464 Dave Asprey: Train Your Brain for Peak Performance

“If your physical health isn’t working, your brain won’t work.” - Dave Asprey If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes, video, and more at http://lewishowes.com/464 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 464 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.

• 0:33Lewis Howes?

  Welcome everyone to another edition of the School of Greatness Podcast. Let's go today. This is all about how to train your brain for peak performance. It starts in the mind. It starts, everything starts with our thoughts and our brain and our energy. And if we don't have the right thoughts, we don't create the right energy. If we don't have the right energy, we can't create great results in our life and everything else suffers. So this is such a powerful episode and I hope you take notes and I hope you share this with your friends because it is powerful. Now, Dave Asprey, for those who don't know, is founder of Bulletproof and author of the New York Times bestseller,

• 1:11Lewis Howes?

  The Bulletproof Diet. He's a Silicon Valley investor and technology entrepreneur who spent two decades and over $300,000 to hack his own biology. That's right. He's hacked his body many times. And Dave is the creator of the widely popular Bulletproof Coffee, something that I love, and also host of the health podcast Bulletproof Radio. Now through his work, Dave provides information, techniques, and keys to taking control of and improving your biochemistry, your body and your mind, so that they all work in unison, helping you execute at levels far beyond what you'd expect, without burning out, without getting sick, or allowing stress to control your decisions.

• 1:55Lewis Howes?

  He's got a new book out called Head Strong, and I think you're gonna love it. Some of the main things we talk about in today's episode are how your body and brain process energy like a battery, why you should push your body to its limits once a week. Also, the new compound that makes your brain able to change itself. The worst toxins for your mitochondria and energy. And foods everyone should cut out of their diet for good brain health. We talk about that and so much more. I'm super pumped for you guys to dive in. But before we do, want to give a shout out to our iTunes review of the week. This is from Gaben, who said, I've been listening to the School of Greatness for over a year,

• 2:36Lewis Howes?

  and I still look forward to listening to who is going to be speaking every week. This podcast is worth subscribing to if you are looking to discover positivity, wisdom, practical advice, and of course, inspiration. I hope it continues to grow. So awesome. Thank you so much for that review, Gaben. We appreciate you. And if you want to be considered as a review of the week, then make sure to leave a review over at iTunes.com/greatness for a chance to be shouted out on the podcast. Now, without further ado, let me introduce to you the one, the only, Dave Asprey.

• 3:16Lewis Howes?

  Welcome everyone back to the School of Greatness podcast. We've got a new guest on, Dave Asprey, with a book out right now. The book is called Head Strong, and he is a New York Times bestselling author and founder and creator of Bulletproof Coffee and the Bulletproof Diet. So Dave, thank you so much for being here, man. I'm very excited about this. I'm happy to actually be in your studios. Right? It's pretty nice. It's nice. Yeah, I love it. We just renovated it and updated it. We wanted to make it very intentional. We've got the phoenix rising on the wall. We've got the school lockers. We've got the cool, you know, moss in the woods. So it's coming together. Oh, yeah. You nailed it. It's been good. So also, Dave has got this book, The Bulletproof Diet. Make sure you guys check this one out as well. Awesome book. I did the diet before. I drank the coffee.

• 3:59Lewis Howes?

  It's a game changer. And everyone, Wyclef was in here and he had the coffee for the first time. He was like, what is this? This is amazing. So, you know, you've really taken the world over by storm, first with kind of like the coffee stuff. But then people learned about all the biohacking that you were doing. For years, you've been doing this, not just since you had the coffee, but you were doing all these tests on yourself. Um biomechanics, on the physiology, on muscles, on the brain. And this new book is really about how to maximize the mind, right? How to optimize the brain so we can optimize our lives. Is that correct?

• 4:31Dave Asprey?

  Yeah, that's a great way of putting it.

• 4:33Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 4:33Dave Asprey?

  And people have this, this idea that I'll, I'll start out at the very highest level. Like I'm, I'm going to just change my thinking and, and I'm, I'm going to go out, I'm going to learn to meditate or going to, to, to just start at the, the very most complex, most esoteric. Like I'm going to go learn math.

• 4:50Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh.

• 4:50Dave Asprey?

  It, it turns out that everything you do with your brain, it comes down to how well your brain can make and use and allocate energy. So there are some things you can do that change everything in your head and oftentimes in the rest of your body as well, that really don't have anything to do with memory training, uh, or with even meditation, or with any skill acquisition thing. It's like you turn up the volume, the level of whatever you're doing goes up. So if you're already great, you turn up the volume, you got more greatness. And if you're a total jerk, you turn the volume, you'll be more of a total jerk, but you'll be more effective jerk.

• 5:22Lewis Howes?

  Right, exactly. Yeah. So Headstrong is really about, um, how to untap the brain energy to work smarter and think faster in just a couple of weeks. Now, why is the brain the most important thing? Is the brain more important than your physical health and your, your workout habits and other habits that you have? Is the brain the thing we should be focusing on the most? Or is there a balance between everything else?

• 5:43Dave Asprey?

  When you dig in the research, there's actually a debate. Do the muscles exist for the brain? Or does the brain exist for the muscles? And probably the brain exists for the muscles, which is a surprising thing for a lot of people. If your physical health isn't working, your brain won't work. It gets really strange though, because the fundamental unit that controls most of the health in the brain is the same as the rest of the body, but it's just a question of density. We have these things called mitochondria and these are things that were bacteria a couple billion years ago and we somehow incorporated them into our cells and there's all sorts of like tens of thousands of pages of academic debate about how this happened because this is the genesis

• 6:28Dave Asprey?

  of all life on earth. Right. Somehow we became able to carry batteries around with us so that we don't have to have roots in the ground like plants do. Well, those little batteries were red rod shaped bacteria. We incorporated them into our cells or they invaded ourselves, which is probably more like what happened. They took us over and these little bacteria, there's about 15,000 of them per cell in the brain and only 1,000 of them per cell in the rest of your body, except the heart. So the eyes, the, the brain and the heart have this incredible density of these little things that control everything about you. That give us energy. They give you energy, but they also decide if cells live or die. They make hormones. It's not the only part of you that makes hormones, but they're actually in control

• 7:13Dave Asprey?

  of the hormone factories. They decide whether or not you'll get cancer. They control cellular aging and literally those little guys call the shots and they don't really care much about what you want. They care about what they want. You're a walking Petri dish for them and they're going to make sure that the Petri dish stays alive. Wow. What are these called? They're called mitochondria. And they're in your brain. They're in your whole body. Yeah. They're cells. Well, they're inside your cells. Inside your cells. So each one of your cells has all these different components in it, you know, kind of like, like they're the, like a carburetor or a battery inside, inside each cell. So about 10% of your body weight is your battery and these things are the battery in the body. To charge the body, give you energy. They give you energy. Keep you awake. Yeah, they, they take the food and they take the air and they take light even and

• 7:57Dave Asprey?

  they turn it into electrons. The same electrons that power your iPhone, power your body. Wow. And it turns out these little guys are semiconductors. We didn't know this until about five years ago and that's why they're affected by electromagnetic fields, by light, by electricity and by temperature and all these other things that you can manipulate. And since they don't listen to you very well, but they listen to the world around you, you just change the world around you and all of a sudden your brain has more energy. And when you get these guys hacked, you feel it first in your brain and you feel it second right in, in the chest, like in, in your emotional center. You, you feel it in your heart, you know, you put your heart into something. So by doing this, of course your muscles are going to benefit because they all have battery needs. It's just they don't need very much to move. Thinking is actually a harder work than moving.

• 8:42Dave Asprey?

  So what if you were to give yourself a battery upgrade? You'd be a better athlete, you'd be a better lover, you'd be a better spouse, and frankly, a better human being because you have more energy to say no when you have one of those urges to go out and do something you shouldn't do.

• 8:58Lewis Howes?

  Right, right, right. And so this helps you, but it all starts from the brain first. If the brain muscle and mass is not optimized, and you're saying that the rest of our body will not have the energy. Is that what I'm hearing you say?

• 9:09Dave Asprey?

  Well, if your brain isn't working, the rest of your body won't be working and vice versa. So it, you can't.

• 9:15Lewis Howes?

  It's a feedback loop.

• 9:16Dave Asprey?

  Yeah, you can't do that.

• 9:17Lewis Howes?

  It starts with the brain.

• 9:17Dave Asprey?

  It starts with the brain.

• 9:18Lewis Howes?

  If you're, have no sleep and you're eating horrible foods and you're not getting any sunlight and you're stressed out all the time, but you're working really, really hard, you're working out really hard and you're trying to build your body, the brain is not going to have the energy to recover or you're not going to be fully optimized or something. There's going to be breakdowns.

• 9:35Dave Asprey?

  What will happen is these little bacteria throughout the body, these mitochondria, they're going to sense that you're stressed. They're going to sense they don't have enough recovery. They don't have enough energy, like they're not getting enough food or enough light or enough of the other things that they rely on to be a healthy colony.

• 9:49Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 9:50Dave Asprey?

  When they don't get that, they're going to communicate with each other. Life sucks. Get ready, like get ready for famine. Like, like there's a threat, there's some ominous threat and they're bacteria. They're stupid. They don't know what a threat is. So they're going to change your physiology to have higher cortisol, lower testosterone, less focus, less energy. You're more optimized to fight and to run away and you're going to, you're going to be crankier.

• 10:11Lewis Howes?

  More reactive, resentful.

• 10:13Dave Asprey?

  Yeah, your blood sugar is going to swing because like, what do I need to fight? What do I need to run? And here's the thing that comes out of this research that just fascinates me. There's only three things you need to do to stay alive.

• 10:24Dave Asprey?

  If you're a cat, if you're a bacteria, or if you're a possum or a tree, it doesn't matter. It's always only three things. Run away from or kill scary things. And plants do that by making poisons or spines and things like that. Uh, and they can't run away because they're plants. Sorry. All right. And then, uh, let's see, you have to eat everything to make sure you don't starve to death, right? So I've certainly done both of those behaviors. You know, you eat all the donuts and oops. And then the third thing is have sex with everything that's left. To make sure the species doesn't die out, right?

• 10:53Lewis Howes?

  So reproduce, yeah.

• 10:54Dave Asprey?

  Right. So Lewis, can you think of anything you've ever done you're ashamed of that didn't come from one of those three behaviors?

• 11:01Lewis Howes?

  I mean, I've been ashamed of a lot of things I've done, but those three behaviors. What's the first one again?

• 11:07Dave Asprey?

  It was run away from or kill things.

• 11:08Lewis Howes?

  Run away from or kill thing? No, I mean, I was gonna say getting angry at something, but that's in that category, right?

• 11:12Dave Asprey?

  That's what it is, right?

• 11:13Lewis Howes?

  Like lashing out or being reactive or being frustrated that I didn't get what I wanted or something. The second one is eat everything.

• 11:19Dave Asprey?

  Mm hmm.

• 11:19Lewis Howes?

  I've done that a lot. I've been ashamed of all the, I mean, I was a sugar fiend my whole life.

• 11:24Dave Asprey?

  Totally.

• 11:24Lewis Howes?

  And, uh, you know, I cut out sugar for forty five days, the last forty five days and what a transformation in my mind and my body and my health just by not having sugar. And then wanting to reproduce? Yes, I've been there too.

• 11:37Dave Asprey?

  Yeah, like did I really go on that date?

• 11:39Lewis Howes?

  Exactly.

• 11:41Dave Asprey?

  The, the thing is, we take responsibility for those things and those are things we're responsible for. But they're not you. They're emergent behaviors that come from what bacteria want. Cause the bacteria are the puppet masters in our bodies. And when you realize that, you better take care of those little bastards because they have control over you in some way. But when they give you enough energy in return for this symbiosis they have, you can then have enough energy for the human adult parts of your brain to easily take over and easily control things that we call that willpower. So, so when you feel the urge to, you know, flip the guy off in traffic or to yell at your spouse or, you know, to eat all the donuts, if your battery is charged all the way, you're like, oh, I got this. It's not even that big of a deal. I'm just gonna say no.

• 12:26Dave Asprey?

  And it's those times when you're browning out a little bit like, wow, you know, it's the end of the day. I'm a little tired, you know, I, fine, I'm, I'll just have half the donut and you, you dive in and you know, there's, yeah, there's, you know, there's frosted stuff all over your face and colored sprinkles on your shirt and you're, oh man.

• 12:42Lewis Howes?

  Or you say the thing you wish you didn't say or whatever happens. Yeah. Fascinating. So how did you, how have you applied this into your life? Uh, what are the main things that you've done on a daily basis that you've seen a transformation in your life? Cause you've done a lot of biohacking and mind hacking for years.

• 12:58Dave Asprey?

  For years.

• 12:59Lewis Howes?

  So what is this new stuff that you've been doing? Just to be honest, I've, we've probably seen each other maybe ten times, like in person. I've known you for a while, but we've probably been interacting in ten times in person. This time you look younger than I've ever seen you and we mentioned when you Came in, you look stronger, you look like you have more energy, you look clearer. Like you never looked as clear as you do now. For some reason, you look very clear, high energy and youthful. Not that you didn't before, we just look like even, you know, more youthful. So one of the things that you're doing that's allowing you to have this energy of abundance that, you know, you've never had before.

• 13:32Dave Asprey?

  I'm, I'm doing a lot of stuff and one of the things that, that, that it's a fair criticism of biohacking is how do you know if it works? Well, like you just said, there's, there's evidence that something is working.

• 13:44Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 13:44Dave Asprey?

  Can I tell you that one of the 45 things I'm doing is the one? Well, no, because it wasn't the one. There's something called synergy and, and there's amplification. And if you do A, it doesn't work very well. You do B, it doesn't work very well. And shockingly, if you do A and B, it works. But the, the double blind reductionist, like Western medicine thing, I, I swear there's, there's like some guy in a white lab coat. He's like, there was no such thing as bread. Here's why. I baked the water and nothing happened. I baked the flour, nothing happened. I baked the yeast and nothing happened. Therefore, there is no bread. And you're like, maybe if you mixed them and then baked them, there would be bread. Right. But no, that's more than one variable. I can't do it. I have to test single variables. Our bodies are incredibly complex systems. So what I do and what this, this program and headstrong, the two week program is, is let's do

• 14:28Dave Asprey?

  many of the things that make your mitochondria stronger, all at the same time.

• 14:31Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 14:32Dave Asprey?

  Instead of messing around with just one thing.

• 14:34Lewis Howes?

  Give me a few examples of some of the things. And I know you do things at every different point in the day. You do things in the morning, you do things in the afternoon and night. You're like constantly testing and tweaking.

• 14:44Dave Asprey?

  Well, one, one of the things that, that doesn't cost anything that, that's really effective is changing temperature. So mitochondria, their job is to stay alive and then their job is also to kill off the weak. So you got to stress them enough to kill off the weak and that process is, is called apoptosis. If you don't do that, you get cancer. So you want to.

• 15:08Lewis Howes?

  You want to stress.

• 15:09Dave Asprey?

  You, you want to stress them, but not too much. So it's brief periods of stress.

• 15:13Lewis Howes?

  So there's like ice.

• 15:15Dave Asprey?

  Ice is great.

• 15:15Lewis Howes?

  Tubbs or ice showers.

• 15:16Dave Asprey?

  Yeah, just a cold shower in the morning, not a whole cold shower because cold showers suck.

• 15:20Lewis Howes?

  For a minute.

• 15:21Dave Asprey?

  Yeah, just take a hot shower at the end, turn it on cold, do it all at once and just feel the pain for a minute. Those little guys, they're going to freak out.

• 15:29Lewis Howes?

  That makes them stronger.

• 15:30Dave Asprey?

  They get stronger and the weak ones die, right? And then you burn more calories throughout the day. Your brain is clearer and inflammation goes down. And here's the interesting thing. Every time you have inflammation, it's because your mitochondria aren't working very well. So if something makes you inflamed, it's because you damaged your battery system in the body. When things are working well, they they actually change the structure of the water in your body. It's called exclusion zone water, and no one knew mitochondria could do this until a couple of years ago. Gerald Pollak figured this out, and he talked about it at the Bulletproof Conference. So all of a sudden, you're just telling these little guys, hey, the world isn't always warm and soft and fuzzy. Maybe you should just toughen up a little bit. And then that toughness gets built into your system and you carry it with you for the rest of the day.

• 16:13Dave Asprey?

  And so you're a little leaner, you're a little, just just more on point, and it costs you nothing. In fact, you saved a quarter cent on heating hot water for that last one minute. Like, it it was just a change in habit. Another thing is exercise. So I looked at all the research on mitochondria and exercise. Like, what's what's going to make them stronger, what's not going to make them stronger? There's a set of studies that show if you go for a walk for 20 minutes a day, that that increases mitochondrial function. That's it. That's it. Now, that's one set of studies. You can go for longer, but if you go for too long, you actually can stress them out, which which isn't a good thing. So, you know, if you're gonna every every day go for, you know, a two hour run without recovery, it's the lack of recovery that really messes up your energy system.

• 16:56Dave Asprey?

  So you see a lot of people who are type A entrepreneurs like you or me, where, you know, we we like to go. Yeah. And they're like, and on top of that, I'm gonna like run at the Kona Ironman, and I'm gonna do it without sleep, just because I could, right? So you push like that, and I've certainly done that, you know, in my early career in in tech, that the company that held Google's first servers and things like that. I burn, I'm like, why would you burn the candle at both ends when you could also light the middle?

• 17:21Dave Asprey?

  It's so bad for you. And it's bad for you because it breaks your mitochondria. Like, like, they get stressed like that, and they communicate with each other. And they do that with, they do it with chemicals, and we believe that they probably do it with light as well, which is really interesting. If those theories are proven, and I I would bet right now that they will be, we know that these little parts of your cells make lights the same way an LED light does. They literally make little photons and they receive photons. So a set of scientists are proposing that that's how mitochondria talk, which is why if you're beating up your muscles all the time, you're gonna be tired in your head, because the whole system of these bacteria that are interacting, and they're not bacteria anymore, they're part of our cells. They're called organelles, but they still have that little bit of bacterial behavior that's built in.

• 18:06Dave Asprey?

  And that allows us to be who we are and what we are. So it's fascinating. And you, yeah, go ahead. The other exercise, just so I, like, so people listening, I don't leave them going, I just have to go for a walk. Once or maybe twice a week, but certainly once a week, you need to kick your ass. And there's two ways to do it. And these are actually both in the bulletproof diet too, because we knew they worked, but we didn't understand the mitochondrial part of that back then. One is intermittent sprinting, just basically sprint for 60 seconds. And there's a neat trick in headstrong that's not in the first book, and I got this from John Gray. The. The men from Mars? Yeah. Yeah, okay. That guy, he is a crazy biohacker. You would not know this from reading his books about relationships. No, he, he goes deep. So we got to be friends and he's like, Dave, after you sprint, instead of walking, lay on your back.

• 18:51Dave Asprey?

  Just lay down, like the way you're seeing on a CrossFit gym, people just kill themselves and lay down. There's a reason they're doing that. They, they're not doing it because they know the reason they're doing it because they, they felt the urge and that was their instinct. Whatever I would do CrossFit or lay down, it's because I could have breathed and I was just like. It, it, well, that's the body's natural response. So if you want to increase the height and the trough, which is what you're doing. You're telling guys, you better be ready to just like bring it all at once. You're training the battery in your body to totally have a high voltage and then stop. So. So you should stop and go on your back. You shouldn't keep walking. Yeah, at least sit down, better yet lay down. Really? For a minute and then get up and sprint again and then lay down. And this is what animals will do, right? That's true. And it's, it, it's amazing what a difference that is. So that's one way you kick your ass. The other way is lift heavy things for 15 minutes or less and don't stop.

• 19:36Dave Asprey?

  Keep the muscles engaged the entire time. Don't stop at the top, don't stop at the bottom, as heavy as you can and you'll. While stretching and warming up properly. Why would you do that? Yeah, I, I do my warmups on the, on the bulletproof vibe, you know, I'm vibrating when I do that. Sure, sure. Uh, and I, I do that vibration stuff every day or I go for a walk, but quite often I'm on the phone and it's, I'm in Canada, it's dark and raining. You're in Vancouver, right? Yeah, I'm in Vancouver Island. Yeah, yeah. I'm on an organic farm. Amazing, amazing.

• 20:02Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, so I mean, it's funny because I've always in track and field when I ran track, they would always tell you to like, keep walking after you're done with the sprints. So it's interesting. And why is it, what's the science behind laying on your back or stopping?

• 20:14Dave Asprey?

  It has to do with heart rate variability and cardiac recovery and getting the the system to go from sprint to calm as fast as possible. That's what you're trying to get it to do. It's just to increase the the recovery after the sprint so that you can do another sprint.

• 20:28Lewis Howes?

  Another set.

• 20:29Dave Asprey?

  Yeah. And it's, you know, we're talking to you for 10 minutes, 15 minutes. It's, it looks a little funny if you just collapse, people call ambulances off it.

• 20:37Lewis Howes?

  And you, you only work out once or twice a week, right? Like a heavy thing, otherwise you're walking and that's it, right?

• 20:41Dave Asprey?

  That's about it. Yeah, I'll go to yoga class when I get a chance. Like, I appreciate yoga more for the the stretching and all. But I'm, I'm doing all right from a 44 year old. Yeah, I'm 44.

• 20:52Lewis Howes?

  You're a headstrong.

• 20:52Dave Asprey?

  Yeah, I'm headstrong. There you go. I still have like stretch marks. I mean, I've weighed for people who don't know this, I used to weigh 300 pounds. Like, I was obese for until, geez, my my mid 30s.

• 21:01Lewis Howes?

  Wow, you could carry it okay as a 6'4" guy.

• 21:04Dave Asprey?

  Yeah.

• 21:04Lewis Howes?

  A little bit better.

• 21:05Dave Asprey?

  I couldn't quite see my feet, but you know, I remember the first time I saw my ribs, I'm like, oh, my God, like I. Wow. For years, walking down the hallway, I would like turn sideways to make space for people because I was just used to having this bulk that I don't have anymore.

• 21:18Lewis Howes?

  How's it feel?

• 21:19Dave Asprey?

  It it feels now natural, but for a while it was, it was pretty strange. And I I put on about 19 pounds in a month last month.

• 21:27Lewis Howes?

  It's crazy.

• 21:28Dave Asprey?

  I was actually doing something that's not in the book, but if if you order, do the orderheadstrong.com, I'll I'll tell you how I did it.

• 21:34Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 21:35Dave Asprey?

  Uh, but I was, I wanted to increase my mitochondria by 50%. Like, this is a major battery systems upgrade.

• 21:41Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 21:41Dave Asprey?

  And I used a research chemical called a SARM in order to do that. And I wasn't trying to put on muscles like I'm happy.

• 21:48Lewis Howes?

  You're not training heavy weights all the time, yeah?

• 21:49Dave Asprey?

  No, I don't want to, I don't want to look like a bodybuilder and I, I very much appreciate bodybuilders. I'm also looking to lift 180 and carrying too much muscle mass.

• 21:59Lewis Howes?

  It's hard.

• 22:00Dave Asprey?

  Isn't, well, it's not necessarily, yeah, it's, it's not where I want to go, but so I had to buy new, a new suit and like half my shirts don't fit. Oh, my God. You know, I was okay the way I was before, but it kind of feels good to have a little bit of

• 22:11Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, you're strong, man.

• 22:12Dave Asprey?

  I'm feeling good.

• 22:13Lewis Howes?

  That's great.

• 22:13Dave Asprey?

  And 20% increase in strength across the board on the ARX. I have this, when I, when I do lifting, I'm fighting a winch with a computer. So I have like a strain gauge. I don't usually use like heavy things that have gravity associated with them. So I'm basically pushing it to something where it's always quantified and just across the board, 20%, 20%, 20% in a month with three workouts on that and one electrical stimulation workout.

• 22:35Lewis Howes?

  Amazing, man.

• 22:36Dave Asprey?

  Super crazy.

• 22:37Lewis Howes?

  And you look younger, too.

• 22:39Dave Asprey?

  There's some stem cells involved, but a lot of this, as soon as you get the mitochondria working better, they're responsible for powering recovery and, and, and repair. So what happens? You do this to make your brain work better. You feel in your brain first, but then it goes throughout the body. And like, I'm, you know, because you've known me for a while, I am getting younger.

• 22:54Lewis Howes?

  You are, man.

• 22:55Dave Asprey?

  I'm not, I'm not.

• 22:56Lewis Howes?

  You are. It's crazy. You almost looked like a little weathered at times, like the first few times I met you. Maybe it was because you were like launching a business and you're like, everything was involved in the stress.

• 23:04Dave Asprey?

  When you first met me, I was a VP at a publicly traded company, head of global evangelism and starting a blog.

• 23:10Lewis Howes?

  On the side, yeah.

• 23:11Dave Asprey?

  And in three years, I was one of the top 20 most influential voices in health on the internet. Like, I was, oh, and I was a new dad or second new daddy.

• 23:18Lewis Howes?

  It was a lot. You had a lot going on.

• 23:20Dave Asprey?

  Yeah.

• 23:20Lewis Howes?

  You, you had. You seemed like more, you just seemed like overwhelmed whenever, when I first met you a few times, because you had a lot going on. I can only imagine. And now you just seem like this lightness about you.

• 23:30Dave Asprey?

  There's something else I've done, too.

• 23:31Lewis Howes?

  Freedom, you know?

• 23:32Dave Asprey?

  And this is something I write about in here. I've talked about neurofeedback as like a general term, but I opened 40 years of Zen, which is now something that, that I'm, I'm running as a, well, I'm an operationally running it, but something that I created that has been like my baby. I wanted the world's best brain mechanic in order to do like performance tuning for my brain. I've, I've had my own EEG machines at home for 20 years.

• 23:55Lewis Howes?

  And what's that?

• 23:56Dave Asprey?

  EEG is the idea you can measure electricity coming out of the brain. Guess where that electricity comes from? It's all about mitochondria, right?

• 24:02Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 24:02Dave Asprey?

  So you can measure it and then you can teach the brain, which means teaching the mitochondria how to work better.

• 24:07Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 24:08Dave Asprey?

  So I've been doing this, but I kind of tapped out on all the things out there. So we created new hardware and software and in order to teach you to be in this Zen state, like 20 to 40 years of daily Zen practice, you can achieve that in five days.

• 24:23Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 24:24Dave Asprey?

  And that sounds like a big claim. It's just, it's quantitative analysis of your brain. I can show you your brain before and after. And like, there you go. You just, you made these, these shifts happen. So I've been doing that. It's a facility in Seattle. It's a five day executive thing. Very few people can go through and like we we vet out some people or just where like this isn't the right training for you. But I did that because I really wanted this for myself. So I've been able to go and do that. And here's what's interesting. You get a new battery upgrade. You do this this headstrong stuff. What do you spend most of your energy on? You spend it controlling your desire to kill people, your desire to eat everything. You can turn off everything. That's the bulletproof diet. How do you lose the cravings? That's what the whole diet thing was about. That's one of the three things. I still haven't hacked that. You know, how do you not want to have sex?

• 25:07Dave Asprey?

  Because actually it's good to want to have sex. If you don't have sex, your mitochondria won't be happy either. Because that's one of the reasons they they exist is to reproduce, right? So sex is good for you and all that. But the the thing is, how do you control that that overwhelming anxiety, the fear, the the sense of overwhelm?

• 25:21Lewis Howes?

  Stress.

• 25:22Dave Asprey?

  I I sit in these big pods that we've made that that literally have twenty four electrodes glued to my head with a computer showing me how to be chill. So literally on the way over here, I was negotiating a hundred million dollar deal, no joke. Right? And it's a very substantial thing. I'm looking at venture capital dollars and all these things. And right before that, I was on stage with Jim Quick at Quick Learning. But I'm not stressed. Like you can see me like I'm I'm happy and I'm full of this. Before even even, you know, five years ago, without this level of training, I think it would have been harder for me to task switch and just to be grounded and present. So some of this is just deep internal awareness. And because I don't have the food craving thing, the the one third of my cognitive burden that would have gone towards saying no to food or thinking about food, that's gone.

• 26:07Lewis Howes?

  You're just gonna give it to me. I need something. Yeah, I need some energy, right?

• 26:09Dave Asprey?

  Yeah. And and the the part of me that's like, I have to run away from or or kill things, that's turned off. I mean, if if you were to attack me right now, I would respond appropriately and with my instincts. But I'm not like oversensitive to those things. So I'm in that sense of groundedness and awareness, but not in a state of fear. And that also frees up a huge amount of energy that was subconscious, but it was like constant worry in the background. What if, what if, like, what if there's not enough? What am I going to say next? All those voices, those are just gone. The voice in my head is just blissfully silent now. And then, you know, there's there's that third behavior there like that. I'm married. So like, you know, I get something like that. There you go, there you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great, man. Amazing. What is this process called? That's called five day process. It's called forty years of Zen. You created it or is it part of a program that? I created it, yeah. It's it's it's my baby.

• 26:54Dave Asprey?

  I've been like, I gotta tell you the story. I'll have to check it out, man. It's cool, yeah, you should come up and do it. I would love to. Jim did it, Jim Quick did. When you, that's in Vishal Lakani did as well. I don't know if you know Vishal. Yeah, of course. If you, oh, JJ, she was on the show. Yeah, JJ's been real. Yeah, in fact, it's in her book. Nice. So when you, when I started doing this in nineteen ninety six, this is like going back, geez, I'm old, it's like twenty years ago. I decided my brain was, I was really struggling and I didn't understand mitochondria, I didn't understand like how to turn energy on. I was really successful in my career, but I was, I was like, I wouldn't hire myself. I don't remember what's going on half the time, like I'm, I'm all over the place. So I started doing neurofeedback in Silicon Valley and this, this, I walk into the office for the first time and this like ten year old kid

• 27:35Dave Asprey?

  comes up and, and he looks, he looks at me and goes, blah, and just starts running in a circle around me and it doesn't stop yelling or running. It just runs like twenty or thirty times, like this is weird. And I realized, okay, the kid's probably autistic or something, but it was kind of jarring. So I did my training for ten sessions, got some nominal benefits, this is very primitive tech. And then I come back six weeks later and the same kid's in the waiting room, I'm like, oh, God. And he walks up to me and he goes, hi, my name's Bobby and like makes eye contact and I was so blown away. It was like a miracle had happened. And I, I realized this is where neuroplasticity comes from. Like this is why a kid could change so much and I had some change from that. And that actually encouraged me to start, not just doing neurofeedback, but I bought the gear and I've been doing it myself for twenty years.

• 28:18Dave Asprey?

  And I've been working with neuroscientists and like leaders in the field. Cause there's a certain point where you could harm your brain with neurofeedback, cause it's like, you know, doing surgery on yourself, you should be careful about that. And what came out about that is actually part of what's in the book. And it's something called brain derived nootropic factor, B D N F. This is a compound that makes your brain able to change itself better. And many of the practices in the two week program are designed to increase levels of this that makes your brain more plastic, more youthful. The cold shower thing we talked about, exercise, higher quality sleep, not necessarily more sleep, just better sleep. Yeah. And I, it drives me nuts, people say you need more sleep, like, no, you need good sleep. Yeah, yeah.

• 29:00Dave Asprey?

  Right? It's just such a different animal when you're like, I slept with no wasted time. I woke up in six hours and I felt amazing. By the way. Last fourteen hundred and thirty eight nights, six hours and five minutes of sleep. Like I track it every night. I have for more than three years. That's what How many five hours? Six hours and five minutes. That's my average. Some nights it's night before last was three and a half hours because I was flying. I had to get up early, but like you can bring it all day. It doesn't matter. Amazing. Right. And if you do that every night, you're not going to like your life, but it is, it's entirely flexible. Yeah, wow. So the, the whole BD and F conversation is how do you make your brain younger so you can learn better? And one of the things that happens as we age and how old are you now? Thirty three. Thirty three. So you're already, you're, you're already on this. Thirty four in a month. Yeah. And you're already on this path.

• 29:46Dave Asprey?

  How do I stay younger? All right. Forty eight percent of people under forty have early onset mitochondrial dysfunction. That means they're not making enough energy and also their, their neuroplasticity will go down because they don't have enough energy to make new neurons. And so that's half of us under forty. Over forty, everyone has mitochondrial insufficiency and that's called aging. So our goal is no matter what age you are, to give you maximum performance in this battery. So you can turn the battery on. You can, you can pull a charge out of it at very high voltage if necessary. And this would be, you know, the ability to sprint, the ability to lift something heavy. Or during like forty years of Zen, we actually train you to increase voltage that your brain can make it.

• 30:27Dave Asprey?

  It's a trainable thing. So literally the speed of neuron firing and the, the height of the voltage curve you make in your brain is hackable in five days. It is completely ridiculous. There's no one ever thought to train that. This is not the stuff you do for a sick brain, the stuff you do for a super brain. And some of that's what you're seeing in me. Like I've hacked the crap out of my brain. Amazing. BD and F though, those cold showers, exercise, sleep, eating more fat. And one of the other big things is avoiding toxins that lower mitochondrial function. Which what are? Mercury. Vegetable. No, you can eat, you can eat fish. Not a lot of it. Yeah, you don't want like super high like tuna and, and, and sharks and things like that.

• 31:08Dave Asprey?

  But one of the biggest ones out there is environmental mold toxins. And I did a documentary, it's called moldy movie.com about this. I interviewed Daniel Amen and Mark Hyman and some of the luminaries in the field about what's going on with these. And it turns out a lot of people get sick when like there's a water leak in their building. And they don't know why they're sick. Suddenly like everything sucks in their life, they gain some weight, they get emotionally unstable, they start forgetting things. It's because they're poisoning their mitochondria. The battery that used to make electrons well, doesn't make electrons well. So there's things you can, you can do about that, but one of the things you do is you eat less of those. One of the reasons paleo works that a lot of paleo people don't know about is that paleo naturally eliminates a lot of the mold that we eat.

• 31:51Dave Asprey?

  Because it's in grain for the most part. And when you cut out the grain, you cut out these things that slow down your energy systems. You don't do any grain? I don't do any grain, I'll do white rice, it's part of the bulletproof diet. Got it. And the rest of the grains, you just don't do it. No quinoa, none of the other grains? Quinoa is technically a seed, not a grain. And I, quinoa works for most people, but there are some people where it's just not right. Yeah, it's, it's on the suspect foods where like it might be guilty, might be fine, you just gotta, you gotta know. So I would be uncomfortable saying quinoa is good for you. Yeah. I'd be uncomfortable saying it's bad for you. It's, it's a testable one versus some kryptonite foods like MSG, corn oil, soybean oil, canola oil. Those things are always bad for your brain. Uh, in fact, this, this is going to shock people, but nicotine is a mitochondrial stimulant in low doses.

• 32:36Dave Asprey?

  I've never smoked, smoking is bad for you. But if someone came to me and said, Dave, here's a plate of deep fried food and here's a cigarette. I would rather smoke the cigarette. Wow. Because at least I'll get the nicotine performance boost. And the damage from the free radicals from the smoke and all the other crap in the cigarette, they're only going to really hit me for four hours. The fried food is at least 24 hours of damage to the brain, to the membranes in the mitochondria and in your cells that make all this energy. Bad fat is really bad for you. And one of the reasons that I look the way I look is I don't eat bad fat. It's not, oh, I'll just have a little bit, I just had to have the deep fried Brussels sprouts. I'm like, what do you fry those in? I don't eat that crap. It's not food. And when you get that, that, that freedom from cravings that comes from eating a higher fat diet, from using brain octane and bulletproof coffee and all that stuff,

• 33:21Dave Asprey?

  you suddenly have that ability to be like, I'll just pass on the fries because I know the steak is coming. And when you do that sort of thing, okay, you look better, you feel better, but your brain stays sharper. And like, I'm, I'm amazed at the changes I've been able to experience from just that one decision.

• 33:35Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 33:35Dave Asprey?

  Not that I've ever smoked instead of.

• 33:37Lewis Howes?

  Right, right, exactly. So what are the things you like are non-negotiables that you cut out? Maybe like five or seven things you think everyone should cut out of their.

• 33:45Dave Asprey?

  Things that contain MSG have to go. And there's still a group of science trolls who say, there's no evidence that MSG is bad for you. I'm like, except for like a gazillion pieces of evidence that you chose to ignore. So MSG causes hypoglycemia. Restaurants buy spices that are 74% MSG by volume. And they are now required to be labeled as MSG. Spice extractives, paprika extract, garlic extract, a lot of the extracts and flavorings, natural flavoring sometimes. The food companies sell these in magazines and catalogs saying, does not have to be labeled as MSG. They know it's MSG, but according to FDA law, actually probably USDA law,

• 34:28Dave Asprey?

  but 75% or above is MSG. When you eat this, or let's say you're running a restaurant, you want to make more money? Put something into the food that has MSG in it that isn't labeled. Your chef can, can, without even knowing it's in there, will be, oh no, there's no MSG. I checked the label. When people eat this, it's going, they're, they're going to like the food because it tastes good. But they're also going to increase their order by about 30% because they're going to order more drinks because they get thirsty and they're going to order dessert because they got hypoglycemia. Guess what hypoglycemia is? It's a lack of energy going into the inputs and the batteries in your cells.

• 35:00Lewis Howes?

  So you feel like you need more.

• 35:01Dave Asprey?

  Well, they start creating a panic response. It's like, give me sugar, baby. And that's where sugar cravings are coming from. So yeah, you gotta not eat MSG. It's just not there.

• 35:10Lewis Howes?

  Healthier fats, because you have less cravings when you're more fat.

• 35:13Dave Asprey?

  And it's not just healthier fats, it's undamaged fats. You can take like this grass-fed steak and like, oh, it's so amazing. It's got that nice ribbon, like a ribeye, a nice yellow fat. It's like juicy and good. Well, throw it under a broiler at 450. You don't want to eat it. Because when you damage fat, it makes really toxic free radicals that directly lower your energy production. So you want gently cooked meat, like a lightly caramelized steak is fine. A blackened steak, you gotta cut off the black part or just don't eat it. And I'm sad to say this, but if you're cooking on a grill versus baking, broiling, or cooking in water, or even like a stir fry, the grill makes a lot of things that we've known for years contribute to cancer.

• 35:54Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 35:55Dave Asprey?

  Yeah. And unfortunately, before they contribute to cancer.

• 35:57Lewis Howes?

  That's so good though.

• 35:58Dave Asprey?

  I love grill. You can add smoked salt, though, if you get like the real smoked salt, not the MSG salt, like Lowry's and all, but the stuff where they like Alder smoked.

• 36:05Lewis Howes?

  I know.

• 36:07Dave Asprey?

  It is.

• 36:08Lewis Howes?

  It's so good.

• 36:09Dave Asprey?

  It's amazing.

• 36:10Lewis Howes?

  It's a bad view, probably, right?

• 36:11Dave Asprey?

  It's the MSG, though.

• 36:12Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, of course.

• 36:13Dave Asprey?

  So I'm like, use the stuff where it's just the pure smoke.

• 36:16Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 36:17Dave Asprey?

  That isn't going to cause damage to your mitochondria. And people are like, Dave, you're such a picky bastard, right? Like, seriously?

• 36:23Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 36:23Dave Asprey?

  Like, look, try it. Try this for two weeks. And just the times when you're like, I would have had like a food coma. Food comas are not normal.

• 36:31Lewis Howes?

  Shouldn't have them.

• 36:32Dave Asprey?

  Yeah, the coma comes because the energy in your brain where you should have been on, turned off, because the energy was going to pumping crap out that shouldn't have been there in the first place.

• 36:39Lewis Howes?

  People probably didn't have food comas a hundred years ago.

• 36:41Dave Asprey?

  Yeah, if they did, it was like vodka and juice.

• 36:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, right. But it wasn't like putting all these toxins in our body and see inflammation constantly, right?

• 36:48Dave Asprey?

  Yeah.

• 36:48Lewis Howes?

  And talking about inflammation, I think you say inflammation is the muffin top of the brain, is that right?

• 36:53Dave Asprey?

  Yes.

• 36:54Lewis Howes?

  In the book. And what does that mean? What is that?

• 36:56Dave Asprey?

  Well, anyone who's ever had muffin top maybe notices that some days it's there and some days it's not, right? Muffin top is not fat. Muffin top is inflammation. If it's always there, you have a little bit of flab. But for most of us, like, you know, I went out drinking last night, I stayed up late, or I flew somewhere, and then the next morning I had muffin top. You don't put on fat like that. It's just the fact that your mitochondria became less efficient at managing water and you ended up getting some bloating. You can also get bloating if you eat a bunch of carbs because you store water weight when you eat carbs and things like that.

• 37:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 37:27Dave Asprey?

  But when you get that muffin top, it's highly variable. So when you see the muffin top here that wasn't there yesterday, your brain has the same kind of inflammation.

• 37:35Lewis Howes?

  And here's the

• 37:35Dave Asprey?

  Really?

• 37:35Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. So if you see it on the body, it's in the brain.

• 37:37Dave Asprey?

  And here's the weird thing about inflammation. Inside each each cell in the brain, there's this 15,000 mitochondria and they have something called the electron transport chain. So they make electrons from food and then they have to move them. Right? So if a cell is, you know, let's just kind of blow it up like it's the size of my hand. Right? And the electron has to go from here to here. Well, make the make inflammation happen. Now the electron has to go twice as far.

• 38:01Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 38:01Dave Asprey?

  So a small increase in inflammation really changes the efficiency of the system. And that's why inflamed neurons and brain inflammation is terrible for cognitive performance. And if you're seeing inflammation in the body, you'll see it in the brain.

• 38:16Lewis Howes?

  Drops the mic. No, I'm kidding. What are, what else is inflammation foods that we shouldn't have?

• 38:21Dave Asprey?

  Gluten.

• 38:22Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 38:22Dave Asprey?

  And look, there are people who will argue, oh, I like gluten. Okay, that's great. I like heroin too. Right? Okay. I don't actually like heroin.

• 38:30Lewis Howes?

  Or alcohol.

• 38:31Dave Asprey?

  I've never tried heroin to be honest. So but that whole thing like it doesn't matter.

• 38:36Lewis Howes?

  I like sugar too, but that's not good for you.

• 38:37Dave Asprey?

  Yeah, right. And it's so that's not a valid argument.

• 38:40Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 38:40Dave Asprey?

  And then there's a bunch of people say like, there's a bunch of studies that show that only celiac's no. There's study after study after study that show that gluten causes problems more for some than for others. But it's never a food that makes you.

• 38:53Lewis Howes?

  It's not an enhancer.

• 38:54Dave Asprey?

  No, it it at best, at best, it's neutral and it's probably bad.

• 38:59Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 38:59Dave Asprey?

  And it's not going to make you superhuman. It's not going to make you everything. It's not going to make you great. Right? I mean, like you're the school of greatness, right? If you really want to be great, gluten just shouldn't be on your diet. And if you're like, oh, I just have it twice a week. No, it causes continuous changes in your immune system. Depending on what genetics you have and all those things. So just because like, well, I can eat it and I feel okay.

• 39:21Lewis Howes?

  Doesn't mean it's not damaging something in your body or your mind.

• 39:23Dave Asprey?

  You can also start smoking and feel okay. It doesn't mean it was a good choice, right?

• 39:26Lewis Howes?

  Exactly.

• 39:27Dave Asprey?

  So I I know that that's a controversial thing, but we should take gluten out of the human diet. Unless unless in times of famine, it would be better for our soil, better for agriculture, better for animals, better for us, better for everyone. It's we know better now. We just do it because that's what we've done for the last few thousand years. Because we had to feed a lot of people when we didn't have good technology.

• 39:45Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Or we didn't have the money or whatever. Yeah.

• 39:46Dave Asprey?

  Yeah. All right. So we talked about bad fats, we talked about burned fats, we talked about burned meat. We talked about gluten. All right. Here's the other thing.

• 39:53Lewis Howes?

  Sugar, bro, right?

• 39:54Dave Asprey?

  Well, sugar, absolutely. Except mitochondria love sugar. So yes.

• 39:59Lewis Howes?

  What types of sugar?

• 39:59Dave Asprey?

  Well, they love straight up glucose. So fructose is bad for you, like high fructose corn syrup especially. And by the way, anything that's not organic and is made out of corn is full of glyphosate. Which is essentially Roundup. That stuff is a mitochondrial inhibitor. Guess what? These, these bastards who make glyphosate, who, who literally, we should, we should stop them tomorrow because it's destroying our soil. They say it doesn't affect humans because it only affects bacteria. There's a quadrillion ancient bacteria in your body that are in there and they are affected by glyphosate. It's just a fact. Not to mention your gut bacteria, which talk to your mitochondria via these light pathways. They're also affected by glyphosate. So you need to eat more organic and you shouldn't eat concentrated corn products anyway. Yeah.

• 40:43Dave Asprey?

  But there are times, especially if, if you're like, wow, I'm getting a really strong sugar craving. Guess what? You might want to give into it. Right? But what should you do? Have a banana or an apple or something? No, a banana or an apple are mostly fruit toast. You're not going to get it. You might want to have a, a small amount of real sugar. Really? And I- Or honey or something or no? Honey could work. Yeah. And you'd want to do that just because you're having an energy crash, right? And it's better to train your body. You got to burn some fat. Use some brain octane, which will go straight to ketones. Right? But you can do that and a little bit of sugar. So if someone's, if you're listening to this like, wow, I can feel like I'm crashing. Like I, I had lunch at, at this restaurant. It tasted too good to be true. Maybe I'm getting a sugar crash. If you prop up your glucose without having a huge wave of sugar, you know, I'm going to eat five scoops of Ben and Jerry's. Yeah.

• 41:25Dave Asprey?

  A tiny bit along with some fat and protein, it might turn off a migraine. Like it, it might affect, it might affect you in a big way. So if you, if you're crashing, there's nothing wrong with saying, all right, I, I, I need a little bit of sugar right now. And some honey and some pistachios or some cashews or something. Some Hulva, right? That, that'd be fine. Right? Yeah. And so people are really surprised. I was like, Dave, I thought you were like a zero carb. I'm like, no. Bulletproof diet has always been a cyclical ketosis diet that uses external ketones in the form of brain octane to all, to make sure you always have some ketones. Ketones are these fat burning molecules that give you more energy than sugar. We're, we're wired to only have ketones or only have sugar. And here's the cool thing about your brain, your neurons, they prefer fat as fuel.

• 42:08Dave Asprey?

  They'll burn ketones over glucose, even if they're both in your brain at the same time. Yeah. But the way we evolve, we're not supposed to have fat and sugar. If you want fat, it's easy, fast for four days or go on like the Atkins diet, like a ketogenic diet. And then you have no glucose and only fat. Or eat some carbs and some protein and then you're in back in glucose mode, which is our default energy production mode. Well, you can cheat and that's part of Ed Strong. What if you had enough protein and a few carbs, not too many. So you actually had glucose in the system and you had ketones. You're not supposed to be able to do that. You're supposed to be in one or the other, but because brain octane converts to ketones, even if you're eating carbs, there you go. Now you get the benefits of ketones, which is more energy than mitochondria.

• 42:48Dave Asprey?

  The neurons in the brain, they get to get their optimal fuel, but the nerve, the immune cells in the brain called glial cells, they want sugar. So they get a little bit of blood sugar that comes from eating even vegetables and from eating steak and things like that. So all of a sudden now both types of cells in your brain got the kind of fuel that was best for them. So now you have the energy to grow new neurons, do neurogenesis, things like that, which is cool. Oh, and we haven't talked about neurogenesis very much. We talked about BDNF before. There's a new supplement that I write about in the book. Studies just came out. It's the one you gave me? Yeah, it's called Neuromaster. Where'd I put it? And there it is. Yes. So this comes from coffee fruit. This is not coffee bean, just not green coffee extract.

• 43:31Dave Asprey?

  And in two different studies, it raises that BDNF, that factor that gives you a more youthful brain. So when I'm doing all this crazy brain training at 40 years, then when I'm meditating, when I'm doing anything that is a skill acquisition thing, including reading, I take one of those in the morning. So it keeps my brain at higher BDNF levels. And I do all the other practices in here. Most of the things that make your mitochondria strong also increase BDNF. So even intermittent fasting, the bulletproof intermittent fasting, all those things do it. So it doesn't matter what you're studying, what you're working to be better at. Having more neuroplasticity can only benefit you. And that's why we came out with that stuff. I'm, I'm pretty excited about it. It's one of my, one of my important new supplements.

• 44:10Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, you got so much at bulletproof.com. You got tons of great products and foods. You've got the bars that I love that we're talking about the lemon bars are amazing. What's it happening again, the ingredients?

• 44:19Dave Asprey?

  It's brain octane oil and collagen protein instead of like, there's a lot of bars.

• 44:23Lewis Howes?

  Protein is bad.

• 44:24Dave Asprey?

  Yeah, well, whey is, is not that good, but a lot of the, the very common like ketogenic bars have milk protein isolate from non-organic milk. It's like, it's one step above soy protein.

• 44:36Lewis Howes?

  Toxic, right? It's got some inflammation or it's.

• 44:38Dave Asprey?

  It is very likely to increase inflammation and certainly it's, it's not pure. And collagen you can't get in most food. You have to boil bones to get bone broth or gelatin or something. So it'd have a bar where all the protein in it comes from collagen with cashew as a binder. And then to get the brain octane to suppress hunger and turn on ketones. That's what I eat when I travel. I give these things to my kids and I just made those bars because I didn't want to eat the ingredients. Like artificial sweeteners are universally train wax for mitochondria. Things like sucralose, aspartame, asyl sulfate, potassium, those belong on those kryptonite foods list. And a lot of people who are into keto, and by the way, I lost 50 pounds in the late nineties on the Atkins diet going to ketosis.

• 45:18Dave Asprey?

  And I ate artificial sweeteners the whole time and you can't lose the other 50 pounds because artificial sweeteners cause inflammation. And half your weight gain is inflammation anyway.

• 45:26Lewis Howes?

  Doesn't matter how hard you work out.

• 45:27Dave Asprey?

  Yeah.

• 45:28Lewis Howes?

  Right?

• 45:28Dave Asprey?

  Didn't for me.

• 45:29Lewis Howes?

  The food, yeah, yeah.

• 45:30Dave Asprey?

  An hour and a half a day, six days a week, and to not lose weight after a year and a half of that.

• 45:34Lewis Howes?

  Twenty.

• 45:34Dave Asprey?

  Yeah. I was only like 24 when I did that.

• 45:37Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 45:38Dave Asprey?

  And I, it, I was so, I felt like such a failure. I'd had three knees or two knee surgeries.

• 45:42Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man.

• 45:42Dave Asprey?

  And I was like, all right, I'm never going back. Like I'm, I'm done with these surgeries. I'm going to be in the best shape of my life. I can max out every machine at my gym and I would do 45 minutes of cardio at an incline.

• 45:52Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 45:52Dave Asprey?

  And.

• 45:53Lewis Howes?

  But you were still eating the wrong things.

• 45:55Dave Asprey?

  Yeah, I was actually eating less calories, about 1800 calories a day. And I was eating a low fat diet and I could not lose the weight. I was like, I could bench press my thin friends while they eat french fries. And it was a, one day I looked at them like, wait a minute, I actually do eat less than any of my friends. And like, it's not me. Like, it's not that I didn't try hard enough. It's not that a moral failing. It's, it's what I'm doing just doesn't work. And what happened, I was overtraining and I was fat deficient and protein deficient, eating inflammation and all that kind of crap.

• 46:22Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. And if you guys haven't checked out bulletproof.com, make sure you check it out. You got a lot of great resources, the books, diet stuff, but you have tons of supplements, products, foods, the bulletproof coffee obviously has changed thousands of people's lives, hundreds of thousands.

• 46:38Dave Asprey?

  Check this out, forty eight million cups of bulletproof coffee.

• 46:40Lewis Howes?

  No way. Served in what way? How do you quantify that? Like at home or at a store?

• 46:45Dave Asprey?

  In total. Bulletproof coffee is, is the mold free, lab tested beans with brain octane oil and grass fed butter. Putting butter in coffee is better than putting milk in coffee because milk steals the polyphenols from your coffee. It sticks to them and polyphenols are required for mitochondria to function. In fact, check this out. Throughout all of history, the first trade routes established were for salt because salt is required for adrenal function. It's fundamental being a human. And if you have salt cravings, there's an easy thing to do. Give in to them. Just use sea salt, right? You need that. That's your adrenal system crying for salt.

• 47:17Lewis Howes?

  That was like cash back in the day, right?

• 47:18Dave Asprey?

  Yeah. Yeah. You paid your Roman soldiers in salt as a man worth his salt and maybe a woman, but back then I don't think they paid for women in salt.

• 47:24Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 47:25Dave Asprey?

  Paying for women is bad, by the way.

• 47:26Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 47:26Dave Asprey?

  That's what they did back then because they were bad Romans.

• 47:28Lewis Howes?

  Yep.

• 47:28Dave Asprey?

  Anyway, you know what I'm saying? Like literally soldiers paid in salt.

• 47:31Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 47:32Dave Asprey?

  And from there, the next evolution of those routes was spice. What are the highest polyphenol foods on earth? They're spices. You know, oregano, thyme, vanilla, like all of these things, right? And after that was tea. Tea is also a high polyphenol food. It turns out these little mitochondria that run things, they are desperate to get these compounds that function as antioxidants, but also are signaling molecules to the body. So we set up global commerce. We've had wars over access to polyphenols and we've had wars over coffee. And it turns out coffee is the highest polyphenol food in the American diet, just because we get most of our polyphenols from that. So part of the headstrong program

• 48:14Dave Asprey?

  is you need to add more high quality spices and herbs to your food, more turmeric. And coffee is good. Tea is good. Dark chocolate is good. Unfortunately, alcohol is bad for mitochondria, but wine has some polyphenols in it. So if you're going to have some, at least drink wine with less anti nutrients that that harm mitochondrial function in it. Uh, so there's, there's cool stuff you can do.

• 48:35Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 48:35Dave Asprey?

  Uh, in all these different things, but who would have thought that polyphenols were so important to the evolution of our society? Well, it turns out bulletproof coffee is the culmination of, of that where we don't use milk in it. We use butter because butter allows you to absorb the polyphenols. And we use brain octane in it, which also allows you to make more energy from it. So all of a sudden the mitochondria, like you gave me energy, you gave me, you gave me polyphenols at the same time, I'm ready to party and that's why you feel so different when you drink it.

• 49:01Lewis Howes?

  Wow, I love it. And there's no crash and it tastes smooth. And it's like, I don't drink coffee, but I like bulletproof. So we drink it all the time here.

• 49:07Dave Asprey?

  Cool.

• 49:08Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah. But I never drank coffee before.

• 49:10Dave Asprey?

  Isn't like being a, like being a vegetarian that eats fish, you know, like.

• 49:13Lewis Howes?

  Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But I never had coffee before. I mean, I'd have it every now and then or a cappuccino or something just for like a taste order, but now, uh, yeah, I do it almost every day.

• 49:21Dave Asprey?

  It's a performance enhancing substance and you drink less of it, like a cup of bulletproof is, is a good amount.

• 49:25Lewis Howes?

  A long way. Yeah, it goes a long way. So awesome, man. I want to make sure everyone check out bulletproof.com. Make sure you check out, uh, orderheadstrong.com. You can get some free videos, a lot of other good stuff here. It's, uh, the bulletproof plan to activate untapped brain energy to work smarter and think faster in just two weeks. So it's really a two week program to get you up to speed on everything you need. Test it all, put it all together and then see how you feel after two weeks.

• 49:50Dave Asprey?

  There you go.

• 49:50Lewis Howes?

  And they can connect with you on social media. Where? What's the best place?

• 49:54Dave Asprey?

  See, I'm Dave Asprey on Instagram. On Facebook, I've got 300 and something thousand followers. So pretty much Facebook.

• 50:01Lewis Howes?

  At Dave Asprey everywhere?

• 50:02Dave Asprey?

  Yeah, it's all Dave. I think on Instagram, it might be dave dot Asprey.

• 50:05Lewis Howes?

  Okay, cool. Yeah.

• 50:06Dave Asprey?

  I think on Instagram, I'm dave dot Asprey and I'm Dave Asprey on Facebook.

• 50:09Lewis Howes?

  Awesome. Awesome. Uh, a couple of final questions for you. Uh, this one's called the three truths. I don't think I asked this the last time you were on, which was a few years ago.

• 50:16Dave Asprey?

  Yeah, it's been a while.

• 50:17Lewis Howes?

  So this is called the three truths. I ask everyone at the end and the question is when you're 180 and it's your last day and you've written everything you want to write, you've put out videos, you put out all this content, but for whatever reason it's erased, it's gone. No one has any of your information anymore. All the stuff you've taught, they don't have access to it. And you have a piece of paper and a pen and you get to write down three truths. The three things you know to be true about everything you've learned, everything you've experienced, all the biohacking, the mind hacking, all of it. It came down to the three things that you would pass on to the world. These lessons are truths. What would be your three truths?

• 50:53Dave Asprey?

  It's an interesting question. I, I haven't heard you ask it before, so I'm coming into it blind. See, this is what professional interviewers do is we're actually taught to not say that's an interesting question, but I did it anyway, just to throw you.

• 51:05Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 51:06Dave Asprey?

  I'll think about that for a second.

• 51:08Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 51:08Dave Asprey?

  Hmm. Three truths. Uh, the first one would, would be that, uh, the world is way more complex than you, than you perceive it to be. Uh, like there are things you just don't notice that, that are really important. Uh, the, uh, the second one would be that you have way more control than you ever thought you did. And the third one would be that

• 51:36Dave Asprey?

  it costs you more and causes more harm than you think when you hold hate and anger in your heart. And that the antidote for that is gratitude and forgiveness. And that if you can just do that, that when you set that stuff down, you stop carrying other people's baggage for them that costs you, that you don't know how much freedom that'll give you, but you're also probably entirely unaware of the, of the harm you're causing other people by sending them those bad vibes.

• 52:06Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Well, those are great, man. Those are great. Um, I want to acknowledge you for a moment, Dave, for being intelligently, um, useful in all of your ways of being a resource for the world. I mean, you've, you've tested so many things on yourself. You've researched more than probably anyone I know to, to see how you can improve your life and impact the lives of millions of people around the world. And you've put yourself through who knows what type of harm or all these different tests, and you continue to push the boundaries to be in service to yourself and to other people with this, you know, this mind hacking and everything that you do.

• 52:47Lewis Howes?

  So I acknowledge all the work that you do to constantly step up for yourself, risk yourself to learn how we can improve our lives and it's, it's really making a big impact. So I would acknowledge you for that.

• 52:58Dave Asprey?

  I appreciate that, Lewis. That feels good. Thank you.

• 53:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, of course, man. Final question is what's your definition of greatness?

• 53:05Dave Asprey?

  Definition of greatness?

• 53:08Dave Asprey?

  You know, the, the very greatest people in history, in, in my view of, of looking at this are the people who've, who've reached full enlightenment. And my definition of enlightenment is based on, I've studied in Nepal and Tibet and all this stuff, but I don't follow any one spiritual school or anything like that. I believe that when you have full awareness of what's going on inside your body, that that leads to full awareness of what's going on outside your body. So a sense of inner awareness tied with a sense of outer awareness, when you know everything that's going on, you will be great because your ability to interact with the

• 53:48Dave Asprey?

  world without telling yourself a story that's not true, you basically erase the story. So you're like, oh, this is what's actually happening instead of what I told myself about what's actually happening. So it's about removing self-deception and that's what makes you great.

• 54:03Lewis Howes?

  Dave Asprey, thanks so much, man. Appreciate it.

• 54:06Dave Asprey?

  Thanks, Lewis.

• 54:09Lewis Howes?

  Boom shakalaka. There you guys go. I hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure to subscribe. If this is your first time here, just click on the podcast app and click on subscribe over on your iPhone podcast app, over on Stitcher, or on SoundCloud. And if you haven't left a review yet, make sure to leave a review for your chance to be a reviewer of the week. Go to iTunes.com/greatness and let us know what you think about these episodes. Make sure to share this one with your friends. If you thought it had any value, if you know someone who could benefit from this, then share out the link, LewisHowes.com/464. And share it out with your friends. Train your brain for peak performance. Or just click on the podcast app, wherever you're listening to it right now, and click on the share button.

• 54:53Lewis Howes?

  It'll go right out to Twitter, Facebook, and as always, tag me on your Instagram stories where you're listening to this, because I love to connect with people over on their Instagram stories, @lewishowes. I hope you guys enjoyed this one, and we've got a big interview coming up next with Eric Thomas, the hip hop preacher. Get ready. Make sure to subscribe because this one is gonna be hot and you want to be notified when it comes out. Live. I love you guys very much and you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.

• 55:48Lewis Howes?

  Live.