Dave Asprey || Fast This Way

It's always a pleasure. I'm a big fan of your work. I've mentioned to you multiple times when I talk about the four F words in Fastest Way, things that drive human behavior. But there's another one, you know, around transcendence and you know, being more connected to more than just yourself and all that. So thanks for the inspiration, well, thank you. You know, the feelings mutual. After I was on your gracious enough to have me on your podcast, I was left with this feeling of you know this

this this is a cool cut. You know it was such an effortless conversation we had, you know, I mean, there was no there was no like effort there. So I love when that happens. Yeah, that's the best podcast or conversations you want to have anyway, and you just have a few hundred thousand people listening in because they wanted to hear. Then everybody wins. Yeah, well so we want to talk about I hope I got your bio right. I couldn't actually see anything on the screen, so I

was doing predictive text. But I hope, I hope, but I got all the words everything. But now it's four times in your time, so teller it fastest way. Just hit the list again for second week. So this is my fourth book on the list, which is kind of I feel like a real author. At a certain point,

You're like, okay, I think I'm there, congratulations, thank you. Well, I really enjoyed this book, and I wanted to kind of start at the beginning, if we can, with this vision because I had to be completely honest, I never even was I wasn't familiar with the phrase vision quest, and then it took me down. Yeah, I mean people are shocked by that. They're like, the author of transcend has never been on a vision quest with a shaman. But you know, yeah, this is a new territory for me.

So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that experience and maybe why I should try us a vision quest sometime. So tell me about what it was like. You know, why why did you look into it? I mean, you just were spontaneous. You went on to Google and you typed like you just went to the first shaman that showed up. I mean, I couldn't even imagine that that have a high having a high probability of turning out well in retrospect. The appropriate way to find a shaman who's a good fit for

you is to ask around and to get a personal referral. Right, And I have been through Alberta Vodo's shamanic training, at least the beginning of his training program. And I did that after I did certainly after I did. I was kind I believe after I did the work in the cave. No, I did it before I did the work in the cave.

But what it comes down to is, in some traditional cultures in North America, but not all of them, from what I understand, there are various rituals and as a coming of age or when there was a big change in your life, you would basically go out with a loincloth and a knife or whatever the traditional minimal garb was, and you would live in the wilderness fasting until you had a vision, and you'd come back with your vision.

And quite often this was done for young men when they'd get to know age of adolescence, kind of to celebrate adulthood, and at various other special times through life. And if you're more on the medicinal side of things, more on the spiritual side of things, you might do regular fasts in solitude. And it's a long standing tradition, not even just in North America. You know, I have a encyclopedia of shamanism around here somewhere looks at these

practices around the world. So there's a long history of doing this. And I don't think it's fair for any one culture to say that they own fasting, because you know, the people in India and the people in China. It's a global thing. In fact, one of the guests on the show, Dan Brown, who I believe is at Harvard, He's translated the thirteenth century text direct from Sanskrit. Looking at mystery writer. No, no, he has the same name

as a mystery writer. This is a really experienced either psychology or psychiatry professor who also knows Sanskrit and translates thirteenth century cave yoga texts about how to do breathing and fasting in cave. So like, this goes way back

and it's a universal thing. And in my case in two thousand and eight, you know, given I didn't quite yet know how to properly work with the spiritual side of things the way I know now, I just connected through serendipity with someone who could take me out and it was it was interesting, to say the least, because

I didn't know what to expect. And when you go on a spiritual path and do some kind of transformative thing, and it can be anything transcendent, right, you get an idea and it kind of sits in the back of your mind and it percolates and eventually you feel cold to do it. The same thing happened when I went to Mount Kailash in the very remote part of western Tibetan, which is kind of the Mount Olympus of the Mount

Olympus of the East. You know where the gods live if you're Hindu or Buddhist, this is you know, the home of them, and no one would climb the mountain, but you walk into circle around two show respect. So I just heard about this southing for ten years and the opportunity presented itself when I was in New Poll and I'm like, all right, and I'm want a bust

to lasa. It just happens, right. So this was one of those situations where I just felt like, you know, I don't know why I need to do this, but I knew part of it was I had issues with just afraid of being alone, and a lot of people have this. And what I learned through my personal development process of just becoming who I am is that fear is never a rational thing. Fear isn't a thought, It's a feeling, and so feelings don't have to have any

reason for them. But this is something that will drive people to be in bad relationships longer than they should. It'll drive and sustain a job that's bad for them. It'll drive them, you know, to to not look inward because as long as there's someone else around, you can look there. So I thought, all right, I know I have residual stuff around that. I also know I'm eat when I eat when I'm lonely, and I'm afraid of fasting. I know that if I fast, I'm gon act like

a jerk, and I've been three hundred pounds. I don't want to do that. So I'm like, Okay, this is great. Four days in the cave. There's a spiritual aspect to it. I'm going to push my loneliness fear. I'm going to push my hunger fear. But there's no people, there's no food, so there's no temptation and let me see what happens. And that was why I did it. It was also my first four day fast. Is your first four day? I mean to just jump into the deep end like that.

You know, must have taken some courage there. So when you emerge from this cave, what insights did you have then about about how revolutionary fasting can be? The thing that just blew my mind. Okay, I was of the mindset. And this was before I wrote The Bulletproof Die, and I've been teaching people that are men fast for more

than ten years. People lost a million plus pounds on the stuff that I do in my books, but I didn't know any of that, and so for me, I was thinking, I'm going to be so weak, like you know, I'm going to get picked up at the end of this, and I'll probably just be a zombie on the fourth

day when it was time to get picked up. During the fast, you have a cell phone but not a smartphone, and in the morning you wake up, you some to text that's basically I'm not dead, and then you get to a text thumbs up, and then you turn off the phone and you know you're all by yourself. But what happened is I got a text. You know, I'll be at the trailhead at noon or whatever, and I'm like, you know what, I'll just walk to this other cave

where I know there's another person. I'm feeling so good, so I poured down most of my water, I kept a canteen, throw my sleeping bag, my jack in my backpack, and I was just like glowing with energy, way more than I'd had in a long time. And I ended up getting lost in the desert and I climbed the wrong mountain no battery, and it's getting in the sun side his head and I'm like, you know, I grew up in the desert. I know survival and mountaineering and all water going to it's not going to be pretty

I had. I had one canteen full of water. Who wants to carry three gallons of water with you? Right? But it was uh. I didn't have a concern in the world. I'm like, things are, things are fine. And I was so full of energy I could have walked a marathon. I ended up walking about ten miles with no food for four days, and I wasn't sore, wasn't tired.

I just felt great the whole time. And you know, right right as my battery was almost dead, of course, I just found my way to the right road, and you know, found actually found a road and found the truck, and everything was good. But the fact that I could walk around feeling fantastic, just enjoying the sky and looking at all the cactus and the snakes and the creatures of the desert, not a care in the world without

any food, Like are you kidding? That was completely transformative because I realized, you know, that feeling that you have, that's if I don't eat, I'm going to die. It takes you three months to starve to death, maybe two months, depending on your metabolism. So if you skip lunch or just get breakfast, you're not starving. You're not even in the world of starving, but that's what your body believes, that's what your body makes you feel, and then you

act on it. That helped me to see that it was one of the reasons that I felt really comfortable with intermitt fasting is one of the very early people talking about this as a thing you can do, and that was, you know, a big inspiration for the beginnings of the bullet of your diet. Now, why did you start bulletproof? What was the what was the what did you feel like it was missing in the market at

that time? Wow, that's a big question. I know. In order to lose the one hundred pounds that I've lost, and I've kept off for a long time, I struggled. I mean I was a raw vegan. I did liquid diets of various types, even going back into the eighties. I'm talking like I'm sixteen and trying a liquid diet because I'm fat, and look, I can lose twenty pounds in a week and you gained thirty two weeks later.

And these aren't eating disordering kind of things. These are a sincere desire to lose you know, fifty or one hundred pounds that need to go. I tried Atkins and I lost fifty of the one hundred pounds, which is an early form of keto. And it took me ten more years, in thousands of papers and just deciding to take control of my own biology to get the other fifty pounds to stay off. And I looked at every diet book out there, and all of them focused on

just one thing, and the guys know. So I wrote the Bulletproof Diet because this is a diet that accounts for things that have become major trends. It had intermittent fasting, It had keto that cyclical. It had don't eat omegas, seed oils in steady grass fed animals and things like that. It had avoid plant toxins like lectins that are causing inflammation for you, and of course, you know, don't eat sugar.

So it had five things that have basically become more and more trendy over the last ten years, all into one book, because you have to do them all if you want the maximum human performance. But that's why I wrote the book. I started the blog because I've run an anti aging nonprofit group in Palo Aldo in Silicon Valley and I did it for more than ten years. I was the only guy under fifty in the room, and I'm learning so much precious knowledge from my elders.

And we're four minutes from Google's headquarters and no one from Google ever shows up. I'm like, but don't they understand this is the stuff that makes your brain work better, this stuff that makes you stay young, Like this is so precious. And I realized the problem was the language. So I sat down with my board and I said, guys, we should start sharing this in a blog and me

do some video and all this stuff. And they argued for three months over the name of the blog, and I just I was like, you know what, it's okay. This doesn't have to be nonprofit. Is just going to be my blog. So I started writing all of this knowledge accumulated from more than a decade of intense self experimentation and research. I'm just going to put it out there. Five people read the blog, and when they read the blog, it's going to help them not suffer the way I suffered.

I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars recovering my health and becoming as healthy as I am now. Actually a lot of that on the upgrades. It's more than a million dollars, but a lot of that I didn't need to do. I didn't need to suffer for a decade. I didn't need to do all that. I just needed

clear guidance. So I put it down. I know it's going to help a few people, and it turns out more than a few people were interested, and it took off with like developers and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, then Wall Street, and from there it went to Hollywood and the recording industry. Because these are all people with high mental demand, who they want to look a certain way, they want to feel a certain way. But because this

was what people learned, their brains to work. And sure they want to look good, but they want their brains to work because who cares if you look God, if you can't remember your lines right. And the entrepreneurs always have more work to do. And if you're sitting in a meeting and you're a zombie, it's a dead meeting. And you know it. I live that way growing my career in Silicon Valley, and I was faking it and there are a lot of people faking it right now.

I just want to sincerely not let people do that. I had a VP level job at a public company with stock options when I started bulletproof. It was not meant to be a business. When I decided to make coffee and MCT oil, but especially coffee that didn't have toxins in it, so I could find coffee that wouldn't give me a headache and make me want to punch people, like maybe one hundred people care. The market size for clean coffee was zero, and it's one hundred million dollar category.

The market size for MCT was nothing. It's a billion dollar category for college and protein billion dollar category and I did all three of those because you couldn't buy it, And like that was it? Just make stuff you can't buy? Are you the one that made MCT like the thing to buy? Like, yep, that was me. I never heard. There was a point where I never heard about it before, and then there's a point where I heard about it

all the time. Okay, but you knock it off and there's some subtle chemistry involved in making in the right way. But yeah, I made MCT the thing, Dave, I did some this morning, and I'm too jacked up. What what do you recommend for it? I usually love it, but today I think I took too I drank too much of your coffee to my heart is powering this something is too much of my coffee. But cure is another cops guy? Is that so you could go off the cliff and then return back to normal. I'm totally don't

do that. By the way, I'm not blaming your I mean I I'm not blaming your coffee. I'm saying and that's my own fault for taking drinking. I was so excited to talk to you today. I was so excited to talk to you today that I was like, I'm gonna you know, I'm gonna wear the glasses. I'm gonna have like five cups of MC you know of uh your coffee, five cups of bulgro did you? Yeah? Well, I had a couple. I had a couple and then but I but both of them. I had MCT, you know,

and then you gave me butter as well. You gave me all these things to put it. I put it all in. I put it on. Yeah. Yeah, Like, why is my heart wanting to beet out of its chest right now? That's just caffeine. Okay, you got overcaffeinated and that's a simple thing. What happens with MCT is your body, especially if you haven't done in keto diet or any

intermint fasting ever before. Your body is like, oh, thank god, I finally got the ability to make more electrons in my mitochondria, and your neurons light up the same way I felt on that fourth day of fasting. I was running all in keytnes. That was part of the reason I was so energetic. You get that when you drink bulletrough coffee because the MCT that's specific kind that's in there turns into keytnes very efficiently in the body, and so all of a sudden, your neurons have more electrons

than they did before. So now you've got too much caffeine and your neurons like, yeah, I got the energy right, and that combination is pretty potent. Yeah, I'd say. I'm like, I'm like, give me a marathon, Give me a marathon. Yeah. If you get too much caffeine like that, there's something called elphenine. It's an amino acid that helps you chill out of you know, I should have taken that. I have some rate. I'll take like three hundred milligrams of that it'll like a fit things out. I see it

on my desk. But anyway, okay, so your your your story is very interesting. I mean you you said once to like on a Lewis House Uh interview, that like you had more estrogen than your mom or something and twenty six and then less testosterone than her, and and that was you know, you had health. The point here is you had I'm not like knocking people with the low testosterone, but the point here is that you had

certain health situation condition that you didn't know. Tronic fatigue syndrome. Yeah, like fibro miles, like every lime disease, every bad thing, toxic, put everything bad, a lot of things. I had arthritis, high risk of stroke and heart attack, pre diabetes. It was all in there before I was thirty. Yeah. And by the way, it's okay to knock people or lower and testosterone guys and women. If you're low on testosterone and you know it in a lab test, you can

fix it. You either change your sleep and change your saturated fat intake. And if that doesn't work, you can use external bioidentical testosterone the way I do, and it'll change your brain and it'll change your life. It'll give you your zest for life back right, And there's no It's just like taking a thyroid hormone or anything else. If you're low and your body's not making it, you can take control of your biology and you will love

your life when you do it. And it has side effects where oh yeah, you might like your better activities better, but that's not why you do it. You do it because it makes you like you. Well. I find like weight I'm really into weightlifting, and I find that that just naturally increases my Testostering heavy lifting will do it. But but you know, there's like an insult that's going around though, like they call people like soy boys or whatever, like I don't like. I don't like that, you know,

I don't like insulting people. Insulting people is rude and it's unnecessary, and it means you're insecure in your belief system. And I'm just curious about my belief system. You know, if I'm wrong about something, I like to see the evidence, and you know, I'll test it. What I recommend to people has been extensively tested and it's directionally very accurate and it's the test of time. But hey, I'm sure, there's some tweaks I could do. Yeah, maybe maybe I

need to take my glasses off at some point. Of course, I created the company and wrote the patents on why they work. So I'm pretty sure they work. But you show me they don't and I'll change my behavior and it's okay, right, yeah, so you yes, you're right. So you you you say something really interesting in your book. You say going without doesn't mean going without everything, and well, this is a common theme. I feel like you talk about that throughout this book. You know, like it you

can still try this faster. You have this like rule, right, like a certain amount of days and a certain can you tell us this role that you that you talk about in your book and so people can get like started on the right foot. Sure. The definition of fasting is to go without. And what fasting is is to show the body that it's not going to die when you don't get something that you feel like you need. And for me, I felt like I needed to be around people all the time or I would get stressed. Right.

That was my body thinking that I was going to die if I didn't have something else time. It was not a true thing, but it's a thing that felt true, and you feel like if you don't have lunch, you're starving. In fact, you probably say it like that, I'm starving, let's go eat. Well, you're not actually starving, it just feels like that. That's because you're having hunger cravings because you haven't learned how to eat the right stuff, or you haven't learned how to fast. And you can fast

from masturbation. You can fast from alcohol. You can fast from carbs. It's called a cato diet. You can fast from animal products. It's called making yourself sick with a vegan diet. I mean, you can do all these things. But fasting is simply saying I think I need this. I'm going to show myself that I don't for some period of time. You can fast from air. It's called breath work. It's oh, I'm going to breathe out and

hold my lungs empty for ten whole seconds. The first time you do that, it's going to feel really anxious, and eventually like, you know what, I can own this. I know that at a certain point air is the right thing. But your anxiety goes down. Every time you fast from something you think you need. It creates more free energy for the rest of your life once you show yourself that you didn't need it as bad as

you thought you did. And even with the people who are really rich, you can only have water during a fast. I like, I don't know, guys. I know some people who think you can have water, the think you should have fasting without water. So which one is the real fast? And the reality is let's look at the biochemistry of fasting. So whenever you go twelve hours without food, you've done a little miniature fast, and a lot of people do that without knowing it, and there's evidence that says benefits

start to kick in. But if you do fourteen or sixteen or eighteen hours without food, you get a lot more benefits. But you don't have to do it every day, and you might find that it works better every day. But a lot of people say, well, I felt really good on a fourteen hour fast, so I started doing eighteen hour fasts, and then I did them every day, and then once a week I would just only eat once a day, so I was doing twenty three hour

fast and then every weekend I fast two days. And if it works for you, that's great, But for a lot of people they because it worked at first, they keep doing it more and more and more, and it's overfasting and it creates a lot of biological stress. And I see women messing with their hormones. First sleep, than hormones, then thinning hair, and with men it's sleep, then it's a different hormone. But you basically wake up without a kickstand and then you get thinning hair. And it's overfasting.

So just because some is good doesn't mean more as better. So it's like a comfortable kind of fasting. And there is a working fast, and there's a spiritual fast. And we talked about the spiritual fast and there's some cool things that happen there. But in fact, I'll talk a bit more about the spirit side a minute. But a working fast, Okay, you've got two kids running around the house, maybe I do right and are not at school like

you'd want them to be. You're trying to focus on this meeting, you're trying to get something done, and you've never fasted before and you had a glass of water for breakfast. What's going to happen is you're going to get angry, and you're going to be cold, and you're probably going to get shaky from hypoglycemia, and you feel like crap, you're not going to show up in your life.

So you're not going to fast again because it's too miserable. Well, there are hacks for fasts that allow you to get the metabolic benefits of fasting, so your metabolism becomes stronger and more flexible and you're not even thinking about food. And when you do that, you develop a fasting practice. And you do that for a few months, and oh, I guess I could have just water, but I'll probably have black coffee, and oh tomorrow I was tired. Maybe

I'll make it a bulletproof. But the science about what's happening in the body, we understand it now in a way we didn't ten years ago. And you maintain this amazing system called autophogy where your body instead of digesting food, it digests old cells that are zombie cells or cells that are weak. Think of it. If you have like one of those old Las vegas on billboards, a couple bulbs are dem well, you'd want to replace the dim ones.

When you stop eating all the time, your body has the digestive energy to digest the weak bulbs and grow new strong ones. And it's a really powerful thing because you're not going to get diabetes if you get breakfast most mornings. And let's think return on investment. I spent no money, no time, no energy on breakfast. I felt better that morning than when I ate, and then I didn't get diabetes. Like I got paid up front, and I got returns that day, and I got returns next year.

It's a fantastic thing. That sounds amazing. It sounds amazing billion billion. Our question is how can you over when you feel that urge? You know, because you distinguished between hunger and craving, and that was actually really I mean,

that was really important. It was a ca you know, like I'm not going to die, you know when I have this craving, you know, like if I don't satisfy it right and and even I can trade myself to overcome it in many different areas of my life, like you talk about, you know, like you know, we meditate, you say, because we're fasting from thinking. Like I like that phrasing. I like that. You know, there's various things we do to train us to give us the muscle

to be able to not be ruled. Is it doesn't all this just come down to not being a slave to our cravings, you know. In a way, I think it comes down to not being a slave to your mitochondria. These are ancient bacteria. They're embedded in every cell in your body. They sense the world about a quarter second before you become aware of it, and they make decisions.

They make neurotransmitters, they make hormones, then they make energy, and they believe that you are a walking Petri dish and they do not care that you're in there right, you're an unwelcome guest. That their job is to keep them meat alive and make sure you reproduce. So they follow the rules that every life form does. If it's scary, take all energy, put it there, run away from kill or hide. And then if you have more energy, use it to eat everything, which is why we eat everything.

And if you have energy left after that, have sex with everything else, because that's what all life does, right, and pretty much that's everything everyone's ever done that they're ashamed of comes from one of those three things. And they're all driven by ancient code written in bacteria. And that means when you get that sensation of oh my god, I have to eat. It's you know, quadrillion ancient bacteria going you should eat right and why they're telling you that.

Maybe it's beause your blood sugar is just regulated. Maybe it's because you ate something in your last meal that caused a perturbation in the system, and they're saying you gotta have energy right now. And so a craving is intense desire to eat. I didn't know that you could feel hungry because I thought cravings were hunger, and like, oh, I'm feeling hungry, man, I really want some food. I can wait fifteen minutes, but I gotta eat really soon. That's a craving. What hunger is is, you know what

my energy levels are, get a little bit low. I probably would be better off if I eat in the next couple hours, but I could wait a day. Hunger is a gentle thing and it's not a scary thing. But cravings are intense, and people eat a lot of things that cause cravings. And what you find from fasting is if you wake up in the morning, like, man, my stomach's growling, I have this gnawing hunger and I just woke up. Well, it's what you ate for dinner.

That's what did it, so the meal before the fast causes cravings, and I talk in fastest way, I'm like, Okay, here's the five big classes of things that you can eat that cause cravings. It might not cosset cravings for you, but it probably does. So why don't you not eat any of those in your next meal and then see how easy your fast is? And then have some of those in the meal after that and see how easier

fast is. And I've led about thirty thousand people through a fasting challenge where I teach them how to do this for free, just if you read the book, or if you don't read the book Fastestweight dot Com. It's a free course where I'm teaching the book to people. And the whole point there is and people can sign up for it like it's a gift. I just I want this knowledge out there. And what you find is wow, you know some days are really intense hunger and some

days aren't, and it's totally totally up to you. And then you realize, I don't want eat that anymore because it's not compatible with me because it makes me starving. And if you eat food that makes you hungry, or the food didn't work. That's really good. I mean, that's it's profound. Does that mean everything? Does that apply to everything in my life? Everything in terms of cravings or yeah, like that principle you know of like does that apply

to relationships, you know, to attraction to people? I don't think it does to relationships and attraction. I mean you've studied that extensively with relationships though, that basic mitochondrial thing. Look, your body is actively sensing in ways you don't know, like pheromones. And you know, there's studies I've talked about him on on Bulletproof Radio where men will smell good to a woman and then he's attractive. But if there's

a phenotype mismatch, the guy won't smell right. But if the woman's on birth control pills that monitor that modify hormones, she can't smell the guy. And there's actually divorces that have happened because the woman goes off the pill and her all a sudden, she's like, my husband doesn't smell good anymore, Like I'm not attracted at all. Yeah, and then you know that's a big part of it, where like the physical attraction was This is why okay, Kupa

should have like scratch and sniff option. I've said that for years. You don't have the time, right, Oh, were in the same wave once again? Are we in the same wave of the way mine bell mind mouth? Yeah, yeah, it needs to be a scratch and sniff option. No,

you're you're absolutely right. But okay, I'll focus on on the principles in your book for a second, because you know, there's there's so many diets out there, and I was reading it going through your book, I was like, I wonder what he thinks of like the keto diet, you know, like, what do you think you know? So I would like to just hone in on that bouse. I tried the Keo diet and made me angry, it really did. And can you explain to me the science of this why

it made me? Explain exactly why? Yay. So The Bulletproof Diet was one of the first modern keto books. But it said use keto as a scalpel as a tool, and use it selectively, and don't stay in katosas for

long periods of time. Use MTT oil when you want to get some ketones that have a lot of benefit some days, go for three, four or five days without eating carbs, but then need some carbs, and the keto diet kind of evolved to if it's not a carb, you could eat it, and you know, it's the kind of the keto bro mindset, and carbs are Back's what happened. And then you get companies that like, oh, well, I'm going to make a coffee with milk protein isolate, which

is a garbage protein. It's like a waste product. We can't even get rid of it. But they put it in there and go, well, it's keto. It didn't have many sugar. You're like, guys, you put canoa oil in there. You put like garbage proteins that cause cravings. In fact, some milk proteins break down and I talked about it in the book into something that sticks to the opiate receptors in the brain. You're gonna want more of that

the next day. Yeah, Gluten does that as well. It's called gluteomorphine, right, And this is why you have a piece of bread, You're gonna want one the next day and the next day and the next day. And so you just realized some foods are craving masters and some of them aren't. And what you find is eating the right kinds of fat and more fat is incredibly satisfying. But eating the wrong kinds of fat makes you hungrier, it makes you more inflamed, and so you're like, wow,

who would have thought. It's not about how much fat or how many calories, It's about the right kind of fat and the right kind of protein. So when you eat keto, you were probably eating artificial sweeteners. You were probably eating low quality, cheap proteins. They put in keto, Keto mass Gainer five thousand, and all the products like that, because you can say keto and anything that's sugar free, but you should be on a moderate protein, high healthy fat.

Keto and magic happens. You felt like garbage all the time, in part because if you lost weight, your gut bacteria got really stressed. They pumped out lip a polysacchride, which caused brain fog. Talk about how to hack that in the book. There's a couple of supplements that completely eliminate that. And if you're losing weight, your fat sales are full of mercury and pesticides, your abody actually stores it there. And so if you're losing weight and you're not binding

the toxins. As you lose weight, you get brain fog from it. When people do the stuff that I've been teaching for a while, which is eating the right foods to be in katosis for brief periods of time, they don't get the kto flu well. I wish I knew you a couple of years ago when I tried this diet. You know, I said earlier there's something really profound about it, and I couldn't pinpoint it. And I think I can go deeper at a much neardier level about why I

think this is really profound. It relates to, I think notions of free will in a way. Roy Baumeister wrote a paper that I'd love to send to you after this call. On the title of it is do smokers have free Will? And they did a large review of the literature amongst those who are addicted to smoking and those who were able to quit to actually just try to ask the question, like, you know, just how much are we a slave to those kinds of impulses when

we're addicted to smoking. They found that people overestimated the extent to which they would never be able to quit. They over estimate, you know, they kind of in the moment when they were addicted. They said, there's no way in the world I could ever not be addicted to smoking. I'll die if I don't smoke for two three days. But you know, he found that that people were like ninety percent of his sample where they were shocked, like a week went by, two three weeks by. Eventually they're like, oh,

I'm I even thinking about smoking anymore. It's just something I'm not even thinking about. So you just made me think of that literature, because I just wonder if there's like a just like a mind bogglingly profound truth of the world here, which is that we need to trually not listen so much to our our our cravings about anything in a way, like we need to not take them so seriously, like they're they're telling us that we're gonna just die if we don't, like, oh, you need

to watch that poor movie. You're gonna die. It's like no, It's like no, what, No, I'm not gonna die. But here's where that feeling comes from. And I talk about fasting from porn in here. I know. So there's like the Quadrillian ancient bacteria, and they form a distributed intelligence, and really complex behaviors emerge when you run simple rules, unfathomable numbers of times. And we've proven this mathematically. It's

like a new branch of math around emergent behaviors. And what's happening is these little guys who get to see things and make decisions before it rolls up through your proofer cortex, and you even get to pay attention to it. And they're going, hmmm, if we don't reproduce the species, it's a bad thing. And every guy who's ever been in bed having sex going, I am not going to

ejaculate right now. All of a sudden, right before it happens, you're like, you know what, it's a really good idea that right now the most important thing on planet, I'm gonna do it. And just five seconds ago you're like, I'm not going to. I'm not going to. Who flipped that switch. It's the same guy who when you lean on a hot stove and you didn't know it and you pulled your hand away, and a good thing. I pulled my hand away even though you didn't pull your

hand away, it was automatic. It was that guy. They're in charge, right, and they really want to make sure the species reproduces. They really want to make sure of famine doesn't kill you because you might be the last human on earth and it would be the end of the species. So you're gonna eat the goddamn chips and that's how it is, right. And if that thing might be scary, it doesn't matter if you know it's just your boss telling you did a crappy job. But it

feels like death. So you're gonna run away, kill or hide, and you're gonna yell at your boss. You're gonna go home and mope or do whatever your coping behavior is until you do your personal work. So the whole process of personal development is training the mitochondrial distributed intelligence to sit, roll over, beg and behave itself everything you do. And the reason it's so sneaky is it can hide things from you and also it can turn down the energy

and will power comes from electrons. And I have the studies to prove that they're in I think in super you know, they're in Headstrong in my book, where there's actually like studies done. Will power goes down when the amount of free electricity in the body goes down. So these little guys like we can pull every trick in the book and we get to do it before you have permission, So of course it's hard to do it.

But when you're like, guys, you're going to sit with that popcorn on your nose the way the dog does before he's allowed to eat it, because I'm not eating until two o'clock this afternoon. And you can do it with willpower and just muscle through it and it's a spiritual fast. Or you could say, tell you what, I'm going to give you an alternate fuel that will cause you to become stronger so you'll stop pestering me about food.

Either one works. I love this. Can we get more into like the kind of mentality we can develop to sustain this food related lifestyle, Like let's say, you know, I want to wake up tomorrow morning and be like, I'm a new man. I'm living the fastest way lifestyle. What are other things in my armor, my mental armor that I can do well? One of the things is just to ask yourself it is this true? And is this true? Question? Is like, Okay, I feel like I'm starving.

I know it's not true, right, And that's actually for Byron Katie as the one who's done the most work on on that and most of the urges and cravings that you have around food are completely not true. And then you learn to ask yourself a question, is this biologically compatible with me? And there's a part of you this is your manter of concess, but it's flavorful and delicious, and I want to eat it, and it's going to

be you know, crispy or whatever. And then there's another part of here that says, I always feel like crap. I want to eat that, right, but you eat it anyway. So eventually you cultivate a mindset that says, I eat food that's compatible with me, and then you have to find flavorful food that's compatible with you. Where most people get wrong. It's like, oh, I'll have the kale salad.

Kale tastes like crap. Kale makes you hungry. Kale is full of toxins and doesn't have enough energy to power anything. It's not a very good food source. In fact, it'll make your fasts worse. And I talk about the two major toxins in kale and meant why that's biologically real in the book. But it's maybe not kale. It could be something else. But eventually you're like, you know what that looks like something that is going to nourish me.

It is going to leave me full of energy. And after I eat that, I'm gonna have a food high. Not like the sugar caffeine food high, but the man I got everything I needed. I feel so good. I'm not going to think about food for six or eight hours. And you don't. And someone puts donuts in front of you, you just don't want them because you realize those donuts post compatible with me. It's positive. I could put donuts

in front of you and be like, yeah, whatevers. You can measure my salvary output like mazlov'sas there is nothing, there's hope. They're not food like. And it's not that I have this wall power and there's no shame or guilter and that stuff. It's just that when you're used to running at your at the power, you're capable of

The Limitless movie, The Bulletproof. The state of high performance was the first tagline for the It's hard to put words to having the amount of energy and focus and clarity and willpower and control and happiness in my life. And I know that there's some things, man, I eat that I'm going to enjoy it, but I'm going to pay way more than the vut of the enjoyment. And so I want to feel like this all the time because this is the most precious thing on earth. It's energy.

Because think about it. Okay, there's three big things that we think about for resources. We think about dollars, we think about time, and we think about energy. But most people don't think that much about energy. It's kind of it's just there. It's not there. They don't manage it. So I know this because I had no energy by the time I was thirty. Like, I bought disability insurance and I wouldn't have hired myself. And I had the accelerator all the way to the floor and I was

slowing down. I didn't know what to do. That's what motivated me to create the stuff I created. But when you have no energy, if you have time, you sleep all the time. That's all you do. Okay. When you have no energy and you have money, you spend all of your money. You get your energy back. And I did that. I spend all of the money I had and sometimes and then some because I was desperate to feel normal much less the way I feel now, which

is a whole different level. And what you realize is that everything you do you invest some amount of energy and it has a return on energy because with energy you can make time and you can money. But if you have no energy, time and money become useless. So you start thinking about food, all right, what's it going to do with my energy right now? Oh? That's not it. So what else would taste amazing and be satisfying and delicious and fulfilling That is going to give me my energy?

And you choose that and pretson. You're like, I don't want the skittles right because I won't I won't feel the energy. But what else could I do that would be really satisfying? Can of eat some high end dark chocolate? You know you can? And it's a much better choice. And it's not being perfect. It's about just making something that's a better decision than the one that you would have made before. And eventually you just get used to feeling. Man, I don't know the right word for it. There's a

it's ephemeral. How do you feel right now? And Okay, it's the end of the day for me. It's like four in the afternoon. I've been on a ninety minute podcast. I've been in management and things. I had some difficult HR stuff. I've been fundraising. I feel amazing, like I have so much energy. I had lunch a couple hours ago. It was twenty four hours after my meal before that, so I had lunch yesterday. I had lunch today, Oh wow, And I wasn't hungry. I didn't think about food. I'm like,

I'm totally good to go. And if I hadn't had lunch, it was like, oh, my wife made it for me. It was this lamburgers from our own lamb on our organic farm. Like I'm eating that. But I wasn't hungry. I would have waited until dinner just because I had a busy day. But it's the dialed in I don't grasp for words. I don't my mind can do whatever I wanted to do, and my body feels good. My joints aren't sore the way they have been for a lot in my life. Like everything's working, and it's working

with so little friction. Why would I come up the works? And when you realize that you're capable of feeling that way and by the way. Try intermittent fasting. You do it the way I'm talking about with especially with the bulletproof stuff. You might feel it the first day. If not, you'll feel by the end of the week you're like, WHOA Like I am clearer than I have been in a long time. I had forgotten, in fact, maybe ever

knew that I could feel like that. But in forty eight and I have more energy than I did when I was twenty eight. And I look at my brain response time on quantitative eg ske measures P. Four fifty D. You probably know what that is. I have the average brain response time for audio and visual stimulation of a twenty year old. What about your telomeres? What how old

were you in terms of your telomeres? Well, it depends which once you measure teila mare measurement is a suspects science because they're pulling blood and blood tila mare is change in length all the time, so different tissues in the body have different telomere length. And the real way to get tela mares would be to basically do a muscle biopsy from different sites in the body, which is painful, and know what's going to do that sound you get a very different result than if you just do a

blood one. So I have seen blood ones vary by up to twenty years taken one week apart. Well, that doesn't too much error. It's too much time. Yeah, exactly, it's a lot of noise. So I've been younger and I've been as old as I am, but I don't really trust those. But I look at my arterial flexibility with pulse wave analysis, and I have the average flexible arteries of a twenty four year old. I have the grip's drink of an eighteen year old. And I don't

train all this stuff like it's just natural. But all that's a side effect. I just want to feel freaking amazing. All that well, it's by choice, and this is coming back from a three hundred pounds like wrecked biology. But I'm going to finish this. I'm going to have another internal call for my company. I'm going to go in and it's Friday night. I'm gonna make dinner with the kids.

We're going to have dinner, maybe watch a movie or something, right, and I'll be an intentive, awake, alert father who's not zoned down on the couch drinking a beer. And I'm going to sleep like a rock star. Tonight. Last night I got two and a half hours of deep sleep and two hours of rem sleep in seven hours of total sleep. And it's easy. This is easier than anything I've ever done before, because I have so much energy.

This is why I wrote Fastest Way, because man if half the country learned dinnermitten fasting and learned to not maybe listen so much to that voice in her this says I'm starving, I'm afraid. I need this, I need this, I need this, which all eventually drives to fear. Imagine what the world looks like you have enough energy to take care of the people around you, not just yourself,

Like I want that world. It's it's possible. Well, not only that, but all the less food that we'd be eating, we could give to throw road countries where people are starving, you know, in a dead, deathly, deathly way. You know you said someplace that you said, you know why, I'll live to be one eighty? Could do you think you still could be? Could you live to one eighty? It's at least one hundred and eighty. I don't want to Dave. You are you're like you're you're a cool cat man

like you. You you think you don't think small, do you? Look, here's the deal. I'm okay to die trying. But we know people can do one twenty. In fact, a lady who was one hundred and seventeen just got COVID and survived. So if our current best, our current best is one twenty. These were people born when there were no cars. They fought World War One on horseback twenty years after they were born. I mean, it's it's a completely different world.

There was no no antibiotics, no DNA because they couldn't spell it because they know it existed. We didn't understand anything. We couldn't share pubbed. I mean, I guess you use

the pony express back then. I have no idea, but like, if they can do it and we can't do fifty percent better over the next one hundred and twenty years, one hundred and forty years of life, you know what, It's because a common hit the planet, or because we destroyed all of our top soil with synthetic beef production, or some kind of weird thing that we do to ourselves.

Otherwise I will not be alone. There are going to be many people who aren't just you know, hustled over or hunched over, you know, hollow shells who don't remember their name. I'm talking working brain, working memory, enough wisdom to finally have solved some of the things that I wanted to solve in my own life and others, and enough wisdom to share and give back, like we need our village elders. It needs to be full power. And it's happening. The tech is here. The tech is arriving

every single day at an exponentially increasing rate. And I've been involved in that field for twenty years and it's finally happening. Man. Can you imagine, like me and you we do a podcast when we're both one hundred and eighty years old, what we would look like. You would think our chins will know down to the we should look about like we do now, dude, I mean we

are right now. There's things like peptide signaling and microelectric things and poles to electromagnetic very subtle changes you can make so we can drive collegen synthesis and scan already, right, So we are to the point now. Even David Sinclair, a friend from Harvard, it's like for the first time he stands up and says we can reverse biological aging and cells. And I studied this a lot. I went around, I did all the stuff that crazy, you know, billionaires do.

I've had a ton of my stem cells taken out and put into my brain and everywhere else you can think of. And what you find is that we know so much more now than we ever did. And it's so incredibly cheap. You get your DNA sequence for a couple hundred bucks. That would have cost one hundred million dollars when I was starting my career. That's only in

whatever thirty years. Thirty years, I'm talking about one hundred years, right, So our ability to change ourselves to be the age we want to be, to beat the energy you want to be, and to be the kind people that were actually wired in ourselves to be. It's coming, and it's better now than it's ever been. And it's hard to see that. If you're tired and sick and listening to this and you go to the doctor and he kind of sees you for three minutes and hands you a

bottle of pills, that's not the future. Well, I really hope, I hope this is. I hope you're right. There's a lot of work to do, a lot of work to do in this life. There is a lot of work to do, but man, the work is easier than ever before. Scott, we're different countries on opposite sides of the planet, or not the planet of a continent. We're looking at each other over a video right now, recording it. Do you know what a miracle that is? It's it's absolutely miraculous.

So where are you right now? I'm in Victoria, British Columbia. Oh okay, yeah, no, I mean, it is absolutely miraculous. I'm wondering if we're still going to go at the same rate you know that we have. We're not technology, it's exponential, So it's totally exponential. And my whole career in Silicon Valley has shown me this over and over because the tech that's letting us do this is letting

other people share information more quickly than ever before. You know, we're using artificial intelligence to learn things about biology that we could only dream of even five years ago. So it's exponentially getting faster and faster. The only question is whether you know, evil corporations or bad people will try to, you know, prevent stuff like that from rolling out they can't. That's why we have biohackers. Hackers find stuff, we share it.

You know. Something does worry me though, is that stuff can be So that's the only ones that are going to be, you know, one hundred eighty years old or like the billionaires, you know, and like everyone else dies. Is that the kind of world we want to have to worry? So if you think about it, the first people to get cell phones were the billionaires. Right. They spend forty thousand dollars and took up the whole trunk of their Mercedes three hundred d right, and it's twenty

five dollars a minute. And you see him driving down in LA. They're TV producer like, who is that guy? I think he is? And you can buy a cell phone for a dollar an Africa thirty years later. Okay, yes, the billionaires will be the first people to live to one hundred and eighty because they're going to spend billions of dollars to do it. And guess what they're going to do. Then they're going to say, hey, I think i'd like my kids who lived one hundred and eighty two.

I have to commercialize this. And when people see that happening. If this technology does not get shared, there will be pitchforks. This is a fundamental human rights There should be There should be a pitchforks. Do you want to be one hundred and eight years old where everyone you know dies because you didn't share the stupid thing you figured out? No, they don't either. Some of these guys are my friends. I've met them because of bulldproop. A lot of them

usable at Proof. I've sat down with them. They're putting hundreds of millions of dollars into research on aging. They don't want to keep it to themselves. They want to build companies out of it. They want to bring it to the world because, frankly, a world full of people who are old and sick and dying is not the

world any of us wants to live in. And if you're going to be here for one hundred and eighty years, are you really going to throw that plastic wrapper in the ocean because you're going to eat it one hundred years from now? Yeah? No, absolutely, I completely agree. Do you think you'll live longer than Kurtzwell, given his weird diet. Probably. I feel like there's like a competition among like the I'm going to live forever guys like, yeah, I'm younger

than he is. Yeah, so the younger you are, the more years you have for the technology to catch up. But the odds are pretty good there. And I actually have enormous respect for Raker as well. And he's been a transformative guy in Silicon Valley. He's a legend. Yeah, he's a legend. Yeah, absolute legend. And I'm yeah, I'm not sure. I was changed his diet, but his original ant aging diet didn't fly with most of the people,

the anti aging and street that I worked with. But he's an innovator like me, right, like I would infect one of these. I'll pick his brand on my show, I'm sure, because he's a brilliant, brilliant guy. Shocked he's never been on your podcast. You know. When he wrote his last book, he was supposed to come on and something something came up and we never connected. Was his book? Was it his book Transcend? No, it was, uh, because we both have the same book titles. It was the

one before that. It was like a Girl's Name. It was actually the best written book I've ever seen. To just explain to people, even to kids like here's how technology is coming. It was fantastic. It was like Lucy or something, I don't remember his name. Cool. Yeah. So you talk about different types of fasting in your book, and I was wondering if you could explain the sixteen eight fast. To be sure, the sixteen eight fast is the most popular intermit fast. Youll scene. That means you

don't eat for sixteen hours, even eight hours. And if you're new to fascinating, what except, here's what the means, have dinner, have a little bit early. In fact, eating dinner early makes you sleep better, It'll make you live longer. It's really good for you. So let's say you're done eating at six pm. You got a bed at ten. That was four hours. You sleep for eight hours, that was twelve hours. That's twelve hours. If you wake up at six am and by ten am, that was just

sixteen hours. So I mean, have dinner in dinner by six, have breakfast at ten. You can do this. You had a late breakfast, right, have some black coffee. I can do that. I can do that, you can do. So that's a sixteen eight fast. But then again, what if you just waited to lunch right now, you've got an eighteen hour and an eighteen six fast, and that's more convenient. And what you do is you add in the three fasting hacks from the book, either at eight am or

ten am, whatever you want to. And one of them is black coffee. One of them is bulletproof coffee, and there's various biochemical reasons, and the other one is pre by at a fiber. All of these tell your body are still fasting, but they give you electro, so all of a sudden you're like, yeah, my brainer's better than it did before, right, But a sixteen eight fast is very achievable. And the better thing is, especially if you're metabolically unfit. I have a chapter in the book for

you. You You don't have to do it every day. You can do it three days a week and you get great benefits. But you'll probably find you want to do it every day because you feel better than when you ate breakfast. You just eat breakfast, because one hundred years ago, one hundred and fifty years ago, when we had basically the invention of industrial production, people would go to work in the morning and they'd work fourteen hours without a

bathroom break. I mean like that was that, and you didn't get a lunch break and din't get any break, so they'd say the only time to eat was then, and then they'd go to bed. So eventually, you know, there were riots and whatever, and they got a lunch hour. But we started regimented eating because of industrialization. It's never been good for us. In fact, it's like this, if you had a think, Look, I go to the gas

station every Tuesday and I fill up right now. If you didn't drive your car all week, you'd be stupid to go fill up. But you always fill up with ten gallons. So you go there and you just pump the ten gallons out. What are you to put in the back seat? I don't know. I pump it out on the ground, but you always pump at the same That's what we're doing. What if you didn't eat until you were hungry, what would happened? What happens you get healthier?

Nothing bad would happen. It's mind bowling. Well, just people are on an autopilot. I mean, it's just it takes a book like yours from you to be like, wait, hold up, you mean I didn't I don't not eat that all the time. Yeah, you might feel the need to or you might want to eat it all the time, but then you're like, well, wait a minute, CUDA's doing It's like creamy and fatty and delicious. Would would that be nearly as satisfying as that, you know, low fat

sugar treat? And you know, why do I want the salty chip that I know will make me hungry in about twenty minutes, I'm going to want more? Like what if I could have something that was salty like a fat bomb or you know, something that had more hef

to it. That's the reason I make the Collejron bars I make for a bullet if I'm not trying to sell those there, But I wanted to get something that I could eat on airplane so wouldn't make me hunger again, because everything I eat on airplane makes me like starving in a half hour, Like I'd rather starve, So I eat those How do you do that? What I eat those bars? Oh? Yeah? I love the college. I love

the collegeen bars. I feel like my my I look I always look younger than I am anyway, but I feel like I look even younger than I already do. Collegen makes a difference. I know, I know it's funny the fat. Look at this, Look at this, you look like a great beauty. It's not. It's not too shabby over here? Is it? Is it a zoom filter? Though there's no fil filter, no filter. You look pretty good. There is, though, a half life of fat in the body. It takes two years to replace half the fat in

your body. Wow. And if you go on fastest way and you or you try the bulletproof thing where you're eating more grass fed butter, eating more saturated fats, your body actually will remake all of your cell membranes, including your mitochondria, and those become better light bulbs, better power producers. Over two years your place half the fat. But collagen

takes seven years. Oh wow. So if you eat some collagen every day and your body starts incorporating the building blocks of collagen into your own collagen stares over about seven years, half the collagen, your body is going to be your place with properly made younger college. And shit, that's amazing. I've been doing it for fourteen years now and you're one hundred good. So you're like a baby pretty much. I mean, that is incredible, And so I'm going to keep up like I do. I do. I

do have collage in every single day. So it's a really important practice. Every every person around one hundred plus years ago hid in collagen every day because we wouldn't throw away parts of the animal like that. We would make soup from bones and skin and we eat everything. Now we just eat the muscles and throw the rest away. You need that collagen. So you say that some fasts are better than others. I mean, we just talked about

the sixteen eight one. Can you could perhaps tell our listeners like one to stay away from them and do like do you warn against some particular a warning gets over fasting? Okay, so you know it's one of my favorite fast is called one meal a day or oh mad. It sounds, you know, all manly. I'm going to do

oh mad today, very test right. What it means is you basically have that one meal and so ideally, if you were to be perfect, you have it around two or three in the afternoon, and that helps you sleep way better at night, and you do that dinner time questore, Oh I would normally no, but I'm truly not hungry. I actually don't want food. And you know, you hang out and have a good evening and you wake up the next day you don't want breakfast because I'm not hungry,

and then lunch trolls a run. I guess I could eat, So I do that sometimes. But if you don't have a metabolism that works well, that it's going to totally be a stress or it's gonna overwhelm you. So fasting is like weightlifting, right, if you go to the gym every day and you lift heavy, you just get injured, you get tired, and you don't put on muscle. So with fasting, I tell people start gently. You don't have

to do it the same way every day. If you didn't sleep well, if you're hungover, you're having a really rough day. Eat are you okay? Yeah? I just I've been talking all day. Okay, just had to have some water. But all I say is eat. It's okay to eat. So a lot of people fall in this rigid fasting. I have to follow the rules. I'm going to fast, and it's the same as eating three meals a day.

Following the rules, especially for women, it's really important. Like if you're just blown out today, have some breakfast, but have protein in fat, don't have you know, the stack of pancakes and once a week, make sure you eat three times today. So that sort of unending, brutal, rigid fasting. It creates more biological stress than your body needs. And fasting should be a hormetic stressor that makes you stronger.

And a lot of people, when they say I have to do a sixteen eight every day, women are doing great. And then it comes time for their period, and some women do great fastering. Some women do great fasting during their period, but a lot of times they're already in flame. There's already enough biological stress, and maybe that's a day when you do a twelve hour fast or a fourteen hour fast, not an eighteen hour fast, and just it's

okay to mix it up on a daily basis. The trick is every day your stomach should be empty for at least twelve hours, and if you do that, you're going to be happy, and eventually you just get stronger and then you go longer. I think I do that automatically. If I stop beating at seven and I don't eat again until eight, I'm definitely doing that already. So that's good you are, But I can are longer. Yeah, yeah, I can go further. No longer is better. No, look,

I'm sold, Dave. You know, I like at least sixteen. I could go sixteen, right like, yeah, yeah, and then if you did sixteen eight, like four or five days a week again, weekends, have brunch or whatever. Yeah, it'll it'll transform your brain. I mean, your body starts to just replace the dim bulbs. I am, You've got a lot of dim bulbs. I can tell. Is that a good thing? I just messing it. I'm like, I a bete, Dave.

I was definitely not a yeah. I was like, no, look I was I was going to see something really kind. I was going to say. I am immensely grateful to have friends like you. I really appreciate you talking to me. I know you've been talking all day, and I really appreciate you coming to my podcast and teaching us. Not that you know that fasting is like the art. It's an art form, you know, and there's a science, absolutely, but it also feels like it's kind of this art

form that's not only about food. And I think that's a really mind boggling, you know, sort of realization that one gets from reading your book. So thanks so much for chatting with me. You are welcome, Scott. I. I really I'm a fan of your work and I just sat some fo on your show. You do really thought provoking stuff at time. Happy that we get to be friends. Yeah, thanks Dave, Well happy fasting Well. Likewise, thanks for listening

to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in on the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.