hormonal fluctuations every month than men do. They have testosterone, so men are going to get testosterone acne maybe more so than women. Let’s divide this. What should women do to have really good skin, and then tell me what men should do? What’s the overlap? I’ve never asked this before, but I always wanted to know.

Trevor Cates: No, that’s an interesting way to divide it up. Now, I mean I would say that yeah, women do have different hormonal issues; but otherwise, it’s going to be pretty similar.

Dave Asprey: Okay.

Trevor Cates: What I’ve found is that there are six root causes behind skin issues. What I did is I created a skin quiz to help people identify their skin type. Then, they can understand which of the root causes are problem for them. I want to talk about some of the root causes, but I also want to tell people about the skin types. What I did is I was just so tired of the typical dry/oily/mature, those types of skin types. What I did is I renamed them, I redefined them. I named them all, gave them all people names. They’re Amber, Sage, Olivia, Heath, and Emmett. The reason is- [crosstalk 00:23:08]

Dave Asprey: Emmett?

Trevor Cates: Emmett, yeah.

Dave Asprey: What kind of like a new-age millennial name is Emmett? Come on, Trevor.

Trevor Cates: Please!

Dave Asprey: Okay, Trevor’s a pretty hip name, too. All right, so you’ve got all these … All right, so wait a minute. Am I like an Olivia? Am I going to be able to go to store and be like, “Hi, I’m an Olivia. Can you help me?” Are they going to … What’s going to happen there, Trevor?

Trevor Cates: You should go to theskinquiz.com and find out your skin type.

Dave Asprey: I admit that before the show, I did not do the skin quiz. All right.

Trevor Cates: Okay.

Dave Asprey: And this is on- [crosstalk 00:23:37]

Trevor Cates: Well, [crosstalk/inaudible 00:23:37] you should.

Dave Asprey: This is on your website?

Trevor Cates: Yeah, it’s- [crosstalk 00:23:41]

Dave Asprey: All right, I will do it.

Trevor Cates: Or they can just go to my website or go to theskinquiz.com. The reason why I created them with people names is I see my patients as people, rather than just a skin disease or a skin type. Everyone has every one of [inaudible 00:23:57] … own group of root causes associated with. I couldn’t sit down with every single person around the world. I can only see people in Park City, one on one, or over phone appointments. I wanted to help people find their root causes, because that’s when they’re really going to help clear up their skin issues and age gracefully. For Sage skin types, one of their big problems or concern [inaudible 00:24:25] … aging. They feel like they’re aging more rapidly than other people. Their root causes are going to be different than an Emmett skin type that tends to have more things like itchy, inflamed skin, or eczema; but it has to do with the root causes behind that.

Dave Asprey: Did you date a boy in high school named Emmett?

Trevor Cates: No, I did not. Why are you so hung up on this name? I do have a cousin named Emmett, and he’s one of my favorite cousins.

Dave Asprey: Does he have itchy skin? I’m just wondering if there’s a person out there, you’re like, “I’m naming this one Olivia, and that Emmett, because like I didn’t like this person, because that one had great skin.”

Trevor Cates: They all have their skin issues, Dave.

Dave Asprey: All right, so there’s this kind of pudgy kid named Emmett with inflamed skin, so tell me more about his skin.

Trevor Cates: With each of the skin types, they have a root cause. We want to address that. You were talking about how a lot of what helps us help you with your skin has been diet. I think about 80% of healthy skin has to do with what’s going on internally, like a healthy lifestyle with diet, exercise, stress management; those kinds of things. Then, 20% is still what we put on our skin, because I used to think for many, many years. I’m a naturopathic physician for 17 years. I’m in my mid-forties.

Dave Asprey: Are you really?

Trevor Cates: Yeah.

Dave Asprey: I thought I was older than you. I guess what you’re doing works, because you do look younger than me. Damn it, more skin cells! More stem cells, I got to do something about … We’re going to race. All right.

Trevor Cates: I think that, as many years as a naturopathic physician, I thought it all came from the inside out. I thought it was 100% from the inside out. Then when I hit my 40s, or my early 40s, I thought, ‘Wait a minute, maybe there is something to the skincare products.’ That’s when I started doing research on skincare ingredients, and skincare products, and found some really interesting stuff about what makes natural products actually effective rather than just the ones that are non-toxic.

We want to avoid harmful chemicals in our personal care products, because it is a real problem. On average, we use nine personal care products every day, which exposes us to 126 unique ingredients. The problem with that is that in the United States, the FDA has only banned 11 ingredients; whereas in Europe, they’ve banned over 1,000 ingredients in personal care products.

Dave Asprey: Wow.

Trevor Cates: Yeah.

Dave Asprey: I’ve often thought that embalming fluid would be really good for my face, because then it won’t age at all. It will just be held in time. Is that not true? That would be legal under the FDA, right?

Trevor Cates: Right, you know and actually, embalming fluid contains formaldehyde. Actually quite a few of the products that we use, that people use, contain formaldehyde, or formaldehyde releasers. There’s a whole group of chemicals that are used in very common skincare products that are known as formaldehyde releasers. They have these crazy weird names, so you would never know it contains formaldehyde because its’ like DMDM Hydantoin, which says nothing about formaldehyde in the name; but if you put those products on your skin, it actually releases formaldehyde into the air around you and actually absorbs through your skin.

Dave Asprey: Formaldehyde’s particularly scary. Lana, you know Lana [inaudible 00:27:39], my wife, she went to med school and they do a lot of work with cadavers. You have to cut them into little pieces and look at their parts to become a good doctor.

Trevor Cates: [crosstalk/inaudible 00:27:49].

Dave Asprey: She developed a formaldehyde sensitivity. When she’s around formaldehyde-containing products, she just gets really dizzy and has to go lay down. It’s a problem. Formaldehyde furniture, for her, is completely not okay. It’s straight from med school. Formaldehyde’s nasty stuff. I test products for it, like food products. I’ve been wanting, for three years, to launch a ketone salt supplement. Right now, I use Brain Octane as the source of exogenous ketones, with really great lab data from the University of California on how it raises ketones; and it’s formaldehyde-free. All of the keto salts that I can find out there have formaldehyde and acetone in them. It’s like, ‘Man, I want to sell these, but I’m not,’ yet other people are selling those products. What does formaldehyde do on the body and in the body? Walk me through that, because I find it scary.

Trevor Cates: Yeah, well what the biggest thing with formaldehyde is that it’s a known carcinogen. It causes cancer. Yeah, that’s one of the reasons why we definitely want to avoid it. We know it’s most toxic really when it’s inhaled, so that’s one of my concerns about the formaldehyde releasers in personal care products is that it’s releasing formaldehyde into the air. You’re actually breathing it in. Any time it’s released, that’s particularly toxic.

Dave Asprey: Is that whole list on your website or in the book?

Trevor Cates: Yeah, absolutely. My book, I have the top 20 worst ingredients, the ones that you absolutely want to avoid. I have all the names of formaldehyde releasers, and all the resources in my book, ‘Clean Skin From Within.’

Dave Asprey: I can tell you that that is not something I knew about. I didn’t realize there were that many of them. The formaldehyde releasing thing seems really nasty. What are the top three worst ingredients that people listening right now can check their bottle of lotion for?

Trevor Cates: Yeah. Well, one ingredient that might surprise people is fragrance.

Dave Asprey: Yeah.

Trevor Cates: A lot of products contain fragrance. When manufacturers put the word ‘fragrance’ on there, it’s an opportunity to hide a lot of ingredients. For example, one of the ingredients that’s commonly found in fragrance are phthalates, in particular, diethyl phthalate. Phthalates are plasticizing agents, and they’re known hormone disrupting chemicals. We talked about root causes of skin issues, and hormones being one of them, and here are people are using a lot of the skincare products and the harmful ingredients have hormone disrupting effects. Here you are using these products to try and … People are trying to make themselves look younger, and look better, but they actually could be disrupting their hormones even further and creating more accelerated aging, and acne breakouts, and all kinds of things. Fragrance is something that you want to be careful with. Unfortunately, it’s in a lot of products.

Dave Asprey: Yeah.

Trevor Cates: Even some of the so-called natural ones.

Dave Asprey: It shouldn’t be there. What about natural fragrance? What’s your take on that?

Trevor Cates: Well, essential oils is the best alternative. With synthetic fragrance versus … The word ‘fragrance,’ there’s no real regulation with that. If somebody is saying “Natural fragrance,” what does that mean?

Dave Asprey: It doesn’t mean anything, right?

Trevor Cates: It doesn’t really mean anything. What I would suggest is look for those that contain essential oils. That’s why we use them in The Spa Dr products is because we wanted people to have that, know that luxury of smell and feel of skincare products because people are used to that; but without the downside of the synthetic fragrance.

Dave Asprey: It also gets really weird because there’s regulatory stuff that most people listening would have no idea about. It’s legal to put whatever the hell you want in as a fragrance in a skincare product, but when we’re making Fat Water, I have natural flavors in there. I tell people in my books, don’t eat stuff with natural flavors, because you don’t know what’s in there.

I went and I’m talking with my flavoring people, like “Okay, are these actually coming from fruits and vegetables?”

“Yes, they are.” These are properly extracted. You go through the whole science. All right, this is a safe, natural flavor; but it still has to be called a natural flavor because that’s what the FDA says it is.

You’re like, “Ahh!” The word itself is meant to obfuscate. It’s possible you could have someone that says ‘fragrance’ on the label, and it might be, but it’s unlikely that it’s a harmless fragrance that’s synthetic. It’s possible that it’s a naturally derived if it’s a natural fragrance that is harmless. The ones I trust say basically, essential oils. Otherwise, no.

I have an essential oil question for you. Now, there is at least one study that says that lavender in men causes us to grow man boobs; and that it goes away six weeks after you stop using it. Now, I will, full disclosure here, I have a problem with man boobs. I used to be obese. Any time I get inflammation, I get man boobs. It’s just irritating as all hell. I’m a little afraid of lavender. Should I have lavender fear?

Trevor Cates: [crosstalk 00:32:41] I’m so glad you brought that up, because unless there’s new research that’s come out since I last looked. I looked a couple months ago at the research. What I saw with these lavender studies, and I looked at them, they were like three boys in each of the … there were two studies, they think. There were three boys in each one. They developed, yeah … They were starting to develop man boobs.

Dave Asprey: I like how you have to pause to say that word, it wasn’t … gynecomastia, which just isn’t a cool word. ‘Man boobs’ is way cooler.

Trevor Cates: I’m just going to go with what Dave said.

Dave Asprey: My new ringtone, by the way, is you saying “Man boobs, man boobs,” every time my phone rings.

Trevor Cates: Perfect. With those, the interesting thing was that it was products that were made with synthetic ingredients. They were using soaps, and cleansers, and lotions, that have a number of different chemicals in them. How do you know it’s the lavender? It’s not like it was lavender essential oil. They were lavender-scented products.

Dave Asprey: With estrogen straight in them, okay.

Trevor Cates: Yeah, so it could have had the synthetic fragrance with phthalates in them. It could have had any number of hormone disrupting chemicals that are common in products.

Dave Asprey: All right. My executive assistant, Genevieve, runs a lavender farm, so I’m going to get a whole bunch of lavender oil and smear it on my man boobs. If they get really big, I’m calling you. That’s all I’m saying.

Trevor Cates: [crosstalk 00:34:04]. Okay, call me. I’d like you to do that experiment.

Dave Asprey: I actually will, although I’m allergic to some kinds of lavender. Here’s the thing, there are weird environmental things around essential oils, like we use them 40 Years of Zen, the brain training thing, to help people recover more quickly from an intense brain training session. If you put the wrong oil in the wrong place, it can have a profound effect. Part of me is a little bit worried about smearing essential oils that have unusual effects all over the body as a daily skincare regimen. Do you ever worry about that, or are they just not strong enough to matter?

Trevor Cates: I think, sure, if you’re using straight essential oils. There is definitely a dilution factor. You don’t want to use super high concentrations of essential oils anyway, it can be irritating to the skin. If you use essential oils straight to the skin, many of them can be very … could cause people to react to them and be sensitizing. What I suggest is that people dilute them. It depends, some essential oils are stronger than others. Tea tree oil is super strong. Anybody that’s ever opened a thing of tea tree oil knows how strong that is. You want to dilute them. Lavender oil is one that’s pretty strong, too, so I usually have people dilute that. If somebody were using a bottle of my Glow Boost, which is step four of my system, I would tell them to add just a few drops of that; maybe ten drops, max. It’s not like you’re using straight essential oils, and just slathering it all over you body.

Dave Asprey: All right. That’s a fair answer. I always, in the back of my mind, I’m like, “Am I treating myself with essential oil if I’m just using a skincare product?” I think you answered that one pretty good. All right, let’s talk about dry skin. What’s up with dry skin?

Trevor Cates: Well, it depends on the dry skin. There are lot of different factors that can play a role in dry skin. I live in Park City, Utah. We’re high up in elevation. It’s winter most of the year. A lot of people here have dry skin, part of that’s environmental. If you’re getting dry skin year round, then it might be something more internally going on, and that could be people aren’t getting enough water or they’re dehydrated because they’re not getting the right types of fats.

If you’re having excess amounts of trans fats, or hydrogenated, partially hydrogenated oils, rather than the better fats like avocado oil, or olive oil, coconut oil, grass fed butter, those kinds of things are definitely going to be better than something like the trans fats. That’s a big part of dry skin is addressing it from the inside out, getting hydration, getting the right fats. If it’s inflamed and irritated in addition to being dry, then there might be some issues with food intolerances, food sensitivities, or something topically that you’re using on your skin that’s irritating it.

Dave Asprey: All right, then what about thyroid? That seems to be a part of the equation as well.

Trevor Cates: Yeah, absolutely. Again, with any skin issue, I’m always trying to figure out what the root cause is. With dry skin, if somebody has low thyroid function, or sub-optimal thyroid function, one of the biggest ways that shows up is dry skin. If somebody has low energy, maybe they’re constipated, they’re cold, those kinds of issues in addition to having dry skin, then I would look more into addressing a thyroid; and maybe even adrenals because adrenals and thyroid are closely connected.

Dave Asprey: What about having too much thyroid? What does that do to your skin?

Trevor Cates: People that have too much thyroid, so if somebody is … For example, if someone’s hypothyroid, and they start, if their does of thyroid medication is too high, they might actually start developing acne. Their skin might go the opposite direction and be more oily and acne-prone. Same thing if someone has hyperthyroidism, they might notice their skin is particularly oily and acne-prone.

Dave Asprey: It’s amazing how thyroid does that. In ‘Head Strong,’ I wrote a lot about how thyroid controls mitochondrial function. Mitochondria actually make some of your hormones, like pregnenolone, which is the main … They call it the ‘mother hormone’ that converts to DHEA, and converts to testosterone, and estrogen, and all these other things, progesterone. At the end of the day, it does come down to mitochondria, and thyroid is the thermostat for that. Not enough thyroid, dry skin; too much, oily skin. Which is to me, just a fascinating multi-step system in the body.

Trevor Cates: It is. For people to just say, “Oh, I have dry skin,” or to say they have oily skin, or something. That is just not enough information. That’s why I think the root cause and redefining skin types is so important.

Dave Asprey: It’s kind of like saying “I’m tired.”

Like, “Well, you know there are multiple reasons you might be tired. It’s kind of not enough to be diagnostic.” It’s just one little data point. Without the picture of the system, how are you going to know?

Trevor Cates: Yeah, and so much so of dermatologists and estheticians, a lot of times will [inaudible 00:39:12] … dry skin, so let’s put this cream on you and make you better.” It’s not really addressing the root cause, yeah.

Dave Asprey: I got dry skin recently that was interesting. I picked up a brain eating amoeba in a very exotic environment known as Phoenix. This completely works my digestive tract over, for four months. Nothing worked right. I went to three different specialists, and finally found the root cause and took some relatively heavy-duty drugs. This amoeba damages the microvilli in your gut, so my ability to absorb fats and everything else was going down. If it successfully drilled it’s way through, which it didn’t, because well, this whole bulletproof resilience, high collagen thing seems to help with that sort of thing. It could have actually killed me, which would have been really irritating.

What I did is I took some drugs for it, and I was fine in a week; but then I started developing really dry skin after that. The fix for me was to take butane HTL, which is basically stomach acid. When you take certain antibiotics, or just as you age, you make less stomach acid and then you can’t absorb fat very well. I used to take maybe six grams with every meal, and I haven’t needed to take it in about three or four years, because I fixed my gut; but this stuff damaged my gut again, so now I’m re-fixing my gut. I’m taking more hydrochloric acid. Even if you eat the right fats, if you can’t absorb them, you might still have dry skin.

Trevor Cates: [crosstalk 00:40:38] Yeah.

Dave Asprey: But who would ever think of that stuff, right? Brain eating amoebas cause dry skin.

Trevor Cates: Right, well it’s really interesting, any gut issues. Again, going back to the gut, it is a really important part of healthy skin. Anything that’s going to throw off the gut microbiome throughout that, which can lead to leaky gut, and some other issues with the gut. That can definitely impact the skin. As a naturopathic physician, we … Well, of course, the naturopathic physicians, we talk about the gut in relationship to a lot of different aspects of our health. It’s no different with skin.

Dave Asprey: What about what’s some other things that people listening might want to talk about? Dark circles. These things used to plague me. I always had really dark circles. I’d get these little lines on the outside of my eyes, like pointing down. They’d call it like sad puppy eyes. People literally had asked me if I’d been in a fight.

I’m like, “No, I just look this way.” What’s up with dark circles under the eyes? I don’t really get them that much anymore, unless I deserve them, but.

Trevor Cates: Well, and there’s a reason why you don’t get them anymore. The most common cause of those dark circles has to do with, there’s a nickname for them. They’re called ‘allergic shiners.’

Dave Asprey: Exactly.

Trevor Cates: Yeah, so they come from food allergies or sensitivities and intolerances. Because you’ve cleaned up your diet and you’re probably avoiding the foods that you’re intolerant or sensitive to, then those dark circles will go away. Now for some people, it’s partly genetics and their skin tone has to do with the dark circles. The biggest things are get a good night’s sleep, work on your sleep, and also look for food intolerances or allergies and avoid those; and they usually clear up. If you just happen to, for some people it’s just occasionally, they get them.

Maybe, “Yeah, I know I didn’t get a good night’s sleep, or I know I ate something that I wasn’t supposed to.” Here’s a little DIY trick: get arnica gel and put arnica gel under your eyes. That helps clear up the dark under eye circles.

Dave Asprey: There’s a product called ‘Traumeel,’ which really used to work amazingly ell. Traumeel’s an arnica gel with some other homeopathic stuff. I know about this stuff because going back ten plus years, I would get IV treatments. I did intravenous treatments for high mercury and high lead, and so I’ve had a lot of needles in my arm. Now I just get IV vitamins. I used to get these huge bruises, like the size of a golf ball, any time they’d put a needle in. The doctor would put Traumeel on there and it would stop, and I would never bruise, ever. It was like miraculous. Then Traumeel changed it’s formula, and now it totally doesn’t stop bruising the way it used to; but it might still work on shiners. I was kind of annoyed.

Trevor Cates: Yeah. You can get straight arnica gel.

Dave Asprey: Yeah.

Trevor Cates: You could try that. Also, there are other brands, Hyland’s, for example.

Dave Asprey: Yeah.

Trevor Cates: There are other brands that make arnica gel.

Dave Asprey: What’s your favorite brand of arnica gel?

Trevor Cates: For aches and pains, it actually used to be Traumeel, until they changed it.

Dave Asprey: Yeah.

Trevor Cates: For me, it doesn’t work as well anymore. I really like the Hyland’s brand. I like their-

Dave Asprey: [crosstalk 00:43:43] How do you spell that? H-Y-L-A-N.

Trevor Cates: H-Y-L-A-N-D-S.

Dave Asprey: Okay.

Trevor Cates: I don’t have any affiliation with them. I used to do some work with them, but I don’t anymore.

Dave Asprey: Okay, it’s just a recommendation from someone.

Trevor Cates: Yeah.

Dave Asprey: Because you see people clinically, and all. Yeah, I do swear by arnica. I’ve never felt it orally, I’ve taken it. It doesn’t seem to do anything, but when you smear it on your skin, it does something that’s really cool. I don’t know the mechanism of action, but it’s pretty repeatable when you get a good quality product.

All right, I’m going to ask you one more question before we run out of time. Actually, two more questions. One of them is, let’s see … I’m trying to think. We talked about dark circles. All right, what about wrinkles? I saw a wrinkle on my forehead the other day, and I was like, “Oh my god, now I’m really old.” Kidding, I’ve had wrinkles for a while. We get wrinkles around our eyes. You don’t, but normal people do; and on our foreheads, and things like that. What’s going to stop those the most? Do I need to be injecting paint filler or something in there?

Trevor Cates: Please don’t. Please don’t do that. I know you like-

Dave Asprey: [crosstalk 00:44:47]

Trevor Cates: -To experiment on yourself, but please don’t do that. It’s normal for us to age. We all are going to get some wrinkles, and some changes in our skin. It’s inevitable because there’s gravity, and there’s aging. There’s just changes that happen, and it’s not so bad because hey, that means we’ve been living and laughing. We’ve got smile lines that, hey, we’re alive. That means that’s a good thing. Nobody wants a real frozen, Botox-looking face. Those just don’t look right. But, there are things that you can do, certainly to slow down the process so that it doesn’t look older than you are. Hopefully, you’ll look younger than you are. Maybe even if a woman, maybe you’ll look younger than your daughter. Who knows.

Dave Asprey: I’m going to put you on the spot here. You’ve never used Botox?

Trevor Cates: No.

Dave Asprey: Okay. You didn’t even pause for a second, to be like, “Should I tell them the truth?” That was a truthful answer. If you guys see the video, you’ll know. I believe you, because I know you, too. You wouldn’t lie about that.

Trevor Cates: No.

Dave Asprey: If people see you on your website and all that, you really do youthful. It’s one thing, I always say like, and I may piss off a few … Don’t trust a fat doctor who tells you to lose weight. They’re not just going to give you good advice. I’m sorry, if you can’t do it for yourself, or maybe if they can tell you, “Look, I’m heavy because I have a 100 pound tumor I’m going to get removed.” Okay, that’s one thing. The rest of the time, it’s not okay.

Same thing, if you’re dealing with a skincare doctor who looks older than they are, you’re like, “Okay? Like, come on, man. Like, show me what works here.” That’s just me saying that you’re putting your money where your mouth is. You clearly walk the talk, and talk the walk, and go both ways on that; which is cool.

Trevor Cates: Thank you. It really goes back to that 80/20 thing. 80% of what you do internally. A healthy lifestyle, what are you eating? How are you managing your stress? Are you exercising? Then, 20%, what are you putting on your skin? Both of those play a role in the aging process.

Like I said, when I hit 40, I was like, “Ooh, maybe I need to look at the skincare stuff, because maybe that does play a role.” I did see a dramatic difference in my skin when I started using the skincare products, too. It’s really a combination thing. A lot of with diet, a lot of it boils down to a few different nutrients. Antioxidants are important because oxidative damage is one of the big root causes that accelerates the aging process. Eating lots of antioxidant, colorful fruits and vegetables. Also, getting the rights kinds of fats. As I mentioned before, those are really important for our skin, skin hydration. Also, things that help support our collagen, so getting foods that support collagen. Vitamin C rich foods, for example. Also things like bone broth, and gelatin collagen, collagen supplements, those all can help support healthy skin and graceful aging from the inside out. Those are all important.

Of course, we want to address any root causes, so gut issues. If we’re not absorbing the nutrients, we’re not absorbing those healthy fats, then that’s not going to help us. We want to address those root causes. Then topically, using products with the lot of the same kinds of ideas. So antioxidant-rich ingredients in skincare products; things like resveratrol, coQ10. Making sure though that they’re the right kinds, and you’re not using the harmful ingredients with the hormone disrupting chemicals; instead, using clean ones.

Another thing that we haven’t really talked about is the pH of your skin. That actually plays a really big role in the aging process. Our skin is actually does best, the pH range of 4 to 4.5. Skincare products, a lot of them have a high pH, which actually speeds up the aging process. It impacts our skin microbiome, and it speeds up the aging if we’re using high pH products. If you think about it, even water has a neutral pH of 7. Even water is going to disrupt the skin’s natural pH. We want to use skincare products that have that 4.5 to 5 pH range that helps maintain a healthy skin microbiome and pH.

Dave Asprey: Should I be misting apple cider vinegar on my face, or something?

Trevor Cates: No, please don’t do that, because that’s going to be too acidic.

Dave Asprey: But it’s just a little bit. I mean if you cut off water, a couple drops …

Trevor Cates: If you combine it with other ingredients, then it could be okay.

Dave Asprey: All right, good deal. No battery acid on the face. All right, I hear you on that one. It’s interesting, though, because I think a lot of times, people are like, “Oh, you have to be alkaline.” My experience with alkaline water is that it didn’t make my skin look very good. It also didn’t help my digestion, either. What’s your take on alkaline water?

Trevor Cates: Well, I think that when it comes to … People often times ask me about, “What about diet? Doesn’t you need to eat a alkalizing diet or drink the alkalizing water?” I think for the most part, if you’re eating lots of vegetables, you’re going to be balancing out the pH internally. You’re going to get, and you don’t want to overdo it with acidic foods like sugar, and too much dairy, or gluten, or those kinds of things, a lot of wheat. Those are going to be too acidic; so just eat more vegetables and don’t worry so much about the alkalizing water.

Dave Asprey: Yeah.

Trevor Cates: I don’t think that that’s as much of an issue.

Dave Asprey: I had … Jeez, I spent $1200 on an alkaline water machine in 1998. It was not good for me. I was like my digestion didn’t work for a while. I’ve tried every kind of alkaline water forever. Bottom line is alkaline springs kill animals, and people say “Oh, the Bulletproof diet is too acidic.”

I’m like, “I’ve had my blood taken. I’ve had my urine, like lots of times,” and actually, I’m borderline too alkaline. I’m working to make my system more acidic when you do this sort of stuff, because of the number of vegetables that are in the diet. Yeah, I think that’s mostly overblown, except in a few cases where halfway through a marathon, you might want to switch to alkaline water to help deal with lactic … There are times.

Trevor Cates: Yeah.

Dave Asprey: But man, that doesn’t seem like a way to make your skin look good. either putting alkaline water on your skin is clearly bad, but even taking it internally doesn’t seem like it’s going to give you better looking skin. All right, well thanks for sharing a bunch of tips, a bunch of thoughts. I think the main takeaway for listeners is that 80% of how your skin looks is what you put in your mouth. If you’re going to put stuff on your skin, it ought to be stuff that’s safe to put in your mouth. Is that kind of a good synopsis here?

Trevor Cates: It’s true. If you can’t put it in your mouth, you probably shouldn’t be putting it on your skin, because you’re likely going to absorb a lot of those ingredients.

Dave Asprey: That’s actually the rule in our house, with my kids, with my wife. That was in the ‘Better Baby Book.’ It’s like look, your skin absorbs food. In fact, this is a little known fact; and you have kids. When children are under two years old, 50% of their calories are absorbed through the skin on their face, not through their mouth. Few people know this. You don’t believe at all, do you?

Trevor Cates: I’m going to have to go look that up, Dave.

Dave Asprey: I delivered this so cleanly. There has to be a reason that kids smear food all over their face all the time, but it’s not because they’re absorbing it through their skin. I’m sure that’s not why. Anyway, that’s just my made-up fake science of the day. I’m in the realm of alternative facts here, and that’s an alternative fact, and a damn good one. All right.

On that lovely note, Trevor, if someone came to you tomorrow and said, “Look, I want to kick ass at everything I do, including how I look; but not just that, you know, like at life.” Three most important piece of advice you’d have for them, what would you tell them?

Trevor Cates: Absolutely. First thing is to eat more vegetables, get more balanced foods, eat whole foods. That’s really the biggest thing. We’ve been talking a lot about how 80% of what you do internally, and your lifestyle; so certainly food plays a big role in that. Just eat more vegetables. If you can’t do anything else, eat more vegetables. Get them in your smoothie, or however you can do it.

Dave Asprey: Like ketchup, and French fries.

Trevor Cates: No, no. Greens are best. Jeez.

Dave Asprey: Sorry, I went into government mode there.

Trevor Cates: [crosstalk/inaudible 00:52:48]

Dave Asprey: Okay, more veggies, I got you.

Trevor Cates: Yeah, and then figure out ways to move your body and de-stress. Those are really important, because it’s actually really help with the skin, too. I talk about all of this in my book, it’s a very much of a combined approach of clean body, clean mind, clean slate, clean plate. I cover all of those in the book.

Then, the third thing is using the clean skincare products. It’s really the most important ones, and the ones you use ever day. The daily ritual that you have with your skincare products, those are the most important ones to choose nontoxic, the natural actives in that good pH range.

Dave Asprey: Awesome. Your book is called ‘Clean Skin From Within.’ If people go to The Spa Dr, that’s D-R, dot com, then if you go to TheSpaDr.com/Bulletproof, you’ll send them a book if they pay for shipping, which is pretty good, and give a bunch of free stuff. If you just want to check out Trevor’s work, and you want nothing to do with any sort of codes or whatever, just go to TheSpaDr.com, that’s totally cool, too. I’m not here to sell books, but I actually think that Trevor’s book is worthy of your attention. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have her on the show. I like new sources of knowledge and things that look at the system of the human body. Trevor, being a naturopath, not just a dermatologist, you definitely think like that. We’ve had a chance to chat a bit on your show, and things like that. I highly recommend that people check out your book.

While you’re at it, since you’re going to be going and ordering books and all that stuff, ‘Head Strong’ is available for pre-order. You totally should go to OrderHeadStrong.com. TheSpaDr.com/Bulletproof to get Trevor’s amazing new book about your skin, which is going to get to you first; because your book comes out in March. Then, ‘Head Strong’ comes out only three weeks later, and you get to that, OrderHeadStrong.com. Do Trevor and me a favor, go out there and check out some books. One of the most important things you can do for your brain is you can read a lots. I have this huge stack of books that I’m working my way through right now. It’s actually like this tall. Because I am a Bulletproof Radio guy, I get all the books before they come out. I’m holding this copy of ‘Head Strong,’ and on the back of it, it’s not even the right back because this is the pre-release version with the crappy cover that rubs off when you do it. It’s cool, because I get to read all those, so I get that access.

For you, if you want to just naturally do what’s right for your body, having baseline knowledge about how stuff actually works is worth it for you. I can tell you, if you’re 25 right now, and you don’t have pimples, or some other skin problem, you probably don’t think about your skin that much; especially if you’re a guy. Women, I think that you guys genetically look at your skin more than guys do. Here’s the deal, if you do a few basic things that are preventative maintenance in your 20s, when you’re in your mid-forties like Trevor and me … Although I still don’t believe you about that, but anyway. You’re going to really, really like how you look.

All your friends are going to look at you and be like, “What did you do?”

You’re like, “Well, I had some butter. I stopped eating bad stuff and things like that.” Small changes that come from having information are totally the things that make it easy and effortless, and cheap, versus waiting until you’re like, “I’m 45, and I look like I’m 55, so now it’s time to go in for like, lasers, and drills, and injections, and Botox,” and Frankenstein face, and all that kind of stuff. Lots of people do that, but you don’t want to go there; so just do it right in the first place.

Trevor, thanks for being on Bulletproof Radio. It’s always a pleasure to get to hang out with you and ask you some questions. I am going to be smearing lavender on my man boobs and see what happens. If they get really big, I’m totally going to call you out on this.

Trevor Cates: Yes, [inaudible 00:56:34]. Thank you, Dave. It’s been so great to be here.

Dave Asprey: Have an awesome day.

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Winning Against Autoimmune Disease with Functional Medicine – Amy Myers M.D. – #390

February 24, 2017 by Dave Asprey

Why you should listen –

Autoimmune disease cases have skyrocketed across the world. Once rare diseases become more commonplace, western medicine is struggling to combat this rising health threat. One of the best hopes of turning the tide against the uptick in autoimmune disease cases is the type of functional medicine that Dr. Amy Myers practices. In this episode of Bulletproof Radio, Dr. Myers lays out a blueprint for tackling this worldwide epidemic by the right medical tests and diagnosis tools, a proper diet, and monitoring your environment for hidden toxins like mold.

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Dave: About a quarter of Americans don’t get enough vitamin A in their diet. Vitamin A is essential for the human body and it’s been shown to help with inflammation, immune system, maintaining strength and integrity of your bones, and it’s part of having a healthy sex life. One of the best sources of vitamin A is a type of cod liver oil that Daria Imports called Dropi. Dropi is one of the purest cod liver oils on the market today. It’s made exclusively from wild Cod that’s caught and processed in the oldest fishing village in Iceland. It’s cold processed, which preserves it’s natural fatty acids including Omega 3 in vitamins A and vitamin D and it also, because of the way it’s processed qualifies as a raw food instead of a processed food.

The people over at Daria are really passionate about wellness and peak performance. One of their guys, Ash, is now working on becoming a Bullet Proof coach, they’re so passionate about being bullet proof. You might want to check out the new cod liver oil called Dropi and just in celebration of Ash’s hard work becoming a coach, my friends over at Daria are giving Bullet Proof listeners 20% off any order. Head on over to dariaimports.com/bulletproof and check out all the cool products they’ve got in the cod liver oil space and you’ll save 20%. Don’t wait. This is a limited time offer. Just go to dariaimports.com/bulletproof.

Announcer: 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 you can actually exfoliate from the inside out when you take something called vitamin A, which is something that you can use topically in some of the skin care products out there. When you take it orally, it can treat skin problems and it changes the physiology of your skin by promoting epidermal differentiation, changing growth factors, inhibiting the production of oil, and suppressing androgen formation, which means that if you have acne, eczema, psoriasis, cold sores or things like that, they can get better from vitamin A. But be careful because if you take too much vitamin A without getting your sunshine and taking your vitamin D, vitamin A will suppress your vitamin D because the cool thing about your body is it listens to the environment around you. The bad thing about your body is that when you do something, it can change something else. It’s always fighting to have equilibrium and your job is to change the environment around you so that it has the right equilibrium so that it’ll do what you want it to do, namely not have acne.

Speaking of skin, before we get into the show, if you’re a long time listener you’ve probably heard about my history with toxic environmental mold exposure and the countless stories I’ve shared from friends, and family, and co-workers, and even in the documentary, Moldy, that I filmed. Hopefully you had a chance to stop by the Air Oasis booth at the 2016 Bulletproof Conference. What I found is that the Air Oasis technology provides the most advanced protection that I’ve been able to find against mold and other environmental contaminants that are airborne. Unlike a conventional air purifier, Air Oasis sanitizes the air and surfaces like door handles, countertops, and even your iPad screen. It neutralizes micro-toxins and mold spores in air and prevents mold from replicating on your walls and surfaces and it removes about 99% of air allergens, odors, bacteria, and viruses.

The way it does this is pretty cool. It’s based on the NASA technology that was designed for deep space missions. It’s compact, it’s really low maintenance, and it’s energy efficient. There’s about 10 years of university lab and field studies backing it up and they currently sanitize 100 million square feet of occupied space including the tallest building in the world, hospitals, and professional sports teams. It’s not an ozone generator so you’re not breathing ozone, which isn’t good for you, although injecting ozone might be. It’s made right here in America so you know it’s the highest quality. Head on over to airoasis.com/bulletproof20 and you’ll get 20% off in a special offer on an indoor air quality test kit. That’s airoasis.com/bulletproof20.

If you haven’t had a chance to try Bulletproof upgraded collagen protein, you need to give it a try. Here’s why. It’s a noninflammatory protein that helps your skin, your bones, your hair, your nails. It’s one of the most important proteins you can get and it’s one that’s missing from your diet unless you make bone broth using the recipes that are in Bulletproof the Cookbook. Since even though I’m pretty dark bullet proof, I don’t always have a pot of bones simmering at my house because it’s actually a lot of work and so is defrosting little cubes of the stuff in my freezer so I just take Bulletproof Collagen Protein, which has no flavor in my Bulletproof Coffee and I put it in my coffee in the morning and bam, I’ve got 20 grams of the kind of protein that isn’t available elsewhere. That’s Bulletproof Upgraded Collagen on Bulletproof.com. I would appreciate it if you would check it out if you haven’t tried it. You’ll feel the difference. It’s really cool, joints, hair, and movement; all that kind of stuff.

Since you’re already sitting at your computer right now, maybe, or driving and you have iTunes running, if you just go to that thing at the top that says, “Leave a Five Star Review for Dave,” and you click that and left a five star review, I would be amazed and grateful for that as well.

Today’s guest is a leader in the functional medicine community and like my wife, Dr. Lana, she worked for five years in emergency medicine and training in conventional medicine before cutting over from the dark side. Just kidding. Cutting over to the side where we’re looking more at how our body is a system. She’s helped a lot of people help reverse autoimmune disease and wrote a New York Times Best Selling Book called The Autoimmune Solution and The Thyroid Connection. If you’re listening to this and you’re saying, “I don’t have auto immunity,” I say I don’t really know if you know if you have auto immunity and you say, “I don’t have a thyroid issue the odds are actually higher that you do have an undiagnosed thyroid issue than that you don’t if you’re alive. That’s why she’s on and she’s none other than Dr. Amy Myers. Amy, welcome to the show.

Amy: Hey Dave. Thanks for having me, very excited to be here.

Dave: Now, I just asserted something kind of big that most people listening, like if odds are higher that they have something going on with their thyroids than not. Do you believe that?

Amy: I do and most thyroid conditions are autoimmune in nature so the two books go hand in hand with one another. Most people with thyroid dysfunction don’t actually know that their thyroid dysfunction is autoimmune because their doctor hasn’t checked their antibodies. As I write about in the book, many people can have thyroid dysfunction even when their doctor has told them that all of their labs are normal. Of course, I know you’ve had other guests talking about the thyroid but we can certainly get into all the reasons why that is with the reference ranges being too large, with people not converting to Free T3, with people having high reverse T3’s, and all the various reasons of how that can actually happen.

Dave: A lot of listeners might not know your Free T3 and all that stuff so I’d want to make sure we define all that stuff for them. But even just the concept of autoimmunity is something that all that means is that your immune system is attacking either parts of your body or compounds that your body makes. I did, actually jeez, going back til maybe 26, 27 so that would’ve been like 15+ years ago, I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s and I still take a small amount of thyroid medication, much less than I used to, although I have no antibodies anymore. I reversed that. The reason we’re saying that many people have a problem with thyroid is that the thyroid is an energy thermostat for you, like it basically controls how much energy your mitochondria make.

Speaking of mitochondria, Head Strong is a book about mitochondria. That’s why I’m so up to speed on all this and you should go to your favorite online book seller or just go to orderheadstrong.com and I’ll send you, if you get this before April 4th, I’ll send you a giant coupon for the Bulletproof website. It’s a really good thing to check out that book on mitochondria. But since most people are out there and like, “Ah, I feel pretty good,” but what you’re saying, Amy, is that when someone feels pretty good but not like completely like amazing all the time, that thyroid and your own body’s immune reaction to your own thyroid can be a part of the problem?

Amy: Sure, and one thing that I also like to say, I mean you mentioned that you’re on a small amount of thyroid medication. I like to clarify that and call it supplemental thyroid hormone. That’s how I refer to it in the book because a lot of people, particularly following you, following me you know, or seeing people reverse disease, they feel like they’ve failed if they don’t get off this medication. When people think of it as supplemental thyroid hormone, that a lot of people with autoimmune dysfunction, particularly thyroid, takes 5-10 years to get diagnosed, six different doctors, they’ve had this for many years and if they’ve gotten beyond the inflammatory stage to the damage stage to where they have damaged the tissue, you can’t regrow your thyroid tissue, right? You got your autoimmunity under control by getting the antibodies to go away.

Dave: You just said can’t, which is like it’s one of the weasel words in the Bulletproof lexicon.

Amy: Well, I have-

Dave: If I inject stem cells and hit it with a laser in a hyperbaric chamber, while spinning around 40 times a second, isn’t there some way, like, can’t we regrow our thyroid? There’s got to be a way.

Amy: Well, I had Graves disease and before I knew about functional medicine and had mine ablated.

Dave: Okay.

Amy: I literally have no thyroid function. Can somebody, you know, sure but also, and maybe many of your listeners are doing things like that. You can see my hyperbaric machine in the back.

Dave: Totally.

Amy: But a lot of people don’t have that opportunity and so-

Dave: You’re right.

Amy: Even if that was possible, the vast majority of people don’t have that accessible to them. I just want listeners to not feel that if they do need to be on some supplemental thyroid hormone that they haven’t failed, that, you know-

Dave: Yeah.

Amy: That is replacing a certain amount of hormone that your body is missing because of the damage that occurred.

Dave: Let’s face it, if you’re over 40, nature wants you to die. I mean, like, “Get out of the way. You already had your babies. They’re old enough to reproduce so it’s time to clear out the field.” I take supplemental testosterone. I’ve been really open about that for years because my levels were too low. When I’m 140, I’m planning to live to at least 180, so when I’m 140 I’m pretty sure that any hormone, including ones we probably have that we haven’t identified yet, that is low, I will be completely using. I’ll be dialing it in. There’s nothing that’s about surrender or weakness. That says you’re taking control of your body’s hormone levels. It’s a very different perspective that says, “If my body isn’t making the hormones of a 25 year old even though I’m 45, therefore something’s wrong with me.” Yeah, there’s something wrong with you. You’re getting old-

Amy: Right.

Dave: And you didn’t do anything about it. That’s what’s wrong with you. I’m a little, maybe over pretending-

Amy: No, for sure.

Dave: That’s what I believe.

Amy: Right but I mean replacing it to 20 is a different thing than just replacing it and then we have people who’ve completely burned out their adrenals and everything and they’re just burning the candles at both ends and always trying to find the root cause of what’s going on.

Dave: You talked about having a hyperbaric chamber and having had Graves disease. Why did you get Graves disease?

Amy: Why did I get Graves disease? Well, I talk about in both books kind of five factors that I believe lead to pretty much all chronic disease and I pretty much had them all. I was a vegetarian for 27 years. I was in the Peace Core so I had SIBO and Candida. I was in the Peace Core and every Wednesday was shot day. I’m MTHFR Homozygous so I had lots of mercury overload and I’d spent time in China.

Dave: We’ve got to pause for a second there.

Amy: Okay.

Dave: MTHFR Homozygous is actually not something that lives under a rock and bites you, if you haven’t heard it. What that means and this is something where probably what, I’d say a third of people listening have genetic shifts that mean that they don’t process some compounds the way others do like folic acid for instance.

Amy: Can use it, yeah.

Dave: If you’re like you, or me, or like a lot of people listening, some environmental things just jack you up kind of permanently. You had that and you were getting shots every week because of your Peace Core stuff.

Amy: Right.

Dave: Okay so those are some pretty big things and those shots do affect you. If people say vaccines don’t affect you, my wife had to take a semester off her internship. She was going to do Doctors Without Borders in the Himalayan Rescue Association stuff and when she got all the injections they required, her brain went away. Literally she couldn’t work in the ER for quite a while because of brain swelling from these. Yeah, vaccines, some of them are useful but good God.

Amy: Yeah.

Dave: That was big.

Amy: I look at diet so I was a vegetarian.

Dave: Yeah.

Amy: I was eating a lot of gluten. I’m gluten intolerant. I look at leaky gut. I had leaky gut from Candida, and SIBO, and toxins, infections, Epstein-Barr, a variety of other viruses.

Dave: You were trashed. Wow.

Amy: Then stress. My mother had passed away the year before I got Graves disease. I came back from the Peace Core, was readjusting, taking all my post-vac, premed classes and then my mother passed away very unexpectedly from pancreatic cancer so I had like kind of the perfect storm of everything of how I think that I got Graves disease. There was an uncle who’d had diabetes type 1 so there was some history of autoimmunity on my dad’s side but no first degree relative with autoimmunity.

Dave: Talk about Graves disease just to let people-

Amy: Sure.

Dave: Who don’t know what it is know what happened.

Amy: Yeah, sure.

Dave: By the way, I love this level of detail because this is why you know what you know because you lived it, not because you sat behind a double blind study-

Amy: Right.

Dave: And decided and judged. But anyway, what is Graves disease?

Amy: Well, I think that’s one of the reasons why patients, when they come to me, really feel comfortable because I’ve experienced it. I’ve been trained as a conventional physician. I’ve been trained in functional medicine and I’ve personally experienced all of this. There’s very little somebody sitting across the table from me that I haven’t experienced and you can see by seeing my infrared sauna and my hyperbaric that I practice what I preach in living the lifestyle. Graves disease, most people are more familiar with Hashimoto’s, which is what you said you had, which is, well it can go hyper and hypo but ultimately a burnout of the thyroid where you end up with a lower metabolism and hypothyroidism. Mine was hyperthyroidism. The autoimmune form is Graves so I was having, my second year of medical school, panic attacks, insomnia. I eventually had a hand tremor. My leg muscles were so weak that I was holding the banisters going down the stairs.

Of course I get the doctor finally and she says to me, “Oh, it’s medical school stress. You just think you’re a medical school student learning everything that we’re teaching in med school,” and I knew that there was something really wrong with me. But it’s the opposite of the hypothyroidism. Everything revs up, which is what all my symptoms were, anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, weight loss, tremor, fast heart rate. In conventional medicine as opposed to Hashimoto’s in conventional medicine, “the treatment” is the same. They give you supplemental thyroid hormone, right? But in conventional medicine with Graves, it is medication to shut down-

Dave: Okay.

Amy: The production of your thyroid hormone, PTU is what I took, to blow your thyroid up like Hiroshima or to surgically remove it. I actually went into medical school know I would do what I’m doing but I didn’t know how to get there. My father was a Professor of International Studies with China being his specialty so I went back to my roots of Chinese medicine. That didn’t work for me. I then tried the PTU and I got toxic hepatitis so within about a month I was feeling even worse. My liver enzymes were very elevated and so I had to get off the medication right away. The internet was just coming about. I spent a lot of time researching for alternatives and couldn’t find any and ultimately had my thyroid ablated with the radioactive iodine so I don’t have a thyroid now.

Then eventually met Mark Hyman and found functional medicine and kind of realized that even though conventional medicine solved my disease so to speak by blowing up my thyroid, if I never really got down to those root causes, I was leaving myself wide open to some other form of autoimmunity. You’re three times more likely to get another autoimmune disease once you already have one and if I didn’t deal with my diet, and my leaky gut, and all those heavy metals and toxins, and infections, and stress that I was just leaving myself open to something else. I then really spent the next several years diving into myself and then eventually opened my own functional medicine clinic working with people from all over the world with autoimmunity and thyroid dysfunction.

Dave: It’s an impressive path you’ve gone down and you mentioned Peace Core and vegetarian and you didn’t say parasites. People eat a lot of vegetables. Actually vegetables are a bigger way of getting parasites actually, at least if they’re raw vegetables, than eating meat, which is a surprise to a lot of people. But did you ever look at parasites from all that Peace Core time?

Amy: I did and it’s so surprising. I mean, I totally was for sure thought I was going to have a parasite. I’ve done so many stool tests. No parasites. In fact I’m now taking the parasite treatment to try to help bolster my immune system, the HDC treatment.

Dave: HDC, it’s cool.

Amy: Yeah, from Sidney Baker but no I didn’t. It’s like totally surprising. I had SIBO of course because I was eating lots of grains, and legumes, and carbs and I had Candida but on no stool test did I have parasites.

Dave: Wow.

Amy: I know, pretty incredible.

Dave: I had a brain eating amoeba that I just got rid of two weeks ago. That was really irritating. Fortunately-

Amy: Sure.

Dave: Because I have a highly resilient fault tolerant system at this point, it was unable to penetrate my gut lining and move into my brain, which would have-

Amy: Well, that’s good.

Dave: Really, really pissed me off.

Amy: That would have sucked, yeah.

Dave: I had it for four months with all sorts of GI symptoms but my immune system-

Amy: Wait, how’d you get it, from vegetables?

Dave: At a restaurant in Phoenix probably from vegetables.

Amy: Yeah.

Dave: It was someone from a third world country probably just working without clean hands.

Amy: Right.

Dave: They’re not really sure but it was actually pretty darn disruptive to have something like that. I do see a lot of people who go down this path, they get a blastocysts or they get another parasite.

Amy: Absolutely.

Dave: But you didn’t even though you really had like-

Amy: Yeah.

Dave: All of the warning signs for parasites. You also mentioned toxic mold.

Amy: Yeah.

Dave: What’s your experience there?

Amy: Well, I think I’ve been exposed to mold my entire life. I grew up in New Orleans, old, you know-

Dave: Yeah, that’s one of the-

Amy: 100 year old houses, all kinds of stuff. Yeah, for sure.

Dave: One of the moldiest cities in North America, right?

Amy: Yeah, I’m pretty sure that Austin has it beat but New Orleans is definitely up there. I’ve lived in only moldy places but I didn’t realize. I mean, where it tipped my immune system was about four years ago in an office. It was in Austin. In a little house was my first office and there was a rainstorm and it was very clear that it kicked something up because several of us were starting to have symptoms. That was my first foray into it and it was very interesting. I used to think, if something wasn’t this sort of set of diet, leaky gut, infections, I definitely thought everything was heavy metals. Then once I got exposed to toxic mold and got into that world, I now see so much. Of course now I’ve also learned about Lyme as well and it’s amazing just how prevalent, well, the two overlap but how much Lyme and toxic mold there is that I see in my clinic in all of those people who are just not getting diagnosed.

Then got, really in the midst of writing my second book, The Thyroid Connection, was having, just I, probably like you, I check- I’m like a kid in a candy store. I have a lab in my office and so I check labs all the time and so I was seeing some autoimmune markers creeping up. I thought, “This is really weird because I’m doing everything like to a tee. This doesn’t make sense. I had gotten married, and moved into my husband’s house, and it was new, and so it was off gassing and I thought it was that, and the stress, and the first book coming out. You know you always kind of think, “Oh, it’s this or it’s that.” Finally there’s a woman that can feel mold anywhere. I had her come over to the house and she literally nearly died. It was so bad. In the midst of my book I just jumped out of the house and got in an apartment. This year I’ve been in eight different apartments trying to find somewhere safe to live in Austin.

Dave: Austin does have a problem because it’s so humid.

Amy: Huge.

Dave: Any time indoor humidity gets too high or sometimes too low, you can get a mold problem. By the way-

Amy: They’re building so much so quickly here and wrapping everything.

Dave: Yeah. For listeners, if you haven’t seen Moldy, the documentary I made, I spent a couple hundred thousand dollars our of my own pocket to make a documentary about toxic mold. It’s at moldymovie.com and the reason I did that is this stuff trashed my biology and roughly 28% of the population has genes where mold will cause almost permanent changes including Hashimoto’s is directly linked. It’s not the only cause but a direct cause of Hashimoto’s, as well as adrenal dysfunction, is toxic mold. The worst exposure is in the environment when you breathe it. When you eat toxic molds, I.e. one of the reasons I go after moldy coffee is when I am exposed to coffee with mold in it, it knocks me out because my immune system is ready, it’s alert for the stuff so I had to give up coffee for five years before I invented mold-free coffee that now is very well know. The Bulletproof coffee, people can drink it who can’t drink normal coffee sometimes because I don’t get the jitters and the shakes that came from the moldy stuff.

Amy: I see it with all kinds of autoimmune conditions.

Dave: You do? Okay.

Amy: There is a link but yeah, all kinds of autoimmune conditions, particularly a lot of the neurological autoimmune conditions.

Dave: It’ll trigger the demyelination of the nerves so the nerves lose their insulation, which is tied to MS and Parkinson’s. One of the more interesting studies, since we’re talking about autoimmunity, and mold, and because you are someone who’s had mold just like me, and if you’re listener’s going, “This doesn’t apply to me,” guys, watch Moldy, the documentary. I’ve got Daniel Amen, Mark Hyman. These are big physicians who’ve done this, talking about how this is one of the most important problems out there and also-

Amy: It’s huge.

Dave: At least half and one of the experts in the movie who does mold inspections for a living says 70% of structures have water damage so think about it like this. You may have a thyroid problem. You may just not be at the top of your game but you’re doing pretty good. If there’s a water stain on your ceiling, you have this whole new level of performance that you can unlock just by getting the crap out of your environment. It’s like kryptonite that will grow when it’s too wet in your house.

Amy: There’s so many people, I mean it’s just like people with Lyme, 90% or more of the people that I find have Lyme don’t remember the tick bite.

Dave: Yeah.

Amy: There’s so many people who don’t have the stain on their ceiling. there’s so many people who had, I mean, I actually was just at a friends house and I could tell it was molding and was asking. We started talking about something and I was asking, “Well, have you ever had any leaks,” and they say, “No.” Then later they’re talking about how right before they moved into the house, the plumber came and did a test to the water and all was fine. Then they came back the next morning and there was two inches of water in the entire house but people don’t make the correlation of a leak. They think, did something from the roof leak? People don’t. It’s just amazing the number of people that I ask and I really have to dig down to ask very specific questions for them to understand what I mean.

Dave: One of the things that I often wonder, most of my hormone levels have been off since my mid twenties and there are a couple studies that show environmental mold can cause autoimmune hypopituitarism and your pituitary gland controls most hormones, including thyroid, adrenals, your sex hormones. We actually know which part of the pituitary gland will be attacked by our immune system if you’re exposed to which species of mold. It’s that specific so that there’s no woo-woo science about this. This is just happening. It’s just invisible and it’s not well known. I don’t want to make this a podcast about mold because we’re talking about a broader autoimmune thing. It’s just for listeners, this applies to everyone.

Amy: Yeah, well it does apply to everyone that it is everywhere but not everybody’s affected by it. My husband had no symptoms whatsoever. He is, and his levels, actually we did a urine test and his levels were 10 times what mine are. Immunologically at least, he was able to tolerate it and not affected by it. It is present.

Dave: I’ve got to stop you for a second there.

Amy: Yeah.

Dave: He was able to tolerate it but when you say, “And was not affected by it,” his cancer risk is through the roof.

Amy: For sure. That doesn’t mean-

Dave: He was affected by it. He just didn’t feel it, right?

Amy: Right.

Dave: There’s a difference.

Amy: Right. Right. It doesn’t mean that, I mean so here’s the catch 22. The work of Richie Shoemaker, he’ll tell you, you have to have this certain set of genes to be predisposed to it, 28% of the population, yet even if you don’t have the genes, just like Celiac. We’re seeing people with Celiac-

Dave: Yeah.

Amy: Have Celiac who don’t have the genes. Even if you don’t have the genes, if you’re living in a moldy place, that’s not good. Even if you are not currently being affected by it, it doesn’t mean that I didn’t go through detox with my husband and get him out of the environment for future risk.

Dave: Yeah. Well, Dr. Shoemaker’s on kind of the radical fringes.

Amy: Yeah.

Dave: It’s only an immune response that matters. The preponderance of evidence, I’ve got more than 2,000 studies on the Bulletproof website, which I would call a lot. I was showing that the toxins made by the mold have a set of effects that are bad for all of us including cancer and a bunch of other things and the immune stuff that Shoemaker focuses on really matters. I find it disingenuous to say it’s only one or the other. It’s a combination. I interview one couple in the documentary, in Mold, where they’re both physicians and she got sick when they moved into a moldy place.

Amy: They’re from Austin aren’t they?

Dave: No, Santa Barbara.

Amy: Okay. There was a couple from Austin.

Dave: Yeah, this is Jeanette Hope.

Amy: Yeah.

Dave: Yeah, there was a couple from Austin. That’s right. But it was interesting because the husband is a physician. He’s like, “I’ve got nothing. Maybe my wife is crazy.”

Amy: Right.

Dave: She’s this doctor. She goes, “I have 42 symptoms. I must be crazy,” except she had a fever so she biopsied every organ in her body and eventually they realized it is an environmental problem. The environment is making her weak but not him weak yet when you go to those 2,000 studies about cancer and essentially every chronic illness you can think of is made worse by this exposer. Her husband was at higher risk but felt fine. That’s the scary thing. If something knocks you out and you have like a sense of it, then you’re a canary and you know. But the reason you have a canary in the coal mine is that it dies before everyone else but they’re going to die even though they don’t feel it. You and me, we’re canaries.

Amy: Right.

Dave: For everyone listening, there are things that trigger, like if someone in your house suddenly just completely goes bonkers, you might want to look at the house. It doesn’t have to be mold. It might be many other things but it’s just the environment is a major trigger. As a functional medicine doctor, you’re trained on that and that’s what you’re writing about in your books rather than these are crazy people.

Amy: Yeah. No, I see it all the time. The wife, I typically see more women than men just because of autoimmunity is more present and of course the husbands kind of think their wives are crazy because they’re fine in the house and the wife is not. It kind of goes down that path but back to your hormones going low in your 20s, when I see a young man in his 20s with his thyroid, and his adrenals, and his testosterone off, certainly Lyme and also toxic mold are two things that I absolutely think about.

Dave: I did have chronic Lyme. In fact, my wife and I started Malaise Diagnostics in the US, which is a test so we could run species specific. I could run my own labs because we were in a lab company but I am to the point I do not believe that there is a single case of chronic Lyme without an exposure to either toxic mold or similar toxins from algae or things like that. That’s a pretty radical thing and it pisses off all the Lymeys but this is- 98% of people listening to this have Lyme in their pee. We can get the DNA from your pee. You have Lyme. It just doesn’t do anything.

Amy: Right.

Dave: Then you walk into a moldy building and two days later you have chronic Lyme. This is what’s going on.

Amy: I had this conversation-

Dave: Do you agree?

Amy: With another functional medicine doctor because he’s in the Northeast and he’s talking about all his Lyme patients and I’m down here talking about all my mold patients and I’m like, “They’re one and the same.”

Dave: Yeah, they are.

Amy: There’s so much overlap.

Dave: Now, let’s get out there, Fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, those are mold people as far as I can tell and occasionally Lyme, and occasionally mitochondrial dysfunction at a big level but I would say 80-90% of those things are misdiagnosed. They’re just mold illness.

Amy: Yeah.

Dave: Do you agree with me there?

Amy: Well, I think that’s huge. Thyroid, I mean some get misdiagnosed.

Dave: Sure.

Amy: It’s thyroid, it’s hard to say but absolutely it’s one of the things that I think about.

Dave: It’s frustrating but it’s also kind of enlightening because as a former 300 pound person who has lived these low energy states, to be able to write a book about how to turn energy back on, you don’t know how to turn it back on until you know what it’s like when it’s off and you’ve felt the same thing. You know how to deal with your patients because you have the training of a Western physician, which is incredibly valuable and you’re actually qualified to treat people. I’m absolutely not. I don’t treat anyone. I just know how stuff works and it’s like, “Maybe you should look at that.” I find the most effective functional medicine people are people who are trained and practiced in Western medicine and got really sick so you nailed it.

Amy: Yeah, unfortunately. Somebody asked me if I could have my thyroid back or be doing what I’m doing and as much as this is my passion and I love helping people, I’m like, “I actually would just take my thyroid back.”

Dave: Yeah, that’s a fair thought. I wouldn’t-

Amy: Not having a thyroid is a very, you know, it regulates everything but I am here and at least I made the best, you know, made some lemonade out of lemons.

Dave: Give us 10 years, we’ll grow you a new one. We’ll 3D print it, stick it right back in. You won’t even miss it. You may not believe me but you can bet on it. I’m looking at the rate of change. It’s the coolest time ever to be alive. We’re gaining more control and more understanding of these systems than we ever have had, even though you might have to go to Mexico to do it.

Amy: Yeah.

Dave: Now, let’s talk some more about autoimmunity because-

Amy: Sure.

Dave: Probably I’m guessing half of listeners know they have something going on. Maybe less than that. For the rest of us there are things that are risks because even if you don’t have this, you don’t want to do things that are going to stupidly increase your odds of getting an autoimmune condition. You think, “I’m doing fine,” and then all of a sudden you get fired, your house burns down, stress goes up, a tick bites you, and then you go into a toxic mold cave somewhere. All of a sudden you’re like, “Damn, now I understand what that crazy Asprey guy was talking about.” The idea is minimize but don’t be obsessive about removing triggers here. Let’s talk about gluten. My take is gluten doesn’t have a place in your diet if you want to live a highly functional long life. You might not feel it but it’s never the best food you could get. What’s your take on gluten?

Amy: 100% agree. I am so black or white about it.

Dave: What about people who have zero Celiac, zero autoimmune stuff, they eat it and they feel great?

Amy: I just feel like the way, you know, one, if it’s not organic then it has Roundup on it, which we know-

Dave: Of course.

Amy: Leads to leaky gut. It’s, for the most part, processed and so it’s refined and dealing with your blood sugar. I just feel like it’s just not a good food. It’s, like you said, even those people who don’t have a problem with it, the way that we’ve hybridized it, it has more gluten in it. It’s being sprayed with Roundup. It’s just there’s nothing really good about it and there’s not a lot of nutrients in it.

Dave: There’s also this problem and I follow on the agricultural side, there’s global mycotoxin incident maps.

Amy: Yeah.

Dave: Different countries have different species in different amounts. There is no crop of grain that is not substantially contaminated with mold. The longer it’s stored, the worse it gets and we tend to feed the worst of it industrial cows and then we eat the rest of it. But depending on how it was stored, whether it was in a bulk bin, the batch of wheat you’re getting has a very substantial chance of containing [trichostathines 00:32:52] and all these other things that directly effect mitochondrial function and for some people you’re really going to, like it tears up your gut. 85% of people with Crohn’s disease have higher than normal levels of aflatoxin in their blood. There’s all these pieces to it so eating foods that are likely to be sprayed by us with our poisons and fungus makes more of its poison, it’s just not a wise food choice.

Amy: Now, can you tell if you eat, I mean, I know obviously you’re eating mostly grass fed or whatnot but if you travel like I do and there are just situations where you can’t, can you tell when you eat meat somewhere that has been fed conventional grains?

Dave: Yeah, I don’t eat conventional meat on purpose anywhere but sometimes they lie to you at restaurants. Yeah, I can feel it. There’s all sorts of things like I get an inflammatory response from it. I actually can feel it in the tartar build up in the back of my teeth. I don’t get any tartar on my teeth but your kidney’s get stressed when they get the toxins like that and then that changes the deposition of minerals in your mouth from these two ducts under your tongue. All right people, I told you I was an event correlation machine. This is repeatable. I can tell you which joints are going to get sore if I’m eating conventional meat.

The bottom line is I don’t want to do that because I think it’s bad for the animal, it’s bad for the planet, it’s bad for the soil. There’s an ethical thing to it but also I don’t like feeling that way. I just like my brain working effortlessly and I like my body to not have any pain at all and to be able to just focus, and never lose my train of thought, and never open the fridge and try and remember why. I just never had that when I was fat and when things weren’t working well. I’ll do just about anything to stay in that state. I’ll be at a restaurant, I’ll say give me a bowl of your steamed non-organic veggies if that’s the lowest harmed food and I’ll just be a vegetarian for a meal versus I was hungry so I ate the nice looking steak that made me inflamed the next day. Maybe I’m radical there but I’m cool with that. What about you? Can you tell?

Amy: No, that I can’t tell.

Dave: Okay.

Amy: I can definitely tell dairy, gluten, sugar, corn so I will, I mean we obviously eat everything organic in our house and we take snacks when we’re traveling and things like that but I was just, my dad was in ICU for a week and I was out of town and had to eat in restaurants.

Dave: Wow.

Amy: You do the best that you can. Obviously if I felt that way, I would make a different decision but since I don’t get those symptoms, my philosophy is trying to control your environment in your environment. Then when you’re out, making the best choices you can and not freaking out over it because the stress of freaking out over it is-

Dave: It’s worse.

Amy: Yeah.

Dave: People can get orthorexic on stuff like that and that’s scary. Orthorexia is almost like anorexia. It’s this idea that you have an emotional shame, or a guilt, or a fear response when you eat foods that aren’t perfect. That’s why the Bulletproof diet’s a spectrum so that you’re like, this is how you gracefully degrade so if you’re not going to get grass-fed beef, fine I’ll get the fish or I’ll go to vegetables. The other thing that I do, and I’m curious if you do this, I use the Bulletproof Activated Charcoal when I go out to restaurants because there’s always crap in the food that I didn’t want. The charcoal tends to bind the toxins in the gut. It’s sort of, when I do that with conventional beef, I’m way more normal the next morning. Do you bother with that or do you not need to?

Amy: Well, I don’t do it for the reason of the food. I do it more of most of the places that I travel are moldy so I’ll either use your charcoal or a product called GI Detox that has both the clay and a charcoal in it and that seems to do, as well as a lot of glutathione is magic for me. That’s one of the things that turned my brain back on and that’s why I make it.

Dave: Yeah. I’m assuming you do intravenous?

Amy: Actually we have one, an acetylated one that I feel works really well with patients. I’ve had just incredible results with it so most, 80% or so of my patients fly in from out of town so we don’t do a lot of IV’s in my clinic because people aren’t here to be receiving IV’s. They basically come for the first visit and then do everything else by phone.

Dave: Okay, cool. That makes good sense. You do talk about nutrient deficiency is linked to autoimmunity. What are these nutrient deficiencies that you’ve looked at? There’s a high correlation, by the way, with the Bulletproof, just general stay well so I was pleased but just walk through your list of six.

Amy: Yeah, so I think that you’re also probably looking at, in reference to the thyroid-

Dave: Yeah.

Amy: Vitamin A is a big one for people and immune as well. Iodine, there’s a whole iodine controversy with they thyroid if you want to talk about that. Zinc, selenium, B vitamins, a lot of people, as we mentioned earlier, have MTHFR methylation issues. Even if they’re getting enough, they’re not able to necessarily utilize it. Am I missing something? Magnesium’s typically there as well.

Dave: Vitamin D.

Amy: Vitamin D, yeah, of course.

Dave: Awesome. That’s a fantastic list. Yeah, actually let’s talk about the B vitamin, a thing with [crosstalk 00:38:17]

Amy: B vitamin or iodine?

Dave: Actually let’s talk about iodine. What you’re talking about there is, there is a group of people who say that if you have autoimmune problems you shouldn’t take iodine. But I manufacture an iodine supplement from kelp. I take iodine and I have autoimmune conditions. You can kind of guess where I am on this argument. What’s your take on taking iodine?

Amy: Yeah, for sure and I have a section in the book about this. How much do you take, roughly?

Dave: Well, my supplements are the 150 micrograms.

Amy: Yeah.

Dave: Relatively conservative but for a while I did the Brownstein 15 milligram protocol.

Amy: Okay.

Dave: I did just fine.

Amy: Yeah.

Dave: Just for people listening, 15 milligrams of iodine, there’s a technical term for it which is, I don’t want to swear to much but technically that’s called a shitload.

Amy: Yeah.

Dave: You take a very high dose of the stuff and I wouldn’t recommend that you start there. If you’re going to play at those levels, you need to do a lot of research but at a low supplemental level, it seems safe. But you might totally recommend some other thing.

Amy: No.

Dave: I have no idea what your thoughts are.

Amy: In the book, you know I formulated a multi-vitamin to go along with my program for the thyroid book and I have 300 micrograms of iodine. I feel that we are iodine deficient.

Dave: Yeah.

Amy: Then you add in all the other halides, the bromides, chloride, and fluoride and we’re really deficient. Really, it’s kind of replacing back. Now, what you were talking about, the Brownstein, there’s something called Iodoral that’s 25 milligrams, which is a thousand fold what I’m recommending. Some people even take up to 50 milligrams. Now, I don’t personally subscribe to that with people. I’ve taken those high levels but I also don’t have a thyroid, just more for breast health and stuff. I, like you, pretty much try everything on myself just to see what in the world is going to happen before I start giving it to other people. I’ve never prescribed that to patients. Just being a physician, I didn’t feel that, that was prudent.

I’ve had 50% of the people who’ve come in from somewhere else on that swear it cured them and 50% of the people come in and swear it is what ruined their thyroid. For me, I think the jury’s out. If you’re going to do something like that, you really need to be working with a practitioner that really gets it and is following you and monitoring you. I think taking it in the microgram dosages, most everybody should be doing that. I’ve never seen anybody react to iodine at those levels.

Dave: It’s such a fundamental part of the way our enzymes work. You’ve got to have some of it. The other interesting thing about iodine, which is maybe less autoimmune, it’s an old trick but when women have really painful, tender breasts from fibrocystic breast disease especially, you can paint iodine on the breasts, the Lugol’s iodine solution and sometimes within minutes the pain goes away. It’s kind of ridiculous how sometimes your body is just begging for it.

Amy: There’s a whole theory out there about breast cancer and iodine right? I mean there’s a lot less breast cancer in Japan and is that because they’re eating less meat, they’re eating more soy? Is it because they have a much more iodine rich diet? Our thyroid is the place that takes up most of our iodine or has most but then our breast tissue and our ovaries are the other areas and testes in a male where they’re the most iodine receptors.

Dave: The other place that a country doctor would paint iodine would be around the vagina for the same reason and for treating all sorts of strange conditions there but I’ve never heard of putting iodine on the scrotum. Is that also something that’s done? I didn’t know there were receptors down there. I’m going to have to try it tonight.

Amy: Yeah, I don’t know.

Dave: I’m going to have to dip the boys.

Amy: Check it out. Let us know.

Dave: I didn’t think we-

Amy: I was going to say something about well, blue balls but-

Dave: Yeah, different colors, you know?

Amy: And you went from blue but yeah, purple balls.

Dave: If there’s a way to get like a rainbow of colors, there’ll be unicorn balls.

Amy: Yeah.

Dave: That’s perfect then. I’ll use some kale when I’m done.

Amy: Yeah.

Dave: Now, would you describe what’s going on with thyroid as an epidemic at this point? It almost feels like so many people have it that it’s like an undiagnosed thing happening.

Amy: Yeah.

Dave: Is that an overblown statement?

Amy: I don’t think so. I think autoimmunity in general could basically be considered an epidemic and certainly thyroid. Within autoimmunity, thyroid is the most popular, so to speak, autoimmune disease but we’ve increased the number of people with autoimmune disease by three-fold in the last 50 years. I remember when I was little there was like one person or family friend that had something and it was, I remember hearing Lupus, and it was this really horrible, terrible disease. Now it’s like everywhere you turn somebody, you know? You know five people with some sort of autoimmune condition when you ask about the thyroid.

I remember when I was traveling actually for filming something for our PBS special. The woman at the desk at the hotel was super, super kind to me so I ran out to a Barnes and Noble and I thought, “Well, is this weird to buy her this thyroid book,” but then I thought it was a nice gesture to give her a copy of my book but I didn’t have one with me. Of course I hand it to her and thought it was going to be awkward and she’s like, “Oh, I just got diagnosed with thyroid. This is perfect.” How many people do you run into that tell you that, the random person behind the counter with their thyroid dysfunction?

Dave: Right. You just don’t know but you see it sometimes and it’s kind of sad. It’s the same thing though, if you see a person who’s 300 pounds, like I used to be, sitting in a restaurant obviously trying to eat healthy, loading up the pasta and you’re just like, “Ugh!” You want to say something but either they’re interested or they’re not interested. I usually don’t say anything unless they ask, right? I might just drop a crumb and if they’re interested otherwise I don’t want to be that guy who like walks around and tells people, “You have mold! You should stop eating gluten!”

Amy: I know. It’s so hard but being a doctor and being somebody who went into profession to help-

Dave: Yeah.

Amy: What I did is I had my staff, I had basically instead of business cards made I have one card that’s the cover of one of my books and the other side is the cover of the other book because I’ll see people with vitiligo or psoriasis or something and I don’t want them to think that if I give them a business card that I’m soliciting them to come see me as a patient because I’m not. I have plenty of patients. It’s more I want to offer them help so I found now that I have these cards with just the book on it, that people are much- they’re receptive usually. I was at Target the other day and this woman had the most horrific rash and I could tell she was so uncomfortable. I just said, “Look, I know this is kind of awkward. I hope you don’t mind but I noticed your rash and one of these books might be really helpful for you.” She was so appreciative because she was like, “Yeah, I’m at my wits end. All they want to do is give me creams at my doctors and I’ve really started exploring other things.” I’ve found most people are really appreciative if you approach it in that kind of way. But I hear you. It’s a weird thing where you want to help somebody but not- It’s also kind of invasive to say something.

Dave: Yeah, and you don’t want to trigger people. Any time you’re dealing with food, it’s a survival thing.

Amy: Yeah.

Dave: Because if you don’t have food, you die and anytime you’re dealing with almost any medical thing at a really core level there’s fear of death involved so people act in the weirdest ways. I’m always like, “Look, if you’re interested, cool. If not, you’re going to do what you’re going to do and I’m going to be okay with that.”

Amy: Yeah.

Dave: But it took me a while to get there. Well, I appreciate you sharing what you know about thyroid. Tell me the titles of your books again.

Amy: The Autoimmune Solution and The Thyroid Connection.

Dave: Awesome. These are definitely useful books for if you’re listening and this whole conversations been up your alley. These are books you totally want to read. All right Amy, if someone came to you tomorrow and said, “I want to perform better at everything I do in my life. Not just my job, not just my sport but just at everything. What are the three most important pieces of advice you’d have for me?” What would you tell them?

Amy: I would tell them to give up gluten. I would tell them to follow a, I mean just to say, “Get good sleep,” is kind of difficult so I have programs in both books, the amber lights and I’m big into the glasses but good sleep hygiene of getting good night’s sleep. I would say working on their level of stress, reducing stress. These are all different things than you think I would probably say but-

Dave: Food, sleep, and stress, it’s a good list. It really is.

Amy: Yeah.

Dave: Awesome. Well, thank you for coming on Bulletproof Radio and what URL can people go to, to sort of get the whole download?

Amy: Everything is Amy Myers MD so my website’s just Amy Myers and Myers is M-Y-E-R-S MD and Facebook, Twitter, all that social stuff is just Amy Myers MD.

Dave: Awesome. Amy, thanks for being on Bulletproof Radio.

Amy: Thanks for having me; really appreciate it.

Dave: If you enjoyed today’s episode, head on over to your favorite book seller and pick up a copy of one of Amy’s books. While you’re at it, you might want to pic up your pre-order of Headstrong, my new book about mitochondria and how to have more energy in your head. Hopefully you’ll get both books together. They’ll be paired up there at the bottom of your screen and you’ll learn something from both of them. Have an awesome day.

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Supplement Stacks for Sex, Sleep, Stress, and More

February 23, 2017 by Team Asprey

Supplements are a tricky business. With so much misinformation and no regulation, it can be overwhelming to know where to start with them. What are good brands? What’s the dose? What about purity? Delivery method? Form? Time of day to take them? With food or without?

You can find a Bulletproof breakdown of the best supplements to take here. It’s a good place to start if you’re putting together a baseline supplement routine. What you’re about to read is geared more toward enhancing specific facets of your life when you want them: sleep, stress, sex, mood, and focus/memory. You’ll get all the details about how to supplement, including recommended brands, and stacks to use.

What is a “stack”?

The term started in the bodybuilding community and refers to a group of different nutrients that work together to enhance the intended goal. Big muscles are cool, but big brains and getting busy in the bedroom are cooler.

The supplements in this article are split into stacks you can take together, but you can also try each compound individually. Experiment to find a balance that works for you.

Sleep

Magnesium stimulates GABA and melatonin release, helping you fall asleep faster, reach deeper phases of sleep, and wake up less at night [1]. You’ll feel it within a few minutes. Magnesium also prevents muscle cramps while you sleep.

Recommended brand: Natural Calm magnesium citrate (start slow; this form can cause disaster pants) or Doctor’s Best magnesium glycinate

Dose: 400-600 mg

Time taken: Before bed

Phenibut is GABA (the major calming neurotransmitter in your brain) with a phenyl ring attached, which allows the molecule to pass your blood-brain barrier and reach receptors in your brain. Phenibut was originally developed for Russian astronauts, to ease the stress of flight and help them sleep in space. It relieves anxiety and drives you into deeper sleep [2]. Phenibut is also a nootropic: it boosts cognition, giving you relaxed clarity of thought.

Phenibut can be addictive, so it’s very important to take it correctly. The two common mistakes people make are taking phenibut daily and increasing the dose over time. Phenibut’s effects last for 48-72 hours, so you only want to take it once every three days (twice a week max). You also want to cycle it to avoid tolerance. Go two weeks on phenibut, two weeks off. Don’t go past 250mg doses; if you stop feeling the effects at 250mg, cycle off for a couple weeks. Don’t mix phenibut with alcohol, either. It amplifies the effects, which can be dangerous.

Dose: 250 mg (never higher)

Time Taken: Anytime, but only twice a week max (Monday and Thursday, for example). Do two weeks on phenibut, two weeks off.

Kava is like chamomile on steroids. It contains compounds called kavalactones that increase both GABA [3] and serotonin [4], two neurotransmitters that are key for priming your body to sleep. You can brew kava tea or buy an extract. Be warned: it tastes like mud. Don’t be alarmed if kava makes your mouth go numb; it’s two natural anesthetics, dihydrokavain and dihydromethysticin, binding to receptors on your tongue. You can find a full breakdown of kava here.

Recommended brand: Yogi kava tea (you can find this at most grocery stores) or NOW kava extract

Dose: 1-2 teabags, or follow package instructions for extracts

Time taken: An hour before bed, with fat (kavalactones are fat-soluble)

Bulletproof Sleep Mode contains L-ornithine, an amino acid that decreases cortisol response and normalizes sleep patterns [5]. It also has melatonin, the hormone you produce throughout the day that makes you sleepy at night. Most melatonin supplements contain anywhere from 2-10mg melatonin, which is excessive and can lead to issues over time. Sleep Mode has 0.3mg, a dose that’s still bioactive but far more sustainable.

Recommended brand: Bulletproof

Dose: 2 softgels

Time taken: before bed

Note: Kava and phenibut work on different GABA receptor subtypes, which means they aren’t dangerous when you mix them. That said, the combination will really knock you out. That’s great if you have trouble sleeping, but it can also be overwhelming for some people. If you find you feel especially groggy and you don’t like it, drop either kava or phenibut.

Stress & anxiety

Kava is also great for stress. Kava extract is comparable to benzodiazepines like Valium when it comes to relieving stress and anxiety, with none of the side effects [6,7,8]. It relaxes you without impairing mental clarity, either [9], which makes it a nice alternative to drinking. See the breakdown above for dosage. The one difference is that for stress, you’ll want to take kava in the morning, and maybe a couple more times throughout the day.

L-theanine curbs both your physiological and psychological stress responses [10]. It also promotes alertness, leaving you in a calm, focused state [11]. Pair it with caffeine to increase your cognitive function [12], or take it on its own to chill out.

Recommended brand: Powder City

Dose: 200 mg

Time taken: With a fat source (L-theanine is fat-soluble)

Ashwagandha is a powerful adaptogen. Randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies have found that ashwagandha decreases cortisol response by 15-30% in healthy but stressed adults [13,14]. “Ashwagandha” is Hindi for “smell of horse,” referring to the herb’s potent smell and taste. Get this one in pill form to avoid the unpleasantness.

Recommended brand: Powder City
Dose: 500-1000 mg

Time taken: Morning

Astragalus is one of the better-studied Chinese/Korean herbs. It contains polysaccharides that protect your mitochondria from stress-induced oxidative damage [15,16], which makes it a good choice if you’re chronically stressed or pushing to meet a deadline.

Recommended brand: NOW Foods Astragalus Extract

Dose: 500 mg

Time taken: With a fat source (astragalus is fat-soluble)

He Shou Wu is rich in antioxidants and contains chrysophanol, which protects against inflammation and improves brain function under stress [17]. It also reverses liver damage in vitro [18].

Recommended brand: Now Foods

Dose: 560 mg

Time taken: With a fat source (he shou wu is fat-soluble)

Gynostemma, also called southern ginseng, doesn’t have solid clinical studies to back up its effect on stress. It’s on this list because data from 40 Years of Zen has found that gynostemma reliably increases alpha waves, the brain waves associated with a calm meditative state. Not convinced? Try it on its own and see if you feel a difference.

Recommended brand: Paradise Gynostemma Extract

Dose: 250 mg

Time taken: With fat (gypenosides, the active compounds in gynostemma, are fat-soluble)

Sex

Maca gets both men and women in the mood [19,20,21]. It also improves sperm motility [22] and erectile dysfunction [23]. You want gelatinized (cooked) maca – raw maca has antinutrients and extra starches. Some maca gets moldy, which can affect cognition. If you feel like you lose mental clarity after taking it, try switching brands.

Recommended brand: Gaia MacaBoost (it’s paired with ginger and cacao, which makes it taste far less disgusting than pure maca powder)

Dose: 3-5g (1-2 tbsp)

Time taken: With a fat source (maca is fat-soluble)

Tribulus terrestris is a powerful aphrodisiac in both men and women, although we still don’t know how it works [24,25,26]. Tribulus does not increase testosterone, which many marketers claim, but it does reliably increase libido and erection strength.

Recommended brand: NOW Foods Tribulus Terrestris Extract

Dose: 1000 mg

Time taken: Morning or an hour before sex, with a fat source

Mood

EPA & DHA, the two animal-based omega-3 fatty acids, support a healthy mood [27]. Also, unlike the omega-6 fatty acid arachidonic acid, omega-3 fatty acids are not used by the body to generate inflammation. Wild fatty fish like salmon, anchovies, mackerel, and sardines are high in EPA and DHA. You can also supplement, and probably should, as most people don’t get nearly enough omega-3s through diet alone.

Recommended brand: Bulletproof Omega Krill Complex

Dose: 1000+ mg

Time taken: Morning and night

5-HTP is what your body naturally makes from the amino acid tryptophan. From there, 5-HTP is converted into serotonin and melatonin. You know serotonin, the neurotransmitter responsible for boosting mood and emotional well being – all while helping your body deal with stress? But your body can sometimes struggle with turning 5-HTP into that all-important happy neurotransmitter. Supplementing with 5-HTP — which readily crosses the blood-brain-barrier — is the easiest way to organically support your levels of the mood-lifting neurotransmitter serotonin.

Recommended brand: NOW Foods 5-HTP

Dose: 50 mg

Time taken: Take one capsule, up to 6 times spread evenly throughout your day, to support emotional well-being and a balanced mood.

Mucuna pruriens is high in L-dopa, the precursor to mood-boosting dopamine [28]. Mucuna has been used to relieve the symptoms of Parkinson’s related to low dopamine, a discovery that later led to researchers manufacturing synthetic L-dopa as a treatment. Even if you’re in good shape cognitively, mucuna can give you a boost in mood.

Recommended brand: NOW Foods mucuna extract

Dose: 100-200 mg

Time taken: with food

Magnesium deficiency can contribute to depressed mood, and many people are deficient in it [29,30]. Try supplementing with 400-600 mg per day. Even if it doesn’t help with mood, it’ll help with stress and sleep, and sleep is essential to balancing hormones and neurochemicals related to mood. See above for brand and timing recommendations.

Focus & memory

There are a lot of different ways to increase your focus and memory. This guide to smart drugs breaks down 13 different options for you to try. Everyone’s brain is different; experiment to find out what works for you. The three smart drugs below are a great place to start and work for most people.

Aniracetam doesn’t have many studies behind it, partly because it’s in a regulatory gray zone. It’s legal to buy without a prescription, but it’s effective enough that it may become a drug soon. It markedly improves both memory and mental turnover, which explains why so many people take it for public speaking (far fewer “ums” and “ahs”). One study in rats found that aniracetam improves memory and counters depression [31].

Recommended Brand: BeamZen. Go for capsules; racetams are bitter and don’t dissolve in water.

Dose: 650 mg, 1-2 times daily

Time taken: Morning, with a fat source (and afternoon for a second dose, if you’d like)

Phenylpiracetam is a cousin of aniracetam with slightly different effects. Most studies focus on using phenylpiracetam to repair brain cells: it helps restore neurologic function after strokes [32] and in patients with epilepsy-related brain damage [33]. Anecdotally, healthy people report increased memory, faster recall, improved ability to switch attention, and more energy from phenylpiracetam.

Recommended Brand: BeamZen

Dose: 100 mg, 1-4 times daily

Time taken: Morning, with a fat source (and more throughout the day, if you’d like)

Note: Members of the racetam family, like the two above, deplete acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that affects energy and attention [34]. Some people are choline-dominant, and won’t have an issue taking racetams. Others don’t produce as much choline, and may crash a few hours after taking racetams. If you feel sleepy or low-energy after taking racetams, add in a choline source. You can either take a choline supplement or down a couple pastured raw egg yolks in the morning.

L-tyrosine is a precursor to dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine, three crucial neurotransmitters for focus and mood. Supplementing with it can improve cognitive function under pressure [35], which has led to tyrosine research by the military, for possible use with soldiers [36]. You get tyrosine in your diet, but supplementing with it in purified form drives more l-tyrosine to making new neurotransmitters, as opposed to getting it with the other amino acids contained in dietary sources, where it favors things like protein synthesis [36].

Recommended brand: Jarrow Formulas

Dose: 500-1000 mg

Time taken: any time

What else would you like to see supplement stacks for? Anything this article missed? Leave your thoughts in the comments below. And for more on supplements, check out the basic Bulletproof guide to daily supplements, as well as this breakdown of 13 nootropics for a sharper brain. Thanks for reading and have a great week!

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The Nine Essential Steps For Peak Brain & Body Performance – Anat Baniel – #394

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Sleep

Stress & anxiety

Sex

Mood

Focus & memory

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