The Phenomenon of Your Metabolism – Siim Land – #628

Foreign.

A state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is about this little thing called autophagy. The 2016 Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine was awarded to a cell biologist named Yoshinori Osumi for his discoveries of mechanisms of autophagy. That was awarded a couple years after the bulletproof diet came out. Where one of the techniques, which I called bulletproof protein fasting, where you avoid almost all protein for 24 hours to turn on this amazing process in the body. When I published the book. But the Nobel Prize was based usually on 30 or 40 years of research.

So.

So this stuff we've known about, but you probably haven't heard about. And the reason that there was a rush of interest in this is because autophagy means self eating. And it's described as the cellular house cleaning or self renewal process. And there's something in your cells you probably don't know about called autophagosomes. And they're built around junk the body wants to destroy. So these things compost the garbage into reusable building blocks and nutrients. And what are some things like that? Fat deposits, older damaged organelles, clumps of poisonous proteins, toxic molecules. Basically. If something's going to gum up your works, you might want to clean it out every now and then. And you're going to read a lot more about this in my anti aging book that's coming up here right now. There are more than a dozen biotech firms developing small molecule drugs to enhance or inhibit autophagy, to treat all kinds of diseases. And I would put aging on that list of diseases. Today's guest is a very interesting author, public speaker and coach who's really focused in on autophagy. His name is Siem Land and he's in Estonia. And his newest book is about 500 pages. It's called Metabolic Autophagy. It's one of those books you can't put down if you're into the metabolism. And if you're not into the metabolism, it might be a bit much. But that's all right because we all have a metabolism. The question is how much do you want to know? In today's episode, you're going to learn quite a bit about what's going on in there that you didn't know about and what you can do about it. Siem, welcome to the show.

Hey. Hey, Dave. Thanks for having me.

Now, you've been on a couple of my friends shows as well. You've been on Dr. Mercola's show. I think that's pretty cool. He's a friend and has been at the conference. He mentioned your name and several other of my colleagues are like, dave, you got to talk to Siem. So I've been excited to do this. You started your blog about this just in 2015, and you were still in college and you weren't studying autophagy, you were studying something almost the same, anthropology. I mean, they rhyme sort of. But what's going on with that? Why are you an autophagy fanboy?

Yeah, well, I think like you said, like, if you're interested in this metabolism and everything related to the body, then it kind of creates this intrinsic curiosity about how do you. Or how does these things work as well as how do you optimize them? And like, I've been into this biohacking thing for. Yeah, ever since I started college. And at that time I was focused on anthropology, but it wasn't something that I would like, wanted to do for the rest of my life. It was like somewhat I was just scratching my own itch and wanted to learn more about the human, like the human animal or the human being inside a culture and inside a society. So in a way, it isn't directly connected with like biochemistry or biology or autophagy, but it's still something that kind of teaches you or makes you more curious about the human animal and how does everything work. And during that time I was, you know, creating articles on my blog. And one of the kind of reemerging topics that I was really fascinated about was intermittent fasting and autophagy. So ever since that time, I was just, you know, scavenging all the different new research has come out of it and learning how do you actually apply it to, like, your everyday life. And now that I've written a book about it, I just wanted to share all that knowledge that I've gathered over the time and also, like, refute some of the misconceptions and fallacies about both fasting as well as like, general diet.

You don't have a degree in medicine or anything like that, right?

No, I'm just bachelor's in anthropology.

So I gotta ask, what makes you qualified to write a book like this?

Well, yeah, that's a common question. Like, first of all, I don't have a real biochemistry degree. And second, I'm like, so young. Who are you talking about? Longevity and anti aging. But I think that may be like another one of those strengths that makes people want to or pay more attention to me. Just because it's somewhat so deviant and so contradicting.

I love it.

Yeah. Or it's so rare.

It's kind of a dumb question. And I've never really asked that before, because if someone did something by virtue of doing it, they are now qualified to do it. That's the definition of it. And a Wall Street Journal reporter asked me that on stage. Like, how dare you do biohacking. You don't have a white lab coat and a medical degree. Like, well, here's one of the little things. You can't take away my medical license for telling the truth, now can you? And I've interviewed lots of doctors on the show who had their license revoked when they said, hey, I found something new. And then they get slapped around for a while and 20 years later someone comes along says, actually this does work, but by then they've ruined their career. So there's a role for people with inquisitive minds like you to go out there, dig deep. You have 50 pages of references in your book. My very first one, the Better Baby Book. Like, what right do I have to write that? I don't know. There was 1,100 references in the book and it was actually researched. So doing research, you don't have to have a degree, much less a degree in medicine or biology. So just the curiosity and willingness to do awesome things.

Yeah, that's the beauty of biohackers taking control of their own health and actually going deeper into the science than other people.

You nailed it. And you're definitely, I mean, you're all over this idea of biohacking. And I love it that you started when you were at the. Basically when you started school. So you started school in 2011?

Yeah, something like that.

So that was right when the term was just when I first wrote the definition of it. And you're so you are very early. That's cool. And right now, your Body Mind empowerment podcast, you got 120 episodes. You're interviewing a lot of people to learn, which is a higher ROI return on investment for you. Reading a paper on PubMed about something or interviewing someone about something?

I think it depends on the particular topic. There's definitely a lot to learn from many individuals and this just osmosis affect learning from the, like a near exposure from them. Like if you talk to people like Mercola or I don't know, you know, Vishen Lakhiani, then you can definitely gain more than just the knowledge from them. You gain more like this sort of a general vibe and you Kind of learn how, how you learn the way they think and that kind of changes your own way of thinking. So I think that is much more powerful than just, you know, reading regular studies, etc. Especially if you don't have, let's say, a lot of background or you don't have a background knowledge about the particular topics. You may just reading it for nothing and you may not get that much out of it. Whereas a real conversation is definitely more. It's going to rub off on you a lot more.

I love that answer. The idea of getting a vibe from someone. I learn more from having a really good conversation with someone smart, someone who's done the research and usually then by going out and doing research myself. Although sometimes like, ah, there was a nugget and I had to read that paper and whatever. But you can read an awful lot in a, in a cave somewhere and maybe not move along your path as far as just being able to interview, you know, 100 people who are doing good stuff. So which is, which is cool. One of the reasons I continue to do the show, I don't, I don't have to continue doing Bulletproof Radio. I just like to, because, you know, we get to have this conversation. All right, let's jump into Metabolic Autophagy. Why did you choose that title for your book, Metabolic versus the Benefits of Superautophagy? What was behind your thought process there? Because I wouldn't have known how to name a book this complex.

Yeah, well, when you look at what does metabolic mean, then? It just refers to the general kind of processes and the phenomenon of your metabolism. And that's generally everything that is related to energy production, you know, growth, repair, et cetera, et cetera. So your entire world is almost surrounded by the concept of metabolism. And the reason I added autophagy to that is also that when, when I was doing that research about autophagy, then I realized that it's kind of a very central component to everything else that your body goes through on a daily basis. And there's some form of autophagy happening almost all the time. And it's very connected to, for instance, like life extension from caloric restriction. It's connected to brain protection against neurodegeneration and general insulin sensitivity. It protects against muscle sarcopenia and so on. So, yeah, I found it to be actually so much more important and so much more central to the entire metabolic processes. So it was a good combination I decided to kind of put together.

I understand controlling our metabolism is really important and it feels like Autophagy goes beyond just your metabolism. Your metabolism is the rate at which you're turning food and air into electrons at the end of the day. And some of the stuff that's going on here is more about system self repair and other longevity and anti aging things like that. Which is why I've been fascinated with autophagy for a very long time. So if autophagy goes beyond the metabolism, let's just jump into some of the stuff that works from your book. What is your take on why intermittent fasting has a place?

Yeah, for. Well, I think intermittent fasting is almost like a very normal way of, of eating that humans evolved under. Like, if you think that hunter gatherers in the past were used to eating three squares a meal a day, then you're quite wrong and that they were actually more, they spent more time in a faster state than in a fit one. So that already tells you that the process of or doing some form of introverted fasting, or time or secret eating itself is almost built into the natural ways our metabolism is supposed to work. And also research is showing that, well, at least one of the few known ways of promoting lifespan across all species is caloric restriction. That applies to like yeast, flies, roundworms, etc. But when you actually look deeper into that, then you can see that autophagy plays a critical role in the life extension effects of caloric restriction. Such as if you genetically mutify some mice that they won't express autophagy in adequate amounts even when they are put under severe caloric restriction, then those mice, they're not going to live longer. Whereas the mice that have normal autophagy activated during caloric restriction, those mice, they, you know, show those life extension benefits. So the kind of. And that applies to like different research in yeast as well as mice. So that can tell you that the goal or the reasons why caloric restriction extends lifespan isn't just because of the caloric restriction. It's because it stimulates certain longevity pathways such as autophagy, such as sirtuins, such as foxoproteins, ampk and so on. And those things, they can be activated with other means besides just caloric restriction. And intermittent fasting has been shown to be as effective, if not even more effective, in inducing those same benefits. And you don't have to starve. Basically.

I've been to more than a few conferences at the American Academy of Anti Aging Medicine and places like that just from 20 years of anti aging nonprofit work. And there's always five or six people who are Rail thin. And they're saying, well, you know, I'm practicing caloric restriction and I eat 1300 calories a day, and I really don't feel like I'm hungry all the time. And I got used to being cold all the time. And they do not look well. They're saying, but I'm going to live longer. And I'm just thinking that's not the kind of life. If you live one third lesson, one third less quality, and you live one third longer, you sort of maybe washed out. And so I never looked at that as a sustainable, attractive thing that anyone other than extreme radicals would do. And yeah, it looks like intermittent fasting probably is going to get us most of the way there, if not all the way.

Yeah. I want to also add that although someone may be eating like 1200 calories a day just to practice caloric restriction and they hope to live longer, it doesn't mean that they actually gain those benefits because you have to also take into account metabolic adaptation. So they say that you have to. To gain the benefits of caloric restriction, you have to reduce your calories for like 10 to 20% and make sure you don't experience malnutrition. But the problem is that if you're eating 10, 20% fewer calories over the course of months and years, then your body gets used to it and you have to drastically reduce those calories again. So. So you're going to end up have to consume like 40% fewer colors than you normally would and et cetera, et cetera. So it's not very stable.

You end up being a breatharian at a certain point. You have one leaf every day. This idea of cycles where some days you eat a normal amount of calories and some days you don't. It just works. Even the whole keto perspective, it's always been, hey, ketosis for, well, come out of ketosis, go back in versus just staying in it forever. And we're going to get into that in a bit. But first up, you do a really good job of talking about catabolism versus, well, anabolism, I hate that word, versus an anabolic state. Can you talk about the difference between the two states and what intermittent fasting does?

Yeah, for sure. Well, if you look at the way your body works, then your body is always kind of trying to monitor the nutritional environment that it is in. And for that it has developed these different fuel sensors that detect the energy status and the nutrient status of your body at any particular moment. And those two nutrient sensors are mtor which is mechanistic target of rapamycin and ampk. And they are almost like the two sides to the yin and yang of your metabolism that are constantly balancing each other out. So MTOR is the main growth pathway that stimulates cell growth repair and anabolism. And AMPK is the catabolic side which is more like breakdown and recycling. That kind of forces ketosis. That also promotes autophagy and enables the body to clear itself out. So those two things are constantly being balanced on the 24 hour period. And when you're fasting then you're more catabolic, you're breaking things down. You're activating ampk, you're suppressing mtor, and when you're eating then you're doing the opposite. You're, you know, inhibiting ampk, you're becoming more anabolic and you're activating MTOR just so you, you can repair. So that's why intermittent fasting refers to cycling in and out of different sides of the coin, so to say going catabolic to gain the benefits of the self repair and every once in a while to go into the anabolic side so you can actually build tissue and not waste away the way you explained.

That 24 hour cycle. So there's times when you have a lot of one, a lot of the other. It seems like when I really peel back the label on a lot of the biohacking techniques that I recommend, whether it's the nutritional supplement or even a lot of the machinery from upgrade labs, there's a way to do some cryotherapy where, oh, I'm getting, I guess in Celsius, 160 degrees below zero. But it's only for three minutes. But the idea is that is a really deep valley of temperature way beyond what your body would normally expect, which causes a strong adaptation response. And then the same thing for like we call it the cheat machine. But it lets you exercise against something that's not gravity and it puts on muscle about three times faster than normal things just by changing the slope of the curve. So if you believe that idea that the body will adapt based on the height of the peak or the base of the trough, it would follow that two of the techniques for changing MTOR and AMPK pharmaceutically might be a good idea. So for mk, what people recommend is one of two things. Metformin or betaine, essentially herbs. And on the other side you can take rapamycin. Do you use either one of those?

I don't use either metformin nor rapamycin. Although I have seen very promising research about it and I do think that it can definitely work in inducing autophagy and suppressing mtor and like it can be somewhat of a good strategy for someone who is interested in dipping into autophagy more frequently, et cetera. And also like some of the negative side effects related to metformin, they, I think they are somewhat over exaggerated. For someone who is healthy, someone taking metformin, you know, infrequently, etc. Then I don't see like a huge issue there. And I think that would be, I would suggest just maybe like try to wait for more like human trials before I myself start tricking it. But I do think they take other similar compounds like berberine for instance. Berberine is essentially like a very similar kind of a drug or a natural supplement that, that also mimics the same similar effects as metformin and like lower saturation.

And I meant berberine earlier. So thank you for, for that correction there. I started taking metformin somewhere around 2007, 2008 when the first studies came out. And there's a company called Biomarker Pharmaceuticals went and did all these studies on mice, the life extension studies of metformin said, hey, this old diabetes drug, if you take it in a different dosing thing has effects. So I took it for about three years. I ended up meeting the founding team at Biomarker and they couldn't believe I'd been doing it. And I said, yeah, of course I started doing it after the first, you know, the first paper came out. Why wouldn't I? Because I've basically been suffering from the diseases of aging when I was young and I don't like this. And I quit though, because some other studies came out that showed that it could have mitochondrial suppression. And I'm right on the fence of going back onto it because for the last eight years I've taken berberine just like you talked about. But a recent interview with James Clements, we talked about the fact that there are some studies that show that that herb can cause cardiac issues, including low heart rate and low blood pressure, and including some life threatening things like that. So the idea that you might have a sudden drop in your blood pressure because you're taking this herb, I mean, sudden as in you pass out sort of thing, maybe it's worth looking into that. So I'm debating would it be wise to do low dose metformin on an occasional base just to increase miso cleanup? And I know you're not a doctor and you can't make recommendations and stuff like that. But if you were talking to someone who is late 40s, metabolically healthy, wanted to live for a very long time, given all the research you've read, what would you think about.

Yeah, that's a very, very like good point. So to say that these drugs, they work because they lower your blood blood sugar and they drop insulin a lot. So the reason you want to actually, you know, cycle between those states is like a important thing because, you know, if you combine all these different biohacks like intermittent fasting, taking metformin, doing high intensive exercise, eating keto, etc. Then you, it becomes like the hormetic stimulus, so to say, becomes somewhat overbearing for your body to kind of endure. And that's why it's, you know, everything is, the poison is in the dose. So I think like doing it cyclically is the key. So to say you don't want to be activating the, you don't want to activate autophagy all the time, you don't want to be taking berberine all the time, you don't want to be in keto all the time. And at the same time you don't want to be anabolic and you don't want to be, you know, activating MTOR all the time. So the key is like cyclical and variation. And I, I myself usually when I take berberine, then I combine it after like some, some form of like a higher carb meal, just so kind of like lower my blood sugar faster and I can go back into autophagy and ketosis faster as well. So yeah, I'm not taking it like on a consistent basis. Okay, but if I would take them, then I would combine it like strategically around those times where I would know that either my blood sugar is going to be slightly higher or like my insulin is higher.

Why don't you just use vanadol sulfate and chromium after those meals? Doesn't that work better anyway?

Yeah, you can take them as well. But you know, depends on what kind of, you know, I think there's not going to be a much huge difference. Depends on like how much, let's say in the example of cyclical keto, depends on how many carbs you're eating or how high your blood sugar actually goes, etc.

Do you worry about low insulin?

I would worry about it if I would start to see like some negative sides, side effects in my metabolism or my thyroid functioning or like muscle development, so to say lower insulin levels are being shown to be like associated with greater longevity in other species. But again, I think it's a matter of cyclical aspects that you don't want to be probably suppressing it all the time. Because insulin has many beneficial effects. Like a lot of the low carb keto people, they tend to villainize insulin. But insulin is one of them, one of the most, one of the most anabolic hormones. And it's very useful, but only if you activate it at the right time and you do it strategically.

It's funny that there's this thing called IGF1 insulin like growth factor. It's insulin like because it does what insulin does which makes you grow. In the research for Superhuman, my anti aging book that just hit Amazon, I talk about risk of all cause mortality in humans from studies from high insulin versus low insulin. Chronic low insulin is more dangerous than high insulin. However, I wouldn't want high insulin either. What you want is a well regulated metabolism. And of course, just like you've said already twice in the show, maybe you should be in ketosis some of the time, but probably not continuously forever, which is one of the big keto myths. It just drives me nuts. And that's why the original recommendations that I've come out with and evolved over the time, it's cyclical, cyclical, cyclical. And you're coming out with a lot of new research supporting that from this angle on autophagy.

Yeah, and the same applies to some of the negative side effects of autophagy as well. Like chronic autophagy can actually promote tumor metastasis. So to say that if you are like some of the research is saying that autophagy is amazing for disease prevention and making sure that you don't get disease. But if you're already sick, then it's essentially potentially strengthening some of the malignancy just because it's like a self repair process and it doesn't have like objective understanding of what's good or bad. It's just some of the cancer cells may just feed off of it and steal some of the residue that's created by autophagy. So yeah, that's why the cyclical approach is definitely even for autophagy and fasting much more important.

You're, I'm guessing around a little under 30.

24.

24. All right, so more than a little under 30. And you have talked about how you do 20 hour intermittent fasting and you've been doing it for seven years. Do you do it every day?

Not every day. Like I probably have once a week where I'm not fasting. So to say that long, I'll probably have like two to three meals on that particular day just to kind of break the cycle.

I've known a good number of young, healthy, especially men who are just saying, wow, I feel way better, my body works better, I have abs. Intermittent fasting is something I'm going to do every day for the rest of my life. I love this. But I also do a lot of work with people at all age ranges, especially because I do anti aging stuff. I've got people in their 70s, 80s, 90s as well as you see a bunch of CEOs who typically aren't in the best shape, although that's changing these days. Most of them, if they're not already on a pretty advanced regiment, if they start intermittent fasting every day, especially doing it for 20 hours like you do, what happens?

I think that for older people it's just very more, they have to be more careful with what kind of foods they're eating and making sure that they get more nutrients during the feeding window. Because as you get older, you naturally experience this decline in growth hormone, testosterone, as well as anabolic resistance. So, so it becomes very difficult, it becomes more difficult for you to maintain lean muscle tissue. And maintaining lean tissue is incredibly important for longevity and anti aging. So generally the way I can see that it can be bypassed is to just increase the protein content of your diet a little bit as well as the nutrient density and also shortening the fasting window. So to say so as you're older or as you're like under some extreme nutritional stress, whether that be from like high, high level exercise or being pregnant or being underage, et cetera, then for them they can just adjust their fasting regimen by shortening their fasting window and they can still gain the same benefits because they, they don't need to be fasting that long to, for their body to go into this sort of a self repair mode.

That's, that's a really good nuanced answer that matches my experience. It feels like there's essentially, it's a stress on the body to do intermittent fasting. And if you're not in great shape, you might want to start intermittent fasting three times a week. You might want to say, well, today I didn't sleep well last night, I feel like crap and I'm going to be flying to New York. In fact, if you're flying, I still think you should fast or at least have some brain octane before you go to get some ketones there. But I just question whether that advice that works really well when you're under 30 and exercising a lot and managing life differently than when you're 50 and chronically sleep deprived and stressed and doing things. So I would just caution listeners, yes, intermittent fasting is a powerful technique. It works differently for men and women and it's okay to start slow and it's okay to be cyclical. But you will end up probably the way I am, where if I have an intense day, I actually will do bulletproof coffee where I do get some ketones in the morning, my insulin stays perfectly flat. I know you mentioned bulletproof coffee somewhere in the book you say it's at least part science and part hype, if I remember right.

We'll talk about that later.

But I'll do that. And if it's a day where I'm like, yeah, I'm just going to be sitting around doing a podcast or something like this morning all I did was I had a bunch of strange herbs and supplements and a big cup of black bulletproof coffee, as in I used the mold free beans. But I would say for the average executive or the average person with an intense life, if they're starting intermittent fasting, how are they going to feel at 11:30 in the afternoon or in the morning the first time they skip breakfast? What usually happens?

Yeah, for sure. If you haven't done any form of fasting before then and you're coming from a sugar burning metabolism, then it's going to be really difficult to get to it because your body isn't used to using ketones. And I think yeah, definitely the bulletproof coffee is amazing thing for teaching the body to become more fat adapted and start using ketones, etc. So although like well the, the fats you get from bulletproof coffee, they actually promote some form of autophagy which is like a subcategory of autophagy called chaperone mediated autophagy. So that that type of autophagy is stimulated by ketone bodies and it's more of like a specific type that just targets specific proteins, mainly like branched chain aminias. It's so you can definitely maintain this state of autophagy even if you drink bulletproof coffee, so to say. And if you combine it with some form of trimexic eating then you're getting like increased basal autophagy even. So yeah, it's a very effective strategy for building fat adaptation and even gaining the benefits of autophagy.

You know, I didn't have any idea that you were going to say that, but I'm grateful you did because I've been saying for years, look, I do not have a double blinded clinical study that shows you when you put some brain octane in your coffee or butter or the whole bulletproof coffee recipe that it will do the same autophagy. But all the observations I've had are that when me or others, when we drink bulletproof coffee only in the morning without even adding the bulletproof collagen stuff to it because that would be protein, it changes the effects that there's definitely a form of autophagy happening and it may or may not be the same as if you just had coffee, tea, water or zero calories. And you're saying that at least the chaperone mediated side's there. Well, what's missing if you don't have brain octane or anything that enhances ketones? What's the other kind of autophagy besides chaperone mediated?

Well, the main form of autophagy is macro autophagy and the other form of like a sub form of is also like microautophagy. So I'm not sure like how big the difference is between like chaperemediated autophagy and macro autophagy. But I would say that macro autophagy would just the effects or the like the metabolic effects would be somewhat greater because you're not, you're keeping the MTOR much lower than you were to be when you were taking like some form of fats, so to say. Because although fats, they don't suppress or they don't raise insulin, they can still change the energy status of your cells, so to say by changing the ratios between AMPK and mtor. So yeah, I think the only difference is that with the chaperoned autophagy you, you will maintain more deeper ketosis and an increased level of ketosis. But you may not be, let's say, getting these sort of more thorough cellular clearance. There isn't like any research, like I.

Said, there are, both of us are hypothesizing here. But when you read the research enough times, you see how it works and you know how it should be, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. That was a really complete and impressive answer. And while you're answering that, you probably 50% of the time you looked up and to the right in your eyes twitch. Do you know you do that?

Yeah, I don't notice that. I know you've noticed it before. Yeah.

Do you have a weird brain?

Not sure. Not sure what it means, but maybe.

I mean, I'm asking because A surprising number of people I've interviewed, and this is like more than 600 now. I remember one person must be. I think it was T.S. wiley on hormones. She said, oh, yeah, in college, I had a tumor in one part of my brain, and when it grew back, I had that of part. Part of my brain twice as big. And now I can read research papers in a way that I couldn't before. And she sort of had a superpower. And so, I mean, did you whack your head? Did you have encephalitis, anything like that? Because you have a really. Your ability to pull information together. You're many standard deviations above the norm, especially for someone who's 24.

Right.

So. And one thing you're doing is you look up into the right, which. And there's some neurological stuff that's beneficial. I tend to look up into the left, by the way, when I'm.

When I'm.

When I'm pulling information together. But I just want. I'm curious because you actually do personal development and you talk about energy, work, and the other stuff.

Yeah.

What's your awareness of what you're doing in there and can you make that teachable or share it with our listeners?

I think I just. It's the way I process information. So I'm more of like a audio learner. So I'm not. When I'm, like, looking into that corner, then I'm not like, actually cognitively visualizing or looking at what I see in the corner. I'm actually looking inside my brain or trying to extract some of the information from there. So it's. I suggest it's just my way of processing audio information. And my favorite way of, like, learning is also, like, audio and listening to podcasts and audiobooks. So maybe it just has become like a habit.

I think it's. It's benefiting you probably in ways that aren't immediately apparent. There are. This actually goes back in 70s, 80s. There's charts that show which quadrant of your vision your eyes are going to. You're accessing different parts of the brain. So my interpretation of what I'm seeing here is that you're going to a certain part of the brain and giving it more energy when you do that. And I'm just wondering if that's a technique that you picked up through all of your interesting research or whether it's just a natural skill. And it sounds like it's just a natural skill, but you definitely have the ability to pull together very disparate concepts very quickly to form a cohesive answer. And the world needs more of that. All right, let's go back to metabolic. What's the one I'm looking for? Metabolic flexibility. What, what is your definition of metabolic flexibility and how can people turn it on as quickly as possible?

Yeah, well, metabolic flexibility is just your body's ability to swap between different fuel sources and also being able to function well without any fuel, so to say. And that refers to generally like an increased level of fat adaptation and being able to use both fatty acids as well as glucose in different situations. So by default, the body is almost like when you're born, then you're actually born in ketosis. Like mother's breast milk is, has ketones in it. And the children are general. The way the children survive is by going into ketosis. And that's why they have like some, some higher body fat as well. And when you're kids brains have to.

Have ketosis, baby brains, it's vital, right?

Yeah. And when you are like getting older, then you just, you know, because you're eating the standard diet, so to say you're kind of losing it, you're losing some form of the keto adaptation because of consuming too many carbohydrates and eating too frequently and not practicing like time or sheet eating. So that's a, that's kind of a shame. And the problem is that, you know, there's nothing wrong inherently with being just a sugar burner. It's just that it may jeopardize your longevity and it's not going to be that sustainable. So if you are running on sugar, then you're somewhat metabolically inflexible because you lack the ability to tap into your own body fat stores when you are depleted from, let's say, the last cereal bowl that you ate for breakfast. And like, in a healthy metabolism, a healthy metabolism should be able to go immediately into your own body fat stores whenever you run out of the food that you ate recently, because it's part of like the way the human body is evolved under and it should be like healthy. And that's like metabolic flexibility in a sense. If you run out of, if you run out of glycogen and glucose, then you're gonna immediately go into ketosis or not immediately, but like very fast. And you'll be still able to use ketones and your own body fat for fuel and especially during times of fasting and like low carb diets. And the way you promote that is through like both ketogenic dieting as well as intermittent fasting. So to say, and definitely like implementing the cyclical aspect, so to say, because a ketogenic diet is also somewhat metabolically inflexible because if you stay in ketosis all the time, then eventually you're losing your body's ability to process glucose efficiently as well, so to say you become somewhat physiologically insulin resistant and that's like a beneficial adaptation in the state of ketosis, but it's not optimal for metabolic flexibility, so to say. And that's why going in and out of it teaches your body to swap those fuel sources more efficiently and in so doing like achieve more freedom and also like flexibility.

It's made a really big difference for me because, you know, when I was 24 that was, I guess I had probably lost 20 of my £300, you know, I was probably around 280 at your age and I, I would have, it was my fourth year of universe. I would have been like 21 when I 22, maybe when I hit the range 300 pounds. So I mean I was in a very different place struggling with this and that knowledge just wasn't out there. Where I've ended up is I pretty much have background ketones all the time and I don't eat a zero carb or near zero carb diet on many days of the week. Some days I do, some days I fast. Like you, mixing it up is really important. But when I do eat, I put brain octane on my food and I can reliably get a 0.3 to 0.5 millimoles of ketones on a bloodstick. So what I'm doing is I'm having more than mother nature would normally put in their ketones. And there's some carbs, but not too many carbs. And since the, the cells can pull from both of those metabolic flexibility happens. And you throw in the intermittent fasting, you throw in the 24, 48 hour fasting and various exercise and whatever else. It feels like my energy levels are higher than they've ever been, probably because they're both there. But it doesn't necessarily require two weeks of extreme bacon only keto sort of thing. What's your take on these background ketones? The 0.3 to 0.5 for longer extended periods of time.

I think it's very useful in a sense. So you get the neurological benefits of ketones as well as the autophagy benefits of ketones, while at the same time you're not, you know, relying on carbohydrates as a main fuel source and you're not being in a state of hyperinsulinemia. So, yeah, definitely, like combining them together in some shape or form, at least every once in a while, will probably enable you to still maintain keto adaptation without completely kicking yourself out of ketosis and without damaging your metabolic health in so doing. Because there's a difference between just being in very strict ketosis and being keto adapted. So being in ketosis would mean that you have higher levels of ketones and the deeper stages of ketosis, they usually start around 2.0 millimoles and, and up to 5, et cetera. So that will be like a state of nutritional ketosis. But it doesn't really mean that you're like very keto adapted. You can have like a lot of ketones, but you're not able to use them. But on the other hand, being keto adapted means that your body actually uses them for energy and that can actually be registered with like a slightly smaller amount of ketones as well. As long as you have enough energy throughout the day, entire day, and you don't feel like you're like deprived of energy and you need to have like another bagel, so to say. So if you're keto adapted, then you, then you're able to function much more efficiently without higher levels of ketones because your, your, your body is burning them for energy instead of like just storing them in the bloodstream.

I've often talked with, especially the, I'm going to call them the Keto Bros, the, the, the radical fringe of keto dieters who have a lot in common with the radical vegans. Or. It's like, if you ever eat a gram of glucose or carbohydrate again, you're a bad man. And you're like, guys, I've been there. And it gave me leaky gut and food allergies and my sleep went to hell and my testosterone went down. And you're probably not going to like. In fact, it'll probably make you angry all the time. Oh, wait, are you angry right now? Oh, you are like, you sort of, yeah.

Pulling the string.

I mean, you've, you've seen these guys online. It's probably a lack of glucose for the glial cells in the brain to perform synaptic pruning. So I, man, I'm going somewhere with this question, but I just woke up and something's not kicking in my brain. I had this cool thing, vegan in my 20s. This kind of thing where I'd lose my train of thought would happen to me 40 times a day, it was just the same thing, and it drove me insane, and I just learned to sort of fake it. And I'm to the point now where it essentially rarely, if ever happens. And it's happened to me twice this morning, so I'm really scratching my head. I'm like, all right, I know my sleep quality was weird last night, and I had a half a glass of 2013 French wine, and I didn't feel normal after it. And I'm wondering, like. Like, something's not right metabolically in my brain, because I just would never lose that. So now I'm thinking, all right, what is the thing I did that caused me to have slightly less cognitive function? Do you do stuff like that as well? Like, do you track. Hey, my brain isn't working as well today?

Yeah, like, definitely. You know that there are definitely different feedback loops you can pay attention to, even just, like, the OURA ring score or your HRV and average heart rate. So I do notice, like, for instance, if I eat something bad or if I, like, just react negatively to it, or if I eat too close to bedtime, then I'll see, like, a slightly higher resting heart rate and also, like, some interruptions in HRV and so. And like, maybe deep sleep quality. So those would be something. The immediate things. Everyone can see that, okay, my sleep quality sucks, and they can trace back to it usually, like nutrition or, like, blue light or something. Those things, they interrupt with it. But also just general, let's say, cognition and focus, those things can also be affected, especially if you're somewhat metabolically inflexible. Then you may experience these dips more often, or you may react negatively to bad food more because your body is kind of struggling to deal with it. But if you're really, let's say, keto adapter, it's a lot. Then you probably shouldn't notice, like, a whole lot of difference or, like, depends on, like, how much your bad food are you getting? And, like, definitely it's a matter of, again, the hormetic dose and how much poison are you getting exposed to.

Yeah, your. Your resilience gets much higher, and mine's higher than it's ever been. I do know from my aura score, I woke up, like, five times last night. I don't remember it. And that never happens. I get really high sleep scores and. And I got a lot of deep sleep, but less REM than normal. Anyway, I'm just noticing my brain's off a little bit, and there's always a reason. And it could just be a Shortage of smart drugs, but we'll figure that out.

Well, you can't win every day, so.

Exactly. And the good news is, and what I'm going to do now is I'm going to continue my keto bro question, because I remember what I was saying for that. So these keto bros will say, I got my keto levels up to five. And the other guy's like, I pounded this stuff that tasted like gasoline. And now I got my ketones up to seven. And I kind of look at them and then I imagine the adults from the decade that I was born in, which to you would be ancient history. I was born in the 70s. So in the 70s, there were these guys going, you know, carbs give you energy. And then there's these two guys going, you know what? I got my blood glucose up to 400 after I pounded all these, these sugary drinks. And Ella goes, yeah, I got mine up to 450. And it seems like in either case, if you're getting the energy molecule in your blood that high, it's because you're not using it and it's probably not beneficial. Do you see any benefits to having exceptionally high ketones in the body? Is their presence doing something magic that you've come across in your research that I haven't?

Probably. Some of the research by Dominic d' Agostino is showing that elevation of these ketones in your bloodstream with the help of exogenous ketones and ketone esters has like, neuroprotective effects and used for epilepsy, et cetera. But I think they're not like, the results aren't based upon super high levels of these ketones. They're somewhat linked in the therapeutic range. And I would also suggest, like you said, that if you have a lot of these energy molecules in your bloodstream, then, yeah, it means that you're not really burning them. And at the same time, any excess, whether that be glucose, whether that be protein, whether it be fat or ketones, any excess isn't something that your body actually wants. Your body wants to maintain this very tight range of energy. And higher, even like a higher metabolic rate, isn't beneficial for longevity because it's going to essentially wear down your mitochondria. And high levels of energy in the bloodstream may also just indicate that, first of all, you're not using it. And secondly, it's going to start to, I don't know, ravage or damage some of the healthy cells into doing that.

Is a well thought out, rational perspective. On it. I definitely interviewed Dominic. I think he was around episode 80 of the 600 and something so several years ago and I think one other time since then. What I haven't seen in his research, but I haven't asked him personally is whether someone with cancer is doing hyperbaric therapy, whether having a level of 4 versus 3 on their ketones has any statistical difference or whether it's just having enough ketones that they're abundantly available. And I don't know. What do you know about things like Candida or even cancer using ketones as a fuel source?

Well, I do have heard that it's useful for treating cancer and even like fasting. Plus keto is like and hyperbaric and that can be somewhat an effective strategy. But I've also seen like some conflicting research in some instance, especially from like autophagy research, that some form of autophagy isn't always good when you are having this sort of malignancy. And even like bacteria, even some bacterial infections aren't ideal to treat with fasting and autophagy. So yeah, I think it's, it's supposed to be like a very context dependent thing and very depend upon this particular type of cancer and disease. So probably some intermittency is again some of the critical aspects and combining different strategies and not relying solely on one thing, solely because you read online that fasting cures cancer and, and ketones too. So et cetera. So you have to be very kind of diligent about it and actually work with someone who is, you know, doing it professionally.

That is a wonderful thing to remind listeners of. I have a friend who said, oh, I have breast cancer. And so she went and did an alternative treatment that didn't work. But she was sort of so scared to know whether it worked or not that she didn't go back to get a scan to see if it worked or not. It was one of those sort of ostrich moves where you put your head in the sand and of course the thing didn't work, although it could have. And so it resulted in a much bigger procedure and fortunately she made it. But what that all means is the type of cancer you have, some of them can survive on ketones and people say I'm going to starve my yeast infection. News flash. Candida albicans, which causes the majority but not all yeast infections. There's other species of candidates, Candida, that are a problem, but Candida albicans can and does eat ketones as a fuel source as well as glucose. So the idea that you're going to just starve actually doesn't work that way. And I'm intrigued because I meet the classical definition of someone who definitely had multiple metabolic problems. And you call it chronic illness, because when I was young, chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, toxic mold poisoning, was probably the root cause of some of those. And pre diabetes and high blood sugar and stroke and heart attack risk and all kinds of bad stuff. You take someone with that set of just unfortunate situations like that and then you say, oh, go hack yourself. Well, okay, I did that. Fortunately, I was in a position where I made some money that I lost later, but I ended up spending hundreds of thousands of dollars hacking myself. And I became a pretty substantial expert in it because there were no experts to tell me, oh, by the way, Dave, you can't starve the Candida. Because of course, I had candida as a part of all that. When you live in a moldy house, you get yeast infections inside your gut. But today, I mean, yearbook's out there. There's abundant knowledge out there, and there are functional medicine doctors who can sit down and they can actually measure the yeast that you have and say, oh, this yeast is susceptible to. And they can tell you the compounds. And one compound may be caprylic acid, which is awesome. And sometimes it's not caprylic acid, by the way, there's another name for caprylic acid if it's triple distilled, made from coconuts, and filtered by clay in the United States to extreme measures. The name for caprylic acid would be brain octane. It's C8MCT is what caprylic acid is. And it's one of the things you could say, oh, it doesn't. If you have the stuff in your gut that's susceptible, it is, but it's all measurable now, and it wasn't before. So if you're fat or you're tired or you're feeling hopeless, you're living in a time of just shocking abundance of knowledge, information, and tools to fix all that stuff. So you can use Dr. Google and then you go and do a real doctor, and the real doctor can help you with some tests and help to guide things like that. Just like SEEM is saying here in that, you know, you can get some good advice, and if you're dealing with, you know, something as big as cancer, you better get that good advice. But you might want to get multiple advantage, multiple viewpoints, and you might want to try more than one treatment, because that's okay.

Yeah, yes.

All right, I'll get off my soapbox there. I'm supposed to be interviewing you, but I get passionate about this. You push a button for me.

Yeah. It's like, I think you have to kind of remember that your body is always adapting to what you throw at it, so to say. So imagine if, like, there is this trench warfare between your healthy cells and bad cells, and if you consistently throw mortar shells on your enemy, which is like, the cancer cells, eventually those cancer cells, they're going to dig in and they're going to build bunkers, they're going to build castles, and that same mortal shell is going to have less of an effect. So that's why even the, you know, the bat shells are also adapting to the treatments that you're throwing at. And that's why it's important to do them, like, short term. And also look at it where you're throwing your mortar shells and what's the effect and then changing your approach so that you could actually, like, break them down.

Teaching the world to be cyclical in its approach to maintaining our own hardware is a. Is a great act of service. So. So I'm happy that you're carrying that through almost everything you talk about, because, man, I did not understand that for many years. And you can be harmed by eating sugar all the time or never eating any carbs all the time. So I think we both fundamentally agree on that. And speaking of harming yourself, this is one of my favorite questions people ask me. But because you're also a biohacker for a while, what is the worst outcome from a biohack you've ever experienced? When you say, I'm going to try this on myself, what backfired the worst?

Well, I haven't had, like, any huge failures in my experiments, so to say. Like, before I started keto, then I already listened to your podcast and gained some good tips on how do you start it and how to avoid, like, MCT explosions. Initially starting, oh, yeah, disaster pants wasn't.

A part of your life. Lucky you.

So luckily I was fortunate in that sense. But I would say that maybe just general, like, you know, when you are doing these biohacks and you listen to things about fasting ketosis and hit cardio and cold, cold therapy and ice baths, etc, then you kind of want to put them all together and combine. So I think I may. I haven't had any, like, serious, you know, negative effects from it, but just general, maybe like a somewhat, you know, hypothyroidism a little bit for short. Periods feeling somewhat cold when you're fasting for too long or just like, you know, feeling not that energized because you're putting all those stressors onto your body and you're not giving your enough time to recover. So yeah, I've definitely learned that that's why not going too enthusiastically into those things and not trying to maximize everything else you do and actually giving your body a break and healing allow it to recover. That's where like most of the magic wow actually happens. So yeah, like even I heard it from Dr. Dr. Mercola, but he heard it from Walter Longo and he said that the miracle of fasting happens in the refeeding. So that's essentially kind of describes the entire process of phisis and general stress adaptation.

That is that. That's beautiful. It's making it about recovery. Your point there is very nuanced as well though, saying if you wanted to stack up all these things, you're probably going to have more problems. One of the big efforts that I'm working on right now is at Upgrade Labs. So Upgrade Labs is the experiential biohacking spin out of Bulletproof. So this is our answer to the big exercise industry where we all basically chase tigers and lift rocks or variations on those things. And I'm just thinking there's gotta be a better way. But how do you know if you're going to walk into Upgrade Labs? Should you do the intense red and infrared light therapy first, then cryotherapy, and then do the thing that makes you triple your muscle growth versus lifting rocks? Or should you do this unusually timed cardio with cold compression on it? Right. There's all sorts of paths through the technology. So we're building artificial intelligence and machine learning to look at your current state, how much recovery, how much stimulation, how much. So no one knows. We have trainers who know, we have theories and we have best practices and things like that. But I want to validate and test and iterate the best practices and maybe some of that knowledge will come out. And in another couple years, the biohacks you just mentioned seem will be able to say, you know, if you were going to do an intermittent fast, it'd be amazing what happened if you jumped in a sauna ahead of time because this combination of heat shock protein is going to be great. And if you did some really weird breathing exercises to create hypoxia, that would also be good because you need an elevation of HIF1 factor. Nobody knows because we're testing single variables now and we actually Live in a multivariable world. So I guess what you're saying is if you mix your variables, you might get especially all going the same direction, you might get negative results.

Yeah, for sure. Like you said, everyone has their own kind of requirements and everyone needs different approaches. And probably someone who is metabolically unhealthy needs a different type of fasting routine than someone who is very healthy and already in ketosis, so to say at least keto adapted. So yeah, there's different ways of doing fasting, there are different ways of taking nootropics, there are just different ways of doing hiit cardio. And it all depends on the particular individual. And I like that you said that we're going to develop these artificial intelligence to actually tell you what kind of like what even like on the nutritional level, like what kind of food actually fits your genetics and like what's your microbiome status, et cetera. So we have exciting times that are coming out and we can individualize and personalize all these different strategies.

I love it that you just mentioned that we both use the oura ring and Harpreet's been on the show to talk about it. And I think this is the best piece of tracking tech that I'm aware of. And I was CTO of a wristband tracking company earlier, not that many years ago now. So that's one. In terms of gut bacteria, I use the viome test. I've been involved with the company since the very early days. Do you use viome or do you use anything else to look at what's going on in your gut?

No, the viome, they don't ship to Europe yet, so I'm waiting until they do. So I'm a bit behind that. But I do take.

Well, next time you're in the US to have it sent to your hotel. Your information will go to Europe. So I usually do mine in a hotel in the US because it's faster.

But yeah, for sure I'll have to do that. But yeah, I do like general blood tests and just organic acid tests every once in a while to pay attention.

Organic acid, Okay. I love organic acid tests for mitochondrial function. What about either inflammatory cytokines or food allergy panels? Because one of the things keto people can get is food allergies if the lining of their gut doesn't have enough mucin. Have you tested?

Yeah, I have, but I haven't had any problems. I've seen that my kind of body is very able to handle even like gluten and so on. So I don't have any allergies to dairy or something like that.

So you come from good stock and you live in a part of the world where until last year, Roundup was banned. Give yourself another 20 years.

Yeah.

Although it's looking like. It's looking like Bayer might not be alike in life because they keep losing lawsuits over all the bad they've done to the bacteria ecosystem of our planet with the their stuff. So sorry, guys, maybe everyone in Europe won't get food allergies the way they did here. All right, Is there anything else about autophagy that you wish the world knew that they just don't get what's missing?

There are many other ways of also activating autophagy besides caloric restriction and fasting. A few of those we've already mentioned, like saunas, high intensity cardio heat and cold exposure, they also got like, other ways of stimulating those same longevity pathways without having to essentially starve yourself. And yeah, you can gain a lot of these beneficial effects for lifespan as well as metabolic health and metabolic flexibility by implementing these things. So maybe like, one of the best strategies everyone should do, regardless of whether the biohacking or not, is like resistance training, building muscle, even like taking regular saunas and some form of cold exposure as well. So those are part and parcel of every biohacker already. But I think the emphasis shouldn't be to kick your ass all the time and do a lot of stressful activities, but also actually allow your body to heal and use those things as a form of Recovery SIM.

At 24 years old, you just displayed an amount of wisdom that I probably didn't really get until I was 40. Around that, hey, it's okay to be kind to your biology instead of just pushing all the time. So I'm damned impressed. Well, that is awesome.

Well, I've had, like, good influences in the sense that if you are, you know, like you said earlier, that we have access to technology and information so you can learn about all those things already and you don't have to make the same mistakes other people have made. So I'm actually supposed to be not making those same mistakes because otherwise we'll be like, going downward as a species.

Very, very cool perspective. Perhaps I was just too egotistical to learn from my, from my elders. And that's one of the reasons that now I cultivate friendships with people in their 70s and 80s and 90s, because they know more stuff than I do. It's kind of amazing. It's almost like they've lived another 50 years than I have.

Exactly.

That's really cool. Well, kudos for the amount of learning and your unique ability to synthesize knowledge. What do you do for blue light blocking? Do you have true dark glasses? If not, I'll send you some. But do you just use dimmer switches? Do you put stickers over the LED lights? What's your basic strategy there?

Yeah, I do have true dark, like the Twilight.

Oh, you do?

Yeah.

That's cool. I'll send you some anyway if you want.

But the Twilight and the day walkers as well. So when I first got them, then I noticed like a huge improvement in my deep sleep. And actually I guess posted an article on TrueDark's website as well where I talked about.

Oh, thank you. I didn't even know that.

Yeah, yeah, it was just released a few days ago, but yeah, like, I saw like an improvement in like 15% of deep sleep just by using 50 or 15. Okay. Yeah, so I saw like, just because of blocking out the blue light, it did like show a higher score on my Oura ring. So that's a huge thing. And other blue blocking mechanisms or things I use is just like filters on the smartphone, such as, like on my Android it's Twilight and on my PC it's Flux. So those are the easiest ones. And also just not having bright lights around the household in the evening. Yeah, that's a pretty much. Because I've seen some research showing that the blue light can also interrupt with melatonin through the skin. So there are some receptors in the skin as well. So you don't want to be bathing in bright lights when you're about to go to bed.

You know what's really cool? I've been maybe one of the loudest voices saying that, look, we have receptors in our skin. This is an issue. However, when I talked with Satchin Panda about that, he said, Dave, yeah, I saw the same study and Satchin Panda is a researcher from the Salk Institute who just wrote a really good book on time restricted eating and just a fascinating patchnet guy. And he said, Dave, that study looked pretty good. But then I really went in on it and what they had done is they had taken a bright white light behind the knee, all taped up or no light at all. And the people couldn't tell. Like, there's no way to know whether you were getting a light or not. And then they said, oh, look, when they have this light, the sleep quality is no good. But there was a TV on in the room. But there was a TV on that they didn't control for and that that was almost certainly a major confounding factor and that subsequent studies had found that there are photoreceptors in the skin, but you're unlikely to affect the circadian clock and the SCN or the core clock in the system. But you might have some more aging, like photo aging of the skin or something. If you're sleeping with lots of blue light, I still would say you should sleep in a perfectly dark room, but I'm less concerned about there being a little bit of light on my skin than I used to be based on all that stuff. But I still think, why would you not dim your light tonight?

Pretty clear. Yeah, exactly. Like, why wouldn't you take advantage of it or not? Why not be cautious, in a sense, and, you know, you don't have to be definitely, like, neurotic about it and be scared of some blue light on your skin. You just have to kind of know that it's probably not as detrimental as blue light through the eyes. But at the same time, if you're already home, then just, you know, dimming down the lights, it also, like, psychologically calms your mind and makes you prepared for the sleep, so to say. So even the psychological effects can be, you know, significant.

Beautiful. Final question for you seem. How long are you going to live?

Yeah, that's an interesting question. Like, when I did a podcast with Dr. Mercola a few days ago, I was old, he asked me the same question because he know.

Oh, is he asking that question now, too?

That's. No, no. He. He. He asked me because he knew you were going to ask it. So. So I'm going to give you the same answer that I gave to him, which is like, I'm not that worried about living as long as possible. I'm more focused on making sure that the information and the influence I have on the world would live longer than me or live longer as my physical body, so to say, because that's going to have a much more, let's say, significant impact on actually changing the world than me living longer. So I'm not worried about actually actual immortality. I would be much more concerned with, like, legacy and being remembered for something that actually changed the world.

Very, very cool. A very, very nuanced answer. Don't you feel like, though, if your physical tissues lived. Lived longer, that you'd have the ability to have a bigger impact on the world?

For sure. Like, that's.

That's what's motivating me.

That's exactly that. Yeah, that's another point and a nuance that with the advancement of technology and other biohacks, we will probably increase the average lifespan of many people. But at the same time, it's not inherently dependent on me. I'm not the one who is going to create those technologies. I'm the one who is going to have to maybe test them out or something. But it's not solely dependent upon me. So I'm not focusing on that. But yeah, I would suggest that if you were to be living like several hundred years, for 500 years, et cetera, then the impact on the world will be different or like more, more on a grander scale. But at the same time you have to be also mindful of the fact that if you are living very old, then it's also going to impose many different kinds of problems on society and culture that we don't really comprehend at the moment because we don't have those challenges. So yeah, it's a funny, fun, fun time to be a part of this sort of a change in human biology.

It is. And one of the reasons I'm asking you this question specifically is since you started university, you've been biohacking. You know more about anti aging now than anyone at any age did 20 years ago. And you practice anti aging as a young, healthy kid human. Okay, that is awesome. And I'm thinking, I knew where I am right now and if I could come back from the crappy start that I had, I'm thinking, man, what would happen if I did all these practices when I came out with a good start and I started in my late teens? The outcome, look the way you look when you're 70, even if you don't apply any of the stem cells and advanced anti aging technology, all that stuff is going to be shocking to your peers who eat a crappy diet and all that sort of stuff. Completely shocking. But I want to know what's going to happen, what it's going to look like. So the only way that I can think of to know what you're going to look like when you're 100 is for me to be around when I'm whatever, 140, whatever I'm going to be, to be like, wow, you look a lot better than I do. That's great. So I would encourage you to live a long time.

Right? Yeah, exactly. It's going to put more pressure on myself to actually hold up to it or live up to it.

There you go. Well, your website is Seamland S I I m land.com. you've got a bunch of cool stuff up there. Your podcast, Body Mind Empowerment, is doing very well. You got more than 100 episodes out there. And kudos for that, by the way. Most people give up after 20 episodes when they realize it's actually work to do a podcast, so you made it way past that barrier. And thanks for being on Bulletproof Radio.

Well, thanks for having me, and I'm glad to talk with you.

If you liked today's episode, you know what to do. Pick up a copy of Metabolic Autophagy if that's the kind of light reading that makes you happy. And if you do decide to do that, you owe it to yourself to go to Amazon and leave a review for the book. And here's why you owe it to yourself. Because when you review a book, you're expressing gratitude. And when you express gratitude, it extends your telomeres by 47%. Okay, I made up that last fact. But the bottom line is, expressing gratitude actually does feel good. And it really helps us authors know that what we're doing is worth the time and energy it takes to write a book. So thanks for deciding to review whatever it is you read, because we actually do see it. Have a beautiful day. Sam.