Ep #027 | How to Reverse Aging, Prevent Disease and Improve Health with Biohacking

In this episode of the mindvalley Show, I bring you the legendary biohacker Dave Asprey. Dave is the original godfather of biohacking and one of the smartest men in the world when it comes to amplifying the potential of our body and our health. So I've been learning a ton from Dave ever since 2016 when we became friends. And I was delighted to be able to get him on stage at mindvalley and then record this interview just for you. In this interview, Dave is going to go through some pretty controversial topics. Now, we did not want to play nice. We, we did not want to tiptoe around topics, just have an open mind. Maybe you'll find loopholes in what he's saying. Maybe some of it might influence you. You're going to hear him also speak about other aspects of health that we can move towards so that we live our best lives and what we need to avoid. We'll be talking about why meat is so important and what men need to do to stay lean and fit. We'll explore new methodologies of reversing aging, like full body stem cell treatments. We'll discuss, as Dave calls it, stem cells in your penis or vagina, or as medical doctors call it, the P shot or the O shot. And before we begin, I just want to let you know that Dave's new program, Smarter, Not Harder, is now part of mindvalley membership. So if you're a mindvalley member, go and check it out. You're going to learn so much about how to optimize your health and how to live long, longer. And if you're new to mindvalley, you can sign up for a very low fee, get access to 100 of the best transformative programs out there, including Dave Asprey's program, and all available@mindvalley.com now let's get started with this interview with Dave Asprey. What I really want to talk about is Dave's most controversial ideas. And there are certain things that I think we have come to believe about our biology, our body, our daily practices, which in my private conversations with Dave Asprey, he said, well, that's absolute nonsense based on the science, based on what data is showing us, this is a false idea and it's actually causing people to get sicker. And one of the things I'm going to ask you, Dave, is to explain this chart. It's a chart that shows the, the average American lifespan. Now you're American. And this chart shows that in the last three years, the lifespan of the average American plummeted by almost three years, while the lifespan of other people living in Western countries across Europe continued to increase. So mind you, this is not just Covid it plummeted in America by three years. Today, Americans die three years earlier than the average European. And so obviously what we think we know about our health, something is off. And let's start with perhaps your thoughts on why this might be so.

The US has the least environmental regulations of any developed country right now. The EPA only tests pesticides and herbicides for their effect on one bug, bees. So they will sell pesticides that destroy life, all life, as long as it doesn't affect bees. Bees don't touch dirt. So glyphosate, which has been absolutely saturating the US over the last 25 years, it gets incorporated into your cell membranes, into your collagen, and it stops your body from working on multiple different fronts. It's a carcinogenic, but at levels that are allowable in the US actually, 300 times below the allowable level. Earthworms get seizures. So in the US you are allowed to decimate life in order to grow crops more effectively, to save money on weeding, because chemical companies have absolutely infiltrated the US government and made regulations that allow and sometimes even require absurd levels of chemicals.

So.

So Americans have a higher toxin burden than Europeans because European governments, by and large have been protecting their citizens from glyphosate and other toxins. Another one, atrazine, that's allowed in the US but not in Europe. It makes frogs into hermaphrodites at levels that are allowable. I wouldn't drink American tap water if I were you.

Now, do you see change happening here.

In the U.S. yeah.

Are there any talks at the government level about changing American policy and following more of the regulations that are established here in Europe?

Well, in the US the most important policies we have are that the drug companies need to make more money. And the drug companies and the chemical companies actually come from the same roots because the drugs are made out of chemicals and they have the same owners. So in the U.S. no, we're right. Now, until we fix some structural problems in governance, I don't really see how the US is going to fix this. What they're doing is they're saying, worry about carbon capture. Meanwhile, we're going to saturate you with chemicals that mean you won't be alive or your kids won't be alive by the time carbon becomes a real problem.

And then sell you the drugs to get rid of the Diseases that America's awful food policy are actually putting in your body.

Exactly. I'm not saying that carbon isn't an issue. In fact, I was the first. I wrote the first $50,000 check into what became Elon Musk's hundred million dollar X prize for carbon capture. I know you're involved with the X prize as well, so I think it's an issue that's just a 60 to 100 year issue. The chemical pollution is a much shorter term problem.

It's literally killing us.

It is literally killing us. And it's coming to Europe. The companies are infiltrating, they're doing treaties and things like that so that they can spray more and more of this stuff. You guys don't want it here in Europe.

Europe, right. And here's an example of how it's coming to Europe. So if you look at Brexit, right, one of the press articles I read from the pro Brexit group was Europe has to stop telling Brits how to classify their bananas. Because Europe actually had really tight regulation, even on bananas. But there's a reason for this regulation. So the pro Brexit crowd was saying these regulations are making it hard for farmers to grow crops. No, these regulations were ensuring that the crops that were being produced, which are not by farmer Brown and his small little farm and his five pigs and his cow, but huge multinationals follow certain regulations so that poisons are not going in our body, right? So Britain, by removing itself from the eu, is actually about to make its people sicker. Because EU regulation is really, really, really, really pro consumer. It protects us. And so we got to watch out for this. So I know that as entrepreneurs we often anti regulation, but there's regulation that's good and there's regulation that's bad. Like for example, if you have a building and you gotta meet the fire code so your employees are safe, that's good regulation. It keeps people safe. Before that, in cities like New York, a lot of people would die when a fire broke out because they couldn't get out of their building. So it's really important that we don't fall for the politicians who are saying, let's dismantle all regulation because these regulations keep us safe. Dave, I find, and I'm curious to know your thoughts on this. Every time I go to America, I dread that experience because in one week I put on a pound, I weigh myself every single day. And I find that if I spend two weeks in the United States, even if I'm eating the exact same foods I'm eating here in Europe. I put on a pound a week. When I come back to Europe, I immediately start shedding weight. Here in Europe, I drink very little. I eat a ton of bread. I love carbs. I love the pasta. Here, I do not put on weight. As soon as I set foot in any state in the United States, I start getting bloated.

When you go to the US Almost all restaurants are buying from one single company called Cisco Foods, and they buy pretty much the same stuff. So you go to all these restaurants that have different flavors, but they're all selling you the same things. The US has allowed a huge number of artificial flavors, artificial colorings, and other compounds in foods that are illegal. So you think you're getting a French fry in the US but it doesn't have the same ingredients. Even, say, from McDonald's. The list of ingredients is entirely different. In Europe, it's going to have some kind of oil that's probably not good for you, and it's going to have some salt and some potatoes. And in the US There's a huge long list of things, and they do that to drive costs down or to make it more addictive. So the reason is you think you're eating the same food, but you're not. There's a lot more chemicals in American food. On top of that, while you are surrounded by pesticides and herbicides at much higher levels, the water quality in the US Is lower. And what's going on there is you're not actually putting on a pound of fat. You're putting on a pound of inflammation. It's hard to put a pound of fat on in one week. You can do it, but it's really hard. So what's going on there is your cells. Instead of turning that air and food into electricity and heat, they. They were turning it into inflammation. And then as soon as you came back here and you cleared the toxins, then you felt better. One of the reasons that I can live in the US And I can be as lean and fit as I am is that I upregulated all of my detox pathways so that I can handle the toxic environment that the government in the US Created for us.

So that's where I think we may disagree. I don't think the government in the US Is creating this. I think it's voting behavior. Americans have this weird, crazy, irrational idea that government regulation is bad, that socialism is coming.

Hold on. Did you just. You still believe that voting makes a difference in the U.S. yes, it does.

I actually believe it that.

Wow, it's very European of you, Vishen.

Yeah, I actually sincerely believe that voting makes a difference in the United States. Right, in the United States, they are good politicians and they are politicians like Trump who rail against government regulation. All I'm saying is this. We're not talking about the grand scheme of things, but when it comes to food, government regulation is important because if you do not have government regulation, that's coming from, well, from intelligent people who are governments, who are consulting with intelligent experts like yourself, so that we can limit pesticides, we can limit some of the stuff that's making us sicker. If we take out that regulation, the big food companies, because of their algorithm, move downwards towards greater consumption but lower nutritional density.

Vishen, I've had the opportunity when I was CEO of Bulletproof, to meet with the CEOs of most of the big food companies like Coca Cola and Pepsi and Kraft and companies like that. And the questions are always the same. How do we innovate? Because we have this problem. If we increase the cost of our product by half a cent, then our competitors will sell something slightly cheaper and Americans will buy that, always. That's because there's a lot of poverty in the us, way more than people recognize. We have good public relations in the US, but right now, 50% of the population couldn't come up with $1,000 for an emergency. They just simply can't. They're all living right at the edge of poverty. And that's not a good situation because that's what drives poor quality in food. So the problem with regulation in the U.S. though, Vishen, is that companies a long time ago realized that they could use regulation as a way of creating artificial barriers to entry. And they do it all the time. So when I was starting at Bulletproof, so I'm going to put normal ingredients on labels. Oh, no. So you spend a quarter million dollars later to make sure that you got all of the words right. That wasn't necessarily about safety, that was about creating barriers. And when you're doing something like buying a mattress in the us, a chemical company lobbied the state of California to require 6 pounds of flame retardant, even in children's mattresses, because children smoke in bed. And now they guarantee to market forever, because once California mandates something, all the other states will follow it, because manufacturers do that. And those disrupt our children's endocrine system.

And so the question is, who is to blame here? Is it the company or is it the government? I'd say it's America's insane Lobbying.

Lobbying is a major.

Which is a form of corruption. It's a legalized form of corruption.

It is.

And that's where I'm just a bigger fan. And then we can move on to the next conversation because there's so much I want to ask you. But that's where I'm a bigger fan of European policy. Here in Estonia, I've had the benefit of meeting various people who work in the government, and I look at the policy that they are enacting. For example, In Estonia, for 51% of the country is forested, everything grown here is certified organic. All of this is law. American bread is not allowed in Europe because it's not legally classified as bread. I hate to break it to you, but if you live in the United States and you buy bread, it's not bread. It's a commercial weird product that here in Europe we cannot even consider food. And that's what you're putting in your body. And this is where I think healthy government regulation can help. Okay, but let's go on to the next controversial topic I want to find out. You mentioned earlier that you detox your body. You basically make your body bulletproof, which is such an apt name if you live in America, by giving yourself the right nutritions so that your body can deal with all the toxins that enter your body. What are you, how are you doing this? What is your regimen like?

People like to say, well, I get all my nutrients from mother Nature because they come in my food. Well, if you believe that, then you should also be getting your toxins only from mother Nature. But the reality is we get all kinds of man made stuff in and our bodies didn't evolve to handle that. So there's three detox pathways in biohacking that I teach via something called the triple G. The first one is glutathione. This is the primary detox molecule in your liver, your brain, all your cells have it. You can take glutathione and I take it on a regular basis, but not every day. The second one is something from my most recent book, Smarter, Not Harder. It's calcium D glucarate. This is the second detox pathway in the liver that removes things like bpa. It removes things that get stuck in your liver, the estrogenic chemicals and excess estrogen from your environment. Or if you're in the us, there's actually estrogen from birth control pills in the tap water. So you want to be able to clean that stuff out quickly. So that's glutathione glucarate. And the third one is glycine, which is an amino acid found in collagen. Or you can take glycine directly.

Now, these, all three of these things, glutathione, glucarate and glycine, these are supplements we can buy in a cost effective way on Amazon.

You can buy on a cost effective way. I don't know if you want to buy supplements on Amazon anymore because half of them seem to be counterfeit these days. If you can support a business by buying directly from the business's website, you're doing the world a favor. Thank you. And the race to the bottom for how much something costs is a race to the bottom for the quality of something. And if you've noticed that everything you buy on Amazon falls apart in two weeks, that's why. So I like to buy direct because you actually get the real product.

Is there a brand that you recommend that we look at?

There are a variety of brands, depending on what country you live in for those things. And it's hard to say. One company always does things that are better than others.

And it's also okay for you to mention yours brand.

Sure. So my brand is called Supgrade Labs. You can go to vitamindake-a k e.com and check it out. And I've got a couple of formulas that are very foundational just to get your minerals back, to get your fat solubles back.

And we can get that from Upgrade Labs.

You get that from Upgrade Labs. And Upgrade Labs is my biohacking franchise that's opening across the U.S. there are now 15 locations that are in the process of opening and people looking at dog dozens more. So you'll be able to biohack in your neighborhood and we'll tell you exactly what supplements you need.

That's amazing. That's amazing. So Dave's program on Mindvalley, for those of you who don't know, Dave has a biohacking quest now available in mindvalley. That's where I learned about D A K E. Really powerful stuff. Today I had a friend who caught a flu and I actually this morning was preparing vitamin D, a K E, which I learned from Dave in little, like tea packets to give it to my friend. And also Upgrade Labs is an amazing facility. Every time I stop over in Santa Monica or in Venice, it's kind of on the border of both. I go to the Upgrade Labs facility and I use the ARX machine. This is an incredible device that you find at Dave's facility. And in just about 15 to 20 minutes. You have a workout that can set you up for an entire month.

The idea of Vishen is that few of us have enough time to exercise and we all have different goals for exercise. So we'll put muscle on three to five times faster than what you do at the gym. We can do cardio 12 times faster without sweating. So you actually just get it done. In the amount of time you spend brushing your teeth every week, you can have 12% better cardio function.

12% better cardio function. And how much time does that take? It upgrades.

It takes 15 minutes a week.

15 minutes. Thank you.

And we also added neurofeedback from 40 years of Zen so you could get a little taste of the 40 years of Zen. So the idea is, look, if you have an hour to improve yourself, don't spend it on a treadmill. It's just a waste of time.

Okay, so we got your detox supplement stack. Now I want to ask you in terms of performance enhancers. Okay. What are the supplements that you take to enhance your performance? And what I'm curious about is what does Dave Asprey take on a daily basis?

Well, I just did a video on Instagram where I counted. I had 84 pills in my sack that morning.

84 pills a day.

And that's just in the morning. There's probably another 40 or 50 in the evening.

Wow, hang on. You just blew my mind. You're taking 84 pills in the morning and 40 or 50 pills in the evening. Yep. Okay. Now no normal human being is going to do that. Okay, you're obviously metahuman.

Why would anyone here want to be normal? Which means average.

I like that. So what I want, but what I want you to do is to help our audience ease into that. I don't know if I can get our audience to take 120 pills a day. But what are the best, the most essential that you think they need to get started with?

All right, number one is Vitamin Dake. I mentioned Vitamind A K e dot com and this is all of the fat soluble vitamins that you need. And the reason you take those is because that controls where minerals go into your body. And you couple it with Minerals101, which is on the same website. And Minerals 101 is broad spectrum macro minerals. Because right now when you eat the plant based foods or even the organic foods, even animal based foods, our soil is depleted. Your body makes enzymes with minerals. You die without minerals. And we're all running on a very, very low Level of minerals, you get the minerals back and you get the fat solubles back. And suddenly your ability to do everything in your life, whether it's start a company, meditate, exercise, sleep, they all improve. Even your ability to make testosterone improves.

So D A K E Vitamin Dake. And then the Second one was minerals.

101, which is called Minerals one by.

One mineral something we get from where.

You can get it. The same website, Minerals101 is on the Vitamin Dake website. And the third one is Dangeroitic.

That website is.

That is vitamindake D A K e dot com.

Vitamindake D A K e dot com. Okay. Is that one of your brands?

Yeah, it's one of my brands. Fantastic.

Yeah.

And then the trace minerals are built into Danger Coffee. So when you drink your coffee, you're replenishing minerals, but when you eat oat milk, you're taking them out. So what you want to do is realize, oh, every time I have a seed or a grain or a nut, I'm depleting minerals. And every time I add minerals in with animal proteins or in this case with. These are plant based ionic minerals that are in the coffee. So Danger Coffee, it's called Danger Coffee because who knows, knows what you might do.

Beautiful. So, Dave, would you mind doing me a favor? So for the people who might be watching this on YouTube, could you show your abs publicly again?

All right.

Also as a treat to the people in the audience who maybe want to see that. All right, Would you mind just let that up?

Number one, I didn't do sit ups before. This is not staged. Number two, I used to weigh 300 pounds. Okay? So these are my abs right now, without any planning, I've been in Europe for a couple days and as a former fat guy, I don't know, I think I'm doing all right. I exercise 20 minutes a week at Upgrade Labs, though.

You exercise 20 minutes a week?

Yeah.

Okay, so this is unconventional, right? How old are you, Dave? Are you able to share?

Well, my biological age says that I'm about 39, and my chronological age says 50. So I'm identifying as my biological age.

That's beautiful. Beautiful. Okay, so Dave is 50, but his actual age biologically is 39. Now I'm 47. I'm going to turn. I'm 47 and a half. So I'm about two and a half years younger than you. And actually, I want to confess, I got to know Dave. I can't remember who introduced us, but I got to know Dave in 2015 and I started being introduced to biohacking through this man. And if you look at Pictures of Me 2015 and Pictures of me today, I. I've actually been able to reverse aging considerably.

You're leaner and younger significantly.

Like I went from 22% body fat to 15% body fat. And that was through a combination of different things. WildFit was 1, but also 10x and 10x was heavily influenced by things I learned from Dave Asprey. But there were other things that I learned from Dave which was really interesting and unconventional. For example, the power of forgiveness as a tool to shift your biology. And we'll talk more on that later. But what I want to ask you now is how is it as a 50 year old, you're able to stay so lean and so fit? What are some of the practices you do? Because what's surprising about your, your body composition is that a. You used to weigh 300 pounds, right? What do you weigh right now?

I weigh about 197 pounds.

Okay, so that's 103 pounds that you've taken off your system and kept off. The second thing that's unusual about you is that you are in your 50s and you live in the United States.

Yep, I'm in the 1%.

You're in the 1%. What are some. And the third thing actually is that you only exercise 20 minutes a week.

Yep.

Okay, now the 20 minutes of exercise. Let's start with that. What exact form of exercise are you doing?

I'm doing the things we have at Upgrade Labs. So these are AI driven exercise things. If I'm going to do cardio, I've got a heart rate monitor on and it's varying the resistance based on my heart rate and my capabilities at the time. And that drives change very quickly when I'm exercising. I'll use the cheat machine at Upgrade Labs. If I don't have access to that. There's six or seven other things I wrote about in my most recent book, Smarter, Not Harder, or that's in my quest with you, Vision.

And are these machines that you're using? This is the. The ARX machine. Right.

That's one of the many machines that we use at Upgrade Labs. We have a variety of texts, some we make and some are from partners. And what you'll find is that when you change the signal going into the body to get the signal that creates change, instead of the signal that makes you tired, you can transform yourself really easily. So I'm reasonably ripped. That's a caffeine molecule tattoo. Right? There. But you can see my body fat's relatively low because you can see the bottom of the muscle belly. And this is my weak arm. This one's bigger because I'm not that symmetrical because I'm not actually a bodybuilder. So how am I doing this? Well, the first thing I do is I don't eat seed oils. If it has canola oil, I throw it away. It's not food anymore. So I go to a restaurant, I don't eat the fried stuff. I tell them cook it in butter or I'm not going to eat it or cook it in no fat at all. So I'm on a very low omega 6 diet and I have been since I wrote the bulletproof diet in 2011 or something. So that's been a long term thing. But the longer you go without the bad fats, the, the better off you are. I also don't eat the things that are inflammatory for my system and they're different for different people. If you go to daveasprey.com roadmap, that is the entire bulletproof diet on one page for free. And it tells you these foods give you energy with very few toxins. These foods are suspect foods. I know my guilty suspects. And these foods are always bad. So you avoid the always bads. You eat the suspect foods that work for you. So you might be totally fine on bell peppers. For me, I get arthritis when I eat them and I get swollen from it. So I don't eat those. They're just not compatible with my system. They're not good or bad. And so a lot of people think, well, that's good for you always. That's rarely the case, except we need more protein, more quality animal protein than we're getting. And the amount of protein that we eat has gone down and down and down. And interestingly, you don't hear about this much in the news, but China's been investing very heavily in getting more animal protein for its citizens. And the average height has gone up by three inches.

Wow.

Because studies show everywhere when you have more animal protein, people grow taller and stronger. So I eat a gram of high quality animal protein per pound of body weight. So I get about 200 grams of protein a day. That's hard to do, but it means when I go out, people have gone out with me here, I'll say, I'll take two of them. The steak, those little tiny steaks.

So let's do some math there, okay? So people can put this in perspective. An Average egg contains 12 grams of protein, you're taking 200. So that's the equivalent of 17 eggs a day. Yep.

And eggs aren't that bioavailable, but if you take enzymes with them, that'll work. Eggs are good for you, unless you're allergic. They're a common allergen.

Right. So let's break that down. What are some of the things you're eating a day to get that amount of protein?

Steak.

Steak. Okay. Steak. What else are you just stuffing yourself with?

Steak, Fish. I'll eat wild caught fish. Steak, lamb.

Okay. Amazing.

Yeah. I don't do eggs because I'm allergic to eggs.

Oh, I see.

When I did my. Before carnivore had a name, when I was testing out the edges of the bulletproof diet, I did about three months of absolutely zero carbs. And during that time, I gave myself leaky gut and I got to be allergic to eggs. So this is a common thing when people go carnivore for long periods of time, or if you go vegan, you'll also tend to get a lot more autoimmunity from the plant. So it's okay to go carnivore for a week or two, but then you need to take a break, rebuild your gut lining.

Right, Right. So we don't. So we don't destroy the biodiversity of our gut bacteria. So how much protein per body fat did you say you need to take? One gram per pound.

One gram per pound. And if you do that, and that's.

Even if you're not doing weight training.

Even if you're not doing weight training, you might get down to 0.8. But honestly, just try it. If you love protein, if you do that, you want to take some digestive enzymes, too, to make sure that you don't have fermenting protein in your gut. But this will completely turn off hunger. And you have this resilience and this energy that you wouldn't believe. But if you wrap it with canola oil and all those other things, rapeseed oil and soybean oil and all, it doesn't work nearly as well.

And now science is showing that if you take more protein, your body actually increases its metabolic rate. So even though you're eating more, you're actually burning off more fat.

I think that definitely works because few people have this level of around 8% body fat, especially with 20 minutes of exercise. Granted, my exercise is hacked and my diet's hacked, but.

Very true. So let's talk about the exercise, the ARX machine. So I don't know the other machines when I go to Upgrade. I always use the ARX machine. It's based on the Big Five exercise routine popularized by Dr. Doug McGuff in the book Body by Science. The exact same philosophy is in mindvalley's 10x. So if you have an Upgrade Labs close by, definitely use it. When I stay in Santa Monica, I choose Airbnb's Close to Upgrade Labs because that's how much I love that place. Right? And then I go to Dave's Upgrade Coffee because it's just a great place to work. You meet a lot of mindvalley people there, you meet a lot of biohackers there. Every time I sit there, I just bump into people I know who have a common interest. So remember Upgrade Labs. And I'm so excited that you're expanding this now.

Also, one other thing. Ownandupgradelabs.com if you want to be a franchisee, people can become an entrepreneur that way.

That's great.

Which is really fun. So ownandupgradelabs.com if you're interested, I'd love to work with you.

And if you can't find and Upgrade Labs where you are, you can do mindvalley's 10x. Same exercises, but we teach you how to do it in a regular gym or at home, just using body weight. But the philosophy is the same, the science is the same. It's both derived from the same set of scientific studies. And Dave and I influenced each other in terms of designing these respective exercise programs. With 10x, it's roughly 30 to 40 minutes a week. If you use Dave's machines, then it goes down to 20 minutes a week. Now, Dave, next question. Carbs. How much carbs do you take? Like what? What are the things that regular people enjoy that you are also able to enjoy? Like can you take pizza? Can you enjoy pasta?

I don't handle gluten. Well, some people do, some people don't. And it turns out in Europe you use soft wheat, which is much less aggressive than American hard wheat, especially when you coat American hard wheat with glyphosate. So when I'm in Europe, I'll have an occasional gluten containing thing with some enzymes. But if I do it regularly, it really does wreck me. So you just have to know what's compatible with you and what isn't.

I see.

So for me, with my immune system, my genetic background, that's off my regular diet, but I am not a zero carb guy. And I'm one of the people who heavily influenced the keto movement because I talked about cyclical ketosis as a tool for losing weight and making your brain work really well, and intermittent fasting in the very early days of it becoming a thing. But people get stuck on that. So I've always said, have carbs, and you can go for three or four days if you're doing a keto phase, and then have some carbs at least once a week, sometimes twice a week. And the idea is to keep the body so you can burn carbs, you can burn fat, you can be metabolically flexible. So I eat carbs most days. For me, I like white rice the most because it has the least toxins and it digests really well when it's cooked properly. I also. I don't mind honey. I'll eat one or two pieces of fruit. But other than that, those are kind of my carbs. If you're not sensitive to potatoes, roughly a third of people are sensitive to potatoes. If you're not, they're a great source of starch and carbs.

And there was a recent study on rice that if you cook white rice. And what was it? Was it coconut oil? Coconut oil, it reduces its calorie count by 70% because of the way the coconut oil changes the structure of the rice grains. More of it pass through your gut, but you get the fiber and the carbs that are actually healthy for you.

And a lot of people don't know this, but when you eat those prebiotic fibers, which is what happens when you cook rice, that way your gut bacteria will turn it into saturated fats called butyric acid and propionic acid. So people say gorillas are so strong. Gorillas have this giant gut that ferments the plants into fats that make gorillas look that way. We don't have guts that can do that, but we can with some prebiotic fiber, we can do some of that. And that's why you feel good when you get that. So sushi rice without sugar in it is actually better for you than hot rice.

I see. Now, you mentioned cyclical keto. Keto, by the way, being on keto nonstop, which some people do, can actually wreck your body. There was a survey done of 36 diets and its efficacy, and keto was 35 out of 36 in terms of how effective it. It was one of the least effective diets. But you mentioned cyclical keto. Cyclical keto was the basis of Mindvalley's Wildfit. It's the same thing, except that wildfit goes also into, like, behavioral modification. But I want you to define cyclical keto.

What that means is you go into ketosis, you stand there for a day or two, and then you come out and you go back in. And the trick is, for a lot of people, wheat is addictive. So for me, when I eat it, in addition to inflammation, it turns into something called gluteomorphin. And it hits my opiate receptors in my brain. And the next day, after I have bread, man, I really want bread. And after four days of bread, I'm like, bring me the bread, bring me the bread. Right. So if it has that effect on you, that's not what you would do as your carb, because it would be very hard to do it. So you find carbs that don't give you cravings, and I find honey, coconut water, some fruit. But you don't go crazy on fruit because. Because if you get more than about 25 grams of fructose a day, it does cause aging by something called advanced glycation end products.

I see. That's an important thing. Now, going back to protein a little, do you ever take protein shakes, protein powders, protein bars?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, I invented the collagen protein bar, so I'm a fan of collagen in particular, which is an animal based protein.

Okay, so let's talk about collagen, because both you and the supplement scientist at Mindvalley works with Sean Wells, have been raving about collagen. Tell us why it's important.

Well, in the early days of biohacking, no one talked about collagen. It was an unheard of supplement, and I turned it into a billion dollar industry category. Because collagen is a third of the protein in your body. You really need collagen to have healthy skin, to have healthy joints. Given that I had arthritis in my knees when I was 14, I've had three knee surgeries. I thought maybe I should learn about how to have healthy joints. So as I was studying anti aging over the years, I realized collagen was terribly important. And it's also rich in glycine, the amino acid that helps with detox. So I recommend about 20 grams of collagen protein on top of your normal protein. This is important because glycine in collagen will help to balance out the other amino acids that are in animal meat. Right. So if you're eating a steak or hamburger or something like that, it has a ratio of amino acids. And adding collagen to that is more like eating the whole animal instead of just eating a part of the animal. And it turns out we are whole animals. So if we only eat mussels from our food animals, then we don't end up as strong as if we ate the organs and the skin and the hooves and.

Which is how we were 100,000 years ago. Right. We would eat the entire animal. So we would get that healthy supply of diversity of proteins. We don't do that right now.

Even here in Estonia. There's like these weird liver tarts everywhere. You guys love liver here?

Yeah, liver's gross. It's disgusting.

Yeah, I take pills. It's just easier. I've taken pills for 15 years. Liver pills.

Okay, so you, you say take protein. Whey protein.

Whey protein is good. Assuming you're. You're not sensitive to it. It's a very powerful way to do it.

And then add collagen to it. Do we. What, what about creatine? Should we be adding creatine to our protein shake?

If you're eating a lot of red meat, you probably, probably don't need creatine. I do add creatine to my protein shakes. And if you are vegetarian or vegan, it is non negotiable. You have to have creatine because it's missing from your food along with the minerals and along with vitamin B12 and all these other things. So creatine is more important for vegetarians.

So this is really important for vegetarians. Now what. So do you take a shake every day?

I do most days, especially when I'm traveling. I found it's impossible to get enough protein when I travel.

What else do you add to your shake?

I add, when I'm traveling, powdered blueberries.

Usually powdered blueberries. Okay.

Yeah. And the idea is, what can I travel with that has the least possible weight that'll get the amount of protein that I need? So I have little baggies of it that I make when I travel. And I put it in. This is going to sound gross. I put it in hot water because it dissolves better and I shake it up and I just kind of grimace and drink it. And then I got my protein.

Yeah. Blueberries are amazing for the brain. I think there was a study done, Max Lugerberg talked about it, where three to five bowls of blue cups of blueberries a week increase your lifespan by two to three years in terms of brain health and staving off Alzheimer's.

It's interesting because a lot of times we say berries are good for you, but it turns out blackberries and raspberries are very high in oxalic acid, which is also high in kale and spinach. And the more plant based and vegan you are or have been, the higher this builds up in your tissues and it causes a lot of metabolic problems.

Problems.

I'm still detoxing from my time as a vegan more than 10 years ago.

Now. Let's talk about that. You've been, you are very public in denouncing veganism and vegetarianism. Right?

Have you seen the list of Hollywood celebrities who went vegan and said, I quit because I was depressed, because I was bloated, because I hated my life, because I lost my muscles? Almost everyone who starts being vegan stops being vegan.

Exactly 10. So there's been a 10% decline in veganism in the last one year because of what's emerging of how bad it is for your body.

Yeah, it wrecked me.

I do not advise any of my friends to go down that path. And my friends who are on that path, I slowly encourage them to get back to eating normal. But I want you to say this because people need to hear this, okay?

There are three reasons that you would choose to go vegan. The first is you believe it's healthier for you. At this point, we know with 100% certainty that, that it is not healthier for you. No matter how much you yell about it or bully people, it's still not healthy. Number two, we might say we're doing it for the environment. As a small regenerative farmer, animal poop is as important as animal meat or milk because the poop builds soil and soil is a carbon sink and soil grows food. So no animals, no poop, no soil. No soil, no plants. It works like that. So we must have animals in our ecosystem. That's how it works. And you could say, well, I'm going to go vegan because of moral and ethical things. I don't want to create suffering in animals. Now, as a farmer, I'll tell you about my walnut tree. I've had one walnut off my walnut tree in the entire time we've lived there. Anna. Why do we not get our walnuts?

Could we get a mic to Anna, please?

Anna's my daughter. Turn around, Anna. There you go.

Everything eats the walnuts.

That's right. There's squirrels running around, there's ravens, bugs.

Pretty much everything just wants to eat the walnuts.

They grab most of them off the tree before they even get ripe.

I remember once we decided, you know, it might be nice to actually get to try a couple of the walnuts this year.

So we tied some wax paper over like two of them, just hoping maybe.

Things won't get at them that way. Next morning the walnuts were gone and.

The wax paper was in a neat.

Pile on the ground.

So if I was a walnut farmer, I would go in kill mode and I'd put up traps and poison and I would shoot the squirrels. That's what walnut farmers do. So the deaths per calorie from plant foods involves all of the animals that were killed to stop them from eating your wheat, your corn, your soy, your avocados. So if you want the lowest deaths per calorie, it is grass fed bison followed by grass fed cows. And the reason for that is that you can eat a whole bison for two years and have a pound of meat a day. And that's high nutritious, high mineral, good quality food. And that bison or that cow, if it's grass fed, walked on land that was still natural land, which means it increased biodiversity. And instead we could take that land and we could kill everything, plow everything under, add some chemical fertilizer and we could turn it into corn. I'd rather eat the bison than corn on the cob.

Yep, it's significantly healthier for you, significantly healthier for the environment. The Estonian side of my family are regenerative farmers. We have a regenerative farm. And again, the sheep, the cows that we have there are so essential for the biodiversity and the health of the soil and the food that grows there. So this is really important and vishen.

You get it because it's in your family. But no small farmer is ever going to be cruel to their animals. We wake up early to feed them, we wake up at three in the morning to birth the little lambs when they come out, to make sure that the moms don't die, because they will die if you don't handle it right. And it's a lot of work and a lot of love. And it's very different if you're in some industrial company that's abusing animals. That's not what I'm talking about. I don't think you should eat that either. We sheep, yeah, you've got to do that so you can support small farmers. And here's the thing, if you buy a box of frozen meat direct from a small farmer, they keep most of the money. But if they ship it off to a big slaughterhouse that then goes into a major supermarket chain, they get just enough so that 90% of small farmers in the US have a day job and then come home and have a full time job farming because they love farming and they're taking care of their animals, they're taking care of the land. I'm fortunate. We're both fortunate. We're entrepreneurs, we're so successful. So we had a farm manager. I don't think I could have done what I've done in the business world if I had to go shovel crap every morning.

Yeah, yeah. I've seen how, how small farmers take care of their sheep, of their animals. It is beautiful to see. Yes, we do have to eventually eat them. Yeah. But it's still, it is still. It's so much healthier for the planet and the earth. Now there's one more thing. Daas, right. The digestive amino acid score. And, and vegans and vegetarians claim that they can get proteins from plants, but there's a measure of how effective a protein is for your system. And animal proteins are way more effective than plant proteins. Could you talk about that?

Absolutely. What scores highest? Red meat. So it's beef, then lamb, then pork, then chicken, then eggs, in order. And if you go back to that bulletproof diet roadmap that I talked about earlier going back, was that 12 years now, in order. That's how you select your meats from the most effective to least effective.

So if you're trying to get, let's say you weigh 150 pounds and you're trying to get 150 grams of protein a day for your body weight, if you're eating plant proteins, you actually have to get 250 to 300 grams of plant proteins because plant proteins simply do not score as high in terms of the impact that they have on the human body as animal proteins.

So you're talking about one scoop of animal protein or 4? 4 scoops of nasty tasting plant based proteins that make you fart. Plant based proteins are there to protect the plants from predators. That's what they're there for. And yes, we can survive on all sorts of things. That's one of the reasons we're the dominant species on the planet. Because there's all sorts of foods you can eat in a survival situation, but don't eat those all the time because they punch you in the kidneys. You don't want to do that.

And that's another reason to get off being a vegan or vegetarian farting. I interviewed Reagan and Huanpa, who are mindvalley speakers on this, and the interview was hilarious because Reagan said, I love my husband Huanpa, but I'm so glad he got off being A vegetarian because I had to live with the farting. And then they got their son to convert from being a vegan vegetarian. Daniel, whom you met earlier, he started eating meat again, and he started that. It transformed this life.

Yeah, we have a really serious problem as a species. My first book, a lot of people haven't heard of it, is called the Better Baby Book, and it's about what you do for fertility, to have the healthiest baby possible. And I wrote it because it took five years of research in order to have my kids, because my wife at the time was infertile. So we figured out how to use food and environment and biohacking principles to restore fertility.

So.

So I got really, really deep into what happens with kids. And one of the things that's much worse now than it was even 15, 16 years ago is the testosterone levels. In all Westerners, but particularly in the US they're 50% of where they were 20 years ago. What that means is that our fertility is going down. But testosterone and dopamine in the brain, this is the chemical that makes you motivated. They move to get. So what that means is that as your testosterone drops, your motivation to do something that matters in the world drops as well. This is true for men and women. We just need different amounts of testosterone. So is animal protein, that includes all the minerals like zinc that you don't get from plants. Is that going to help raise testosterone? Yeah, it is. In fact, Kellogg's Corn Flakes was engineered about 120 years ago in order to reduce testosterone because Dr. Kellogg believed that sexual desire was the root of all evil. So he did his very best to make foods that would neuter humans. And now they're health foods. Weird.

Kellogg's is one of the craziest companies in the world. So here's a list of foods you can take that actually increase testosterone. Now explain this, Dave. Testosterone is not just necessary for men. It gives you motivation. It gives you drive. It makes you better focused at your work. It makes you better at sex. But is testosterone also necessary for women?

Testosterone is the hormone of desire. Yes, bedroom desire, but it's desire to be a good mother or a good father. Desire to show up in the world. And there's two things that you need. You need energy, which comes from thyroid hormone, which, by the way, plant generally are bad for your thyroid. And then you also need testosterone. If you have those two things, you have enough energy and desire to change the world. So I've seen entrepreneurs like, we've both burned the midnight oil a few times. You don't get enough sleep, you're eating, you're on the road. Circadian disruption, your testosterone goes down, your motivation goes down and you wake up in the morning and yeah, there's no kickstand, but also you're just not as motivated to do. You're working the world, right? And I've been low testosterone lower than my mom when I was 26 actually. So I've been on testosterone therapy to keep my levels at anti aging levels about 800 to 1,000. And I'm going to have those when I'm 120 years old because it makes life worth living, right?

And so we got to get our testosterone up because it's down by 50%. Dr. Amy Killen, who was on the stage a couple of weeks back, said, if that doesn't freak you out, you don't know what it's doing to your body. But we should be alarmed that our testosterone levels are down 50% since the 1980s. So here's a list of supplements you can take that actually increase testosterone. Now this list is from Dan Masaritsky, who is a decathlon athlete and a chef. He was just here speaking at Mindvalley U. Tongkat Ali Tribulus, Zinc. And if you take zinc, you also got to take copper, ashwagandha, pine pollen, saffet musli, colostrum, whey protein, and then gut health and digestion aids. So Dan says, I eat plenty of kimchi and I drink something called RS Koso. And Dan has the, as a man, he has the fittest, best built body I've seen on any human being.

He's definitely fit. There's one caution about ashwagandha. Ashwagandha is a stress relieving herb. So what you want to be able to do to raise testosterone is handle stress better. So, so adaptogens allow you to turn stress on and then off quickly so you don't walk around stressed all the time. But if you take ashwagandha for long periods of time at higher doses, it can actually reduce orgasm intensity and frequency. So you can overdo ashwagandha.

We don't want that. So thank you so much, Dave Asprey. This was an incredible conversation, but there's one more thing. We have five minutes left. Okay, Dave, what are the best biohacks to optimize yourself for sex?

All right, there's an equation, it's a Taoist equation. You guys know Taoism? They were actually studying longevity. They wanted to live forever and they realized that the energy it takes for the Third F word for sex. That is a thing. So they started monitoring it and they came up with an equation for men. And I tried to disprove it for a year. And I published my data in one of the books and it says that if you want to maintain your energy as a man, the rules are different. For women, it's that you should take your age in years, so 47. So age in years minus seven divided by four. So for you, that's 10.

10.

And that means that you can ejaculate once every 10 days if you want to maintain your virility and your strength. And the reason for this is that your testosterone drops as you age. But every time you ejaculate, you have a 24 to 48 hour major decline in testosterone.

I see.

This is why. Will you respect me in the morning? Well, no, oftentimes guys don't because their testosterone's in the shitter, their dopamine's in the shitter, and then, well, you wake up and nothing's as good as it was before. And I didn't believe this. I wanted to disprove it. So we're in a year testing out various things. The other thing they tell you is for men only, if you want to live forever, you ejaculate once every 30 days and you keep your orgasms to less than an hour. So I didn't believe either of those was possible. They are both possible. The second one is a little bit painful though, because your abs get tired. So what? How is this even possible? Well, you can have. And this is something most guys don't even hear this, because when I say ejaculate, you think I mean orgasm. You can have a full, intense orgasm without ejaculating. And when you master that, you're ready to go again and again and again. So no, what's the equation for women? Because the Taoists didn't.

So what you're saying is men should ejaculate only once every four days.

Once every X number of days, based on that equation. So if you were 20 years old, it's pretty much like every day or two. Right. And so they were doing this not to torture men, but just to say you can be depleted by this. But they also say women walk away undiminished when you read the text. Which means for women, orgasms don't deplete them. In fact, it enhances their energy. So there's an equation for women, but they never wrote it. But I figured out what it is. You know what it is?

What?

Okay, it's until. Okay. It's the number of orgasms until you feel like you're going to die plus two. I love that.

What else? Dave, you can share. Feel free to get freaky on us. I know some of the stuff you've done to your dick.

All right, so I have also written about this in the anti aging book. I think it's superhuman as well. You can change the function and the size and sensitivity of your reproductive organs as a man or a woman. So I actually did a video at the biohacking conference I run where I didn't let you see anything you didn't want to see, but it was actually me getting injected with stem cells into my penis.

And that was by Dr. Amy Killen. It was by Dr. Amy Killen, sexual optimization expert. Amy's new course on sexual health is coming to mindvalley soon.

Nice.

Yeah. And that's because she's injected both me and Dave in our dicks.

Now, you could say, why would we do this? Well, as you age, you want to maintain youthfulness. And one of the most important parts of the way we connect with the world as men or women energetically, is through our reproductive organs. They're just studded with sensors. They're called nerves. Right. So if you have a healthy sex life and a healthy reproductive system, it actually is a marker and a sign to your body that you have a reason for living. Because if your body thinks you can't reproduce, your body's like, well, maybe I should just start shutting down. Because you're less important than people who can reproduce. So you want to keep your reproductive abilities where they were when you were in your 30s.

So the medical term for what Dave is talking about is called the P shot, the penis shot. The female version is called the O shot. Tell us what a P shot and an O shot does.

Well, when you get a P shot, it's stem cells, usually, and they inject it in the corpus cavernosum. And what this does is it increases blood flow and rejuvenation. There are other technologies I've talked about on my blog and in various podcasts. There's pumping. There's also shock wave therapy. But you can, if you have concerns, some little voice in your head that says you're not big enough, you can absolutely change that. The science is very real. People don't talk about it. It gets censored on Instagram and things like that. But the bottom line is, if you're having either erectile issues or you just can't last long enough, or you have some concern about size or shape or bendiness or whatever. It's all hackable. And for women, if you've had kids, especially as you age, the tissues get thinner. When you get an O shot, they inject either stem cells or sometimes exosomes or other things around the vulva, inside the lining, and even into the clitoris. And when they do that, you're numb, it doesn't hurt. And within a week, it's like you've lost 20 years. It's very, very, very noticeable.

It reverses the aging of your private parts by around 20 years.

Right? And so the reason I'm talking about this is because everybody ages, some of us more quickly than others. But there's no reason that if you're having pelvic pain, if you're having problems with urinary retention, especially after kids, or you're a guy who's just not having the same function that you had before, it's all hackable and it's relatively easy to do. But no one talks about it because it's kind of douchey to sit up here and talk about our dicks, right?

And it shouldn't be. It shouldn't be, right, because this is how, as Dave's daughter said, this is how babies are made. Now, if you want to go deeper into these topics, the two experts that you can reference that both Dave and I personally know, their programs are now coming to Mindvalley as part of your Mindvalley membership. Dr. Amy Killen. She operates in Park City, Utah. She's the medical doctor that pioneered the P shot and the O shot. And she's the one who has worked with Dave Asprey, myself, and many other people in the. The biohacking movement. Dr. Amy's new program, the Science of Good Sex, is coming to Mind Valley shortly. The other person, if you want to understand ejaculations, how to have energy, orgasms, the leading Tantra teacher, Leila Martin. Her program on Tantra is coming to mindvalley in the next six months as well. So you can take the energetic approach to sex as well as the medical doctor approach to sex.

The reason this matters is that for adults, sex is a form of nourishment. It's how we create polarity in the world. It's how we connect with each other. And if you don't have sex and love in your life, you won't live as long, and you won't show up in the world the way you can. And if you don't have those in your life, you can Create them. But if you don't have the hardware working and you don't have the emotional work done, it's harder to create them. And that's why you do both the esoteric spiritual practices from Layla. And if you need them, you do the medical practices. Or maybe you just want to do them because.

And what we are seeing in the world is just like health. Lifespans are decreasing in the United States. The way we approach sex is actually getting unhealthier. Part of it could be attributed to the testosterone decline, which is down 50% since the 1980s. Other things could be the bad foods that we are putting in our body. But sex is a natural driver of human behavior. And how much you're having sex actually will influence your longevity, the radiance of your skin, your motivation, your happiness levels. So seriously, folks, take this down. Fuck more. Write that down in your notebooks and do it in a healthy way. There you go.

Love it.

So if you enjoyed that episode with Dave Asprey, I'd like to invite you to perhaps join me and Dave on something really special that we recently created. Dave, myself and Naveen Jain, one of the greatest entrepreneurial minds of our generation, recently formed a mastermind for people who want to play life at a different level. This mastermind is called Apollo Group, and it's a joint venture between our respective companies. Naveen Jain runs viome, the AI powered gut microbiome company, the company that is basically transforming healthcare through the use of AI. And Naveen, if you haven't heard of him, has been a subject, just like Dave, of many episodes of the mindvalley podcast. He is a bold visionary thinker, the first private citizen to get the right to put a robot on the moon, and founder of multiple companies. This guy is so epically cool. He shares a private island with Richard Branson. So Naveen, Dave Asprey and myself came together to create a Polo group. And a Polo group is basically a business and life mastermind for people who want to master the following things. Wealth and business growth. And who better to teach you than Naveen? Second, biohacking, longevity and health. Who better than Dave Asprey? And the third, mindset, Spiritual practices, habits so that you can master your life as you master your bank account and grow your business. And that's where I come in. So the Apollo Group is a really interesting project. I'm really excited about it. It started out with me, Dave and Naveen hanging out and helping each other grow. And then we thought, wouldn't it be cool if we opened this up to other entrepreneurs. And so it's a group. It's just kicking off. Our first big trip is going to be happening in February 2024 and not only are we connected on WhatsApp and on Zoom, but we go on two trips together. Yes, I'm talking about going to exotic locations, spending time together, really getting to connect. Needless to say, this group is a high end premium mastermind. And if you've been looking for a really high level group that you could be part of, right, with incredible people who are running businesses that are going to be in the hundreds of millions, if not billions, but people who are not just about growing their business but improving every aspect of their life. This is for you. Not only do you get mentored by Meenaveen and Dave, but you form really tight bonds with the other members of the group. The link is below this video in the description. Go ahead and check it out. Simply put in your email address, watch the video and if you decide you want to apply, at the end of the video we give you information on how to put in an application. So I look forward to seeing you there in Apollo if this is something for you. And I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Mindvalley podcast. This is Vishal Lakiani and I'll see you on our next episode.