My Honda “daily driver” brain upgrade technology

May 14, 2011 by Dave Asprey

I’ve been a guinea pig for every technology I can find that will change (or upgrade) my brain and mind. The only brain hacking technology on my list that I haven’t tried requires a 10 ton magnet. I’m talking smart drugs, meditation, breathing, EEG, MCT oil, sound, light, whole body vibration, electrical stimulation, infrared lasers shining through the skull, shamanic drumming, yoga postures, even fasting in a cave. I’ve tried almost everything I could find, no matter how weird it sounded, as long as I didn’t think it would permanently cook me. I didn’t expect any of it to really work but hoped some of it would.

The results have been fantastic – freaking awesome actually. They have been life-changing, performance-enhancing, need-for-sleep reducing, intelligence-building, creativity-enhancing, stress-reducing. [Read more…] about My Honda “daily driver” brain upgrade technology

My Fat Body Mistakes vs. My Bulletproof® Body Plan

May 2, 2011 by Dave Asprey

The vast majority of executives I know in Silicon Valley are spending a lot of time and energy trying to lose weight, or just stay thin. That’s what I did when I weighed 300lbs years ago. Losing weight was my single biggest focus every day in the gym and at meals. I spent at least 20 hours a week trying to lose weight . I did this for years – what a complete waste of time!

Thanks to the joys of biohacking and self-experimenting, while working with world-class experts, I don’t have to spend any time on my physique to stay lean and muscular, and if I have time to exercise for 10 minutes even twice a week (a good idea), I start to look like a bodybuilder.

I maintain a 6-pack and muscle mass with no exercise at all thanks to the Bulletproof® Diet, but when I want to add 10 pounds of muscle in 2-4 weeks, I eat more, I sleep more, and I do 10 minutes of high intensity exercise, twice a week. [Read more…] about My Fat Body Mistakes vs. My Bulletproof® Body Plan

Bulletproof Video: Get Stable Energy & Perform Better

April 19, 2011 by Dave Asprey

Here’s a video of a talk that I gave recently about one of the major unidentified energy-sapping problems. It will revolutionize the way you think about food and cholesterol, and along the way it will help you troubleshoot how your think and perform.

As an example, I was on the phone this week with Ben Rubin, CTO of sleep hacking company Zeo, going over his personal biohacking regimen with him. He’s on fire already and I’m helping him tune his program to be even more impactful. He’ll be blogging about that on The Bulletproof Executive in the coming weeks.

He asked me, “How do I stay in that high performance state for even longer? I need to avoid the downtime that sometimes hits me. Last night, about 5pm, I just zoned out and didn’t do anything for several hours. It was like I was just too slow and foggy to feel like my normal high productive self.”

It’s a common feeling. You’re rocking it one day, and then you just hit a wall and crash. If it happens every day at the same time, it’s probably blood sugar, but if it’s random, look at what you ate in the hours before and see if it’s any of the high-risk foods I identify in this video.

Foods like chocolate, nuts, coffee, cheese, and processed meats very frequently contain high levels of neuroactive chemicals made by the molds and fungi that inhabit them. Many of these are active in a parts per billion level. It’s one of the prime reasons that you will perform *much* better on a fresh & local diet. Processed foods usually contain detectable levels of toxic molds that affect your brain.

In Ben’s case, he’d eaten some cashews a half hour before he hit the wall. Cashews are a healthy nut when they’re raw, fresh, and stored properly in a refrigerator after they were shelled. My own experience tells me that about 60% of the cashews you can buy contain toxins at a level high enough to lower your performance.

We’re not taught that foods have an immediate and noticeable impact on our energy level and mental performance, but they do. Watch the video to learn more about where to find these hidden performance-hindering substances, and what to do to block them. Then, start noticing whether Starbucks makes you feel worse that that high-end coffee roaster down the street. Keep in mind that not every piece of chocolate has the same level of chemicals in it. By choosing higher quality foods, you can perform better. It can help you avoid *hours* of downtime.

Hacking Your Bacon IQ: The Bacon Centerfold

April 12, 2011 by Dave Asprey

Being a Bulletproof® Executive and all, I’m not one to read “Ladies Home Journal,”or “Men’s Journal” for that matter, where one can see all sorts of strangely groomed and waxed men primping with their expensive watches. I’m more of a Scientific American Mind kind of guy.

One morning, at the Hyatt Hotel in Denver, I sat down to a healthy, high-fat breakfast of poached eggs and avocado. I selected these goods to fuel my brain before I went on stage in front of a few hundred people. There, I spied a copy of Men’s Journal on a nearby table that was opened up to what can only be called a bacon centerfold containing glorious pictures of naked, gourmet bacon from some of the top bacon pimps in the country.

It’s a great review. If you want to pick up some awesome bacon, this is a good place to start, but don’t forget Applegate Farms bacon, available at Whole Foods. They were kind enough to reply to one of my earlier posts on bacon.

I wrote that real men (and women) cure their own bacon. By that definition, I’m not a real man, but I plan to be one soon, thanks to this piece from Lifehacker.

The human body runs best on high-octane fuel, and the highest-octane food we have contains plenty of fat (refer to the Bulletproof Food section for a detailed explanation). It also explains why I eat moderate amounts of bacon, yet have HDL (good) cholesterol levels of 86, which is higher than is theoretically possible for males on normal blood work charts.

Unburned bacon, from healthy animals, will NOT raise your cholesterol, or harm you in other ways. If you burn it, however, you will create nitrosamines that are a corollary cause of cancer and migraines. Overcooked bacon is also a dietary source of harmful, denatured protein. Here’s the research to back that up.

Being a biohacker, I know that if you sprinkle even a small amount of an antioxidant (like vitamin C powder) on your bacon before you cook it, you block the formation of nitrosamines and small amounts won’t change the flavor. The bacon in this picture is slightly blackened around the edges, which can mean that the bacon artist who made this used too much dextrose (sugars brown easily) or that the bacon is slightly burned. Scared of nitrates or nitrite preservatives? Vegetables like lettuce contain far more, on average, than bacon!

Only a bite of this juicy piece of bacon will satisfy my lust…for knowledge of course. I must have some! 🙂

These high-end, bacon centerfold celebreties are beautiful and shapely, but I don’t think they can keep up with Jim, a bacon hacker who smokes the best bacon only 2 miles from my house. It is with much regret that I will have to try them all to make sure. To pursue the perfect bulletproof bacon, I will pair each sampling with my quest to brew the perfect cup of butter-enriched Bulletproof® coffee. (Seriously. I have a 6 pack and haven’t worked out in far too long…this is awesome!)

Direct links to the lovely bacon:

Applegate Farms
surryfarms.com
vanderosefarms.com
smokehouse.com
lobels.com
ncsmokehouse.com
blackpigmeatco.com
nodinessmokehouse.com

Special thanks to Herb Kim, founder of the Thinking Digital Conference, who recently coined the term “Bacon IQ.” He’s also the guy who came up with the name “Bulletproof® Executive” several years ago on a flight from SFO to Heathrow as we sat across from each other in the Virgin Atlantic Upper Class section.

Dave Asprey’s “The Upgraded Self: Top 6 Biohacks”

March 10, 2011 by Dave Asprey

This video is from the talk I gave at the BIL 2011 Conference in Long Beach aboard the Queen Mary a few years ago. If you’ve ever wondered how I do what I do, this talk distils 15 years of experimenting into a half hour, then maps out how to do a lot of this stuff for yourself.

This presentation talks about real-world techniques I’ve assembled in my biohacking practice – things I used to increase my IQ, lose 100 lbs., radically reduce sleep, fit 40 years of Zen meditation into one very long week, and maintain an above-average career growth at the same time.

Here’s just some of the information I cover:

Some of my knowledge from years of nonprofit work with leading anti-aging physicians and researchers like Aubrey de Grey, Dr. Phillip Miller, Gary Taubes, along with extensive research (1300 references) completed for The Better Baby Book, the book I wrote with my wife Dr. Lana about how to have a healthy pregnancy and a smarter baby.

I introduce the exposome, explain why it’s bigger than your genome, and why it’s infinitely easier to biohack at any age than your genome.

How epigenetics gives you control of your genetics.

We’ll cover the top 6 things you can do to upgrade yourself, ranging from bio and neurofeedback to upgrading immune function.

You’ll hear me talk about Zeo sleep hacking, Brain State Technologies, Heart Math Institute, Art of Living exercises, supplements, smart drugs, and more, including the obligatory references to the neurophysiology of Buddhism. To balance that out, I also explain how Tim Ferriss gave me a larger…posterior. Seriously. 😉

In this video, I talk about MCT oil, but this was before we really perfected Brain Octane, which isn’t just coconut oil or MCT oil, but made with C8 MCTs only, which metabolize into ketone energy more efficiently than other MCTs. Your body simply cannot store ketones from Brain Octane as fat; instead, it is excreted through your lungs (breath), or kidneys (urine). Pretty cool. I also mention high-quality grass-fed collagen.

If you’re curious about the Bulletproof Diet in its entirety, start here.

This is the most concise and prioritized summary of tricks in my massive biohacker’s toolbox. If it’s not worth a half hour of your time, I don’t know how to make anything else that would be!

As always, it’s your comments and questions that keep me blogging. Please ask questions or make comments on this page so we can share the knowledge with others.

Mistakes of Napoleon Hill, the O.G. Bulletproof Executive

February 26, 2011 by Dave Asprey

via naphill.org

Napoleon Hill is the author of “Think and Grow Rich,” one of the top-selling and most influential books on executive performance ever written. The book was commissioned years ago by Andrew Carnegie who employed Napoleon Hill to spend years discovering what makes people highly successful and wealthy. He wanted to know best practices, techniques, anything that moved the needle.

Legend has it that twenty years after the first copy of “Think and Grow Rich” was published, a reporter surveyed millionaires and asked what they single most influential factor was in their success. More than half of new millionaires named the book.

I became a “Think and Grow Rich” fanboy more than 20 years ago when I was 16. I wrote a goal down on a torn-out piece of notebook paper and taped it to my mirror. I wrote, “I will be a millionaire when I turn 23.” Friends laughed when they saw it, and for good reason. After all, I didn’t meet that goal until I was 26, but I wouldn’t have met it at all without some of the techniques in “Think and Grow Rich.”

“The Secret” is a new age interpretation of a more than 50 year old book.

I was so pleased when Andrew Jeffs, one of my readers blessed with two first names, sent me a newsletter from the Napoleon Hill World Learning Center at Purdue University because I didn’t know anyone was actively promoting Mr. Hill’s work anymore.

Experience has taught me that to get your brain and motivation in order, you simply have to optimize your underlying health and fitness, or your brain won’t do what it’s meant to do. You don’t need to spend very much time keeping your “infrastructure” running well , but you *must* do the right things. “Think and Grow Rich” techniques work better on a high-octane, well-tuned brain in a body that won’t collapse when it’s pushed.

Napoleon Hill agrees, breaking these domains into physical, mental, emotional, social, financial, and spiritual. More modern influences, including my professor Stew Friedman from Wharton and author of “Total Leadership,” use similar categories to this day.

That’s why I was saddened to see completely backwards advice in the Napoleon Hill 21-day challenge. In the physical domain, they recommend swapping junk food for a zero-fat bag of sugar called “fruit” and exercising with a walk for 15 minutes a day.

Outcome-driven Napoleon Hill would be turning over in his grave if he saw this. The fact is that in 21 days, you can transform your physical infrastructure – like gaining 10 lbs of muscle and losing 10 lbs of fat, or making your cells 7 times more efficient at making energy – but you can’t do it by eating empty fruit calories or going for a stroll. You CAN do it with healthy high octane foods like grass-fed steak, eggs, butter, avocado, and nuts, and with, at most, three 10-minute high intensity workouts per week.

Tim Ferriss does it, I have done it for 15 years, often without any exercise required, John Durant does it, Cross-fit people get it. Paleo people get it, and some of the best executives I know are paleo, Cross-fit, meditating unstoppable balls of fire.

Add Napoleon Hill’s advice to a foundation like that, and you can’t help but shine at what you do.

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My Honda “daily driver” brain upgrade technology

Here’s just some of the information I cover:

Get on “The Inside Track” with Dave

See What Trouble Dave’s Getting Into on Social

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

Get on
“The Inside Track”
with Dave