Elizabeth Stein 0:00
Hi, everyone. I'm Elizabeth Stein, founder and CEO of purely Elizabeth and this is live purely with Elizabeth, featuring candid conversations about how to thrive on your wellness journey. This week's guest is Dave Asprey, known around the world as the father of biohacking. Dave is an acclaimed Health Science entrepreneur, founder of bulletproof coffee and danger coffee, four time New York Times bestselling author and host of award winning top 100 podcast The Human Upgrade. Dave's mission is to empower enabled people to lead happier more conscious lives by using biohacking techniques and technology to improve the functioning and destiny of the body and mind. In this episode, we talked about Dave's path to biohacking, his favorite high-tech and low tech biohacking techniques for optimal health. The difference between biological age and chronological age and how we can increase our longevity, Dave's favorite foods to eat and avoid, we talk about hormones, toxins, sleep tips. AI's potential to optimize health and so much more. Keep listening to learn all about Dave. Dave, welcome to the podcast. It's an absolute pleasure to have you on and I cannot wait to pick that amazing brain of yours.

Dave Asprey 1:23
It is my pleasure. I love being able to just talk about fun stuff.

Elizabeth Stein 1:28
Sweet. Well, that's good started, of course with your story. And really, that's just give us a little bit of the journey from being overweight and unhealthy to becoming the father of biohacking. What was really like that turning point for you, in your early life?

Dave Asprey 1:45
Everyone who's fat and I weighed 300 pounds. So I can just say everyone who's fat. And if you got triggered by that, get a therapist. So everyone who's fat knows that they're fat. And we go into all these different defense patterns. The first one is just denying like, oh, I just had to buy new pants, but it's just temporary, or it's water weight or whatever. But after a while, I went from a 32 to a 46 inch waist. And you think that would be enough, but here's the deal. At the time, I was in a relationship, my career was taking off like crazy, like, I mean millions of dollars in my 20s and lost it in my 20s. But it was one of those things where it wasn't my most important thing. But when I started getting really tired, and I started forgetting everything I was doing at work, and I realized one day I won't even hire myself, I'm gonna have to do something. So I went to the doctor, like that's what sane people would do, right? And the doctor was like, “Maybe you should try to lose weight.” I looked, I'm like, “You're fat too. What do you recommend I do?” He's like, well, eat a healthy diet and exercise. Mike does 90 minutes of exercise a day, six days a week on a low fat, low calorie diet count. And he looks at me like you're lying. I know you're eating Snickers bars. I'm not lying. I actually did this. And it didn't frickin work. And that's why I'm here in your office. And I just realized this guy was not intellectually or career wise, trained to help me. So I fired him when he told me vitamin C would kill me. He actually told me that. So I, I went on and studied biology for four years about mitochondrial biology. I'm like, I have a problem with energy, I'm gonna fix that. And I became the leader of a anti aging nonprofit group or longevity group in Palo Alto, California, where all the members were three, or sometimes more than three times my age. And I learned from the elders and we brought in the Masters of longevity on stage in a community forum to speak to an audience of 100 people and I moderated that for several years.

Elizabeth Stein 3:51
What year is this? Just to take us back.

Dave Asprey 3:55
the late 90s. Okay, so I learned from 80 year olds in the late 90s, making themselves younger, and I'm a leader in the field of longevity today, in part because I made longevity, one of the pillars of the biohacking movement. The reality is, I was so frustrated, we held our meetings, this nonprofit, two minutes from Google's headquarters in Palo Alto, at their headquarters in Mountain View, but it was in Palo Alto for people who live there understanding I, I know he's not telling the truth, I am. Anyway, at this place. I had one Google employees show up and it was my uncle. Otherwise, no one would show. And like guys, this is the key to living twice as long to having a brain that works better when you're 25 than all of your friends to having more potency, having a leaner body to having more energy, more power, more resilience, all this stuff that I desperately wanted in my 20s and my 30s. And I didn't really have and here I am. I'm in my, my late 20s, early 30s And I'm starting to learn from people three times my age with more energy. We had an 88 year old on the board, who was a profoundly just evolved human being. And he ended up dating a tantric teacher in her 30s. Wow. And this wasn't like a financial dependency, we actually just fell in love because he had young person energy. He called me at 11:30 at night when I was tired, and he was ready to go and talk about the latest. What is going on? How is this possible? So biohacking was just a way to talk about the benefits of longevity treatments. When you don't do them for longevity, you do them for what you want, which is control of your own biology. So I brought together consciousness, cognitive enhancement, physical strength and training, whether it's for athletics or anything else, and the longevity people. And when you do those things in neuroscience as well, when you bring all that together, you realize what's the uniting element control over your own biology. It's biological autonomy or freedom. So the definition of biohacking when I wrote my first blog post was the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you, so you have control of your own biology. And if you let that sink in, like, wait, it's an art and a science. Yes, you can study art with science, you can figure out what works. And it turns out a lot of the biohacking movement. Because we're data centric. For me, I could still be working out 90 minutes a day, six days a week, 20 years later, and not getting results. Or I could see if what I'm doing actually works, and then change it. And most of the time, we believe something will work. And we do it until the ends of the earth, even though it doesn't serve us anymore. And by the way, that's what happened when I was a vegan, which really wrecked my health even more than it was already wrecked. But it took me way longer to recognize that than it would have if I had just looked at my lab results and seen what was happening. So now I teach people and I've been many millions of people have access my work and people have lost millions of pounds on the Bulletproof Diet. It was the first big book on intermittent fasting and functional coffee and collagen and all the stuff that I'm known for. And it was just because I didn't want anyone to go through the pain and suffering that I went through in my teens and 20s of just working out all the time and always being in pain, always being tired. Feeling like there's no more gas in the tank, but you got to keep going. And I would have never thought that in 2018 Webster's would add biohacking to the English language is a new word and the my name would be in the online dictionary there. I was like, wow, I started for the first conference on biohacking at 100 people at a bar in San Francisco. And we just held our 12th year in Dallas and 3200 people, Joe Dispenza speaking Dr. Daniel Amon, Gabby Bernstein, this mix of consciousness, and science and longevity. And it's so fun. And it's it's become a passion for me. And how lucky am I that I get to do all the weird stuff to myself to live longer than I'm supposed to? And then share all the reasons why with untold numbers of people. And I'm just grateful all the time.

Elizabeth Stein 8:05
That's amazing. It's funny because as we were chatting earlier, before we started, I heard you speak at this conference in 2018, at Wellspring in Palm Springs, and the person who spoke after you I don't remember their name, I just have a picture of them. But they were talking about really marrying passion and purpose in your life. And I feel like for you, certainly that was the time in your 20s Where you certainly found your passion and your purpose and you're truly living out that every single day.

Dave Asprey 8:35
It's really easy to talk about passion and purpose. In my early 20s, I had this just burning desire in the tech worlds at a very good career in Silicon Valley. The first thing ever sold over the internet was actually sold out in my dorm room.

Elizabeth Stein 8:52
What was it that you were selling or doing?

Dave Asprey 8:56
I was making T shirts who said caffeine, my drug of choice. And I've always been into coffee. I've always been into coffee only when I graduated from my undergrad. I was coffee. But I made these T shirts and I was just trying to pay my tuition like I was scrappy. And I sold them online before the web browser was invented. And then a professor from Rutgers University went on and said no one will ever make money on the internet. And I'm like, well, are you maybe Ivy League meanwhile, I went to an Ivy League school years later, but I'm like you maybe Ivy League but I'm already making money. So and. And then there's this big wave of publicity where I was on all these magazines and newspapers on like, 2223 going to look at me I'm so special. And like, man, it turns out having a picture in a magazine doesn't make you happy maybe for like five minutes. And I've been in vogue in men's health and I don't name New York Times all of them and I got on Nightline three times and like it doesn't make you happy. Like it's you can be grateful for it but it's not a source of happiness. And I made and lost all that money. It wasn't a source of happiness. So I'm just like, maybe passion doesn't come from getting stuff. Passion actually comes from dopamine, which comes from testosterone. And in my early 20s We tested my testosterone levels, which wasn't something you would do in the late 90s. Except I was fat. And I was tired all the time. And my health was just very hard even for really good doctors to move. And we found out I had lower testosterone than my mom. And this is environmental toxin exposure. This is what obesity does. And it's a major reason a lot of in fact, almost everyone today has half the testosterone they should have. So when I got on testosterone under a doctor's supervision to get my levels up to where they should be for healthy 25-26 year olds, my passion got much better. And so passion and purpose, you can have a purpose, but you have no passion. That's biology and you can fix your testosterone by carefully avoiding plastics and synthetic fragrances. Good luck with that, by the way, just walk through an airport, how many people are wearing a bottle of Chanel number five? And all these poor kids are smell maxing? Have you heard of that?

Elizabeth Stein 11:01
No.

Dave Asprey 11:02
Maxing or something like these 1415 year old boys are getting into very expensive color.

Elizabeth Stein 11:11
My nephew is into this and like, oh my god, this is horrible.

Dave Asprey 11:14
It shrinks your balls, kids, like you don't want to do this. This is companies that are hacking your lowest level your smell system, you should be smelling like someone who takes a shower at least every other day when you're 14 not like a bottle of fragrance from a chemical company. Because the fragrance stops your testosterone, right? Which means you will be less of a man. And it means you have less of an impact in the world.

Elizabeth Stein 11:40
I'm saying this to my mom who's listening right now to tell my nephew to stop wearing this.

Dave Asprey 11:45
If my kids had done that, I would have said I'm sorry. But you're not allowed. Like straight up. You're also not allowed to you know, inject yourself with cyanide or vape. Like you don't do those things because they're provably awful for you. But since people want their testosterone so they can have their dopamine so they can be motivated and have passion and happiness. Well, okay, we will start by removing downy fabric softener and all the other scented crap from your house, but then you're still soaking in plastic and you're still eating there. Because it's almost impossible to have testosterone in today's modern world unless you're really, really diligent about sleep and sun exposure in the right paths. So after a 14-year level is tested, if they're low, make some changes. If they're still low, you can supplement it because it turns out for men and women, hormone replacement therapy when you start going through menopause or andropause extends life and reduces risk of all diseases. So for 20 years, we've been telling women, oh, no, hormone replacement therapy is dangerous. But the studies actually show that when you use bioidentical hormones, it reduces a woman's risk of Alzheimer's and cancer and cardiac disease. So why would big pharma companies tell you not to do something that reduces the amount of money you spend on all of their stuff when you get old? I can't imagine that there must be an accident those poor people, they made such a such a tragic mistake that benefited them to the tune of trillions of dollars. So men, women, you need your testosterone, your progesterone, you need your other hormones. And you should have them like healthy 25 or 30 year old when you're 130. Because if you don't, you won't be 130. It's that straightforward.

Elizabeth Stein 13:28
So how long are you going to live to what's the latest these days?

Dave Asprey 13:32
I'm going to live to at least 180. And my big book on longevity is called Super Human. I read it, I was gonna call it don't die. But my publishers like no one's ever going to read that. And it's funny today, Brian Johnson, who was just on stage at the Biohacking Conference, and he's a friend. You know, he's got a book out, I think, by this by that title. And that's really the goal. But it's for me, 180 is very conservative. And here's why. If you think about it, our very best is 122 years old that we have recorded, there's actually a bunch of evidence that there are people who have lived into their 180s. In fact, I have a couple books, and there's some evidence, but it's so long ago who even keeps records very well. So we'll say 120 choose our best. I just want 50% better than our current best and have 130 years to do it. So given that we are spending $600 billion a year on investing in longevity technologies right now, and we were spending less than $1,000,000,000.10 years ago because no one believed this was possible. Do you think we're gonna have any breakthroughs? In longevity, I've had gene therapy that makes me nine years younger biologically. And I will have one of the other nine therapies, I'm now advising that company called mini circle, and there's nine other therapeutics that will also extend human life I'm gonna have I'll be in the front row for all of those trials. You think that all of us might get access to those technologies someday? I think we will. The things that might stop me from living to at least 180 and might stop you are, there is some bad force, I have no idea who that is actively destroying the food supply in the US. I don't know if you heard about this yet. For some reason, egg, dairy and meat, production facilities just keep catching on fire and blowing up. And strangely, they do them all in one city. And then the next day, they do another city and then the next day, another city, but it's totally random. I have no idea who I can just look at the data and say something odd is happening. But that could stop us from living a long time or comet hitting the Earth. Or maybe if like an evil person did some sort of strange, untested drug on almost all the population on the planet that had unintended consequences. But we all know that would never happen except in a James Bond movie with an evil villain. So I don't have to worry about that one.

Elizabeth Stein 15:57
So as you think about your…

Dave Asprey 16:01
your straight face there really, it was a plus.

Elizabeth Stein 16:06
As you think about your chronological age versus your biological age, what's the difference right now, nine years?

Dave Asprey 16:15
There's many different ways of measuring yes, there's something called extrinsic age, which is what your lifestyle does to your age. And for me, that's 19 and a half years younger than my parents age, there's intrinsic age, which is a measure of your immune system. And for me, that's not as good because I've had a history of autoimmunity and toxic mold exposure and all the bad stuff. And then there's some called glycan age, which is what's the effect of the sugar you've been exposed to. And there's a bunch of other ones like the speed of your brain, and the flexibility of your arteries. So on some of those, I'm 18. Some of them I'm 25. Some of them, some of them, I'm 36. Some of them I'm 45. And the calendar says that I'm 51. And it's becoming really confusing, because I go to some of these websites, and they're like, what's your gender? You know, male, female, or like, what do you identify as? Like, okay, alright, so I pick one. And but then, like, What's your age? And they don't let me talk about my what age I identify as, and since my lab tests match my identity, but the calendar doesn't? Why is it legal for, say, the government on my driver's license to make me put an age that's not what I identify as?

Elizabeth Stein 17:29
what do you feel?

Dave Asprey 17:32
I am in my mid 30s. There are studies out there that show most people even when they're 50, or 60, or 70 will still feel like they did when they were 35. Like that's kind of where your clock sticks. And what this means, though, is that if you have an old person's mindset, and you see yourself as old, you are old, and I tell myself when I meditate, you're 28% old. I'm only 20% I am a young man, and my body works better than it ever has. For someone who was obese, I've been on national TV with my shirt off. And in magazines. I am 6% body fat, you can like see how lean that's caffeine by the way. And I work out 20 minutes per week. That's all AI powered. And that is from upgrade Labs, which is a franchise we're opening in more than 28 locations in the US right now. Where you go in you spend an hour once or twice a week, and you get the benefits of going to the gym for many more hours. And we can train your brain we can even make you younger using AI. So I just want to waste my time on exercise that doesn't work and makes me need new joints when I'm old. sighs I'm not gonna get old. So there's that.

Elizabeth Stein 18:48
It's not happening. All right, I want to talk about both this sort of high tech biohacking stuff that you can we can be doing. We're only working out for 20 minutes a week, which is unbelievable. And then also some of them are simple, sort of low tech, easy things that people can be doing as well.

Dave Asprey 19:07
Simple, low tech, easy things. So what do you wanna start?

Elizabeth Stein 19:12
The service and below tech, easy from… let’s start just like from an eating standpoint?

Dave Asprey 19:20
Here's the most important thing when it comes to eating. Eat less toxins. It's not about eating more of the good stuff. It's about eating less of the bad stuff. And there are this is gonna sound crazy. There are forces out there that would love for you to believe that the cheapest peasant food is the healthiest food despite enormous evidence. There was once a time when Big Tobacco would hire people in white lab coats to tell you I'm a doctor and you smoked Marlboro. Because that's the best one. It's absurd, but that's what happened. Well, who do you think bought all the big processed food companies? In the late 90s, the big tobacco owns big food. And they're behaving the same way like, oh, it's expensive to sell you high quality animal protein and fats, it's very cheap to sell you soybean oil, fried corn. And so if we can just convince you that cornflakes or any of these vegan foods are healthier than the foods we've eaten for the entire history of humanity, they'll make a lot more money, because now you'll spend $7 on oat milk, which is like a tablespoon of oats with all their unhealthy stuff blended into water that raises your blood sugar, as much as drinking a coke. So cows are expensive cow milk goes expensive cow milk is high protein. Oat Milk is nonsense, garbage food, but they've convinced us to pay more for oat milk than for cow milk. And these kinds of things. You got to look at what are the bad things in food? And then what's the good thing. The bad things are heavy metals, which are a big problem on our food supply. Yeah, there is something called phytic acid, which is present in nuts, and especially grains and whole grains. Phytic acid sucks minerals out of your body. And if you're eating a lot of these healthy whole foods, whole grain. Well, throughout all of history, when you could afford to you remove the brown part of the rice, you remove the brown part of the wheat, not because you're stupid, because that's the part of the plant that has the most toxins that cause harm to humans. But if you're a peasant, and you don't have enough calories, you can eat it, you just have to absorb the poison that comes wrapped around the seeds because Mother Nature doesn't want things to eat the seeds of plants they can't grow. So it's so weird that now we're fetishizing these plant toxins, oh, I eat only a Whole Foods whole grain diet. The fact there's fiber and whole wheat or brown rice doesn't matter. There's more fiber in your broccoli. What's going on there is you're getting a huge amount of phytic acid. So now you're getting osteoporosis and you have no zinc and no calcium, no magnesium. And then you say oh, I'll replace it with nuts and beans. Oh wait, they have that. And they also have something called oxalate, which is a substantial problem. 70% of kidney stones are caused by plants not by beer and red meat. But people blame red meat. In fact, spinach, kale, raspberries, sweet potatoes, almonds are very high in a toxin that we tracked carefully until 1950. So when people saying well, my whole body hurts, and I have interstitial cystitis and vulvodynia and I have this constant pain in my joints. Maybe it's because you're eating way more of a plant toxin than you're supposed to. And the plants are designed that way. Because the plants know that if we overeat them, we will not be successful as animals because we're in pain all the time. So we'll stop eating the plants. And then balance is restored in mother nature.

Elizabeth Stein 22:55
But if you eat them, small amount, like you have a small serving of raspberries, is that okay? Or you just completely avoid them totally.

Dave Asprey 23:04
It depends on how sensitive you are. And if they're in season. So raspberries, and I've raised raspberries on my regenerative farm. They're in season for about three weeks. And for that three weeks, you're probably gonna have sore joints. If you eat a bucketful of raspberries every day, you're going to have to pee a lot, and it's probably going to hurt. But if you've eaten a lot of raspberries, that's exactly what happens. And this is razor sharp calcium oxalate crystals that form in your kidneys and bladder that irritate your urethra, right? So you can do it. But if you do it most of us do, including me when I was a vegan, well, raspberries are good for me, I'll just eat half a pound of them every day, because they're unlimited availability. But that's not how the world works in all of history. And things like kale and spinach. They are starvation foods that you only eat if you have to, and you would only eat them if they were cooked with milk. So the calcium from the milk would stick to the calcium oxalate. So we have these poor people today. And I was one of them. Well, I'll just use almond milk, which is another source of this toxin, and I'll mix it with my spinach and kale juice. Right? And that's going to be healthy for me and I'll use it with my a whole wheat grain thing. And I'll throw some kind of weird vegan highly processed industrial food on there and go, look, I'm so healthy. You're doing everything exactly wrong and you spent $24 on that lunch. And the God's honest truth is if you'd have bought a cheap burger, you would have been 10 times better off even though that's not good for you either. It's just better for you than the food replacement stuff. This is what I did as a vegan and then a raw vegan. So I'm only speaking from experience and from while a book with more than 1000 References that's on the New York Times science monthly bestseller list where I've done the research on this so this isn't conspiracy theory stuff. This is 1000s and 1000s of medical studies documenting what these toxins do. As a farmer, if I give my chickens and pigs is too much phytic acid, they can't reproduce. It's so weird that human fertility rates are as low as they've ever been, they're still dropping. I wonder if environmental pollution and just eating a lot of poverty foods that are bad for fertility would have anything to do with that. So this is a thing. So what do you want to do? I'm going to summarize it. For food, you want to eat one gram of animal protein, I mean, eggs, dairy, if you tolerate it, red meat, or if you really want to chicken or fish, they're not as good as red meat. So one gram per pound of body weight,

Elizabeth Stein 25:33
They're not as good because they don't have as many minerals in them?

Dave Asprey 25:38
It's an amino acid ratio thing, and a type of fat thing. Or in the case of fish, there's so much plastic and mercury and fish these days, it's very hard to get clean fish. So serving official week great, but people who salmon pescatarian like, oh, that's just a short way of saying I have seriously high levels of mercury in my brain, and I'm going to need 1000s of dollars of medical treatment to get my health back. Maybe being a pescatarian, there's just not enough protein and fish compared to the amount of mercury. So you're gonna need a gram of protein per pound of body weight, plant based protein doesn't work, you need three times as much of it as animal protein. And you cannot do that. Because your stomach would bloat, like it's just not possible to get enough protein as a vegan, you can get enough protein to survive, but not to thrive. So if you do that, you're going to stop eating Omega six fats, which means canola oil, soybean oil, corn oil, vegetable oil, anything that's fried in a restaurant, no canola oil, and you're gonna eat instead, some olive oil, but not all olive oil, you're gonna need some avocados, hopefully not avocado oil, because most avocado oil is fake these days. And you're gonna eat butter and coconut oil. And if you do that, all of a sudden, you've changed out bad fats for good fats. Yes, the good fats are the saturated fats, because that's what your hormones are made out of. This is why back when I was involved with Bulletproof Coffee, there was a global shortage of grass fed butter, because people discovered when they put this in their coffee, they felt so much better. And after about two years of increasing your butter consumption, you wake up when they go, I feel so much better. I don't need that much butter anymore. It's because it takes two years to replace half your cell membranes with clean healthy fats. So this is a permanent upgrade. So now you sit down at the restaurant like where do I get my protein first? Where to get my low toxin veggies second, and don't put it in of your shitty oil on my food. Thank you very much. And if you just do that thing, you can eat almost anywhere. No, I don't want the deep fried brussel sprouts. That's stupid, because you just ruin them with bad oils. So you just say can you steam it or cooking and butter? Please? Can you steam it or cook it in butter? And then you order whatever protein you want grass fed is better. And if you do that, okay, what's the best source of carbs? If you're trying to lose weight, you can go into ketosis. I've taught people cyclical ketosis for many, many years, it's part of part of the whole keto movement was a Bulletproof Diet. The problem is, most people are not going to be in ketosis most of the time, unless you're doing it for a specific performance reason. What this means is you can eat some carbs, but not too many carbs. But what carbs do you order there's the French bread that makes you hungry. So you want dessert that you have before dinner, there's mashed potatoes, there's rice, and there's a bunch of fried carbs of various flavors like french fries. Your best choice in most restaurants is white rice as the lowest toxin load of any starch that you're going to eat, followed probably by mashed potatoes, except almost all mashed potatoes now are highly processed mashed potato powder mixed with canola oil and MSG. So I wouldn't touch them in a restaurant. But if I made it myself, I would eat them. So I order white rice at restaurants. And this will sound very controversial. But if you're in the mood for carbs and you had enough protein, you had enough fat you had some fiber with your veggies at dinner, if you want to scoop a sorbet or some sugar at the end, you had no other carbs, it's not going to kill you. It's not ideal, but it's a lot better than eating french fries. In fact, I would rather smoke a cigarette than eat a plate of French fries cooked in canola oil or soybean oil. The reason for that is that smoking is bad for you. It causes about eight hours of inflammation. But nicotine in low doses reverses Alzheimer's disease. French fries cause 48 hours of inflammation and they have no benefits. So I have never smoked a cigarette. I do use pharmaceutical nicotine apart from tobacco and micro doses to stop Alzheimer's disease and to make my brain work better and last longer. But I can't imagine, literally can't imagine choosing to eat a plate of French fries at a restaurant. Because two days of inflammation that affects your brain. Your skin looks worse but your brain doesn't work the next day for what? Like some crunchy french fries? It just doesn't make any sense to me. So what you do is you learn how do I feel at the end of the meal and if at the end of the meal Do you want dessert you ate wrong, it means you ate something you're sensitive to or somebody that had MSG, or possibly NutraSweet that causes sugar cravings, restaurants know this, you put an MSG based sauce that says it has no MSG in it, but does, you put it on a food, you will sell 40% more. Because people spend on extra soft drinks, and they spend on extra dessert because they got a sugar craving because that nice sauce on the fish dropped your blood sugar is so bad. That's what MSG does. So I generally cook at home, I eat amazing food because I learned how to cook, I wrote a cookbook, it's not that hard to learn how to cook. And once you do that, like no restaurant can compare to what you can make on your stove in 15 minutes. Just 15 minutes. And if you know how to cook, you know how to cook with one or two pans and you don't make a huge amount of dishes. So that people have this weird fear of cooking, I have a fear of spending 15 minutes in a car going to a restaurant. You say I want that. I want that time back. So learn how to cook, you'll save a ton of money. And your health will change. That's a simple one. Second thing, yeah, don't eat after the sun goes down. Your body has this incredibly effective and entirely invisible timing system. And this is in large part based on my book on cognitive function called head strong. And in it, I talked about how 5% of the cells in your eyes, they sense light, but they don't since light that you ever get to see that signal goes around your visual processing system. And it goes right into the core of your brain where there's a timing system and your body, this distributed mitochondrial network throughout your body, these ancient bacteria they're trying to figure out is it day or night so they know what to do. Because they don't even know they're in your body. They're like I'm floating around in some kind of bag of salty water. And like I'm trying to figure out what to do here. So the mitochondria are the front line sensors of reality. And yet they're ancient bacteria that are stuck into our cells. All this happens way before we can think about something. So once they look around with this timing system, they say hmm, where's the sun? What color is the sun? How bright is it? And based on that, they decide it's the middle of the day, and then you shove hormones for middle today, or oh look, there's some red light, it must be sunset. Okay, if the if the lights in front of me, and it's dim and it's turning reddish hues, and there's no ultraviolet in it, it must be sunset. Let's start winding down. Let's start making melatonin Let's become insulin resistant. So if you break that, and you say, okay, it's 8:30 at night, I'm gonna go out to a brightly lit restaurant full of noise, I'm gonna pump myself full of food. Then the mitochondria like, well, I saw light. I heard noise. And also, 2 billion years ago, when these timing systems evolved, the most food was present in the middle of the day, because we were eating algae. So there's the most sunshine. So let's have the most food in the middle of the day. But now you're saying, okay, there's food and there's bright light. And it's eight or nine at night, and you go home, so I still went to sleep. But if you learn how to track your sleep, you will learn. You don't get good sleep, you can get good sleep or bad sleep just like you have good food or bad food. So I started tracking my sleep 17 years ago now. And at the time, I was terrible asleep. I mean, horrible. And I just figured it doesn't really matter. The less sleep the better because it sucks. And I bought a headband didn't even make it anymore, not Victoria's Secret approved every night. And I tracked every variable I could think of that would affect sleep. And it turns out meal timing. And the color and intensity of light are really important. I even filed a patent on a special kind of lenses for controlling when your body knows that it's daytime or nighttime. It's called True Dark. And I've been making these things for 10 years. And the glasses that we designed for sleep, we're about to release a study in a journal about neuroscience, where wearing the right color of true dark glasses in 15 minutes shifts your brain into a state of advanced meditation. And this is what you can use before bed so I don't get jet lag anywhere on the planet because I understand the color of light and I don't eat on airplanes when my body should be thinking it's the middle of the night. So no one teaches you this stuff in school your grandmother didn't tell you this stuff. Or maybe she did if you’re Ayurvedic from India, right because certain traditions do know this. So bottom line, no midnight snacks anymore. And don't eat fried crap. More animal protein, eat veggies, but avoid the ones that are higher in toxins and cause inflammation. So how do you know the older and more traditional is the safer it is. So if you're talking lettuce, celery, carrots, things like that broccoli, cauliflower, cucumbers, those are relatively safe. And you still don't want to eat all of those but having some of those on your plate is probably fine. If yours saying, Well, no, no, I'm I'm new and I'm fancy. I'm gonna have the chard, spinach kale, gently massage salad with some bizarre nut from a place I've never even heard of. The reason these are not the predominant foods of humanity is because their survival foods, they're not thriving foods

Elizabeth Stein 35:19
All right. So here's our low tech biohack. When it comes to food, let's talk about sleep and exercise or just other activities. So you talked about sleep, and how you were terrible sleeper, how much sleep do you get today?

Dave Asprey 35:36
I guess six and a half hours of sleep per night, and an average night, 90 minutes of deep sleep and 90 minutes of REM sleep.

Elizabeth Stein 35:46
What tips do you have for getting a nap? Good sleep. And I'm like, I need nine hours of sleep. I feel like

Dave Asprey 35:55
Oh, here's some bad news. Most people when they heard me say six nap, I was like, Oh my gosh, he must be unhealthy. Well, here's what the data shows. The people who live the longest sleep six and a half hours per night. And this is coming from three different studies of more than a million and sometimes more than 3 million people tracked over years. This is the best data we have on sleep. And does that mean you should lower your sleep? No. And what it means is that healthy people need less sleep. And truly I don't want to scare you, Elizabeth. But people who need nine hours of sleep have a much higher all cause mortality than people who sleep seven hours a night. What that means is you could just be an outlier and you go to sleep and you dream and you're recreating reality in some kind of Shamanic way. I do know some people like that, but for the average human, if you need nine hours of sleep, it's because something is inefficient or ineffective about your sleep, or there's something going on like a hidden infection.

Elizabeth Stein 36:55
Or my dog’s waking me up throughout the night.

Dave Asprey 36:59
There you go. That would be it. So you need more sleep because you have interrupted sleep, like who would have thought that makes so much sense. So then the trick is, how do you figure out what sleep supplement to give your dog so your dog won't wake up? Brilliant. You also might find that if you change the time of feeding your dog, your dog sleeps deeper. You also find if you put in really dim lighting in your house, your dog is just as susceptible to circadian biology as you are. So in my home after the sun goes down, I have read or like a deep amber lights that are on dimmer switches so it's more candle lit. Because my body understands his candle it and then suddenly I want to go to sleep when it's 10 or 11. When I look back for the vast majority of my life when I didn't know that I would go to bed at 2am. That was my standard bedtime. I was a night owl. Well I'm a night owl if the bathroom lights are on in the kitchen lights are on. And I have bright lights and they're starting to bright screens but if I don't have those I go to sleep like a normal person who would have thought .

Elizabeth Stein 37:59
Great tips. Alright, so what are some of the other activities that you do in your day that may be top three that people should be incorporating or could be incorporating?

Dave Asprey 38:09
This is based on a lot of data from upgrade Labs, which is the franchise that's opening across the country and people go to own and upgrade labs.com If you're interested in becoming a biohacking facility that helps people live longer. And based on that we know that Cryotherapy is a really powerful way to turn off inflammation and inflammation is a part of aging and degeneration. So I will do cryotherapy at an upgrade labs or if I can't get access to the highly efficient cold air that isn't very painful, I will do a cold plunge or an ice bath that is much more painful.

Elizabeth Stein 38:48
Equally as beneficial, though, like one might be more painful. But is it the same?

Dave Asprey 38:54
Cold plunges are not as beneficial on a permanent basis because you have to take a shower before and after. So it takes like 15 minutes to do that you have to dry your hair. If you get into a cryotherapy chamber, which is just cold air, it just takes three minutes and then you're done. So you get more benefit per minute, but the outcome is the same. So I'm super lazy and I don't want to spend more time than I need to. So I spent three minutes in cold air versus 15 minutes getting ready to sit in cold water for three minutes, which works more anyway. I also recommend based on a lot of data that you find some way to get either infrared light or a full infrared sauna or just any kind of sauna. Again, infrared light we use a high end clinical light bedded upgrade Labs, which gives you a dose of this. You can get an infrared sauna at home or use a full sight but infrared saunas and full sun as require a shower and require an hour and red lights take a red and infrared lights take about 20 minutes. So again, it's like how much time do you want to spend? If you and I do have an infrared sauna I do have a cold plunge at home for when I can't get into an upgrade labs. Also I test all this stuff out because that's my job. So I, I would say find a way to get cold. But here's the trick that's free for everyone listening. Go into your shower. And at the end of your warm shower, turn the water is cold as it'll get and let it go on your forehead, face and upper chest. And just do that for one minute. Now the first time you do this, you will scream, you'll say Dave Asprey is a jerk, or something worse, right? But that's okay, I'm used to it. And then you're gonna last maybe 10 seconds. The next day, do it again, and mark the days so that you'll really do this, the next day, you might go 20 or 30 seconds. And the third day, you might go 45 seconds to a minute before you start swearing. And the fourth day, you're gonna do it and magically, it doesn't hurt at all. And you come out and you just feel so invigorated and you don't get hot water at the end, you just got a little bit cold for a minute. What happens is that in studies, after three days of brief cold exposure, these little mitochondria we talked about earlier, they're the ones that make body heat inside of you. So they learn, oh, I might have to make body heat quickly. Let me turn on my ability to get warm fast. And so now you've remodeled the levels of cardio lipid in your mitochondrial membrane, which you don't have to remember there's not a quiz. But that's what happened. And that's why on the fourth day, you're like, okay, maybe Dave's not that big of a jerk. And after that you just like your cold shower. But it takes three days of intentionally being willing to do something that sucks. No one likes cold water in the face in the morning. But you will like it after four days.

Elizabeth Stein 41:33
Then what's the ideal amount of time after that four days that you experienced the cold?

Dave Asprey 41:38
getting up to three minutes, but not more, is ideal. And if you wanted to be really fancy about it, you have a lot of time, you could do one minute then get then one minute of warmth then one minute cold, warm, always finish on cold. Because telling your body that it's responsible for warming itself up throughout the day, it burns a lot more calories, it also teaches your body to be warm. In the first few days, when you do this, you'll be chilly. And that's okay. Put on a sweater. And after a little while your body will say Hmm, I guess I'm gonna have to be warm all by myself. And then you'll be that one person was like, No, I'm okay. I'm not freezing right now. Because you actually learn to consciously or unconsciously keep your body warm, even if it's slightly cold outside.

Elizabeth Stein 42:20
So coming back to food for a moment as the person who really brought collagen into the world and MCT oil, is there anything new that you are working on experimenting with incorporating into your diet?

Dave Asprey 42:37
Yeah, collagen is a really important protein, I made it into a billion dollar industry category. And it's helped so many people. It's super crazy when you think about it. And I just for people who know about me from bulletproof, I am not associated bulletproof, they do not they do not I, I have no idea if they're following my standards or I have no contact with them and no ownership or anything. My new coffee company, by the way is called Danger Coffee, because who knows what you might do. And it's a different take on coffee. That's mold free but also happens a large dose of trace minerals. But when you go back to collagen, turns out about 20 grams, or one or two scoops of collagen depending on which brand you're using is the right dose. And going far beyond that, which I have done has declining benefits. And way too much collagen can actually stimulate the oxalate pathways the same as raspberries and kale and spinach and things like that. So 100 grams a day of collagen, you probably don't need that the role of collagen in your in your diet, if it's made right is to give your body a signal that you have damaged your joints, because there's all this collagen floating around that wouldn't otherwise be there. And then the body goes oh, I guess I should turn on my joint repair mechanisms. And then it does that even though your joints weren't injured. And that's why your joints feel better and can stay younger. When you eat some collagen your diet. And we have this problem with almost everything we have. Some is better, more must be better. And with exercise. If you lift twice a week, it's probably good for you. If you lift every day, you're gonna get cortisol belly, and it's not good for you and you'll injure yourself. So it's this weird thing where you got to find the Goldilocks dose and collagen has one as well. It's 20 grams. So what am I working on that's new? One of the things that that I've also really been into is prebiotics and soluble fiber. And what I've been doing now, on my podcast, which is called the human upgrade, I just find that the most innovative people and interview them about things. So I've had several episodes on gut bacteria actually probably like 20 episodes on gut bacteria, but different kinds of probiotics that act as manufacturing. Really manufacturing plants in your gut if you feed them the right prebiotics, really good things happen. So that's been a big part of it. it but the most exciting thing I'm working on is that even with all of the knowledge that I have, knowing that what I'm doing is working is still hard to do. And one of the things that just pisses me off, is going into the doctor and asking for a lab test. And they're like, why do you need a lab test? I'm like, because it's my body, like, I just wanted to know. And then you get in this argument, and you pay your copay, and then you may get your results, the doctor may order it, but then they don't know how to explain it. So for the past three years, my tech team has been working on an AI tool that lets you order labs for longevity panels, and how healthy am I and then interprets them for you and tells you, okay, well, this is where your body is, what do you want? Do you want to be smarter? Don't be faster? Do you want to have more muscle? Do you want to be leaner? Do you want to get your energy back? Do you want stress resilience? Do you want better libido? Do you want better sleep, and based on those priorities, then we recommend here's what your lab values ought to be. And here's the supplements. By the way, here's a discount on the supplements. And even here's the pharmaceutical stuff and the stuff you should ask a doctor for. Right? So now all of a sudden, you know what to do. And it's not expensive. It's like I think for the most advanced longevity panels, it's around 600 bucks, and includes a year of analyzing your data. And we can look at your aura ring and tie in your sleep data. So I want this for myself. And we've programmed the system with everything I've ever said or written, which is really cool.

Elizabeth Stein 46:29
And it's available now?

Dave Asprey 46:33
it's called upgrade health upgrade health.com. It's part of my upgrade labs company. And this is the thing that says no matter where in the world you live, even if there's no if there's no upgrade labs near you, you can at least figure out what your priorities are. Because it's really worried Elizabeth. I'm like, okay, do you want to live a lot longer? Or do you wanna have a ton of energy? You can only get one. What would you pick?

Elizabeth Stein 46:59
Live a lot longer.

Dave Asprey 47:01
But even if you were really tired all the time?

Elizabeth Stein 47:01
No, I would want both. I already have the energy. So that's why I'm not picking that.

Dave Asprey 47:09
Exactly. But someone with low energy. Yeah, right. So it turns out health doesn't mean anything. Because we all want everything. It's like if you were to buy a new phone, you want the phone with a giant screen that fits in your purse, and you wanted to have an infinite battery life. Like the bigger the phone, the bigger the battery bigger the screen, but then it won't fit. But you want it all. You want it for your health, too. So we use AI to actually help you figure out what goal matters most to you. So we can hit that one first, and how to do it in the least amount of time and energy. And even the less amount of work like one of the common things. It's easy to spend eight hours a day on longevity. The problem is, if you do that, when you're old, even if you live longer you spend most of your life like doing unpleasant things and not having much of a life. So how do we cram the things in to get a signal in your body to make you live longer and feel better and to get all the things you want in the least possible time. So you can spend time with your kids and time with your dog and time with your family and on your career and meditating whatever else you want to do. So let's get it done. Because no one has 10 hours a week to spend exercising. That's not the world we live in. And it turns out when people use like the AI bike, that's part of upgrade labs.0 15 minutes a week was three five minute sessions, no sweating allowed. You don't have to change clothes. Because it's that easy. Wow. Six times better results than an hour a day of spin class five days a week. So we're talking in 15 minutes, to radically change your endurance versus what you think works. So why don't we just do that? So now your cardio is out of the way? Or do you want muscle? Let's do that three to five times faster than what you think works, which is picking up rocks. Oh, we have some time left over it. Let's look a computer up your head and teach how to meditate with a computer looking at your brainwaves. So that when you're meditating wrong, it will tell you and you can do it right. That's what a great labs does. That's, that's what I'm gonna spend my time on. But I don't want to spend all my time on longevity, because I have stuff to do. And so there's just deep respect for the amount of time and energy and money and suffering people are willing to do to get the life they want. Like let's not waste all of our life trying to get the life we want. Let's get it and then live it. greathealth.com is the name of that web site.

Elizabeth Stein 49:27
Well, everyone definitely needs check that out. I definitely will. So Dave, thank you so much for being here in closing. Last question, what is your number one non negotiable to thrive on your wellness journey?

Dave Asprey 49:41
The number one non negotiable is kindness. And what this means is you've got to be kind to yourself, which is the hardest part of it all. If you think you're going to whip yourself into shape, or you're going to beat yourself up, it is not likely that you're going to get very If are powered by shame or guilt or self hatred, so you gotta learn how to be kind to yourself. And that's what makes you also kind to others. And the most basic step you can take is be well nourished. When you have enough minerals, when you have enough of the right kinds of fat enough protein, your body relaxes, because it doesn't feel like there's a feminine, when your body has enough energy, and it's not relaxed. Or when your body has enough energy and it is relaxed, you're naturally less stressed, which means you have the energy to be kind to yourself, and to be kind to other people. So we're building a world full of people who are so full of energy that who knows what they might do. That's the tagline for danger coffees, who knows what you might do because of the minerals. But once you have that, then you're going to choose consciously to be kind to do things that make the world a better place, the kind of peacefulness that comes from, like just being tired and downtrodden. And controlled isn't the kind of piece I'm interested in, and no one wants that. So I want to build super powerful humans who are inherently dangerous, because they can do anything. But of course, because they're smart. And because they're in control themselves. They're just going to help the little old lady across the street who needed it. And they're going to be nice to each other because we're supposed to do that. And it's only people who are malnourished and mistreated and haven't experienced kindness, who end up being these reactive programmable people that we all know. So the goal is, let's get back in charge of our own biology because we're wired to be nice to each other. It's not that hard.

Elizabeth Stein 51:29
I love that. Well, what a perfect way to end it's all about kindness at the end of the day. Dave, thank you so much for being here. It was an absolute pleasure. I think we could have probably chatted for another two hours, but I really appreciate all your time. Thanks so much.

Dave Asprey 51:45
Thanks, Elizabeth. Have a wonderful day.

Elizabeth Stein 51:48
You too. Bye. Thanks so much for joining me and live purely with Elizabeth. I hope you feel inspired to thrive on your wellness journey. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to rate subscribe and review. You can follow us on Instagram at purely underscore Elizabeth to catch up on all the latest. See you next Wednesday on the podcast.