Joshua:                   The first thing I would say is, with respect to stuff, let it go. It’s just stuff and it has only the meaning that you give it. Things don’t have meaning unless we give a meaning. Second thing I would say is, it has to do with the people in our lives. You can’t change the people around you, but you can change the people around you. What I mean by that is, you can’t try to change someone. Make them, mold them into what you want them to be, but you can surround yourself by supportive people with similar interests and values. They may even have different beliefs. I look at me and Ryan, we have radically different personalities, we have different belief systems, different political leanings, but we have similar values. I surround myself with people who make me a better version of myself. The last thing I would say is try to love people and use things because the opposite never works.

There are about 300,000 items in the average American home. Side note, in my home, that includes just those little hair bands for my daughter, there’s got to be 300,000 of those. 3.1% of the world’s kids live in America, but they own 40% of the toys consumed globally

We’ve seen this huge trend of people like Marie, I was going to call her Kimono, I’m totally forgetting her last name. Joshua:                   Kondo.

Joshua:                   Yeah, and so I figured out if you were to throw any complications into this equation this minimalist lifestyle and work, but then of course, I stumbled across some other folks as well. People like Leo Babauta who I’m sure you know, he runs a website called Zen Habits, and he’s a father of six. When I first stumbled across him he had kids everywhere from entering college to elementary school and everything in between and he and his wife Eva lived in the city in San Francisco, yet, they were minimalists. Then, I found people like Joshua and Kim Becker who were in the documentary and they have two kids in the suburbs of Phoenix or Courtney Carver and her teenage daughter and her husband in Salt Lake City.

Dave:                        It turns out there’s actually a number for how much it costs to buy happiness and I gave a talk at the third Bulletproof conference on this and the number $75,000. There’s a study that shows people’s happiness level does go up a little bit with each dollar they earn up to $75,000 because that’s the point where you’ve covered health care costs, food, housing and communications and transportation. When you have your basic needs covered, additional dollars don’t make you any happier, but if you’re making $30,000, making $75,000 actually will measurably make you happier because you’re less stressed and less worried about, “How do I put food on the table?” If you have a minimalist lifestyle, maybe the number is lower than $75,000 because you’ve cut your spend substantially. Maybe the number’s only $42,000 or whatever it is, but there is a number. I’m struggling to make ends meet and if you’re struggling, struggling is the opposite of happiness. You can be happy while struggling, it just takes a pretty enlightened person to do that and most of us aren’t there.

I published a study on football players, NFL players who had been hit in the head thousands of times. What we did for them is put them on a multiple vitamin, high dose omega-3 fatty acids 5.6 grams, and blend ... I like higher EPA than DHA. A supplement I created calledBrain and Memory Power Boost that works in seven different ways, and 80% of our players showed improvement including, not just self-report, they showed improvement in blood flow to their prefrontal cortex zones back. That's not a placebo thing. A placebo thing is not actually going to improve blood flow to the focus, or thought judgment, impulse control part of your brain.

We have a rulein my house. We don't put on our skin if we wouldn't put it in our mouth.

He's taking one of the big box stores fish oil. His omega-3 fatty acid probably was 5%, when it should be 8% or above. I had him stop and give him ours, Omega-3 Power, two capsules a day and his level three months later was 10; so quality matters. Plus, if you read a lot of label. Rancidity matters. You want to make sure the expiration date is there, and you want to make sure you have a high quality brand. I know, I really care about quality like you really care about quality. Then, you have to actually read the level on how much is it. Two of our capsules have 146 mg of omega-3 fatty acids where two capsules, one of the big box stores may have 120 mg. I recommend kids get at least 1,000 mg, adults 1,400 or often more. If you're on a repair situation, it's more like five grams.

I personally never seen it as a problem with my patients, but the only people I know who are taking like 20 grams of fish oil are in head trauma recovery programs. People say, "Oh, you should worry about bleeding or bruising." I haven't seen that as a significant problem.

Well, medical doctors travel in herds and there’s a pack safety illusion that exists in medicine that if we just all follow the crowd everyone’s going to be okay and it will be the way we do things. It’s like let’s stick together.

What we find is that think of it this way. Let’s say, the reference range of vitamin C in the bloodstream is one milligram per deciliter. After a 15,000, a 15-gram IBC infusion and we typically, do measure people after we give them an infusion, it’s about 100 milligrams per deciliter. It’s 100 times what you would normally have in your blood. Now, you can take as much oral vitamin C as you can and you might get it up from one to maybe three, maybe four, maybe five if you’ve already been taking vitamin C for a long time but to get beyond that is almost impossible.

Now, there are cases where people have taken, they’ve built themselves up to 50, 60,000 milligrams of oral vitamin C a day over months and years and they can achieve a higher blood level in the 20s, maybe the 30s. What we’re shooting for with cancer patients is for 400 milligrams per deciliter.

I think the concept of antioxidants has been misunderstood. What Dr. Tom Levy and I have introduced at our most recent conference is this concept of redox medicine that everything in nature is redox. Dave Asprey:                     Yes. Explain redox for our listeners. This is also in headstrong. Just like define that. It’s so important. You guys will have to hear this. Ron Hunninghake:           Yeah. Well, life is redox. There’s oxidation, there is reduction. Oxidation is when molecules lose electrons and it causes dysfunction of some sort. Reduction is when from some source, such as vitamin C or good quality food, you are able to get electrons back in order to stabilize the molecule and to stabilize the structures that it’s working within.

There are some other doctors that have looked at depriving cancer patients of all vitamin C for periods of time and then hitting them really hard with high doses of vitamin C as a possible way of inducing apoptosis in cancer cells. There’s a lot of research in this area and it’s not like it’s all worked out now. It’s more like we are in the early stages of flight and we need research is what we really need and unfortunately, it’s hard to come by at the funding for this particular area.

If you don’t know the word orthomolecular, this is a word that basically ties together nutrition and vitamins and health from medical perspective.