Kind: captions
Language: en
you don't have to experience pain and
hunger to get the benefits of fasting
it's self-inflicted suffering that you
didn't need to do i was basically eating
boiled chicken breasts and steamed
broccoli all day every day and finally
my wife and my business partners pulled
me aside and said dude you no longer
have a personality aging is death by a
thousand cuts i've always thought of
fasting as you put nothing in your mouth
that isn't exactly h2o this is about
more energy and it's about more clarity
and less time wasted give me some rapid
fire things that are going to help me be
superhuman
[Music]
why is it problematic though to go all
in like when i think about autophagy and
the cells cleaning themselves up and
knowing that that gets kick-started by
just not eating
why is it problematic to go too hard on
a fast
well there's a name for over-fasting
it's called starvation and malnutrition
so there's that now do you do you
bracket that only by time though so is
that like if i was going to do a
three-day fast
um i would think that your advice would
be go all in but obviously having read
the book i know you have a different
punch line so
um
is is it that it becomes problematic as
you get into the 7 10
21 day range or do you think that that's
actually sub optimal from the jump
you know i'm totally happy to do a three
day fast four day five day seven day ten
day although when you get to ten and
beyond you probably wanna be very
experienced or have some medical
oversight because your electrolytes are
likely to get out of whack and frankly
your ability to really detect what's
going on your body isn't very good like
you're kind of loopy after 10 days of
fasting you have like clarity but you're
also ungrounded
and you're talking about water only
fasting
um even if you're having tea and coffee
and water only fasting is basically a
form of self-flagellation i call that
hair shirt fasting
hair shirt
hair shirt so uh monks used to because
they were such sinners they would make
shirts out of human hair that were super
itchy and then they'd wear them all day
so the itchiness would remind them of
how bad they were in other words it's
self-inflicted suffering that you didn't
need to do
uh so it's okay most everyone has herbal
tea in every spiritual tradition ever or
just black tea or green tea
um so the fact that mice did water
fasting is because they didn't have
anything else they're mice and so water
only fasting is for
perfectionists kind of purists you don't
have to do that to get the benefits in
fact you'll probably get more if you
have some polyphenols during your fast
alright so let's define some terms here
so i've always thought of fasting as you
put nothing in your mouth that isn't
exactly h2o that anything beyond maybe
i
recently broadened my stance to include
salt just normal table that's pretty
important
that's it there's that
so walk us through then so if we've got
okay at water only becomes problematic
roughly around 10 days and i'll say that
that seems slightly
controversial i've heard people say that
you can go farther with supervision
but broaden my notion of what a fast is
the definition of fasting is simply to
go without
and you can fast from many things you
can fast from masturbation
you can fast from porn you can fast from
alcohol right you can fast from junk
food it's called eating healthier you
can fast from carbs it's called the keto
diet you can fast from animal products
even though it's a bad idea for long
periods of time it's called the vegan
diet and there's all sorts of things
so fasting literally means to go without
for a set period of time
and all of those things can make you
stronger and a lot of people mix up the
metabolic and the cognitive and the
health benefits of fasting with the
self-control benefits and they try to
mix them up
and the truth of the matter is that you
and i are pretty fortunate you know
we've
had companies that have done well
and we don't have to worry about getting
up driving for an hour in traffic our
kids are now staying at home with you
know two kids hanging off each arm
and just a huge amount of chaos oh and
on top of that i'm just gonna fast today
even though i'm metabolically not really
in good shape and what's gonna happen is
you'll be just like me when i weigh 300
pounds you're going to be hypogly [ __ ]
you're going to be hangry you're going
to yell at your kids you're going to
yell at your boss
and it's not going to be a good day and
you're going to say basically f fasting
this is stupid it doesn't work but you
don't have to do that you don't have to
experience pain and hunger to get the
benefits of fasting and to go into
fasting and after
10 plus years of recommending this in my
my writing
and 15 years of practicing this what you
find out is that there are things that
you can do in literature that don't
trigger the two things that break a fast
what breaks a fast is having sugar or
carbohydrate that raises your insulin so
if you keep insulin low and your blood
glucose won't change much except for
based on your adrenal
adrenal function
if you do that and you don't eat protein
which impacts a whole different set of
enzymes you're getting the benefits of
fasting and now some people are already
up in arms going you can't have 5 000
calories of fat no you would get
disaster pants if you did that but you
can have
small amounts of this and the evidence i
have for this is called
number one bulletproof protein fasting
which has been practiced since 2012 when
i wrote about it and this is you eat
less than 15 grams of protein during a
day
but you eat
carbs and you eat fat and magically
autophagy turns on in studies you can do
that so i think we're gonna have to
we're gonna have to define then what the
biological markers are that we're um
bracketing fasting with so if the
loosest definition of fasting is going
without but now we as we get into sort
of metabolic fasting or dietary fasting
there's certain parameters that we're
looking for so
i've heard people define it as you
started that you break a fast with
anything that raises your insulin and
should you take in something that
doesn't raise your insulin then you have
not broken your fast and so i'm just
curious as one why do people use insulin
as the marker is insulin the only marker
of a fast or if it if you're not an
autophagy it's technically not a fast
like what are the the parameters by
which you say this still qualifies as a
fast
it depends on your goals and the type of
fast you're looking for
right so some people fast for
healing the gut
right and during that kind of a fast you
might want to have
just water you probably want to have
water plus these colored compounds in
tea or coffee because those feed good
bacteria they're a prebiotic you might
also use one of the three fasting hacks
that just turn off the pain of fasting
for people just need to get through the
day and fast and get healthier along the
way is prebiotic fiber
so you can do that and what does
prebiotic fiber get rid of
symptomatically headaches hunger
prebiotic fiber feeds the bacteria in
your gut so they make less
lipopolysaccharide which is a major
issue during fasting it also makes sure
that you don't starve the gut bacteria
and when you do that you turn off hunger
and there's multiple studies that show
that the soluble fiber that cannot be
digested by you
that it helps support good gut bacteria
so now you're fasting you're not dealing
with a large amount of
lipopolysaccharides which are bacterial
toxins they make when they're stressed
in the gut
so then like oh wait a minute i had
healthier gut bacteria my blood sugar
didn't change but the gut bacteria
converted this fiber into butyric acid
or butyrate which is a ketogenic
compound
so all of a sudden wow i didn't
experience hunger this morning wasn't
that great i didn't spend half my
morning thinking about muffins and
barely make it through the day and i
still got my fast in and this idea that
you have to feel pain and suffering and
just like muscle through it it doesn't
work for people who have a lot going on
in fact it makes it much harder i don't
believe in causing suffering unless
there's a hormetic effect and there's no
other way to do it
okay so let's talk about the goal of a
fast so
um
one so you just talked about healing a
gut so there we might have different
outcomes that we're looking for
basically you'd be resting the gut you
even say in the book if you have a gut
problem you're trying to heal it the
easiest way to heal it is to not have
anything in the gut um so that makes a
lot of sense so we're not necessarily
worried about insulin going up down or
indifferent we're not necessarily
worried about even calories being
present we're worried about having
things for the bacteria in your gut to
have to work on so that they can just
take a break and sort of hit the reset
button now if i'm doing a
fast where my specific goal is to get
into autophagy
what can we intake
and still have autophagy being present
like can i have
uh
fat in my diet and stay in
autophagy or
what does that look like you can have
moderate amounts of fat in your diet and
still stay an autophagy but in
the research that i did and in the
conversations with other experts it's
apparent that having only fat isn't
going to affect autophagy now if you
have
3 000 calories of fat a caloric excess
can inhibit autophagy but no one's ever
studied what a fat only caloric excess
looks like because no one would actually
do that
so
there's also a lot of things like the
fasting mimicking diet that turn on on
top of it even though you're eating some
stuff and what elements of the fast are
they mimicking
um well it's a very low calories for
five days about 500 calories or so
for five days and this is based on
research from walter longo who's what
i'd call him the godfather of fasting
and one of the top fasting experts out
there today so they're saying we're
turning on autophagy even though we're
eating some stuff so you can't even say
protein without saying which proteins
there's some proteins you can't even
digest and maybe those wouldn't affect
it so it gets very specific around some
amino acids raise insulin a lot more so
is you know a few teaspoons of whey
protein going to break a fast more than
collagen probably but it depends on your
individual response to those ideally
though less than 15 grams of
protein from all sources is going to
maintain your state of autophagy and
this goes back to like my first big book
in 2014 and that data was out there and
based on studies so the deal is just
have no protein and have no sugar and no
carbs you can digest and the fasting
processes will work
there's one little asterisk to that
statement and we're getting relatively
technical
um
one of the things that happens when you
fast is there's something called fiat
it's fasting induced adipose factor and
your liver turns this on
it says oh i'm fasting
there's no calories i better use this
and what is it accelerates fat burning
and when you're not fasting it
accelerates fat storage
unfortunately if you have a lot of bad
gut bacteria
they're like oh
this petri dish is our petri dish so
we're going to hack it and the bacteria
themselves will make more
fasting-induced adipose factor than your
liver would naturally which means that
you lose weight faster when you're
fasting but you gain weight faster when
you're eating and this is a question
that
um because they want to make sure that
their petri dish doesn't starve and also
eye is a little bacteria i don't have
any food let me tell the petri dish to
secrete more energy so it can go find
food and then i'll get food
so they're literally changing your
behavior and it it's fascinating that
they do this but you can also manipulate
them knowing that they do this and so
fasting can help you lose weight but if
you have good gut bacteria present and
you're aware of that fact you can do
things like consume that tea those
polyphenols that feeds good bacteria
called the bacteriodes family so the
colored compounds and fruits and
vegetables and coffee and tea and
chocolate
are all prebiotics for good gut bacteria
that you cannot buy in a probiotic and
so having healthy gut bacteria resolves
that problem and the the reality is that
you and i are from the perspective of
our mitochondria which are the things
we're working on mostly in fact most of
my work is around mitochondria these are
ancient bacteria embedded in our body
they think they're in charge and they're
the ones driving your hunger your fear
your cravings um they're the the ones
that make you you know date people you
shouldn't be dating and they drive human
desire in fact there's an order of
operations from them that i describe in
the book and this is the algorithm for
all life forms
and
so they're messing with you and then you
have gut bacteria that are also messing
with you by secreting their own factors
to try and get your body to do what they
want you to do and then for us we're
also in there in our logical cognitive
brains going
wait a minute i'm getting pulled all
over the place by these urges
right and then eventually when your
energy is lower and your urges are high
your ability to manage your emotions
goes down
your ability to make good decisions goes
down and then you eat the cookie and
that's the annoying thing
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improvement all right back to today's
episode so when i think about um
all of this stuff sort of working in
concert this big cacophony of things
happening you've got the mitochondria
are pulling you in one direction you've
got the bacteria in your gut pulling you
and another you have your own body's
response to
lack of food
we've got autophagy that's working for
us we're cleaning up the cells so i
could see how that would speak to
longevity maybe even clarity but other
than autophagy
what are some of the reasons that
fasting is so important for people the
number one reason isn't autophagy that's
actually kind of a nerd
reason for fasting and i say that
happily being a nerd
most people who are practicing
intermittent fasting today don't even
know what autophagy is and that's okay
what they know is that they fast and
they get energy
right and it's a lot of energy because
even if we're eating a so-called healthy
diet
according to the the bulletproof stuff
the first chapter of the book there's
five classes of toxins made by mother
nature
that we're eating every day
right and
um the first one
i think is the first big book about it
was lectins not all lectins are bad but
these are defense molecules for certain
types of foods like grains and bell
peppers and things like that and they
make you really hungry and they mess
with you right and then you look at
things like
phytic acids that inhibit your ability
to absorb minerals there goes your
argument for a whole grain kind of thing
because they're full of these things
that stop you from having zinc there's a
problem there and then we have histamine
which forms in certain foods and they
sit around that gives you just severe
cravings and then you have oxalic acid
which is kale and charred in raw spinach
which i've been warning about for years
and then the fifth one is mycotoxins
that grow on food
in the field and while it's stored and
all of those will mess with you and when
you fast you get none of those it's like
wow i feel so good and it's not the
fasting it's that you're not eating
stuff that makes you feel bad that
you're used to eating every day so
that's a
a hidden side benefit of fasting
yeah so getting into like inflammation
and things like that and fasting having
such a profound impact on that
what i want to know
when we start fasting and we're having
the
our energy levels are going up because
we're not intaking a bunch of things
that you know whether it's just bad food
or whether it's the toxins you're
talking about
we also are getting this lowering of
inflammation
one i'm curious what's causing the
lowering of inflammation is it simply
the absence of the toxins that you
mentioned or
is there more to it
there's two big things going on one is
the absence of toxins the other one is
that ketones themselves are
anti-inflammatory profoundly
anti-inflammatory
so now you're saying wait a minute
i'm having less inflammation because uh
if i had to guess
i'm gonna say
it's probably two-thirds caused by not
eating stuff that makes you weak and
one-third caused by the presence of
ketones um the inflammatory things i
could be wrong but that's you know a
very rough estimate of why and if you
were to say i'm gonna go on a super
clean no plant toxin kind of diet you
feel pretty similar but you're still
gonna have blood sugar swings that you
don't get when you're fasting they
generally after a little while it
stabilizes
okay so we've got fasting playing this
insane role when we're talking about
metabolic diseases which depending on
who you talk to is everything from
cancer heart disease alzheimer's like
there must be some common thing that
this all has
working together so is it insulin people
have referred to alzheimer's as type 3
diabetes type 3 of the brain
um is it just inflammation in general
from the ketone bodies like what what is
it that is operating across all these
different um
disease manifestations
what's going on there is you're getting
a metabolic reset and you're getting a
lot of autophagy you're taking the the
mitochondria that are weak
they've learned and there's a
quadrillion of them way more than there
are cells in your body and they've
learned yeah there's lots of food coming
i don't really have to do anything it's
okay if i'm running at you know 50
efficiency it's good enough for the
world i'm in and then suddenly like i'm
in a world where i have to be able to
really be on my toes
the body looks around and says well this
sucks i guess i'm gonna have to kick out
all the weak mitochondria and go to the
expensive process of building fresh new
ones that are young
and those are the mitochondria that can
effectively and efficiently use glucose
or ketones and that's what's causing a
lot of this it's removal of senescent
cells
but even then if you were to take a
water fast and you were to say hey i'm
going to do
500 milligrams of fissitin and 2 grams
of quercetin which are massive synalytic
promoters you're going to get more out
of it but now you're not a water only
fast you're using supplements in a
targeted way
to improve autophagy
and
so i believe that the the puritanical
approach of just water isn't advisable
but i do think if you're going to do
stuff during a fast it's got to be
limited and you've got to know what it
is and why you're taking it for instance
there's other supplements that i
recommend in fast this way that improve
the body's ability to do what it does
during fasting i'm talking about
proteolytic enzymes things like
serrapeptase and natto kinase and what
these do is they help the body to break
down waste proteins and scar tissue so
since the body's already working on that
and you give it more of the enzymes it
needs that means your pancreas and
discerning state your liver can make the
enzymes that they need to make for
repairing dna and refolding proteins and
things like that because some of the
cleanup proteins you've already taken
orally
you can also take
things like activated charcoal during a
fast and because your gut bacteria get
really stressed and they make more of
that lipopolysaccharide or lps we talked
about earlier if you bind that in the
gut
you actually have less inflammation but
you feel a lot better so the the water
own thing is like i'm just gonna put my
head down and go through it
i just don't believe in extra suffering
i would say anyone on a water fast who
adds activated charcoal is going to have
better results a hundred percent of the
time because it's blocking the toxins
from coming out into the body i know in
the book you said that part of the keto
flu that people experience when they're
beginning fasting or beginning a keto
diet is mitigated by taking activated
charcoal for that reason it's
interesting i wish i had known that the
first time that i did keto which i had
brutal keto flu it was yeah god awful
um what are some of the other because
you give many different styles of
fasting
and ways to mitigate some of the the
difficulties that people can have with
fasting so what are some of the other
things that we need to address and how
do we address them
one of the biggest concerns there is is
people are saying fasting makes me feel
good so i'm going to just do it every
day they go you know what i'm going to
try this new omad thing where i only eat
dinner right like i'll do that every day
for a week or so oh this is awesome i've
never heard of that
one meal a day oh mad yeah so omad is
one meal a day and they're saying okay
um that's that's great and omen is
really easy skip breakfast skip lunch
have dinner there you just did a 24 hour
fasted it's not as sexy as it sounds
like i'm old mad i'm i'm keto i'm strong
it's literally you skip two meals not
good for you
and
uh during the day though you might get a
little bit hungry but there's things you
can do
so if you ate if you eat the right food
you won't be hungry after you eat and if
you eat the wrong food which most of us
do at least one or two things is off
then an hour too later we're like man i
really want some food i got a sugar
craving what's going on and then you
have to work on it so learning how to
eat is an important part of not
experiencing pain during a fast but
people are like okay i can do a 24-hour
fast man i feel so good i'm rocking it
what's really happening though is
they're kind of getting a little bit
stressed biologically they're feeling
good mentally but their body's saying
okay i'm making a lot of cortisol and
adrenaline right now
which i'm using to break down some
muscles so i can have enough glucose to
keep my brain running because this isn't
a fat burning body yet like your
metabolism isn't flexible and if you've
been eating bad fats for years it's
gonna take a while to fix your
mitochondria what's the ideal split for
you
the ideal split is whatever you'll do
and 16-8 is great but for 16 hours of
not eating and then i eat however much i
want in an eight-hour window or do you
put limitations in the eating window you
can eat as much as you want during the
window of twinkies
uh you know you can and you'll still get
benefits to be perfectly honest you'll
just get more benefits if you eat good
stuff during the window and that's the
other thing okay maybe you don't want to
go grass-fed only maybe you don't want
to eliminate french fries from your
universe
okay fine intermittent fasting will help
everybody even on a complete crap diet
however you'll be more hungry during
intermittent fast if you eat crap so you
got to deal with that and ideally what
you're eating after you break your fast
you can have carbs and not have carbs
but don't have sugar don't have seed
oils and eat grass-fed meat or don't eat
meat
and if you follow those basic principles
and there's other nuances in there what
you find is that you feel really good
and the next morning you wake up and
you're not ravenous
and you're like oh yeah i don't even
want breakfast
and that's a very liberating thing
because if we're spending so many of our
thoughts every day on food food food and
then you just aren't hungry
it really changes things so i want
millions of people to say i'm going to
try this basic thing i'm not going to
worry about getting my diet perfect i
might make a few changes but i'm just
going to learn how to intermittent fast
and what i don't want them to do is what
a lot of the fasting community does
where it's all about the fast and you
know every month i'm going to fast for a
week and what you end up doing is you
get people who become
they basically burn out their adrenals
and so women see sleep problems as the
first symptom that they're overdoing it
and then they see
hormonal problems in their monthly cycle
and then see hair loss and hair thinning
guys same thing but it's usually two to
four weeks out for women first is sleep
problems then you wake up and there
isn't a kickstand
and then
you
it took me a second it got there yeah
and then after that you can see her
thing as well and this is from excess
cortisol because you overdid it and you
can see the same thing from just being
keto for three months straight right
that's why i've always recommended
cycling because i made all these
mistakes when i was learning about all
this stuff it was just very early days
and so how do you make this sustainable
and the truth is fasting the same way
every day is bad for you because it
doesn't lend
your body the idea of metabolic
flexibility it's like oh i live in a
world where there's almost never enough
food so have breakfast every now and
then at least you know saturday morning
have breakfast with your family and you
can have a keto breakfast or you can
have the gluten-free waffles whatever
you want you should be able to handle
that just don't eat bad oils and over
time it takes about two years to replace
half your cell membranes the oil in
those membranes
over time you'll become more and more
metabolically flexible because your
cells work better but if while you're
intermittent fasting you're still eating
a ton of junk food
you won't get that benefit but you'll
get many other benefits of fasting
you're still going to lose weight you're
still going to have
an improved blood sugar profile but not
as good as if you made a few changes in
the diet so this is something everyone
can do that's cheaper and more
convenient than what you do in the
morning right now i used to get just
dave ferociously cold like i was cold
all the time i was like bundled up i had
i lost a ton of weight so i lost 60
pounds
but i did it really stupidly and i did
it through essentially rabbit starvation
i wasn't eating any fat no carbs 85
maybe a little more percentage of my
calories came from protein i was
basically eating boiled chicken breasts
and steamed broccoli all day every day
it's a crappy life isn't it oh my god it
was horrible it was horrible and finally
my wife and my business partners pulled
me aside and said dude you no longer
have a personality yeah like
it just sucked but i got super lean but
i
almost certainly did some sort of
cellular or metabolic damage and for
years after that i was so [ __ ] cold
all the time yeah now that didn't change
until i started taking cold showers and
now i find that like
i'm just not that cold very often
anymore
so
i have definitely developed a resilience
to
cold did you have your thyroid levels
checked i did not thought i paid
attention to it what about that probably
happened is that something happened that
lowered your thyroid function which is
part of the reason you got fat because
your thyroid is the thermostat for all
your cells the mitochondria listen to
thyroid hormone to figure out what to do
and this is why in superhuman i talk
about the vegan trap
tell me more this is one of the more
interesting parts of the book and so i
was a raw vegan for a while i was cold
when i was raw vegan too come to think
of it
but then i got a lot of other health
issues i hadn't had before even though i
did lose some weight on that but
what happens is
you say all right
based on an assumption
and the assumption is it's going to make
me healthy or it's going to be better
for the planet both of which are wrong
by the way
so
i did this and
what happens for the first six weeks is
the type of fat in your cell membranes
changes and it changes to match
vegetables newsflash we're not
vegetables so as that happens your body
says oh my ability to make energy just
went down i will compensate by turning
up my thyroid hormone but then at a
certain point your thyroid is turned all
the way up and then nothing
nothing's happening you're still making
enough energy and then you can get
thyroid problems including hashimoto's
which is a common problem of doing that
and
not to mention you're eating excessive
carbs just by definition because that's
what plants make mostly
and
the vegan trap there is this idea that
you feel great for six weeks the period
of time that it takes to make a new
habit is 40 days or maybe it's six weeks
which is 42 days and after that period
of time like look i felt better on the
vegan diet and you did you cranked up
your thyroid hormone so
now you feel good and
that can't be why i'm not feeling good
that can be why i'm getting cold but
that's the vegan trap is that you you
were convinced it made you feel good
because it did so it can't be that and
you start looking at all these other
things well it's maybe because i'm not
vegan enough like i'm going to cut out
salt right and like you just keep doing
these things trying to figure out why
didn't i recapture that initial glow and
it's because various biological systems
are turning off so for cleansing or
whatever yeah vegan for a little while
it's great the rest of the time you
should be pretty much 80 90 vegan with
some of the types of fat that you're
made out of which are saturated fats you
don't get the right ones from plants
alone
and the amount of building block protein
that your body needs things like
collagen protein are essential you do
not need the amount of animal protein
that most people eat and you should
never eat industrially raised animal
proteins it's bad for them and it's bad
for the soil it's bad for the earth and
it's bad for your soul depending on
whatever soul belief systems you have
like nobody wins
when you crowd animals
so i will eat the vegan meal every time
or i'll fast before i'll eat the the
industrially raised feedlot animals it's
not okay
however
i have a small farm i raise sheep and
pigs and i eat them and they're
delicious and i don't eat a lot of them
because you don't need a lot of them and
the total deaths
per
calorie on the bulletproof diet which is
primarily vegetables which don't kill
anything grains actually do kill a lot
of things through habitat destruction
and just mechanized cutting down of
crops
so we have big problems there where a
tractor comes through and kills the
turtles the bunnies the ladybugs the
butterflies and destroys lots of crops
for you to get low yield calories from
these things
so
what you probably need is
four ounces and maybe six ounces
of
meat
a day and not more than that and the
guidelines in superhuman that's for
normal people if you're a weightlifter
or you're over age 60 it's probably 0.6
grams per pound of body weight which is
way less than bodybuilders as long as
it's one or two grams so you can really
want to pound your protein and what the
studies are showing is whether it's
animal or plant protein you don't want
to overdo protein like you did with the
rabbit thing there if you eat more than
20 percent of your calories from protein
it is going to cause a four times higher
increase in all-cause mortality is that
protein no matter the source uh i know
like sure if it's fried and stuff like
that oh no
the cooking of the protein really
matters but it actually matters based on
amino acid ratios okay so are you saying
20 whether it's plant or animal animal
protein is worse with 20 but if you eat
20 plant protein you're still not going
to get the benefits and you're going to
start having problems from it
so there are essential amino acids amino
acids they're the building blocks of
proteins so you can kind of look at
those they're letters in the alphabet
yep and then you string them together
and you get peptides which are protein
fragments and you so each each peptide
is a word and when you put the words
together into a sentence that's a
protein right and so if you look at the
composition of letters that are in what
you eat there's ones that are required
for us to live called cysteine and
methionine and tryptophan so you must
have them or over time you'll starve
slight problem if you have too much of
them they lead to systemic inflammation
systemic inflammation is a sign of
mitochondrial dysfunction which means
they're making you older so your risks
for cancer and cardiovascular disease do
go up if you over consume animal protein
so then the logic will say well don't
eat any of it then except for the fact
that you need those they're essential
and they're building blocks the good
news is that almost no one is going to
be protein deficient if they were to go
vegan it's not about protein you might
miss a few of your conditionally
essential ones but you would miss out on
things like collagen proteins including
diane tripeptides that really help you
to build the cartilage in your joints
and keep your skin working and the types
of fats that come in animals are very
important so what you end up finding is
all of us should be eating way less
animals but that doesn't mean we should
eat zero animals all of us should be
eating way more dairy fat but not more
dairy protein because that protein is
not the ideal protein for us you can
have some of it but you don't need too
much of it
and you end up in this thing where we've
made these artificial divides of that's
a
plant-based protein therefore it's good
for you
or we could just say guys different
proteins do different things and you
should choose the right proteins whether
they come from a test tube whether they
come from an animal look at what the
protein is the source is less important
and then you look at the source and you
say okay which of these sources builds
our soil and makes for a healthy world
where there's diversity
and i just having run
uh an organic farm that looks at
permaculture
i can tell you i can't eat grass but i
can eat the thing that ate the grass and
it's poop sure is good for the garden
right so we have this this ecosystem
where we all get along
and this is how it worked before there
were humans we had
a hundred million buffalo running around
in the u.s keeping our soil healthy as
part of that's their job was to go out
and fertilize things and it's it's very
interesting to watch how we we've taken
on these belief systems um that you know
nothing can ever die not paying
attention to the fact that when the
tractor came through and cut the bread
for your sandwich that you killed many
many creatures
and back when we had a health ecosystem
you could walk around behind the tractor
with a bag and pick up hundreds of frogs
and snakes you could have frog legs for
dinner every time they cut the grain
well now all the frogs are dead and
there's no more snakes because we have
monoculture everywhere but hey at least
we're not killing anything
[Music]
how do you really feel dave
let me ask you what do you think about
the carnivore diet
i did something similar to that when i
was testing out like the edges of the
bulletproof recommendations
i
did
one serving of vegetables a day for
three months
right so it wasn't pure carnivore uh
because you know i did eat a little bit
of broccoli every day
it jacked me up really oh my god did you
transition though or did you just like
hammer over well i was already
you know doing keto and cyclical and
keto with uh meat or keto plant-based
okay with me okay yeah yeah you're
one of the few people i've heard like
really throw out some heavy warnings
about protein so keep going got it when
you say that it jacked you up here's
what it did yeah
i was tracking my sleep i've tracked my
sleep for almost 15 years six hours and
17 minutes or something i'm so [ __ ]
close to the truth what is it six hours
and 10 minutes but you're see come on
seven minutes off all right i'm going to
give you full credit
that that's pretty amazing
um
yeah and this is like for many years now
that much sleep and i my percentage of
deep and rem keeps going up but during
that time
i felt really good for the first week or
two and after that my sleep i was waking
up 10 to 12 times a night without
knowing it i'd wake up in the morning i
look at my results i'm like this is the
worst sleep ever what's going on and i
had
like like a kind of a constant headache
and i got angry and i was my joints
heard and it it was not working and i
was
really convinced okay we don't need any
carbs but that's wrong you do need carbs
and i think what it did is tell me more
why do you say that because as of this
moment i don't believe that to be true
tell me how i'm wrong um because the gut
bacteria that eat carbs benefit from
soluble fiber so if you're not getting
soluble fiber there's a little chapter
in here on that you can still be keto
and have soluble fiber but you got to
have something to feed certain species
of gut bacteria so they can do stuff now
if you go back a bulletproof diet was
the first book in the entire genre that
talked about how collagen can be
used in the gut to make butyric acid so
maybe my problem was i was eating too
many ribeyes and i wasn't eating enough
collagen when i was doing my my diet
there
i've interviewed steve omahundro
this is a guy who's a leader in
artificial intelligence creating a
global brain who came down with um
cancer in his blood
and he'd been fighting it for a long
time with and it was he was slowly going
down when carnivore cured him completely
fixed and so he came on and talked about
those pictures of his freezer and things
it's all just meat so i'm a huge fan
just like i would say go vegan for a
month go carnivore for a month reset
your gut bacteria
i actually have questions about the
sustainability
of eating only grass-fed meat and i know
if we took most of our golf courses and
turn them into grass-fed meat production
facilities i.e farms we can handle a lot
more than we do but we're just eating
too much meat as a species so as a brief
intervention to cure yourself
i i'm in huge support of it but you
better do nose to tail and
being the guy who has learned how to
take our lambs down you know how to how
to take him down as in i haven't like
i've learned at a butcher shop how to do
it there's a lot of stuff in there that
you're supposed to be eating that you
don't
and the idea here is you need to get the
skin you need to get the organs and
things like that if you're going to go
kind of so there's there's a case for it
there are people who've done it for many
years successfully
i think it's very expensive very
limiting and probably bad for the planet
and may be good for you but
i'd want some more evidence
all right give me some rapid fire things
that are going to help me be superhuman
green tea
black coffee
dark chocolate blueberries
sleeping like a professional even if you
get less sleep give me some of your
sleep tips like is it timing obviously
light you're like [ __ ] synonymous
with blue blocking yeah i i did make
those kind of cool
i
i have a company called true dark just
in full disclosure i founded the thing
but if i don't wear my glasses before
bed for at least an hour i do not get
the one and a half to two hours of deep
sleep that i expect in six hours if this
is even if the lights are dim and it it
doesn't matter it really matters if i
travel it matters even more so i landed
last night i got to my hotel around
midnight
and i got my hour and 40 minutes of deep
sleep last night in a hotel after
landing and coming in that i could never
do that ever that's amazing
that's the glasses but for dreaming it's
been a real problem getting enough rem
sleep for me for years has been an issue
and there's a company called life cycle
that makes an australian lion's mane
mushroom extract i had the guys on the
show they went really deep on the
science and i've lions main is well
known for its cognitive enhancing
properties um this stuff for sleep
though
uh is something that that that has
worked for me and i can tell you if i
don't i do a lot i do five droppers of
it if i do that i get my hour and a half
of rem and if i don't i'm going to get
30 minutes
the other things that work aside from
dark and that lowering the temperature
of the room
for people wake up late like three or
four in the morning can't go back to
sleep racing thoughts that's a cortisol
and a fueling issue before bed you need
either raw honey or
collagen or mct oil brain octane or
maybe all three and there's different
pathways raw honey not in hot water
because that's not raw anymore it raises
liver glycogen but not muscle glycogen
and we're talking a small amount it
stabilizes it so you don't get a blood
sugar crash brain octane provides
ketones which are the backup energy
supply for the brain to pump itself out
at night
and for some people the amino acid
glycine that's present in collagen can
be calming and help them sleep through
the night i do those i take the sleep
mode supplement i formulated blackout
curtains are a necessity at this point
raising the head of your bed by six
inches there's really good evidence that
that's going to change blood flow
dynamics and cerebral spinal fluid
dynamics in the brain and make it easier
for your brain to drain stuff out that's
interesting so literally put a couple
bricks under the head of your bed
it's pretty easy to do that and it's a
one-time hack that can have ongoing
benefits
what about red and amber light
amber light is good amber light in fact
true light one of the parts of true dark
we make a light that uses amber for like
blood vessel formation in the skin along
with collagen regeneration
and so there's usefulness for that
during the day you usually see me
wearing yellow glasses that block some
blue light but not all because you need
blue light during the day so amber light
as a therapeutic wavelength on the skin
it works on blood vessels
mostly and on fine wrinkles
red light and infrared light also work
on fine wrinkles on collagen
regeneration on tissue regeneration and
if you're looking to use an amber light
at night it turns out blue blocking
isn't enough to make you go to sleep
there's four kinds of light that mess
with your sleep and blue blockers only
get one of the four so your melatonin
will go out but the other three are
still there so you need to block all
four that's why the sleep glasses are
different than blue blocking
so you see a lot of people walking
around blue blockers during the day they
got no daytime signal at all so that's a
bad thing
but if you're walking around under
bright leds and staring your screen on
full power all day you're getting an
overwhelm of daylight signal so it's
about getting it getting it right but
for me it's that hour before bed where
you just have to nail it
and for looking younger red light
therapy is profound for the skin and
what what do you use for red light
therapy is there a device
yeah there's a variety of devices so you
go to upgrade labs we have you know the
the
many tens of thousands of dollar whole
body thing you kind of roast on it with
systemic effects including you can
actually see your nitric oxide levels go
up on a
spit strip after you expose the red
light it has biological effects and then
it's kind of the mid-range of cost and
performance there's a company called
juve
and they have a very very powerful leds
in an array and then at the
most affordable end of things is the
true light stuff from the company i have
that makes the glasses they're more
affordable they have yellow uh they have
the red and they have the infrared but
they're not as powerful of leds so i
would say you got to look at your your
your price point where you want to go
what you want to do but it's an led
therapy kind of thing and you know jude
makes a little box you can take with you
and there's panels you can string
together
the bottom line is if you're feeling
weird in your stomach and you have
nausea or you have a headache and you
put red light on your stomach or on your
head it's shocking what happens there's
studies of putting red light in
conjunction with ketosis and they looked
at somewhere in minnesota they looked at
say a dozen people they put them on a
strict keto diet
they put them on red light therapy with
a strict keto diet and a standard diet
and red light therapy of the standard
diet and the men who were on
keto plus red light therapy had a
doubling of testosterone production
but keto alone and red light alone both
bumped it up but nowhere near as much so
there's synergistic effects between keto
and red light which is really cool is
there a timing of that
like when do you want your red light in
the morning and the night um generally
you just think of sunset and sun
okay so you would do when you wake up
two before bed and during the day if you
if you have time you know and you're
looking at skin repair or something you
can do it any time during the day but
the two peak periods are before bed and
upon waking nice
all right man there is a lot more in
this book you are a very easy man to
find online but where's your ideal for
people to connect with you where's your
ideal for people to snatch up the book
go to
daveasprey.com and this is my author url
you can clearly go to bulletproof.com
pick up all the cool bulletproof stuff
i've put most of my blog posts and all
the podcast transcripts and all that
kind of stuff on daveasper.com go there
and if you send me your receipt from
picking up superhuman um there's eight
interviews with like the leading gods of
anti-aging that are just for people who
picked up the books i'm really serious
about this
building a community around people that
do the stuff that has been a non-profit
activity for me for 20 years that's now
becoming my my primary focus nice man
what's one change that you would have
people make that would take them the
farthest towards becoming superhuman
this is going to sound really really
lame it's probably sleep today it
doesn't sound lame to me i mean i like
to tell you you should meditate or you
should you know make sure that you're
not eating toxins it all is synergistic
but seriously if you just learn to get
better sleep in whatever time you have
to sleep it is the most leveraged return
on investment and it's probably also the
cheapest thing you can do so that and
maybe order some breathing exercises a
pretty good deal nice
so i don't think we closed the loop on
metabolic flexibility before so
metabolic flexibility being um that
you've got on one hand you can burn the
glucose and then on the other that you
can burn ketones uh most people unless
they're paying attention never get into
a space where they can burn ketones
because they're not creating ketones
can you give people really fast because
i want to get back to what an ideal fast
looks like according to fast this way
but first give people a quick breakdown
about how you put your body in a state
where it will produce ketones and
exactly what they are
ketones are what happens when your body
burns fat instead of sugar naturally it
doesn't happen if you're consuming
carbohydrates in any meaningful amount
and it doesn't happen if you're eating a
ton of protein and
what happens when you do that is ketones
have more energy in them than glucose
does and the neurons in your brain love
ketones in fact all the cells in your
body do but some of them prefer blood
glucose so all the sudden you get this
feeling of clarity and the natural way
to get into ketosis is you fast for
about two days for the average person
sometimes three and then the body says i
got nothing here i better start burning
my fat stores so it liberates some fat
from the fat stores and all the toxins
from the fat it liberates as well which
is why it's good to mop them up while
you're fasting and then your cells get
get this and they go oh man we've got to
reformat our power plants because
they're used to only having sugar
so it takes metabolic energy to
transform and they literally change
their shape and function so that they're
better at consuming fat
right and that takes a while now you're
metabolically flexible but if you do
that all the time forever your cells are
like why would i ever be configured to
do glucose i live in a world with no
sugar
so they aren't very good at that which
is why cycling in and out of ketosis
fasting some of the time but not other
times and not fasting the same way every
day or every week is really powerful you
want to keep the body a little bit off
balance so it's like you know what i'm
ready to make energy at any time rapidly
from any type of fuel and when you do
that you can actually go out and have a
bowl of hopefully dairy-free ice cream
without bad fats in it so a
coconut-based ice cream and uh with real
sugar and everything and it'll happen
your blood sugar will go up and come
right back down and you'll be fine and
that's a metabolically flexible person
you do it all the time you won't be
metabolically flexible
right but if you're the guy who has ice
cream every single night
well then what's going to happen is
you're not going to know how to burn fat
whatsoever your body's going to be only
sugar burning and it's it's not going to
work and your blood sugar will always be
high so the idea is occasionally it's
okay to have some carbs i don't
recommend you know ice cream is a major
source but honestly if you're
intermittent fasting you're occasionally
in ketosis
you ought to be able to eat a treat that
isn't full of inflammatory stuff like
bad oils and all and be just fine and
the evidence is that people whose
metabolisms work really well they can do
it and their blood sugar doesn't go
bonkers
okay now if we were gonna give somebody
the fastest way starter kit um you know
sort of a what is a basic week look like
what is what is a good entry point where
they're not hangry they're not going
crazy but they're still getting some
benefits anti-inflammatory
they're maybe in
you know ketosis they've got some
autophagy going on like what does that
starter kit fast look like
all right i'm going to to explain that
right here i'm also going to offer
um because i was a teacher for five
years at the university of california i
wrote every book i've written i haven't
really been a great teacher of the
content i just write them like you
should read it when people order fast
this way and send the receipt to
fastthisway.com
i will teach you this over two weeks
like every morning explaining walking
people through this who are new to
fasting ending in a one or two day
spiritual fast so that's the long answer
to the question is this gonna take me
two weeks but i'll show you the short
answer
is that
do 12 hours without food see if you can
do that if you've never done it before
that's not really technically an
intermittent fast you're just showing
yourself you've got legs and you work
yourself up to 14 hours without food and
that's when you're really starting a
real intermittent fast
and then you maybe the next day you have
breakfast just lots of protein lots of
fat no carbs for breakfast right you're
taking it easy and then the next day
okay i'm gonna do a 16 hour fast
and
you're you may use all three of the
fasting hacks because you're ravenous
when i was 300 pounds if you told me i
was going to skip breakfast and lunch
i'm like i will kill the people around
me like i will be such a jerk and it was
true i ate six or eight times a day
because i knew i'd go into starvation
mode if i didn't and all this like
mental garbage we've been told
so
what you end up with is this idea where
you're slowly going to work your way up
and it's okay to do that and some
mornings someone's going to bring in
donuts and you're just going to break
your fast and in the book i explain the
psychology and the biology of why that
happens and it's just it's okay right
you have the rest of your life to to do
this that's why it's called a fasting
practice
and it doesn't have to be perfect
and once you get up to that 68 one day
you're going to sit there and go you
know what
it's lunch time but i'm actually not
that hungry so i am going to for the
first time in my adult life
i'm going to just say i'm not going to
dinner and then you're really kind of
tricking yourself because it's only like
four or five more hours until you've had
dinner anyway and then you're going wait
a minute the last time i ate was dinner
yesterday but it wasn't pain it wasn't
suffering it wasn't struggle it wasn't
strife it wasn't pushing it was just oh
okay i could do that i was a little
hungry in the afternoon but i drank some
extra water right maybe you did use
coffee coffee is good for you anyway
right it's okay and then no sugar or
cream i'm assuming thank you no sugar no
cream no protein no artificial sweetener
either you can use stevia or monk fruit
if you want to but definitely not
neutral sweeter splenda because those
wreck your gut bacteria
and
it it's really shocking and you see this
look at wonder like wow i can't believe
i i thought i would die right but i
didn't i just did 24 hours
and as we talked about earlier that's
you know one meal a day but if the next
day you're like i did yesterday i'm
gonna do it again today and you're still
just getting into it you're probably not
gonna feel as good right so the next day
go back to 16-8 right like slowly work
up to it and what you're doing it's like
you go to the gym say i haven't worked
out in two years but i'm gonna go do a
full crossfit workout right i'm gonna do
the full wad and then the next day
you're laying on your back and you're
like i think i have to go to the
hospital my kidneys are overloaded with
protein breakdown you know i hate my
life it's because it's okay
when you're exercising yourselves the
way fasting is it's okay to just get
started in a healthy
gentle way and work yourself up to this
i can fast for 48 hours and still be
totally fine and and have my brain work
and do interviews like this
and i feel great i can also eat and feel
great but before i'd eat and then i get
the food coma and then you don't feel
very good and then you gotta have some
sugar that doesn't happen either but if
you just go all in and say i'm gonna
start with a ten day water fast
man you're gonna feel like crap and the
deal here is fasting is not about
deprivation and it's not supposed to be
about willpower unless
you're doing a spiritual fast
and what i would say is do fasting in a
painless way which is a big part of the
book or choose to face the pain and use
it as a spiritual personal development
practice
the arc of the book
when i first started this i was afraid
of of being hungry i was afraid of being
alone
which was something i came up with
through my personal development work i'm
like oh i didn't realize this so i hired
a shaman to drop me off in the middle of
nowhere in a cave there's no food and
there's no people for 10 miles in any
direction
and i'm like i'm going to be here for
four days and i'm scared you know
i'm pretty scared of this to be
perfectly honest it's the first time
i've done a four-day fast
and
when i got out of there i couldn't
believe the energy i had and i talk in
in the book about you know the the
mental process you go through the first
time you do a fast like that
and
that is a spiritual practice and that's
why at the end of this this challenge
i'm running for people it i am going to
say all right here's the meditation work
that you do here's understanding the
voice in your head because there's these
three voices in your head that make you
do everything you've ever been ashamed
of and they're coming from mitochondria
and gut bacteria
and getting on top of that and just
owning that that's awesome but if you
have to own it every day on top of
everything else in your life it's going
to be overwhelming and it's going to
raise your cortisol and you don't need
to do that to get the benefits what are
the three voices
this is the algorithm that all life runs
it doesn't matter if you're a plant it
doesn't matter if you're a bacteria
which is what's powering us or whether
you know you're a deer and the first
rule is run away from kill or hide from
everything so that's fear and you put 10
times more energy on that than is
necessary
right because from the perspective of
making a life form that will always be
around it should protect itself and you
protect yourself if you're a plant with
hard shells or spikes or toxins and if
you're bacteria use toxins or other
defense things
and if you're a person you think you're
out of it and
the second f word which gets about five
times more attention than normal is eat
everything because famines kill lots of
things so now we have fear and we have
food
right and that's why food gets so much
attention when you're fasting because
your bacteria like eat that eat that eat
that eat that eat that and like no no no
and eventually it's like a little kid
wearing you down and okay fine you can
have half the cookie johnny and they're
like why do i eat the cookie i'm such a
bad person no your mitochondria got the
best of you it's okay
and then the third f word what else does
all life have to do to make sure it's on
the earth forever tom fornicate baby
oh i was thinking fertility but if you
want to just go straight through i'll go
right there
you're correct so i actually was
thinking of the other f word i was just
trying to get you to say it
so nice dodge
what um what's going there is that gets
about three times more attention than it
deserves
right and all life has to do it and this
explains everything you've ever done
that you're ashamed of
like all
procrastination all resistance all not
seeing things like that's fear right
eating all the stuff you shouldn't eat
that's food going on that date you know
you shouldn't have gone on
that is the other f word right and this
is in our cells this is not your brain
this is your cellular biology driving
you to do it
and the saving grace in all of this
and this is towards the end of the book
is that there is a fourth f word that
all life does and it's friend
and this is why we form communities why
we specialize and we're actually wired
to help each other
right but if you're so wrapped up in
hunger and so wrapped up in lack of love
and so wrapped up in fear whether it's
from watching too much news or just your
old programming that's like oh no if if
you know if my boss yells you're my bad
person no one will love me
and you just lose it so if those are
going on we aren't there to help other
people and if you can turn off the
hunger voice it frees up so much more
energy that you can now do the work
necessary to turn down the fear and to
make sure that you're managing the love
in your life and all of a sudden you're
a better person than you were before and
this is why fasting is so important
because it has the power to give you the
energy to overcome the other f words
that are messing with you on a daily
basis and it's not because we're bad
people it's a separate operating system
meant to keep you alive it's not trying
to harm you it just makes you do stupid
stuff all the time and fasting is a way
out of that trap
is that the reason that this is such a
time-honored tradition for spiritual
traditions to use fasting or is there
something more was there what were all
the things that you learned or
discovered in the cave
there are
two reasons that spiritual fasting works
and i actually reference a bunch of
different fasting practices from around
the world in the book that are all
spiritual traditions one of them is that
when the neurons in your brain get
ketones from fasting you actually think
better you have more energy for thinking
and for awareness food tastes better
colors are brighter
right and you're aware of sensations in
your body and the world around you it's
like someone went from black and white
to color tv so so you get this this
energy is like wow i like this and if
you take that energy and you turn it
inwards you become aware of what's going
on in there in a way that you normally
wouldn't be and i believe that's a part
of it and the other part of it is
you know you do have to to feel the
hunger and have willpower to overcome
the hunger for two days or so and it's
about showing yourself who's in charge
right and that is a spiritual practice
in and of itself but it's the the
clarity that comes and with that clarity
you can do deep work
i want to talk about that growing part
so you said in the cave you know doing a
extended fast like that you're creating
the space to do the deep work or you
have the energy to do the deep work what
was the deep work like what was it that
and i mean you talk about in the books i
don't think i'm going out of school here
but what was it that drew you to wanting
to do a spiritual fast um and then
you know what what did you encounter
that you've taken with you
well i'd i'd lost a lot of weight but i
recognized i still had you know a fear
of being hungry because when your
metabolism doesn't work when you're as
fat as i was if you don't have food your
brain stops working i had a great career
in silicon valley you're very
cognitively demanding but interesting
and fascinating and you're in a meeting
and like
my brain won't work like i'm trying to
think right now and i got nothing like
the accelerator's all the way to the
floor
and i'm slowing down i can push hard but
it doesn't matter how much i try doesn't
much i want it's not a willpower or a
moral issue it's a biological issue so
you become afraid of being hungry
because you don't want to be disabled
right and i had that and i recognized i
had that i didn't know what to do about
it i said well i'm just gonna you know
face it and one thing that happens when
you face your fears they lose their
power so for me in the cave i'm like
there's no one around like
showing myself i'm actually still safe
with no food i'm still safe with no
companionship right and then to be able
to go you know what great i'm not going
to die and that soaks into your body
it's not just in the day
you're just sitting there thinking you
walking around
i sat there i'd think and say you know
what okay i'm just gonna go walk i'd
walk up the little canyon where i was
you know i'd stack up rocks i had a
little journal
and and just really
feel but you know you think about all
the stuff you've done uh that man i wish
i hadn't done that now i understand what
was driving me to do that and you really
you gain insight and and you
you feel way more connected
uh to the world around you and like most
like yeah i'm gonna fast i'm gonna have
my metabolism i'm going to get younger
i'm going to lose weight and get abs and
go these benefits like actually you have
no distractions when you're fasting so
if you remove all the distractions from
your world and you do some of the other
things that i talk about in the book
briefly you know fasting from sex
is a very powerful practice that raises
your testosterone if you're a man if
you're a woman it probably isn't
beneficial
um
there's other things towards the end of
the book like fasting from hate like try
to go
four hours without thinking one bad
thought about another person and then go
24 hours it is remarkably difficult to
do that and you become aware during that
time i cannot believe how often i'm like
sending dirt towards people that i
didn't know i was doing it costs you to
send them dirt you got to make the
electrons do that and it gives it does
nothing for you
right
so
you can go without many different things
but when you have the clarity and the
time to sit in a cave like why am i
thinking about this right now like why
is it pushing my buttons why did that
show up for me right now and then you
you dig on like oh my god i've never
thought about it like that
and this is once i had the clarity of
ketones right i had zero inputs anywhere
i had no food in front of me to to
challenge me and i could say oh i'm
really hungry and then i'm like why am i
thinking that i know there's no food
here and like who's thinking that
because it's not me
and then you realize oh there actually
is a separate consciousness that's
driving my biology and i i mean you can
see the effect of that consciousness
using neurofeedback and all it's one of
the things i do with my neurofeedback
company 40 years of zen and it's wow
there's this whole thing that's like
making me worry about stuff that i know
isn't a threat and it's making me worry
about food when i know i'm not going to
starve i'm like wait why what and then
you start really getting in there and
you when you're done with a spiritual
fast like that
you can develop a sense of
first
empathy like i i feel the pain that i
felt i feel the pain of others when
they're hungry right and then the level
beyond that in spiritual teaching
teachings
is a sense of compassion where instead
of having to feel everyone else's pain
you can see the pain and you feel
open-heartedness towards them and you
want to serve without taking it in and
the final state which is the hardest one
to develop in these open-hearted
buddhist practices is equanimity which
is where you can be completely calm and
at peace no matter what's happening
inside or outside of you
and and that's the kind of things that
can develop when you sit in the cave for
days because you're like wow i had all
this garbage in my mind that i didn't
know was in there because i had nothing
else to do but unpack it and we're just
too busy to do that but i would say
the fasting runs from i skipped
breakfast and i had more energy and i'm
better off metabolically all the way up
to
i sat somewhere for several days in
intense personal development but when
most people hear fasting all they hear
is i'll starve therefore i'll die and
then they blank out to it and
no this is about more energy and it's
about more clarity and less time wasted
and less pain in your life yeah and
hearing you describe the way people push
back seeing how even today sort of the
mainstream
medical establishment thinks of fasting
and how it's considered so sort of
outlandish and you know people
immediately go to well you're going to
give
people anorexia and it's such a bizarre
reaction and when you think about those
three f's and and the fear that seems to
be driving people's perception of this
do you have like a magic
phrase
or idea that you can give to people that
are really resistant to get them to try
it
you can fast without ever being hungry
and without ever suffering
and you'll have more energy but when i
was
you know really heavy still i was eating
super healthy what i thought was healthy
you know low-fat
low-calorie stuff
but i was still working on it and if you
told me i had to fast i'd be like no
like i'm not going to i'll go into
starvation mode and it's going to suck
and then i won't be able to do my job
and you know i'll act like a jerk and
all that stuff that message is playing
super loud for everyone who's got extra
pounds
and then they have this desire to fast
but then you feel like a failure
because the automated system in your
body
wants you to eat and you don't know how
to deal with it so the deal is i'm going
to put you in charge that that's what's
going on here and so all of the bad
things that you think about fasting
won't happen what's going to happen is
you're going to save time and you're
going to feel better than you do today
and you'll never be hungry and then like
okay i'm going to try this once i think
you're full of crap and they almost
always start with a fasting hack there's
a reason that there's been several
hundred million cups of bulletproof
coffee and people lost a million pounds
on the bulletproof diet it's because
when they had that fat in the morning
they were intermittent fasting they just
didn't feel hungry
and for the first time in their lives
when lunch time came around they're like
i guess i could eat
instead of the way i used to be which is
like what's for lunch what's for lunch
tacos you know that whole voice it just
shuts up and oh my god it's so
liberating
yeah it really does change your
relationship to hunger that was the
thing that i could never quite get
people to understand about ketosis
specifically and it's not like you're
not hungry it's that it doesn't have a
grip on you which is very very different
it's because there's two things that we
confuse one is a craving and the other
is hunger
and hunger is the sense that you know
what it's time to eat sometime soon
but i could wait a while and a craving
is if i don't eat right now someone's
going to die
whether it's me or someone else
and most people eat in such a way that
they always experience cravings and
they've never experienced just hunger
without a craving i was like that a
hundred percent and when you clean out
the stuff that's causing the cravings
like wow
the experience of lunch is so different
what is up my friend tom bill you here
and i have a big question to ask you how
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i've got something cool for you and let
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boring which is what kills most people
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requires you to do those challenging
stressful things and to stick with them
even when it gets boring and it will get
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right i've just released a class from
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university until then my friends be
legendary peace out
you and i share an obsession with the
new book you're
living to 180. so your book opens with
one of my favorite quotes of all time
which is do not go gently into that good
night rage rage rage against the dying
of the light
why start there how has this become your
obsession
it's funny there's a very old restaurant
in berkeley california in fact
my parents
used to eat there my mom was pregnant
with me like way back in the day it's
called spanglers and they actually have
that quote up in when you enter into the
restaurant there so i remember when i
was a little kid my grandfather
reading that quote to me
and i remember my grandfather was
passing away he was in his
in his 80s and he came down with an
autoimmune kidney condition and he sat
down and he said well i'm a phd
scientist chemist
and i know that if i work really hard
i might get to the point where i can sit
at home and be well enough to watch golf
and do dialysis twice a week for the
rest of my life
i don't want that so i'm going on the
wine diet
and
he said call the family and he said what
does that mean he said i'm only having
wine no water no nothing else so
everyone flew in and he passed away a
few days later literally doing exactly
what he said he just had a few sips of
wine whenever he wanted to but he
decided he was gonna go let's talk about
that for a second so i'm i'm actually
really interested in this so
um like if i
knew that that was a one-way street
as much as i want to live forever 180
like as long as humanly possible if it
got to the end man i'm i'm all about the
wine diet or
euthanasia quite frankly like where do
you come down on that
if you think that there's hope and you
think that there's hope to have the
quality of life that you want then you
fight for it and in fact one of these
guys who never discloses publicly ceo of
a fortune 200 company he was diagnosed
with pancreatic cancer the same stuff
that took out
steve jobs
and i sat down at the rosewood hotel
and
he said dave i'm going to tell you what
i did and the day he was diagnosed he
said i'm not gonna die i have i have a
company and i have kids this isn't fair
he never told anyone so he went on a
full keto diet that day
and he
shrunk his tumor to the point that it
became operable they did chemo on it and
when the doctors weren't looking to
inject insulin to do insulin potentiated
therapy which works way better than
chemotherapy but the doctors wouldn't do
and so he's like i'm taking charge and
you know what he he did it right so and
i and
in running an antigen nonprofit group
for 20 years i have met people who are
saying i have this life-threatening
condition and i am going to own this and
they do and i've also met with so i'm
going to own this in a certain point
they go it's not working and they make
peace with it and the people who die
kicking and screaming are the most
unhappy and if you believe any of the
buddhist perspectives on hell or any of
those other things like that those are
the people who have probably a shitty
afterlife and aren't going to like their
next life if you're into reincarnation
do you believe in that absolutely really
yeah that's so interesting how did you
get into that like when did that become
your dominant belief system there's the
western side of this so i grew up as in
a in an atheist household full of
rigorous engineers and you know like
only stupid people would believe that
stuff but here's what it comes down to
if your nervous system believes
that you get to you get a game over at
the end of this game you relax a lot
more
okay
okay so so check this out if i can do
anything to remove my unconscious fear
of death which inhibits me from doing
the things that i want to do when i'm
here
if believing reincarnation can do that
fine i'll sign up for it because here's
the deal if i'm right
great if i'm wrong i'm dead i don't care
like i you can't lose by believing in
reincarnation so i can't tell you that
it's provable i've also done very deep
states of neurofeedback i've done deep
stuff shamanic wise and i've talked to
different people from different
traditions who look at me and say the
same things about stuff that i have no
knowledge of so
as a curious person where that
scientific method is observe is the
first step i've observed stuff i can't
explain via
any normal hypothesis so i know the
stuff that we believe has holes in it
just like it does biologically so i'm
just going to say i like that choice
best because even if it's complete
[ __ ] it still enhances my quality of
life that's really interesting so
one the reason that the one thing in all
that that doesn't resonate with me is
that believing that you get a game over
at the end of this causes you to relax
which is the exact opposite i would say
certainly for me
even if i live forever like i want to go
hard hard hard every day and if there's
an end then i really want to go hard
every day whereas i feel like the the
opposite might be true if i knew i were
getting reincarnated
one of my lives might be the donut life
where i just chill and i'm like look i'm
gonna tap out early i get it but
i'm just gonna eat me some tasty food
until it comes if you believe i went to
tibet to learn meditation from the
masters like i've debated the llamas and
what they'll tell you is oh you've
probably done that
had the donut life yeah absolutely like
if you're asking that question now you
probably already had your donut life
right right so the idea is you're going
to keep making the same mistakes for
lifetime after lifetime after lifetime
until you learn your lesson so for me
that's pretty good motivation to learn
my lesson this time so i have to repeat
the lesson again because who wants to
read first grade over and over and over
eventually that's going to get boring
all right so while we have this one and
this isn't our donut life then what
should we be doing like i love the
concept that you explore in the book
about okay you may be here and maybe
here is even pretty good but there
actually is something above that and
that you're not kidding when you say
that you really want to live to 180. how
do we actually get there like walk us
through the you call it the the four
killers sure start there
and
everything in
superhuman comes down to something
called return on investment and it you
just have to look at what you're
investing and we usually think of
investment as dollars but what we're
really investing is not even time we're
investing energy
because if you have energy you can use
the energy to make money if you have
time but no energy the time is useless
if you have money but no energy the
money is mostly useless unless you spend
it to get energy back which is what i
had to do when i weighed 300 pounds and
you know i was i was screwed up
so
if you don't have money you don't have
time to have energy you're in pretty
desperate straight
so when it comes to living to 180 what
if during this entire life however long
it is you did the things that gave you
the highest return on investment for
learning the lessons that you need to
learn whether because this is the only
life you have and you tricked yourself
into believing reincarnation so your
heart rate variability will go higher or
because you actually are going to come
back in our life i have no idea but i'm
good either way
so just in case i think living to at
least 180 is a good plan it lets me do
more of the fun stuff and when we get
down to what's in superhuman first step
to living 180 is not dying
so
it sounds kind of obvious but
a lot of people read that book oh i
never thought about it but let's just
play the odds if you're average by the
way okay if you're listening to the show
you're already not average because
you're paying attention to health right
and if you're reading superhuman you're
not average but if you are average
what's going to kill you is probably
heart disease cancer
or alzheimer's disease or diabetes and
diabetes is termed as a risk factor for
the other three so
pretty much that's your future you're
going to be unable to metabolize food
until you puff up and die of a sugar
overload and other diseases that's no
good
you're going to pop a gasket your heart
will stop beating
um or you could just forget your name
and your kids names and end up in
diapers
and cancer we all know you know chemical
poisoning radiation poisoning surgery
and what no one talks about though is
that your chances of living if you had
cancer are twice as high now as they
used to be so we're actually
not preventing cancer very well the
incidence is higher but the survival
rate is increasing pretty dramatically
right so
i
i end up looking at all these and saying
okay what do we do the basic things to
avoid your risk of all of those because
if you just turn that down your quality
of life is unquestionably going to be
higher even if you die at 87 or whatever
the average would be given your
demographics
and then once you've lowered those risks
you say all right what are the things
that are going to make me die of some
other cause and maybe one of these
and for those there's these seven
pillars of aging that now scientists
understand we used to think oh we don't
know why we age we age because of time
you know we age because of
whatever
but it's not one thing and it's sort of
like why does your car break
well is it because you didn't change the
oil you didn't put gas in the tank you
didn't change the tires you didn't
rotate the timing belt and all the other
stuff you do to maintain a car and did
you do it the right time
throughout the life of the car if you do
it right there's cars with 700 000 miles
on them and driving today and there's
cars in the junkyard with 70 000 miles
right i'd like this to be a 700 000 mile
car it might have a few wrinkles in the
seats but it's perfectly serviceable and
it gets around under its own power and
this is doable but only if you know the
maintenance schedule so the seven
pillars in superhuman are about those
for each of the pillars
there's things you can do that are free
that are lifestyle based there's things
you can do that are pretty cheap
like maybe change your diet a little bit
or
take a supplement
or
a small gadget let's say and then there
are things that are based on the very
cutting edge science some of them are
frighteningly expensive but this is what
the millionaires are doing
and i went to the trouble of going out
and doing as many of those as i could
afford or find and
those things are are in here so here's
the experience of doing it here's you
know an expert here's you know my own
assessment of this and here's the
results i had and what i
want people to walk away from this
interview from reading the book just
from thinking about this
aging is death by a thousand cuts and
these seven pillars are what are holding
you up but what if you took less cuts
they were less deep and then you healed
those cuts like wolverine
instead of just putting band-aids on
them
you'll find that when you're old you
have a lot less scars
and you function a lot better and
actually you're not old you just have
lots of years and that is the path that
i'm on and it's an accessible achievable
path for everyone
so one of the things you talk about in
the book i was actually um excited to
see that you put it into a nice simple
sentence and basically aging boils down
to the mitochondria yeah and i've never
heard anybody put such a fine point on
it before one for people that don't know
what are mitochondria and then two why
is aging so related to that
mitochondria are we like say the power
plants of the cells this is seventh
grade biology it's what you hear on
every new show but uh i went really deep
on the biology of these ancient bacteria
that we like to say we harnessed for
ourselves they're actually running a lot
of the decisions in our bodies
they're the ones who run the operating
system of life for us and the operating
system of life is run away from kill or
hide from scary things they decide how
much energy goes into fight or flight
and how much goes into cellular protein
folding they're making the electrons and
deciding what to do with them and
they're keenly interested in food
because without food their job is to
take
food and air and a little bit of light
and make energy out of that and if they
don't get enough of those things they
freak out and they change their
behaviors that changes your behaviors
and mitochondria because the way you're
talking about them make them sound like
they're a separate entity and they
actually do have their own dna right
they are separate bacteria that are now
inside our cells they have their own dna
and they share some functions with our
dna but after this book came out when i
said very straightforward mitochondria
are at the root of aging and one of the
seven pillars is mitochondrial uh
mutation however their performance
determines how well you live then the
study came out and what they found was
profound they found that when
mitochondria make enough energy that the
energy gets used by
your nuclear dna repair facilities so if
you have enough energy in your cells
because you ate the right stuff because
you did the right stuff like sleep and
exercise the right way and all the other
things that i talk about in here
you will have enough energy to repair
your human dna not your mitochondrial
dna so if you don't want to get cancer
you don't want to get these mutations
over time you've got to have enough
energy to repair and this is what's
happening to a lot of us and i say a lot
of us 48 of people under age 40 have
mitochondrial insufficiency
everyone over age 40 has mitochondrial
insufficiency unless they're managing it
how do you test for that
it just so happens that upgrade labs we
have the gold standard test in fact
we're the only ones who have it we have
exclusive rights to it
you use a vo2 mask and it actually
measures your oxygen consumption and how
efficient you are at using it there are
other blood tests in all that are just
not that reliable i've been searching
for a mitochondrial sufficiency test for
years the only one that i know is you
get on an exercise bike breathing
through a mask with a special algorithm
that analyzes what you're doing to see
how much energy you make and how much
oxygen was left over there's no lying to
that system right so the studies show
those numbers are accurate so what that
means is as we age we get worse at using
air and food to make electrons whether
it's to ride a bike or to think a
thought or to feel an emotion all of
those are driven by the same exact
electrons that are powering your phone
and we unfortunately can't plug into a
usb cable to recharge yet that would be
a lot easier that's that's the next one
that would be a lot easier um so
if mitochondria are the source of aging
you threw out a couple things really
faster that we can do to protect against
that or to optimize our mitochondria
what does that look like
there's about a quadrillion mitochondria
in your body way more than there are
bacteria in your gut and way way more
than there are cells in your body so
your neurons in your brain have 15 000
mitochondria in one cell
and these things have their own little
unique consciousness cell level
consciousness like a bacteria would have
you know very basic things that they do
but it's become this elegant dance where
inside a neuron these mitochondria will
move back and forth and it'll break in
half and and they do stuff that is at
the very very core of life so if we
didn't understand 20 30 years ago
because we couldn't see it we couldn't
measure it
and
one of the things that they do is they
hang around even if they don't work very
well that means that if you don't
provide enough stress for them they will
not go to the biologically expensive
trouble of killing the weak ones and
replacing them with fresh young ones
interesting i didn't know that so it's
kind of like a cell in your battery
right you're in your tesla even in your
phone there's multiple cells in your
battery and if one of the cells goes bad
the battery the phone keeps working
doesn't charge quite as well two of the
cells go bad eventually enough the cells
go bad it only holds the charge for five
minutes you're in the hospital your
phone's getting replaced
well what if there was a way to say oh
the cell's going wrong let me kick that
cell out and grow a fresh new cell
that's what our bodies do
and
when you do things like fasting
and you just don't eat breakfast it's
not that hard or don't eat for a couple
days
when you do that all the cells that
cannot survive because they're freaking
out i don't mean your cells i mean the
cells within the cells the mitochondria
they'll actually die through a process
called autophagy
and when that happens
your body cleans out the dead ones and
you grow fresh new young ones
but if you never experience hunger
because you're living that donut life
then
you won't do that and if you get really
cold for a brief period of time
any cell that can't make enough heat
to keep you warm your body says oh an
ice age might be coming i better have
enough young cells that can make heat
and it gets rid of the cells all right
let's get real specific on both of those
and then we'll keep going but so
intermittent fasting what's your
protocol
so
bulletproof diet 2014 i talked about
doing a 16 hour window it turns out you
can and this has since been backed up by
several experts on autophagy you can
have bulletproof coffee
in the morning zero sugar zero protein
is important zero carbs so you're only
doing fat and coffee or just coffee or
tea a lot of people can't go for 16
hours i mean if you're like i was when
when i went 300 pounds
the idea of going without eating six or
eight meals a day is abhorrent because
you know you're gonna die and so
or you're saying okay i've got this
willpower i'm going to do it and at 11
in in the morning you're looking around
going everyone around me is a jerk like
i want to punch all these people i'm
gonna make it to lunch but why is
everyone such a you know
that's not functional so a lot of people
they're starting it off with bulletproof
coffee because they're getting their
energy up right so i'm going to put that
in the realm of intermittent fasting i
call that one bulletproof fasting
shocking right
but i'm also very clear
the
amount of caffeine in two cups of coffee
doubles ketone production right so you
can have and that's just caffeine but
coffee itself has other benefits so you
can have two cups even of decaf if you
want to but calf works better in the
morning without any of the blood
pressure stuff in it and you're still
going to see a metabolic advantage from
doing that
and if you
go for 16 or 18 hours of fasting for me
i skip breakfast and have a late lunch
it works really well the recommendations
near exercise
before the late lunch because exercising
in a fasted state increases autophagy
increases stress on the cells the ones
who can't hack it get out of dodge and
you grow new ones
and
i'll tell you the data actually shows if
you want to be a circadian you know
great golden god you probably should
have breakfast in an early lunch and
then fast but you'll have no friends if
you do that so it's not worth it that's
literally how i live my life so i eat my
last meal at 2 p.m yep
and you have no friends it's perfect i
literally dave how'd you know
uh it is it does make it hard though
how often do you
go days without eating
i would say twice a month i'll go a
couple days without eating and i've
experimented i i feel really good if i
go more than 48 hours so
you feel better oh yeah i feel
great when i'm fasting and i feel
really good when i'm done and here's the
kicker though if i'm going to go that
amount of time and i want to feel really
good and be able to write work out my
books and do projects i'm not going to
do working out during a two or three day
fast but i'll not have dinner on friday
and then
on saturday morning i'm going to have
coffee but i'm going to put a teaspoon
of brain octane in there which is a very
small amount different people have all
sorts of different debates about you
know how much of what makes it a fast
because the mice only had water
i'm just going to say look brain octane
specifically doesn't get stored as fat
and doesn't get metabolized by the liver
it goes around those things directly
into energy and you're doing a teaspoon
of it i get the same results from that
as i do if i just drink black coffee but
my hunger levels are like way way lower
so i just feel nothing
does brain octane have uh calories it
doesn't have calories yeah but different
calories do different things right sure
so this is a calorie that doesn't
require anything from the liver and it
doesn't require
any insulin in fact it'll have no effect
on your insulin whatsoever and it
doesn't require any protease or any of
the protein digestion things so it
pretty much goes in and gets used as
energy and superhuman i call it one of
the energy fats where most fats get
stored as fat or have to get broken down
by the liver to become energy the energy
of building blocks this stuff doesn't do
that
yeah with fast it's interesting so the
very first time i fast i did a three day
fast and
i had a brutal headache the second night
oh and i woke up in the middle of the
night my head is pounding and i'm like i
don't know if advil has calories or not
so i refuse to take it um you know what
it works
activated charcoal like i
never tried that oh it's one of the in
fact it's the first supplement that that
i made for bulletproof and it's an ultra
fine one it helps with headaches it can
help with headaches if they're induced
by toxins and what happened is your gut
bacteria were getting really pissed off
they were making extra
lipopolysaccharides and you might have
been dehydrated you might have needed
magnesium and sodium and potassium but
what's most likely is you are pumping
out tons of lipopolysaccharides that are
making you feel bad so anyone who's
fasting i highly recommend take
activated charcoal because your body's
gonna be dumping toxins you might as
well absorb them in the gut and poop
them out instead of putting them into
your liver and letting your body
recirculate them when the liver doesn't
have glucose available for oxidative
destruction of toxins one of the reasons
you get a sugar craving if you eat a
food that has toxins in it or even moldy
coffee you get that sugar craving
because your liver is like god this is a
stressor i need energy right now it's
going to call on you to get that energy
so
when you're fasting absorbing toxins
transformative there are zero calories
at least digestible calories in charcoal
right
interesting yeah i've never tried
charcoal okay so now the cold thing so
what's your protocol for cold how long
and how cold
i have a cryotherapy machine at home we
put them in bulletproof labs so three
minutes of air that's chilled to 270
degrees below zero that's cold now
but that's air okay this is different
than a cold shower cold shower is like
right walking outside in shorts during a
snowstorm when you're warm is not that
big of a deal and cryotherapy is more
like that so i'm getting the signal into
my body it's a very strong signal in a
very short period of time you come out
you have like goose pimples but i'm i'm
not sure most people don't shiver if
they're healthy they shouldn't shiver
and i also went through a period of ice
baths i have a digitally controlled ice
bath that will hold the temperature
constant circulate the water and freeze
your butt off if you want to do that and
there's peripheral cold sensors that are
in the skin which cryotherapy with air
does and then there's stuff from cold
showers or ice baths which are the core
temperature receptors and the ones on
the skin and
it's arguable which one's better i know
which one takes less time and you get
similar results from both
a mouse research a study came out
and they show how much cold exposure and
how much time is necessary and it
matches exactly what i see in humans so
i'm going to say this one works for
humans as well just because it's the
same numbers right what i noticed from
myself and others you take a cold shower
the first day after eight seconds and by
the way the water hits you in the
forehead and the chest after eight
seconds
you're like dave's a jerk and you jump
out of the shower and you're hitting
yourself in the head because your head
hurts right and then you go back in the
next day and you're going to be 20 30
seconds before you do the same thing and
the third day you can do a minute and
you come out going i still think dave's
a jerk but it wasn't that bad and the
fourth day you get in like this feels
really good well what changed in three
days well the mouse studies show that
three days of brief cold exposure
changes the levels of cardiolipin in the
mitochondrial cell membrane and
cardiolipin cardiolipin and it's one of
the things that makes mitochondrial
membranes and all cells their membrane
is what is what essentially allows some
things and allows something's out in
mitochondria the mitochondrial membrane
potential is what makes the electrons
so
what it's doing is it's making the
mitochondria work better and they shift
the amount of this compound that's in
the membrane to allow them to be better
at making electricity and that's why
after three days oh i can make enough
electricity to handle the cold whereas
before i couldn't do it
and that's why that three-day period of
swearing at you for listening to this
show is worth it because on the fourth
day i feel good but then you burn way
more calories throughout the day you
feel better so is it literally making
the
mitochondria more thermogenic
like what's why
why would the response to cold be that
the only thing i can think is all right
my understanding of the difference
between traditional adipose tissue and
brown fat is that you have more dense
mitochondria which are able to generate
more energy which thusly creates more
heat and therefore you're able to keep
yourself more warm so that was sort of
always i thought more mitochondria are
being formed i didn't realize there was
actually something happening to that
mitochondria itself you will see a shift
over time to have more brown fat and
less white fat as the demands on the
body to instantly turn on lots of heat
goes up the body says okay let me shape
myself to an environment where i'm
required to turn on lots of heat quickly
so this is just a shift to match the
environment that your body thinks it's
in which is one where cold could happen
at any time
so the brown fat that mostly is along
your upper spine that will that will get
stronger and bigger and it has more
mitochondria but the rest of the
mitochondria throughout your body will
also shift their levels of cardiolipin
so what you're getting is more
mitochondria in the form of more brown
fat and you're getting better
mitochondria everywhere else and the
mitochondria that cannot make enough
heat
will get replaced and that's i think the
big win and the amount of time that it
takes to do that i don't know the amount
of time that it takes to grow a single
new mitochondria it's probably different
for different cells based on nutritional
availability but it's an interesting
question i want to start as nootropics
so my personal obsession is the brain
and you go into in the book nootropics
you talk about um going to burning man
as one of your action items which i
thought was cool
walk me through
nootropics how we can use things to
enhance our cognition and not just
nootropics but the sort of host of
things that we can do
this is one of my favorite 20-year
passions
starting in
my mid-20s i said my brain isn't working
the way it's supposed to i started
forgetting things i was having problems
i didn't like and my career was just
taking off
so i said what can i do to hack this
i ordered my first big
package of smart drugs and these are
mostly pharmaceuticals
they came in i was all excited and and i
took the first of the bunch i was
testing out on myself it was called
piracetam and i used an analog of that
even today and i write about that in
game changers but
the experience was really weird i took
it for a week and i'm like damn i'm so
i'm so excited i'm so disappointed this
stuff doesn't work so i stopped taking
it and the next day i said
you know
i'm grasping for words and i realized
the previous week
every time i wanted to think of a word
it would just come to me and then i
found that i'd say what's the word for
that what was i going to say
and i realized i wasn't having that
what good nootropics do the ones that
aren't energizing which is a different
effect that's also helpful
they make you feel more like yourself
they reduce the struggle and the work it
takes to do something so it would have
been within your skill set but a
struggle or a stretch like oh i got that
sort of like if you could you know lift
a 35 pound dumbbell
but it's work and all of a sudden you'll
be like oh yeah i got that maybe i could
do 45. so it's this performance enhancer
but it feels so natural it feels like
yourself that after a very short period
of time you get used to having that
superpower and it just becomes your new
normal and it turns out there's a whole
bunch of different racetam family drugs
perastem's been around for almost 60
years it's made by sandoz
pharmaceuticals a big pharmaceutical
company in europe it's protective of
your neurons it increases oxygen but not
blood flow in the brain and we're not
sure all the ways that it works but it's
got a long safety history
the downsides are it may use more
acetylcholine which is a
neurotransmitter you can eat raw egg
yolks or take soy lecithin or some of
the supplements that i make have things
that increase acetylcholine in it and
it's widely available at whole foods or
anywhere would you have to eat raw egg
yolks to get it if they're lightly
cooked it's okay but if you burn your
egg yolks you're not really going to get
functional culine it'll be burned it's
damaged by heat
so you uh you go through that that that
might be one side effect the other side
effect it amplifies caffeine so you take
one of these things hold on your brain
works better it protects your neurons in
low oxygen environments increases oxygen
in the brain
and things work better like i think i
like this
and what i switched to and in game
changers i kind of give the the dosage
and all this
is one called aniracetam and aniracetam
is
lower stress it also is the only one
that increases memory io or input output
and i'm a computer science
guy i was a
computer hacker by training when i went
300 pounds and if you can increase
the speed that you put something into a
computer's memory or you get it out it
radically changes the performance of the
whole computer so faster memory
means something well as a human being if
you can find a substance that increases
your ability to get things in and out of
your memory when you meditate you're
going to remember how to meditate better
when you study you're going to remember
what you do better when you want to
recall what you did you're going to do
it better i've been on that stuff for 20
years and it's really impactful
there's also
these things that if you increase energy
in the brain you increase performance
everywhere
and that's been a big a big focus my
book before game changers was called
headstrong all about
if you increase
function of energy producing cells
called mitochondria in the brain
what's it going to do and it turns out
your emotions get better your ability to
regulate your emotions your ability to
recall things your ability to just have
raw power to be you it goes up
some nootropics
and a lot of the ones that i focus my my
formulations on are around increasing
energy throughout the body but most
especially in the brain and then others
are around manipulating or modifying
things
another nootropic that's really
really powerful
is
something that comes from green
coffee fruit not the coffee beans
themselves but actually the fruit itself
and
we produce it's called neuromaster
there's a compound in the brain called
bdnf brain brain-derived nootropic
factor
and this is nootropic factor we're
talking about nootropics this is stuff
that lets the brain be more plastic more
like a young brain and it's tied to
something called nerve growth factor
and if you can find a way to raise those
things
your brain will act like a young
person's brain it'll learn faster
so the number one thing that we know
that's free
that raises both of those is exercise
high intensity interval training lifting
heavy things stuff that you've talked
about before on the show right
but
this compound in neuromaster raises your
bdnf levels four times more than
exercise so i'm like i think i'll
exercise and i'll take that stuff so i
want that young plastic brain
and after 20 years of trying pretty much
every nootropic out there i've settled
in on what works for my brain but my
advice for you
as you go down that path and for
everyone watching or listening is
your brain is not the same as your
spouse your friend even your parents
although it's more likely to be like
your parents
so the stack that works for me
may not be the stack for you and this is
why when you see companies have like 15
different racetams and all the stuff in
there don't start there because one of
those may have a negative effect on you
and one may have a very positive effect
so try those individually most of the
time with supplements like try all the
ones that might work and see if you get
the results you want then pull them out
i found that with nootropics
it doesn't work that way for the
pharmaceuticals with the plant-based
ones it usually does and i make
something called smart mode
which is a
set of very well-studied plant-based
compounds for cognitive enhancement
different
kind of a different universe than the
pharmaceutical side
and it's funny because another nootropic
that's controversial and it's in game
changers is micro dosing of lsd yes i
interviewed 500 plus people nobel prize
winners all these people and i said
not what does one person do i ask them
all the same structured question but
what do they all have in common like
what are the rules they follow to become
game changers so that i could boil that
down and frankly use it for myself right
like instead of doing what that one guy
did i'll do what all of them agreed on
and
not all of them microdose lsd in fact
very few of them do but the three big
buckets that came out of all this
research over several years was they do
things to be smarter faster and happier
so happiness doesn't come from wealth
but wealth can come from happiness but
being angry and tired and unhappy all
the time is not a good way to become
successful or to change the game in your
field or frankly to become wealthy or
powerful or whatever else important
i also got from the data not one person
who's been a game changer named when i
asked three most important things in the
world for people want to perform better
not one said wealth power or fame
they're not seeking that that is not the
target it is a side effect of them doing
what they're here to do
and
i had this dinner in new york it was
profound
my friend andrew hosted this and there's
this long table 25 people and there's
hedge fund managers like big people in
new york and it was a jeffersonian
dialogue and what that means is that
instead of just having a random dinner
conversation one person asked a question
of the table then we discuss it
only one person at a time so we're all
listening and focused it was really cool
i've never done that before
and when it got to be my turn to ask a
question i said all right how many
people here have used
hallucinogens or psychedelics
for personal development
every single hand at the table went up
wow i'm talking 20 year old artists to
70 year old senior executive people
they'd all done it at least once right
and the rule that came out of that
in game changers was get outside your
head there's 46 laws in this book that
people follow in the lines of 48 laws of
power and robert greene's actually in
the book the guy who wrote 48 laws of
power
and
get outside your head doesn't mean you
go do drugs in fact if you're under 25 i
would say don't go do drugs because your
brain's not done cooking
don't go you know some to some random
party even burning man
do it with
a trained professional in a place where
it's legal and i talk about you can
actually go to a place in costa rica
that has a medically licensed ayahuasca
setting i did ayahuasca in peru 20 years
ago with a shaman in the jungle which
was a transformative experience for me
but
just to go out there and say hey i got
someone to go to disneyland that is not
good for your soul is not good for your
performance it's not cognitive enhancing
but having the ability to look in and
see what your mistakes are you can do
this with holotropic breathing which is
a type of breathing that was developed
to replace lsd for psychotherapy in the
early 70s
go into detail about that oh i love this
so tom
in addition to this losing 100 pounds
getting control of my biology and having
a successful career making my brain work
better
when all the stuff that was supposed to
work didn't work i said i'm gonna go
outside the box i'm an engineer
so i'm gonna try meditation it's not
supposed to work and 20 years ago no one
meditated or if you did you wouldn't
tell your friends because they think
you're a goofy
and i put it on my linkedin profile
and
i said i'm going to go
uh do a personal development thing and i
was at a point in my life i was ending a
relationship and a friend said dave you
have to go do this and i said what is it
she said i'm not going to tell you
so what she said you won't do it if i
tell you so just trust me all right fine
i didn't know what else to do i was
feeling kind of desperate so i went to
this personal development retreat
and a part of this was you'd lay down on
a mat with a facilitator started
watching over you if there's a bunch of
other people who are doing the same
thing and they play like movie
soundtrack music and you do this really
deep rapid breathing
and
the technical term for what you do is
called tripping balls
that's the technical term yeah you're
like what is going on here and literally
is it because you're essentially
hyperventilating yeah okay you're
hypoxic but it has with the music and
the seven setting it has really deep
like really deep things that happen and
i have seen more
things in there than i have from
ayahuasca or from doing you know
ceremonial use of psychedelics
i do it like maybe once every year or
two
and twice i've done this with stan groff
the guy who invented it he's the guy who
created the field of transpersonal
psychology
in the 60s in czechoslovakia when it was
still one country
he had from sandoz pharmaceuticals the
same company that makes paracetam he had
a shipment of lsd when it was first
invented and he as a licensed
psychiatrist treated 3 000 patients with
lsd
and he noticed that they were all
getting better and he was frustrated
that the freudian stuff wasn't working
so they all get better but there's
patterns
about how you come into the world
there's patterns
where people get stuck and he could help
them work through it using this and when
you say patterns of how you come into
the world are you talking like literal
birth you're talking about birth okay
yeah and there's according to stan's
work there's five stages of birth
and one is you're floating you're all
happy and your mom and you know there's
plenty of space and you're like ah
there's not enough space in here like
it's getting tight and then there's oh
my god someone's trying to smash the
crap out of me
that would be the actual getting born
and then there's that i just came into
the world and then there's the you know
your first breath kind of thing and then
there's the is it a safe world or is it
an unsafe world
and
he found that repeatedly the people who
had this kind of problem had stuff stuck
here and they would actually go back and
revisit the emotional symptoms of birth
and based on that a lot of the pre and
paranormal psychology that is
groundbreaking work for the over the
last 30 years came from stan's work with
his wife
and when lsd was made illegal he said
screw that noise and so he studied yoga
and ayurveda to find a kind of breathing
that would produce the same effects and
i can tell you when you do that
breathing with a licensed you know
practice professional knows what they're
doing
you can do personal development that is
very hard to do and it's one of the ways
without drugs to get outside of yourself
in my case what i figured out was
i was born with the umbilical cord
wrapped around my neck and i didn't have
oxygen cut off to my brain so
i was like
that's no big deal who cares right you
know there's like some random thing that
happened like a trivia point
and when i met the woman running this
retreat where they did breathing uh it
was called the star foundation i'm still
around and she has these like really
vibrant blue eyes and she looks at me
she goes
tell me about your birth
and and i was like kind of weirded out
like i'm an engineer so i
look how i go uh
hospitals vaginas
you know and i was kind of like like
what's up with this
and
she she said well do you really really
do you know anything and i said yeah i
had the cord around that she goes i
thought so and she puts up a
powerpoint slide
and
it's me like a swot analysis they teach
that in business school like strength
weakness opportunity it was like if i
was a butterfly pinned down
like she nailed all the things i was
afraid of that i wouldn't tell anyone
and i was like
how did this how did you know that and
it was like an act of wizardry and she
said well it's science we've been
studying this for 30 years and we know
that people who have an umbilical cord
or really traumatic coming to the world
they come in and what had happened
is i'd come into the world like
something's trying to kill me and so you
come into the world ready to kill and
you never stop and i did that for 30
years talk about raising your iq stop
doing that
you'll be a lot smarter right
explain that to people you talk about
that quite profoundly in the book what
do you mean by if you stop coming out
the world like that you're actually
smarter well you your body makes
electrons the primary thing that your
cells do inside each cell there's
there's hundreds to thousands or even
tens of thousands of these ancient
bacteria called mitochondria and they
run a lot of our our operating system
and their job is to take food and air
and make energy and then the energy goes
somewhere energy goes to breathing to
walking to willpower it also goes to
thinking it goes to anxiety it goes to
stress it goes to hate it goes to any of
the bad things right so
if you're putting without your
permission or knowledge you're putting
your energy into that you're not putting
into thinking you're not putting to
serving your community you're not
putting into your relationships you're
not putting in into into love into
kindness into self-kindness into
recuperation into recovery into becoming
a better human being and it is you have
one electron the same electron that
powers your iphone and
are you going to put it into being a
better human being and you put it into
being afraid of something that isn't a
threat
and we're wired to over respond to
threats because all animals including
ones without brains like ours that's the
that's the operating system for survival
and it starts inside each cell
literally quadrillions of times
or quadrillions of locations in the body
millions of times a second your body is
saying what's going to kill me now
what's going to come now and it's our
job as we become smarter and more
intelligent more effective to actually
turn down that voice and some of the
laws and game changers are about
how do you become aware of that because
awareness is hard it the story that you
tell yourself about whether something is
a threat you believe it when someone
cuts you off in traffic and the story
that goes in your head is that son of a
[ __ ] thinks he's more important than me
and you know i should kill him now i
used to have like an over developed
middle finger muscle from that but
that story is all bs right that probably
came from being bullied in first grade
who knows but the real story is someone
cut in front of you and they could be on
their way to the hospital to go see
their dying wife or they could just be
an [ __ ] but you don't know so
i stopped the stress that that would
think for that i'm like i'm going to
choose the story but we're doing this
thousands or even tens of thousands of
times a day and if you just shift the
needle a little bit
by gaining awareness
the end result is not only do you have
more time and more electrons to think
more effectively but
we're wired to be nice to each other and
when i say wired i mentioned
overreacting to fear tom
if you are a single-celled organism
there's a very specific set of rules
that everything has to follow
and the first rule is if something if
you think something's about to kill you
it's a threat immediately you have to
run you have to kill or you have to hide
and that's the first effort it's fear
because it's game over like if you're a
bacteria someone eats you oh that was
okay lost so life won't go on without
that
the second thing you do
is eat everything
because you don't know there's going to
be a famine if you starve it's game over
and the third thing so that was feed so
we have fear feed the third one is also
an f word and it's reproduced the
species
and that explains like why you date all
the people you shouldn't date
because if you don't reproduce the
species it's game over
so
our wine is all about game over and you
can say well that sucks because that's
the human condition it's actually the
condition of life
and without it none of us would be here
because we would do things that would
self-destruct or i'd say we do them more
often a lot of us self-destruct anyway
but there's another f word that comes at
the end of that in its friend
even single-celled organisms will work
together they'll cooperate and they'll
form a community that provides
greater benefits than being the the lone
wolf kind of thing and humans are the
same way so this is our order of
operations so our job as as human beings
your job with the work you're doing and
spreading information like this it's
like look maybe we can have less fear we
have less hunger we can have better sex
and maybe more beneficial soulful
you know healthy sex by the way there's
four laws in game changers about sex
including orgasm hangovers and what
those do to men
and
when you you get past that
we're actually supposed to be nice to
each other it actually feels good to be
supportive and to be nice and this is
built into our built into every cell in
our body and that's why this getting
outside your head is so important and
whether you choose to go down that
psychedelic route whether you want to do
a shamanic drumming ceremony you want to
fast in a cave you want to go to tibet
and you know gotta go to mount kailash
and do meditation for 10 days
these are all paths that lead to more
self-awareness and along the way would
it be nice if you weren't hungry the
whole time so maybe you could eat
properly right
and if you just do some of these right
you don't do them all right
there's huge amounts of untapped energy
inside
the human body inside us energetically
biochemically
emotionally
spiritually it's all it's all in there
and i was only tapping
i don't even know what percent five
percent 10
when i was in my 20s and i'm 46
and i have more energy now than i did
when i was 25 and i have more energy
than a lot of the people work for me 20
years younger than me
and
it's all there because i just stopped
doing the stuff that wasn't serving me
so to that point going back to these 3
000 people treated with lsd the fact
that everyone around the table had
experimented with hallucinogens is it
the dissolution of the ego is it like
what is it about it that's going to
allow you to redistribute that energy to
stop wasting it on stupid [ __ ] like what
what happens actually oh that is a
profound question
so part of my path has been doing
neurofeedback and i've spent four months
of my life with electrodes glued to my
head doing intense meditation looking at
brain waves and i do this with clients
and
you can learn some things about the ego
i mentioned that operating system in the
body
there are studies this is creepy but
these are real studies that are
validated and reproducible
where
they'll take a computer screen
and they'll have a random number
generator inside the computer so no one
knows what's going to come out and if
it's an even number
they show a picture of flowers and
puppies and if it's an odd number they
show a picture of grizzly violence okay
they're hooking the subject of the study
up to monitors that look at their it's
called galvanic stress response or skin
response it's a measure of stress in the
body and the weird thing is before the
image comes up before any human being
knows what the image is going to be if
it's the grisly image
the body responds before the image it's
crazy it's creepy right if that is real
and it is then there are some things
that we don't understand there's all
sorts of theories and some of them are
being borne out and it probably has
something to do with quantum which is
the most misused new age buzzword of all
hell but it's also quantum physics
quantum biology these are real
scientific things studied at university
so we
essentially there's something going on
here where we have the ability to detect
the environment around us
before we have conscious awareness on
this so the body responds
and then we think about it and then we
tell ourselves a story about why we did
it but the order of operations is
different and if if that sounds weird
here's something that happens to most of
us sometime in our life you lean on a
hot stove
and you pull your hand away before you
get behind you say thank goodness i
pulled my hand away but that is not your
statement because you did not decide to
pull your hand away
something pulled your hand away without
your knowledge of permission and you
were glad it happened so you decided
that it was you did it right
well what is that that's the ego the ego
is the operating system that keeps you
alive if there's no human in there so it
has its own goals it has its own agenda
and it is there to keep you alive
unfortunately it thinks many things will
kill you that won't kill you and most of
its programming happens in age zero
through seven
that's interesting so if you were
bullied and even if you had great
parents i promise you that there was one
time when your mom stopped nursing you
and you got really pissed off and
whatever was happening in the situation
it it leaves a pattern and your body is
just a pattern matching system and the
egos they're like hey i'm just trying to
live and your ego's also just it's
absolutely convinced that if you're in
charge instead of it you'll die because
it's job is to keep you alive and if
it's not doing its job you'll die right
and because it's an emergent system
inside the body
what's happening when
you take
any of these solutions when you do any
of these practices that get you sort of
outside yourself you gain better
self-awareness because you start looking
at yourself as this system and you start
seeing what your ego is doing you see
how absurd that story is about the guy
cutting you off in traffic or what are
some patterns and routines that people
can do on a daily basis
you've talked about how only miracles
happen in the morning talking about the
power belief
what can anybody watching right now take
away and do on a daily basis to make
sure that they're optimized for this
okay the single biggest way to turn off
the ego the ego is about
want it's about emptiness it's about
what the debate's called hungry ghost so
hungry ghost hungry ghost it's one of
the seven realms of hell in tibetan
buddhism and it's one where everyone
walks around with these distended
bellies and they're always hungry no
matter what they eat they can never be
satisfied no matter what they have and
this happens with a lot of people
entrepreneurs
this happened when i was 26 tom i made
six million dollars when i was 26 years
old at the company that held google's
first servers i lost it when i was 28.
when i when i had that money i looked at
a friend at the same company where we
all made more money than we should have
and i said i'll be happy when i have 10
million
i freaking said that okay what kind of a
jerk move was that but that was my story
right that's that hungry ghost syndrome
right and so what you can do that's the
antidote for that that's the antidote
for all the stress
anxiety
anger fear is something i do with my
kids every night and you don't have kids
to do it but
i sit down and i say
tell me three things you're grateful for
today and gratitude is the final law in
game changers and what we see in in 40
years is in the neuroscience facility
when people
are grateful even for just the shittiest
day ever
they're grateful
for one little thing
that transforms the biological response
in the body from
want from that hungry ghost from i'm
never going to have i'm never going to
be happy it transforms it into
whoa
there's something good here there's some
abundance and what happens right after
gratitude and with in the neuroscience
stuff we dig deep we say okay that was
the gateway now you've got to actually
do something called forgiveness
which is when you permanently change
your pattern or instead of holding that
grudge whether it's a grudge you chose
consciously because something happened
to you when you were 20 or something you
chose unconsciously because it happened
to you when you were two it doesn't
really matter you forgive that all the
way and what's left is compassion so now
you can walk into a situation that would
have just absolutely just you know
tightened your jaw and you're like you
know what i'm grateful for this
and
you're unflappable
the amount of energy you waste the
amount of struggle you have it all goes
down and it's simple write down three
things you're grateful for and i ask my
kids to do this every single night not
to write down they just tell me
and sometimes it's like i'm grateful we
had steak you know i'm grateful i played
with johnny whatever but my son was five
he goes i'm grateful for the big bang
because without it there wouldn't be
anything and you're like whoa like like
i never would have thought of that one
but these little things
it's free you just have to find a way to
consciously intentionally be grateful
instead of be hungry empty pissed off
angry stressed feeling not good enough
and all the other stuff this is what the
people who are game changers people
who've
done really big things including you
like you've figured out a lot of the
stuff in this book when people get to a
certain level they by definition had to
figure out some of these laws because
you cannot get there
if you're running just the normal mogul
programming that we all come into the
world with it's gonna say you put in the
book that um oh god normal is your
nemesis yeah normal is the enemy one of
the two averages the enemy there you go
nice yeah yeah i like that so speaking
of average being the enemy and things
that we can do one of the concepts that
i found really interesting in the book
is rewilding
and your choice to move to an island in
vancouver on an organic farm because you
said the greatest gift you could give
your kids was growing up in nature talk
about that why is it important what does
it do for us what's forest bathing like
all that stuff oh this is so cool i'm so
happy that you went there
the
idea of of rewilding is that we've been
kind of domesticated when animals are in
a zoo the old zoos were you know a bar
like bars and a cement cage and animals
would die all the time so they finally
was maybe we could make an environment
that's at least mostly like nature so
you go to the san diego zoo and there's
trees all around and there's a little
miniature savannah and all that
well we're the same way so you have
plants in your house
you do some sometimes you're cold
sometimes you're warm sometimes you
you're hungry
things that would have happened to us as
as human beings
it's really transformative to have some
of that when you combine that with
access to nature you get this idea of
forest bathing which came from japan and
just walking around in a forest exposing
yourself to trees and clean air
does a couple things
one is it's shown to reduce anxiety
levels just seeing plants does that but
the other thing it does is it changes
the microbiome in your gut and your your
lungs and your nose because you're
walking through forest bacteria and our
bodies collect
these bacteria from the environment
around us and they become a part of us
and the idea that we're not bacteria is
completely false there's bacteria inside
every cell in your body that power who
you are there's they become a part of us
so we like to think they're different
than those other bacteria but they're
not
so
this forest bathing you get the
cognitive effects of seeing the green
a lot of people don't know this but we
can see more shades of green than any
other color
because we evolved in the forest and the
reason you need that fine ability to see
the shades of green is because that's
where the leopards hide
predators are there but we're wired in
that environment when you do it your
body relaxes
and so just introducing
plants
walks in nature
sunshine
and occasional biological stresses it's
cold it's hot i'm hungry i worked really
hard the way animals would have
transforms your biology
do you take cold showers
i do in fact if you take a cold shower
for three days in a row you only need
about 30 seconds maybe a minute at the
end of your shower so if you do this it
has to hit you on the forehead
and the chest
and it's important because the most cold
receptors are there and you're going to
last 10 seconds the first time you do it
and you it's really unpleasant and
you'll be like shivering second day 20
seconds third day like you know what i
felt a little i actually felt kind of
good today and the fourth day like yes
and
there's uh something in your
mitochondrial membrane membranes are
little layers of fat that surround every
cell
and it's called cardiolipin and a new
study just came out that shows three
days of cold exposure even for a few
minutes raises cardiolipin levels which
makes your cells make energy more
effectively all day long
the side benefit of a cold shower is
that these ancient bacteria
some of them are in good shape and some
of them are not in good shape when they
can't turn on heat quickly it means
they're weak if you show the body you
will be in an environment where
sometimes you need to make it heat
quickly the weak ones will die and
they'll be replaced by young ones so you
want to stay young
you take a cold shower you don't do it
every day but do it every couple days
after you get used to it
all right so let's talk about staying
young let's talk about so my personal
fantasy is actually to live forever what
are things that people can do on a daily
basis to prime themselves to live as
long as humanly possible i love it um
this month men's health ran an article
about i've been really public i'm going
to live to at least 180. and at least is
an important word there because like you
said i'm happy with forever
and
what you want to do is look at at aging
as death by
a thousand cuts there's no one cause of
aging
it's
we think that there's basically seven
different things that happen inside your
cells and outside your cells that evolve
over time
and
here's the deal if it's death by a
thousand cuts maybe you could have only
500 cuts and make them less deep so when
it is not expensive it's not
inconvenient or painful
take the path of less cuts
don't eat fried food
don't eat charred food like these are
very basic things but the science is
pretty solid on that don't eat seed oils
things like canola oil corn oil soybean
oil vegetable oil cottonseed oil that
stuff will make you age and we
understand that it is abundantly clear
don't eat too much animal protein and
don't eat no animal protein
like these are things eat a lot of
vegetables
don't eat
stuff that's been sprayed with
glyphosate because it messes with the
way your body makes collagen protein and
it messes with your gut bacteria
and
things things like that those are going
to go a huge way sleep adequately
right i sleep about six hours and five
minutes a night do you set an alarm uh i
do
uh if i if i have a busy day which i
quite often do however i often wake up
before the alarm and the alarm is set to
wake me up at the top of a sleep cycle
so i never wake up when i'm groggy
so you can do that or you can just make
sure you get enough sleep we have enough
deep sleep which is anti-aging enough
rem sleep which consolidates your
memories and if you do that you're going
to live a lot longer oh and don't eat
too much
if you eat a lot of calories
more more than your body needs that's
aging intermittent fasting which i
helped to populate in 2014 with the
bulger diet that is a big thing it works
occasional longer fasting none of these
is expensive and i take 150 supplements
a day whoa
we can't list all 150 but give me some
of the all-stars
so i focus on mitochondrial enhancement
so i take a kind of fish oil that comes
from not just krill but it comes from
fish eggs
and fish eggs are an even richer source
of phospholipids and so that's something
that bulletproof manufactures it's our
omega-3 krill
and i think that's really important
because getting omega-3s into the brain
is the most important thing you can do i
take supplements that control
inflammation because my body still tends
to because i had autoimmunity for a long
time it tends to have more
um it does more inflammation so we make
a turmeric that has some chinese herbs
in it that really work for the kind of
inflammation that i have like i feel
much better
i take a bunch of other unusual
mitochondrial enhancers that we make
one's called unfair advantage
another one's called keto prime and that
actually primes the mitochondrial pump
to be able to use sugar or fat to make
more energy so i used to open 10 bottles
take 10 pills now i open one bottle and
it's just less work so a lot of this has
been consolidation over time in order to
do it so when i travel i have three
bags like little crack bags full of
pills and i take one when i wake up i
take one with food or coffee in the
morning one at lunch and one before i go
to bed and you know what my life is way
better when i do it it's annoying and
it's not cheap but i'm going to extend
my life and even if i completely die
trying i've extended the quality of my
life energy along the way you cannot
lose with that strategy
talk to me about vitamin d you've said
that sun exposure is not optional and
i'm i'm trying to imagine you in
vancouver in say february getting sun
every day um
do you really go outside in the sun it
every day in vancouver it sucked to move
up to the pacific northwest i've been up
there for eight years i grew up in a
desert in new mexico
so
i'm a desert person what i do in the
winter and it took me about three
winters to figure this out
is i take vitamin d and taking vitamin d
is important as a supplement as a
supplement and we make one in fact this
is important this is the one i take it's
it's called adk because you need vitamin
a and vitamin d together and if you take
vitamin d without vitamin k and i mean
k2 not k1
when you take those together vitamin k
basically keeps the calcium in the cells
and vitamin d encourages calcium to go
into the cells if you take
the
vitamin d without vitamin k it can
encourage calcification throughout the
body which is not what you want that's a
bad thing so
that
that works really well but for vitamin d
to work it has to be activated through a
process called sulfation
and that's what happens with ultraviolet
light exposure so in vancouver what i do
in the morning i stand on my vibrating
platform yes bulletproof makes that it's
called the bulletproof vibe i stand on
that and i have a suntanning lamp that's
optimized for high uvb it helps your
vitamin d and it even helps with
collagen formation where do you get the
machines i know mercola was making one
for a while that was uvb optimized yes
i have mccullen's old machine okay and
what happened there is
it was very unpopular to to say that
that uvb light had any health impacts
and it's bad for you in high doses let's
be really clear like you can get cancer
for too much uvb but if you do a search
for high uvb tanning lamps they sell
them on amazon they have little boxes
that do it and just don't overuse it
this is not about getting dark this is
about getting an effective dose of
something that's going to bio-transform
the vitamin d hormone it's a hormone not
really a vitamin in the body so that it
becomes active and that can reduce your
risk just having active vitamin d of all
sorts of things so i that's what i do
right and i feel good about that and i
think the science is solid on that what
are a few key things that people can do
for their diet if they want to live
forever
all right
i wrote two books that are sort of diet
focused one of them is head strong but
the big diet book is the bulletproof
diet and here's the gist of it
it is cyclical ketosis if you
do the the the keto bro diet as i'm
going to call it right which is you
never eat a carb again i don't think
that's going to work for you if you eat
lots of carbs that's not going to work
for you so you should absolutely do keto
and then you should stop then you should
do keto and then you should stop and
this is for your gut bacteria and this
is for the glial cells in your brain
that prefer glucose to ketones right and
so i feel like like if you go to the oh
i'm going to be like i used to be a raw
vegan you know that's not going to end
well for you i'll just tell you really
you didn't uh enjoy the experience well
i mean i felt great for the first two
three months like most people do because
you're eating a lot less of the other
crap
but it's what happens over time even if
you're pretty knowledgeable very few
people in fact none of the anti-aging
people i know support that kind of thing
because they see it in patients the
crossfit coach is like yeah i can spot a
vegan or raw vegan i ask them to hold on
to a bar and they drop off after five
seconds and people eat french fries can
hold on for 15 seconds and people eat
grass-fed steak and you know do keto and
you are doing things right they hold on
for 30 seconds like it's quantifiable
right so this isn't a rip on vegans i
was a vegan for a long time i would eat
gravel if it's what was best for me or
best for the planet i'd say eating
grass-fed meat that restores soils
is best for you and best for the planet
but not too much and that plus a huge
plate of vegetables with lots of
undamaged quality fats following the
ratio in your cells
your cells are 45 saturated fat your
cell membranes especially in the brain
is a little bit higher they're in the
brain about 30 35 percent
monounsaturated fat
and then the rest of it is all about the
ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 and there
you want more omega-3 and less omega-6
so tons of veggies moderate amount of
high quality grass-fed protein
tons of fat from protein perspective
you want to get high quality protein and
plant compounds polyphenols terribly
important you're not going to get them
from colored fruits and vegetables
they're just not rich enough
herbs and spices are how you get it
and number one source of polyphenols in
the world you probably know what it is
coffee coffee i do know that because you
talked about it in the book i was like
right so coffee tea chocolate and i'm
sad to say this even though we all like
red wine it doesn't have very many
polyphenols and you gotta detox the
alcohol and the aldehyde so you can have
some wine but make sure it's good
quality wine i would say wine and
grass-fed meat it's like
spend money on quality and consume less
and you don't have to consume that and
in that algorithm it's like it's quality
over quantity when you do that it sends
a signal to the whole food production
system
about what's acceptable and you know
this because you've run a very impactful
sizable company right
if the customers are saying they want
something and they won't buy the wrong
stuff
well then the company's making
the garbage food they lose sales and the
company's making the really good things
right they gain sales so all of us when
we say i want the animal that was fed
grass instead of fed corn and soy and
antibiotics i'm willing to pay a little
bit more even if i buy a little bit less
so it's the same dollars out of my
pocket you'll change our soil you'll
change our agricultural systems i
i firmly believe that both for my own
biology and for the world that we're
going to live forever in i don't want to
mess it up right
i know what you know a lot about this
stuff tom what do you think about
nutrition dude we will bring you back
for part two because i haven't even
gotten to a like one-fifth of the things
that i wanted to talk to you about
talking too much no this has been
amazing it's exactly what i wanted
before i asked my last question tell
these guys where they can find you
online
go to
bulletproof.com and check out
bulletproof radio on itunes wherever
podcasts are distributed and game
changers is in stores now if you read it
and you like it leave a review i
actually see those reviews you do too
when people tell you any of your work it
matters we care like the reviews you get
on the show they matter you can thank
both of us
and there you got your gratitude
checkbox for the day
nice i like that
my final question what's one change that
people could make that would have the
biggest impact on their health
wow just one change with the single
biggest impact all right can i answer
with two things sure all right number
one learn how to sleep like a boss okay
there's a bunch of new sleep hacks and
game changers
do whatever it takes to sleep really
well and you're gonna have to black out
your room you're gonna have to like just
learn how to do it no one teaches us how
to sleep
okay and most of that stuff is free or
very inexpensive or one time cost
the second thing is
you've got to stop eating the things
that make you weak and you know what
those are and there's one category of
foods that are pretty much bad for
everyone
seed oils deep fried stuff
charred things and whole grains those
are just not good for anyone right and
you may tolerate whole grains better
than your friend they're still not good
for you sorry okay so get those out and
in the bulletproof diet there's a layer
of suspect foods
they're
bad for some people and good for some
people and you need to know which of the
suspect foods are guilty for you
and there's an infographic just google
bulletproof roadmap and you can download
it it's a free thing it's basically the
entire bulletproof diet book without all
the explanations just here's what to do
now here's what foods are really good
the bulletproof foods these are suspect
and these are kryptonite foods just so
you can alright if i'm going to do a
protein or whatever that that totally
works
if you look at those 200 foods that i
put down in my book you could be
diseased
take a sharpie out and circle the ones
that you love already i like this i like
that one tomatoes i like oh man i like
this one okay
that's a great starting point because if
you start eating those foods you're
already head of the game because you
already love foods that can actually eat
that can activate your health defenses