Top 5 Biohacks for Happiness & Health w/Dave Asprey EP: 1084

“Fasting is like exercise. You don’t want to overdo it and you don’t want to under-do it.”Today's guest is Dave Asprey, who is the Founder & Chairman of Bulletproof. Over the last two decades Dave has worked with world-renowned doctors, researchers, scientists and global mavericks to uncover the latest, most innovative methods, techniques and products for enhancing mental and physical performance. Dave has personally spent nearly $2 million taking control of his own biology - pushing the bounds of human possibility all in the name of science and evolution. In this episode Lewis and Dave discuss the techniques to avoid falling into “The Fasting Trap,” why fasting differs between men and women, why the standard American diet is the number one worst diet to have and why veganism isn’t too far behind, and so much more! For more go to: www.lewishowes.com/1084Read Dave’s new book: https://fastthisway.com/The Wim Hof Experience: Mindset Training, Power Breathing, and Brotherhood: https://link.chtbl.com/910-podA Scientific Guide to Living Longer, Feeling Happier & Eating Healthier with Dr. Rhonda Patrick: https://link.chtbl.com/967-podThe Science of Sleep for Ultimate Success with Shawn Stevenson: https://link.chtbl.com/896-pod Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 1,084 with New York Times bestselling author Dave Asprey. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:28Lewis Howes?

  Author Napoleon Hill said, "There are no limitations to the mind, except those that we acknowledge." And Zig Ziglar said, "It's not what you've got, it's what you use that makes a difference." My guest today is my friend Dave Asprey, who is a founder and chairman of Bulletproof. And over the last two decades, Dave has worked with world-renowned doctors, researchers, scientists, and global mavericks to uncover the latest, most innovative methods, techniques, and products for enhancing mental and physical performance. And Dave has personally spent nearly $2 million taking control of his own biology, pushing the bounds of human possibilities, all in the name of science and evolution. And he's recently the author of the new book,

• 1:12Lewis Howes?

  Fast This Way: Burn Fat, Heal Inflammation, and Eat Like the High-Performing Human You Were Meant to Be. And in this episode, we discuss the techniques to avoid falling into the fasting trap, also why fasting differs for men and women, and the differences between the two, the history and science of fasting, why the standard American diet is the number one worst diet to have, and why veganism isn't too far behind in Dave's perspective, three things you're allowed to eat during a fast, the top five bio hacks for health and happiness, and so much more. If you're enjoying this at all, make sure to share this with someone that you think would be inspired by this. Spread the message of greatness

• 1:54Lewis Howes?

  to someone else that you care about today. Use the link lewishowes.com/1084, or just copy and paste the link wherever you're listening to this episode right now. And at any moment, make sure to click that subscribe button over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify right now. When you subscribe, when you leave a rating and review, it helps us spread the message of greatness to more people in that ecosystem. So click the subscribe button right now to Apple Podcasts for the School of Greatness to be notified when we bring the latest and greatest minds in the world to you here. Okay, in just a moment, the one and only Dave Asprey.

• 2:30Lewis Howes?

  Welcome everyone back to the School of Greatness Podcast. Very excited about our guest, my man Dave Asprey is in the house. What's up, brother? Good to see you, man.

• 2:37Dave Asprey?

  Louis, good to see you. I wish I was there in person.

• 2:39Lewis Howes?

  I know. When you can come back down, we'll make it happen. But in the meantime, one of the most fascinating topics of the last few years has been fasting and intermittent fasting, using bulletproof coffee to fast, 24-hour fast with just water, week-long fast, all these different things. There's apps that are exploding that are helping people learn how to fast better. And this morning I fasted. I had my bulletproof, which I typically do, thanks to your inspiration. And I'm curious, I've tried different things myself. I've done a three-day fast with no food. I do mostly intermittent fasting most days, between 14 to 16-hour fast. I do these things. But I'm curious, from your experience of all the tests that you've been doing,

• 3:24Lewis Howes?

  what is the fast that works best for you personally at this stage of your life? And what is the type of fast that you think the general population should be considering to improve the quality of their life, to live longer, and all these things that you talk about?

• 3:40Dave Asprey?

  If there was an easy answer to that, my book would have read like this. Step one, don't eat for a while. Step two, it's good for you. Here's a bunch of studies.

• 3:49Dave Asprey?

  10 years after writing my first big book and releasing the Bulletproof Diet, people have lost a million pounds using intermittent fasting and bulletproof coffee and the other principles in that. And it stood the test of time, but I've learned a lot. And what you find is that there is not an answer for the general population because women are not just smaller men with less muscles. And so it varies. It also changes on time of life. And the most important thing, and the thing that motivated me to write Fast This Way, is that it's not the same every day. So I was on a big TV show in London that required me to be awake at 2:30 a.m. and fully alert with bright lights on and, you know,

• 4:33Dave Asprey?

  being in a studio. That next morning was not the time to intermittent fast because I already had enough circadian stress. And so the deal is, what's the right fast for you today? And to give yourself permission to do it differently. And you know, because you're a pro athlete, or you were. You on a day when you're just, you don't have it and you say, I'm going to go lift heavy anyway, what would happen to you?

• 4:58Lewis Howes?

  You might hurt yourself, you might strain something, you might not have the energy to do the full thing. And then, you know, you might regret it, you might pull a muscle, who knows?

• 5:07Dave Asprey?

  Exactly. And fasting is the same kind of a thing where you're saying, okay, you know, what did my Oura ring tell me this morning about my readiness score? So, okay, if I'm ready to go and I'm totally full of it, maybe today is one meal a day. And maybe you're going to wake up and say, you know, in most days I just do a 14 or 16 hour fast because that's what works really well for me. And I usually do a 16 or an 18 hour fast. Today it's around two o'clock, I had my first meal. And before that, I just had some black bulletproof coffee without even the butter and MCT because I didn't have time to put it in there because I was busy. And like, sure, my metabolism can handle that. But when I weighed 300 pounds, if I would have tried that, I would have been hangry and hypoglycemic and I would not have shown up the way that I expect myself

• 5:50Dave Asprey?

  to show up. So it's that kindness to yourself that says, you know what? Today I'm going to do this. And if it's just not working, it's okay to say, I only fasted for 12 hours, which is the minimum fast that really does anything. Most people do 12 hours and don't even know it.

• 6:05Lewis Howes?

  So what am I, am I hearing you say that, you know, just because you say you want to intermittent fast for two weeks or for a month, that you shouldn't push the fasting? If you went to bed at 2am for some reason, if you haven't recovered from your workouts, if you're exhausted and you're moody, that maybe you should eat breakfast or you should have a smoothie or do something to give you more energy and calories in the morning as opposed to just, well, well, I'm supposed to fast because it's going to make me live longer and, and kill off these dead cells or whatever. But it may be more harm if you actually don't listen to your body. Is that what I'm hearing you say?

• 6:39Dave Asprey?

  That is exactly right. Fasting is like exercise and you don't want to overdo it. You don't want to underdo it. And what we fall into as just being humans is what I call the fasting trap. And before that, there was the keto trap. And before that, when I was a raw vegan, it was the vegan trap. And the trap goes like this. And I may be more guilty of this than most people when I look back on my life. Hey, this is good. I'll just do more of it. Right? And that isn't the thing, the right amount is good. And

• 7:09Dave Asprey?

  Many things in life have a U-shaped response curve or an inverted U. So what that means is if you do just do a little bit, nothing happens. You do the right amount, you get tons of benefits. And if you do too much, the benefits go back down. And fasting is a stressor on the body, but it's a good stressor unless you already have enough stress. So if your girlfriend broke up with you last night, maybe a 24 hour fast today is just really not the thing to do. But maybe wallowing in a bucket of ice cream isn't the right thing to do either. And there's something in the middle there. And so when people say, how should I fast every day? I can tell you for women, the recommendations, there's a whole chapter just on the studies for women in the book, because there are fewer of them. It turns out the minimum effective dose is three fasts a week, like a Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

• 7:54Dave Asprey?

  If you can do 14 or 16 hours, you'll get some benefits. And you get used to that and say, you know what? Maybe I'm going to do it five days a week. But I tell everyone, even, and this will make some people mad, like have breakfast Saturday or Sunday. Don't have, you know, crazy, ridiculous, you know, IHOP. But if you want to have some gluten free pancakes even, it's fine. Because if you have a flexible metabolism, you should be able to handle it. And you want your body to know that it is in a land of plenty. You don't eat all the time, but that there's always enough food. And if you push your fasts too much, too often, you get an epigenetic, an environmental signal that says, hey, there's kind of a little bit of a famine going on here. And then your body adjusts in a way that isn't good for you.

• 8:36Dave Asprey?

  So it's the idea time without, time with, but you still have a sense of abundance in your tissues, which is very different than a low calorie diet, which just makes you feel like crap and want to punch people. That's not good.

• 8:46Lewis Howes?

  So it's taking it in in cycles. Let's do, I'm going to do this for two weeks, four weeks. But it's not going to be years consistently fasting, because that may not be as useful to your body long term.

• 8:59Dave Asprey?

  I think it will be years. Most people who practice intermittent fasting and learn how to do it the right way, they have more energy in the morning, the intermittent fast than when they have breakfast. Like Saturday morning, I sit down, you know, we have a small organic farm. So we're going to have bacon from our own pigs. It's the best bacon on the planet. I like bacon, but I look at myself, man, it's only nine. I really don't want to eat anything right now because I know that I actually have more energy if I don't eat, but I'm going to because I'm doing it for a social thing. You know, this is family time, right? And I also know that I'm teaching my body, you should be able to handle this. All right. And I do, but there's times when I look at, I'm just not hungry, even though this is a time when most people say I'd be ravenous. And it's that freedom from the voice in your head that says, if I don't eat lunch, I'm going to starve. That's,

• 9:44Dave Asprey?

  that's the reason people do this for long term. In fact, one of the studies in Fast This Way talks about how the average person spends 15% of their thoughts about what their next meal is. I'm like, maybe we could have that 15% back and do something better with it.

• 9:59Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. Yeah, it's more about optimizing your life and not obsessing over the, the brain thinking about what am I going to eat or watching media that's saying eat this fast food and you're constantly saying, well, what's next? What's next? As opposed to allowing your brain and your gut to rest for a little bit.

• 10:16Dave Asprey?

  The brain and gut rest thing is, is very interesting because in the history of fasting, it's always had spiritual contexts or health contexts. And what they do is they say, well, fast for a couple of days. And then on the third day, you stop caring about food, you get a lot of energy and then you can go into this new, open, spiritual state. And there's several things happening there that I never would have imagined to be true, back when the idea of skipping breakfast was something that was scary. Like, I don't want to do that. The first thing that happens is that when there's food in your stomach, even if it's really good food, that food is going to take energy to digest. So, energy that could have gone into thinking or feeling or repairing tissues or whatever, it goes

• 10:59Dave Asprey?

  into attacking the steak you're eating. And it breaks it down and you absorb it and then you get more energy later. But the process of doing that is an energy suck. So if you have especially a high sugar, high carb, even oatmeal kind of breakfast, well, all of a sudden, all the energy that should have gone into your morning goes into your gut. And that's not where you wanted it to be. And then your blood sugar goes up and it, when it goes back down, the muffin calls to you at 10 a.m. and you really want the muffin. And then you start expending willpower on the muffin. Meanwhile, your body is spending extra energy digesting, so you have less energy for willpower, you're probably going to eat the muffin. And it doesn't mean you're a bad person. It just means that that's biology.

• 11:40Dave Asprey?

  But the second thing that happens on these longer fasts is that you go into a state of ketosis after about a couple of days of not eating anything. And ketones provide more electrons to the neurons in your brain than even glucose or sugar or carbs do, even though that's what your brain usually eats. So all of a sudden now, you get these people fasting, all the energy that would have gone to digestion is going into repairing their tissues and going into their brain. And the brain got more energy because it's burning a better fuel. And then the body says, well, if there's no food, maybe I should open up my perception and my sensors and I should become more tuned into the world around me so I could find something to eat.

• 12:20Dave Asprey?

  Now, if you say, I'm not gonna eat yet, I'm gonna use that openness to connect with others. I'm gonna use it to connect with myself, to go for a walk in nature. You're actually in a different state. So you get all three of those from a longer fast, but the hack that I now have 10 years of experience with is that when you use MCT oil during a fast, I have very good evidence you stay fasted, but you get the ketones that would have been present after a three day fast. And this is why people will say, okay, I'm going to do the bulletproof coffee thing in the morning, which I'm well known for. And there's a couple of other things going on there biochemically, but one of the things is that you just got the third day of fasting feeling the morning you fasted. And this is very sustainable.

• 13:04Dave Asprey?

  I mean, there are people who have done this for 10 years now and keep doing it because they're never hungry. And just not being hungry is such a relief. I know when I was a 300 pounder, I didn't even know you could have hunger.

• 13:17Lewis Howes?

  You're always hungry though, when you're 300 pounds probably, right? In the beginning?

• 13:21Dave Asprey?

  I was never hungry. I was always craving. I didn't know there was a difference.

• 13:24Lewis Howes?

  Craving, ah.

• 13:25Dave Asprey?

  Right?

• 13:26Lewis Howes?

  What's the difference between craving and hunger?

• 13:27Dave Asprey?

  There you go. Most people listening probably feel cravings most of the time. And craving is when, if I don't eat soon, a disaster is going to happen. Like, I really need to eat. And it's an intense thing. But it turns out hunger is, I should probably eat sometime in the next couple of hours for, you know, to perform better, but if I didn't, I'd be all right. I could go till tomorrow if I need to. So hunger is a gentle feeling. And the intensity of cravings is terrible. And what people find when they learn how to intermittent fast in the right ways is that they've eliminated cravings and hunger becomes a gentle presence in your life. Like, oh, it's a little bit cold in the room. Maybe I could turn the thermostat up, but if I don't, I'll be all right.

• 14:09Dave Asprey?

  And that calmness and peace that comes from it, that was what led me to write the book.

• 14:15Lewis Howes?

  And what's the biggest mistake you've made in fasting personally in the last 10 years? Or a mistake you've seen from other people who've tried to do fasting that it didn't work out for them?

• 14:26Dave Asprey?

  It's falling into that fasting trap that says if something's good, more is better.

• 14:30Lewis Howes?

  Extremism of it.

• 14:32Dave Asprey?

  Extremism, or even just something that worked for a little while, assuming it's always going to work. I noticed when I started writing about intermittent fasting, it's been a big pillar of the bulletproof diet for a long time, I think before intermittent fasting was really cool. And then people would call me and they'd say, especially women, I, you know, I felt amazing. I've lost weight. I, I can't believe this. Like, who would ever thought butter would make me not hungry? I love my life. But then they call about four weeks, five weeks later and say, you know what? I feel like my sleep quality has gone down. What's going on here? And then I say, well, did you follow the advice of cycling in and out of keto and having some carbs sometimes and not, you're not pushing it? Like, well, no, I just felt so good.

• 15:16Dave Asprey?

  I just kept doing that one thing, which was I didn't need any carbs for long periods of time. And then I added this intermittent fasting. And then, so step one is you lose quality of sleep. Same amount of sleep, lower quality. Second thing, and men usually hit this about a month after women, but men and women both get poor quality of sleep. Women will get, their cycle is less regular than it was before. So they're going, hmm, this is weird. I don't normally have hormonal issues, but I'm feeling it this month more than I do. And for guys, I'm waking up without a kickstand. And the third thing that happens. I was watching you process that.

• 15:58Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. So you wake up without a kickstand because you're not having carbs and you're doing it an extreme way. Is that what you're saying?

• 16:04Dave Asprey?

  Well, it's because you're over fasting.

• 16:05Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 16:05Dave Asprey?

  Right. And so the body is like, oh, it's a stressful environment. I don't really need that biological function very well because there's not enough food. It's a famine, right? And your cortisol levels go up. And what happens when cortisol goes up and you keep it elevated because you're not eating often enough is thinning of hair. And it happens in women and men. So like, okay, sleep, hormones, hair, in that order is what happens when you overfast.

• 16:28Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 16:30Dave Asprey?

  And I've gone through times where I definitely went over keto. I went through a three month period where I ate just one serving of broccoli a day. Just like meat and all, and it was all grass fed and very carnivore ish, although I didn't have zero veggies. And I felt amazing at first, but by the end of that, it's exactly the same as over fasting. Where my, I'd wake up 12 times a night, but not know that I woke up and my sleep monitoring thinks that I was. And then you can even, you know, mess with your gut bacteria if you overdo it. So the deal is, look, you skip breakfast and you have lunch around noon or two. And sometimes you only have dinner, but you mix it up. And that's actually how it was in nature. But this idea of a rigid fasting schedule and you're going to like muscle through and push through. Like if you're fading, right?

• 17:15Dave Asprey?

  And I'm just not, I'm not feeling very good today.

• 17:17Lewis Howes?

  Eat some food, have some broccoli, have some vegetables, have some salad, have some, yeah.

• 17:21Dave Asprey?

  Yeah. And it's just, it's okay. And the other, the flip side is also true. What if you say, I'm going to have a 16 hour fast today and noon comes like, I'm so feeling good. Like, you know, I'm going to make this a 20 or a 23 hour fast because I have it in me today.

• 17:35Lewis Howes?

  Feeling good. You have the energy. Yeah.

• 17:37Dave Asprey?

  Yeah. Right. And like, I feel like as an athlete, you would know this better than most. Sometimes go to the gym and you do the prescribing. Other times like, I'm going to pull, pull another set in because I can, and cause like my body's ready. If we approach fasting that way, really good things happen. And I thought it was important, I look at everything I do. And I mean, because we're friends and all, you know, I do cryotherapy and stem cells and all kinds of crazy stuff. Right. But. There's a return on investment for everything you do. And it's not based on dollars. It's based on energy. You spend energy to do something and you get energy back. Well, fasting is like, okay, you walk into the bank and you don't have an account there. And the teller's like, oh, hi, here's some money. But I didn't do anything. That's right here.

• 18:21Dave Asprey?

  Here's some money and we'll pay you interest on this later today. And then two years from now, we'll pay you more interest. Like, but I didn't open an account. I didn't put any energy into this. I was like, yeah, fine. That's all right. Cause with fasting, you spent no money and no time and no energy on breakfast. So you got paid right now. You got free energy and free money and time back. And then all morning long, you have less hunger and more energy than you did when you had the Pop-Tarts. And then you don't get type two diabetes and you have more energy and you have to buy smaller pants. And like all kinds of good things happen, even if you're not perfect with your diet. And so this is the one thing that has the highest return on investment because you invest less than you do today.

• 18:59Lewis Howes?

  And what do you think is the worst food to eat before you start fasting? Like, what's the worst thing you could do where it's kind of, it doesn't matter that you fasted because you just had this, this and this, you know, 16 hours ago.

• 19:13Dave Asprey?

  A bunch of fried stuff, especially like french fries. Yeah. From a restaurant, especially because they use such bad oils. And what you find from fasting is that sometimes it's effortless. And sometimes you're just have gnawing hunger.

• 19:29Dave Asprey?

  And the gnawing hunger, it's your fault. It's what you ate before the fast.

• 19:32Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 19:33Dave Asprey?

  So in Fast This Way, I teach about these six big categories of food that are likely to cause cravings for you. And they don't all cause the same intensity of cravings, but these are foods that aren't as good as we think they are. Because we have, anything you're going to eat has three things in it. And most nutritionists only look at two. I'm not picking on nutritionists specifically, dietitians are even worse. I'll pick on them. These are the guys who feed you Jell-O with NutraSweet in the hospital. But. There's calories in food and some types of of popular wisdom say, well, eat food with less calories. Guys, calories are energy. Energy is what you want. And to say that you are somehow going to feel really good on a low calorie diet, it does not work. As a

• 20:15Dave Asprey?

  300 pound guy who's lost way more than 100 pounds, let's say I'm a 200 pound guy now, but you you go low calorie, lose 20 pounds, gain 30, lose 30, gain 40. It does not work. It makes you miserable and it makes you just, just cranky.

• 20:28Lewis Howes?

  So what's the solution? What's the solution then?

• 20:30Dave Asprey?

  Well, the solution is you actually eat enough calories and you eat the right kinds of calories. So well, let's assume your food has some energy in it. The second thing food has, it has nutrients. So it has vitamins and minerals and stuff like that. This is good. Now, most of the time we stop there and say, okay, you should eat more of this because it has, for some reason, people say less calories and other people say more nutrients. But the third bucket is what matters. The third bucket is anti nutrients or toxins. And it's not like any food is is perfect, but some have more or less calories, some have more or less nutrients, and some have more or less anti nutrients. And if you pretend like they don't exist, which is how most nutritional stuff is written, let's eat this because it's packed with this, ignoring the fact that you could literally have a bowl

• 21:12Dave Asprey?

  of cyanide. And if you put some vitamins in it, they say, well, it's low calorie, it's high in vitamins, you should eat that. And so I teach people in in fast this way, look, here's the things to look for. If you eat that, you're probably going to have a miserable fast with low energy cravings and be cold. But if you don't eat that, you're going to have a much easier fast. And then you start to realize, wait a minute, maybe I'm going to choose foods that don't make me hungry as soon as I finish eating them. And if you master that, even when you're not intermittent fasting, you're going to have lunch. And instead of wanting a snack at two, I'm actually full until dinner. I just don't want to eat. So I don't think about eating. I don't reach for the cookies.

• 21:48Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 21:48Dave Asprey?

  So instead of willpower, it's just biology. It's so much easier that way.

• 21:52Lewis Howes?

  What would you say would be the top three foods, if you could only have three, that you would eat before a fast, whether 16 hour or 24 hour?

• 22:00Dave Asprey?

  It would be definitely grass fed steak. There is nothing more satiating than animal fats or butter. This stuff, it's full of nutrients as long as it's grass fed. If it's industrial, it'll actually give you cravings. It's not good to eat industrially raised animals. So the idea that meat is good or bad, you gotta know what meat, how's the animal treated? And all that, it matters. I wish that it didn't matter. I wish you could just eat gravel, but it doesn't work. So this is something that is the most satiating. Something with a lot of soluble fiber in it. You can do broccoli if you want to. You can do some, some vegetables preferably cooked. Not all vegetables are going to have the same effect on you. So I talk about things like how the nightshade family of vegetables, which have been a core part of the bulletproof diet, like guys, watch out for that. If you

• 22:45Dave Asprey?

  eat bell peppers, you're probably going to feel different than if you eat cabbage. In fact, you'll feel very different. And when I say that, most people go, oh, wait, I guess that might be true, but we've just never thought about it.

• 22:56Lewis Howes?

  Different, different in a not feeling as good with the nightshades?

• 22:59Dave Asprey?

  Bell peppers are in the deadly nightshade family. They're clearly not deadly, but they cause inflammation in many people. But in others, they handle it pretty well.

• 23:07Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 23:08Dave Asprey?

  So I'm like, watch out for that. But for me, I would say, give me some vegetables, give me some steak. And then the other thing that's going to be really good is anything with fat, dark chocolate, guacamole, things like that. A salad with a really heavy dressing with real olive oil, not the fake stuff, and with some extra MCT oil in it and some extra avocados on top. So give me the good, undamaged fats, not a lot of seed oils. Give me some protein and give me some vegetables. You do that and you can cruise all day long. But if you say, oh, instead, I'm going to insert some kind of fancy raw kale salad. Kale gives a lot of people cravings. In fact, it's not very good for you at all. In fact, have you ever eaten a huge kale salad and then been, I'm so full, I'm so satisfied,

• 23:53Dave Asprey?

  I'm just bursting with energy, I'm not going to be hungry for four hours?

• 23:56Lewis Howes?

  No.

• 23:58Dave Asprey?

  Even if you, even if you're covered in bacon, it still doesn't work. Kale has stuff in it that pisses your body off. It really does. And it's just how it is. It doesn't taste that good either. But even if you like the taste of it, it's not particularly a strong health food.

• 24:11Lewis Howes?

  There you go. And how does, from all the research that you've done, obviously you've tested this for 10 years personally, but from the research and the science, how does fasting the right way play a role in anti-aging in your life and other people's lives?

• 24:28Dave Asprey?

  The number one thing fasting, or intermittent fasting regularly will do, and remember, it doesn't have to be a super long one. 14 hours can start, 16 hours is good. We're not talking heavy duty, you know, living in a cave kind of stuff. And that will stop you from having insulin resistance. When you have insulin resistance, it means that insulin levels go up and your body can't hear them, so they go up higher. When your insulin is higher, your all-cause mortality goes up. In other words, your chances of dying from every disease you can think of happens. What insulin resistance means is that when there's energy in your body, your cells are weak enough that they can't make good use of the energy. And fasting fixes that problem. When sugar goes up in the body, it forms something called advanced glycation end products. It basically cooks your tissues the way onions brown in a pan.

• 25:13Dave Asprey?

  And we know this from 30 years of anti-aging research about the effect of excess insulin and sugar in the body. Fasting will fix that. But on top of it, there's something called autophagy, which is a core part of the recommendations I make, which is do whatever it takes to cause your body to turn its protein digestion mechanisms back on you. Because if it's not busy eating steak and eggs, or tofu, if that's what you're into, it'll turn around and go, oh, there's some extra debris, some junk inside the cells, outside the cells, I can clean that up. And if you go a little bit longer, it says, you know what? I've got enough extra enzyme activity here. I think I will take out the weak mitochondria, these little power plant generators. I'll take out the weak ones and

• 25:55Dave Asprey?

  replace them with young, strong ones. And you start upgrading yourself internally, because the stuff that would have gone into digesting the food you eat every two hours, because that's what someone told you to do in the 70s. Instead of doing that, you're eating the stuff in your body that makes you old. And when you control insulin and you control autophagy, something very interesting anti-aging wise happens, and it's that you actually have younger and more abundant stem cells in your body. So intermittent fasting has proven to increase stem cells, increases testosterone, human growth hormone, and a huge swath of anti-aging substances in the body. And it's free.

• 26:33Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 26:34Dave Asprey?

  It costs less than eating breakfast.

• 26:36Lewis Howes?

  And what's some of the new research about stem cells or the new developments that have excited you that everyone should know about?

• 26:43Dave Asprey?

  Well, I've been pretty public about doing a lot of stem cells. I've had my bone marrow taken out twice and I've had-

• 26:50Lewis Howes?

  You've been trying to convince me to do this for a while. I've been considering it. I still, I still didn't consider more.

• 26:57Dave Asprey?

  It'll change your life. Anyone with old injuries like that, I have just no bodily pain. And you, you get younger and there's really intriguing new research about stem cells making brains work better, especially if you've had a traumatic brain injury, which I have had. And so you, you just get younger. And I can't tell you that it was stem cells alone that did this. I live, you know, a bulletproof life and all that. But I recently measured my brain's response time. This is an automatic response time. How quickly does the brain respond when a light or a sound comes on? So this isn't a conscious thing. And my response time is the average response time for a 20 year old. The response time goes down with, or goes up with age. So you get slower and slower as you age. So I have

• 27:39Dave Asprey?

  a 20 year old's ability to respond to the environment around me, which is pretty remarkable. And I truly think that the stem cells helped with that. There's also things like arterial flexibility, where I have the average flexible arteries of a 24 year old. When you just compare, and I'm twice as old as that, Louis. So something is working. I think stem cells are a core part of the anti-aging thing. What's happening now, though, is we're able to pull things that are like stem cells out of the blood instead of out of the marrow. And that's a lot less painful. And then-

• 28:11Lewis Howes?

  I'm more open to that than the whole sucking out of my bones. Yeah, it's spinning it up.

• 28:16Dave Asprey?

  You're asleep when you're actually, I was awake one time when they did.

• 28:20Lewis Howes?

  So wait, what's this new, what's this new blood drawing stem cell that you're talking about?

• 28:25Dave Asprey?

  It's still getting regulatory approval, but it's called a very small stem like cells. But I'll show you the video sometime and that I'm laying on the table and the doctor has this thing and he hammers it with a hammer.

• 28:37Lewis Howes?

  Oh no, I can't.

• 28:38Dave Asprey?

  And it goes.

• 28:40Dave Asprey?

  Every time I see that video, it's like, it's the worst thing ever.

• 28:44Lewis Howes?

  Man, yeah, you go through a lot of pain to have, you know.

• 28:50Dave Asprey?

  It's really weird, Louis. It's almost like hunger. Like you can look at something as pain or just weird. And when I really dug into it, like there is the strangest feeling in my skeleton, but it wasn't pain. It was just so outside the universe of anything you would ever or should ever feel that it, your body could say it's pain or it could just be like.

• 29:12Lewis Howes?

  That's different. That's weird.

• 29:13Dave Asprey?

  Yeah. So I, I can say I've, I've been through much more painful things than that. But the idea that, that we could have younger and more stem cells by skipping breakfast is a little bit less money and time than that. And that's why I think it's such an important practice.

• 29:31Lewis Howes?

  And what's this, uh, what's this blood, uh, stem cell process then? It's not, it's not available yet, but have you tested it?

• 29:38Dave Asprey?

  What have you? There's, there's a very few doctors who are, are offering it today. And I think it's in a bit of a gray zone from a regulatory perspective. So.

• 29:46Lewis Howes?

  Have you tried it?

• 29:47Dave Asprey?

  Very small stem like cells. Of course I've tried it.

• 29:50Lewis Howes?

  How do you, how do you feel about it?

• 29:52Dave Asprey?

  Well, I think it's hard to say to compare A versus B. There's a lot more studies on getting stem cells from your fat or your marrow. There's also people getting stem cells from like placental cords and umbilical cords or placenta's and umbilical cords.

• 30:08Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 30:09Dave Asprey?

  There, um, I have mixed feelings about that because if you're getting stem cells from eight different people and like, how, how tested was that? And that makes all of my friends who do stem cells that way irritated that I would question it. Maybe it's perfectly good. I know a lot of people do it and love it. I just, in my mind, I'm like, what? Do we test for every little virus and every little bacteria and? I kind of like the idea of growing my own stem cells, but that's not legal in the US anymore. It was for a while and that was the most effective.

• 30:38Lewis Howes?

  That's crazy.

• 30:39Dave Asprey?

  It's coming down. We're like year one of of an evolution that's happening, kind of like cell phones. The first cell phone is some some guy in LA in his Mercedes 300D convertible, the whole trunk is his cell phone.

• 30:51Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 30:52Dave Asprey?

  And it was like $25 a minute. But with stem cells, it's come down in price a lot. The efficacy is way higher and it's getting better. It works better and better every year, but it still takes a doctor a lot of time to get the needles in all the right places and understand your joints. And but man, it's, you know, a couple hours of relatively minor discomfort, but then you're better for decades. It's a really big deal, Lewis. And I would tell you, if you fast before you do that procedure, you have less insulin resistance, you have a working metabolism, everything you can do in a hospital, whether it's a surgery, whether you're getting a car accident, whatever, everything goes better

• 31:34Dave Asprey?

  if you just have a strong metabolism. And so like, what do we all need right now? We want more resilience. Resilience comes from biology. The people who are best at taking fat or sugar plus air, combining them and getting abundant energy, those are the people who live the longest, have the best life. They have more opportunity for greatness because they simply have more electrons bouncing around in their heads to do stuff with. And it could power your immune system, it could power whatever you're doing in the world. But that's the core of everything I've ever done with bulletproof with all the content. How do you make yourself better at making energy? And it turns out sometimes not eating is part of the equation.

• 32:14Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. And I'm curious, you know, everyone swears by the lifestyle slash diet that they live by that works for them. People who are vegan swear by it and. The ones who are super healthy have lots of energy, the ones who are vegetarian.

• 32:33Dave Asprey?

  I feel like vegans just swear, they don't even swear by their diet. Is that just me?

• 32:37Lewis Howes?

  Who does? Yeah, I mean, they swear by lots of things.

• 32:39Dave Asprey?

  Sorry, vegans, I'm just teasing you guys.

• 32:41Lewis Howes?

  That the, you know, the vegetarian diet, people who live a vegetarian lifestyle for a long time say that this is best for them. People are carnivore diet, say it's the best for them, keto. Is there a worst type of diet, even though some of these things might work extremely well for particular body types? What, what is the?

• 32:59Dave Asprey?

  The worst type of diet is the standard American diet. And there's three things in it that are just horribly destructive. The first one is, what?

• 33:07Lewis Howes?

  Sugar?

• 33:08Dave Asprey?

  Sugar? Sugar's there, but I don't think it's as destructive as the other two.

• 33:11Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 33:12Dave Asprey?

  So I'll give an order from the worst to the, the best of the worst, right? So the number one thing that is wrong with the American diet is seed oils. These omega six oils and canola, corn, soybean, safflower, sunflower, all this stuff that's in everything at the restaurant. And most packaged foods at the grocery store, unless you know, buy from the right company. It's full of these oils. These are the oils that drive insulin resistance. Your body takes these oils and they're all plant based oils. And it says, hmm, I'm going to try to construct the outer layer of my mitochondria, my cells, these little batteries. But I have the wrong ingredients, so I'm going to make subpar batteries.

• 33:53Dave Asprey?

  Like if you go to the, the knockoff store and you buy the cheap batteries and it lasts a third as long as the good ones. That's what happens when you eat a lot of seed oils. Americans have about 40 times more of that oil in their systems than they should, and it gets built into your tissues. And that makes you weak, is just not good.

• 34:12Lewis Howes?

  Seed oils.

• 34:13Dave Asprey?

  Seed oils are bad. Second thing is industrially raised meat. It's full of xenoestrogens. These are estrogens that make animals fat on one third less calories than normal. It's also full of antibiotics and it's destroying the soil of the planet right now. It also is depleting farmland when we take and we grow corn and soy and grain. And we don't actually put the animal poop back into the soil, the way we do on my farm. What we're doing is we're sucking all the nutrients out of the soil. And we're creating a very, very big catastrophe 60 years from now, we'll be out of topsoil. Because we stopped having animals walk around and poop on it, the way it works when you're doing a regenerative agriculture kind of thing.

• 34:57Dave Asprey?

  But worst of all, you eat industrial animals, they're also full of cortisol. And so you do this, they mess up your gut bacteria and they're full of glyphosate because it was on the feed. And glyphosate disrupts your, your gut bacteria, your nervous system activity and is tied to cancer. So we're getting bad oils. Oh, and those animals, because they ate corn and soy, they're full of bad oils too. So now you're like, man, the steak tasted good. And I had that nice salad dressing that came out of a bottle that was full of crap oils. And you think you're being healthy, but you're completely wrecking things. And this is some of the stuff that I did when I was heavy, right? And then the third thing would be sugar, right? You just, if you have a ton of sugar, it's directly harmful. If you do the stuff I'm talking about, you can probably have a few grams of sugar and you won't notice that

• 35:41Dave Asprey?

  your body can handle it just fine. So sugar is not good for you and it is addictive, but it is way better to eat sugar than it is to eat corn oil. But don't eat either one.

• 35:51Lewis Howes?

  Don't eat either one. Yeah. Have sugar every once in a while.

• 35:54Dave Asprey?

  Yeah.

• 35:54Lewis Howes?

  But don't eat oil and

• 35:56Dave Asprey?

  Yeah. Like if, if someone said, here's a birthday cake, you know, it's gluten free. I don't do gluten. And they said, I made it with canola oil. I'd just be like, no, right? But if they said, I made it with sugar and butter, I'd be like, all right, I'm gonna have some. And it's that, the sugar, okay, your body can process that and it's gone. The other stuff, it sticks and it gets in there and you don't want to do it. So the worst diet of all is that one with lots of fried stuff and bad oils. But the second worst diet for people who think they're being healthy was, this isn't going to be popular, but it is the vegan diet.

• 36:25Lewis Howes?

  Why is that?

• 36:26Dave Asprey?

  There's two things. Okay. I was a devout raw vegan. Okay. I did this for more than a year. I mean, I have bowls as big as my head full of kale and blended and mashed and sprouted. And I mean, I'm good with

• 36:38Lewis Howes?

  Rice and beans and everything.

• 36:39Dave Asprey?

  Yeah. Yeah. All that stuff. So what happens there is your body doesn't get the essential fats that it needs. We are not made out of plant oils. And I have, I have in my books, I talk about the studies that show when you change the type of oil you eat, it changes what your body is made of. So when you go on a plant-based diet, you're getting two things. You're getting plant-based oils, which are not very compatible with you. Vegans will get mad at me and say, Dave, we can convert plant omega threes to the good ones. Yes, it takes 45 grams of bad omega threes to make one gram of the good ones, if your body can do that, which it won't be able to do because you're on a plant-based diet. And then you get tons of these anti-nutrients from plants

• 37:22Dave Asprey?

  that cause cravings. When I was a raw vegan, I was always hungry. And I think that that's a very common occurrence. And I would say, well, that's weird. I'm going to put more coconut oil or eat more, you know, fresh Avocado or something. All these things. Avocados. It didn't matter. It's because plants don't want you to eat them and they cover themselves in defense systems that cause cravings. So I talk about the five big categories of things that are causing problems with us right now. And many plants that are common on a plant based diet are not very compatible with humans. Like, oh, they have these vitamins. Yeah, they also stick to the stuff that lines the cartilage in your joints and gives you joint pain. Or they inhibit your ability to absorb zinc and magnesium and iron and things like that.

• 38:06Dave Asprey?

  And so what happens is you tell yourself you're doing this to be nice to the animals. But what you're doing is you're making sure that the animals will go extinct because if everyone was vegan, we'd have no animals. And then two generations later, we'd all be extinct because we'd have no animals to make soil. Because you can't grow carrots without animal poop at the end of the day. You can do it for 20 years. You can do it for 30 years, but eventually you have to build that soil back up. So what's happening on a plant based diet is the wrong fats and lots of anti nutrients. And that combination is kryptonite for people. And I've had tens of thousands of former vegans go bulletproof. And part of the reason I made the bulletproof diet was because I did harm to myself, including additional food allergies and worse hypothyroidism as a result of being vegan.

• 38:49Dave Asprey?

  And in terms of animal cruelty, I calculated deaths per calorie from eating a pound of grass fed steak every day, which is a lot. You don't need to do that unless you're on the carnivore side of things, which there's an argument for that. But if you do that and the cow is grass fed and local, unless the cow stepped on a frog, you kill less than one animal per year in all of your food. But if you eat boxes of processed soy nuggets, you disrupted the lives of whatever was going to live on that land and whatever the tractors killed. And so the number of deaths per calorie is way higher for any grain product and any, anything other than basically fresh picked vegetables because of habitat destruction and tractor kills. And like, I asked a monk this in Tibet.

• 39:34Dave Asprey?

  I'm not dogmatic, but I want to do what works. So I like to minimize suffering. Buy from a local farmer, eat less meat, but make it grass fed and eat very good fats. And if you do that, you'll never have a craving during a fast. And if you don't believe anything I say, you can still be plant-based or vegan. And you can still be standard American diet. Dave, I like my industrial animals, you know, go screw yourself. Just do intermittent fasting and you'll still improve. It works for any diet out there. And I'm happy to share the knowledge and I've

• 40:03Lewis Howes?

  For sure.

• 40:04Dave Asprey?

  Moved a lot of, a lot of information. There's 3,000 blog posts and stuff like that. But what I want people to do is figure out the foods that are compatible with your biology. And if you're one of the small percentage of people who's like, you know what? Vegetarian works for me. I know people, it really does. They eat some eggs, they eat some cheese, they eat a substantial amount of butter. And magically that really works for them and that's okay. But if it doesn't work for you, don't tell yourself it's supposed to work. So you'll do it even more. That's the mistake that I made.

• 40:32Lewis Howes?

  Are you friends with some vegans that you've had these conversations with or like Rich Roll? Or, you know, anyone like that?

• 40:39Dave Asprey?

  I haven't had Rich on the show, but I would totally do that. And I've certainly had conversations with vegans a lot. And there's, there's kind of two mindsets there. One of them says you're doing it for your health. Right? The evidence does not support that. And here's what's really going on and it's intimately tied to fasting. There's a compound in the body called mTOR. And you've probably talked about it on the show before. mTOR is a signaling molecule that says grow, says, you know, build muscle, you know, build tissue. And when you eat protein, a lot of protein, plant-based will raise it, but animal-based raises it much more. So when mTOR goes up, you put on muscle. But chronic elevation of mTOR equals cancer.

• 41:24Dave Asprey?

  Right? So that's a bit of a problem. So one solution say, well, I'm going to go plant-based and low protein. The problem with that is that mTOR gets suppressed, but it never goes up. So you get frailty. Like these are the people who break their hips. These people have the vegan sized pants for men. They're like little stick legs. Right? You don't, you don't want to be there. So what's the solution? Well, Don't eat for a while, then work out and then eat. And what's neat is that mTOR is like a spring. You can push it down and when it's down, it's good. Except if it never goes up, it's not good. So when you push it down, there's three things that we know of that suppress mTOR. And this is how you build muscle and how you account for the difference in outcomes

• 42:08Dave Asprey?

  from vegans versus carnivores, let's say. So to suppress mTOR, fasting does it, exercise does it, and coffee does it. So what you do is eat dinner and stop eating around six. Don't eat after dinner. So you got four hours of fasting before bedtime. You sleep for eight hours, you just fasted for 12 hours. Wait another four hours. There you fasted 16 hours, you had a late breakfast. But before you eat, do some squats. Go lift. I mean, it can be a very quick workout, just something heavy. And then you eat. And because all three of those things push the mTOR down, as soon as you eat some protein, the body says, wow, and it spikes the mTOR much higher. And then the exercise has a bigger impact on your tissues. So you got more exercise benefits in less time.

• 42:51Dave Asprey?

  Your mTOR was briefly elevated because you only ate once that day or twice that day. And then it goes back down and it stays down. People feel good on a vegan diet because they suppress mTOR, which is driving chronic inflammation. Problem is you do that forever, you'd never get the muscles and the growth. And then you get the anti nutrients and you get the bad fats. So it's okay to be vegan for a week. It's probably good for you. But then at the end of that week, maybe you should go carnivore. So cycles are good. And I will tell you, being all keto all the time is terrible for you. Being all vegan all the time is terrible for you. And I've done both. That's why intermittent fasting is so awesome because you can eat both vegetables. You can even have white rice. You can have carbs. You don't have to be in keto and ketosis and all that to do fasting. It's cycling in and out. So be vegan for a day, but just don't be vegan for a year and you'll be fine.

• 43:34Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha. Yeah, I'd love to hear you and a vegan talk about the research and the science on both sides and see. You know, what comes from that?

• 43:42Dave Asprey?

  I love having a genuine conversation where it's born out of health. When it, when it's a lot of the health stuff, like what the health, it was, it was created by people who went to jail for blowing up research laboratories because they were testing chicken eggs. Like, like there were some very strong animal rights people there masquerading as health people. But the whole thing about, you know, erections and vegetables and all that stuff. Every doctor I know rolled their eyes and was like, this is the worst propaganda I've ever seen. Like, like there is no validity to this whatsoever.

• 44:12Lewis Howes?

  From game changers or from, uh, I don't know if you watched that one?

• 44:15Dave Asprey?

  Yeah, I definitely watched that one.

• 44:16Lewis Howes?

  With guys, with guys having meat and then they had no erections the next morning or something. And then the ones with vegetables had all the erections in the world or something.

• 44:24Dave Asprey?

  The, the first animal rights propaganda one was, uh, what the health. And when people like, oh, we don't really care that much about this, like, oh, we'll make it a performance enhancer. But man, if you want to see an athlete get injured, make them, make them vegan and keep them vegan for a while. And they did have a lot of muscle.

• 44:40Lewis Howes?

  Well, there's some athlete, there's some athletes who are vegan. It seems like they're, they say they're healthier, they recover faster, you know, there are some cases.

• 44:48Dave Asprey?

  Before they were eating and the standard American diet, right?

• 44:53Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 44:53Dave Asprey?

  And, uh, what you'll find is, um, who's that famous sprinter who went vegan a while ago? Um, Usain Bolt.

• 45:01Lewis Howes?

  He's vegan now?

• 45:01Dave Asprey?

  Faster, the first year he went vegan because he stopped eating a bunch of crap. And after that, he was sidelined by injuries every year and never set another record.

• 45:08Lewis Howes?

  It could be because he was getting older, there could be other factors there, but.

• 45:11Dave Asprey?

  Of course, there could be.

• 45:12Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:13Dave Asprey?

  I think it's because he didn't have enough coffee. That's, that's my.

• 45:16Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I'm always trying to learn, you know, from every, without making one side right or wrong, and trying to find the research for every study to see, okay, well, is, what are the cases for eating meat? Quality meat, what are the cases for being vegan, what are the cases for vegetarian? Cause I'm always trying to learn like, hey, maybe what I'm doing is not optimal. So.

• 45:36Dave Asprey?

  You know, Liz, your, your curiosity is what makes you, uh, a fantastic guy. Like you're always just authentically questioning. And there's new studies out that show that curiosity makes you young. Uh, Stephen Kotler talks about curiosity. Being a component of flow state. I'm the same way. Like I, like I said, I was a raw vegan. I was a devout roving. Like I have to have my enzymes never heated above a hundred and 12 degrees. And you know, I, I was hardcore, right? So I'm willing to be wrong and I've been wrong.

• 46:05Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 46:05Dave Asprey?

  And I've been really sick and it's gone to the point now where I talk about the science in all of the, the books that I write. And I'm more convinced than I've ever been that no matter what we agree or don't agree on about what to eat. There's two things. One is if you don't eat for a while every day, you're going to be better off. The second thing is that eat whatever doesn't make you hungry after you finish eating and you'll be better off. So if you are the rare vegan who's like, oh, I had a, you know, bowl of beans and squishy whatevers. Uh, and you know, I am vibing with energy and I'm not hungry for four hours afterwards. I haven't met one yet, but there might be one out there, but most of them are like snacking on kale chips constantly because they're ravenous all the time.

• 46:50Dave Asprey?

  So, but I, I'm very happy to be proven wrong.

• 46:53Lewis Howes?

  I hear you there. Uh, and I'm, you know, it's always learning, always exploring.

• 46:58Dave Asprey?

  What are you eating now?

• 47:00Lewis Howes?

  This, this week I'm eating like the last month I was like doing mostly keto and experimenting with that. And it worked for a while until it didn't.

• 47:13Dave Asprey?

  Yes.

• 47:13Lewis Howes?

  And then now I was like, you know what? Let me try vegetarian plant based for this week. And so I'm eating vegetarian plant based.

• 47:22Dave Asprey?

  Vegetarian is different than vegan though, just to be real clear.

• 47:24Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's true. Well, I'm having a little bit of cheese, but yeah, so, uh, and a little eggs, but I'm trying to be more the vegan, but I'm having some cheese and eggs. I guess it's vegetarian, but yeah, so I'm trying that. I'm just trying to explore to see what are the foods make me feel good when I poop. To be honest, like what makes it feel good when it comes out? Because if, if it doesn't feel good when it comes out, then I probably shouldn't be eating those foods. Maybe those are peppers, maybe those are whatever nightshades or something or a certain type of meat. Uh, and figuring out, you know, how do I just flow easily effortlessly every time? And, and optimize the gut is really what I'm looking for, which I feel like things are pretty good right now, but I'm always looking to improve and test.

• 48:08Dave Asprey?

  It's a common thing with, especially with keto, where constipation happens, right? And the gut bacteria can get really out of whack on a keto diet. And this is why I first went keto in the late 90s. It was called the Atkins diet, right? And I lost 50 pounds on it. The other 50 took 10 years to come off because it's inflammation that's caused by eating the wrong stuff when you're in keto, right? And then we have the modern renaissance of keto where there still isn't a great focus on here's the right type of protein. You get people putting milk protein isolate, which is almost a waste product in the US into their food saying, there it's keto because it's a protein. And you're like, no, you're doing it wrong. Like you, you can do better.

• 48:51Dave Asprey?

  But here's, there's three hacks you can do during a fast that allow your body to stay fasted and don't make you get hangry and all. And one of those hacks is the one you're looking for. So I want to walk your listeners through three things you're allowed to have during a fast. And by the way, some people get very angry when I say you can have something during a fast. Those are people who say, but the mice in the study only had water. Like that's because that was all you gave them. But we wanted people to be high performance and comfortable. And I despise the idea of when I weighed 300 pounds of someone sitting down and saying, Dave, I want you to only have water this morning and then you're going to go to work and you're going to show up and you're going to perform. And that's without two kids.

• 49:31Lewis Howes?

  And be focused.

• 49:32Dave Asprey?

  And yeah, I couldn't do it. And if I did, it would have taken every ounce of willpower and I would have been miserable and I would have been hangry. This is not how to teach people to fast. And I think it's mean spirited. So it's okay to do things that reduce your hunger and increase your focus during a fast, as long as your body's still getting the benefits. So here's the three. And the third one's going to be right for you. First one, there was abundant evidence that black coffee during a fast makes the fast work better. The new science behind that, that didn't exist when I first talked about bulletproof coffee, is that the amount of caffeine in two small cups of coffee doubles ketone production, even if you eat carbs at night. So a little bit of a bump.

• 50:12Lewis Howes?

  Black coffee, no butter, no MCT.

• 50:16Dave Asprey?

  That's step one, right? That's just black coffee.

• 50:18Lewis Howes?

  Black coffee.

• 50:19Dave Asprey?

  Okay. And that in and of itself doubles ketones.

• 50:21Lewis Howes?

  Got it. So that's okay during a fast based on the science.

• 50:24Dave Asprey?

  Not at night, but in the morning. Yeah.

• 50:26Lewis Howes?

  In the morning. Yeah, of course. Okay.

• 50:29Dave Asprey?

  So the second thing, well, let's talk about why that works because it also explains why the second thing works.

• 50:34Lewis Howes?

  Doesn't it have some calories though? It wasn't going to affect the body in some way with those calories?

• 50:39Dave Asprey?

  Coffee has nominal calories. It's, it's not very much. And it's not that calories are going to disrupt the fast. It's raising insulin or raising mTOR are what break the fast.

• 50:52Lewis Howes?

  So any type of carbs, any type of sugar, anything that it raises that, yeah.

• 50:55Dave Asprey?

  Carbs, sugar, or protein are going to break your fast, but there's some wiggle room in there. And when you have ketones higher, it suppresses ghrelin, which is the hunger and the cravings hormone. And it raises CCK, which is the fullness hormone that was brought to you by Calvin Klein. And it's cholecalcinein for the, the people who are interested in the hard science of it. What, what you find Louis though, is that when you manipulate those things, the voice in your head telling you to think about food all the time starts to go away. And coffee is shown in many, many studies to be generally good for you. And there's still some people argue about that. Sorry. I just go to PubMed and Google coffee and the name of a disease and see what you find and then make your own decision on that.

• 51:39Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 51:39Dave Asprey?

  The.

• 51:40Lewis Howes?

  It's probably the amount of, the amount of coffee. If you're having 10 cups of coffee, then it's probably not the best thing for you.

• 51:46Dave Asprey?

  The studies show that up to five cups a day increases longevity and that.

• 51:52Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 51:52Dave Asprey?

  You get slightly better up to five cups. Like in other words, four is probably better than three.

• 51:57Lewis Howes?

  Four cups a day is, is, is.

• 52:00Dave Asprey?

  It can be caffeinated or decaffeinated, but studies all show up to five cups a day makes you live.

• 52:05Lewis Howes?

  Wow. That's interesting.

• 52:06Dave Asprey?

  And so I actually do a cup of decaf in the afternoon because I really couldn't do five cups in the morning. That'd be a little bit too much for me.

• 52:13Lewis Howes?

  Might be too jittery if you don't have the food and you're just having caffeine. So you gotta, you gotta test this for your body. I think for sure.

• 52:18Dave Asprey?

  You can have one. I'm not telling you to drink more coffee. I'm just saying have a cup of coffee in the morning and you'll fast. It's going to be easier. And if you're feeling like you want something at 10, have a cup of black coffee versus water and you'll have less distractions, more focus. You'll feel better and you'll probably lose weight faster too. So this is like really easy, but someone's like, well, it's not water. You can't do it. Do you know what a hair shirt is?

• 52:39Lewis Howes?

  Hair shirt?

• 52:40Dave Asprey?

  Yeah.

• 52:41Lewis Howes?

  No.

• 52:42Dave Asprey?

  These monks, many years ago, used to weave shirts out of human hair. And they'd wear them because they were extra itchy. And they wanted to increase their suffering because suffering is a virtue. Okay, those monks are reincarnated as people who only drink water when they're fasting in the middle of the workday. If you want to do water fast for medical reasons on the weekend and rest and relax and reflect, that's called a spiritual fast and there's benefits to that.

• 53:04Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 53:04Dave Asprey?

  But to try and do that when you're like a mom and you have kids and work, it's not okay unless your body is really in tune for that.

• 53:11Lewis Howes?

  Unless you've slept 10 hours and you're recovered and you're ready for it, yeah.

• 53:15Dave Asprey?

  Right. So there's our black coffee. Second hack is one, yeah, I'm well known for it. I'm not trying to sell more bulletproof coffee. And I will tell you, if you use that MCT oil I've been talking about for 10 years, I made MCT a thing. It really wasn't, uh, wasn't in the world of biohacking. If you do that and a little bit of grass fed butter, it doesn't have to be two tablespoons, it can be just a small amount. It will give you a lot more ketones from the MCT. And something magic happens when you put butter in coffee. We did not know why this was the case, but when you blend butter in coffee, now new research out of the University of Washington, I donated, uh, an, you know, unallocated grant to UW and said, could you please look at like water and fat and stuff?

• 53:58Dave Asprey?

  And Gerald Pollak, who's written several books about this, who's, uh, just turned 80, is a biochemist. And he said, look, when you put water next to droplets of butter fat, it forms a very thick exclusion zone. This is the way the, the body normally drink water. You put the water near your cell membranes. You heat the water and it changes the water into the viscosity level of water that you need to make energy. But when you do it in a blender and then you drink it, just by having a little bit of fat in the water. Your body can immediately put that water to work inside mitochondria without having to process it first. And that means you can more effectively burn fat or sugar. And this is why 15 minutes like, oh, wow, I got ketones and I got this water I can use. And then poof,

• 54:42Dave Asprey?

  your brain wakes up. That's why you drink it in the morning and you feel the difference that you talked about earlier. Okay, so that's a good, a good hack for fasting. But people say, well, wait, why, there's calories in there. Yes, but it doesn't raise insulin at all, and it doesn't raise mTOR at all. So you're still getting the benefits of the fast. And the third thing, this is going to be the magic one for you. No one's ever talked about this in the context of fasting that I'm aware of before. And it's prebiotic fiber. The recommended amount you should get is about 20 or 30 grams a day. Most people don't get it. Or if they do get it, they're eating tons of whole grains with all the anti nutrients and irritants in them. So it's not good for you. So if you put a couple scoops of prebiotic fiber in water,

• 55:25Dave Asprey?

  coffee, or tea, it is carbs, except your body can't digest it. And it goes right into your gut bacteria. It feeds the good guys. You'll grow more species and more abundance in your gut bacteria. And they eat it. And in studies, they convert prebiotic fiber into short chain fatty acids called butyric acid that is pro ketogenic. And there's dozens of studies that show soluble fiber suppresses hunger. And there's many more that show it makes you live longer. In fact, it's a core part of my anti aging recommendation. Wow. So there you go.

• 55:55Lewis Howes?

  Is this a powder? Is this a supplement?

• 55:58Dave Asprey?

  Flavorless powder. And yes,

• 56:00Lewis Howes?

  What's it called? Prebiotic, prebiotic what?

• 56:02Dave Asprey?

  Prebiotic fiber is what it's called.

• 56:04Lewis Howes?

  Got it.

• 56:05Dave Asprey?

  And the one I make for Bulletproof is called Inner Fuel. I'm not here to sell Inner Fuel. I'll tell you what's in it. If you want to do that. Bulletproof Inner Fuel, though, it's all packaged up. I did all the research. There's three different kinds of fiber in there. They're all sap from trees. And these are specific things that feed the good guys. And they have zero flavor. So you can put it in whatever and it's very neutral. And it doesn't get all clumpy like a Metamucil or like, like gunky. You can't really tell it's in there. So I usually get about 40 to 60 grams of soluble fiber a day, which is way more than most people. And it's going to make sure that everything goes out, pretty much no matter what you eat, the way you want it to. But most importantly, it suppresses hunger and it gives

• 56:45Dave Asprey?

  you good gut bacteria. So Louis, I quadrupled the number of species of bacteria in my gut with the formula. And it's made out of acacia gum, Larch arabeno galactin, and hydrolyzed guar gum.

• 56:59Dave Asprey?

  Try and spell all those. That's why I just, you can Google the ingredients on bulletproof interfuel if you don't want to buy the stuff, but you can just Google for prebiotic fiber. And there's different companies who make different types of things. Try this, Louis. You can put it in there. You're still fasting as long as it doesn't have sugar and stuff in there, which some of them do. And that combination, there is no one on earth who can drink a bulletproof coffee with 20 or 30 grams of soluble fiber and then look at a donut and want to eat the donut. Like your body's like, it's full, but the fasting mechanism still works.

• 57:30Lewis Howes?

  Can you do the bulletproof and the powder in it, the fiber? And it's all in one and it tastes fine?

• 57:36Dave Asprey?

  It tastes just like a latte.

• 57:38Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 57:39Dave Asprey?

  And that's the trick. Some of, some of the prebiotic fibers are very flavorful and not that good. These are very neutral. So I, I think you should try that. And now people are saying, Dave, that can't be a fast because there was something in there. Well, look at your insulin levels, look at your MTOR levels, look at the mechanics of fasting. And what you realize is, wow, this taught me to be able to go without breakfast. This gave me enough power. And then maybe a month from now, you go, you know what? I'll try it without the fiber or I'll try it without the butter or without the MCT. That's fine, but this is going to teach your body to be flexible and you can do it forever. And maybe some days when you're feeling really strong, I'll just do black coffee. And other days, you know what? I'm a little hungry. Things are off. I'm just going to put everything in there, but I'm still going to get my fast. And I want that kind of freedom for people.

• 58:25Lewis Howes?

  That's powerful, man. Are you saying that the best way to do it is if you're going to do anything is only black coffee and then the MCT and, and ghee and the fiber? If you need a little extra boost?

• 58:38Dave Asprey?

  It depends on your biology. There are some people who for decades, well, not decades, for a decade have done bulletproof coffee most mornings. In fact, I think most people feel the most energy when they do that. But there will be times like today, I didn't do a bulletproof coffee in the morning. I just did black coffee because I didn't have time to throw butter and MCT in the blender. I had a podcast. I'm just going to drink my black coffee, but my metabolism is so strong, it doesn't matter. But you're not going to get to having a strong metabolism if you start out saying, I'm going to do a water only fast, or really likely a black coffee fast. If you're substantially overweight, you haven't tried this before, or you've tried stuff and it hasn't worked, it's okay to use all three hacks to get out the door. It's like going to the track and walking around the track one time. Right? And eventually like I can do it 10 times. It doesn't matter.

• 59:23Dave Asprey?

  And this is the gap why people have a hard time getting started fasting because it just sucks. But you can turn off all the suck with these three hacks and then you dial them back. And some of them like the soluble fiber, there's an argument for having that every day. But see what happens? Don't have it for a week, have it for a week and just play around, have it later in the day. You don't have to do the same every way.

• 59:42Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. I'm curious, a couple of final questions for you.

• 59:47Lewis Howes?

  If you could, you're, you're the king of biohacking, right? You've tried everything.

• 59:52Lewis Howes?

  You know, you do it all. I'm curious if you could only do personally or recommend five biohacks. And that's it. To optimize your energy levels, to live longer, to, to, you know, increase your immune system, to be a happier, healthier human being. And you can only do five things, whether it's wear the glasses, whether it's get a certain amount of sleep, whether it's eat this specific way. If you could only share five things that people could be doing to improve the quality of their life. From the million things that you've tried, what would you say are those five things?

• 1:00:32Dave Asprey?

  All right. Number one is free and it's not fasting and I'm going to start there. It's actually forgiveness.

• 1:00:43Dave Asprey?

  If you can learn the skill and it is a skill you practice, it's a muscle to forgive the grudges that you carry.

• 1:00:52Dave Asprey?

  It will make you live longer.

• 1:00:53Lewis Howes?

  Set you free.

• 1:00:55Dave Asprey?

  Yes. Like that's the thing. I do find it's hard to have enough energy to let go of grudges and to do forgiveness if you're tired and hungry all the time.

• 1:01:03Lewis Howes?

  That's hard.

• 1:01:03Dave Asprey?

  So turning up your energy makes forgiveness easier and it's a core part of my practice. And if you're listening to this, you're going, oh, whatever. No, seriously. If you're still mad at that, whatever, you've got to find the practice that's going to let you not have a charge of it. Cause that charge sucks energy that should go to something good.

• 1:01:19Lewis Howes?

  So much energy. And to add to that, I think people not only learning to forgive other people, learning to forgive yourself for something you did or you didn't do, because I beat myself up. For years with shame and guilt and resentment for myself. Yes, other people, but for the things that I said, did, didn't do, regretted. And holding on to that for yourself, that self inflicted pain is just as horrible in my opinion. Cause it takes the energy and the life from you. So I'm so glad you said forgiveness is number one.

• 1:01:51Dave Asprey?

  Um, I'm going to go on a little bit of a tangent here before we hit the other four. Fast this way is it tells the story of me fasting in a cave for four days. A shaman dropped me off in the desert. And here's one of the big reasons I was terrified of not eating or terrified of being hungry. Because I knew that if I was hungry, that I would become hangry and I would be a total jerk. And I was ashamed of that. And I didn't like it when I didn't have enough energy to manage my emotions and to act like the adult that I wanted to act like. So I was like, if I'm in a cave and I'm by myself and I'm also kind of afraid of being lonely. I know I'm eat when I'm lonely. Um, all there's no people, there's no food anywhere for 10 miles around. I, I kind of went on that spiritual journey and that is in the book along with spiritual fasting.

• 1:02:35Dave Asprey?

  But learning to, to sense that I don't want to act like a jerk, but I do. And then forgive yourself for making mistakes like that. That was a part of what I learned in the cave and it's part of what's in the book. So it's important. Um, and I love how honest you are about that too. And if you're holding a grudge against yourself. So when I do forgiveness, it's you forgive the other person, you forgive the thing that they did. And then you forgive yourself and when you do all three of those and a forgiveness exercise. You get a lot more energy and that is a bio hack that supersedes all the others.

• 1:03:05Lewis Howes?

  That's huge. So forgiveness, number one.

• 1:03:08Dave Asprey?

  Number two, you've got to sleep well, not long, but well. And yeah, I am going to talk about the red glasses. It's a patent that I filed called True Dark. This is one of my companies. So I have a bias and all that. And we're about to release a whole bunch more research about what it does for the brain, but you can make yourself sleep better. If before you go to bed, you dim the lights, you block out your bedroom and you block four different frequencies of light that go into your eyes. The difference is profound. Last night I got two hours of deep sleep and change and two hours of REM sleep in seven hours of sleep. I couldn't do that until I started wearing the glasses.

• 1:03:45Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:03:45Dave Asprey?

  My lights. You have to do that.

• 1:03:46Lewis Howes?

  I gotta start doing that. I think I have a pair, so I have to start just applying it and doing it.

• 1:03:51Dave Asprey?

  Just try it for a week. Just put them on for an hour before bed. There's a new one called the Sunset that has a little bit of a less dark one. I think I sent you the ones for jet lag. There's some that are a little bit lighter, but still block out the right angle and everything. Man, it's

• 1:04:04Lewis Howes?

  I'll have to get the new ones. Yeah, whatever you're wearing, I'll get the

• 1:04:08Dave Asprey?

  Okay, true dark it is. And yeah, I'm not trying to sell anything. So I just make companies who build things that I can't buy. And that's all I do. So, so we got forgiveness, we got sleep.

• 1:04:20Lewis Howes?

  Sleep, yeah.

• 1:04:20Dave Asprey?

  Third one, movement. And the studies are very clear. I know there are a lot of studies on this. You need to walk for 20 minutes a day, some kind of movement. It doesn't have to be crazy. And then once or twice a week, you need to do something for 10 minutes that makes you want to cry or throw up. So squats, pushups, heavy sprints, anything like that, high intensity. You can do more if you want to, but you've got to at least move. And then once or twice a week, push. Okay, so that's

• 1:04:46Lewis Howes?

  Three.

• 1:04:47Dave Asprey?

  Three. And then the other one that I would highly recommend is tell your body that sometimes it has to be able to go to full power generation very quickly. And the easiest way to do that is actually a cold shower or other form of cryotherapy. And this is at the end of your shower, full cold forehead and chest. And

• 1:05:07Lewis Howes?

  Does not have to be on the whole body, but just forehead, chest.

• 1:05:11Dave Asprey?

  It's better that it runs down the body, but the most important sensors are in your forehead and chest.

• 1:05:15Lewis Howes?

  Got it.

• 1:05:15Dave Asprey?

  And you're gonna hate it for the first three days. After three days, the mitochondria change the levels of cardiolipin, and all of a sudden, it's not cold, it just feels exhilarating. But the first three days, you'll hate me. And it's okay to swear in the shower. Dave Asprey's a jerk. And then, so that's four of them. The other biohack. If I could only have five would be neurofeedback. And at this point, Lewis, I've had more than a thousand entrepreneurs come through my neurofeedback program. I would say meditation. So if neurofeedback isn't accessible to you, you can meditate. But if you meditate with a lie detector telling you, no, that didn't work, that worked, that worked, forgiveness becomes easier. Relaxation becomes easier. Knowing when you're in fight or flight becomes easier.

• 1:05:58Dave Asprey?

  And so if you wanted to have more meditation in less time or make more progress in this life than you otherwise would, having something that tells you you're doing a good job that's not you is really helpful because you're always going to tell yourself you did a good job because we all like to hear that, even if it's not true. So I want an external source to tell me that I'm meditating right. And for me, it's neurofeedback. And my company that does that is called 40 Years of Zen. And that's absolutely changed my life because I learned how to actually do forgiveness at a very deep level. Whereas if I say, oh, I forgive that person, but you didn't really. But to go deep, you know what I'm talking about because you've, you've done the work.

• 1:06:32Lewis Howes?

  Yes, yes. Not the fake forgiveness, not the surface level, but the deep forgiveness, which is really challenging if you don't know how to practice it. And if you haven't done it, you know, you never, you never really fully do it until you feel that in a deeper way. And it takes practice, you know, forgiveness takes a lot of time and practice.

• 1:06:51Dave Asprey?

  I realize I, I said something there that could be misinterpreted. When I said you've done the work, that was the work with a capital W, like the work of being a better human being. I wasn't trying to imply you've done the stuff that I'm talking about.

• 1:07:00Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure. Yeah, I'm always doing the work, you know, I've got a long way to improve and lots to overcome still.

• 1:07:06Dave Asprey?

  I have a lot of respect for you, Lewis, because you've, I mean, you've evolved so much. It's, it's beautiful to see.

• 1:07:11Lewis Howes?

  I appreciate it. Got a long way to go. We're here to improve our lives and help other people as well, just like you're doing it bulletproof and everything you're doing, which I want people to get this book. Make sure you guys check it out. Powerful book about fasting, about burning fat, healing inflammation and eating like the high performing human you were meant to be. Fastest way, you can check it out right now. You can get an audible, you can get it on Amazon and you can go to your website, daveasprey.com to check it out. You can go to bulletproof.com to check out other stuff or.

• 1:07:43Dave Asprey?

  Go to fastthisway.com. I've never taught a book, Lewis. There's a two week fasting training where I teach you, you go through a full challenge and it's free. I'm not trying to sell it. I just want people to learn this because it's, it's free. You just have to learn it and then you can do it forever. You'll live longer, you'll be nicer. So fastthisway.com, sign up, my gift.

• 1:08:02Lewis Howes?

  Check that out. You're on social media Bulletproof Exec on Twitter, Dave dot Asprey on Instagram, Bulletproof Executive on Facebook. Uh, where do you hang out the most these days online?

• 1:08:13Dave Asprey?

  I'm probably more on Instagram. I haven't become a TikTok guy. Have you done TikTok yet?

• 1:08:17Lewis Howes?

  I am doing TikTok. I'm getting heavily involved in it. Actually, I mean, my team is actually doing more of it for, for me because we have so much content. So we're putting it on there.

• 1:08:26Dave Asprey?

  Are you like doing the dances where you point at stuff?

• 1:08:28Lewis Howes?

  I'm not, but I, I've done a few things and, and I know, I might actually be doing more this year to test it and see. But I like things that are more evergreen and can live for a long time.

• 1:08:41Dave Asprey?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:41Lewis Howes?

  And TikTok might be deleted tomorrow, might be gone in a year. And so it's trying to figure out how to utilize technology to drive people to something more long form, which is, you know, our podcast or YouTube or whatever. So it's, it's maximizing time and energy for different platforms, which you know all about this too. There's so many different platforms out there now. Um, but this is amazing. And I want people to know, uh, that we've had Dave on a couple of times. So if you want to hear Dave's three truths and his definition of greatness, we'll link that up in the show notes on the previous interviews. So you can learn more about that. Uh, and, and see all of his other great content we've had with him on here. And how else can we support you in this time?

• 1:09:22Dave Asprey?

  Uh, you know, the best thing you could do to support me is learn how to skip breakfast. Uh, intermittent fasting is meant to be a part of most people's lives, at least some of the time. And when you do it, it is going to meaningfully shift the quality of your life and it's going to lower healthcare costs. It's going to make all of us more resilient humans.

• 1:09:38Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:38Dave Asprey?

  That's why it's worth it. And Lewis, thanks for the work you do, man.

• 1:09:42Lewis Howes?

  Of course, of course, man. Yeah. And it's free. I had a Dr. Jason Fung on who talks about fasting as well and how

• 1:09:48Dave Asprey?

  Yeah, he's great.

• 1:09:48Lewis Howes?

  He's helping people, you know, kind of reverse type two diabetes and prevent it. And he's just like, just don't eat, you know, breakfast or just, just don't eat for a day and do that every now and then, and it's free. So I think it's, uh, the research is proving it all. Uh, you've got some great stuff in here. So thank you for this. I appreciate and acknowledge you for constantly being the human guinea pig and testing the craziest things and figuring out what the practical ways that we can apply these things in our life. Uh, so I appreciate and acknowledge you, Dave, for constantly showing up in this way and, and creating great work and great products and programs for people to improve. So thanks for all you do, man.

• 1:10:26Dave Asprey?

  You got it. We will both help a lot of people figure out how to do things that work better than what they're doing now. And I recognize you and come on my show again when you do the next big thing. I'm always happy to share your message with my audience. And thank you for having me on to share this new knowledge with yours.

• 1:10:42Lewis Howes?

  Of course. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did enjoy it, do me a favor right now. Click the subscribe button on Apple Podcasts right now to get notified of the greatest minds that bring their wealth of information to the show every single week. So you can stay notified up to date on this incredible podcast. Click subscribe there or Spotify or anywhere that you listen and make sure to spread this message to someone that you care about, a friend, a family member, a colleague, just text them the link lewishouse.com/1084 or copy and paste the link wherever you're listening to your podcast right now. And if at any moment you thought that you've got value out of this, then please leave us a rating and review and let us know the part that you enjoyed the most. We'd love reading those reviews and

• 1:11:25Lewis Howes?

  seeing what part of these episodes that helped you and inspired you the most. And also, if you want inspirational messages sent to your phone from me, every single week, I text my texting community, it's free. Just text the word podcast to 614-350-3960. Again, text me the word podcast right now, 614-350-3960. And I want to leave you with this quote from cartoonist Charles Schultz, who said, "There is no heavier burden than an unfulfilled potential." And I know you've got so much potential inside of you. There's so much more you can create, do, and become, but you've got to be willing to take the steps necessary. And the first step is having the right information and tools that you can apply in your daily life. So make sure you're using these tools,

• 1:12:08Lewis Howes?

  you're actually applying them in your life towards your goals, towards your potential, because you've got so much inside of you. I know you do. And if no one's told you lately, you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And you know what time it is? It's time to go out there and do something great.