Biohacking + Brain Health with Dave Asprey
Today I am speaking with Dave Asprey. I have followed Dave's work for many years, and some of his books and teachings helped shape my way of thinking as it is today.
Dave Asprey is the founder of Upgrade Labs & known as the 'Father of Biohacking'.
He Is a four-time New York times bestselling science author, host of the Webby award-winning podcast The Human Upgrade, and has been featured on the Today Show, CNN, The New York Times, Dr. Oz, and more.
Over the last two decades Dave, “The Father of Biohacking”, has worked with world-renowned doctors, researchers, scientists, and global mavericks to uncover the latest, most innovative methods, techniques and products for enhancing mental and physical performance. Dave has personally spent over $2 million taking control of his own biology – pushing the bounds of human posibility all in the name of science evolution and revolution.
The creator of the Bulletproof Diet, and innovator of Bulletproof Coffee, Collagen Protein supplements and many more advances in commercial wellness products, Dave’s mission is to empower the entire globe with information and knowledge that unlocks the Super Human in everyone at any age. The proof of these advancements are better sleep, energy, and expanded capacity for all. Be a better partner, parent, provider and overall human being in every aspect of life.
Learn more about Dave: https://daveasprey.com/
Shop Danger Coffee: https://dangercoffee.com | Use code KAYLA to save!
“Health is the language of power.”
TRANSCRIPT
Kayla Barnes (00:03)
Dave, it is such a pleasure to have you here with me today.
Dave Asprey (00:07)
It's my pleasure, Kayla.
Kayla Barnes (00:10)
For anyone that's not aware of your story, how did you get into biohacking in the first place?
Dave Asprey (00:16)
Well, I used to weigh 300lbs and actually I'm about 225 now because I'm carrying more muscle than I have a lot of the time. I've lost 100lbs of fat and I had real serious brain fog in my twentys. I had arthritis since I was a teenager. I was diagnosed being at high risk of stroke and a heart attack before I was 30, pre diabetic, and I had chronic fatigue syndrome. So kind of a wreck. And when my doctors just either didn't believe me or couldn't help, I realized I'm going to have to do something about this. So I literally told my doctor he was fired when he told me one vitamin C capsule day would kill me. So I didn't have a doctor for four years and I would just stay up every night after my job in tech in Silicon Valley and read medical journals and I taught myself how to hack my own biology. And when I say hack, I was a computer hacker. I was at the company that held Google's first servers when it was two guys in the computer. And I was a co founder of a part of the company that did that as well as many other very large companies now.
Dave Asprey (01:28)
So I was teaching people how to build technology, how to manage technology and how to make it do what you want, even if it's not your technology. I'm like, oh, my body my technology. I better make it do what I want. And when I was looking for a name for this that brought together work I'd done in the antiaging field, in the autism research field, looking at neuroscience, looking at bodybuilders, looking at astronauts and special forces, what language do we have to bring us all together? And it turns out it's the language around control of our own biology. So for me, I just wanted my body to do what I wanted. I wanted my mind to do what I wanted and my mind was all over the place and my body was all over the place and I just want to be able to bring it every day at work. I'm building the most exciting technology I could think of at the time. And when I realized running the anti aging nonprofit group, the only people who really care about aging, guess who they are, Kayla?
Kayla Barnes (02:22)
Old people.
Dave Asprey (02:23)
Yes. And guess who really cares about health.
Kayla Barnes (02:29)
Sick people.
Dave Asprey (02:32)
Exactly. So sick people and old people care about antiaging and health. So what's the language? It's actually the language of power. It's the language of energy, because that's what I cared about. I am so tired of being tired. I'm so tired of not being able to think when I know that I'm smart, but I don't feel smart right now or when I'm just so exhausted and I'm trying to keep my eyes open in a meeting. I'm like, I cannot do this, no matter how much willpower I put into it. And I'm at a very different point in my life where I have more energy, more cognitive function, more everything that I would have ever wanted when I was 20. But I am more than twice that age now and completely in an amazing state, cognitively and physically and emotionally. It's remarkable. I didn't know if this was doable, but I just wanted a name for that so I could bring together a community of people. I did not trademark the word biohacking, and I could have I trademarked Bulletproof and the Human Upgrade and stuff like that, but I wanted this to be our word for what we do.
Dave Asprey (03:35)
So I run the biohacking conference, which is the first and longest running and largest biohacking conference. But anyone can have a biohacking group meet up in their living room without me knowing about it. It is a movement in society. It's been in glamor, it's been in Vogue. It was a fat computer hacker. Those are the least likely things ever. But it's become something that is global, and it's something that is at all ages. I know seven year old biohackers, and I know 16 year old biohackers, and they're all just totally kicking ass. And that just makes me happy every day.
Kayla Barnes (04:07)
Absolutely. I love that. And I want to say thank you, because your books actually years ago inspired me to think about how I felt. I started doing this when I was 17, and I felt, like, terrible then. And now I feel way better than I did when I was in my late teens. It's wild.
Dave Asprey (04:27)
Isnt it cool?
Kayla Barnes (04:29)
It's the coolest. And the fact that you're promoting agency over your own health is incredible. And I know that you've created a movement that people are feeling better, looking better, even in later years of life. And that's what life is about. Feeling good every morning, like jumping out of bed and just having energy to power through the day and show up for people that you love. So you're the man that started it all. So thank you.
Dave Asprey (04:54)
You're most welcome. I love hearing that someone has even read one of my books, and even more that it made a difference for how you think. Any time you write something, even on Instagram and you have some really well thought out posts, I think they're just very factual, but it takes a lot of time and energy to distill knowledge and then to structure and organize it. And that's why I write books. You don't write books to make money. Like the per hour return on writing books is equivalent to being a barista. Even if you're a sizable author. Like the number of thousands of hours that goes into it is ridiculous. But what comes out of it is like the most condensed, efficient way to transmit information that I know of. So that's why I keep doing I'm working on my next book, which will be my fifth New York Times bestseller, because the process of making myself do the work of organizing the thoughts makes them more teachable, and it makes them more actionable for me and for everyone else, too.
Kayla Barnes (05:53)
Absolutely. It has to be great for discipline as well.
Dave Asprey (05:56)
Yeah.
Kayla Barnes (05:57)
Okay, so let's talk about what are your most tried and true biohacks, like the OG biohacks.
Dave Asprey (06:05)
I'm actually drinking one of them right now. There are still a small number of misguided people who are following an old program, usually from a marketing company, to say, I'm going to quit drinking coffee. Yes, guys, Danger Coffee is my new coffee company. You could say that. I'm saying this to make a buck. I'll also tell you it's not going to change my life. If you do or don't drink Danger Coffee, it simply doesn't. But it might change yours, which is why I make this stuff. So coffee is associated with living longer reduction all cause mortality, and you can take any condition you think about, and you can Google coffee in that condition, and it usually is good for it. So I just think the preponderance of evidence is there, and a lot of the stuff is old school. If you're not eating grass fed meat, you're missing out on a huge performance increase. If you're not eating meaningful amounts of animal based saturated fat, your cells will not make energy the right way, and you will be lethargic. And that's just how it is. If you are eating meaningful amounts of things that inflame you, including a lot of plants that people think are healthy, like Kale gross and a bunch of other things you've been told they're healthy.
Dave Asprey (07:25)
But if they're not working for you and you're not just bursting with energy, well, maybe they're not working for you. And the whole essence of biohacking is, well, who cares if someone says it's true? We've been lied to for at least 75 years by big business. So test it. If your heart rate variability is better when you sleep, if you wake up feeling better or you don't have dark circles on your eyes or whatever it is you're thinking about, like, oh, today was better than yesterday. What did I not do? And that's one of the other algorithms of biohacking. It's stop doing the stuff that makes you weak. That's a lot easier than doing something to make yourself stronger. So just removing Kryptonite from your life. Imagine if you were Superman, and then one day your girlfriend, Lois Lane comes home with this cool air freshener. It's this cool green color with Kryptonite and a little bit of perfume and a little bit of spice mix with a healthy green kale kryptonite. And you're like, oh, that isn't great. And then all of a sudden, why my laser vision is a little bit off, and I flew into a building the other day.
Dave Asprey (08:29)
Sorry, guys, but it's not like you lost everything. You just aren't as good as you were or as good as you could have been. And so when you get rid of that junk, it's not like there was actually an increase in your power. It's that you just got your power back to where it was supposed to be. And then you can start laying in upgrades, and there are some serious upgrades you can do after you're back to baseline. But so many people listening don't even know what baseline feels like because they've been taken out as kids eating chicken Nuggets, and they've never had healthy cell biology. And it takes a little bit of work to do that. Oh, my God, you'll have to eat more butter. How much suffering is involved in that? It's not that hard. Other ones I take smart drugs, neurofeedback, especially, like the 40 years of Zen stuff, which is one of my portfolio companies. That's been very meaningful for me. And now for more than 1000 other people, I've meditated in caves. I've traveled around Nepal and Tibet learning meditation from the Masters, and the list goes on and on.
Dave Asprey (09:29)
But a lot of this is mindfulness and just tracking whether you use data and science trackers or you just have a number every day. How do I feel today? At the end of the day, do I like my life? That's enough for you to go, oh, my God. Who would have thought that when I eat gluten two days later, I hate my life? You're never going to know that unless you write it down and pay attention. That's the thing.
Kayla Barnes (09:51)
Yeah, I couldn't agree with that more. I talk about it a lot. Just pay attention to how you feel. If you eat a meal and you're eating kale, I know it's your favorite, and you feel like crap after, then don't do that thing again. So I agree. By the way, can you tell people your stance on kale? Why is it that you dislike it?
Dave Asprey (10:11)
Well, the first reason is that kale tastes like crap. Now, you might be saying to yourself, oh, but I like kale. No, you don't. You like natural MSG called nutritional yeast. You like sugar and Maple syrup, or you like bacon. That's what's always on kale, so you can choke it down. You could just throw away the kale and choke down those other things, and you'd probably enjoy them even more. But aside from the bitter, nasty taste, kale is full of something called oxalic acid. Oxalic acid is one of the five major categories of Mother Nature made toxins that take you off your game. It's from chapter one of the Bulletproof diet that came out in like, I think I first wrote about in 2011. So oxalic acid sticks to calcium inside your body and your blood. It forms tiny razor sharp crystals that accumulate in different tissues. It is the leading cause of kidney stones. It also causes systemic inflammation. It can cause even food cravings and sugar cravings after you eat it. Ever be full after a kale salad? No, that's right. You never were full because your body is going, give me something to deal with these toxins.
Dave Asprey (11:15)
And maybe the worst place they can go is if you're so equipped into your vulva and cause a condition called vulva Denia, which causes extreme pain from even a light touch. So why are we eating kale again? Oh, maybe it's because of thallium. You might have heard of thallium, which is a toxic metal. In fact, it's 1000 times more toxic than lead. Now, where does thallium in the environment come from? Oh, unleaded gasoline. They put thallium in there instead of lead because lead is bad. See, this is government thinking. Get rid of lead. Lead bad, but not paying attention to whether what they put in was much worse. Guess what? Plant accumulates thallium better than any other known species. Or could it be kale? And what is thallium do in the body? It displaces potassium, which is really important for your cells, the electrical system and hydration levels. And it's what the Russians used to call the Poisoner's. Poison because they would use it to kill people before they invented polonium, which is much more of a Russian signature to it. So there you have it. You're eating kale. Oh, wait. It's more expensive per calorie and probably per pound than grass fed ground meat.
Dave Asprey (12:18)
And it is not only not full of the nutrients they say it's full of, it actively pulls nutrients out of your body. It's one of the reasons that I was looking at. How can I help people using something like coffee? Danger? Coffee, which is my new brand, has 56 trace minerals added back into it because the foods like kale, like grains, they're actually pulling metals out of your bones, metals that you need, and we've got to be putting them back in. So when you're complexing minerals in your body using oxalic acid in your kale, it's a net negative. So, no, kale is not a good source of vitamins and minerals. It steals them from you. That's why I don't like kale. Plus, it's gross to the same already.
Kayla Barnes (13:06)
I agree. I don't need a lot of kale either. Actually, no kale, especially once I heard your stance on it. I literally will avoid kale at all costs.
Dave Asprey (13:15)
I found a way to save money on kale. I just punched myself in the face, and then it's like, I don't have to buy the kale, and I get a similar effect.
Kayla Barnes (13:23)
Oh, my gosh. This could be like a comedy little tour. Maybe only a few of us would be laughing.
Dave Asprey (13:30)
Really? Just give me going on kale nutrition jokes. They're hilarious.
Kayla Barnes (13:34)
But no I love it. So that's amazing. So we talked about some of your tried and true biohacks. I agree with coffee. And by the way. For everyone that's listening.
Kayla Barnes (13:41)
I was telling Dave that I drank his first coffee and definitely drink his new coffee. I love it. And highly recommend. And Dave, real quick, can you talk about the other details of the coffee? So we have the minerals, but it's still myotoxin free mold tested all of this, right?
Dave Asprey (13:56)
Oh, yeah. This is tested to my newest standards. It's third party lab tested. And if you read the label for dangerous coffee, it says mold tested right on it. And if you look at other brands that have a reputation for being clean, they don't actually say that they're mold tested anymore. So you got to be really careful and read the fine print on any brand that you're paying attention to. The other thing that coffee is good for is intermittent fasting, which is a massively important biohack. To go back to your last question, it's been a part of the bulletproof diet for the past decade. And one of the things that makes intermittent fasting really powerful is if you can do it without being hungry. So it's not will power base. And my last book called Fast This Way, I go deep into that. And when you're getting minerals during a fast, minerals, they have a chance to take action. And they actually bind to toxins in a specific form that I use in Danger Coffee. So you're getting electrolytes minerals, mold free, lab tested coffee. And this coffee tastes very different than anything I've done before because we actually found a way to ferment the coffee with clean microbes.
Dave Asprey (15:05)
So it is exceptionally clean coffee. But other types of coffee are simply unfermented. So part of what brings out the flavor is fermentation. But part of what introduces toxins is fermentation. So the very best coffee, Danger coffee, could be fermented and still clean. So it has that amazing flavor that you might want. And it's proudly definitely lab tested for mold. And I have to call this out about intermittent fasting. There's fast with Dave. I'll teach you how to fast for free. And my favorite URL of all time is my other biohack. It's sleepwithdave.com. And that's all about sleeping better because honestly, if you learn intermittent fasting, you learn how to sleep. You're probably a better biohacker than almost everyone, even if you still eat chicken Nuggets, which you probably shouldn't do either.
Kayla Barnes (15:58)
Absolutely. I agree. And the coffee tastes incredible. So thank you for that. So we talked about your favorite biohacks. What about new kind of more innovative biohacks that you're liking right now?
Dave Asprey (16:12)
Well, I started this journey going my brain feels like crap. And I don't know if I would hire myself for this demanding job in Silicon Valley. In fact, I bought disability insurance in my mid 20s, not a lot of 20 something year olds do that. But I was worried. And all my lab tests were fine. All my doctors said I was fine. There was no actual medical evidence that anything was going wrong. But I'm just like, I'm so tired. And when you look at what you can do with the brain. I started out with nootropics, and I ordered a bunch of them from Europe, and it was much harder to get them. No one even knew what no tropics were back then. So I spent, like, $1,000. And this package arrived six weeks later and plain Brown wrapping from England or something. And I tried some nootropics, some of the racetam family. And a week later, I was so pissed. I'm like, These don't even work. So I stopped taking them. And then the next day, I was like, what was that word again? And I realized that when I was taking the Nootropics, my verbal fluency, I wasn't losing words.
Dave Asprey (17:17)
I wasn't having to look for words. It was just smooth and easy. Well, that was what happens when you take Nootropics. Even when you use the right coffee, the right intermittent fasting, the right whatever, you just feel more like yourself, and it's smooth and easy, and the level of resistance in your life is down. So that was the first thing that I really felt for Nootropics was that I still use nootropics to this day. And I have some favorite ones, but I'm always trying out new ones. And then I'm also trying out brain modulation technologies. One of my companies makes light therapy devices, and that one's called True Light. And I've been experimenting with more light on different parts of my brain. I've been experimenting with other brain modulation technologies for years, but I think we're finally getting to the point of understanding how to hack our brain. Different frequencies of electricity over the brain has been a part of my practice for 20 years, actually, when you think about it, like when I write my book, I run electricity at a certain current, but now there's pulsed electromagnets on the brain. Some of what we're doing at 40 years is end.
Dave Asprey (18:26)
So we're coming to this point where we're knowing between certain types of light, certain types of magnetism, certain types of electrocurrent, and maybe even certain types of ultrasound. We can kind of do magic.
Kayla Barnes (18:55)
Okay, perfect. Yeah, I agree. And I love some of these modalities, too. I use a little red light up the nose, a little photobiomodulation. So I agree. I've heard you say that your brain is the age of a 20 year old. So you have the nootropics, you have 40 years of Zen. Is there anything else that you're doing for your brain right now?
Dave Asprey (19:16)
Everything you do that enhances your metabolism ultimately helps your brain. First, your mitochondria. Are we, like, say, the power plants of your cells. But as you know, that's not really accurate. They are environmental sensors that after they decide what to do. And I noticed, they decide this is before your brain even notices reality. Your mitochondria have decided, is this a good environment? Bad environment, what time is it? And they can decide to be a manufacturing plant that makes proteins or inflammatory molecules. They can decide to make electricity. They can decide to split and make new mitochondria. They can decide to clean themselves up. So they're really the puppet Masters of your body. Your neurons have 15,000 mitochondria in each cell. And so do your cardiac cells. But most of the rest of your body has only a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand. So these are the most energy burning parts of the body. Which means when you can be better at turning air and food into electricity, then your brain and your heart feel it first. And you get the most benefits there. For me, when I look at what is your brain look like?
Dave Asprey (20:28)
What does your brain function look like? It is largely about making your brain work better, which means anything that improves systemic energy production equals brain first. And that was kind of the basis of my book Headstrong, which is all the brain hacks that I know of in it. So for me, what I think I like to measure is a couple of different things in the brain just to go into, like, how did you know you have a young brain? One of them is hippocampal volume. So the hippocampus shrinks over time. And you measure this with various things like an MRI or I think you can see it when you're doing a DEXA Scan. But I don't actually know for sure. But my hippocampal volume is an 87th percentile, which means it's not shrinking the way it's supposed to. I wonder what happened there. Right. And is that from mitochondria? Is that from eating adequate saturated fat? And the Omega threes? Is it from all the brain training? We actually don't know, but I can tell you it's working. The second thing, and this is probably the most quantitatively, solid and interesting, is called P 300 D.
Dave Asprey (21:40)
Have you heard of that?
Kayla Barnes (21:42)
No, but I'm very intrigued.
Dave Asprey (21:45)
So in the field of neurofeedback, there are all sorts of signals you can get off the brain. And I've learned a lot about it because one of my companies, the one that designs the tech for 40 years, has been we manufacture our own amplifiers and software for analyzing and collecting brainwaves. And one of the interesting metrics is how quickly does your brain respond after there's either a light or a sound in the environment? Right. So this isn't how quickly do you make a decision? How quickly do you think of something? It's literally, if there's a light switch that goes on and off, your brain won't Twitch electrically for about 240 milliseconds. If you're maybe in shape, 17 year old or a NASCAR driver like that's, the very fastest response times just for the brain. You still have to decide what to do. That's just for your brain to know your body's already reacting. And then as you age, it goes down to about 350, maybe even 375 milliseconds. So there's a decline. Reality happens. And if you're young and smart and healthy, a quarter second after reality, your brain gets the first sign that reality happened.
Dave Asprey (22:57)
And then you decide what to do. And it might be half a second or a whole second later. So we've lived with this gap between our biology sensing and responding to the world, and then us being told that our biology did that, and then us deciding what we just did was our fault. And the most classic example of this, if you lean against the hot stove, you don't go, oh, look, it's hot. I smell bacon. Let me pull my hand away. We don't actually do that, but as soon as we pull our hand away, we go, wow. Good thing I pulled my hand away before I got burned. But it wasn't you who pulled your hand away. Like, who did that? Well, it was your mitochondria and distributed networks making a decision to keep the petri dish that is you alive. So how quickly can your brain detect these things? It's hackable, and it's predictable, completely linear curve with age. Except I have the average brain response time of a 20 year old when you measure my P 300 D. Why is that? Could it be the six months of developing and designing and creating the 40 years of Zen program?
Dave Asprey (23:57)
So I had literally no more feedback every day for six months of my life in divided times. It could it be the mitochondrial enhancement? Could it be running electrical current over my brain, the light therapy, ozone therapy, eating the right foods? I think it's all those. But what I do know is, fundamentally, it works like that's, how fast I am or more to the point, how fast my brain can sense reality. And I'm not saying that to brag. I'm just saying that if a guy who is as sick and as fat and is basically wrecked as I was biologically, if I can do that in my 40s, maybe you could do it better than me.
Kayla Barnes (24:36)
Yes, absolutely. That's incredible.
Speaker 3 (24:40)
And thank you for sharing.
Kayla Barnes (24:42)
I'd want to do that test soon and see where I fall. I would hope that I fall pretty. I hope that I would do pretty well. But we'll see, of course. So I want to talk about diet. You have the bulletproof diet. Do you still adhere to that? Is that still what your beliefs pretty strongly are? Like, what is a day of eating for Dave? Looks like.
Dave Asprey (25:02)
I went through so far. I have a mentorship group where there's more than 1000 people and we get together every couple of weeks. And I have a call with them. And I've also done a class on every one of my books. I teach my books in short segments. So if you want to just go deep for six weeks or something, it's time like a class with a group. And I just recorded the entire notes for the bulletproof diet, which means I got to review every word that I wrote ten years later to see, OK, what did I miss? What did I get wrong, given what I know now? And at the end of it, when I was talking to my team, I'm like, wow, I forgot half the stuff I wrote in there, but I think I nailed it. Chapter one of the book, we talk about lectins, we talk about oxalates, Omega six fats and mycotoxins and histamine. And if you look at all the trends that we're hearing about now, histamine and diets is being talked about. Finally, there's a few voices, including you, who talk about mold toxins and that they're actually quite common in food.
Dave Asprey (26:07)
And our ranchers know that they can't feed too many of them to cows or pigs because, well, they start failing to gain weight and dying sooner. So they don't like to do that. But of course, for us, it's okay. And then the lectins has a big rise in attention. And the other thing I talked about was phytic acid, which no one talks about, but all these fake plant foods that are being sold as healthy, they're exceptionally high in a compound that sticks to zinc and calcium and other precious minerals in your body. And just being vegan, which I was for a while, was a raw vegan trying to get healthy before I created the bulletproof thing to heal from being vegan. It takes about two years of eating butter to restore your cell memories after you've been a vegan for a couple of years. But what did I get wrong in it? Well, the impact of oxalic acid is probably a little bit higher than I thought. And some of the foods that I put in the okay group, like almonds and sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes are a great source of carbohydrates if you're not oxalic acid sensitive.
Dave Asprey (27:12)
And I feel like I should have maybe paid more attention to ranking nuts based on Omega six fats. And it's already ranked on the bulletproof diet. Daveaspray.com, roadmap print out on the fridge. It's not selling anything. It's just like the info. I ranked the nuts based on percentage of saturated fat, which is why macadamias and cashews. Yes, they're not a nut, but whatever. I ranked them highly based on their fatty acid profile. And then after that, I ranked them based on, like, toxins, whether they're likely to be moldy and whether they have these other things like phytic acid and lectin. But I think I maybe should have waited the Omega sixs and some of the nuts more heavily than I did because I think I've failed to comprehend how many nuts people would actually eat. Oh, that one's only kind of okay, but it's good enough. I'm just going to go to town and if you're eating five handfuls of almonds a day, it is going to suck your body dry of minerals. It's not a good choice, but if you want some almond flour and something, that's fine. It's a question of degree. Where we have failed kind of as a species is that our brains love to solve problems without thinking, because we're wired to save energy.
Dave Asprey (28:24)
So what we do is we build these basic mental templates, these heuristics. And one of them is if something good more, if something bad less, that way you don't have to think right. And it drives polarization. It also drives overall stupidity, because if something more good, well, fasting is good, therefore, you should starve to death and people will way over fast, or they'll do the same thing. Three nuts good, 15 nuts better. But it turns out almost everything. There's a Goldilock zone. I would have maybe encouraged people to eat fewer nuts than I did, but I think overall the Omega six thing, I've been low Omega six fat diet for almost 15 years, and I've been low on all the other things. And I haven't changed the diet at all. I moved my eating window up a little bit, too. I used to just say I find if I've dinner by seven. We just learned more about the strength of the signal of food on circadian biology. I've always been one of the earliest voices in the effect of light on biology, and I've written patents about that for my glasses company, which is true dark.
Dave Asprey (29:35)
But it turns out if light is the number one signal of circadian timing, food timing is the second strongest signal. And after that, it's probably temperature. And after that, it's either exercise or seeing a lot of faces. And at that point, they're kind of minor variables. So if you get your light and your meal timing right, your sleep quality goes just through the roof. And for me now, I'm pretty religious. I don't like to eat after 530 in the evening, maybe finish dinner at six, but you won't see me doing dinner at 08:00 almost ever, unless it's some kind of a social thing. And then I find I'm just not going to sleep as well that night. But I know it. So I wasn't as militant on early dinner as I should have been. Otherwise I would read that book again right now and stand by every word in it.
Kayla Barnes (30:21)
That's great. I mean, I agree with the principles completely as well. Something that I'm excited that people are talking about more and you've been talking about this forever, but I would love for people to hear from you. So these pro inflammatory oils, soybean canola oil that are literally in everything. I mean, we won't say, but a very popular grocery store that people tend to trust. You walk over to the hot bar and filled with this canola oil. Can you just explain why they're really going to wreck havoc? They are and will be wrecking havoc on us.
Dave Asprey (30:55)
Well, one of the things that negatively affected us includes those oils. But I hope you can edit this. One of the things that's been really affecting us for a long time goes back to the early 1900. There were these two really odd guys. There was Dr. Kellogg and Dr. Graham. Dr. Kellogg made Kellogg's cornflakes and Graham made Graham crackers. And what these were was low fat sugary foods designed to reduce testosterone levels because these wackos believed that lowering sexual desire would make for a healthier society. And this led to all kinds of weird beliefs. And as that kind of belief system metastasized, thanks to the power of big marketing, we ended up to the 1970s belief that somehow if you ate every part of the food, it was better. This flies in the face of all of human history, where cooking was created to remove toxins or to make nutrients more bioavailable. So we would Peel our foods and then we'd eat them. And then the movement of saying, well, there's fiber in there. It doesn't matter if there's cyanide and lead, there's fiber. So you eat it because you ignore the stuff that makes you weak, and then you just focus on the presence of something.
Dave Asprey (32:35)
So where we ended up was this idea that anything plant based must be good for you. And this is driven in part by that movement and in part by trauma. And it was the animal rights movement which was founded by someone who was responding out of trauma to what happened during World War Two. It's like I saw so much horror. I get triggered every time I see an animal. Therefore, I'm going to create a movement around not eating animals, ignoring the fact that you kill more squirrels to eat a vegan burger than you do to eat a cow burger. Right. So there's all this weird sexual shaming and trauma and just nonclear thinking that's leading people to say, oh, if I eat the shell of the Walnut because it's a whole food, or if I eat stuff that no one throughout history would eat on purpose unless they were dying of starvation, somehow it makes me a better person. And the trend towards canola oil, soybean oil, it's just cheap. And they're telling you it's healthy because it's plant based. You know what else is plant based? Sarin nerve gas that killed all the people in a Tokyo subway attack.
Dave Asprey (33:44)
There are tons of toxins. You don't believe me? Just go out into the forest and eat some plants. And if you can walk out of the forest under your own power after that, you should drive to the hospital because it's probably going to be really bad for you. So plants are not harmless, and plant oils are not compatible with human biology in volume. So we've always been exposed to some amount. For instance, grassfed beef is 1.7% of the fat in there. It's Omega six fat. So that's about right for us. But when we substitute Tallow and all the other things that we've always eaten throughout, everywhere on the planet where we can get it, these weird oils that have never existed, those are oils that slow metabolic function. So when you add a ton of these seed oils, whether because you just went vegan or because you've just been eating a bunch of French fries cooked at a modern restaurant, those oils become incorporated into the cell membranes, which are made of tiny droplets of fat. And when that happens, it slows cell metabolism. So then your body sees that and goes, oh, my God, this is horrible.
Dave Asprey (34:44)
So it turns up your thermostat by making more thyroid hormones. So then you feel really good for about a month or two, and then after that, you start making less and less energy. Guess what plant oils are really good for? They're good for putting animals into hibernation mode. They eat a lot of these plant fats, the Omega six fats in fall, which allows them to fall asleep and be fat all winter. So why would you want to eat those? Unless hibernation is your game? They're simply bad for you metabolically. They're related to cancer, to skin aging, specifically to diabetes, to Alzheimer's. And they're unstable, especially when cooked. If you want to do just one thing from this whole interview, stop eating those fried things at restaurants and stop eating commercial salad dressing and switch to butter for your cooking, for your eating and eat more grassfed animals. If you did that, you'd radically shift your amount of fat that you eat. And over the next two years, you'll be thinner, leaner, happier, and you'll live longer. And plus, butter tastes good.
Kayla Barnes (35:47)
I couldn't agree more. I love butter and I love ghee. Those are some of my top favorites for cooking. So thank you for that. So you intend on living to 100? Is it still 180 or have you up the ante?
Dave Asprey (36:00)
It's always been at least 180 because I don't want to unfairly limit myself.
Kayla Barnes (36:05)
Yeah, that would be very unfair. So what does that look like? What do you think will have to happen in order to enable you to do that? Is it caloric restriction? Do you think there's going to be a massive shift in technology that's going to help, or what do you think the principles are going to be to help you do that?
Dave Asprey (36:22)
Probably just feasting on the blood of my enemies would be the first part of it. Okay, it's not being angry all the time, but why 180? And there's really good science behind that. My second to last book, which is called Superhuman, is the big anti aging book about everything that we know right now. Another good book about that with similar thinking is Life Force, the Tony Robbins, Peter Dimmed, this book that recently came out. And what those two books will show you very clearly is that we know so much more now than in all of human history about aging. And given that the current best we have is people who are 120 years old walking around. They were born before the first automobile. World War I would be fought largely on horseback. And maybe if you buy planes, I mean, this is really primitive times. They couldn't spell DNA. They didn't have antibiotics. They didn't know the mitochondria was. They didn't have PubMed. They didn't have machine learning. They didn't have even mostly phones. So if you wanted to learn something, how to write a letter or get in a carriage and ride somewhere, maybe on a train, good God, could you imagine learning at that speed?
Dave Asprey (37:33)
It would have taken an entire human lifetime to write half of one of my books. But I can do what I can do now because I can look at most of the sum of human knowledge and filter it and build connections. And that is amazing. Given all of that, I kind of think that if in the next 130, whatever years, we can't do 50% better than our current best because an asteroid hit the planet, it's because a bunch of crazy people broke our culture. So that learning was no longer allowed, or more likely, it's because we destroyed our topsoil, growing a bunch of canola oil to feed the people who are going to die of diabetes. So let's keep our topsoil safe, which is a big carbon sink, and let's allow science to continue with free speech, free inquiry, and the ability to be wrong and be stupid and still speak. And if we can just do that, I think it's in the bag. A lot of us are going to live way longer than we think.
Kayla Barnes (38:30)
A couple of quick questions about that. So I actually went down to his clinic in Naples, and I did the full diagnostics. I'm waiting for my results. But do you think that will play an important role? Basically, don't die early. Right. Catch things prior to them developing.
Dave Asprey (38:46)
Yeah. In the program in superhuman like step one, don't die. And there are four killers. And if you just don't die of one of those, you're probably going to live a lot longer. And certainly you're going to live a lot better. Right. And what does that look like? Well, diabetes is a precursor to the other three big killers. We have cancer, we have heart disease, and we have Alzheimer's. If you just don't get one of those, the odds of being 100 and walking around under your own power with a fully working brain going, you know what? I think I've earned the title village elder because I actually have wisdom. I have accumulated enough experience. I've dealt with enough of my own BS that I can see the world clearly and share with people who are willing to listen. That's what the role of our village elder has always been. And we're in this weird point society where we fed people so poorly and we stress people out so much that our old people are largely too tired and too brain fogged and too unhealthy to do what they're supposed to do, which is provide a modulating voice of wisdom so that we don't make the same mistakes generation after generation after generation.
Dave Asprey (39:56)
I think we desperately need a bunch of 150 year olds who know what they're doing, who are sources of knowledge, saying, you know what? The last three times we try to create censorship models in big governments, it led to the governments being overthrown. So let's not do that again. Things like that. Where do you think the Constitution came from? It came from guys who figured that out and said, you know, this is what governments always do. Let's put some controls in place. So that comes from wisdom, from having time to study history, having time to date the wrong people, having time to get fat and lose the weight, having time to learn how to meditate. And when you're done, you're like, you know what? I've achieved a level of mastery over my life. I want to share still having the energy to give back. That's what this looks like. That's why it matters so much. But yeah, if you get diabetes and Alzheimer's, you're not going to do it. So you have to avoid the four killers. And then in the model that I use in Superhuman, there are seven major causes of aging, and you have to address all seven.
Dave Asprey (40:50)
So if you have a car and you're saying, I'm going to drive this car forever. So I definitely make sure I change my oil, but I never rotate my tires, it's not going to work, right? Something is going to give out. So what are the seven most important things that you deal with for aging? And what are the technologies that we have now that are free, the ones that we have now that are cheap, and the ones that the crazy billionaires are doing? I went and I did all of those that I could, and I wrote about them more so that we could talk about the science behind it and how these things that we now understand can be modulated. Things like senescent cells or zombie cells, things like telomeres, things like mitochondrial function accumulation, junk inside the cells, accumulation outside the cells, and DNA and mitochondrial mutations. These are all things you got to address each of those, and there are ways to do it. And I believe that machine learning and AI are a big part of it. My newest company, where I'm putting the most focus is called Upgrade Labs. And right now we're cracking the code on exercise and recovery using artificial intelligence.
Dave Asprey (41:55)
We are gathering more data about your body than you've ever been able to gather, having to do specific things that aren't really exercise but work five or ten times better and then looking at the results and feeding them back into the system. So we're always learning how to shave minutes off of what you do to have the body and the mind that you want. And for some people, I want to be swollen, other people I want cardio, other people. I just want to be chill and super smart. You get to pick the goal. How do we get you there in the fewest possible minutes with the least possible effort and only really big data sets can get us there. But that's happening for aging. It's happening for all of the human condition right now. You just don't see it because it's happening, like, all over the world and research labs and it's so cool.
Kayla Barnes (42:38)
Yeah, I think the future is going to be just so incredible. What about stem cells? Do you think stem cells are going to play a role in actually getting to 180?
Dave Asprey (42:48)
I've bet really big on stem cells. I worked with Dr. Harry Adelson at Dosa clinics in Park City. We created this whole body stem cell makeover. And you could go in and say, oh, I have. Sorney I want stem cells or my back hurts, which is his main specialty. But I'm like, look, I'm going to fly here. We're going to take out some bone marrow cells or some fat cells. We're going to use excess homes and some V sells and all these different things. Why don't you just do all of me at once? Like I want the whole body thinks I don't want just one part of me to heal. I want all of me to be younger. So I've had stem cells inside my cerebral spine and fluid inside my spine, every joint in my body, face, hair, reproductive organs, everything you can think of. And I've done it multiple times. So I really, truly have seen the difference, especially in cognitive function that may account for my faster brain, to be honest. And the data and the science is getting better and better. And every year, stem cell effectiveness and techniques improve. The only risk there that I'm aware of is over regulation in the US.
Dave Asprey (43:56)
Things that are quite easy to do in other countries can be unfairly limited, so the US can fall behind if we're not careful. The good news is that the stuff that's most tried and tested, the stuff that I've been doing in Salt Lake is legal and achievable. But some of the most cutting edge stuff on the planet that won't be approved here for five years is available elsewhere, but it's also less tested. So there is a safety margin from doing it in the US. But I really would like it if more innovation was allowed. And that's one of the big risks for people want to live a very long time is your government may not let you. So you'll have to get a new government to move somewhere or elect someone else or whatever else.
Kayla Barnes (44:35)
Absolutely. And my last question is what about peptides? What are your opinion on peptides? Do you have some favorites?
Dave Asprey (44:42)
I've been using peptides for about ten years now and that was one of the chapters in Superhuman. And like anything, you use certain nutrients to get results that you're looking for and you use certain peptides to get results as well. So one of my favorites is MSH melanocyte stimulating hormone. Now that's one of my favorites because I am 99% Northern European and that means I am what they would call butt white. Unfortunately, I have the vitamin D receptors of someone who should live in Africa or in a Pacific Island somewhere. So what that means is that if I get enough sun to make my vitamin D levels happy, I would be burned to a crisp. And if I get a Tan, it's going to take too much sun exposure. But if I have a natural Tan, I can protect myself from the sun more. So I inject MSH, and then I get in the sun for 20 minutes and I have a healthy Tan which gives me natural sunscreen the rest of the time. So I really like that stuff. I've used epitalon, which lengthens your telomeres. I've used pinealan, which helps with your pineal gland.
Dave Asprey (45:51)
The thymic peptides help with immune function. Bpc one five seven for wound healing is particularly powerful. And then what else? I've tried probably 50 different peptides. Some of them work for some people, they don't work for others. Things like deep sleep inducing peptide doesn't do anything for me, but others swear by it. So sometimes you just have to play around. But the ones that are probably most popular would be PT 141, which is good for as you age, reproduction, prostate health. But the side effect is it makes you feel like you're 18 again from a bedroom perspective. So a lot of people like PT, one for one because they're getting an anti aging effect. But it's also called a recreational substance. So that one's a fun one too.
Kayla Barnes (46:40)
Yeah, absolutely. I think that they're really interesting.
Kayla Barnes (46:43)
But regulation comes in there too.
Kayla Barnes (46:45)
We can have things and then we can't. So it's an interesting landscape.
Dave Asprey (46:49)
At a certain point, we just have to say, guys, these are protein fragments that are present in our bodies. Now, you don't get to regulate those. You do not have a constitutional right. You don't have a moral right. This is my biology, my choice. And if someone tells you that you may not have access to a therapy that will extend or save your life, that person is your enemy and you have a right to defend yourself.
Kayla Barnes (47:14)
Absolutely. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Well, David, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you here with me today. Thank you so much.
Dave Asprey (47:21)
You're welcome. Kayla. Keep putting out the good content on Instagram. There are more and more voices every day talking about biohacking talking about this complete mistake we're making by somehow thinking that fake food that tastes vaguely like meat is somehow the logical equivalent of meat and so I appreciate that you're just talking about real stuff on your channel. Keep doing it.
Kayla Barnes (47:44)
Thank you so much.
