Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351

23:39And the motivation is instead of wasting a lot of time, I'm going to do a more effective workout. So you just tell yourself, I am going to save 45 minutes of suffering by going to the gym right now. That flips the switch on your emotional body. So now all of a sudden, oh yeah, I'm going to save because saving feels bigger than doing work. You can do this in your entrepreneurial life as well. I have this long hour meeting. This is going to suck. Well, what if you reposition that mentally and say, I'm going to save eight hours of work later. So in your mind, you're saying, wow, I'm saving seven hours of effort and that meeting will not feel painful.

24:19Understand, savings motivates you because your biology is lazy, even though you have an immense drive and power, otherwise you wouldn't be an entrepreneur. So I don't wanna waste my willpower. I can use my willpower to overcome my desire to not go to the gym, or I could change my desire so that I wanna go to the gym so I can save my willpower for building my business. Now, I know a lot of this has to do with the fact that our body is acting before our brain. Can you talk to us about what's happening biologically? This is one of my favorite parts of biohacking. What really happens, and this is totally invisible, is that say I clap my hands and you know that it took some time for the sound to get to your ears and then you heard it.

24:59But that's a total lie. Because if we glued electrodes on your head, like we do at my neuroscience company, well, your auditory cortex, the part of your brain that hears things, a third of a second after the sound got to your body, your body allowed your brain to hear it. And during that third of a second, the body decides what you're allowed to hear and what you're going to feel about it. And then you're going to make up a story that matches the feeling. This is how all of reality works. There's a one third of a second window where your body gets to betray you. And understanding that is pretty profound.

25:33Now you go, oh, my body's pre-processing reality for me. How is it doing that? What are the rules it's using? Well, it's using rules that it learned starting from the moment of conception to try and figure out how to survive in this world. So your body's creating a user interface to help you survive. Unfortunately, it got programmed by that time someone almost dropped you when you were one year old, by that coach who was mean to you, by the bullies, by parenting, even the best parents make mistakes. So all of us, especially when we're younger, we have triggers. There's things that just piss you off.

26:07They get under your skin. That is ancient survival systems that are making you feel a certain way to try and keep you alive. And understanding that's not you. It's not that you got anxious. It's that your body got anxious and then you chose how to react about it. But if you don't know that, you're going to feel that you're the same thing as your body. And then this is the worst for entrepreneurs. Let's say you're cruising along, business is doing okay, and then something happens. Potential lawsuit from some douchebag employee who's making up a story because you fired them because they stole money.

26:38I've had that happen, by the way. So stuff like that. Okay, now the lawsuit or the bad PR, whatever, it feels like a threat to your body. And now you're in a state of fight or flight, your decision-making goes down, your team leadership goes down, and you're dysregulated. It happens all the time. Understand this was your body's response. It was not you. And by creating that division, now you can say, all right, I can tell my body's freaking out. Let me do some deep breaths. Let me do a cold plunge. Let me do whatever the biohack is to turn off the bodily response. In the meantime, though, I am not going to be triggered.

27:13I am not going to be reactive. And if you can stop being reactive when there's a perceived threat to your company, you'll see that a perceived threat isn't even real. You want to hear a story about that? Yeah, I would love to. Years ago, about 2015 or so, Bulletproof is taking off. And to be clear, guys, Danger Coffee is my new coffee company. I have nothing to do with Bulletproof anymore. But years ago, Bulletproof is taking off. And I get on this guy, Joe Rogan's show. And I didn't even know he was because I don't actually listen to podcasts. I have 500 million downloads of my own. I make them.

27:48I don't listen to them. So I go on and I changed Joe Rogan's life. I helped him with ADHD. We talked about Kale, all kinds of good stuff. And he is prolific in his praise. Multiple, multiple episodes. But then he has ownership in a company that decides to copy Bulletproof. So overnight, he sends 25 ,000 organized trolls to my website to just decimate it. And he starts basically saying all sorts of bad things about me online. Oh, my God. Oh, it was super dirty. It was financially motivated. and he actually deleted the three episodes where I've been on when he went over to Spotify. But the point of all this is that that freaked me out.

28:27I was already doing very well, hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, and he caused a bump in sales, but it wasn't life-changing, but it was cool. So it just felt weird, and then all of a sudden, that did trigger me. Like, what is going on? So I, for about six months, I was really dysregulated. My social media, instead of people saying, Dave, I lost a bunch of weight. My brain works. Thank you. You saved my life. My family's different. All this amazing stuff. It was just, you're a con artist and a snake oil salesman. And it was all from one guy trying to ruin my reputation. Well, that did push my threat response buttons.

29:02And so I was reactive to it. When I sat down and I did the stuff that I write about now, it's called The Reset Mode. My next book is about that. And went in and dealt with the trigger itself. Here was the reality. It felt like I was being tortured or that I was going to die or whatever. Like it felt really threatening to my work in the world. Every time Joe Rogan says Dave Asprey is a bad man, I sell more coffee. That's the reality. But I couldn't see it. My body wouldn't let me see it until I dealt with an old trauma that was part of it. Every entrepreneur in existence has old traumas that we're unaware of that flavor how we see reality.

29:42And if you find yourself being reactive, that's powerful, but you're unlikely to know you're being reactive. And this is why you have a team who trusts you. They're going to tell you when you're being reactive. In my case, my buddy Zach, who was a convoy commander in Iraq driving generals past explosive stuff, called me on my bullshit. And you need a team who can call you on your bullshit when you're being emotional, you're being reactive. And if it happens, it's either an old trauma or maybe you drank too much last night and your biology is out. And this is another thing entrepreneurs just need to understand.

30:17If you're feeling dysregulated, your brain is foggy, you're reactive, you're cranky, whatever it is, it's either your biology is stressed or you're emotionally stressed. It's one of the two. It's always one of those. Deal with the biology first because it's easy and then the emotions feel less strong and then deal with the emotions. If you do that, you're captain of your own ship and it changes everything. I have a question about this. Can you talk to us about the importance of just managing our stress and especially related to the laziness principle? Like why do we have to manage our stress and anxiety?

30:52Well, stress is not good or bad. Stress is what causes you to become stronger. So if you're a typical entrepreneur like me, well, if stress is what makes you stronger, let me do even more stress. In fact, I'll lift weights twice a day. Well, lifting weights is stress, right? And you can build incredible resilience with biohacking. You also need to recover. So I don't recommend you avoid stress. I recommend you avoid useless stress, things that only take out of your energy bucket instead of putting things in. And recognize where are you on the scale from one to 10. If you just flew back from Dubai and maybe you drank too much, maybe you didn't sleep, is it time to go to the gym, lift heavy, and go out partying again?

31:39It's not. So recognizing 80 % of the improvement that you get cognitively or physically comes from recovering after stress. It does not come from the stress. Entrepreneurs are wired to focus on stress and to go into stressful situations because we can handle it. We're not wired to recover. When entrepreneurs come in to upgrade labs, we're measuring all this stuff. And they're saying, I want to put on muscle. You're not ready. Your body is not recovered. So if you want to grow, you want to improve, you recover first, then you stimulate, then you recover. 80 % of the improvement comes from recovering.

32:18So don't be afraid of stress. Choose useful stress. And stress is different than anxiety. Anxiety is this feeling of doom. You feel it across your chest, in your gut, in your heart. And something is causing that. And it's either repetitive thoughts in the head. And for that, I use neurofeedback at 40 Years of Zen. And I teach a lot of techniques in my books. Or most likely, something is wrong inside your body. It doesn't have a micronutrient. It doesn't have a mineral it needs. And the biggest needle mover is the simplest. list. If you were to take vitamin Dake, it's just vitamindake.com. These are fat-soluble vitamins.

32:57And you take those along with Minerals 101, broad-spectrum minerals. The fat-soluble vitamins drive the minerals into your tissues in the right place. So now, if you have stress in your business, stress in your personal life, or you just go to the gym and you're lifting, now the body says, okay, there was stress. Now I want to recover. Do I have enough zinc? Oh, I do. Now I can make testosterone. Now I can make muscle. Oh, I don't have enough zinc. I'm going to feel anxiety. So at least half your anxiety and sometimes 80, 90 % of it, it's just biology. It's not the thoughts in your head. You just think it's the thoughts in your head.

33:34Wow. That's so interesting. I never realized that your diet can impact your anxiety. In fact, it's the number one contributor to anxiety. You can have PTSD the way I used to. You can have emotional stress. You can have relationship problems. Those are very real. It's just they're impacting you so much because your biology is wrecked, because it's tweaked, because you have all kinds of problems. What I see now in entrepreneurs, both men and women, is that your testosterone is too low. It's because we have estrogen everywhere. You're using air fresheners and perfume and scented products and there's plastic and everything.

34:09When testosterone is low, it doesn't matter if men or women, women have more testosterone than estrogen, believe it or not, naturally. And since everyone is low right now, testosterone controls dopamine. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter that causes you to be motivated by pursuing a goal. So a low testosterone man or woman who's an entrepreneur is not going to pursue their goals as much as they could. How do you fix it? Eat less bad oils, less synthetic fragrances and things like that, less plastic clothing, less plastic bottles, and then you eat more saturated fats. So you can actually make testosterone and get a lab test.

34:48If I'd have had access to lab tests during the first part of my career, when I was 26, I made$6 million at the first company that did data centers. When Google was two guys and two computers, we built the buildings that held their servers. My testosterone was lower than my mom's. And I found this out back then. It was very hard to do. 90 % of people listening to this episode are low in their sex hormones right now. So you might as well test it. In testing it, you go to the doctor and the doctor says you don't need it, you're too young. I'm like, I'm done with that. You can go to axo.health, A-X-O dot health, and someone will come to your house and draw blood and advance longevity panels like 600 bucks.

35:27And then you get a dashboard. Where are my sex hormones? And let's say maybe you're 26, 27, like I was at that time when I made all that money. You can say, I don't need to. If you're feeling great, know your numbers. Because when you are 47 instead of 27, you can keep your testosterone and estrogen and other hormones right where you feel best. And if you're 300 pounds like I was in my early 20s, you're already wrecked, but at least recognize what is wrong. And you don't have to go to a doctor to do this anymore. You have a right to your own data. If you know your ROAS, if you know the amount of traffic going to your website, how many downloads for your podcast, how dare you not know your thyroid, which controls energy, your testosterone, which controls motivation, and your inflammation, which is a sign that your efforts, the electricity your body makes is not going into something useful, it's going into inflammation.

36:20If you have those variables, you manage them the same way you manage anything else in your business, and it costs less than you're probably spending on AdWords every day. Totally, totally. I feel like I've been getting more into bypassing the regular doctor and just getting my health checked. Have you heard of these full body scans that are coming out? What do you think about that? I had the founders of PreNuvo, which is one of the whole body scans on my podcast about three, four years ago. And they reached out a couple of months later and said, Dave, that podcast episode saved 25 lives. People, after they got their whole body scan, perfectly healthy looking people, they called them and said, straight to the hospital, You're about to blow an aneurysm.

37:01And another dozen people had life-threatening things that needed treatment, things like stage three cancer that you have no symptoms of, but they can see it. So you go and you spend an hour doing that. Given that cancer, it's incredibly increased, especially in young people, for some reason over the last five years. Who could ever talk about what that was? But it's actually a big problem in young people. I do a whole body scan every year and it runs about 2 ,500 bucks and it'll tell you if anything's wrong. And some critics will say, you might find something that's wrong that wasn't actually wrong.

37:39Well, that's why you do it every year. So you see what changes. I have two spots in my brain that are congenital. They don't cause any symptoms, but if they got bigger, I'd go work on it. It's like basic maintenance. Most people listening, if you're an entrepreneur, you're doing ideally hundreds of thousands to maybe 100 million plus in your business. You can afford a few grand to make sure that your biology is keeping track with your business. It's required. In fact, it's silly to run a business and not manage your biology. It's just not that hard anymore. It used to be really difficult. You can get the Axo Health Test.

38:15You can order the supplements. It's just not much work. And you don't have to eat perfectly. You might find this food really affects your sleep if you have a ring that tracks your sleep or something. But it just isn't that hard. The one thing that I wish someone had taught me when I was learning entrepreneurship in my 20s, your company is a direct reflection of your energy. So if you're feeling physical anxiety because your body is not getting the nutrients it needs or you're feeling emotional anxiety, your team will be dysregulated. So if you're powerful and shiny and bright and dialed in and clean, your company will be the same thing.

38:54So much of us, like for me, it's like I'm buying like$2 ,000 shoes and$5 ,000 bags. It's like, why not spend it on your own body, you know? So I'm totally in line with that. I want to talk about ADHD for a second. I did this webinar. It was sponsored by BetterHelp and I had to work really hard on it. And I studied a lot about ADHD and I feel like I have it. I self-diagnosed myself with it. I also feel like it's a superpower of mine. Show me an entrepreneur without ADHD. It's exceptionally rare. Like we are attracted to entrepreneurship because we have ADHD. And certainly I meet those diagnostic criteria.

39:33At least I used to, I might not anymore. Yeah. And so when I was looking into it and I was reading about your laziness principle, in my head, I was like, it just feels like he's talking about people with ADHD because it seems like neurodiverse people have more issues being motivated in getting their task done, unless they're really into what they're doing and really passionate about it. And then neurotypical people stereotypically do well at mundane tasks that they don't want to do and they don't really need a lot of motivation. And so just curious to understand, do you feel like everybody just has ADHD to a degree?

40:11Well, if you're a muggle, your boss can tell you to pay attention to something and you will just do it. And that seems horrible because the ability to control your attention. So you put all of your attention onto something you care about and you ignore things that don't matter. That's the kind of world I want to live in. I don't want to be someone, oh, look, pay attention to this stupid thing that doesn't move the needle for the world forward. No, you cannot make me do that. So the superpower is that. But what it does mean is you need to put systems in place to help you manage that. Because there will be things, if you have ADHD, that just take a huge amount of energy for you to do it.

40:56And they're different for different people. So identify the top 10 things that suck your energy the most. It might be paying bills. It might be taking out the trash, whatever it is. And just make a sacred commitment to yourself that you are never going to do those again in your life. Because they're not worth it. And hire someone to do it. And I also have to tell you this. If you do your own laundry and you're an entrepreneur, you're doing it wrong unless you have a laundry fetish. If you love your laundry, go for it. The rest of the time, that is the lowest value thing you could ever do with your time.

41:31So be absolutely savage about hiring people to do the stuff you hate. You do that first. So I need a head of marketing. No, you need someone to wash your socks and do the other things that you hate because you will be so much more free that then you will hire the right person to be in charge of marketing. So you got to get rid of that stuff, especially if you have ADHD. It's critically important for you to just get everything done you want to get done.

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46:32If you had to think about each heartbeat, you had to think about each breath and squeeze all the little things that need squeezing and pumping, your brain would be overwhelmed. In fact, you would just die. So there's an operating system in there. And that operating system is what's taking care of business in that third of a second before your conscious brain sees or hears anything. And it's the thing that's responsible for rapid threat detection. it's not very smart, but it's very, very fast. And you felt this. If you ever lean against a hot stove and then you go, oh, that's pretty hot. I guess I should move my hand away.

47:05And that's not how it works. You pull your hand away before you get burned and say, good thing I was so fast. I pulled my hand away. It wasn't you. It was your operating system. Another name for the operating system is your ego. It's all the stuff that happens before you can think. And we all learn, including me, to feel shame and guilt about this part of us because we think it's us. No, it's a very fast, very ancient part of your operating system that's reacting to potential threats because it doesn't understand a threat is not a tiger. That's all it's wired for is don't die right now. So embracing this idea that you have an operating system, that it does things without your knowledge or permission, and that you can influence your operating system by reprogramming it with things like meditation or breath work, or 40 years of Zen, my neuroscience program is my preferred way.

47:57Or they can influence the operating system by making it feel more nourished and more safe, by feeding yourself the right way, by having darkness at night and sunlight during the day, and just make the body feel like it has more capacity. And then you're harder to trigger. And then you stay more focused on whatever it is you care about. Can you talk to us about fast on, fast off and how we can do this with our diet, with our exercise, with our breathing and meditation even? One of the things that entrepreneurs do is we have this belief. If something is good, more of it's better. And if something is bad, you shouldn't have any of it.

48:35A good example there would be cortisol. It's the death hormone. Low cortisol is four times more deadly than high cortisol. all. So there's a proper dose and proper timing for everything. And we do the same thing in the gym. When I was a 23-year-old 300-pound guy, I went to the gym 90 minutes a day, six days a week, without fail for 18 months. You'd think I would have been ripped. No. I still weighed 300 pounds and I had a 46-inch waist when I started and when I finished. And it really pissed me off. So what was the problem? Well, if exercise is better, more exercise must be better to get results.

49:15And we oftentimes do this in our businesses too. If this thing works, I need to do more of it. But there's a right amount of ad spend because spending more when ROAS goes down is a bad idea. So what you want to be able to do is just allocate your resources effectively to doing the right amount of stuff. And what we've learned about biology and the principle of Smarter, Not Harder is that the body doesn't change based on the amount of work you do. It changes based on how quickly you do the work and how quickly you recover. And using this, if you come to Upgrade Labs, we have an AI bike. And you can do this for 15 minutes a week.

49:55So three, five minute sessions. And during that time, you never sweat. It's barely hard. It is 94 % more efficient than going to a spin class. So in 15 minutes, the amount of time you spend brushing your teeth, you can have the same cardiovascular benefits. Actually, it's not the same, I lied. You can have six times more cardiovascular benefits than you would get from doing an hour of spin class a day. The reason is wrap it on, wrap it off. So think about this. Recovery is what causes you to improve, not pushing harder. And I look at what I've done to my body, to my mind when I was younger, because I believe that pushing harder or got results?

50:35No. It's pushing hard for a short period of time and then recovering. That causes positive change in your brain, in your muscles, all throughout your biology. And the liberating part of this, it takes way less time to do that. So now you have time for your relationships and your business instead of just giving everything and just pushing, pushing, pushing. It's spikes of pushing followed by recovery. Spikes of pushing followed by recovery. And it follows, if you can learn to recover faster than Mother Nature intended, you can do way more in your life. And that's what biohacking really is about.

51:09So give me an example. Like if we go to the gym, how would you approach going to the gym? What you would do is you would lift heavy and you would exhaust the muscles as fast as you can. And you would keep your workout to 15 minutes. And depending on what your goals are, you're going to go for the largest muscles first. So you want quads, you want your butt, you want your chest, you want your back. If you just did those and you did it in 15 minutes, as hard as you can, and afterwards you laid on your back and took some deep breaths and you were done, instead of going and doing a lot more machines or say, well, more is better.

51:45Let me get on the treadmill. It turns out you'll get much better results and you can do things that stack the deck in your favor. You make sure you've got your vitamin D and your minerals 101 so that you have the precursors, the building blocks. And then you make sure you have animal protein right after you work out. So now the body says, oh, I'm nourished and I'm safe. You might even finish and do some breath work. Just bring your heart rate down. Relax. And the body says, oh, there was a brief stressor. It must have been a tiger. But now I'm nourished and I'm safe. And when the body has experienced stress and it is nourished and it is safe, it will change rapidly and dramatically.

52:23But what I used to do and what most people do is they go into the gym for 45 minutes and they really overtrain. And then, okay, I'm done. They go back to work. But it's the nutrient status and the heart rate that really change things. So it's relaxing after you exercise. This means you go to the gym, you lift heavy twice a week. And look, if you're a fitness competitor and you want to get the best tricep, you're going to work that thing out. But I'll tell you, my exercise regimen, 20 minutes a week at Upgrade Labs using AI-powered tech. My muscles are AI. My cardio is all AI. I'm 4.8 % body fat.

53:00The calendar thinks I'm 52. My lab tests think I'm 35. And I'm reasonably ripped. That's caffeine, by the way. All right? So you can do the same thing. If you got back, say you go to the gym four to six hours a week, if you got that back and you were in better shape than with what you're doing now, what would you do with four to six hours? Spend it with your girlfriend or your boyfriend. Spend it on a new project at work. Spend it learning how to meditate or play pickleball, whatever. You're just wasting time in the gym. So being fit is important, but it does not follow that spending more time in the gym makes you more fit.

53:37That is a myth. It is learning how to stimulate and recover in the briefest period of time freeze you so that you have the body and the mind you want and you can do stuff that matters. It's really hard for me to actually absorb that. Like I'm a person who goes to the gym five, six times a week and I go for 45 minutes to even an hour and a half. And I feel like I'm in really good shape and I like it, you know? And so for me, when I hear that, I'm just like, well, that sounds like my life enjoyment is going to be reduced. Well, if going to the gym is something you really, really love, you can do it as long as you're not overtraining.

54:16I don't know very many people who exercise for an hour a day who are not overtrained. So what if you went to a yoga class instead of whatever kind of thing you're doing now? What if you went for a walk in the forest? What if you went to a meditation class? Would you actually have a better body and a better mind? It's entirely possible. I'm going to experiment. I'm going to biohack on myself. A lot of people, especially high-stress entrepreneurs, they'll go to the gym to burn off excess adrenaline and cortisol. In fact, special forces people, after an operation, they will go to the gym and just kill it for an hour just to dump all their stress hormones.

54:55If you're using exercise to deal with the stress, maybe you should find out where the stress is coming from and do something about that. Or you might be doing it because you're addicted to endorphins. And I know people like, if I don't go for a run every day, I'm just, I'm not happy. You know what happens to those guys as they age? They get new knees and new hips because going for a five-mile run every day is not good for your body over time. And if you can't deal with reality, unless you basically go out and exercise with high intensity every single day, something's probably not right. And I respect the desire to be stronger and faster, and I share it.

55:34What I'm proposing is you want to be able to do that and be in a place of peace and power. And it shouldn't take an hour a day. And if you just love running, do it as long as you can. But it does come at a cost. So let's talk about diet. You mentioned in the beginning of this interview that you basically made the vegan diet obsolete to a degree. Some people still are vegan. I feel like beef is really making a comeback. When I was growing up, everybody was anti-red meat and it was a really big deal. and I would always try to avoid red meat and everybody tried to avoid red meat. And now I feel like everybody or a lot of people, at least in my world, are all about beef and everyone's pretty anti-chicken right now.

56:19So talk to us about that. What should we know about meat? Well, grass-fed red meat is the healthiest meat that most people can eat. And there's three reasons that people become vegan and none of them are valid scientifically. One of them is saying, I don't want there to be suffering in animals. Okay. Number one, if you're eating a soy burger or one of those impossible things, there are large threshers and tractors that go through the field and they cut up every animal. So there's dead baby deer, turtles, salamanders, mice, butterflies, snakes, all the things. if they're even still alive on that land, because unless you're eating organic stuff, the land has been sterilized by glyphosate and things like that.

57:06So the death per calorie from a vegan thing are much, much higher than if you eat a pound of grass-fed meat every day. Because that cow, it was just one life for you to eat for an entire year. And that means you can buy it from a small farmer who treated the cow with respect. I built and ran a regenerative farm for 10 years on Vancouver Island. I've raised my own animals and eaten them for a long time. So there is not an ethical argument around killing. You're killing more animals with your fake food. The health argument, vegans get sick all the time. These plant things suck minerals out of your bones.

57:41The more vegan you are, the more you need more minerals in your diet. So that doesn't work very well. And you don't have the right fat and your testosterone is low and you feel ungrounded. And there's a reason that people make jokes about vegans being highly emotionally reactive. I say this as a former raw vegan. you're ungrounded because you don't have any minerals in your body. So those don't work. So it's not health. It's not animals. And then this ridiculous environmental argument. Grass-fed animals build soil. Soil is the largest carbon sink on the planet. I put the first$50 ,000 into the Carbon Capture X prize that Elon Musk funded for$100 million.

58:16And we can pull carbon out of the air. We're not going to do it with industrial farming for plant-based things. We're going to do it by restoring our soil, which requires animals. So why should you eat meat? It is the right kind of fat, the right kind of protein, and it's mineral rich. And it's actually good for the environment. We just need to fix our animal agriculture. And if you look at chickens, the kind of heritage chickens that I raise take nine months to reach full size. The kind that you're eating takes six weeks to reach full size. And they have no minerals in them. They have very little nutrients.

58:47And they torture those animals. And you can eat one chicken a day. So you want to kill 365 animals a year? You don't want to kill one animal a year. And from a spiritual shamanic perspective, at 40 Years of Zen, we do a lot of spiritual stuff. I've done shamanic training. I've met with meditation gurus and learned from them all over the world. The reality is that from a spiritual perspective, I believe animals or farm animals come here to experience gratitude. And this is why all societies practice saying grace or saying something grateful. So when I'm going to eat that beautiful grass-fed rib eye that I'm going to eat after this show, I'm going to take about 10 seconds, say, hey, thanks, cow.

59:26And then it's complete. So if you want to feel better, I'm not even kidding, add a pound of steak a day for a week and watch how your life changes. Eating that much red meat, eating one gram of animal protein per pound of body weight has the same effect on your biology as taking semaglutide or one of the GLP-1 drugs. That costs$1 ,000 a month to do that stuff. and I have used GLP one time for a podcast. I've never used it. And how many people walk around at 4.8 % body fat, especially with a history of obesity, it's unheard of. And I'm not using pharmaceuticals to do it. I'm using beef. And what about the argument?

1:00:03There's a couple arguments and one of them might be a wives' tale, but like meat stays in your stomach for a really long time, I've heard. And then also cholesterol. Well, the people who say meat stay around in your stomach all the time, I've seen that stuff as well. It's nonsense. And all you have to do is go to any doctor who does colonoscopies. They look with a camera inside your colon, and there is no meat in your colon. The sides are pink. It's just not there. Now, what does stick around in your colon and rot is plants. It turns out the lowest residue food you can eat is meat. You eat meat, almost all of it's digested, and there's very little leftover.

1:00:40and contrast that with a bowl of kale or whole grains, neither of which I eat, what you're going to find is tons of undigestible matter that is rotting in the gut. Ideally, it's fermenting and making good stuff, but that oftentimes doesn't happen. And there is no evidence that meat sticks around your gut. That's just a wives' tale because it does get fully digested. Also, if you're eating too much meat and your body doesn't make enough enzymes, you will have the worst farts ever, in which case you need to fix your digestion because meat absorbs completely. And then cholesterol, even the American Heart Association, the worst job ever of doing their mission, well, they say that cholesterol in food is a nutrient of non-concern.

1:01:27They've said eating cholesterol doesn't harm you at all. And these are the most skeptical people on the planet. And cholesterol is the precursor for all of your sex hormones, for your stress hormones, low cholesterol people, including what happens when you're vegan, they die more from all-cause mortality. The longest-lived humans have higher LDL and higher HDL. And when you eat the way I've been teaching entrepreneurs and others to eat for 10-plus years now, you get enough saturated fat, you get enough animal protein, your resilience goes up, and your inflammation goes down, your HDL, which is the protective kind of cholesterol goes up and your LDL largely doesn't matter in that thing.

1:02:07And I teach people with the Axo Health app, here are the markers to pay attention to. If you're worried about, oh no, I ate some butter, I might die. Well, number one, that's what we've been eating throughout all of history and people didn't get heart attacks until recently. But let's say you're still, just test the markers that tell you whether there's damage to the lining of your arteries. It's pretty easy to do. So one question about plants, because I feel like a lot of people just think anything that's a fruit or vegetable is healthy and that's really just not the case. Oh my God. So talk to us about anti-nutrients, lectins, all that kind of stuff.

1:02:42All right. If you were to walk outside into your backyard or into the forest, pick a plant, just a random one and chew it up and swallow it, you know what's going to happen? You're probably going to the hospital or maybe just to the bathroom. Most plants are so toxic you can't eat them, right? And so there's, well, those aren't the edible plants, okay? Just because something is edible, do you think all edible plants are 100 % edible or does each plant come with pros and cons? We know that that's the case. So can you survive on a plant to get energy even though it's also delivering toxins? Of course you can.

1:03:16That's one of the things that's made our species so powerful because during famines, we can eat all sorts of stuff. It just comes at a cost. In my first big biohacking book, in the first chapter, I wrote about these five big toxins that are affecting your performance that come from plants. And lectins cause inflammation differently for different people. These are plant defense compounds. And the most famous lectin is called sarin nerve gas. And this is something that terrorists have used for creating chaos. And it comes from beans. So lectins can be really good or really bad for you. You just don't know, depending on your genetics.

1:03:54So minimizing lectins for a brief period, if suddenly your joints don't hurt anymore, that's a big sign. The one that people oftentimes miss is called phytic acid. This is present in whole grains and legumes. And phytic acid steals minerals, including calcium and zinc and a lot of the other ones, from your bones and from your mitochondria. It's such a problem that when farmers feed chickens or cows grain, they have to measure the phytic acid level because the cows or chickens will have such soft bones they can't stand. So then they give them special enzymes to block this. And those animals can digest phytic acid and humans can't.

1:04:30And then there's oxalate, which is a huge issue. And these are all in the first chapter of the Bulletproof Diet. And oxalates are compounds that cause razor-sharp calcium crystals to form throughout your body. And we can handle about 200 milligrams a day. one spinach, kale, beet, almond smoothie can have five times the amount your body can handle. And when you're young, it doesn't cause damage. You might get some skin irritation or a little bit of soreness, but they stick around in the body over time. And 70 % of kidney stones are caused by plants, not by eating animals. When people lower oxalate in their diet by getting rid of the weird freaky superfoods, eating less whole grains, eat white rice instead of whole grains if you want a grain, what happens?

1:05:15And they eat less spinach, less kale, even red raspberries. All of a sudden, their brains work better. They don't have cravings. Their joints don't hurt. Their skin clears up. So there's, okay, could you eat those foods and survive? Yes. Is that going to be an improvement in your quality of life? No. So what I recommend people do is eat the low-toxin plants and eat grass-fed meat. And for carbs, you eat the kinds of fruit that are lower in toxins. And you eat some rice, eat some honey. And if you do that, you're going to be fine. And maybe some sweet potatoes, maybe some white potatoes. Those both have toxins depending on whether you're sensitive or not.

1:05:51So I'm not asking for perfection. I'm just saying that if you make a few changes to minimize, just to recognize that some plants are probably causing your digestive problems and your skin problems, stop them for a little while and watch how life changes. The reason you do this as an entrepreneur is that if something's causing inflammation in your gut and you think it's good for you and it's not. And your gut's inflamed, your brain's inflamed. When your brain's inflamed, someone's going to do something stupid in your company and you're going to get pissed off at them. You're going to yell at them.

1:06:21And then the whole day, the whole company is disrupted. So you have to manage your biology if you want to be the leader of your company. So this feels like pretty complex, right? And I know you were mentioning that it's not a one size fits all thing. It's based on our genetics. But if you had to say, listen, eat these foods, you'll be pretty safe? Or is there just no way to do that? It's more about avoiding the most likely harmful foods than it is eating the good foods. The best thing is grass-fed meat. And you can get grass-fed hamburger, you can get grass-fed steak. It really matters that it's grass-fed for a whole bunch of complex reasons, including environmental and including your own health.

1:07:00But grass-fed meat, and then instead of spinach, have lettuce or arugula. Those are good for you. Be careful with the nightshade family, which is potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant, bell peppers. There are so many people, 28 % of rheumatoid arthritis is caused by those plants. So don't eat them for a week and then eat them again and see what happened. You may be completely immune to them or like many, many people you go, oh wait, when I don't eat those, my brain is clearer, my skin is clearer, and my digestion is better. My joints don't hurt. And then in terms of carbohydrates, white rice. The reason white rice is so much better than brown rice is that brown rice contains way more arsenic and way more inflammatory compounds in the gut.

1:07:44And this is why in every rice eating culture, people who can afford it eat white rice and only the poorest peasants eat brown rice. There's more calories in brown rice because you keep the lining of the rice, the outer shell, the husk, but that's bad for you. It's better than starving, but it's not a superfood. And if a restaurant tries to charge more for brown rice, you should tell them to go screw themselves. Eat the white rice if you're going to eat carbs like that. Don't eat refined sugar. It's not good for you. If you find you need more carbs, honey and fruit, and don't eat a zero carb diet all the time.

1:08:18It's bad for you. Don't eat carbs every day. It's bad for you. And every now and then skip breakfast or skip dinner, do some intermittent fasting three days a week. Intermittent fasting starts at 12 hours a day of not eating. Have an earlier dinner, have a later breakfast, and you'll be fine. And if anybody's interested in the fasting piece, that's what Dave talked about a lot on our last interview, and we are going to be playing it later on this week. So coffee is something that you are really into. You had bulletproof coffee. You mentioned you're no longer doing bulletproof coffee. Tell us about danger coffee.

1:08:53Danger coffee is a new idea. It's called danger because who knows what you might do. it's the good kind of danger, the kind of danger that entrepreneurs are attracted to. To make it, it is lab-tested mold-free because the mold toxin that's found in coffee very commonly, especially in the U.S., in fact, recent studies just came out, it directly inhibits mitochondrial function, which means it takes your energy. So if you drink coffee and it needs sugar and then you feel tweaked a while later and you want more coffee, it's probably the toxins from mold in the coffee. So danger coffee is mold-free.

1:09:25Brands I've worked with in the past no longer say mold-free on the label. They just say clean, whatever that means. And what's biggest about Danger Coffee, there is a therapeutic dose of trace minerals and electrolytes in the coffee. It's a very high-end, amazing flavor coffee, but Danger Coffee has those minerals, and those minerals help your body make electricity. So if you're going to make a cup of coffee in the morning, it might as well give you a therapeutic dose of trace minerals that your body needs to make energy in your cells, and you feel different, people say, oh my gosh, it doesn't need sugar.

1:10:00No, it's because it's really good coffee. It tastes great. But the minerals do something different in the body. You can add butter, you can add MCT, you can blend it up or not. It still creates a very different coffee experience. Very cool. Well, Dave, this has been such an incredible interview. I really enjoyed it. I learned so much. I end my interview with two questions that I ask all of my guests. It doesn't have to be about today's topic. You could just answer from the heart. You're speaking to entrepreneurs, of course, as you know. What is one actionable thing our young and profiters can do today to be more profitable tomorrow?

1:10:34One thing you could do today to be more profitable tomorrow is find an older person, over 70, and ask them for advice. Because they have suffered way more than you have. And they will tell you for free what to do. I love that. Never heard that before. And what is your secret to profiting in life? And this can be beyond just business. The most important secret to profiting in life, it's to understand that you're not investing dollars, you're investing energy, and then you're investing time, and then you're investing suffering, and then you're investing dollars. So look at it as how much energy did I put in and how much energy did I get out of it?

1:11:18If that is the thing that you measure, it'll directly lead to more joy and more happiness and the sense that you're resilient and you can handle everything. But if you only focus on dollars, every time you get more dollars, it won't make you happier. That's really smart. Dave, where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do? You can go to dangercoffee.com to check out the coffee. And all of my stuff is at daveasprey.com. And if you feel called to go deep with me on neuroscience over five days in Seattle, with the world's top brain upgrade facility, 40yearsofzen.com. Amazing.

1:11:56Well, I will get all of your links from your team, put them in the show notes. Dave, thank you so much for your time. Thanks, Hala.

1:12:07Yeah, fam, as entrepreneurs, executives, and strivers, we put a lot of strain on our bodies and our brains. And it's clear that optimizing our own personal health and well-being should be a priority. and not just for ourselves, but for the health of our businesses. Like Dave Asprey said, you have to have energy. You have to have a functioning brain and body. And the earlier you get started looking after yourself, the easier it will be. But it's also easier if you're smarter about it. And Dave had some great tips on how to get smarter about your workouts and your self-care routine and how you can save time and get better results.

1:12:44For one thing, Dave says, don't try to avoid stress, but rather focus on recovering from it. 80 % of the improvement that we get cognitively or physically comes from recovering after stress. If you want to sharpen your brain or your muscles, you need to stress them out and then let them recover. Push hard for a short period of time and then recover. Doing an intense 15-minute workout can be way more productive than a longer, less intensive one. You'll also get better results if you're eating well. Your brain and body will be in a better place and recover and grow if they're well-nourished. And finally, take the time to understand your unique body and needs.

1:13:22Take some tests. Find out what vitamins and nutrients you need to be at your best. Like Dave said, as an entrepreneur or business owner, you can afford a few grand to make sure that your biology is keeping track with your business. Thanks for listening to this episode of Young and Profiting Podcast. If you listened, learned, and profited from this conversation with the energetic Dave Asprey, then please share this episode with your friends, colleagues, and family. Who wouldn't want to learn how to get more from their workout and self-care routine? And if you did enjoy this show and you learned something, then drop us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, CastBox, wherever you listen to the show.

1:13:56Nothing helps us reach more people than a good review from you. If you prefer to watch your podcasts as videos, you can find us on YouTube. I'm approaching 60 ,000 subscribers on YouTube, which is awesome. Thank you for following the channel and just look up Young and Profiting and you'll find all of our episodes on there. You can also find me on Instagram or LinkedIn. by searching my name. It's Hala Taha. Of course, I got to shout out my amazing production team. Thank you so much to everybody at the Yacht Media family. I appreciate all your hard work. This is your host, Hala Taha, aka the Podcast Princess, signing off.