I am honored to reconnect with Dave Asprey today! He is the renowned father of biohacking and a New York Times bestselling author.
Dave would like a world where we all have enough free time and peace to be at full power! In this episode, he and I have a no-nonsense conversation about his newest book, Smarter Not Harder, which is my favorite of all his books! We dive into the impact of the pandemic, the art and science of environment, the laziness principle, homeostasis, and the concept behind “slope with the curve” thinking. We discuss anti-nutrients, the biohacking pathway, REHIIT training, and various other cellular hacks, including hypoxification and specialized breathing, and how trauma pertains to becoming a more efficient human. I also ask Dave about his favorite supplements.
I hope you enjoy listening to today’s conversation with Dave Asprey as much as I did recording it!
IN THIS EPISODE YOU WILL LEARN:
Why Dave chose to write his latest book now.
How Dave’s book can help you achieve homeostasis.
The 5 goals in Dave’s book that he recommends for people focus on, one at a time.
A fundamental mistake that people in the world of health and fitness often make.
How the “slope with the curve” biology works.
How you can save energy with biohacking.
The benefits of REHIT (Reduced Energy High-Intensity Interval Training).
Some foods that can negatively impact our health.
Dave shares his thoughts on dairy.
Using hypoxification as a cellular biohack.
Dave sheds some light on his favorite supplements.
The role of trauma resolution.
“What I want you to do and what I’m teaching you to do in Smarter Not Harder is to be precise about things- not perfect.”
-Dave Asprey
Connect with Cynthia Thurlow
Check out Cynthia’s website
Connect with Dave Asprey
On his website
To open an Upgrade Labs, go to www.ownanupgradelabs.com
Dave’s new book, Smarter Not Harder is available from most bookstores.
Transcript:
Cynthia Thurlow: Welcome to Everyday Wellness Podcast. I'm your host, Nurse Practitioner, Cynthia Thurlow. This podcast is designed to educate, empower, and inspire you to achieve your health and wellness goals. My goal and intent, is to provide you with the best content and conversations from leaders in the health and wellness industry each week and impact over a million lives.
Today, I had the honor of reconnecting with Dave Asprey. He is the renowned father of biohacking and a New York Times bestselling author. We had a no-nonsense conversation about his newest book, Smarter Not Harder, which quite honestly is, I think, my very favorite of all of his books. We dove deep into the impact of the pandemic, the art and science of environment, the role of the laziness principle as well as homeostasis, the concept of slope-of-the-curve thinking, the role of anti-nutrients including phytic acid, conventional chicken, and dairy, the biohacking pathway, the impact of REHIT, which is a specific type of exercise as well as other cellular hacks including hypoxification and specialized breathing. I did ask him about his favorite supplements and I think you'll be surprised, as well as the role of trauma as it pertains to becoming a more efficient human. I hope you will enjoy this conversation with Dave as much as I did recording it.
So, let's really start from the beginning. The last three years have impacted every person that's listening to this podcast and every person that's out there pretty profoundly. Did you get the idea to write the book during, I don't want to say, the heyday, the pandemic, or the insanity of the pandemic, however you'd like to reframe it. What was the impetus? Why this book now is what I'm asking.
Dave Asprey: The ideas behind Smarter Not Harder have been percolating for actually since the start of biohacking, where the original definition when I was creating this movement, it was the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so that you have full control of your own biology. And all of the things that I'm writing about in Smarter Not Harder are different ways of getting a very precise signal in your body to make it do what you want, which allows you to save a huge amount of time and energy, which goes against our societal programming, which is like, you really have to have grit and suffer and struggle. And if you just feel enough pain and overcome it with willpower, you'll get results. It turns out that's not really how it works. You might exercise your willpower that way, which is good.
A grit is important, but you shouldn't waste your grit. You could use your grit on stuff that matters, instead of like, “I could have just cooked my food on the stove, but that wasn't good enough, so I got an exercise bike and I peddled really hard to heat my food up.” Okay, if that's your thing, but we're doing this all the time because we just don't know any better. Maybe not that exact example, but things almost as bad. I want a world where people have enough free time and peace to be at full power because when we're at full power, we're nicer to each other. The weird thing is we become very dangerous. And dangerous people I mean, who knows what they might do. They might be hard to program. They might not be just responsive to things that don't require much energy to believe. In Smarter Not Harder, I actually talk about how we can prove using neuroscience for a third of a second.
All the time there's something else inside of you that's in charge of you. It's kind of scary. If you're 18, listening to this, it's actually only a quarter second where it's in charge. And if you're an average age and average brain, it's about 350 milliseconds. If you're starting to get towards Alzheimer's or dementia, it might be 400 milliseconds. So, we have this window where some other jerk is in charge and that jerk is like, “Lay on the couch. Don't do anything hard.” And it turns out thinking about stuff is really hard. So, if you really want to ponder something, you sit down, you get out of journal, you sit in a chair, and you just might sit there for like a couple of hours and just really think through all the different things if you can do it without getting bored.
Well, it turns out your body doesn't like that. What it likes to do is jump to conclusions because it takes less electricity to jump to conclusions and it's so afraid, you'll run out of electricity. And the worst your food is, the more ultra-processed, plant-based nonsense marketing food you eat, the more toxins you have, the harder it is to have enough energy to think. So, you become very programmable. So, the reason that I wanted to release the book now was that Upgrade Labs is franchising. This is my company where I've done eight years of work to be ready to write the book and this is now a franchise. Anyone can open a biohacking lab now. Go to ownandupgradelabs.com. We'll talk about that some more.
But, okay, now we know how to do it, so let's turn everyone's power back on. And that's also why my newest coffee company called Danger Coffee is named that. Who knows what you might do, you might ask that person out, you might get a raise, you might do something really big in the world that's been percolating, but you didn't have the spark to do it. Well, let's turn the spark back on. And that's why I wrote the book now because I think people need to read Smarter Not Harder because when you do it, you're just going to discover, “Oh, my God, you might be ungovernable.”
Cynthia Thurlow: Yeah, I mean one of the things I enjoyed was that it was very much focused on empowering people, giving them good information that they could was tangible, and there's a range of options for recommendations, which I loved as well. I love that you kind of talked about this laziness principle because it is a kind of a key theme that runs throughout the book. And for me, being married to an engineer, there's a lot of efficiency in my life. It's been a byproduct of being partnered with my husband for over 20 years. He's all about efficiency. That's a lot of what this book is kind of touching on, is there's a more efficient way to live your life where there's less friction, a little bit more flow, if you will.
Dave Asprey: It's funny because the efficiency doesn't ever push a button for anyone except engineers, probably like your husband or like me. Do you ever wake up in the morning, “Today, I want to be efficient.” No, efficiency isn't sexy, it's not powerful, it's not fun. When you think about it, “Do you want to be free today? Do you want to be powerful today?” Well, the way you get those things is by moving labor out of your mind and body to other things so that you have freedom to do what you want instead of what you have to do. Efficiency, it turns out is really sexy, but it's not branded properly, so we don't call it that. I like to call it freedom.
Cynthia Thurlow: I think that's a very important concept, especially given the landscape of the last three years, without getting super tied into that narrative. Now let's shift a little bit and talk about the role of homeostasis. So, I think for a lot of my listeners, they're familiar with the term hormesis and homeostasis, but it's really all speaking about the health of our mitochondria and doing things that positively or negatively impact this. I think for a lot of individuals, they don't realize that it's not normal to be really, really tired all the time. But that has kind of been the given. More often than not, when people reach out to us on social media, they can't get out of bed, their sleep is terrible, they're just exhausted all the time. It's not just for women, it's also for men. It's become the norm.
Dave Asprey: I'm an early adopter, so in my mid 20s, I had chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, arthritis. I weighed 300 pounds, high risk of stroke and heart attack. And I remember very much what it's like to sit there and you feel like you're in a car and you're pushing the accelerator all the way to the floor, and you're just slowing down, and you can push harder, but there's nothing left. When you push, nothing happens. It's this feeling of kind of desperation, of helplessness, and you hide it because we're wired as primates to just not show weakness. There's a huge number of people who are just barely putting one foot in front of the other, and no one knows. So, you're not alone if that's happening. I remember I was doing that, and I'd get home at the end of the day, I didn't know how I drove home. I had no recollection of it.
My career is taking off in Silicon Valley, I'm a very successful person and I was just hiding it, and I would fake it. When I launched my really big company, Bulletproof, one of my board members wrote a blog post on Medium and this was one of my first investors, a good friend, and he said, “I'm a high-powered Silicon Valley VC. Every day I have crippling fatigue and I can barely make it through the day no matter what I do and I've been hiding it forever.” One of the reasons that they invested is, he said, “After the first 30 days of trying what Dave told me to do, yes, including butter in coffee.” He said, “For the first time in my adult life since I was 17, at the end of the day, I had energy all day long,” He said, "I got my BMW and I started crying."
Okay, this is like a high-powered VC. It's everybody. You can't tell because we don't show it, because we put on our game face. That is one of the reasons I do everything I do. I'm not going back to that. I don't want anyone else to live through what I went through. I just think if I was 20 and I had the knowledge that's in my books, would my life have been way different? Yeah, in a good way. So, when you read Smarter Not Harder, by now you've probably figured out. there's going to be a bunch of hacks in there and there are and you don't have to do all of them. This is the other problem. People can get almost orthorexic, which is when I have to only eat the right foods, or otherwise I'm a bad person. I have to do every bio hack on the planet or I'm a bad person. That's just weird and it's not healthy. If you're doing that, you've got to deal with whatever kind of trauma is causing your perfection.
What I want you to do and what I'm teaching you to do in Smarter Not Harder is to be precise about things, not perfect. So precise means let's pick a goal, like Cynthia, okay, if you woke up in the morning and you're one of the rare people said, “I want to be healthy today,” although most people don't say that, but if that was the top ask for the day, how would you measure it, what would healthy mean to you?
Cynthia Thurlow: Me personally?
Dave Asprey: Yeah.
Cynthia Thurlow: I think for me, because I very much love my Oura Ring. So, one of the first things I do in the morning is I check my data, how much REM, how much deep sleep, how do I feel because sometimes they don't correlate. But for me, that's the first thing I'm thinking about. But it's also exercise, it's connection to nature, it's hydration. I mean, really basic things. It's fasting, all of which kind of fit into my healthy bucket. But, much to your point, I'm definitely one of those people. I don't have to do all those things every single day. I mean, that's just a starting point.
Dave Asprey: It's a starting point. Most listeners, though, “Yes, I want healthy but I don't want it with a burning desire to want it more than I want a cheeseburger or sex or a raise.” Let's just face it, those are the things that our bodies tell us to think about before healthy. But what you can do when you read Smarter Not Harder, is you realize that there's five main components that people are really asking for in different ratios. There's a recipe for you. And I learned this because eight years ago, underneath Arnold Schwarzenegger's Office in Santa Monica, I opened Upgrade Labs. This was where I would take a million dollars' worth of gear that I've used to upgrade my own biology to learn all these principles and made it available to the public and it spun the creation of the biohacking lab industry. There's a bunch of kind of small mom and pops who are looking to do something similar.
But after eight years of doing this and spending more than $10 million on R&D, we got to the point where I understand it now, and I can run it as a business that helps people and actually, as a profitable business. And that's why it's a franchise now. You can literally open one anywhere. This year we have dozens of them opening across the country or at least in the process of opening, I can't tell you the exact dates because of regulatory stuff, but basically, it's happening.
So, you should be able to go out and go to a facility and get some help with this, but if you don't, everything in the book is organized by what's your goal. And I'll tell you the five goals in a sec. And then if this is your top goal, what's your second goal, because let's focus on those instead of trying to do everything all the time. The worst thing you could ever do is say, “I want to put on muscle mass and run a marathon.” Those don't go together. You could put a huge amount of willpower in and just get overtrained and injured, but not build muscle or even much cardiovascular, because you're working against yourself.
So, here're the five things that people ask for in some amount and there's going to be one top goal for you. I'm working on a quiz that will go up on daveasprey.com to help you identify this because it's very hard. Some people, they want muscle, pretty straightforward. I want to have whatever guns or I want abs or I want to add 3 pounds of muscle or something. That's an actual fitness goal. Not necessarily even a health goal, but it's a good one because it's anti-aging and it's pro-metabolic and all the reasons. Other people are going to say, “Actually, I want my cardio. I get tired all the time when I'm walking upstairs.” It's a different thing. If you go to the gym and lift, you're not going to fix your cardio problems. You can have muscles and not go up the stairs. This is a real thing. But if you don't know which one is most important to you, how are you going to fix it.
And then the third thing people say that they want is they want their brain to work better. This is a health goal that you really don't solve in the gym, although that helps a little bit. For me, this was one of my top goals because I had such bad brain fog in my 20s. My career was taken off. So, fixing your brain is just different. And from there, we say, “Okay, what about energy?” A huge number of people say, “I want to get my energy back.” And they're the same people usually who say, I want to lose weight. Those are actually the same process. To get your energy back, stop putting electrons into fat storage and put them into your brain, and then all of a sudden, your energy comes back. It's amazing how that works.
So, the final one, though, is the one that's probably least likely for people to guess for the first time ever since we started doing surveys, not me, this isn't my survey, but since humans have done surveys, people have asked for the ability to manage stress and anxiety more than weight loss. This is how stressed we are. We're stressed in part because of social media, but we're mostly stressed because of who run governments in every country. I don't care where you live. There has been abuse of power around the world and I don't care which side of whatever you're on, we just don't force people to do things against their will unless they're in prison.
So, people are really stressed about that and lack of human connection and all the other stuff that we could talk about. People are saying, I don't know how to handle this, and that's okay because you're not alone in that. When you're stressed, of course you lose your energy, of course you get brain fog, of course you get fat, of course you lose muscle, of course you lose cardio, so you have to pick one. So how do you know. Did I want my brain to work, or did I want my energy back, or did I want the muffin tops go away, or did I want muscles. It's actually a hard thing.
In Smart Not Harder, I teach you how to just pick the top one, and then, okay, now you've got a goal. Let's get serious. I'm going to assume that you have things to do. Maybe you have kids like I do. Maybe you have eight companies, like I do, [laughs] or New York Times bestsellers, and hundreds of millions of downloads of your podcast whatever. I have a lot going on because I'm so lazy and it doesn't make sense, we'll talk about laziness in a minute.
But because of all that stuff, every minute, I think, actually matters. If you're listening to this, every minute of your life matters too. So, if you are going to take care of yourself by dedicating 60 minutes per week, how do you get your goals met. And what would happen if you did such a good job of that it only took 20 minutes and you took the other 40 minutes and met your second goal, and that as soon as you did that for only four weeks or six weeks, you had so much improvement there that all of a sudden you just felt better. You could put that extra energy and the same amount of time into another goal. And all of a sudden you've brought yourself back. In fact, maybe it's not even bringing yourself back, maybe it's just upgrading yourself, maybe you've never felt this way and I know what that's like.
I didn't know you're supposed to walk without it hurting. I was always in pain. My body literally hurt all the time. And brain fog, that's just something everybody gets. And I just didn't know because these were factors of my life since I was a little kid growing up in a toxic mold basement. So, the fact that my brain can work now dozens of times a day, I do not have to look for a word. I do not have to open the refrigerator and wonder why I opened it. None of that. If I lose one word, I stop and go, what did I do to cause that. And there's always a reason and I know why, and I don't worry about it, but I just take note of it. This is what's possible.
It's a level of vibrancy you would never expect. But the way you get there is what's in Smarter not Harder, where pick the first one that's most important, like the shining thing on a hill, and you go take that. Instead of walking up the hill and pushing against mud, take the helicopter. It's just easier, and you deserve that, and it's okay, and you don't have to struggle and suffer, and those don't make you a better person. You must be able to struggle and suffer when it's necessary. It's just not necessary most of the time when you think it is. That's why I wrote the book.
Cynthia Thurlow: Well, I think it's a really important message because I think you and I both see on social media people that are, it's a grind, and they call it the hustle, it's the grind. And I remind people that it really should be a whole lot easier than that. I'm not at all suggesting that hard work isn't worth it. That's not what I'm suggesting. But for your focus of having one thing to focus on at a time allows people to simplify.
Dave Asprey: I'm sorry, but hard work means that you're bad at your job. That's what it means, [laughs] because if you're good at your job, it wouldn't be hard. It means you need to improve. But to intentionally do hard work all the time as a means of improving that's because our brains are lazy and they're trying to save electricity in our thinking. So, here's the fundamental mistake we've made in the world of health and fitness, and it's something that I just tackle head on in Smarter Not Harder. And I call it, this is a really sexy term that your husband will like. It's called “Slope of the curve biology.” And I thought about calling it "The Spike" and being all fancy about it, but whatever. So, here's what it is.
Because our brains like to take thinking shortcuts to save us time and energy, which is a good thing, I'm happy my brain does that because that works pretty well to keep me alive. Otherwise, I'd sit around at the stoplight going, “Should I go?” And I'm just thinking it would turn red by the time I could think my way through every possible thing, like, it goes off automatically. You don't have to think about it. But slope of the curve thinking means, all right, if I want to be good at doing something like, say, lifting heavy things, my job is to lift heavy things for an hour because that's more struggling, more suffering. I'm going to lift a whole lot of stuff until I'm completely blown out and I'm exhausted and I'm sweating all over the place. I've got my social media, my shirt dripped through and all that kind of stuff. And I know I'm going to improve because I do that. You go take a shower and you're satisfied. Now, that's worthy in terms of working hard and showing yourself you can do it.
But if your goal was to actually put on muscle instead of to work hard, maybe there was a way to put on a lot more muscle, like three to five times faster. And if you go to the chapter of Smarter Not Harder, where I talk about all the things we know about putting on muscle, there're a whole lot of hacks including free ones, things that cost like 50 bucks, or things that might if you were to go buy the gear, it's going to cost you 50 grand or you can come to an Upgrade Labs and do it. The way I structure Smarter Not Harder is the free version, the highly affordable version, and the crazy billionaire version. And I concentrate as much crazy billionaire stuff at Upgrade Labs as I possibly can so you don't have to go buy all the stuff and invent how to use it. The differentiator, the thing that's really special about Upgrade Labs that allowed me to write this book is that I've seen enough people come through more than anyone else over time, come through and now I know. Do this, then this, then this for you.
So, we measure your state when you walk in the door. We measure how you're performing in all the gear, and we measure your state the next time. So, we've got the data that no one on earth has, so anyone can come in. Actually, imagine this, you go to a restaurant, but you had a bakery, and on the menu there's water, there's flour, there's yeast, and there's salt. And then like, “Oh, you want bread. Okay, just tell us how much each you want.” You're like, “I just wanted some bread.” When you go to a typical place like this, “What do you want to do? You want to do like a red light or whatever?” I don't know. I want to do the right thing for me based on me and based on my goal. And that was the big challenge.
That's why I waited to write the book. That's why I waited to franchise Upgrade Labs until I thought I could help someone who walks in the door because, Cynthia, if you walk in the door and I walk in the door, we have a few differences. And I know there are probably some people who would argue we have no differences whatsoever, but those are mentally ill people, because it turns out from a biochemical perspective, there are differences. So, we would honor those differences and account for them based on your biology, your age, whether you're tired or not, whether you're inflamed or not, where you are in your cycle, possibly, and what your goal is. And if your goal was to get ripped and my goal was to have more energy, maybe we would do different things. So, we have to account for all of that. It's hard, and that was why it was worth writing a book about.
But what slope of the curve biology shows us is that I'm going to lift all that stuff what the body will respond to with these hacks is a tiny fraction, maybe 20% of the amount of work that our sweaty guy did. And that'll put on the same muscle or more. And of course, you got the extra 40 minutes back. Actually, it's 48 minutes if we do our math right. So, [chuckles] what are you going to do with that. What I'm going to do if you're at Upgrade Labs, I'm going to plug your brain in to our proprietary neurofeedback device that I've been working on also for eight years that has seven patents backing it, because we could also say, “Hurry, meditate faster.” And then what? Yes, you can do that as well. The way the slope of the curve biology works is that, if you push a system, any system in your body, right to the edge of failure and your audience knows that homeostasis is when the body can handle its stuff.
So, you push it right to the edge of where it's about to lose homeostasis or it's going to be destabilized. It might take you a couple of days or even a couple of months to recover from that. You take it right to the edge, but you take it there so quickly, maybe faster than mother nature ever even imagined could be done. And then and this is a big trick. You take it back to calm as fast as humanly possible. So, what the body wants to see is, “Oh, I almost died,” because that's what it thinks when you sprint, literally it's dumb. It's a distributed consciousness of just about trillions of mitochondria. They don't know what's going on. They're dumb bacteria. There's just a whole lot of them. They all kind of votewith each other to feel like, “Is a tiger chasing us? Oh, shit, there is one.” And when that happens, if you stop and you drop and you lay on your back and you take deep breaths and you think about puppies or whatever it is that makes you chill or chocolate or guacamole, just not kale because it's gross. So, you think about any of these things and you calm down. It's the speed that you calmed down that tells the body to change because from the body's perspective, remember, it's very fast. It's doing this before you can think, and it's invisible to you. What it's doing is it's saying, “Oh, a tiger almost ate me, but now I'm safe and I have adequate nutrients including minerals, including protein, and including electricity because my systems work reasonably well. That means I have enough capacity right now to improve.” But if instead you do what we always do in spin classes and in bodybuilding and all these things is, “Well, the tiger is still there because I climbed the hill when the instructor is yelling at me.” And with Britney Spears playing in the background and you're pedaling really fast.
And then instead of stopping and resting like a sane primate, what we do is like, “Oh, look, let's go cruise for a little while and then do another hill and cruise because more work is better,” but the body is like, “No, I was going to fix myself, but since I'm still being hunted oh, and there's a famine because you fed me a freaking kale salad before this class, not real food. It's like, I'm not going to improve.” The difference for one of the many different technologies that I cover in Smarter Not Harder is around doing that for cardio. Two studies at the University of Colorado show that five minutes of exercise which includes 20 seconds of hard stuff, no sweating whatsoever, gives you a 12% improvement in your cardiovascular fitness, your VO2 max it's called. Five minutes a day, three times a week for six or eight weeks, you got a 12% improvement. 12% improvement equals two years more lifespan in those kinds of aging studies.
So, you could also go for an hour a day, five days a week to spin class. That's 5 hours versus 15 minutes every week and you would get a 2% improvement. You got 6 times better results in 15 minutes a week instead of 5 hours a week. What are you going to do with the other. Oh, and you didn't have to shower afterwards either because you didn't sweat. So, what are you going to do with all the time you saved? Are you going to be a better parent? Are you going to meditate? Are you going to write a book? That's a lot of time. Five hours a week, we can have a side gig for that. You do whatever you want. It's that kind of a thing that kind of just pisses me off. And it's not like we're dumb. All of us know this. Do you know, Cynthia, how much money is spent every year in the US on Ghost gym memberships?
Cynthia Thurlow: I don't know, I better [crosstalk]
Dave Asprey: $400 million a year people spend on gym memberships that they know they should want to use, but they don't want to use because the return on investment isn't there. So, you pay your $29 a month or whatever it is and you never go. But you know you should go. Even worse, you are taught to feel shame because you don't want to go. And there's a lot of freedom in Smarter Not Harder, because your meat, your hardware, it is wired by Mother Nature or God or whoever the heck you think evolved our systems the way they are. It's wired to save energy. Your body, which controls everything you see in here and feel, it wants to be lazy because it knows a famine could be coming. Why would you waste any energy when you don't have to.
It's a great way to keep alive and it works for turtles, it works for zebras, it works for trees. Don't waste energy. So, here you are going, I want to go waste energy at the gym. Cognitively, you want to. Your body is like, “Screw you, buddy. There's a pizza, there's a couch, there's Netflix.” And that is biologically attractive. The same way we look at someone who's physically attractive, like, “Wow, look at those legs.” Your body has the same response to the couch, but we feel shame about looking at the couch. How could I want to do that, because you come from a long line of two billion years of life that has survived by not wasting energy. So, you have to acknowledge it's not you, it's not bad, it's your body, it's your hardware, and it's for survival. And then you have to trick your body and that's why it's called biohacking.
Cynthia Thurlow: I love that and I think it's very affirming to know that we are programmed to behave that way. I think, as you said, appropriately stated, the shameful kind of feeling that many people evoke because they've got this gym membership, they do want to go to the gym, they don't want to go to the gym. They have all these conflicting feelings that make it more challenging for them to commit to 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. No, in the book, there's a new term I have to be completely transparent. I'm very familiarized with HIIT, but REHIT, I think, is again going back to this efficiency principle, let's talk about that because that really had me rethinking the HIIT that I was doing once or twice a week. I was hmm this makes a lot of sense.
Dave Asprey: It's called reduced exertion high intensity training and it's not really even intervals. So, and there're some graphs in the book that are real interesting to look at and very easy to understand. It's not an engineering textbook by longshot. This is a "How do you do it" book, because that's the only kind I write. Like, it has to be actionable. But if we were to do that normal exercise we talked about where you might go for a half hour, 45 minutes, maybe you're on the stairstep or whatever you're doing, like the hill climb and then flat and then hill climb, and well, that's a lot of work and it takes a lot of time. About 10, 12 years ago, I started talking about high intensity interval training when the research was coming out, which said, okay, instead you're going to take maybe 15 minutes instead of a half hour, 45 minutes.
You're going to warm up a bit, sprint like crazy for 30 seconds or a minute, and then you're going to jog a little while and sprint again. You're going to do it three times. You're going to really feel exhausted when you're done. And then you actually got more benefits than doing the long class. This was the first step towards understanding slope of the curve and how important it is. And then new research started coming out on what is the actual correct pattern for this. What they found was what I described before, the body wants to get the signal and then recover. That's it. So, what we were doing is we’re getting too much signal in. And I wrote a little about this in one of my previous books after an interview with John Gray, who helped to inspire me. This is the women are from a planet and men are from the other planet, the Mars and Venus. I forget who's from what planet. Do you remember?
Cynthia Thurlow: Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus.
Dave Asprey: Sorry, John, I love your books. I just can't remember what planet I'm from. The whole situation with John is he said, “You know Dave, I noticed during high intensity interval training, if I lay down on my back between intervals, I do better.” I'm like, “Aha, there's a little crumb of truth in that. And then when I found the research from the University of Colorado, it was like, “Oh, okay, we can use this at Upgrade Labs.” That's what we do with a custom-modified bike that's tied into our information systems to program you the right way. What you do then if you don't have access to an Upgrade Labs, is you go to the park and you act like you've eaten two THC gummies.
So, you walk really slowly, you must be on something because it has to be way slower, like as calm and as peaceful as you can be. Think calm thoughts, really chill, and then set an alarm on your phone or something. Something has to just be the trigger. And then you run like you're going to die. And it has to be really fast, all out. Even better yet, you have some weight in your backpack. I mean, like literally dump all of your energy in 20 seconds because there is a predator behind you. Maybe because you're running, maybe it's 30 seconds because you don't have the bike with an AI control system we do at Labs. And then after that, stop and drop. Like I said, they're going to think you're on drugs. Close your eyes and take deep breaths. If anyone tries to give you mouth to mouth, tell them to go away.
[laughter]
Really deep breaths and just calm, peaceful. When you feel like you've got your heart rate most of the way down, get up and really gently walk again. Do that twice. And that is going to be so much better than running in circles around the park, breaking your knees and hips. It actually works better. And so, yes, it looks funny. Who cares. I mean, have you ever been to any class where people are all wearing a bunch of tight clothes, sweating on each other. They all look funny. It's okay. You're supposed to look funny at the gym, so do that. That's just one example, but the reduced exertion there, how do we push the body to the edge of equilibrium.
Well, when I have the ability to measure how much output you're putting on pedals and I have your heart rate, I can do that really well with technology, which is why Upgrade Labs is so much more effective. And just if your listeners going, “What?” Yes, ownanupgradelabs.com is where you would go if you wanted to open one in your city, and there may already be one opening in your city, so my goal is that there will be thousands of these across the US and Canada to start, and maybe we'll do some other country deals. I'm talking with a couple of international places.
But the idea here is you just want to get it done. And you didn't want to waste one minute of your precious life doing stuff, slogging it out in the gym. You went there and we gave you a prescription for what technologies to use, in what order, and you went in and you did it. You left feeling better than when you came in. And you improved rapidly. You'd have to believe you improved because we give you the numbers like thousands of measures that tell you, “Okay, are you stronger? Are you not stronger? Is your system working better? Did your inflammation that you can't see with your eyes go down or did it go up?” You can have so much control over your body so that instead of feeling like you're a servant to your body you realize that your body is something that will respond to what you tell it to do.
It doesn't respond because you think about it. That is possible. You have to go into very advanced meditation states like the 40 years of Zen neurofeedback or do like heavy duty holotropic breathing. There are ways to interface with your body, but it's super mystical spiritual stuff, and it's hard to dial in. So, assuming you're not going to do that, your body is not listening to you. It might if you're thinking you're really stressed about something, you're probably feeling stressed in the body and then making up a story about it. It's also possible to make up stress in your head and feed that into your body, but that's not that common. Quite often it's the body feeling stress and telling you it must be something around you, and then you believe that or maybe it's just the government, but that's different.
[laughter]
So that's how it all works. I feel like there's so much capacity we have as humans to just do better.
Cynthia Thurlow: