What Your Blood is Trying to Tell You – Oz Garcia – #383

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The human body relies on millions of microorganisms to keep us alive. This army of independent contractors helps the human body digest and deliver nutrients, combat disease, and even power our cells. Dave welcomes Entrepreneur and Moon colonizer Naveen Jain to the podcast to discuss these amazing little machines, and to warn us about how modern day conveniences such as processed foods and antibacterial soaps threaten to destroy this delicate and life-sustaining ecosystem housed within our body.

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Speaker 1:           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 scientists now believe that if we took all of the ice and water out of the moon’s interior that you could cover the moon in about an ocean of three feet of water, which is kind of cool. [inaudible 00:00:30] think there was no ice on the moon. In addition to running Bulletproof Radio, I’m also a full time CEO at Bulletproof. We’re a coffee company. We make nootropics and things like that, and one of the things that I pay attention to is hiring. Something that I’d like to share with you is if you’re hiring, do you know where to post your job to find the best candidates? It just isn’t enough to find quality candidates.

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Today’s guest is a friend and a guy you may have heard of who’s done some things that I’ve always been impressed by. His name is Naveen Jain. Naveen came to the U.S. as an Indian entrepreneur with $5 bucks in his pocket. He founded InfoSpace, one of the companies that actually helped me graduate for my undergrad degree because I was doing online research when everyone else was using microfiche. It was an unfair advantage, and this was way pre-Google. At one point this company was worth $31 billion at the time when I was working in an infrastructure as well. In fact, I think InfoSpace was an Axis Communications customer, if I remember right.

Naveen:               Yes.

Dave:                    Since then Naveen’s gone on to own, I think with Howard Schultz you owned one of the big sports franchises, the Seattle Sonics. You’ve started Moon Express, one of the most prominent astroid and moon mining kind of companies out there, which is shocking and amazing. Now you’ve moved in the last couple years, since we’ve gotten to know each other, into hacking the human body in a really meaningful, interesting way using research funding out of Los Alamos National Labs. I want to talk with you today about how you got to be who you are. I want to talk certainly a little bit about hacking the human body because our audience is all about human performance, but really I want to know how do you possibly go from “I’m an Internet guy” to “I’m a moon mining guy” to “I’m looking at the RNA inside the human body” guy?

These are such diverse fields and you’ve been very successful in two of the three, and I believe the third one is coming. I want to hear your story. I think our listeners are going to be profoundly interested. Welcome to the show.

Naveen:               As an entrepreneur, it’s really all about execution. People get so focused on the ideas. Ideas are a dime a dozen. As an entrepreneur, all we have to do is simply focus on what are the biggest challenges facing humanity? If you want to create a billion dollar company, it’s trivial, all you have to do is solve a $10 billion problem. As long as you find what are the biggest problems that we can solve, and now the most interesting thing that I find is that confluence and convergence of exponential technologies, you and I and a small group of people are capable of doing things that only the large companies or the nation states could do.

Imagine when we land on the moon this year, not only we become the first private company ever to do so. We become the fourth super power. Just think for a second, we become the fourth super power ever have to achieve the feat of leaving earth orbit and landing on any planet we body. What that shows is the next set of super powers are not going to be nation of states, it’s going to be the entrepreneurs like you and I who are going to go out and solve the problem, whether it is creating the abundance of fresh water, creating the abundance of energy, getting rid of the fossil fuels and making completely clean energy, it’s going to be an entrepreneur, whether it’s the Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Richard Branson or Dave Asprey. It is going to be one of us who’s going to go out and solve the biggest problems facing humanity, and we have technology at our disposal to do so.

Dave:                    There’s a bunch of people, let’s say, I’m one of the advisors for the Peter Teal 20 Under 20. I’ve mentored some of the people in this. For listeners, this is a program where Peter Teal actually pays you to quit college and start a company when you’re young and you don’t know any better because then you don’t even know what you’re not supposed to do. You’ll just go through and you’ll break stuff that needs breaking. That’s the heart of disruption, which my whole career’s been disrupting big telecoms that do stupid things, like let’s make the Internet. You’ve clearly disrupted things that are actually really hard to disrupt though.

It’s easy to sit here from a position of a guy with a lot of money who can write big checks and you can fund your own things and you’re a professional investor who’s backed a lot of successful companies. You have this weight behind you of momentum and resources, so you can solve a $10 billion problem. Now let’s say you’re a sophomore at Stanford and you’re like, “Okay, I’m inspired. I believe I want to make the world a better place. I’m mission driven. What do I do?” What you say there is kind of a big thing.

Naveen:               What’s very interesting is that just because your vision is big, doesn’t mean you have to boil the ocean on day one. What you do is you take a small slice of the problem and you start solving it. The thing you have to start with saying is when you start a business, ask yourself a question. God forbid if I am actually successful in doing what I’m going to do, can it actually scale, can it actually help billions of people? Is there a market that’s big enough that I can go saturate and then go out and prove it in a very small market? Make sure you tweak it and you get everything working. Once you get everything working the beauty of the thing is the capital is not [inaudible 00:06:43].

Capital goes with a portion that is [inaudible 00:06:45]. You may be the sophomore at Stanford, but guess what, if you creates something that you have proven in a small market that it works and it’s scalable, the money will come to you because every one of the guys with the money has two things: they’re greedy and the fear of missing out. They will come and give you all the money you need so you can go out and do the things that you can do because they want to be part of the success. Every one wants to associate themselves as success. The advantage you have as a sophomore at Stanford or any other colleges, really simple. When you’re a non-expert, you’re able to look at the problem very differently just like you mentioned.

Once you actually become an expert in the field, it’s a good thing to some extent, but you’re only able to improve things incrementally, maybe 10 percent or 15 percent, which is not bad, but that does not cause disruption. If you want to disrupt something 10X or 15X, you really have to challenge the foundation that everything that people have taken for granted who are experts in the field and challenge that. When you look at in the human body, doctors are taught we are a homogenous organism. We consist of our DNA on our genes and that’s all that matters. Until we all start to look at ourselves and saying we are an ecosystem, which is only 10 percent human and 90 percent microbial. We have the whole climate inside of us, and when we don’t take care of the climate, we all know what happens. The organism gets sick.

The company that I started called Viome, our goal is really not that big. We want to make sickness optional. We want to make sickness elective. People should never get sick. The only reason they get sick is their gut flora, the gut microbiome is an imbalance, and when that’s an imbalance your immune system goes in imbalance. If you don’t have a proper diet, your nutrients and your biochemistry of your body goes in imbalance, and that’s how you get sick.

Dave:                    There’s really only five or six environmental factors that compose all of the epigenetic factors for you. It’s the toxin exposure sort of thing.

Naveen:               And [inaudible 00:09:02], diet.

Dave:                    Yeah, the diet’s part of your environment, right? You basically have light, you have vibration. You have radiation including … well that’s part of lights basically but you have electromagnetic frequencies that are also part of the whole radiation spectrum, and temperature and time. Other than that, it’s all there. All of those influence the gut bacteria. They influence our cells, all the living systems listen. What you’re doing though, tell me a little bit more about this. One of the reasons that I’m here today is I just found out over the last few months about what you’re up to. You know I’ve been working on Hacking the Human Body. That’s part of my goal with Bulletproof is give us control of our biology, and because we’re both old Internet guys, we know the first thing you do to get control is you instrument.

If you can measure it, you can control it.

Naveen:               Absolutely.

Dave:                    You have a very different vibe on measuring the human body than anybody I’ve ever talked to. Walk me through what you’re doing.

Naveen:               Of course. What we’re doing is if you can analyze your body at a molecular level, if you really think about it we may be really complex, but we’re really, really simple. At the end of the day our body is a biochemical industry. There’s the biochemistry of our body. That means if you’re able to measure all of the metabolites, the small molecules in your body. Then you focus on all the gut microbiome, which is 90 percent of the cells in your gut. As opposed to getting focused on the DNA, you simply focus on the things that are actually happening, which is RNA. By looking at the RNA, you’re able to see what is active and what the functionality of these things are because you can look at the enzymes and the proteins.

What we do is we look at your gut and we say in a gut, since at the end of the day 90 percent of the import that you have really is coming through the gut. If you can figure out what is happening inside your gut, you can essentially see how human body is going to react to it. In fact, 25 percent of all the metabolites in your body are produced only by the microbiome. When you start to see that why do we have so many diseases that never used to happen before, whether you start to think about autoimmune diseases, the allergies, the eczema, the Alzheimer’s disease, the autism, the depression, the ADHD and anxiety, they may look all different. The symptoms may be different; the underlying cost for all of them is exactly the same, which is imbalance of your microbiome and your immune system responds to the environment that you are in.

Dave:                    In the new book that’s coming out in April, the new Bulletproof book called Headstrong, I read a lot about the mitochondria in the body. When we were sitting down before the show, you were saying but those are all just bacteria anyway. For listeners, the mitochondria, these power plants in your cells, you have like a thousand in the average cell and 10,000 in some of your more powerful cells like your brain, your eyes, your heart. They’re really just bacteria that have highly specialized to work within our body. Do you consider the mitochondria to be a part of your microbiome?

Naveen:               It is to some extent. Think about it, it’s an RNA, right? What we’re doing is, if you think about in the beginning we were a single cell, and as we became this multi cell thing, this symbionic relationship, mitochondria was a bacteria and then it became an organelle within our own cell. Now in fact our human DNA only produces 20,000 genes. Our microbes in our gut produce 10 million genes. You can see who’s controlling who. What really is happening and the latest research is showing whether the disease like Parkinson’s actually starts in your gut. They don’t start in your brain, and you’re able to control what happens inside of your body through your diet and nutrition.

I know you and I are going to have a bounty on our head from all these pharmaceutical companies because at the end of the day the biggest blockbuster drug is something we do every day, which is the food we eat. All we have to do is take the right supplements, which are nutrients that your body needs, because what’s the biochemistry? It requires the molecules, it requires the enzymes, and it requires the co-factor. If you know what enzyme is not being produced by your body or is less or what co-factor is missing, you’re able to complete the energy cycle. When you’re tired, it’s not there is something wrong with you.

Dave:                    That’s not weakness.

Naveen:               It’s not the weakness. It’s just simply the biochemistry of your body is not working because you lack certain enzymes or co-factor. That’s why I love Bulletproof. I love Bulletproof because honestly at our home we have a pantry full of Bulletproof supplies. There’s nothing better I would do than to wake up in the morning, start with a Bulletproof coffee and have Bulletproof supplements. The thing that we have really done now, which I think is so synergistic is now working with Viome, with Bulletproof, we’re able to recommend exactly what supplements you need, and as your body is adapting you can keep changing, but better than that. You don’t have to have a fate anymore that is this Bulletproof [inaudible 00:14:20] actually making your mitochondria better or not. You can see it.

The point is Viome will show you why Bulletproof actually works. It’s no longer a religion. It’s no longer afraid. It’s a science. That to me is what the beauty of the thing is. I knew it works. Now I have the proof it works.

Dave:                    A lot of us have learned not to trust our felt sense. I think it worked but maybe I’m being deceived by myself.

Naveen:               The placebo effect.

Dave:                    The bottom line is we understand a lot of biochemistry and we can talk about it, but what you’re doing is different because there’s various mitochondrial function tests and in fact one of the sets of research that I wrote about in Headstrong, 48 percent of people under age 40 have mitochondrial dysfunction. They call it early onset. Everyone over age 40 has mitochondrial dysfunction; they call it aging. It’s always there. In my view of things, after this really deep research, is that the gut bacteria, they talk to our bacteria, which are the organelles in our cells, mitochondria. They talk actually via biophotons, via light. People are going, “What?”

This is now well established in bioengineering circles. There’s a semi conductive thing for one femtosecond, these little photons come out and we know mitochondria are photo reactive. There’s a chemical messenger …

Naveen:               Of course.

Dave:                    … and a very high speed, just the way we used to build data centers. There’s high speed signaling and low speed signaling. Hormone may change or a signaling molecule or an enzyme. At the same time, there’s almost real time, like fiberoptic kind of communications. This is why you eat something and 20 minutes later you can be like, “Something’s not right,” and it may be a blood sugar drop, but it may be more of a signal of an energy crisis that came from the bacteria in your guy going, “You just ate antibiotic tainted meat, so now I’m going to shift your energy regulation down.”

What are you doing at Viome that’s going to be different? I can guess oxygen consumption, there’s all sorts of ways to know if mitochondria works.

Naveen:               The interesting thing is we are actually measuring every single biochemistry of your human body. When you’re doing the [inaudible 00:16:24], in other words we’re looking at RNA, every single thing that’s being expressed.

Dave:                    I think some listeners will get lost by that. RNA comes out and it reads DNA. Your DNA is where your genes are stored, and RNA has to unpack a gene using, by the way you use apple cider vinegar, you get acetal groups, which allow you to unpack your stuff better. Side note, brain octane increases ketones, which make it easier to unpack DNA so RNA can read it. What you’re looking at is not the stuff on the hard drive. You’re looking at the thing that copies the stuff on the hard drive to see what it’s doing.

Naveen:               What’s in the memory?

Dave:                    Exactly.

Naveen:               The beauty of the thing is just because your genes have a potential to express something, it doesn’t mean they’re being actually expressed. The epigenetics, the acetylation and the methylation of the DNA are the genes actually controls if they’re going to be expressed, how much they’re going to be expressed or they’re going to be all expressed. Actually the microbiome actually controls that. When you’re eating and you say, “I’m feeling full or I’m feeling hungry,” well you know where that signal comes from? That comes from your microbiome. You live to feed your microbiome. When they say, “I am full,” you know what happens? It releases a leptin.

Your brain releases Leptin and says, “Oh my god, I think I’m full.” When it releases ghrelin, it says, “I’m hungry.”

Dave:                    One of the things I learned in the Bulletproof diet research is that I don’t actually trust my gut biome because it’s not acting in my best interests. The bacteria in my gut believe that I’m a Petrie dish and they’re going to control me like one. The bacteria inside my cells, the mitochondria, they believe that I’m a Petrie dish and they’re going to control me like one. Their goals are closer to mine than my gut bacteria. There’s a symbionic relationship, but it’s kind of like we’re getting a signal from the gut bacteria, and then our own bacteria are saying, “Well you know what, I think you should use this energy to go out and reproduce, so don’t work, go out on a date instead and do something fun and run away from things.”

All of our core base behaviors seem to be driven at a cellular level.

Naveen:               It is true, but I don’t think your gut bacteria actually is really a parasite. It is a symbionic …

Dave:                    Sometimes it is right?

Naveen:               Actually very rarely because you remember what’s happening here. For example, then you eat fiber. Our human DNA, the human body cannot digest fiber. It goes to your large intestine and the microbes eat the fiber, and do you know what they do? In turn, they release the short-chain fatty acids. That is what our body needs. In some sense we feed them and they feed us. Nature was very, very smart. Nature thought, “If I have to create this complex human body, it is going to be so complex that I have to create a massive amount of genetic thing in a single cell to do that.” Nature realized, “Wait a sec, all these functions are being provided by different of these bacteria. What if we can put them all together to do this complex thing?” That’s how we became an ecosystem in ourselves.

When we eat processed food, when we eat the things that are bad for our microbiome, it’s like putting a fossil fuels inside your body and watching it just completely getting destroyed. When you take antibiotics, it’s like nuking the planet. It’s nuking the body. It completely, it doesn’t care, good or bad, it kills all the bacteria. Guess what happens. The bacteria that survives, it just takes over.

Dave:                    It also gets pissed off.

Naveen:               Oh god yes.

Dave:                    One of the things that I learned about in my own course of healing from toxic mold in my house and just losing a hundred pounds and all is that when you stress a bacteria or a fungus or a yeast, whatever, they make 10 to 100 times more of their own natural toxins. Like something just killed everything, I better get aggressive. Those toxins are called lipopolysaccharides. They cross the gut barrier, and they cause brain fog, fatigue, autoimmunity, leaky guy, and pretty much tied to every bad disease including cancer and Alzheimer’s that you can name.

Naveen:               Absolutely correct. That is by the way the cancer does exactly the same thing. Cancer is not the homogenous cell. It’s heterogeneous, and it’s actually an organism in itself. When you do the chemotherapy and it survives, first thing what does it want to do? It wants to spread.

Dave:                    It’s way more aggressive, right.

Naveen:               It wants to spread because it knows it’s under attack. When it’s under attack, it wants to spread all over your body because that’s how the organism survives. If you ever fight evolution, evolution wins. If you want to go out and you want to attack this bacteria, not only do they become antibiotics for this strand, and then they become so toxic that it starts to eat the organisms. The other thing that happens is when you don’t feed this microbiome, especially if you don’t eat fiber in your body, these bacteria starts to eat the mucus lining. When they start to eat a single cell of mucus lining, that essentially is protecting your epithelial cells and they’re needed.

Most of your listeners may not know 70 percent of our immune system actually is in our gut. The reason it’s in our gut is we may not realize it, we as human body are like a donut. We’re holey all the way out and our body is built around these odd things.

Dave:                    We’re a hollow tube.

Naveen:               We’re a hollow tube. That hollow tube is where most of the input comes from. Guess what, the immune system is right there. Our microbes in our gut actually train our immune system, friend or foe. They are the one when you inject some parasites, guess what, they are the first line of defense. They say, “Uh oh, don’t like these guys. They’re going to come take away my home. I’m going to kill it.” A lot of the parasites that actually we take in our food is killed by our gut flora before even our immune system gets to it.

Dave:                    There’s an interesting thing called fasting induced adipocyte factor. If you don’t eat anything, your liver makes this stuff, which basically says burn fat, but if you eat something it says store fat. Gut bacteria, they want to make sure you survive a famine, so when you fast they actually influence the levels of fasting induced adipocyte factor, so they make you burn extra fat when you fast because they don’t have anything to ferment. Then when you store fat, they make you store extra fat to make sure they have a backup supply, which is phenomenal. You get these things amplifying your own signals, and in that case you can argue my liver did that already. I don’t want these guys hacking the system. On the other hand, maybe it’s good for me, and those same things also make healthy bacteria, so the symbiosis is very complex.

Naveen:               The symbiosis is extremely complex. Also I think we’re constantly learning about our human body. Just last week … imagine we humans have analyzed a body. We looked at a dead body. We have cut it open multiple times, and guess what. We’re still finding new things. Last week alone we found a new organ.

Dave:                    I missed that one.

Naveen:               Yeah. Essentially the lining that connects all the [inaudible 00:23:24] all throughout connects to our body, they thought there was separate tissue, it turns out it’s a one single tissue, it’s a new organ that we define.

Dave:                    Wow.

Naveen:               imagine, we used to think that all of our immune system actually stopped at the neck. They found the immune system is all the way to the brain, so guess what’s happening. They found the immune system was hiding in our brain that we did not know. Now when we talk about having Alzheimer’s, suddenly we realize it’s actually the infection and our immune system is the one that corners the inflammation, tries to capture this infection, and that’s what causes the things. What’s happening is that when your microbiome is imbalanced, it cleans the immune system wrong. The immune system starts to get active, and that active immune system is the one that causes autoimmune diseases, or when you have a leaky gut you start to get all kinds of food allergies.

When your immune system is too active, it starts to eat our cells, which is autoimmune thing, but sometimes as you start to age, our blood brain barrier actually gets weak and that’s how you start to get infection in the brain and the immune system in the brain starts to inflame and it starts to kill the neurons. Some of the toxin remover things are not working. I think you have been really good about improving the brain thing. Imagine you’re able to take a blinking light at 40 yards and suddenly it just starts to melt away the beta amyloid. You have been a pioneer Dave in terms of understanding how the human brain works, and getting people to feel so good about themselves simply by using your device as optical. It’s not like you’re going out and drilling a hole in the brain.

Simply through diet and simply through light to be able to activate the brain functions so not only you feel good, you actually are better.

Dave:                    It’s that difference where I used to just think I was weak. I’m sitting here, I made $6 million, I’m 26. Well still when I was 28. I’m sitting there, I’m like, “I’m so tired, I can’t focus and it’s because I’m not trying hard enough. It’s because I’m not strong enough, I’m not smart enough. I’m not fast enough.” All that was completely wrong. It was because there was a biological hardware problem. Everyone listening, when it stops being a moral failing and just becomes a configuration issue, it’s so much easier that way.

Naveen:               Exactly. Then we can tune it, because the point is we start to blame the nature. It’s my genes. Uh-uh.

Dave:                    Screw your genes.

Naveen:               It’s not your genes, it’s your diet. It is the nutrition that’s lacking. If you can control and imagine your diet and nutrition is the best blockbuster drug you’re going to ever have.

Dave:                    That has been my experience. Here we are. We’re two Internet geeks from [inaudible 00:26:17], successful entrepreneur and we’re talking about this stuff. I imagine people listening, we have a lot of functional medicine, anti aging people and a lot of just interested people commuting or working right now. They’ll listen to this going, “All right, this guy must have a new poop test, because he’s talking about microbiome.” That’s not what you’re doing at all.

Naveen:               We do actually have, not the microbiome test, but we do a poop test.

Dave:                    Oh you do? Okay.

Naveen:               That is actually one of the best ways to understand what is happening inside your body, the two places. Your urine test and your poop test is so powerful because we just don’t look at … Today’s microbiome really has become a bad thing, because most microbiome testing today when you go to the companies they’ll do something called 16S, which is a genus level thing. Which is really as useless as not doing it.

Dave:                    It’s like percentage of men and women in Asians versus African Americans or whatever.

Naveen:               That’s all it is. If you look at America, the whole of United States, they’ll say well there are some blacks and there are some whites and there are some brown people, and by the way some of them are named Smith and some of them named Jones and that’s it. That’s what America is all about. When you and I look at that thing and say, “Well gee, they are doctors, they’re an engineer, they’re plumbers. They all have very different function.” What we do is we look at everything that’s going on inside your body by analyzing your poop. What happens is not only we see every single screen of bacteria, not just a species. Every screen, we look at every virus, we look at every phage. We look at the human RNA.

Dave:                    You said something there, phage. Most listeners have never heard of a phage even though you should have, except they don’t teach you this in biology and in the West we pretty much ignored them. The Russians pioneered phage research. They just basically control viruses, which can control proteins, if I remember right.

Naveen:               Basically phages actually attack the bacteria. What happens if phages don’t impact humans but they impact other bacteria, so they start to attack the good bacteria. Phages are important, to some extent they could also be used for attacking specific type of bacteria, so instead of taking antibiotics you should be taking phages for specific bacteria.

Dave:                    Phages live in the soil, unless you spray the soil with Round-Up and you sterilize it, which we’ve got to stop doing that because these are actually more important than antibiotics in controlling unhealthy bacteria.

Naveen:               Absolutely correct. I think a lot of counterintuitive thing. Imagine why the first world or the developing countries has so many of these diseases. Number one, the children are born to caesarean section. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.

Dave:                    Thank you for saying that. The U.S. is the leader in ceasarean section.

Naveen:               Interesting thing is the nature works extremely well, during labor your gut flora actually starts to move toward the vaginal canal. When the baby’s born it actually flows and gets the first introduction of the microbiome in the body. The first seven days, with the breastfed milk, it is not to feed the baby. It is simply to feed the microbiome so they start to grow and they start to digest the food because a lot of the digestion happens through these microbiome.

Dave:                    I have an alternate theory here.

Naveen:               Tell me.

Dave:                    Any parent of a small child knows that half the small child’s calories are absorbed right through their face, which is why they smear the food all over their face. Is that true?

Naveen:               I’ve never heard of that.

Dave:                    I’m just kidding. We’re both parents, so we’ve both seen it. There must be a reason they do that.

Naveen:               The second thing really happens is we actually don’t allow our children to play in the dirt anymore. First of all, we have to stop putting all the Round-Up and all the toxin and all the fertilizers and all the crap into the thing, but good old farm soil is absolutely wonderful because that’s how the humans became one with nature. As we start to live in urban areas, we in fact are not being exposed to all the things that used to be exposed to when we were living on the farm. People are now selling the farm air, because you really need all the things that you used to get from all the farms, because you want to get all those microbes so you don’t get allergic reaction so your immune system is trained properly.

Dave:                    People wonder, “Dave, why did you move away from Silicon Valley?” Well I have two young kids and we live on an operating organic farm and they go out in the dirt every single day, and I did that for my kids.

Naveen:               Let them eat the dirt.

Dave:                    They do.

Naveen:               It’s a really good thing. Don’t wash your hand with Purell all the time because you’re essentially making these bacteria resistant. I think that some of the things that happen is we have become too hygienic. I really think as humans we’re supposed to live with nature and a little bit of the thing that we’ve become part of it is what trains our immune system. I think we should talk about some of the cool stuff about going to the moon next.

Dave:                    Yeah, okay, let’s get to the moon stuff, but I have a couple more questions for you, the new work you’re doing around RNA analysis.

Naveen:               Gut inflammation.

Dave:                    You’re doing gut inflammation but you’re doing a poop test and you’re doing a blood test. You’re looking at the blood biome. The two things have got me really excited about, let’s actually just do an interview instead of just chatting. One of them is that when you’re looking at poop, instead of just bacteria, you’re looking at very specific types but you’re also looking at phages, viruses and very importantly you’re looking at the fungal biome, which no one does, and it’s at least as complex as the bacteria.

Naveen:               Regardless, we’re looking at parasites. We’re looking at human RNA that shows you how your gut inflammation is doing, and we’re looking at the metabolites that the microbes are producing, and the blood volume which nobody has ever done. Once you’re able to do that, since we are able to look at all the RNAs, we’re looking at the mitochondrial function. We’re able to see the bacteria, phages and viruses in the blood that no one has ever looked at. That I think is going to be so phenomenal that we’ll be able to find the predictive bio markers of the diseases so we are able to cure the things before you even see the symptoms of it.

Dave:                    That’s how it’s supposed to be. Everyone listening by now, if they’ve heard more than three shows and they know that mitochondrial are at the very core of performing well. If you can’t make enough electricity in your body, it doesn’t matter how hard you want to do something, you won’t do it. How can they get access to a mitochondrial test? By the way, I don’t have a recommended one yet.

Naveen:               Every one of your listeners should really sign up for Viome services and for the listeners of Bulletproof we’re going to actually have a special quote for them to put them ahead of the queue, because as opposed to waiting for tens of thousands of people who already signed up, every Bulletproof listener is going to get ahead of the queue and they’re going to be the first one to be able to get the service.

Dave:                    That’s awesome. We didn’t even plan that. We talked about doing some sort of thing. Here’s the deal. You know how important all of the biome stuff is. You’ve heard many different podcasts where we’ve talked with Jeff Bland and Mark Hyman and all these various different people, but I couldn’t find a way to get a reliable mitochondrial test that didn’t require an oxygen mask and a laboratory, which is what I do. Being able to get this for you is really powerful. You want to be first in line. The code is going to be Bulletproof. What’s the URL.

Naveen:               Bulletproof. Go to Viome.com, V as in Victor, I-O-M-E, dot com.

Dave:                    V-I-O-M-E dot com, and what is it? It’s $100 a month?

Naveen:               $99 a month.

Dave:                    Cool. You get four tests a year?

Naveen:               Four tests a year.

Dave:                    These are four poop tests and four blood tests?

Naveen:               Yes.

Dave:                    Okay, cool. If you compare that to what you would spend for normal lab testing that doesn’t get you mitochondrial, it doesn’t get you a lot of that stuff … Do you do telomeres at all in that?

Naveen:               Telomeres is totally separate.

Dave:                    It’s totally separate, all right, cool. That’s still not a small amount of money, but it’s also a very good deal for four lab tests to track how you’re doing on a regular basis. It’s actually one of the most affordable, comprehensive things like this I’ve been able to find, which is why I’m super stoked on it. Viome.com/Bulletproof, and just so you guys know I get a small commission on that, but at the same time …

Naveen:               It’s not about the commission. You and I both know this.

Dave:                    No, it’s not. I want to be full disclosure so people know. I don’t want anybody to feel like I’m sneaking something in. Also, we are working on getting Bulletproof supplements so that when you know what’s going on, that Viome can recommend Bulletproof supplements. We’re just helping each other out here. You guys should know that, but more importantly, I’ve been wanting this stuff for like 10 years and now I’m going to get it. I think a lot of you will be interested as a standard health tracking service, the $99 a month is actually a very reasonable thing and it’s actually less than I give as a bonus. It’s a compensation. All of the employees at Bulletproof get more than $100 a month of discounted Bulletproof stuff because it helps them be healthier.

The ability to spend even less than I’m doing that way in order to get the data so you know you’re not wasting money on supplements, that’s huge.

Naveen:               That is the big. Plus more than just not wasting money, the reason people continue with something is because they know it’s working. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. This shows you it’s working so you continue taking it because it’s working. I don’t know.

Dave:                    Exactly. There’s all kinds of stuff out there. Learning to trust that sense versus just to deceive yourself is so tough. We talked about Hacking the Human Body, and if you’re listening to this going, “What the heck?” We are Internet entrepreneurs, engineering systems thinking geeks. Neither one of us has a medical degree.

Naveen:               No medical degree.

Dave:                    Unlicensed bio hacker. This goes back to what you said earlier about being an entrepreneur. You go for something you don’t know, you’re like, “Well why aren’t they doing this?”

Naveen:               Exactly my point.

Dave:                    Since I don’t know the reasons, I’m just going to do it. All people come up through a certain industry see the box because that’s what they grew in, but you didn’t see this box.

Naveen:               Actually we saw the box, but I applied the thinking of my engineering box into this box that nobody has ever applied. I want listeners to know something that’s really interesting here is this technology was developed at a national lab. They spent billions of dollars developing this technology and it took them 10 years. What you’re really seeing is 10 years of hard work and billions of dollars that were spent by the government to really for a national security. Now that work can actually be applied for the benefit of humanity. You and I are benefiting because our tax dollars are already spent on this.

Dave:                    That’s something really cool. There’s a lot of innovation that actually has been funded by national laboratories. By the way, my father spent his entire career since college at a national laboratory in Albuquerque, the one that’s Internal Combustion Research Sandia National Laboratories. I grew up in a laboratory family, and much of that research, they discover it and maybe it ends up in the …

Naveen:               It sits on the shelf.

Dave:                    … space program or something, but it’s not used. What you did is you’re an execution oriented entrepreneur, you had a big problem. You had your own health issues, family health issues just like all humans have. You’re like, “Wait, I’m an engineer. There’s all these solutions. Maybe I just need to match them up,” but then you executed. Before we get into the space though, how did you execute on matching, how did you get something from the government and then make a private company out of it?

Naveen:               Actually I started a company called Blue Dot. The purpose of Blue Dot was exactly, is to look at some of the space technologies coming out of NASA or some of the technologies coming out of national labs or at the DOD Labs, and trying to see how you can apply the technology for something that is something totally different. For example, we also are working with NASA at JPL where they had a technology that they designed for Hubble Telescope. Think about what Hubble Telescope does. Hubble Telescope is able to detect a very, very faint light from a very, very distended star. Now most people look at a star and say, “Cool.”

I start looking at that and thing, “Wow.” Imagine, I thought every bacteria has auto fluorescence. You put a UV light on a bacteria, it has very faint auto fluorescence. Light bulb. I said, “Ah ha. Can we take this UV sense and put a small camera and you spit when you’re sick, and you see fluorescence.” You say, “Holy shit, I need to take antibiotics. I got a bacteria infection.”

Dave:                    That’s so cool.

Naveen:               Now you have a simple test for virus, viral [inaudible 00:38:52] bacteria infection for something that was done way back when for Hubble Telescope. Now we are able to apply that for something that is totally different and will change the trajectory of how humanity lives by just simple adapting. That’s what you and I do best.

Dave:                    When you cross over, stuff happens. I had coffee a while back with a guy who holds the first patent ever for [inaudible 00:39:17] to 11B. This is in Mountain View, California. I said, “What are you working on?” He said, “Well I know you’re doing this anti aging stuff Dave.” He said, “I took the really sensitive signal detectors we use to troubleshoot our radios and I pointed them at my own body, and oh my god, there’s a huge signal coming off of my body,” and he showed me all the data. It’s like, “This is so cool.” He’s not a doctor, he has no idea, but he’s like, “I’m pretty sure I can get diagnostic criteria.”

What’s happening is the fields of engineering and biology are becoming bioengineering, and bioengineering is a new specialty. There’s a few people educated in it, but most of the them …

Naveen:               Bioinformatics.

Dave:                    That’s a whole thing. Most of the time you’re getting engineers who are coming into bio, you don’t get a lot of doctors that become engineers, but it does happen. There’s engineers who don’t become doctors but they’re like, “I’m tired of my knees hurting, so I’m going to do something wacky,” but it works.

Naveen:               The interesting thing is actually the doctors becoming engineers are very, very different because they come from very different mindset. Engineers are actually really cool kind of people. They simply look at the data. To them, it doesn’t matter whether data is a sensor data, it’s coming from biochemistry data, it’s coming from blood, it’s coming from poop. They don’t care. Here’s the data and I can apply the software and the patter, the machine learning, and guess what, I find the pattern. That’s what engineers do. They actually are just data junky. We all are information junky and by looking at information, we are able to deduce things that people who are taught a medical degree have never even looked at.

The beauty of the thing is the humans have never had the technology that could look at the human body in such a detail. Until the Hubble Telescope was invented, we thought there are few stars here and there, and suddenly when we pointed the Hubble Telescope in a one square inch of area, we saw there are billions and billions of galaxies in that area. Imagine turning that Hubble Telescope inside your body and suddenly we say, “Oh my god, look at the climate of our body. What have we done to ourselves?”

Dave:                    Exactly.

Naveen:               That technology has gotten so affordable, just like landing on the moon. The first time we landed on the moon it cost us $25 billion. The mission that we had that’s going out this year is going to be under $10 million.

Dave:                    This unmanned, right? Just robots?

Naveen:               Unmanned mission.

Dave:                    Why do you need people on there?

Naveen:               Why do we need people there? Because you can actually get everything then robotically. As you mentioned, I’m going to go back and step back for a second.

Dave:                    I love the moon stuff. By the way, I have an analysis stick on my laptop. I’m a huge fan.

Naveen:               Maybe we should meet up separately, another part [inaudible 00:41:49].

Dave:                    We could. I’d be up for that. Guys, leave us some comments. We’ll talk about some moon stuff here, but if you want to hear a lot more about creating a company that can go to the moon and all that, we can do a whole other episode on that. It’s a bit different than the human performance thing, but as long as we tie it back to the entrepreneurial, the cognitive and emotional side of things.

Naveen:               Here’s a very interesting thing is to me, the going to the moon is not about just going to the moon. It is simply about a proof and the showcase of what entrepreneurs are capable of doing. When we land on the moon, I want every entrepreneur to be able to say if they can land on the moon, what is my moonshot? My moon should could be cure the cancer, cure the Alzheimer’s, understand my human body and make it completely high performance. Whatever your moonshot is, now you have the technology at your disposal to solve it. To me, we were talking about as an entrepreneur thinking, they’re really simple. Dream so big that people think you’re absolutely crazy. When people tell you what is that you’re doing and you tell them what you’re doing, and if they don’t think it’s crazy you’re not thinking big enough.

Think big and never be afraid to fail. As an entrepreneur, you only fail when you give up. Everything else is just a pivot. That means if the things are not working, you change, you adapt and you pivot, and then until you give up, you have not failed. Every idea that does not work is simply a stepping stone to a bigger success. Now to me, as you become successful in life, always remember, stay humble. The sure sign of success in life is the humility. If you have to tell someone how rich you are, then you have not achieved success. Success comes when you say I am still learning. The human curiosity, the best parenting advice … we’re both parents. I can give you the best parenting advice, to me, is really is make the children intellectually curious.

As a parent, I’ve seen the parents who say, “Well I can only take the horse to the water, I can’t make him drink.” I keep thinking why do you think you need to take them to the water or make them drink. What if you just make them thirsty?

Dave:                    There you go.

Naveen:               If you make them thirsty, what will happen? They will find their own water and they will go out and drink. Our job as parent is to simply make them thirsty. As an entrepreneur, our job is not to get boggled by what it is, but focus on what it can be. When people talk about is the glass half empty or is the glass half full, and my question always is do I want to fill the glass? If I want to fill the glass, does it really matter if it’s half empty or half full?

Dave:                    I like that. That’s actually a great analogy. What’s in it? That would matter. How did your parents make you curious? You’ve had an interesting path.

Naveen:               I think interestingly we grew up in very, very humble beginnings. We grew up in India. There were times when we didn’t have food to eat. We moved from village to village. I came to the United States 35 years ago with $5 in my pocket. God has been amazingly kind to us. What my parents taught us was it’s about learning. It’s about being curious, about able to go out and do things. Even though my mother could read, she sat me down and she would point and say, “Tell me the answer to this problem.” I would say, “Mom, the answer is seven.” She would say, “Don’t make me look. Do it again.” I’ll do it again, and I’d say, “Mom, I think the answer is seven.” She said, “Good, now go to the next one.”

The point was she cared. She wanted to really show that the only way to get out of the poverty is to really learn, to be curious. She was completely okay when I would take anything that I found in the house and open it up. My dad would get so angry, “Look at what your son did now. He just broke this thing.” She would say, “He will fix it. Don’t worry about it.” I was so curious that I was willing to go out and try things, and my mom encouraged it. She said, “It’s okay if we can’t fix it. You know what, we’ll put it back, and if you can’t put it back, so be it.” The point was that curiosity is what allowed me to be who I am today, that I don’t really care what the problem is because I know I can open it up and take complex problem, break it down into simpler, simpler, simpler problem, it’s small modules that you can execute and you start doing small, small slices. Next thing you know, you’re boiling the ocean.

Dave:                    The idea of breaking down into a small problem, that ties into what Clayton Christensen, the guy who coined the term disruptive innovation. You probably met Clayton.

Naveen:               Of course I’ve met Clayton.

Dave:                    I’ve worked with his consulting firm, but I’ve never actually interacted with him like on a phone call.

Naveen:               He’s a wonderful human being. As a human being, I have more respect for him than most of the professors I have ever met.

Dave:                    He saved my career a lot, and probably doesn’t know it.

Naveen:               Have you read his book?

Dave:                    Yeah. In fact Disruptive Technology was …

Naveen:               No, not that one. How Will You Measure Your Life?

Dave:                    That one is the latest one.

Naveen:               It touched my heart.

Dave:                    It’s a profound book from someone who’s spent his whole time looking at this. What you’re saying matches what Clayton did. Clayton analyzed how do these small annoying startups suddenly topple big industries? His seminal work was on the hard drive industry where you have these companies doing several billion a year in revenue, and then two years later these small web startups are buying them because of this crazy disruptive thing that’s happening. What you’re saying is you start small, you solve one problem, and it’s not big enough to be a threat. Then all of a sudden, it just grows and grows. By the time the big guys notice, it’s too late. They try and buy you and essentially the industry’s broken. The telecoms got broken by the Internet this way. Frankly, lost cost servers broke mainframes this way. We’ve just been doing this forever.

Naveen:               Actually it’s better now.

Dave:                    oh it’s much better.

Naveen:               What’s really happening is with the convergence of exponential technologies, it doesn’t matter what lifecycle you’re on. Every five to 10 years, whatever is being done is becoming obsolete. You and I and everyone listening to it, we’re living in the most amazing time in the human history. Next 10 years there’s going to be more changes than happened in human history.

Dave:                    Amen. Everything is changing rapidly.

Naveen:               Here is the thing. In the next 10 to 15 years, half of the fortune 500 companies will go bankrupt. Here’s the beauty of it: when the old guard dies, what happens? You and I and everyone has an opportunity now to be the new king. Every technology that exists today will be obsolete in five to 10 years. What that means is you can be the guy who disrupts the current industry. It doesn’t matter what it is. Let me give you a couple of good examples here for your listeners here. It’s not about the technology that you look at what it’s doing. It’s the secondary and tertiary in back of the technology that most entrepreneurs miss out on, but that’s where actually the opportunities are.

For example, everyone knows about a self-driving car. You will say, “Well that’s going to have a massive impact on the automobile industry because you no longer need to own the car. You can be on demand, and by the way, if I’m going out on a date I can order a Ferrari. If I’m going out long distance, I can order a Prius. I don’t need to own the car anymore.” Now imagine if you ever start driving car, what happens to the parking lots? You don’t need the parking lots. Could they become the affordable housing now? What happens to all the parking lots? Could they become the parks? Could they become the housing?

Secondly, if these cars are communicating with each other, we don’t need to build as many roads. That means what happens to the Caterpillars of the world? If these cars are not going into an accident, what happens to the automobile insurance? What happens to the life insurance? More than that, what happens to the real estate prices in the urban areas because now you can live in the suburbs and your car becomes your office. Holographic images, you are sitting there. It doesn’t matter where you are, your location’s shifted now. The real estate is impacted, the insurance is impacted. The insurance companies are impacted, and suddenly you have abundance of housing.

Dave:                    It’s happening, for sure. I live on Vancouver Island in the sunniest part of Canada, and in the last five years the shift, there’s tons of successful entrepreneurs moving there because they want clean air and because it doesn’t really matter where you’re living.

Naveen:               It doesn’t matter where you live anymore. The other thing is understanding when you’re looking at solving a problem, are you solving the symptom of the problem? Are you actually solving the real problem? Let me give you an example. Let’s assume you’re an entrepreneur and you say, “Look, I want to solve the fresh water problem because people don’t have enough fresh water.” You go out and start to build a [inaudible 00:50:55] technology and everything else. Until you realize why do we have a shortage of fresh water and you realize majority of the fresh water is used for agriculture, and it’s ah ha. What if I can use aquaponics or aeroponics and suddenly I don’t need this water. That means now I can solve the fresh water problem simply agriculture problem.

Then while you are thinking, “Oh my god, I got it,” some other entrepreneur comes along and says, “Wait a sec, the majority of the agriculture is used for cattle. All I have to do is instead of raising the cattle, what if I’m able to take a stem cell of a cow and create the bio factories and only create muscle tissue than beef.” I’m not the moral just to tell people they shouldn’t eat beef, but I don’t need to have a cattle to peel of this living animal. I can have the beef simply grow up in a bio factory.

Dave:                    That was interesting because we were talking about the human body, it’s this complex system and it’s about the environment they’re in. I do not see a future where we can grow laboratory meat with an environment that creates the equivalent of what comes out of animals because they’ll end up making it like tofurky. I’m a little concerned about that one to be honest, but I like the vision that says if we can make an equivalent health product with all of the small [crosstalk 00:52:20].

Naveen:               By the way, no antibiotics. What’s happening is to live and you eat beef, you’re not eating beef. What you’re eating is so much of antibiotics that has been put into the cow.

Dave:                    I eat the cows that eat the grass that grow in the front quarter of my farms. I’m getting real cow, but one in a hundred people order grass fed meat that way.

Naveen:               Very, very few people get that. My point is what I was starting to say was that suddenly the fresh water problem actually becomes a synthetic biologic problem, and that’s the point I was trying to make.

Dave:                    I got it.

Naveen:               It is really understanding the root cause. Yes, by the way, if you care about the environment, the biggest damage to the environment is done by the cows. The cattle.

Dave:                    You don’t think it’s the pig farms? I’ve looked into this a lot.

Naveen:               The cattle and the pigs.

Dave:                    The pigs are a lot worse.

Naveen:               The pigs are a lot worse, but my point is …

Dave:                    They’re delicious.

Naveen:               Cattle and the pigs, but here’s the best part. If you care about the environment, all you have to do is eat less of that one day. Don’t eat meat one day, you will do more for the environment than driving a Tesla.

Dave:                    I would agree with you if you’re talking about industrial meat, but if you care about soil integrity, you would want to eat grass fed cows so they’ll poop on the soil to make healthy material in the soil.

Naveen:               Actually if you really care about the environment, the next big thing is going to be the microbiome of the soil.

Dave:                    That’s exactly right.

Naveen:               If you’re able to adjust the soil microbiome, you can increase the yield of a crop 100 percent to 500 percent. Suddenly you’re able to feed not just seven billion people but 30 billion people because you’ve adjusted the yield of the crop by simply changing the microbiome of the soil.

Dave:                    That’s real. That stuff happens, and you don’t have to make GMO crops, you don’t have to [crosstalk 00:54:07] poison.

Naveen:               No, not at all.

Dave:                    There’s so much simpler solutions.

Naveen:               So much simpler is simply understand the ecosystem of how this plant grows.

Dave:                    I have a question, and you may have even seen deals like this. I haven’t come across any. I want to stop spraying antibiotics on our soil because living soil makes living biome and your gut makes living humans. We are based on soil. It seems like with robotic technology we have today, you can have free roaming robots with visual recognition stuff that are solar powered. Every time they see a weed growing, they just take a metal rod and stick into the soil where the weed is. Why do you need to spray poison on soil to stop weeds?

Naveen:               There are many, many ways of killing the things that we don’t want, especially the weeds. You could laser to death.

Dave:                    I’m just looking at power. You can laser them, there’s all sorts of things, but the number one thing you don’t have to do is pour toxic stuff on them.

Naveen:               Why is that? Because it goes back into your body.

Dave:                    Have you funded something like that? This is such an obvious problem. People listening, do this.

Naveen:               There you go. My point is when everyone comes across a problem, the question shouldn’t be why didn’t someone do something about it, the question should be what can I do about it? Anyone who’s listening, you just got an idea from Dave here.

Dave:                    There you go.

Naveen:               Go out and solve the problem for the weed without putting any toxin in the soil.

Dave:                    Give us robots, even to pick off insects. It’s not that hard. It’s well within our capability. I’m serious, if you actually do that I will talk about what you’re doing. I’ll give you a leg up. I’ll introduce you to investors, whatever it takes because I actually want to see that. I’ll put it in my garden too. It would save me time and it would be really cool. Not that I actually pick my own weeds. I’ll admit, I have a gardener help me with that. We talked a little bit, you got some technology from the government for Viome, and your moonshot stuff though, you actually don’t want government technology because the stuff they use is from the 1980s because it’s radiation hardened and it’s easier just to put 10 android phones with duct tape and send that to space essentially, right?

Naveen:               Actually on a moon [inaudible 00:56:06] what we’re doing is we’re taking advantage of all of the latest exponential technologies. We’re able to 3D print the rocket, we’re able to 3D print our lander. We’re able to use the hydrogen peroxide for our fuel.

Dave:                    Which is nontoxic.

Naveen:               Nontoxic, and by the way, all you get out of it is water vapor. The reason we’re using hydrogen peroxide, because we can build that on the moon because it requires H2O too, which is water on the moon.

Dave:                    One of the things that was actually really just a huge mind shift for me was when we first met, was with Peter Diamandis and I went to the 10th anniversary of the Ansari X Prize. We were at the Space X fabrication, and I watched them 3D printing a rocket engine. It was the coolest thing. We got to have dinner and talk. If I remember right, we were making little lunar landing stations out of legos as a contest. Just to see the level of these technologies that are mostly hidden. We hear about self-driving cars and all that, but even if you’re relatively well read, you have no idea what’s happening in terms of the speed of change in 50 different fields, and that’s what’s coming together. You’re saying it’s going to cost $10 million to get a robot on the moon. Are they going to bring stuff back from the moon too?

Naveen:               Yes. The interesting thing is my prediction is within 10 years we’re going to have a boots on the moon for under $10,000. Imagine that for $10,000 you’ll be able to go to the moon and come back, which is really a first class ticket cheaper … I mean I think it costs more to go on a first class from here to Dubai. My point is the costs are coming down so much, and the reason is once you start to get a reusable rocket, the cost really becomes the cost of the fuel. What if you don’t have to take all the fuel from earth, because 93 percent of the weight of the rocket is the fuel. What if we can re-fuel on the way? We actually take the water, hydrogen and oxygen, rocket fuel and the fuel for humanity, and you put them into earth orbit, you put them in the moon orbit so you’re able to re-fuel yourself as you’re going up instead of getting all the fuel yourself.

Imagine one day we are able to live on the moon. I understand that Elon wants to go to Mars, but moon is only three days away. You’d rather be a lunatic three days a way than to be a martian six months away.

Dave:                    I have biological questions about the viability of both of those.

Naveen:               I’ll tell you [inaudible 00:58:28].

Dave:                    Our mitochondria are not well adapted for that.

Naveen:               Ah ha.

Dave:                    We can hack that, but the human body’s going to require some upgrades and some environmental changes in space habitats.

Naveen:               It is. The beauty of the thing is go back to the nature. What we found is that nature has already done this. You find that there are bacteria which are not only surviving, they are actually thriving in radioactive waste in the high radiation. [inaudible 00:58:55] and the radioactive waste, the bacteria has evolved to not only survive but thrive using the radiation. Now imagine if you can take the genetic material from these bacteria, use the CRISPR technology, so CRISPR-Cas9 or CRISPR-Cas3, CRISPR-Cas1 or CFCF, C1C1, you’re able to now modify all human genes so that we became radiation resistant, but better than that, instead of eating pizza, we’ll be saying, “Baby, give me some more radiation.”

Dave:                    Just have uranium tablets for breakfast and you’ll be good to go. Now that’s a pretty darn trans human vision. A lot of people listening to this …

Naveen:               It’s going to happen.

Dave:                    It is, unquestionably. A lot of people listening to this are probably a little bit wigged out by that. At what point do you see a difference between say changing our genes so that we can live in environments where we want to live versus replacing yourself with robot parts.

Naveen:               Today when you get your hip replacement, what’s happening?

Dave:                    You got a robot part.

Naveen:               Right. You get your knee replacement, you get your heart replacement. Now the only different is instead of using a big heart, you’re actually maybe growing your own heart. You can take your skin, the skin can work them into IPS cells and can work them back into the things, and grow a 3D printed liver or a 3D printed kidney or a 3D printed heart. Now imagine if you have the nanobots in your body that are not only cleaning up your body and repairing the DNA, repairing your mitochondria, re-feeding your mitochondria, but suddenly are also providing oxygen. They stay put, they don’t do anything. Let’s assume your heart stops working. You don’t die. Your nanobots kick in. They start to supply the oxygen. You pick up a phone, you call your doctor and say, “Hey doc, I think my heart stopped. I’ll be there in 30 minutes. Can you print me a new heart? I’ll be there.”

Dave:                    I got a meeting at seven.

Naveen:               You call your doctor, you go drive the car. He gives you a new heart, you put it back in and you’re good to go. The point is it really is freaky to think about augmentation, but it happened slowly enough that people don’t realize it. For example, when you and I were young what we did, we met someone we remember their phone number. Now all of that has been augmented with the iPhone.

Dave:                    We just swipe right.

Naveen:               Now it’s augmented. Now our memory is now on cell phones. We don’t remember the facts anymore, we remember the keywords for the Google to find the information. We now have our cell phone that’s augmenting our brain. Imagine slowly, slowly we’re going to start doing more and more augmentation. Now imagine if you can have a brain computer interface where our brain is constantly connected to the Internet where all the information is being fed. Our nanobots in our brain are communicating. Who is this guy? What did we discuss last time? All the information is coming back to you. I think what happens is when people are worried about self-driving cars, they don’t realize that planes are self-driving for a long time. People get so worried about “I’m not going to have a robot in my house.” Your dishwasher is a robot.

The point is when things start to happen, as Peter says all the time, the day before the breakthrough is a crazy idea and the day after the breakthrough is [inaudible 01:02:27].

Dave:                    Then it becomes self-obvious and all the people who said you were crazy suddenly said it was their idea in the first place?

Naveen:               Well being rented in the first place.

Dave:                    You got to love that. It is what happens on a very regular basis. I believe all the things you’re saying here, and we’ve talked about this stuff. Certainly I’m in that camp. For people who are listening and are saying I don’t want to lose my humanity, what do you have to say to that?

Naveen:               The point is what is it about losing humanity? Let’s talk about what makes us human. If we say, “I don’t want to live forever,” what is that I that we talk about? If I is your body, your body actually never lives for any day because your body’s constantly changing. Remember when you were a tiny baby and now you’re this adult? It’s not the same body. If you say it’s my DNA, your DNA are propagated through your children. At the end of the day, irrespective of how proud we are of ourselves, we’re simply a container. A beautiful container for parasites is who we are. What differentiates between Dave and Naveen is our memories and our experiences. That’s really what separates the two of us is that the experience we have had, the memories we have had, all that is who we really are.

If we can take that memories and experiences, now let’s assume people are able to do the head transplant.

Dave:                    Right. Someone’s going to try it.

Naveen:               Already they’re already doing it in China. They’re able to do a dog transplant.

Dave:                    Wow, they did a dog head transplant?

Naveen:               Dog head transplant.

Dave:                    That’s creepy.

Naveen:               How creepy this thing will be, you see someone working out and you say, “Wow, that’s really nice body.” That’s creepy, right? Imagine, suddenly does the body really need to be biochemical body anymore.

Dave:                    These are real questions. The thing is, I was talking about living to 180 plus as my personal goal.

Naveen:               Why not 300?

Dave:                    That’s why there’s a plus on there. 180 is the worst case. I look at …

Naveen:               What does living really mean?

Dave:                    That’s a question. If you upload yourself to the Internet, are you still alive. I think there will be debates about that even after someone succeeds in allegedly doing that. The nature of [inaudible 01:04:51] is do we have a soul, all that kind of stuff. I do think though if you, like you said, you look back to what we did when we were kids or you look back 30 years ago, how did we do research? It was on optical microfiche in a catalog. You could spend two weeks to find one fact. Then you launched InfoSpace, and what would have taken me weeks at the library to get my degree took me like 20 minutes and then I could go out and have pizza. It changed everything from a research perspective.

You look at the cell phones that we have now, and your iPhone is the sum of the world’s compute power in 1960 and all of that. I would just encourage listeners, you live in the future, you see the future. I do the same sort of thing. None of this is crazy because it’s all happening within our lifetimes.

Naveen:               Here’s the thing. Not only in our lifetime, in the next 10 years there’s no doubt in my mind we’ll be able to understand the human biology, are cells good enough. As we said, the sickness will become optional. What if the aging, as we all know, is one other disease? What if the aging becomes optional?

Dave:                    It will. Absolutely.

Naveen:               That’s my point. Why do we age? It’s really simple. It’s because somehow our cells are no longer able to keep up because either nutrients are lacking, our DNA repair machine is broken or the mitochondria is not functioning properly, but all those things will get fixed up. When they get fixed up … People say, “I don’t want to live up to 100” because in their mind, 100 is a fragile old man. Can barely walk, in a walker. No. Think about when you were 30 year old, and if you could actually be like that for the next 300 years, who wouldn’t want to be?

Dave:                    I don’t understand that. I’ve met a lot of people who say, “I think I’d get bored.” I don’t understand boredom. There’s always something interesting.

Naveen:               You know what, if you are actually believe you’re going to get bored, you need a new life.

Dave:                    Hey man.

Naveen:               My point is I can’t find enough hours in a day. I only sleep four hours a day because there’s so much to do. I wake up in the morning, I jump out of the bed because I’m thinking, “Oh my god, there’s so much happening.” I’m just so excited about life. I love life. I love learning. Where is the boredom? The day you stop learning is the day you actually have died. Most people who are bored are actually already dead, so I don’t know why they’re just not …

Dave:                    Get out of the way.

Naveen:               They’re zombies. They literally are zombies now. The minute your brain is no longer growing, you have become a parasite on society.

Dave:                    Wow, that is powerful and I agree. If you’re not here to do something, it’s okay to get out of the way. You said something that’s interesting there. I went through a period when I was a new dad, I was working as a VP at a big tech company, head of Global Evangelism so flying around a lot, and I started Bulletproof. I’m sleeping five hours max a night, I did it for two years and often I’d do was three or four hours night. I lost weight. All the biomarkers I had were fine. I don’t think it was necessarily good for me. It might have shortened some telomeres and I sleep actually six hours, not six hours, it’s six hours and four minutes for the last three and a half years according to my data stuff. Last night was four and a half and I’m fine today. People can’t see us.

You’re getting about four hours a night, but you’re also running now a health company, and there’s pretty good data you should be getting six hours. What do you say to that?

Naveen:               I think the answer absolutely true. There’s no doubt in my mind I probably need another two hours. It will probably will happen, but I’m just so excited. I’m so excited about what I’m doing. I think to some extent when you get to our age …

Dave:                    How old are you?

Naveen:               57.

Dave:                    Okay, cool. God, you don’t look 57.

Naveen:               Oh thanks. My point is everyday I think, “Oh my god, there’s so much to be done.” I just get so excited about doing things, but I’m going to make it a point to actually start getting additional two hours, and I do want to get to a six hour time because I know it’s good for me.

Dave:                    Do you monitor your human growth hormone, your testosterone, all your biomarkers?

Naveen:               In all honesty, I don’t but I should.

Dave:                    I monitor my RNA expression to see if my mitochondria work, but I don’t look at my human growth hormone. That’s cool. That’s funny.

Naveen:               It’s one of those things, it’s like I feel good.

Dave:                    Also, as someone who’s worked with a lot of people including people with chronic fatigue and people who don’t, you have the eyes and the skin of someone younger than you are. Those are very obvious giveaway things. Your energy level is, I don’t know, you’re probably not on Adderall, but every time I’ve ever talked with you, I’ve ever interacted with you, you’re always just passionate and full of energy, which are probably better indicators than a lab value. You can tell. You’re not substantially overweight or underweight and all that. I believe in very heavily tracking what you’re hacking. You can spend all your time tracking every five minutes everything, that you’re never going to change. Who cares? That’s not useful data.

Naveen:               I think that’s what happens. People get so caught up in the data that they first of all can’t change. For example, looking at a DNA. Why bother looking at DNA? You can’t change it anyway.

Dave:                    Or for that matter, let’s look at cholesterol because it’s easy to measure even though it’s a terrible indicator of health.

Naveen:               Cholesterol is good for you.

Dave:                    Oops.

Naveen:               Nature is not that stupid. Too much of everything is bad, but cholesterol in itself is not a bad thing. Like fat. One of the things that people just don’t realize, fat is not the enemy. Your enemy is the glucose, your enemy is the sugar.

Dave:                    Or just damaged fat. Trans fats and things like that. It’s one of those things where I think guys like Mark Hyman and David Ludwig, who I’ve become friends with, Dr. Perlmutter, they call it the fats out of the bag instead of the cat’s out of the bag. I think it’s becoming increasingly hard for the 1970s physicians who’ve been recommending these low fat diets for a long time. People just don’t listen because it’s not credible anymore.

Naveen:               First of all, it has never been credible. Second, personally I believer there’s no one diet is good for everyone. Even as humans, we have 90 percent common DNA between us and a plant.

Dave:                    And politicians are actually 98 percent.

Naveen:               They’re probably 98 percent with the parasites. My point is what makes us really different is our microbiome. If our microbiome between two individuals, less than 10 percent of our microbiome we have in common even though 99 percent of our DNA is the same. My point is the same diet that is good for you may not be good for me. That’s really what I believe the next big plan is going to be the diet that’s based on the test. That means personalized diet based on your microbiome, based on your metabolome. You’re really looking at your metabolites and adjusting your nutrients and diet based on those two things, your metabolome and microbiome and gut inflammation. Really the key to in terms of how you’re going to adjust your diet, and no two diets are going to be alike.

Dave:                    What about fecal transplants? I’ve looked at that. The FDA somehow thinks that poop is a drug now, which kind of makes me laugh.

Naveen:               I hate to say it, but I really think the best way to actually repopulate and re-wire your microbiome is really a fecal matter transplant. FMT is the best way to do that, probiotic. When you take probiotic, it’s transient. It tunes the immune system but it does not stay there. You have to constantly keep taking it because you do train the immune system, but most of them actually die in your stomach anyway.

Dave:                    Couldn’t you just put the probiotics in the other end?

Naveen:               The answer would be [inaudible 01:12:59]. Basically your poop is nothing but essentially a microbiome re-transplant.

Dave:                    Yeah, it’s human compost.

Naveen:               I really think to some extent that is the key. I think what a lot of the research is showing is that they’re able to find the obesity. Autoimmune diseases, all those things, you take a fat mice and take a poop from a fat mice, give it to the thin mice, the thin mice becomes fat.

Dave:                    That was in the Bulletproof Diet. You read about that study.

Naveen:               Thin mice, you take a microbiome, the poop and put them in a fat mice, the face mice becomes thin.

Dave:                    Does that mean are you going to be able to buy Michael Phelps poop on eBay? How do you know where to get this stuff? You’re doing microbiome testing as a part of Viome, and I absolutely love doing once every three months so you can see what changed. It changes in 48 hours when you eat pizza.

Naveen:               It does.

Dave:                    All the bad ones come up that make the cancer causing things. It’s pretty fast.

Naveen:               It is.

Dave:                    What about this? Where do people get that? What’s your though?

Naveen:               I think that at the end of the day, you need to, instead of just storing your stem cells, you should also be storing your poop. When you’re healthy you have your poop and when you actually get sick and God forbid you have to take antibiotics and you’re going to essentially carpet bomb your gut flora, you need to go back and re-populate with your own healthy microbiome.

Dave:                    Do all those bacteria and phages and all that, do they survive [inaudible 01:14:29]?

Naveen:               They absolutely survive.

Dave:                    Interesting. There’s actually a real business opportunity there. I would do that. In fact, one of my kids has never had any antibiotics. The other one had one for a rapidly spreading infection that was necessary.

Naveen:               That’s my point. If they had a poop, they could they have re-planted that.

Dave:                    I have a seven year old’s perfectly healthy poop, but I know it won’t last in my freezer, but I have liquid nitrogen at home because of a cryo therapy chamber. I could work something out. We need a bank for that.

Naveen:               You need a poop bank. I really think the poop bank and stem cell bank are really the key.

Dave:                    That’s such a cool idea. Somebody start that. I’ll make a deposit.

Naveen:               Actually the interesting thing is the same type of thing is that you talk about living long and living healthy. Another thing you could do is the research shows that when they’re able to take blood from a young person, a young mice to an old mice, it actually reversed aging.

Dave:                    I’ve looked at the feasibility of just hiring a college student who doesn’t do a lot of bad drugs and things like that that are going to mess them up and just be like, “Here’s the deal. Here’s a sizeable check which is to encourage you to live a healthy life and to pay for your quality food and all that stuff. Since giving blood every six weeks is good for you anyway, it doesn’t harm you in any way, why don’t we just do that?” I know Peter Teal, people are like, “He’s a vampire.” Who the hell cares? This seems like a great way for a young person to help supplement their schooling or something, and why wouldn’t you?

Naveen:               The interesting thing is you don’t have to do that anymore because you should be able to take your own blood when you’re young, a child, store it, and take the stem cells from the blood and actually multiply them. Now you can multiply the stem cells outside your body.

Dave:                    You would do blood stem cells or fat stem cells?

Naveen:               What do you mean?

Dave:                    I’ve had my stem cells taken out of my fat.

Naveen:               No, but you would do from the blood.

Dave:                    Interesting. Blood doesn’t have tons of stem cells in it.

Naveen:               The plasma.

Dave:                    The platelet, plasma kind of stuff. Okay, cool.

Naveen:               My point is you’re able to in fact take the stem cells from your fat from your skin and able to grow them.

Dave:                    I’ve done that. I have my banked. I have 25 doses banked.

Naveen:               More than just bank. I’m saying you can actually multiply them.

Dave:                    Yeah, we took one dose and grew it to 25.

Naveen:               You can amplify them and re-inject your stem cells every now and then.

Dave:                    I do it every six months.

Naveen:               There you go. That actually will keep your body healthy and continuously repaired.

Dave:                    You’re not doing this yet?

Naveen:               I’m not doing it yet, but I’m still looking young.

Dave:                    You are, but you should store them now because they do age. I’ve got a hookup for you in Seattle if you want. It’s about a 20 minute drive from our offices where we can just make it happen.

Naveen:               I might just do that.

Dave:                    Even if you don’t have them re-injected, just to get them harvested and stored. When you’re 90, you want 50 to 70 year old stem cells, not 90 year old stem cells.

Naveen:               That is correct.

Dave:                    You owe that to yourself. That and your extra two hours of sleep might be a good [crosstalk 01:17:09].

Naveen:               There you go. That rarity.

Dave:                    Awesome. Naveen, it’s been a fantastic conversation. We talked about Moon Express, we talked about Viome. We talked about just your background as an entrepreneur, how much sleep you get. If someone came to you tomorrow and they said, “Look, I want to perform better at everything I do in my life, what are the three most important pieces of advice you have for me,” what would you have to offer them?

Naveen:               First of all would be to start dreaming big. Really start to think about what are the biggest problems. Don’t be afraid that I know nothing about it. If you look at the most successful entrepreneurs, they are not the experts in their field. They all started because they saw a big problem. When you see a big problem, you essentially start to take a small, small slice, then start executing on them. The thing that you should be doing is that when you meet a successful person, to start following their habits, which is one of the bad things I hear constantly.

Dave:                    I love this.

Naveen:               People say, “Seven habits of successful people.” Actually it makes no difference. Following peoples habit is not what you want. Following the part process is what you want. How they think about the problem, how they think about life, how they think about what is going on. Follow their part process, don’t follow their habits. Yes, love Tony Robbins, love him, but just because he goes out and takes a bath every day doesn’t mean if you take an ice bath you’re going to become Tony Robbins.

Dave:                    Yeah, Tony’s a special guy without the ice bath.

Naveen:               Exactly my point. He’s just a special guy.

Dave:                    It works for him.

Naveen:               If he didn’t take an ice bath, he would be great Tony Robbins without the ice bath.

Dave:                    I hear you. I do all sorts of weird bio hacking stuff that makes a difference for me, but maybe someone wants to try it, I’m a professional guinea pig. I hear you there. One of the reasons I don’t disclose my entire list of supplements, I don’t want people doing what I do. I’m a guy with autoimmune issues who used to be obese who’s 44 and does all sorts of weird stuff. God forbid that you copy me. Do what’s right for you. That’s why I talk about what some things do. Thank you for saying that. You’re the only guest in 355 guests whose ever said that.

Naveen:               Thank you.

Dave:                    I love that answer. That was one. Learn how to think, not habits.

Naveen:               Number two would be dreaming big and not be afraid to fail. The number three would be constantly stay intellectually curious. The day you stop dreaming, stop being intellectually curious, you have actually died at that time. You’ve become a zombie. To me, remaining intellectually curious is one of the most important things you do. I think even people talk about playing golf. If you have so much time in your life that you can spend eight hours on a golf course, I think you should give somebody, saying, “Hey, you have a right to shoot me that my life is such a waste that I can spend eight hours of my life on a golf course. My life is not worth living anymore.”

Dave:                    I got to confess. I know some of the golfers are horrified right now. When I graduated from Wharton, a bunch of my friends and I were like, “We should learn to golf. That’s what successful people do.” All of us and we’re in Palo Alto, we go to the golf course and we take six weeks of golf lessons on a Saturday morning. At the end of six weeks I think nine out of 10 of us looked around, we’re like, “This takes incredible amounts of time. Screw this noise,” and we never went back. The other ones are like, “This is good sunshine.” I don’t know why they went. I’m with you there.

Naveen:               My point is they’re really focused on what you care about. Find something that actually moves the needle. To me, people talk about having a passion, talk about, “I want to do what I’m passionate about.” My feeling is not actually about things that you are passionate about. It’s something you need to be obsessed about. It is something that you can’t sleep because you just are obsessed about what is going on. That to me, and people say “How do I ever find what my passion is?” I think what I found is the best way to find what your true passion is, imagine if you have everything that you want in life, you have $1 billion, you have wonderful family, you have everything that you always wanted. What is it that you would do then?

If you do that now, you would get everything that you want. That means your true passion is something you’re going to do when you have everything in your life. That is your true passion. If you do that, you will get everything you want. Making money is never should be the goal. Making money is the byproduct of doing things that you actually care about. Making money is like having an orgasm. If you focus on it, you’re never going to get it. If you enjoy the process, you will get that. That’s my point is if you focus on making money, you will never make it. If you focus on solving a problem, you’ll make money as a byproduct.

Dave:                    I got to double down on that one. I was extremely focused on making money until I was about 30, but it was like that’s all that matters.

Naveen:               By the way, you never made it.

Dave:                    You can’t keep it, and you’re miserable all the time. It’s a horrible life. It’s absolutely just as shitty as life could ever be. I’m happy you offered that to listeners as well because it’s true. It’s the meaning and the experiences that matter.

Naveen:               Once you started Bulletproof and you started doing things that you cared about …

Dave:                    It’s easier.

Naveen:               … guess what, now you are making money that even though you’ve been wanting, you didn’t focus on it.

Dave:                    It wasn’t when I started the company. I already had a salary and stock options and stuff.

Naveen:               There you go.

Dave:                    It was there to do something good. If people took nothing else away from this whole thing, that one piece of advice, focus on value creation not on money, the money happens even if it doesn’t feel like it’s going to.

Naveen:               That’s right. Once you become successful anyway it’s not about living a life of success, it’s living a life of significance is what matters. Other thing that I would say probably at least I always follow and I probably should offer to everyone else is surround yourself with people that are positive. Walk away from anyone who laughs at your ambition. Walk away from people who are negative. You don’t want a negative energy around you.

Dave:                    It’s okay to fire your friends if they’re not doing it.

Naveen:               That’s right. The minute you find people who are negative, whether they’re your employees or not, so I tell every single person who works with me in my company, my simple advice is your total contribution to this company is your productivity times your attitude. If your attitude is negative, I don’t really care how productive you are, you’re a negative contribution to the company. You’ve got to go.

Dave:                    It’s a very healthy way to keep your culture clean. I’m very fortunate at Bulletproof because of our mission I think we attract the positive people. All it takes is a couple of people with a bad attitude and it spreads.

Naveen:               Bad apple, rotten apples. I think that right thing as an entrepreneur, which really is to clean that culture. That’s a subtle difference between a cult leader and an entrepreneur. A cult leader wants to keep the loyalty of people to themselves, and a great entrepreneur takes the loyalty and makes it the cause of the company. That actually survives and thrives beyond the entrepreneur. People who are working, they don’t work for Dave, they work for Bulletproof. The cause of Bulletproof is their cause. Their cause is not to make Dave Asprey.

Dave:                    Thank goodness.

Naveen:               That’s what I love.

Dave:                    It makes me kind of mad really. What do you want? What’s best for everyone, that’s what I want. Maybe I don’t even know.

Naveen:               The thing that I love about you Dave is we have spent so much time together, is that your energy, your passion and the product that you build they actually work. You’re not selling the snake oil. In this industry, I have to add there are too many people who just sell snake oil. The thing that I love about Bulletproof is every product is something you have tested, something you know scientifically works. When I buy Bulletproof, I am buying the credibility of Dave because I know Dave would not sell it unless it actually worked. That is the kind of credibility that every entrepreneur needs to have that every company you start, you put your name on it. Everyone knows that it’s my company and if I do something wrong, you get to take the blame.

I know when you put your name to it, I know that product works. I hope all of your listeners know that it doesn’t matter what product you introduce, they’re buying it because of you and your credibility, your science is really something that has really built what Bulletproof is.

Dave:                    Thanks for saying that. That’s great praise. I appreciate that you talk about the fact that you use it. That’s really cool and I’m grateful. As we wind up this show, earlier we mentioned people who want to get first in life for tracking their data using this monthly model that works really well for me. Instead of having to get blood drawn, it’s a finger stick home. You can do it all at home.

Naveen:               All at home.

Dave:                    Without any annoyingness.

Naveen:               By the way, there’s no shipping in the ice container.

Dave:                    None of that, okay.

Naveen:               There’s nobody coming to your house doing the intravenous blood draw. None of that stuff.

Dave:                    It’s completely disruptive to the way you’re used to getting this data.

Naveen:               That’s right.

Dave:                    You’re getting data that’s actually not available in normal lab tests, like your mitochondrial function.

Naveen:               By the way, we’re not a lab, so we’re actually a service. It’s a [inaudible 01:26:42] service. You have an iPhone app and an android app, and you’re able to essentially see what is going on. You’ll be able to understand what you need to be doing, and it’s your constant companion.

Dave:                    It provides good advice and it gives you the data. I’m really excited about this. That’s Viome, V-I-O-M-E, dot com, and then the code is Bulletproof, which will put you at the front of the line.

Naveen:               That’s right.

Dave:                    Which is pretty cool. Guys, remember that, and if that’s interest to you, please do it. If it’s interesting to someone else, send it to them. If it’s not interesting at all, don’t go there. Just know that we are disrupting what was once something that took a doctor’s note and some sticking veins in your arm and refrigerated blood shipping. I used to run a lab testing company about 10 years ago. It’s horrible business. You’re disrupting all that just so people have clean data about how things are changing over time, and that’s a holy grail for me.

Naveen:               Actually more than that. You couldn’t get this much data 10 years ago. It didn’t matter what you did.

Dave:                    I tried. I could not get it.

Naveen:               That’s the point. Today we have access to kind of information that was never available before, and that kind of disruption is what will change who we are, how we live and make sickness optional.

Dave:                    Exactly. Naveen, thanks for being on Bulletproof.

Naveen:               Thank you Dave. What a pleasure.

Dave:                    It was great fun.

Naveen:               Thank you.

 

 

 

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Why you should listen –

Rebuilding your body on the cellular level is no longer science fiction. Dave welcomes Peter Z. Wasowski to the podcast today to talk about Vasper, a new technology that uses compressions, grounding and cold therapy, to heal the body from the inside out. What was once the secret to building strong muscles and accelerated healing used by NASA astronauts and elite Nave Seals, is now being used by people as old as 97 to optimize hormone balance, improve cognitive function, reduce inflammation and relieve pain.

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

Dave Asprey:                     You’re listening to Bulletproof Radio. Today’s cool fact of the day is that when you smile, you use a minimum of 36 muscles. Before we get into the show, there are a couple of things that are worth knowing about. First one is my new book, “Head Strong”. It is not available yet except you can pre-order it on Amazon. If you are a listener of Bulletproof Radio and you like these kinds of conversations where I interview maverick scientists, inventors, people who are doing things that really no one knew was possible. Today is a great example of that.

This book talks about how you can take control of the mitochondria, these tiny little power plants in your cells to give them more energy. When you have more energy, exercise is easier, thinking is easier, resisting the cookie is easier, everything is easier. This is a follow-on work and an upgrade to what’s in the Bulletproof diet. It’s called “Head Strong”. It’s on Amazon. I got to tell you, two years of work, I don’t know the exact number of studies in there but I can tell you that in the back of the book that it’s going from, basically, page 296 up to, whatever that is, up to 321, so about 30 pages of references here, all about mitochondria with specific needs you can do.

You’ll find that even just a fraction of what’s in here, including some of the crazy bio hacks that we’ll discuss today, that it’s actually not nearly as hard to have more energy as you might think. When you have more energy, everything else gets easier. Really, that’s what this [inaudible 00:01:47] is all about, making everything easier.

Recently, I discovered one of nature’s miracle foods walking around at the Bulletproof conference in Pasadena. That’s where I met Walid, the owner of Desert Farms, a company that sells organic camel milk across the United States. We talked about camel milk and I learned some things about camel that I’d read about but haven’t really focused on. It has a bunch of immunoactive molecules that you don’t get from normal milk. It has a bunch of beneficial bacteria different than you would get from cow milk. It’s full of lactoferrin, which is a natural substance. It has anti-bacterial, anti-viral, anti-parasitic and anti-cancer properties even. It contains bio-identical IGF-1 which is insulin-like growth factor, which is the only natural hormone that promotes muscle growth and uses fat stores instead of glucose. It’s compatible with things like ketose and brain octane. It doesn’t have lactoglobulin which is something that messes with you if you’re lactose intolerant.

Camel milk from Desert Farms is organic and paleo-approved. It works for keto, it’s GMO-free, pasture raised, basically meets all the requirements for a Bulletproof diet without all the inflammation that can come from cow milk protein. Head on over desertfarms.com and get 20% off, anything on the website using promo code “Bulletproof20” at checkout. Again, that’s desertfarms.com, promo code “Bulletproof20”. Totally worth your time to give this a shot.

Now, let’s get into the show. This is Peter Wasowski. Peter is an inventor. He created a company called Vasper. He’s been working on this stuff for 18 years. Peter is here on Vancouver Island at the Bulletproof labs alpha here. We just installed the Vasper machine and there’s a Facebook live recording of that earlier where we broadcast my first workout on this thing. Peter, I’m going to describe my experience with the exercise and then we’re going to go into your background, how you got to where you are. I just want people to understand how impactful this thing is.

You get on it, I did essentially the equivalent of a high intensity interval training session on a, feels like an exercise bike but one where you’re also moving your arms. You’ve got these compression things on your arms and your legs and you’re sitting on a chilled pad. You’re getting cooled down, you’re getting chilled and a very specific amount pressure, the specific temperature. You don’t really sweat but you feel after just 30 seconds like you’ve done a horrible number of squats. It feels burn in your muscles. It’s an incredible hack of the signalling system in your body, and that’s why I wanted to have one of these added to the lab and why I think you should go to your local gym and say, “You guys have to have one of these because it’s a workout like no other.” It’s super cool.

I did sleep really well last night, as well, which is a side effect of this thing. Peter, welcome to the show and how the heck did you come up with this idea?

Peter Wasowski:              Thank you. Thank you very much having me today. I came up with this idea after I sold my previous company and moved to Hawaii. I had two major issues. I had arthritic ankles because both ankles were broken whenever you have a joint break, it develops into arthritis often. I was also pre-diabetic. My grandfather died of diabetes. Once you live in the tropics, the symptoms of arthritis and the symptoms of high blood sugar become much more acute.

I had two choices, wither to rely on different types of medications which obviously have side effects and would have decreased the quality of my life tremendously or do something different that has not been done before. This technology basically came to being in order to save my own skin. I had some experience with cooling technology because the company that I was part before, I was a co-founder of it, it was called Cool Systems. The product they currently have is called Game Ready. It’s used by professional athletes and so forth. We sold that company in the year 2000.

Dave Asprey:                     What did that do? That was like the cooling glove? What was it?

Peter Wasowski:              No, no. This was basically a piece of equipment that cools the joints after exercise. But the most important of it was that it could cool the joints in flights. Half of the games that professional athletes have are done away from home. Imagine they get injured in a game and then they climb on an airplane, once the plane gets up to 30,000 feet, the cabin is at 8,000 feet. That injury actually gets worse because the tissues expand at altitude. This was a piece of equipment that applied what we call a RICE effect. RICE stands for Rest Ice Compression in Elevation. It actually treated that injury in flight.

For an athlete that makes $10, $20 million dollars a year, that was a huge thing. We sold that company to Lee Steinberg. If you’ve seen the movie Jerry Maguire, that was modeled after his life. They’re doing quite well. The product is called Game Ready. They’re selling, I guess, I even saw it on Ebay for sale.

We sold that company, moved to the big island. When I noticed a tremendous increase in the arthritic pain that I had as well as my blood sugar was going up so I have to go to insulin injections pretty soon. I wanted to design something that actually address the cause rather than the symptom. I didn’t have anything else to do at that point. This was my focus.

The very, very first piece of equipment that I built was very crude. It had, basically, it was a old piece of air-conditioning device that I [replumped 00:08:01] to cool water rather than air and built a very crude prototype. But within a couple of weeks of using it, I actually saw the difference for the pain would go away, I would flush the pain pills down the toilet. For the first time in 30 years, my blood sugar came back to normal, which was a major shock.

I realized that I had something that was working and started using it extensibly on myself, then friends and neighbors. I was part of … I still belong to a Kennel club over there and members of the Kennel club would come and, Outrigger Kennel club. They reported great results.

Dave Asprey:                     How long have you lived in Hawaii?

Peter Wasowski:              Eighteen years.

Dave Asprey:                     You’re watching this on Facebook live right now, by the way, if you’re listening to show on iTunes, I’ve started broadcasting some of these live on Facebook. If you follow my Dave Asprey profile on Facebook, you’ll actually get these ahead of time. If you’re watching the YouTube channel, which is bulletproof.com/youtube, you can find the subscription link there. What Peter hasn’t told you is that he is 68 years old and he has lived in a sun-drenched part of the world for 18 years. You look, maybe 50s, in terms of your skin. Your skin is tanned but not overtanned. You don’t have wrinkles. Is your skin better since you started doing this? Have you just always been naturally really youthful? What happened? You don’t look your age.

Peter Wasowski:              Thank you. Actually, in February, I’ll be 69 on February 11th.

Dave Asprey:                     Unbelievable.

Peter Wasowski:              I think this has helped a lot. I’ve been doing it for a long time, of course. I think that and a healthy food and lifestyle definitely makes a huge difference. Everything that I’ve done is geared towards probably-active health. What happens normally, when we get sick, we go to a doctor and we hope that the doctor will find a pathway to health for us and sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t.

An interesting thing about ancient civilizations like ancient Hawaiians or some of the ancient indigenous cultures, the doctor was paid full salary when everyone in the village was healthy. Of course, he was being paid with wood, fish, food, whatever they were paying him. The minute somebody would get sick they would pay him less. What I wanted to design is a piece of technology that actually provide you with pro-active health rather than reactive health when you actually become a CEO of your own health. It seems like we found that technology and the people that use these, we have over a hundred of these right now throughout United States and we’re installing the first two in Europe in about a week and a half. All those people report pretty amazing results which is absolutely the most encouraging and rewarding experience for me.

I have a unique, maybe not so unique, but my own idea of what a definition of happiness is. It goes like this. If you want to be happy for five minutes, take a nap. If you want to be happy for two weeks, take a vacation. If you want to be happy from time to time, have a drink, Bulletproof water which is absolutely awesome, I love it. This is going to be part of the Vasper hydration system from now on. It has all the good stuff and none of the stuff that you don’t want to drink.

If you want to be happy continuously, keep creating positive difference in the lives of others. That’s really where the happiness comes from. You’re basically on the same tribe.

Dave Asprey:                     That’s why we’re doing what we’re doing, right?

Peter Wasowski:              Exactly.

Dave Asprey:                     I did a lot of research on Vasper before i even had a chance to meet you through Denzel, then strategic coach, and Joe Polish, who’s another friend also. We’ve run into each other there as well. I get to know you and I’d looked at your system even a couple of years ago going, “This is interesting but it seems a little expensive, it’s not a consumer grade. This is something that is meant to be at professional gyms facilities, physical therapists and maybe even a Pilates studio or something, where you’d come in, you do two or three sessions a week. You’re getting the equivalent of a couple of hours.

I know this sounds hard to believe but it’s equivalent to a couple of hours of intense cardio in about 20 minutes. The reason is the equivalent of that is that you get a lactic acid signal. Tell me if I’m translating some of this wrong but you get a lactic acid signal in the muscles that comes from a long endurance workout like that that then triggers cellular repair but because of the compression and the temperature changes, you’re amplifying the signal dramatically. A smaller amount of exercise equals a big signal so you’d get this incredible, rejuvenating thing happening systemically as a result of exercise.

Did I nail that?

Peter Wasowski:              Close, yeah. Basically, what we’re doing I bio-mimicking the physiology that naturally occurs in children. Whenever you see kids your age, whenever you see four, five, six, seven, eight year olds, you don’t see them walking. They’re always going full speed ahead. If you were to look inside their quad muscles, you’d see very highly concentrated lactic acid. The reason the concentration is high is because the body is short, the muscles are short. They, of course, use those muscles tremendously. They concentrate huge amounts of lactic acid.

The keyword here is concentration, not the amount. The concentration is what drives a very powerful signal to the pituitary gland, to the brain, requesting growth hormone to rebuild those muscles back to pre-exercise conditions. Children just do that naturally. Of course, they have a high level of growth hormones because they’re growing. They boost those hormone levels.

This is one of the reasons why a child is such a resilient being. If you bring a child to doctor with a meniscus tear or ligament tear, most of the time there’s really no medical intervention necessary. The child recovers very quickly on his own. We are actually bulletproof until we hit puberty. Once you hit puberty, of course, your body is taller, there’s more real estate here. You can no longer concentrate lactic acid to those levels because those muscles are longer. You also don’t have time to run around all day. You’re closer to your adult height so your natural hormone secretions are slowing down. Because of those three things, every 10 years, we lose 14% of our, what’s called, anabolic hormones, the hormones that rebuild our body, 14% every 10 years.

If you go to a medical professional and they check your hormone levels, they’ll say, “Well, guess what, you’re getting older.” The truth is that our hormones don’t decline because we age. We age because our hormones decline. The idea here was to see how we can increase the hormonal production without having to do Crossfit Insanity P90X or some of those very, very intense type of exercise that less than one percent of the people are doing. It, of course, has some injuries tied to it. It’s absolutely very, very tough to do. At my age, I would not be … even if I could do it, I would not be comfortable doing it.

Dave Asprey:                     There aren’t a lot of 69 year old crossfitters, that’s very true, or endurance runners. Any of the things that you can do until you’re 35 get progressively more difficult. I know a few people 50+ who do that. There are amazing people like, Mark [inaudible 00:15:56] been on the show and he still does a ton of exercise. Even he has switched his long, drawn out runs to a slower pace because he finally got better results.

I think the argument is, if you’re like me, my goal is to live to at least 180 years old. That’s not a joke, it’s not PR. I actually think it’s possible, actually, every damn thing I can to do it. One of the things is not destroying my knees. I’ve had three knee surgeries. I had them before I was 23. I have a screw in my right knee. I had arthritis on my knees since I was 14. It’s gone. I don’t have those problems. I’ve trekked the Himalayas and the Andes. I still though if I was to go play basketball for awhile. I’d probably have an unstable knee. I know how much it sucks to be limited in mobility like that.

How does the cooling and how does this affect from the Vasper work with bad joints or sore joints or thing like that? What’s the stress load that it’s putting on the body?

Peter Wasowski:              Excellent question and we’ll get into cooling. One thing I wanted to just briefly point out about intense exercise is that, I’ve done a lot of work with professional and amateur athletes. Of course, we all want to look awesome. A lot of these people that I come across, they, from the outside, their bodies look amazing, chiseled, beautiful bodies. But then, if you check their hormone panels, it’s like looking at a car that has 20 layers of paint and it’s rusting on the inside.

Many people don’t realize the physiological price you pay for running on pavement for two hours or doing very, very intense exercise that actually breaks down your body.

Dave Asprey:                     Without recovery.

Peter Wasowski:              Without recovery. Vasper is an antidote to that. Let’s get to cooling. Cooling is very, very important because what happens when we exercise is we normally sweat. In order for your body to sweat, there’s a tremendous amount of blood that has to be brought to the surface of the skin. Of course, the skin is the biggest organ in your body, it has six and a half million pores. Each one of us has a finite amount of blood on board which happens to be eight percent of your body weight. If you’re looking at a hundred pound person, you’re looking at eight pounds of blood inside that person, a little more than a gallon. If you exercise with intensity, you can actually shunt as much as almost 40% of that blood or close to it to the surface of the skin-

Dave Asprey:                     Just for cooling?

Peter Wasowski:              Just for cooling, just to push the sweat through the pores, which means you have less blood flow at the muscle level, and this is precisely why you have sore muscles for a day or two, because there is not enough blood there to remove the lactic acid. But also, what happens, which is even more important, is that as your core body temperature goes up and your blood temperature goes up, you’re releasing blood oxygen from the blood. Blood is mostly water.

What happens when we heat water, you can actually see the steam coming off of it. That’s the oxygen leaving the water. If you cool water, the opposite happens and the oxygen is absorbed in the water then, of course, you can freeze it then it turns to ice. When you exercise on a different scale, a similar thing happens with the blood stream. As the blood temperature goes up, it starts releasing blood oxygen. Blood oxygen is what the muscles live on. This is the fuel for the muscle tissue.

The less blood oxygen you have on board, the quicker you’ll reach a condition called, where you reach the VO2 max, your ability to metabolize oxygen. Once that happens, you can no longer perform. That’s hitting the wall in the athletic terms. When you’re before cooled doing a Vasper session, the idea there is not to lower core body temperature but to prevent your core body temperature from going up and preventing sweating.

When you prevent sweating, all of the blood flow that you want in the muscle tissue is there because you’re not sweating. It’s not at the surface of the skin. At the same time, the blood temperature itself is slightly cooler, much closer to your normal range. That means that all the blood oxygen that you need for the muscle tissue is inside the blood stream. That’s the reason for cooling.

Dave Asprey:                     When you cool cells as well, there is a distance electrons have to move inside the cell, the electron transport system, we used to call the chain but it’s really a diffused system more like a chain link fence than a chain. When you shrink the size of one of these, now I’m talking like a network engineer because it’s actually my background. In training, I used to run the webinar and internet engineering program at the University of California, and believe it or not, back in the early days with the internet. If you need to send something from here to there, it’s not a big deal if it takes one second to get there if you only send one thing. If you need to send something back and forth a billion times, that one second is now a billion seconds.

If you can shrink that one second to half a second, you saved an enormous amount of time because it’s amplified by a billion. When you shrink a cell by making it cooler, even just a little bit, the billions of electrons that flow through it actually flow through it more effectively and more efficiently. I think you’d get a cellular improvement there which is shown in better oxygen consumption. Your utilization of the air you breathe, you can measure in the gas that’s breathed out from your body.

Have you seen any other research or done any other research on effects of the cooling or just the entire Vasper system on mitochondrial size or density or performance or anything else on that neighborhood?

Peter Wasowski:              Yes, yes, absolutely. There’s a lot of work that’s been done in that area especially with people that suffer from heat sensitive disease like, for example, multiple sclerosis or Parkinson’s. What you described is fascinating because that’s exactly what happens. Each one of the neurons has a small gap in between. That gap in called node of Ranvier. Ranvier was the French anatomist that discovered this. What happens is that a normal core body temperature that pulses only two milliseconds is very small. If you lower the core body temperature by very slight, about one and a half degrees Fahrenheit, you actually increase the amplitude by 400% to eight milliseconds.

What happens is you end up with what’s called a salutatory conduction. That drives, you can actually jump over the damaged neuron or you can amplify a much, much stronger signal to the fast switch muscle fibers and perform much much better. The results we’ve seen with heat sensitive disease people like [inaudible 00:22:46] are absolutely off the charts. People that have fibromyalgia and so forth. This is precisely what you have described. That’s what happens. We increase the amplitude of the electrical impulse and our body is an electrochemical device.

Dave Asprey:                     It is interesting that you talk about fibromyalgia. If you’ve been listening for a while, you might have heard me alk about this. I’ve been diagnosed with chronic lyme disease, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and toxic mold poisoning. I believe that all of those symptoms can be and usually are tied to environmental toxic mold exposure. I filmed a documentary about that called “Moldy”. Interviewed some of the top experts in the field as well as people like me who had been infected by it, sleeping in a bedroom that had slime behind one of the walls, just things that are non-obvious but have a huge impact.

All of those conditions, and also MS, ALS, Parkinson’s have at their core a mitochondrial weakness. Your mitochondria stopped working. The batteries or the power plants in your body, they don’t work. “Head Strong”, the book where i’ve spent the last two years researching this is how do you make sure that the weak mitochondria die and the strong ones either get bigger, more efficient or replicate themselves? You can have more power, literally more power. Like you’re saying, you can train the body to have more power. Even at the 40 years, I was then, neurofeedback institute that I’ve opened up in Seattle, one of the four different things that we do for your brain is we increase the voltage potential in your brain, literally teach the cells in your brain to make more power so that you can use that for thinking. That’s a local effect.

Are we teaching our muscle cells to make more power when we’re using the Vasper? What’s the effect where the cooling is versus everywhere else? What are we doing to the mitochondria there?

Peter Wasowski:              We’re definitely increasing the profusion. There’s a tremendous amount of blood that is channeled through the entire body including the compressed muscles. There’s a huge detox that happens. The reason Crossfit Insanity P90X, those very, very intense anaerobic exercise, actually produces benefits. It’s because it forces this massive flow of blood through the body that can only happen during very intense exercise. We’re basically biomimic and exactly the same physiology on Vasper, except you’re sitting on a chair. The oldest person using Vasper is 97 years old. The youngest is 10 years old.

Then, we have Navy Seals, astronauts, professional athletes in the middle, so we can adjust the software to each one of these people to give them a benefit of very, very strong anaerobic exercise. They’re safe and they’re doing a low impact type of workout.

Dave Asprey:                     I’ve had a couple of people ask what’s the difference between this and Kaatsu, which is another compression technology. Can you talk about Kaatsu and Vasper in similarities and differences?

Peter Wasowski:              Kaatsu is a very innovative type of exercise. This is something that actually got this whole what’s called BFR. BFR stands for blood flow restriction exercise movement going. The gentleman, Yoshiaki was a brilliant man who was a body builder at one point. What he discovered is that in Japan, when you sit, you don’t sit on a chair like we’re sitting. You’re sitting, you’re basically on the floor and your feet are under you. He discovered at one point that if you sit there for about half an hour or so, you touch your quads, that the hardness and firmness of those quads is very similar to what it feels like when you do, you pump iron for a while.

That’s how Kaatsu came to being. The Kaatsu uses a very small part of what Vasper is all about. They’re basically the compression at a very high pressure level. They go about, I think outputs of 250 millimeters of mercury, which is intense pressure, it’s basically [turnika 00:27:12] type exercise. It does produce results but it takes a strong willed, determined person to do it on a regular basis simply because it’s quite intense. I wanted to design something that could be used by a 97 year old. You would never see a 97 year old, perhaps using Kaatsu, on a regular basis. It’s great for athletes who compete and some of the athletes use it.

Dave Asprey:                     It’s a more intense thing. The Kaatsu guys were at the Bulletproof Conference which is cool. You were there as well.

Peter Wasowski:              I met Yoshiaki Sato, a very, very nice man. He’s the same age as me and looks like incredible hulk.

Dave Asprey:                     He’s doing something right. You’re using chilled water pressure and the Kaatsu system uses an air pressure?

Peter Wasowski:              They use air, correct.

Dave Asprey:                     Is it also cooled?

Peter Wasowski:              No.

Dave Asprey:                     No, okay. It’s basically, it’s blood flow restriction but without the temperature changes.

Peter Wasowski:              That’s right.

Dave Asprey:                     I haven’t done Kaatsu yet although it’s been on my list for a long time. I can tell you that the chilling has a huge effect just from the exercise that we did yesterday. It’s very different than what I was expecting. As long time listeners know, I have an ice bath with a digital temperature control. There’s a cryotherapy chamber right underneath where we’re sitting, that uses liquid nitrogen. I’m comfortable with using cold as one of the main biological signals that come into us.

If you look at biohacking itself, the definition of biohacking is changing the environment around you and inside of you so that you have full control of your own biology so you can do whatever you want to do. The big variables in your environment are temperature, light, food intake, the time of day matters like there’s circadian biology. Then, there’s emotional stress and physiological stress. What you’re doing is you’re tweaking physiological stress, and I forgot air, air pressure and air composition is important, like how much hydrogen, how much nitrogen and what pressure and things because you can vary those. EMFs I guess would be the other ones, electromagnetic frequencies, as well as light.

That’s the set of things we can manipulate. By doing intensity, physiological pressure, as well as temperature at the same time and controlling them precisely, I think you’ve created a unique workaround for this problem of how do I get enough intensity without overworking the system so that you’d get the healing signal without all of the joint stress and all the other time that it takes to do this.

Peter Wasowski:              Correct. It’s amazing that you’ve mentioned all of these things because all of these things including EMFs is addressed at Vasper.

Dave Asprey:                     Talk about EMFs in Vasper, that’s interesting.

Peter Wasowski:              The EMFs, when you’re in Vasper, you’re barefoot. You’re barefoot and you are on your feet on brass plates that are being cooled.

Dave Asprey:                     Very cold brass plates.

Peter Wasowski:              Yeah. From EMFs point of view, there was a very amazing scientist back in middle to late 60s into the 70s, his name was Robert Becker.

Dave Asprey:                     Yeah, this is one of the primary books on biohacking that got me into this years ago, okay.

Peter Wasowski:              There you go.

Dave Asprey:                     “Electromagentism in Life”, I believe it was called.

Peter Wasowski:              He wrote two books. One is called, “Body Electric”.

Dave Asprey:                     That’s right.

Peter Wasowski:              The second is called “Cross Currents”.  My understanding is he was twice nominated for a Nobel prize of medicine.

Dave Asprey:                     Should have gotten one.

Peter Wasowski:              He should have got one. He actually did a lot of research on EMFs. He was trying to find cure for arthritis, which to this day we don’t have a cure.

Dave Asprey:                     Other than don’t eat night shades, for 20% of arthritis anyway.

Peter Wasowski:              What he realized is that the arthritis took off on a very steep curve in early 60s when polymers were invented. When people invented synthetic clothing like nylon shorts, plastic, nylon carpets, then we would walk around and pick up this massive amounts of static electricity which is [oxilant 00:31:19] inflammatory energy. Then you go outside in rubber-soled shoes and you don’t have a way to discharge the static electricity to the ground. Different types of other immune disease like arthritis, fibromyalgia, lupus and so forth, that went on a very steep curve in the Western world.

At that point apparently, in those times, he traveled around and he went to India where people who were … you have 800-plus million people, many of them working barefoot with cotton clothing, they didn’t have these issues. He realized that when you actually download the static electricity to the ground, you can equalize this electromagnetic load in your body. This goes way back thousands of years into the oldest form of medicine known as ayurveda. Ayurvedic medicine became, originated in India over … it’s close between 8,000 or 9,000, 10,000 years old.

Back then, when you had a patient come to an ayurvedic doctor complaining of joint pains, the doctor would dig a hole in the ground and bury him up to here. After some time, half an hour or whatever, he would take him out and the pain is gone. What happened? The static electricity got discharged into the ground. Negative electrons were absorbed from the ground and your electromagnetic load was absolutely optimized.

Dave Asprey:                     All of that is mitochondrial, by the way. This is in the book.

Peter Wasowski:              It’s 100% mitochondrial. You’re totally right. This is what was designed at the Vasper. The reason you are on brass plates-

Dave Asprey:                     They’re grounded.

Peter Wasowski:              They’re grounded.

Dave Asprey:                     I didn’t even know that. That’s brilliant.

Peter Wasowski:              Yes. You have water going underneath it. Of course, water will pick up, and all of that is going to the tank which is grounded to the electrical system. You are actually discharging the electrical load. Most people that I see right now wear synthetic clothing when they exercise, spandex, all of that stuff. It looks great but when you exercise in it, it creates massive amounts of static electricity.

When you’re on Vasper, you’re downloading that during that period. The reason we cool your feet is because what happens when you’re under a hot blanket? What do you do? You stick your foot out, right? You want to … Your feet are your thermostats and radiators at the same time. We found the right temperature gradient to cool your feet. You also have a lot vascular beds, a lot of vascularity in your feet, so that you actually, your thermostat is at the right setting so you can perform better.

Dave Asprey:                     You’ve been down to the Bulletproof Coffee Shop in Sta. Monica, right?

Peter Wasowski:              I have.

Dave Asprey:                     We have a custom-made table. I went to great lengths to get this thing made. When you sit at this table, you might not even know if you get a chance to be there. On the top of it, there’s this big … it looks like a circuit board with hexagons on embedded metal in the table. It actually wraps around underneath the edge of the wood, goes down to the metal frame of the table, and it’s sitting on a giant piece of steel that we had installed, and it’s all electrically grounded. When people are sitting, working at the table or just eating the grass fed sliders or whatever they order, they are actually touching the table and they’re electrically grounded. They’re dumping their extra static charge not even knowing it a lot of them. The idea is to build stuff like that in the environment. I have no clue that you built that into your device. That is so neat, I love that.

Peter Wasowski:              Thank you.

Dave Asprey:                     Now, people are getting electrically grounded which helps inflammation, they’re getting the cooling and the motion. The program that I ran last night, we did a seven-minute warm-up. Then we did some 15 and 30-seconds pretty intense intervals, some sprints with a minute or two of very low activity between them. I probably could have done more but I was winded and feeling a little bit … It feel like a runner’s high when I was done with it, like I would feel coming out of the cryotherapy chamber, which is only three minutes but has no exercise, where you just get an opiate response from endorphins.

How do people feel when they’re done with Vasper and how long does the feeling last?

Peter Wasowski:              When you’re done with Vasper, you basically feel rejuvenated because … for several reasons. There was a tremendous amount of blood that you pushed through the body. Of course, each one of the cells in the body works on osmosis. All of the nutrients go into a cell via osmosis. All of the waste goes out of the cell via osmosis. There has to be a certain intra-cellular osmotic pressure to make that exchange happen easily. To do that, your profusion has to be very high.

This is why people who could do intense anaerobic exercise are relatively healthy unless they get hurt doing it. You’re getting a similar feeling here without paying the physiological price, without sweating, without being tired. Normally, when you exercise intensely for an hour, it takes you the same amount of time to recover for your core body temperature to come back to normal for your profusion, everything comes back to normal. Most of us don’t like the side effects of exercise. I happen to be one of those people.

What I care very much about as far as living into over a hundred years old, is you cannot afford to destroy your body inside. This is the stuff you don’t see from outside. This is your joints, your kidneys, your liver, your lungs. You have to keep that in relatively decent shape. The only way you can do that is without, basically, overtraining. Vasper is anti-overtraining device. The idea is to provide you with this benefit of intense exercise without actually paying the physiological price.

Dave Asprey:                     I’ve seen this a lot because I’ve done … I still do some coaching with CEO types, but very little because I’m spending a lot of time as a CEO. But in the earlier days of Bulletproof, I would maintain 10 or 12 one-on-one coaching clients. I see this a lot. You get these type A entrepreneurs, very successful people growing companies. If you kick ass at one thing, you want to kick association at everything.

I’m going to do a couple of Ironman triathlons, I’ll run a marathon, I’m going to fly to Japan the day after, you give a speech, this super intense thing. I was the same way. I made $6 million when I was 26, lost it when I was 28, and had that Silicon Valley thing. You end up driving and driving and it turns out that if you’re going to perform really well, you have to recover in an equal amount. Being good at recovery was never something that I’ve been taught in my life. I had to learn how to recover.

Can someone who’s probably overtraining, because they’re overtraining in their business life or in their family life, because they have unhealthy relationships or essentially, the total physiological and emotional stress load is way too high because they’re overtraining on top of overemotional training, is Vasper a recovery technology that you can use on top of too much physical training so that you recover faster? Should you replace some training with Vasper?

Peter Wasowski:              You can do both. You could definitely use it as a recovery mode. We work with hockey players for example. When they finish a hockey game, they’re basically, they feel like almost at the edge of death. We want to recover them, especially at night, they cannot sleep after that. There’s hundreds and hundreds of different protocol setting that are either for recovery or for training. If you use it for training, it should be the first thing you do in the morning. You could do both.

Dave Asprey:                     Okay, you could do both. That’s cool. Someone could literally finish crossfit workout and then hop on a Vasper and it would help them recover better from a crossfit workout?

Peter Wasowski:              That’s right. They can also … what they should do is the Vasper before the crossfit workout and their crossfit workout would be much more efficient.

Dave Asprey:                     No kidding. That’s cool. Because they’re cool?

Peter Wasowski:              Because they’re hormonally-optimized. One important thing to realize is what happens hormonally. Again, if we go back to a young child, when you’re dealing with four, five, six seven, eight year-olds, the reason we love being with those people is because they don’t have depression, they don’t require energy drink when they get up, they are just wonderful people to be with. They are hormonally-balanced.

If you look at anyone who is not healthy, the one thing that is … the perfect measuring device is their hormones. If you look at their hormone levels, the growth hormone, testosterone, DHEA, IGF-1, the hormones that actually rebuild your body, you can actually see huge differences. For athletes, for example, if you look at athletes who do synthetic hormones which is not legal, many of them don’t realize the physiological price that they pay for it. This is something we have seen with baseball a lot. Baseball is pretty intense sport that requires two things, very quick recovery especially for the joints, but also increased visual acuity. The growth hormone actually helps them in both levels.

This is why you’ve heard about Barry Bonds, they wear out, all those people because they actually use … a lot of them use growth hormone to recover and also to increase their visual acuity so they can see the ball better. Once you start using synthetic hormone, it basically turns of your own pituitary gland from making your own hormone because it’s flooded by synthetic hormone. It doesn’t need to produce anymore of your own hormone. The pituitary gland is the master gland in your body. It actually controls that hormone production downstream. It actually triggers testosterone, THEA, IGF-1. The other hormones that rebuild your body are triggered by the pituitary.

Once you stop using … once the pituitary goes on strike because you’re using synthetic hormone, then of course, you’re not making testosterone so you have to go to steroids. It’s not a choice. You have to start using steroids to have testosterone. You’d lose what’s called a hormonal balance. This is when you see athletes doing crazy things. They become … they have what’s called the Roid rage, which is … once your hormonal balance is out of [kilt 00:42:07] then your emotional balance follows it.

Dave Asprey:                     That’s totally true. The Roid rage was mostly from the synthetic hormones, not from bio-identical testosterone.

Peter Wasowski:              Yeah. I don’t have huge experience with different types of hormone replacement therapy. I just simply know that if you can stimulate your own hormonal increase, then you’re not dealing with the side effects. What we’re doing is we’re stimulating your own growth hormone which means what we call a downstream anabolic effect, not only doesn’t turn off, it’s actually intensified.

When we measure those hormone levels on people, we’re seeing their testosterone levels go up the IGF, the other hormones that actually would build the body go up at the same time. It’s like finding a backdoor to the endocrine system. That’s the beautiful thing about not relying on something from the outside.

Dave Asprey:                     You’re better off to tweak the environment so your body makes hormones at the level of a 30-year old when you’re 200. I think you want to be able to do that. So far, that’s been challenging for most anti-ageing professionals. You’ve got some results, a mutual friend who’s, I think, 72, who is now, basically has 30-year-old testosterone levels. Tons of energy, sharp mind and all that. You’re cool doing something right. In my case, the hypothalamus sends signals to the pituitary, the pituitary sends signals to the adrenals, and then there’s a whole feedback system between all three of those.

When I was 26, I was 300 pounds or maybe, I was only 280 then but I was fat. I was really tired and just dragging all these weird symptoms and was financially successful that coats the pain on the outside but just falling apart in the inside. I went to the doctor and I had tons of estrogen almost no testosterone at all. I was aromatising because I’d been obese and my thyroid levels were very, very low and my adrenals were shot. Essentially, every hormone made by the pituitary wasn’t working before I did any bioidentical replacement. Taking thyroid and taking testosterone really it just improves it. It got me parts of my brain back. A lot of the bio-hacking I have done have replaced that. I actually take less thyroid now than I used to.

I went off testosterone for about three years and could keep my levels reasonably okay but I went them to be like late 20s not mid-30s even though I’m in mid-40s now. I do bio-identical testosterone. I do it under a physician’s guide so I keep my levels at about 750 which is where I want them to be without [inaudible 00:44:58], I’m really careful they’ll drop to 600, maybe even 500. I think that’s not quite where I want to be for a long term growth. We’ll see what happens with Vasper. Maybe I can go off the testosterone, we’ll see.

Peter Wasowski:              I think you can possibly reduce it or go off. Vasper is not perhaps a total replacement for any hormone replacement therapy, but actually, it’s a great complement. You can then optimize it especially if you have a physician working with you.

Dave Asprey:                     I want to switch gears a little bit. You’ve done some unusual things in your life, and you mentioned that you moved to Hawaii after you sold your first company. You moved to Hawaii and you lived on an organic farm, similar to me. I’m not in Hawaii but I’m on a island and I use all the, it’s snowed in right now but we have a garden that feeds the whole family and had a little farm stand and all. Why did you … you could have gone anywhere you wanted, why did you move to Hawaii? Why did you get an organic farm? What made you make those decisions?

Peter Wasowski:              The initial decisions was driven by the school for our children. We found this pretty incredible school on the big island, it’s called Hawaii Preparatory Academy. We always loved Hawaii. We always love going there. I love the culture. I had the type of work, I had a business at that point that was in Europe that didn’t require me to be there, and I just sold the company. It was a good time to do this. We wanted our kids to live in a natural environment and learn about food and all of these things. It actually happened, and our daughter loves it so much that she’s still there and doesn’t want to move, doesn’t want to leave.

There is a certain draw from this indigenous culture type spirit that you have in a place like Hawaii. This whole spirit of aloha that people talk about is actually there. We connect. I have friends that are … I don’t see as often as I did when I was there all the time but whenever we connect again, it’s just like we saw each other yesterday. In fact, the daughter of my next door neighbor finished business school and the first thing she did is to call me to, she’s in California asking for a job. She’s now working for us. We maintain those very close relationships. It’s easy to do over there. Some people come to Hawaii and they leave after some months or a year or two. For me, it was just like coming home again.

Dave Asprey:                     You just felt a draw to that?

Peter Wasowski:              Yeah.

Dave Asprey:                     You mentioned California. I forgot to say this but, behind Singularity University on the NASA aims property there, I guess it’s officially [inaudible 00:48:09] Park or is it [inaudible 00:48:10]?

Peter Wasowski:              No, it’s Mountain View.

Dave Asprey:                     It’s Mountain View, okay. I used to live about five minutes from one of Vasper’s headquarters. It’s right near Google right there on Highway 101, ground zero, Silicon Valley. There’s this giant hangar and you’re right next to the big hangar, right behind Singularity University which Peter Diamandis runs. Peter’s a friend. I really respect and admire, wrote abundance in bold and basically got the x price off the ground. Did that x price off the ground, that was a good … Hopefully they’re laughing on Facebook.

Peter Wasowski:              That was literally exactly what happened.

Dave Asprey:                     You’re there but you’ve got astronauts coming by and you’ve got a Vasper … was it Vasper Central, Vasper labs? What do you call it there?

Peter Wasowski:              That’s where the headquarters is. This is a dick device. We have headquarters at the NASA Research Park. It’s about 400 feet South of one of the biggest hangars in the world. That hangar has amazing history, used to be used for blimps, dirigibles that they use in World War I. The hangar is so big that when it was covered it created its own weather. It actually was sunny outside but it rained, there were clouds and raining inside the hangar. They found after a while that they found asbestos in the ground water because the water was running down the side of the skin so the skin had to be taken off and that was going to be replaced.

That where all of the … a lot of creative things, amazing creative things are happening. We were right at the heart of Silicon Valley. We do work with astronauts. We have a system at the astronaut gym at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, used by astronauts. Currently, we have a Space Act agreement, which is a research agreement with NASA, to develop exercise technology for astronauts in the International Space Station and for deep space travel.

The human body is basically the weakest link in space exploration. We have equipment. We’ve sent probes to Mars and deep into space without any problem but without a human being inside. Once you put an astronaut inside a space craft, after three or four or five weeks there, a 40-year-old astronaut has a strength of an 80-year-old man. They’re losing bone tissue, muscle tissue. There has to be … they exercise two or three hours or longer everyday to slow down the decay of their body. We turn into a different species when we go into microgravity.

There’s a tremendous amount of research going into that space to make sure that our body can withstand extended flight. Our goal is to reduce the requirement of exercise to perhaps 20 minutes instead of three hours plus.

Dave Asprey:                     That frees up a lot of astronaut time to do other things.

Peter Wasowski:              It does. The amazing is that other people like Space X and private individuals who are definitely very results-oriented are looking at this as well.

Dave Asprey:                     I’ve chatted with Peter and some of the other leaders in private space flight, I’m very fortunate to get time with these people, talked with [inaudible 00:51:42] Jane about this. I believe that for us to make it to Mars, there are some human upgrades that are required. I’d ask questions like, “Okay we can get a spaceship there but how do you protect people from mitochondrial damage that happens in these environments?”

Peter Wasowski:              Precisely.

Dave Asprey:                     Bottom line is we’ve got to hack our mitochondria. I referenced a few of those kinds of things in “Head Strong”. The other thing that’s happening in space travel right now is that they’re finding out that when you spend time without gravity that your cerebral spinal fluid doesn’t get signals it needs so it actually gets stronger and stronger inside the head and actually shrinks the brain. They’re seeing permanent changes, negative changes in visual acuity after just six months in flight.

If you take someone for two years on the way to Mars, halfway there, their brain is going to be strung. It’s going to get cognitive dysfunction and they’ll go blind. Do you think that the kind of things that you’re doing would affect cerebral spinal fluid as well as blood flow? Do you have any data on that at all? For people listening, your cerebral spinal fluid washes your brain at night. This is one of those things that if you can do anything to make it work better, you’ll change your performance on Earth but it might be the difference between seeing and not seeing in space. Do you think your system can do that?

Peter Wasowski:              It’ll be presumptuous for me to say yes the system could do it. I think it can make a big difference in the entire physiology which could include and would include, obviously, the CSF or cerebral spinal fluid, as well as blood and everything else. There’s more research that needs to go there. I have designed, actually, a very specific piece of equipment to 100% address exactly what you’re talking about.

Dave Asprey:                     Of course, you have.

Peter Wasowski:              That design has not yet been put into a prototype. This is my hope that we can do that with Vasper. Basically, what we’re talking about is if you are an astronaut going up, we would weigh you with your body mass and your weight on the ground and actually check exactly how much body mass you’re pressing against the ground at gravity, and then take cast molds of your legs and design a very specific piece of equipment that would pressurize the vascular beds at the right place at the right time. Another piece of equipment that would slow down the blood flow so you can get the valves to work again.

Dave Asprey:                     External counter pulsation.

Peter Wasowski:              Exactly. This is something that could precisely do what you just described. It hasn’t yet been developed into a prototype and tested but the idea is there.

Dave Asprey:                     If you’re listening to this, if you’re going, “these guys are such geeks”, here’s what’s happening. In 20 years, the stuff that Peter just talked about will be available widely and cheaply because we’ll figure out either it works or it doesn’t. If it works, it’ll flow down. A lot of people don’t know that many of the innovations in your kitchen came from the Space Shuttle research program. Things like teflon, which actually has negative health effects, some substantial ones especially if you heat it above 400 degrees. Things like-

Peter Wasowski:              [crosstalk 00:54:49].

Dave Asprey:                     They’re bad for you, right? It’s also created a lot of pollution things, DuPont, we know about you. Regardless of all that stuff, so much of what we do today came from pushing boundaries. The whole point of Bulletproof Radio is I want to interview people whoa re pushing boundaries and figure out what boundaries you’re pushing. There’s another one you’re doing aside from the cooling and compression with Vasper. What I want to know though is what makes you push boundaries like this? Tell me what you do in a normal day as a maverick inventor, biohacker guy. What time do you wake up?

Peter Wasowski:              I wake up at 5:00 or earlier, 5:00 in the morning. I like to do the meditation. There are several other things that I do. Most people don’t realize that before computers, we wrote things down with our hand. We wrote in cursive. There’s a very interesting connection between your handwriting cursive and your brain. It actually generates a very specific balance. I do actually write in cursive. There’s a phenomenal book that you can download for free online. The book is called “Thought Power”.

Dave Asprey:                     Okay, “Thought Power”.

Peter Wasowski:              “Thought Power”.

Dave Asprey:                     The link will be in the show notes for this.

Peter Wasowski:              I’ve actually transcribed this book. This is part of my therapy. I’m almost done with it. I write that every morning. It’s amazing therapy.

Dave Asprey:                     Just that one book? You actually copied the book.

Peter Wasowski:              I copied the book in cursive, yeah.

Dave Asprey:                     Okay. How many times have you copied it or just one time?

Peter Wasowski:              I’m almost done with the first time. I think if I do it again, it’ll be a different book. The whole idea is to write in cursive rather than punch keyboard.

Dave Asprey:                     Interesting.

Peter Wasowski:              There is a tremendous thing that happens. It feels great. I look forward to doing that. I do my exercise and I do Vasper. We eat some pretty amazing food.

Dave Asprey:                     Are you on a special diet of any sort?

Peter Wasowski:              I’m not. The form of medicine that actually resonates with me better that anything else is the ayurvedic medicine. Again, this was done over ten, thousands and thousands of years. It was done with a purpose of creating results because if you didn’t create results, you were not rewarded for the results. Again, ayurvedic doctor was getting paid full salary when everyone under his care was healthy. That was the whole idea.

This is what I love doing. This is the type of philosophy that I aspire to. When you talk about CEOs and people that are driven to succeed, this is a very interesting concept that we see in birds and animals. Whenever you see a flock of birds, they’re flying in those formation and the bird that is the leading bird has the shortest life span because he has to break the air and create the space for others where they are basically going behind.

Dave Asprey:                     That’s like the person who wakes up earliest in the morning?

Peter Wasowski:              Possibly.

Dave Asprey:                     Just kidding.

Peter Wasowski:              That bird actually doesn’t … has the shortest life span as well. There’s a competition for that space, just like there’s competition among CEOs and athletes and so forth to be the best they can. The whole idea is to do that with intelligence, to balance it and not kill your body inside, but actually do something that does give you that edge with a certain amount of wisdom and balance behind it. That’s what, I think, came from India. There’s an ayurvedic college Emeryville right next to Berkeley that I go to quite often. It’s called Vedika Global.

They do amazing programs online as well and teach you how to eat and what foods to eat. I think, what you’re doing with diet is pretty phenomenal. Again, I can’t stop thinking this thing up but it actually tastes amazingly good. If you look at what you put in it, it’s exactly what you need. It’s exactly what you need not to just waterload your body because if you drink too much water, you can actually die from it. You can actually kill yourself with water.

If you drink sweet water like a sugar water, that’s like 12 teaspoons of sugar dissolved in it, which takes your body into acidic state and it actually drains your calcium. It does all kinds of great stuff. This feels good and it feels good afterwards. Definitely part of our-

Dave Asprey:                     We’ll get that into the training facility as some astronauts drinking it maybe. Other people can come to … your facility in Mountain View there is open to the public now or you’re about to open it? What the-

Peter Wasowski:              It’s open to the public. Vasper stands for vascular performance, that’s where the name came from. If you go to vasper.com, you can actually schedule yourself online.

Dave Asprey:                     There are hundreds of thousands of listeners in Silicon Valley. I’m from there and this kind of research is particularly interesting to software developers. People who are actually really willing to just say, “You know what? There is no moral benefit to doing more work than is necessary to solve the problem.” If you write code, the most elegant code is the single line of code that does everything. It’s not 25 lines of code.

Peter Wasowski:              Exactly.

Dave Asprey:                     If you’re doing the same thing when you’re controlling your own biology, what is the one thing I could do that would accommodate or accomplish the most goals in the least amount of time? That’s why I think this approach has just taken off, first in Silicon valley, and it’s big on Wall Street and stuff. That’s why I think you’re located in a great location. You might have a line out the door from people who listen on their way into work. You’re right off the freeway too. I know that neighborhood so well. It smelled stomping ground so it’s cool.

Peter Wasowski:              Yeah, it’s amazing. Thank you for this. This is actually amazing. Many people don’t realize that water is actually where your blood comes from.

Dave Asprey:                     What do you mean? That the plasma-

Peter Wasowski:              Blood is mostly water.

Dave Asprey:                     That’s true.

Peter Wasowski:              If you have the right water and fat is what you need for your brain. This is amazing combination of the right things that you should be putting into your mouth.

Dave Asprey:                     There’s something called exclusion zone water. We have Gerald Pollack at the Bulletproof Conference. I don’t know if you saw his talk when you were there. Gerald Pollack really discovered this. It turns out when water is in a biological system, it’s structured in a different way. Your mitochondria need water that is not water that comes out of the sink. They actually have to convert it by making infrared light inside the mitochondria in order to make the water so that it’s less viscous, so that it flows better.

One of the ways you can make exclusion zone water is it happens at the zone where water sticks to lipid membranes. That’s where we have microdroplets of fat water in there. The idea is you’re getting the actual benefits of brain octane which converts directly to ketones, zero sugar. What I think, the reason I feel it very, very strongly, I think that it’s likely, there’s a formation of exclusion zone water. I haven’t had a chance to test that. I’m talking about ways to do it. This is very cutting edge water chemistry. We don’t know, but all I know is I drink it it and I feel good, maybe more good than I would normally feel than if I just took a little bit of brain octane oil in the same amount. You take a one gram capsule in the capsules, you feel that but it’s different than drinking it dispersed in water.

Who knows? I’m pleased that it works the way it does, we’ll put it that way.

Peter Wasowski:              It feels awesome.

Dave Asprey:                     Now, I’m checking the time here. It looks like we’re almost up to the end of the show. Let’s see how people are doing on Facebook. There’s a bunch of people hanging in there. Let’s see, there’s a question that I’d like to ask you. This is a question that I’ve asked every guest on the show.

If someone came to you tomorrow, based on your entire life, not just what you’re doing with Vasper, and said, “Look, I want to perform better at everything that I do”, what are the three most important piece of advice you’d have for me? What would you offer them?

Peter Wasowski:              The first advice is you have to move. Our bodies were designed to move. If you don’t move, you don’t live. Whenever I see people in those little scooters and whatever, I see somebody who is going to their grave faster. Movement is extremely important.

The second thing that is, perhaps even more important, is what does inside your mouth. The Bulletproof diet, I’ve been to your Bulletproof Coffee Shop, it’s a completely different experience than going some place and throwing something into your stomach. You actually feel rejuvenated afterwards. We do need to get smart about what we consume because you are what you eat.

Then, the third thing would be how you think about life. There’s this book, “Thought Power”, actually, it’s amazing because it teaches you how much change in your life and in others you can influence just by controlling your thoughts and realizing the amount of energy and power that you can change inside yourself and how you can actually influence others so all of us live in a better-connected world. All of us are connected. The idea is, I love what you do, this biohacking is a great antidote to just taking a pill and thinking that’s going to help. Very often, it may help somebody who sells the pill but not the person who consumes it.

Dave Asprey:                     There’s a big industry of that, right?

Peter Wasowski:              Right. I think we’re on the same tribe as far as what we’re doing and it’s all about creating positive difference in the lives of others. Those three things, moving, right food, and positive thoughts. The ayurvedic medicine has a very interesting thing about food that applies to Bulletproof as well. They basically said that if the food is right, no medicine is necessary. If the food is wrong, no medicine will help. I, definitely, have always admired the work you’ve done, and, obviously, the results you’ve created for yourself and others.

Dave Asprey:                     I really appreciate that. I appreciate your knowledge and wisdom. One of the things that I maybe don’t talk about enough on Bulletproof Radio is learning from people with a lot more experience than you. You’re almost 69, I’m 44, so you’ve been around the block a few times more than I have. Probably made a lot more mistakes than I have yet. If I can point some of my mistakes by learning from yours or share that with a couple of hundred thousand people, maybe we’ll all benefit from that. It’s always fun for me to get to interview someone with a lot more experience than I have which is great.

Thanks for being on Bulletproof Radio. I really appreciate it. Where can people find out more about Vasper aside from going to your place in Mountain View? Vasper.com if I remember right?

Peter Wasowski:              Yeah, vasper.com. If you go to vasper.com and you want to, if you live in, obviously, not close to Mountain View, we have some commercial facilities that gives Vasper. You can actually find out where they are. At this moment, it’s the United States and Canada. Starting next week, we will have two in Europe, one in Poland, one in United Kingdom in England. Hopefully, that’s going to keep on expanding. Vasper.com is the place. You can send an email to an information at vasper. If you have questions, I will be happy to respond.

Dave Asprey:                     I would encourage you to, if this is interesting, find a place near you, go give it a try. They usually will let you use it for an amount of money less than a massage or maybe a little bit more than a yoga class, but it’s not outrageous. These are not meant to be, consumer-grade unless you’re a very, very successful consumer maybe.

If it works and you’ll love it, you’ll soon find that you want to go to your local gym and just say, “Guys, you need to put one of these in.” That’s how we drive change in workout facilities. My take on this is, look, if I have an hour, I could go get on an electrical machine and just praying for an hour, prayed. But what if i did a 20-minute workout and I got way more benefits that I would have in the hour, and I freed up 40 minutes. I could take that 40 minutes so I could go play with my kids. I could write another blog post for you. I could just meditate or I could do some neuro feedback. There’s so many things you can do. The world is more abundant and more interesting and more rich now than it ever has been in all of history.

Despite all that whatever people are saying about 2016 or whatever current negative news where you’re in, there is so much cool stuff. This bone in my hand has more compute power than it was on the planet when I was born. It’s the coolest time ever to be alive so why would you waste it doing inefficient exercise? I don’t get it. There is no merit in suffering more than it is necessary to get the results you want. You should minimize suffering. When you do that, you’ll maximize what you have to get back to the rest of the world. That’s why I wanted Peter on the show today.

Peter, thanks again.

Peter Wasowski:              Thank you, David. Thank you.

Dave Asprey:                     If you like the show or you like this on Facebook, since we did a live broadcast on this one, there’s a couple things that you could do. One is go to iTunes and subscribe and leave a five star review. It makes more difference than you would possibly imagine. It’s just a way to thanks for this kind of interview. You can also go to the Facebook page. There’s a Bulletproof page and I always put the podcast up on the day of Asprey, a public person page Facebook. If you’re not following that, I’d appreciate if you went there and just click follow or like or whatever it is you click on Facebook for that, so that I can notify you about these.

All right, on that note, thanks everyone.

Peter Wasowski:              You’re much … I’m learning from you just like listening to all this stuff. Thank you.

Dave Asprey:                     I’m fortunate to be surrounded by a lot of smart people who tell me good stuff. All right. Thank you all, have a wonderful day.

 

 

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Dave Asprey:                     If you haven’t heard about the benefits of Camel milk, it’s totally worth your time to look into this as something you could add to your Bulletproof diet. Camel milk is something that I learned about from Walid, the owner of Desert Farms who’s the largest seller of Camel Milk out there.

Camel Milk got its start in the autism community because it’s non-reactive, the way Camel milk is. Now, it’s just become one of the new super foods that’s out there. One of the reasons is that it’s full Lactoferrin, which is a natural substance that’s present in mother’s milk that has antibacterial, antiviral, antiparasitic, anticancer properties. It doesn’t have lactose or Lactoglobulin. The stuff that makes lactose intolerant people unable to process milk from cows. Desert Farms’ camel milk is also organic. It’s tested for heavy metals and actually 900 different contaminants. It is [Guido 00:00:50] certified, GMO free, has no bovine growth hormone or anything weird like that, and it’s pasture-raised, so it’s all grass-fed.

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Automated:                       Bulletproof Radio, a station of high performance.

Dave Asprey:                     You’re listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today’s cool fact of the day is about mastery. People who really have achieved a level beyond other people. I look for masters when I interview people on Bulletproof Radio. Here’s a cool fact about a master. Dr. Yoshiro Nakamatsu who is the inventor of the floppy disk and 3,300 other patented [interventions 00:01:56] is one of those unusual genius master-level people. He’s also a biohacker. He hacks his genius by intentionally staying under water until the moment just before he drowns. He believes that it stimulates his brain. He actually invented a tablet, so he can actually take notes under water. It turns out he’s right. That treatment stimulates your brain to make more capillaries. When you get into that Pseudohypoxic state, which is similar to what happens when you’re doing the Wim Hof Breathing Method or art of living or something else like that, you actually can go into a theta state which is where intuition and creativity happen.

When you put pressure on your head, you’re actually making your mitochondria closer together, so your electrons don’t have to move as far. They move an awful lot of time, so a tiny difference in how far they move equals better functioning brain. This crazy guy paid attention to how we felt and what worked. Well, 3,300 patterns later, you could say he’s crazy, or you could say he’s a genius. You could just say he mastered it. If you’re a regular listener, you’ve heard me share my list of top 10 biohacks. Let’s talk about number nine: fun hacks for the Bulletproof mind.

It may sound weird, but hanging upside down is a great way to hack your brain. Regularly inverting trains your brain capillaries, making them stronger, more capable to bring oxygen to your brain. It’s pretty straight forward. More oxygen in the brain means better performance. I get my daily stretch and my dose of oxygen with my Teeter inversion table, which is so central for optimum focus, concentration and mental energy. That full body stretch elongates the spine, and takes the pressure off the disks so they can plump back up. Less pressure means less pain. If you have back pain, even if you’ve been lucky enough to avoid it so far, you really want to Teeter to invert everyday to keep your back and joints feeling great. For every 35 years, Teeter has set the standard for quality inversion equipment you can trust.

My friends over at Teeter have decided to show some love to Bulletproof listeners. For a limited time, you can get the Teeter inversion table with bonus accessories and a free pair of gravity boots, so you can invert at home or take the boots with you to the gym. To get this deal, which is a savings of over 138 bucks, go to getteeter.com/bulletproof. You’ll also get free shipping and a 60-day money back guarantee and free returns, so there’s absolutely no risk for you to try it out. Remember, you can only get the Teeter with bonus accessories and a free pair of gravity boots by going to getteeter.com/bulletproof. G-E-T-T-E-E-T-E-R.com/bulletproof. Check it out.

Today’s guest is someone who doesn’t know it, but someone who actually probably saved my career. If not, really helped accelerate my career way back in the day. Before I tell you who it is, I’ll tell you a little story. I was 26 years old. I made six million dollars at the company that held Google’s very first server. When it was Larry and Sergey and one server, and they needed to put it somewhere, they came to a company where I helped to start the consulting group inside the company called Exodus Communications. I found myself in short order, being a 27-year-old, attending board meetings for a company worth $36 billion on the stock market. I wasn’t allowed to speak at board meetings, but I got to see them. I attended executive staff with people twice my age and about 100 times my experience, because my experience was only a few years in Corporate America.

I was an engineer with a little bit of Asperger syndrome. I used to describe my job as taking ideas that are crayon-simple, and redoing them in finger paint for executives. I did not understand them. I thought they were crazy people. Truly, their behavior made no sense to a rational, logical brain. Then, I picked up a book that absolutely changed my ability to do this, and it was called The 48 Laws of Power. This was a book that had taken quite a while to write with a cultural anthropology, stories throughout all of history, looking at how people in power got in power and stayed in power and distilling the essence. It was one of the books that I will just never forget because I read this book, and a week later, I sat in the executive staff meeting. I’m like, “Oh, my God. These people are not crazy people. These people are powerful people. The rules they follow are not engineering rules. They’re power rules.”

By learning that switch in my own ability to think about this, I learned how to function in Silicon Valley, how to work at the venture capital firm, how to raise money and how to do what I do at Bulletproof. If I didn’t have those rules to make me stop thinking like a robot and start thinking like a chess player, I wouldn’t have done it. The author of this book is Robert Greene who is sitting here on YouTube, those watching YouTube channel or on iTunes.

Robert, thank you for your work. It feels like 15 years ago, but your book totally changed my career, so thank you.

Robert Greene:                Well, that’s great to hear, Dave. I’m expecting a check any day now. I mean, just kidding. That’s a great story.

Dave Asprey:                     Here’s what you book didn’t teach me how to do.

Robert Greene:                Oh, uh-oh.

Dave Asprey:                     I mentioned I made six million dollars when I was 26. I lost the six million dollars when I was 28. I’d write you a check, but it might have a decimal point at the beginning of the number.

Robert Greene:                Oh, I see. Okay.

Dave Asprey:                     Unfortunately, but that wasn’t your book’s fault. That was actually my own fault, and that’s happened in Silicon Valley, all over the place. Since that time, you’ve applied that similar incredible rigor to some other books like The Art of Seduction, looking at what happens when people seduce other people, which is also very interesting how you characterize the different types of seduction that happen. The 33 Strategies of War, and the 50th Law, which I just think is hilarious. You actually wrote it with the rapper, 50 Cent, which is super cool. What a mash-up. I wouldn’t have imagined. Then, most recently, Mastery, which is also a hell of a read. You’ve just gone through over the past 20 years. Ever since I’ve been working, and just written these books that distill knowledge in a way that no one else has been able to touch, in my experience. I want to ask you questions from each book in this interview.

Robert Greene:                Sure.

Dave Asprey:                     The intent is that for, probably, my guess, there’s about half a million people that hear this interview eventually, so I want to make sure that we add values. They get actionable things from each of the questions. First question is in the preface for the 48 Laws of Power, you quoted Machiavelli. You said, “Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good.” Why did you pick a quote like that?

Robert Greene:                Because it’s so completely true, and it’s one of the first quotes in the book. It distills my experience and why I wrote the book. Basically, I am not a naturally manipulative Machiavellian type. I’m more of the naïve, innocent type, particularly when I first went to work. I’ve had many different jobs, but when I started in journalism. I worked in Hollywood and many other places. I wasn’t the devilish Machiavellian type, and I made some common mistakes such as never outshine the master, law number one. I transgressed that law and paid the price for it. Basically, the idea is they’re out there. People have come up with the percentage for how many very highly-Machiavellian people there are. It’s almost genetic, 5%, less than that. Something like that. Most people aren’t like that. Most people need the 48 Laws of Power. They need to understand it.

For instance, if you’re an artist or more of a creative type, you’re going to think that, “Well, my talent, my creativity, that’s what’s going to see through in my career.” Boy, are you naïve because you’re going to suffer from all of the assholes out there in film or producers. The people who control the money control the power. You’re going to be in a lot of trouble. If you might be a good person, but there are a lot of bad people out there. The bad people tend to come, get into positions of power. It’s a book to arm you with knowledge, like you helped you in those meetings. I felt that that quote from Machiavelli just summed up what I was trying to communicate.

Dave Asprey:                     I definitely have come across that 5%. Often times, they do end up in positions of power.

Robert Greene:                Yes.

Dave Asprey:                     You talk in 48 Laws of Power about how Galileo works with the Medici’s. How does, “Never outshine the master” actually come to play? What does that really mean?

Robert Greene:                It means something very basic. People in power are human beings. They’re not of a different genetic code than you or I. They have insecurities. They feel that maybe other people don’t respect them as much as they should. They’re looking at those around them through an insecure lens. You’re not aware of that. You think, “Well, that boss of mine. He/she is so powerful. He’s above all of those petty things.” You will try very hard to impress that boss. You will work extra hard on a project. You will try and befriend everybody else in the office, and you’re not aware that in the process of doing that, you might be making that boss feel insecure, as if, “This younger person, 10, 20 years younger is smarter, is more hip. People like him or her more.” You’re a threat, and you’re not aware of that because you think, “Well, work. It’s all about doing the best job.” No because whenever you put three people together, politics intervene.

That person, that boss is looking at you, going, “Is this person a possible threat? Is he/she making me look bad in comparison?” Through that lens, they might decide, “I don’t like this person. He’s maybe or she’s maybe too smart for the job. I don’t trust them. I’m going to fire them.” When they fire you, or they demote you, you’ll never know why. They’ll never admit that it came from outshining. They’ll never admit that envy was maybe the root of it. They’ll come up with an excuse. Something about your personality, something about you, not fitting in, not being a team player. Whatever the bullshit is. They’ll come up with the excuse for why you’re fired. Therefore, this is a classic example of what I said. People who are creative and talented aren’t aware of these kinds of things. You are inadvertently perhaps digging your own grave by trying too hard.

What I talk about in Mastery, I go through this. Really, when you first enter a job, you want to do what I call, “The Benjamin Franklin Strategy,” which is mute your colors, not be so brilliant, fit in, look like someone who works hard but isn’t a threat, be a master observer. You’re going to find in the end, you’ll have a longer and better career. The Galileo method is the reverse perspective on that, and that what he did in naming the Jupiter planets that he discovered through the telescope was he named him after the Medici’s. He made his master look greater than is humanly possible, associating the Medici’s with these planets. Instead of making yourself look good, which is what you would normally do without thinking about it, you want to make the boss, the master look brilliant. You want to make them feel even greater. There are many ways to do that, and that’s like power of a higher level. Not outshining is power 101. Going to the level where you actually literally learn how to make the master feel greater about him or herself is another level that will eventually help raise you up.

Dave Asprey:                     When someone gets fired for outshining the master, do you think that these Machiavellian masters have admitted to themselves inside their head that that’s why? Do you think it’s just a vague feeling of discomfort, so they just swatted it?

Robert Greene:                Well, two things on that front. In the game of power, I tell people it doesn’t matter. Who cares what’s going on in their head? All you know is you were fired.

Dave Asprey:                     A fair point.

Robert Greene:                That’s the game. You’re playing chess. The guy moves the king, and in a very bad way. What’s going on in his head? You don’t care. You just think, “It’s a bad move. I’m going to counter it.” I mean it’s an interesting question, and I don’t know. I think, in some cases, of course, the master is aware that there’s envy involved. In my new book, I have a whole chapter on envy.

Dave Asprey:                     Oh, good.

Robert Greene:                It’s an insidious emotion. It’s the most insidious emotion of them all because the moment you feel it, you try to disguise it. You’re going to tell yourself, you feel a twinge of envy for that younger person who might be more talented. Then, you’re going to immediately justify that emotion by saying, “Well, actually, they’re not a good person. They’re aggressive. They’re assertive. They’re blah, blah, blah.” You’re going to cover it up. The boss either is a little bit aware or maybe to the point where they’re not even aware at all because it operates very quickly, this covering up, because we don’t want to admit to ourselves, particularly a boss, that we feel insecure.

Dave Asprey:                     the reason I ask is that I am a CEO. Bulletproof is a rapid growing venture-backed company. One of the things that I’ve noticed amongst my friends in Silicon Valley is that they people who can hire the absolute rockstars and allow them to shine are the ones who create companies that outperform. The act of being a CEO is an act of self-awareness. I do a lot of neuro-feedback. I run a neuro-feedback-like institute for training my own brain permanently, so that I can become aware of what’s actually going on. They’re like, “Do I believe the story I told myself?” I’m putting this on as if you are the master, how do you avoid being an asshole? I don’t remember that rule, but I would love to know the antidote for that.

Robert Greene:                Well, oh God, I could write a whole book about that.

Dave Asprey:                     Yes, please do.

Robert Greene:                I am, but a lot of it depends on being result-oriented and not being inward looking where you’re thinking about your ego and how other people perceive you. What you want in the end is to make more money and to have a more successful company. I know, for instance, in one of my books, I talk about General Patton in the 33 Strategies of War, very brilliant strategist. A difficult person, but a brilliant strategist. He kept coming up against this thing where he was brilliant, probably the most brilliant general we had in World War II. He kept being blocked in his career by people like Eisenhower and Bradley because he was a bit abrasive. He kept thinking, “Well, don’t results matter? We’re in a war where lives are at stake. Shouldn’t be my strategic genius be more important than my personality?” Well, even in war, there are people who care more about their ego, about how they’re perceived by other people.

If I were to build a monster CEO, and Machiavelli talks about this, it would be someone who’s extremely adaptable, extremely fluid, doesn’t have preconceived notions, is open in the moment, a zen thing and is completely realistic and results-oriented. If you’re an angel investor or you’re a CEO, your game is to make as much money as possible. You want to hire somebody who’s highly creative. It is possible that you’re going to make a mistake. You’re going to hire a snake in the grass. Someone who’s not only brilliant, but is very ambitious and is actually looking to take your job away from you. There are scenarios like that. Maybe it doesn’t apply to you, but often, people will hire that kind of snake who, in the end, is a real threat and does ruin the company or take things away from them. You have to be very clever, and you have to see through people and be able to judge their character. In the end, if you are fluid, if you can learn from your mistakes, and you can be realistic and care more about results than your ego, that would be the monster CEO.

Dave Asprey:                     The ego awareness is the core, and that’s the very core of the neurofeedback where I spent 10 weeks of my life now, with electrodes glued to my head.

Robert Greene:                Wow.

Dave Asprey:                     There’s a lie detector to tell me when my ego is in-charge versus me. I’m still not done, but it’s designed to create that zen thing. Speaking of zen, you’re actually a practicing Zen Buddhist, right?

Robert Greene:                Yes, I am.

Dave Asprey:                     Does that influence your writing? Tell me about your Zen Buddhist practice and [crosstalk 00:19:24].

Robert Greene:                Well, I mean I’ve been interested in it since I was very young, but I’ve only been intensely practicing and meditating everyday and going deep into it for about seven years. I can’ say that the 48 Laws of Power, because it predates the meditation. I’ve been very influenced by the philosophy, by the thinking for many, many, many years. Certainly, since I began the practice, which is mostly meditation, what we call zazen, but also involves … I do go to group sessions, and I do read a lot. I have other ways of getting the knowledge, but the main thing is zazen has had a tremendous impact on my writing. It had a big impact on mastery and is having an even bigger impact on the book that I’m writing now.

Dave Asprey:                     I am very excited to read your new book. There’s great wisdom in the Buddhist practice. Even Bulletproof Coffee, the idea for it came to me in Mount Kailash in Western Tibet. I went there to learn how to mediate from the masters. There’s definitely a connection there to the [eco-awareness 00:20:31] teachings that you’ve been studying.

Robert Greene:                Yes, yes. The other thing is it’s not just book knowledge that matters. It’s something very experiential. In writing a book, I find the problem is sometimes, which is for anything, you tend to rely on clichés, on formulas. You’re not alive in the moment. You’re not thinking in the moment. You’re not thinking for yourself. You’re relying on second hand concepts that people have given you. This practice has shown me, just like the man who puts himself in the water, nearly asphyxiates himself has taught me how to be very alive in the moment when I’m writing. It’s a constant struggle. It’s had impact on me on many, many levels.

Dave Asprey:                     Okay. Do you look at how the words feel when you’re writing them? Is that what you mean?

Robert Greene:                The new book, I’m trying to capture a certain essence, a certain tone. The book’s about human nature. I have to be thinking and reflecting on what it is I’m actually saying go to a deeper level and connecting with the material instead of relying on abstract concepts. The other thing, on a more basic level, is I’m a very audio-oral person. I’m literally mouthing the words as I’m writing. There’s a spoken context to it, and I have to hear what I’m literally writing.

Dave Asprey:                     The reason I’m asking is I’ve just finished my third … I guess this is [inaudible 00:22:15]? Fourth big book, and hopefully, my second New York Times best seller with any luck called Head Strong. This book, I dictated most of it using the dictation function just on my Mac. There’s something, I think that the Buddhist practices at [Wislim 00:22:33], so I’m familiar with talking about any of the power of the spoken word and even [omen 00:22:37] and things like that. There’s something different when you say it. It’s interesting because you’re typing, but your mouthing as you type. When I’m writing, I’m looking for the sensation in my physical body. Does the sentence feel good? Does it go in without a splash, like a professional diver? I’ve never really asked someone. In your writing, I’ll just tell you. Your writing is incredibly complex. It’s better than mine. Just as a writer, I think I wrote a pretty damn good book, but no, it’s not at the level of yours. I just want to know how you do it.

Robert Greene:                Well, I don’t know how to answer that, but I can say that I don’t do anything else. I don’t. I don’t have other jobs, really. I do some speaking. I do some consulting, but mostly, this is it. What do I spend my day? I’m thinking, I’m thinking, I’m thinking. I’m going deeper and deeper and deeper into it. A lot of books, quite frankly, are written by people who are very distracted. I get the impression that they’re very distracted. They’re a professor who’s teaching, who’s grading papers. Then, took six months off to distill thoughts, but they’re not really there, and it shows because the first chapter is good. Second chapter is getting boring and repetitious. By the end, I totally peters out. They’re distracted. I don’t know what it is. I can tell a writer who’s focused, who’s really in the moment, who’s really captured what they’re trying to write. There are people around today who would do that brilliantly. I read a lot of biographies for my work, and there’s some great writers out there who captured their subjects.

Dave Asprey:                     Who are two or three that stand-out, just off the top of your head? Two or three writers who you think don’t read the books just to look at their style.

Robert Greene:                Well, Robert Caro would be on top of the list for biographies. The Lyndon Johnson books now heavily-researched, devotes his whole life to it. That’s all. He really is based on other books on Robert Moses, et cetera, but the level of intense focus that you can tell when you’re reading it, but also the fact that he knows the subject. For instance, in my book on strategy, my version of the Art of War, which is the 33 Strategies of War. The hero of that book is Napoleon Bonaparte for me. I called him the Mozart of Warfare. He was a genius, the first 10 years of his career, a genius strategist. Nobody else can compare to him, and I gave myself the task. What made him more brilliant than others? None of the writers I read ever really answered that simple question. What was the single source of this man’s genius?

Now, it took me a while. I read 12 biographies. I read a 1,200-page book on just his military campaigns. I felt like through that, I came to an understanding that the genius of Napoleon was he had a highly-organized brain. He could assimilate massive amounts of information before the advent of computers, and he could organize it in his brain. When it came time to plan a strategy or to adapt a strategy in the middle of a battlefield, the man had more information that he could access in his brain. It was brilliantly organized. Nobody else really ever said that. I mean people alluded to it. People alluded to it, but to say that in a simple sentence because if you think about it, the application is amazing. That is a highly-creative skill. Something that can make anybody a Napoleon is to be able to learn from that, to know that organizing your thoughts is a very powerful technique. Anyway, to get back to your question, through research and thinking, I dug deeper than I think a lot of other people did on that particular subject.

Dave Asprey:                     You must have read Robert Asprin’s biography of Napoleon as one of your 12 books. Is he familiar?

Robert Greene:                Is that a relative? Is that a relative?

Dave Asprey:                     Yes. He’s my great uncle.

Robert Greene:                I have that book. Yes, I have it.

Dave Asprey:                     Yes, I bet you would. He’s crazy, crazy great uncle. He lived for five years in whatever region he was writing a book about. All history and get to know all the people, visit all the sites and just obsessive like Asperger’s runs in my family. I don’t know if he had it or not, but super detailed work.

Robert Greene:                Is this your father or grandfather?

Dave Asprey:                     He’s my uncle, so great uncle.

Robert Greene:                Mm-hmm (affirmative), okay.

Dave Asprey:                     Yes, he would have been like my grandfather’s brother.

Robert Greene:                Oh, I definitely read the book. It’s very familiar. I’m sure it was good.

Dave Asprey:                     Yes, I mean you’ve read probably more books than me which is a lot. They all come together for me, but anyhow, I was just intrigued when I realized you’ve dug that deep. You had to have read that book. All right, there’s another one quick story about organizing thoughts. There are different people who will teach. Jim Kwik is a good friend who teaches speed reading. He’s had a lot of Hollywood, a lot of CEOs, that kind of-

Robert Greene:                That’s so funny. I find that always funny. I collect these things where the name Kwik is into speed reading.

Dave Asprey:                     Isn’t it great?

Robert Greene:                There’s so many examples of that. I’ve got to put that in my list. Anyway, go ahead.

Dave Asprey:                     Yes, K-W-I-K.

Robert Greene:                Oh, oh, oh, I see. I thought it was …

Dave Asprey:                     Yes, but still, it matches.

Robert Greene:                Yes, yes, yes.

Dave Asprey:                     He does this superhero thing. He taught Wolverine and all the X-men cast, just like a fantastic human being. He teaches some stuff like that, but I’ve looked at how I do. Sometimes, when I’m doing biohacking things, for five years, I ran the Web and Internet Engineering Program at the University of California when the internet was being built the way we know it today. I was teaching engineers who are working the next things that were going to happen. Every night, four nights a week, I would do this for two or three hours after work. I would sit down over dinner, and I would read the latest trade and tech magazines. I would have to assimilate the information, a lot of it in 45 minutes while eating a salad into a teachable class. I did this for five years.

Robert Greene:                Wow.

Dave Asprey:                     To this day, I believe that that ability to assimilate information has helped me so much because people ask me questions. I’m like, “Oh,” and in the memory structure, I know what it looks like. It’s like a 3-D weird thing in my head. I don’t want to hold myself out as an example of excellence there, but I seem to be able to think about hacking the human body in a way that’s different than most people. They often think that that is just like drinking from a fire hose until it hurt. Then, doing it over and over probably helped me in my career.

Robert Greene:                Oh, I’m sure. I’m sure it has. Yes.

Dave Asprey:                     All right. There’s another law from 48 Laws of Power I’d like to ask you about. It’s one that says, and this is only what I remember off the top of my head, which was, “To create loyalty, make an enemy.” I might have paraphrased it wrong. Does that sound like one that makes sense?

Robert Greene:                Well, law number two is never put too much trust in friends, and I think it’s, “Learn to use enemies.” Something to that effect.

Dave Asprey:                     This is one where the gist of it was if you want to get someone close to you, you alienate them. Then, you ask them for help, and because they help you-

Robert Greene:                Yes, that’s law number two.

Dave Asprey:                     Okay, cool.

Robert Greene:                Yes.

Dave Asprey:                     I had a guy in my career who perceived that I slighted him, but he wanted my knowledge on his [team 00:30:15]. He sat me down in his office and basically said, “I can’t fire you because you don’t work for me, but I’m going to drive you into the ground.” Essentially, “It was nice working with you. You’re persona non grata.” This guy was two levels up in the org from me, so it’s basically like a death threat from a CEO level executive. I’m shaking a little bit, but I have a good boss. I do good work, so I’m just not going to worry about this. Literally, for six weeks, he would walk passed me in the hallway and look the other way. I didn’t know what to do with this.

Then, six weeks later, to a tee, he comes and asks me for help. Without 48 Laws of Power, I felt that really, he was totally playing me. It was like working to bring me into his sphere, right? It was applied brilliantly, and this is one of the Machiavellian guys that I ever met. Actually, we’re still friends. There’s mutual respect, and I come to his house and all that, but that sticks out. If that rule hadn’t been written, I’m telling you, I would have walked into a chainsaw.

Robert Greene:                Well, it’s basic human psychology.

Dave Asprey:                     Yes.

Robert Greene:                You can understand I even on a seduction level. If someone is too friendly with you and too outgoing and wants to please you, you initially have a level of not much respect for them. They seem to be trying too hard. They’re too accessible to you. There’s an insecurity that you sense, but if the opposite happens, and they’re playing hard to get, and they seem to not like you, and they seem to be distant. I think it’s chimpanzee brain taking over, but there’s an element of, “Wow. Maybe something’s wrong with me. Maybe I have to try and please that person.”

Anyway, whatever is going on in your brain, the moment that person turns it around and comes to you, you respect him. There’s a little bit of awe. You’re completely moved by the reversal that they’re suddenly now interested in you. You’re ready to eat out of their hand. If you could just apply that like this man applied to you, think of the power that you have in an office or a situation, at least to not make yourself such a person-pleaser, which actually turns a lot of people off. It’s just based on elemental psychology that I think 300 years ago, people mostly understood.

Dave Asprey:                     Something shifted. Maybe it has to do with just likes on Facebook and retweets or something, but it seems like that’s a little bit harder to do on social. Do you think social media changed the 48 Laws of Power?

Robert Greene:                No. Nothing changes the 48 Laws of Power.

Dave Asprey:                     Well-said.

Robert Greene:                In my new book, I try and say, “Look, human nature has been in place,” well, you can’t really say the beginning. I could go maybe a million years ago. I could go further, but let’s just say 20,000 years ago. There’s a lot of history there, a lot of generations of things going on where this human nature is biological, and it’s cultural. The cultural aspect is not just the present cultural moment you live in. It goes back thousands of years. When you take human nature, and you create the internet, what happens is in the beginning, people are going, “Wow, you’ve revolutionized the world. Everything has changed. Everything’s going to be communication, creativity, freedom of expression, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” What happens? After three, four, five, ten years, human nature transforms the internet into what? Anything human has always been. Making money, power moves, trolls, yelling and arguing, irrationality. It becomes a garden full of all of the weeds of human nature that were there in the time of the bible. Social media has not changed that, and you’re asking about the aspect of creating friends and enemy-type dynamic. That would still work on social media.

Dave Asprey:                     It still works. What does the 48 Laws of Power predict one could do with trolls?

Robert Greene:                Well, trolls exist in real life.

Dave Asprey:                     They do, absolutely. They’re bullied in high school. Now, they’re another boost upon the world, right?

Robert Greene:                Yes, and I call the equivalent of a troll in a boss situation is what I call the psychotic boss. It’s not me who made it up. It’s a well-known mean, but the psychotic boss is basically somebody that anything you do is going to piss them off. You try and please them, they don’t like you. You try and push away from them, they don’t like you. They’ve got issues, and it’s all about power and torture, and they’re so sadistic. What you need with a psychotic boss is you need emotional distance. You need to not take things personally. If you’re trapped in this, okay, you’ve got to deal with it, but if you can get out, quit your job. Is life worth getting enmeshed in this problem? When you’re dealing with a troll on the internet, walk away. It’s not worth it. You know the old bible saying. “Arguing with a fool will make you a fool.” You become a fool by trying to argue with them and get them to change your mind. Walk away from trolls. Don’t feed the trolls, as we say.

If you can’t, if you’re enmeshed in them, then, you need that zen samurai ability to emotionally distance yourself. Release all of the emotions and the drama. Look at them in a subjective a manner as possible. See that they’re irrational. They’ve got deep problems. They’re very unhappy, et cetera. If you get that distance from it, then, you can torture them back. You can give the-

Dave Asprey:                     That’s dark.

Robert Greene:                Oh, I don’t care. Well, they deserve it. They deserve it. You can give the perfect comeback that will really get into their skin. I don’t do it as much as I used to, but on Facebook or whatever. I don’t do much Twitter, but Facebook, you get those trolls. I just love saying something that I know will irritate the fuck out of them. You can only do that if you’re not emotionally invested in the argument.

Dave Asprey:                     Yes. I used to get great pleasure from pushing troll buttons like you. There’s an art to it that is mean, but I found that even though I have emotional distance from it, eventually, my ego liked it too much, so I [crosstalk 00:36:58].

Robert Greene:                Of course, it’s better. It’s better to disengage and not deal with them. I deal with them.

Dave Asprey:                     You have the pleasure in just one little sentence causing fountains of …

Robert Greene:                Oh, you can’t. Why deny that pleasure to you? Life is short. That’s fine.

Dave Asprey:                     It’s like, “You can have cheesecake, or you could bait the trolls.” It might be more fun to bait the trolls.

Robert Greene:                Yes, yes. I agree.

Dave Asprey:                     All right. That’s hilarious. Now, you do talk about mastering your emotions. One of the things I work on if a troll actually does push my buttons is I work on feeling compassion towards them. It’s like, “Okay, this person actually was abused. That’s why they believe that everyone is out to scam them. Everyone’s out to harm them or steal from them.” Basically, that’s why they’re mean because their mom probably beat them or something similar. It may not have been domestic abuse, but something bad happened to that person. They’re carrying the scars of it and their trauma. That allows me to disengage and see both sides of this and realize what they’re saying has nothing to do with me.

Robert Greene:                Well, that’s right.

Dave Asprey:                     Yes. Okay, I have the rare and great fortune to run a neuroscience lab and to be able to glue stuff to my head. I’ve traveled to Tibet. I’ve meditated in Cambodia. I’ve done Ayahuasca in South … Okay, I’ve done my work, right? Most people don’t have the time and effort, or maybe they didn’t need as much work as I did because I used to be an angry weird guy. Now, I’m just weird, not angry. What’s an average person listening to this is going to go, “How the hell do you disengage from the abusive boss, from the people who are trolling you over and over?” Do you have a recipe, a mastery perspective on getting control over your own emotions when someone’s pushing your buttons?

Robert Greene:                Yes, I do. I mean we could spend three hours on that subject alone. The thing is I try and tell you in Mastery, and it has to do with how the human brain works. You can master anything if you’re patient, and you go through a process. You take basic steps. If you want to learn the bicycle, and you’re four years, you know you’re going to have to do training wheels, a tricycle. You’ll get there. You’ll fall a few times, but you’ll get there. Mastering your emotions is no different from learning to ride a bicycle or swimming or any kind of skill. It’s going to require patience, which of course, is hard to develop in the beginning. It’s going to require going through a process and not getting so ahead of yourself. You have to say, “You have to take baby steps.” I have ideas in many of my books, including Mastery and in my new book about how you can take these baby steps, so that you learn. “Oh, I did this today. I was able to distance myself. I got a reward for it. Wow. Okay, I can do more.”

What that will mean is in just a simple scenario, in a seduction-like scenario, you’re just starting to date a girl. You’re all anxious and insecure. Your first thing is to call her right away or text her. Okay, train yourself to wait 24 hours before you call. Calm yourself down, and see what happens to you. A similar process, which happens to me all the time. It happens to a lot of other people. It’s the angry e-mail or the angry whatever it is. You’re so pissed off. You’re in the moment. You have no perspective. You’re blowing something small into something large. Okay. Wait 24 hours and what happens? You wake up the next day and you go, “Wow, man. It wasn’t such a big deal. What was I thinking?” You’ll learn that with time, you gain a perspective that you didn’t have in the moment. You can go through these exercises in all sorts of ways.

In one of my books, I believe in the War book, I talk about Joseph Stalin. You think you have a bad boss. Well, you try working for Joseph Stalin where one wrong word, and you’re dead, okay? I talk in the book about a famous composer named Dmitri Shostakovich, a great composer, a music who had to pay court to stall in and please him and was constantly running afoul. If you ran two afoul, he’d be sent to the labor camps, and he would die. He went through a mental strategy of, “When I’m in front of Joseph Stalin, I think of him as a child. This is a four-year-old in front of me who had to sit on the toilet. His mother had to help him wipe himself,” et cetera. Pardon my language. He was potty-trained. I don’t know if he was going through this process, but basically, he demythologized him.

He brought him down to the level of, “He’s just a human being. He’s not this scary, intimidating man. He was a child once.” He’s very insecure, and allowed him to not embroiled. Of course, he realized the danger that if he showed disrespect, he would also end up dead. He couldn’t go too far with that, but it allowed him to not get emotional in the moment. Now, we can take many ways, gimmicks to do that for the particular scenario that you’re in, but you want to be taking baby steps and getting little rewards everyday to see the power that you can have on a daily basis, by learning to detach yourself. You don’t want to do it from everything. You have your family. You have your children, your loved ones. You also have to learn when is the moment to attach yourself? It’s a skill like anything else.

Dave Asprey:                     It’s one of the primary skills that I’ve trained neurologically on myself. It’s something we call the neurofeedback augmented reset process where you sit there, and you look at your brain waves. You see which things cause them to basically stop being functional. Then, you go, “Oh, that’s what it feels like.” Then, there’s a reset practice you go through to actually cut that off. I could learn to be non-reactive in the face of … I had a board meeting once, and the board room was like, “I should be seeing anxiety in you right now.” I looked at him and said, “This is anxiety.” I’m like, “Okay. We’ll just deal with whatever the situation is, but we don’t have to deal with it with an emotional response if things will work, or they won’t work. Either way, no one’s going to die.

Robert Greene:                Well, I find that this is applicable in every situation, but this ability to give yourself 12 hours or 24 hours is so simple.

Dave Asprey:                     Yes.

Robert Greene:                You will see immediately the change within you over time when you don’t react. You can get other people to help you do that. You can get other people to not have you send that e-mail. I will do that with people that I consult with. It’s so simple, and it starts you on the path to doing, to mastery.

Dave Asprey:                     For people listening to this who are maybe earlier in their career, if I had known What Robert Greene just said right there about, “Don’t send the angry e-mail,” I have lost, and I mean this, hundreds of thousands of dollars because of angry e-mails. I wouldn’t have lost that job, or I would have gotten promoted. During the lay-off, I wouldn’t have been the one laid off. That was 800,000 in that one. What happens there, for me, was I would stay up late at night because that’s the time I’m … (Michael Bruce 00:44:38] calls it a wolf. I get my real productive, creative stuff later at night when no one bothers you. By the way, for people who are like, “Oh, my God. He doesn’t wake up early.” The early bird works for the late bird, just so we get that right there, but that’s not always true either. I would stay up late, and I would write these e-mails, and because like you, feeding trolls is good. I maybe use a little inflammatory language. My ego is engaged. I was angrier and thought they didn’t respect me. Whoever the heck messages those are playing in my head.

Then, the next morning, by the time I wake up and go to work, there’s fires burning everywhere. It was because of my angry e-mails. “I guess I shouldn’t have done that,” and my mentors are like, “Dave, you got to stop.” Then, you don’t know it. Just like you said. I finally learned it in my mid-30’s. It’s like, “I’m just not going to send angry e-mails.” You just pick up the phone, and you tell them. Then, all of a sudden, it’s not an angry e-mail anymore, but gods, the advice you just offered, there’s half a million people who are going to hear this. Don’t send angry e-mails. Whatever you do.

Robert Greene:                Right, right. I have been doing this for a long time. I still have to go through that. I still write angry e-mails, and one out of 10 times, I will actually send it. I will regret it, so it’s an ongoing process you never completely mastered because you’re a human, because you’ve got that reptilian part of the brainstem or whatever it is. We’re emotional creatures. You’re never going to completely master it, but getting partway there is a lot.

Dave Asprey:                     They say the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

Robert Greene:                Yes.

Dave Asprey:                     That goes doubly for when you’re watching that ego inside of you to when it said in your e-mails. Here’s another question for you because you studied both Mastery and 48 Laws of Power. I believe, and I want to know if you believe this as well, and I’m really curious. I believe that at our core, we are wired to be kind to each other. When you remove all the bad programming, all the bad programming, all of the trauma, you satisfy basic needs like food, shelter, water, that people’s core motivations actually help. Do you share that perspective? Do you think that there’s some layer of people who are like, “No, I just want stuff?”

Robert Greene:                Well, it’s a great essential question that tells you a lot about a person. It’s undeniable that we’re social animals, that we became who we are, sitting today on a Skype phone call, having evolved beyond other primates by virtue of being social animals that know how to cooperate. This goes back millions of years. At the same time though, as somebody who’s writing a book about human nature, there is another element. There’s something double of the human [psyche 00:47:38]. There is an aggressive side. There is a side, I call it in my new book, I just used this. I have symbols when I’m writing chapters, and this chapter is called, “Take” because it just epitomizes to me this aspect of human nature where we never feel like we have enough. We have to take more. We have stories of very primitive cultures arriving on the island of New Zealand and destroying all of the large [atemfona 00:48:08] there and eating their way through the environment, and basically creating ecological catastrophe 10,000 years ago.

There’s something about the human. I feel like it has to do with our weakness, physically, compared to other animals where we are insecure, where we never feel like we have enough. An aggressive, violent edge to us that can make us antisocial. At the same time that we are the masters at cooperating, there is something that was put into the machinery, a bug, that has the opposite potential. It’s the source for who we are today, and why we’re on the verge, perhaps, of destroying life on the planet. I don’t feel like you can ignore that destructive side of human nature, and you cannot ignore the empathetic side of human nature and the conscious side of human nature and the ability to overcome some of these irrational animalistic-type desires that we have. I think it’s just that we’re complex, so I would put those two elements side-by-side, and depending on which prevails, you have a different kind of human being or a different kind of social group.

Dave Asprey:                     Very, very learned answer. How does that work when you apply that thinking to the different mentalities of power, which okay, people are necessarily power-seeking or power-sharing versus mastery? You talk about mastery and power as different things. You have different books about them. Explain the difference between the two. Do you think that either of those are core human natures?

Robert Greene:                Well, the power is definitely a core human nature. People have written books about chimpanzees and how Machiavellian they are. You could probably take six of the 48 laws and show that chimpanzees actually use these laws of power. I’m remember the [series 00:50:14] of it. They never outshine the master.

Dave Asprey:                     Yes, I believe you, yes.

Robert Greene:                It’s definitely wired into us. We are a Machiavellian animal, and our primate ancestors, particularly chimpanzees are very Machiavellian. We are also the creature that knows how to master things. They’re just different sides of the [psyche 00:50:37]. I just try to tell people, “We live in a complex world where you have to know how to be social and political.” Now, I interviewed Paul Graham for Mastery. I know you’re probably familiar with Paul Graham. He is someone who’s obviously become very powerful, and he-

Dave Asprey:                     Explain for our listeners who may not know who Paul Graham is. I just want to be polite to them, in case someone doesn’t know.

Robert Greene:                Well, originally, in the 90’s, he invented the first place to shop on the internet, which he sold to Yahoo and made quite a lot of money. Then, he retired and became one of the first really popular bloggers in Silicon Valley and writes a lot about power and wealth and other interesting issues. Then, he started Y Combinator about, what? 10 years ago?

Dave Asprey:                     Yes.

Robert Greene:                I don’t know how long ago.

Dave Asprey:                     That’s about right.

Robert Greene:                He sold and is no longer involved. I don’t know what his latest venture is. I interviewed him for Mastery about five years ago. Y Combinator is this ultimate incubator school, school for entrepreneurs, in which he teaches you how to make a brilliant start-up. In return, if it works, he gets a share of whatever you create. It’s worth billions of dollars, and he sold it to, I think, Sam Altman is now the new CEO.

Dave Asprey:                     Yes.

Robert Greene:                Anyway, so he’s a brilliant guy. He was originally a hacker, studied Computer Programming, artificial intelligence, brilliant, brilliant hacker, computer programming guy. Anyway, Paul Graham is terrible at the political side of stuff. He admits it. He hates it. He read the 48 Laws of Power, but he says he just hated it. He hated politics. It was why he couldn’t be an academia. It was ruining his career. He just wanted to be by himself, and he knows it. He knows that it’s a weakness of his, and you can’t survive even in Silicon Valley, even with just your computing skills if you can’t get along with people. What does he do? Well, his hack is he depends on his wife.

Dave Asprey:                     Exactly.

Robert Greene:                His wife is actually brilliant in dealing with people. She’s very sympathetic, very empathetic person, and he lets her handle it all. The interesting thing is he knows that that’s his weakness, and he covered fro his weakness. You cannot escape the social element. You need the 48 Laws of Power. On the other hand, if that’s the only thing you read or follow, you’re going to be a con artist because all you deal in life is illusion. It’s creating the illusion of power. You know how to make yourself look big and greater. You use unpredictability, law 17 or so, which is Donald Trump’s law. The power of being unpredictable and how it intimidates people. You can be good at all these things, but it’s an all-illusion, really. If it’s not based on anything real, you have to skill. You have no talent. You have no creative energy. It won’t get you, ultimately, very far.

Mastery, I created that because I feel like a lot of young people have lost connection to the wisdom that the brain actually grounds you in the brain himself. How we learn, how we develop skills, and the power that you get once you reach a level of 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 hours is very, very real. The power of a Bobby Fischer compared to someone who’s just starting out playing chess is unbelievable. Think of the potential of the human brain when you get to that 20,000-hour point. I wanted to cover that subject, so people didn’t get the impression that me, Robert Greene, I believe it’s all about power and politics and bullshit. No. You really do need to master whatever it is that you do.

Dave Asprey:                     That said, if you want to become a master of your craft, if you don’t know the 48 Laws of Power, it will take you a lot longer to become a master because people will keep throwing stuff in front of you, speed bumps that appear for no reason you perceive. I never consciously used the 48 Laws of Power. I’m sure I might have accidentally done it, but I don’t use those. As an awareness tool to know when you’re being played, oh my god, this was like a firewall for me, sociologically. Like Paul Graham there, I didn’t natively have the social skills. I was 300 pounds. I had cognitive fatigue during some of these. That’s like hacking the human body thing. Losing 100 pounds was cool. Then, raising my IQ and all that stuff, but I’ve got a lot more social skills. I actually make eye contact, all that stuff now. I used to be Asperger’s directional stuff. Even to this day, there are some social skills that I’m just not going to think about. I have a really good Executive admin, and I have a socially aware wife.

Robert Greene:                Right, right, right.

Dave Asprey:                     What I’ve learned as an entrepreneur is look, if there’s stuff that doesn’t come natively to you, you need very basic proficiency, and you can hire the skills. If you receive a gift from me, and you may or may not have, it’s actually not from me. I’m sorry. Anyone who’s received a gift from me, I probably signed the book, but I didn’t think to send it because gift-giving isn’t my love language, to quote the Five Love Languages. I didn’t even think about that, but I know I’m supposed to do it. I have someone who thinks about it for you.

Robert Greene:                I see.

Dave Asprey:                     That’s not a weakness, right? That’s actually a strength, but if we’re going back to our conversation about ego and all, a lot of people, especially as they’re working to become masters, they spend so much energy focusing on their weaknesses, instead of their strengths. What does your take on mastery have to do with how to achieve balance between not being a total idiot in this perspective versus being a rockstar in this perspective?

Robert Greene:                Well, so I have six chapters in Mastery. Chapter four is on social intelligence. I’m telling the reader that social intelligence is a skill that you must develop, or you’re going to be in trouble. There are a couple other skills such as your apprenticeship and your ability to work with a mentor. It is one among three things that you must absolutely learn to be proficient at. Also, knowing your career. What is the-

Dave Asprey:                     Can I pause you for a second there to just double-down on that one for listeners? There’s a guy some people have heard of, Marc Andreessen. If you’re our age, you all know who Marc is.

Robert Greene:                Sure.

Dave Asprey:                     Marc wrote the very first web browser, okay?

Robert Greene:                Yes.

Dave Asprey:                     I was the first guy to sell anything over the internet, and I did that before Marc wrote the first web browser, and I was a tech journalist. I reviewed his browser versus the Netscape 1.0, okay? Marc Andreessen is worth a cabillion dollars. I am not very economically successful by comparison. In fact, I’ve lost my fortune when I was that age and have worked for a paycheck ever since. I still have a paycheck because I have investors, right? The difference between Marc Andreessen and me back then is that I was arrogant and stupid. There was no way I would have listened to a mentor, or I wouldn’t have apprenticed anywhere because I already knew everything.

Marc walked over to Jim Clark in Silicon Valley, the guy who ran Sun Microsystems, one of the big computing companies that’s now defunct because Oracle bought them, and was like, “Hey, Jim. Can you tell me how to do this?” Marc, in his great wisdom, created all these stuff because he would take advice from the masters, and because I was an arrogant punk with too much ego, I wouldn’t. The difference is hundreds of times difference in economic output, so just learn from the lessons that Robert is talking about right here. Learn from the mistakes I’ve made. That rule matters. Anyway, keep going. I just wanted to make sure that’s really clear.

Robert Greene:                Well, yes, yes, so I’m trying to tell you hopefully, you’ll read the whole book before you go out and do whatever you’re going to be doing in your career.

Dave Asprey:                     This is Mastery, right, the book you’re talking about?

Robert Greene:                Mastery, yes.

Dave Asprey:                     Okay.

Robert Greene:                I wrote a whole chapter on social intelligence within Mastery, saying that the brain is an entire organ. Although it’s a controversial subject, but there aren’t separate components for mastering computer programming and mastering how to deal with people. In fact, they’re all intertwined, interconnected. Your ability to be social, to get along with people, to have empathy actually has a profound impact on your ability to solve everyday problems. The process of getting inside another person and thinking, “Wow,” what is going on in their mind is almost a similar process to, “Hmm, there’s something in the atmosphere, a particular chemical compound that I want to solve.” Whatever it is, it’s a very similar mental process of putting yourself inside a phenomenon and thinking through it. The brain is an interconnected organ. You need to be able to have basic social skills and social intelligence, no matter what level you’re at.

Some people, it comes naturally to. Jessica Livingston, Paul Graham’s wife, your wife, they don’t really need to be bothering about social intelligence. A lot of women are like this. They’re good at it. They know it. It’s in their blood, so they can skip chapter four. Other people are brilliant hackers and can learn the hell out of something, have zero social skills. They need to spend a lot more time on chapter four. The great polymaths that I was fascinated with, people like Da Vinci. I think you’d have to consider Benjamin Franklin, on of the great polymaths were brilliant at the social game. Da Vinci was the most charming man anyone ever met. Benjamin Franklin was master at human psychology. He had to learn it. He didn’t start out brilliant at it. He realized he was actually quite weak, and he trained himself to be an incredible observer of people and to just basically study and witness and observe people in action.

It’s a skill. You learn the skill by practicing it. To ignore the social or political game is extremely dangerous, as you discovered in your life. If you’re someone starting out, you’re 22 years old, and you’re about to enter a career or a job, you have to practice both of them. Even if you’re naturally gifted at the social game, you still have to practice them. When you’re starting your career, you’re spending a lot of time working on your skills, whatever those skills are, and you’re observing the people around you. You’re observing the social dynamic. You’re observing the power dynamic. You look at the boss, and you say, “Why did this man or woman get to that place? What’s their characteristics? What is the culture of the place where I’m working at? Do they value assertiveness, or do they value cooperation? What is the psychology of the people involved, as they interconnect with each other?” You want to be alive and sensitive to that, as sensitive as you are to the actual skills that you’re having to learn, whether it’s writing copy or hacking or whatever. That’s how I basically structured Mastery.

Beware, woe to you if you ignore social intelligence.

Dave Asprey:                     There’s a hack for that, at least the way I picked up a lot of that, in addition to just personal development stuff. I had picked up on the importance of this after getting my ass handed to me a few times in my career and in my 20’s. I started going to a business networking meet-up that happened every Thursday night on the Stanford campus. We have this thing called the Stanford Barn. This was for early … I don’t they had invented the word e-commerce yet. We still called ourselves the Web Guild. This was before web masters were a thing, now that they’re mostly gone. We get together every Thursday, and there were these business people. I show up. I’m this fat engineering guy, don’t know how to dress like, “Are you sure it’s okay?” Don’t understand any of these stuff, and I did this for two years every Thursday night, give or take, just because it was like a cultural anthropologist. I was watching these people. I had no clue. Finally, I learned how to interact and not just enter and eat all the grapes.

Robert Greene:                Right, right.

Dave Asprey:                     It didn’t come, at all, naturally, but if I hadn’t done that, I don’t think I can function the way I do today because for me, that was remedial learning, just to get up to kindergarten level. I think a lot of people listening who don’t understand or even look down on shmoozing or networking or things like that know. It’s like the way bees dance. They wiggle their butts, and they signal through each other. Humans have some of that. It’s just harder to see.

Robert Greene:                Well, you bring up a very good point. I should have said that earlier. It is almost like a basic skill that you must develop. It’s almost like when we were talking about waiting before you send that angry e-mail. Simple exposure to social situations is how you’re going to start developing the skill. If you spend a lot of time alone, that skill atrophies. The virtual version of it isn’t good enough. Eye contact isn’t the same on a computer, as it is in flesh and blood. You need to be out there, doing what you did. Your intuitive wisdom there is simply interacting with people, going to more social situations, observing people, absorbing their energy, forcing yourself to interact. If you’re in an office, that’s how you practice the skill as an actual real interactions, not on the computer, not on Facebook, et cetera. You bring up a very good point. Probably the most essential thing that you can do is actually, the more social interactions you have, the more the skill will start naturally developing.

Dave Asprey:                     What are your other top techniques for developing mastery?

Robert Greene:                Well, Mastery begins chapter one with one very simple thing. If you don’t do chapter one, there’s no hope for you, I’m afraid. Well, it’s true. That is choosing the right path, the right career, what I call your life’s task. I call it your life’s task, and it’s one moment where I might wax a little poetic, but you’re a very unique person. Your set of molecules, your DNA, there’s nobody else like you ever, will ever exist or has ever existed. There’s something unique about what you’re interested in. What I call your primal inclinations, the subjects that you’re inclined to when you were three, four, five years old. You want to be able to work within that basic strength that you have. The brain learns at a much higher rate when you’re emotionally engaged, when you want to learn, when it’s something that excites you. If it’s something that you have to learn, you absorb one-tenth of the information that you have when you are alive and tense. “Man, I really want to learn this because I love this subject.”

If you choose a career, the typical scenario is you listen to your parents and your friends. You got to law school because you know that’s going to make a lot of money, but it’s not what you love. You can get pretty far, but you’re never going to get to mastery. You’re never going to learn at the rate that an Einstein learned when he realized at a very early age that he was obsessed with Physics and obsessed with the question of relativity and spend day and night and day and night, thinking about one particular problem. You’re never going to learn at that optimum rate by choosing something that you don’t love. Mastery begins and ends with that because if you find what it is, and the problem with a lot of people is they don’t know what that is. Finding what that is and creating the perfect niche for yourself makes all the other things, will happen in an organic way. It will help you to learn some of the things I discuss in the book, such as the importance of the apprenticeship phase, the importance of working with a mentor, et cetera.

If you don’t know who you are, you don’t know what you love, you don’t know what you’re good at, you’re never going to get there. I give many, many examples on how to find it and of people in history who found it in a strange way. It’s not like you wake up and go, “Oh, I meant to write the 48 Laws of Power.” Life doesn’t work like that. It’s a process. You’re discovering what you hate. You’re discovering the jobs you don’t want to do. You’re discovering the writing that doesn’t appeal to you. Then, eventually, if you’re alert and self-aware, you’ll discover it. That’s like the gist of it. You don’t find … It can happen later in life. It doesn’t necessarily have to happen in your 20’s. It’s better if it happens in your 20’s because when you’re younger, you’re more creative and more energetic. It can happen in your 30’s or 40’s. I didn’t start writing the 48 Laws of Power until I was 37, so it took me a while to figure out what my life’s task was.

Dave Asprey:                     Well, I’m grateful that you decided to do that because that was a really impactful book. You sold one and a half or 1.2 million copies or something.

Robert Greene:                Oh, we’re getting closer to two million now.

Dave Asprey:                     Oh, to two? There you go. That’s well-deserved. For people listening, you guys have heard me interview 350 experts. Maverick scientists, crazy geniuses, authors, teachers, celebrities, a few of them. Of all of them, if there’s only a few books you’re going to read, I’m telling you. Pick a couple of Robert’s books. Robert, this is not just on the show. This is actually my genuine belief there. You really want to change the trajectory of what’s going to happen in your life over the next hundred years. Yes, if you’re young, you have a pretty good chance of living a hundred years from how ever how old you are today. Thank you, technology. Do this. Read Mastery. Read the 48 Laws of Power. Know when you’re being played. It’s just priceless. Biohacking is cool. Having cells that work is really important, so you have the will power to apply the skills for mastery and all that stuff, but if you’re just walking into invisible walls all the time, you don’t know it, it sucks. I only say that from personal experience. You really helped me see some of those walls, so I’m actually just full of gratitude that I get to interview you because how cool is that? I have one more question for you.

Robert Greene:                Thank you.

Dave Asprey:                     Oh, you’re so welcome.

Robert Greene:                Sure.

Dave Asprey:                     Final question I’ve asked every guest on the show. If someone came to you tomorrow, and they said, “Look, I want to be better at everything I do. I want to kick-ass at life,” what are the three most important pieces of advice you have for me? What would you do? How would you distill all of this knowledge you have?

Robert Greene:                I would say lower your expectations a little bit. Don’t try for that.

Dave Asprey:                     Just a little better, come on.

Robert Greene:                That’s the 20-year-old who thinks that he or she can just be great at everything. You can’t because it’s not how we’re wired. I want you to scale down. I’m writing a chapter in my new book. It’s the Laws of Human Nature, and each chapter deals with a slightly negative quality in human nature. The chapter I’m finishing now is on grandiosity. At the end of the chapter, I talk about practical grandiosity. How to be grandiose, but in a practical way. The practical way is to focus on something simple. Develop, concentrate your energies. When the mind is concentrated and focused, it has immense powers. When it’s diffused and distracted, and things that can accomplish 80 things, it’s useless. You neutralize all of the powers of the brain that you were born with.

Dave Asprey:                     You’re saying focus on some things?

Robert Greene:                Yes. I want you when you’re 20, 22, that great wonderful age, to say, “I’m going to be absolutely brilliant at this one thing. I’m going to master this one thing.” In mastering this one thing, it will open up like the lotus flower image in Buddhism. It will open up to five or 10 or 20 other things. Paul Graham, all he mastered when we was 21, 22 was programming. He was just an absolute great programmer. He also studied painting. I don’t know why he was interested in art. It was a second thing. Then, years went by. He didn’t know what he wanted to do, and he let time go by. He was a little bit lost. Then, he heard an ad on the radio. He was painting in a loft in New York when he thought he was going to be a painter. He heard an ad on the radio for Netscape and how Netscape was going to be the new frontier. People were going to buy things on the internet. He goes, “Shit, man. I’m sitting here, barely making a living, painting. I can make a fortune.”

All of that programming skills that he developed in his 20’s, now, he could shift and do something that he never thought of when he was 23. He had the skill to exploit this new frontier. You want to have a basic skill that you can now exploit for whatever it is that’s going to come upon you in five years, where you can suddenly seize some great opportunity. Once you learn that basic skill, okay, learn a second one if you want. Learn a third one, but don’t go on until you’ve actually first mastered that first one. Learn to control your impatience. Master yourself.

I’m going to give you an advice. It’s master yourself. Yourself without any help is someone who’s impatient, insecure. You’re like a four-year-old that’s led out into the world of adults. You don’t have what is necessary to succeed because you have no control over yourself. You think you’re great, and you’re not great. You have no skill. You have no experience. You have no knowledge. Get over it, okay? You-

Dave Asprey:                     No, I love this, man.

Robert Greene:                Someone had to say it. This is cool. You need to master yourself. You need to overcome all of these things that you think you’re so great at, and you’re not. If you’re going to learn one thing, it’s going to be you’re going to control your impatience. You’re going to control your grandiosity. You’re going to control all the other things. Your emotions that tend to reek havoc in the office or wherever. All the other things that you want, you’ll get in your 30’s or 40’s. If you start off when you’re 21 and say, “I’m going to get everything, man. I’m going to conquer the world. I’m going to bust whatever it is.” You probably won’t get very far.

If you start focusing on one thing, and you’re patient, and you love it, and you’re excited, when you’re in your 30’s, that organically will happen to you. Believe me. In fact, I have story after story of people in history and people I interviewed for Mastery. It’s the path that will lead you to something. I know it’s not what you want to hear. You want to hear some formula for getting everything you want and being happy, but it doesn’t exist. It takes work. It takes work.

Dave Asprey:                     Very well-said. Did we get three in there? I think that was three.

Robert Greene:                I don’t know. I’m sorry.

Dave Asprey:                     I’m trying to count, but that was at least three, and it was all great wisdom. Do you mind if I ask how old you are?

Robert Greene:                I’m 57.

Dave Asprey:                     57. Actually, I’m 44, so you’ve got more than a decade on me.

Robert Greene:                I do.

Dave Asprey:                     Actually, you’ve lived more, and one of the things that I didn’t appreciate when I was young is the wisdom of elders. I think you talk about that a lot in Mastery.

Robert Greene:                Yes.

Dave Asprey:                     I actually learned that because I started running an anti-aging non-profit group in Palo Alto called the Silicon Valley Health Institute. People in my board of directors were 88 years old.

Robert Greene:                Oh, wow, wow, yes.

Dave Asprey:                     You’re like, “These people are so much better than I am in almost everything.” It’s the value of experience. Like you said, falling down and exposure and things like that. What profound advice, Robert. Even better than I hoped that you’d [give us 01:16:37].

Robert Greene:                Oh, well, that’s good. That’s good to hear.

Dave Asprey:                     Thanks so much for being on Bulletproof Radio.

Robert Greene:                Oh, my pleasure, my pleasure.

Dave Asprey:                     For listeners, you might not know this. If you go to the Bulletproof website asprey.wpengine.com, there’s transcripts for all of Bulletproof radio. You can actually download this, and what I’m going to do is I’m going to list all of Robert’s books on there as links. What I want you to do is just close your eyes and click one of the links.

Robert Greene:                That’s good.

Dave Asprey:                     It will take you to Amazon and read that book if you haven’t read any of them. I would say maybe the Art of Seduction is either more or less interesting to you. If you’re married with kids like I am, trust me. The Art of Seduction might be more important to you than it is when you’re 22 and dating. I’m just saying. You guys have Tinder, all right? I don’t.

Robert Greene:                Yes, that’s right. The Art of Seduction is also about social seduction.

Dave Asprey:                     It is, it is.

Robert Greene:                And political seduction and marketing seduction. It’s all the same.

Dave Asprey:                     Very well-said. All right. When your next book comes out, I hope to have you back on Bulletproof Radio.

Robert Greene:                I would love that. I would love that.

Dave Asprey:                     The week of launch, we’ll make sure everyone listening hears about the book because honestly, you were one of … This might sound like I’m kissing your ass, but I’m not. In my experience of reading a lot of personal growth, which isn’t really your category, but a lot of other stuff. You have provided more wisdom with more rigor than most other authors I’ve come across.

Robert Greene:                Oh, that’s very nice. Thank you.

Dave Asprey:                     Yes, so a full endorsement from Bulletproof on Robert Greene’s writing. You guys should read all of it.

Robert Greene:                Wow, thank you.

Dave Asprey:                     Robert, I look forward to our next conversation.

Robert Greene:                Oh, me too, Dave. Thank you. That was great. It was great. I really enjoyed it.

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