Dhru Purohit Show - The Lucky Charms Vs. Steak Controversy, Toxic Super Foods, Better Fibers, Fasting Tips And Why Minerals Matter With Dave Asprey

Episode Date: February 9, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth, InsideTracker, and LMNT. Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with Dave Asprey, the “Father of Biohacking,” to discuss optimizing your biology in a way that’s sustainable, smart, and personalized to your uniqueness. Dave Asprey is an acclaimed entrepreneur, four-time New York Times bestselling science author, host of the top-100 podcast The Human Upgrade, and CEO of Upgrade Labs. Today, Dave is focused on upgrading humanity through Upgrade Labs, the first biohacking facilities, and is proud to launch his latest book Smarter, Not Harder: The Biohacker's Guide to Getting the Body and Mind You Want, available everywhere books are sold February 28, 2023. In this episode, Dhru and Dave Asprey dive into: -Why the new nutrient-profiling system ranks Lucky Charms higher than beef (2:37) -How antinutrients in plant foods can cause nutrient deficiencies (13:00) -The type of fiber Dave supplements with and why (16:55) -How your “meat operating system” keeps you alive (23:00) -How thyroid hormone dysregulation can prevent weight loss (35:56) -The top foods Dave recommends to thrive (42:58) -The most toxic superfoods (47:36) -Dave’s thoughts about minerals and nutrient deficiencies (1:06:58) -The telltale signs that someone is deficient in essential minerals (1:10:35) Also mentioned in this episode: -Smarter, Not Harder (available for preorder) -The Human Upgrade Podcast Hype or Hope? Semaglutide Changes the Weight Game -Biohacking Conference 2023 -Dave’s coffee, Danger Coffee -The world’s first human upgrade center, Upgrade Labs For more on Dave Asprey, follow him on Instagram @dave.asprey, YouTube @DaveAspreyBPR, or his website, https://www.daveasprey.com Cozy Earth are the most comfortable, temperature regulating, and non-toxic sheets on the market. Right now, get 40% off your Cozy Earth sheets. Just head over to https://www.cozyearth.com and use code DHRU InsideTracker provides detailed nutrition and lifestyle guidance based on your individual needs. Right now, they’re offering my podcast community 20% off. Just go to https://www.insidetracker.com/DHRU to get your discount and try it out for yourself. Right now, LMNT is offering my listeners a free sample pack with any purchase, that’s eight single-serving packets FREE with any LMNT order. This is a great way to try all eight flavors or share LMNT with a salty friend. Get yours at https://www.drinkLMNT.com/DHRU. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When we're at full energy, we have the ability to fully think about and process something. But quite often we're not at full energy and we're distracted, so our brains take shortcuts. And the biggest shortcut is if something is good, do more of it. And if something is bad, do less of it. You are not lazy, but sometimes your body is. And if you understand how to take advantage of that, you can achieve your wildest health dreams. That's what our guest today believes. Welcome to the Drew Proet podcast.

Each week, we explore the inner workings of the brain and the brain. the body with one of the brightest minds and wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is Dave Asprey. And Dave has a new book out. It's called Smarter, Not Harder, the Biohacker's Guide to Getting the Body and Mind You Want. Today's interview, we cover a lot of topics with Dave, who's been on this podcast a bunch. We jump into the topic of toxic superfoods, foods that Dave thinks are not as healthy

as other people think. Now, I'll be honest, this is always a confusing topic for me, and I know it can often be a confusing topic for our listeners when a whole group of people say that a food is healthy, and then another person or another group of people will say that food is not healthy, it brings up a lot of questions, and Dave and I had a healthy back and forth where I pushed them a little bit and said, help us really understand why you see these foods as not as healthy. I don't know if toxic is the right word, but not as healthy. We also talk about fiber.

What are the best sources of fiber that Dave recommends? We talk about weight loss and Dave's approach to weight loss in his own life and why that might be different than a lot of the weight loss advice that's out there. And the idea that your body is a little lazy and that actually can be a good thing. You're not lazy, but your body is and we just need to know how to take advantage of it. So a little bit about Dave, if you don't know, he's a little bit about Dave. he's an acclaimed entrepreneur, a four-time New York Times bestselling science author, the host of a Top 100 podcast, the Human Upgrade Podcast,

and he's also the CEO of Upgrade Labs, which is a new business that he's launched. And he's also known as the father of biohacking, known as being the person that kind of came up with that word and put it out there into the lexicon. It's a fun back and forth. Dave also has a new coffee brand that's out called Danger Coffee. It's Coffee with Minerals.

is really pumped about it. So we talk about the power of minerals inside of there. And I think you'll enjoy this interview. So stay tuned for our episode with Dave Asprey. I want to jump right in and talk about something a little bit topical. Let's talk about Lucky Charms and why they are a healthier option than beef and steak. Well, Lucky Charms are sprayed with glyphosate, which is now an essential nutrient for the American diet. Yeah.

Because glyphosate is anti-backer. And so not only does it sterilize the soil, it can sterilize your gut to get rid of that pesky microbiome. And this is why Lucky Charms at the first level are really, really so much better for you than steak or eggs or things with nutrients on them. And on top of that, they add another layer of essential natural, I mean unnatural flavors and artificial flavors and colorings because there's now a recommended daily allowance, sponsored by Monsanto and Pfizer, I think, of special colorings that we all need to have.

because they're shown to interfere with our neurochemistry. And so if we have working neurochemistry and we lack these essential artificial things, we might be dangerous. I mean, who knows what we might do? We might wake up in the morning and do what we wanted to do instead of what we're told. This is why Lucky Charms are much better for you than real food. For those people who are following along and obviously hear the humor in it, but are like totally baffled why we start off with that.

Give us a little bit of context about why we're talking about Lucky Charms. Recently, the government came out with this incredibly broken system for rating food that's related to the food pyramid. It's not the same as it, but it does rank the food compass. It does rank Lucky Charms as higher than things like meat and eggs and even fruit. And it doesn't make any sense unless you were to design a food compass to get people to eat the cheapest, highest margin foods, which is what the food pyramid and the food compass are for. throughout history, we've known that people eating grains are not the strongest people. For instance, back when we had gladiators in ancient Rome, they were called barley men because they ate barley because that was the cheap food.

So the rich people eat the highest nutrient food and the poorest people eat the lowest nutrient food. And we have a government and we have large companies trying to convince everyone to eat the cheapest, lowest quality food that creates weak humans, but it's better than starving to death. I don't want to create that future for myself, for my kids, or for any of us. We must create a future where we acknowledge what foods make humans strong because strong humans are nice to each other and we're peaceful. And weak humans are always tired.

They might be peaceful because they're tired, but they're also angry and anxious all the time. I just don't want that. So let's find a way to identify the foods that make us strongest. and then make them available for everyone. There's plenty of technology to do that. There's plenty of ability to do that. There just isn't a willingness from a few mean people who keep buying up all of the farmland

and trying to convert it into chemical soaked, sterilized land. And we will stop that. You know, regarding the Food Compass thing, because I was digging into it a little bit, I went on the website, I'm kind of looking at some of their FAQs and everything like that. And their place that they're coming from

and some of the folks at Tufts who I think were involved in that original study, They're saying that whole wheat, any foods that are going to have whole wheat as a part of that, even if they have some added flavors, added sugars, whatever, is going to be a much healthier option based on epidemiological studies, right? And big picture of what we know, that big picture epidemiological studies say that a lot of saturated fat and a lot of too much protein. is correlated with all sorts of things, right? So I'm just bringing up in context, right? Just so everybody understands like what they're saying.

They also said that foods that do not contain whole wheat and are refined grains score lower than than meat. So that was kind of like their way of saying like, look, this is the first food system to like score, you know, refined grains lower than me. But let's start off with the first one, right? Let's talk about these epidemiological studies. and them showing the correlation with things like a lot of the plant foods that people are talking about in whole wheat, which is what the food compass is based on. I'd love you to talk about that. If you want to have a whole wheat fetish, I absolutely support your right to do that.

Just don't share it with me. Because epidemiology is the art of saying, I hope these two are related without actually finding out whether they are related. It's not causative. It's correlative. there's a famous study of pigeons where they rigged a random timer to drop food into a pigeon cage. And soon the pigeons started doing these complex dances because they became convinced that there was a correlation between the dropping of the food in their complex dancing. This actually happened.

Humans are not that different from pigeons. So when we look at epidemiology, there are all kinds of things that break. And one of the biggest ones is data collection. and the other one is things we didn't pay attention to. So until you understand how something works, which is really at the center of biohacking, let's identify an effect and then let's go deep until we figure out what it is so we can manipulate it.

We end up making big mistakes. Another example there, you say, well, I know that whole wheat's good for you. So therefore, here's a cyanide pill covered in whole wheat. It must be good for you because they ignore the downside and the harmful effects. Whole wheat and whole grains in particular, in addition to containing lectins that I wrote about, what, 12 years ago in my first big diet book, they also contain phytic acid, which is a big thing that I'm writing about in Smarter, not harder.

Phytic acid sucks minerals out of your body. It prevents you from having the minerals that you need in your bones and in your mitochondria, especially zinc. So if you eat a whole wheat diet, you are going to be mineral deficient. You'll have weak bones and you'll have a weak metabolism. So what I recommend people do is if you're going to eat flour, don't eat American flour because it's routinely sprayed with glyphosate that causes harm. You'd have to eat European flour where they don't do that.

And then you would throw away the more harmful outer parts of the whole wheat and you would eat the inner part as a source of carbohydrate, which you don't need that much of. So what you would do is you would take a big juicy grass-fed, grass-finished ribby, and you'd have a croissant with it made with real butter. And okay, there you go. but not a whole wheat croissant because they're fetishizing fiber. You can get fiber without the downside of phytic acid, without the downside of lectins, without the downside of gluten, without the downside of leaky gut that everyone gets from gluten.

Would I eat whole wheat during a famine to stay alive? Hell yeah. Is it an essential food for humans? No, it is not. It is just delicious. With the phytic acid, there's a whole section inside of the book. I really appreciated how you broke it down. Thank you.

Because I'm always paying attention. I'm trying to see where does the audience get confused when they're on social media and they're consuming a lot of different content. Oh, yeah. And recently there was a gentleman, Simon Hill, who's known as sort of like a PhD, not sort of, he has a PhD and he is very clear about his approach about plant-based eating. I think he was the guy that got Chris Hemsworth on a plant-based diet originally, right? He's from Australia, a former rugby fair.

Who didn't stand on it, did he? I don't think he stayed on it. No one can stay on this. I was a rough-based diet. loving in for a while, and man, it trashed me. Simon had a video where he was saying, yes, Phytate in the short term does strip minerals on a meal by meal basis. And again, this is not to challenge you or anything like that.

I'm asking on behalf of the audience. I'm interested. You can challenge me too. Maybe I'm wrong. This is cool. And he was saying that he was referencing these bigger meta-analysis showing that on a whole that the effect that fite has when eaten inside of a health. your diet where people are eating, including a lot of these foods that you were mentioning,

you know, that have lectins and other things, that it doesn't strip out the minerals. Now, obviously, I don't have the study in front of me. You know, we could pull up the social media clip and take a look at it. But I think that that's where sometimes people get a little bit confused from the zooming in and the zooming out. I'd like to see the study because where a lot of my knowledge about biohacking comes from is areas where you can't confuse it. It's not even from labs, although I read all the PubMed papers.

it's from animal husbandry. Because for the past, oh, 10 or so years, I've lived on and run and grown a regenerative agriculture farm. So I know about growing animals, and I read the studies of what ranchers do. And they measure the amount of phytate in food for chickens and cows when they're feeding them the industrial foods of corn and soy and grains that are full of phytic acid.

And they know the upper limits that can be in the food before they have to start adding phytase to the animals' diets. These are animals that make fidecatease. phytase in their stomachs so they can tolerate way more than humans who don't make meaningful amounts of phytase. Phytase stops phytic acid from stealing your minerals. So they know that they're getting reductions in fertility. They know that they're getting weak bones.

They know that they're getting health problems from feeding this from animals that are designed to eat it. And so we have Simon coming through and I haven't seen the study so I can't comment directly on it, but saying, oh, well, as long as you eat a healthy diet, we're back to the Lucky Charms Conference. Oh, it's part of a healthy diet with all this random crap that people don't eat. The bottom line is, why would you intentionally put this thing in that binds minerals? Because in epidemiology, without knowing why or even if, we believe that eating more whole wheat is correlated

with some kind of benefits from fiber. How about you do what I've recommended since my last big book, the fasting book, and even the one before that? You can take what I do, 40 to 60 grams of soluble fiber, also known as prebiotic fiber, without eating any grains. Oh my God, what would happen if you did that? well, the number of bacteria in your gut would go up by four times. That's what happened to me. And then you have all the benefits and none of the downside. Why do we want to punch ourselves in the face to get a benefit? The entire aggregate nutrient density index that food is marketed on is completely based on, let's ignore the downside.

In biohacking, first stop doing harmful things and then add good things. The epidemiology approach is, let's ignore all of that. If something is good, you should do more, regardless of the fact that it comes. comes with a big load of toxins. Let's not do that to ourselves anymore. We can do better and you feel better and you look better and you get younger and your brain starts to work and you're just not so tired all the time. It's totally worth getting rid of the toxins in wheat and then finding out why people live longer. And yes, I wrote a book about why and how people live longer to at least 180 is my goal. You mentioned fiber and the fiber you take. What is it and what's your frequency

of taking it and what's like the dosage? I take 40 to 60 grams. total in supplement form, in other words, as a powder. And you can add it to smoothies, you can add it to coffee. It doesn't really change flavor. And what's the source of the fiber? The source of the fiber is something that I made for the company I used to run called Bulletproof. And it's called Inner Fuel. And that product, when I formulated it, it had acacia gum, which is basically sap of a tree that's shown in lots of studies to be beneficial for your gut bacteria. It also has guar gum and locust gum, and the guar gum is hydrolyzed. It's pre-digested. All of these are shown in multiple studies to increase the populations of good bacteria in the gut. And there are also many studies

showing that increasing soluble fiber, it's less clear for insoluble fiber, but there's many studies showing an increase in longevity and a reduction of all cause mortality. So if you want to live a long time, you need to get this stuff, but taking it, oh, I got whole wheat pancakes to get it with a huge amount of other stuff that's not good for you. That's going to cause the leaky gut and the inflammation. And you're going to get glyphosate if you eat wheat in the U.S. almost all the time. So why would you do that? It's like focusing on this one good thing and ignoring all the bad things. And we're seeing this increasingly in food marketing and even in, you know, big industrialist marketing. They've got everyone looking at carbon dioxide levels, which is the least of our concerns

compared to atrazine. Because the level of atrazine allowed in your water. is three times the amount it takes to turn a frog from a boy into a girl. So we have like feminizing pollutants in our water that's a far more clear and present danger than increasing CO2. We might want to look at both of them. But let's pick the things that matter the most. And I will tell you, getting more fiber from whole wheat is not what matters the most. You can get the fiber in lots of different ways without all the bad stuff that's in whole wheat. All right. One more question for you. Apparently we're all going to be eating bugs in the future. Yeah. Not me. I'm going to be eating industrialists.

They're made out meat. I eat meat. If they made bugs taste good, do you think that that bugs could actually genuinely be a good source of protein for some people? There are products in the supermarket now. If you turn over the label and you look, there is bug flour in them. It's just not on the front of it. I've seen a few. Like cricket flour.

Yeah, but they don't tell you it's on the front. They're just, you know, chips and you look. These are the kind of products that would have soy protein in them. and they're saying, oh, we found a cheaper source because there's a belief, and it's a false belief. And I go into some detail in Smarter or Not Harder, that all proteins are the same. It's exactly the same belief that all calories are the same. At this point, most of your listeners already know different calories do different things to you. And so does different timing of those calories. Those are independent and important variables. Even if epidemiology doesn't know about it,

it's still real. So when it comes to proteins, there's a plant-based protein that, that's one of my favorites. It's sarin nerve gas. It was used in the Tokyo subway attacks, and it's one of the deadliest substances in no demand. It's extracted from jack beans. So do you want to be on a high protein diet? Maybe you should pick the protein, right? Same thing for animal proteins. Snake venom probably isn't very good for you, so you don't think you want to eat much of that unless you're in Taipei, maybe, and they're doing the snake venom smoothies. So that's a thing? It is a thing. I've been there. Yeah, they inject. Is it a hallucinogen? Like, why are they taking you? It's like a health tonic. You enjoy it.

eject from like a live snake, a cobra, then they squirt it into some kind of liquid that neutralizes the venom and it turns black and then you drink it. I did that years ago in the street market. It was pretty crazy. I wish I had pictures of that. And that said though, so we at this point anyone listening should go, oh wait, yeah, I guess different proteins do do different things. Collagen is different than soybeans. It just is. So they're saying, well, it's a cheaper source of protein. Well, what do the proteins do and what kinds of fat are in there? bugs first came on the market as a viable thing about eight years ago, I did the research on the type of fat that's in insects.

And unfortunately, you're getting lots of omega-6 fat and some unstable omega-3s. And none of the saturated fat that is the basis for your hormones and your brain on all of my recommendations. Just one question about that. Is that kind of like industrial chickens because they're being fed, like corn and soy and other stuff? Is it the food source? because obviously pasture race chickens, there's a little bit of a different dynamic.

Is it the food source or is it just bugs are inherently higher mega-6? That's an intriguing question. All of the studies that I found were probably looking at farmed bugs, not wild-caught bugs. So let's put it this way. If you're going to eat a bug burger, make sure that it's grass-fed and wild-cott. You have a new book out, Smarter, not Harder. It's a fantastic read. I sped read it over the past week.

Thank you. One of the core ideas inside of there is you're not lazy, but your body is. Talk to us about that and what do you mean by that? Okay. When I snap my fingers, you heard it right away, right? Yes. Okay. Except you didn't.

That's just your perception of it. Because when I go to 40 years as in my neuroscience company and we glue electrodes to your head, there's, for the average person, about a third of a second delay between when something happens, and when your brain gets the very first electrical sign that it even perceived it, much less you understood what it was. So that means that there's a third of a second to a half of a second, maybe lag time between reality and what you see, but the lag time is invisible to you, and it's invisible to me. It turns out that lag time is tunable. If you're young, say you're 18, you have about a quarter second instead of a third of a second. And if you've hacked your brain

the way I have, I still have a quarter second response time. But nonetheless, What the heck is going on here? Well, there's a system, a very elegant system designed to keep your meat alive. I call it in the book the meat operating system or meat OS, kind of like iOS, but even cooler. It does things. And it is designed to make sure that your meat stays alive even if you're not in there. In fact, it doesn't even like it that you're in there. It wants to be in charge of the meat.

Meanwhile, you want to be in charge of your meat. Remember that definition of biohacking at the very beginning? the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you, so you have full control. This is the ancient struggle against our egos. Why did I eat the whole plate of Cheetos? Because your operating system made you do it. And it's optimized to make sure you eat everything because there might be a famine and to not use any energy more than the minimum necessary because there might be a famine. Your body is freaked out because famines have destroyed most life forms of the last two billion years and were a life form. This is all happening in the third of a second.

Second, before your brain can engage, even if you're a superhuman. You just aren't a real-time system, not your consciousness. But the rest of your body is a real-time system, and it's making all these damn decisions for you. And then it comes up as an urge to Netflix instead of going to the gym. So what we've evolved over time is this complex system. It says, we're going to use this weird thing called willpower. And I published a couple studies in, I think, my brain book,

about how willpower is mitochondrally derived. Mitochondria are the power plants and environmental sensors in your cells. They're deciding what to do before you get a chance to think about it. And what they're telling you to do is chill, be lazy. And you could say, well, this sucks, except it's awesome, because all human innovation and progress comes from our desire to be lazy. It's a very precious thing. And using will power to overcome laziness,

you will always, always lose over time. The reason you lose over time is that the system that makes the energy that drives the willpower is the system you're using willpower against. So eventually it'll just turn off electrical flow to your willpower circuitry. And yes, that's a gross simplification. But this is why when you say, I have a New Year's resolution, how many people stick to it? This is why I say, I'm going to do this. And we build these crazy systems to overcome it.

Like, let's do BJ Fog's habit formation stuff. These are hacks to your operating system to get yourself to do stuff without it intervening and telling you not to do it. So here's the first hack from Smarter, not Harder. And it's based on the laziness principle. Okay. We can fight against our laziness and we can be ashamed and guilty of it. Or we can say, oh, that's a sacred part of our human existence. And having the ability to lay around and really,

relax and think and focus and create art and do the stuff that we really want to do, that's built into us. And the hack is pretty simple. You ever have your wife come home from a shopping trip and say, honey, I saved $400 on these high heels? Yeah. Well, how many times has she come home and said, honey, I spent $500 on these high heels that were on sale for $400 off? She doesn't wear high heels, but probably more often than not. Handbags, high heels. I mean what I'm talking about right all of us do this and by the way congrats on not wearing high heels yes they're bad for you but what's happening there is we will celebrate savings with way more emphasis than we celebrate expenditure of energy so I admire the

people who are out there going yeah I'm just gonna muscle it up and I'm just going to grit every single day it's just a very hard path what inspired me to write smarter not harder is that when I was younger and I weighed 300 pounds, I was so desperate to lose the weight and to just be healthy. So I said my top priority of anything is going to be, this is all willpower based, it's going to be going to the gym and eating less calories. I spent 702 hours going to the gym. I went to the gym 90 minutes a day, six days a week without fail. It didn't matter if I was sick, didn't matter if it was final exams or as my career was starting. it just didn't matter. This was my top priority. At the end of that, I still had a 46-inch waist.

I still weighed 300 pounds. And I thought to myself, maybe it's because I'm eating too much lettuce because I'm not eating the salad dressing because there's calories in it. I'm not even eating the chicken because there's calories in it. So I'm hungry all the time and I'm training all the time and I'm not losing weight. And there's good reasons for that. There's hormonal reasons. There's obisogens. These are toxins in the environment that cause you to be fat no matter what you do. and it turns out calories in, calories out really doesn't work. But I did all this exercise, and it didn't work. So I said, I want to write smarter, not harder, because there are things that you can do that work

radically better, and I waste a lot of willpower on that. What I do now is things that work, for instance, I write about a technique called rehit in the book, reduced exertion, high intensity training. And these are designed mostly by AI systems. These are algorithms to get a signal into the body, to cause the body to respond, and then to return to baseline very quickly. And when you do this, you save, in this case, it's between 8 and 12 times the amount of time. That hack in particular is for cardiovascular fitness. And what is it?

It's an equipment. This is something we're doing at Upgrade Labs. And Upgrade Labs is now franchising across the country. By the way, own and Upgrade Labs.com is where. where you can go if you want to be a franchisee. And what this does is it measures your heart rate, and it very carefully brings you in under 20 seconds to your highest possible level of exertion

without disregulating your system. And this is the hack. It very quickly drops you back to baseline. And I write about this principle in the whole book because it turns out it's not about how much work you do. That's not what drives change. What drives change is how fast you can turn it on and off. So pushing the system to what's called disequilibrium, where you lose equilibrium, that's not

really good for you. And it can take days and days to recover, and you can become overtrained that way. Taking yourself right to the edge is good for you. And hovering there, though, isn't particularly good for you. And then bringing yourself back faster. So in other words, a quick spike works for almost everything, whether it's creating change in the nervous system, like increasing the effects of meditation. There's a chapter on that.

increasing cardiovascular muscle, increasing stress resilience, increasing cognitive function, all of those appear to follow this basic principle I'm proposing, which is it's not about the amount of work you do. It's about the strength of the onset of the signal and the strength of the turning off of the signal. And in the case of reheat at Upgrade Labs, we're using an AI system in order to guide you right to the edge and right back. The benefit is it takes five minutes in total to do this, and it works between six and eight times better than doing a 45-minute cardio class five days a week. So you give me 15 minutes a week in three, five-minute sessions. I will provably give you a better V-O-2 max than you would get from running every single day. And I want

you to take the time that you would have spent and the willpower you would have spent on running and use it to do something that matters more to you and to the world around you. This seems like a really good thing that we can do because I don't celebrate, yes, I spent five minutes doing something me that was mildly hard that didn't make me sweat. I said, dude, I saved 55 minutes of unpleasant cardio. Can that's a clarifying question? No. About your weight loss journey, right?

You shared something and you were talking about calories, right? And you were saying like calories, it turns out calories, you know, calories in, calories out, like that whole thing is to paraphrase, it's like, it doesn't make sense, right? Unless you're a really angry, like weightlifter, bro, there's a few like trolls online who still walk out there saying a diet soda. and a Snickers bar counsel each other out. If you're one of those people, there's an exception because they live in an alternate reality. Got it.

Now, is it that, so take into extreme situations where somebody's doing like gastric bypass, right? Take in extreme situations right now where you have this miracle weight loss drug that everybody's talking about and want to give it to. That stuff works. Yeah. Right. So, from my understanding, and obviously those two are very different things, right, Ozympic, semi-glutane, and obviously gastric bypasses, there's completely different things.

Isn't the mechanism of action essentially for all of those that people are genuinely eating less calories? So it's not that it wouldn't work. I mean, people are less hungry when it comes to like a Zempic from what little I know about it. So they're eating less calories. So that could play a role in their weight loss. Now, what you're saying, and again, correct me if I'm wrong,

but I'm just sort of laying out the hypothesis of what I'm understanding from you, what you're saying is that it's not the only thing and it's also not sustainable if you think that you're just going to go and lose weight by primarily focusing on that. There's other factors, obesity, gins, hormones, et cetera. So I just like to clarify because I think sometimes people hear, oh, the calories in, calories out doesn't work.

But I think that there's also plenty of people who listen to this podcast who overeat the quote unquote healthy foods that are out there and they struggle with body composition. So I just want to, you know, piece through that a little bit. I love that we're going to go deep on this because, yeah, you can overeat. And overeating can make you fat. But under-eating does not always, in fact, quite often doesn't cause you to lose weight. And one of the things that just puts a nail in the coffin of the calories make you fat and calories keep you fat thing is a drug called xeralinol.

You ever heard of it? No. You wouldn't because it's for cows. What they do is they take a toxic mold. It's called xeralinone is a toxin made by mold. And it's a synthetic or a xenoestrogen. It's a thousand times more estrogen than human estrogen. And it's an environmental toxin.

They concentrate it into little waxy pellets. You put a waxy pellet in a cow's ear. It melts into the membrane in the cow's ear enters their system. That cow will now get fat on one third less calories. It's called feed efficiency. And they measure this for food in cows and pigs and chickens. Yeah, I've definitely heard of it. I didn't know it was called that.

If you can get fat on a third less calories, every calorie bro online who tells you, there's calories in, calories out, Newton's law, man, I don't care what kind of degree they have. This drug is a paradox. It cannot exist, except it does. So, what about thyroid hormone? Well, if like me when I was at that time, I was living in household toxic mold, I also had thyroid dysregulation. If you work out a lot and your thyroid is low, you will not lose weight because your body won't turn up the thermostat.

And let me be straightforward. Working out was probably good for me because I was able to max out all but two of the machines at the gym. There were two where I was like two plates away, like a shoulder press, something didn't work right. But everything else, I was strong, but I was still really, really fat. So we also have overtraining, and especially in women, this is a massive issue. oh, if I exercise more and I eat less, you create systemic stress and you increase cortisol. Cortisol increases adiposity. So you end up getting that fat around the midsection that just won't budge.

The number of people, men and women I've met who are saying, I'm going to use willpower and habit, and I'm going to just pound it out every single day at the gym. Well, if you're not also pounding it out every single day on recovery and getting eight to 10 hours, which is a lot of sleep and eating perfectly and controlling all these other variables, are probably overtraining, which can increase your ability to hold fat. You also have the timing thing. If you eat after the sun goes down, it makes you fatter than if you eat when the sun is up. And there's reasons for that I've written about it in a couple of my books, mostly circadian biology. Dr. Sachin Panda's work, I think has been most illuminating on that. So you just can't say,

well, it's your fault. You're eating too much, but it may be your fault that you're eating too much. But there are so many people there who feel really guilty. And every time they go to pick up a piece of nutritious food, especially something that's been demonized like grass-fed meat, like eggs, like butter, the things that actually help you build hormones and help support your system, things with enough minerals to make you strong, they feel guilty. And then they've been tricked and saying, well, I'm going to eat a celery stick. Because calories, even though celery has no energy in it to speak of, and it's mostly water.

So we've got to stop doing that and say if you're going to exercise more, you must eat more and you must eat higher quality and you must sleep more, not less. So in the case of where you were talking about semi-glutate, right, and you're saying that stuff works, right? What's its mechanism of action that so many people are losing weight on it? And obviously there's a whole question about side effects and how strong they are and this controversy about it being now recommended to be prescribed to kids before lifestyle factors are, you know, really looked at. So how does that work and why does it work? Simulutide. I did a whole episode with one of the main researchers behind it on the human upgrade on my show. So I would refer people to that for a better summary than what I'm going to be able to do.

But it's a glp agonist and it's changing insulin sensitivity. So yes, you do want to eat less. And I tried it, full disclosure for one week. I did one injection and I felt like I had morning sickness all week, at least I think it was like more expensiveous. Yeah, a lot of people have like gastrointestinal stuff. It was unpuzzant, but I know lots of people who've used it and it really, really helps. Yes, you eat less, but it's tinkering with cellular metabolism at the same time, which is why it works more effectively than just eating less. Right. Because you could say, well, I'm just going to do

some intermittent fasting and some regular fasting, which usually works for people unless they're soaked with toxins and their thyroid's broken and they're low on testosterone, then it doesn't work. But if you did an equivalent calories from fasting or from just caloric restriction versus simoglutide, simoglutide actually works better because it's changing insulin sensitivity. So there's benefits. And do you know that if it, and maybe they don't know, would it still work if people didn't eat less? Because there's a whole thing about, well, I guess, yeah, that would be the question. If somebody was on it and you didn't change how you ate, you stayed at the same level of calories if somebody was measuring that. Would it still work? Very likely. I don't have a

particular study in mind, but because it's changing these levels of insulin signaling compounds and insulin receptor compounds, very likely. And the reality, though, is that the body does have an energy-regulated system that works pretty well when you don't mess with it with Lucky Charms or other sources of artificial whatever's, and you're not soaking in toxins. Hunger is pretty useful. And if you learn to listen to your hunger, your body's going to tell you eat more meat, or it's going to tell you eat more carbs. The problem is that if you're soaking in straight sugar, that system gets hacked. So I'm a fan of eating a little bit intuitively.

The problem is that if you just do that without understanding the downside of what you're eating, if you eat intuitively, you're going to read an article that says eat a whole bunch of whole wheat stuff. So you're going to have 16 pieces of whole wheat French toast and wonder why you're getting fat. Well, it's because whole wheat makes you fat. You know, there's this really interesting section in the book where you talk about how ancient societies around the food sources that they found in, you know, intuitively, again, picking up on that, knew that you have to prepare those food sources in a very special way if you want to deal with some of the anti-nutrients and stuff. And the example that you gave was about kinawa. And so tell us tell us how people. We used to make quinoa back in the day.

Sure. So quino is an ancient sustenance food. And I was actually just down at Machu Picchu in Peru earlier, I guess later last year. And it's a native food, but they don't just eat it because it shreds your gut. What they do is they take it and they ferment it for several days. Or in a more modern way, you could pressure cook it. But how many restaurants do you know who are using quinoa flour that hasn't been processed at all? or they just, you know, throw it, they steam it, throw it in a salad.

You don't inactivate the phytase when you do that. And probably some lectins. I don't remember the lectin counting quinoa off the top of my head. But what ends up happening there is, is you eat it, and, yeah, there's no wonder you get a ton of gas from it, and you get other things and your joints hurt or your skin's inflamed or things like that. So properly cooked quinoa can be a source of carbohydrate, but keep in mind, the Peruvian people who live on corn, potatoes, and quinoa, which are all starchy, they're about five feet tall. Like the entire, like all of the people who eat those things, these are great survival

foods, but they aren't great thrival foods. So they managed to overcome famine, which was a major thing by inventing some modern agricultural tools like farming and corn and beans. And people say, but corn and beans and rice and all those things are quinoa. If you put them together, it's a complete protein. Yeah, it's a complete protein that comes with 400 grams of carbohydrate in order to get enough complete protein. So it's a vegan fantasy to say you're going to get enough protein and amino acids from those things.

So right now, I would encourage people, stop eating quinoa. The reason is that Peruvian people in the hills are starving because you are eating their sustenance food and making it unavailable to them. so now they have to import soybeans or something worse. And you're doing that because you think it's a superfood. It's not. It's just a grain. It's better than wheat, but maybe you don't need it.

So if those are some examples in your book and in your opinion and laying out all this sort of research you've come across of foods that are not supporting us to thrive, give us some of your top foods that support us to thrive. If you wanted some carbohydrate, and I am not anti-carb, it's, it's, it's, it's, funny, I did help to make the notion that ketosis is a good tool in the Bulletproof Diet. I helped to make that a thing, but the warning in the Bulletproof Diet was don't do ketosis unending because it will break you, same as the vegan diet will break you. So you look at what foods. For carbohydrates, one of the most amazing foods is a traditional food, and it's really the only grain I'm going to recommend, which is white rice.

Now, throughout every rice eating culture, if you could afford it, you ate the white rice. and if you were very, very poor, you would eat the brown rice. And they knew this because brown rice disturbs your gut. And brown rice, now we know, has 80 times more arsenic in the outer part of the rice. So they remove the hard to digest toxic part of the grain and leave the easier to digest part in the middle. You do not eat brown rice to get the vitamins or the fiber that's in the outside because it has phytic acid and because it has heavy metals. You get rid of that stuff and you realize that I ate. the rice in order to get calories from starch. You can also eat sweet potatoes, which work very well

for most people. Or if you're not sensitive to that particular species, like I am, white potatoes work reasonably well as well. So those are good sources of carbs. So is fruit. Most fruit is okay. Not all fruit is great. And you can eat some veggies and the Bulletproof Diet. Dave Asprey.com slash roadmap is a free one-page download of less inflammatory vegetables versus more inflammatory vegetables. Eat some low-inflammation vegetables. But the real center-point, the real center-place foods that make a massive difference for people are high-quality saturated fats, ghee, butter, tallow, even lard from properly raised pigs can be really, really good for you. These are much more stable than you're going to get from these plant oils. So,

So I've been yelling for, what, 15 years now, let's not eat seed oils, and I don't eat them at all. So if you're going to eat French fries, it's the duck fat fries. It's the tallow fries or at least palm oil or coconut oil. But never, ever, canola oil and soybean oil. You might even look at something called zero acre farms. They have a new cultured oil that comes from yeast fermentation that is a clean oil that's all mono-unsaturated. So there are ways to do this. We just have to recognize seed oils are cheap and they're bad for you.

So we get rid of those and replace them with butter and other animal fats. And on the protein front, it's not about how much protein goes in your mouth. It's about how much protein your body receives from what you eat. Imagine if you said, well, I ate a hamburger, but I wrapped it in a balloon first. So it just passed through undigested. Pretty obviously you didn't really eat the hamburger. Well, if you're eating these plant-based proteins, they have a chemical way of doing that. and they have protein digestion inhibitors in them.

So for every gram of plant-based protein, you need another gram of animal-based protein to replace that. And the reason for this is that plants really don't want it to eat their babies because they can't run away. They defend themselves in other ways by depleting our minerals. So what I recommend people do then is eat the animals that are optimized for eating the plants, and that is ruminant animals. Animal protein from beef and lamb and goat and bison and venison or elk if you want to go out and hunt stuff is by far biologically the most available. You get the most benefits from that.

Double bonus points if you take digestive enzymes so you really get all the protein that your body should have. After that, it's eggs and if you're not allergic to it like most people are, it's dairy protein. Dairy protein, you want raw ideally and you want grass fed or A2 ideally milk if you tolerate it. If not, then you go to sheep's milk. And if not, you could also have goat's milk. So these are the super foods. These are the things that make people live longer. I'm 8% body fat right now.

And I don't know what I was at my peak. But it's pretty incredible. You're not hungry. You need to get enough protein. And it needs to be high quality protein. You need to get enough fat. It needs to be high quality fat. And then you tune your carbohydrates based on how much energy you're going to output and

how much exercise you're going to do and whether you want to lose weight or not. It's not that hard. But if you have cravings all the time and you're exhausted all the time, it is really hard. So a couple more questions on that. And I want to get to minerals because you've talked about minerals a bunch and you're kind of leading up into it. So I was recently just sent a book called toxic superfoods. And I'm always interested. I want to read about a bunch of things.

Yeah. There's a lot of superfoods that are, it's complete nonsense. And I was a devout raw vegan. Yeah. Like, oh, it makes me mad. Yeah, we talked about this. I used to have like a whole raw food vegan website. like at raw.com, which sounds like a different type of website, but it was about raw foods.

Oh, yeah. I was a subscriber, but that was a different. So in that book, one of the things that she talks about inside of there is obviously the dangers of a lot of foods that are high in oxalates and oxalates and calcium. Now, I think the part that gets a little bit confusing for a lot of people as they're just trying to navigate the world of nutrition, they're not an expert, it's not there day-to-day, you know, even somebody like myself, So in there, I think she partnered with a lab that is the first lab that can reasonably get a good estimate of how much oxalates are in certain foods. And of course, there's ones that you talk about that are out there like spinach, right,

having high oxalates and it being a problem and calcium building up over the long haul and us not always knowing immediately that's a situation. But also listed on her list of foods, and I'll have to go back to it to see where the rank is, is like sweet potatoes and white potatoes. Yep, I was going to say that. And so I guess the question is, you know, you've mentioned white rice, you mentioned sweet potatoes, white potatoes if you can handle them. And now somebody else is coming in and saying that, hey, these foods are actually high in oxalates.

And you talk about oxalates in your book. So just trying to balance it out. And whether or not those are things, you know, is it dosage? Is it, you know, certain forms? Or do you disagree with her just giving you a platform to be able to talk about it any way you want to? I'm going to take you back to chapter one of the Bulletproof Diet, which was published in print in 2014 and put online in 2012. So there's five big toxins that we're dealing with in food. There's phytic acid.

There's lectins. There's oxalic acid. There's histamine, which comes mostly from leftovers in fermentation, which is a problem for some people. And there's mycotoxins, which is another storage or field toxin. And you probably are sensitive to some of those. But the reality is that 28% of people get rheumatoid arthritis from lectins, which are present in white potatoes. By the way, I'm one of those. there's another group of people who are way more sensitive to oxalic acid and they're going to notice it,

but they're not going to notice it for a while. In my case, I probably wasn't that sensitive to oxalic acid, but I was a raw vegan and I ate stupid amounts of oxalic acid and it builds up in your tissues over time. And when it does that, it leads to kidney stones. It leads to gout. It leads to vulva dinia in women where these razor-sharp calcium crystals form in their vulva, and it's so painful you can't even wear underwear. Minus the last one. Did you deal with any of those? I didn't get kidney stones.

I've seen them on people who are frequent kale eaters around me, but I did get a lot of joint pain from it. And given that I'm sensitive also to the nightshade vegetables, the lectins in those, I've had three knee surgeries before I was 23. They diagnosed me with arthritis when I was 14 in my knees. that was a nutritional issue because I'm one of the approximately 28% of people who has the genes that mean that I do not handle nightshade vegetables very well. So it gets complex because you listen to this going, well, I want to put everything in a good

or a bad bucket. Welcome to your lazy brain. That's something insomper or not harder. This is what our brains do. When we're at full energy, we have the ability to fully think about and process something. But quite often we're not at full energy and we're distracted. our brains take shortcuts. And the biggest shortcut is, if something is good, do more of it, and if something is bad, do less of it. This is why epidemiology makes the mistakes it does about

lucky charms. Whole wheat good. It was an intellectual shortcut versus actually digging deeper in it and realizing that whole wheat comes a whole bunch of bad stuff, even if there might be some good stuff. Let's only do the good and stop the bad. So what's happening with our entire nutritional system around oxalic acid is we're saying kale good, because of a system. million dollar investment from the kale marketing association a long time ago. Before they did that, the largest buyer of kale was Pizza Hut because they put it on the salad bar around the salad to make the salad look pretty. It was garnish. Yep. So oxalates, you can probably handle some. And let's be straightforward. There's oxalic acid in chocolate, which I recommend. There's oxalic

acid in small amounts in coffee, which I also recommend. So most people can handle a certain amount of bits. But if you go out there and eat some beet greens, some, a whole bunch of beets because you've heard they have nitric oxide or that they can increase nitric oxide. And then you do some raw spinach salads because someone in the 70s decided that those are good for you, even though their mother knew that you always cook it as creamed spinach so that the calcium and the milk will stop the oxalic acid crystals in it, you end up realizing that it's a problem. But it may take years. And here's an example. I went sometime on early 2010s. I went on the Joe Rogan Show. And the second time I came on, I said, Joe, you're telling people to do

raw kale smoothies. It's a problem. Here's why. Here's how you reduce the risk. You cook the kale with water, with calcium in the water, and then you dump the water out to get rid of it. And you don't eat the freely kale. You eat the dino kale. If you really must eat kale, but there's just better choices. And then you can do it, right? And he didn't take action. Seven years later, Mike Tyson's on the show. And Mike's like, killer kale. And Joe says, yeah, I, I, suddenly had to quit eating kale oxalic acid because over time he cranked up his levels of oxalic acid until he probably felt in his joints or kidney stones he didn't say why he was doing with it. But yeah, oxalicastid is not great for you, but it's not the end of the world.

But if you know that you maybe don't want to maximize your intake of spinach and kale the way they taught us to do as raw vegans, like you put it in your smoothie every day, you're punching yourself in the kidneys when you do that and you should stop doing it. So could that same logic be applied to a lot of topics around like lectins? Like, hey, look, it's not the end of the world. It's just really about the dosage. We tend to overeat certain foods. And then if some people want to have some grains and beans and especially if they're preparing

them the right way, great. But like don't overdo stuff and don't miss out on all the healthy fats and proteins that are in the diet. Could you apply the same logic there? You know, this is another one of those intellectually lazy shortcuts. I'm totally calling you lazy just to see if you get mad at me. I don't get mad often. I know you don't. You're super chill. I appreciate that about you.

Moderation and everything is stupid. Would you like a moderate amount of lead, mercury, and cyanide today? No, some things are more dangerous than others. So here's the thing. If you know that you are acutely sensitive to the nightshade vegetables, okay? I am, by the way. Yeah, okay. So no, you don't just have a little bit unless you decide it's worth it. You're like, I'm going to take the hit. You can do something. You stay up all night, partying and drinking or whatever. You knew you're going to feel like crap the next morning, but it was worth it. So you did it.

Fine. Go out and have your jalapinas. I grew up eating New Mexico green chili. I'm from New Mexico. I love the stuff. It's soul food. Every single time I eat it, I pay for at least a week with serious joint pain. I don't touch it.

I don't eat any night shade vegetables because I am really sensitive. Now, does this mean that other people who are not sensitive who can eat all that stuff with no problems? Should they avoid them? No. Should they live on nightshade? I don't know, ask our friend Dr. Gundry, and I tend to agree, they poke holes in your gut line. They're probably not great for you, but you can handle it. So what you do is you start paying attention, knowing that there's these things.

And some of them you'll feel. You will not feel oxalates unless you're already high. You'll usually feel oxalates if you get a lot of mineral tartar built up on the back of your bottom teeth. You know you're oxalate sensitive. Eat a bunch of spinach and kale or beets. And then if you get crunchy weird stuff in your mouth, you have an oxalate problem. But other than that, it's hard to tell. You could also do a Viome test, which would tell you whether you have oxalobacter species that can help to break it down in your gut, whether you have more or less of those.

But generally, that's something you should minimize. You don't have to get rid of it, but save it for the good stuff, which is chocolate and coffee. And even things like, believe it or not, red raspberries and blackberries are exceptionally high on oxalic acid. These are like the paleo superfoods, right? Here's a story about those. years ago when I was still coming off of being a raw vegan I'd go to the farmer's market in Mountain View California and I would buy massive like pounds of raspberries and blackberries and I'd put them in the fridge and I would make it spread them out so they would keep for a week and I would

just eat as many as I wanted every day because they're so good for you right well I started having to pee 30 times a day and I went to the doctor and I'm like this is disturbing my life like it there's what's happening here is I don't know so they sent me up to San Francisco They put a camera where no camera should ever go in a man. And they said, well, we don't know what's wrong with you, but did you know you only have one kidney? I'm like, well, shit, no. That wasn't interesting.

Apparently I was born that way. But I have one super mega kidney. So that means I'm more evolved. I have no idea. So even until I figured out what it was, it was raspberries and it was blackberries. Because loxalic acid is also an irritator of your kidneys and your urethra and your bladder. So the combination of mold toxins, mycotoxins, which. also comes from old berries and moldy coffee and oxalic acid from all these berries meant I have to

pee all the time. So I quit doing that and I still regret having a camera put there. So that was if something's good, more is better. That's not always true. I was also following the basic things. Our bodies are designed to make quick and easy intellectual decisions because it takes too much electricity and we're just wired to be lazy. When you become aware of that, you go, okay, there is no moderation and everything, how sensitive am I? How long do I want to live and how much do I care about it? And if the thing that makes you happiest on earth is eating like a chicken spinach salad, you probably should eat the spinach chicken salad and take a bunch of calcium along with it to help bind it in the gut and just do your best and not worry about it. But if you're dealing with

kidney stones and debilitating gout, and no one's ever told you this is a problem, maybe you should stop doing the very expensive kale. Kale is more expensive than grass-fed beef on a per-calorie Why are you doing that? It's a good question. So can you also apply that? Not can you is really the message also too like in the process of living more dangerously, which is like the theme inside the book, really you're advocating for people cleaning up their lifestyle, which is obviously diet as a part of that, but information, friends, community, etc.

Sure. Right? The government whispering in your ear about what direction you should have in this or that. And through that process, deeply personalizing the things in your life step by step so you can figure out what works for you. That could be these foods that you're mentioning. Right. But it could also be foods that people say that are very healthy, but may not work for you.

Okay, great, it doesn't work for you? Well, there's plenty of other healthy foods to, you know, do. That's part of the big picture message. Well, the big picture message about Danger. By the way, do we have a Danger coffee bag? I think we have one right here. Oh, I already give to you. Good.

Okay, there you go. So it actually says feel dangerously good. So I'm not telling people to go out and do dangerous things. I'm telling them to be dangerous. Smells great, by the way. Oh, thank you. There are two kinds of peace we can have in the world. One of them is weak and downtrodden.

I'm so tired. And I've been there. I don't have energy to do what's right. I just barely have enough to get through the day. And chronic fatigue syndrome feels exactly like that. I had it for years. And the other kind is I am so powerful that I can see what's going on. I have enough energy to think about it.

To see past BS, I'm unprogrammable. And I'm going to do the right thing, even if it's hard. Because I have the energy to do hard things today. And I'm working really hard on building that kind of world. That's just what matters. So it's not that you go out and, you know, play tag with cars or do some kind of crazy ski jump. Do those if it makes you happy. It's that you have an inherent knowingness that you can.

handle anything that life brings your way. And that is a dangerous person. I want to surround myself with dangerous people. And dangerous people, they could do anything. They could start companies. They could change the world. They could see right through propaganda campaigns and say, no, I will not do that because it is wrong. We need a lot more of that in the world right now. I'm less concerned about governments whispering in my ear because governments are by definition incompetent. I'm worried about corporations whispering in my ear because corporations actually. are much better at that. They're the ones who invented, well, remarketed propaganda as public relations. I just looked at my PR agent over here.

They're fighting a good fight, Stanton. We're hackable. As humans, our operating system will do all sorts of things that we cannot see by definition. And when we have adequate minerals, which is why Danger coffee is full of minerals, I add a whole bunch of trace minerals to it. You'd have to buy a trace mineral supplement if you weren't drinking the coffee. I do that because people with enough minerals, people with enough fat soluble vitamins, people with enough butter,

people with enough protein, were harder to program. I just don't like what I saw over the past three years on either side of the extremism. I want people who are common grounded no matter what's happening in the world around them. And it starts inside your cells. It starts in your meat operating system.

So it is our job to train our meat operating system to go right to the edge of breaking and then come right back to center and to do it very, very quickly. That's what I'm doing at Upgrade Labs on a physical basis. We do on a nutrition basis, even from a meditation perspective. You can get better results in less time by showing your meat operating system the edge and then showing at the center and doing it very quickly. And when we do that, we actually do the right thing because I believe deep down drew,

and I think you do too, that we're wired to be nice to each other. Humans are basically good. We just aren't wired to be nice to each other if we're exhausted and we're afraid. So let's get rid of exhaustion and let's get rid of fear. I love it. An important thing. And I think part of that fear is also as people listen to podcasts, they navigate the space. There's this urgent pressure that I hear from my audience often that people feeling like every week we have on a different guest.

They talk about different things from their unique perspective of the world. And obviously there's guests that people love to live. listen to and look forward to hearing about on a regular basis like yourself. And one of my thoughts is that because people are so hard on themselves, right, partly because of some of the programming that they grew up with, the voice of an uncle and a thought of- Because they're bad people. I mean, let's face it. That's the voice in their head, right?

The voice of a disapproving parent or whatever it might be, that there's this pressure that I'm not doing enough, I'm not enough, and I need to be more. And I think the thing is that when we let a lot of that go, we can listen to any of content that's out there, this podcast, anybody else listening to your podcast. And it's very simple. We can listen to our intuition. We can see, oh, wow, you know what? That's really interesting. I've thought about that. I came across a book on my table that was about it, but I didn't read it. Oh, I've been following their social media account. That's interesting. I want to dig more into that topic of minerals, et cetera, whatever it is. And then there's other things where it's like,

oh, hey, actually, I've tried this food that everybody's saying is healthy. For some reason, it's not working for me right now. I'm getting this or I'm getting that. Okay, cool. I'm not going to make it a big deal. Maybe I'll try it again in the future. Oh, okay, maybe I'll try to repair my gut. It's a little bit taking off the pressure of that criticism that people have towards himself, which sometimes the argument for the health world that people bring in is like, everybody's talking about what not to eat. When you add all those list of things together, then people are like, okay, I'm not going to fucking do anything. And then they stick to their own habits that are out there. Yeah. Instead of focusing on the basics of like get rid of ultra-process food, work out,

you know, 150 minutes a week, surround yourself by incredible people, and have a loving community and good relationships in the life. So I know that's a lot that I'm throwing out there, but I just love to acknowledge that I think that if people step back from the hypercriticalness that they had, you can listen to content in a way where it's like, great, take what you want and leave what you don't. And the world will be a better place and you'll be a happier human being. Very well said. The voice of orthorexia is the loudest voice. when you carry those to logical extremes. Or, oh, my God, I'm going to die if I eat quinoa because Dave just told me that if it's not cooked right, it actually shreds my gut.

Well, here's the deal. You've probably been shredding your gut for most of your life eating the stuff that they feed you at restaurants, and you're still here. Because our meat operating system is so worried about a tiger eating us, any kind of perceived threat is the same as a tiger eating us. It can't differentiate between, oh, mild degradation over years versus, oh, I just had a headache or I far. it a lot, right? I am teaching you how to do things that not just give you health, but get you something beyond health, like a state of vibrant awareness and limitless energy and the ability to maintain your stance and your state no matter what's happening in the world around you. It's called equanimity. It's resilience. That's why I named my last company bulletproof.

Like, I want to feel like I'm bulletproof. And those are different. Bottom line is, it's a journey. you cannot A, B, test your last meal. You either ate pancakes or you didn't eat pancakes. Your next meal, you can do it, but it's a different test. By simplifying what you do, by learning something might matter that you never thought about, now you're getting the tools to test and see what works. The number of people I've known over the years where I told them about nightshade vegetables and they stop eating them for a week and go, oh, my God, like my skin cleared up and my joints don't hurt.

And I can't believe this. My brain is sharper. what the heck? Well, they didn't know it might matter and they were putting cayenne like I did on everything because it's supposed to be good for you. So this is just knowledge that might be useful. It might also be completely useless for you. So there is no moral failing in trying an experiment. There is no moral failing and saying, I don't give a crap about that. I'm going to do something else I like and I love pizza. Neither one of those has morality to all. All morality there is programming from your church, from your teachers or from your family. And you can just turn all that stuff.

off. That's part of, in fact, that's why the back quarter of the book is around biohacking the spiritual side of things. How do you deal with the voice in your head? Because if you want control of your own biology, if your mean meat operating system is yelling at you that you're a failure because you didn't pick the right species of carrot, well, maybe you need to deal with the operating system, not the species of carrot. I want to pull on that thread, but before we do, we talked about, we're going to get back to minerals. Why did you dedicate such a big section in the book about minerals and what do you really want people to get? You've already talked about the new coffee, we'll link to it in the show notes, has minerals added into it.

Before we get to coffee, specifically, let's just talk about minerals as a whole. Sure. I was looking for things that match the title, the smarter or not harder, things that have such a profound better impact than the way we do it today that they're worth people's time to read about and probably try. And because I've written a big book on the New York Times science bestseller list about mitochondria, I know a lot about this stuff. What I've found is that our crops, our soil is depleted of minerals because we keep growing stuff in it and we don't let animals poop on it. We're not rotating

animals the way I would on my regenerative farm. So the plants you eat that are supposed to have minerals actually don't because there weren't any minerals for them to eat in the soil. At the same time, we've eaten more and more plant-based foods, including all these weird grains that our grandparents wouldn't have eaten, they would have eaten white bread, not whole wheat bread. They might have eaten rye bread, which has its own advantages. They don't know why they did it, but rye is better than whole wheat. So they did all these weird things that we stopped doing. And we eat things like rice cakes that are terribly high in phytic acid. So we've increased the excretion of minerals because of our diet, and we've reduced the intake of minerals. And this makes for weak human beings.

Our bones are weaker. They're less dense. Our cells can't make energy because we use minerals to make enzymatic reactions happen. And if you're low on those, you cannot make ATP very efficiently, and you will be tired because your brain uses a lot of ATP. So what could I tell people to do that's going to make everything easier

in the smallest amount of work? And the two things that rose to the top were minerals. There's macro minerals, and there's trace minerals, and there's even ultra-trace minerals, and all of these matter. We need to be rich in these to be at full power.

The second thing is a vitamin Dake, which is something that we're making for upgrade labs, as by the way, own and upgrade labs where people want to be a franchisee. Vitamin Dake is a combination of vitamin D3, vitamin A, real vitamin A from animals, not the fake beta carotene from plants. It doesn't work.

D-A-K-1, and very importantly, K2, which is almost exclusively from animals, or nato, which is gross. And vitamin E, and there's different forms of vitamin E I talked about in the book. If you get your fast, soluble vitamins right and you take minerals the fat soluble vitamins tell the minerals where to go and where to stay in the body if you just took those two as the only vitamins you took vitamin dake

and a mineral supplement and or danger coffee what you're going to end up with is the foundational elements for folding proteins better for recovering faster and for making more energy and if you are deficient in these minerals you're going to go out and spend a hundred bucks on a newtropic you're going to get a gem membership. We're going to do all these things. They just won't work as well because you are missing these invisible cofactors that you are not getting from your food today no matter how much you try unless you do liver, oysters, and a ton of grass-fed meat.

And by the way, I do those, all of those things, and I take my trace minerals, my bone density is off the charts. So two things. Is there a mineral that starts with R and how do we get Drake involved in like being the spokesman and number two, more seriously? That made me happy. I looked for a V mineral to make it vitamin Dave, but I couldn't do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We need to swap it out. Number two, is there, we were talking so much about Drake. I actually just completely forgot what I was going to say. I've got a new trope before you after the show, don't know. Oh, yeah. What are the signs, here we go, what are the signs besides low energy that somebody might be low in these minerals? Are there other things, right? Like, is explosion of gray hair or something?

Is it like, what are the signs if somebody's low in these things, minus you mentioned low energy? Cracks in your skin are a sign. And very importantly, gray hair. There's three causes of gray hair, and one of the big causes is depletion of copper. And copper is a very unusual mineral. You remember copper tone, the sunscreen? Actually, you might not. You probably don't need sunscreen.

You're lucky. I know of it because I've probably seen commercials of it, but no, I've never used it. In the old days, copper tone actually had copper in it, and your skin desperately needs copper, and so there's your hair. But because it's possible that have too much copper, they actually made them take copper out of copper tone, so there's no copper in it anymore. Copper is important for making collagen for making hair. So many people got gray hair over the past three years, number one, because of stress that

was caused by government policies made by idiots. And number two, they were taking a bunch of zinc because everyone knows zinc reduces your chances of getting pretty much all infections, bacterial or viral, even if they have a fancy brand on them. So generally zinc is good for you. Oh, zinc also raises testosterone. Every supplement company out there says, oh, let's put more zinc in it. So many people are taking five supplements that all contain zinc. Zinc pushes copper out.

So people got gray hair from stress and they got gray hair from copper depletion from over-consuming zinc. So in the book, I talk about appropriate zinc and copper balance and how important it is that you get some copper. And if I could buy a topical copper supplement, I would absolutely use it because getting copper on your skin is good for you. I love it. I definitely one of those people that had an explosion of gray hair. But even during the pandemic, I wasn't stressed out. I don't kind of let a lot of things, you know, get to me that way and just understood just the nature of the world and all the things that were there. Did you take a lot of zinc. Definitely took a lot of zinc. Yeah, that's why. Yeah. So can you bring the copper back? I talk about

forms of copper that are more absorbable in the book and smarter, not harder. And interestingly, taking the copper away from the zinc is the most optimal way to do it. So you could wake up and take your copper and then later on take your zinc. Or if you've had that much zinc, maybe you just need to take copper for a while and back off on the zinc. Any guidance on dosages or, you know, do you have a product that fills the gap for these? There are traits. There are traits. amounts of zinc and copper and all the minerals in Danger Coffee. And at Upgrade Labs, we have our supplement company is called Subgrade Labs, but I'm not even shipping that one yet. I would suggest get a multi-mineral supplement that contains all of the trace minerals and all of the macromenerals.

It's going to be at least four and maybe six pills. You say what? Well, look, magnesium. It's just a big thing. You're going to take several magnesium pills if you're going to get enough magnesium. That's just how it is. Some of the major minerals, you probably probably don't need to take calcium for most people, but you do need magnesium and you need zinc, you need copper, you need vanadium, you need chromium. Most people haven't even heard of these. So get a broad spectrum one. And very soon on Upgradelabs.com, you'll be able to get it, but I haven't launched that yet because I'm still tweaking the formula because I guess I'm a perfectionist when it comes to supplements. Well, we all benefit because of that.

where else do you want to go with this conversation? Things in the book that you feel particularly excited about. I have a whole list of things that are there, but I like to, especially this far into the interview, I like for the guests to really sort of go with what they're feeling sort of top of mind on. All right. Drew, people like to listen to you. Do you know why?

Because I'm a handsome Indian young man. I mean, that's what I like to listen to you. They like to listen to you. Well, you have a good voice. also have calm energy. Like you have good energy. Like your eyes are bright and shiny and you're excited, you care and you genuinely care and it's not an act. I know you well enough just as a friend, right? So this is real. They can feel it in some way. So what can people who are listening to to have that kind of energy? Like you said, during the pandemic, you were relatively chill. You

didn't get stressed out. You know how many people would just give everything they have to not be stress out because they're feeling anxiety all the time? Well, that anxiety, it doesn't always, in fact, usually it doesn't even come from the mind. You think it does. It comes from the body. The meat operating system, when it has toxins, when it doesn't have minerals, when it's not getting enough of the fuel sources it needs, it's lacking protein, it's only getting bad fats. It feels anxiety, but it's a very fast, very dumb system in your body. It doesn't understand time. It understand that you go to 7-Eleven and get a hot dog on a stick if you were starving. Like it has no knowledge of anything.

It only feels. And it either feels like it has enough or it feels like something's profoundly wrong with the world. And when it feels that way and it's it's like trying to make a bright light, but it's like the, it's fizzing out. You know, the bulb is dimming and it's trying so hard. The accelerator is pushed to the floor, but you're slowing down and you can't push any harder. When it feels that way, you feel anxiety. And then your human brain goes, there must be a cause for my anxiety.

And then you say, it's my spouse. It's this. And you become very programmable because you're automatically without thinking, looking for a cause of a feeling that is caused by deficiencies or toxins in your meat. And you believe that those are you. And yes, sometimes you get thoughts that run away from you and the thoughts can create stress. But quite often those thoughts that feel like they're coming from you, they're also coming from low-level systems.

And when you correct a nutrient deficiency, when maybe you take a methyl donor, which is something like methylfolates, a common supplement or trimethyglycine, I think I mentioned those a little bit in the book. Magically, you lose your racing thoughts. So was it you choosing to have those thoughts that were racing? Or was something wrong in the brain was looking for what it was in the world around you?

I have a problem with methylation. It's called MTHFR. Many of your listeners do as well. If I take the normal form of folic acid that's in Lucky Charms by law, it's actually toxic for me. About a third of people have that. We cannot process it. But if I take the methylated form, then I can process it.

If I don't get enough methyl donors, I get angry and cranky and everyone around me is an asshole. But when I have enough methyl donors, I'm calm and I'm focused. I also have spent six months of my life doing 40 years of Zen work with electrodes glued to my head doing brain upgrades so I can be calm and focused and have that resilience and equanimity we talked about. How much of it's biological versus belief system and will power base? I couldn't tell you. What I do know is that even with all the neurological training and being to monasteries around the world and studying meditation with masters, if I become tweaked too much biologically, it is very hard to hold my state, even with all of my training. So I make a conscious effort to be,

build the environment around me, especially the stuff that I drink, the stuff that I breathe, the stuff that I eat, even the information that I consume, so that I can most easily maintain my state and I have the training on the state. What is very important to me is that most people don't have any training on how to control the state of their brain. So part of what I'm doing at Upgrade Labs, and in the book, the last maybe quarter of the book, is around the spiritual side of things. We're including neurofeedback at Upgrade Labs, because you save so much time. on putting on some muscle, getting your cardio, these other things, you might as well spend 20 minutes with a computer showing your brain what it's doing so you can rewire it to make it do

what you want instead of it doing what it wants. It's profoundly changed my life. You have your own spiritual meditation practice that's taught you to be chill and to have the good energy that you have and to be able to share it with the world on your show. So many people want to have that level of calmness and that level of peace. We don't have it because we're lacking minerals. We don't have it because we have toxins. And then we don't have it because we've never trained our nervous system to show it that we're in charge instead of it being in charge. And that is why the last part of the book, I did my best to describe what spiritual traditions have roles of scrolls for thousands of years they've been trying to describe. But how do you most quickly create the state of equanimity?

And we could say, well, meditate. Meditation is a good thing. I will also tell you, hurry, meditate faster. Because, well, you have an hour today. You could spend it meditating. I've had many days where I spend an hour and more meditating. But I also have teenagers. And if I could spend an hour talking with my son about something that's interesting to him or an hour meditating, I think the hour talking with my son might be more valuable,

but I still wanted the state of meditation. So what if I could do it in 10 minutes? Would I do that? Yeah. we no longer have the luxury in the world that we've created, especially over the last couple years, of spending six hours a day on meal prep of the perfect meal, meditating for a couple hours, and then doing however much the latest guru told you of cardio that you probably didn't need, as well as some strength training. Oh, and you probably should do some yoga. Oh, and you should

take a cold bath, and the list goes on forever. How much time are you going to live when you're not biohacking. That's really important. And the reason I wrote, smart or not hardest, I just want you to know, pick a goal. There's five goals that people usually have when they talk about their health. Most people don't even know what health is. If I was to ask you, if you want to be healthy, what does that mean? Do you have a measure for it? Well, some people might be body composition, other people might be a level of strength that they want to hit. Other people might apply the health to the spiritual mental health side. But yeah, give us your five if you can list them out. What I found is I started the biohacking lab facility idea eight years ago underneath Arnold Schwarzenegger's office.

And today is upgrade labs and we're opening them across the country. And what's really interesting there is over time, I have all the biohacking tech. And people come in and I get to ask them, okay, what really matters? And it boils down to the structure of smarter and harder. Some people want strength. And you mentioned that when you call that one out. other people want their energy back or they want to lose weight. They're the same thing. If you're putting your electricity into forming fat, you're low in energy. So, and the practices are exactly

the same for getting energy back as losing weight. Then people want cardiovascular fitness, which is different than strength. And the people who say, I want both cardio and strength at the same time. No, sorry, you have to pick one that's a priority because the kind of training you do to run a marathon takes away muscle. So you're not going to be like a power lifter and a marathon runner. They don't look the same. They don't have the same metabolisms. I'd argue one's healthier.

But if that's your goal, they're different health goals, right? Then you also have stress management. For the first time ever last year, more people said that they wanted to manage their stress than wanted to lose weight. Wow. For the last 30 years, it's always lose weight, lose weight, lose weight is the top thing. When you survey people about their health goals, no, it's stress management. now. And then the final one is they want the brain to work better. So Upgrade Labs is built around

those five things. And when you come in, we give you a survey and we figure out which is most important. And in the book, I teach you how to do that for yourself. Then say, all right, what is the practice that's going to give you the most return per minute to get you your top goal and to get you your second goal? And then you look at that and you say, oh, that's awesome. this was five times more effective than what I was going to do. And then instead of celebrating the fact you did something hard for 10 minutes, you celebrate the fact that you saved 45 minutes. And then your motivation is easy because saving 45 minutes is awesome.

Spending 10 minutes doing something hard is not awesome. It's just better than spending an hour. So we teach you to motivate yourself so that you do it. And it's so much more effective that you have that extra time. And the extra time can go back into making yourself more powerful. or it can go back into your community or your family or something like that. But the spiritual side is the hardest one. And that's the one where people oftentimes fall down.

Okay, my body works well enough and I have no reason for existence. I don't know why I'm here. I still have a mean voice in my head. I don't know why I do the things that I do. I had that in spades. I was actually a jerk when I was younger. And I wasn't happy. And I tried fame.

I was an entrepreneur magazine as the first guy to sell anything over the internet. I just found pictures of that when I was moving to Austin, like old polaroids of it. And good God, I was fat. And that didn't make me happy more than 15 minutes. I went, great, I've been in a magazine all of a sudden. Here's like a full color photo of me. And I was still empty. And so then I said, I'll make some money.

By the time I'm 26, I made $6 million. I'm still not happy. Got divorced when I was about 30. I'm still not happy. And I just went on this like, why am I not happy? That's the last quarter of smarter, not harder. What are the things we're doing that are stopping that? And what are the hacks?

Because you could say, all right, I'm just going to meditate for two hours today, forever, and I'm going to every year spend a month in a cave in Nepal. And there are people who do this and full respect for that. If you don't want to or don't have time and resources to do that, what are the things that get you to a state of peace and happiness the fastest and the least amount of time? And I've been studying that for 20 years. That's what one of my companies does. And we're going to have a small piece of that at Upgrade Labs.

But I want people to read the last part of the book, even though it's probably the hardest one to read because we're talking to all these weird concepts around peace, around forgiveness, around gratitude. There are ways to make those work better than what you think. You ever remember when you were a kid and you know, you'd punch a sibling or something, your mom would say, you better say you're sorry. Yep. That's not forgiveness. Right?

And we've all felt that. So there are many people who've had a bad breakup or a trauma or a car accident or abuse or whatever. Or maybe they're just harder themselves. They haven't forgiven themselves. How do you do that more effectively? And there's a process in the book that's based on what I've been teaching to thousands of entrepreneurs in my neurofeedback program. And I want people to do the least possible meditation. And so I talk about the technologies of meditation, things that will get your brain into the states, the mystical states, the spiritual states, the states, the states of,

of resetting yourself. How do you do that more quickly? And there's tech that does it. It's not just neurofeedback. There are techniques like breathwork on top of meditation that just work better. In fact, I just interviewed Shri Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Guru Dev, as he goes by today, who's the founder of Art of Living. I did his breathwork practices many years ago for five years straight. Every morning I'd wake up and I meditate with breathwork. And it worked better than just meditating. I got more return per minute of personal development time. So I go through all of the tech that's out there and all the techniques and just tell you, these are the ones that have a better return. Because your time and your energy are the most valuable things you have, and if you're doing less effective exercise,

you're eating the wrong stuff that you think is healthy for you, and you're actually using your energy to improve yourself with meditation, you're just doing a very ineffective form of it for you. maybe you could do better. And if you do that and you find one thing in Smarter or Not Harder that really works for you, it will save you hundreds and hundreds of hours over the course of your life. And that's why this book was worth my time to write. And that's why I know in my guts that when someone reads this, they'll get way more back than the time and energy they spent reading it.

Otherwise, I wouldn't want to write it. If and when psychedelics are legalized in some sort of form. and not just decriminalize? Could you ever see upgrade labs incorporating them into what they have going on? Psychedelics are totally legal today. It's called ketamine. Ketamine has been on the WHO list of drugs. Not that I really think they have a lot of credibility from a health perspective anymore,

but they used to. And ketamine is used in thousands of therapists offices. I did an episode of my show about five years ago. I went in and did an injectable ketamine therapy. session with a therapist. And I would call it the forgiveness drug. On ketamine, it's remarkably easy to let go of old traumas. It's very safe and it's so safe that there are even companies that allow you to do it at home now. I recommend doing it with the therapist. You can also go out and do it, and I've written about this in various books. You can go out and try the various things. I believe

ayahuasca is the last one you should try, not the first one, if you're going to go down that path. And I do talk about that in order in the book, just in terms of spiritual safety and likelihood of getting you where you want to go. Even though I live in Austin, I believe that if you have to do 400 ayahuasca or mushroom ceremonies, at what point do you know it's not working? Because in my life, I've done ayahuasca exactly twice, 23 years apart. And that's enough. But I've used other psychedelics for personal development. And there's nothing wrong with that. But there is a lot more risk than people talk about. Upgrade labs probably won't go in that direction because we have technology from 40 years of Zen that will put you in similar states without drugs. I have seen more visionary things. I have

downloaded the contents of my books. I have seen past lives just from neurofeedback at 40 years of Zen. The only thing that's come close to it is holotropic breathing. So for people listening, if you haven't tried, in fact, this is in the book, if you haven't tried EMDR, which is a therapeutic technique for resolving trauma, even dumb little traumas that you think aren't affecting your operating system, they are. You just can't tell because your operating system doesn't want you to know. If you haven't tried that, if you haven't tried holotropic breathing or Wimhoff breathing, the kind that makes you kind of trip balls where you leave your body and things like that. If you haven't tried tantric sex, the kind where you leave your body and meet God because it was

that good. And yes, there are classes on how to do that. I've had a few guests on the show talk about that. If you haven't tried those things, maybe going straight to the drugs is not the right thing to do. If you haven't tried neurofeedback, you can also reach some profound states there. So I would encourage people to use the hardware that you have, use the onboard capabilities before you go out and try and replace it or upgrade it or use external things. Even light sound goggles. And this is part of the chapter on spiritual hacking, things like Brain Tap.

You can put yourself very quickly in a state that would be very hard to get into otherwise. And people say, without cheating, the Dalai Lama about 15 years ago put out a $100,000 grant for the first neuroscience team who could use tech to help him get into a very specific state that he needed to get into. He said, it takes me four hours of hard meditation to get into the state. If someone could make some tech that would help me get there faster, I could do my job better. So I'm going to go with his lead. Hurry, meditate faster.

totally fine with that. In our last interview, we were talking about fasting from your previous book. You had this great section that we ended up clipping and putting on YouTube. And it was all about how fasting can be personalized for women and their unique biology. And you were talking about it because what white might work for and what some of the research shows for men might have to be personalized for women that was there. And with my audience being, you know, I don't know how it is for your podcast audience, but I would say the majority of my audience is women that's listening to this podcast. That's because your hair, right?

Yeah, it's my hair. Not the gray hair. Anything inside of this book on the topic of biohacking, separate from fasting, you did a great job. And that clip, by the way, has like hundreds of thousands of views because people are looking for that information. You did a great job of laying it out. Anything else that you'd be talking about personalizing that you might want to call attention to. Sure. I want to be really clear, too.

All women are not the same because you have. have your fertile years, you have paramenopause, and you have menopause. And guys are not the same either. We have Andropause. We just don't really like to talk about it. Right. And an 18-year-old guy and a 70-year-old guy have radically different requirements and needs. And then we have genetics. So this book is written to be about customizing it for you as a human. And if you're a human who is ovulating, then you're going to have some specific nutrient. requirements. In the context of minerals, the mineral requirements are different for men and women, and I write about that in the book. Many women get anemia, and they get anemia because every

month they're bleeding a certain amount. And so common treatment is iron. The problem is that a lot of anemia is caused by copper deficiency, because when you don't have enough copper, you can't make use of iron. So these women are trying to eat more iron, or even worse, they're eating spinach because they heard it has iron. The iron and spinach is 1.7% absorbable Thank you, oxalic acid. Spinochet is not a good source of iron. You need to eat a steak. And when you do that, if you're copper deficient,

you're still going to have problems. And yes, liver is a good source of copper. It just tastes bad. So I talk about that in the context of anemia and women. Not all women have it. Many have it who don't know. But for men, we oftentimes have too much iron, and that can be because of copper deficiencies

or even from having too much copper. So we talk about it. And the important thing, though, is choosing a goal. And men and women oftentimes have similar goals. I want to get my energy back. I want to lose weight. So you can choose a goal, and then you can say,

all right, based on that, what are the technologies or techniques that work better for my specific goal that's actually measurable and attainable? And once you've chosen a goal and you've chosen a technique that's orders of magnitude better than running away from tigers

or picking up rocks, which is what all exercise has been anyway, then you sit down and say, okay, what is my current status? You know, am I a man or a woman? How old am I? What are my weaknesses? What are my strengths? What are I know works?

What I know it doesn't work? And then you customize the dosage. And the book is structured on getting a signal into your body to cause the body to respond without breaking the body. And the strength of the signal for women is oftentimes different than for men. And I talk about this in the context of overtraining for women. So many women are overtrained and underfed. It's amazing. You stop lifting heavy or you stop exercising hard every single day and you start

eating more protein and more fat and suddenly start losing weight. But I thought it was about calories. No, overtraining is a massive problem. Women hit the overtraining wall before men do. And when it happens, they have to eat more and they have to sleep more and work out a little bit less. And magically, their body composition changes. But more importantly, their hormones regulate and they feel amazing. but if they're following the I only eat lettuce and I lift all the time the way Dave did in his 20s when you weigh 300 pounds to desperately try to lose weight, it didn't work for me and it won't work for them either. The right signal at the right time for women. Beautiful. Dave, this has been fantastic. I super appreciate the new book and I'm glad you're

getting it out there. Any final words that you want to leave our audience with? We have all the links that you've mentioned below. People want to open a franchise. They want to work with you guys. There's a link for that. Danger coffee. And of course, most importantly pre-ordering or ordering the book depending on when this interview comes out. Any final words you want to leave our audience with? There is. So Drew, I mean, you've written a book. I've written, this will be my fifth near a time's bestseller, most likely.

And writing books is the lowest dollars per hour action that I do. I would make more paying myself to work in my coffee shop on a per hour basis. There's thousands and thousands of hours that goes into any worthy book, including the one that you wrote. So I would say if you like listening to podcasts, great, the amount of effort that goes into creating an audiobook is enormous. So I would say, download the audiobook. I read the whole thing actually last week in my own voice, download the audiobook and the return on investment per minute of time listening. This is the densest, most valuable stuff that I know of from all of my life in the book. And I am deeply grateful if you do me the honor of pre-ordering it because it helps

other people find it. There's also the biohacking conference. It's entering into its ninth year. And when I started this movement, it was 100 people at a bar in San Francisco. And this year, I'm expecting probably about 5,000 people in June in Orlando. It's biohackingconference.com. I love it. Amazing. And I appreciate it. Anytime an author goes out of their way and records the audiobook, which I know takes hours and hours, well, days, right? Because you have to come in, all the edits, other stuff. But it's so much more enjoyable to read their material or listen to their material in their own voice. And yeah, that's just one of many reasons that I super appreciate you, Dave. Thanks for coming back on the podcast. Wish you the most amount of success with this book.

You're on a mission to help people. You know, you were suffering at one point in time, and you found answers. And that's what you're trying to provide people. And I really love that about you. Thank you, Drew. Keep helping people as well. You're doing amazing work. I look forward to coming back on 10 years from now and doing even more.