92 Increase Your IQ, Lose 100 Pounds, and Add Years to Your Life on Less Sleep with Dave Asprey

"Feeling awesome all the time is my goal." - Dave Asprey To learn more and get the show notes, head on over to www.lewishowes.com/92 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 92 with the Bulletproof Executive, Dave Asprey.

• 0:07Lewis Howes?

  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?

  What is up everyone? Thanks so much for joining me today on the School of Greatness Podcast. My name is Lewis Howes. And a lot of you have been asking personal questions and asking me to share more information about myself on the podcast. From my, from my past. So I thought I'd give you guys a little fun fact today and let you guys know that I actually attended four different universities while I was in college. It took me about seven years to actually complete it and get my degree in sports management. But I actually went to four different universities. Can you believe it? I transferred around a lot and I actually went to two schools twice. I went from one school to another, then back to that same school, then back to the other school, then back to the same school. So I was transferring around a lot.

• 1:17Lewis Howes?

  And I studied abroad in Hawaii one semester. So lots of different interesting times in college, mostly for sports and for football. But that's my fun fact. Now today we've got Dave Asprey on who is the founder of the Bulletproof Executive, the Bulletproof Podcast. And he's a Silicon Valley investor and technology entrepreneur who spent 15 years and over $300,000 to hack his own biology. That's right. And he lost about 100 pounds without counting calories or excessive exercise. And used techniques to upgrade his brain by more than 20 IQ points. Lowered his biological age while learning to sleep more efficiently in less time.

• 1:58Lewis Howes?

  Learning to do all these seemingly impossible things transformed him into a better entrepreneur, husband and father.

• 2:06Lewis Howes?

  Some of this seems a little interesting for me and I wanted to dive in and ask Dave all these questions, you know, can you really sleep less and lose weight and still be efficient throughout the day? You know, as an athlete, I feel like I need to sleep more to recover when I'm training. So I dive into all these different questions. Dave is also the creator of the very popular Bulletproof Coffee, which some of you may be aware of or even drink. So we talk about that process, what he's up to in the future, and many, many other cool things. And without further ado, let's dive into this episode with Dave Asprey.

• 2:49Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness Podcast. Very excited about today's guest. His name is Mr. Dave Asprey. What's going on, Dave?

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Not a lot right now. I'm super stoked to be on your show. Thanks for having me.

• 3:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, man. It's, you know, since I launched my podcast, you've been in the top of the ranks on the health category. I was, I kind of go back and forth to business and health because I'm a mixture of guests in that category. So it's always fun to try to, to beat you out every now and then for a couple of days and here and there. And I see you always ahead of me. So it's always, it's always fun to strive for your, your level of podcast excellence.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Well, maybe by having me on the show will help rankings up some. And I hope this show beats my show because that would be funny and awesome. And

• 3:36Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, well, it's been a lot of fun. You know, we've been, I've been watching you from afar. And obviously we have a lot of the same mutual friends. I think we probably got like a hundred mutual friends on Facebook or something crazy. So we've interviewed a number of the same guests and, you know, fall in similar circles with books and stuff like that. So finally grateful that I get to connect and really interview about what it means to be bulletproof. And so let's go ahead and just start with that. Like, why did you get into this bulletproof state of high performance? And what does it mean to be bulletproof?

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Bulletproof is, like you said, it's a state of high performance. But behind that high performance isn't invincibility or indestructibility, like you might imply from the name, but it's actually resilience. The idea of high-performance resilience is maybe hard to get your mind around. But the idea is you can take the hit. You know what the hit is, you know what it's going to do to you, and you have the appropriate tools to help your biology do what you want it to do. So you're really taking control of your own biology, maybe for the first time. And when you do that, that opens up a gateway to let you take care of your own psychology. Because if your biochemistry is jacked, it doesn't really matter how much personal growth work you're going to do.

• 4:49Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  You've got to address those core needs. And if you have problems with cellular respiration and your mitochondria are dysfunctional, I'm sorry, you're going to be cranky and tired a lot. And until you fix that, it doesn't matter how much at peace you are, how many times you say om, you're not going to be able to bring it when you need to bring it.

• 5:05Lewis Howes?

  So you're saying you got to fix the biology in order for you to have the energy to, and the calmness to do everything else in your life is what you're saying?

• 5:13Speaker 01

  You got to fix the hardware before you write the software.

• 5:16Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha. So you can't just do meditations or pray or whatever it is, do spiritual mantras or affirmations if you're not physically and mentally in the right state of mind or in the right physical state of being first, correct? They may put a Band-Aid on it, but it may not get to the root is what you're saying.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can do those things, but it's much more difficult and you don't get the return on that investment of time and energy that you should expect from doing those amazing activities. So I'm not saying don't meditate. What I'm saying is put everything you have into making your biology work right so that when you meditate, you'll achieve your goals.

• 5:53Lewis Howes?

  Maximum results, right? Gotcha. Now, you were in Silicon Valley, you're an investor and an entrepreneur in the technology space. But what was really like the spark for all of this research and biohacking? Was it because you were overweight and just I gotta lose weight was the first thing? Or was there something else that was off that you realized you got to start taking action on this?

• 6:15Speaker 01

  I weighed 300 pounds and I'm somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 pounds now.

• 6:18Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  I've been putting on some muscle lately with the electricity. So I might be around 220. I haven't weighed myself in a little while, but I lost 100 pounds of fat and I'm really comfortable with that, that number.

• 6:30Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  That wasn't the motivation, though, because, I mean, fat people are really motivated to lose weight. It's just most of us do things that don't work very well, and then we feel guilty that we didn't do them hard enough, which is great for the dieting industry, but maybe not so good for your psyche. The problem that I ran into was after I lost about half the weight, I had some serious brain fog. I'm, you know, 26 in Silicon Valley. I've lost some weight, but I'm still pretty fat. And I made $6 million at the company that created modern cloud computing. Google's first servers were in our buildings and used our network. The company was called Exodus Communications. And it was an amazing time, but I would go to these meetings, and I wouldn't know what happened to me after the meetings. I just couldn't remember anything. And I was just, I felt like I was hungover

• 7:16Speaker 01

  all the time. And something was broken in my brain. I remember I went to the doctor and said, I feel like I've been poisoned, like, like, things aren't right. So here I am, you know, this like, almost unimaginable amount of money. But I don't have cognitive health, and I don't have physical health. So I ended up spending $300,000 on upgrading myself over the next 10 or 15 years. I went from what I thought was normal, but turns out was really unhealthy, to a level of performance that I never knew that I had in me. Like, I am better now, my ability to pay attention, to focus, to think, to act, even to move,

• 8:00Speaker 01

  than I was when I was 20. And I'm 41.

• 8:02Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  I started writing this stuff about three years ago, while I was a VP at a big internet security company. Just because it kind of wasn't fair that I had all this, all this money and time to spend on fixing all this. And I thought a few people would be, would just really benefit. I might change a few people's lives who didn't have to deal with what I did. And I was just honored, actually, by the overwhelming response to the techniques that I posted. So I, I ended up leaving my job in Silicon Valley, and I run Bulletproof now. And by the way, I lost my $6 million two years after I made it. So I've been working, you know, paying for my family, like everyone else, for the past 20 years. But I did have a couple of years of, oh, my God, I'm rich beyond belief, and I'm 26 and full of myself.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  And that's why I got into anti-aging.

• 8:49Lewis Howes?

  Now, how'd you, how'd you lose the $6 million?

• 8:54Speaker 01

  I was responsible for all mergers and acquisitions due diligence on the technology side. That meant that I was blacked out. It was illegal for me to trade our company's stock and I watched it fall from $60 a share to $5 a share when it was illegal for me to keep my money.

• 9:09Lewis Howes?

  Hmm, interesting. And so from there, you said, you mentioned how you got into anti-aging after that. Why did you get into anti-aging?

• 9:18Speaker 01

  I think when you're young and you get a ton of money, you're like, okay, I'm gonna swing for the fences. I'm gonna think really big. And I'm not alone here. I mean, look at what happened with Larry and Sergey when they made like real money at Google. They're now funding all these things to like, oh, I have a 20% increased risk of this disease? Well, here's $100 million to stop that disease, right? It's actually a logical thing you do when you realize my core needs are met. I'm not gonna starve. You know, I'm unlikely to die from all these other things. Well, how do I lower my risk? So I started thinking about that. And part of the reason I got into it truly is that the thing that helped me the most

• 10:01Speaker 01

  when I started having this cognitive dysfunction was smart drugs. So being an early internet guy, I went out there and I learned about smart drugs from a guy named Steve Fokes, who was really, he wrote the first real book about how to use them. It turns out we've become good friends and he's an advisor to the anti-aging nonprofit that I've run for a decade called the Silicon Valley Health Institute. So smart drugs were a part of what turned my brain on enough to let me fix my own biology.

• 10:29Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  And given, given that, like, that's just an obvious gateway into anti-aging because while I wanted my brain to be superpowered, like, how can I make the rest of me last forever? And I don't know if forever is even my goal anymore, but I do know that feeling awesome all the time is my goal.

• 10:45Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Dude, I'm stoked.

• 10:47Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, and in your bio, you talk about how you, you've lowered your biological age while learning to sleep more affectionately in less time. Now, what does that exactly mean by you've lowered your biological age? And how old do you want to live to?

• 11:02Speaker 01

  There are probably dozens of ways of judging biological age from mitochondrial respiration to telomere length. And the measure that I'm using for that one was a 24-hour heart rate monitor, like a hospital-grade monitor that you wear, and you run it through an algorithm that looks at the responsiveness of your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system to see how it compares to people of your age. And when I did that in the middle of my two years of five hours of sleep or less kind of experiment, I found out that my nervous system, basically my stress level age, was less than my biological age, even

• 11:45Speaker 01

  though I was intentionally stressing myself out. What I did was I thought, well, it's probably harmful to sleep five hours or less per night, every night. I'm trying to get fat, so I can prove that calories in did not equal the amount of weight I gained. I figured I'd eat enough calories, extra calories, to gain 20 pounds. I would gain like two pounds, and then say, look, magically, 18 pounds disappeared, the math is wrong. What I did was I lost weight, and I got this, just a ton of mental focus and clarity, and I started bulletproof while outperforming in my day job as a VP at a company.

• 12:16Lewis Howes?

  With less sleep.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  I was five hours or less every single night.

• 12:20Lewis Howes?

  Now, were you working out a lot as well and doing intense activities, physical activities, or just?

• 12:25Speaker 01

  No, that probably would have killed me. I stopped working out entirely.

• 12:29Lewis Howes?

  Okay, so this is how to lose weight without the physical activity, but just by what you put in your body?

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. And by the way, I say I stopped working out, doesn't mean I stopped moving.

• 12:39Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Those are just different things. And a lot of people think going for a walk is working out. And sorry, I got news for you, they're not the same. But an intense workout is a physical stressor. Not getting enough sleep is a physical stressor, and being sick, or having your spouse yell at you, or not having enough money, those are all stress. And so you've got so much stress to spend, I went through everything I could in life to maximize my resilience during that time. And that meant that I didn't do heavy workouts, because I would have needed

• 13:10Lewis Howes?

  More sleep.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Several more hours of sleep during that time if I did.

• 13:13Lewis Howes?

  To recover, or nap time, or something like that, right?

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 13:17Lewis Howes?

  So that's interesting. That was one of my questions because you were just spoke at Mastermind Talks, I believe with where I was at last year and I saw, I think it was Amir Rosic there as well?

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:27Lewis Howes?

  And he was on the show a while back and talking about the power of sleep for elite athletes and entrepreneurs. And you know, he has this whole ritual where he goes to, he turns off everything when the lights go out, natural sunlight, basically. And he turns off all the screens and dims the lights and goes to bed, I think around 10 o'clock every night, wakes up with the sunrise and then has this whole process of why it recharges him, why it gives him more energy, why it helps him to live longer, all these different things. But it sounds like you're doing a little bit of the opposite where, you know, you're not focused on as much sleep as necessary. But he also is an extreme athlete and trains really hard. So that's why you'd probably need that, right?

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you're going to do that to your body to be an extreme athlete, you are going to want that extra sleep to do the, the physical repair. I would argue that being an extreme athlete like that, while it can be emotionally and physically really rewarding, that from an anti-aging strategy, it's maybe you're wearing some things out, you're pushing things pretty hard. There's a comfortable, healthy amount of intense exercise. But if you're an extreme athlete, you might be exceeding that.

• 14:37Lewis Howes?

  Sure. It's interesting.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  And then sleep matters.

• 14:39Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's interesting you say that. I'm actually, I forgot to say that we were talking, for those listening in, Dave and I were video chatting before this interview and I forgot to show you, Dave, that I've actually got a cup of Bulletproof Coffee in my hands right now. I'm sipping on it for the first time. I'm trying for the first time. I've been hearing about it from all my friends who are like, swear by it. And I don't drink coffee. So this, I went to Air One. I live right next to, I live in LA, next to Air One, which you're, there's signs outside that say Bulletproof Coffee. It's amazing the type of marketing you get at a grocery store. You know, outside, there's no other signs promoting any other product except for Bulletproof. I took a picture and I'll send it to you. I don't know if you've seen that.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  I'd love to see that picture. I love the guy's Air One. It's it's the only store I've ever been to in the US or Canada where they have a licensed physician in the vitamin section.

• 15:30Lewis Howes?

  Oh my gosh.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  You can actually tell you what's going on. Like, I love that.

• 15:33Lewis Howes?

  It's incre- it like puts Whole Foods to shame. It's such an incredible store. Everything is the most expensive thing ever. It's it's but it's amazing. Uh, so anyways, I was like, okay, I gotta go in and try this today before I get on the interview so I can really experience the product, right? And I actually took the, uh, my stomach was really hurting me last week and my, uh, my assistant gave me one of the coconut charcoal, uh, vitamins or whatever they are.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, the capsules, the detox capsules.

• 16:01Lewis Howes?

  Yes. And it's like, it took the pain away in my stomach. I had like this intense stomach ache and it really, uh, so you know, solved that issue for me like within an hour and I felt a lot better. So, the stuff's been great. Anyways, I tried the, uh, I tried the coffee and it's, it's awesome. You know, it's really intense for me because I don't drink caffeine. So I'm like, I'm like, oh my God, this is like my, my stomach really feels it and I'm like charged up, but it tastes good and, uh, it's definitely a, a cool, a cool taste. So I'm, I'm glad to try that out. Um, what was I gonna say? I was getting off on a rant there, but, um.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  About exercise and sleep, probably.

• 16:39Lewis Howes?

  Yes. Um, oh man, I had a point to that story, but besides the fact that it's really good and I'm, and it's cool that you're in stores and, and seeing that, but, exercise, what was I gonna say? Man, I had a point to that.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Uh, I, I think we stimulated your brain. Go light on your first cup, Jack. It, it actually, since you got it at Air One, they make it with brain octane oil.

• 17:01Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  It's extractive coconut oil and it, it will turn on mitochondria that can burn ketones better than glucose.

• 17:09Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Uh, there's a study out there that says your, your brain prefers those and brain octane is a source of ketones. So sometimes people are like, my brain is working all the way and I don't know what to do with it. Just the first day and then you kind of get used to having the capacity and then you.

• 17:22Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. It's so charged up, right? It's like, it's intense. It's interesting because my, uh, my assistant, she, her husband. Lost forty pounds in two months during the bulletproof diet. And she sent me some notes because she knew I was interviewing you. She scheduled this. And she said, he, I'm reading his notes right now. His cholesterol dropped eighty six points.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  Holy crap.

• 17:44Lewis Howes?

  Triglycerides dropped by a hundred points and his blood pressure went back to normal range. She says, the diet works, but why? How? It goes against everything we've ever been taught about fats. It makes absolutely no sense that you can drink butter and oil and lose weight. So can you explain that?

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 18:03Lewis Howes?

  I thought that was a good testimonial for you, too.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  It blows blows him away and I'm grateful for that. The, my experience was kind of the same. I mentioned before this, this kind of ridiculous two years where I went on five hours of sleep. I also had between four thousand and forty five hundred calories a day. My goal was to get fat. And

• 18:24Lewis Howes?

  Why was to get fat?

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wanted just to get a little bit fat so I could just like kind of hang out and be like, guys, I know that counting calories doesn't make sense, but here it is. I slept less, which makes you fatter.

• 18:35Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  If you're not improving sleep quality at the same time. I ate more, which is supposed to make you fat, and I stopped exercising. And what you know, I didn't gain, I also thought I'd say I didn't gain nearly as enough weight. But what I didn't expect, I posted exactly one picture of my six pack. Keep in mind, I'm a former three hundred pounder. I have stretch marks. Like, I'm not exactly like pleased that I have like zebra stripes all along my love handles. But I don't have love handles.

• 18:58Lewis Howes?

  But you're a fit looking guy.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  I'm pretty stoked and like it keeps getting better the longer I do this.

• 19:03Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  So I did post the one picture of my six pack ever about eighteen months into that experiment. Just to be like, no, really, this is how I look after doing this thing that should have made me gain weight. And there's something wrong with this, you know, thirty, you eat an extra thirty five hundred calories, you're going to gain a pound of fat. Like, it just doesn't work like that.

• 19:21Lewis Howes?

  So you're, wait, so you're saying that if I eat an extra thirty five hundred calories than I normally eat, that I'm not going to gain a pound?

• 19:29Speaker 01

  I will say that categorically, you're not going to gain a pound. Now, right now, people who have carbohydrate or calorie laboratories where they measure everything you breathe, they're saying, but that's not true. If you have an extra 3,500 calories that go into the body, it's actually about 3,500, then you have to gain weight. But the thing is, when the calories go into your body, your body changes the amount of energy that you use. So if you want to be low energy, eat a low calorie diet and your brain will be like, I'm tired. Especially if you do it for a long period of time. And it's kind of a nasty trap because you can make yourself thin

• 20:12Speaker 01

  by basically telling your body, there's a tiger chasing me. And I mean, just go for a long jog every day and then tell your body there's a famine by eating no fat and by eating a low calorie diet. And yes, if you go to anywhere in the world where there's been a famine, there are many thin people. But none of them are going to live a long time and none of them are biologically healthy. So if your goal is to be biologically healthy, maybe you should eat the right amounts of fat and have lots of energy for your brain, but not eat excessive carbs.

• 20:40Lewis Howes?

  So you're actually saying it's valuable to eat more calories, the right types of calories, to create more energy for yourself throughout the day and you're not going to gain weight by doing so?

• 20:51Speaker 01

  As long as the calories are the right kinds of calories and you're not eating things in that food that also make you fat. There are certain environmental toxins and man-made toxins that contribute to weight gain. And they also cause food cravings, most of them. So it turns out it's a relatively long set of things to understand. But what I did over the course of that two years, and keep in mind, I've been working with anti-aging professionals and interviewing them and all that for more than a decade. But I boiled these principles down. I wrote my first book, I co-authored it with my wife, about what do you do before enduring pregnancy from a nutrition perspective? So like, there's a lot of work that went into creating the principles behind the Bulletproof Diet.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  The proof in the pudding for me, so to speak, was this two-year period of just excessive calories, more than I wanted, when I'm like, the only way I can get this in my body is I'm gonna just use more and more of this bulletproof coffee. So I did that and was just totally shocked. And when I published more about that and I started using principles from ketosis to do not plain intermittent fasting, which for most people who have jobs, it doesn't work that well because they get really tired in the middle of the day. You keep the ketones high using bulletproof coffee, but you eat no protein and no sugar. So there's a meal timing thing that works. But end of the day, it's pretty easy to lose weight when you're never, ever hungry. You don't have

• 22:20Lewis Howes?

  More. Right. So you're generating, you're adding the calories through the coffee with the butter and the oils, right? Is that, is the?

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's called brain octane oil.

• 22:28Lewis Howes?

  Yep.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  And it's, and it's a kind of coffee that doesn't have the mold

• 22:32Lewis Howes?

  The crash.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  That are common in coffee. So you get a jitter and a crash. A lot of people say, I can't drink coffee. It makes me jittery. Well, it turns out they're actually sensitive to the toxins in the coffee, not to coffee itself, because those people drink my coffee, which is lab tested and created differently even before it's roasted. And that difference that, wow, I drink it and I feel different. So I have all those problems. I drink most coffee. I feel jittery. I'm like, I can tell you if there's mold in coffee because my body reacts that way.

• 22:59Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  And my lab tests back that up. Like, there we go. That's, that's a clean cup. So you do all that stuff right. But on the bulletproof diet, what you're doing is you're eating a lot of fat, like 70% of your calories come from fat and lots of saturated fat from clean sources, like healthy animals that eat grass. And you feel a difference immediately just in how your brain works. Just your zest for life comes back on. And for me, that's it. I want my brain to feel good. If I had an extra 10 pounds, I don't care. Like, I'm 41, I have two kids, I'm married, and it just really isn't, I'm not a cover model. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm a dad. I just want to look good and I want to feel good.

• 23:40Lewis Howes?

  Feel good. Yeah.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  But do I need to look like I'm Superman? Like, no, I don't.

• 23:44Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 23:46Lewis Howes?

  And part of that is part of that genetics too, where some people are just like, doesn't matter what they eat, they're just shredded, six packs or?

• 23:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, there are some people who just are genetically like that. But here's an interesting thing. In mice, they can make germ free mice. And so these are mice that are specially raised to have zero bacteria in their bodies. And they can feed them anything and they're like lean and shredded. Then they introduce gut bacteria and they'll gain 60% body fat in like a week.

• 24:13Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  So it turns out that it's not just genetic. It's like, what bacteria did your parents have? And did you inherit those from your parents? So there's a whole section in the Bulletproof Diet Book. And by the way, hope you don't mind a quick plug, bulletproofdietbook.com. Just please check it out. I'll send you the first chapter free. I'll give you the infographic for the diet free. I just want people to feel this way. And hopefully you'll like it and preorder my book and I'd be grateful for that.

• 24:36Lewis Howes?

  For sure.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Download the roadmap that tells you what to eat, when, and which foods are less inflammatory than others. Pretty straightforward to follow. And when you do that, there's, there's a whole section in that book about what it does to your gut bacteria. And it's fascinating that those bacteria that you think are healthy may actually be making you fat because they've kind of hijacked or hacked some of the systems in the body. And as a biohacker, like, oh wait, there's already a hacker in my body. And how do I hack the hacker? And it turns out what you put in your mouth works.

• 25:05Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. Now, who is the bulletproof diet for? Because is, can an extreme athlete get on this diet and this, you know, obviously they can't sleep that, that little. So would it not be for that type of individual? Or who is it for?

• 25:21Speaker 01

  There are multiple world champions using the bulletproof diet religiously. In fact, the higher performance they are, the more they adhere to like the smaller principles of it. Because the difference now, especially at the very high end of competition, it's, you know, 0.01 seconds sometimes between first and last. It's amazing. So the smallest nuance nutritionally can have just enough of a boost in order for you to win.

• 25:49Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  And when you're executing at that level, you feel it. So then you, you really start paying attention. So we have about 93 ambassadors, people who are on top of their game, world poker champions. Guys with NFL rings, professional wrestlers with heavyweight belts that are doing the bulletproof diet and talking about it on Facebook and Twitter. And I'm, I'm just blown away because I built this for myself as an entrepreneur who wants to live a long time really comfortably, doesn't want to age too quickly, wants to look good. But most of all, I just, I want to always be able to bring it. I want to be able to get on an airplane, fly halfway around the world, get off the plane, stand on stage and not stutter and not think of what I was going to say and

• 26:31Speaker 01

  just, just be able to bring it all day long until I'm the last guy in there bringing it and then go to sleep. And I'm, I can do it. Like I run circles around some guys, you know, 10 or 15 years younger than me because I've hacked my biology that way. And it just feels like this is kind of like a human birthright. And when I see a, a guy who could kick my ass 10 ways from Sunday or a professional athlete or, or like a Hollywood guy, I'm just, I'm, I'm amazed. And I'm, I'm just so stoked that they found value in, in the core framework for the diet because it totally works. It changed my life.

• 27:07Lewis Howes?

  Wow. Incredible. Now, are there, are there any negative effects of cycling on and off the diet? Or is it something you're constantly doing or that people are constantly doing? Or is it kind of like you take it when you need it? Or is it just a complete lifestyle change?

• 27:22Speaker 01

  The bulletproof diet is, it's a roadmap and you're always somewhere on the map. So there's kind of sketchy neighborhoods and you can be in the pizza and beer neighborhood, right? You're still eating X amount of inflammation. And the idea of, you know, eat this, don't eat that kind of diet stuff, which is how every diet's been for the most part. It doesn't work with the psychology of humans very well because sometimes you want to cheat and then, oh, I cheated and then I failed. So I might as well just eat.

• 27:49Lewis Howes?

  And you feel guilty and then you overindulge, right?

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Right. And so what I

• 27:54Lewis Howes?

  So how's the, how's the bulletproof diet work then? What's, what is the food?

• 27:58Speaker 01

  Okay. So you pick something like protein or fat or nuts. Like there's different categories in it. And then you say, well, how could I make the best choice in that category, given what's in front of me right now? So if you had a choice between, let's say, industrial processed chicken, which is really not very good for you, or industrially processed genetically modified tofu?

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Well, neither one of those is particularly good.

• 28:24Lewis Howes?

  What's the lesser of two evils?

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, but shouldn't you, especially if you don't like either one very much, but you gotta eat something right now? Shouldn't you pick the one that's least harmful to your body? And most of us would say yes, but most of us probably don't know which one that is. Well, on the diet, I stack rank all that stuff. So you can choose less inflammatory, healthier foods. And in the book, I recommend that people for just two weeks, they eat like super clean on the bulletproof diet. And the reason you do that is just to feel how you feel. Sure. Wow, I didn't need a nap this afternoon. I paid attention in the meeting. I got my laundry done. And like, I feel good at the end of the day and then I slept really deeply. And you realize how addled you were before, and then I wanted to go out and eat like the classical cheat day.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  And just, just get wrecked. Because you'll feel crappy for three days and then you're like, oh, that's how it used to be.

• 29:19Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Really on the bulletproof diet, you're not going to be perfect, but you're just going to make better choices when you have a good choice in front of you. And there'll be times when you just ate like a pint of Haagen Dazs. But at least you got your saturated fat and even though it was from lower quality animals. And you got too much sugar and you know you're out of ketosis and whatever, but like, okay, I'm still on the roadmap. Cause you can't leave the roadmap and, and that's the important thing.

• 29:43Lewis Howes?

  That's interesting. I did it. I've done a number of different experience, experiments on myself with foods. Not to the level that you've done, but uh, I got up to 250 pounds. You know, I used to play pro football, so I was eating probably 7, 8,000 calories a day when I was training. Cause it was, you know, five, six hours of training, lifting, you know, film. It was just like nonstop, a lot of energy. And um, after I stopped playing, I got injured and I was recovering for about a year with a broken, you know, with the surgery from a broken wrist. And I was in a cast for a long time and I was still eating those calories. You know, I thought I was still kind of training my body. I thought I was still training, I guess.

• 30:22Lewis Howes?

  So I was eating a lot, you know, double Chipotle burritos with double meat uh, for lunch, you know, and then just like desserts like crazy. And I gained, I don't know, 35 pounds or something, but it was all really sloppy. My siblings started to call me Fluous for Fat Louis. And um, I started to realize it at one point when my underwear folded over itself. When I just had it on, my belly was sticking out so much that the underwear was folding over. So I said enough's enough. I'm gonna go off, no, I'm gonna just go try one thing, no sugar for thirty days. And I had no sugar, no like refined sugars. I had like a piece of fruit once a day. And that was my only sugar. And um, within thirty days, I lost thirty pounds.

• 31:06Lewis Howes?

  Um, just cutting out sugar, not doing anything different exercise wise, nothing else, just no sugar. And uh, there were some other moments where I, I tried to get off gluten. I, I did no gluten for two weeks. And then I remember having a huge bowl of pasta, then like after two weeks. And I literally felt like I was drunk, like I couldn't open my eyes. I could barely move. I wanted to pass out right then. So I noticed some things about my body when I was just doing these tests, and I'm sure you have lots of stories like that. But uh, what I wanted to ask you was, what is the difference between Paleo and the Bulletproof Diet? Because every time I go to the bookstore, it seems like there's ten new Paleo bestsellers out there.

• 31:48Lewis Howes?

  And are there similar principles or is yours completely different?

• 31:54Speaker 01

  There are some similar principles. Uh, the Bulletproof Diet evolved before there was a, a name for, for Paleo. Uh, this started back in around two thousand three, really. Uh, the research before that was, was for years before that. And this is, the principles in this diet allowed my wife to restore her fertility. Uh, she had PCOS. We weren't going to be able to have kids. And we had two children without fertility assistance at thirty-nine and forty-one. Uh, she's a Carolinska trained physician and you know, knows what she's doing. But so, so this is something that, that's been going on for a long time.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  There are definitely things that Paleo and Bulletproof have learned from the Weston A. Price Foundation. Around uh, you know, natural, natural health and eating grass-fed animals and things like that.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  But the core principles behind Bulletproof, I focus more on inflammatory toxins than traditional paleo and I'm also less dogmatic about carbs than traditional paleo. And I say traditional paleo because I mean, I love the paleo community and I have so many friends who are big people in paleo and a lot of them have been on my show and I, you know, I like it. The problems with paleo are coming out, some of the things around carbohydrate intake. So we now have people saying, well, here's the way to modify paleo for you. And it turns out we're different. So on the Bulletproof Diet, I focus more on inflammatory toxins,

• 33:28Speaker 01

  like how to cook your meat. I actually have a set of recommendations there. Burned meat or excessive protein are two of the main problems in paleo. Really? Too much protein's inflammatory. Really? Too little protein or low quality protein's bad for you too. Huh. So how much protein should you be having? It depends on how much you exercise and it depends on what your goals are. But the short version of that answer is as little protein as you can get away with to meet your goals. Really? Yeah. And this is the opposite of what I used to believe because I've followed natural bodybuilding guys, like guys like Rob Fagan going back into the mid 90s. And I've always been like, gotta pump the protein, gotta pump the protein. The difficulty with

• 34:13Speaker 01

  that is something you'll see anytime you go to a traditional Atkins diet conference. You'll see a bunch of 300 pound people who used to weigh 400 pounds. And the same thing happened to me. I went from 300 down to 250. I had 50 to go and I was stuck. And the reason I was stuck is that I was eating too much protein and I was eating some artificial sweeteners that jacked up your blood sugar and caused food cravings. But one of the techniques that I write about in the Bulletproof Diet book, Is called bulletproof protein fasting. So, once a day, you eat less than 15 grams or once a day. Once a week, you eat less than 15 grams of protein. So, almost no protein. Even you have to be careful like broccoli and kale because there's protein in there. And this turns on something called autophagy,

• 34:55Speaker 01

  which totally allows your cells to take all of that fuel that would have been used for digestion of protein and turn it on to digesting waste protein inside your cells. So, autophagy can clean out your cells and you'll feel a difference right away if you're used to eating protein every single day. So, doing this even once a month or ideally, once a week, if you're really trying to improve yourself, it has anti-aging applications.

• 35:18Lewis Howes?

  No way.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  It's pretty amazing. And Paleo doesn't really talk about that. So, I've got sort of three different things you do. You do the normal bulletproof diet. You eat kind of the same stuff every day. You've got bulletproof intermittent fasting, where you eat only fat in the morning, so you don't have to feel like you're going through a fast, but you still get the fat burning benefits and some of the other benefits of fasting. And then, you've got this one day a week of protein fasting. It's not painful because the entire time, I don't want you to ever feel hungry or have a food craving. And if you eat according to these principles, that's what's supposed to happen.

• 35:50Lewis Howes?

  Wow. This is interesting, actually. Now, for a guy like me that's training constantly, you know, I'm working out, I'm playing with the USA national team, I'm trying to go to the Olympics. You know, is, do I need protein? Or do I need to, you know?

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:07Lewis Howes?

  Can I do this?

• 36:08Speaker 01

  You're gonna up your protein, for sure.

• 36:11Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  And what you don't want to do, though, is like pound whey protein. And keep in mind, I manufacture like one of the best whey proteins, I think, on the market. And I've done all sorts of stuff to increase its glutathione, creating power and all that. But I tell people, like, two tablespoons of whey protein a day ought to do it because excessive cysteine and methionine, which are amino acids that your body needs, but too much of those things actually goes down inflammatory pathways.

• 36:38Lewis Howes?

  Jeez.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  If you instead go with high glycine protein, things like collagen, and I make a grass-fed collagen, that's the most premium stuff out there. It's amazing. I take it every single day. I give it to my kids. And when you use a less inflammatory, high-quality protein source, in this case, one that's hydrolyzed, so it's predigested, so you can absorb it and you get the dientripeptides. What happens there is that you're able to use the protein fully and you get less ammonia leftover. And what ammonia does is it causes inflammation, it increases the load on your liver and kidneys, and it makes you tired and foggy and actually makes you cranky.

• 37:13Lewis Howes?

  Whoa.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  So what you want to do is play with the quality of the protein and then play with the timing of the protein.

• 37:19Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  You know, do you train in a fasted state or do you not train in a fasted state? And there's arguments both ways. I like to do it, but if you're training every single day, training in a fasted state may actually cause so much stress on your adrenals that you might want to either take an adrenal extract or you might want to preload with some protein and some fat before you work out.

• 37:40Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 37:41Speaker 01

  Because you never want to burn protein for fuel. And that's a bit controversial. You can burn protein for fuel. It's just not an efficient fuel source because it makes too much byproduct. It's like if you had one of those military trucks that could burn almost any kind of fuel for a disaster. Well, kerosene makes like stinky nasty smoke. And if you're burning high octane gas, it runs like a top. Well, the highest octane fuel you can get is fat. It's got the most calories per gram. And once you become keto adapted, which means you're taught your body how to burn fat, you will willingly and happily burn fat as a fuel source.

• 38:16Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  So the idea behind the bulletproof diet is go into ketosis, be there for a little while, and then once a week, come out of ketosis. Eat a bunch of carbs, but not like junk food carbs. Eat white rice, eat sweet potatoes, eat.

• 38:30Lewis Howes?

  I love sweet potatoes.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, like just bake them in the oven.

• 38:34Lewis Howes?

  So good.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Soak them in butter.

• 38:35Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh. Wow. Okay, so let me break this down. So we're covering a lot right now, and I'm trying to take it all in. So let me think about from like the simplest terms, because you're mentioning a lot of names and things that I'm aware of, but I don't know if everyone is aware of what they mean and kind of the principles behind them. So let's say I wake up and I do, I don't eat in the morning. That's called intermittent fasting, right? There's a certain period where you don't eat correctly. It could be until noon or the whole day or whatever.

• 39:09Lewis Howes?

  Now, if I work out without eating beforehand, or if I do a run or something where I'm burning calories, am I burning fat first or am I burning protein first? Because you mentioned something like you don't want to burn protein off of your workouts, correct?

• 39:26Speaker 01

  If you work out in a fasted state and you eat a low-fat or a high-protein-low-fat diet, you've taught your body the first place to go is to go to protein. So you can actually burn your muscles for fuel and you don't want to be doing that.

• 39:39Lewis Howes?

  That's not good.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  But if you have gone into ketosis and your body is comfortable in a fat-burning state or in a carbohydrate-burning state like mine is, then your body's like, oh, here's some fat, I can burn some fat. And it'll make ketones much more readily and it'll burn fat for fuel. And there are guys who've placed, you know, very highly in the Ironman at Kona, who have brain octane fuel, which is the type of fat that goes most quickly into ketones in the body. And ketones are these fat-burning bodies. Instead of carrying glucose around, you can burn ketones. And they actually have it in their water bottles, not just a little bit of it mixed with water. But that sort of thing that says, wow, my body really likes burning ketones because

• 40:25Speaker 01

  it's more efficient than burning sugar and it can also burn sugar. Like those kinds of things to have two fuel sources changes the whole equation.

• 40:33Lewis Howes?

  Wow. This stuff fascinates me. You know, the thing is that everyone's body is different though. So do these principles work for each person? Or is it, again, kind of like you've done where you've tested and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on yourself and done these experiments? When we apply the bulletproof diet or any type of diet, do we really need to test what works for us, what we're experiencing, the feedback we're getting from our body and our focus, and tailor it to each person because we're all made up differently, right?

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're totally right. We're all made up differently. The core principles of eat a diet that allows your body to go into fat burning mode. That alone, some people go into fat burning mode on 100 grams of carbs a day. And some people have to go down to 15 grams of carbs a day because they just have a really hard time doing it. So there's a big difference. And the other thing that's totally not even related to paleo, that's a big part of the bulletproof diet, is there are bulletproof foods that work for almost everyone. These are the ones that have the most energy, the least amount of toxins, the ones that really just make you feel great.

• 41:37Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  There's a set of, I call them kryptonite foods, just no one should be eating this crap. Like it's better than starving to death, but if you're buying this book, you actually aren't.

• 41:47Lewis Howes?

  What are some of those foods?

• 41:49Speaker 01

  Like MSG, things, actually, I would call it gluten, especially high gluten foods, high fructose corn syrup, things like that. They just don't have a place in your diet. It's not that it's going to kill you to eat them once. They'll probably cause a food craving and, and may change your ability to think super well for a little while. They're not going to kill you. They just suck. And like, if you want to be a high performer, these are things that don't have a place in your kitchen. And if you occasionally get exposed to one, unless you have some weird autoimmune condition, you'll probably live, but you won't live as well as you could have.

• 42:18Lewis Howes?

  So gluten is really bad, is what you're saying? You should not have it in your diet?

• 42:22Speaker 01

  And, and very, very much so, even if you're not celiac. And I've had a couple of the, the top gluten doctors on the show, on the Bulletproof Radio podcast to talk about this. In particular, there was some study that came out that said, there's no such thing as non-celiac gluten sensitivity. Bottom line is, when you eat gluten, it lowers blood flow to the brain. You don't want that. You really don't. And in many people, it causes autoimmune problems in nine different tissues in the body that are not celiac. So there's pretty good reasons to avoid it.

• 42:54Lewis Howes?

  It's so funny because, you know, playing football and basketball, growing up, you know, we would have team dinners, like the, right before a game or something, and they would just fill us up with pasta. And meat, right? And just like kind of eat as much as you can, get much as much energy as possible. I always remember feeling like I was yawning in games, like I was always exhausted. But before the game even started, warming up, I was like, man, I gotta play for the next four hours. This is gonna be tough. And it was like I was working against myself all the time. And again, like I said, when I did that experiment where I got off of gluten completely for two weeks, when I, when I had a bowl of pasta, it was delicious. Don't get me wrong, tasted amazing, but I literally felt like my body was, was not functioning

• 43:39Lewis Howes?

  within an hour afterwards. I couldn't, I remember we were going on a drive to look at a view over Mulholland with a couple buddies of mine at night to like look over all of LA. And I couldn't get out of the car to go out and look at the view. I was like, guys, I gotta lay down. I'm exhausted. I feel like I'm gonna like pass out. I literally couldn't open my eyes and it was that much of an effect on my body. And I'm not, you know, well, I guess I've built up immunity to it. But having it so much that when I took it out and then it came back, it was just, it messed me up.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  There's something called glutamorphin. And in many people, when you break down gluten, it forms an opiate substance. So once you're quote clean, then okay, fine. But if you take a little bit of heroin every day, okay, just a little bit, you're totally fine. Right? So you go through withdrawals and this will happen. It took me a couple of years to figure this out when I first went low carb. I was like, well, okay, once a week, like there's this crusty sourdough bread. I live in California. It's amazing. So I'd eat it and I'd say, I'm just gonna have one piece. And the next day I would find myself sort of tricking myself. Like I'm just gonna have two pieces and then three pieces. And I'm like, oh my God, this bread stuff is addictive.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  And I didn't know the reason it was addictive until a few years later, but I just realized I had to be cold turkey on that.

• 44:57Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  So we have these, these kryptonite foods, things like that, that are going to cause food cravings. They're going to make you have a lag in energy, a lag in focus, and you don't want that. And a lot of them also make you fat.

• 45:08Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  But in the middle of the bulletproof diet and to really kind of separate it out from what's going on in paleo, there's a bunch of suspect foods. So if you're eating super clean, don't eat those. But. Some people like beans and a few people even digest them well and it doesn't make them fat or give them food cravings. I think beans are a really problematic food source.

• 45:26Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 45:27Speaker 01

  For most people. Yeah, some people are fine on them and there's a lot to do with your gut biome and what bacteria you have, but there's also something called a lectin. This is a protein that's inside the bean that sticks to some of the sugars that line the cells in your body. So depending on your genetics and depending on environmental factors, a lot of people, the lectins, don't do them any good. Lectins are there to make sure animals don't eat beans because beans are supposed to germinate, sprout and continue the survival of the bean species.

• 45:55Lewis Howes?

  Wow, yeah.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  They weren't designed to be food. So traditional techniques of fermenting and cooking and rinsing and all these things, just to make them palatable, that's a good idea, but if you're eating, you know, bean flour that somebody just ground up from beans, you're not getting proper preparation of them either.

• 46:11Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  So beans are considered a suspect food on the diet and there's a free app. It's called Food Detective. This is an app that I released at no cost because it's so important people have this, whether or not they ever read my book, doesn't matter. And what you do is you get your heart rate using the app before you eat and then you measure it three times after you eat. And it will tell you if you had a sensitivity to something that was in that meal. And this is a test of your sympathetic nervous system response. So if there was a food that you were particularly sensitive to, this will flag it for you. It's easier to get a blood test to say what foods are my allergiance. Don't eat those for a while until your body can calm down. And what I found is the vast majority of people

• 46:54Speaker 01

  today have some foods they don't know about. Oftentimes the foods they crave the most that are actually making them weak. So you want to identify the suspect foods, take the ones that are actually kryptonite for you and just cut those out. And the ones where you're like, well, I don't gain weight. I feel pretty good. I don't get hungry. I don't get brain fog from that. You know, I'm okay with white potatoes. I just tell people, when you're trying to eat super clean, don't do white potatoes because 20% of all rheumatoid arthritis is caused by potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants and bell peppers because of that same thing, the lectin that sticks to certain things in your body. There's a genetic component too. So just cut that stuff out. You don't need white potatoes to live. Feel really, really good. Add them back in. And if you wake up feeling like a truck hit you, that's a pretty good sign. White potatoes aren't for you.

• 47:35Lewis Howes?

  Wow. Yeah, I just downloaded the app. It looks really cool. So make sure everyone goes and downloads that. And I'll have that linked up in the show notes at the end for sure. Let me, tell me, what are the main, like, what are the three to five? Non-negotiables, the things that you cannot have, that you should not be having, must take out. You said gluten is one. You know, I talked to a lot of vegans. I've got some great friends who are vegans, been vegans for 15 years and they look amazing. And I don't know how. They look really young. They look really fit and amazing. And Rich Roll, I don't know if you know Rich Roll, he's got a podcast, vegan runner. And, you know, he talked about you've got to cut out all dairy.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  All right, we got to talk about vegans, including Rich, for sure. But we can talk about things to take out. Soy, corn, and particularly corn syrup.

• 48:23Lewis Howes?

  Corn, no corn?

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Particularly no dried corn products and no corn syrup and no corn oil.

• 48:29Lewis Howes?

  What about corn on the cob?

• 48:30Speaker 01

  Eat some fresh sweet corn, go for it.

• 48:32Lewis Howes?

  Okay. I love sweet corn.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  So let's see, that's three. Anything containing MSG. And the other one is, I would say legumes, particularly peanuts. And part of the reason, oh, wait, hold on, I forgot the other massive one, that would be number six, is actually dairy, except butter or ghee. Because dairy protein, particularly cheese, is highly inflammatory. And Rich is spot on about that.

• 49:02Lewis Howes?

  So good, though. It tastes so amazing, Dave. I just love cheese. Blue cheese is even better. The stinkier, the better. The moldier, it's like unbelievable.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  So I'm going to-

• 49:14Lewis Howes?

  So bad, though, right?

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Well, there are some people who will argue that it's good for you. And I know a few people who cured like weird throat infections by eating blue cheese.

• 49:25Lewis Howes?

  No way.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. However, there's actually a toxin called roquefertacin, and you'd be amazed where it comes from. You know, roquefert cheese.

• 49:34Lewis Howes?

  Roquefert cheese, yeah.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  And here's what cheese is. We take- The milk from the cow, and if the cow ate what most cows on earth eat today, which is grains and all, they actually feed moldy grain because it's been stored for a while in a shed somewhere to the cows. And this is well documented, although I'm not just like making this up. You can search for aflatoxin milk and most countries have standards. And in the US, we actually do have a standard for just aflatoxin. But the protein in milk accumulates approximately 60% of the mold toxins that the animal eats. By the way, this is one of the hidden reasons that paleo works because paleo tells you eat grass fed animals that didn't eat moldy grain.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  So you reduce the, the effect of these toxins that affect your body at a parts per billion level, like super tiny amounts can affect your inflammation levels. So with cheese, though, you're taking this already kind of toxic protein. And then you're putting it in a little place to age with some enzymes and some bacteria and some fungus. And then a little war erupts between the bacteria and the fungus, or just between different strains of bacteria. And what one of them does is say, this is my cheese. And then it like basically spreads out some poison for the other stuff. And then the other stuff is like, oh yeah, back at you. And then it like goes into chemical warfare and then they basically lob chemicals at each other until there's no more raw material left for making raw materials to fight for your piece of the cheese.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  And it tastes amazing, no question about it. But it does things to the biome in your stomach. The biome is the bacteria that live in your gut and it does things to the inflammation in your body. And if there is casein left in your cheese, which there usually is, casein goes into caseiomorphin, just like gluten did. And it triggers the opiate receptors that make you crave more cheese. That's why pizza is such a major, amazing tasting drug.

• 51:24Lewis Howes?

  It's the, I had two full pizzas a couple nights ago, if you can believe it or not. It's thin crust, they were very, very thin, so it wasn't that much. But, uh, man, it just, once in a while I gotta have a pizza.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  You know, if you're gonna do it, they make pizza crust out of white rice, particularly white, like sushi rice. And that is much better for you than gluten. And then if you do it with grass fed cheese on there, you can get buffalo cheese, like buffalo mozzarella.

• 51:49Lewis Howes?

  That sounds good.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  That's a legit pizza and that's going to be less inflammatory than doing the traditional gluten industrial cheese route.

• 51:57Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure. Man, it's just so good. It's such a. But here's a

• 52:01Speaker 01

  Let's talk vegans.

• 52:02Lewis Howes?

  Let's do it. Yeah, I want to talk vegans because I've got vegan friends who are like swear by it. They've got, you know, obviously some have the principles for not wanting to kill animals. Others just think that it's, uh, you know, not healthy. Um, and then, you know, all the reasons for the dairy, the meat, the inflammatory, inflammatory, what am I saying? Inflammation from meats, things like that. So yeah, what's your take on vegans? And, uh, what's, why is it important to eat meat?

• 52:32Speaker 01

  I was a raw vegan, uh, for a good amount of time and I actually lost weight. Felt amazing. Oh yeah. I could have written raw vegan cookbooks. In fact, some of the cooking techniques in bulletproof came right out of my time as a raw vegan.

• 52:42Lewis Howes?

  How many years? For how long?

• 52:44Speaker 01

  I was a raw vegan for about six months, I want to say.

• 52:49Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  And after about three months, I noticed that my teeth were starting to really hurt. They became sensitive and I had like a dental emergency. I had to like cancel a meeting because like when my teeth had cracked. And I started getting weird autoimmune stuff that I didn't have before. Some food allergies that are still with me today. And I realized that it wasn't serving me. So I actually became a raw omnivore and I would eat either carpaccio or sushi a couple of times a week. So I, I ended up stopping that when I went to China and Nepal and Tibet because I'm not eating raw yak. That's been hanging outside someone's shed.

• 53:26Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  It's not safe. And I asked, I mean, I, I care very much about animal welfare. I'm actually building a small organic farm right now where I'll actually have my own.

• 53:38Lewis Howes?

  I really like that.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  And I asked this Tibetan Lama, cause I did a 10 day Buddhist retreat and it was vegetarian and, and everyone kept farting when they're meditating. And it was, it was kind of embarrassing because you just couldn't help it because everyone's just eating all these beans. And I went a little further into Tibet and I saw a yak skin hanging from a prayer pole. And Buddhist monks really actually like hard questions. It's part of their training. So I asked the head Lama, say, hey, like, what's with the no killing thing? You have a dead animal hanging from your flagpole. Like, why did you kill it? And he just shrugged and said, one death feeds everyone.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  And he said, we need meat in order to be healthy here and was totally calm with it. And I, when I came back, I, I struggled with this because I, I still, I don't eat chicken. I, I think chickens, it's one death per meal. I eat grass fed beef. The cows that I eat when I'm home eat grass that grows in the front yard. Basically, I, I sell the hay to the neighboring guy who raises the cows and then I get a cow back. And I know how the cow was treated. I didn't know its name, although that's probably because I didn't have one. Uh, cause he has 300 of them, but like it, it's a, a well-treated animal. It tastes amazing. And if I eat a pound of meat a day, which is a lot,

• 54:59Speaker 01

  that animal is going to last for more than a year. In fact, I'll 0.7 animals per day. And we need cows, sorry, not 0.7 animals per day, 0.7 animals per year. So we need cows and sheep to keep soil from turning into deserts. The function of animals with hooves is to plow up the earth and then put new bacteria from their poop into the soil. Sure. And when we got rid of the buffalo, we got the Dust Bowl. Because we got rid of the buffalo and we figured this out in Africa. There's a fascinating TED Talk about elephants in Africa and how elephants actually reverse desertification by pooping and plowing up soil. Wow.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  So let's look at how many deaths per calorie come from a vegan diet. Now, a big tractor went through and cut down all that grain and it cut down all the snakes, bunnies, turtles, rabbits, grasshoppers and smaller life forms that were in that field. We also destroyed the soil. We destroyed habitat. That could have been a natural, healthy biome. And instead, we basically took it and we watered it with water from an aquifer that we've drained all over the southwest in order to make low calorie density foods like fresh vegetables, let's say, that we then put on a truck with petroleum and drove for a thousand miles, or better yet, an airplane from Peru, so you can have your, you know, raw whatever in the middle of winter. Sorry, we didn't evolve that way. It's not environmentally sustainable and it's actively bad for the environment.

• 56:25Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 56:26Speaker 01

  Give me a stick of grass-fed butter from a cow that ate on grassland that didn't need to be irrigated. And what I'm eating is one of the most sustainable foods on earth and it doesn't have the inflammatory protein that's present in cheese. Take all that extra protein from the dairy and give it to a pig and let the pig make bacon and I'll eat that. And that's why I spoke at the David Wolf conference. He's like one of the head raw vegan guys and I really like David.

• 56:49Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  We actually went to the same school at the same time together years ago. And I stood up and I thought I might get booed off the stage, but I said, guys, I've been a raw vegan, but today I'm a lacto-ovo-beefo-porco vegetarian.

• 57:03Lewis Howes?

  And what does that exactly mean?

• 57:09Lewis Howes?

  Explain it in terms of people understand like myself.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  So there are people go, I'm a vegetarian, but I'm a lacto-ovo vegetarian, which means I'll eat milk and eggs, but I'm still vegetarian. Right? And then like, I'm only a lacto vegetarian. I only milk, but not eggs. And it's like, I'm sorry, the animals I eat, they might be lacto-ovo-beefo, you know, beef and pork, but they were treated well. They ate natural food and they didn't die in a horror of pain and suffering. And I don't eat commercial meat. I don't feel good when I eat it. It's mistreated. It's given antibiotics and it's not cool. So food quality, I love the vegan philosophy there about quality of food. I share it. There are lots of vegans who've gone bulletproof, especially if their health wasn't doing very well.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  And I very much respect the principles behind a vegan diet. When you put on your system thinking cap, though, there are ways to improve your health and to improve the health of the world by selectively eating very high quality animal products and not too much of them.

• 58:11Lewis Howes?

  Right. And besides the point of, you know, living in a sustainable world and not shipping, you know, these raw foods from all over the world and things like that and. Using the gas and all that, the time and energy for that, what about the effects of the body? Needs meat, you know, these grass-fed beefs and things like that over not needing meat. Like, does our body, can it function as highly without meats? Uh, if they're the top of the line meats, or can we still function on the high end? Cause I know there's some athletes, like UFC fighters, I think there's a couple of guys, maybe in the NFL, who are, who say they're vegan. I think Carl Lewis was a vegan.

• 58:53Lewis Howes?

  So I think there's some extreme athletes who have done exceptionally well, performed at high levels, but.

• 59:00Speaker 01

  And it's, it's funny, Lewis, I, I wrote about Carl Lewis. He went vegan, he did really well for the first, what, six months or so after he went vegan? And after that, he kept getting injured and he didn't set any more records.

• 59:13Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 59:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that was actually a really controversial post. And there's something that I call the vegan trap, and it's something that I fell into. If you go vegan, you will cut an enormous amount of toxins from industrial meat out of your body, and you will feel good. You'll get the glow, as we talk about as vegans.

• 59:30Lewis Howes?

  Right, the vegan power.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  And like, you know, you'll, you'll lose weight too. Like, you'll, you'll feel really good. I advocate a very fresh, very carefully chosen vegan diet for up to 30 days. It'll totally be good for you. It's a cleanse.

• 59:46Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 59:46Speaker 01

  But if you do it all the time, the vast majority of people don't do very well on it. And the ones who do are typically very young, or they might be exercising their asses off, kinda like you do. So you would tolerate a vegan diet better than someone who is exercising a lot less. But just because you tolerate it, doesn't mean that you're, that you're doing great things for your aging and all of that.

• 1:00:09Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. So, man, I would love to hear a conversation between you and like Rich Roll or some.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  Vegan.

• 1:00:16Lewis Howes?

  And I wonder.

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  I'll invite Rich onto my podcast.

• 1:00:18Lewis Howes?

  You should.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  Uh, no, I, I will. It's a really good idea. I, I love talking to people who totally disagree with me. As long as we have a conversation that's done like, you know, you're a poopy head.

• 1:00:26Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  I'm done with that. I'm just not playing that. I, I will. I, I love hearing people say, actually, no. Here's, here's the reason you should eat beets. And I tell you, avoid beets. They're high in sugar and they're high in oxalic acid, which causes all sorts of weaknesses in the body. But there's another set of athletes who say, eat a little bit of beet because of nitric oxide. And like, I don't know the answer to that, but I'm pretty sure that people eat a lot of beets don't do as well. So like, let's, let's come to a consensus. Like, that's what scientists do.

• 1:00:53Lewis Howes?

  Right. It's crazy. I mean, it's amazing. I mean, I look at Rich Roldo, uh, he's a buddy of mine and I look at his physique and his body and how he does these ultra marathons. And, uh, it's amazing how he's transformed his body from being overweight. I think he was 50 or a hundred pounds overweight, kinda like you.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:09Lewis Howes?

  Went completely cold into vegan, cold turkey and, uh, transformed his body and it serves him. It works for him. So there may be things that work for people and maybe they don't work for people.

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  There are, there are multiple paths, no doubt about it.

• 1:01:22Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  If we look at his stress levels, his aging levels and all, he may have phenomenal numbers. I don't even know if he tracks all that stuff. I'd wanna know his triglycerides and all.

• 1:01:32Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  But there are certainly many paths and I've, like I said, I, I lived the raw vegan thing for, for quite a while and I, I benefited from it.

• 1:01:40Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  But over time I got autoimmune conditions and, and there's probably about 30 ro- former raw vegans in the bulletproof forums today who are like, I got sick when I was raw vegan and it's taken me a couple of years, especially women get this, uh, to get my health back. Um, oftentimes they start in their early twenties and then it doesn't hit them because you're resilient when you're young. And then they hit like, you know, 28 or 30 and they just realize like, oh my God, it's not working.

• 1:02:05Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  What do I do next?

• 1:02:06Lewis Howes?

  I interviewed, uh, Bob Harper, who's the host of The Biggest Loser and I actually work out with him sometimes in a CrossFit gym here in LA. And he was vegan for a year and then decided to go off of it because he said he was starting to feel sick and wasn't able to gain the strength, uh, as much when he was working out and just, it wasn't working for him as much. And then he transferred back into, you know, having, eating meats and grassroots meats and things like that. And now he's put on this strength again. So I, I've definitely heard that.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  It's funny, one of my buddies, Karez Reynolds, runs a hammer CrossFit in Phoenix. And I had this conversation with him. He said, Dave, when someone walks in for their first assessment, I don't know what they eat. If they jump up, he has a hang test where you just hang on a bar as long as you can, just holding your whole body weight. He goes, I can pick a vegan out because they can't hold on very long.

• 1:02:52Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  And it doesn't matter if they look good, but like, they just don't have the core strength and resilience that I expect. And so he gets them on a higher saturated fat thing, not just coconut oil, bring butter and some more animal protein in. And then they get the ability to hang on to the bar for much longer. So it's not like you're a bad person if you're a vegan. You're not.

• 1:03:12Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  I've been one. I respect all that. It's just that even a guy like Rich, I swear, if we added like some ghee, clarified butter into his diet, I bet we would see better performance from him.

• 1:03:23Lewis Howes?

  Wow. Amazing. Amazing. Well, I could talk about this stuff forever. But I've got a couple of questions left for you because we're already at an hour and I could talk for three more hours. But I want to make sure everyone goes and pre-orders the book before I ask you the last couple of questions. Go to bulletproofdietbook.com. You can get a free roadmap and you can also, you'll get the information on how to buy the book there. I think it's order bulletproofdietbook.com is where you can order it. But it doesn't come out until December. We'll be sure to have you back on then and talk more about that as I'm sure you'll have some cool giveaways and prizes for people that buy multiple copies then. Check that out. Go check out bulletproofexec.com. Download the podcast. It's an amazing

• 1:04:06Lewis Howes?

  podcast. Lots of great guests on there. And again, research, lots of information, tests, examples, and it's great. So go check it out there. Subscribe on the newsletter, bulletproofexec.com as well. He's got, Dave's got a conference coming out. You've got workshops, speaking gigs, so you can just get information on all that stuff that he's got going on. Definitely recommend checking it out. And hopefully I can come to one of your conferences here in the near future as well, Dave, and check that out. Couple of questions left. One, you've done all this testing and you've done so many experiments. Do you have all the answers yet?

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  No one has all the answers yet, and no one will ever have all of the answers. The whole process of science is to keep pushing at the edges of what's possible, because the things that we think are impossible today actually aren't. So how do you get by with no sleep and feel great and amazing? Or how do you just sleep better? Things like that, we're nowhere near done. We're just scratching the surface because we didn't have the sensors, we didn't have the technology in order to even understand what was going on with humans until a little while ago, and we're still building it. So, no, I don't have all the answers. In fact, my email signature line says, "I guarantee that at least one statement on my website or in this email is wrong."

• 1:05:29Lewis Howes?

  That's funny. Nice. Okay, so what continues to drive you? Is it searching for the answers?

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  What motivates me today is, it's funny, you mentioned the Bulletproof Conference in LA, September 26th. And Stephen Kotler, the guy who wrote The Rise of Superman, and has started the Flow Genome Project. I'm supporting the Flow Genome Project. He's the keynote speaker, and we're going to actually have technology to put you in a flow state there. And what motivates me now is being in a flow state, like being a great dad and helping a lot of people is my big motivator. Like, if I don't feel like I'm helping people, I don't have a good day. So I try to structure the things that I do with Bulletproof to be of public service. I just invested a ton of money in making a high-end documentary that comes out in March about the effect of mold in our houses

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  and in our food supply, and what it does to people. I'm interviewing like the world's top physicians treating this, and a bunch of really high-performance people who are knocked out of their careers by this, this kind of unexpected thing growing in their bedroom. So that's a public awareness activity, and I'm stoked to be able to do things like that that are really about spreading things. That's what motivates me.

• 1:06:40Lewis Howes?

  I love it. Where do you see Bulletproof Executive in the future?

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  We're opening our first coffee shop in Santa Monica.

• 1:06:47Lewis Howes?

  Wow, really?

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  This year, yeah.

• 1:06:50Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  And the idea is coffee, especially done right, bulletproof coffee. It's a gateway drug to feeling amazing all the time. So my understanding of the world is that when people turn their brain on all the way, using whatever technologies work for them, including a vegan diet, if that's right for them,

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  that when their brain is on all the way and they've met their core biological needs, they're nicer to each other. And I want my kids to grow up in a world, and I want to be in a world where people are nice to each other because they're not ravenous all the time. I think we can do that and we can actually help people achieve a lot more and just be better people by addressing core biology and then psychology.

• 1:07:31Lewis Howes?

  Very cool. I hope you have Wi-Fi there. I'll be sure to have lots of meetings there.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  Count on it.

• 1:07:36Lewis Howes?

  What are you most grateful for recently?

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  You know, most recently, I mean, how could I not be grateful for the Boulder Diet Book deal and all, but I've been grateful. My son just turned five, my daughter just turned seven, and it's been just an amazing summer. They're off school, so I've had some time to just like to do father kid stuff. And I just took a picture of my five-year-old Alan the other day. We were climbing a local peak and he was walking along this edge of this giant boulder and I snapped this photo and he's ripped. He's five, but I was just watching the way he moved and just like how fit he was in climbing trees. And I look back to like, I was a fat kid and I'm just grateful that I have the knowledge

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  to help my kids just have their biology work so they can just be whoever they're going to be. And I'm just, I'm just blown away by that.

• 1:08:34Lewis Howes?

  I love it. I, before I ask you the final question, I just wanted to acknowledge you for the amount of energy, commitment and effort that you've put into learning about the state of high performance and the research you've done, again, the investments you've made, the products you've created to serve others in. Helping them get to their highest level and helping them achieve their own greatness. So I really acknowledge you for everything you're up to in the world and the big change you're having in people's lives. So thanks for that and I acknowledge you. I want to ask you the final question, which is what I ask all of my guests, and that is, what is your definition of greatness?

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  Great final question, and thank you for those kind words, by the way. I'm honored. You're a pretty high-performance guy. Thank you.

• 1:09:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, my pleasure.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  Now, definition of greatness, let's think about that for a second. I think of Henry Miller. There's a quote that I use sometimes in my talks and one that's, I think, the most phenomenal one ever. And he says, "The goal of life is not to accumulate power, but to radiate it." And my definition of greatness is to live by those words and rather than, you know, grasping at the things and, you know, just kind of hoarding things, to instead just look at how do I use whatever I have with me, whether it's almost nothing or whether

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  it's great wealth, in the service of others. And that's what makes you great and not anything else.

• 1:10:17Lewis Howes?

  Dave, I love that and I appreciate you so much for coming on, sharing your wisdom, and again, for everything you're up to in the world to make it a better place. So thanks so much for coming on, my man.

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  Lewis, love your show, love the work you're doing.

• 1:10:31Lewis Howes?

  Thank you.

• 1:10:41Lewis Howes?

  I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Thanks again for tuning in and leave a comment and share this post over at lewishouse.com/92. All the stuff that we talked about from the interview with Dave is right there on the show notes, lewishouse.com/92. We've got some cool videos and some links. You can check out Dave's new book over there. And let me know what you guys think. Leave us a review. Over on iTunes, over at iTunes.com/SchoolOfGreatness, where you can see all of the posts, or over at Stitcher as well. I appreciate you guys so much for checking out this episode and hanging out with me today, and Dave, and look forward to seeing you guys on the next episode of The School of Greatness.