Healing Therapy
Introduction [00:00:04]
Hello, this podcast is sponsored by Now Alchemy. Now, Alchemy is an amazing company that has formulated the most powerful substance in our body that was taken way back in the Egyptian era, known as the food of the Gods. Not only does it bring in balance, happiness and increase your intuition, it decalcifies your pineal gland, which opens up your third eye, it increases your light body, allowing your consciousness and your awareness to be open and aware of everything that is going on. The high level mineral source, which we need today on our planet, is so important with the fact that the earth itself has been overturned so many times with all of the farming industries that we do not have access to the rich Ormus that is available in this planet. And thanks to Now Alchemy, we do. We now have the sustenance that our body needs that is brought in from the Himalayan Mountains and the Dead Sea Ormus, which is a powerful energy source that moves to your body and brings together a whole synthesis of information to every part of your body. By bringing this mineral source, you are nourishing our body at a cellular level. I love the company for what it stands for and its ethics, and it has been a sponsor of Ancient Wisdom Today podcast since the beginning. And that’s why I always ask the tribe to support their sponsors who are sponsoring this show, because I go through each of the sponsors with strong ethics and integrity to make sure that whatever they are bringing forth isn’t aligned to the planet and into you and for all of us so that we can grow and have health and wellness in our lives. Ormus’s company spends a lot of time with advanced scientists, naturopaths and doctors and herbalists to formulate a sourcing technique that brings in the highest quality of organic ingredients for the most mysterious and desolate countries in order to bring the magic in the bottle. Which is Ormus. Now, alchemy is not just for health and wellness community, but for all people seeking to become their greatest version of himself. And I’ve been taking this product for many months, and it has been such an addition to my shamanic love that I bring to the world. And how I bring love into the lives of people is by keeping myself healthy and happy and lifted and shifted. By bringing the highest source of minerals in my body, I am able to hold a high vibration of energy and light when doing healing work or when I’m speaking to large groups of people and when I’m here late and doing ancient wisdom today podcasts. So I invite you to experience the amazingness of ORMUS. They have so many powerful selections that you can choose from, from 24 karat gold ORMUS to Shilajit to nano enhanced CBD to Elysium, each bringing a different blend of energy to your body. And I honestly say that this company is really changing the lives of people. Ever since I have mentioned them and shared them with all of the people in the tribe, I’ve been getting letters and letters of people’s lives that have been changing. And not to mention the fact that those who have suffered so many times from PTSD, which is post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, confusion, fog brain, and all of these other symptoms that have been plaguing us because of the onslaught of aggressive energies on our planet, by taking ORMUS, these things are cleared, neutralized and allowing you to have more balance and groundedness in who you are, as well as enhancing your mind so that you’re able to think clearly and have a stronger focus. You can get ORMUS by contacting www.nowalchemy.com That’s www.nowalchemy.com. And if you use the code:Shaman, you’ll get 11% off every purchase you make. I’m so happy that we are building beautiful things in our body because putting beautiful things in our body is putting beautiful things in our mind and our spirit, and that allows us to shine and radiate our truth in this world. As leaders, I love you. Enjoy the show.
Human beings have been sharing stories for hundreds of thousands of years, and with those stories came the emotional, spiritual, and physical knowledge of the ancients.Shaman Durek is a third-generation shaman, an evolutionary innovator and a women’s empowerment leader. He’s here to bring forth the ancient wisdom of our elders to help heal and bring happiness into our modern society. We’re sharing ancient knowledge in modern times in order to put the power back in people’s hands. Welcome to the tribe.
Shaman Durek [00:05:21]
Hello, beautiful tribe. You are so powerful and so amazing, and I am so happy to be here with you once again. What a powerful and amazing tribe we have of leaders and healers and teachers and engineers and doctors and psychotherapists and artists and all kinds of amazing people who are working in all fields of life, sharing the message of love and bringing that message forward. And I am so happy to be a part of this tribe because we are lit a F, because we are operating in the consciousness of accelerated vision for our planet to see global change happen at the highest level. And the way we do that is we educate ourselves and we share information, and we lift ourselves by being a part of the conversation and engaging in different conversations, which allows us through the wisdom of this knowledge is that we’re bringing in from other people to continue to keep that lit train going. So I am so happy to be here. And what I’m really happy about and I’m sure you’re going to be happy as well as I am here with my brother, who is the love of my heart and my soul and my being. He is such an amazing man. He is a serious edge maker. And when I say edge maker, everyone, you know what I mean, I mean someone who’s willing to go to the outer boundaries of reality and thought and create and innovate like some of the people that you know from Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, people in the in the past that thought before what people could see and vision as possibility and bring it to us so that we can shape and lift ourselves and shift ourselves into higher levels of what it means to be a human being on planet Earth. So, I just want to let you know this guy is so wonderful and so dear to my heart and I’m so happy to bring him here and share him with the tribe, his knowledge, his wisdom, his information and the things that he’s going to share with us that can improve your lives and better ways. So, I welcome you to the show, brotherDave Asprey.
Dave Asprey [00:07:21]
Shaman Durek, thanks for having me on. And you said to me, you said you said people are lit AF?
Shaman Durek
Lit As fuck
Dave Asprey
And I was trying to make you drop an F bomb in your first sentence and I pulled it up. There we go. All right. Now that’s out of the way. I’m just kidding, I knew what it meant, I knew what it meant.
Shaman Durek
I know. I mean, kids, I have a lot of people who listen to the show who kids watch it as well. But, you know, I mean, I f bombs come out of my mouth from time to time, and I love those F bombs. They have good energy behind them. That can actually shift people. I call it like shake up to wake up. Yeah. Then get your attention. Yes, exactly. So I want to just start diving in right away into really getting into everything that you represent. And I want to go back to how did it start for you in your vision, because you are truly a visionary. And so I want to go into that space because there’s a lot of people in the world who see everything that you’re doing with bullet proof and so forth. But, you know, it’s always something. You can look at a product and you can look at a company. But, you know, people don’t understand that there’s a real innovator, a real visionary that holds it down to create that company. What was the thing that got you into that vision that way?
Dave Asprey [00:08:29]
Back in the day, I was a computer hacker and I was the first guy to sell anything over the Internet, which was a T-shirt that said Caffeine, my drug of choice. And there’s a picture of me. And I was maybe twenty three in Entrepreneur magazine. And it’s my proof of fat picture because I weighed about three hundred pounds and double XL t shirt and I went on from that, that thing selling it out of my dorm room to pay for my tuition all the way to working in Silicon Valley, the company that held Google’s very first servers, where I was a co-founder of a part of that company, and I made six million dollars when I was twenty six years old and I lost it when I was twenty eight. But along the way I hit three hundred pounds. So I had arthritis since I was 14 on my knees. By the time I was twenty nine, I’d been diagnosed with high risk for stroke and heart attack, pre diabetes, chronic fatigue syndrome, cognitive dysfunction, Lyme disease, toxic mold exposure and a few other things.
Shaman Durek [00:09:33]
That’s a heavy, heavy list of symptoms.
Dave Asprey [00:09:37]
It was. And I’m sitting there. you can feel when disruptive change is coming to an industry or to the world and building that early version of the Internet. This was right as the Web browser was born. And that was a world changing thing. And you could feel that something, something momentous was happening for the world. At the same time, I started not being able to pay attention in meetings and I was tired all the time and how much I slept and then went to the doctor and I said, I feel almost like someone’s poisoned me. Not that I think someone has, but just something’s wrong. And he looked at me and he said, maybe you should. Try to lose weight. And I said, do you think I’m not trying and you could tell he thought I was eating Snickers bars and just lying about it. So the truth was, I had worked out for 90 minutes a day for 18 months, six days a week, halfway tough cardio. I could max out every machine at the gym except for two. And I was still a 300 pound walking blob. I was pretty strong.
Shaman Durek [00:10:46]
So you’re the geeky fat kid.
Dave Asprey [00:10:47]
Absolutely. And just that look in the doctor’s eye when he said that and then proceeded to tell me that vitamin C would kill me, I just looked at him and said, you’re fired. And I walked out of the office. I never paid for the doctor’s appointment. And it was on my credit report for four years or something. But it was on principle. I just wouldn’t pay the guy. And I said, I’m going to have to hack this myself. So every night I’d go home and I would study biochemistry. And I started out with smart drugs, said, how can I turn my brain back on? It turns out I had it exactly backwards, but I was an engineer. I lived all in my head at the time, nothing from the neck down. So I bought twelve hundred dollars worth of smart drugs from Europe and six weeks later they arrived in a plain wrapped box and I opened it and I took them. And a week later I was pretty pissed because I was convinced that they didn’t work. But when I stopped taking them, like, wait, they were working because when you when your body works better, it just feels so natural, like, oh yeah, this is I’m supposed to feel. So they were relatively subtle and that launched me down this path to say, well, what else can I do for for human performance? And I ended up, aside from exercise, trying every different diet on the planet and eventually coming up with the bulletproof diet, which is based on many different principles. I ran an anti aging nonprofit group for 20 years. We got to interview the leaders in the field. I get to meet an 88 year old guy who was on the board of directors who was dating a thirty five year old, and actually they were in love.
Shaman Durek [00:12:19]
But how did you get to that point of, like, where you fed up? I mean, because, like, here’s the thing. I’m hearing what you’re saying. And there’s a lot of people out there in the world who are like, well, how did this geeky fat kid becomeDave Asprey? Right. And like, so what was the turning point of the nonsense inside of you that was like, I’ve had enough. I’m going to actually become very proactive and really change this.
Dave Asprey [00:12:46]
One of them was when that doctor just looked at me and said, maybe you should try to lose weight and couldn’t tell me how and looking for what the other one was, because there’s a couple little things that that really stand out in that one of them was just sitting in a meeting and having a discussion about some esoteric technology concept that I knew I had taught a class on this and I couldn’t remember it and it just wasn’t there. And I had this feeling like I’m not going to be able to continue this career that I love. I might not even be going to put bread on my table. I still ate bread back then and I, I really have this survival level thing that said, if I don’t fix this, I might die. And it turns out I had all the things that happened to old people in my 20s, that long list of things I talked about. That’s what it feels like to be 70 or 60, even for a lot of people. Now, half of people now have a high risk of Alzheimer’s when they’re old. I mean, it’s bad news. I am never going back to that. And it was this realization that at a younger age than most, you know, I might die. And if I don’t die, I’m going to suffer a lot. And I didn’t want to suffer anymore. I didn’t want to wake up in the morning and say, I don’t know if I have enough energy to do all the things that matter today, but I’m just going to put one foot in for the other and just make it through the day. I wanted to always have the energy to bring it, and I had never had that. The way I grew up, just biologically was never that healthy. And now I’m 11 and a half percent body fat. My brain works really well. I’m in my mid 40s. I have more energy than I ever have. I sleep six hours and five minutes a night at least I have for the last five years
Shaman Durek [00:14:33]
You looked amazing.
Dave Asprey [00:14:34]
Thank you, but I feel amazing. And I realized about seven, eight years ago I lost the desire to do tech, all the world changing stuff. That was the early Internet. Had it become Facebook, it wasn’t quite as world changing as it once was and I was doing it, but I didn’t have the passion anymore. And I sat down. I was a vice president at a big technology security firm and I said, I’m going to write a blog for myself when I was 16 or 20. And I’m going to tell myself in that blog everything that I know now, having spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in 15 years of really focused effort on hacking myself, on upgrading the human body. And my very first blog post was about bulletproof coffee, which hadn’t become a brand yet. Then it was, hey, did you know that that this can happen? But even bulletproof coffee came about because I didn’t stop with food and smart drugs along the way. I said, I’ve got to figure out what’s going on in my head here because I’ve been in bad relationships. I keep making bad decisions and I’m a rational, smart guy. What’s going on? So I went to Tibet and I did, I learned meditation from the Masters. I went to Mount Kailash. I did an ayahuasca ceremony with a shaman 20 plus years ago before it was cool. And in fact, when I went there, the locals that they said, you’re white, Dave,ayahuasca is for locals and you’re going to throw up. You won’t like this.
And they thought I was nuts. And then they said, there’s some crazy gringo who wants to try this. So I found a medicine man and I did a ceremony and I really I dug as deep as I could at every level. As an engineering guy, though, I said, hey, I’m going to try what’s supposed to work. 15 years of antibiotics didn’t cure all the problems I had. I took them every month and all I did was wreck my Gut. And so I’m going to try. I was not supposed to work, but some people say it works. And I found huge value in pursuing esoteric realms, things like meditation, which 20 years ago, if you just said you meditated, they would walk you out of the company office. It means you’re crazy pants and there’s a very strong divide. And all these other practices. Oh, yeah, learning from people and to better doing ayahuasca people didn’t know what it was. And I said I just felt called to experiment with all of this stuff with the basic thing and said, look, if it’s going to make me perform better at everything I do as a human being, then that’s what I’m interested in. And I started the blog. I figured five people are going to read this blog, but it’s going to change their lives. And it turns out a lot more than five people read the blog. And soon I said, great, I’m going to start making the products. I can’t buy things that are based on hard science. Things are based on antiaging research, things that are based on human performance. And you fast forward let’s see, that was about twenty, twelve or six years later. Bulletproof has raised sixty nine million dollars in venture funding and we’ve made one hundred and twenty five million cups of bulletproof coffee. And where the top or at least one of the top two or three products in five different categories which startups are not supposed to be able to do. And all this happened from this basic idea that people want to feel really good. They don’t want to feel ampy, they want the energy to be themselves all the way to show up, not to necessarily. I’m going to run faster, I’m going to work harder, although you might choose to do those at some times in your day. But whatever I’m doing right now, whether it’s relaxing, whether it’s meditating, whether it’s being present for my kids, all of those require energy. And for me I needed more energy because I had a deficit of it. And when I turned it on, everything I did got easier. And I find that that algorithm works for everyone. Stop doing the things that make you weak and do more of the things that give you. More energy, more power, and teaching people that you have control, if you’re feeling crappy, it’s your fault you did something that caused that. You don’t know what it was, but it’s still within your control. You can change it. And if anyone on Earth is a living example of that, as a 300 pound guy with all the, quote, old people diseases when I was young to be where I am now, I’m profoundly grateful I went through all that crap because it let me build a framework and teach it to people. And now my my shows that more than 500 episodes, my books are in 14 plus languages, about six hundred fifty thousand copies. A New York Times science best selling author. At the same time, I’m a CEO and a father of two kids and
Shaman Durek [00:19:04] and an amazing friend.
Dave Asprey [00:19:06] Thank you. How do I have enough energy to do all this? I mean, I look at it. It’s just there’s nothing I can say but just that I’m super grateful for that. But if I hadn’t been through the pain and I hadn’t gone on the quest to learn all this knowledge and then to organize it so that I could tell it to myself when I was much younger, that I just want one person to read that and have the change in trajectory of the rest of their life, the return on investment for all the time I’ve spent writing, if just one person reads, it does for them what it’s done for me. It’s a completely amazing investment and that’s been the ethos from day one and still is today.
Shaman Durek [00:19:43] That’s beautiful. That’s actually a noble thing to say. I want to reflect on something that you’re talking about because I was looking into things a little bit deeper than what you were sharing with me. And what I was really reflecting on was the tribe and people listening to this and really giving them an understanding that it’s the level of recognizing that in order for you to truly live and evolve life, it’s not about doing the same thing that causes you pain or causes you discomfort. It’s about taking discovery, going on the quest, going on the journey. What I really loved about your story was that you were talking about it. But what you what stood out the most for me was your willingness to go beyond that, which was being presented to you by society, by the world, by what was available in the stores, by what the doctors were saying was available. And you were willing to say, yeah, however, let me go and do this and see what will happen here and really going on this quest of experimenting and discovery. And I think a lot of people have lost that in life, you know, and really need to really reclaim that. What are your thoughts on that?
Dave Asprey [00:20:52] Oh,Shaman Durek I mean, I would encourage people to do what’s supposed to work, and if it works, then you’re done. But here’s the deal. That shit doesn’t work. And I did it. And I didn’t just tell myself I did it. I didn’t. Oh, I’ll just have a few Snickers bars between my workouts. I did everything that I was supposed to do to feel good and look good and to lose weight and put all of my energy and effort into it. And all I got was to be fat and still and stronger. And I just felt like a failure. Maybe I ate too many pieces of lettuce today, you know, maybe I should have lifted two more plates. But at a certain point, you think, you know what? I did everything and it didn’t work. And so for anyone listening, you can be a scientist and experiment. And if you think taking a bunch of pharmaceutical drugs, you think all colors are the same. So you can live on pop tarts and soda, just see what happens. And I’ll tell you, you can pretty much do whatever you want, tell you about twenty five and you’ll get away with it unless you have some chronic illness or something. After that your life will turn to hell. Yeah. And it won’t happen with the flip of a light switch between twenty five and 30 and thirty five. All of a sudden the things you used to do you can’t do anymore and it sneaks up on you and it’s crappy. And bottom line is we’re highly resilient because we were wired by Mother Nature to be able to have kids and you can start doing that as a teenager and then to get out of the way when the kids are old enough to reproduce. And that’s why you can survive on Pop Tarts and God knows what else. I don’t know why I’m picking on Pop Tarts tonight, but I am. And, you know, but this was called junk food. So that whole situation gets down to if it works for you. Great. And what the problem was for me is that it didn’t even work very well for me when I was a teenager in my early twenties. But I kept believing it. And we all fall into this trap and one that you you share and one that you well understand. And this is a trap that says if you tell yourself something is going to work and that you’re a failure or you’re somehow a bad person, if it doesn’t work for you, then you need to do it even more. It’s very easy to fall into that trap. And that’s what I had done. And it’s actually the best business model on Earth. If you just care about profit and you’re willing to harm people and let’s say diet soda, well, that stuff makes you fat. So you tell people the problem is you’re not drinking enough of this. That’s why you’re fat and they keep drinking more of it, which makes them stay fat. It’s like printing money. Of course, it’s a form of theft and it’s it’s unethical to do that, but you you still see companies doing that, but even then the companies aren’t there isn’t like a bad person at that company says, “I know this is going on.” And what it is, is micro decisions are made millions and millions of times a day in companies, even mid-sized companies like mine. And if the mission of the company is shareholder profits among above all else, what emerges is over time, pretty crappy behavior. That’s why you see companies like Google Don’t Be Evil slogan, which we’ll see how that turns out.
Shaman Durek [00:23:55] Right? Right, exactly. So what do you think is the thing that is affecting people? Like why aren’t people getting out of that mental construct that was built to them by the system, which is to consume and consume and consume things even though it’s painful? It’s not working, it doesn’t feel good. You see people getting into conversations, building relationships with people in their lives that are just feeding them poison energy, poisoned words, poison everything. Someone’s watching a news and you see them watching the news and they’re getting angry and upset and they’re driving their car and they’re having road rage. And all of these things are happening because they keep doing the same thing. What do you think is the thing that’s happening to them on a level of why they continue to do that and not shift gears?
Dave Asprey [00:24:38] I think I have a pretty well qualified answer for you. One of my side projects is a neuroscience company called 40 Years of Zen. And this is the technology that I’ve used to upgrade my own brain to be able to put myself in some advanced meditative states that I wouldn’t otherwise have been able.
Shaman Durek [00:24:53] I can’t wait for you to do that with me.
Dave Asprey [00:24:55] Oh, yeah, we’re going to do that. But that’s allowed me the chance to look inside the heads of a bunch of people, usually high performing CEO types, celebrities and a bunch of other people as well. And there’s some things that that come out when you start looking at that. And what it comes down to is everyone, as a condition of being human, has old patterns that are built into our system. And these patterns are set up mostly in our first seven years of life. And we all have little traumas. And you might be hearing this thing. I don’t have any traumas. Here’s the deal. There was a time in your life where your mom said, you know, I’m really done nursing you. You’re biting me. I’m telling you that time when you wanted the boob and you didn’t get the boob, that was a trauma. These things happen at the time when you were a year old or whatever it was, it felt like the end of the world. So you end up building behavior patterns. And these are behavior patterns that emerge from the system of ancient bacteria that actually runs the power plants in your body. And it’s there to keep your body alive. Those bacteria think that you’re a petri dish. So they build up these patterned systems. And one of the first patterns you learn is that if I fail, then no one will love me. And if you think of that from a five year old’s perspective, if no one loves you, then no one will feed you and then you’ll die. And so we equate at a pre rational level. It’s actually happens before we can think about it. It is invisible to us. And this is one of the foundations of where our ego comes from. We believe and we act and we tell ourselves stories that if we if we fail, then we’re bad. Well, here’s the deal. If you did something for a while that didn’t work, that means you made a bad decision. That means you failed. That means you’re unlovable. That means you’re going to starve to death. And it is not true. But that is what your nervous system believes. And you can say, well, I’m rational. I know that’s not true. It doesn’t matter if you know it’s not true. It’s that your body feels it’s not true. So we get stuck in repeating patterns that don’t work. That’s one of the big things. The other thing is a trap that I had terribly and it’s the I’ll be happy when trap. So it will go back to when I…
Shaman Durek [00:27:13] I’ll be happy when. Yeah, I’ve heard that from a lot of people.
Dave Asprey [00:27:15] I was the biggest jerk ever. So I’m a dork so I’m twenty six, I’ve got six million dollars. OK, this is all the money you’ll ever need in your life and sort of should have been looking at this growing kind of fat and happy.
Shaman Durek [00:27:29] How did you make that through hacking.
Dave Asprey [00:27:32] No, I just downloaded it from some bank accounts.
Shaman Durek [00:27:34] Hahaha you were hacking the government files.
Dave Asprey [00:27:39] This was the company that held Google’s first servers. And we went public and there was a fantastic time in the stock market. And so I had shares of stock in the company. The company went public and I was wealthy overnight. Got it. And it was a very kind of disruptive experience. But I sat and I looked at one of my friends. Everyone at the company had made at least a million dollars. He’d been there for a year or two. So it was not really real money, except it was real money. And I looked at my friend and I said, you know, I’ll be happy when I have ten million dollars. OK, what kind of a twenty six year old punk ass would say, oh, I have six million dollars, I’m not happy, I’ll be happy to have ten. Like, that’s the lack of consciousness that I had in my life. Here I’m doing meaningful work, we built a lot of the modern Internet, the way it works today.
Shaman Durek [00:28:25] Well, you said it yourself right there. It’s the lack of consciousness. Yeah, because the lack the idea of lack is what you were holding on to in your consciousness.
Dave Asprey [00:28:33] And that’s why I lost the six million dollars to was that sense of lack the the conscious grounded.
Shaman Durek [00:28:40] What do you mean you lost it?
Dave Asprey [00:28:41] Well, two years after I made six million dollars, that company went bankrupt. And along the way, all they had to do was quit my job, sell my shares, and I was set for life. But the fear of loss was so big that the fear of loss was, well, if I do that, I might not make my ten million dollars. So I stayed at the company. I didn’t sell my shares. And because I had risen up in the executive ranks, I had inside information. I was allowed to sell my shares as an employee. So I was in a situation where I could literally snap my fingers and have six million dollars or three dollars million or two million dollars instead of hung on. Because I was afraid of losing, I was afraid I wouldn’t get my 10 million. And all of that was just a mental construct that was not based in reality whatsoever. Right. And that’s a great crucible, a great just talking point about this idea. I’ll be happy when so you tell yourself, if I don’t do that, I’ll be a failure. No one love me and therefore I’ll die so I can’t stop what I’m doing. And I know if I just keep doing this, I’ll get something that’s going to make me happy later. And that combination is it’s very addictive and it’s very hard to break.
Shaman Durek [00:29:45]
A lot of people do that in America and all over the world. I see people stay in relationships that are dysfunctional. I see people stay in jobs that are killing them and causing them stress and anxiety and building up their cortisol levels and causing them to have all kinds of health issues from ulcers, you name it, to, you know, to irritable bowel syndrome. I see people who are saying, oh, well, when my husband when the kids leave, then I’ll divorce my my horrible husband who puts me down and abuses me every single day. And then the kids leave and then I’m like, well, what are you doing now? Why are you still there? People have this intrinsic nature, exactly what you said, where they say that it’s going to. So, you know, I’ll have a better life when this happens or when that happens or when this happens. But what is the when my what was the when for you?
Dave Asprey [00:30:29]
For a lot of people, it’s when you hit rock bottom. And for me, I hit rock bottom from a health perspective. And I said this is unacceptable. I actually might die. I bought disability insurance when I was in my mid 20s because my doctors all said I had a clean bill of health, but I did not feel like I had a clean bill of health. I knew something was not right and that was part of it rock bottom. And then I decided to do more of the personal development, the going off and learning from the various traditions around the world, because I’d been in a really bad relationship for five years. And when I unpacked what was going on that was not thoughts is all feelings that were I was blind to. It was that same thing. It was I, being lonely equals dying So I was willing to stay in a bad relationship because at least I wouldn’t be alone. And so one of the cures for that along this path is I fasted for four days in a cave all by myself with no one around for ten miles in any direction outside Sedona. And I did it fasted for a very specific reason. One of the other things I had is a three hundred pound guy whose energy would just crash all the time. There was a time in my life I couldn’t imagine going a day without eating six or eight meals and constantly snacking, and it’s because my metabolism was broken. But you end up with us…
Shaman Durek [00:31:48] yeah that is very scary for me. I know being an omatur,
Dave Asprey [00:31:51] well, it felt really scary. And, you know, it’s like because, you know, you’ve been heavy as well.
Shaman Durek [00:31:55] Yeah i was a fat kid
Dave Asprey [00:31:56] And for me, if my brain doesn’t work, then at least the way I used to value myself. I’m less of a man. You know, I’m an engineer. I’m a computer hacker. I’m not a jock. And so here it is. My identity is a threat if I’m not eating all the time and my career is at risk and all these different things. But eventually I said, all right, I’m going to face hunger and im going to face loneliness. And what happened at the end of those four days, I was a lot less afraid of being alone and had no fear of hunger. And since then, I’ve been able to hack hunger and other other ways where I don’t experience cravings ever, which is awesome.
Shaman Durek [00:32:37] Yeah, I don’t get cravings either. I’ve hacked hunger, but I and I and it is awesome. I mean for me, I was the kid who was really, really skinny as a kid. How to step mom who told me every single day that I look like a picture to make you call me birdmen. That was her nickname for me, Birdman, Birdman, Birdman. So I started to eat because I don’t want to be called Birdman anymore. And then it became a dysfunction because in my home I found that my father, my step mom, would spend most of her time at the country club and shopping and doing whatever they so there’s and he didn’t want to cook every night. So he would take us to fast food. So we ate McDonald’s one night, Taco Bell another night, Carl’s Jr., another night, pizza another night. Ah, he’d bring home steak. Right. And that was like my dad’s idea of steak. Was steak a huge dollop. Of mayonnaise, tomatoes, and sometimes he would even take sour cream and pour milk into it and put sugar into it and eat it like a soup. I mean, it was just disgusting. But, you know, growing up like that and then I became from the skinny boy to becoming this fat boy where friends are making fun of me. They’re like, oh, my God, you have breasts. You know, you have this, you’re that. And so I really started doing getting sick and tired. I remember one day I woke up and I hated myself so much and I was like, I got to do something. I went to the gym. I pretty much lived in the gym. There was this guy named Troy who worked at the front desk. And I would be in the gym all the time. All the time. All the time. And then finally I realized that it wasn’t the back of me doing the gym because nothing was changing. It was how I was eating what I was putting in my body.
Dave Asprey [00:34:06] Exercise does not make you thin. It never did. It can make you toned and a little bit stronger. Food is what makes you fat and it’s not too much food. It’s the wrong food will make you fat. And yes, too much food isn’t good for you, but it’s it’s very hard to get fat on certain kinds of food. When I was writing The Bulletproof Diet, I went through an experiment. I said, I’m going to intentionally make myself fat. I don’t know. So I’ve lost the vast majority of the weight that I’ve lost.
Shaman Durek [00:34:36] I love you, Dave.
Dave Asprey [00:34:38] And I was so pissed off at all these people who for years had told me calories are all that counts. So you could live on sugar as long as you have too many calories, it doesn’t work. But the years of pain that it caused me personally believing that myth so, I’m just going to eat between four and five thousand calories a day and I’m going to sleep five hours or less per night. And at the end of a month I should gain three pounds. But all I’ve eaten so many calories that if you do math, then I should have gained twenty pounds but only gain three pounds. Therefore there’s something else going on. That was my experiment. The problem was I actually started losing even more weight and I felt really good. And I ended up doing this for about 18 months and that was the eighteen months when I started bulletproof. So I’m writing about this experiment. I’m creating the info graphic that that’s behind the book and doing all this work. And I’m working full time as a vice president at a big company and I have a new child. My second child has just been born. I’m just bursting with energy going, what the heck is going on now? I was just born. Everyone eating excess calories is actually not good for you. If you eat way more calories than you need over time, it will make you age more quickly. So this wasn’t good for me necessarily,
Shaman Durek [00:35:53] can you say that again for the tribe i really want them to get some knowledge here
Dave Asprey [00:35:56] OK, if you eat excess food, way more calories than you need, even if you don’t get fat, it will make you age more quickly. So you don’t want to overeat on a regular basis, but you don’t get fat because you’re eating too many calories. You get fat because you’re eating the wrong calories or you’re eating inflammatory toxins and oftentimes both. So if you eat the right foods, even if you eat a whole lot of them, it’s much harder to get fat and you might even be able to get fat, which is what happened to me during my experiment. And that became one of the the proof points for the bulletproof diet, among many others.
Shaman Durek [00:36:34] What do you what do you what is the wrong foods? What would you say the wrong foods are.
Dave Asprey [00:36:38] on the in the bullet proof philosophy. There’s three buckets for foods and there’s-
Shaman Durek [00:36:48] Hey, tribe looking for something lit, verified. Let me share with you Monk Oil. Monk Oil makes beautiful skin potions for people that live in cities, and I’ve been using them for so many years. And today I want to talk about how to use them. First of all, don’t drink them. I wouldn’t want you to get sick. Their skin potions, they’re not ingestible. Monk oil City skin potions is the real deal magic potion applied to the skin made by and for city dwellers in New York City. Monk Oil wants to help you be your best in all environments, and not just every time you feel totally ideal. It means to bring that into your life every day and to bring something alternate, relational and connected on ritual levels into your everyday life to really shift the reality and perspective into something more meaningful and spiritual. There are four types of skin potions, each with specific intention. And effect, each of the potions speak to different parts of us and work on levels of the body, the soul and the spirit. How to use Monk Oil Anointing Our Skin with Monk Oil reminds us of the importance of daily rituals of self-love in our lives so that we may then be of service to others. How I like to use them is I like to take the monk oil and place it on the back of my neck and the front of my chest, in the back of my wrists and the back of my knees and on my stomach to open up the energies of all the different energy gates shamonically for my body. But I’m sure you’ll find the way that works best for you. Use it when you wake up in the morning and before meditation by applying a drop to your third eye and heart chakra, slather it all over your beautiful body after you bathe for a complete head to toe forcefield. Bring it with you and apply it to your wrists and your neck before subway rides, or if you’re in a busy, crowded city or around a bunch of people, plane travels, meetings, all of these places you want to make sure you have that oil on too so you don’t take in all the negative energies and all the things that are affecting you. So that you can eliminate any type of frequency that isn’t love, ritual, power and environment that is filled with joy and happiness, which is what you should feel like all the time, adds up to a hot bath, keeps them in your bag and hit it midday instead of coffee, sugar or booze, if you feel stressed or nervous to wear a protective sheath during activities that require stamina. Working with children, walking around Times Square, sitting at the desk, caretaking as a part of your yoga and meditation practice, need of energy, refresh on a busy day and before and after an intense situation by putting on the monk oil are just smelling it, smelling it, awakens the senses and allows your body to connect into that deep spiritual wellbeing. Monk oil uses only ethically sourced, organic based oils and essential oils and their potions, there are no fillers or preservatives. Each potion has flower essences that work in a healing capacity with your life force and a powerful crystal to further activate the potion. They are conjured with love and attention on full moons, new moons, solstices, Equinox and other amazing, cosmically created days. You can learn more about Monk oil and their different potions at www.MonkOil.com, that’s www.MonkOil.com Monk Oil is excited to offer a 25 percent discount to the tribe on their trios of three different potions with the offer code of trios.Shaman Durek. That’s t r i oShaman Durek for those in the U.S. at www.MonkOil.com. And if you would like to try Monk Oil and you live outside of the U.S., check out Raw Living UK online. Adding Monk oil to our daily lives and ritual and sharing it with our friends and family allows us to hold the spiritual essence of our being intact and be surrounded by so much love and positive energy and take ourselves to a whole nother lit level. Stay lit.
Dave Asprey[00:41:32] Kryptonite foods, and this is a set of foods that are bad for everyone, there’s a set of suspects
Shaman Durek did you say kryptonite like Superman?
Dave Asprey just like Superman…
Shaman Durek I love you Hahaha!
Dave Asprey [00:41:42]You eat those and you get weak They’re not going to kill you, but they’re going to make you weak. Right. And then there’s a set of suspect foods. And this is really important. Foods oftentimes have defense systems in them and different humans are wired differently to be able to tolerate different foods. So these are foods that may be making you fat and tired and inflamed and all sorts of other things. Or they may be just fine for you, but you’ll never know until you quit eating all of the suspect foods, eliminate all the suspects and see how you feel. And you do that for two weeks ago. Whoa. If I sleep, it’s improved. My joints don’t hurt. My skin looks really good. I have tons of energy. I don’t have cravings. I’m pretty sure some of those suspects are guilty. And then there’s these bulletproof foods, which are the foods that are undamaged fats and clean sources of protein and tons and tons of the right vegetables. But even some vegetables, some allegedly healthy vegetables aren’t very healthy for a lot of people. But to answer your question, in that framework, the kryptonite foods are most processed foods, grains other than white rice. And I’m talking even whole wheat is not good for people. Some people tolerate it better than others, but it is never a high performance food. Even the people say I tolerate it really, really well and get really mad when they when they say that there’s a preponderance of evidence that it is not an ideal food for humans. And there’s biochemical evidence, there’s epidemiological evidence. And it it yes, it’s better than starving to death, but it is nowhere near a High-Performance food for humans.
Shaman Durek [00:43:06] So grains meaning?
Dave Asprey [00:43:09] wheat and all of the other similar grains spelt camu to all of these other things that people like to put in gluten free flour because they don’t have one molecule called gluten. But here’s the deal. Plants can’t run away the way humans can. So to keep you from eating their babies, they cover their babies and toxins. And that’s why if you went into the forest today and ate most of the plants there, you’d get a horrible stomach ache or you would die.
Shaman Durek [00:43:35] Right. And that’s the same that happens with with cashews. Right. Cashews. If people and people catch some people get sick because there’s a coating on the outside.
Dave Asprey [00:43:44] Well, in fact, everyone who eats cashews as found in the wild would get sick. And the reason I use cashews is that when we process cashews to make them edible, we’re taking off the peeling on the outside of it. It’s actually they have to be boiled. You can’t really get a raw cashew because the outer part is always cooked and discarded to get to the middle, which is much lower in those defense systems than a lot of even nuts. But grains in particular. All this will. But grains Have fiber. Yeah, and the fiber is there with a matrix of all sorts of compounds that are in place to keep animals from eating these grains. And a few animals like ducks and geese and mice can handle these pretty well. They evolved to handle those toxins, but we didn’t. So you eat them and you can get the basically sugar, the carbohydrates out of them. But you also get these inflammatory compounds that start to wear away at your system via a whole bunch of different pathways, some of which you may be more susceptible to than your neighbor and vice versa. So that’s why those are out. But the big thing that is most most dangerous in modern foods is damaged oils. We did not evolve to eat soybean oil, canola oil, corn oil, vegetable oil, whatever the hell that is. And the reasons for that are many. One is it’s the wrong type of oil. Our bodies are not made of. Those kinds of oils were made of mostly saturated fats and some monounsaturated fats. But during the processing to get those oils, we damage the oils. And a lot of people don’t know this, but every cell membrane in your body cell membrane isn’t like saran wrap. It’s actually tiny droplets of fat. And inside each cell you have between a couple of hundred and up to fifteen thousand mitochondria. These are ancient bacteria that became the power plants and the environmental sensors in ourselves. Each of those is made of tiny droplets of fat on its membrane. So if you go out there and say, I’m going to eat the French fries, well, that oil is completely damaged. And your body will say, well, I got to do something with this oil. So I’m going to try to build some cells out of this. And you get dysfunctional cells that create free radicals and inflammation. And even worse, it tries to build mitochondrial membranes out of those. And now your batteries can’t make and store energy the way they’re supposed to. So you walk around running at low power. And I will tell you right now,Shaman Durek, if you look at the studies of what happens when you eat fried foods, one time you have at least twenty four hours of systemic inflammation. If you were to smoke a cigarette, which is a disgusting habit. Don’t do that. You have you have four hours of information. And I’ll tell you right now, the bowl of French fries and a cigarette is the better choice. But maybe you could do neither one.
Shaman Durek [00:46:31] Interesting, so, you know, it’s interesting that you say that because I noticed that ever since you have been like educating me on everything that you’ve created with the bullet proof as far as the brain octane oil and all of that, I noticed that in my mind and my thoughts in the way that I operate as a shaman because of the level of pathways that I you know, how I connect to things. I have a very sensitive energy form that runs through my entire being, my synthesis, my sensorium, the way I’m cognitive to my experiences, my internal everything when I’m eating other foods. I noticed the heaviness of them. So I notice I have to meditate more and do more shamanic work on myself to get that poison out of my body, which means a lot of times coughing up things and throwing up things that get might just to get my energy in the right place. And ever since I started doing the brain doctoring oil, I’ve noticed my brain being sharper, my synthesis being clearer. I don’t have to get I don’t feel this energy inside of me that’s murky or distorted where I literally can tap into things very quickly without having to change the distorted fields back into a field that actually makes sense for my body. And it’s been really helpful. So when you’re talking about these other oils, how do we how do we eat in the world, then that’s that’s because you understand a thing. Because then you go you go out to dinner. Am I supposed to go into the back kitchen and tell the chef, hey, you’re about to make my food with that vegetable oil, you’re about to make my food with that canola oil. You’re about to make my food with these different oils. You’re about to mess up my life for the next month. What do we do?
Dave Asprey [00:48:09] Well, you want to eat out at the right restaurants, which means you don’t go to the cheap mass market ones because they universally use canola oil, which is just not a good choice. And a lot of people like to rationalize this, to say, oh, well, it’s just a little bit won’t hurt. But a lot of people are worried about taking fish oil. You just take this one little tablet official and as these huge metabolic effects, but it’s a couple of grams of fish oil, you think a couple of grams of highly inflammatory oils isn’t equally bad? It turns out it is so. How do you do this, you go to the restaurant and there are some types of oil that are not subject to breaking down the way vegetable oils are, vegetable oils are called polyunsaturated and unsaturated means it will be damaged by heat or air or light. But saturated fats, things like butter, coconut oil and, yes, brain octane oils is an unusual type of saturated fat. But these are oils that are there fully stable. They can be damaged by excessively high heat. But if you say, you know what, I like the vegetables on the menu, bring me a plate of those. And could you cook them in butter instead of canola oil? Because I’m allergic, every restaurant on Earth understands allergies. Now they just cook them in butter. Even if it’s not grass fed butter, you’re going to get stable fats from the butter. And all of a sudden now you’ve got a huge plate of vegetables which were all vegetable deficient unless you eat a very careful diet and vegetables doesn’t include lentils and beans and stuff like that. I’m talking green vegetables. And then on the bulletproof diet, I recommend wild caught and grass fed, ethically raised protein only you never eat another industrially raised animal again if you go 100 percent bulletproof. And the reason there is it’s not worth it from an environmental sustainability impact. It’s not worth it from what it does to you to your own biology. And it’s not worth it for what it does energetically. It’s actually bad for you. And it’s an absolute crime the way we’re treating animals today. That said, I have a small family farm. I live on an organic farm. We’ve got four sheep and two pigs.
Shaman Durek[00:50:14] Yeah, I’ve been on that farm. I love your farm.
Dave Asprey [00:50:16] And you know what?
Shaman Durek Your sheep are wild.
Dave Asprey They are.
Shaman Durek [00:50:20] Haha your sheep can actually have their own mind.
Dave Asprey [00:50:23] And I’m pretty sure we’re going to eat one of them this year.
Shaman Durek [00:50:25] Yeah, I know. I was I was all sad. I was like, oh, I don’t want to know about this
Dave Asprey [00:50:30] but the deal is there. It’s that or nothing. I’m not going to eat a tortured animal. I’m not going to an animal that was fed all that corn and soy and antibiotics and all that stuff. And it’s totally OK to say, you know, I’m just going to play the vegetables covered in fat. So most restaurants today, they’ll give you avocados. So I’ll do this every time I want a plate of green vegetables, sauteed them in butter or steamed them add some butter and bring me a whole avocado, if you could. Do you have any wild caught., smoked salmon or do you have a piece of fish or something? Or if you’re lucky, they might even have the good stuff, grass fed steak or something. My restaurant in Santa Monica, it’s a bulletproof coffee shop or bullet proof cafe, and we only do grass fed stuff. So I go there, I’m going to get a good, good dose of protein. But a good dose of protein is two to four ounces. You don’t need the one pound steak or the one pound hamburger double patty thing. Excessive protein from any source, especially animals, is also inflammatory. So you want to be in a low to moderate protein diet, very high and undamaged fats with tons of vegetables. And that’s the basic template. And it turns out with even within the vegetable kingdom, the nightshade family of vegetables, the so-called deadly nightshade includes potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants, bell peppers and spicy peppers somewhere around 30 and probably as high as I’m just making this up. But somewhere around 70 percent of people have at least some sensitivities to some of those because those are plants that weren’t in our food supply until relatively recently in the last few hundred years. And that’s right. And I’ll tell you, I eat that stuff. I get arthritis again. And when I don’t eat it, I don’t have arthritis. Eat that stuff. I get food cravings. If I don’t eat it,
Shaman Durek Is that to do with the Nightshade groups?
Dave Asprey[00:52:18] the nightshade groups yeah. But there are some people who can eat it and they’re completely happy. They come from a lineage, their mitochondrial DNA or their gut bacteria, probably not bacteria, but probably genetically they are capable of.
Shaman Durek [00:52:30] I’ve noticed the Latin community can handle it.
Dave Asprey [00:52:33] Yep, they oftentimes can. And it turns out beans and whole grains or other big sources of these things. So the bulletproof diet accounts for those. But did you know that thirty percent of people don’t have gut bacteria that can digest the toxins in kale? If I try to feed raw kale to my sheep, they’ll spit it out because animals know not to eat things that are bad for you. And here it is as humans. Well, what if I grind this kale up with a lot of sugar or something? Then I can make it. I can make it good for me that protective compounds clock sialic acid and it’s tied to a whole bunch of of really bad conditions, including some recent research says likely autism, certainly gout.
Shaman Durek [00:53:13] I was going to say gout because I studied holism right gout, it can also have multiple sclerosis, kidney stones, kidney problems. It can affect your whole entire immune system. Breaking down your immune system affect it can cause problems in your upper respiratory system as well. I mean, and all of that because of the fact that you’re putting that in your system, your body doesn’t know what to do with it
Dave Asprey [00:53:37] And the worst. Of all that I think it causes is called vulvodynia, and this is a condition where tiny crystals of Salick acid form in the labia and it creates such discomfort in women who have it. They came in, wear underwear, they’ll be wearing dresses with no underwear because
Shaman Durek[00:53:54]i had a client from turkey with that she thought she got it from high level of masturbation.
Dave Asprey[00:54:00] Haha that’s not what caused it.
Shaman Durek I know thats what she thought
Dave Asprey the other big cause for salick acid or potentially uric acid is environmental toxic mold. If you’re in a water damaged home and that happens, that can be there. This actually happened to my wife before I met her. She ate a relatively large amount of kale and she lived in a water damage home and she developed that. And she tells me how horrible it was when she had it. And it’s one of those things who would have thought that maybe kale, which is good for 70 percent of us, is terribly bad for 30 percent of us.
Shaman Durek[00:54:30] It’s not good for a lot of people, because even just the the breakdown of it in your system is very difficult for your body to digest it. And not only that, but like when you have that type of acid in your body, you also build what is called uric crystals. And those crystals turn to arthritis, they turn to inflammation inside your joints and so forth. And a lot of people don’t even realize that. And every time I talk to people, I’m always educating them like, you know, people get really into their kale chips. And every time I go to some health food restaurant in L.A., they’re like kale salad, kale. This kale that I’m like I go to like Kalekill.
Dave Asprey [00:55:04] I love you, man. And people call kale is super food. If there was a superfood I’m sorry, it’s coffee and yeah, I run a coffee company, whatever. But you look at the science, there’s hundreds of studies supporting. Yeah. There’s hundreds of studies supporting coffee and you look the one supporting kale. There are high degrees of polyphenols and kale. There are vitamins and kale. Unfortunately, there are also things that make many people weaken it. And I actually developed some techniques on the Bulletproofed blog. It turns out the type of kale you choose has a huge impact on how much salic acid that you get, how you prepare it works and what you should do. If you’re going to eat kale, which can be delicious, is you boil the kale and dump the water and you eat Dino Kale, which is not the lacy frilly kale the least you feel. Kale is a garnish for decoration. You don’t eat that, although a lot of people just kind of forced themselves to eat it by using it in some way. And if you want bonus points, you can actually add baking soda or calcium carbonate, which is a supplement you can get. You add that to the water when you’re boiling it and that’ll precipitate the crystals out. So that way, if you do eat some of the crystals, at least they just go through your gut. Otherwise they precipitate out in your blood when they add calcium. And then you get these crystals wherever they go, your joints, your vagina, your brain, you just don’t need that. So does this mean you should never you kale no. But if you’re having symptoms and you don’t like how your body feels all the time and you’re eating tons of kale under the assumption that, well, I read it somewhere, it must be good for me, maybe you want to eliminate everything all at once. That could be bad for you. And what I found in the research is that there’s four big classes of compounds that mess with huge numbers of people and they don’t know it and they’re doing all of these at the same time. So even if they eliminate one, nothing changes, which is why for two weeks you stop the suspect foods and those big four categories.
Shaman Durek Is that in your book, by the way?
Dave Asprey This is in the book and this is called The Bulletproof Diet. And my second book, Headstrong, is about all the stuff that makes your brain have more energy. But those four categories of things that make you weak in food, one of them is Salak Acid, which is found in a lot of the heavier greens, especially eat them raw.
Shaman Durek [00:57:09] It’s why people don’t get out of bed.
Dave Asprey [00:57:11] It is one of the reasons I certainly don’t want to get out of bed. If you give me Raw kale,
Shaman Durek [00:57:15] not with our lifestyle, that wouldn’t work.
Dave Asprey[00:57:18] The second one is we all have histamine. The thing that causes allergies, it’s also a neurotransmitter. It’s one of many different biogenic amines and another famous those called thiamin that causes migraines. Well, that happens from bacterial breakdown in foods and in some fermented foods. Have at some foods are just naturally high and histamine. So if you do that, you’re likely to get tired and have sugar cravings after a meal and you just wouldn’t know it. But that’s a really important thing for a lot of people. Some people are more sensitive than others. And then we have these plant compounds in the Nightshade family called lecterns that are also present in whole grains and they’re present in legumes as well. And I tell people generally don’t eat legumes, but I do make an exception for cashews because of the way they’re processed. Most people handle cashews very well.
Shaman Durek [00:58:01] I think cashews are part of the poison oak family.
Dave Asprey [00:58:04] No, they’re part of the legume family, not poison oak. Poison oak is from the legume family. It’s true that if you touch a wild cashew, the outer part of it, the stuff that you would never get in a store, it has strong skin irritants in it. But all the lecterns are concentrated on the outside of it. That’s why they blanch the outer part of it, take off the shell. And the part that’s left in the middle is very well tolerated. There are some people who are cashew sensitive, but if you look around at cashew sensitivity versus Almond sensitivity, you’ll find more people are sensitive to Almond than cashews, which is why I went with cashews. But that said, some people don’t handle cashews well, and if you find you’re one of those people don’t eat cashews, but they tend to be one of the one of the nuts that works really well and doesn’t trigger nut allergies to people because they’re not technically nut. And but that said, you know, most people, they’re eating beans on a very frequent basis. They cause inflammation. I gave up beans a long time ago because I split test. I tried different things. You eliminate everything from a family. The original elimination diets took two years to complete all these weird calendars and all this. It’s unnecessary. Just eliminate everything that might be causing pain,
Shaman Durek[00:59:45] You do that for two weeks to see how you feel and then just eat a piece of cheesecake rolled up in a pizza and wash it down with some beer and see how you feel the next day and go, Oh, this is how I used to feel. I don’t want to go back to that. And then you realize, OK, I’m going to choose the foods that are compatible with my biology. And it’s totally OK if the person sitting across from your meal is on a different diet and they love all those foods and it works for them. There’s a list of foods that really aren’t working for them. They’re just self deceiving and there are just individual variances and they’re OK. Let’s talk coffee.
Dave Asprey All right.
Shaman Durek Let’s talk about the truth and also the myths of coffee, because I’ve learned a lot from you about coffee. I didn’t know that coffee had mold. Tell me about that.
Dave Asprey [01:00:01] All right. I have always loved coffee, but I gave it up for five years because I found when I drank it within two hours, I would get cranky and I would get sugar cravings. I would see another cup. And I do this over and over. So you start getting up to six, eight cups a day, then you win yourself off and then you keep going. And I after five years of having given this up, I spent three months traveling around in Tibet and Nepal learning meditation. And I came back to the U.S. and I said, I’m going to have a cup of really good coffee just to see what happens. So I had a cup of coffee and I felt amazing and it was so delicious. I said Great I’m not allergic anymore because I thought it was a coffee allergy. So the next day I had another cup of high end coffee from a different source and that I got all the symptoms back and I thought, wait a minute, I didn’t suddenly overnight develop a coffee intolerance it doesn’t happen that fast. It’s the coffee. It’s not me. And I dug in and all the biochemistry and the agricultural science behind coffee. And what I found was kind of disturbing the way we processed coffee. There’s two big ways of doing it. One is you pick the coffee. Cherries is actually kind of like cherries and you let them sit on a tarp in the sun spoiling until the outer parts are ready to be flaked off. And that’s called a natural process coffee. And that creates the most toxins. It’s also very flavorful. So the rest of the coffee industry said, well, there’s problems with that and it’s less efficient. Let’s instead take a big vat, just a cement vat. Let’s put river water that’s unfiltered in there and let’s dump a bunch of coffee cherries in there and let them basically sit in ferment and bubble and and whatever is in there is going to grow. And then we’ll hose all that off, break off the outside, and then we’ll roast it and all that. It turns out that that process also creates a potent mycotoxins. This means a mold toxin that’s called okan toxin a. And it’s such a substantial threat to your kidney bladders, your genes, and so immune cells, a whole bunch of things throughout the body.
Shaman Durek[01:02:06] I need you to say that again, because people I really want you to know because I know a lot of people who drink coffee and I always, you know, I never drink. I didn’t drink coffee. And the reason why I didn’t drink coffee because I would have a cup and I was shaking and out of these really intensely, you know how sensitive I am to everything. It was really shaking me, you know, and then when I was at your house and you were like making coffee for my niece and stuff and for Tanya, my publicist, I was like they were like, oh, and you guys, I’m I want some coffee. I’m like, no, I’m going to have coffee because I had that memory. Yes. And then when you kind of, you know, educated me more about what why it’s like that. And I tried the bulletproof coffee. I didn’t have that shaking feeling at all. And I really want people to hear that again for you. I need you to tell people again how coffee that has mold, what it does to your health.
Dave Asprey [01:02:55] The mold that’s found in coffee called Okrotoxin A or OTA is the abbreviation for it is tied to all kinds of bladder and kidney. And it’s called nephron toxicity, as well as in dozens and dozens of other studies where they they say it causes mitochondrial harm and it’s tied to cancer and a decline in multiple systems in the body and mold toxins are the most cancer causing type of toxins. We know aflatoxin and Peanut’s is the most famous one. This one is related to that. And people say, Dave, you made this up so you could sell coffee, which is funny. I already had a big job in tech. I did not need to start selling coffee. It was even my plan. Yeah, I just wanted to drink. That wouldn’t make me crash, and
Shaman Durek[01:03:40] that’s what I love about you. I love your authenticity.
Dave Asprey[01:03:45] what I did is I said, let’s see if we can find coffee that is less likely that these toxins. And I found a way to do that. And then I said, what if I had a lab test, the cleanest coffee and find out what these toxins are? It turns out some people did that. It’s called government agencies around the world, because China, Japan, all of Europe, Venezuela, they all put government limits in place for this toxin at somewhere between five and 10 parts per billion. And this is a very, very low. You’re not going to taste that, although coffee that’s more bitter if something is interesting problem is more likely to have that toxin in it because of various things in the coffee processing that increases the odds of there being a mold in it.
Shaman Durek [01:04:29] So Starbucks doesn’t have mold.
Dave Asprey [01:04:31] You know, I cannot tell you on a cup by cup basis. Starbucks has a…
Shaman Durek multiple of different coffee’s coming through?
Dave Asprey I mean well They buy coffee at auction like most coffee companies do. So you don’t know what happened at Green. There was a coffee grading system. It’s one of the most traded commodities on Earth. So you say, well, I want beans this size, this grade, this species, and they look pretty good. And what
Shaman Durek [01:04:52] so why take the risk then?
Dave Asprey [01:04:52] Well, there’s why take the risk? And also, why did all these countries put government limits in place on this toxin? It’s not like it’s good for their economy to do that. They would love for people to have cheaper coffee because coffee is good for people’s productivity. People want cheap coffee. Well, here’s what happened. I have a video somewhere on the website with the former president of the Specialty Coffee Association. This is the largest coffee body in the US and he’s at our plantation in Guatemala. And I’m interviewing him. And he said, Dave, I was in Japan when the trade minister rejected a thousand shipping containers of green coffee because they were too moldy, like, OK, maybe I’m not making this up because this is real. And I looked at it and I said, what did you do with the coffee? And he said, we sent it to us. There’s no legal limit on Okrotoxin A In coffee. So I said, all right, our standards, we test for twenty seven different toxins that form during coffee, fermentation, and our standards for that one are far in excess of any government standards. I have super clean coffee and we actually change. We put in new infrastructure in Guatemala and Colombia to change green coffee processing to avoid these fermentation steps that are causing problems. And the coffee is a dollar a pound more expensive than other high end coffee. It tastes really good, but I just care about how I feel. I would drink kale juice, which tastes like crap if it made me feel this good. I don’t care how it tastes, I just want to feel amazing. It turns out the good taste was a side effect and I am religious on the purity of coffee, not just the purity of its lineage and whether it smells and tastes good. Those are table stakes. What I want is how am I going to feel an hour after I drink it? That’s the win. And that mole toxins are a huge part of what makes you either feel good or feel bad and get a sugar craving and jittery and cranky and yell at people after you have a cup of coffee. It’s the toxins. It’s not the coffee.
Shaman Durek [01:06:47] So what’s going with the whole understanding of coffee? There’s a lot of people, you know, who are listening, who are vegan and, you know, including myself, as you know. And how do we get to have bulletproof coffee? What if what what can how can vegans be a part of this lit train?
Dave Asprey [01:07:07] There’s ways to do it. And I will say and I’ll go deep in the science with you on this, that it doesn’t work quite as well if it’s vegan. But you can see
Shaman Durek [01:07:18] I figured you’re going to go into the deep of the science.
Dave Asprey [01:07:20] Yeah, it’s what you do is you get the bulletproof coffee beans and you brew coffee the way you like to brew coffee. And then you get the bulletproof brain octane oil, which is part of the bulletproof coffee recipe. And you use this. It’s a very potent extract of coconut oil has no flavor, but it’s one that it’s what causes one of the two big pathways that are causing your brain to light up that way. When you use brain octane, it’s because it turns into ketones in the body in a way that coconut oil can’t. So you put that in the coffee, you have the brewed coffee, and then you add another kind of fat. People use either cocoa butter or coconut oil. It will not be as creamy or not be as frothy. And unfortunately, the reason it doesn’t work as well, if you do it that way, has to do with lipid chemistry. And there’s a long tradition in vegetarian societies like India of using something called guey, which is clarified butter. And we funded some research at the University of Washington recently. This is research that wasn’t we didn’t fund it for a specific thing. We basically said we want to support the bioengineers looking at water in biology to find out what makes something called exclusion zone water. And it turns out when you drink water in your body, the first thing your body does is it makes Twelve hundred nanometer light, also known as heat, but it’s a very specific frequency of heat and it converts that water from what’s called bulk water into exclusion zone water. And this can only happen when the water is up against fat. And when they looked at Gey at the University of Washington in water, not coffee, just water. And in that specific kind of fat, they found a very large amount of exclusions on water, one of the highest amounts they’d ever seen. And we don’t have the research on all the different types of fats. But I can tell you from drinking it that if you put a teaspoon of ghee in there, you get more energy from this. And this is something that came straight out of Tibet. And that was actually the genesis for putting butter and coffee in. And I should talk about this. I was a raw vegan. I can make the best raw vegan desserts. I was all in on this stuff before I went to Tibet, where you really can’t be a raw food person. It’s not possible. But I was feeling like crap at eighteen thousand feet elevation on the side of Mount Kailash, which is the headwaters of the Indus and Ganges and arguably one of the most holy mountains in the world. And it’s middle of nowhere at 10 degrees below zero. And I’m feeling like crap because there’s no oxygen and there’s no heat And it was not not the most hospitable environment in this little Tibetan lady who could walk twice as fast as I could, even though she was half as tall. She gave me a bowl of yak butter tea. And it’s not that delicious, but I drink it. And five minutes later, my brain just turned on and something happened. I took a little note. My travel journal I like this is amazing. There is something going on here. And I started looking and the wealthy Tibetans who had two yaks, one of the acts would carry a blender and a car battery to power the blender. And the the poor families had a butter churn. The Hang powered one. And every morning, even though there’s no running water, they’re nomads. They would brew the tea, they’d pour it into the butter churn, they would add some butter, and then they would spend 10 minutes with by hands basically churning that and then they would drink it. But wouldn’t a smart person just eat the butter and drink the tea and not have to do the dishes afterwards? Why? Well, it doesn’t work. If you take a bite of butter and drink a cup of coffee, you don’t get that effect. So what’s going on is blending and making tiny droplets of fat inside. Water has one effect. And if you do it with coffee or tea, it has another effect because those little polyphenols are there. So I didn’t know all this. I what I do is I feel really different if I just put butter in my coffee instead of milk turns up milk protein, which is not good for you. It’s called Kason. It sticks to the plant, compounds in coffee called polyphenols so your body can’t absorb them. So milk takes away coffee’s goodness, at least from a health perspective.
Shaman Durek[01:11:22] So when everyone’s pouring milk into their coffee that I see at Starbucks and everything there, actually they have no clue. They’re just been programed.
Dave Asprey [01:11:28] Well, it tastes good, too. I mean, let’s face it, and it’s not really fair to pick on Starbucks. I mean, this is the company that brought coffee awareness to the US
Shaman Durek [01:11:37] I’m not picking on Starbucks at all. I’m just saying people in society today like run to Starbucks every time they can. And I would just be cool if they had, you know, bulletproof coffee in Starbuck.
Dave Asprey [01:11:52] it would but it would require, you know, a different kind of coffee beans that. The good news is, though, you can go to Whole Foods today and they’ll make you a bulletproof coffee and there’s cold brew, bulletproof coffee on on the shelf in the fridge. You can pick it up. So there’s four hundred and forty locations that have it, which to me is an entrepreneur of a relatively small company that’s circa twenty twelve starting. That’s amazing. And so it’s just because people feel different
Shaman Durek [01:12:19] starbucks aside, any coffee place when people are putting milk into your coffee. Right. These people don’t realize that they’re taking away from because, you know, you said something to me and I’ll never forget it. You said to me, I think it was a couple of weeks ago you said to me, I really want you to understand the medicinal properties of coffee and how it can support you,Shaman Durek. And that when you said medicinal, that’s what turned my light bulb on. It was like, OK, Dave, I’m in and let’s see what this is about.
Dave Asprey [01:12:47] It’s funny because coffee raises something called In-rf two, which is a really important compound for for growing things in your brain and making energy in your cells, in your mitochondria. And it turns out the amount of caffeine in two small cups of coffee doubles ketone production. So if you have coffee in the morning and you’re not eating carbs, it makes your body make more of this precious energy called ketones. Any meditation tradition that includes fasting causes you to generate ketones. And one of the reasons they do that is after about four days of eating nothing or in a modern incarnation, eating less than fifteen grams of carbs a day, you suddenly click into the state of mental clarity. That’s remarkable. And most of us aren’t going too fast for several days to get there. So we don’t experience it except in, you know, if you’re at a yoga retreat or something and. The reason that that works is because you have two main categories of cells in your brain, you have neurons and you have something called glial cells, and glial cells are responsible for the immune system in the brain and pruning synapses. And there’s sort of the maintenance drones and the neurons do all the work. Well, the neurons prefer energy from ketones. Even if you have sugar in your blood, they’ll suck every ketone out of there. And the reason for that is neurons are the most energy consuming cells in the body. They’re the ones about fifteen thousand mitochondria. They’re big, strong cells that just just suck energy. Well, it turns out energy from fat has more energy in it. It’s called a calorie than energy from sugar. So we all know fat has more calories than sugar. Well, did you want to be a high energy person or a low energy person? Well, apparently your brain wants to be high energy problems. If you only have ketones in your body, your glial cells, these maintenance cells, they don’t get they want, which is carbohydrate. So we evolved in a state where if we eat protein, which turns into carbs or we eat carbs, we’re always in a state of using glucose so maintenance. Drones are happy and our neurons are always hungry. And when you use brain octane oil in your bulletproof coffee, you get that caffeine effect, which increases ketone production. You get ketones directly from brain octane oil more than you can from coconut oil or Mct oil.
Shaman Durek [01:14:58] That’s why I’m so excited about it.
Dave Asprey[01:15:00] Yeah, then if people feel it the first time, there’s a reason we’ve done one hundred and twenty five million cups ordered in twenty five million cups in a few years. It’s not even believable, except it happened is because people drink at one time they go, oh I feel something. I like how I feel. And then they tell their friends and then they do it again. Because for me this is an extra source of energy that my brain wants. And here’s what happens to your ketone levels up just a little bit. The amount that most people can get from using a normal dose of brain octane when you’re ketone levels rise to far less than the full ketosis diet. There’s two hormones in your body.Shaman Durek one is called ghrelin. And ghrelin is the hunger hormone. It causes cravings and the other one is called Cicek. And that’s the fulness hormone that makes you feel full. If you get your ketones to just bump a little bit, magically your hunger hormone ghrelin drops through the floor so you just don’t care about food anymore. The 10:00 a.m. snack that most people have, a little cinnamon roll, a little bagel or something, you just don’t even think about it.
Shaman Durek[01:16:03] You don’t think of it at all.
Dave Asprey It’s gone from your life.
Shaman Durek Yeah, it doesn’t even cross my mind.
Dave Asprey [01:16:07] Yeah. There’s no sense of hunger. it’s just gone. Well, that’s because ghrelin dropped and cck went up. So you just stop or so food, loses its power over you when you’re in that state. And that’s why I drink my bullet proof in the morning. I put little packets of brain octane oil on my lunch, on my dinner. That’s when I could bring octane oil to my kids because it lets you stop obsessing about food and all the energy that you were putting into thinking about what’s going to be on your plate next, what’s going to keep me from starving to death. All that energy is just go somewhere else and they can go into working on whatever you really afraid of. You can go into your love life. You can go into your meditation practice, into your job, into doing something that’s meaningful.
Shaman Durek [01:16:48] Yeah, I honestly say on and I try on the lit train, it’s bulletproof definitely because it’s changed my life. I literally have, you know, and I’m already very light , you know, been kind of a follower. So my energy is like really, really intense. And so now because I have the bulletproof as a part of my life and then the brain octane oil and I do the other one, which is unfair advantage, which literally I take before my interviews when people interview me and my I literally feel like I’m like like the the math wizard or like my brain just like it. It’s I say things out of my mouth that I would never catch myself
Dave Asprey Its just another gear like a car or a bicycle shifts gears up and your like oh I got more power here
Shaman Durek[01:17:31] Yeah. I feel like a sports car that like I said, race, I don’t know, you know, but I used to race cars when I was young. I was a street racer and I used to do it to make money. It was like I really need it, but I for me it was the thrill. And so I had I bought this kind of like Street Racer car and I had like, you know, the nitrous tank in it with the neon lights, like, very like,
Dave Asprey No way!
Shaman Durek Fast and furious . Yeah. So I every week you get you sign up for the different races that they have, some of them at four o’clock in the morning. Some of them are really like really like two o’clock in the morning. Some of them are late in late afternoon. And it depends what location and what I always loved about racing was I would get to this point if some of these racers who would race like there’s one girl I used to irritate me, her name was Uki, and she would get on the side of my car and she’d look at me and like and then she’d like like, I don’t know what was going on because she made her car so light she’d punch it and just go so fast and not. And so I would hit the nitrous thing. But you can only do it. You only can do it because, you know, after a while you’re you could blow up your car. So so my friends thought I was always funny because I what I got from the racing was this feeling of like I’m I’m racing them and, you know, I. wOn some competitions where everyone pays one hundred bucks and, you know, you get the win, the whole pot and so forth, but what I feel like when I’m taking the brain octane, when I’m doing the bullet proof is I feel I gave up racing because I got into a couple of accidents. My dad was like, either you give up racing or that’s it. And so I made the choice to give up racing. I you know, my dad was like a shaman racer. Does not look good now is the shaman whose racing cars. So but the thing is, I feel like that in my spirit, I feel like that in my mind. I feel like that in my body. And when I talk to the tribe about staying late all day, every day, that is what you have brought into my life. I really bring so much into people’s life already. But what I what I love about is like when I’m texting you and you’re like, oh, try this thing and do it like this. And then I do it and then I’m like, I feel like I’m racing again, but it’s me. Yeah. And it’s so awesome.
Dave Asprey[01:19:29] You get used to feeling like yourself and and our natural state is we’re supposed to have enough energy to handle whatever life brings us. It’s always in there. This is in every single person. But we don’t turn it on. And it’s funny that you were a racer because what does that name bring octane. What can of gas, high octane gas. I named it that way because I felt the same effect. It’s like, wow, I have more energy than I did before in high octane gas. Gives your car more energy per explosion in a cylinder and is through that effect on the neurons, through ketones, through these exclusion zone water changes, through polyphenols in coffee. There’s about seven different things that go into making your cells work the way they do on the bulletproof coffee, at least according to the theories in the bulletproof diet. And then some of the other things like unfair advantage in keto prime that you use. Those come out of my next book called Headstrong, which is here’s everything we know about how to help your brain make as much energy as capable of making. And the cool thing about making more energy in your brain is, yes, you can think more now, you can meditate better. But when you have more energy, you also have the energy it takes to fold cells, to clean out your system and all these other things that are required for not getting old and degrading with time
Shaman Durek [01:20:46] Autophagise? Autophagy?
Dave Asprey [01:20:48] yeah autophagy, even your sleep works better when your mitochondria have more energy, your sleep efficiency goes up.
Shaman Durek Yeah, that happens for me.
Dave Asprey And in fact, a study just came out a couple of weeks ago from things called Gleen. It’s an unusual university somewhere in the UK and they just confirmed something that I wrote about in twenty twelve on the blog. They said, this is weird, but people sleep more than eight hours a day, have a 30 percent higher risk of dying than those who sleep less than eight hours a day.
Shaman Durek I sleep four hours.
Dave AspreyWell, there you go. You’re going to live forever now. But by the way, this is not an argument. If you’re listening to this, do not restrict your sleep. But what that really means is people who need less sleep are healthier. Right? So if you can make your mitochondria make more energy, whether it’s through food, through avoiding toxins, through exercise, through cold showers and all these other things that are in headstrong, what you’re doing there is you’re saying, well, now I can sleep more effectively and my six hours in five minutes has served me very, very well. And I’ve been tracking it digitally every night for actually about geez almost 15 years now on different platforms. But I have the data for the last five years on my phone and I can do that. And I and I’m not I’m not sacrificing anything. I’m actually gaining two hours a day. And the data is pretty clear on that. Now, quality sleep really matters and quantity of sleep isn’t an important variable, although there are very few people who can go four hours a night, only people with a very substantial level of spiritual attainment can generally do what you do. I did my four or five hours a night for that 18 months, and I don’t think it it increased my lifespan and we have even talked about that. But my my current goal is to live to at least one hundred and eighty years old, .
Shaman Durek [01:22:37] Yeah, I think you know Hahaha.
Dave Asprey [01:22:40] And that’s why I get my six hours of sleep.
Shaman Durek [01:22:43] Yeah. I don’t know if I want to, I think I want to have maybe, maybe a machine that will be built with my information in it that they can just, you know, have a holographic form of me. I have other planets to go to
Dave Asprey [01:22:54] There’s already a name for that. It’s called your body, right?
Shaman Durek[01:22:57] Yes, of course. My biological spacesuit.
Dave Asprey It really is.
Shaman Durek I love you dave. And I’m going to live to one hundred and eighty five, you know. And you know and I’m not going to say that you can’t because I believe everything is possible. And I believe that, you know, the what we what we can’t perceive as possible is possible. And all we have to do is really just put our minds to it and we can create anything. I am so happy to have had you on the show. It’s wonderful to have you on the show. I like having my friends on the show and spending time with you. And it’s so great that we’re actually here in New York. And I know because you have a busy schedule tomorrow and I do as well, too. But it’s so nice that. You know, we could be in different countries doing our work and helping the world and then being able to be here and do this podcast with each other as well. I’m really happy for that.
Dave Asprey [01:23:47] And thank you for having me on. Thanks for being a force for good in the world. I really appreciate you. Appreciate what you do. And I love you, brother.
Shaman Durek [01:23:55] And I love you, too. So thank you.
All right, tribe. Well, check that out. You feel the fire, you feel the fire desire taking you higher. Remember, look, I tell you all the time, if you are, if what people are speaking to you and you don’t feel like you’re getting lit and you’re getting on fire, that means they’re not they’re not operating in your true desire. It’s time for you to recognize that what they speak has to lift you to a higher peak. This is what it’s about. And so the message is that you got today is about giving you that fuel, giving you that that understanding of how to take yourself to that supercharged place where you can operate at higher levels within your brain, in your body and the way that you’re operating in your life, because that’s the only way our tribe moves, is staying on the lit train every day, all day. Remember, nothing in your life is to stop that train. Only you are the one who decides how that train operates. And the way that you do that is by feeling yourself up with knowledge, feeling yourself up with nutrients and nurturing yourself, loving yourself, taking yourself higher and remembering to keep that fire. I love you so much and also get a chance. If you’re not following me already, you can check me out on Instagram. Check outDave Asprey. He’s also on Instagram and you can check out bulletproof coffee. You can also go to any Whole Foods. I went to Whole Foods. I stocked up on my bulletproof coffee, but I also ordered online as well, because, as you know, now my train is constantly moving at a higher speed. And I have to make sure I have a lot of that bulletproof coffee and a lot of that stuff that he has that is really taking me to a higher level. And, you know, I’m all about sharing with you all those things that really are shifting and lifting you to higher levels in yourself and give it a chance. Please, please, please check out the master class that I did with Sahara rose. It’s keeping people lit and putting them in their leadership and allowing you to just cut out all the nonsense in your life until next time. Tribe, I love you and goodbye.
Shaman Durek [01:26:00] Hello, Tribe. This podcast is sponsored by four sigmatic, four sigmatic is a natural superfood company that specializes in mushroom based drinks that benefit our immunity . Energy, longevity and keeping us healthy and enhanced in our lives four sigmatic makes a wide variety of blends, including mushroom coffee, mushroom elixir, hot cocoa moccia and super food blends. I believe strongly in this company. I’ve been taking four sigmatic and it has changed my life. I can’t even begin to start my day without a cup of four sigmatic in front of me right before I meditate or I do anything from speaking engagements to traveling to doing healing on. People are just going out in the world and sharing my immense love for this planet and for everyone on it. I feel lit times 1000. It is literally shifting the energy in my being. I’m talking, firing off those synapses, kicking my body into high gear by awakening those electrons, spinning those electrons, getting my body so on point with my focus, my creativity and my energy. One of the products that I love the most is the lions manes, coffee lions mane promotes productivity and focus. And it was known by shamans and monks who take that into their body for meditation, focus and clarity so they can really tune in to the energies and absorb the knowledge and information that is coming to them from the spirit world. And as you know, on ancient wisdom today, we like to keep it lit all day, every day. And how do we do that? By creating magic. And what is magic? Magic is turning up that energy live in our truth, honoring who we are and doing what’s right for us so that we can live a beautiful, powerful, easy, playful, fun, joyous and just the most powerful life in this now time. So if you don’t have four sigmatic on your shelf, in your bag, in your briefcase, on the airplane with you right before you speak, whatever it is that you do, you have to get this even for your kids, for your teenagers, pop it in there and their bag before they go to school. This is the drink that literally makes you think it is powerful and it is enriched with so many powerful mushrooms. And these adaptations are literally changing the lives of people. And remember, I’ve talked to you many times before in the past about mushrooms and the networking system of mushrooms when it gets into your body and just really taking your body to a whole new level. So if you’re interested in learning more about this amazing company, because I just really want you to know, Tribe, that everything I share with you, I share with you from my heart because I believe in it and I see what it has done for me and my life and all of my friends and family go to foursigmatic.com/shamandurek and you will get a discount code at your checkout. That’s foursigmatic.com/shamandurek for your fifteen percent off. I love you tribe. I love you so much. That is the reason why I choose sponsors that are in alignment and authenticity to what this tribe is about. Staying lit, staying focused, staying driven and changing our planet for the good. Love you, enjoy the share Bye.