How To Strengthen Your Willpower Muscle

How To Strengthen Your Willpower Muscle

“Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.”  -Mahatma Gandhi

Humans are capable of extraordinary feats. You have the potential to run longer than any creature in the animal kingdom, churning out hundreds of miles without breaking [1]. You could go without food for over a year and survive [2]. Not that you’d want to. But what if you could put in 80 hours a week at the office like it’s nothing, or set goals and never give up on them?

It helps to have willpower: the ability to dig deep and keep going, even against crushing odds. Willpower seems abstract – it can feel like some people have it, and others don’t.

In reality, though, willpower is more like a muscle. It’s seated in a particular part of your brain, and you can build it a little bit stronger, every day, with a few simple hacks. Here’s a guide to how willpower works, and how you can strengthen your will to reach your goals.

[Tweet “#Willpower is like a muscle. And you can build it stronger every day, with a few simple hacks.”]

Decision fatigue: your brain on willpower

How long you can go without making bad decisions depends on the strength of your anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a little C-shaped part of your brain right by your temple [3,4,5].

Think of your ACC as an energetic bank account. When you start your day it’s flush with energy. Every time you exert effort, you withdraw a bit of fuel, slowly emptying your ACC. Choosing what to wear in the morning takes out a little bit. Same with deciding what to make for breakfast. Bigger tasks – working a 12-hour day to finish a project, for example – empty your account faster. If you overdraw, your ACC stops responding and your willpower runs out. That’s when you give in to bad decisions.

This phenomenon is called decision fatigue: the more decisions you make, the worse your judgment becomes. Corporations have known about decision fatigue for years. That’s why they put brightly packaged candy at registers – as you make decisions while shopping, your brain glucose dips. By the time you’re ready to check out, you’re more likely to crave sugar to replenish your glucose stores than you were when you came in the door (unless you follow the Bulletproof Diet and you’re running on fat). By the same token, you’re more likely to get a favorable parole decision from a judge in the morning than you are at the end of a long day [6]. So if you ever get arrested, aim for an early morning hearing. 😉

The good news is that you can build up the amount of energy you store in your ACC, and you can reduce the number of decisions you make with a few steady habits.

Push your comfort zone to build a stronger will

Your brain is a wonderfully flexible tool. It adapts to the demands you put on it, which means you can train your willpower the same way you would train a muscle. Every time you empty your willpower reserve, it comes back a little bit stronger. You want to control the depletion, though, to avoid bad decisions.

The best way is to choose something that that takes self-control and make it into a habit.

[Tweet “Want to build willpower? Set a goal right now. Something to do every day but nothing too difficult.”]

Set a goal for yourself right now. Choose something you can work toward every day, and start off slowly. You want it to be sustainable. For example, choose to stop using electronics at 7 PM every night, or to go for a one-mile run every morning. Choose something that isn’t so difficult you’ll avoid it, but is enough of a challenge that you’ll have to work at it.

After a few weeks, your brain will adapt to your new habit. When you find you’re meeting your goal without trying, either up the ante (start running for two miles every morning, for example) or keep your habit as it is and start another one. That way you’re constantly stressing your willpower enough that it’s growing, every day. Before long, you’ll be doing things that seemed impossible when you started out.

The self-control will bleed into other parts of your life too. People with more self-control [7]:

  • Do better at work
  • Have stronger relationships
  • Are more emotionally stable
  • Are happier overall

You’ll want to free up as much willpower as possible to apply to your new habit. Let’s talk about how to do that now.

[Tweet “Willpower Hack #1 – Minimize your wardrobe. Hack #2 – Replace breakfast with #BulletproofCoffee”]

Save up willpower with these 4 hacks

Structure provides freedom. Every time you eliminate a choice from your day, you save a little bit of willpower to put toward something important to you. When you have your day-to-day routine so dialed in that you don’t even think about it, you can focus all your energy on your goals. Here are 4 ways to simplify your daily habits and free up willpower.

Minimize your wardrobe

Steve Jobs was famous for his black turtleneck and New Balance sneakers. Mark Zuckerberg has 10 identical gray t-shirts in his closet. Barack Obama cycles through three or four suits every week.

All three of them understand the power of eliminating decisions. When you reach for the same outfit every day, you never have to think about what to wear or how you look. It seems minor, but you’re saving a lot of mental energy.

Not ready to go full Steve Jobs? Try a capsule wardrobe. Pick 3 or 4 tops, bottoms, jackets, and shoes, all in neutral colors like gray and navy. Plan it out so everything in your closet complements everything else, to the point where you could get dressed in the dark and still look good. Then get rid of all your other clothes so you only have 15-25 items in your closet. You can find capsule wardrobe guides online for inspiration.

Replace breakfast with Bulletproof Coffee

Bulletproof Coffee will keep you running until the afternoon. It’s quicker and cheaper than a typical breakfast, and it means you don’t have to think about cooking in the morning. The ketones from the Brain Octane Oil give your brain immediate fuel, too. You’ll have sharp, stable energy until lunch, and you’ll never again have to think about what to eat for breakfast. Here’s the recipe.

paleo steak bowl recipe

Cycle through the same few delicious meals

Get really good at making 5 or 6 different tasty dishes. You’ll buy groceries and cook on autopilot because you’ll always reach for the same ingredients. When you get tired of one of the meals, swap it out for a new one. Good nutrition supplies your brain with an abundance of fuel. Your brain draws on much deeper stores of energy, which means it takes a lot more for you to run out of willpower.

You can find simple, delicious Bulletproof recipes in Bulletproof: The Cookbook, and plenty of free ones on the blog.

Schedule your day

Pencil out your day, hour by hour, and tailor it to your biology. If you find you lose focus in the early afternoon, put a workout or a couple hours of fun in your schedule at that time. Are you a night owl? Schedule work starting later in the day. Have you been trying to read more? Write in some time before bed when you put down your screens (which improves your sleep) and pick up a book, every night. Love watching TV? Write that in too.

You’ll find you have a lot more time in the day when you map everything out and stick to it. Building habits also becomes much easier if you have them written down in front of you or scheduled out on your calendar. Bonus hack: Listen to this episode of Bulletproof Radio with Michael Breus. He’ll teach you how to figure out the best times of day for you to work, sleep, and play.

For more on simplifying and structuring your life, check out this interview with The Minimalists on Bulletproof Radio. They talk about how consuming less and removing distractions leads to a more enriching life.

Subscribe below for more tips on enhancing your biology. Thanks for reading and have a great week!

References

[expand title=”Click to read the complete list of references.” swaptitle=”Click to hide references.”]

  1. https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/3716644
  2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2495396/
  3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18547820
  4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3647221/
  5. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1783632/
  6. http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889
  7. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0022-3506.2004.00263.x/full

 

Fighting the Child Obesity Crisis – Dr. David Ludwig #375

Why you should listen –

America is losing the war against childhood obesity. This seemingly unstoppable epidemic is the single biggest health risk to our youth, and in most cases, it’s completely avoidable.  Today’s guest is the world-renowned Dr. David Ludwig, a man who has dedicated his life to saving our children from this scourge with his cutting-edge research at Harvard. In this episode, Dr. Ludwig reveals the science behind why our children are most vulnerable to childhood obesity, and how a change of diet can save their lives.

Enjoy the show!

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

Watch

Listen

Follow Along with the Transcript!

[expand title=”CLICK HERE to read along with the transcript!” swaptitle=”Click to hide transcript”]

Click here to download a PDF of this transcript

 

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

Dave Asprey:                     You’re listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today’s cool fact of the day is actually not that cool. It’s a little bit troubling. It’s that today we’re going to talk about kids, and right now, only about 2% of American children eat a healthy diet. Researchers say that childhood obesity could reduce life expectancy by five years or more over the next decades. It’s already happening, by the way, right now. We just had a reduction in that that you’ll hear about in the show.

I want my kids to have the ability to live to at least 150, given that I’m going to live to 180+, or at least that’s my plan. I also want your kids to have that same opportunity, because I believe it’s entirely possible given our biology, given our technology, that we can extend our human life span very meaningfully. Not so that you’re old and decrepit, but so that you’re old and full of energy, and then eventually you die, but you don’t spend thirty years in that retirement home. Unless that’s what you want to do. It’s that level of freedom, that level of control over our biology, and that’s what has my attention. Because right now, forty-five percent of children diagnosed with diabetes have type two diabetes, just because they are obese.

When I was an obese kid, I was never diagnosed with type two diabetes. In my early twenties, I had a fasting blood sugar of 117, and I was definitely pre-diabetic, pretty much on the cusp of type two diabetes. I know that that was not necessary, and it wasn’t because my parents didn’t care, they were actually actively taking steps to improve my health, they were just the wrong steps.

Experts believe that if the current adolescent obesity rates persist, they’ll be more than a hundred thousand additional cases of heart disease connected to obesity in about twenty years. This is just not okay.

You are going to hear from a guy on the show today who is doing something about it. A guy with some of the most impressive credentials you’ll ever come across. A New York Times #1 Best Selling author who has been on the show before. This is not meant to scare you as a cool fact of the day, this is meant to inspire you that there’s something not so cool happening, but there’s stuff you can do about it.

Before we get into the show, there’s something that can help, and it’s called Bulletproof Get Some ice cream. This recipe is something that I developed to help my wife want to get pregnant. It’s something that we used to help turn her fertility back on by just loading the body up with healthy undamaged fats. What it uses is … Well, no sugar, and it uses Bulletproof XCT oil or brain octane oil, grass-fed butter, and egg yolks, and zero sugar. This is such a nutritionally dense and satisfying ice cream that it’s called Get Some ice cream, because about an hour after you eat it, adults bodies get a signal from the food that says, “There’s every ingredient you need to make a healthy baby, maybe now’s a good time to go try.” This is kind of a well known recipe amongst long-time bulletproofers or people who read the Better Baby book. It’s something I haven’t talked about enough.

You can use Bulletproof Vanilla Max, which is our lab-tested vanilla. Vanilla’s neat, because when you use real vanilla, not that fake stuff that about 95% of vanilla flavoring is made of, real vanilla is full of these dark polyphenols that are really good sources of antioxidants. You put the vanilla, you put the brain octane, you blend it all up and you make it in an ice cream maker.

Here’s why I’m telling you this in a show that’s going to be about obesity and about kids and about fat. My kids eat Get Some ice cream for breakfast. They’re like, “I get ice cream for breakfast?” You can make it with chocolate, you can make it with vanilla. Check out the recipe on the website. It’s called Bulletproof Get Some ice cream, and if you ever happen to be in Santa Monica, we make it in the Bulletproof Coffee Shops. You can go there, and we’ll make it for you. It sounds too good to be true, zero sugar, really creamy, amazing, and good enough for breakfast for your kids, where they’ll want to eat it, it’s there, and it’s what we do in my house. You can find bulletproof XCT oil, brain octane oil, and vanilla max all on bulletproof.com, and I always appreciate your business. It’s one of the ways you can say thanks for what we do on the show here.

Speaking of the show, if the show’s really beneficial for you, I’d love it if you took just a minute to give us a five star rating on iTunes. I know it takes a little bit of your attention. It maybe takes ten seconds, but it really helps other people find the show, and it helps to inspire me. I’m grateful for your feedback, grateful for your comments, grateful for your support. However you choose to express it.

You ever have one of those times when you’re in a really big meeting, really big stakes, and you start to sweat because it’s sweat or maybe even because you’re nervous? It’s certainly happened to me, maybe in one of my first Silicon Valley pitch meetings, and I never liked that. It was really a problem for me when I was heavier. Turns out now, you no longer need to worry about under arm sweat or the embarrassment of sweat appearing through your shirt with an undershirt from Thompson Tee.

The Thompson Tee with hydro-shield sweat-proof technology’s a patented undershirt guaranteed to completely block underarm sweat, preventing those embarrassing wet marks and yellow stains. They are hand-crafted in the USA. The undershirts come in a variety of styles, sizes, and colors. I like these because there’s no chemical treatment, so the effectiveness doesn’t wash out over time, and they’re machine wash and dryer safe, so they are as convenient as normal stuff without all the weird chemicals. Every shirt comes with an unconditional thirty-day money back guarantee regardless of if it’s been worn, so you wear it, wash it, and try it. Everyone should have at least one Thompson Tee for that special meeting or event where you need to look really good. Thompson Tee serves over 50,000 loyal customers in eighty countries. Visit thompsontee.com/bulletproof right now and enter “bulletproof” at checkout to get 20% off your order. That’s thompsontee.com/bulletproof, and enter “bulletproof” at check out.

Now onto the show.

We are filming live from the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine in Las Vegas, which is the preeminent event for anti-aging physicians really in the world. This is a very well-respected organization. I have one of the keynote speakers here as a guest, which is a good honor. We get to meet in person. If you’re a long time listener, you already maybe heard the podcast with Doctor David Ludwig. Dr. Ludwig is a giant in our field. I’m going to have to read this, because there’s too many affiliations for all of you. If you’re watching on our YouTube channel, obviously I’m looking down here.

He’s an endocrinologist and researcher at Boston’s Children Hospital. He’s a Founder of the Optimal Weight for Life Program, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard, and a professor of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. You don’t see a lot of endocrinologist, physicians, nutrition professors out there. It’s pretty amazing just academically and the things you’ve tied together, Dr. Ludwig. Welcome to the show.

David Ludwig:                    Thank you. It’s a great pleasure to be back with you, and congratulations on your great work.

Dave Asprey:                     Oh, thanks. It’s funny because I’m also keynoting at this conference, which is an honor for me, because I’m the only non-physician to do it. To share a stage with you and Dr. Perlmutter.

David Ludwig:                    David Perlmutter, so we talked about the three-Ds, the three Davids.

Dave Asprey:                     Exactly. It’s kind of …

David Ludwig:                    You’ve got nutrition in 3D.

Dave Asprey:                     It’s kind of crazy, and the reason I wanted to talk with you today and to share your knowledge with our guests is that last time you were on the show, you talked about your new book, Always Hungry, which is … If you guys haven’t checked out this book, if you liked the bulletproof diet, if you’re interested in what fat can do for you, here’s the guy with about ten thousand times more academic credentials than I have, who has some good stuff to say about fat. You’re one of the people leading the national conversation along with Nina Teicholz, I always say her name wrong.

David Ludwig:                    Teicholz.

Dave Asprey:                     Teicholz. Nina and I are friends as well, even though I say her name wrong, who has also written some books about fat, but there’s this national conversation where you have the old school low-fats, mostly paid for by big grain sort of research out there, and you’re refuting some of that using very strong academics, randomized controlled trials, and the things that everyone wants, but no one has paid for except for maybe big drug companies and things like that. But there’s something else you’ve done. It’s something that I actually really value, and I wanted to talk about that as well. Your very first book was actually about combating childhood obesity. So I wanted today to touch on what are we going to do in order to get randomized controlled trials, like really good research to support the things that are in your book, things that are in Doctor Perlmutter’s book, and the things about what fat actually does for our brains and our metabolism. That’s part of it.

The other thing is what can people listening do for their kids to combat childhood obesity? As you know, I was an obese child, and I still have stretch marks all over the place.

David Ludwig:                    Wow. [crosstalk 00:09:14]

Dave Asprey:                     Quick plug, by the way, the new stretch marks book is on Amazon. It’s like a buck or something. It’s really cheap. Everything I know about stretch marks in one place.

David Ludwig:                    So you don’t have to stretch financially.

Dave Asprey:                     Exactly. But this is the sort of thing if someone had told me when I was a kid. I was desperate. You know the three rippled stomach when you’re fourteen, and your self-esteem is affected by that, and you feel crappy. My parents were giving me bran muffins and squeeze margarine, because that’s what the doctors said, you know? What should people listening do if they are dealing with fat kids to help them?

David Ludwig:                    Yeah, well, part of the tragedy is not only is the main prescription that we’re telling people to follow the low-fat diet doesn’t work. Not only does it not work for most people, and we can talk about why, but it blames people for the failure. If losing weight is just about calorie balance, just eat less, move more, than anybody should be able to do it, and if you can’t do it, there must be something the matter with you.

Dave Asprey:                     Like a moral failing, right?

David Ludwig:                    Why is it that society treats people with a weight problem with more stigma than with almost any other medical issue? It’s because there’s this implicit sense that weight is simply a matter of wills, will-power, discipline, and sticking to a diet. If you can’t do it, there must be something the matter with you.

Dave Asprey:                     Yeah, you’re weak.

David Ludwig:                    Poor disciple, poor willpower, or a character issue. You know? Think of gluttony and sloth among the seven deadly sins. My message and so many others, including yours, is that body weight is more about biology than will-power.

Dave Asprey:                     Oh, yeah.

David Ludwig:                    Talk about kids in school to this day, children can get fat-free, sugary pink or chocolate milk. It doesn’t matter they dump in loads of sugar, as long as it’s fat-free, but children are prohibited by national policy through the USDA from getting plain whole milk.

Dave Asprey:                     It’s offensive.

David Ludwig:                    This is what I call the persisting harms of the low-fat diet era. Even thought the USDA came forth with its new recommendations 2015, quietly lifting the limit on dietary fat, almost nobody knows about it, because the low-fat diet was launched with massive fanfare. Government, nutrition societies, doctors, dietitians have been telling us for so long that if you don’t want fat on your body, don’t put fat into your body, and yet that whole low-fat diet era has sort of been ended with no publicity. The public consciousness is still colored by that fear of fat and food policy. National nutrition policy, as we were just discussing in the schools, and there are dozens of other examples, is still infused by the low-fat message.

Why is that wrong? I mean, your audience has heard you talk about this, but it’s simply because when we cut back on fat, if you restrict calories, and low-fat diets are the way to do that most quickly, yes you’ll lose weight, but your body fights back. The brain perceives calorie deprivation, and what does it do? What every dieter recognizes. Your hunger goes up. Your metabolism slows down. You go into starvation mode. Stress hormones are secreted. That then further erode your lean tissue, and that’s a recipe for failure. But we’ve got to reverse that. Actually, one of the best ways is instead to focus on the processed carbohydrates, which are raising insulin and driving fat cells into a feeding frenzy. Once fat cells calm down, the calories you eat stay around in the blood stream longer so they’re there to nourish your brain, they’re there to nourish your muscles and your organs, and so your brain can say, “Wait a second. All right. I can calm down. I don’t have to worry that the fuel supply is limited.”

Hunger decreases, metabolism speeds up, and then you get to lose weight with your body’s multi-million year evolutionary system working with you, not against you. That’s a message that’s important for everybody, but it’s critical for the children.

Dave Asprey:                     About two years ago, I sat down at a conference with Nina Teicholz … I don’t know if I said that right. There’s an “r” in there?

David Ludwig:                    Teicholz, I think.

Dave Asprey:                     Teicholz. Sorry, Nina, if you’re listening to this. She and I sat down, and we actually discussed whether there was a need for a class action lawsuit against the American Heart Association for their bad advice. I’m so troubled by this. The very next day, I gave a talk in Malibu to a room full of very high-end Hollywood TV producers about the bulletproof diet. I went through reverse T3 and cortisol and the case for a high-fat diet, and there was a cardiothoracic surgeon in the audience. At the end of this, she stood up, and she was one of the very Senior Executives at the American Heart Association. I thought, man, she’s just going to tear me apart. She’s got a lot of credentials. She turned around and she looked at everyone. She said, “I agree with everything he just said. We changed our fat recommendations a year ago based on the science and no one will listen.”

I honestly almost had a tear in my eye, because it’s not them. It’s that there’s a momentum that’s happening from this bad advice from years ago that’s been built in, but even the leading voices now are starting to talk about what you’re saying. In fact, you’re one of the leading voices about fat.

David Ludwig:                    Well, I do have to congratulate the American Heart Association. They have … Like every other professional association, the government, they advocated a low-fat diet, but they were quick to recognize within the last decade. Not only did they recognize it, but they’ve come out with some very powerful policy statements targeting sugar, and recognizing that the metabolic syndrome, which is the soil out of which diabetes and heart disease rose, is fueled by insulin resistance. If you’re insulin resistant, what sense does it make to dumb in so much carbohydrate?

Dave Asprey:                     I would have put them on the list of bad guys ten years ago, and I am also truly impressed that the American Heart Association is moving … They shouldn’t be a leading edge thing. They need to be a little bit conservative, because they are a very large voice. That actually gave me great hope.

The second thing you said about how low-fat diets cause obesity, one of the things that I dealt with when I weighed 300 pounds … I could lose 20 pounds, and then I’d gain thirty. Lose thirty, gain forty. It has to do with a hormone called ghrelin, one you’re certainly familiar with. What I discovered after recognizing that bulletproof coffee had an unusual effect, but not necessarily understanding what the effect was, I came across a couple studies that showed that when you could raise your ketone levels even just a .5 on a blood stick, which is below nutritional ketosis, that it would reset your ghrelin levels to your current body weight. Ghrelin’s the thing that makes you have cravings and hunger all the time. So that instead of having …

If you use a low-fat diet to lose weight, if you’re three-hundred pounds and you lose fifty pounds, you will have the hunger and craving levels of a three-hundred pounder. You’ll lose eventually. You’ll start eating. That’s not a moral failing, that’s just running out of will power. But, if you go into very mild ketosis, just a little bit, that that flips a switch, and all of a sudden your hunger levels now match your current body weight, which is kind of liberating. Do you think this increase in fat that you’re talking about in your book, do you have to go into ketosis for this to help people?

David Ludwig:                    Let me just first say that I don’t say … I’m not arguing that every low-fat diet is wrong for everybody.

Dave Asprey:                     Agreed.

David Ludwig:                    There are populations that have eaten relatively low-fat in quite a healthy way. The Okinawan diet is said [inaudible 00:17:13], but let’s keep in mind that this is a very physically active population. It isn’t burdened by obesity and insulin resistance. We’re talking about what to do with a population in the United States, and increasingly throughout the western and now the developing nations, that has obesity as it’s leading nutritional problem with insulin resistance. The ultimate expression of that is type two diabetes, the ultimate metabolic meltdown. People with diabetes are still told to eat a high carbohydrate diet. Type two diabetes is by definition glucose or carbohydrate intolerance. It’s like telling somebody with lactose intolerance to have a lot of lactose. It doesn’t make sense.

Your question … Ketogenic diets are now increasingly the topic of very interesting research. Humans are designed to be ketogenic when they are starving, when they are fasting. We can trigger that also with a very low carbohydrate diet, as long as the protein intake isn’t too high.

Dave Asprey:                     Or exogenous, like the brain octane oil that I make.

David Ludwig:                    Or, yes, you’ve focused on ways of hacking the ketogenic pathways. These medium chain triglycerides, especially C8 and C10, are very ketogenic. The body wants to burn them. It goes right to the front of the fuel shuttle and raises ketone levels. Ketones pass the blood brain barrier. My own experience on a ketogenic diet was really nice mental clarity. Because blood sugar … When you are dependent on glucose so feed your brain, changes in your blood sugar could potentially affect your mental function. We see that in people with what’s called reactive hypoglycemia. They eat a bagel for breakfast, they feel good for an hour, couple hours later, you can see their blood sugar is down, at or below fasting, and they’re fuzzy. Ketones, if you get into that state, are stable. They’re a very efficient fuel. Question is, does everybody need to be … Is it advantageous for everybody? We don’t know. We need the research.

I think what I’m especially interested in is people with type two diabetes. The possibility that a ketogenic diet could comprise an alternative to bariatric surgery has to be researched. Why do we spend a billion dollars to develop a drug for just one diabetes complication? A cholesterol or hypertension or control blood sugar. We need to be spending a billion dollars for high-quality long-term big-scale randomized, controlled trials, but most of the research we do in nutrition suffers from a shoestring budget. So we can’t get definitive answers. I think that that’s one place.

Another big question is whether the ketogenic diet will have advantages for the broad population, or whether we can get most of the benefits just by cutting down on the processed carbs, building up on the healthy fats. Ketogenic diets are restrictive, although maybe with some of your preparations, a little less so.

Dave Asprey:                     I’ve come to the conclusion, and this … Jeff Volek, who is one of the preeminent ketone researchers is actually here at the A4M. I’m going to hopefully get a chance to chat with him as well. There’s a crowd of very vocal ketone advocates online, who are all ketosis all the time, glucose is the devil’s work, and I don’t believe that’s borne out biologically. After having been in extreme ketosis for a while, I believe that there’s a pretty good argument that everyone, with maybe some weird genetic exceptions, would benefit from being in ketosis at least occasionally, at least mildly.

What I’m finding on my own blood sticks is that if I use brain octane in my bulletproof coffee, I can get to .8, which is the edge of nutritional ketosis, as long as I don’t have any sugar in the morning. Even if I had sugar the night before. I just want a little bit of ketone present, because it provides that mental clarity and by varying things like that, I just measured my insulin sensitivity, and it’s on a scale of 1 to 120. I don’t remember the metrics off the top of my head, but 120 is type two diabetic, and 1 is as insulin sensitive as you can get. I used to be pre-diabetic, and I’m 1. I’m as insulin sensitive as you can get, and I’m highly glucose tolerant at the same time, which is unusual. I think that’s cyclical ketosis doing it, but I want to see the research [crosstalk 00:21:55].

David Ludwig:                    Yeah. You know, we need to have a one billion dollar institute. Let’s create one in Harvard, to do the definitive studies to answer these questions. Whatever the answer is, we need it. We need the answer. Maybe there are some areas that we … I cherish my own hypothesis. Maybe we’re 50% right, maybe we’re 80% right. Even if we’re 10% right, let’s find that ten percent, and prove it. Then, finally, the percentage where maybe we didn’t get it right, but out of failure of a research study, sometimes you get a much greater discovery, like penicillin, was discovered out of someone’s failed experiment basically.

Dave Asprey:                     Right, right.

David Ludwig:                    It just makes no sense that we are investing so massively in drug development and have so many fundamental questions about food as medicine. Every time we eat, the hormones in our body change … Hormones are the most potent substance we have. They change the very expression of genes in the body, and you can influence that based on the amount, but also the type of foods you eat. Why aren’t we taking advantage of that? Why aren’t we thinking of food as the ultimate medicine without side effects? There’s no multi-billion dollar company that stands to make huge profits from food research.

Dave Asprey:                     It’s true, at least not yet. Bulletproof is very far from a billion dollar company, but I’m willing, as the company grows, to fund research on things like that.

David Ludwig:                    I’m coming back in five years.

Dave Asprey:                     Even maybe less than that, because there’s a difference when you are making foods that are meant to have a specific effect. One of the problems that I run into though is that if I, say, carefully crafted a coffee beverage that I knew had medical effects, even if I can show in one of your Harvard studies very strong effects, let’s say on Alzheimer’s, cancer, diabetes, or heart disease. Any of the really big diseases of aging, there are legal limitations that make it illegal to say a food can do that. Right? It doesn’t matter how much data. It doesn’t matter if everyone in the country knows it, if I put it on the label, it’s not okay. Do you think that there’s maybe room for a policy change of when food is proven to be healthy, we might actually call it healthy?

David Ludwig:                    I think when we’ve got … The problem is there’s so many supplements with commercial interests that have been marketed in scurrilous ways.

Dave Asprey:                     Very.

David Ludwig:                    That’s the whole point, if we’ve got the data, then we can base recommendations and claims on that. Now, I want to bring this around. Comment on something that you just said, and then bring this back to children, where you started. We’ve passed a milestone this year, which is that life expectancy for the first time, essentially since the Civil War, increased year after year, a few blips, a flu epidemic of 1918 is one. Basically, it’s been going up ever since. Yet, lately, the last couple of decades, it’s been going up, because we’ve been using more powerful drugs and surgical procedures to deal with the consequences of our diet, of obesity, of insulin resistance. We’ve really … We’ve just hit the tipping point. We saw that increase in life expectancy slow down in the last few years. Last year, you’ve got the first statistically significant decline in life expectancy.

Dave Asprey:                     It was about two months, right? The difference in life expectancy went down by about two months?

David Ludwig:                    Yeah, that sounds about the right … This is … Many of them were food-related diseases. Most notably, cardiovascular disease and diabetes and a few others. What’s happening now? We’ve got the first generation of children that were … I should say that the most notable declines wasn’t spread across the population. It was in middle age. Not the old, not elderly. They are doing all right for their age. It’s the middle age where we’re seeing that going up. So what do we know about the middle age? Well, this is the first generation born with industrial foods, born in the 50s and 60s just as the fast-food, industrial processed foods were really invading our diet. Then, the low-fat diet on top of that. That generation is now beginning to be the canary in the mind shaft here.

It emphasizes the critical importance of starting in childhood. This is an age when both behavioral, but also biological plasticity is at its greatest. Whether it’s developing that relationship between the palette and the brain and the sensitivity, or the gut microbiome that’s training the immune system to tolerate the right foods, not develop leaky gut, or unfortunately, with the wrong influences, get the wrong microbiome and the leaky gut and the consequences is systemic.

To get effective prevention for children, we need three things. We need the right diet. We have to give them the right message. You’ve got to line up biology with behavior. We need the right approach to physical activity. Kids don’t want to spend twenty minutes on a treadmill. We need to make physical activity fun again. Then, we need parenting practices that will guide change. We live in this toxic environment with all the wrong influences. So until we can actually get the policy changes to make the world a healthier place, the family has to be a bastion of protection for children in the home. You create this protective bubble. Parents do that in two key ways. One is modeling. You do it, they’ll do it. Unfortunately, if you don’t do it, they won’t do it. Actually, what we would call protecting the home environment. If it doesn’t support health, don’t bring it in the home. That applies to food, that applies to the hi-def wide screen TV in every room. Not that a kid can never have an ice cream cone, just don’t have it in the home.

We get these three things right, the right approach to understanding of food, the right approach to physical activity, and the protective home environment, we can get [inaudible 00:28:33] into the obesity epidemic during those first few years that I think would prevent a massive, massive public health crisis to come.

Dave Asprey:                     There’s part of it too, it starts about three months before conception. It really starts with your grandmother from an epigenetic perspective. My very first book was the Better Baby Book with Dr. Lana, my wife, and it’s what we did to turn our fertility back on. What came out of that really clearly, and here we are at an anti-aging conference, if you really want to live a long time, have a super healthy grandmother and mother who ate great foods. I think a lot of this dying in middle age that we’re seeing now is because our mothers were eating processed foods. We know that this passes down. Even if you start with making an environment in the way we did in our home, everything possible. We live in a forest. My kids can play outside. We grow our own organic food.

David Ludwig:                    No lyme disease?

Dave Asprey:                     No lyme disease. Yeah.

David Ludwig:                    All right.

Dave Asprey:                     Just lemon. But we do so many things to try to do that, but they’re still paying for the genetic sins of my parents and their parents.

David Ludwig:                    It’s funny, in the bible there’s this quote saying, “The sins of the father will be visited for seven generations.” If you just do bible studies, that sounds pretty harsh, but maybe from an epigenetic perspective, the elders knew something.

Dave Asprey:                     I think they did. Certainly for two generations, it’s very dramatic. You look at the kids and grandkids of people who experienced extreme trauma in World War II, and it affects their type two diabetes rate. What you’re saying now to people, if you start young, get your kids going and they’ll do really well, but the real gift of that is in addition to seeing your kids thrive and not be obese and have brains that work so they can be calm and focused is that when you have grandkids, your grandkids will absolutely shine.

David Ludwig:                    We’ll get a victorious cycle rather than a vicious intergenerational cycle.

Dave Asprey:                     Very well put.

David Ludwig:                    Let’s emphasize that it’s never too late. You’re a beautiful example of … You talk about in your book and your public speaking how you had developed obesity. You had all sorts of …

Dave Asprey:                     Arthritis when I was fourteen, yeah.

David Ludwig:                    … Chronic diseases, yeah. You’ve … You look pretty good to me. I don’t think I want to meet you in a dark alley.

Dave Asprey:                     I’m forty-four, and I’m literally … My brain works better now than it did when I was twenty-four, and this is the power of changing our environment so that our biology does what we want, and what you’re saying is to parents, you change the environment in the home and the kid’s biology will follow.

David Ludwig:                    Yeah, and that’s why I wrote my most recent book, Always Hungry. First we had a three-phase program to first jump-start metabolic change with a very high fat, although luscious diet. It’s the easiest way. When you dump in high-quality fats, you can displace the processed carbs without craving them. We have some research to suggest that it actually turns off the nucleus accumbens, the craving center. Transition to something that’s going to be sustainable. The epilogue of my book is policy prescription. Once we’ve brought healing into our own lives, and into our own families, we have to turn that outward and fight for policy changes to detoxify the environment. The most effective way we can do that is having made those changes in our own life, because then we can speak with credibility and authority having struggled and showing success. That just communicates with people very effectively.

Dave Asprey:                     Something else that’s affecting kids, and affected you, is environmental toxic mold. When we first met, when I interviewed you for Always Hungry, you were going through a personal mold experience. Are you open to chatting about that real quick?

David Ludwig:                    Well, I’ll just say that we had after this horrible winter a few years ago all throughout the northeast, I believe, massive amounts of snow. We got ice dams around the house, and turns out that we had leaks through the chimney down and had a … Through several floors through the house, very extensive mold. As we began to look into this more, our air handling system had a lot of mold.

Dave Asprey:                     Was contaminated, yeah.

David Ludwig:                    [inaudible 00:33:11] picked it up, but also air handling, if you’ve got air conditioning, you’ve got water. If that’s not being … In most homes, that’s not something you’ve talked about, unless you’re really paying attention to where water happens. For many homes, even if the roof is solid, it’s the air handling or the air condition system. Mold can grow. I, myself, was experiencing some joint aches and muscle aches and …

Dave Asprey:                     Did you gain weight?

David Ludwig:                    I didn’t gain weight.

Dave Asprey:                     Cognitively, what happened?

David Ludwig:                    I think I just didn’t feel like I was at my best.

Dave Asprey:                     It’s like kryptonite. It didn’t kill you, but it made you weaker. Is that a …

David Ludwig:                    Sure. We fortunately got some good advice, and we found where the problem was. We mediated it, and happily our insurance coverage is …

Dave Asprey:                     Beautiful. You’re fortunate.

David Ludwig:                    Covered for that, you know. You really wonder about families that don’t have good insurance coverage or …

Dave Asprey:                     Or just don’t know. Most of them have no idea.

David Ludwig:                    Yeah, don’t even know.

Dave Asprey:                     That’s one of the things that triggered my obesity. I know from all the other mold symptoms I had, like constant nose bleeds and bruising. I lived in a moldy basement when I was getting to be an obese kid. Mold in a certain population of people triggers weight gain. Other people it triggers autoimmunity.

David Ludwig:                    The problem is these symptoms are so generalized. Is it mold, is it lyme disease?

Dave Asprey:                     Or both.

David Ludwig:                    Is it food allergies? Is it chronic stress? Is it … It could be so many things, and I think that that really speaks to a couple things. One is we need good research. We need research … There’s a lot of vested interest against mold research, because it’s potentially a trillion dollar problem. In the housing industry and the insurance industry, don’t want this information out, because they don’t want to be paying for …

Dave Asprey:                     That’s terrible.

David Ludwig:                    Why aren’t we thinking about environmental exposures more effectively?

Dave Asprey:                     Let’s see. Food and then air. The number two source of public threat in my mind is mold … Allergic response to mold, and the toxins, the direct toxins that mold manufactures.

David Ludwig:                    We need the … Going back to … We need the research.

Dave Asprey:                     We do.

David Ludwig:                    We don’t know. Maybe … Of course, there’s individual differences. Some people can live in a relatively moldy environment. Other people are highly sensitive.

Dave Asprey:                     It’s very variable.

David Ludwig:                    We know that. There’s literally … Just look at food allergies. Some people can eat peanuts all they want. Other people, a whiff of it could send them into an anaphylactic reaction. It’s not enough to just say there’s a problem. We need to understand it, and take a much broader view of how food, stress, environment influence our immune system and influence our microbiology.

Dave Asprey:                     Part of the thing that’s exciting here is that the technology is coming so we can test the air in your home, or in my home, and understand what’s in it. We can test food the way that I do with the coffee, and other problematic foods where agriculture research they’re at high risk. Then we can cross correlate those things and some people have less reactivity, however, there are some toxins that are hormetic, take a little bit, you get stronger. There are other ones where it causes oxidative DNA damage. It just does more for that guy than for that woman, but maybe we ought to just pull this out of our environment when we can do it cost effectively. That’s the direction I’m pushing, not perfection, but just awareness of problems, more research, and I’ve got about 900 studies on OTA and 1,200 on aflatoxin. We know they’re bad, but the dose and the individual variations, it’s like a big open hole of research.

David Ludwig:                    A huge question mark.

Dave Asprey:                     Before we wrap up, something that we talked about, you’re interested in doing real, randomized controlled trials of nutritional things that don’t have any vested interest, because they are not pharmaceuticals and things like that. I know that we have a very substantial number of highly successful people who listen to the show, because I’ve spoken with many of them. People with hundreds of millions to billions of dollars at their disposal, and thank you for listening by the way. Some of you I don’t even know, I’m sure, but others I’ve been fortunate to meet. If any of you are looking for some philanthropy, this is a good human being with all of the right academic affiliations. This is the sort of thing that I’m really interested in.

David Ludwig:                    And no relationships with the food industry. It’s important that we do the research without conflicts of interest. That’s why you don’t want to turn to the food industry for the millions of dollars.

Dave Asprey:                     Well, we know what General Mills and all the grain companies have done to further research. Canola oil …

David Ludwig:                    Even if the food industry has the greatest of interests, you know, well motivated, we need the research to be impeccable.

Dave Asprey:                     At arm’s length, right?

David Ludwig:                    I’m proposing that we create a quarter billion dollar institute at Harvard for intensive, state of the art nutrition research, where we begin to think of food from its ability to influence our metabolism, the expression of our genes in ways that may make all the difference between a lifetime of good health or chronic disease.

Dave Asprey:                     Maybe with some luck, someone who is looking for a good cause might want to fund some of your work at Harvard. If so, you can probably find either one of us on social media, or just send an email to support@bulletproof and I’ll hook you up in the right way, because this is the sort of thing that can change the world in a very meaningful way.

Dr. Ludwig, your book is Always Hungry, and I already said this at the beginning of the show, but if you haven’t read the book and you’re interested enough to be a regular bulletproof listener, this is one that belongs on your bookshelf. It’s very worthwhile, and it comes from someone who is the opposite of me, the unlicensed biohacker. Incredibly well-credentialed, well-experienced professor in multiple fields that are all coming together to provide you with the knowledge you have now.

Thank you for being on Bulletproof Radio. Any other URLs or things you’d [crosstalk 00:39:17].

David Ludwig:                    Sure. I invite your viewers to find me on drdavidludwig.com.

Dave Asprey:                     Okay. D-R David L-U-D-W-I-G?

David Ludwig:                    Yes, drdavidludwig.com. There, you’ll find links to my social media. We also have a Facebook community of I think now 7,000 plus people who are following the Always Hungry program and giving each other support. It’s free and non-commercial. You don’t have to buy the book to join the community. Our perspective is we’re trying to heal ourselves, and then create a grassroots movement for social change where we can then begin to demand that the healthy options are the convenient and the affordable options too.

Dave Asprey:                     Amen. Thanks from Bulletproof Radio, and it’s always a pleasure to get to hang out. We just finished lunch with Dr. Perlmutter, and it’s been an amazing day.

David Ludwig:                    Okay.

Dave Asprey:                     Really appreciate your work and appreciate you.

David Ludwig:                    Thank you for having me.

Dave Asprey:                     Thanks.

 

 

[/expand]

Hack Your Way To A Better Sex Life – Dr. Emily Morse – #373

Why you should listen –

Start off the New Year right with some toe-curling, lip biting sex tips from Sex With Emily’s Dr. Emily Morse. Emily combines ancient techniques, cutting-edge science, and a little bit of psychology mixed in, to help you achieve greater physical satisfaction with your partner while at the same time allowing you to shed some of the embarrassment and shame surrounding sexuality that can prevent people from fully enjoying sex.
Enjoy the show!

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

Watch

Listen

Timestamps

0:00 – Thomson Tee (enter Bulletproof at checkout)
1:40 – Cool fact of the day!
2:40 – Teeter Inversion Table
4:00 – New coffee roasts at Bulletproof!
5:00 – Welcome Emily Morse!
5:50 – Top tech items to improve your sex life
10:00 – Dave and Lana’s stem cell experiment
14:00 – How sex changes over time
16:40 – How the pill affects your sense of smell
19:50 – Kegel exercises for men and women
30:00 – How did Emily end up doing this for a living?
33:00 – How to be safe
37:00 – Sexual resolutions
38:45 – Shame
42:00 – Emily’s top 3 recommendations for performing better in the bedroom
45:00 – Biohacked Box

Featured

Thomson Tee (enter Bulletproof at checkout)
Teeter
Sex with Emily
Biohacked Box

Resources

Kegel Camp (App Store)

Fiera
The Intensity
New Bulletproof Coffee Roasts

Follow Along with the Transcript!

Click here to download a PDF of this transcript

Dave Asprey:                          You ever have one of those times when you’re in a really big meeting, really big stakes, and you start to sweat because it’s hot or maybe even because you’re nervous? It’s certainly happened to me, maybe in one of my first Silicon Valley pitch meetings. I never liked that. It was really a problem for me when I was heavier. It turns out now you no longer need to worry about underarm sweat or the embarrassment of sweat appearing through your shirt with an undershirt from Thompson Tee. The Thompson Tee with hydro shield sweat-proof technology is a patented undershirt guaranteed to completely block underarm sweat, preventing those embarrassing wet marks and yellow stains. They’re handcrafted in the USA. The undershirts come in a variety of styles, sizes, and colors.

I like these because there’s no chemical treatment, so the effectiveness doesn’t wash out over time, and they’re machine wash and dryer safe. They’re as convenient as normal stuff without all the weird chemicals. Every shirt comes with an unconditional 30 day money back guarantee, regardless of if it’s been worn. You wear it, wash it, and try it. Everyone should have at least one Thompson Tee for that special meeting or event where you need to look really good. Thompson Tee serves over 50,000 loyal customers in 80 countries. Visit thompsontee.com/bulletproof right now, and enter bulletproof at checkout to get 20% off your order. That’s thopsontee.com/bulletproof, and enter bulletproof at checkout.

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

Dave Asprey:                          You’re listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today’s cool fact of the day is that you’ve often heard from me that the brain has the most mitochondria per cell of anywhere in the body. The brain, the eye, and the heart, but that’s not actually true. The cool fact of the day for today is that the part of the body that has the very most mitochondria, these power plants per cell, is actually the ovaries. In women, the ovaries have 10 times more power production capacity than the brain of a man or a woman, or at least in an individual brain cell. The ovaries are smaller than your brain. When you look at mitochondrial density, it’s actually a pretty good indication of how important those tissues are.

That might be a precursor to what we’re going to talk about on the show today. If you have little ones present who simply don’t know anything about the birds and the bees, maybe this isn’t the right episode for you, but we won’t get too crazy. Before you find out who today’s guest is, though, if you’re a regular listener, you’ve heard me share my list of top 10 bio hacks. 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 and more capable to bring oxygen to your brain. It’s pretty straightforward. 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 essential 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 a Teeter to invert everyday to keep your back and joints feeling great.

For over 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, go to getteeter.com/bulletproof. You’ll also get free shipping, and a 60 day money back guarantee, and free returns. 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.

I would totally love it if you went over to iTunes right now and you left some feedback, because it’s amazing what happens when you just take a few seconds to leave a five star review. It helps other people find the show, and that just provides more leverage for the time and energy that goes into interviews like this so that you can learn actionable, useful stuff. While you’re at it, check out bulletproof.com, because we have a bunch of new types of coffee. We’ve got the mentalist roast, and we’ve got French kick, a roast that’s dark, but not burned. You’ll find that if you head over there, there’s now those, plus our Bulletproof process decaf and the original roast. No matter how you like your coffee, we can get you the best beans, the cleanest beans that make you feel amazing. That’s on bulletproof.com.

Today’s guest is none other than Dr. Emily Morse. She’s the host and creator of the successful and wildly popular Sex With Emily podcast and website, which by the way, has the best, most marketable name ever, because you cannot forget that name. She’s also the author of a book called “Hot Sex: Over 200 Things You Can Try Tonight”, and she’s the founder of Kegel Camp, which is an app that is a fun and easy way for men and women to get the benefits of kegel exercises. Yes, men can do kegel exercises. No, you probably don’t want to use a kegel barbell if you’re a man. Just saying. Emily, welcome to the show.

Emily Morse:                         So great to be on your show again, Dave. I’m so happy for you and all your success.

Dave Asprey:                          Likewise.

Emily Morse:                         I love it.

Dave Asprey:                          I’ve been seeing ask Emily columns everywhere, and I haven’t dared to ask you any of those deep, personal questions myself, but that’s why we have a show. We can ask all these questions.

Emily Morse:                         Can’t wait. I’m open. Whatever you got, ask me.

Dave Asprey:                          All right. I want to know, because it is this end of the year season, and things like that, the top tech items that can improve your sex life. What are some of the things that you think are most interesting right now?

Emily Morse:                         Okay, this is a good question, because as part of my job, I have to travel around the world to different sex conferences and see what the latest and greatest things that are happening for sex. One of them is there’s a five minute fix now for women’s libido. Imagine that. One of the top questions I get asked is from women and men, “Why doesn’t my partner want to have sex with me? I have low libido, no desire. What do we do about it?” As we know, female Viagra will not ever exist, at least during our time.

There’s a product called the Fiera. It’s a product that you use it regularly. A woman lays back in bed, uses it five minutes a day, and it attaches to your clitoris using gentle suction. What this does is it stimulates her physical arousal. There’s blood that rushes to her clitoris. It’s not a vibrator, but what it does do is it spikes her arousal using it once a week for a month, she’s going to realize without pills, without anything … It was developed my medical professionals for women. There was nothing else like this. I’ve tried it. We’ve all tried it. That’s another perks of our job is we get to try everything on the market, and it’s pretty amazing.

Dave Asprey:                          Okay, so is this a little battery operated suction device kind of thing, or is it a little plunger?

Emily Morse:                         It’s not a plunger. It kind of looks like a little butterfly. It’s kind of like a [inaudible 00:07:30]. It’s the six of your palm, and you put it on, and it’s got this indicator light. You’d like this. When it makes an attachment, a connection, it suctions, the light turns blue. You sit there for five minutes, and you charge it up like you would a vibrator. It just has this gentle vibration waves, but again, not like a vibrator. It brings the blood to the clitoris so women are getting more turned on this way. Then you take it off, and you can have sex. Women are reporting … Again, it was a team of professionals. Yeah, it’s awesome.

Dave Asprey:                          You use this thing, it’s called the Fiera. You use it before sex, or just use it every morning so then you’ll just be more aroused all the time?

Emily Morse:                         Use it before sex. You use it in the morning as part of your routine. Women are reporting that once they get that blood flowing and they’re going, that they don’t even need to use it as often, because they’re already in the mood for it. What happens is we get so distracted with our … Men, you get turned on if you see someone walking down the street. You’re like, “I’m ready to go.” For women, if our brain is not on board, our body will not follow. If you lay down, you’re trying, and this is going to stimulate you five minutes a day, you start to think about sex more, you’re having sex more, you’re going to want sex more. It’ll increase desire, overall desire for sex. It’s kind of a warm-up for women who have decreased libido.

Dave Asprey:                          That sounds automated.

Emily Morse:                         [crosstalk 00:09:02]. It sounds what?

Dave Asprey:                          I can [inaudible 00:09:03] like, “Oh, I’m just brushing my teeth in the morning, and doing my daily arousal.” It’s just kind of funny, actually.

Emily Morse:                         That’s because guys don’t need to do that, but for women they’re like, “I don’t want to take a pill. I don’t want to have sex,” so it’s five minutes. You lay back, and then you kind of look forward to it, because it feels good. You’re like, “Oh, okay. Now I think I’m ready. I would like to have some sex.” It’s working, and it was developed by a team of women and professionals. It’s just like it is the number one question I get asked wherever I go. Every woman thinks they’re the only one dealing with it. I get pulled aside at parties like, “I don’t want to have sex anymore. What do I do? I don’t have the desire?” Then the men are like, “She doesn’t want to have sex.” If this device you buy it, you wear it a few times a week, and it can help, which we’ve all tried it. It does work.

Dave Asprey:                          That may sound weird if you’re in your mid 20s and you don’t have this problem, you’re like, “What the heck? Why are these people talking about it?” Over time, this is a major issue. I hear about it all the time from people as well. They’re like, “How do I hack that?”

Emily Morse:                         It’s a hack.

Dave Asprey:                          I’m not a sexologist, but one of the things that got a lot of attention at the Bulletproof Conference this year, which you missed, by the way, is-

Emily Morse:                         I was [crosstalk 00:10:12]. I was in Amsterdam.

Dave Asprey:                          I know you were travelling.

Emily Morse:                         I was in Amsterdam at a sex conference learning about the Fiera, but I would have loved to have been there.

Dave Asprey:                          Amsterdam has some pretty good sex conferences, I hear. I can see why you made that decision. I would have been there, too. Just kidding.

Emily Morse:                         [crosstalk 00:10:25].

Dave Asprey:                          What we did is I had my stem cells taken out, and my wife, Dr. Lanna, had her stem cells taken out, actually extracted from our own fat, and then re-injected at various parts of the body, all sorts of injury sites. I had my stem cells injected into, well, they call it the P shot. You can imagine where it was injected. Lanna, who’s in her late 40s, had her stem cells injected, in addition to all the normal injury sites and things like that, into what they call the O shot. Basically-

Emily Morse:                         I’ve heard of … No, they’ve been wanting me to do this. Keep going. Yeah.

Dave Asprey:                          Profound changes in a week, like back to 25 years old again. Giant changes that are just not even believable.

Emily Morse:                         She did the O shot?

Dave Asprey:                          She did the O shot. They did it into the vaginal walls and into the clitoris. She talked about this on stage, so that’s the downside of being a professional bio hacker is sometimes you broadcast a video of what your toes look like when the needle goes in. You see this video of my toes going, “Ahh!” It was kind of painful to get the shots, but both of us experienced a renewed vigor, as you might say.

Emily Morse:                         Goodness. I’ve heard all about the O shot. They’ve been wanting to get me in there. Tell me, yeah.

Dave Asprey:                          You should try it. She’s a mother of two kids, and things shift over time. They shifted back really, really radically and really quickly. Things like, “Oh, my toes curl again,” and pretty cool stuff. There are definitely things that you can do that are libido related, and even just a little bit of suction, like you’re talking about, more blood flow. More blood flow on a regular basis equals cells actually come back to life. They’re not dead, but they’re [sinession 00:12:12]. They’re asleep. They don’t have enough metabolic activity. Just a change in blood flow is kind of cool.

Emily Morse:                         That’s exactly what it is. I was going to say that it just creates the physical arousal that’ll stimulate your brain to be thinking about it again, because it does kind of dormant, if you’re not [inaudible 00:12:28] paying attention to it, stimulating it with the O shot. I love that you did it. I’ve got to talk to her about it. I’ll watch it. Did you tape all the conference?

Dave Asprey:                          Oh yeah, yeah. The whole conference proceedings are available online. I’ll get you a pass. It’s probably bulletproofconference.com I think is the right thing, but we’ll get you the code, because we have the proceedings all there. A lot of people listening, you’re like okay, either we’re all just kind of talking about this for no reason, but here’s the thing. We also had a guy who goes by the name of Dr. Love, Paul Zak, who’s an expert in oxytocin, talking about oxytocin. What’s happening here is if you don’t have a functioning sex life is your ability to perform in the board room, show up as a parent, or as a spouse, as a friend, as an employee, whatever it is you do in life, if you’re not dealing with that part of it, it affects your neurotransmitters. It affects your happiness levels. You’ve got to address this stuff. If you can do it better or faster or have some kind of technology or do whatever turns you on, even if it involves whatever turns you on, it doesn’t matter, it’s important that you pay attention to those things.

Emily Morse:                         Absolutely, but the other thing I want to say, Dave, is it was interesting. You said, “In your 20s, you don’t have to worry about it.” When you’re in a long term relationship, if you’re in your 20s and you’ve been dating someone for two … My producer, she’s been in a relationship for three years, and she’s like, “God, it …” She was more excited than anybody, been living with her boyfriend, she’s 28, to try it, because she’s like, “If you’ve been living …” You know. You’re living with someone, the same thing over and over again. It’s biology. The honeymoon phase will end, everybody. It happens in every relationship. Everyone is so surprised that, “God, I no longer want to have sex anymore as much as I did those first six months.”

Dave Asprey:                          It’s eating the same flavor of ice cream everyday for the rest of your life. You might want to put some chocolate sauce on it. That’s all I’m saying.

Emily Morse:                         Just a little chocolate, little sprinkles.

Dave Asprey:                          Yeah, whatever little variations are good. If it’s a piece of technology, that’s cool. I agree. This is something that no one told me when I was in my 20s. I don’t think people talk about this very much. In your columns, in your writing, you talk about this quite a bit, but for listeners who are earlier in the stages of adult development, the Eriksonian stages there, this happens to pretty much all of us over time. I just turned 44. It’s amazing what changes over time, even if you’re doing anti-aging stuff.

Emily Morse:                         No, it is absolutely true. I always wonder why, because I get hundreds of emails a day to my inbox, Sex with Emily. I had a few questions, we answer them on the podcast. Literally it’s like they realize they were the first one that realized the world wasn’t flat. They’re like, “Oh my God, I no longer want to have sex. I love my boyfriend. We’ve been together two years.” Nobody prepares you for this. I always tell couples you prepare for everything else. You move in together. You kind of decide on what color you’re going to paint the room. You might start saving for a 401K. Are we going to move to the country or the city? You don’t talk about your sex life, because just know, it is going to wane. There will be challenges. It’s part of being in a relationship. We talk about that a lot. Prepare for it. Don’t be so shocked. We have things you can do.

Dave Asprey:                          Something that actually inspires me is that it may be social media that did it or just the ease of communication, but I find that people … I look back to the way I was when I was 20. I was pretty resistant to outside information, and so were a lot of the people around me. I find that the younger people I get to hang out with now, they’re actively seeking to avoid the kind of mistakes that I was like, “I’ll make those mistakes myself.” It’s kind of cool, because they’ll ask the questions on your show, and they’ll listen to the answer, whereas I wouldn’t even ask the question back then.

Emily Morse:                         Right. I think back then we didn’t even know what the questions were. My sex education was abysmal, and my mom would say, “If you got any questions, ask me.” I didn’t even know what to ask. I was a [inaudible 00:16:15]. I never had an orgasm. I didn’t think to masturbate. I didn’t know. Now it’s like we kind of know, and there’s so many places to … Not a lot of places to get great sex information. My website, I hope, but in sex education is, like I said, abysmal. Yeah, now people are more curious, so it’s good.

Dave Asprey:                          They’re more curious and just more open to playing with what’s happening, and just learning from others. I’m happy that you’re talking about the changes that happen in relationships. The other thing that happens that no one talks about, and you may have addressed this on one of your shows, but if not, I want to hear your thoughts on this or if you’ve heard about it. When you’re on the pill, it changes how you sense your mate’s smell. We’re attracted to people based on smell and a bunch of other things. A women will be really attracted to her boyfriend. They get married. She goes off the pill, and all of a sudden he’s not attractive anymore.

This is scary stuff. My advice for people who are on the pill, number one, if you want to live a long time and not get cancer and all this stuff, quit messing with your hormones. Get off the pill and start tracking your ovulation. Just learn how your body works. Okay, if you’re not going to do that, get off the pill for at least six months before you get married, because if you loose attraction to the person that you think is the one, you might want to know that before you have babies, just saying.

Emily Morse:                         I totally agree with you. The pill, here’s the other thing that we didn’t find out. Your doctor goes in, he gives you a pill, he doesn’t tell you, “Guess what? Besides all the attraction stuff, you might get depressed. You’re going to be bloated,” all these side-effects that no one tells you. They also don’t tell you that you can adjust it, that if this pill doesn’t work for you, you might need another kind of birth control. Adjust it, the different level of estrogen, progesterone, IUD, whatever you want to get, and they warn you of nothing.

When young girls who are getting it, they’re like, “I want to go back to the doctor.” Hard enough to get an appointment. There’s all these things around the pill that I think you’re right. Just use condoms. Get [inaudible 00:18:15] maybe take some time, figure it out. You’re right, but it is true. What if you made this big mistake? You wake up and smell your husband, and he’s the wrong guy for you. Wake up and smell the roses, smell the husband.

Dave Asprey:                          There’s other things, too, that the more I dig into how our bodies work and the delicate dance we have in the environment around us, the reason you’re attracted to the smell of your husband and he’s attracted to you is that that signals biological genetic compatibility. You are at a very low level wired to not want to have sex with people who aren’t going to give you good babies. If you mess with that system, it’s just not going to end well. It’s not that you can’t have a healthy baby. It’s just that the baby won’t be as healthy as it could have been had you allowed your body to help you choose someone you’re attracted to.

Emily Morse:                         Right. I know. It’s fascinating.

Dave Asprey:                          It is.

Emily Morse:                         [inaudible 00:19:07] this happened, your wife go off the pill, and she was like, “Eh.”

Dave Asprey:                          She didn’t like me in the first place. She was just using me for my good looks.

Emily Morse:                         [inaudible 00:19:15] change. You look good, Dave. I got to say, you look …

Dave Asprey:                          Just kidding. She wasn’t on the pill. She, being a trained physician who looked at the side effects was like, “This is bad news. I’m not doing that.”

Emily Morse:                         I know, it is bad news. Even my nieces, they’re getting on the pill. I’m like, “God, can we talk?” Yeah, not the best thing.

Dave Asprey:                          Yeah. Let’s talk about kegel exercises, because this is something that I actually haven’t written about, I don’t believe, on the Bulletproof website. It’s something I’ve known about for a long time, something that guys absolutely should be doing, something that I’ve actually done for a long time, and something that a lot of women do. Let’s talk about kegel exercises, first for women, what they are, what the benefits are, if you have any hacks for them, and then tell me about kegel exercises for men, because I think a lot of people don’t know about this.

Emily Morse:                         Okay. Kegel exercises are another way. They’re kind of a little bit of magic. Just imagine doing your kegels, and they don’t take that much time. If you do them a few times a week, you’ll see so many improvements. Let’s talk about for women. If you don’t know what they are, best way to describe it, I’ve not found a more elegant way, but it’s those pee stopping muscles when you stop and start the flow of urine. If you’re going to the bathroom and someone knocks on the door, you stop it. It’s those muscles. What you do is five minutes a day you tense, relax them, tense, relax. You hold them for 10 seconds, relax. I have an iPhone app called Kegel Camp that I created because doctors always tell you to do them, and you never remember. It can remind you twice a day to do them, as many times. It gets harder. There’s 20 levels.

The point is you do them, and these muscles atrophy over time. They just will. Your pelvic floor, like everything else, will drop. No matter what age you are, it’s important to work them. For women, you can have stronger orgasms. After childbirth, a lot of women suffer from urinary incontinence. You sneeze and you pee. Not so fun. It’s just healthy to keep those muscles strong. It’s just for a lot of women, even for myself, I haven’t had kids, but I was feeling like practice what I preach. I’m going to do them. I have to say, just like the Fiera for libido, I felt like it enhanced my libido, because we just shut down that whole part of our body, women. We’re like neck up. Just the fact of five minutes a day breathing into it, it’s like I’ve got kegels of steel. I wish I could show you, but I did things like that. I’m having stronger orgasms. I’m desiring sex more, because I’m drawing attention to that area.

Dave Asprey:                          You don’t have to be naked to do these. You could be doing kegel exercises right now, and I wouldn’t know it.

Emily Morse:                         Oh yeah. Actually, I’ve been doing them the whole show.

Dave Asprey:                          Me too.

Emily Morse:                         I’m trying to [inaudible 00:22:01]. My goal is when I’m a guest on other people’s podcast. No, but here’s the thing. Doctors are always like, “Oh, when you’re at a traffic light, do them.” People can get those routines down every time. I have a friend who will say, “Every time I’m on the phone, I do them.” I forget. That’s why my app is like, “Reminder,” and then it walks you through it. Yes, you could do them anywhere. You could do them, tense, relax those muscles. The thing is a lot of people do them incorrectly. I’ve got some information on my site, and they squeeze their butts too much. It’s really these really delicate muscles that you just got to make sure you tense and relax them, again, five minutes. It helps.

Dave Asprey:                          You hold them for five minutes straight, or you tense on and off for five minutes?

Emily Morse:                         The entire exercise is five minutes. You can do three if you want to hack it.

Dave Asprey:                          You’re doing it, you’re holding for five seconds? I’m assuming there’s women listening to this right now who are like, “Okay, I’m going to try this.”

Emily Morse:                         Yeah, so when you hold them for five seconds, release. You tense, relax, five seconds. Tense and hold. On my app, again, you don’t have to use my app. My app-

Dave Asprey:                          What’s the name of the app?

Emily Morse:                         It’s called Kegel Camp.

Dave Asprey:                          Kegel Camp. All right. If you want that … Android and iPhone?

Emily Morse:                         Just iPhone, but we’re working on it. We’ve had it out for five years.

Dave Asprey:                          Just iPhone. The Android people are going to be yelling and posting. You Android people are so angry. I’m just kidding.

Emily Morse:                         They’re so angry at me. Everyday they email. I’m going to get it on there, I swear. I’ve had it for years. There’s so many things going on. I’ve got to get it on Android. I’m going to be honest, there’s other apps, too, but mine’s the best. However, there might be an Android version of something else. When I first launched the app, I only had 10 levels. How it gets increasingly more difficult is you hold them longer. It’s still a five minute routine or three minute, but then you tense and hold for 10 seconds and release it for 10 seconds, or you do rapid ones. You play with it, but it’s still the same muscles. Just like any other kind of exercise routine, you mix up your routine it gets increasingly harder, so I release it at 10 levels thinking, “Is anyone really going to do it?” They were like, “I’ve got to 10. Now what?” Now there’s 10 levels. People are like, “Oh my God.”

I have guys, we’ll talk about the benefits for men. I’ve had guys who are like, “Oh my God, now I shoot across the room like I’m 19 years old,” for example, when the ejaculate. They’re like, “I can maintain my erection longer.” It’s helpful for the prostate for men. Men and women do them the same way. We all have the pelvic floor muscles, the kegel muscles to work on. For women, the new technology this year was a product called the Intensity by PourMoi. These are all on my website as well, sexwithemily.com.

The coolest thing about this product is … Oh God, I love this. I wish they could do this for every kind of exercise is that it’s an insertable product. You put it inside you. It kind of is a vibrator, to be honest. It looks like a rabbit vibrator, but it uses gentle electro stimulation five to eight minutes a day for four times a week, and it stimulates your kegel muscles, so it actually does it for you. You like back in bed, check out your phone, answer an email. I’m telling you, I don’t even have to do them on my own. It totally works. It feels good. Then it’s a vibrator, and then at the end you’re like, “Okay.” You get a little reward here.

Dave Asprey:                          Reward you for your workout.

Emily Morse:                         Exactly.

Dave Asprey:                          If people listening think that’s skeptical, I just have to tell you straight up the vast majority of how my whole body looks right now comes from vibration and electrical stimulation. It puts on muscle. I use the Bulletproof Vibe, which is the standing vibration platform that I manufacture. You can look at me. I’m not the most ripped. The New York Times says I’m almost muscular, which is what I want to be. There’s that, and I put electrodes on my arm, and I run the same kind of currents, but heavier, over my body. That’s what I do.

Emily Morse:                         You’re sitting at home eating popcorn exercising?

Dave Asprey:                          I stand for 10 minutes a day on a platform while I’m on the phone. It vibrates 30 times a second. I do a little yoga poses, like one-legged forward folds or squats, but I’m not working out, because I’m on the phone doing them. I just stand there. Then I run the electricity once or twice a week. Sometimes I lift heavy stuff maybe once every two weeks, and I go for a walk every now and then. Literally I work out less than anyone I know. I’m looking pretty good for a mid 40s guy.

Emily Morse:                         That’s amazing. I was like, “Why do you look so good?” Is it all Bulletproof? No, I mean-

Dave Asprey:                          No, I do the Bulletproofs. I had my own stem cells put in my blood. I do everything. I’m going to live to 180 years old. There is nothing on Earth that I don’t do, but I don’t exercise all the time. The only reason I’m bringing this up is this is an example. The two technologies that you’re talking about there, like the electrical stimulation, and I don’t really want to put myself in whole body suction, except actually I do. I have a machine that takes me to 22,000 feet elevation. Literally, it removes air pressure and then puts it back. It’s like [inaudible 00:26:52] for my whole body all that the same time. It’s like a space capsule thing. Anyway, this is biohacking craziness.

Emily Morse:                         I love biohacking craziness [inaudible 00:27:00], because I always say, “What if you could do something that would do your sit-ups for you?” What I was talking about is my show, and how amazing would that be if you didn’t have to go to the gym, and you’re telling me you’ve actually invented this-

Dave Asprey:                          No, actually that’s Suzanne, Suzanne Summers. She’s been on the show, too. That Ab Blaster stuff with the electrical stim, it’s not a joke. When you run the electrical current over your muscles the right wave forms, they totally, totally work. There’s seven a Face Master that she makes where it’s like the electrical stim around your eyes. She sent me one and it’s really cool. I don’t use it regularly, because I have all sorts of toys, but when you do use it, oh my God, if you have crows feet and bags, you can shock them away in two minutes. It exercises your face muscles.

Emily Morse:                         [crosstalk 00:27:39] my show if you’re not going to use it, I’m totally going to use it.

Dave Asprey:                          Awesome. I’m sure she’ll-

Emily Morse:                         [inaudible 00:27:45] crows feet. No, so this is the same kind of thing. Yeah, this Intensity, you put it inside if you’re like, “I can’t do it,” and it’s a vibrator, so hey. It also will stimulate your libido. That’s so cool. I love you’re doing all this stuff.

Dave Asprey:                          I’m just saying that that stuff really works for muscle development. If you’re a woman of any age, or frankly a guy, although we don’t get as much attention down there from electrical current stuff, but these kinds of things to increase strength in the pelvic floor, it goes beyond just sexual interest and performance. They talk about your core muscles in your meditation and the eastern yoga side of things. That’s the lowest of the, what do we call them? I’m blanking on it.

Emily Morse:                         The chakras.

Dave Asprey:                          The locks. There’s three different locks. There’s [mudras budras 00:28:32]. There’s basically a root lock that it’s called. There’s also a throw lock. When you have a strong core, in other words, the perineum area, it actually grounds you and enables you to move energy up your central column. This goes beyond just, “I’m good in bed, and I have powerful orgasms.” It’s like, “I am more present as a woman or a man, because the core of my very core is strong.”

Emily Morse:                         I’m so glad you brought that up, because it’s actually I do a lot of meditation and breathing. I realize a lot of times I was very chest up. I wasn’t as connected. With all my yoga and all the spiritual meditating for 20 years, often times you go through your day, this whole part of me can be just shut down. When you’re breathing into your pelvic floor while you’re doing these exercises and strengthening your pelvic floor, it does have an amazing impact on your entire body and your entire well-being. You’re so right.

Dave Asprey:                          All right. This tech, these are biohacking tech for sex, but this was called Intensity, and it was by PourMe or something?

Emily Morse:                         PourMoi, like “for me” in French. P-O-U-R-M-O-I.com. Again, it’s all on my website, because they sent me one. I would never talk about a product that I didn’t know. I try everything, luckily. We get 25 pounds of sex toys sent to us today. [crosstalk 00:29:51]-

Dave Asprey:                          You have a good life, don’t you?

Emily Morse:                         I really do, I have to say. Some guy emailed me. I’m actually doing these dating apps now for fun, and a test, and maybe we’ll get to that, but he was like, “How did you manage to turn my favorite hobby into your career?” I’m like, “Because it’s sex. It’s amazing. It’s fun.” I was happy to get your Bulletproof coffee the other day, because usually it’s toys. That was actually a nice change from the [inaudible 00:30:16]. We usually get-

Dave Asprey:                          I don’t recommend ground coffee for use down there, but there are …

Emily Morse:                         I was like, “Oh my God, it’s coffee and the mug.” I love Contigo, that you use Contigo, because I’m obsessed with Contigo everything.

Dave Asprey:                          They make some amazing mugs. The Bulletproof Contigo mug, I tested 100 mugs to find one that was the perfect one. Yeah.

Emily Morse:                         I gift it to all my friends, the Contigo everything. They’re water bottles. I have it right here. I have 15 of them, everybody in my life I have, because they don’t spill. They’re amazing. Yeah, I do have the best job ever. They sent it to me. I’m like, “Really? Am I going to do this?” Then sure enough it became part of my … I meditate. I do my kegels. I do this thing. It all works.

Dave Asprey:                          I’m just going to go there. My wife will probably kill me, but given that I mentioned I do my exercise with electrical stimulation, it is conceivably possible that you could put the negative electrodes on one person, and the positive electrodes on another person. Then the areas where the two people are contacting that have the most electrical flow, which would be the wettest areas, might carry the most current. Does anyone ever say anything like that?

Emily Morse:                         I don’t even know. I missed it there. You lost me.

Dave Asprey:                          It’s possible during sex to have electrical current, like the little tens unites, the ones you can buy, the little cheap $10 massage me kind of electrical current things.

Emily Morse:                         Oh, you’re talking about electro stimulation, like vibrator [inaudible 00:31:42].

Dave Asprey:                          Yeah, like the vibrator thing that you were just talking about.

Emily Morse:                         Okay, got it.

Dave Asprey:                          You can actually take, if you have a positive terminal and a negative terminal, you can put them on different sex partners.

Emily Morse:                         Right.

Dave Asprey:                          Then the areas where you come together actually literally carry a small, tingling electrical current.

Emily Morse:                         Right.

Dave Asprey:                          Which means that your lips, your fingers, and the obvious areas are going to do that. Given that I have electrical stimulation equipment that changes physiology, how could I not try something like that, or theoretically try something like that?

Emily Morse:                         It’s a huge things right now. I’ve got a whole vibrator kit here they sent me that’s all electro stim. People use it for electro play, for sex. There’s all these vibrators now that goes beyond vibrations, but that shock to your system can actually be a great turn on for people. Is that what you’re talking about?

Dave Asprey:                          Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about, but there’s the, “Oh, I’m just going to shock myself,” but it’s one thing when basically one person is half of the connection, the other person is the other half, like an [inaudible 00:32:37]. Only the areas where you touch does the electrical current flow.

Emily Morse:                         Right, exactly. It can feel really good, which is kind of like if you give yourself a massage, it won’t feel so good, but if someone else is stimulating you, it can feel amazing.

Dave Asprey:                          Exactly.

Emily Morse:                         Or not.

Dave Asprey:                          It also kind of connects your nervous systems in a weird way, but do you think there’s any danger in this stuff? Not like your heart’s going to stop. It’s not like that, but are there long-term safety studies for this stuff that you’re aware of?

Emily Morse:                         I haven’t heard … God, you always hear about dangers with sex when people they take it too far, like autoerotic asphyxiation. I don’t encourage that. Even bondage with shibari ropes, and they do stuff, you got to be careful with everything. I haven’t [inaudible 00:33:21] these devices. Yes, with this electric stimulation, sure, you can go too far, like with everything, but I haven’t heard, and I read everything about sex. I’ve never heard anybody completely shocking themselves to the point of anything super.

Dave Asprey:                          I don’t think there’s any short-term risk. I just wonder. I believe long-term electrical stimulation actually makes your cells stronger. It adds electrons to your mitochondria. Terry Wahls, who’s been on the show who wrote the book “Minding my Mitochondria” actually used the electrical stim to cure her MS. She got out of a wheelchair using batter powered stem.

Emily Morse:                         How?

Dave Asprey:                          Along with diet and everything else. I think we’re doing good things, but there are a group of people out there who will be like, “Oh my God, what’s going to happen?” My advice for everyone listening is if it’s plugged into the wall, don’t stick it inside you. If it’s batter powered, and it doesn’t have a rotating motor, it’s probably not going to have a big electrical field. If it’s a vibrator, it may have a small electrical field, and it may not be good for you over long periods of time. We don’t know.

Emily Morse:                         This Intensity actually takes two double A batteries. It’s not plugged into the wall, and you start out at a really low speed. Who knows? Just like everything else, people are like, “Vibrators, are they bad for you? Are they going to numb you?” Moderation, people. Pay attention to your body. Yeah.

Dave Asprey:                          I didn’t know we’d go into that level of detail in electrical play, but I did have Mistress Natalie on a while ago, a professional dominatrix from New York. She went way deeper on that stuff than I ever thought. No problem.

Emily Morse:                         Right, no. Why not? I think sex, it’s going to become a little … How do you know what you’re going to be into? People are like, “Oh, I can never do that,” or, “That’s way outside my box,” but I don’t know. Just if you eat the same meal everyday, the same kind of sex everyday, why not try something new? Why not experiment with it? Who knows? Maybe it feels good to get shocked during sex with the right …

Dave Asprey:                          Yeah, or at least have some tingly stuff in the right places, if it’s not getting shocked. The bottom line is that we’re humans here to have an experience and to have experiences. If there’s an experience you’re attracted to, my advice would be if no one’s getting hurt, at least not very much, go for it.

Emily Morse:                         [crosstalk 00:35:25].

Dave Asprey:                          You might like it, right? The worst you’ll do is not like it, and then say, “Don’t do that anymore.”

Emily Morse:                         Yeah, that’s what I always tell my listeners. Why not? I think that we have such a limited view of what kind of pleasure we can have from sex, because we have sex the same way typically over and over and over again. “Oh, I can only have an orgasm this way, on top, on the bottom,” or, “I only feel good in this position.” How do you know? Just because that’s the way you’ve always done it, that’s like the biggest curse in language. We’ve always done it this way. Why not try something?

Even in my office, again, best job ever, I had a woman who worked for me, and she was like, “I’ve never had a multiple orgasm, so obviously it won’t happen.” I was like, “How do you know it won’t happen?” She’s like, “I just know.” We make decisions like this all the time. I said, “Try this.” I gave her some tips. Sex with Emily team does a sex toy review show podcast once a month. She came back in the next day and she said, “I had five.” I’m like, “Wow, you even surpassed most people.”

We have such limitations about what we’re going to like with sex, or that it’s always going to be the same. I’m just saying God, if you really want to have longevity with your sex life, attraction to your partner, or just even learn your own body, try some of these things. It’s sex. It’s supposed to be fun and pleasurable. Go there. Try it.

Dave Asprey:                          It is, indeed, and I love hearing that. For the new year, a lot of people make resolutions. I don’t know how many people make sexual resolutions for the new year, but what resolutions to improve someone’s sex life would you recommend?

Emily Morse:                         God, I recommend that everybody adds in just one little sexual resolution, because again, we’re talking about preventing what we know is going to happen, some kind of malaise in your sex life. I say resolve to masturbate with a purpose.

Dave Asprey:                          Like orgasm, or some other purpose?

Emily Morse:                         Okay. We know that’s a sure thing. You’re thinking, “You know what? I got my hand, men are going, ‘I do it all the time.'”

Dave Asprey:                          How hard is that? Oh wait, I just-

Emily Morse:                         Right, exactly. For women, again, and men, we tend to masturbate the same way, if we do at all, over and over and over again. There’s so much information that we can get from taking time to masturbate that will actually help us improve our sex life. Try new things. Understand your body. Try. I have nothing against watching porn, reading erotica, trying a new sex toy, exploring your body in different ways using your fingers. Nipple orgasms, second most common orgasm. How many women have had one of those? I haven’t. I haven’t really focused on it. It’s on my bucket list. Just with the purpose of knowing your body more and wanting more pleasure in the year, and also you might learn some things that you never knew that it felt great when someone tickles the inside of your wrist here or something, your forearm. Then you can share that with a partner. Then improve your sex life. Try new things, setting the mood, toys. I’m a huge fan of toys, different positions. Just don’t stagnate there, okay? Masturbation [inaudible 00:38:36].

Dave Asprey:                          All right. Resolve no stagnation. What about the role of shame? It seems like a lot of people are really ashamed that they might like something, they wouldn’t like something. It seems like the more shame that’s associated with something when someone does it, the more intense the experience for them. At least that’s what Mistress Natalie was talking about there.

Emily Morse:                         Oh my God, there’s so much shame.

Dave Asprey:                          Yeah, what’s your take on that?

Emily Morse:                         My take is yes, there’s so much shame when it comes to sex and to asking for what we want, to even admitting that we masturbate or that we enjoy sex. It never goes away. For a lot of people, it doesn’t go away, and it can start from childhood, religion, messages we got especially as young girls. There’s always that time in a young girl’s life when we’re maybe about six or seven, and everything is great. Maybe we feel like we’re just like the guys. It’s a hot summer day. We’re outside. Maybe we take our shirt of as well. Someone says, “Hey there, Emily, little Emily. Put your shirt on. You’re not supposed to be … Cross your legs.”

That’s when the shame starts. We think there’s something wrong with my body parts. I should be shameful of showing myself. Yeah, you shouldn’t walk around when you’re 15 with your shirt off, but there’s just something bad around our bodies. There’s shame. We’re not taught anything about pleasure, that it actually can feel good. We’re just taught, “Cover up. Your body is only for you to see.” These messages start at a very, very young age. If that’s the conditioning we got in our home, it’s going to continue into our sex life.

I talk to people of all ages, literally, that are just like, “Wow, but I just feel so bad talking about sex or masturbating still.” I think just the way to get over that is to realize that sex is for your pleasure, and to just kind of … It’s reprogramming the mind, really, and realizing you’re not going to hell. You’re going to experience so much more pleasure. All the serotonin, dopamine, everything will be spiked because of the pleasures you’re getting from it. It’s really just kind of just altering the way that you think around sex. Shame is a tough one. That’s why couples don’t often communicate around sex, because they’re afraid that they’re going to be shamed for asking for what they want in bed, that a woman is going to feel like she’ll be judged as a slut because she knows that if she’s in this position, this is the most pleasure, or if a guy asks for a certain fantasy that he wants, pleasure, that he’ll be judged. It’s all messed up in our brains, and it prevents us from having the best sex we can.

Dave Asprey:                          That’s a good resolution for the beginning of the year, but also just any time. Just resolve to ask for something you want in bed that you’ve never had. That’s a powerful thing to do. It’s also a little bit scary for most people, but you’ll probably find that if you do that, you might get what you ask for. You might even like it. Your partner might like it, or they might not. If you don’t ask, you’ll never know.

Emily Morse:                         Exactly. I always say communication is lubrication, because the more that you actually practice talking to your partner about sex and what you like and what you want, you’re going to find out that your sex life is going to improve. It’s like a muscle, communicating about sex. We don’t learn it. No one tells you how to do it, so yes, it will be a little uncomfortable the first time. Believe me, the rewards are going to come back tenfold. Just practice communicating and asking for what you want. If it’s not comfortable for you, I often say make a sexual bucket list with your partner. Be like, “These are the five things I want to try,” and you exchange lists and see, “Let’s kind of put these on … In January we’ll do this, February.” Your sex life could just go through the roof. Why not try? Life is too short not to have good sex.

Dave Asprey:                          It’s totally true. Life is way too short for mediocre sex. We’re coming up on the end of the show, and I’d love to ask you the Bulletproof question.

Emily Morse:                         Do it.

Dave Asprey:                          Since you’ve already been on the show once, so you’ve already answered the original Bulletproof question. I’m going to ask you a different question. The normal question is what are your top three recommendations for someone who comes to you and says, “Look, I want to perform better at everything I do in life.” You’ve already answered that question. However, if someone came to you tomorrow and said, “What are your top three recommendations for performing better in the bedroom?” what would you say? You only have three things that you can recommend. What are they?

Emily Morse:                         Okay. Number one-

Dave Asprey:                          Man or woman. It’s got to be generic.

Emily Morse:                         Okay, generic. I would say number one is masturbation, even for men, men and women. Men are like, “I don’t have a problem with that,” but masturbate a little bit differently for men, too. You think that, “Oh, I’ve got my hand. It feels good. Try a fleshlight. Try something different. Try prostate play. Masturbate, masturbate. It’s the best information you’ll get about what feels good, so masturbation. Communication. Communicate, like I said, communicate with your partner. That will help everybody across the board. Most people do not ask for what they want out of fear or shame, and then they’re never going to get it. Then they have bad sex. I’d say it’s kind of what I said. Masturbate, communicate, and honestly, use lube. I’m telling you-

Dave Asprey:                          Top three, I love it.

Emily Morse:                         Top three. Lubrication, people are like, “Oh, don’t worry, I don’t have a problem.” This is what everyone says to me. “Oh, no. We don’t have that problem. We’re already wet.” No, no, no. Guess what? Lube, my dream is a lube on every nightstand. Literally [inaudible 00:44:03] computer, lube on every nightstand, because there’s this stigma that if you use lube, it’s because she’s dry. There’s discomfort. You didn’t turn her on. It’s embarrassing. I’m not talking about KY jelly. I’m saying go get a good bottle of System Joe lube, or something that’s great. You add a few drops, a few drops before you start sex on the clitoris, around your penis. I’m telling you, women, 80% of women in this study at Indiana University showed they were more likely to orgasm when you add a little lube. That’s my tip.

Dave Asprey:                          That sounds like a pretty good tip. All right, Emily. Thank you for being on Bulletproof Radio and sharing some incredibly interesting new technologies around hacking your ability to have an orgasm. People can find out more at sexwithemily.com. They can subscribe to your podcast by the same name, and find your content with ask Emily pretty much all over the place now. Did I get all the good places?

Emily Morse:                         Yep, all the good places. It’s all on my website, you can find it. Also social media, we do a lot of giveaways, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, it’s all at Facebook @SexWithEmily across the board. Yeah, just go there. You’ll learn it all, because I’m everywhere on the web, but Sex With Emily is a good home base to start.

Dave Asprey:                          Awesome.

Emily Morse:                         Podcast, all that.

Dave Asprey:                          Thanks for being on Bulletproof Radio this time.

Emily Morse:                         So fun. Next time you’re on Sex With Emily.

Dave Asprey:                          All right, it’s a deal.

Emily Morse:                         Okay.

Dave Asprey:                          If you liked today’s episode, you could head on over to iTunes and leave a five star ranking, which I always appreciate. Or if you want more, you could check out the box that I ship quarterly. Every quarter I put together a couple hundred dollars worth of new biohacking technology, sometimes software, but usually stuff, like really interesting devices, maybe even some of the types of devices and other things we talked about on the show today. I curate these. I spend three months putting this stuff together, getting really good deals, putting it into a box, and shipping it to you. You spend $100 to get way more than $100 worth of stuff. It’s personally picked out by me as being biohacker approved. I ship this to you quarterly.

If you want to get a Dave Asprey box that’s shipped quarterly, you can go to biohacked.com and subscribe. When you subscribed, I’ll immediately start making sure I get enough of all the things for you. I usually include some very high value golden ticket items, which means that for instance in the last box, someone won a $15,000 five day trip to the 40 Years of Zen most exclusive brain training program in the world right now, which was kind of cool. Quite often we give away things worth thousands of dollars to a few lucky winners. You might want to check that out. You just subscribe. You always get way more than you pay for, and it’s always approved by me. I record a video telling you what all the stuff is for. It’s at biohacked.com. That’s biohacked with an ED on the end .com. Just look for the Dave Asprey box.

Bulletproof Alcohol: What to Drink During the Holidays

Even if you’re totally committed to the Bulletproof lifestyle, odds are you relax with a drink every now and then. Clean alcohol will still impact your performance a little bit, but sometimes it’s worth it for the fun.

Drinking can get trickier during the holiday season. Typical holiday libations tend toward the more toxic side of alcohol – beer, wine, and sugary drinks like eggnog will probably leave you feeling rough in the morning and affect your performance throughout the day. With a little tweaking, though, you can make holiday classics as Bulletproof as alcohol can be. Here are a few recipes to carry you through Christmas and New Year’s.

[Tweet “Real Talk: Alcohol isn’t Bulletproof! But if you do imbibe, these recipes are as close as it gets.”]

Bulletproof Eggnog

If you take out the sugar, eggnog is one of the most Bulletproof cocktails you can make. The egg yolks are full of good fats and brain-boosting nutrients like choline, and bourbon is a pretty clean spirit. Here’s a Bulletproof eggnog recipe with no sugar:

Ingredients:

  • 4 pastured egg yolks
  • 1 can coconut milk (or raw, grass-fed cream, if you tolerate dairy)
  • 1 tsp nutmeg
  • 1 tsp ground organic Madagascar vanilla
  • 2 tbsp xylitol/erythritol/stevia
  • 4 beaten egg whites (beat these before you combine and blend!)
  • bourbon (optional)

Combine all ingredients and blend until creamy!

 

Biohacked wine

Typical wine can have 76 different additives, none of which the producers have to disclose on their labels. Artificial coloring, ammonia, defoaming agents, metals, added sugar, and all kinds of other odd chemicals contribute to the crushing hangover a lot of people get from wine.

Wine can also be high in inflammatory, carcinogenic mycotoxins from moldy vats or poor fermentation practices. Then there’s the huge pesticide load that wine grapes carry. Yuck.

The most Bulletproof wine comes from Dry Farm Wines. Todd, the founder, sources natural, organic, biodynamic, low-alcohol wine and lab tests it to be free of mold and additives. That means minimal inflammation and little to no hangover the next morning. You can hear Todd talk in-depth about biodynamic wine here on Bulletproof Radio.

 

View More: http://lianamikah.pass.us/bulletprooflifestyleLighter cocktails

Alcohol saps your vitamin B stores, which is part of what leaves you hung over. FATwater makes a good mixer for cocktails because it’s high in B vitamins and doesn’t have sugar. Here are three refreshing Bulletproof versions of classic cocktails that use FATwater:

 

Greyhound

Pour the liquor over the ice and top with the FATwater. Simple as that.

 

Rosemary Lemon Drop

  • 1.5 oz potato vodka
  • Fresh rosemary sprigs
  • Lemon FATwater
  • Lemon slices
  • Lemon zest
  • Ice

Drop 3-4 rosemary sprigs into your bottle of potato vodka and let it infuse for at least 24 hours. Combine the rosemary-infused vodka, lemon FATwater, ice, lemon slices, and lemon zest in a shaker. Shake and strain into a martini glass. Garnish with an extra slice of lemon or sprig of rosemary if you want to get fancy.

 

Pineapple Coconut Cooler

Blend ingredients together until creamy. Use about a 50/50 mix of pineapple FATwater and coconut milk.

[Tweet “Test out these holiday cocktail classics with a Bulletproof twist! #cheers”]

No matter what you drink, you won’t escape the fact that alcohol is a toxin. Here’s a complete guide to hacking your hangover to minimize the damage drinking does. Do you have favorite holiday cocktails? Leave your recipe in the comments! You can also subscribe below for more recipes and ways to upgrade your biology. Thanks for reading and have a great week.

 

 

Mashup of the Titans – Part 2 w/ Tim Ferriss – #371

Welcome to Part 2 of our interview with none other than the 4-hour man himself, Tim Ferriss. Tim is the author of three #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers: The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, and The 4-Hour Chef. In his own words “For the last two years, I’ve interviewed nearly two hundred world-class performers for my podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show. Guests range from super celebs (Jamie Foxx, Arnold Schwarzenegger, etc.) and athletes (icons of powerlifting, gymnastics, surfing, etc.) to legendary Special Operations commanders and black-market biochemists.” Today, Tim is here on Bulletproof Radio to talk about the culmination of those interviews — his new book, Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers. Enjoy the show.
Bulletproof Executive Radio at the iTunes, App Store, iBookstore, and Mac App Store

YouTube

Listen

Follow Along with the Transcript!

[expand title=”CLICK HERE to read along with the transcript!” swaptitle=”Click to hide transcript”]
Announcer: Bulletproof Radio. A state of high performance.
Dave Asprey: You’re listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today’s cool of the fact of the day is about the psychological effects of failure. It turns out that failure makes the same goal seem less attainable, it distorts your perceptions of your abilities, it can make you believe that you’re helpless, and just one single failure experience can create an unconscious fear of failure. When you have fear of failure you can sabotage yourself without even knowing it and it’s something that you can transmit to your own kids, or maybe you got from your parents.
The pressure to succeed increases performance anxiety, which causes you to choke. While this is the real end of the cool fact of the day, it’s that a great way to overcome choking is actually to whistle or mutter. So when you feel like going, “Oh, what am I going to do?”, just whistling or kind of just talking to yourself for a little while can make a difference. The psychologically healthiest response to failure is to focus on the variables that are in your control. If you really want to focus on failure though, you could do what I do with my kids. Every day I celebrate my biggest fail and they celebrate their biggest fail, because if you don’t fail at something it means you weren’t working out your edges. When failure becomes a success, well then the fear of failure just goes away.
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 and more capable to bring oxygen to your brain. It’s pretty straightforward. 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 essential for optimum focus, concentration and mental energy. That full body stretch elongates the spine, it takes the pressure off the discs 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 a Teeter to invert every day to keep your back and joints feeling great.
For over 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 dot com slash Bulletproof. Check it out.
This is part two of the Bulletproof Radio interview with Tim Ferriss where we talk about the tools that successful people use to create health, and wealth, and wisdom, and some of it which can be found in his new book. Let’s get back on with Tim.
Have you tried Ibogaine or are you willing to talk about it? Or you can say …
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I can talk about it, I can talk about it.
Dave Asprey: … take the Fifth.
Tim Ferriss: Yep. No, I’m not going to take the Fifth. So I should just, as a caveat for people listening. In the United States, the legal side effects of using anything that we were talking about right now are extremely severe. These compounds are in the same class, Schedule I, as cocaine and heroin. So if you are caught with these things, much more so if you are caught with enough that it can be considered intent to distribute, you can go to jail for a long time, 20 plus years. That all having been said, I have used ibogaine, specifically ibogaine the alkaloid, not iboga, in a microdosing protocol. And I’ve experimented …
Dave Asprey: I haven’t heard of. That’s cool.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So I have not gone on, nor do I have very … I don’t have real interest in going on a full ride iboga or ibogaine experience. I know a lot of people involved and many doctors who are working with heroin addicts …
Dave Asprey: Crossroads and places, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. It has tremendous applications in that particular sphere, but ibogaine also has the worst safety record of any psychedelic that I have seen, mostly related to cardiac events. To date, and some people think this is … The numbers are actually much higher, closer to one in 100, but the number that is thrown around is one in 300 people have a fatal cardiac event. Now, if you have proper medical supervision and they are looking at pulse oximeters, they’re looking at your pulse, heart rate, and you’re hooked up to proper machines, they have atropine on hand and so on, that shouldn’t happen. But, nonetheless, it looks like at least in the somewhat highly unregulated, and largely I think in many cases sadly unqualified, clinics that are providing ibogaine, people die. But I have microdosed it at very low dosages. We’re talking in the two to four milligram range total, which is at least, or I should say, yeah at least or at maximum 1/100, as I understand it, of the migs per kigs full ride dose that I would potentially use in a ceremonial or heroin/opiate detox protocol.
I have done quite a bit of experimentation on that side of things. Hard to get …
Dave Asprey: What was that like?
Tim Ferriss: Hard to get.
Dave Asprey: A very … Well, where I live it’s legal. I’m in Canada so …
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dave Asprey: … I mean it isn’t scheduled here.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. In the US, it’s like nipples and ibogaine, both get you in a lot of trouble.
Dave Asprey: Now what is your experience from microdosing that? I mean, I may or may not have microdosed a few other substances …
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure, and actually … So the three, I should say, the three longest chapters in “Tools of Titans,” and they’re long, the first is on fasting and ketosis and Dominic D’Agostino. We did a lot of extra conversations and a lot of e-mails to flesh it out. The other two are all on psychedelics and talk about a lot of the experimentation in my personal schedule and so on. In the case of microdosing ibogaine, I could tell you exactly what I noticed. First off, it is, it did not induce any hallucinations whatsoever, which is very deliberate. It had, for me, initially the effect of perhaps half a tablet of Adderall, which I’m not particularly fond of.
Dave Asprey: Yeah, that’s harsh.
Tim Ferriss: I got a mild pre-frontal headache. If I combined it, or I shouldn’t say combined it, but if I consumed green tea within two hours, the side effects, meaning this frontal headache, were much worse. It was not the case with black tea. I had a slightly buzzy, very very mildly anxious feel for the first three to four hours. In that period of time though, I did have heightened attention. It is used by some people as a very mild stimulant. In fact, it was sold in France for precisely that reason. It was sold as a stimulant many, many years ago. What’s interesting to me is not what happens on the first day, it’s what happens subsequently. There are some speculative, not entirely implausible explanations for why this would be, like a regulation of the [inaudible 00:07:39] opiate receptors and so on.
For the next two to three days, I feel like my happiness setpoint is about 15% higher, 15 to 20% higher.
Dave Asprey: Wow!
Tim Ferriss: And I have the non-reactivity, the kind of cool and dispassionate assessment of things that I don’t react emotionally, overly emotionally, that would typically take for me two to three weeks of daily meditation without fail. That is like that. I utilized in this particular case, or the regimen that I landed on, was microdosing on Mondays and Fridays. So I’ve done that for months at a time. I found it very, very, at least in terms of observable side effects, very very low, based on the, my reviews of the very scant literature involving human trials and also rat studies with ibogaine or iboga. They have observed, for instance, at higher milligrams of ibogaine per kilogram of body weight in mice some, I should say, several types of brain damage, but at the lower dosages, certainly no one’s looked at microdosing that I’m aware of, but at those doses these types of side effects were not observed.
The fact of the matter is the dose makes the poison. So …
Dave Asprey: Oh, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: … if I want to kill you with water, I can kill you with water. I mean, and I’m not talking about drowning you I’m talking about making you drink it until your heart stops working. The dose makes the poison. It’s not surprising to me that you take some weird psychedelic stimulant from West Africa and you force feed a shovelful of it to a rat that bad things are going to happen. I’m not terribly surprised by that. But nonetheless, it is more dangerous, certainly I would say than psilocybin or some of these others that I mentioned, at least based on the data that we have available.
There are some people who are aiming to develop or take metabolites like noribogaine and develop them into pharmaceuticals that allow some of the detox, and it appears like opiate or opioid receptor resetting that ibogaine accomplishes without some of the side effects. So, yeah, these are all topics that I’m digging very deeply into, for sure.
Dave Asprey: It’s really fascinating because it’s still controversial. I mean there are people out there who are like, “If using hallucinogens, you’re … It’s tied to the CIA. You’re a bad and satanist.” People, there’s a lot of wacky stuff out there, but we’re talking extremely small amounts, that in studies and just observably, improve your performance like meaningfully.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. I mean the … My general predisposition and preference is focusing on compounds in the whole food form. Call me old-fashioned, but I think that we can get pretty epistemologically arrogant to think that we understand how exactly every component in a given plant functions, the sum of the parts. I think that’s generally reaching because do we even have the technology to identify all the constituent components in the first place? Probably not. For me, I defer when trying to research and certainly use these compounds to plants that have been used for millennia most likely by at least one or ideally multiple civilizations. Look, I mean that isn’t exactly a placebo-controlled, randomized trial, but humans figure out pretty quickly if over a few thousand years of regular consumption what things really mess you up or kill you because you win a Darwin award otherwise. I’m not saying all these things are safe at all. By the way, I use these substances with supervision, I very often have medical personnel or MDs in attendance. I take this stuff very, very seriously because could you certainly exacerbate or even trigger predispositions like schizophrenia? Absolutely.
One of my cousins by marriage fried his brains using LSD. His family had a history of schizophrenia and he went from super high-functioning chess whiz to staring off into space, I kid you not. I’ve seen that firsthand, part of the reason I don’t use LSD but that’s the longer story. It has applications to a lot of stuff it’s just not my tool of choice. If you’re in an unsafe environment or an uncontrolled environment, you are using a hallucinogen that you may decide that you can fly and step out of a window. You may decide that you want to go for a walk and walk out into a street, which actually happened to me once very, very early on in college when I was experimenting with these, but I didn’t know how to properly manage the surroundings and circumstances. I came out of a trip standing in the middle of the road in the middle of the night with headlights coming down on me. That’s not safe. Caveat emptor, folks, take the stuff seriously.
But very powerful compounds that have incredible applications to treatment-resistant depression, potentially. End of life anxiety in cancer patients, PTSD, opiate addiction, which by the way of the 22 or 23 veterans who commit suicide in the United States every day, about a third are associated with opiate addiction, prescription medication opiate addiction. The list goes on. If you look at even with the small data set that we have so far. It’s preliminary, let’s call it that.
The magnitude of effect and the duration of effect after a single dose of psilocybin … There’s a study that just received a bunch of coverage in the New York Times a few days ago and it was looking at cancer patients and anti-depressive effects of psilocybin. I think it said 80% of the subjects who received psilocybin seven months later still reported a significant effect from one dose. There is no other intervention that I am aware of, and I’ve read quite a bit of the literature, that comes even close to that. You can say the same thing for nicotine addiction and alcoholism. Very few people realize way back in the day when AA was being formed, the founder wanted to have LSD as one of the steps because he himself became sober after a psychedelic experience using something else. Nonetheless, LSD was what was most readily available at the time.
I’m glad that people are revisiting this. It’s still very much politically maligned for scientifically, I think, indefensible reasons.
Dave Asprey: It’s puritanical bullshit, I think.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dave Asprey: I don’t swear that much on Bulletproof Radio except when it’s really deserved, but sorry.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dave Asprey: That’s what it’s deserved for, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’m from Long Island. It doesn’t offend me.
Dave Asprey: Oh, I wasn’t apologizing to you, Tim. That was for the people listening who are like, “Dave doesn’t normally swear! My kids are listening.” Sorry, kids. Don’t say that at home.
Tim Ferriss: Ear muffs. Ear muffs, kids.
Dave Asprey: Right. Now, what you’re saying about using these things for drug and alcohol addiction is powerful. When people ask me this, and you probably get asked this all the time too, what would you do for a heroin addict? These are typically people who are asking for a friend. In my mind there’s two heavy big guns, and one is ibogaine and the other one is cerebral electrical stimulation. They have the most evidence behind … They’re just running little electrical current across the brain. Everything else pales in comparison in studies. Those are just things that are either controversial, no one’s heard of it or they seem scary. So I’m grateful that you’re just talking about it, just laying it out there.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I mean it’s in the dedication page, on the dedication page in my book, is the commitment to apply a non-trivial portion of the proceeds to studies in scientific research at places like Johns Hopkins and so on that are hopefully going to steer the ship and get these compounds rescheduled in such a way that I’m not even concerned at this point about everybody having access to it. I just want more research to be performed. What’s … If we want to just step away from the, say addiction aspect or the applications of these compounds, what’s so fascinating about psychedelics, which is also a loaded term. Some people are now calling them entheogens …
Dave Asprey: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: … is that at different dosages the same compound behaves like a completely different drug. That is wild, right? So you have … We’re talking about microdosing. In the case of LSD you might have 10 micrograms or 15 as a microdose. Then that is sub-perceptual. As one person put it, “The rocks don’t glitter even a little and the flowers don’t turn to look at you.” This is very sub-perceptual. Microdosing has shown as … I think you might have mentioned some very interesting applications to endurance sports.
Dave Asprey: Oh, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Now, then you get to, let’s just call it a museum or a concert dose, 50 milligrams. Then you start moving up to say what’s called 100, 150 …
Dave Asprey: Basically a tab, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for creative problem solving, including the hard sciences. James Fadiman, who is in the book as well, worked with a number of corporations at one point who brought in people who had become stuck trying to design new circuit boards or solve complex mathematical problems. It was something like 33 out of 35 with his particular regimen, which involved LSD, were able to then find solutions, meaning solve equations or publish papers, design circuit boards. Thirty-three out of 35, or something just incredible like that. That’s … Let’s just call it 150. Then you go up and you get to the transcendent and then the heroic. Even if you want to cleave away from your … You want to cleave off your ego and strap yourself to the icebreaker of existential pain and delight, then there’s that too. It’s incredible how different the effects are. It’s not like you start seeing the same effect at a low dose and then it just gets more intense. It’s very, very different …
Dave Asprey: Yeah, yeah. Very well put.
Tim Ferriss: So, yeah. Go figure. Hopefully we’ll learn more after a whole set of dozens and dozens of studies get done. I’ve thought about actually funding studies in Canada for a lot of reasons, including costs, well legality and therefore cost for say …
Dave Asprey: You know, if you’re serious about that, Tim … I mean, I’m not a Canadian citizen yet, I’m a permanent resident up here, but they have Canadian grants for R&D that’s done up here where the government writes checks for a lot of money for Canadian-based companies, even if they’re not owned and run by Canadians. You could probably get doubling down whatever the grant was as long as there’s an R&D aspect to it.
Tim Ferriss: Cool!
Dave Asprey: Canada’s a cool place and dollars are very cheap up here. You could just buy them like with American dollars.
Tim Ferriss: Sweet!
Dave Asprey: You get extra money. [crosstalk 00:19:29]
Tim Ferriss: You get extra doubloonies, as they say?
Dave Asprey: Exactly. Now … Let me do a quick time check with you. We can go over some more stuff in the book. Do you have time for that?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah!
Dave Asprey: Do you want to keep chatting for a little while? I have fun. [crosstalk 00:19:43]
Tim Ferriss: I do have a … What do you think about maybe another 15 minutes? Does that work for you?
Dave Asprey: Yeah, I’m totally good.
Tim Ferriss: Because I have a date with another smart drug, which is known as wine. And have a bit of a meeting and a commitment that I have to get to, but yeah, I’m happy to do another … Let’s do another 15. I’m happy to talk about whatever.
Dave Asprey: All right. I can respect that commitment to wine but you’re going to have to share with our listeners exactly which one you have a date with.
Tim Ferriss: Well, you know, I was enjoying some Trapiche Malbec and Catena Malbec, which is from high altitude from Argentina. Tonight I’ve been getting a little frisky. I’ve been getting a little promiscuous with my wine drinking, and I know nothing about Italian wine. For the last two days I’ve been having very fruity, Pinot noir-esque Italian wines that I can’t pronounce. That’s my … I guess it’s a blind date at this point. I don’t know who’s going to show up.
Dave Asprey: Fair enough. Now you had Lyme disease. You were real public about that for a while, which … We chatted at the time. I had it for a long time and it totally knocked me down. One of the reasons that I know so much about ketosis and all is that it really helped me get my brain back on. I can tolerate wine now better than I ever could in the last 15 years. What I want to know, and I think a substantial number of people listening want to know too, did you tolerate wine and beer and things like that before Lyme disease, during Lyme disease, and did it change after Lyme disease?
Tim Ferriss: That is a very good question that I haven’t pondered before. To be honest, I don’t recall drinking very much when I was at 10%, when I was really, really knocked out …
Dave Asprey: When you’re drained, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I mean I was operating at literally 10% at best capacity for about nine months. I don’t remember much from that period at all.
Dave Asprey: Yeah, the brain fog is severe.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I don’t remember much at all of what happened other than just painful joints and slurred speech and forgetting friends’ names and feeling like I had dementia for that period of time out on [inaudible 00:22:00] …
Dave Asprey: Well you pretty much did have dementia.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I pretty much do. I don’t think I drank very much during that period so I couldn’t tell you. I would say that at this point my response to alcohol seems to be roughly equivalent to what it was before Lyme disease. But I’ll tell you something else. I’m not sure I mentioned this when we spoke about it. When I had the very imperfect but unfortunate solely-available testing done, so the Western blot …
Dave Asprey: Western blot.
Tim Ferriss: They said, “You realize that you’ve actually had Lyme disease before, right? The long-term antibodies were positive.” That I think could explain some really tough periods that I had when I was a kid, that I had a lot of long term implications. But to the alcohol question I don’t know. I can share a little discovery though that you might enjoy …
Dave Asprey: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: … related to alcohol. I had a really tough breakup, maybe a year and a half ago. Long relationship, and I won’t get into all the juicy details but … No one did anything bad, it was just one of those like …
Dave Asprey: Yeah, [crosstalk 00:23:15].
Tim Ferriss: “I think it’s time. Time for us to part ways.” It was very tough for me. One of my buddies, being a good buddy, was like, “Hey, idiot. You’re not allowed to mope around in your house for the next six months. Come to Sweden with me. I’m going to Sweden.” I was like, “All right, I’ll go to Sweden.”
Dave Asprey: [Swedish 00:23:30]
Tim Ferriss: Man, and I kind of dragged myself there and my friend kind of proceeded to try to feed me ungodly amounts of alcohol and gets me to do stupid things.
Dave Asprey: Very Swedish.
Tim Ferriss: What I noticed though after two nights of drinking, I would say an amount of alcohol, half of which would normally make me vomit, without any subsequent vomiting I was like, “What is going on here? This is really weird.” I’ve never had this much alcohol and not vomited halfway through, because we’re talking dozens of drinks, like vodka …
Dave Asprey: Good god!
Tim Ferriss: … wine, champagne. It was filthy.
Dave Asprey: And you were mixing them. Ugh!
Tim Ferriss: Ugh, it was terrible. I mean, the worst sort of night out alcohol hygiene you could imagine. It was terrible, but I didn’t get sick. I was puzzled by this. I started looking at the various supplements and so on that I was taking, my diet, trying to figure out what might account for it because it was consistent. What I eventually found doing some searches on not only PubMed but on Google Books, is that lysine appears to affect ethanol metabolism. I was taking L-lysine, a few grams a day, to just prevent any type of flu or whatnot because I was low on sleep to begin with, low on sleep afterwards. I’d forgotten my passport, I couldn’t … It was a big disaster getting there so I was really sleep-deprived and I didn’t want to get sick. I was taking all this L-lysine and I’ve replicated that since. I don’t know if it’s reliable, I don’t know if there’s much there …
Dave Asprey: That’s fine.
Tim Ferriss: … but that is something if I know I’m going to have a big night like I had a couple of nights ago at a friend’s bachelor party which was … Alcohol in those quantities is not my preferred sport, but L-lysine is definitely part of the portfolio.
Dave Asprey: That’s a pretty cool experiment.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dave Asprey: I will also share an alcohol thing, which is going to offend wine consumers everywhere. I’m pretty sketchy on a lot of American wines because our standards for microtoxins are not nearly as tight as Europeans. A good French wine is like two parts per billion, and here I think it’s 10. It’s not well regulated. I feel the difference. I have weird dreams when I get American wine. I don’t get it from French wine. There are some good American brands, they’re just … You got to know which vintage and what year and all that. I had some wine that was organic and reasonably clean but I was a little nervous and I was with … [inaudible 00:26:11], and I drank half of it. The next day I’m like, “Oh, this has been sitting out. I’ll just try this.” I took the wine, put it in the blender, I added the Brain Octane and some ice. I blended it up and it makes this crazy lavender color that’s entirely unnatural for a food. Yes, it was ruining a wine but it had already been opened for 24 hours so it wasn’t that sinful.
The Brain Octane actually in studies helps to prevent damage from LPS, lipopolysaccharides, that alcohol escorts across the gut, specifically to the liver. Basically it supports liver stuff. Just biochemically, I’m like, “This might make me not have an effect.” I drank half the bottle the first night, and I must’ve gotten mildly buzzed and felt good, but it was a little stiff the next morning. I drank the other half the next night and I was like, “Okay, I did it. It tastes more like a wine cooler smoothie thing.” It was delicious. I’d sampled it on other people without telling them what it was, and they’re like, “What drink is this? Like I want to buy that.” I gave … It was good enough to pass the fruity umbrella straw test.
Anyway, I don’t know what that’s worth it, but you might … When you’re in ketosis you might see that there’s a difference there. My question there is were you in ketosis? Were you running on a beta-hydroxybutyrate?
Tim Ferriss: No, no. I was not.
Dave Asprey: You were not, okay.
Tim Ferriss: No, no. In Sweden it was like, “Hey, you want some more bread with your bread?” It was definitely not keto-friendly, but I …
Dave Asprey: My wife is Swedish. They eat bread and herring and nothing else, and cheese right?
Tim Ferriss: Yes. Ah, Swedes. I love Sweden. So on the alcohol question about is it related to Lyme, I don’t know. I don’t know. I really don’t feel like I have any residual symptoms at this point …
Dave Asprey: Good for you, man.
Tim Ferriss: … which is great.
Dave Asprey: Congratulations on that.
Tim Ferriss: Thanks.
Dave Asprey: There’s a lot of people who work on that quite a bit. It’s been a big area of focus for me because like you you’re saying I had it when I was young. There’s a lot of people walking around who have Lyme, have water damage in their environment or some other biological pathology and they don’t know it. They walk around angry all the time and hating everyone around them. It’s like, “It’s biological! It’s not that you’re an asshole, it’s that something is tweaking on you to make you act like an asshole,” and you probably feel bad about it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, and it’s really … One of my first recommendations … I am not against antibiotics. I think they serve an important function.
Dave Asprey: They do.
Tim Ferriss: There’s a lot of nonsense out there related to Lyme disease. I think it’s widely misdiagnosed. All that having been said, if people have tried the conventional therapies and don’t seem to be making progress, I as an adjunct to a number of friends have recommended getting to at least two millimolars, just measuring it with a Precision Xtra, for instance, ketotic state through fasting then followed by diet. Very small sample size, we’re talking maybe five close friends who have come to me with this, so far 100% success rate in terms of dramatically reducing or eliminating the symptoms of Lyme or what they assumed was Lyme, because who knows? I didn’t look at their blood tests.
Dave Asprey: There’s mitochondrial pathologies that all kind of manifest the same way. There’s a toxin from Lyme, there’s toxin from mold, there’s toxin from fish, there’s excess mercury. They all reduce mitochondrial functioning ketones turning back up. It’s kind of cool, that’s why I’m focusing so much on mitochondria in the next book, because I’m like, “Wait, what’s the uniting element in everything I’ve ever done that worked?” That’s what they were.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so it’s …
Dave Asprey: How about hits to the head? Do I remember you talking to me about TBI?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I have plenty of hits to the head. Yes, I’ve plenty of … Just from all the years of combat sports, kickboxing, boxing, and so on. Wrestling, judo, getting thrown on my head. I mean it’s … It’s pretty definitive, I would say, or certain that I have a decent amount of … I’ve had concussions for sure, I mean 100% diagnosed. I’ve been knocked unconscious. It’s not good.
Dave Asprey: I’ve been looking at the brains of senior executive types with [inaudible 00:30:22] and neurofeedback stuff. Ninety percent of people that come in for a performance upgrade, they have an observable TBI they don’t know about. Like look, this part of your brain looks like it’s been smacked. You can see it with a 24-channel EEG with software interpolation. I think it’s a major performance inhibitor for even some of the world’s highest performers. I took a really good hit to the head, like a really bad TBI. I got food poisoning and passed out. My head hit the floor right on the temple. I couldn’t play Go Fish with my kids because my working memory was shot. I was swearing all the time, and I fortunately have the right tools. Once I recognized that it was what it was, I was able to come back in a couple of weeks.
During that couple of weeks I was … I was kind of an asshole to my employees, to friends. You don’t even know it’s happening. I’ve talked with a few other really high performing people who had something like this happen and like, “Oh, my god! I’m so embarrassed, look at the things I did.” It’s like you’re not yourself, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I can’t turn back the sands of time at this point, so I’m making the best of it. I do think that it’s certainly a contributing factor, maybe a contributing factor, to the depressive periods that I’ve had. I think that it almost certainly plays a role in a lot of the depression, suicide, et cetera that we see in veterans, whether the … Very often they’ve been exposed to IEDs or different types of head trauma. These are all things that I’m exploring but I’m trying not to do … Derek Sivers is an incredible entrepreneur, also really kind of a philosopher programmer who built CD Baby, which at the time was the largest independent music market, I suppose you could say, platform in the world, which he later sold. What he says to himself and the advice he’d give his younger self is … One of the pieces is “Don’t be a donkey.” This is going somewhere.
So “Don’t be a donkey,” he’ll remind himself, and the number of my listeners have put this on their kitchen mirrors and things like that, or rather bathroom mirrors. It refers to burden’s ass. When Derek was in his 30s, he felt like the world wanted to pressure him into specializing in one thing, but he wanted to do 10 things and he didn’t want to conform to the expectations of other people. He wanted to have it all, do it all. Burden’s ass is a fable. There’s a donkey in between hay on one side and water on the other. It can’t decide if it wants to eat or if it wants to drink. Eat, drink, eat, drink, because the donkey can’t think long term. Of course it could just do one and then the next, but it ends up dying in the middle because it can’t make a decision.
“Don’t be a donkey” to him was effectively you can do it all, you just can’t do it at the same time. You have to focus on one thing for a year, then maybe another for a year. If you try to do all 10 things, you’ll get to a point, five years later where you will not have made progress on any of them. There’s so many areas that I’d like explore, particularly through more scientific studies and rigor. The first domino that I want to tip over is the psychedelics. The TBI is very interesting to me. I think that the psychedelics in a way is an umbrella. Potential modality and treatment that could and actually there’s some literature to support this …
Dave Asprey: Oh, yeah, you’re very right. That’s why I brought it up actually. It was because of the psychedelic angle. There are … People hit their head, a large portion of the time get PTSD. You can work on the PTSD around that with the psychedelics and maybe even just with increasing connectivity. I’m … Tim, I love it that you’re working with Johns Hopkins and that you’re pushing on this because it’s just science. We want to know how it works, and if we don’t do the research we’ll never know how it works.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, and the LD 50, the dosage that would kill 50% of the population or at least the subjects in a given study for these, is so low with the exception of ibogaine and the case of say psilocybin, that the safety really is not an issue for at least a number of these compounds when done in a proper setting. The fact that they’re Schedule I, which is high potential for abuse or addiction, which is ludicrous when you look at the existing data, and B, no known medical application. It’s silly, which is why I think it’s very important to use populations that are very hard to attack or malign. So cancer patients, terminal cancer patients, veterans, people who have treatment-resistant depression, those are bipartisan issues. This should not be controversial. I’m trying to take the politically charged, emotional debate that has been very counterproductive for the last few decades and turn it into one of just open-minded scientific inquiry. We’ll see.
It’s going to be a challenge but it’s the type of challenge that I like and fortunately with a lot of the habits and so on that I’ve accumulated over the last few years, I’ve become a little less combative and a little better at empathy and seeing solutions that aren’t necessarily win-lose. Not that I was always that way but I’ve become better at seeing multiple sides of the problem or, as Jocko Willink would say, detaching, stepping back and just being able to almost have this out of body experience where I can look at something, a situation, and observe if someone thinks I’m angry or if the emotional tone is off, if I’m conveying my message but I’m doing it in a way that sounds aggressive even though it’s not intended to be.
It was really wild with “Tools of Titans” that as I wrote it … I’m such a checklist, Excel spreadsheet, data export and crunch type of guy, when I look at … I know you do something very similar. I would imagine for behavior change, “Okay, I want to instill this particular behavior in this following change. Now we’re going to look at the science and I’m going to take this methodical step by step approach and I’m going to decide on the frequency and the dosage and the this and the that and I’m going to track my metrics … ”
I didn’t do any of that when I was editing this book, but just by the sheer exposure and osmosis I suppose, I started … Maybe it’s in part because I designed the book in such a way that these are short, very short profiles, five to 10 pages typically. Each point, each tactic is maybe one to two paragraphs. I just ended up using them without all of that apparatus, all that heavy lifting, and I’m not going to say bullshit but it just showed me that you don’t always have to have this huge amount of scaffolding around instilling something like that which was reassuring for me quite frankly because that stuff is fatiguing! It’s kind of tiring to have all those levels of abstraction. It’s been nice to just snack on Scooby Snacks and have them actually pan out.
Dave Asprey: It’s a little relaxing that way. I did go through a period, and it sounds like that’s what you’re talking about, where I was maybe tracking more than was beneficial. I’m a fan of track what you hack, and the rest of the time just notice “How do I feel right now?” That’s actually mindfulness in a certain way, and then doing the reverse, root cause analysis event correlation is … That’s a practiced art and you can use the numbers for that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, and you can get super fancy. I’ve been involved with quantified self since the very, very first meetup 20 some odd people in Kevin Kelly’s house in 2008 or 2009. I’ve witnessed mass data tracking and consumption, and I’ve done it myself, but I think sometimes it’s as simple as something that Jodie Foster said, and I might get this slightly off, but it’s pretty close which was, “In the end, success is sleeping well.”
Dave Asprey: There you go. Very well said.
Tim Ferriss: It’s like all right, why don’t we just look at how easy it is for you to fall asleep and how you feel when you wake up. That is, I think, as good a barometer as just about anything else for most of what matters, but hey.
Dave Asprey: Well put, Tim.
Tim Ferriss: Still a student, still a work in progress, still trying to figure it out.
Dave Asprey: All right. Two more questions, one short one, one medium one.
Tim Ferriss: All right.
Dave Asprey: Short question. What percentage of the titans out there, both ones you’ve interviewed and not interviewed, do you think have been heavily influen- … Not heavily, have been meaningfully influenced by a psychedelic experience?
Tim Ferriss: Well, I would say in Silicon Valley the kind of open secret is you look at the top tier folks and they’re there … I think there are many potential explanations for this, but … Eric Weinstein who’s a PhD, mathematician, physicist. He’s the managing director of Thiel Capital, so he works directly with Peter Thiel. He calls it the … He was very much anti every drug for his entire life, as straitlaced as you can imagine, and only in the last few years has been exposed to psychedelics because he identified what he called the psychedelic elite, and in Silicon Valley he just said, “Hey …”
Dave Asprey: There’s a lot of them.
Tim Ferriss: In the top, say five, 10% of the performers in pretty much every area in this particular world, this particular corner, everyone has used, or is currently using psychedelics in some capacity. Now, I don’t want to say that that is causal, that they are that good because of it. Maybe when you’re that driven your neuroses are also 100X everyone else, so you need a powerful intervention to even maintain a semblance of sanity as you’re trying to hit all these home runs, maybe. But I would say it’s an extremely high percentage. If we’re looking at the titans, it is a very, very, very high percentage. Not all of them are ready to talk about it publicly …
Dave Asprey: Of course.
Tim Ferriss: … because of the legal status of these compounds, but it’s a very high percentage.
Dave Asprey: That is my understanding as well and my experience is that it’s a substantially high percentage. I wish more of them felt safe enough to talk about it and maybe 20 years from now they will when the laws change, but we can talk about it without naming names and … I just want to reiterate there are teenagers who listen as their parents listen to this. This is not dropping acid and going to Disneyland because that is neurologically, spiritually, emotionally, psychologically dangerous and ill-advised. Do not play with these. We’re talking about something different, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s totally different. You would treat it like you are choosing a neurosurgeon to excise a tumor from your brain. You’re not going to go on Craigslist to find someone to do that. You’re not going to go to Burning Man and grab a hula hoop and walk off into the desert with someone and ask them to perform neurosurgery on you. Treat it that way and there are plenty of warnings and caveats and so on in “Tools of the Titans,” so definitely don’t skip those. Pay attention to the protocol.
Dave Asprey: The next question and the last question of the interview, it’s one you’ve answered before but I want to look at the delta here. Now that you’ve written “Tools of Titans,” you’ve absorbed this knowledge from those 10,000 pages of transcripts and the active writing crystallizes things in your brain so well. It’s really cool. If someone came to you today and said, “Look, I want to kick ass 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 offer them?
Tim Ferriss: Three most important things to kick ass in all areas?
Dave Asprey: Yeah, and who knows? I want to be better at everything I do. What do I need to know?
Tim Ferriss: All right. The first answer, if you ask Richard Branson, would be work out, exercise, seriously. I think that exercise and specifically for me in the last few years, body weight calisthenics, like gymnastic strength training. There’s a coach, Christopher Sommer … In the healthy section, I talk about … Effectively the combination of gymnastic strength training, acroyoga, and ketosis and fasting, were what have completely changed my life from a physical and mental performance standpoint. I would give the same answer as Richard Branson which is work out, but specifically I would say investigate GymnasticBodies, just the company, or some form of gymnastic strength training which focuses on mobility, i.e. the ability to exhibit strength in your end ranges. It’s very different for passive flexibility, but it does something very interesting. I don’t know if it’s brain drive neurotrophic factor or whatever …
Dave Asprey: Probably.
Tim Ferriss: … but cognitively, man. If I do that two or three times a week, even minimally, short sessions 30 to 60 minutes, it’s been a game changer. I would say that’s the one.
Dave Asprey: When you cross the midline it causes more connections between the hemispheres and a lot of the twists and things like that you’re applying pressure. I believe that might be part of it, but I love that answer. No one’s ever been that specific with exercise, so thank you for specificity. What’s number two?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure. So number two would have to be diet-related. I would say of specifically … What would I say specifically related to diet? Honestly, I would say, and this is going to sound weird, but a combination … I’m kind of cheating here. Combination of regular fasting for longevity, because what good does it do if you kick ass for 10 years and then croak?
Dave Asprey: Amen.
Tim Ferriss: Regular fasting and we don’t have time to get into exactly what that means, but I do shorter, regular monthly and then longer, say a quarter and an annual. Eating shitty food, and this is maybe bleeding into a number three, but eating really … Not shitty. Eating really, really, really, really cheap food for at least a few days a month, wearing the same clothing for that entire period, and try sleeping on a sleeping bag on your floor. Here’s why. This is related to a letter … I’m going to get super specific and dirty. This is …
Dave Asprey: I love it.
Tim Ferriss: This is letter 13 on festivals and fasting from Seneca the Younger to [Bu-kil-ee-us 00:45:24]. It’s a letter where he talks about fear rehearsal. You’re practicing your worst case scenario, losing all your money, let’s say. What do you do? Maybe you go camping but you would wear say … I wear a cheap T-shirt and pair of jeans, cheap shoes, that’s it for the week. Then I’ll either fast the whole time or I will survive, and it’s really not that bad quite frankly, on instant oatmeal or rice and beans. It’s something it’s two to three dollars a day max in cost, and experience what it would be like to rehearse poverty in this case. It is … It makes you extremely resilient and able to take bold steps in different directions because you realize that the worst case in many respects isn’t that bad. You might actually come out of the experiment really, really happy. That’s another weird side effect.
I know that’s a huge cheat, but that’s like the diet/practice of some pragmatic …
Dave Asprey: Practice dietary poverty, there we go.
Tim Ferriss: There we go. Then number three, number three, kick ass in all areas would be ask absurd questions. Ask absurd questions, this came up over and over and over and over again. Interviewing Peter Thiel, who’s a serial billionaire …
Dave Asprey: Yeah, he’s a cool guy.
Tim Ferriss: Incredible guy. Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X Prize, questions like “Why can’t you achieve your 10-year plans in the next six months?” Don’t just think about it for 10 seconds and then move on, sit down and write three pages, stream of consciousness. Or questions like … This is a question that Peter Diamandis, he asks companies who want his investment, he’ll say, “How could you 10X your company’s economics in the next …” I’m making up this number, but “three months?” If they say “That’s impossible,” his response is “I don’t accept that answer. Try again.” These types of crazy absurd questions I used to ask myself, still do sometimes.
But if i had a gun against my head I would say for when I was writing this book, this is actually kind of funny. I was … I kept on coming up with these absurd questions, absurd questions like “Okay, well let’s try that,” in the process of writing the book. I would journal on questions like, “How would I write this book if I only had a week to do it?” It’s very important that they’re absurd, I mean seemingly impossible. The goal isn’t to determine how to write it in the week, it’s to aim so high and crazy that you probably land somewhere in between and there’s something that you can really use that you wouldn’t have thought of if you’re trying to do it incrementally.
Asking absurd questions is number three for me.
Dave Asprey: I love those answers and they are different than your last ones, not that I’ve memorized them but after 300 and something out of some large number. I don’t have them all memorized but I’m going to go back when you write the blog post for this and we’ll do a compare and contrast then.
Tim Ferriss: I’ll be curious to check them out.
Dave Asprey: Like “What did Tim Ferriss learn from his, from The Tim Ferriss Show and from ‘Tools of Titans’?” Now the book, the book is available now. People can pick it up …
Tim Ferriss: It’s everywhere.
Dave Asprey: Either they can pick it up at their bookstore or they can go online and they can order it from wherever books are sold. You have a website set up for it, ToolsOfTitans.com?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, ToolsOfTitans.com. You can find sample chapters. Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote the foreword which is so surreal and blows my mind …
Dave Asprey: That’s pretty cool.
Tim Ferriss: … which is honestly really empowering to read by itself. It’s title could be because it’s the beginning of the piece “I Am Not A Self-Made Man,” really interesting about learning from other people. That’s a good place to go, Tools of Titans or BandN.com, Amazon.com, wherever dot com, or your local bookstore. You’ll be able to find it everywhere. It’s hard to miss, I mean it’s gigantic. It has a bright red cover on it, so if it’s there it will be hard to miss.
Dave Asprey: Well, Tim, thanks for being on Bulletproof Radio today.
Tim Ferriss: My pleasure, man! Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.
Dave Asprey: If you enjoyed today’s episode, you know what to do. Head on out and pick up a copy of Tim’s book, read it, use the knowledge in it to do something good. It’s a pretty straightforward ask and it’s actually worth your time to do it. I really do my best to not waste your time on this show. This was hopefully a useful interview for you with lots of tidbits, and I’m looking forward to hearing from you on the next episode.
[/expand]

Start hacking your way to better than standard performance and results.

Receive weekly biohacking tips and tech by becoming a Dave Asprey insider.

By sharing your email, you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy