Mark Bell's Power Project - MBPP EP. 605 - Fasting is the Answer, Counting Calories is the Problem ft. Dave Asprey

Episode Date: October 8, 2021

The "God Father of Biohacking" Dave Asprey is a four-time New York times bestselling science author, host of the Webby award-winning podcast Bulletproof Radio, and has been featured on the Today Show, CNN, The New York Times, Dr. Oz, and more. Today he talks to us about why counting calories is flawed and why people are losing weight drinking Bulletproof Coffee. Special perks for our listeners below! ➢Magic Spoon Cereal: https://www.magicspoon.com/powerproject to automatically save $5 off a variety pack! ➢8 Sleep: Visit https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro! ➢Marek Health: https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT15 for 15% off ALL LABS! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off! ➢LMNT Electrolytes: http://drinklmnt.com/powerproject ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Subscribe to the Power Project Newsletter! ➢ https://bit.ly/2JvmXMb Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

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Head over there right now. You guys ready? I'm ready. Yeah, I'm ready. Okay. Let me just get this going here. Are we going to be live? No, we're not live, but we're live with Dave.

We're live with Dave. Oh, my God. There he is. Is it him? I'm almost here. He's almost there. You're somewhere. Ah, look at that.

I think we got a good setup. Perfect. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. We appreciate it. Oh, you're most welcome. Thanks for having me on, man. That's cool. It was fun to do the eyeball thing with you yesterday.

Oh, that was great. So we got to kick this off. We are experiencing what we call sober October. And we have decided as a group to get away from caffeine very, very reluctantly and to get rid of coffee and stuff like that. So some of us. Hold on. Isn't alcohol different from coffee? I think so.

Yeah, I think they are different. Yeah. I don't think they're the same. I'm going to do like a sober October. I'm going to get away from oxygen. Yeah. That's what I was saying. That's what it feels like.

He said we agree. It was his idea. Get away from kale if you want to get away from kale. That's worth doing. Get away from a bunch of stuff that we don't like anyway. He makes so much sense. I know.

Let me just ask you guys this. There's something you do every day and it makes you feel really good and if you don't do it you feel bad what am I talking about cocaine exercise I'm talking about exercise so if you're going to do super October you have to stop

exercising yeah I know we talked about that but we decided against it you you wrote this into you i gotta question the the reasoning skills yeah i mean there's there's not good reasoning there's no science behind it but i what i do have a question for you is why is it so difficult for people to even just manage like drinking less coffee. I've heard you speak about two cups of coffee, I think, has enough caffeine in it to assist and boost ketone levels. So that's probably one of the

many reasons why it doesn't feel great to get rid of your coffee after you've been drinking it for years. Well, there's a variety of reasons for it, but that's probably not the biggest one. Caffeine does change your levels of cyclic AMP, which gives you energy. And if you're used to having that and it goes away for about three days, the body says, I'm going to adjust. By the way, if you give up carbs for about three days, you can get a keto flu. It's like there's enzymes. The body says, oh, I'm going to have to shift my enzyme configuration over to something else. Imagine if you had a plant like a Tesla plant and you're used to making model Xs and then you got to switch over one night

to making model Y or whatever the heck else he has going on. Then there's going to be a change over cost. And so the body gets used to running on coffee, which has other, many other benefits, including that keto benefit. Um, then the switchover is going to have a cost and that's okay. It's the same thing. If you quit exercising, start exercising again. Oh, I used to have to allocate resources towards being ready to exercise and to be strong versus allocate resources to something else like sitting on the couch and watching breaking bad. It makes me wonder though, Dave, is there a, is there a drawback to caffeine? Cause like me, myself, I was talking to Mark about this. I've been sending him messages cause you know, I only have usually like two or 300 milligrams a day. That's not much, right? So in my mind,

stopping drinking coffee would have been a very easy process but even my levels of motivation for the past few days i'm typically i have no problems with that but even my levels of motivation were affected from that lack of two to three hundred milligrams of caffeine so it makes me wonder is it really that good for me to to drink that coffee like i'm like if i'm this without it what the fuck is going on maybe it's still the withdrawal period but I'm just trying to figure out, is this actually that good for me in the long run? Well, what would happen if you didn't exercise for three days?

I mean, I kind of said something like that earlier before, but just because you feel worse without it doesn't mean it's bad for you. It actually probably means it's good for you. Yeah. Now you could say, well, Dave, that's not true of cocaine. It feels really good. Not good for you. So the, the heuristic, the way of thinking, the problem solving math that we all do unconsciously in our heads is around that. Oh, well, if I need it to feel strong, it's probably something that

makes me weak. That's not valid rational thinking because I can show you two cases. Cocaine, not good. Caffeine, well, how many hundreds of studies is it going to take about coffee and insert name of any disease you can think of, insert aging, insert keto, and all of them come out in favor of coffee within limits. If you're one of the approximately 10% of the population who has a problem with genes and your detox system, CYP34A in the liver, and you're a slow caffeine metabolizer, you probably should have one cup or no cups. And there are some people who they just can't have any caffeine from any source. I know 50 times more people say, oh, I can't have caffeine, but they can eat chocolate and they can drink soda. They just can't have coffee.

They're not their problems with caffeine. Their problems with moldy coffee. And a lot of those people have become customers of the stuff that I make because they, oh, I can drink that and I feel fine. I drink that and I feel wrecked. The same thing happened to me. I gave up coffee for five years. What's the last thing you heard years you're saying that you maybe stopped coffee five years ago or four or five years good deal um i stopped coffee am i let's just like looks like it's back you're back you're good you're good i stopped coffee

five not five years ago i stopped stopped coffee for five years before I started Bulletproof, my last big coffee company. And I did it because coffee would make me feel tweaked. I would drink it and an hour or two later, I would want sugar and I would just kind of have this feeling of anxiety. It was like physical anxiety in my body. And I said, I must be allergic to coffee. And one of the things that led me back to this was I came back from Nepal and Tibet where I'd done a bunch of meditation. I drank a cup of coffee that didn't make me tweak

and the next day a different cup made me tweak. And I'm like, wait a minute, it's something else. So what we're dealing with here is sometimes it's not just caffeine,'s not just coffee it's other variables that we don't even think about so now we're saying okay what's your genetic profile how many cups is good for you are you getting caffeine or are you getting caffeine plus chocolate polyphenols plus matcha plus coffee all of which have their individual benefits plus whatever fermentation byproducts

are there in the chocolate or the coffee or even certain kinds of tea like pu-erh tea, where the fermentation byproducts are generally good for you. So we don't know any of those things and we think it's just caffeine, but it's not. It's a complex web that affects your microbiome as well. But we do know up to five cups a day with actually more is better. Up to five cups a day with four being better than three reduces all-cause mortality. That is not true of kale or broccoli, by the way. Wait, so let me ask this. In terms of the milligrams, because usually people are saying up to 500 or 600 milligrams is cool for most when you get above

that? Usually 400 is the number. Okay. And that's middle of a bell curve, right? So for you guys, you're pretty much walls of muscle. So you probably are going to need more because that 400 is going to be safe for 120 pound plant-based dieter who's trying to get big and never succeeds. So if it's okay for them, you guys are going to be okay. So I was consuming about probably more than 600 milligrams a day. My son is eight months old, so I'm still trying to adjust to everything, life with the baby, waking up at night. So far, I will say I'm equally as tired as when I was taking caffeine. I don't have that extra pep in my step, like right to when I walk into the office. But throughout the day, the lulls are still there, period.

The one thing that is completely different, and I'm curious if you know how I can help cure this, because of the caffeine withdrawal, I am getting some pretty severe headaches. Like even my vision's getting weird. And so what is going on there and is there anything i can do to help alleviate that because that so far everything else it's like well i'm tired like i can get through it i'll go work out and kind of get the energy back up but the the headache man it will suppress everything else and make life just kind of shitty without coffee. Watch him say drink coffee. Well, I'm just going to have to say this. If you punch yourself in the face and it hurts,

your face before and afterwards, or you could not punch yourself in the face. So may I suggest the best way to go off of caffeine should you ever want to shorten your life and make yourself unhappy like that would be to taper off for a day or two and go from your five cups down to three cups for a couple days and down to two cups and have no headache but if you are getting a headache here's what i do. And this will piss off some of our most natural friends. I would get a Pepsod AC and a couple of good old fashioned aspirin. And you use the Pepsod because it actually prevents a lot of the damage that aspirin does to the lining of your stomach and the risk of bleeding. So you could do that and maybe a little bit of baking soda at the same time.

And that's going to help your headache enormously and do that for a few days. When should we drink coffee? I've heard kind of more recently people saying like, maybe you should be like a little bit more alert, maybe a little bit more awake and not have it like right when you wake up. Do you disagree with that? Or do you have any special times a day or timing of coffee that you think is effective? Man, you're asking all the great coffee questions. I haven't answered in a while because you go through like media cycles. This is so cool. Thank you. There's been a lot of debate about this and I'm going to give you both sides of it. There's one group that says, oh, wait an hour

before, right? That is terrible advice and great advice at the same time, depending on who you are. And here's how to tell. If you're someone who wakes up early, like if you're the early bird, you wake up at five, you got pep in your step, you're super happy, tons of energy, and you go to bed early, you should wait an hour, right? Maybe even two, whenever you want. If you're someone who says they forced me to wake up at 8 a.m. and I do it because that's the latest I can possibly wake up and still get to work on time, have your coffee when you first wake up. And so the answer is, who are you? What's your circadian rhythm like? So the night owls need coffee when they wake up and the morning people need coffee

later. So there isn't a right answer there. The reason for this though, is I think really interesting because I'm a bit of a nerd about it. And it has to do with your acid alkaline cycle and your circadian rhythm. And when you wake up, there's a cortisol spike. And I think you guys know about that. Anyone who's into serious strength knows you should have like a rise in cortisol in the morning. And a lot of weightlifters will actually use bioidentical cortisol either to suppress or enhance biological functions. It's like thyroid hormone. You can use it for a variety of reasons. And if you're low on cortisol and you take some, it can make huge differences. So in order to get energy in the morning, you should have a cortisol spike in

the morning. And this is why people who are night owls, their cortisol spike isn't early enough. And when you drink coffee, you do get a mild cortisol spike. That is not bad for you at all. It's normal. But if you can use it to raise cortisol earlier in the morning so you can become a little bit more of an early person, that's great. But if you wake up at 5 a.m. ready to jump around and sing, then you already have cortisol then, and you should take it a little bit later to get that spike in cortisol. So there's a cortisol

circadian rhythm that happens, and the most important thing is it rises in the morning, so when you get out of bed, you have enough blood pressure that you don't fall over and then get eaten by a predator. That's why it all works like that. But there's also an acid-alkaline cycle that's really interesting for athletics specifically. People say, coffee is acidic. You should quit drinking it. They do say it like that. Those same avocado-eating little vegan

kind of people... By the way, I was a raw vegan for quite a while, so I'm kind of talking about myself here. They'll tell you, but lemon and lime, those are alkaline. How does that work? Have you ever tasted a lemon or lime? Do those taste alkaline to you? You ever push a pH meter in there? No, they're highly acidic. It's what's called fruit acids and fruit acids are acids. They're not alkaline foods. They're acidic foods that metabolize to become alkaline.

Guess what kind of acids in acidic coffee? Fruit acids that do the same thing. So then now we have to ask ourselves, what is the role of acid and alkalinity in strength and power and endurance? Now, it turns out that the spike in acid is energizing and is good for power. And if you let that continue, though, what happens? Lactic acid. That's not good for endurance. This is why in a marathon, you see people drink some baking soda around mile 16, mile 20,

they actually do better because they're able to help handle the acid load better. So in an ideal endurance world, you start with acid and then go to alkaline. What does coffee do? Start with acid, go to alkaline, which is why it's good because throughout the day, even if you're not doing crazy exercise, you just have a bunch of meetings. You want energy to start and then alkalinity to endure. And you can do that with coffee. That's another reason that you've heard me and many others like Charles Poliquin, who, geez, where did I first, it's probably Wilson's book on adrenals a long time ago is where I first heard of this. But you can do lemon or lime in water with a bunch of salt in the morning. And the reason you do the salt is because the salt also helps with that rise in blood pressure

and it makes it easier for the body to make a little bit less cortisol and still get the blood pressure you need. So basically sea salt, water, morning, then coffee is the ideal way to do it. And if you want that extra boost, have some MCTs. That would be good to have in the coffee as well. And a little bit of butter in the coffee or a lot if you need the calories. Like if you want energy because you're a big guy because you have a lot that day, you can add more. But at least a teaspoon of butter because it changes the structure of the water in the coffee so that your body can use it to make ATP more readily without having to process it the way it has to process normal water that you drink.

So there's a lot of weird biochemistry going on in here, but I tell you, man, after 10 years of Bulletproof coffee, you know, people lost a million pounds on it. So many pro athletes and, you know, uh, fighters, I mean, football, just name a pro sport where there aren't some number of people who go, yeah, I do that or some variation of it because it works. And those are some of the reasons. Why is it that you can drink Bulletproof coffee and still be quote unquote fasted? You know, there are so many people get really mad about this. They get upset. These are usually the calorie people, right?

You guys know them. So there's like a group of super angry. Look, a diet soda is better for you than a regular soda because it has less calories. And they always talk in that voice. And it's exactly the same voice as the vegans who are like you're killing animals not knowing that they just destroyed habitat with their dumb garbanzo bean stuff so like this just happens right and so sorry guys if i offended either one of you let's see we've got the keto people as well like if you have another carb you a bad person, but it's this really kind of radical perspective on things that I don't, I don't think is really working. So I know you

have some other question there, but I got all excited about it. Yeah. Just, uh, yeah. How can, uh, you know, drinking bulletproof coffee, which does have calories. So now we have the calorie angry people and what they'll tell you is, you know, calories are all that matters and they're just wrong. Okay. And at this point it's been disproven so many times when you have the calories and what the calories are composed of matters. Macros are important for God's sake. If you're going to argue against that, like there's no point in having a conversation. So then you have people say, but I looked at the fasting studies and the mice only had water. Mice don't have espresso machines. Duh. Okay.

They didn't test it. Right. But then you look at every fasting tradition throughout the world. I don't care if you're looking at Ayurveda, you're looking at China, you're looking at Russia, what do they have? Tea. They're not drinking water. They're drinking tea. Right. And there's a reason for that because it works better. And now you can say, but Bulletproof Coffee isn't just coffee. It has other stuff in it. It has calories. Well, you look at what are the hallmarks of a fasted state. The hallmarks of a fasted state are two hormones that really matter or one's a signaling compound. There's insulin. There was a test probably in the second or third year after I brought Bulletproof Coffee out. Some third-party guy went out there and tested 300

breakfasts to figure out which ones raised insulin the most. Bulletproof Coffee was number one for zero effect on insulin and blood glucose. It does not change at all. Now, if you have a cup of coffee, black, it's probably going to go up a little bit because cortisol goes up because the caffeine hits you more quickly. Cortisol goes up a little bit. Cortisol and adrenaline will release a little bit of glucose. Bulletproof coffee slows the absorption or I should say any coffee blended with that, but Bulletproof coffee is the brand I make. I'd say any coffee blended with that, but Bulletproof Coffee is the brand I make. It slows the absorption of caffeine so you don't get the hit quite as fast. So this was the most stable.

So if insulin doesn't go up at all, your body thinks you're fasting. The other part of fasting that you guys are probably really familiar with based on the diameter of your biceps here is mTOR, right? mTOR is a compound that tells the body to go into grow mode and it's independent from testosterone and all the anabolic stuff. So what's going on with mTOR is that it's like a spring and you want it to be low. So you'll live a long time and you won't grow cancer and you want it to periodically go really high so you can put on muscle, right? And I don'ticeps like you guys but i'm doing pretty well the new york times says i'm almost muscular which is what i want to be for anti-aging right i don't want to be like plant-based because then i could only wear like stretchy pants and stuff you know like the little stick ones um what i want to

be instead is i want to have enough muscle mass i don't have to deal with sarcopenia i'm strong i'm balanced and i don't think i want to be quite as big as you guys, although sometimes I'm like, man, that'd be fun. I could go there. But then I kind of balance it out. Plus, I'm lazy. So mTOR, how do you do that? You take it and you smash it down.

And the more you compress it, and then when you eat the right stuff, and the number one thing that raises mTOR is carbs and sugar, but carbs specifically or sugar specifically, but any carb will do it. Number two is protein. So what you do is you smash it down. What are the three things that we know suppress mTOR? Hmm.

Fasting. And black coffee suppresses mtor and any other guesses fat what no fat doesn't suppress mtor exercise suppresses mtor that's one of the reasons that you grow after you put so here's the recipe from fast this way my last book gee what would happen if you didn't eat for 12, 14, 16 hours and you had coffee during that time? So suppress mTOR, suppress mTOR, right? Then you lift. You just do some air squats or some pushups so you can go for a full on lifting session. And right afterwards, you have carbs and protein. Well, what's going to happen is the mTOR is going to go up right when the signal's there and it's going to go up more than just exercise would do, more than just exercise plus protein because you suppressed it so much ahead of time.

And you could do it without coffee if you want to, but those are the three big ones in studies that suppress it. But since when you have Bulletproof coffee in the morning and you're having only fat and fat that does not raise mTOR at all. And you haven't raised your insulin levels at all. Your body says, okay, I'm still fasting. I've got ketones present from the MCT oil and the ketones happen when I'm fasting. This is a normal thing, right? That's why this is a hack and it's carefully designed. And when people say you can't do it because calories, I'm like, do you not know how the system works? It absolutely works. And it's been tested with intermittent fasting, that exact protocol, for 10 years. And half a million books or thereabouts talking about it.

Actually, my total book count is almost a million. But whether you want to say all of them involved with coffee, I don't really care. But enough that it's hundreds of thousands of people. So you can say, well, the mice didn't only have water. I'm like, I don't really care, but enough that it's hundreds of thousands of people. So you can say, well, the mice didn't only only had water. I'm like, I don't really care about the mice. I'll eat them. All right. I have a question like, okay, so we now see how like fat affects fasting, but how about if you were to only have protein? So let's say during a fast, you chose to either have weight protein or have a meal that had a bit of fat and a bit of protein. Because when I, when I started fasting, like, I don't know, three or four years ago,

I was very strict about not eating anything when I fast, only having coffee or coffee and electrolytes. That's it. In the past few months, I've been allowing myself to maybe have some whey protein or something during the fast or whatever. Yeah, it's not really fasting. But how does that affect the fast and maybe what we're trying to get out of it? That is a really interesting question.

It depends on the kind of protein. So whey protein is particularly known for raising insulin a lot. So you get more of a spike from whey. And even then, okay, is it hydrolyzed whey? Is it whey protein concentrate? Is it isolate? How much did you blend it? All of those are variables. Was it mixed with casein, which I don't recommend a lot of, especially guys looking for physique will look for casein because it has a long lasting amino acid effect on the body, but it's also correlated with a lot of bad effects on the liver and cancer. And essentially it's harder to detox. So you could be taking a protein blend and have a very different answer depending on what it is. Um, you're, uh, you're technically not fasting because the protein

will raise insulin and blood glucose to a certain extent. And more importantly, it'll raise mTOR. That said, is it a good practice for you probably because it's what your body wants you to do that's why you're doing it right you a lot of times people start out with strict fasting and it feels so good right and also i i mean all three of us, or four of us, including Control Room, all of us are type A high-performance people. That's who you talk to on your podcast. That's who I talk to on my podcast. It's called the human upgrade. That's kind of what I do.

We're going to say, this is good. Give me more. That's why I think I'll break world records on powerlifting. More is better. It's our mindset. Well, with fasting, once you get to a certain point, I just did this with Shaman Durek, who's a friend who was just on my show. He's been doing OMAD one meal a day for a couple of years now. But some nights, he's like, I'm having a hard time sleeping. I'm like, well, maybe that's because you overdid it. And I think what happened is you actually overdid it, right? So you were getting a little too much fasting. Your body's like, you know what? Can I have some protein? Cause you gotta, I mean, you've got a lot of muscles in there and you got to feed those guys. So you're still better off than if you had a croissant or a bunch of carbs for breakfast. Right. And I think if you

were to say I'm going to do shorter fasts or every other day, I'll do a fast with just black coffee or just tea or just water, whatever you want to do. Right. And then, and then the other days you have protein for breakfast. I can tell you this morning, I'm playing around with some new proteins for my, my new company, uh, for upgrade labs. So I had a, some very unusual proteins and peptides this morning with my coffee and I don't even feel guilty about it. Right. Like it's totally good. Some mornings do it. Some mornings don't. I think that's your recipe. Can you help me understand? Okay. I'll admit I'm one of those calorie people. I love you, Dave, but I'm definitely one of those that's going to see somebody, you know, putting butter in the coffee and then just wonder how many calories are in

there. But after what you just explained about m torn, the, uh, coffee and MCT oil, not raising the insulin levels, where does the coffee go? Like,

how does our body utilize it? If, um, you know, it's not going to turn into, um, I guess fat, I'll say,

are you saying where does the fat go versus the coffee? No, just in general. If I eat carbs and I go work out, that carbs is going to help fuel that workout. Where does the fat from the butter and the MCT oil go in the body? What does it do? Got it. So about 50% of the calories that you're burning are not being used for exercise. They're being used for keeping your body warm, for respiration, heartbeat, and 15, 20% for your brain.

And so we don't measure those unless you're in a calorie chamber. And this is why I'm one of those sort of like the calorie counting thing doesn't work because you never know how much you're in a calorie chamber. And this is why I'm one of those sort of like the calorie kind of thing doesn't work because you never know how much you're putting out. And at Upgrade Labs, and there should be at least a hundred of those coming up here. So I'm looking to make this more available. One of the pieces of gear that we use can tell you very accurately your basal metabolic rate. And mine's depending on where I am in life between 2,700 and 3,000 calories a day. And that's what it's going to take. But if it's cold outside, it's different than if it's warm outside, right? And like, how are you going to know all this stuff? So what

you're doing is you're picking a number. It's a fictional number that changes every day. And then you're going to tell yourself that you know how much is in your food, which you don't and then you're going to tell yourself that you know how much is in your food, which you don't unless you weigh everything. And even if you weigh everything, do you know those cashews? Were they summer cashews or winter cashews? Because the amount of sunlight they got and what was in the soil can change the calories per gram in a meaningful amount. So what we have here is I'm convincing myself that the number of calories I'm eating is real and I'm'm convincing myself the number of calories I'm burning is real, and those are both fictional numbers. That said, you lock someone in a calorie chamber, and you control and measure every single calorie, will they lose weight if their body works right? If they have hormone problems, they still won't lose weight, and I have very knowledgeable doctors who've been on my podcast saying that that's the case. So a working system should lose weight if

it has less calories than it expends, but it won't because it'll turn down calorie burning. And at the end of the day, you can create a torture chamber where someone might lose weight eventually, but it's not going to be anywhere near the same rate. So where does the fact go? Well, MCT oil cannot, okay, let me be accurate here. There's four kinds of MCT oil. Okay. The cheapest and most abundant MCT oil is called lauric acid. It's a C12. It can be stored as fat. It is basically sold as an MCT oil. Companies like Onnit will put it in there and tell you it's good for you. The problem is it actually doesn't metabolize like an MCT oil. The name MCT came from a chemist, not a biochemist. It should be categorized as a long chain fat, but it's so cheap and abundant. We do fracking with it.

We take coconut and palm oil. We break it into its little constituents. And we take that one that there's so much of it. We put it everywhere. They make soap out of it, or they inject it in the earth to get natural gas out, or you sell it and tell people it's good for them if that's how you roll i don't do that one so that's the the the very abundant mct and coconut oil so i'm going to take that one off the list there's three mcts left okay one of them c6 is the disaster oil uh sorry it's the disaster pants oil. So that one, you do not want C6. We're not going to be eating that stuff.

So we take that one off and we only have two left. And I swear I'm not going to flip you guys off. I was like, is he going to do it? I was like, how am I going to do this? Right. Okay. So what's left is C8 and C10. So we're going to take, there I did it. We're going to take C, we're going to take C10 off did it. We're going to take C, uh, we're going to take C10

off. C10 cannot be stored as fat. It doesn't raise ketones nearly as much as C8, which is the one I've been recommending since I started writing about this stuff, uh, in 2011. So C8, five years after I started, like, I can feel the difference. Studies came out at UC San Diego that showed C8 raises ketones way more than anything else. And both C8 and C10 cannot be stored as fat. C6 won't be stored as fat because you'll shit it out. And C12 will be stored as fat. So basically, the MCTs that I would recommend using, they can only be metabolized for energy. They don't go into fat.

So that's pretty cool. And then you're saying, okay, what about the other calories? You need a teaspoon of butter in order to get the molecular changes in the water. That's what, 36 calories or something? And you can go up to, oh, several tablespoons. And some of the highest dose recipes I've talked about are 400 or more accurately 360 calories. For the first two years of going bulletproof, you are going to have a craving for grass-fed butter. You're going to just be like, oh my God, I need it. I'll put as much in my coffee as I can. It's hard to put words to it, but it's like an addict. And I finally figured out why. The half-life of fat in your body is about two years.

It's 700 and something days. So what's going on here is you have too much omega-6 fat in your body. Your cell membranes, more specifically your mitochondrial membranes, and the cardiolipin, which is one of the major energy-making parts of those, is full of bad fats. And the second the body gets a chance to say, you mean I can have some stable saturated fat in there instead of this unstable omega-6 that you've been feeding me in excess? It makes you crave the butter. And after two years, you've replaced half the fat in your cell membranes with stable functional fats that are saturated and then all of a sudden you wake up one day go i only want a teaspoon of butter i only want two teaspoons of butter i don't need that like i did so that's a very long answer to your question and the answer is where does it go it can

go in metabolically and the body says now that i have the building blocks to make healthy cells it will burn calories to fold proteins and change your cell membranes. Okay. It takes energy to do that. So where do we account for that with calories? Well, you're rebuilding the body, but you're not rebuilding more muscle. You're rebuilding the batteries, the power plants and manufacturing plants with better building components. So that's where some of the butter goes and the rest of it can go to fat, but what's going to signal the storage of fat insulin that wasn't present you put out a famous tweet you either said calories are dumb or calories are stupid and it just flamed everybody everybody went crazy over it um but it sounds to me that

you're that you're maybe just saying that it's not maybe a super accurate account of what's happening. But it does appear to me and appears to a lot of people that it can be effective to track what you eat and to pay attention to the overall amount of energy that you consume, even though there's a lot of nuanced stuff like food labels can be quite a bit off and our energy output could be way off. But is it fair to say that like somebody could lose weight if they're tracking their calories and paying attention to it? And maybe previously they weren't doing that.

You can lose weight by tracking your flavors too. If you actually take a piece of paper and you write down bitter, sweet, sour, salty, and savory, and you just track each of those on each of the meals, you'll lose weight. How so? Because awareness of what you're eating helps you lose weight. given that you just said and I just said with great rigor, both of us, that we don't actually know how many calories we're eating. If tracking that makes you feel good, dude, track the cycles of the moon. Track whichever astrology stuff you like. I don't really care. If it works for you, you should absolutely do it. But don't sit there and tell people that a fucking diet soda, which is proven to make you fat, why would you say because it has no calories,

it's good for you? Because you're willfully ignoring a huge amount of data and science to stick to your false belief, right? I count leprechauns before I eat because it makes me lose weight. And I tell you, if you don't count leprechauns, you're a bad person. So yes, calories exist. However, if I give you 2,000 calories of corn syrup at midnight and I eat 2,000 calories of MCT oil at 8 a.m., I'm pretty sure that we're not going to have the same amount of weight loss and weight gain, are we? Okay, so it's not the calories. It's the timing. It's the composition. And I don't mean calories don't matter. There's lots of studies that show overfeeding is bad for you. But since you can't count calorie consumption accurately, you can't count calorie use accurately.

Why are we focused on calories again? I believe you mentioned earlier that your metabolic rate is like 2,700 to 3,000. Why do you know that? One of the pieces of gear at upgrade labs does a really careful scientifically validate is like a thirty thousand dollar piece of gear and it looks at electrical capacitance of your cells and electrical resistance of your cells and is pretty much 90 something percent correlated with a deXA scan. And that's the most accurate thing that you can get without a calorie chamber or possibly like one of the VO two max things that you would do looking at respiratory volumes and

things like that. So that's how I know, cause I get to track it over time. But why even know about that? What's the value in you understanding? That's not why I do it actually do that machine to look at visceral fat and cellular hydration that's just a side effect of knowing those things so this is where this one i'm curious because as far as like individuals who track calories and i don't anymore because i have good eating habits and i know how to maintain

gain or lose because i have good eating habits yeah I know how to maintain gain or lose because I have good eating habits. Um, but for those individuals that do, we know that the calories that are being tracked are going to be off by a certain amount. Uh, many individuals that do track to try to make sure they're in a deficit and make sure they're dropping. We also mentioned that the system there, their body has to be, you know, they have to have good habits as far as sleep, et cetera, to make sure their body's working the right way so that if they track whatever, even if it's wrong, they're moving in the right direction. So this is the thing though. This is why I'm, I'm, I don't necessarily understand the idea of calories in calories out being wrong. I understand that

that's not the whole idea, but when you're tracking something for a set amount of time, if that measurement is wrong, you'll still make changes based off of the thing that you've measured. So now if you choose to eat less based off of the measurement, that's wrong. You eat less and you start moving down. You're now dropping. The measurement was wrong, but now you're definitely in a deficit, even though the deficit you're in is not an accurate deficit of what you think it is. But it's still now moving you in that direction. That's kind of what we're talking about here, right? Like we know the measurements are

wrong or most people don't know that, but they are, but it's still going to move them in that direction. It's totally true. So I was a CTO and co-founder of the first company to track heart rate from your wrist, the stuff that's in your Apple watch now and all that stuff, we sold the company 10 years ago or something to Intel. So I got a lot into tracking and I'm using an aura ring now. I'm an investor advisor in aura. Provably all of the data on your sleep, your heart rate, and your respiration from any tracking devices off by some amount, right? And the algorithms are pretty good from Aura. There's another company called Sleep Space. I've interviewed Dan Gartenberg.

He can take this data and has a better picture of sleep. So what I tell people who are worried about that is, is your percentage of deep sleep improving or not improving? Even if it's relatively wrong, it's going to be directionally accurate, right? And it's right enough, okay? And that's kind of what you're saying. Is calories right enough? And I would say it probably is, but here's where it gets to be a real problem. Okay. I used to weigh 300 pounds. I believed the calorie thing. So I said, I'm going to lose this

weight. It's the most important thing I could ever do. I went to the gym an hour and a half a day, six days a week, half weights, half cardio. I'm going to burn off those potato chips, except I wasn't eating potato chips because I went on a low fat, low calorie, high toxin, high omega-6, high corn syrup diet, because that's what low fat, low calorie diets are. And after 18 months of that, I still had a 46 inch waist. I was still 300 pounds. I could max out all but two of the machines at the gym. And I was doing my treadmill with a weighted backpack at 15 degree incline, walking, not running, because I had already had a couple of knee surgeries. So the

calorie thing, I was hungry all the time. I was cold. I gave myself autoimmune issues doing that because I believed in calories. What's going on here is you can hack your metabolism and telling someone that it's about the calories when they are hungry. It's not about the calories. It's about the hunger. So instead of tracking calories, track hunger. And my advice would be eat so that you're not hungry within four hours of your last meal. Do whatever it takes to do that. And if you do that, you will lose weight more reliably. So track your hunger and your food cravings. Remove the foods that cause the cravings, right? Eat until you're full and you stay full for four hours and don't have snacks. But what most people who track calories do, unless they're exceptional, and you guys are

top tier, you know, you're power lifters and all that. But the vast majority of human beings, you know, you're power lifters and all that. But the vast majority of human beings, I was so hungry, I just had one candy. I remember I interviewed a woman in the UK, in London, and she said, I have no food in my house because I have such severe cravings and I know calories. I have to keep my calories down so I won't be fat, even though I'm already fat. I just don't want to get fatter. So if I want to eat, I have to leave my house, go downstairs to the grocery store and buy something. Then I feel ashamed about it. And in the office, I know where every drawer with candy is and I do my best, but every day I have some candy. And the first day she has MCT, butter and coffee, she calls me and is crying.

The first day in my adult life, I didn't have candy. Okay, this is not a calorie thing. The belief in the calorie myth creates enormous human suffering. And it's not accurate that you've said and I've said. Hunger is what matters. And telling people that they should not eat because of calories, it's like telling people don't have sex. Like, how well has that worked in teenagers? Are you still trying to diet on chicken, broccoli, rice, dry turkey?

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Now, you know, on the idea of hunger, the one thing that we talk about as far as fasting is concerned is we can both, all of us here can eat an immense amount of food. Me especially. I can put down a lot of food. But the thing that fasting has been able to give me over the past few, like four years, is absolute hunger control. Is it cool? Yeah. Like, I don't feel, even when I feel hungry, I like, I can eat later.

I can just do that one meal a day. That's not a big deal. The muscle loss hasn't happened either. It's not a I'm going to right yeah yeah and it used to be that way it used to be that when i would eat i'd get frustrated i'd get annoyed i'd have to get a meal in at that point in time right now without that caffeine it's kind of a little difficult but but that's some donuts to let you sniff them and remember they have calories but but that's the thing you know and we have a lot of um individuals who come on the podcast like lane norton alan aragon etc and we have the fasting conversation with them and and more

individuals are now open to it but at the same time um there's still a lot of resistance like for example you know a lot of people say not everyone can do fasting or fasting should women should be super careful with fasting you know so i write about that in my book on fasting too but you know those two guys are some of the angriest dudes out there because they're hungry all the time seriously they have personality defects their brains need help seriously they're dickheads i mean have you read what they write they they just go straight for the everyone at disney agrees me it's a bad person it's like seventh grade all over again with that crowd. It's not all that.

They're not that. Seriously. Alan Aragon. That guy is the biggest hater of people who disagree with him. He's not. There's no curiosity with that guy. He's just a troll. I have to disagree.

I have to disagree. We had Alan on. We had a lot of we had a lot of different opinions on that podcast, but it was very conversational. And he. Oh, that's cool. He might have. He might might have evolved i haven't seen his work in eight years but yeah then i think it's not worth my time yeah no we talked about oh mad with adam i mean with it with alan he was open to it he was open to it he was open to it i will reconsider my my statements there seriously i have not read one of his things in eight years same with literally yeah is lane chilled as well we talked about oh man with lane was cool a little bit

that's what i thought but for example one of our things with omad is because since we all do we do do that from time to time right we haven't noticed much muscle loss if any actually um and we we had that conversation with both of them and both of them like it may not be ideal but most people will not be losing nearly as much muscle or any you know if they get in enough protein etc so they were very open to it i think you might be you know that's actually really cool yeah and true and and this is really honest i have not i used to in the early days of bulletproof i got a lot of the calorie people just like spam my stuff. Not the curious, the I'm going to make fun of you because you're in a different tribe. I don't do tribalism stuff

like that, except against vegans because they're all bad people. By the way, guys, I was a raw vegan for a long time. I don't actually do it against vegans either. I make fun of them, but it's actually done with love. I speak at David Wolf's conferences to raw vegans. Okay. Like, so, so even there it's, it's, it's a teasing, but it's not a hate and it's not a takedown and it's not the skeptic trolling kind of vibe because I don't think that helps us whether it's keto, vegan fasting or calories. Right.

And yeah, I can say calories are dumb, but I didn't say people who believe in calories are dumb. Right. And there's a very big difference between an ad hominem attack and a scientific, hey, this idea does not make sense. Can we talk about it? And that's the vibe I'm talking about. And I will tell you, the most keto people are the angriest dudes ever. The most vegan people are the angriest dudes ever. And the most calorie restricted, artificial color and flavor eating people are the most angry people. And they all sound alike pointing guns at each other. And that's what I'm opposed to. Like, hey, maybe we could like try stuff and figure out what works and then make it work for your grandma. Make it work for someone's parents who are not bodybuilders, who don't read science all the time and make it easy and make it so they don't suffer. And that's all I care about.

Right. I'm happy to be wrong. At this point, you can say bulletproof copy doesn't work for people for hunger suppression. And you can say it only works because they have less calories. But then you have to delete your post two posts ago that said it can't work because it has 400 calories. I'm not sure where that comes from. But you guys have great curiosity, right? And if we would all be curious and less judgmental, man, I would like that.

So if those guys have evolved, that's cool. I think a lot of the stuff when it comes to people saying certain things about yourself, I think that sometimes people can't deal with a lot of the success that you've had, how popular Bulletproof coffee has been. I mean, it's undeniable that you've helped a lot of people lose weight and we know what comes with weight loss is a lot of oftentimes there's a lot of health

benefits. And so these things are undeniable. And I think sometimes people are frustrated that they're not able to maybe get their name out there the same way that you have with especially with your with your products and all the different things you have going on. So I think sometimes people are just like, this guy's wrong. And there, I think, in some ways, trying to in some ways, trying to piggyback off of some of the stuff that you've done. There's a name for that. It's called Envy.

Right. And it's, you know, one of the seven deadly sins and it's, it's really hard, right? I mean, it happens to everyone. And I, I'm an advisor to dozens of companies. I've helped a lot of people and I've had a lot of people try to take me down. I've had companies copy me and get, you know, Joe Rogan. They literally, the day after one of the companies he owns launches a competing product, that's the day that I'm a bad person and a liar. The day before that, oh, my God, he totally changed my brain. I'm like, okay. So I deal with that. People generally don't know about all the stuff that goes down in the world of nutrition, but there are gangs of nutrition thugs from each camp who run around and troll,

and they do it all the time. And so what you'll find is if you're looking at anyone who's an influencer, and you look at the vibe on their content, and if they're pointing fingers at other people saying, all the people who believe this are dumb and bad. And it's a little different, because I am making fun of ideas. And I actually called out two people who have trolled incessantly. In fact, some of the people in that crowd, I don't know if those two, but some of their other kind of buddies have blocked me on Instagram. So I can't even see the shit they say about me.

But I don't care, because I never hear about it unless someone tells me. And then I laugh because there's only three words. And it's actually Tim Ferriss who kind of gave me this, this, uh, this lesson, um, on my podcast. And it's say my name. Every time Joe Rogan said I was a bad person, a liar, I sold more coffee. That's the God's honest truth, right? I'm not going to complain about it. I stand by my science. I stand by my references and I stand by the fact that I don't weigh 300 pounds and I'm never hungry. And I like, you can't, you can, you can be angry or envious, or you can say, maybe there's something to this. What the hell is going on here? What did the world miss? Not what did I miss? And his's cognitive dissonance. When your

reality just shifted and something you believe to be true isn't true, it is scary. And it's not scary cognitively, it's scary in yourselves. And that's why our whole industry can be so angry sometimes. And it's not necessary, right? Because curiosity is the cure for that. What the heck? That can't be. That can't be, therefore you're an asshole. Or that can't be, therefore either you're wrong. Which is different than lying. It's different than misinformation.

It's just a mistake. And it's not a judgment. Or maybe you're intentionally deceptive, but I can never know. Was your fight with Joe Rogan on his show, was it worth it? And what were your feelings kind of after the show where you're like, man, I just made a big mistake or I'm proud of myself for kind of standing my ground in something I believe in. I was on a show three times. I came on there. Okay. You guys are not going to believe um i didn't know who the heck joe rogan was i have never listened to a podcast in my life okay there's a quarter billion downloads of bulletproof radio and it's top one percent of all podcasts for 10 years

and i've never listened to a podcast i never even listened to one of mine like they go out the door and they're done i don't have time that. I absorb through reading 10 times faster than listening. I can't stand doing it. Right. Even ones that I know are full of info. I just, I don't have time for that. So I don't know who Joe is. And, and so I, I, a guy calls me up and says, you should go on the show.

Hooks me up. I go down there and just tell the truth. And the next day, Joe, to Joe, I'm so grateful for this. He's like, you know, this Bulletproof Coffee, like, it's completely changed my brain. And Joe's super ADD, right? So Bulletproof Coffee works very well for that kind of brain. I have the same kind of brain.

I get it, right? So he's in there sloshing it around in a French press and right before we're on the second time. And it's super cool, right? And the guys at Honor are like, Hey, we want to sell your, uh, sell your MCT oil and your coffee. I'm like, all right, that's cool. Right. I was already doing pretty well. This was a bump for sure. Uh, and then the third time I came on Joe's kind of like, well, you know, what's the, what's the secret sauce. And I'm like, I'm

not telling you the secret sauce, man. Neither is Coca-Cola going to tell you what's in there, but I can tell you it's expensive and it's hard. After that show, there was a bunch of back and forth in writing saying, Dave, you lied. Joe said, he said, Dave, I, I think you lied on the show. I want to see your process and I'll sign an NDA, non-disclosure agreement and says it'd be confidential. I said, great, Joe, I'll be in LA next week. Let's meet. It's 80 pages of documentation. You can read it, but you can't take copies. He wouldn't take the meeting. And then, oh, six months later, when he decided to, I don't know, say something bad about me, I emailed them and said, Joe, what's, why would you do that? Like I offer the thing. In writing, I was afraid you'd manipulate me. So what's going on here is the same cognitive dissonance,

the same I want this, I want this, and all that stuff. So am I grateful for it? Yeah. And I can tell you, it completely messed with my head in a big way because when you're helping a bunch of people and your social media is full of people going, Dave, thank you, I lost 100 pounds, my teenagers don't have pimples. you're helping a bunch of people and your social media is full of people going, Dave, thank you. I lost a hundred pounds. My teenagers don't have pimples. And like, like it's, it's, it's changed a lot of people's lives. I mean, more than I could ever understand.

And then to go from that to Dave, you're a charlatan snake oil salesman and all it took me like a little bit of work on that. Um, so I'll just say, yeah, I'm grateful for it. Cause it got the word out more and it taught me some lessons about resilience, how to deal with trolls. And it also taught me that only about 4% of people are the trolls. These are the sociopaths and psychopaths. And there's about another, maybe 20% of people that I'm not saying Joe's one of those, just to be really clear here. I'm just saying that the trolls, the people who get, you get off on that kind of stuff and controlling and causing pain in others, that's about four or 5%. And then about 20% of people have a little bit of that vibe going on. So you ban the 4%, you block them from your account and it's all peace. It was really 300 douchebags coming after

me that looked like 10,000. Diet soda makes you fat. We can't, we can't get off this podcast without you clarifying what that means. Cause a lot of people drinking diet sodas are like, what are you talking about? I drink some diet soda. So do I. Oh, my God. Hold on a second here. You guys gave up coffee, but you drink diet soda. We were talking about that.

We were talking about diet soda. I don't really drink diet soda very often, first of all. That was actually the only stipulation I had with this whole thing because Mark had said, you know, no caffeine, no this, no this, no that, no fun, and no diet sodas. I'm like, whoa. I'm like, I need something. So I drink a lot of zero-calorie sodas because that's kind of like my main, that's my go-to right now. So I'm curious what you're going to say coming up. But, yeah, it really does make me wonder. And does it matter the kind of diet my main, that's my go-to right now. So I'm curious what you're going to say coming up. But yeah, it really does make me wonder. And does it matter the kind of diet soda?

Hell yeah, it matters. What's going on there is if you have stevia or monk fruit, you're probably fine. And I would do that. And you have that in your electrolytes, whatever, go for it. There's some little biological effect from stevia in some people maybe there's mixed research about that but it's it's small it's nutra sweet or spartame and that and sucralose are the two really bad ones and ace k is in the middle so ace k causes benign nodules to grow on your thyroid. That actually happened to me in the late 90s,

because when ASK first came out, I'm like, this stuff is the best sweetener ever. I'm super Atkins, right? And I ate a lot of it. And then the doctor said, God, you got weird stuff on your thyroid. I did my research. I quit it. The nodules went away. So I have concerns there that aren't about obesity. You might get away with ASK, but I don't recommend it. Sucralose is what happens when you chlorinate sugar obsessively. And it turns out your gut bacteria shift dramatically from sucralose and most especially from NutraSweet or Spartan. And there are studies, PubMed studies, that show that NutraSweet causes obesity and metabolic disease despite the intention of limiting caloric intake. The PubMed on that is 253-13461. There's lots of things going on there, and it has to do with your microbiome, because this is the other thing that our calorie friends

haven't fully considered, but the guys over at Viome have definitely considered. Viome is a test of what the gut bacteria, what you have, but more importantly, what they're doing, right? And it turns out that if you feed gut bacteria something that makes them produce butyrate, well, butyrate is a short-chain fatty acid that's highly ketogenic and anti-inflammatory. So you ate a calorie and it turned into butyrate, or you ate a calorie and it turned into butyrate or you ate a calorie and it turned into something else that didn't have those same things so a big part of the calories in calories out is it's not you processing them it's a bunch of bacteria processing them but nutra sweet changes the balance of bacteria in the gut in a way that is pro-obesogenic so i wouldn't do that stuff because you're ruining the balance of bacteria in the gut in a way that is pro obesogenic. So I wouldn't do that

stuff because you're ruining the balance of gut bacteria and you can prove it with a biome test. Don't need any artificial sweeteners for a month and test your poop and your saliva and then do it again. It's like $149 or something. Do it again a month later and you'll see a very noticeable difference. You know, i'm actually curious andrew your thoughts on this too man i know that when i do drink diet soda i know what it does to me when i when i when i like in my gut like i can feel it like i can feel like i got the shits a little bit right but i have good habits as far as food is concerned where it doesn't necessarily affect it i notice it doesn't affect anything as far as my body composition over time because

I've been drinking diet soda for a while now. But if one has control over that, do you think it's that big of an issue still in the long run? Do you think there are really any long-term benefits? But I'm guessing for individuals who don't have a handle on their nutrition, they don't have a handle on their habits as far as not snacking, et cetera, right? It'd be a more dangerous idea for them. Am I kind of onto something there or no? Yeah, there's a total load of toxins. How many toxins did you get?

How many things did you do to disrupt your gut bacteria? For instance, what's the load of glyphosate, which is very meaningful in terms of what we know about it due to gut bacteria. So you're saying, okay, I didn't have any glyphosate, but I had a lot of aspartame. What's it going to do? The answer is we probably don't know,

but together there's usually a negative synergistic effect. This is true of most toxins. So you break down one pathway and then you break down another. It's worse than just doing either independently. So one thing we're not talking about, though, is especially NutraSweet causes or aspartame, it's addictive. And it causes substantial sugar cravings, which usually you'll have with another diet soda. And it does this through a mechanism similar to MSG, which also causes food cravings.

So the excitotoxicity is when you have in a synapse, you put out an amino acid neurotransmitter, amino acid or neurotransmitter, that then has to be taken up. So that's what causes a synapse to fire. When you take either aspartame or MSG, what you're doing is you're causing synapses to fire, which takes calories and energy in the brain.

The brain goes, this is a goddamn emergency. I'm firing more than I want to. I need to make electricity. So the mitochondrial shuttle start moving around and it sends out a strong craving to get some glucose in there already because the brain is under, under attack, except it's not really an immune attack. It's just a fire, fire, fire more than it wants to. Right? So then you say, geez, I have a desire for sugar right now at a restaurant. They add MSG. They sell 30% more on

their ticket size because you order more drinks and you order more dessert. This is one of the reasons that it's a hidden ingredient in restaurants. Well, artificial sweeteners are going to do the same thing. So you have that diet soda and it does all this or you have one with stevia in it and it doesn't do that. So have the stevia ones and you're good to go. Okay. I want to be conscious of your time. So this will be the last question, but I wanted to ask you in particular about strength because you and I have had some interesting text messages back and forth about it.

There is some pharmacology you can use. I'm sure there's some over-the-counter stuff that you might even recommend. And there might be some reasons on why people might want to do certain things with their eyes to maybe potentially help increase their strength, at least from some of the stuff I remember you talking about. What's going on with all that? Let's maybe, if you could, start off with just basic supplements. I'm sure you're going to start with caffeine, but let us know what else you got. You're saying supplements for strength specifically?

Yeah, that maybe helps stimulate the central nervous system to give us a little bit more strength if we're powerlifting, bodybuilding, that kind of stuff. Got it. End of the day, there's a net amount of electricity your body can make today. If everything's working as well as it can with the setup you have, you can recruit so much energy so quickly. And over time, it is possible, actually in short and long term with different compounds, it's possible to manipulate the net energy that you can create. It's called having a higher functioning metabolism. So everything you do is powered by electrons, same as your iPhone, right? And if you have a whole bunch of apps running, the battery goes dead, right? Well, what works well is how do you make it so the muscles and the nervous system can make

maximum electrons required right and when you exercise over a longer period of time you actually myelinate the nerves that that do a certain motion and that myelination is a layer of insulation that is made out of fat but that insulation means that you can carry nerve impulses faster and you use less electricity to make them. So the smartest people and the strongest people have the most efficient systems, not necessarily the most power. both for cognitive and physical, is to have maximum power production and maximum efficiency at the same time, because that's what leads to the state of high performance in meditation, as well as it does in the gym. And one of the things that makes a difference is removing distractions, because part of the system, but not the only part, that lets you lift heavy is your brain. It's your mind. So there's the self-limiting beliefs. I can't do it.

I'm never going to be able to do it. I'm not strong enough. I'll get hurt. Okay. There's that. And if you have enough electricity, we know that willpower, whether it's to not eat or whether it's willpower in order to go exercise when you didn't want to, it's also based on the amount of mitochondria. There's two studies in my book, Headstrong, where I actually tracked down the research that says, yes, net electrical ability equals willpower. And you can deplete that. So if you're in the gym, and you might have seen this, okay,

there's a hot person wearing very short shorts in front of you. There's music on, there's people everywhere, and you want to do a max lift. Is it going to be your max? Your brain was tracking too many different distractions, right? Okay, so that is a waste of electrons, right? Meanwhile, if you kind of go deep, you've got the hat on, you've got these, and you're just really focused, it's a different lift. Okay, some of that is I'm scattering my electricity, my attention around there.

So from a supplement perspective, how do I just have more energy? So when I scatter it, that's part of it. The other one is how do I focus? So I'm going to set aside the focus mindset thing, and I think you guys know a lot about that. And that's a part of showing up in any profession, whether it's a sport or not, is that side. And then how do we waste less? One of the intriguing things is TrueDark, my company that makes those glasses, the ones I sent you, try hitting a max lift wearing those.

Look for four to 6% more weight because the brain is less taxed. So equal sides of the scale, lower useless load or increased power. So what would I do if I wanted to go in and really recruit a lot of power? You want good mitochondrial function. Things like acetyl-L-carnitine are really good. I'm a huge fan of D-ribose as well. in a low carb kind of keto state, you're saying, oh, you know, I don't really want to want to do it. It's a sugar. I think there's great, uh, great evidence that that's going to help you make more ATP over the relatively short term. And you might find someone who says, oh, that can't be true. I found a study that says it doesn't work, but it's usually a study in isolation compared to all the other stuff you're doing. So I've just, I've seen a lot of time when that makes a huge difference over time, creatine and tree halos are things I'd be looking at. Um, creatine for water really makes a difference in the muscles. It also helps to make ATP. Um, do you guys ever play around tree halos? No, no. It's actually in my fasting gum that I'm coming out with soon. Oh, okay.

Oh, well there you go. Um, so a tree halose is one of the most powerful ways to break a fast. Just kidding. That's not true. I'm just messing with you. Triolose in small amounts absolutely isn't going to break a fast. But what it does do is it increases hydration in the cells dramatically. So, triolose is something you're not going to lift heavy this time, but if you use it for a couple of days before it's like creatine,

it gets into the cells and it's going to help. I think if you're doing it in conjunction with a compression shirt or slingshot, all that kind of stuff that also helps. And people don't oftentimes think about the effect of compression. When you squeeze cells, well, they're actually a little smaller, right? Because there's the same number of cells. Well, inside each cell, there's electrons. And they bounce back and forth, not one time, millions of times. And this actually comes from studying network engineering and AI stuff in early my career. But when you're looking at latency in a system, how long it takes to go across something, even a 10% reduction in cell volume, if something's

going back and forth a million times, it actually matters a lot. And so this is one of the reasons I'm a huge fan of compression during any sport, because it's going to increase the efficiency of electron flow. Cause those electrons don't go from here to the muscle. They go bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, like a lot on the way down there. And compression matters more than you'd ever think. Then there's magnesium, like pretty straightforward, things like that. Having adequate minerals is, I think, also, and electrolytes is also underappreciated in most sport. But I think you guys are pretty on to that. I'm guessing your audience is too. Just quick, curious, real quick. Do you still do red light therapy? Is it still as effective as you believe it is or is it?

Oh yeah. My company, TruLight, is doing very well. So TruDark makes my glasses and TruLight makes the light therapy devices, but there's been some really good breakthroughs in the last five years in that space. It turns out there's two kinds of red. There's infrared, which are well-known. I've been talking about this for 10 years, but there's a bunch of studies now about some of the frequencies in the amber spectrum. So I've added those to my devices. And then there's also pulse. It turns out pulsing changes the impact of the light on the body. And you can say it doesn't make any sense.

You know, light is light. It shouldn't matter. I don't care if it should matter. It does matter in studies. Let's figure out why. So there's a signaling thing happening from light. There's a total power density from light. And then there's a spectrum thing from light that helps with wound healing.

And there's lots of studies that show that and helps with collagen thickness and collagen resynthesis. It's a pretty cool time in the world for light therapy right now okay awesome dave thank you so much for your time tell us uh on your way out here about uh your new gyms that are popping up and any new books that you might be working on nice thanks man um upgrade labs is the company where i'm focusing as CEO now. It used to be called Bulletproof Labs, where I pioneered it in LA. This was the first biohacking facility. And it is still open now. And it's right directly underneath Arnold Schwarzenegger's office in Santa Monica,

which is kind of cool. I wanted to open it there along with the first cafe I opened, now called Upgrade Cafe, because it's like the center of physical culture and around the corner from Gold's and all of that. And Upgrade Labs is something that uses tech for people who either are pro athletes and need to recover really quickly, or for people like me who are saying, I would like to get as much benefit to be metabolically and physically healthy and strong as much as possible in the minimum amount of time. And so we're using a variety of artificial intelligence-assisted things to put on cardio, fitness, about 8 to 10 times more efficiently than writing a spin class. And put muscle on about three times faster than you can do with weights.

But with weights, you can do a whole bunch of other muscle systems that I'm never going to touch. This is about people who either don't have it or you've used some of the gear here, right? I mean, you can max out a chest press, but if you want to do a reverse thing for your tricep, that's not it. If you want to sculpt your body and be super powerful, you go to a gym. You want to get minimum effective dose, and that leaves enough time left for neuroscience. So while you're there, we'll tune your brain for you with neurofeedback. So this is a recovery facility that gives you minimum effective, healthy cardio and strength and recovery in way less time than anything else on the planet. A gym for people that don't like to lift. Yep. And you could say that, right?

And the funny thing is most people don't like to lift. Once their metabolisms work, they like to lift. Absolutely. Right? So we can give people metabolic function back in almost no time. And I know too many hedge fund manager, entrepreneur, or just parents, you know, you're both kids are both schools driving around to soccer practice. Like When are you ever going to take care of yourself? If you do, go for a walk during soccer. It doesn't work. You guys know how to exercise. You got to be intentional about it.

Awesome. Again, thank you so much for your time. Have a great rest of your day. Yes, thank you. That was a fun interview. Thanks, guys. Yo. That was awesome. I wish we had more time with him but he gave us some awesome stuff and uh i think i think a lot of people are gonna watch

this episode it's really cool um he's just so opinionated you know shots fired yeah that was so funny well it's really interesting to think that um you know uh someone that has reached we don't normally see someone that reaches the levels that he reached um they're usually calmer at a certain point you know they usually reach a level and then they're just they don't um you bring something up of the past or you bring up people that they don't like and they just a lot of times they shrug it off and they're pretty cool with it they're like ah whatever like yeah we had our differences or whatever but they just like kind of want to move on it was interesting

to me that he got he got you know uh visibly and uh audibly uh you know moved off his spot you know from uh talking about some of these different people that had different ideas well it's because a lot of people in this space are combative when it comes to different things like okay i love i love lane um i love his info but i mean it can't like lane of the past was so much more combative than the lane currently and that's that's the same thing with guys like craig doucette you know what i mean a lot of people in this space you start bringing up things that are contrary to oh i guess what a majority of the evidence-based crowds puts forward and it's just like wrong right you know and they come after that like they're like oh these are zealots and these are you know they're spreading this but you know d Dave has helped tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people lose weight.

That cannot be denied. He's changed hundreds of thousands of lives, if not even fucking millions. Everyone just says Bulletproof Coffee. They're not really necessarily referring to the brand, but they're talking about using MCT and using butter. And I know there's other people that are accredited with that and they people claim it came from tibet and it came from tea and it came from this person and that person they're like you don't understand the history you know but dave asprey is the one that put it on the map he's the one that took the time to patent it he's the one that took the time to

develop all these uh you know that bulletproof labs i've actually been there before i think maybe you guys are one of you guys maybe went with me yeah yeah it's fucking amazing like you got steak and egg breakfast and it's just it's absolutely delicious yeah so we went to the um the coffee shop which is right around the corner from gold's but i never actually went into like the place where they have like all those i'm gonna say pods i don't know if they actually are that but they have all that stuff and right yeah that stuff looks pretty cool yeah um great information and you know i don't agree with some of the stuff he said but i understand i understand why he's frustrated about the calorie thing um but when we really like pressed him he kind of gave up on it

almost like he was almost like when you uh asked, he was like, well, yeah, you're right. Even though it might not be the most accurate thing, it still can help to track it, you know? And so I do think that most people start out being really meticulous with tracking their calories. Then once they find a recipe that works well, they maybe ease off the reins a little bit on how much they track. And maybe any time they need to drop weight again, maybe they start tracking more rigorously to make more marked improvements. But you could say the same thing with any style of diet. I mean, I know for myself, anytime I lean back into going more carnivore, it makes a slight difference.

Or anytime I lean into going more keto or anytime I lean into doing more bodybuilding, I can utilize any of these things or fasting. I can utilize any of those tools. I can implement them whenever I want, just in accordance to whatever results I guess I'm looking for. Yeah. And this is the thing. to whatever results I guess I'm looking for. Yeah. And this is the thing,

like the people that I know that do track successfully, these individuals, food from the outside is a very minimal part of their diet. You know, it's, it's things that they themselves make. And when they do have food out, they're typically careful and it's not an often thing. So there aren't many other variables being put into this system.

But when you do have a, like I have a lot of different variables from time to time, but again, it's like, it's the habit. So it's, it's weird to say it doesn't work, but I can understand the idea that it doesn't work for people that aren't in the space. Well, if you're, if you're a busy parent and you're trying to do something, right. Are you going to be like, most people aren't going to track their meals that vigorously, that rigorously. They're not going to eat all the same things. Life and stuff happens.

And when you track all these outside variables and it doesn't work, it's not because you weren't in, like, it's not because you were actually, you weren't in a deficit. It's because you probably tracked things incorrectly, even though we know it is inherently already incorrect. You went over. You know what I mean? I'm excited to see how many other people are going to pick this up and, you know, do their thing with it, you know, on YouTube. Is Greg going to yell about it? Yeah. Did you guys get a chance to see that?

I saw it. Yeah. Yeah. I saw it. I saw some of what he was talking about. It was Greg Doucette, right, talking about Huberman, right? Yeah. I saw it. I saw some of what he was talking about was Greg Doucette, right? Talking about Huberman, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I'm really curious because I do watch Greg Doucette's videos and he will be at the top of this mountain yelling calories and calories out. End of story. But then he will also talk about how incorrect food labels are and how actually counting calories i don't know exactly the words he used but he said he had a video in the past where it was kind of saying

something like counting calories is dumb he didn't i don't know exactly what it was but he was explaining and showing like how wrong the labels are and how much they lie so it is interesting because like what you were saying and seem like if it's inaccurate but it's inaccurate consistently you can but it's just um it's hard right i guess like what one group is trying to say is that there there is a energy balance to your system right and there's uh there's like a calories in calories out type of thing going on but there's uh when it comes like food labels that's a separate topic because it's like uh

you know that that doesn't that doesn't it's not the same as like the science that goes inside your body you know like it's inaccurate but um that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that the body still uh you know has a certain calorie requirement every day and you have a certain calorie output every single day. Got a poop. I don't wonder what's going on. It's just like this whole fucking thing is so ridiculous to me because I mean, what, what, what, um, what Dave said was true when, when the system or the individual's body is working the way it should, calories in, calories out works more. It doesn't mean it works more, but it just works more successfully over time because say this individual is getting sleep, right?

time, they're not sedentary all the time, even though you can track your calories and keep that into account so you're still in a deficit. It's like most people, there's so many things that are the variables that are out of the way that when now they try to track, that's not the only thing that makes a difference. Even though they think that they're in a deficit, maybe now they're not walking as much because they're eating less food. their their neat is off and now the energy balance is kind of off it's like the s in essence calories in calories out does work it's just there's so many variables that people don't take into account that it's like a person that's like oh yeah i was eating a thousand calories and i wasn't dropping weight um you know it's all yeah that's that, I know people say it all the time. Yeah, I only took this amount of calories in.

Yeah, but then what happened when you started taking that small amount of calories and you probably weren't moving as much, maybe partially the calories are wrong. I was going to say you were tracking very inaccurately. A lot of people, it's inaccurate tracking. I get it. Tracking is inaccurate already, but a lot of things happen when you start eating a really small amount of food that things balance out. You know, it gets to be tricky. Losing weight in general is a caloric deficit. Like they're not they're not equal to each other. It is like losing weight.

I mean, I realize you can lose water. I realize you can lose a lot of other things. But in general, especially the stuff I've heard from Lane Norton and from some other people, and I am a believer to this to some extent, but I don't think that things are this black and white. I believe that losing weight is a caloric deficit and you might have to spend a lot of time figuring out how little food you need to get to that point. And that's where we end up with this weird thing of like, well, tracking calories doesn't work because somebody who's really heavy,

who has an inefficient system, might have to go way down the line to try to figure out how little food they should be eating. They're fighting hunger. They're going to be insanely hungry. So what we promote on this show oftentimes is, let's figure out ways to control hunger. How can we control hunger? We can control hunger by controlling our insulin and not spiking with a lot of carbohydrates or even just not spiking with foods that might not be as satiating for as long. A good way to drive out duration of hunger is to have some fat. A great way to crush hunger is also through protein. When you primarily fill your diet with protein and fat, that can help drive down hunger. You can also add in fiber if you're looking for

something that doesn't have a large caloric load to it. I was waiting for you to say what's another thing that can stop hunger mark what what else could there be come on mark starts with the um see what else can drive to the seat cock did i get right yeah getting that in your mouth might stop you from eating yeah it's yeah. It's undeniable at that point. Oh, coffee. Yeah, coffee, caffeine is another one. I was like, is he going to say it? Is he going to say it?

Just to rub it in. Lifting, you know, working out, exercising can help move. Whatever ways you got to kind of suppress the appetite within reason are all probably good ideas. But I find this to be interesting, too, though, because it doesn't necessarily mean that the reverse is true. So being in a caloric surplus doesn't, a caloric surplus is not weight gain necessarily. It's a little trickier than that.

And it's because it would be hard to perpetually for a long period of time, actually get real great gains off of being in a caloric deficit or even being dead even with your calories. But the message that you send your body and the response that we have to training is actually is actually a little bit separate than the demand that our body may have with calories. Because if you eat the same amount of calories as you always eat, you eat 2,000 calories, and out of nowhere, you start to weight train, you might end up eating more because your body might say, yo, like what's going on here? But you eat 2000 calories every day. You're now 17 years old. You hit the gym,

you start working out. And three months later, you notice that you gain 10 pounds. I think that theoretically you could, you don't necessarily need to be in a caloric surplus to have that muscle gain because the signal of you strength training is independent of nutrients. The only way that it wouldn't work is if you just were simply not consuming enough energy at all, making your body just like almost not able to grow, which you would have to be like in a crazy caloric deficit. So I would even argue and say, you could be in a slight caloric deficit and occasionally gain some muscle mass here and there. Absolutely. But not the best,

not, not the, not the best route to go. Not the fastest either. No, it's going to be slower. Like why? Like when guys are saying,

you know, I'm trying to gain weight and trying to gain size. And a lot of guys eat in a way that drives hunger, which is why a lot of them end up putting on a lot of excess body fat because now they're eating all these things like ice cream or whatever that they can get a lot of calories. And then they end up gaining too much body fat, but they did put on a lot of muscle. Like you can eat in a surplus, but it needs to be a quality surplus where you're actually eating quality food. And a lot of muscle like you can eat in a surplus but it needs to be a quality surplus where you're actually eating quality food and a lot of quality food will make you full and it won't drive your hunger as much but also getting bigger and gaining quality muscle is going to take a little bit

longer and you're not going to see the scale go up as fast and that should be the way that we do it if we don't want to keep going on fucking cutting and bulking cycles all the time i was talking to somebody recently that starts their day out every day with uh kind of almost like a smoothie like it's got some fruit and it's got some protein in it and that's a great way to start your day that's a fantastic way to start your day however i would say like if that's not first of all if that's like not great like if you don't love it if you love it, then we're kind of talking about something slightly different. But if it's pretty much just like protein powder, fruit and water, maybe that's not enough to, I don't know, not enough to like really fill you up.

And then maybe later on in the day you find yourself kind of overeating because what you had in the morning just wasn't like super optimal. I would rather see somebody wake up and have a couple of eggs or if they were going to go with a protein shake, maybe have the protein shake and actually eat the fruit rather than like blending the fruit, just because you might be able to get a little bit more legs out of some of that energy that you had because it might be slower releasing just because it might not, you didn't blend it into a, you didn't blend it into a juice basically. So, you know, there's a lot of little things that you might want to look at in your nutrition and just say, oh, you know, I do drink a couple protein shakes a day.

Protein shakes are great. I utilize them all the time, but they are, um, if they're not like filling you up and they're not kind of covering up, uh, the fact that you want to be in a caloric deficit, then you're kind of missing the whole point in them. Sometimes if you're trying to utilize them for weight loss, I think sometimes people are just, you know, just consuming, uh, liquid calories and not really thinking about it much. And if things aren't driving down your hunger and your goal is to lose weight, then I think you've got to question it a little bit more. Andrew, want to take us on out of here?

I will. Thank you, everybody, for checking out today's episode. And make sure you send it to your favoritist YouTuber that's going to have a field day with what Dave said. It would be interesting to see who you guys are following that might be on the uh calories and calories outside because uh we've been having a lot of fun with that lately uh also follow the podcast at mark bells power project on instagram at mb power project on tiktok and twitter my instagram and twitter is at i am andrew z and at the andrew z on tiktok and sima where you at and at the Andrew Z on TikTok and Sima, where are you at? And see my Indian on Instagram,

YouTube and see me getting on TikTok and Twitter. Honestly, real quick. I think this whole calories in calories out shit, it's all about semantics. It really is. It's all about like, how are you talking about it?

You know what I mean? Because like, even, even with Dave, it's like at a certain point you realize that like, if you're in a true deficit, you will drop body fat and weight. So it's like, it's like at a certain point you realize that like if you're in a true deficit, you will drop body fat and weight. So it's like it's not it's not really saying it's wrong, but it's all about everyone just gets mad about how everyone's doing the messaging of it. That's really it.

Am I am I tripping? No, that's all it is. And then everyone's like they want to try to find points in your in your dialogue where you have conflicting information you know it's like well in 2014 you said this i was like whoa that's a long ass time ago you know and they'll say oh on this podcast you said that but now you're saying this and it just gets to be uh a lot of uh arguing i i think i'm hoping that the, I hope that people are like listening to each other, but I'm fearful that that's probably not what's happening. Yeah. Because Dave, when we brought up different points about Alan Aragon and Lane Norton, he was like, okay, well, like he immediately kind of moved off it and was like, okay, well, if they change, then I, you know, scratch kind of what I just said, you know, which is – that's impressive for someone to do that,

to say, look, I have not been looking at their stuff recently. So if they aren't as tied to their beliefs as they used to be and they're more open to dialogue, then good for them. But I think in the end, we are all trying to work towards the same thing, and that's to help people get into fitness. That's to help get people healthier. That's to help people just be the best that they can possibly become. I'm at Mark Smelly Bell. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength.

Catch you guys later. Bye.