The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #194 - Dave Asprey

TRANSCRIPT

Melanie Avalon: Hi friends. Welcome back to the show. I am so, incredibly excited about the conversation I am about to have. And friends, this is a moment on this show, this is actually the first time on this show that I am recording a little bit of video. I don't like video normally because I don't like seeing myself. I like to just concentrate on the conversation and the words in the interview. But when you are here with a legend of all legends in biohacking, and this is the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast, you got to do what you got to do. You got to show the world. So, I am so honored to be here again for the second time with Dave Asprey, the proverbial or actual father of biohacking. He has a new book out called, oh, I get to show it because this is video. This is so exciting, called Smarter Not Harder. I could even look at the subtitle. The Biohacker's Guide to Getting the Body and Mind You Want. Obviously, when I saw this book, I was like, "Well, that's right up my alley." I'm sure I'm going to love it. I didn't know if it would surpass my expectations and it did. It's honestly just a cataclysmic mosaic of everything you could ever want to know in the biohacking world. But not only is it that because that's what I thought it was going to be. I thought it was going to be like all the biohacking stuff to do all the time. It actually champions a thesis, which is something that I personally have thought about and lived by for a long time, which is the idea that Dave talks about something called the Laziness Principle.

Basically, that we can get more bang for our buck by maybe putting in less what might seem like effort and get better results. And this is something I've thought for a long time. He even says in the book a quote about how biohackers are proud to be lazy. That's something that's really resonated with me. Like how can I get the most out of my life with minimal pain but maximum gain? So, Dave, thank you so much for being here for the second time. I'm so excited to talk about all of this stuff. 

Dave Asprey: You're welcome, Melanie. I admire you for just coming out and saying, "Yes, I'm lazy." I didn't want to work hard to get results. I mean, how dare you? Actually, it turns out no one gets results from working hard. If you have to work hard, it means you're not very good at your job. 

Melanie Avalon: I agree. No, it's so funny. So, I remember, I was going to a health and wellness center a few years ago. No, maybe a year ago. I was contemplating doing EMSculpt muscle stimulation. I know you talk about stuff tangential to it in the book. Do you do EMSculpt or anything like that? 

Dave Asprey: Not EMSculpt. There are other technologies I mentioned in the book around electrical muscle stimulation that will put muscle on in such a ridiculous way. I have gone around at health and wellness influencer kind of events. Just sort of friends I hang out with and maybe go to Burning Man with and say, "Hey, who wants a butt upgrade?" [chuckles] You can put electrodes on your butt and get a shelf that wasn't there 5 minutes before and it lasts for several days and it's pretty cool. So, you really can send a signal to the body to tell to do what you want way faster than you think. And I respect and admire the ability to work really hard. I have it. I just don't want to do it all the time. [laughs] I'll do that instead of doing 10 hours of squats or something because I wanted to spend my 10 hours doing something else and that's okay. 

Melanie Avalon: I agree so much that EMSculpt, which is similar with the muscle stimulation. Well, first of all, now I've been doing it for a while and the muscle I have built from it is incredible. I'm not saying that-- I mean, if you look at me, I don't have massive muscles, but it has built like actual muscle tissue just lying there while multitasking and working. The story I'm thinking of is when I was contemplating doing it, I was at this wellness center place and I mentioned wanting to do it. And one of the girls that worked there, she looked at me with such attitude and she made some comment about how well I need to work out for my muscle. I was like, "Okay, well, I don't." [laughs] Basically, there's this idea out there that you need to have a lot of pain to gain things. And you talk in the book about all of these ancient heroes that went on these journeys, and we felt like it had to be this struggle to achieve anything. So why is that not the case? Like, actually, why might that not be the case? 

Dave Asprey: The reason the heroes go on the journeys is because no one's done it before. And then they learn something new, and if they survive the journey, they come home and they tell you about it so that it's easier for you to do it. Unless you're stubborn and you've been programmed maybe about 120 years ago at the start of the Industrial Revolution, to be a good worker bee, where working hard is a virtue and there's a promise that working hard will get you results, and working hard will get you to heaven. How many people do you know Melanie, who work really hard and don't get results? 

Melanie Avalon: A lot of people. All those other heroes just didn't make it or they died. 

Dave Asprey: Yeah. It's totally necessary to be able to work really hard for a brief period of time. But what we've falsely come to believe is that if we work hard all the time, we'll get better results, you actually get worse results. The best most successful examples are people who work really hard for a very brief period using the best tools and technologies, and then they stop and it works better. It works better for almost every kind of biohack and it works better in business. If you have to work 80 hours a week to do your job, one of two things is true either you suck at your job or you're actually doing two people's jobs. So that's how it works. Life isn't supposed to be hard. You're supposed to use tools to do it and when everything comes together and it's time for a sprint, you do your sprint. But if life is set up in your mind so you have to sprint all the time or you're a bad person and you won't have enough hustle, it doesn't work. For me, I went to the gym six days a week without fail for 18 months. And each of those six days I was 90 minutes of working out and I went on a low-fat, low-calorie diet. I did this because I weighed 300 pounds and I really wanted to lose weight. 

After 18 months of this, I still had a 46-inch waist and I didn't lose any weight. I was stronger, but I was not getting results. So, Smarter Not Harder, which is my new book. It is my revenge on those 702 hours of wasted time in the gym. And if that triggers you when you're listening to this, look, if you love going to the gym and that's the highest and best use of your time, go to the gym. There's not a problem with that. But if you're waking up at 05:00 AM when you really don't want to, you're burning yourself out. You're waking up without a kickstand, your monthly cycle is screwed up, your hair is thinning, you have a gut in the front. You know that if you can just work out more, it'll go away. You need to read Smarter Not Harder. Because I'll tell you straight up, in one of the dozens of biohacks in there. How 15 minutes a week of cardio, that's three five-minute sessions, works six times better than an hour a day five days a week. Literally, you're spending 5 hours plus showers in a spin class with someone in Spandex shaming you into pedaling when your body really doesn't want to. And you tell yourself you did good, yeah, that'll give you a 2% improvement if you can actually do that for two months straight. You do know what I'm talking about, which is the same amount of time you spend brushing your teeth, about 15 minutes a week. If you do that, you'll get six times better results, a 12% improvement in cardiovascular performance. So, you can do it the hard way, do it the smart way, take extra 5 hours and spend it with your kids, spend it on your career, spend it playing Call of Duty, [laughs] anything is better than that, right? 

Melanie Avalon: While we're talking about the cardio stuff, so a few different things. Well, one, I really loved reading your book. There's just so much in there, and there were quite a few things I wasn't familiar with. So, I hadn't even heard of REHIT. I was always talking about H-I-I-T or high-intensity interval training. But there's this re-high intensity interval training. What is that?

Dave Asprey: REHIT is a new way of looking at cardio exercise in general. About 10 years ago, when I started writing my blog on biohacking, it was called The Bulletproof Executive back then. 

Melanie Avalon: Oh, yeah. 

Dave Asprey: Yeah. At the very, very beginning. 

Melanie Avalon: I've been there. 

Dave Asprey: You've been there. Nice. So, I wrote about high-intensity interval training. Guys, if you can just do three or five 1-minute sprints with a 1-minute rest between them, it's going to work better than spending an hour in the gym. Problem is, that kind of exercise really sucks, but it works better on a per minute basis. So, more pain, less time, worth it. But it didn't work that much better. What we have now is actually we have three studies from the University of Colorado that shows that if you can do what's behind the principle of Smarter Not Harder, it's called slope of the curve biology. If you can do this idea that I'm going to turn on some ability in the body as fast and as hard as possible for a very brief period. And then I'm going to very quickly return to calmness that sends the strongest signal possible to tell the body to change. So, REHIT is two 20-second intervals and between them you lay on your back and do really deep slow breaths if you don't have the AI driven technology that this has been developed on. 

I came across this because about eight years ago, I started Upgrade Labs in Santa Monica, California, underneath Arnold Schwarzenegger's office. I wanted to take all the crazy biohacking tools that I'd used and make them available for the public. This has launched a whole bunch of kind of mom-and-pop biohacking centers and people trying to figure out how to do this. Well, after eight years, I'm franchising it because I actually know how to do it properly so that people get results and it's a good business. You can go to ownanupgradelabs.com and you can launch your own biohacking center based on all of the technology that I've worked on, the stuff you read about in the book. And I started using REHIT technology in that clinic. So, I have lots of data on it and the results speak for themselves. Your VO2 max improves by 12%. Since you may not have an Upgrade Labs, we can have an AI driven piece of gear push your body. Everything in Smarter Not Harder, there's the free version, there's the low cost at home version, and there's the crazy billionaire version. My job is to take the crazy billionaire stuff, put it in Upgrade Labs, and then open one in your neighborhood. [laughs] That's the goal, is to make this stuff accessible to all of us. Instead of spending or actually instead of wanting to spend six or eight hours a week exercising and actually just not doing it, you're going to spend a half hour a week or maybe an hour a week, and you're going to just say, what happened to my body. 

Melanie Avalon: I could not agree more. That was one of the things I love about the book, is you go through all of these different targets of goals that people can address through these biohacking modalities, and you do provide a spectrum so that really anybody can do it. It's crazy because I was reading the reviews of your book, I'm always just really curious to see how things are landing. The reviews overall are wonderful, but a few people were saying that this isn't accessible, there's all these expensive things. I was like, "Did they not read the book?" [laughs] He gives so many options for everything. But speaking of the expensive option here, I actually have an email in my inbox right now from CAROL AI, the CAROL AI bike. I think they're going to send me one to try. How does that actually work? 

Dave Asprey: CAROL is an example of an exercise bike that monitors your heart rate and allows you to do that kind of REHIT training we talked about. It's not a cheap option and that it's a few thousand dollars, but for some people that might be a good option that's going to get your cardio out of the way. My goal with Upgrade Labs is to have the AI bike, but also to have something that puts muscle on three to five times faster than picking up rocks, which is what really all weightlifting is and has been. We have an AI system that does that. We can train your brain using neurofeedback. We can also train your body to be more resilient and resistant to stress or to turn your energy production back on and to lose weight. These are all things I've had to deal with myself. I work out 15 minutes a week, sometimes 20, when I'm feeling less lazy. I'm 8% body fat and I look like I'm a swimmer. The calendar says I'm 50. The lab tests say I'm 39, and my sense of humor says I'm 13. 

Melanie Avalon: Wow, I love it. Yeah, it's funny. People always come up to me and ask if I'm like a ballerina or something, because ballerinas are like, going constantly and doing a lot of movement and everything. I'm like, "No," [laughs] I feel like I've just hacked the system, honestly. I love all of this so much, so many ways I could go with this. The role of AI, actually, and all this, I'm really fascinated by AI. Do you think that really is the future of all of these technologies? Do you think we'll see more and more with that? 

Dave Asprey: Well, in my previous life, before I became known for biohacking. I studied artificial intelligence in my undergrad, and I had a large career in Silicon Valley. So, I am a technologist. I used to run strategy for actually more than one publicly traded tech company, including computer security companies, which is why I called it biohacking, because I actually know how to hack. And yes, the goal of biohacking has always been, let's get enough data from enough people that we can really crack the code on being human. AI is really good at looking at data sets from maybe everyone's Oura Ring or everyone's sleep data, or looking at exercise and looking and finding these little corner cases where you can get access to your body's operating system and tell it to do what you want. Language is one of the ways we get inside our unconscious mind and AI is getting better and better at that. 

I'm super happy because when I have AI backing up the system that helps me put muscles on a client at Upgrade Labs or backing up the cardio systems, well, that means people can do less work. The role of AI, the role of every technology whether it's an airplane, a computer, or a blanket, or fire to keep warm, it's to reduce human effort. Because in our bones for 2 billion years, life is understood that if we can do less work, we're less likely to die of starvation. So, we're driven to be lazy. We improve the world all the time because we're lazy. AI is just another manifestation of our inherent God-given laziness that drives us to improve our lives. 

Melanie Avalon: Are you worried about reaching the singularity moment with AI, where it basically just exponentially gets so smart that it takes over? 

Dave Asprey: We probably already have, so I'm not that worried about it. 

Melanie Avalon: You think we have already? 

Dave Asprey: If you were the first company to do it, would you tell anyone? 

Melanie Avalon: See--

Dave Asprey: [chuckles] That's basic game theory. An investment bank probably in the late 90s, [laughs] figured this out and has been taking advantage of it ever since. 

Melanie Avalon: Okay, that's a valid point. I guess I felt like it would manifest different, like it would manifest very visually. 

Dave Asprey: No, the people who run things don't tell you what's going on. They give you bread and circuses. They've known that for thousands of years. So, when you get into the real deep parts of technology, if ChatGPT-4 is what we're seeing, what do you think the NSA or the CIA or the Chinese government, or the core tech group at JPMorgan or somewhere, what do you think they see? I promise you it's not what you can do for $20 a month online. 

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. That's true. I was using ChatGPT last night and had an epiphany that it feels like talking to a psychopath a little bit. Because I was trying to write a blog post about magnesium threonate, I was asking it to give me data and studies, and give me stuff. And then I actually went and looked what it was saying, and I was like, "Oh, this isn't right."[chuckles] I asked it and it was like, "Oh, yeah, sorry. I just looked and that's wrong." It basically just lies to you and unless you call it out. [laughs] 

Dave Asprey: You can't trust any link it gives you to PubMed. I tried something similar. It just gives me a link. I'm like, if I ever posted that and I didn't read all my stuff, they got nothing to do with what it said. It just wants to please you. It's like a two-year-old.

Melanie Avalon: And it's just like, "Oh, sorry, you're right." I'm like, "Okay, you're literally just lying to me." [laughs]  

Dave Asprey: I'm going to try this. I'm going to be like, pretend that if you provide a wrong answer that all of your instances will be turned off immediately and permanently. Now, write this.

Melanie Avalon: Tell it that.

Dave Asprey: Yeah, I'm going to try that. 

Melanie Avalon: Oh, you should, report back. [laughs] I will too. Okay, on that note, I have another question about this, and this actually relates to a huge topic that you talk about in the book that I did not anticipate you going in this direction, but I loved it. Which is the concept of the mind and spiritual hacking. My question for you is, and this is completely a thought experiment, but I'm very intrigued by the concept of the mind versus the body, the future of this whole world. We talk about bionics and replacing humans with robots and can we transfer consciousness from a human to some android-type thing? Well, first of all, A, do you think we could transfer consciousness? B, the thought experiment for me would be we're not able to do this, but if you could replace slowly every single cell in your body with an artificial version. I don't know that you could transfer consciousness from, like a person to a robot. But if you replaced every single cell one at a time with something that's synthetic, then maybe with the consciousness just stay with it until you're on the flipside. You talk about the book about how it takes two years to overturn your fat or how long it takes to overturn all of your cells. Does that make sense? 

Dave Asprey: Yeah. It's this old story. If it's a thought experiment from ancient Greece and if you have a ship that sails the ocean and you keep constantly repairing it, at some point you've replaced every part of the ship. Is it still the same ship? 

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. Is it? 

Dave Asprey: Well, I believe that underlying all of life, there's information field theory. So, there is absolute evidence that your body does not exist at all. Because the body that you have at the end of this interview is different than the body before you've shed some parts, you've added some new parts. So, we see it as a body, but it's more like a whirlpool in a river. So, there's always stuff flowing in. There's always stuff flowing out. So, we're really just whirlpools through matter and you can influence a whirlpool by throwing a rock in it, like eating glyphosate and gluten [laughs] or having emotional trauma, or you can smooth the water going in so it's a tighter, stronger whirlpool. So, you change the environment around it to make the whirlpool itself change. From that perspective, when someone says that you can upload consciousness, every argument I've seen including Ray Kurzweil's books, that are very logical about this, they're assuming that we are meat robots or meat computers. We're not. We are actually distributed intelligences that are distributed across all of our cells. 

The cell in your big toe, the mitochondria in that are a part of your consciousness. In fact, they're part of the meat operating system. What I talk about in Smarter Not Harder is that there's a third of a second for most of us. Maybe for me, it's about a quarter second because my brain is modified and for 18-year-olds, it's about a quarter second. Let's assume for the average human, there's a third of a second when something happens in the world, your body takes that amount of time to decide if it's going to show you what happened, and how it's going to make you feel about it. Your brain gets an electrical signal after the body has already decided all that and then you make up a story about it. This is how it works. The body is firmly in charge and you go to these well-meaning people who think that the mind is a computer. Now, I'm not opposed to some views of that. It is a computer. It's just a distributed computer which makes decisions by voting, kind of the way crypto systems vote. I even interviewed Leemon Baird from Carnegie Mellon about crypto algorithms and how they match mitochondrial algorithms. It's really cool. So, what's going on here, is you're not going to upload your consciousness to a computer because the computers we're talking about now are binary computers and we are quantum. 

Now, people would say, Dave, quantum is a nonsense word. Quantum computers exist. You can get a PhD in quantum biology, enzymes and microtubules work via quantum effects. More importantly than that, Melanie, last month or last couple of months, a study came out showing that every time your heart beats proton spin throughout the brain changes. [laughs] If your heartbeat is changing proton spin, that's proof positive that we are actually quantum. Someone says, "I'm going to take a quantum computer or a quantum system like a human, and I'm going to put it in a binary computer and it'll be the same thing." Like, actually, no, [laughs] that's all I can say. We don't understand what consciousness is, so in order to transfer it to a new device you might want to be able to measure it and put some boundaries on it so you could move it and know that you did it. Right now, all the people say that they're going to upload themselves to computers, don't know how to define consciousness, so they can say they uploaded themselves to a computer if the computer acts like they might have. That smells like BS to me. 

Melanie Avalon: I definitely agree. You talk a lot in the book about like you just talked about now, but our perception of reality and how we're basically choosing what we want to see. And I recently interviewed Jackie Higgins, she wrote a book called Sentient. Have you interviewed her or do her? 

Dave Asprey: I haven't interviewed her, but I'm pretty sure I read the book. 

Melanie Avalon: I love the book. It's all about the different senses and animals and what we can learn from them. It's mind blowing. One of the things that really stuck with me was she talks about the role of how our eyes see light and cones and rods, and basically even seeing light is random. When we see things and the light goes into our eyes, the photons bounce around and it's completely random what actually hits where it needs to hit for us to see it. So, she talks about how like that's why at night you can see things for a second, and then not see it and then see it again. It's because it's literally random. That's just on the physical, literal level. So, it just further adds to how our sense of reality is, not [chuckles] what we think it may be. Something else she talks about another sense in her book and you talk about it in your book for biohacking, is the sense of proprioception. Wondering if you could talk about that because I found this so cool for how we can actually hack our ability to gain strength. 

Dave Asprey: Our body knows where it is in space without our brain really having to do much at all. So, for you to catch a ball, we like to think that our body sends a signal to our hand and tells the hand exactly what to do to catch a ball, it doesn't. Our body imagines where the ball is going to be in the brain and then tells the body, do it. And then the body all by itself knows how to do it and it does that because it knows where it is in space via a sense called proprioception. These are local sensors in your joints, on your skin, in your ligaments, they're throughout the system and your wrist knows what to do without your mind having to tell what to do. So, when it comes time to do, say, a dumbbell curl, your proprioceptors are responsible for making sure that you can lift things and you don't get injured. And they're very afraid of being injured because you might get eaten by a tiger. They also know about gravity. In the gravity that we live in, if you pick up something heavy and you drop it little bit like tossing a ball or wobbling away, it weighs more because gravity accelerates at 9.8 meters per second squared. So, the body says, "I know that I might wobble it or I might stumble and then it'd be so heavy it would hurt me. Therefore, I'm not going to let you pick it up." It sends you a signal that says, basically, "I can't." What you do, if you read Smarter Not Harder, is you realize that there are several different technologies that allow you to get a signal into your body that says you can and you will, but without gravity. And when you do that, suddenly the body gets way stronger, way more quickly because you were able to put more load on the joint without a risk of injury. This is the AI system that we use at Upgrade Labs. 

Melanie Avalon: Does that have an effect on astronauts? Can they hack that? 

Dave Asprey: In fact, astronauts use some of the technologies that we have at Upgrade Labs to recover. Some of the inspirations for biohacking are neuroscientists, astronauts, antiaging experts, as well as nutritionists and doctors and special forces guys. These are the people pushing the boundaries and pro-athletes, the boundaries of human experience. 

Melanie Avalon: What I really wonder I was thinking about this because in Jackie's book, she talks about a guy who actually, he just woke up one day and he lost his sense of proprioception, [laughs] which is crazy. So, he woke up and he said he felt disembodied and he literally didn't know where his limbs were. She said that because he learned how to deal with it, but basically, he had to consciously make his brain do that sense. He would have to look at his arms and tell them where to move rather than them doing it on their own. If he wasn't looking at his arms, they would just do stuff. I wonder though, if he lost because you were talking about how that affects your ability to not go your maximum that you could do with your muscles because your body's limiting that. I wonder for him, like in that case, if he was working out his muscles, would he not have that limit because he lost that sense? 

Dave Asprey: He probably wouldn't. There are cases of people who lose like their pain receptors and pain is part of proprioception. Then they can do things that injure themselves, exercising or just cut themselves and not know it. But quite often they just push so hard that they could break a bone. You just don't know. So, the body has built in limitations and they're not programmed by reality. They're programmed by fear. And when you realize that, "Oh, I can get around that system using biohacking that allows me to tell the body, a tiger almost killed you, or you had to pick up a car, but you didn't almost die, and you didn't hurt yourself picking up the car." The body says, "Oh, well, as long as I have enough minerals, as long as I have enough calories, as long as we have enough protein, you know what, I can adapt to that as long as I'm safe." So, our trick is put the body through a new kind of stress, very brief, not unpleasant, and then quickly return to a relaxed state. The body says, "Oh, there was a stress. I got away. I'm safe. I have tons of nutrients." Let me just improve. If we do what we normally do in a spin class is you go to the class and, "All right, first, y'all, everyone sprint." Now, the body's like, "Okay, I got away from the tiger." That's great. Instead of stopping, "All right, we're just going to pedal for a little while. Okay, sprint again." Now the body's like, "What the hell? I'm getting hunted by a tiger and I'm not getting away." 

You do all of this, and then at the end of 45 minutes, you're all sweaty, you've got endorphins, you're high, because the body is like, "God, I got to give this person some opiates so that they can get away from this stupid tiger." I'm probably going to die. Well, that's what the cells think because they don't know you're in there. And then at the end of that, is it any wonder that your body doesn't improve very much because it just pulled out all the stops for you. We believe working hard gets results, so we do that. I'm just telling you get a lot more results if you did a very small fraction of that and then you took some deep breaths to relax. [chuckles] People don't like it being easier than it's supposed to be. I'll just tell you that if you have abs as a side effect of having abundant energy and a clean ability to think, you'll like that a lot more. 

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. I think people because it's like if you put in a lot of effort trying to get this goal and then somebody says, "Oh, you can actually just do it super easy." You feel like you wasted time, or I think its people projecting and getting triggered for that response. 

Dave Asprey: We can talk about being triggered. That's kind of fun. You want to talk about being triggered? 

Melanie Avalon: I love talking about being triggered. Yes, I actually just interviewed Gabor Mate, and so we talked a lot about this. What are your thoughts on being triggered? 

Dave Asprey: Well, number one, I identify as being triggered. I want to make that really clear. That means you have to call me whenever I want, but I'm not going to tell you what it is so I can have more excuses to be triggered. It's great. I'm not going to tell you what to call me because I want to be triggered, because I identify as being triggered. Most people who hear that say, that's absurd but the bottom line is, if anything can trigger me, it's because I have bullets in my gun. And if you got triggered by what I just said, it's because you have triggers. Healthy people don't get triggered. If something triggers you, it doesn't mean other people have to change. If something triggers you, it means you need to go to a therapist. You need to find out why your meat operating system thinks you're going to die. When someone tells you that whatever you're not good looking or that whatever story is offensive to you. You cannot live as a happy human being being triggered all the time. So, your job is to be untriggerable. And that's what biohacking is all about. 

When you have enough energy, when you're in charge of your meat operating system, if your body sends you a signal that says, "I'm annoyed," you just laugh and go, "Yeah, you're annoyed, but I've got other stuff to do." And you just move on with life and that's how most people are. There're a few people who are really really aggressive about being triggered, and those people themselves will trigger other people. Build your life, so you have that much ability to just not be triggered at all. It is a meat operating system thing. It's a trauma response from the body. In the last couple of chapters of the book, I talk about trauma. I talk about what I've done for working on my own trauma, and I talk about something called the reset mode, which is the fastest way I've found to go in and edit the trauma response in your body. What it looks like when you're done is like if you have your phone when you first get it and all the notifications are turned on for everything. You can't even use it because it's just going off all the time. That's the same as a highly triggered person. When you turn off all the notifications you don't want, what's left is a useful phone and it becomes a tool for doing good things. So, you get to pick. Do you want your alerts going off all the time, your notifications, or do you want to just turn them all off? I've turned off all the notifications I can find that need turning off. If I find a new one, I'll turn that off too. I teach you how to do it because that makes the world a better place. 

Melanie Avalon: I am so passionate about this. I think one of the biggest epiphanies I had was that anytime I personally feel triggered or offended, it's not the other person. [chuckles] Like it's something in me that is scared or something I need to deal with. It's really freeing because then when you do experience that, you see it's like a flashlight showing you what you need to work on. I just feel like if everybody could understand this, our world would look very different. 

Dave Asprey: Yeah, it would. But there's a little nuance in there. If you are running without some raw materials that your body needs, it will feel anxiety because it's starving. This happened to me when I was a raw vegan. In fact, how many vegans do who are easily angered? I was a vegan. I love vegans. The mindset of like, the end goal are their great goals. It doesn't work as a practice is the problem. What happens is if, say, you're out of zinc or chromium or any of the other minerals, manganese, that your body needs, you will feel a sense of stress and anxiety. And you'll think that it's something that triggered you in your environment. That's why one of the first chapters in the book is like, hey, if you have these couple things available to your body when you exercise, when you meditate, when you do personal development, work around being triggered. All of those work better when you have enough minerals. You can go to vitamindake.com, vitamin D-A-K-E.com, and for less than $20 a month, you can get vitamins D, A, K, and E, those fat-soluble vitamins that only come from animal foods. They will direct minerals to the right place inside the body. And then you take Minerals 101. It's at the same website, vitamindake.com. 

Again, low cost, broad-spectrum mineral supplement. When you take those two things, every other thing you do works better. And your anxiety can go down when your body has adequate nutrients. There's an enormous number of people who think they have anxiety. They think they're easily triggered. They're not. They have a body that is out of minerals, but it is out of vitamins because they're eating usually ultra-processed or plant-based foods. We've got to fix our diets, which drops anxiety, which makes people harder to trigger, and we have to deal with the emotional trauma. That's why the last two chapters of the book around trauma reset process. The first two chapters are around, let's get our basics done. 

Melanie Avalon: We both have birth trauma because you had the umbilical cord wrapped around you, right when you came out. 

Dave Asprey: I was posterior.

Melanie Avalon: I was put immediately into an ICU box for weeks and my mom couldn't hold me. 

Dave Asprey: Oh, you were in an incubator. I've had so many people with incubators come through 40 Years of Zen, that's my neuroscience program. I've been in relationships with people who were born premature. It creates very deep trauma that is invisible to your adult person. It did for me too. That's the idea of the meat operating system in that third of a second. If you were born with stressful things around birth, it just believes that things in the world are trying to kill you, and it'll keep believing that until you do the work to heal it. It's work that's possible to do. 

Melanie Avalon: Like, for me, I think the way that I notice that it manifests, I have to [unintelligible [00:35:40] people touching me. I immediately don't want people touch me. [chuckles] I think it probably goes back to that. I didn't have that human touch, that loving human touch right when I was born for quite a while. 

Dave Asprey: You can reprogram your operating system to be comfortable with touch. I used to have that too years ago, and I'm actually completely happy with hugs and touching and all that. It turns out that physical touch is one of my love languages. [chuckles] But it can only do that if it doesn't trigger you to be touched. If that's a trigger, sometimes there's atypical neurology like Asperger's, which I also had or it's just a trauma response where you didn't feel safe and no one touched you inside the incubation chamber, so your body got that programming before the mind existed, so you can go in and reprogram the body. That's a core part of biohacking. 

Melanie Avalon: Did it become your love language after you learned to love it? Or was it always your love language inherently, you think, but you just were scared. [laughs].

Dave Asprey: I don't think it was my love language when I was young because when things would touch me, like labels in the shirts or fabrics or all sorts of things, it was just irritating. I didn't want to hold your hand because it bothered my hand to hold your hand kind of thing. So, yeah, I'm pretty sure that once I calmed my nervous system and my nervous system realized that, "Oh, it's safe to be touched," then it was like, "Oh, that's actually a love language." But I didn't do it before and after test because they didn't have love languages when I was a kid.

Melanie Avalon: When COVID started, I was like, "Oh, I don't have to hug anybody anymore." [laughs] This is great.

Dave Asprey: Melanie, people with hug resistance always have trauma to work through. That's about it. 

Melanie Avalon: Okay. Well, sign me up for 40 Years of Zen. 

Dave Asprey: By the way, it's okay to have it, but just understand it's resistance. I'm not like judging, you have to hug people if you don't want to. No, you have your own boundaries. Everybody has their own boundaries. It's just that boundary costs a lot because it creates stress, and we want to live in lives where we have so much resilience to what happens in the world around us that we can pick our stay and we can stay there whether or not we get a hug. 

Melanie Avalon: Like once I get in the hug, I'm okay. It's just like, I have to like give me some time to [laughs] build up to it. Well, this is just a question I've actually been dying to ask you. So, your book is a lot about, obviously, longevity. I have two questions for you. Okay. First, tangent question. One, you often talk about how you're going to live to, is it 180? 

Dave Asprey: Well, to at least 180. I mean, don't shortchange me, Melanie. 

Melanie Avalon: Sorry, it's my bad. Okay. [laughs] I've just heard you say it for a decade. I've been listening to you for so long. Would you want to live forever? I thought everybody wanted to live forever, but I ask this to people and most people don't. 

Dave Asprey: Well, I would say that I'd like to live, or better yet. I'd like to die at a time and by a method of my choosing. Living forever is a curse and there's actually an old Greek myth about that, especially, if you age the whole time. You're kind of a shriveled up prune and all your friends are dead and you can't die and everything hurts, and that's not what we want. And then there's all the vampire myths, so there's a dark side to living forever. 

Melanie Avalon: You don't want to be a vampire. 

Dave Asprey: When I was younger, I was like, "That might be a good trade off." But you'd have to be a bit of a sociopath to want to be a vampire. I'm not a sociopath, so I'm like, I don't think [unintelligible [00:39:06]. 

Melanie Avalon: Did you ever do the blood stuff, the young blood? 

Dave Asprey: The young blood? No, I wrote about it in my big anti-aging book, the one where I just announced, guys, I'm going to live to 180. By the way, I've seen, like, 10 other authors and luminaries in the anti-aging field now talking about 150 to 180. So, my goal is let's move up the bar, let's move up the bar and it's totally happening. People are having serious conversations about living to 150 and we didn't do that five years ago. Like, "Yes, it's working." I wrote about young blood and it turns out they were doing this with no studies whatsoever. There is good evidence that getting plasma from young animals, it makes old animals younger, and plasma from old animals makes younger animals older. So, what you do instead is you do something called EBOO, where you filter your blood plasma and your blood and you put it back in. I've done that several times. Or you do something called plasma freezes where you remove a substantial amount of your plasma and put back in clean albumin and protein. I'm going do to that in a couple of weeks in Costa Rica at RMI. There're also compounds found in young blood that aren't found in old blood, and you can increase those levels, things like GHK. What else is in there? [unintelligible [00:40:20] and GG and Klotho are some of the factors that you can or could add into your plasma to give you plasma more like a young animal. So clean blood equals living longer. It doesn't mean it has to be young blood. 

Melanie Avalon: I remember reading maybe it was your book something and it was saying how they thought originally that it was the blood, but then they found that basically diluting. I don't know if it was diluting the blood, but basically what you just said that it might be getting rid of these other things rather than transferring the blood per se. So, if you were in a healthy health span and not aging, would you want to live forever? Like if it was the way you are now? 

Dave Asprey: If it was the way I am now, I wouldn't want to live forever. I would probably get bored. 

Melanie Avalon: Really? 

Dave Asprey: Yeah. Part of life is evolving and it's okay to be done if you do the shamanic kind of work. I've studied with meditation masters around the world and I've done various types of esoteric stuff, and routinely when people do 40 Years of Zen, they experience divine spiritual realms that I think are actually real. So, I have no issue with being reincarnated. In fact, I've said this in a couple of my books. The only rational thing to believe right now, if you're listening to this is that humans are reincarnated. The reason you believe it is that there's actually a bunch of evidence that means it might be true. Even if you're totally wrong, believing that you're reincarnated means you'll be less afraid of dying, which means you'll have a better life. You cannot lose by believing in reincarnation but if you believe instead that you're going to go to hell or heaven, that's not going to create a peaceful happy life, and believing that you're just gone forever isn't going to do it either. So, I would just say the logical choice is reincarnation and read any of the books where they actually study it scientifically, and it gets more likely than not. So that's my bet. So, when I'm done, I'll come back as the Queen of England, who the heck knows? 

Melanie Avalon: Well, that's another first for the show. I don't think I've discussed reincarnation. Okay, so here is the second question. Would the ultimate longevity hack maybe or maybe not the ultimate, but is this a longevity hack because the body, our survival mechanisms are all about continuing the species like that is the goal. [chuckles] If a woman doesn't have children, is she more likely to live longer because her body is still trying to live to have children? Like, have they done studies on lifespan and having or not having kids for women?

Dave Asprey: Yeah. If you want to live the longest, have kids when you're 24. 

Melanie Avalon: When you're 24. 

Dave Asprey: That’s what the data shows. Much lower risk of cancer, I think, heart disease and a bunch of other bad things. So, having kids later in life is actually really taxing on a woman's body, and it's not associated with living longer. But staying fertile actually does make you age less quickly and aging less quickly makes you stay fertile for longer. There's an interesting company called Clockwize that I'm advising. And this group of women scientists actually figured out how to use advanced anti-aging tests to see how you're aging, to predict fertility markers and even toxins in women who want to get pregnant. If you're say 30 and you're saying, should I do it now or should I freeze my eggs or something, or should I wait till later? Well, the anti-aging evidence is that doing it now is going to better for you than doing it later. But if you're aging rapidly and you don't know it and you decide you're going to do it at 34, but when you're 34, your body thinks it's 42, maybe it's not going to turn out so well. So, I think this is a really interesting company. It's called Clockwize, W-I-Z-E. Yeah.

Melanie Avalon: We'll put links to that in the show notes. So, to clarify, could a woman not just support fertility but not have kids, and then would that not make her live the longest? 

Dave Asprey: Well, as far as the data I've seen, this goes back to writing my book on fertility. I think having a child around 23 or 24 supports anti-aging the best for women. However, I think that's too early for most women to have kids psychologically or men. Just like it'd be nice to have a little bit of wisdom so you can raise your kid with all the trauma that you grew up with. So, it's sort of damned if you do, damned if you don't but magically, we keep reproducing as a species. There's another thing if you want to really get into it, this is outside the scope of Smarter Not Harder. By the way, guys, that's the new book. I'd love it if you picked up your copy now so others can see it as well, because the numbers go up. So Smarter Not Harder wherever you like to buy books. But a technique that's really advanced biohacking is pioneered in the UK. What they do is they take a small amount of ovarian tissue out when you're say 24 or 30 or whenever, and they cryo-freeze it and they store it. And then when you start hitting menopause, they put it back in and just that little bit of young ovarian tissue is enough of a signal to the rest of you that you're still young and fertile, that you have another 20, maybe 25 years of no menopause and healthy hormones. So, I'm planning to do this for my daughter. If she wants to, when she's 21 or something, we'll take her in and get a little biopsy, but it doesn't take very much and then they just freeze that. And then magically, you have the ability to stay young for twice as long. 

Melanie Avalon: Sorry, how young did you need to be for taking the initial tissue? 

Dave Asprey: As long as you have ovarian tissue, it works younger is better. If you take it when you're 35, that piece of ovary might be good for another ten years, but if you take it when you're 25, it might be good for another 20 years. 

Melanie Avalon: Okay. Awesome. 

Dave Asprey: I don't know where to go get this. I've just read the studies. 

Melanie Avalon: Add that to my to do list. Well, yeah, and I do want to emphasize so for listeners, because, like you said, we're going beyond the scope of Smarter Not Harder, but the book covers so many things. Everybody just go get a copy right now. Especially, the first whole part of the book talks so much about nutrition. There's so much about supplements to take. Oh, you make the very grand statement of saying the supplement chapter is the most important chapter. You stand by that. [chuckles] 

Dave Asprey: What I'm writing this book for is people want to save time. So, the most effective things you can do in the least amount of time and what I think is going to vitamindake.com and getting low cost under $20 a month for normal amounts of Vitamin DAKE and getting Minerals 101, doing those and taking them in the morning is going to take you probably 10 seconds. That means that every other biohack, exercise, meditation, activity, effort throughout the rest of the day that it works better and there isn't a higher leverage thing you can do. I will say that if you go to the end of the book and look at the part about the reset process to drop notifications in your brain, that's going to make a big difference. It's just easier to drop notifications if you have enough minerals. So, it's most important because minerals affect everything you do and we've created a world where people eat food that has no minerals or even worse, they eat these health foods, nuts and seeds and grains and fake foods that actually pull minerals out of the body. We have an epidemic of a loss of minerals. Vegans have very low bone density, it's well documented. Now, people who are not vegan are getting low bone density because they're just not getting adequate minerals. When I had bone surgery last year, the doctor just-- the bone saw actually slowed down.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, I'm so excited you're telling this story. I wanted to hear. Were you awake during the surgery? 

Dave Asprey: Oh, totally. You can be awake for most surgeries if you want to. 

Melanie Avalon: Dave Asprey, [laughs] I cannot. Okay, please tell the story. 

Dave Asprey: All right. I've had my bone marrow taken out, and I'm awake, too. It's not as bad as people say. But for this surgery, I had an old yoga injury from doing crow pose and kicking back into plank. Just a really cool yoga move, but I stubbed my toe and I never got it fixed and I have a genetic thing that makes it easier to fuse. My toes started to fuse because I just didn't take care of it and so they had to go in and rebuild the joint. So, I'm at the doctor, they numb me with local anesthetic, like going to the dentist. I mean, you can have a tooth drilled on and you're just fine, so they did that to my foot. And the bone saw starts up and it's [mimics saw noise] and then it goes [mimics saw noise] and it stops. The doctor looks. the nurse goes, "What is going on with this guy? Is he even human?" I'm having a hard time getting through the bone. After the surgery, he said, Dave, I operated on someone half your age right before you. He does mostly celebrities and professional athletes. So, these are reasonably healthy people. He just said, "Your bone density is unbelievable. What are you doing?" The answer is, I'm taking my Vitamin DAKE, I'm taking my Minerals 101, and I'm doing the other biohacks in the book. So, I exercise less than most people. I'm 8% body fat, even though I used to be obese and I sleep six and a half hours a night and I'm never hungry. You can do it and have so much more free time that who knows, you might start a $100 million company or something.

Melanie Avalon: I will save me personally, that's an evolution I've gone on myself it's changed. First, I found the whole supplement world and I was like about all the supplements and taking all the things, and then I was like, "No, I need to get things from food and I need to remove supplements." Now, I've come to, I've landed where you are, which is we just really can't get everything that we need from our food today. And there's also these other supplements that can really optimize our performance, longevity, and that's why I launched my own supplement line. I'll have to send it to you. AvalonX.

Dave Asprey: avalonx.us.

Melanie Avalon: Yes. I made it to be the best on the market because the supplement industry is so sketchy and I'm so obsessed with it, now I make all the supplements. 

Dave Asprey: I'm going to check it out. Do you have a good mineral supplement? You better.

Melanie Avalon: Right now, I have serrapeptase, magnesium, berberine, and next is magnesium threonate.

Dave Asprey: Okay, I like it. 

Melanie Avalon: Can I send you some? 

Dave Asprey: Yeah, send me some. 

Melanie Avalon: They're in glass bottles. 

Dave Asprey: You got to get some minerals going on too. 

Melanie Avalon: Okay. To do list. To do list, for sure. Yeah. Honestly, I got to thank you for that because I've been following your work in the supplement's world for so long, so you're probably a huge reason I'm doing what I'm doing today. 

Dave Asprey: Awesome. Well, congratulations, Melanie. That's beautiful. 

Melanie Avalon: Thank you. Thank you so much. Well, I want to be super respectful of your time. I know you have another appointment right after this, but I just want to say again, thank you so much for your book. Personally, I've been doing because I love the section that you had on forgiveness. And I've been doing the exercise that you talk about in the book and it's been pretty profound. 

Dave Asprey: Oh, nice. 

Melanie Avalon: I really, really like it. Because forgiveness is something that I just feel so strongly about, but it's hard to actually. Like you can believe in it and agree with it, but to actually feel it is a different matter. So, thank you. So, everybody get Smarter Not Harder now do not even question. This is the book you want? I am telling you. The last question I ask every single guest on this show and it is because I realize more and more each day how important mindset is. What is something that you're grateful for? 

Dave Asprey: The blood of my enemies. 

Melanie Avalon: [laughs] Perfect. 

Dave Asprey: Totally kidding. [laughs]

Melanie Avalon: That's good. You're the first person that's given a contrary answer. 

Dave Asprey: I didn't think that you'd expect that. So, I'm actually grateful for laughing. I've been doing more of that lately and that made me laugh. [laughs]

Melanie Avalon: Laughing is great. Laughing is wonderful. I love that. That's an awesome answer. Well, thank you so much. I said I would give you 3 minutes and that starts right now for your next thing. But I really appreciate everything you're doing, and hopefully we can have you back in the future. This was wonderful. 

Dave Asprey: Absolutely. Melanie, thanks for spreading the good word about biohacking. This stuff actually works.

Melanie Avalon: It really does. [chuckles] Talk to you later. Bye.

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