Dave Asprey on Fasting and Optimizing Your Life | You Just Had A Scare

Ryan reads today’s meditation and talks to Dave Asprey about his new book Fast This Way, the benefits of intermittent fasting, how to optimize your life to maximize both physical and mental performance, and more. Dave Asprey is the founder of Bulletproof & known as the ‘Father of Biohacking’. He is a four-time New York Times bestselling science author, host of the Webby award-winning podcast Bulletproof Radio, and has been featured on the Today Show, CNN, The New York Times, Dr. Oz, and more. Blinkist is the app that gets you fifteen-minute summaries of the best nonfiction books out there. Blinkist lets you get the topline information and the most important points from the most important nonfiction books out there, whether it’s Ryan’s own The Daily Stoic, Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, and more. Go to blinkist.com/stoic, try it free for 7 days, and save 25% off your new subscription, too. Ladder makes the process of getting life insurance quick and easy. To apply, you only need a phone or laptop and a few minutes of time. Ladder’s algorithms work quickly and you’ll find out almost immediately if you’re approved. Go to ladderlife.com/stoic to see if you’re instantly approved today. Streak is a fully embedded workflow and productivity software in Gmail that lets you manage all your work right in your inbox. Sign up for Streak today at Streak.com/stoic and get 20% off your first year of their Pro Plan. DECKED truck bed tool boxes and cargo van storage systems revolutionize organization with a heavy-duty in-vehicle storage system featuring slide out toolboxes. DECKED makes organizing, accessing, protecting, and securing everything you need so much easier. Get your DECKED Drawer System at Decked.com/STOIC and get free shipping. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookFollow Dave Asprey: Homepage, Twitter, Instagram, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

• 0:47Ryan Holiday?

  You just had a scare. We can think about what would change if we found out we had cancer. We can think about what it would be like to see one of our kids in the hospital with tubes coming out of their nose. We can think about the anguish of waiting to hear from the authorities, was our spouse involved in that car crash? Or we can imagine what we'd be thinking in those moments when the news was finally delivered, our hopes, our life flashing before us, the prayers, the promises, the bucket list of everything we'd do if we could just get through this okay. And it's important for you to realize that this exercise, this Stoic practice of memento mori, it is not just hypothetical. Not anymore, anyway.

• 1:31Ryan Holiday?

  You just lived through a year-long version of it. You're living through it right now. There is a deadly pandemic floating in the air, accumulating in the invisible aerosol particles that have claimed the lives of millions. It's been in rooms you have been in. It's been inhaled by people you have passed on the street, just as they've exhaled. It's been incubated in and transmitted from people you've hugged, people you've served as part of your job. Maybe it's even been inside you. Maybe you got COVID, a serious case or a mild one. Everyone reading this, everyone listening... Listening to this, however, has something in common. You survived.

• 2:14Ryan Holiday?

  Maybe you were aware of how close you came. Maybe you had no idea. Maybe you refused to see it. It's true, though. You dodged death. We all did. Do not ignore this brush with mortality. Think on it. Instead, learn from it. Let it sober you up. Keep those promises you would have made had the direness of the situation been clearer or closer to you change because of this. As Marcus Aurelius said to himself during the plague that dominated his own time, "Imagine that you nearly died." Because it's true. Now take what's left of your life and live it properly. This memento mori thing we talk about, and we've been talking about it for years.

• 2:59Ryan Holiday?

  Again, it's not theoretical. We just went through it. You just vividly saw how life can change in an instant. How time can be taken from us. How people can be taken from us. How easily it could have been 10, 100, 1,000 times worse, as it was for Marcus Aurelius in the Antonine Plague, which, you know, many people think he ultimately succumbed to. This idea of memento mori, I'm holding my memento mori coin right now. You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. This is what Stoicism is about. I mean, look, there's even a book, an edition of Seneca's writings called How to Die. This stuff is real. Take it seriously.

• 3:43Ryan Holiday?

  If you want a reminder, go to store.dailystoic.com. But, but just write it down on a piece of paper. I don't care. The point is, memento mori, you could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. Ignore that at your peril.

• 3:59Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I think I mentioned this, that I'm hard at work on the next book, but I'm also putting the final touches on the book that comes out before that. This is the Courage is Calling book, which I'm very excited about. But these are the last days before it goes off to the printers. I go off to my studio to do some.

• 4:24Ryan Holiday?

  Some audiobook recording. One of the nice parts about doing the podcast, I now have my own little studio here, so I don't have to go into a studio. I didn't do it for Lives of the Stoic. I didn't go into a studio because it's the middle of a pandemic. And now, I don't want to spend three days commuting somewhere to record. I want to do it in the privacy of my own house and at my leisure. So I'm going to record the audiobook for Courage is Calling. But I'm already hard at work on the next book in the series, which will be about temperance. And as it happens, that's a theme in today's conversation with the one and only Dave Asprey, founder of the Bulletproof Diet, Bulletproof Coffee. I've known of his stuff for a very long time. I've taken a bunch of his stuff. I know

• 5:08Ryan Holiday?

  my wife loves a bunch of his stuff. We met each other for the first time, I believe, at Jason Gaynor's Mastermind Talks there in, I think the first one was in Toronto, and then he did one in Ojai that I went to. So anyways, I've gotten to know Dave over the years. He's been nice enough to have me on his podcast several times. He's a fan of Perennial Seller, and he's been very generous to me and his platform. But the new book, Fast This Way: How to Lose Weight, Get Smarter, Live Your Longest, Healthiest Life with the Bulletproof Guide to Fasting, I wanted to talk about because fasting is, although sort of a modern trend, obviously goes way back. There is, as we talked about

• 5:52Ryan Holiday?

  in the episode, both a sort of health component to fasting, but also a spiritual component to fasting, and I think a philosophical part. There's a reason that fasting tends to be a part of some of those sort of vision quests, or purification rituals that people might go through. And we talk about all that. I do intermittent fasting, so Dave gave me some great advice that I think will be helpful to you. If you haven't tried fasting,

• 6:21Ryan Holiday?

  Look, for me, it was certainly a breakthrough. It's an important part of my routine, as I've talked about quite a bit, because it just makes me think less about food, makes me more regimented about food, sort of contains the role that food plays in my life. And that's what we get into in today's episode. Dave is a longtime Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur, professional biohacker, New York Times bestselling author of now four books, Game Changers, Headstrong, The Bulletproof Diet, and of course, Fast This Way. He's the host of Bulletproof Radio, his podcast, and like me, he lives out in the country in Victoria, British Columbia.

• 7:01Ryan Holiday?

  So at the end, we nerd out about country life, which the Epicureans said was an important part of our philosophical pursuits. So here is my conversation with the one and only Dave Asprey. Hope you enjoy it. So I do intermittent fasting-ish, not at the level that you're at. So I'll start where I am, and then maybe you can sort of walk me through. You always take these things to the elite level. You can tell me what I'm not doing well and what I should do better. Cool. So basically, my day is, I wake up around like 6:00-ish.

• 7:44Ryan Holiday?

  I work out, usually a walk or a run. I don't eat until 10:30 or 11:00. And then that's like my one meal. Maybe I have a light snack in the middle of the day. Then I have dinner with the kids between 5:00 and 6:00. So I'm usually done eating at 6:00. And I usually do kind of like a second workout in the evening, or if I haven't done the first big workout, then I work out again. And then that's it for my eating window. So I basically do like two, two and a half meals a day, and my eating window is 10:30 to 11:00, from 10:30, 11:00 to 5:00 to 6:00 P.M.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Okay, so you're finishing dinner at six. So you're basically going, you're eating between 11 and six, which is a seven hour eating window, right?

• 8:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. So like 16 ish hours of fasting, basically.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Okay. So you're doing a classic 16, eight, or maybe a 17, seven. But honestly, who's counting? Like the small differences don't, don't matter.

• 8:45Ryan Holiday?

  And I, and I love it. It was a total game changer for me in the sense that I used to think about food a lot, and I would just eat a lot more because I could eat a lot more. And I found, like, I do all my writing in the morning, and I actually have found, one, by not having a meal that I have to eat in the morning, it allows me to go like, right into what I have to do without like a, just logistically, like the time it takes to eat. So I like that. But I, I've just found that I'm also more focused and locked in before I eat. Like when I give a talk, I don't, I never eat before the talk because I find that it's not that the hunger is good, but the, the opposite of hunger, like being full, doesn't seem to get good performance from me.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  It turns out it doesn't get good performance from anyone. And so this idea of breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It, it actually doesn't work. So if you wanted to do really good writing, stuff your face and sit down to write, at least for me, I haven't written as many books as you, and I actually think you're a better writer than I am, but only four near here. And I'm not saying that to kiss your ass. I actually, like, you're one of my favorite writers. So there's that. But you know the cognitive load when you go into the writing zone.

• 9:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Look, some percentage of your, of your energy goes into digesting food. And it can be like 30% of the energy that's in a steak gets eaten up just digesting the steak. And that means blood flow and electron flow that could have gone into thinking goes into your gut. And a lot of systems in the body shift. When you have nothing in your stomach. Some, and this gets a little bit esoteric, but some energy goes into looking at the environment differently. And this is very subtle energy. So imagine there's all these ancient bacteria running your body, your mitochondria. They're not just power plants.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  They're environmental sensors that make individual decisions about what to do based on what they think is happening. And when you combine those quadrillion sensors, all their input, all their little network decision making, it eventually rolls up and then you get to experience all that about a quarter second after it actually happened. And they'll make sure you jump if something scary happens within that quarter second window, but they'll jump and then you'll take credit for the jump afterwards. A lot of this is tied to the ego as well. So what's happening is if they're going, hey, there's no food in here, maybe we should turn our sensors outward and we should be more open. And this is why if you go for a walk, when you're fasted in nature, you sense the forest differently. And I think when you're doing a supreme act of creation, that you channel things differently,

• 11:27Speaker 01

  like your brain works differently because you're looking at the world as in what's here in the world for me versus if you're already full, you're more internally focused, which is maybe not where you want to be when you're writing.

• 11:38Ryan Holiday?

  That makes sense. So, so it's, I also just find that, that I'm not like, you know, you can kind of get sleepy after you eat, depending on what you eat, that there's also just none of that. So it's like, I want to do the important things before sort of food is interacting with my mind.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  I think you're onto a really good track there. And I do it exactly the same way. I can't imagine writing on a full stomach or giving, you know, a Tony Robbins level, you know, you're on a big stage somewhere. It's just not for me, a good idea to have lunch right beforehand.

• 12:16Ryan Holiday?

  No, and I think like, if you were an athlete, like if you're a basketball player, you know, sometimes they'll have like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich beforehand. You're using so, such an inhuman amount of energy. I think that probably is a different scenario than, than the sort of. What most of us are doing, which is like knowledge work or needing to focus or needing to be alert, I don't think you want, you know, so you have a big meal, you get, you can have that crash afterwards. You don't want that while you're trying to do something.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  No, you don't want it athletically. You don't want it cognitively. And for an athlete, what's ideal is that you're full of energy, but your stomach is empty.

• 12:55Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  So that's how, what did you eat how long before? And then what are the two fastest sources of energy that you can get? One of them surprisingly is MCT in small droplets. You blend it into coffee, maybe. The other one obviously is sugar or carbohydrates. And so a lot of, especially endurance athletes who've, or high altitude athletes who've endorsed or embraced is probably a better word, the bulletproof idea there, they'll start out in keto and then halfway through a marathon or something, they'll kick over to glucose. Because you just got to be able to get enough energy in because you're combining air and food. When we're dealing with it cognitively, you probably don't need to go to glucose.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  But if you were, say, giving a three hour talk and, you know, a super high energy talk where you're whipping up a crowd, two hours in, you know, if you had something with a little bit of glucose in it, I wouldn't blame you and it would probably help your brain. You get short-term boosts, but you don't get a long-term boost from glucose. So there's an argument there.

• 13:56Ryan Holiday?

  So walk me through the history of fasting then. Because what's fascinating about, to me, about fasting is that it's both sort of, there's like a performance argument for it and a diet argument for it. But there's also, you know, sort of going way back, like a spiritual element to it, which I guess doing it regularly, the way that I do it, I don't experience, but obviously it's sort of entwined with it.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  The spiritual history of fasting goes back as long as there's been humans. And one of the chapters in Fast This Way, I went back and did that kind of deep research on it, maybe not to the level that you or Robert Greenwood, but to a pretty deep level and look at, there's Jewish traditions, there's traditions in the Muslim world, there are traditions in ancient Christianity and shamanism. And what you find is

• 14:54Speaker 01

  That that thing I mentioned earlier with sensors opening up, they're a part of getting into certain spiritual states, things like samadhi, which is a state described in India, but a state people experience where you become one with the universe. And it's hard to do it with a full stomach because of that sensor network. What's missing in popular culture, though, is we say, oh, fasting equals suffering. And sometimes there is suffering on a spiritual fast. If you're doing a vision quest, the way I did in a cave where a shaman drops you off in the desert, you're not going to see anyone or any food for four days. You know, you're going to face your hunger, you're going to face your fears, you're going to face the loneliness and do what you're going to do.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  And that's not what fasting is for, for most people listening to this right now. There is a working fast, which is what you do, where it's a performance enhancer and a time saver and a money saver. And there is a spiritual fast, which is when you actually rest, you journal, you do not exercise, you might go for a walk, but you don't push yourself hard. And you do it for a longer period of time. And that's when you're using all that energy to do your work, to your personal development work. So when you have those two ideas mixed up and you're trying to use spiritual fasting techniques, or you're doing it and you're overexerting yourself physically, and you're saying, I wonder why I'm having such a hard time this week, and I'm hangry and I'm hypoglycic,

• 16:18Speaker 01

  I have a headache, and this is not what I wanted. Well, okay, it's time to say, performance was the goal, how do I fast for performance? You found a pretty good way. I have some concerns about your exercise timing with food that we can get into.

• 16:31Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  But you're you're doing it in a in a really good way. I also wonder if doing it every single day, including Saturday and Sunday, is serving you, or if you should shake it up, because if you teach the body to always expect the same thing, it doesn't always work. So I have breakfast Saturday morning, I have brunch with with my family specifically, so I don't always get used to not having breakfast. That metabolic flexibility is important. So, you know, have some have some gluten free muffins on Saturday morning.

• 16:59Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I have a million questions now. So first off, what was the word you said, trisoclyblici or blici? Say that again.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Hypoglyblici.

• 17:08Ryan Holiday?

  Well, that's like hangry, but more scientific.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Pretty much. It's hypoglycemia is when you get low blood sugar, which makes you act like a jerk.

• 17:15Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  Right? And I describe myself that way, because, man, when I weighed 300 pounds. If I didn't eat six times a day, I was afraid. That's one of the reasons I had them put me in a cave to fast. I turned into such a jerk that I didn't want to be around coworkers. And I ended a meeting once in my mid twenties and it was my meeting with 10 people. And I said, guys, it's 11:45. I know we're supposed to go till noon, but if I don't eat right now, I'm going to have to eat one of you. So I'll meet you in the cafeteria. And I just walked out of the room because I couldn't hack it. And I look at that and I kind of roll my eyes. I was younger. I should have been healthier and stronger than I am now. But now I could go two days of meetings without eating and I'd be just fine.

• 17:58Ryan Holiday?

  It is funny with kids, you realize, especially young kids, like 90% of all behavioral issues, it's just that their like food routine has been messed up in some way. And they're hangry and that here, if you give them a squeezy pack, they'll chill the hell out. But I love that word. That's great. I think hangry is the root of, you know, most conflict in the modern world.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  I think you're on to something there. I mean, there's always the role of past trauma and all that. But one of the things that I think ties back to Stoicism is the root algorithm for how all life on earth works, including us. I think that's worth talking about. It's definitely in the book. Is that worth covering quickly?

• 18:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, of course. We can talk about everything you want.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  All right. So imagine that you're playing a video game. What are those SimCity type of games? And you're going to create a life form that can live forever. And it's single celled. So what are the things it has to do to stay alive forever, for billions of years? Well, the first thing you would have to do is run away from, kill, or hide from scary things. And it's fear. It has to have a defense system. So that's because you lose in the first round of the game if something comes along and eats you. So there you go. First effort is fear. And that gets 10 times more energy and focus than it really needs. And the second thing that you have to do is you have to eat everything.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  Because famines and lack of fuel kill most animals, most species, most of the time. If you look at the, over the course of years or decades or generations, including humans, you go back 10 generations, a lot of our potential ancestors died of famine. So it's wired into us to eat everything. And this is why when you're not paying attention, you'll take a bite of whatever is in front of you. And so let's say that gets five times more energy than is really necessary. So those are the first two F-words. Fear is 10, food is 5. What's the third thing all life has to do to stay around forever that's an F-word? Ryan, you can get this one.

• 19:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, F-U-C-K.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  I was thinking fertility. Good God, man. I love that one. So yeah, you said it right. And that is going to get about three times more attention than it needs. Because your cells believe that if you don't have sex with everything that you could have sex with, that the end of the species might happen. Because remember, they're small little cells. They don't know time, they don't know context, they don't know you have a refrigerator, they don't know there's billions of people on the planet. They just know I'm playing the game according to these three rules. And there's a fourth F-word that comes after that, which is friend. And all life does it. You form a community, you take care of your elders, you form a biofilm, you make kombucha, you make a forest, you make a herd, you make an ecosystem.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  So interoperability is part of it, but it comes after the first three F-words. And then you look at stoicism, you're like, oh, wait. Are we dealing with the interchange between our prefrontal cortex, the part of us that we identify as ourselves, and this automated ancient defense system? Yeah. And hangry and hypoglycemic, when that system says, I don't have enough food here, it immediately triggers the fear thing and you stop paying attention to the friend thing. And that's why we end up acting like jerks when we're hungry, unless we're trained to be hungry.

• 21:22Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 21:31Ryan Holiday?

  I was thinking about this because the book that I'm working on now is about this idea of temperance or self-discipline. I love it. And what I think is, all the things that you just talked about, if you really think about what it was like to be primitive man, part of the reason we have those sort of adaptions or those urges or those sort of insatiabilities is that the things were relatively rare. Like, how many berries you have to eat to get like in a large load of sugar, you know, compared to like what you can get in one Skittle, you know, is immense, right? So like, our relationship to sex or to food, or even

• 22:12Ryan Holiday?

  to like, any kind of sort of pleasure, comes from this idea, this biological understanding, that generally, these things are quite rare, and you should get them while they're here. And so the virtue of temperance really, not only does it exist, but it's most essential in societies or environments of plenty. And we live in, you know, an environment beyond plenty. It's almost like preposterous abundance. And so, so it's like, where, where natural difficulty or obstacles might have created discipline or, or, or

• 22:55Ryan Holiday?

  temperance before, what I think you talk about and what I talk about is like, no, now this has to be a deliberate, intentional thing, because you can have as much sex as you want, or eat as much as you want, or whenever you want, in a way that, that would have just been like, literally impossible, before Tinder made it as easy as swiping on your phone, or DoorDash made it as easy as having it delivered directly to you.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Temperance is a really interesting, really interesting word. And you look at where temper comes from, it's what you do with steel and a fire. You know, it's a brief period of exposure to heat and then cold is how you temper steel, which makes it harder. And what we're talking about in a lot of this is what I call slope of the curve biology. And it's a new theory, but it says the body responds more quickly and more adaptively when the speed of the change is increased rather than the volume of the change. And this is why high intensity interval training works better for creating change quickly than a larger amount of slower running, for instance.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  So what's happening with temperance there is it's teaching the body to be able to handle stresses for brief periods of time without freaking out. And one of those stresses is hunger. And there are other things like, oh, being in a sauna for longer than you want. In fact, I talk about fasting as the real definition of fasting is to go without. And you can fast from sex, you can fast from porn, you can fast from hate, which is the hardest possible fast.

• 24:32Ryan Holiday?

  Or outrage, yeah, the emotions that stir you up.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. And to say, I'm going to go four hours without thinking a bad thought about myself or other people. Try that one. That is a seriously hard fast to do. And what you realize is that the word need comes up in your head so much. I need to eat. Oh, it's lunchtime, I'm starving. Actually, it takes you 90 days to starve. So there's some kind of a program in there that's telling us we need all sorts of stuff we don't need. And need means you'll die if you don't get it. And it's that same system where you lean on a hot stove, you pull your hand away, but you didn't decide to pull your hand away, it just pulled itself away. I think it's that weird fine line of arguing between that system that pulls your hand away from something that would have caused real harm, and that same system when it pulls

• 25:20Speaker 01

  you towards things that are not of service to you. And temperance is the ability to sit down and say, hmm. I'm just not going to feel stress or anxiety when I get that sensation. And suddenly that sensation goes away because your body realizes it didn't need it in the first place.

• 25:37Ryan Holiday?

  I'll give you Marcus Aurelius's definition of temperance that he is applying to his adopted stepfather, Antoninus, which I think you will like. He doesn't quite say bulletproof, but he says something close. He says, "You could have said of him, as they say of Socrates, that he knew how to enjoy and abstain from things that most people find it hard to abstain from and all too easy to enjoy. Strength, perseverance, self-control in both areas, the mark of a soul in readiness, indomitable."

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 26:12Ryan Holiday?

  I feel like that's the wavelength that you're talking about.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  It's exactly the wavelength. And I want to say thanks on your show to you because I was writing Fast This Way during people, kids being sent home from school and no playdates and all sorts of pandemic stuff. So my son was 10 at the time and every morning he'd come and we'd sit in my infrared sauna and we would read one page or one section of the Daily Stoic.

• 26:43Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, wow.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  And so every morning we'd read that and several quotes from it, I credit you in the book, several quotes from it in the book are from your translations of these. So thank you for that because it really helped, especially being 10 years old and we just needed some father-son time and it gave us something to focus on when we were doing it. And I know it influenced some of what I was writing, so thank you.

• 27:04Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I'm going to send you, I did this kid's book about Marcus that I'll send you for your son. What's your son's name?

• 27:10Speaker 01

  His name's Alan with one L.

• 27:13Ryan Holiday?

  One L?

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:14Ryan Holiday?

  All right, I'm going to send this to you. But I think when you were talking about fasting earlier, one of the things that you were saying that it's sort of about suffering on the spiritual side, what to me is so interesting about the work fasting that you're talking about, the working fast, is it's weirdly decreased suffering.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  A lot.

• 27:33Ryan Holiday?

  So I used to wake up hungry and you do wake up hungry a little bit when you start fasting because it's different. Anytime is different, there's tension or adjustment, but I found that like... You know, when I used to eat breakfast, if you told me that I was pushing breakfast till 11, I'd have been hungry. Now, it's like my body just knows this is when food happens. And I, I just don't seem to need it in the morning. So it's, it's had this weird effect of like, just shrinking the amount of time and energy and like, pining that I feel for food in general, by, by putting it in this box. Not in like a, I mean, I'm sure people with anorexia or bulimia are also putting their eating habits in a, in a box. So I'm,

• 28:16Ryan Holiday?

  it's how you do it that matters. But by sort of shrinking it from like, anytime you want to like, here's the window, it's been really helpful.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  That, that works really well. And the difference is that you're doing it because it's liberating. And if you're doing it because you can't, or out of a sense of, of shame or being good, that's when you're going into the, the sense of, of an eating disorder. And the thing to know about intermittent fasting is you don't have to do it the same way every day. In fact, I would tell you that if you lifted really heavy yesterday, and you went for a run, and you had an emotionally stressful day, you know, fight with family or whatever, and you woke up feeling a little bit hungover and your sleep score was low, if you tracked your sleep, I would say have some protein and some fat at breakfast. Have three meals that day. And you'll actually recover much better. And, and so maybe tomorrow

• 29:09Speaker 01

  you do a 12 hour fast. And then most days you do a 17 hour fast. And that's kind of what I do. The vast majority of the time, I'm around 16 to 18 hours, just like you. But some days, like, man, I just felt like garbage this morning. Something I ate wasn't quite right. I'm gonna have breakfast. Or like, today, I'm really sore. I ran electricity over my whole body. Like, all of my muscles are sore and growing. And so I'm probably only gonna do a 13 hour fast today. And I'm gonna have an extra bunch of protein because my body needs it. So there's, there's that trade off between putting it in a box and then saying, you know, I put it in a box, but today the box didn't fit right. And just being cool with it, where either way, you still got a bunch of benefits. And then not, not doing that slippery

• 29:52Speaker 01

  slope over time where you suddenly as well, I actually went back to only, you know, having breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks, because I slowly, you know, let the kettle get warm.

• 30:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  And then suddenly I'm in boiling water. So having a box where you're like, that's where I usually live. That works.

• 30:08Ryan Holiday?

  No, I think there, there certainly the variability is important. I just find like, it's easier just to sort of, I'm much more of like a consistent person. Like I write the same way. I like it consistent. But I think what was most compelling to me, and I think it's worth pointing out to people listening, is like, you should never let something like intermittent fasting, or this is my routine, or whatever, get in the way of spending time with family. I was reading this book about Queen Elizabeth II. And, you know, she's obviously a big stickler for protocol. This is what the queen does. And there's this famous story where Prince Charles, she's been gone for like seven months, traveling the world. And, you know, he's meeting her on the royal yacht. And, you know, he rushes

• 30:52Ryan Holiday?

  up. And the way the queen is supposed to, you know, land is she's supposed to say hi to these, you know, dignitaries and then embrace her family. And her son, who's like five rushes up not knowing this. And she sort of pushes him away and says, not you, dear. And then, you know, first shakes all these people's hand before embracing their child. To me, the moral of that story, and apparently Prince Charles, one of the titles of a chapter in Prince Charles memoir is not you, dear, because this was such an emotionally scarring moment. But, but the point is, like, if it's a Saturday morning, and I normally don't eat till 10:30, but everyone in the house is sitting down to have breakfast at nine, like, you're being a real idiot if you deprive yourself of that opportunity for

• 31:36Ryan Holiday?

  connection and, and experience, because you're like, oh, I, now you've taken rigidity and you've made it fragility, and you're missing the point.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Well said. And if you're doing a multi-day fast, or you have something really big, you can sit down and have a cup of coffee and be social and be connected. But I tell you, even then, if your young children made you pancakes for the first time, you eat the damn pancakes.

• 32:03Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Because that's what you do.

• 32:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, I love that. Right. And if you can't do it, it's a sign that you might be veering in. Okay, look, if you're a professional athlete and you're training for weigh-in at your fight, of course, again, exceptions.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  There are exceptions.

• 32:19Ryan Holiday?

  But if you can't make exceptions for important things, you've probably veered into the unhealthy coping mechanism territory as opposed to using this strategy of fasting to be better.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  There you go. There's another part of fasting in that we just assume you're supposed to be hungry and that you're supposed to suffer. And what I found over the last 10 years of working with people doing intermittent fasting is it's a core part of the bulletproof diet, which I first put online in 2011. So there's just a lot of experience with this. It was one of the earlier intermittent fasting books of this generation. I'm sure there's some, I interviewed someone who's been intermittent fasting for 50 years on my show recently. So it's not like we're the first people ever to think of this in this generation. But what I found was that the biggest thing that drives hunger during a fast is what you ate for your last meal.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  And so many people eat food that's not compatible with their biology. And if you wake up really hungry in the morning, I promise you that it was your dinner that did that. Or maybe you have some sort of infection or some other thing going on, but it's usually dinner. So fasting teaches you to notice, oh, wow, my biology is off a little bit. Let me see what I might have done that was the trigger. And I point out a bunch of the common triggers in the book, and then I tell you what to do. And so, A, someone who's primed to say, I have to suffer to be good, to be a proper faster, I'm just going to muscle through it. Well, you're already muscling through your day. So there's I call them three fasting hacks, but things you can do during a fast to increase

• 34:04Speaker 01

  energy or turn off hunger that don't break the biochemistry of a fast. And at this point, about 70,000 people have done my fasting challenge where I spend a couple of weeks training them for free on how to do this. So if you wake up and say, today, I'm not going to be able to go through the day, what do you do that still lets you go through the day and perform at the level that life requires? And that's new in the world of fasting, saying, how do you mimic a fast? There's a guy who has a fasting mimicking diet with some bars, one of the guys who studied it most, Walter Longo. And then there's the approach that I take that says, well, a protein is going to break a fast.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  And almost all carbohydrates will break a fast, but smaller amounts of fat don't break a fast. So if you were to have some fat all by itself, your body still thinks you're fasting.

• 34:58Ryan Holiday?

  Like, what's an example of that?

• 34:59Speaker 01

  Well, the most famous one is what I'm well-known for, that bulletproof coffee thing. But I will tell you, if you were to blend grass-fed butter, even if you didn't use MCT oil into tea or even hot water, what you're going to find is that really suppresses hunger. Even coffee, just by itself, black coffee or a strong green tea, caffeine doubles ketone production all by itself, a study out of UC San Diego. So if you were to wake up and say to them, I'm not having breakfast, I'm going to have coffee without artificial sweeteners, without sugar, and without milk, then, wow, that alone will help to suppress hunger. Because when ketone levels go up, they go up when you fast, and then coffee accelerates that.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  As ketones go up, hunger goes down via two different mechanisms. So suddenly, you didn't suffer as much during your fast, and you got to have a cup of coffee. And then you say, okay, today is going to be a really high energy day. Maybe I add a little bit of fat to that, especially if I'm a new faster, because it makes metabolic flexibility easy. The body says, I've got nothing to do here but burn some fat. Let me learn how to do that. And then for other people with gut issues, you can take prebiotic fiber, which is a carb that you can't digest, but makes good gut bacteria farm. You can have that during a fast. Since your body can't digest it, it says, I guess I didn't get anything. But your gut bacteria transform that into pro ketogenic molecules. So these are three things that are shown in many studies

• 36:25Speaker 01

  to suppress hunger and give you energy without breaking a fast. And we have permission to use those because of our job is to show up and not be hangry today and to be able to handle both whatever work brings us and kids bouncing around the house. And I know you have a farm. We just got our first cow this year. We've had about 25 sheep, 25 pigs. And okay, you got to manage those guys. And if an eagle's eating the chickens, you got to deal with that. So life brings whatever. And if you're saying, well, I was trying to intermittent fast today and I'm new to fasting and I'm already weak and shaky, maybe you should use a hack to get yourself so that you got the results you wanted and you still didn't let anything get eaten on your farm.

• 37:07Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 37:14Ryan Holiday?

  Sure, sure. It seems like at the core of obviously fasting, but then your bulletproof stuff. Maybe it sounds like we're on the same wavelength also that it's like, it's all about how you start the day. That sort of well begun is half done. You know, that if you start the day off strong, if you get the morning right, a lot, a lot of stuff can flow out of that. But if you fuck up the morning, you're unlikely to get control later in the day.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  You know, I used to really oppose what you just said.

• 37:51Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, interesting.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Because I am biologically wired to be a night owl. Most of my books are written between, oh, 10:30 or 11:00 PM and 3:00 or 5:00 AM. That is when the magic zone for me happens. And I've learned how to write under all red lights so I don't break my circadian biology. But I was wired to be one of the people who stayed up at night. I was the night guard and about 15% of people are wired that way. And so I was sort of rejecting this early bird thing. But what I didn't understand was that I could use food and light exposure. And there's actually a chapter in the book about that to move my circadian window. Because the body listens to light first and food timing second. So there's a way to become more of a morning person.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  So I wake up at about 6:30, 6:40 every morning now naturally, which is something I've never been able to do my whole life. And so part of it was the timing, but then what do you do in the morning? And I'd say, well, I got to drop the kids off at school and I'm at least not going to turn on my phone on until that's handled. So it was all family time, but it wasn't getting myself in order. I've been following the work of Dr. Barry Morgellon, who's the only guy with permission to actually teach and write Lautzus' oral lineage for 5,000 years. He's a former UCLA surgeon who's about 70, who teaches this stuff. And he's been telling me for years, Dave, you need to just wake up and write your goals first thing in the morning.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  Do these little exercise things, listen to meditation. And I've been doing it for the past, oh, year and a half. And the difference of sitting down and writing out your goals first thing in the morning, before anything else happens and doing a little bit of movement to get fully in your body. I think I was missing out. That will be a permanent part of my practice going forward. In your case, you're definitely waking up and you're going for your walk and your run, which is part of it. But what else do you do in the morning?

• 39:49Ryan Holiday?

  I do the journaling. I do, you know, I'm. It's mostly the journaling and then I go straight into, if I drive to my office, that's about sort of 20 minutes of like music or whatever. And then I go straight into like, whatever the main creative task of the day is.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  I think for a creator, that is the best way to do it because you're putting all your energy there. I have a very carefully managed and optimized calendar. So I basically say, don't talk to me before 10.

• 40:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 40:23Speaker 01

  So I get my upgrades out of the way. I oftentimes write some of my content, but half my life is not creator. It's executive, managing a team at Upgrade Labs. We're about to start franchising.

• 40:36Ryan Holiday?

  Paul Graham talks about maker versus manager. The reality is a lot of us these days are both.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:42Ryan Holiday?

  And but I do think if you're trying to do both simultaneously, or you're flipping between the two, you're going to do both of them poorly. So I try to-

• 40:51Speaker 01

  You can't flip.

• 40:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I try to, I try to do maker stuff in the morning when you're fresh and focused and before the day has intruded. And then the manager stuff, you know, as the second half of the day, like we're recording this in the afternoon. I guess it's technically maker stuff, but it's more like it's, it's, it's not deep work in the way that writing or coming up with a plan or, you know, trying to make a hard decision is, is knowledge work.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  Thinking of what you're going to say next as a, as a good interviewer is way less work than synthesizing a new idea and choosing the perfect language for it. I'm 100% with you. In fact, writing, it's losing, it's losing out now because of social media. Like I used to write a 3,000 word blog post with 15 science recommendations. But honestly, if you just dumb it down and write a 400 word Instagram post with a picture.

• 41:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  That's what people are following and it's a lot less work to do that. But something is lost there because it took- You know, five or six hours to write that blog post for me. But people don't want to read that stuff anymore. I'm glad books are still popular.

• 42:03Ryan Holiday?

  Well, no, and I would also argue that like, if you want to go back to this idea of what's sort of Lindy or lasted longer, it's like the skill to sit down and write something long for, and this is a, this is a, you know, renewing this for 5,000 years, like a short little thing with a picture, this is like a relatively new skill. And so I think people are often abandoning the sort of timeless and we're abandoning one medium for the easier medium. And it's good for you in the short term, maybe it gets you more reach, but in the long run, you're losing, you're letting atrophy really important muscles. And so, um, yeah, I think, uh, I think it can be really easy to do what's getting the

• 42:48Ryan Holiday?

  validation, but you have to think about like, what's going to last, what's going to stand the test of time, what's gonna, what's gonna work. And I would argue that, uh, this is something I was going to ask you about. As someone who's like, sort of always interested in like new trends and a lot of what, a lot of what you talk about runs counter to conventional wisdom, right? Or, or conventional sort of beliefs about health or diet. Has it been interesting to you to watch certain people in your community over the last year with this pandemic, where we're now faced with some real scientific stuff, kind of spin off the planet? You know, like, it's almost like the contrarian-ness that they developed, questioning what, you

• 43:32Ryan Holiday?

  know, big pharma or, or the sort of, uh, the food industry wants you to think, has made it hard for them to take like a real thing seriously. Do you know what I mean?

• 43:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. It, it's been fascinating to me and I, I wrote a, a post recently that was really popular. And I said, guys, I'm, I'm coming out as being vi-curious.

• 43:59Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  That's vaccine industry curious. And I just have to confess, I interviewed the CEO of a company making mRNA vaccines before the pandemic because they're working on vaccines for Alzheimer's and cancer and diabetes. And I'm really interested in that. I think this might be a core part of anti-aging and longevity and biohacking in the future. So I'm not an anti-vaxxer. And I'm also not what I was looking for the counter term to anti-vaxxer and it's vaccine promiscuous. Just like, I'm not going to do any research. Like, as long as a drug company says it's good, I'm going to do it. Because the drug companies don't have a great track record of telling the truth. Pfizer paid a

• 44:43Speaker 01

  $10 billion or $10 billion worth of fines over the last 10 years for hiding information. So I'm like, as a thinking person, I think most of us are somewhere in the middle where we're going to look at things and say, what is the, for any medical condition, whether it's, oh, I have a potential cancer diagnosis, or, you know, there's a pandemic right now, we're going to look at our risk and we're going to look at the potential treatment modalities. And what's happened is, we know that some companies lie and some governments lie. And since we don't know when or how or which, and it's amplified by, by social media and AI algorithms, it's, who do I trust? And what information can I trust? And people

• 45:28Speaker 01

  in the health industry have been pummeled for saying things that were ultimately true, like mercury and fillings is bad for you. We know that now, they finally admitted it. But the people who first said that, they had 30 years of persecution from the industry. So people are saying, I don't know who to trust. And that's why we see people spinning out both into the, you know, everyone's going to die if this doesn't happen, or everyone's going to die if this does happen. So this divisiveness, what I find is, there's about 10% of people who are going to be extremely keto carnivore and extremely vegan plant-based, and nothing's ever going to change them. And everyone else is seeking the optimal path that reduces suffering, reduces death, and increases quality of life and happiness.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  But maybe we don't, we don't exactly know how to optimize that and how to take all costs into account. And that's why there's so much, so much questioning out there right now.

• 46:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think ego plays a, plays a part in this too, where if, if you start, what happens is, so you, you begin to question something, some, some part of, you know, conventional wisdom or the status quo, and you find that not all is what it seems, right? And, and maybe you even uncover something big and, and you, you come up with a new path, a new diet, a new approach, and, and it has real impact. So now, now you've, you've sort of seen that in one area, the emperor has no clothes. It can be really tempting now to think you're a genius who,

• 47:07Ryan Holiday?

  your gut instinct about everything is always correct, right? It's always funny, like, when you look at people who are conspiracy theorists, like, sort of well-known for, for certain conspiracies.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 47:18Ryan Holiday?

  What they usually are often, obviously, there's complete whack jobs like Alex Jones, but there's like, they'll be like, oh, it's, this person's a Harvard professor. You're like, wow, I should take them seriously. And it turns out, oh, you're not a Harvard professor, you know, who is a, you know, an expert on the USSR. And that's why you think, you know, Russia was behind assassinating, you know, JFK or whatever. You're actually an expert in like pharmacology and your expert, your expertise is being applied to another thing. So you're kind of, you're kind of extrapolating your expertise. Do you know what I mean? And I think what, what we've seen in the health and wellness space is people

• 47:59Ryan Holiday?

  who are experts at one little thing, or, or present themselves as expert at one little thing, have suddenly made themselves into experts at a different thing. And it, the ego of like, oh, I know everything. That's where you really get into trouble, I feel like.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  It is exactly where you get into trouble. And that's what drives you to the extremes. Instead, you just say, I'm curious. And the nature of science is to look for things that don't agree with what I think, and then research the heck out of them. But that requires setting the ego aside. And making that way more complex is that if you want to research something that doesn't agree with what just got funded at your university, you're going to be poor while you research that. And you might be proven right. You might get a Nobel Prize at the end of your life. You have to be alive to get a Nobel Prize. You're probably going to suffer greatly and you're going to take a lot of hits. And even for, you know, the little thing I did, hey, guys, saturated fat. In medical studies, it's not bad for you.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  Like, I'm going to ring that bell because it brought my brain back online and it matters. But God, the hate that I got, you know, the, the, just the condemnation, even the calorie people who say it's all about calories and, you know, a meal of corn syrup is the same as a meal of steak if they have the same calories. Those people are provably wrong, but man, the ego and the hate that comes out from that, it's, it's shocking and it's become way easier in the world of the internet. So I think we have like scientific bullying happening as well. When someone stands up and says, I have a question about something that everyone is doing right now, they should be treated with respect instead of with bullying, shame and cancellation. So I'm really concerned about cancel culture.

• 49:46Ryan Holiday?

  It's hard, right? Because you're right, there is bullying, sort of consensus bullying that happens. And then there's also trolling, which is the exact opposite, right? So like, one of my favorite subreddits, there's a subreddit called Ask Historians on Reddit. And it's basically, you can ask historians any question you want. You have to be like a qualified historian to answer. So there's always like really fascinating questions about that. I sort of nerd out about it all the time. I love it there. But they have this policy because they noticed what happens is like Holocaust deniers, for instance, will go in there and they'll, because you used the phrase, so I'm just pointing it out to people. The idea of, I'm just asking questions, you have to be literate.

• 50:28Ryan Holiday?

  And smart because that's also a tactic that trolls use to undermine things, right? So what they call it jacking off, like J A Q, just asking questions. So though a troll who who believes that or wants to sow, let's say doubt about the existence of the Holocaust, will ask some question about like, you know, how do they know exactly how many Jews died in the Holocaust? Or, you know, what were the doors on the gas chambers like? Like they'll ask questions that they don't actually care about.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:58Ryan Holiday?

  That they know it's impossible to get, you know, sort of satisfying or clear cut answers for, or that perhaps there is no answer for, that will then sow doubt about whatever the thing that they're just trying to muddy the water. So it's this tension, right? Because yes, the consensus doesn't like people questioning it. And so people asking good faith questions can get shut down. Like, let's look at the lab leak hypothesis with the origins of the pandemic. Like, we didn't know where it came from. If people thought it was one thing, some people started asking some questions about it. And that got like overreacted to and they they sort of shut that down. And the result was we didn't explore something that we should have been exploring.

• 51:42Ryan Holiday?

  At the same time, you there were people and are people who are propagating the Wuhan lab leak theory in bad faith. They don't actually care where it came from and they don't know where it came from. They just want to distract from the reality of the horrible pandemic that is currently raging through the population. So it's this tricky thing where you have to have the ability to question and then also the ability to see when when other people are trying to use curiosity as a means of sowing doubt or distrust or confusion. You know what I mean?

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. And in fact, Robert Cialdini, who wrote the book Influence, which is probably in the top 10 books, I think people could benefit from reading.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  He talks a lot about how you would go in and do that and how to spot when people are doing it. And I feel like every high school student should read that book because they'd be more effective in their careers, but they'd also be harder to program and influence without knowing they're being influenced.

• 52:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, a lot of Eastern European countries like Finland and stuff, they have, because they have been adjacent to Russia for so long, have really active kind of disinformation and media literacy programs for, for young people because it's such an essential part of their, it's such a, it's an intrinsic vulnerability of their culture because this is sort of the soft power that Russia has always tried to exert, right? And I think America grew very soft, very fat, very stupid. And that's why we have this, you know, sort of glut of conspiracy theories and nonsense and sort of anti-science on both sides. That's

• 53:31Ryan Holiday?

  the irony of the sort of anti-vax stuff is like, it's not, it, it's largely partisan, but there's also people on both sides, you know? But, but media literacy, the ability to see through bullshit and to see when you're being spun or manipulated is really important. And the irony is that the people who have the most foolish beliefs are always the ones that say, you gotta do your research.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  It, it gets really, really slippery because I've seen so much what I'll call vaccine bullying. Someone who's really close to me professionally had been to the emergency room four times since being vaccinated because she has way overactive mast cells and knew it before getting vaccinated. And I would have put her in the, we haven't done any studies on people with your medical condition yet, so it's okay for you to wait a while before getting the vaccine while we gather data about it for biological corner cases, right? This is not an anti-vax statement whatsoever.

• 54:35Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  This is a vaccine curious statement, saying, okay, if you're higher than average risk because of whatever, no one has a right to say, you're putting everyone at risk because you didn't put yourself at risk. And so it's that, how do we pull the emotion and the ego out of that? So when someone isn't vaccinated, you say, you've got your medical freedom and you probably have a good reason and maybe you have a polite, rational conversation about it and realize that they're going to do what they're going to do. And so I'm a little concerned about the use of those influence techniques to force people to do things that might be dangerous for them, or maybe they're just had chemotherapy, right? But you don't know that, right?

• 55:21Speaker 01

  And so there's all these conditions where I would say it's probably okay to wait six months and get a little bit more data. And then there's the question of, do we, and I don't see what I'm doing here, I'm spreading disinfluence here, but do we trust what the people selling the vaccines are telling us, given their track record of lying? And the answer is, if we have good accountability from the government, I think we can, but it behooves us, especially if you have a medical condition, to look at all the data and then to say, all right, there's a social good and then there's a personal protection value that comes from this, like having a lower chance of dying from getting an infection.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  Like that's of value to you, which would be a reason to get a vaccine. And then you could also say, well, I have this weird medical thing, let's see if it's safe for me to take it first because you don't want to increase your chance of dying. And just, there's an individuality here that I think isn't being respected that I'm concerned about.

• 56:20Ryan Holiday?

  I think people struggle with the idea of public health, right? The idea, as an individualistic society, we struggle with the idea of both what our obligations to each other are and what our liberties are. So when you, when you talk about someone who maybe is perhaps slightly higher risk to side effects from a vaccine, which across the board have been extremely low, I think it's worth saying that. But the point of vaccines is to create a large enough herd immunity that those people who can't or shouldn't Don't have to worry about exposure generally from the thing you're being vaccinated by, right? Like, there's never been a vaccine that you you needed or were supposed to get

• 57:05Ryan Holiday?

  100% distribution of. That's not the point. The point is, you get a large enough amount of it that then people who can't, or shouldn't, or, you know, never heard of it because they live in a cabin in the woods somewhere, they're protected by the collective decisions of all the other people. And it was, it was interesting. I've spent a bunch of time volunteering in a vaccine clinic here in the small town we're at, which is only 40% vaccinated. So way below any, you know, any sort of herd immunity, even if you add in infections on top of it. And it struck me, there's a, trying to be careful what I can say, what I can't say. But let's just say there was a, a member of a certain profession that interacts with

• 57:50Ryan Holiday?

  citizens every single day, young, healthy, no medical conditions, and interacts with people of the public with, in a way that the public isn't allowed to not interact with this person. You see the profession that I'm implying, right? A person with, with, with lights that they can flash behind you when you're driving. And it was, it was interesting to watch this person get vaccinated, like, last week, knowing that, you know, this, vaccines have been available to members of this profession in Texas since, like, December. So it's like, this person's not anti-science, or they wouldn't be there. They clearly have no real opposition

• 58:30Ryan Holiday?

  to it, they wouldn't be there. But it's very clear that on their list of priorities, never did it occur to them that, hey, like, I'm interacting with these people, I have no choice of interacting with them, I have no choice not to interact with them, what is my obligation to other people? So I think, I think America is really struggling with the idea of public health in general. And, and I think, let's get off vaccines, this goes to some of the stuff that you talk about, which is that public health is, you know, if you come out with a product that people like, but is bad for their long-term health, like, let's say, I don't know, Cheetos or something, that also has public health consequences, right? Huge ones.

• 59:14Ryan Holiday?

  And, and we, we struggle as a society, I think, the idea of, like, This is good for me, but I'm also very aware that it has negative consequences for other people. That shouldn't necessarily be illegal, but it should be something that you choose not to do.

• 59:30Speaker 01

  It should be. And I look at the 6 trillion and counting that we've spent on our pandemic response, and I know we could have fixed school lunches for the next 100 years for a tiny fraction of that, to remove things that increase risk.

• 59:47Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  The fact that our response has been not overall increasing systems biology health, and, you know, "Hey, everybody, let's get in shape and let's eat less crap," and that there's been almost none of that, that's kind of shocking to me. I was hoping that it would actually drive all of us to make better decisions and to make the government to help support that.

• 1:00:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, we're expressing a lot of anger at individuals who won't, like, say, get a vaccine or wear a mask. And I get that that's a thing they should not be doing, but we should also be angry, just as we were angry at tobacco executives for deceiving generations of people into consuming a very harmful product. You know, people didn't get morbidly obese in this country totally out of their own lack of individual temperance. There were also massively deceitful and manipulative and exploitative practices that contributed to that public health problem. And by the way, I mean, if the number one cause of death

• 1:00:53Ryan Holiday?

  in the United States is heart disease, it's a massive public health crisis that...

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  Let's work on that vaccine.

• 1:00:59Ryan Holiday?

  Of course. Yeah, right. Right. And actually, you had to invent a vaccine, you know, just not slowly creeping up the size of the soda cup, you know, and deceiving people into drinking more of this sugar water than they should. That's also, in a way, that's an easier problem to solve, I guess is what I'm saying.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  It is much easier to solve. And if you really look at the public risk perspective, if it's okay to bully or shame someone who is making their decision about a vaccine, and you're saying you have to do it for my own safety... It's equally okay to bully and shame someone for having the triple venti, extra whip, whatever thing, and a bag of Cheetos. Because when they make themselves more likely to be infected by harming their metabolism, they're also making themselves a breeding ground for new variants and other sorts of things that are infectious. So like, let's not bully and shame people about medical and lifestyle decisions,

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  but let's present them the information and be rational and clear and calm about it and treating people with respect and with kindness if they're making really terrible lifestyle decisions and if they're making their decision about things that they can do to make their community safer. I just think we've got to be patient and kind and this sort of big media language around people and some of the real hateful things I've seen, both on the anti-vaxxer and the really strongly pro-vaxxing, like, no. Part of temperance is kindness and patience and teaching your biology. You can be safe if you don't have lunch.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  You can be safe and at least feel safe in the world the vast majority of the time. And that by doing that, you increase your resilience. And that quote that you had earlier from Marcus Aurelius, that sensation that you're not going to be the one rattled. You've got to learn to not get rattled if someone doesn't do what you think they should do. And that's the hard part, right?

• 1:03:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, well, temperance also interacts with the virtue of justice and justice interacts with temperance and they're all related to each other. Last thing I wanted to talk to you about, because you mentioned it earlier, you live out in the country like I do. Make the sales pitch for country life. I do it a fair amount, but I'd love to hear yours.

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  Oh, this is great. One of the things you can do to make the world a better place long term is you can build topsoil. It is the most important thing that is pulling carbon out of the air, cooling the earth. And our friends at Monsanto have killed much of the topsoil in the country by spraying antibiotics called glyphosate on it. So when you decide that you want to do some country living, you're probably going to have some chickens, you're probably going to end up having some animals. And your quality of life will go through the roof. The biodiversity around you changes your gut bacteria, your calmness changes. You experience nature and the cycles of the world in a way that your body absolutely loves and what your brain loves. You're more creative, you sleep better.

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  It's cheaper. I pay, I pay an annual property tax on my 32 acre farm on Vancouver Island, equal to a month's rent in Palo Alto.

• 1:04:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  Like, it is not even there. I could buy an airplane for the cost savings delta between a similar house in, in a big city and where I live now. And so, like, you, you really can do it. And it's one of the reasons I moved here is I couldn't afford to have two kids in the places where I lived. And now, all of a sudden, yes, I have two kids. There's an intact community. This is something that, you know, talk about. You're in a small town. Everyone knows everyone. You know who to call. You know who's reliable. People help each other because they can. And the distrust isn't there. People don't lock their doors around here. That sort of stuff happens. And I will tell you, waking up and, you know, seeing the chickens and watching the sheep butt heads and, you know, seeing the pigs,

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  it does something good for you in your, in your spirit. So you're helping the planet. You're being kind to animals. You're experiencing life the way it should be done. And with modern technology, you know, I started 100 plus million dollar company, living in the country remotely. You can do whatever you want to do remotely.

• 1:05:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think, I think there's a reason that the tax rate is lower, right? Part of the reason is they want, they want you to have the property and not use it for something. They want it to not be an apartment complex, right? Like Texas, for instance, Texas is only 2% owned by the federal or state government as compared to like California. It's like 50% owned. So Califor, large swaths of California will never be developed, right? That's, that's good and bad. It's partly why housing prices are so high, but it's, it's also why there's so much natural beauty. Well, in Texas, because Texas, the way Texas

• 1:06:04Ryan Holiday?

  enters the union, that's not the case. It's all privately owned. They want to keep some of it as nature preserves and as farms. And so in a sense, by owning land and not developing it, letting trees grow, letting birds live in the trees, letting, you know, water collect on the ground and, and yeah, letting topsoil be created and turned over by chickens. You're, you want to talk about doing something about climate change, like you could drive a Prius or, you know, you could actually contribute to the biodiversity.

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

  Very, very well put. And California's gone nuts. I moved my, I have a biohacking conference I do every year. I moved it from California to Florida this year. Texas was my, my second choice. It's happening in September and it was a big decision, but part of what you just described there in California, it's, it was, it's an out of control state and everything's gotten really expensive. And some of it has to do with land use and land ownership and overregulation and all. So I, I think you're in a great state. There you go, the great state of Texas, in order to be able to have it as long as you have enough water. And you said the, the core thing, letting water build up on the land. We don't think about this when we live in cities and I certainly didn't.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  But you realize how vital soil and grass and bugs and all these things that are invisible, how vital they are to food because you eat the food. I grow all the food my family eats. I guess we bring in some rice and coffee and stuff, but the vast majority of it is our animals and our vegetables. And you can tell, we screwed up. There's no cauliflower this year. Let's get it right. So it's harder than you'd think. And what you get at the, the grocery store isn't the same as what happens when you grow it yourself. There's something good happening.

• 1:07:50Ryan Holiday?

  And there's something just very, it's like, okay, so you cook breakfast and then you got the scraps and you throw them out to the chickens. Then they eat the scraps and then, you know, two days later, you're, you're cooking the eggs that came from the scraps that they just ate. You know, there's, there's something, or it's, you know, you have a, we had a cow die. And, uh, you know, you sort of leave it out and then it's food for the carrion birds. But then also the amount of decomp that goes in and now that, talk about topsoil. Now the soil that comes out where this cow just, you know, sort of disintegrated into it. You, it's, it's, it's a more natural way to live. And, and even if, even if your life is still relatively unnatural. You travel a lot, you do stuff, you, you, it's good to be around it and witness it on a regular basis.

• 1:08:33Ryan Holiday?

  I, I think the other thing you learn is just the memento mori of like all the death, you know, like, uh, as wonderful as it is and is, is. Much as you take care of the animals, you just realize they're on a whole different trajectory than the rest of us. And they die like a lot, whether it's from raccoons or, you know, we had a cow just get stuck in the mud and die from being stuck. And it was very old. It got stuck in the mud. We couldn't, we didn't see it and just died from being stuck in the mud. Right. And you're just like, it's just a reminder of life and its fragility. I, I know you're a life hacker in that sense, but I, I like that.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  You're right. And, and some of these people say, oh, animal cruelty and nature. I'm like, man, I watch eagles take down our chickens on occasion. And I've watched, I didn't watch it, but I watched the aftermath of a raccoon kill four of our turkeys. I know you just killed them and just like ate their heads and just left them. I was like, you little bastard, at least just kill one and eat the whole thing. And, you know, we do our best to protect the animals, but my animals live a damn good life compared to what mother nature was going to give them.

• 1:09:40Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, totally. And, and there's a great D H Lawrence line that I like to quote where it's like, I never has, never, a wild bird will die frozen on a bough. Never was a wild thing, sorry for itself, you know, like they, they do die, but there's not the complaining and the weeping and the moaning. It's just like, this is life. Live while you can, be present. Oh, are there snacks? You know, there's, there's a, you know, that's a, that's a, that's how the animals operate. There's something sobering about that too, I think.

• 1:10:12Speaker 01

  It's also peaceful. My, my wife will go out and she'll sit there and the sheep will get in a circle around her and it's like a weird kind of sheep meditation. But there, there's a peacefulness to animals with horses and cows and sheep, all the remnants, humans connect with them. Their heart rates actually will change to match ours when they accept you into the herd. Horses are most compatible with our, with us electrically. But there's weird studies that show you walk into a stall with a horse, the spacing between its heartbeats will change to match the spacing between your heartbeats. And this is why tweakers can't ride horses because the horse will buck you off because it feels you. And so you connect with animals and all people say, what? That can't be real. I tell you, the chicken breast you're buying, you know, at, at the grocery store is a very far cry from the way it works in the

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  real world.

• 1:10:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. You, you, you realize that.

• 1:11:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there's just, there's something about the wavelength that they're on that's very good and that we co-evolved with a lot of these domesticated animals. So like, that's why we love dogs, I think, in a way, more than cats. Cats sort of domesticated themselves, but dogs were a critical part of our sort of civilizing as a species. And same with horses. So there's this, there's this timeless bond and you could be the most green city person in the world and you step into that, you realize like you're stepping into a, a stream or a consciousness that goes back lots of generations.

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  Very well said. And when it comes to cats, the only reason we like cats is toxoplasmosis, which is a weird cat parasite that invades, you know, the crazy cat lady that makes us like cats. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure we would have got rid of them a long time ago.

• 1:11:58Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, I guess they kill rats and stuff.

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  I'm just kidding.

• 1:12:01Ryan Holiday?

  But that, no, no, you're right. You're right. That we have a, we have a weird co-evolution with cats that's almost like less.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  Oh, way less.

• 1:12:09Ryan Holiday?

  Less, there's less consent involved. But, but no, I think, but you also, it's like, oh, these animals have a job. They do a job and, and we do a job and we're all animals. There's, there is something that I love about, about stepping out on the farm.

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  The acceptance of death is really tied to Stoicism as well, right? The fact that we are going to die and you can say, Dave, you're an anti-aging guy. You're saying you're going to live to at least 180. Yep. I actually think that's real. I also know the sun's going to burn out and the universe will collapse in on itself. I'm going to die. That's just how it is. And that's okay. But with the animals, like our oldest sheep is, is five now. His name's Riley. And he's like the elder of our flock of sheep and he just kind of hangs around. But last year, he started getting a little bit unhealthy and he was limp and a little bit and he's, he's fat and you can't tell the sheep not to eat grass. They don't do intermittent fasting like you can with pigs. So he, I think, well, we asked the kids, should we eat Riley? And they're like, well, we wouldn't want him

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  to go to waste. So, you know, we've taken care of him. He's taken care of us. And if it's time for us to, for us to, to kill him and butcher him and eat him before he dies, which would be a waste of all that love we put into him. Yeah, then it would be time. And it turns out he recovered a little bit. So we're like, oh, we'll keep another year.

• 1:13:27Ryan Holiday?

  Glad you didn't jump on.

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  Just give the kids some knives. They ran out there. It's not like that. Like, like it's a peaceful process.

• 1:13:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  When it's done right. And so there's so much just fear of death that happens in all humans, but particularly people in cities who don't see the cycle of life, the way you just described it so eloquently. There's something really good for humans to understand that fragility, because I think it removes some of our fear of death and ultimately fear of going a day without food, fear of public speaking, fear of everything is fear of death. And

• 1:14:00Ryan Holiday?

  Totally.

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  This temperance right there is not being afraid of death when you're not going to actually die.

• 1:14:05Ryan Holiday?

  I love it. Dave, the new book's great. Thanks for the advice on fasting and I'll give people a spot to check out the new book and, and all your stuff. And can't wait to see you again one of these days.

• 1:14:17Speaker 01

  Beautiful, Ryan. Once we can all travel again, let's hang out.

• 1:14:23Ryan Holiday?

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