Why You Might Want to Reconsider that Carnivore Diet | Dave Asprey on Health Theory

If you eat more than 20% of your calories from protein, it is going to cause a four times higher increase in all cause mortality. Hey everyone, welcome to Health Theory. Today's guest is Dave Asprey, he's back for round two. And if you don't know Dave, he is the Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur and New York Times best-selling author of several books, including Headstrong, Game Changers, and most recently Superhuman. He's also one of the world's most famous biohackers, the founder and CEO of Bulletproof, and the host of the top 10 podcast Bulletproof Radio. Dave, welcome back. It's always fun to come to your house and see the amazing stuff you're working on. Thank you for having me. Of course, and speaking of working on, man, you and I share an obsession with the new book, You're Living to 180. So, your book opens with one of my favorite quotes of all time, which is, "Do not go gently into that good night. Rage, rage, rage against the dying of the light." Why start there? How has this become your obsession? It's funny, there's a very old restaurant in Berkeley, California. In fact, um my parents uh used to eat there when my mom was pregnant with me. Like, way back in the day. It's called Spenger's. And they actually have that quote up in when you enter into the restaurant there. So, I remember when I was a little kid, my grandfather uh reading that quote to me. And I remember my grandfather was uh passing away, he was in his his 80s, and he came down with an autoimmune kidney condition, and he sat down and he said, "Well, I'm a PhD scientist, chemist, and I know that if I work really hard, I might get to the point where I can sit at home and be well enough to watch golf and do dialysis twice a week for the rest of my life." Wow. I don't want that. So, I'm going on the wine diet. And and [laughter] he said, "Call the family." And I said, "What does that mean?" He said, "I'm only having wine. No water, no nothing else." So, everyone flew in and he passed away a few days later, literally doing exactly what he said. He just had a few sips of wine every once in a while, but he decided he was going to go. Let's talk about that for a second. So, I'm I'm actually really interested in this. So, um like if I knew that that was a one-way street, as much as I want to live forever, 180, like as long as humanly possible, if it got to the end, man, I'm I'm all about the wine diet or euthanasia, quite frankly. Like, where do you come down on that? If you think that there's hope, and you think that there's hope to have the quality of life that you want, then you fight for it. And in fact, one of these guys who never discloses publicly, CEO of a Fortune 200 company, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, the same stuff that took out uh Steve Jobs. And I sat down at the Rosewood Hotel, and uh he said, "Dave, I'm I'm going to tell you what I did." And the day he was diagnosed, he he said, "I'm not going to die. I have I have a a company and I have kids. This isn't fair." He never told anyone. So, he went on a full keto diet that day. And he shrunk his tumor to the point that it became operable. They did chemo on it, and when the doctors weren't looking, he'd inject insulin to do insulin-potentiated therapy, which works way better than chemotherapy, but the doctors wouldn't do. And so, he was like, "I'm taking charge." And you know what? He He did it. Right? So, and I And in running an anti-aging nonprofit group for 20 years, I have met people who are saying, "I have this life-threatening condition, and I am going to own this." And they do. And I've also met with some who say, "I'm going to own this." And at a certain point, they go, "It's not working." And they make peace with it. And the people who die kicking and screaming are the most unhappy. And if you believe any of the Buddhist perspectives on hell or any of those other things like that, those are the people who have probably a shitty afterlife, and aren't going to like their next life, if you're into reincarnation. Do you believe in that? Absolutely. Really? Yeah. That's so interesting. How did you get into that? Like when did that become your dominant belief system? There's the western side of this. So I grew up as in a in a atheist household full of rigorous engineers and you know, like all these stupid people would believe that stuff. But here's what it comes down to. If your nervous system believes that you get to you get a game over at the end of this game, you relax a lot more. Okay. Okay. Keep going. So check this out. If I can do anything to remove my unconscious fear of death which inhibits me from doing the things that I want to do when I'm here. If believing reincarnation can do that, fine. I'll sign up for it cuz here's the deal. If I'm right, great. If I'm wrong, I'm dead. I don't care. Like I you can't lose by believing in reincarnation. So I can't tell you that it's provable. I've also done very deep states of neurofeedback. I've done deep stuff shamanic wise and I've talked to different people from different traditions who look at me and say the same things about stuff that I have no knowledge of. So as a curious person where that scientific method is observe is the first step, I've observed stuff I can't explain via any normal hypothesis. So I know the stuff that we believe has holes in it just like it does biologically. So I'm just going to say I like that choice best because even if it's complete [ __ ] it still enhances my quality of life. That's really interesting. So one, the reason that the one thing in all that that doesn't resonate with me is that believing that you get a game over at the end of this causes you to relax which is the exact opposite I would say certainly for me. Even if I live forever, like I want to go hard hard hard every day. And if there's an end, then I really want to go hard every day. Whereas I feel like the the opposite might be true. If I knew I were getting reincarnated, one of my lives might be the donut life where I just chill and I'm like, look, I'm going to tap out early. I get it, but I'm just going to eat me some tasty food until it comes." If you believe that I went to Tibet to learn meditation from the masters. Like I've debated the llamas. And what they'll tell you is Oh, you've probably done that. [laughter] But had the donut life, you mean? Yeah. Absolutely. Like if you're asking that question now, you probably already had your donut life. Right. Right. So, the idea is you're going to keep making the same mistakes for lifetime after lifetime after lifetime until you learn your lesson. So, for me that's pretty good motivation to learn my lesson this time so I don't have to repeat the lesson again because who wants to repeat first grade over and over and over? Eventually, that's going to get boring. All right. So, while we have this one and this isn't our donut life, then what should we be doing? Like I love the concept that you explore in the book about, okay, you may be here and maybe here is even pretty good, but there actually is something above that and that you're not kidding when you say that you really want to live to 180. How do we actually get there? Like walk us through the you call it the the four killers. Sure. Start there. And everything in Superhuman comes down to something called return on investment. And it you just have to look at what you're investing. And we usually think of investment as dollars, but what we're really investing is not even time. We're investing energy. Cuz if you have energy, you can use the energy to make money. If you have time but no energy, the time is useless. If you have money but no energy, the money is mostly useless unless you spend it to get energy back, which is what I had to do when I weighed 300 lb and you know, I was I was screwed up. So, if you don't have money, you don't have time, you don't have energy, you're in pretty desperate straits. So, when it comes to living to 180, what if during this entire life, however long it is, you did the things that gave you the highest return on investment for learning the lessons that you need to learn, whether because this is the only life you have and you tricked yourself into believing in reincarnation so your heart rate variability could go higher, or because you actually are going to come back in your life. I have no idea. But I'm good either way. So, just in case I think living to at least 180 is a good plan. It lets me do more of the fun stuff. And when we get down to what's in Superhuman, first step to living to 180 is not dying. It sounds It sounds kind of obvious, but a lot of people read that book and go, "I never thought about it, but let's just play the odds." If you're average, by the way, okay, if you're listening to the show you're already not average because you're paying attention to health, right? And if you're reading Superhuman, you're not average. But if you are average, what's going to kill you is probably heart disease, cancer, or Alzheimer's disease, or diabetes. And diabetes is turned out as a risk factor for the other three. So, pretty much that's your future. You're going to be unable to metabolize food until you puff up and die of a sugar overload and other diseases. That's no good. Uh you're going to pop a gasket, your heart will stop beating. Um or you could just forget your name and your kids' names and end up in diapers. And uh cancer, we all know, you know, chemical poisoning, radiation poisoning, surgery. And what no one talks about though is that your chances of living if you had cancer are twice as high now as they used to be. So, we're actually not preventing cancer very well. The incidence is higher, but the survival rate is increasing pretty dramatically. Right? So, I I end up looking at all these and saying, "Okay, what do we do the basic things to avoid your risk of all of those?" Because if you just turn that down, your quality of life is unquestionably going to be higher even if you die at 87 or whatever the average would be given your demographics. And then, once you've lowered those risks, you say, "All right, what are the things that are going to make me die of some other cause?" And maybe one of these. And for those, there's these seven pillars of aging that now scientists understand. We used to think, "Oh, we don't know why we age. We age because of time, you know, we age because of whatever." But it's not one thing. And it's sort of like, why does your car break? Well, is it cuz you didn't change the oil? You didn't put gas in the tank? You didn't change the tires? You didn't rotate the timing belt and all the other stuff you do to maintain a car? And did you do it the right time throughout the life of the car? If you do it right, there's cars with 700,000 mi on them driving today, and there's cars in the junkyard with 70,000 mi. Right. I'd like this to be a 700,000 mi car. It might have a few wrinkles in the seats, but it's perfectly serviceable and it gets around under its own power. And this is doable, but only if you know the maintenance schedule. So, the seven pillars in Superhuman are about those. For each of the pillars, um there's things you can do that are free, they're lifestyle based. There's things you can do that are pretty cheap, like, you know, maybe change your diet a little bit or take a supplement, uh or a small gadget, let's say. And then there are things that are based on the very cutting-edge science. Some of them are frighteningly expensive, but this is what the millionaires are doing. And I went to the trouble of going out and doing as many of those as I could afford or find, and those things are are in here. So, I'm Here's the experience of doing it. Here's, you know, an expert. Here's, you know, my own assessment of this. And here's the results I had. And what I want people to walk away from this interview, from reading the book, just from thinking about this, aging is death by a thousand cuts, and these seven pillars are what are holding you up. But what if you took less cuts, they were less deep, and then you healed those cuts like Wolverine, instead of just putting Band-Aids on them? You'll find that when you're old, you have a lot less scars, and you function a lot better, and actually you're not old. You just have lots of years. And that is the path that I'm on, and and it's an accessible, achievable path for everyone. So, one of the things you talk about in the book, I was actually, um excited to see that you put it into a nice simple sentence. And basically, aging boils down to the mitochondria. Yeah. And I've never heard anybody put such a fine point on it before. One, for people that don't know, what are mitochondria? And then two, why is aging so related to that? Mitochondria are we like to say the power plants of the cells. This is seventh grade biology. It's what you hear on every news show. But I went really deep on the biology of these ancient bacteria that we like to say we harnessed for ourselves. They're actually running a lot of the decisions in our bodies. They're the ones who run the operating system of life for us. And the operating system of life is run away from, kill, or hide from scary things. They decide how much energy goes into fight or flight and how much goes into cellular protein folding. They're making the electrons and deciding what to do with them. And they're keenly interested in food because without food their job is to take food and air and a little bit of light and make energy out of that. And if they don't get enough of those things, they freak out and they change their behaviors. That changes your behaviors. And mitochondria, because we are talking about them, make them sound like they're a separate entity. And they actually do have their own DNA, right? They are separate bacteria that are now inside our cells. They have their own DNA and they share some functions with our DNA. But after this book came out, when I said very straightforward, mitochondria are at the root of aging. And one of the seven pillars is mitochondrial uh mutation. However, their performance determines how well you live. Then the study came out and what they found was profound. They found that when mitochondria make enough energy that the energy gets used by your nuclear DNA repair facilities. So, if you have enough energy in your cells because you ate the right stuff, because you did the right stuff like sleep and exercise the right way and all the other things that that I talk about in here, you will have enough energy to repair your human DNA, not your mitochondrial DNA. So, if you don't want to get cancer, you don't want to get these mutations over time, you've got to have enough energy to repair. And this is what's happening to a lot of us. When I say a lot of us, 48% of people under age 40 have mitochondrial insufficiency. Everyone over age 40 has mitochondrial insufficiency unless they're managing it. How do you test for that? It just so happens that Upgrade Labs, we have the gold standard test. In fact, we're the only ones who have it. We have exclusive rights to it. And you use a VO2 mask and it actually measures your oxygen consumption and how efficient you are at using it. There are other blood tests and all that are just not that reliable. I've been searching for a mitochondrial sufficiency test for years. The only one that I know is you get on an exercise bike breathing through a mask with a special algorithm that analyzes what you're doing to see how much energy you make and how much oxygen was left over. There's no lying to that system. Right. So, the studies show those numbers are accurate. So, what that means is as we age, we get worse at using air and food to make electrons, whether it's to ride a bike or to think a thought or to feel an emotion. All of those are driven by the same exact electrons that are powering your phone. And we, unfortunately, can't plug into a USB cable to recharge yet. That would be a lot easier. That's the next book. That would be a lot easier. Um so, if mitochondria are the source of aging, you threw out a couple things really fast there that we can do to protect against that or to optimize our mitochondria, what does that look like? There's about a quadrillion mitochondria in your body, way more than there are bacteria in your gut, and way, way more than there are cells in your body. So, your neurons in your brain have 15,000 mitochondria in one cell. And these things have their own little unique consciousness, the cell level consciousness like a bacteria would have, you know, very basic things that they do, but it's become this elegant dance where inside a neuron, these mitochondria will move back and forth and they'll break in half and and they do stuff that is at the very very core of life. Stuff if didn't understand 20 30 years ago cuz we couldn't see it, we couldn't measure it. And one of the things that they do is they hang around even if they don't work very well. That means that if you don't provide enough stress for them, they will not go to the biological expensive trouble of killing the weak ones and replacing them with fresh young ones. Interesting, I didn't know that. So, it's kind of like a cell in your battery, right? You're in your Tesla or even in your phone, there's multiple cells in your battery and if one of the cells goes bad, the battery the phone keeps working doesn't charge quite as well. Two of the cells go bad, eventually enough of the cells go bad, it only holds a charge for 5 minutes, you're in the hospital your phone's getting replaced. Well, what if there was a way to say, "Oh, this cell's going wrong, let me kick that cell out and grow a fresh new cell." That's what our bodies do. And when you do things like fasting and you just don't eat breakfast, it's not that hard or don't eat for a couple days. When you do that, all the cells that cannot survive because they're freaking out, I don't mean your cells, I mean the cells within the cells, the mitochondria, they'll actually die through a process called autophagy. And when that happens, your body cleans out the dead ones and you grow fresh new young ones. But if you never experience hunger cuz you're living that donut life, then you won't do that. And if you get really cold for a brief period of time, any cell that can't make enough heat to keep you warm, your body says, "Oh, a nice age might be coming. I better have enough young cells that can make heat." And it gets rid of the cells All right, let's get real specific on both of those and then we'll we'll keep going. But so, intermittent fasting, what's your protocol? So, Bulletproof Diet 2014, I talked about doing a 16-hour window. It turns out you can and this has since been backed up by several experts in autophagy, you can have Bulletproof Coffee in the morning. Zero sugar, zero protein is important, zero carbs. So, you're only doing fat and coffee or just coffee or tea. A lot of people can't go for 16 hours. I mean, if you're like I was when when I weighed 300 lbs, the idea of going without eating six or eight meals a day is abhorrent cuz you know you're going to die. And so, or you're saying, "Okay, I've got this willpower. I'm going to do it." And at 11:00 in in the morning, you're looking around going, "Everyone around me is a jerk. Like I want to punch all these people. I'm going to make it to lunch, but why is everyone such a you know" That's not functional. So, a lot of people they're starting it off with Bulletproof Coffee cuz they're getting their energy up, right? So, I'm going to put that in the realm of intermittent fasting. I call that one Bulletproof Fasting, shocking, right? Uh but I'm also very clear. The amount of caffeine in two cups of coffee doubles ketone production. Right? So, you can have And that's just caffeine, but uh coffee itself has other benefits. So, you can have two cups, even a decaf if you want to, but calf works better in the morning without any of the Bulletproof stuff in it, and you're still going to see a metabolic advantage from doing that. And if you go for 16 or 18 hours of fasting, for me I skip breakfast and have a late lunch. Works really well. The recommendations in here exercise before the late lunch because exercising in a fasted state increases autophagy, increases stress on the cells. The ones who can't hack it get out of dodge, and you grow new ones. And I'll tell you the data actually shows if you want to be a circadian, you know, great golden god, you probably should have breakfast and an early lunch and then fast. But you'll have no friends if you do that, so it's not worth it. That's literally how I live my life. So, I eat my last meal at 2:00 p.m. Yep. Um And you have no friends. It's perfect. I Literally, Dave, how did you know? [laughter] Uh it is It does make it hard, though. Um how often do you go days without eating? I would say twice a month I'll go a couple days without eating. And I've experimented I I feel really good if I go more than 48 hours. So, we'll You feel better? Oh, yeah. I feel great when I'm fasting and I feel really good when I'm done. And here's the kicker though. If I'm going to go that amount of time and I want to feel really good and be able to write, you know, work on my books and do projects, I'm not going to do working out during a two or three-day fast, but I'll not have dinner on Friday. And then on Saturday morning, I'm going to have coffee, but I'm going to put a teaspoon of Brain Octane in there, which is a very small amount. Different people have all sorts of different debates about, you know, how much of what makes it a fast cuz the mice only had water. I'm just going to say like Brain Octane specifically doesn't get stored as fat and doesn't get metabolized by the liver. It goes around those things directly into energy and you're doing a teaspoon of it. I get the same results from that as I do with I just drink black coffee, but my hunger levels are like way, way lower. So, I I just feel nothing. I do that Does Brain Octane have uh calories? It does have calories. Yeah, but different calories do different things, right? So, this is a calorie that doesn't uh require anything from the liver and it doesn't require uh any insulin. In fact, it'll have no effect on your insulin whatsoever and uh it doesn't require any protease or any of the protein digestion things. So, it pretty much goes in and gets used as energy. In Superhuman, I call it one of the energy fats, where most fats get stored as fat or have to get broken down by the liver to become energy. They become energy building blocks. This stuff doesn't do that. Yeah, with fast, it's interesting. So, the very first time I fasted, I did a three-day fast and I had a brutal headache the second night and I woke up in the middle of the night, my head is pounding and I'm like, I don't know if Advil has calories or not, so I refused to take it. Um You know what would have worked? Activated charcoal. Like I I've never tried that. Oh, it's one of the In fact, it's the first supplement that that I made for Bulletproof. And it it's an ultra-fine one. It helps with headaches? It can help with headaches if they're induced by toxins. And what happened is your gut bacteria were getting really pissed off. They were making extra lipopolysaccharides, and you might have been dehydrated. You might have needed magnesium and sodium and potassium. But, what's most likely is you were pumping out tons of lipopolysaccharides that are making you feel bad. So, anyone who's fasting, I highly recommend take activated charcoal cuz your body's going to be dumping toxins. You might as well absorb them in the gut and poop them out instead of putting them into your liver and letting your body recirculate them when the liver doesn't have glucose available for oxidative destruction of toxins. One of the reasons you get a sugar craving, if you eat a food that has toxins in it or even moldy coffee, you get that sugar craving cuz your liver's like, "God, this is a stressor. I need energy right now." It's going to call on you to get that energy. So, when you're fasting, absorbing toxins transformative, there are zero calories, at least digestible calories in charcoal. Right. Interesting. Yeah, I've never tried charcoal. Okay, so now the cold thing. So, what's your protocol for cold? How long and how cold? I have a cryotherapy machine at home. We put them in Bulletproof Labs. So, 3 minutes of air that's chilled to 270° below zero. That's cold. Now, What artificial? air. Okay, this is different than a cold shower. Cold shower's like, Right. Walking outside in shorts during a snowstorm when you're warm is not that big of a deal, and cryotherapy is more like that. So, I'm getting the signal into my body. It's a very strong signal in a very short period of time. You come out, you have like goose pimples, but I'm I'm not shivering. Most people don't shiver. If they're healthy, they shouldn't shiver. And I I also went through a period of ice baths. I have a digitally controlled ice bath that'll hold the temperature constant and circulate the water and freeze your butt off if you want to do that. And there's peripheral cold sensors that are in the skin, which cryotherapy with air does. And then there's stuff from cold showers or ice baths, which are the core temperature receptors and the ones on the skin. And it's arguable which one's better. I know which one takes less time, and I know you get similar results from both. So, um a mouse research a study came out and they show how much cold exposure and how much time is necessary and it matches exactly what I've seen in humans. So, I'm going to say this one works for humans as well just because it's the same numbers. Right. What I noticed from myself and others, you take a cold shower the first day, after 8 seconds and by the way, the water hits you in the forehead and the chest. After 8 seconds, you're like, "Dave's a jerk." And you jump out of the shower and you're hitting yourself in the head cuz your head hurts, right? And then you go back in the next day and you're going to be 20, 30 seconds before you do the same thing. And the third day you can do a minute and you come out going, "I still think Dave's a jerk, but it wasn't that bad." And the fourth day you get in like, "This feels really good." Well, what changed in 3 days? Well, the mouse study showed that 3 days of brief cold exposure changes the levels of cardiolipin in the mitochondrial cell membrane. And cardiolipin? Cardiolipin. And it's one of the things that makes mitochondrial membranes and all cells their membrane is what is what essentially allows some things in, allows some things out. In mitochondria, the mitochondrial membrane potential is what makes the electrons. So, what [snorts] it's doing is it's making the mitochondria work better and they shift the amount of this compound that's in the membrane to allow them to be better at making electricity. And that's why after 3 days, oh, I can make enough electricity to handle the cold. Whereas before, I couldn't do it. And that's why that 3-day period of swearing at at you for listening to this show is worth it because on the fourth day, I feel good. But then you burn way more calories throughout the day, you feel better. So, 2 minutes making the mitochondria more thermogenic? Like what's why question. Why would the response to cold be that? The only thing I can think is, all right, my understanding of the difference between traditional adipose tissue and brown fat is that you have more dense mitochondria, which are able to generate more energy, which thusly creates more heat and therefore you're able to keep yourself more warm. So, that was sort of always I thought more mitochondria being formed. I didn't realize there was actually something happening to that mitochondria itself. You will see a shift over time to have more brown fat and less white fat. As the demands on the body to instantly turn on lots of heat goes up, the body says, "Okay, let me shape myself to an environment where I'm required to turn on lots of heat quickly." So, this is just a a shift to match the environment that that your body thinks it's in, which is one where cold could happen at any time. Right. So, the brown fat that mostly is along your upper spine, that will that will get stronger and bigger and it has more mitochondria. But, the rest of the mitochondria throughout your body will also shift their levels of cardiolipin. So, what you're getting is more mitochondria in the form of more brown fat and you're getting better mitochondria everywhere else. And the mitochondria that cannot make enough heat will get replaced. And that's I think the big win and the amount of time that it takes to do that, I don't know the amount of time that it takes to grow a single new mitochondria. It's probably different for different cells based on nutritional availability. Right. But, it's an interesting question. Yeah, I used to get just Dave ferociously cold. Like, I was cold all the time. I was like bundled up. I had I lost a ton of weight. So, I lost 60 lb. But, I did it really stupidly and I did it through essentially rabbit starvation. I wasn't eating any fat, no carbs. 85, maybe a little more, percentage of my calories came from protein. I was basically eating boiled chicken breast and steamed broccoli all day, every day. It's a crappy life, isn't it? Oh my god, it was horrible, horrible. And finally, my wife and my business partners pulled me aside and said, "Dude, you no longer have a personality." Yeah. Like, it it just sucked. But, I got super lean. But, I almost certainly did some sort of cellular or metabolic damage and for years after that, I was so [ __ ] cold all the time. Yeah. Now, that didn't change until I started taking cold showers. And now I find that like I'm just not that cold very often anymore. Interesting. So, I have definitely developed a resilience to cold. Did you ever have your thyroid levels checked? I did not that I paid attention to. How about that? happened is that something happened that lowered your thyroid function, which is part of the reason you got fat. Cuz your thyroid is the thermostat for all your cells. The mitochondria listen to thyroid hormone to figure out what to do. And this is why in Superhuman I talk about the vegan trap. Tell me more. This was one of the more interesting parts of the book. And so I was a raw vegan for a while. I was cold when I was raw vegan, too, come to think of it. That's interesting. But and I got a lot of other health issues I hadn't had before even though I did lose some weight on that. But what happens is you say, all right, based on an assumption, and the assumption is it's going to make me healthy or it's going to be better for the planet, both of which are wrong, by the way. So, I I did this and what happens for the first 6 weeks is the type of fat in your cell membranes changes. And it changes to match vegetables. Newsflash, we're not vegetables. So, as that happens, your body says, oh, my ability to make energy just went down. I will compensate by turning up my thyroid hormone. But then at a certain point, your thyroid is turned all the way up and then nothing nothing's happening. You're still not making enough energy and then you can get thyroid problems including Hashimoto's, which is a common problem of doing that. And not to mention you're eating excessive carbs just by definition cuz that's what plants make mostly. And the vegan trap there is this idea that you feel great for 6 weeks. The period of time that it takes to make a new habit is 40 days or maybe it's 6 weeks, which is 42 days. And after that period of time, like, look, I felt better on the vegan diet. And you did. You cranked up your thyroid hormone. So, now you feel good and that can't be why I'm not feeling good. That can't be why I'm getting cold. But, that's the vegan trap is that you you were convinced it made you feel good because it did. So, it can't be that and you start looking at all these other things. Well, it's maybe it's cuz I'm not vegan enough. Like, I'm going to cut out salt. Right? And like you just keep doing these things trying to figure out why didn't I recapture that initial glow? And it's because various biological systems are turning off. So, for cleansing or whatever, yeah, be vegan for a little while. It's great. The rest of the time you should be pretty much 80 90% vegan with some of the types of fat that you're made out of, which are saturated fats. You don't get the right ones from plants alone. And the amount of building block protein that your body needs. Things like collagen protein are essential. You do not need the amount of animal protein that most people eat. And you should never eat industrially raised animal proteins. It's bad for them and it's bad for the soil, it's bad for the earth and it's bad for your soul, depending on whatever soul uh belief systems you have. Like, nobody wins uh when you crowd animals. So, I will eat the vegan meal every time or I'll fast before I'll eat the the industrially raised feedlot animals. This is not okay. However, um I have a small farm. I raise sheep and pigs and I eat them and they're delicious. And I don't eat a lot of them cuz you don't need a lot of them. And the total deaths per calorie on the Bulletproof Diet, which is primarily vegetables, which don't kill anything. Grains actually do kill a lot of things through habitat destruction and just mechanized uh cutting down of crops. Uh so, we have big problems there where a tractor comes through and kills the turtles, the bunnies, the ladybugs, the butterflies and destroys lots of crops for you to get low yield calories from these things. So, what you probably need is uh 4 oz and maybe 6 oz um of meat a day and not more than that. And the guidelines in Super Human, that's for normal people. If you're a weightlifter um or you're over age 60, it's probably 0.6 g per pound of body weight, which is way less than bodybuilders so it's 1 or 2 g. So, you can really want to pound your protein. And what the studies are showing is whether it's animal or plant protein, you don't want to overdo protein like you did with the rabbit thing there. If you eat more than 20% of your calories from protein, it is going to cause a four times higher increase in all cause mortality. Is that protein no matter the source? Uh I know like sure if it's fried and stuff like that Oh no, there's there's the the cooking of the protein really matters. But it it actually matters based on amino acid ratios. Okay, so are you saying 20% whether it's plant or animal? Animal protein is worse with the 20%, but if you eat 20% plant protein, you're still not going to get the benefits and you're going to start having problems from it. So, there are essential amino acids. Amino acids they're the building blocks of proteins. So, you can kind of look at those they're letters in the alphabet. And then you string them together and you get peptides which are protein fragments and you so each each peptide is a word. And when you put the words together into a sentence, that's a protein. Right? And so, if you look at the composition of letters that are in what you eat, there's ones that are required for us to live called cysteine and methionine and tryptophan. Mhm. So, you must have them or over time you'll starve. Slight problem. If you have too much of them, they lead to systemic inflammation. Systemic inflammation is a sign of mitochondrial dysfunction, which means they're making you older. So, your risks for cancer and cardiovascular disease do go up if you over consume animal protein. So then the logical say, "Well, don't eat any of it then." Except for the fact that you need those. They're essential and they're building blocks. The good news is that almost no one is going to be protein deficient if they were to go vegan. It's not about protein. You might miss a few of your conditionally essential ones, but you would miss out on things like collagen proteins including di and tripeptides that really help you to and the cartilage in your joints and keep your skin working. And the types of fats that come in animals are very important. So, what you end up finding is all of us should be eating way less animals, but that doesn't mean we should eat zero animals. All of us should be eating way more dairy fat, but not more dairy protein cuz that protein is is not the ideal protein for us. You can have some of it, but you don't need too much of it. And you end up in this thing where we've made these artificial divides of that's a plant-based protein, therefore it's good for you. Or we could just say, "Guys, different proteins do different things, and you should choose the right proteins whether they come from a a test tube, whether they come from an animal. Look at what the protein is. The source is less important." And then you look at the source and you say, "Okay, which of these sources builds our soil and makes for a healthy world where there is diversity and I I just ha- having run uh an organic farm that looks at permaculture, I can tell you I can't eat grass, but I can eat the thing that ate the grass, and its poop sure is good for the garden. Right? So, we have this this ecosystem where we all get along. And this is how it worked before there were humans. We had 100 million buffalo running around in the US keeping our soil healthy as part of that's their job was to go out and fertilize things. And it's it's very interesting to watch how we we've taken on these belief systems um that you know, nothing can ever die, not paying attention to the fact that when the tractor came through and cut the bread for your sandwich, that you killed many many creatures. And back when we had a healthy ecosystem, you could walk around behind the tractor with a bag and pick up hundreds of frogs and snakes. You could have frog legs for dinner every time they cut the grain. Well, now all the frogs are dead and there's no more snakes because we have monoculture everywhere. But hey, at least we're not killing anything. How do you really feel, Dave? [laughter] Let me ask you, what do you think about the carnivore diet? I did something similar to that when I was testing out like the edges of the Bulletproof recommendations, I did one serving of vegetables a day for 3 months, right? So, it wasn't pure carnivore because, you know, I did eat a little bit of broccoli every day. Shame on you. It jacked me up. Really? Oh, my god. though, or did you just like hammer over? Well, I was already, you know, doing keto and cyclical and Bulletproof stuff. uh meat, or keto plant-based? Oh, keto with meat. Okay. Yeah, you're one of the few people I've heard like really throw out some heavy warnings about protein. So, keep going. Got it. When you say that it jacked you up, yeah. Uh I was tracking my sleep. I've tracked my sleep for almost 15 years. Yeah, 6 hours and 17 minutes or something. I'm so [ __ ] close to the truth. What is it? 6 hours and 10 minutes, but you're close. See? Come on. 7 minutes off? All right, I'm going to give you full credit on that one. That That's pretty amazing. Um Yeah, and this is like for many years now that much sleep, and I'm I my percentage of deep and REM keeps going up. But during that time, I felt really good for the first week or two, and after that, my sleep I was waking up 10 to 12 times a night without knowing it. I'd wake up in the morning, I'd look at my results, and I'm like, this is the worst sleep ever. What's going on? And I had like like a kind of a constant headache, and I I got angry, and I was my joints hurt, and it it was not working. And I was really convinced, okay, we we don't need any carbs. By the way, that's wrong. You do need carbs. And I think what it did is it Tell me more. Why do you say that? Because as of this moment, I don't believe that to be true. So, tell me how I'm wrong. Um because the gut bacteria that eat carbs benefit from soluble fiber. So, if you're not getting soluble fiber, there's a little chapter in here on that. You can still be keto and have soluble fiber, but you got to have something to feed certain species of gut bacteria so they can do stuff. Now, if you go back, a Bulletproof Diet was the first book in the entire genre that talked about how collagen can be um used in the gut to make butyric acid. So, maybe my problem was I was eating too many ribeyes and I wasn't eating enough collagen when I was doing my my diet there. I've interviewed Steve O'Mahony Andrew. This is a guy who is a leader in artificial intelligence creating a global brain who came down with um cancer in his blood. And he'd been fighting it for a long time with and it was he was slowly going down. Went carnivore cured him. Woah. Completely fixed. And so he came on and talked about that. There's pictures of his freezer and things. It's all just meat. So, I'm a huge fan. Just like I would say, go vegan for a month, go carnivore for a month. Reset your gut bacteria. I actually have questions about the sustainability of eating only grass-fed meat. And I know if we took most of our golf courses and turned them into grass-fed meat production facilities, i.e. farms, we could handle a lot more than we do, but we're just eating too much meat as a species. So, as a a brief intervention to cure yourself, I I'm in huge support of it, but you better do nose-to-tail. And being the guy who has learned how to take our lambs down, you know, how to how to take them down as in I've been like I've learned how to at a butcher shop how to do it, there's a lot of stuff in there that you're supposed to be eating that you don't. And the idea here is you need to get the skin, you need to get the organs and things like that if you're going to go carnivore. So, there's there's a case for it. There are people who've done it for many years successfully. I think it's very expensive, very limiting, and probably bad for the planet, and maybe good for you, but I'd want some more evidence. All right, give me some rapid-fire things that are going to help me be superhuman. Green tea, black coffee, dark chocolate, blueberries, sleeping like a professional even if you get less sleep. Give me some of your sleep tips. Like is it timing? Obviously light. You're like [ __ ] synonymous with blue blocking. Yeah, I I did make those kind of cool. I I have a company called TrueDark. Just to give you full disclosure, I founded the thing. But, if I don't wear my glasses before bed for at least an hour, I do not get the 1 and 1/2 to 2 hours of deep sleep that I expect in 6 hours. If And this is even if the lights are dim and it it doesn't matter. It really matters. If I travel, it matters even more. So, I landed last night. I got to my hotel around midnight. Mhm. And I got my hour and 40 minutes of deep sleep last night in a hotel after landing and coming in. That I could never do that ever. That's amazing. That's the glasses. But, for dreaming, it's been a real problem. Getting enough REM sleep for me for years has been an issue. And there's a company called Life Cycle that makes an Australian lion's mane mushroom extract. I had the guys on the show. They went really deep on the science. And I've lion's mane is well-known for its cognitive enhancing properties. Um this stuff for sleep though uh is something that that that has worked for me. And I can tell you if I don't I do a lot. I do five droppers of it. If I do that, I get my hour and a half of REM. And if I don't, I'm going to get 30 minutes. The other things that work aside from dark, you know, that lowering the temperature of the room for people wake up late like 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning and can't go back to sleep racing thoughts, that's a cortisol and a fueling issue. Before bed, you need either raw honey or collagen or MCT oil/brain octane or maybe all three. And there's different pathways. Raw honey, not in hot water cuz it's not raw anymore, raises liver glycogen but not uh muscle glycogen. And we're talking a small amount. It stabilizes it so you don't get a blood sugar crash. Brain octane provides ketones which are the backup energy supply for the brain to pump itself out at night. And for some people the amino acid glycine that's present in collagen can be calming and help them sleep through the night. I do those. I take the sleep mode supplement I formulated. [snorts] Blackout curtains are a necessity at this point. Raising the head of your bed by 6 in. There's really good evidence that that's going to change blood flow dynamics and cerebral spinal fluid dynamics in the brain and make it easier for your brain to drain stuff out. That's interesting. So, literally put a couple bricks under the head of your bed. It's pretty easy to do that and it's a one-time hack that can have ongoing benefits. Hm. What about red and amber light? Amber light is good. Amber light, in fact, true light, one of the parts of TrueDark, we make a light that uses amber for like blood vessel formation in the skin along with collagen regeneration. And so, there's usefulness for that. During the day, you usually see me wearing uh yellow glasses that block some blue light, but not all cuz you need blue light during the day. So, amber light as a therapeutic wavelength on the skin works on blood vessels mostly and on fine wrinkles. Red light and infrared light also work on fine wrinkles, on collagen regeneration, on tissue regeneration. And if you're looking to use an amber light at night, it turns out blue blocking isn't enough to make you go to sleep. There's four kinds of light that mess with your sleep and blue blockers only get one of the four. So, your melatonin will go up, but the other three are still there. So, you need to block all four, that's why the sleep glasses are different than blue blocking. So, you see a lot of people walking around blue blockers during the day. They got no daytime signal at all, so that's a bad thing. [snorts] But, if you're walking around under bright LEDs and staring at your screen on full power all day, you're getting an overwhelm of daylight signal. So, it's about getting it getting it right, but for me it's that hour before bed where you just have to nail it. Hm. Uh and for looking younger, red light therapy is profound for the skin. And what can What do you use for red light therapy? Is there a device? Yeah, there's a variety of devices. So, you go to Upgrade Labs, we have, you know, the the many tens of thousands of dollar whole body thing you kind of roast on it with systemic effects including you can actually see your nitric oxide levels go up on a on a spit strip after you're exposed to red light. It has biological effects. And then it's kind of the mid-range of cost and performance. There's a company called Joovv. And they have a very very powerful LEDs in an array. And then at the most affordable end of things is the TrueLight stuff from the company I have that makes the glasses. They're more affordable. They have yellow they have the red and they have the infrared, but they're not as powerful of LEDs. So I would say you got to look at your your price point, where you want to go, what you want to do. But it's an LED therapy kind of thing. And you know, Joovv makes a little box you can take with you and there's panels you can string together. The bottom line is if you're feeling weird in your stomach and you you have nausea or you have a headache and you put red light on your stomach or on your head, it's shocking what happens. There's studies of putting red light in conjunction with ketosis. And they looked at somewhere in Minnesota they looked at say a dozen people. They put them on a strict keto diet. They put them on red light therapy with a strict keto diet and a standard diet and red light therapy with a standard diet. And the men who were on keto plus red light therapy had a doubling of testosterone production. But keto alone and red light alone both bumped it up, but nowhere near as much. So there's synergistic effects between keto and red light, which is really cool. a timing of that? Like when do you want your red light in the morning and the night? Um generally you just think of sunset and sun Okay. So you would do it when you wake up, do before bed. And during the day if you if you have time, you know, and you're looking at skin repair or something, you can do it anytime during the day, but the two peak periods are before bed and uh upon waking. Nice. All right, man. There is a lot more in this book. You are a very easy man to find online, but where's your ideal for people to connect with you? Where's your ideal for people to snatch up the book? Go to daveasprey.com and this is my author URL. You can clearly go to bulletproof.com, pick up all the cool Bulletproof stuff. Um, I've put most of my blog posts and all the podcast transcripts and all that kind of stuff on daveasprey.com. So, go there and if you send me your receipt from picking up Superhuman, um, there's eight interviews with like the leading gods of anti-aging that are just for people who picked up the books. So, I'm really serious about this, building a community around people that do the stuff that has been a nonprofit activity for me for 20 years that's now becoming my my primary focus. Nice, man. What's one change that you would have people make that would take them the farthest towards becoming superhuman? This is going to sound really, really lame. It's probably sleep today. Doesn't sound lame to me at all. I I like to tell you you should meditate or you should, you know, make sure that you're not eating toxins. That It all is synergistic, but seriously, if you just learn to get better sleep in whatever time you have to sleep, it is the most leverage return on investment and it's probably also the cheapest thing you can do. So, that and maybe learning some breathing exercises is pretty good deal. Nice. I like it. It's good advice. Guys, this is somebody who literally puts out good advice for a living. If you're not already following him on one of the many platforms that he's active on, you definitely want to. Check out the book. It really is interesting and offers a whole host of things you can be doing to better your life. And speaking of bettering your life, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe and until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. [applause] Thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. You're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset, cultivating grit, and unlocking your full potential.