Bulletproof Sex with Dave Asprey

Okay, so let's talk about one of my favorite ways to upgrade your solo or partner play. It is the Hera by Jiu. It's a sleek, powerful rabbit vibrator that's basically the best of both worlds. It's incredible for internal stimulation and those rumbly, mind blowing clitor vibes Jaejoo is known for. Here's what I love. The external ears are powered by the same motor as the Mimi, which you've heard me rave about before. I love the Mimi. And the internal arm delivers deep, satisfying vibrations right to your G spot. It's super so soft, ultra quiet. And it moves with your body. So whether you're using it solo or with a partner, it has this feel like it's made just for you. And honestly, it's kind of a no brainer. Everyone loves the hera and right now you can get 20 off the hera using code emily20@sexwithemily.com hera that's emily20 for 20 off at sexwithemily.com h e r a so if you've been looking for a toy that delivers powerful blended orgasm with thoughtful design and serious quality, this is it. So go treat yourself. You deserve it. Thanks for listening to Sex with Emily. On today's show, I'm joined by Bulletproof founder and headstrong author Dave Asprey. We're talking about effective ways to improve your sexual performance so you can become the best version of yourself. We get into the distinct health benefits of orgasm for men and women, including why men shouldn't always ejaculate. And hey, you might just develop a six pack of abs. The three basic elements that can inhibit or enhance human performance and how by hacking your sex life, you can influence your motivation in all aspects of your life to become the healthiest version of yourself. All this and so much more. Thanks for listening.

Look into his eyes. They're the eyes of a man obsessed by sex. Eyes that mock our sacred institutions. Bedroom eyes, they call them, in a bygone day. Hey, Emily, you got a boyfriend? Because my man e here, he just got his heart broken. He thinks you're kind of cute.

A girl's gotta have her stance.

Oh, my. Do women know about shrinkage? Isn't it common knowledge?

What do you mean, like laundry? It shrinks.

Can we not talk about sex so much? Are you kidding me?

Oh, my God, I feel so good.

Being bad feels pretty good. But you know, Emily's not the kind of girl you just play with.

You're listening to Sex with Emily. We're talking about sex, relationships and everything in between. For more information go to our website sexwithemily.com check out all the blogs we have there and our recent podcast. I think you guys will love this one. We have one called the Mask of Masculinity with Lewis Howes and if you haven't listened to the episode, we talk about one of my favorite themes, breaking through toxic masculinity and discovering the importance of the other V word vulnerability, which can actually be incredibly transformative. You guys would really like this episode so you can check it out on our site or wherever you are listening to the podcast. We love when you subscribe to the podcast. That's also fabulous. You can do an itunes or wherever you listen. We so appreciate it. It only takes a few seconds and you can also get more Sex with Emily on social it's all Sex with Emily across Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and you'll know the second a new episode is posted. Not to mention you really get to see what goes on at Sex with Emily and my personal life. It's a good time, so check it out and I can't wait to hear from you and message me and all those things on all the social media. I can't wait for you guys to hear this interview I did with Dave Asprey earlier this week. You may be familiar with his name or his Bulletproof brand or one of his New York Times best selling books like Headstrong. So I met Dave when I was co hosting Loveline a few years back and he was a guest on the show and we've stayed in touch as I've been on his Bulletproof Radio podcast and I've become a huge fan of his work, perhaps because we're both clearly on the same page about helping people be the best versions of themselves. I love how he marries science, energy and his exploration of the human race to demonstrate how changing your environment from the inside out will allow you to have full control of your biology and reach a state of high sexual performance. So Dave is his own guinea pig as he works to develop his work around biohacking and the mission behind it. Wait, let's stop there for a second. If you're not familiar with biohacking, you're not alone. Let me break it down for you so you know how I'm driven by helping you and inspiring you to involve your sex life, your relationships, your communication skills, all that stuff. And while there's always the basics, there's also some different ways to learn about your needs and your turn ons and how to communicate them to a partner. So that's why I always share tips and advice so you can really push the envelope, you know, to evolve sexually. So I suppose this is my version of biohacking, which simply put is just taking control of the environment around you and inside of you to implement effective changes. You know, I also love talking about sex hacks, which is like a close cousin to biohacking. You know, like ways to make your orgasm stronger, to enhance intimacy, and to strengthen your mind, body connection by really taking control of your environment and something within yourself. You know, biohacking. So now that we've defined it, here's the rest of the story. My conversation with Dave fuses science, sex and experimentation in a digestible and truly eye opening way that can't help but spark some new ways of approaching your sex life. So I really hope you guys enjoy this interview with the founder and CEO Bulletproof Dave Asprey. And I can't wait to hear your thoughts about the episode. I was on your podcast, so I became familiar. You sent me the books, I drank your coffee and then I was on your podcast for soon after that and we opened up and you said to me, so I didn't orgasm for 30 days, tell me what you think. Have you heard about that? And in my mind I'm thinking, I wasn't prepared for this. Like, I've heard about it. I've studied daoism a little, you know, daoist sex practices and I've studied Tao tantric sex. And I thought, wow, God, you know, tell me about it. We talked about it a little bit, but you kind of jumped over it because I was like, I can't imagine me telling my listeners on Sex with Emily, who for 13 years are texting me and sending questions because they're just happy if they can get laid, right, and they can have sex. And they. And so this was like a whole nother level, which again, it was more of like a, an intellectual thing. And then just like you, I'm always evolving and working on my sex life and you know, in my relationships. Just like I practice what I preach and what I'm learning. So I'm very much understanding now what I've studied, understanding what you're talking about. I've studied tantric and I've actually practiced with people. So I'm very new though to this and I've been wanting to kind of talk to my listeners about this. And we're going to get into everything that you do and you're Bulletproof and headstrong. But I want you to talk to me about the experience of. Because I feel like if anyone can make anyone do this, you could explain the benefits. When I. When I told a guy not to masturbate for 30 days or have an orgasm, they would just, like, stop listening. But I feel like you can explain this process about the power that orgasm and the energy that comes along with that has on men.

Oh, I'm so excited to get to talk about this.

You are the first person, and now you're the one podcast I just want to say that I listen to consistently. I've never said that to anyone. So you actually know it's true. Because I'm like, I don't listen to podcasts because I'm super busy, but I feel like you're the guy for the job. Open.

Wow.

That'S a high hurdle. And I'll do my best there. So it's funny, I just finished a chapter. I have a new book coming out in December, and there's a chapter on exactly this topic because. So we're wired with these three basic behaviors as human beings, and they go in order. And these actually come from what keeps every life form, whether you're a plant or an amoeba or a bacteria, alive. And our bodies are basically based on bacteria. Like, inside all of our cells are these ancient bacteria called mitochondria. And bacteria care about three things in this order. The first thing that matters most over anything in the world is run away from, kill, or hide from scary things. And you've got to do that right now, otherwise someone's going to eat you and it's game over. The second thing we care about is eat everything. And you eat everything because you starve within, like, a few days or a month, and then it's game over. And the third thing we care about, if those first two are handled, is have sex with everything else. Because if the species doesn't reproduce, it's game over. And, like, we're wired that way. So our bodies put huge amounts of energy into, like, you know, beating up or running away from or protecting ourselves from scary things, including, like, criticism and all sorts of things that aren't really life threatening, but that our body thinks is life threatening. And then we spend huge amounts of energy going, what will go on my plate next next time? Like, what? When am I going to eat next? And the energy that's left over is like, all right, can I bang that? To put it in the most crass.

Where can I put my penis? No, Right, right.

And so these are our big wells of energy that are not going towards, like, making the world a better place, not going towards bringing joy or creativity or love into our lives, any of that sort of stuff. They're primal needs that are artificially elevated in our consciousness to be most important. So if we can find a way to turn off those things or to harness that energy that goes towards reproducing species and put it back into our lives in order to do something that we chose to do instead of something that our biology chose for us to do, that that is one of the biggest upgrades you could possibly do. And you don't have to drink coffee or do any of these other headstrong upgrade things I talk about. And it's very different for men and women. And I came across this because it was. Actually, I've read all sorts of strange books about how do you get superpowers in human beings? And what are the outer limits of what our biology is capable of? Because that's at the core of biohacking. And I've studied in Tibet with meditation masters and looked at Taoism and things like that. And one of the Daoist practices is for men, it's that you actually don't ejaculate as frequently as you might. They don't tell you you don't have sex, they just tell you don't ejaculate. Right.

But men are like, well, yeah, but orgasm and ejaculation is. What are you talking about? Same thing. Or have sex and you have an orgasm when you have sex. And that would mean ejaculation.

It's pretty normal, right? I mean, that's how we're wired. And if you read the advanced Taoist text, they say, well, you can actually have an orgasm without ejaculation as a man or a woman. And like, okay, that's kind of interesting. But what really caught my attention, to be perfectly honest, and this was 10, 15 years ago, they say, here's the rule. If you really dig deep in Taoism, it was about, how do you live forever? They wanted immortality. And part of their immortality practice was, what do you do with sex? And for men, they said, there's an equation and it's your age in years -7 divided by 4, and that yields a number. So if you're. I think I was like 42 when I was doing this experiment. So 42 minus 7, whatever. That was 35.

Yeah. I did it for a friend of mine who's 38. It came out to 31. So, yeah, okay, right.

And so then it was basically only ejaculate every eight days if you want to maintain your health, but if you want to live forever, just ejaculate once every 30 days. And I'm like, that seems physically impossible.

Exactly. Right? You're like, what?

Right, but here's the hook. And they go, but make sure you keep your orgasm to less than an hour. And I'm like, I'm a dude. Like we're like 30 second orgasm, we're.

Pretty happy about it negatively over like months. Right, right.

Do you turn yourself inside out? How does that exactly work?

It's not even a thing. Right.

So I'm going to run an experiment because I'm a little skeptical here. And so for a year I tracked my daily happiness and just on a scale of 1 to 10, like how much do I like my life, my job, my relationships at home? Just like how good was today? And granted that's very subjective, but isn't it always subjective whether you like your life or not?

It is, right.

So I kind of created this graph and I also tracked how often did I have sex, how often did I ejaculate. And I came up with some really interesting findings about myself that I didn't know that mirrored what the Daoist said. And it turns out when I ejaculated just once every eight days, I actually liked my life better. And when I did ejaculate for about two to three days afterwards, I liked my life less. So they call this like an ejaculation hangover.

Right?

And like the Taoists will say a man or a woman walks away from sex undiminished. But I'm misquoting it terribly. But it takes something out of the man. In other words, it costs you something biologically because you're taking all of your hormone production, your prostaglandins, and you're taking those and you're like basically making ejaculate and you're using it. There's something called spermidine in there that's actually a potent anti inflammatory. And there's actually a whole body of study about like what does semen do from a health perspective. And it's like, wow.

So the thing is about, it's about the energy, right? So the men, the more they're expending the energy and they have an orgasm and they ejaculate. But I'm wondering, like, cause I do see the benefit, especially for men, I know it helps with focus, like let's talk about that. So you had more pleasure in your life, however, you measure happiness. Because everything that you do, Dave, gotta be honest. Like, can I do this every day for a year and be able to track that? If I did it for a week and I set up a journal, I'd be so proud of myself of every night. Right. I try. Like, my systems are way better than they used to be. But even for that, what you felt was in your relationship, trying and failing is not so bad. When you're like, oh, I don't want to ejaculate. And I do. But the benefits. How did that work with your sex life? Like, the quality of your sex life and your intimacy.

The quality of my sex life went up dramatically because this amazing thing happens when you don't ejaculate. You totally want to have more sex.

Right?

So what ended up happening is the frequency of sex goes up the longer you go without ejaculating, the more often you have sex. So I'm married. I have two young kids. Anyone who's married with two young kids knows you generally don't have sex very much. So it inc. Just because kids are like an anti sex thing. And what ended up happening was, especially when I was doing the 30 day experiments, by the way, publishing the data was kind of embarrassing. I'm like, oh, day 24, oops. How to start that experiment over.

Right, Exactly. Like so on day 24. Right. But over time.

Yeah.

I mean, and I don't know how much you. You've talked about this in your show since, and there's so much I know, but it's like. But now. So that was like 10 years ago or eight years ago, you did something like 42.

That was about five years ago.

Okay, five years ago. So now is it still something that's become part of your life? Like, you still think about it as like another resource in your body that you're like, you're not always going to.

We'll say I don't ejaculate unconsciously.

Okay.

So it's like you're sexually. But I'm going to say I wouldn't if I just, you know, flew to New York and back in 36 hours to be on the Dr. Oz show or something, which happened. Like, I'm not going to come back and then, you know, have sex because I miss my wife and ejaculate because I already took enough of a hit. I traveled across the country twice. I was in an airplane. I breathed bad air. Like, I'm tired, right? So when I'm at full power and have an ejaculate for A while I'll ejaculate. But will I have sex? Yeah, I'll have sex. But then sex becomes less about getting to ejaculation, more about having fun. And what does that do? That raises oxytocin, which is like the love hormone.

Exactly.

And the benefit for women in this whole deal is, well, the daoist studies and lots of other studies show that when women have regular orgasms, like your emotional intelligence goes up, your oxytocin levels go up and it's generally biologically really healthy for women to have regular orgasms. Now guys in this kind of practice can have orgasms. If you can figure out how to have an orgasm without ejaculating. I find that to be a challenging thing to do. But what I also found to be like off the charts, not even putting words to it. That thing about having an ejaculation for an hour or less or not ejaculation, sorry, Having an orgasm for an hour.

Or less through your full body. Right.

Yeah. I don't know how it's possible to start a stopwatch if you're going to do that.

Yeah. You're not going to be like, wait, it's coming, let me start exactly.

But after I can tell you at least 15, 20 minutes kind of times where I'm completely, I don't remind you, not ejaculating the whole time, that would be destructive. But essentially my abs hurt. I'm like, could I just be done? Seriously, I just need to stop. And literally growing a six pack from the intensity of an orgasm as like.

A nice six pack. You're like, it's the orgasm. That's all you gotta do nowadays. That would help you maybe in other fields, in other audiences.

What's your new program, Emily? You gotta six pack orgasms.

There's a whole abs in 15 minutes or less. But yeah, you got orgasm.

But like this happened.

I know.

So it's just, it's worth talking about.

Because we don't watch this guys. We don't. You don't. Guys don't talk about anything, so. But what they do talk about is they email me all the time, my listeners, 50% men, 50% women. But a lot of the questions I get asked, which is why I love that you're here and I wanted to bring you on because all the work that you do around biohacking and being the best performer in every area of your life, how do we become the best sexual performers? And so there's a lot of things I talk about when they're like, I Can't ejaculate or I can't stay hard or I'm too hard or I have no sex drive or low libido. And we just send people and I always say, get checked by your doctor and use certain medications. And I just feel like that's so limited, especially knowing what we know now and blending Eastern and west medicine and supplements, everything that you do, what you've done with Bulletproof and what you're doing now. So I would just love to kind of, kind of give some background to your work to Head Strong, which I loved. I'm like, I live two blocks from Erewhon, so I feel really lucky that I can kind of indulge. But I just want to give some history about and the work that you've done with biohacking. Let's just define biohacking and then kind of get into how that can help people be best performers sexually.

Oh, awesome. Biohacking is a field that I helped to create, kind of build a community around. It's become a movement. And the original definition from that first infographic was the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so that you have full control of your own biology. Now, from a sex perspective, let's see. Do you want to be able to get it up? When you want to be able to get it up? That would be control of your own biology. Do you want to be able to not ejaculate too quickly? That's control of your own biology. And that same body of knowledge, those same techniques can be, I want to get swole or I want to have a ton of energy or I want to pull an all nighter and, you know, perform open heart surgery or whatever. Like, it totally depends. I just want to come home from my commute and be with my family. All of those are control of our own energy, of our own biology. And the techniques are always the same. And the two big things that apply to sex are make sure that the hardware, the energy production in the body is working. I mentioned these little mitochondria that are worried about dying, worried about eating.

You gotta make mitochondria sexy. It matters. Yeah, right?

Yeah. Like all the things that happen both for the woman and the man in insects, or say for women and men in sex, because it doesn't have to be a woman and a man, but those things are all driven by electrons in the body. Like we're powered by the same things that power our iPhones. We just happen to, instead of plugging into the wall, we eat Food, and we breathe, and then we combine those. But if you suck at combining food and air, instead of getting the erections or the other kinds of stimulation that you want, all these electrons that should have gone to your performance in bed, in the boardroom, in wherever else you're executing in your life, they can go to inflammation. You get muffin top and you get brain inflammation, and you're tired and you're cranky. So if you can do something in your diet or in your lifestyle to turn down inflammation, to turn up energy production, you can put that energy to work in the bedroom. And then all of a sudden, wow, I've got, like, a ton of. I feel really good. Like, this was a really energetic lovemaking session. I was able to provide more pleasure for my partner. Like, I had a better time, and maybe I had more self control. And I was able to go for 45 minutes. And at the end of this, the ultimate act of willpower for a guy is saying, all right, Even though every fiber in my being is screaming at me to ejaculate, I'm just not going to do it, because I know that all that screaming is going to go back into me, and I'm gonna use that energy for something else. There's masses of energy that we expend this way kind of unconsciously as guys. And I'm not saying don't have sex. I'm not saying don't be intimate. I'm saying, if you can get to that end and be like, all right, this is even harder than skipping a meal or doing an intense workout. I'm just gonna. I'm gonna take a deep breath, and I'm just gonna say no.

Yeah, what do you do? Yeah, I'm not gonna do it in this moment. You're gonna breathe into it. There's practices, right? And then.

Do you want the shortcut for how to do that?

Dude, please. Yes. Hack sex for me. Do it for everyone.

Okay, so if it's up to you whether or not you're going to ejaculate and you're a guy, there will come a voice in your head, and this is the voice of your mitochondria screaming at you. At the beginning of lovemaking, you'll say, all right, I'm not going to ejaculate today. And by the time you're getting close, you will have created a thousand reasons why it's such a good idea to ejaculate right now. And you'll believe every one of them, because that's the way we're Wired. This is how our biology gets inside our head. It's part of what's inside our head. And it'll make you go, you know.

Just this once, just today, I'll start tomorrow. Right?

Yeah, exactly. So if you're in charge, you're probably going to make bad decisions some of the time. So what you do is you just ask your partner, hey, I'm trying this thing out. And so I want you to decide if I'm going to or not. And as soon as you take yourself out of the decision loop so it's no longer your decision, it becomes fantastically easy to make the decision because there was no decision to make. And of course, some partners are going to like that more than others. And for a lot of women.

Right. Well, because you have accountability then, right? You're like, I'm trying to do this thing. Can you help me and support me in this?

And also, if you think it's a good idea, you can say yes. So it's not like, just tell me no. It's like you decide and then you don't have to decide. And then you'd be like, I think it's a good idea, but your partner is going to be no. Except. And I've talked to a lot of couples privately who just approached me about this. For a lot of women, a lot of women are sort of raised like, it's your job to be responsible for your partner's pleasure and thus their orgasm. So it can be really intimidating for a woman to be in that position. And she's like, well, but if I say no, am I a bad person? And this isn't a logical, though. These are, like, emotional.

Exactly. This is what. Yeah, it's so important to get to this because it is true that we don't. Women are. And I was hoping this has changed because, like, the way I was raised and where I got into this was it was about pleasing the man. Sex was not about my pleasure at all. It was that I felt successful if he orgasm and he had a good time. And that would therefore make me believe that I had a good time. But the way we're reversing this also is that it takes pressure off women so women can really get into their bodies by him. By him not having to ejaculate, but understanding that mentality that it can still be great for both of you is a whole twist of their mind. Like, it's completely different than what we've been taught still.

It's completely different. And I mean, I've had a lot of guys say it like, like I would die if I did that. And like that's just your mitochondria talking.

Exactly.

What they're telling you is the species will die. And that's not a true statement.

How many times did it take? Do you feel like it wasn't as bad? How many days in a row? And then we are getting move on from this in a second.

So I can tell you that doing eight days at first was like, was really a challenge. And doing 30 days was. That took a couple of tries. Because after like 27 days you're like, what's going on? But I can tell you my frequency of sex increases the longer I go without ejaculating. So I was having a lot of sex, lots of oxytocin. And I was like full of energy. Just like really full of energy. And then it gets to the point where finally 30 days, this is great. The surprising effect then for me was that 15, 20 minute whole body orgasm thing. But that won't happen if you don't have enough energy in your body. Like if you're running on an empty fuel tank. And that's why the body of work, the lowest hanging fruit for people. Of those three things that are holding us back, it's what am I going to do for my next meal? That voice in your head, let's shut that up. Because who wants to have sex when you're hungry? No one's going to do that.

No are anxious because stress. Here's the other thing, Dave, is that stress is one of the biggest killers of our sex drive. Right? Couples are saying, I don't want to have sex because I'm too tired, I'm too stressed, I'm too anxious. You know, and I've talked about all these things. You meditate, you relax. What kind of medication are you taking? You should talk to your doctor. But let's talk about all that, like what can people do, like to kind of get that energy? Because if you're not eating healthy, you're not in a good place with your body, you're not going to be able to perform sexually.

If you can find a way to get ketones into your body. And ketones happen when you fast for four days, when you go on a very, very low carbohydrate, high fat diet. And like the bulletproof diet was about how to do that. Right. And head strong is about how to upregulate the mitochondrial function. There's an ingredient in bulletproof coffee called brain octane that puts you in ketosis, the Reason you care about ketosis is simply this. You can make energy from sugar or you can make energy from fat. And we're biologically wired to do one or the other. If you use brain octane, you have energy from fat and energy from whatever sugar is in your body. And now you have more energy and you can go into the bedroom and you're. Your brain works all the way and your body works all the way and you don't get dips. So you're like, I was tired. Now you don't even have to have the coffee, just put some brain octane on your dinner. And you're like, I have more energy afterwards. So it's just up. Regulate your energy and maybe you have some other meal, whatever it is. But this for me is just a reliable thing. I have more energy than I used to. So, number one, add on the energy. Number two, let's turn off the stress. And there's so many different stress management practices. The one that's probably most useful that I found is called heart rate variability training. And this takes a relatively cheap piece of equipment. There's clinical grade stuff that we would do at bulletproof labs in Santa Monica where there's chest straps and all. But the one I'm talking about, you can buy it on Amazon. It's called HeartMath. And I've been advised to those guys, there's no financial relationships or anything. It's just something I use with my executive clients. You clip it on your ear and you look at your phone and it tells you the spacing between your heartbeat. And you play this dumb little game where it tells you, breathe in, breathe out. And when you do it right, the light turns green on the phone. And when you do it wrong, the light stays red. And what it's showing you is how to take your body out of a stress mode into something called parasympathetic mode, or rest and reset mode. So once you learn how to play this game, you don't need the phone anymore. So you're laying there in bed and you're like, all right, I'm getting kind of close here, and I've decided I'm not going to ejaculate. So what you do is you just do that same kind of breath and you do the thing that takes you out of fight or flight mode. Because I'm telling you right before you ejaculate, your body is convinced the species will die and do not ejaculate. This turns that off. So you're laying there like, okay, I'm Going to close. You breathe in, breathe out and do the little thing. You feel it in your chest. But the game teaches you this thing. Otherwise you could do like a compassionate meditation for five years in a cave and learn it or something. That just takes too long. That's the shortest hack. So I was able to have way more control there just by getting control of that part of my nervous system that was trying to convince me that the world was going to end if I didn't ejaculate. Because that was not a true statement, but I sure believed it at the time. Right.

Your world's gotten a lot better ever since too, right?

Yeah. Right. And so this is it. It's like breathing combined with consciously moving out of fight or flight through heart rate variability and just having more energy in the first place, because more energy goes to more willpower. And Headstrong, which is, I think, one of my best books.

Tell my listeners who haven't heard of Head Strong or read Headstrong, talk about that New York Times bestseller. I'm very proud of all your work. Tell me.

Oh, thank you. Headstrong was about how do you have more energy in your brain and in your body? Because energy drives willpower. And if you want to talk about an example of when willpower matters most, it's in the bedroom. You're like, I'm not going to ejaculate right now. That is one of the most extreme uses of willpower, at least as a man, that you can possibly have. And so in order to upregulate that, it's all about energy metabolism. So I wrote this book saying, how do you have more willpower? What is the effect of food and environment on willpower? And I wrote it as an advice book. So here's the science. Here's what to do. And it hit the New York Times science bestseller list right next to Homo deus and sapiens and all these other books that were like baller books. I was blown away because I never expected that to happen. But it's about 100,000 people have read it. It's getting printed in multiple languages now. And it's not about sex, but it's about energy. And sex is about energy. And what I'm just talking about here, what I want people to understand is one of the ways you can double the amount of energy in your body is turn off hunger, cravings. And then what if you could get control of that? I'm going to die if I don't have sex right now thing all of a sudden, like two thirds of the energy your body spends on survival goes back into the quality of your life.

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Can we just go back to, like, basic, like, biology? Like in western medicine, we're going to get put on different meds, we're going to get. We're just not going to give them the whole picture. So I just want a basic bottom, a lesson for my listeners about that.

We have these parts of our cells that used to be bacteria that are responsible for our ability to do things. We like to say that 2 billion years ago, if you remember seventh grade biology, that we were these cells and somehow we harnessed these bacteria to become our power plants. But the real story is that 2 billion years ago, there was some cell floating around and these bacteria were like, hey, if we move in and take over, that's our mobile petri dish. How cool is that? And that was like the first multicellular organism. And now we have these humans walking around. But we have many times more ancient bacteria in our bodies than we do cells in our bodies. And they drive our decision making. The other thing that these mitochondria do, we call them power plants, but they also make hormones. People don't know this, but all of the hormone production in your body is powered by the electricity they make. And they directly make something called pregnenolone, which is the mother hormone that turns into DHEA, that turns into testosterone and estrogen and progesterone. So 48% of people under age 40 have what they call early onset mitochondrial dysfunction. This means that you should be at the prime of your life when you should be getting some frequently and have a high sex drive and everything working right. But half of us don't have the raw power it takes to do that because we broke our biology by staying up too late at night, by eating the wrong foods, by too much stress, probably, who knows, too much social media, all sorts of things like that. And the other half of US under age 40 actually have functioning mitochondria. But we might still not have good hormones and good sex life, but at least we have the raw power to do it. And everyone over age 40 has mitochondrial dysfunction. We call it aging. And my plan to live to 180 years old is really straightforward. I'm going to make energy like I was 25 years old. Except when I was 25 years old, I weighed, like, almost 100 pounds more than I do now. So I'm going to make energy like I should have Made it when I was 25, and I'm going to do that when I'm 125 and the technology is understood. We didn't know this 20 years ago. We know how that system works. And with the food you eat, with the way you sleep, the way you exercise, you can take control of these things. And so before people go on a medication for this, my argument would be, well, maybe we could take a look at some of these lifestyle things, like improving the quality of your sleep, because when you sleep better, your testosterone goes up and. Testosterone for women and men. Testosterone drives desire in women as much as it does in men. Different amounts of it, but you got to have it. And are you getting enough fat? That's a precursor in your diet to testosterone. It turns out cholesterol is what turns into these hormones, not corn oil. It doesn't work like that. You go through and you say, what are these things I can do? And then how do I address blood flow? Because get this, if there's no blood flow in the penis, there's also no blood flow in the brain. If you are under age 40 and you're having a hard time getting it up or you have low sex drive, this is a sign of a much bigger problem in your life. Because healthy animals can reproduce, Unhealthy animals can't reproduce. If you tell yourself you're healthy and you can't get it up, I got news for you. You're not healthy.

Well, exactly. Because if they're. Sex drive and sexual function are like such reliable barometers of health that if you have any problems there, you should be looking at this bigger picture here.

If you can't function, and I suggest go ahead and get a full hormone panel.

Get a full thing. Because you don't go to. They're not talking about your mitochondria. I get that you've made. And I've actually been and become fascinated with it and everything that you're doing and supplements. But where do they start? Hormones, I think, is where you would start.

Yeah. In fact, if there are problems for women or men, just like I'm too tired to have sex. Like you're supposed to when things are working right. You know what? I was too tired to have sex. And then I saw someone naked, and I was like, oh, my God, I'm not tired anymore. I'm gonna go have sex. And if you're not getting that response anymore, okay, maybe you're just tired because you've been working way too much or whatever else it's possible you had a heavy workout. You really are t. You just need more sleep. But if this is a regular occurrence in your life, and it doesn't just happen after a particular stressful situation, you've got something bigger going on, and it comes down to your hormones. So you get a full hormone panel, and they're going to tell you, how much testosterone do you have, how much estrogen do you have, how much progesterone. And it's different for women and men because women have basically a monthly swing that's very predictable in progesterone levels, for instance. So if you're having particularly fertility problems, which is the subject of my very first book, what you end up doing is you get, like a saliva test. And you get your saliva every day for a month to see what your monthly curve looks like. But for most of us, just a blood test that tells you, what are my hormone levels? What do they look like right now? When I was 26, I had this done. My testosterone was lower than my mom's.

That's amazing. Your whole story, I mean, right? You healed yourself from that?

Oh, yeah.

At 26, when it's supposed to be super high, it was lower than your mom's, because what was your life like then? Let's talk about Dave. 20, almost 20 years ago.

Let's see. When I was 26, I made $6 million at the company that held Google's first server. And I lost it when I was 28. So I haven't been, like, rolling in money my whole life. I've been working with a paycheck and mortgage payments and all that. But I did have two years of extreme wealth, which was nice, because at the time, I'm like, my brain isn't working. I bought disability insurance. I'm like, I can't remember stuff anymore. Something's wrong.

And I was not in a happy relationship, to be perfectly honest. I was convinced that if I could only make $10 million, then I'd be happy. Like, how stupid was that? Like, if $6 million doesn't do it, 10 million won't.

Right? So many of us are chasing that next thing, that 6 million, 10 million filter mean. And then we'll be happy, then we'll be successful, and that's just not the way that life works.

My whole next book is about this, and the data is really clear. Happy people are more successful, but financially successful people are not more happy.

So true. Money does not buy happiness, which seems so cliche when you say that, but this is. This is now you actually, of course, have the data behind it. It really doesn't. It's not about that. So anyway, so you realize then you weren't healthy and then you started to make these changes.

But my normal doctor was unable to help. Literally. They couldn't order the right lab panels, the ones I asked for. We don't even know how to do that. And besides, it doesn't matter. I'm like, that's weird. So I fired my doctor. I learned all this stuff over the course of four years of studying. And because I had all the money I needed at the time, I'm like, I'll just buy $500 of supplements every night. I don't care. Anything that I think might be useful, I'm just going to try it. And I became really experimental because I lost hope in medicine. And when I went back to a doctor, I went back to a doctor who specialized in treating very old people to make them younger. And I'm like, you can do my hormone panels. And he's like, you actually look like an old person. Let's see, you're high risk of stroke and heart disease, like very high risk, actually. You're pre diabetic, you have arthritis that you've had since you were 14 in your knees. And now you have the equivalent of senile cognitive dysfunction. Like your brain doesn't work that way.

2.6.

I'm like, I'm old. So I started hanging out with people three times my age. And I ended up running an anti aging nonprofit research group. I'm still, I think, on the board at least, or maybe chairman today in Silicon Valley called the Silicon Valley Health Institute. So I get to meet all these luminaries in the field looking at reversing aging. I'm like, I'll reverse my aging when I'm 26, 28, 30, 35. And what I found was that I got on top of my biology. But there's this whole level of performance that's there for all of us. And we never feel it. We don't know it's there because we're aging slowly, this death by a thousand cuts. And we suck as human beings at going, you know What? Today I'm 0.1% weaker than I was yesterday. We don't feel that. But over the course of five years, like what just happened? Maybe I'm a little bit. And by the time you notice you got to dig out of a hole. And if you address it right now, you're like, I didn't just not lose the 0.1%. I gained 10% of energy, and I need an hour less sleep to get restored. And I'm able to go out and do these things that I've been dreaming of. That's what motivates me to do bulletproof. Because if someone had told me this when I was 20 years old, do you know how different my life would have been?

Exactly. I mean, that's why I love the work that you're doing. And the thing is, how do we guide people, though? Because if you do go to your western medicine doctors, they're not going to be telling you this still. It would still say, go on this hormone replacement or take progesterone, take testosterone, which sometimes is okay, but it's not always the healthy decision. And they wouldn't have all the information that you have. So how do you balance all this out and find out what's right for you when it's limiting what people know? What our doctors know today, the first.

Thing you can do is get your mitochondria working right, because they're gonna help you make more hormones. And it's like, okay, do the things that give you some ketones. You don't have to be on this. Especially for women, if you're on a ketosis, a keto diet all the time, it tends to mess up your gut bacteria. And women tend to lose sleep quality and hormone regulation relatively quickly. So you can do that, but you need to eat some carbs and then stop eating. Eat and stop eating. You can cycle, which is the recommendation in the bulletproof diet, or you can just add some the way I do with the brain octane oil. And either way, start there and eat less stuff that disrupts your hormones. And there's a roadmap on the bulletproof website. It's a gift. There's no cost or anything associated with it, but it's basically the entire bulletproof diet book on one page infographic. You print it out, put it on your fridge, it says, eat more of these foods. These foods might cause problems for you. They might be okay. And these foods just suck. Don't eat them.

If you do that right, you're win. What are the common foods that you see that people are eating that are just like, wrong? That you're like, no, cut this.

Now here's the number one food. And it's probably not what you think. I would say you probably think it would be like gluten or margarine or something. It's actually fried stuff. Yeah, it's so bad when you fry things, you damage the oil. You can't make hormones out of damaged oils. And the amount of inflammation in your body from one meal of fried foods. I don't care if they're fried Brussels sprouts at your favorite Paleo restaurant or it's French sprouts.

You can't do fried Brussels sprouts. Really?

Okay, if it's fried, it's fried cheese sticks or Brussels sprouts. It doesn't matter. And that actually causes 24 hours of inflammation in your vascular system, the thing that brings blood to your sex organs, whether you're a man or woman. And guess what? Smoking only does that for four hours. So I will tell you straight up, smoking a cigarette, one cigarette, is better for you than eating fried vegetables or fried calamari or whatever fried stuff you're gonna eat at the restaurant. Next time, get it baked instead. It's not that big of a deal, but this will actually protect your vascular system in a major way. It's a small change. And I know you might love your fried whatever. I don't care if you love it. You probably love getting laid more.

What are some other sex hacks that are, like, some foods or some of your supplements or plans that could help people? Like, today, Like, I. Okay, I. I hear what you're saying. I don't know if I'm gonna get the orgasm thing down in 30 days. I'll work on that. But what can we do now? Cause I think for couples, too, if one's doing it and the other isn't, how can couples work together?

Well, there's a lot of relationship stuff on couples. But if you decide you're gonna try this stuff that we just talked about at the beginning around, all right, we're going to see what our sex frequency looks like if the guy.

Doesn'T ejaculate as frequently. If both partners are like, let's experiment with this for a week. I promise you, you'll have some fun in the bedroom with that one. And even if you utterly fail at the experiment, at least you had fun with it, right? Like, there's very little downside to that. But when it comes to actually having more energy for sex, one of the things, it's a supplement. And now this is a thing I make, but I make supplements for a reason. And so it's called ketoprime. And this is an unknown compound that's part of how your cells make energy. And you suck on these little lozenges that taste kind of like a sour can. But this allows your body to make energy the way it's supposed To. It's the thing you need to take food and air and then to turn them into energy again. So even if your system doesn't work very well, it's a patch for about four to eight hours. You suck on one of these things. Do it an hour or so before sex, and you'll be like, you know what? I just have more energy. I feel more like myself now. And it's not a stimulant. There's no herbs. There's nothing like that. It's literally the compound you need to make energy. It's called Keto Prime. It's on the bulletproof website. That's one thing. And there's another thing that's in the cookbook, and it's called Bulletproof. Get some Ice Cream. And this came out, my first book, 1300 references in five years. To write it about how do you turn fertility on in women and men? My wife was infertile when I met her. She's a medical doctor. So we did all this research and put together the thing that allowed her to get pregnant at 39 and 42.

Without IVF or anything like that. And today she's like a fertility consultant for celebrities and CEOs and things like that. What we did for that, that was particularly effective was this ice cream. And it's got, believe it or not, raw egg yolks in it, but it doesn't taste like that. Real ice cream always had that. And instead of milk or cream, you actually blend in some butter, and you put in the spraying octane oil in it, and you blend it up, and it's like the richest, creamiest, smoothest ice cream you've ever tried. I mean, like, really good.

Okay.

And here's why it's called get some Ice Cream. Because you eat this, and about an hour later, your body gets a signal that says, you know what? I've got everything necessary to make a baby.

Come on.

All the raw ingredients. Let's go try. And it's called get some. Cause it works better than vodka. Seriously, Right?

Okay.

Like, make it for your significant other and just wait an hour and just see what happens. And they'll be like, you know, I just. I have.

Can I get it? Erewhon. Where can I get it? Bulletproof Cafe.

We make it in the Bulletproof Cafe. You can make it at home. The recipe's on the bulletproof website. Search for bulletproof ice cream, whatever. And it's relatively simple to make. You blend it in your blender and you put it in an ice cream, make a little $75. Like a Cuisinart little frozen bowl thing. And it's the most decadent dessert. But it's more about what happens when the body's like, I got what I needed. The other thing is simple, like fish oil or krill oil. These are associated with fertility forever. And most people don't take that stuff. And it works really well. So these are basic biological things.

Dave, I'm gonna have you answer. We get so many questions from listeners, and this one I thought you could really help with. Hi, Emily. My boyfriend, domestic partner. Steve and I are going on six years together. Steve and I are best friends and extremely close. We tell each other everything, love spending every possible second together, and only cheat on each other with food. We're experiencing some disruption in the relationship because lately I haven't been in the mood for sexual. And I can't pinpoint the exact reason because it could be one of many. I had a hard time shutting down my brain. Sometimes I feel uncomfortable in my body. I'm sure I'm not putting myself in the mood for sex. We also recently moved to New City, but I'm focused on the feelings I'm having within myself. After listening to several of your episodes, you really helped expand mine on how to approach this conversation with Steve. But I think a lot of it has to do with me and my mentality. My last relationship ended because we became better friends and lovers. I'm afraid my situation has a lot to do with my mind and not being in the right mental space to allow someone else to literally inside. Any thoughts or advice would be amazing. Thank you. What would you say to this, Dave? She's not in the mood for sex. Low libido. I just feel like there's so many other things going on than just like, I don't want sex.

You know, it sounds like for this listener, that there's a lot of cognitive stuff going on. And here's the interesting thing. Through the work that led to Head Strong and all that, I am absolutely convinced. And part of this is also just neuroscience and running the 40 years Zen neuroscience thing, there's a voice in your head that actually isn't you. Right? It is that ancient mitochondrial system telling you to keep the petri dish alive based on their priorities, not yours. And so a lot of times we have guilt and shame and things like that that come because we think, like, why am I having those thoughts? Like, why do I have these things? Like, it's my fault. But here's the thing. You have something that's working to keep your body alive using simple rules that's working against your best interests. And that voice in your head, the inner critic, it's actually that it's not you. And the fact that it's present doesn't change. But now you can drop the shame and guilt about that. And for this listener, she's already identified that she's having these racing thoughts and all that stuff. The racing thoughts are there because there's some part of her nervous system that feels like if she goes into her body and feels the feelings, because sex is all about feelings. There's nothing about thinking that if she does that, it's not safe. Right. And the fear thing is never you deciding it's fear. Fear is a feeling that happens before you can think that something is fearful. So the feelings are happening from that. And I would suggest doing something like emdr. Eye movement dissociative, was it response. It's a kind of therapy that's very fast. And what you do is you go in and you sit down with the therapist and usually one or two sessions and they move your eyes until your brain goes into this weird reset.

Isn't it trauma? Like, isn't it more with trauma?

It can be with trauma, but it turns out every fear is based on trauma. But you can have sexual abuse kind of trauma, which is a big use for that stuff. But you can also just have a trauma around sometime in your childhood. You learn that it's not safe to go into your feelings. You have to think about it. And a lot of people spend their whole life, including me, until I was about 30, I was like all about what's going in my head and everything below the neck. It's like that's all just noise and you should just ignore all that.

Right.

For your listener who asked that great question, here is something that is shocking, just shocking at turning on libido. And it is having someone take care of you. And for the vast majority of women, I'm pretty sure that washing socks and doing dishes are absolutely not turn ons. In fact, it's the same for men. So there are times when you're at a point in your life where self care involves actually accepting help for things that you really don't like. And if you're at a place in your relationship, in your life where you can even once a week have someone come in and help out at the things that you find most drudgery, there's actually really good evidence that is going to increase your libido. And it may be something as simple as your partner cooking you dinner. But quite often it might just be like, you know what? But between my commute, my job, and all the household tasks that just by virtue of tradition that I've been tasked with because I'm a woman, because I was raised that I'm a good person, if I vacuum all my own floors every day, or whatever programming you have, that stuff sucks your sex life. And for entrepreneurs like you and me, we can always do more, no matter what. And for a lot of listeners like that, even if you have a day job, the odds are you have a side gig at this point, you're probably thinking, I should be driving an Uber right now, whatever it is. Because since you could always do more, and if you allow yourself to always do more and you don't prioritize self care, your libido will crush. It'll just crash. And what you want to be able to do then is figure out, all right, what are the things in my life that suck the most energy, that make me feel least cared for, and how do I get help on those things? And for many of us, asking for help is an admission of weakness. And this isn't about weakness. This is about asking for someone to care for you and for women more than men. But for both of us, just biologically, knowing that you are cared for is an incredible aphrodisiac.

I hope you guys enjoyed the interview with Dave Asprey. I find him fascinating. And if you want to find more about the Bulletproof lifestyle and his book Headstrong, you can check it all out@Bulletproof.com and you can also find more about it and all the links to his social and his books on our website. Oh, also, you guys, Bulletproof Labs open in Santa Monica, California. This is open to the public. And think of labs as a place to help you achieve the highest state of physical and cognitive performance, AKA labs to help you kick ass. You can check it out@bulletprooflabs.com so thanks everyone for listening. Thanks to my amazing team, Ken, Jamie, our volunteers, Shannon and Jenny, producer Lark and Michael. And thanks, everyone for listening. Was it good for you? Text ask Emily to 797-979.

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