Barbell Shrugged - Biohacking with Dave Asprey - 272

Episode Date: August 9, 2017

This week, we went to Bulletproof to meet with founder Dave Asprey (Twitter: @bulletproofexec), a company you might know best for the “butter in your coffee” craze. But Dave’s work, and Bulletproof, are so much more -- they’re in the business of “biohacking,” or changing your environment inside and out so that you can have the most possible control of your biology. As an executive at a non-profit for anti-aging research, Dave began to understand the nutritive shortcuts -- the biohacks -- that we can activate for our best health. He started blogging about it on the side, and out of that effort grew the Bulletproof empire. Listen in as we discuss his new bestselling book, Head Strong, about being the boss of your mitochondria, and about how there’s not a lot of convincing science to support coffee enemas… Something we wish we’d known a few weeks earlier. This Week on Barbell Shrugged, We Interview Dave Asprey to Discuss: The concept of biohacking - what it is and how to do it The difference between cravings and hunger (and how to shut the cravings down) What nootropics are and how they make your brain perform better Coffee enemas… That’s all we’ll say about that right here. For books mentioned and additional resources, go to http://daily.barbellshrugged.com/episode-272-biohacking-dave-asprey

Yeah, just trying to will change is such a bad strategy. Your body really doesn't listen to you. It only listens to how your heart beats, for the most part. Yeah. And it'll pick up magnetic cues that you send it, but your body's really fast and really stupid. So it listens to the environment. Since now we have control of our environment

in ways that are unprecedented in all of human history, what if we just change that because it's less work? That's what hackers do. Like, we're intrinsically lazy. Like, what's the shortest path to getting the results we want? Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Bledsoe here with Doug Larson and Andy Galpin. And we got Dave Asprey, bulletproof here. So a real pleasure.

We just learned something new about him, but it will go unsaid. That's right. How did you get started? How did you come up with the idea of the Bulletproof thing? I think the branding overall is amazing. Oh, thank you. Because Bulletproof is something that everybody wants to be, right? Well, a lot of people were warning me. I hired the lady who did Starbucks' first logo and Microsoft's, like, the original branding. And she was like, you have to change the name.

It's too violent. I'm like, it's not violent. It's actually about resilience, right? Right. And, like, when you think of bulletproof, you can either go down the military side or just like Superman. Like Superman's actually bulletproof. And that's the vibe I was going for. I want to be able to handle anything the world brings at me. There's a time in my life when I weighed 300 pounds.

I'm super successful in my career, but I can barely handle this. My brain is turning to mush, and I'm exercising all the time. I'm not getting results. I'm eating what's supposed to work, and it's not working. What were the things you were doing back then? So to work and like, it's not working. What were the things you were doing back then? So you were 300 pounds and you were exercising. Oh yeah. I mean, you know, you're fat. So I'm like, you don't even need a scale. It's like, there's a mirror. So I started having knee problems and in my early twenties, I ended up having three knee surgeries.

And after the second knee surgery, I'm like, never again. Like, I know I've gained some weight in college here, but I'm just going to go every day. I don't care if I'm sick. I don't care if I didn't sleep. I'm going to work out every day. I did 45 minutes of treadmill because my knees were already kind of shot from 13 years of soccer. I would do an incline with a backpack, a 15 degree incline. So reasonable.

Plus 45 minutes of weights. And I did six days a week and after 18 months of this i'm like all right i'm so strong i can bench press all my thin friends while they eat cheeseburgers i'm eating like salads and crap and then i was like i'm gonna do something risky for my knee because i'm still like recovering i have these like huge quads i'm like all right i know i'm strong and i played laser tag and i squat twist and blow my acl oh it wasn't even like you know a horseback incident or something a laser tag, and I squat, twist, and blow my ACL. It wasn't even like a horseback incident or something. It was laser tag of all the stupid things.

And I just felt so disheartened, and that was one of the things where I'm like, it's not working. It was supposed to work, and it didn't, and I was really disheartened by that. Yeah. How long have you guys been going? Because Bulletproof came up on my radar several, several years ago, and it looks like there's been quite the transformation over time. Like it started off with like, I'm going to put butter in my coffee,

to something that seems like a lot more now. It started out with maybe 15 years at the time, I'd been running an anti-aging nonprofit research group. So I'd been interviewing top experts for a very 25-year-old nonprofit now that's two minutes from Google's headquarters. And so I got to know all this stuff, and I applied it to myself, and I got a lot stronger. And I'm like, if someone had told me this when I was 16 or 20 or 25, it would have radically changed my life. So I've got a job. I'm a VP at a big tech company. I've got stock options and a quarter million dollar salary.

And I'm not looking to start a company, but I'm like, if someone had just told me this, it would have mattered. So I started the blog saying, I'm just going to share knowledge in a way that I would have been able to absorb before I became a biohacker. And if five people read it,

and they can avoid what I went through, it's totally like a karma point I went through, it's totally like a karma point win. It's just an act of goodness. And after 15 years of running an anti-aging nonprofit, I was like, this just isn't effective. No one does it until they're old. What if you started early? And that was the motivation for it. I wasn't planning to start a company at all. I didn't do an email list. I didn't do anything. I just started writing about what worked. The biohacking thing is interesting to me from a marketing perspective, because a lot of times the advice that you might be giving as a health expert are being adopted by

people who are older, right? Like a lot of like the health space, if you want to make money, you got to go after older clientele. I find the biohacking with just that whole, using that word has really allowed like a lot of young entrepreneurs to adopt these early and i find that very carefully because i wouldn't have listened when i was 25 but i would listen to what i say now it's by design and the amount of money you save by being an anti-aging person when you're 20 versus 60 oh my god like you have all the control when you're young and you lose it every year as you get older.

So the only people who care about health is when you start to lose it. You're like, oh, I better pay attention. But what if you just didn't care about health because you're too busy getting drunk and getting laid? That's the problem. That's when you need to hit it. Yeah. What I like about the approach is the optimization.

Because most 25-year-olds, even if they're following bulletproof protocols, I don't think they're actually still – I still don't think they care about their health. No. I think they're like, oh, how do I outperform my colleagues? How do I outperform the competition in another company or something like that? The only 25-year-olds who care about their health are the ones who didn't have it. Like, oh, I have Crohn's disease. Or in my case, I lived in a house with toxic mold. So they diagnosed me with fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, toxic mold, Lyme disease, high risk for stroke and heart attack, prediabetes, just all this. Oh, and

arthritis since I was 14. Like I started to care about health when I saw the lab data that they're like, you're going to die like you're old. I'm like, I'm not even 30. Like what's going on here? And that was when at just a certain point, you're like, wait, no matter what I do, uh, uh, it, it has to actually work. It can't be something that's just supposed to work. Yeah. What were you actually eating and moving like back then? Were you on like the classic, like all I eat is cheeseburgers. I go to fast food. I drink Cokes all day long. When I was a teenager. Yeah. I mean, we tried to be healthy. We used to squeeze margarine because it was better than butter good god and you know bran muffins remember those days and hey carbs are carbs are for energy and i was a long distance cyclist when i was a teenager like

i lived in albuquerque new mexico and you know high altitude i'd cycle all all the time i was a road biker i had a mountain bike like the first couple years they even came out and i've watched breaking bad i'm like yeah i rode my bike there i rode my bike there. I rode my bike there. Like, and it's, so I wasn't inactive. I played soccer for 13 years till my knees gave out and I didn't eat well as a teenager, but it wasn't because we weren't trying. It's because we didn't know any better because we were giving bad info. And then as I got more serious about this, when I was working out that crazy schedule, I was doing like 1800 calories a day. I was doing low fat lots of beans uh got relatively high protein and just not getting the results and it's because i was doing low fat and way too many

carbs yeah what caused you to see the change well so i went to high school in a in a farming town right where like if you're really cool you played football and you were in 4-H. Which, for people who don't know what 4-H is, that's like, I don't know, it stands for like horses. My wife was in 4-H. She's told me all about it. Yeah. It's amazing. She shows rabbits.

Yeah. She was like, oh, yeah, you cover their eyes and then, like, you show them things. Right. You cover their eyes and you eat them. Whack. So, no one in my high school was into bodybuilding. In fact, if you looked at a bodybuilding magazine, you clearly had an interest in looking at guys in bikinis,

and they'd probably beat you up after school. So I'm at a coffee shop, and there's this magazine there, and it's like sugar makes you fat. This was like midnight. This was pretty early stuff. I'm like, really? Like, I got to look at this. And it was how to makes you fat. And this was like midnight. It was pretty early stuff. I'm like, really? Like I got to look at this. And it was how to get a six pack.

I'm like, I got like a six flab going on here. So I read this thing and I accidentally cut gluten out of my diet. And I wasn't even very good at being low carb back then. This was maybe 93. And I did lose 50 pounds in three months. And more importantly, my personality changed. I became more aware, like more awake, more alert. So it was the cognitive difference.

I'm like, oh, wait, this is cool. And pretty soon I started taking smart drugs, which really turned my brain on enough to, like, let me pay attention to what was going on in the rest of my body. What year was the smart drugs? Or around it? I started taking those in, I'm guessing, 96. When I ordered these things, it was like Google, I don't think, was around yet. But I was the first guy to do e-commerce over the Internet. The first product sold over the Internet was a caffeine T-shirt out of my dorm room before we had the name e-commerce. And so I knew how to search.

And I found this thing called Smart Drug News. And I'm actually good friends with the creator of this now, who an author one of the books on smart drugs named steve folks and it just got to be one of those things where i ordered a thousand dollars worth of smart drugs from europe and they came and i was excited and i took them took all of them of course a lot of people right now are probably wondering what smart drugs you're talking about well at the time this was uh paracetam, hydrogene, vasopressin, lucidryl, and some other things like that, mostly pharmaceuticals. And a lot's changed in the last 20 years in the nootropics industry. I mean, I make some nootropics, like the natural side, not the pharmaceutical side. And I was like, I'm not seeing a difference from some of these.

And other ones, I would see a huge difference. And I realized when you take them, you feel more like yourself. So then you're like, oh, nothing's happening. And then as soon as you take them away, you're like, oh, I don't like feeling this way. This is how I used to feel. So I did get a huge boost in just my energy levels so I could then go and take control of what was really going on here. And it was pretty complex. Yeah.

How has the nootropics, I mean, you said smart drugs, but nootropics, is there a difference between smart drugs and nootropics in your mind? Yeah, nootropics is a broader class that encompasses the natural side of things. So, like, what are Mother Nature's original nootropics? It would be caffeine and nicotine, right? So those are natural. Well, nicotine has gotten a bad rap due to the cigarette industry or tobacco industry burning stuff and breathing it is bad for you but nicotine by itself

if you don't have cancer is really good for you if you have cancer you you shouldn't use nicotine well it's not that much different from caffeine is my understanding well pharma pharmaceutically different receptors in the brain but in terms of what it does it's actually stronger it's the best studied smart drug of all it it is mildly addictive if it's just nicotine but if you pair it with like sucking on things and all the all the social cues that are carefully built in to smoking it's bad news like smoking just everyone listening smoking is bad never smoke but if you occasionally use like a micro dose of nicotine you will perform better for a short period of time yeah we talked about this just last week.

We were talking about if we were to make a supplement, what would be some good things? And I was like, nicotine? Yeah. But you can't put nicotine in a supplement because it's got a bad rap. Well, it's considered a pharmaceutical, which is ridiculous. It's not. I have 1,000-year-old tobacco growing in my garden, and I actually don't smoke it, but I use it to kill bugs. Yeah. and I actually don't smoke it, but I use it to kill bugs. What's some of the biggest mistakes or misunderstandings you see people make with the nootropics

or any of the other stuff, the hacking? Well, a lot of the time, it's the same mistake I made, where I'm like, oh, I didn't recognize that the mind is the last thing after the body. So I started being a computer engineering guy. Like, I'll fix the brain. I'll take the smart drugs. And it was a good decision for me. But if I would have just like looked at the lowest level in the body, mitochondrial function, I'd gotten my food dialed in, figured out the things that were making me weak and stopped doing things that made me weak. I would have needed a lot less smart drugs. Right. So it's like, it's like, you know, I got a car,

it's not running very well. I'm going to repaint it. You know, like maybe you should have looked a little deeper and change the oil. People, people start from different things, you know, I got a car. It's not running very well. I'm going to repaint it. You know, like maybe you should have looked a little deeper and changed the oil. People start from different things, you know. Like sometimes people – some people think about – they find meditation and they're like, oh, I really resonate with this. But some people, you know, would much rather run a 5K. And it seems like there's all these different access points. Right. all these different access points. And after you've gone down the path far enough, you go, oh, this path might have been a little bit more healthy and a little bit faster,

knowing what I know now. But everyone seems to have different interests. So they have to access at different points. That's one of the reasons that I created the term biohacking. Like the definition, when I first wrote it, I didn't trademark the term. I talked to an attorney. I could have, but I'm like, no, I want a community name for what we do because it's not health. It's not anti-aging. It's not bodybuilding. It's not sports medicine, but it's got flavors of all of those things in it. But the deal is people want different outcomes. So the definition was,

it's the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so they have full control of your biology. But I don't say what you're going to do with it. So you want to get swole? Cool. You want to be really strong but lean? Cool. You want to have enough energy to play with your kids after a long day of work? Cool.

You want to live 180 plus, which is my current goal? Fine. But it's totally different, right? You want to grow a third pancreas or whatever. Most people don't even have two. fine but it's totally different right you want to like grow a third pancreas or whatever most people don't even have two but i think uh i think biohacking and just the word hacking in general has gotten a negative connotation and that people are trying to skip steps like like you're cheating or something well i did that really on purpose i am a computer hacker by training and especially

back in the day hack was like illegal and that's part of why it's attractive. Like seriously, who wants to suffer? Like who wants to take the long road? I'll tell you, hurry, meditate faster. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that. But like, that's a good thing. And that's why I do neurofeedback. That's why I opened like a neurofeedback training center

for executives, like super high in stuff with custom hardware and software. Yeah, I get to use that stuff on myself. Do I get a huge benefit from that? Yeah. And do I have time to go do Vipassana for 10 days out of every month to become a better human being? Actually, I don't. I have little kids.

I'd like to see them. It's a tradeoff. And I could shut down my company and go sit in a cave for 20 years. But screw that noise. Seriously, I can do better. Yeah, I think the biohacking thing, what you're saying is like setting up your environment to be conducive to the change you want to make i think a lot of times people try to create change without actually changing the structures around them yeah just trying to will change is such a bad strategy

your body really doesn't listen to you it only listens to the how your heart beats for the most part yeah and it'll pick up magnetic cues that you send it but your body's really fast and really really doesn't listen to you. It only listens to how your heart beats for the most part. Yeah. And it'll pick up magnetic cues that you send it, but your body's really fast and really stupid. So it listens to the environment. Since now we have control of our environment in ways that are unprecedented in all of human history, what if we just change that because it's less work? That's what hackers do. We're intrinsically lazy. What's the shortest path to getting the results we want? And if the results we want include not a high risk of side effects those are part of the plan for the hacker nice all right so you we start talking about meditation there just for a minute and i am actually very interested in

was it is it seven days of zen it's called 40 years of 40 years of zen and it's in seven days or something it's in five days shit you are not even all the numbers all the numbers wrong all i know is you get a lot of zen in a short period of time. It's a little more than that. Of course there is. You just put them in a box. That's it. I feel dirty.

Wow. So it's in an executive mansion. It was a 7,000 square foot thing. It looks like Xavier's School for the Gifted. You pull it through the gates. There's a chef. I already got to go. There's a chef on site everything's grass-fed actually some of my family raises some of the meat there which is kind of cool nice and very carefully crafted supplements

and menu designed for mitochondrial function because i found you can get between two and three times more training in a day before you hit the wall like there's a point of neurological exhaustion where you're like, I cannot do this anymore. And if you only have five days, we're going to make every minute count. You spend three days erasing all of the automated responses to things that aren't dangerous that your body thinks are dangerous. All those happen to you when you're young.

Everyone has them. We've had billionaires come through and very, very successful people. We're wired this way when we're really young for no good rational reason. And then you spend energy for the rest of your life consciously managing impulses. Well, what if you just delete the impulses that don't serve you? That's what you're doing.

And it's a combination of meditation, personal development with the feedback. And we had to develop new protocols and actually new gear to do this because it's very different than the normal neuroscience stuff. It's applied neuroscience. And then we have the last two days where you tell you tell your body how you want

it to see the world so instead of the glass being half full or coming into a room and looking for threats you can come in and be like wow everywhere i go there's opportunities and you actually will find them that way yeah and then we increase voltage in the brain and we increase neuron firing speed like these are straight-up performance tuning. You take your BMW to dine-in, take your car to the race tuning shop. That's what we're doing for the brain. And we're using five different technologies stacked on top of each other all at the same time to do it. And holy crap, it's changed my life.

I couldn't do what I'm doing, especially with like – you're with me now. I'm pretty chill, right? Yeah. I landed at midnight last night, and I've been like on stage twice, and I'm getting on an airplane after this, but I'm happy. Like I'm relaxed. Yeah. I couldn't do this before.

I was like an angry guy. I was like succeeding because I was afraid of failing. Yeah. A lot of people operate that way, but it's not sustainable. It'll kill you. It almost killed me. Yeah. You talked about mitochondria a second ago most

people don't realize how unique that is the fact that it has its own separate dna from us so yeah can you talk about some of the maybe the things you're doing that are supporting that or what the real basic function of that is actually i gotta plug my new book oh headstrong oh no i've got the little i'm trying to channel vanna white here so i just this just hit the new york times about three weeks ago which i was amazed by nice and this is a book about what mitochondria do it turns out there's a quadrillion of these ancient bacteria that we like to say we harnessed two billion years ago right the real story is that two billion years ago they moved right in and took over

and they're still running things today that's the reason why we moved from a single cell to a multi-cell organism, right? Yeah, right. What do bacteria do? Let's see. If you're a bacteria, there's only four things you have to do. Run away from, hide from, or kill scary things. Eat everything. And then fuck everything else.

You guys cool with FOMs? I didn't ask ahead of time. No, you're great. We do. Good deal. The audience will be fine. No. I try to work them in. Strategically. at least 20 times a show good deal okay well then

i'm totally legit so those are the three the three big f words fear feed and fuck and the fourth thing that bacteria do if they do those first three is friend they form communities they form complex biofilms i hate to tell you like we're all walking around as biofilms today so if you just imagine what have you ever done that you're ashamed of that is not me first three well i'm not so sure you might be a cyborg we're all on our way to that yeah exactly but everything i've ever done that i'm ashamed of is a mitochondrial driver you get a quadrillion of these guys making decisions. They sense the environment like probably at least two hundredths of a second before you are aware of the environment. So we think we're doing all this stuff. They're

doing it and they're filtering it for us through their danger filters. And one of their biggest danger filters is lack of fuel. So when you show them that the environment is just perfect for them to just explode with energy and you give them the right fuel you have more willpower you have more energy and your body will self-regulate in a way that's unbelievable and that's why i wrote headstrong but the the fact that all of our anxiety all the things that hold us back the fears it's an emergent behavior from bacteria so you're not you're responsible for owning that and training it. You're responsible for what you do. But those impulses, it's a separate consciousness from you. And that kind of lets you off the hook.

And you're like, oh, shut the hell up, bastards. Versus I'm a bad person because I had an impulse that I didn't like. It's really different. I don't have any impulses I don't like. Why were you humping my leg? I'm not ashamed of it one bit. No shame. That's the difference.

You may be judging my, you know, impulses and desires, but I don't. Leg humpery. There's got to be a domain name for that somewhere. I'm sure. Hashtag that. Let's take a break. When we come back, I want to talk about the next thing. I'm probably going to stick up my ass that you Recommend all right

Hey everybody Marcus kersey co-host of the barbell business podcast You're a gym owner who's looking to fix build or just take your gym from good to great Tune in every Tuesday to the barbell business podcast You can find us on itunes and anywhere else you can download a podcast or you can watch the video version on YouTube on the barbell shrugugged channel. Tune in to find Doug, myself and Mike Bledsoe talking about the latest tips and tricks to take your business to the next level. We'll see you Tuesday. And we're back with Dave Asprey. You want some nicotine? Are you the reason I put coffee up my ass a few months ago? That just might be for personal pleasure and preference. Yeah, absolutely.

It was actually not nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. One of the things a lot of people should know is you have to cool the coffee off first. I made sure to do that. This was one of those experiments that I did. There's a lot of experiments where I'm just like, yeah, whatever. This is not one of them. I read the directions on many different websites. I've tried it a couple times.

By the way, you don't need butter and brain octane in there. You want to use low-toxic beans. But the science is not very strong to support coffee enemas. I wish it was because it has the glutathione release in the liver. I know people feel good, but I think it might just be the caffeine that makes them feel good. Likely. By the way, what did you just pull out of your pocket? I was going to say, do you want some nicotine?

This is a microdose nicotine spray. It's one milligram. Let's do it. Under the way, what did you just pull out of your pocket? I was going to say, do you want some nicotine? This is a microdose nicotine spray. It's one milligram. No way. Under the tongue. For everybody. Hug it up. I'm good. I don't do well on nicotine with an empty stomach.

It makes me feel awful. You're smart. By the way, I just like to use peer pressure with nicotine because it makes people really mad. Bring it around. For the record, that's LSD. It was the wrong one. Sorry. Whoops.

We're officially in a close to record-breaking cocktail in my body right now. It's really bright out here also. This is the most effective form I could find. It has the least nasty artificial sweeteners. You feeling that? Yeah. I use this before I go on stage. It is

a potent smart drug and it's possible to get addicted to it but none of the downside of smoking and you can buy it on Amazon. It's made by Nicorette but it's not approved in the US. It's approved in Canada and Europe. You rebel. So this form factor Nice. It's better than gum

You can actually get some in Canada. We can't get here. It's shocking. Yeah. Canada is an e-commerce wasteland, unfortunately. Yeah. I have some friends that try to sell stuff, and Canada is like one of the last places they get to do it.

Even if you try and ship it over the border at like half time, they just take it. What just happened? I live there, and I try to order stuff. I once ordered a pair of underwear, and it was $52 in customs fees. I'm like, guys, come on, that's a little a lot. Is there anything that you've experimented with that you've liked and then

now all of a sudden you're like, actually, I don't do that anymore or that actually didn't turn around? Anything you changed your mind on? Sure. I was a raw vegan for a while. I mean, like a real, I had, you know, blenders and giant salad bowls. Did you hate people that eat meat too no i we weren't a real vegan then no i started to develop the vegan angst and anger no i'm kidding

and so that was one side of it and and when your body isn't getting something it needs you do tend to develop anger but during the bulletproof diet research i'm like i'm gonna try and do this this sort of eskimo thing so for three months i ate one serving of broccoli a day or less like zero carbs tons of fat and a pretty good amount of meat and i was definitely in heavy ketosis i got to the point where i was waking up 12 times a night without knowing it i woke up feeling like a zombie no matter how much i slept and i gave myself food allergies i'm i'd say 70% done with like really annoying ones my thyroid got worse and like it messed me up and so the only people who are as angry as the radical vegans are the radical keto guys right and I'm like I make exogenous ketone

products like I'm one of the guys who really has pushed the keto diet I'm like like, guys, it's okay to go out of ketosis and come back in. The body likes to cycle in and out. So I piss off the hardcore sugar and carbs are bad forever people, and I piss off the vegan people. But here's the deal. I want to feel good all the time. I want people to feel good all the time. And I know people like Jimmy Moore is a good friend, total gentleman.

And he will probably be in ketosis for the rest of his life because it works for him. And I'm all over that. Right. But for me, man, I would love to just be like, I just, you know, drink a bowl of coffee all the time. It's all I ever need. But man, I didn't do well in pure ketosis for long periods of time with that interruption. And I find for women, it oftentimes doesn't work. But I also have interviewed women who've like for eight months, I've been in ketosis and my life is better so yeah we're individual but those are the two things we're like i love ketosis i love eating shit tons of vegetables but i don't have to do only one of those things right so that that seems that seems slightly counter to what i've heard a lot of people say where where women tend to do better on on lower carb i've heard that a lot of people say that but then on the other hand you just said that a lot of women don't do

well with keto specifically can you go to detail? So low carb is one thing. Women do poorly on sugar. Like sugar is really bad for women. But if they go into pure high fat, low carb, you know, under 20 grams of carbs a day, they'll feel amazing for a little while. But after a month of that, I hear this over and over from clients, my sleep isn't so good anymore. Like my monthly cycle is all jacked up. Or I lost my monthly cycle. That's a pretty good sign something's not right if you're not fertile anymore.

And then they tend to get adrenal stress and thyroid stress and things like that. Not all of them, though. There are women who are like, but it worked really well for me. So you have to test what works. But when I'm working on a book that's sold a half a million copies in 10 languages, I'm not going to tell everyone to be in ketosis all the time. And I'm not going to tell everyone to eat only vegetables all the time, but I'll tell you, cover your plate in vegetables and do whatever it takes to get in ketosis some of the time. Yeah. And for most people, that's the recipe for better performance and feeling better. And could

you tune it and tweak it for your biology from there? Hell yeah, you could. But both of those extremes for me had downsides either that i felt or that i saw with enough followers that i'm like you know i i'm going to speak the truth even if i anger people like could you give a very general recommendation for how often that should be so should that be once a month or it depends on how easily and how fat adapted you are how easily you get into ketosis right so if you've never done it before you might want to be in ketosis for a whole month. Right. Right?

But that's totally good. It's like, well, I finally got it. I can pee on a stick and it finally turns pink. And I learned I can't eat too much protein. And like, there's a game to play there. So that makes it easy. The other thing is, and we're talking about people who maybe aren't going to the gym every day, but a broad swath of the population, having just 0.5 on your blood ketones is a very different life than being at zero

or being at 1.0 or something where, like, well, now you're in real ketosis. And it turns out with Bulletproof Coffee, when you use Brain Octane, Brain Octane raises ketones above 0.5 for most people. Is this different than I've always been curious about the brain octane or a lot of MCT oil versus just coconut oil? Oh, there's a huge difference. It turns out that there's four different lengths of fat that are allowed to be called MCT. And there's something called Lyre's MCT, lauric acid.

It's 50% of what's in coconut oil. It's so abundant that we use it for fracking. Like they're injecting it into the ground. And we use it for soap. Like it is a commodity product. That's why they put it in so many products because it's cheap. Was it antibacterial? It's antibacterial, but monolaurin is antibacterial when it's processed with an enzyme.

That's a different substance. So lauric acid in small amounts is good for you. In high amounts, it actually increases your risk of getting multiple sclerosis, which is why if you're eating two pounds of coconut oil a day, it escorts... I'm freaking out now. How much is too much coconut oil? I might need to dial it back. There's actually some really good research. If you're on a very high fat diet without enough vegetables, without enough fiber, it escorts lipopolysaccharides, these bacterial toxins across the gut, causes liver inflammation, causes mitochondrial slowness, causes inflammation

throughout the body. This is certainly something I was dealing with in the different experiments that I was doing. So masses of vegetables or a fiber supplement can turn into propionic acid and it just so happens that brain octane, but not lauric acid, which is legal to call an MCT. That's why the MCT company is selling generic MCT, that's why they put lauric acid in there, because either they don't know or they don't care. Either one is a failure to serve their customers. So it's almost like a filler product? Yeah, but they're allowed to say it's active.

It acts like a long-chain fat, not a medium-chain fat. And it turns out of the three true biological MCTs, brain octane raises ketones four times more than the other ones. So that's why it takes about between 10 and 18 pounds of coconut oil to make one brain octane, but it takes two pounds of coconut oil to make MCT oil. Is it beneficial to introduce this brain octane in an environment in your body if you're not fat adapted? Absolutely. You can pour it on your ice cream sundae and your ketone levels will go up. And what that does right away is like, oh, when my ketone levels go up, two things, if you get to 0.5, actually 0.38 is all it takes for one of them. But there's two

hormones that are transformative. One of them is called ghrelin. This is a hormone that makes you hungry, right? So you have this craving all the time well you just you kill it right nutritional ketosis will do this but it takes three or four days like okay i'm done with my cravings now i feel great or you could just put it in your coffee put in your smoothie put it in your kale smoothie if you want even though i will tell you there's reasons not to do a kale smoothie but when you when you do that that sets you free and the other hormone is called cck and it's a coli's a – this is the hardest one to say. Cholestokinin. Thank you.

Cholestokinin. There's a syllable in the middle I always get wrong. Both these guys know really big words, so you can always lean on them. I appreciate that. I was just – CCK brought to you by Calvin Klein. I'm done with that. But what that does is that's your satisfaction hormone. So if you just get your ketones up almost halfway to full nutritional ketosis, the cravings go away.

So now we're dealing with, say, women or guys like me when I was 300 pounds, cravings all the time. I didn't know there was anything between cravings and hunger. So all of a sudden you're like, oh, we can hack that. And then you make better choices at your next meal. Oh, I'll have more vegetables. I'm going to avoid the ice cream or the cookies or whatever it is. And that puts you on a path and now it's like okay I'm gonna try nutritional ketosis for real so that was one of the

most important hacks for me and literally I had I had some carbs for lunch I kind of feel shamed but so that's really important distinction the difference it's just your bacteria so Yeah, that's right. It's mitochondria. Not your fault. Mitochondrial shame. So that's a very key distinction between a craving and actual hunger. How would someone know if they're having a craving versus just simply being hungry? I used to end meetings. I was at this company.

We held Google's first servers and, like, the Facebook before they became big and all this. Oh, shit. And it was an amazing time. Yeah, it was cool. The infrastructure we know. And I had a pretty senior level in the company and someone said at 11.45 I said guys I'm sorry I'm ending the meeting early I have to go eat otherwise I'm going to kill one of you

and eat your arm that's a craving I'm like I can't function if I don't eat or there's a voice in your head that says eat this eat this you know that happened to me last time I was at your restaurant. Yeah?

The ice cream. Eat me, eat me, eat me, eat me. Oh, yeah. That might be just because it's good stuff. Actually, I wouldn't mind touching on that. So, yeah, we went to the Bulletproof restaurant. Actually, what's the actual name of it? We call it the Bulletproof Coffee Shop, but it's a full restaurant.

We're in Santa Monica or wherever it's at. All right, craving versus hunger. Oh, yeah. We're really good at derailing people. That's not a bad derail. I've seen worse. The hunger thing, you're like, you know, it's getting to be time to eat. I could eat.

But if I don't eat for another four hours, I'll be fine. That's my state of being. And it's so cool. You're on an airplane. And like, do you want to eat the airplane? I don't even know what to call it food right and the answer is no but it's not like oh i'm gonna say no i'm a good person maybe i'll just have one chip like it's just it's it's a question of degree and can i wait and if you can't wait and it's got all of your attention it's a craving and it's your biology it's your mitochondria going we are going to die if you don't eat and

that means that you didn't do something right for them. Yeah. I was on the plane on the way here, and it was interesting. I was watching everyone. I always turn down the pretzels and whatever, and it's like the flight attendants are always shocked. And the people next to me are shocked. But I was watching this last time. I was sitting in the back, and they're handing it and i go it's like it's like animals yes it's like people couldn't

get the pretzels in their hand fast enough i was sitting there just fascinated i was i was so mad i was sitting in the back no i don't get angry but it was it it was interesting to have that perspective i was just kind of watching the whole thing go down it's like feeding the fish like throwing throwing the food in the water and all the fish are coming up from just like. Yeah, we were at the zoo, you know, is what it felt like. And the animals were getting fed. Oh, it's just a bunch of fucking animals. For a two cent bag of peanuts.

Yeah, right. And it's like the lowest quality stuff you could put in your body. And if you're going to eat on the airplane, plan ahead and bring a bar with you. It's not that hard to do, right? And generally fasting when you fly is going to make you live longer because flying is bad for you. And if you have some ketones present, they protect you from ionizing. I did it this last time.

I did it. I did it. One flight, but I – It was a 25-minute flight. I tested his resilience by building my own ridiculous burger and then eating it right in front of him right before we got on the plane. I was eating like a real burger at the airport, mike was just like i was like i'm still fasting i'm fasting i'm gonna fast motherfucker all right so uh yeah we we did visit your cafe nice and we

did uh have i think we had everything on the menu we did like the people behind the counter were laughing and my buddy uh tj he was like you, he was like, you gotta get the ice cream. You gotta get the ice cream. The ice cream's legit. Yeah, it was good. So the ice cream came from my first book. A lot of people don't even know it. My very first book was on fertility. It's called The Better Baby Book. And Wiley published it. There's five years of research,

1,300 references. My wife was infertile when I met her, and I wanted to turn her fertility back on. She's a medical doctor. You made her fertile? I made her fertile, wanted to turn her fertility back on. She's a medical doctor. You've, you made her fertile. I made her fertile. I knocked her up. Wow. At least I think it was,

you just, this guy's a long term thinker. You're more of a man than anyone I've ever met before. It's amazing. It was so many bad things. I just left it right there. Yeah. She's not listening.

I'm sorry, Lana. I love you, baby. So that book though, things i want to say right there i just left it right there yeah i'm sorry lana i love you baby so that book though really taught me a lot about like what do you have to do and and one of the problems is getting enough quality fat it's not just fat and this is the problem with atkins and a lot of the early keto diets like artificial sweeteners okay corn oil okay as long as it's not sugar just shove it in there and then

you lose half the weight and the other half sticks with you because it's all inflammation weight and what i was doing on that was okay to restore cell membrane integrity it takes two to three years actually about three years to replace the cell membranes at least 75 of them so i'm just like how do i get enough fat into my wife? And I made this ice cream. Not a lot of people say that. I was just leaving that right there. This guy's on another level. Boy, the 13-year-old boy in me right now is struggling. Teach me.

Or Tong. I can help. So the recipe, it's called Get Some Ice Cream. It's on the website. And it's called Get Some Ice Cream because an hour after you eat it, it's got everything that the body needs in order to make a healthy baby. So the body's like, oh, I got the ingredients. Let's go make a baby.

And you literally feel an urge to go to the bedroom an hour after you have this ice cream. It's got nine raw egg yolks. You just sold a lot of ice cream by that comment. I'm connecting a lot of dots right now. It's an interesting day. If it's a first date, you could use vodka or get some ice cream. I'm telling you, get some ice cream works better than vodka. That must have been an interesting two-hour drive back to San Diego for you two.

We're all just pent up in the car, just like, God damn it, get me home. Stupid L.A. traffic. I ate that, and then I drank a Sprig. So I'll let you guys figure out what Sprig is. Use the Googles. All right. We do have to wrap. All right.

What do you want to plug? Where do people find you? So head on over to Bulletproof.com. I've got the Brain Octane Oil, a bunch of other things like Keto Prime, some other very high-quality fats, nootropics. And my new book, Headstrong, is totally worth a read. It's got stuff in there that isn't it isn't anywhere else it talks about like very specific things you can do in two weeks to make your brain work better

and your biology works better at the same time and this is different than the bulletproof diet it's got huge reviews and the guys on the back daniel amon david perlmutter steven masley peter diamandis like there's huge names you know who've read this and like okay there's there's science here like like so I, I'm, I'm pleased with the book. It takes, I don't know, 4,000 hours to write a book and four hours to read it. So it's like the most dense knowledge that I know how to produce. So I would say it's worth the time to read. Right on. I'm a, I'm a big audio book guys where I have my headphones everywhere I go. Is that on audible as well? It is on audible. I read the first chapter and then

I had someone better than me do the rest of the reading it is audible and it's i i mean the bulletproof diet stands as a really really good book but if you care about your brain uh there's so much new research in here i'm i was blown away it it changed me i mean i'm a lot more muscular for the first time in 20 years i am not on thyroid medication i had hashimoto's i cured it with the whole bulletproof approach but then this is just another level where like my body's working better i'm getting younger and it comes from mitochondrial activity excellent thanks for joining us it's been great pleasure yeah thanks dave