Dave Asprey Part 1: Biohacking, Mold Toxicity, Over-Exercising & Keto Diet Myths

Dave Asprey
Anyone who still believes in calories, in, calories out. Including some of my friends in the bodybuilding community who believe that a Kit Kat is the same thing as an orange. Because calories, you can manage your body weight that way until your biology completely breaks. This is the pursuit of Wellness podcast, and I'm your host, Mari Llan.

Mari Llan
What is up, guys? Welcome back to the Pursuit of Wellness podcast. Today's episode is very, very special because this is our 100th episode. Unreal, you guys. We launched the podcast January of 2023 and the fact that we've grown this much in just 100 episodes is actually insane.

100 sounds like such a big number. The fact that I've had almost 100 conversations, whether it's with a guest or simply myself, is unbelievable. And I can't thank you guys enough for the support, for tuning in, for engaging, for giving suggestions. It has been an incredible journey and I'm so excited to see where this takes us. I feel like there's so much left to do, so many more conversations to have, and it's been an unbelievable ride to get to 100 episodes.

So with that said, I really want to give back to the community and do a giveaway. All you need to do is subscribe and follow. And if you already do that, then go ahead and leave a review. Send a screenshot of either or to the Pursuit of Wellness podcast page on Instagram and we will send you a pursuit of wellness tote, bag and hat with a bunch of bloom goodies. We can't wait to celebrate 100 episodes with you guys.

With that said, today we have a very special, special guest for the 100th episode, Dave Asprey, who is a huge name in the health and wellness space. He is known as the father of biohacking. He was originally a computer scientist or a computer hacker who basically took his skillset and applied it to health and wellness. He's also the founder of Bulletproof Coffee, now the founder of his new coffee company, Danger Coffee. He is an entrepreneur and author and advocate of the low carb, high fat diet known as the Bulletproof diet.

He's also evolved a lot since his bulletproof days and has so much knowledge when it comes to health and wellness. We talked a lot about biohacking and what that means and things we can do to biohack easily at home. We talked about hormone testing, we talked about thyroid, we talked about heavy metals, mold, candida. We talked about veganism. We talked about mold and coffee.

Big focus on mold because Dave actually experienced mold toxicity himself. And I've also had experience with that we talked about methods to fight mold and things you can do. Also talked about red meat. We talked about diet. We discussed my acne journey and David's thoughts on that as well.

We go so many places in this episode, we ended up talking for over 90 minutes. So we have decided to split this episode into two. So make sure you tune back in Thursday. This coming Thursday, for part two of my conversation with Dave Asprey, we're going to pick up where he started to discuss my acne and acne in general and things we can do for toxins. We talk about ozone therapy and so much more.

Also fertility, of course, so stay tuned for that. Dave has actually written a book on fertility, so I was really excited to pick his brain. So today is part one of this, part one and two episode. I really hope you enjoy it again. Don't forget to participate in the giveaway.

We are so excited for the 100th episode of the pursuit of wellness. Without further ado, let's hop right into our conversation with Dave. Dave, welcome to the show. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you so much for coming in.

Most people know of you as the father of biohacking. They also know you from bulletproof. And now your new coffee company, Danger Coffee, which I'm very excited to talk about. I'd love to start from the beginning of how you got into health and biohacking in the first place. How did you get this interested?

Dave Asprey
Well, when I was 14, I went to the doctor because my knees hurt all the time. I played soccer for 13 years, and he said, oh, look, you have arthritis in your knees. And I'm like, that's for old people. And I was kind of stunned. And I was also fat.

There was that, and I kept getting fatter. By the time I was 23, I hit 300 pounds, and I'm about 198 pounds right now, and 6% body fat. And I'm not cutting or anything like, that's just how I am. And so that was still kind of okay, but I just had constant body pain. My gut was wrecked.

I'd been on antibiotics for 15 years because I grew up in a basement with toxic mold. So fast forward. I'm 26. My Silicon Valley career was just taken off. I'm a computer hacker, and, man, all kinds of stuff happened.

I was just feeling so much brain fog, like I could barely function, and. But I was doing okay, but I was faking it at work. Like I couldn't remember anything half the time. So I went to a doctor and did a hormone panel before this is something you'd really do. And he calls me up and he says, well, you have lower testosterone than your mom.

Cause he had done my mom's numbers, too. He was one of the first anti aging doctors. And you have, like, no thyroid functions. Okay. So I went on thyroid and got on testosterone to get my levels up to just healthy levels for a 26 year old.

By the way, everyone who's 26 has that level of testosterone now because it's a society wide problem, because of a pollution. It's such an issue. Yeah. I'm seeing it everywhere. My husband's constantly trying to prescribe people testosterone.

Yeah. And some people get really mad because I've made testosterone therapy as acceptable as I know how to make it, especially for people under 40, because we have this idea that you're supposed to struggle, and that makes you a good person. And, no, it's okay to work really hard, but you should do everything you can to make every ounce of work count. And if you're working really hard because you have no testosterone and no thyroid or because you're eating the wrong thing, then you put huge amounts of willpower in, and you got bad results. So for me, getting on those things helped.

But I still couldn't lose all the weight, and I had autoimmune issues and just all kinds of stuff. So I decided I would try all the different diets. I've been a vegan, a devout, raw vegan. I did the original keto diet called the Atkins diet. Lost 50 pounds when I was 21 and gained it back.

And after a while, I said, this is dumb. I'm a computer hacker. I know how to fix systems that I don't own. I know how to break into them, too. Why can't I do this on my own system?

So I turned the hacking idea around. And in computer hacking, we have this idea of a black box, which is. It's a system, but I don't know what's in there, and I want to make it do what I want. So instead of having to know everything, which is kind of a medical approach, or at least believing, you know, everything, I'm like, if I do this, what happens? If I do this, what happens?

And that led to biohacking, which is, in a nutshell, when I created the term to use it on humans, it was the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you to have full control of your own biology. And then you can be curious, is what I'm doing working? How can I measure it if it's not working? Maybe a big company tricked doctors into thinking it was good, or maybe I was just wrong. Or maybe I believed something that wasn't true.

And through that process, I have increased my iq, my extrinsic age. The age from the environment around me on my lab tests is 19.6 years younger than my actual age. I wrote a major New York Times bestselling book on. First one was fertility. Second one was cognitive function.

Third one was on longevity. My rate of aging is 72% the rate of normal. It's the same as Brian Johnson's. I spent $2 million on reversing my age and upgrading myself over 20 years. So I'm only $100,000 a year, guys, so I'm small.

But similar results. In your head, is biohacking and health the same? No. Health is something no one actually wants unless they're really sick. Hmm.

Now, I say this because I've been really sick with chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia and, God, a lot of other stuff. So when you wake up and you're just. I just want to get out of bed, then you want to be healthy. But for most of us, we're healthy enough that it's number twelve on our list of priorities. But did you want to be full of power today?

Did you want to focus effortlessly? Did you just want to feel the vibe? We want that way more than we want to be healthy. The only people who care about aging are old. The only people who care about health are sick.

The rest of us, we are wired in our bones. And I talk about how this works in the world of biohacking in our bones. To want energy, to want power, and to want sex. That's how humans are. And this happens before we can think.

And that's a big part of my last book, was, what's going on before you can think. And how do you change that signal? So you can put muscle on, or you can lose weight or have more energy or get smarter without a lot of work. And it turns out picking up concentrated rocks is a way to get stronger. But on a per minute basis, there are better ways.

Mari Llan
So someone like Brian Johnson. Yep. The thing that confuses me. Mm hmm. So he's vegan, right?

He's fully vegan. No, he's not fully vegan. Oh, I thought he was. So there's this weird longevity guy who said you should eat collagen for longevity. That was me, by the way.

Dave Asprey
I made it into a. Made it into a billion dollar industry category. I'm the first guy to market collagen as a performance supplement. And that was a big part of bulletproof, right? Yeah.

So Brian eats 20 grams of cow skin every day. So he's not vegan. I don't know why he says he's vegan. He's gonna have to knock off the collagen otherwise. By the way, Brian will be at the biohacking conference on stage.

I'm really excited. I actually like Brian. You guys are friends? Yeah, he's cool. Okay.

Like, he's weird. So am I. I don't. It doesn't bother me. So, yeah, he'll be at the conference.

And it's funny. I eat almost exclusively saturated fat. Sheep butter is my favorite, and ghee and things like that. I do two tablespoons of olive oil a day, max. And I do 200 grams of animal protein a day.

Same rate of aging. You do not have to be vegan or carnivore to reduce aging. It's something else. It's eliminating toxins, and that handles so much for so many people. And in the world of health, I see so many people making the same mistakes that I made on the way, and some of them take a long time to recover from.

Mari Llan
So I'm like, raw veganism or even. Just veganism in general. How did you feel when you were a raw vegan? Well, I liked that I got down to 176 pounds. I could have just starved myself.

Dave Asprey
Cause that was what I was doing. But the joint pain was just incredible. And my skin was always bad. I always had, like, thick tartar on my teeth, like, buildup of minerals on the back of it. And then I shattered two of my teeth and realized, oh, my gosh, that's what nutrient deficiencies do for you.

All right, so I stopped being a raw vegan, and then I became a raw omnivore, and I ate raw beef and all the raw veggie stuff. And then I went to Tibet because part of my practice has been, let's get the hardware going. But then how do you work on the software? How do you understand the emotional, psychological, spiritual stuff? So I've traveled to the Himalayas, the Andes, and learned from masters from different disciplines around the road on personal development.

It's what led to my neuroscience mystery school clinic brain upgrade place. And as I was just doing all this work, like, how am I gonna make myself feel better? I went to Tibet. You're not gonna eat raw yak in Tibet. It's just not a good idea.

Cause they're hanging in the wind, swinging. So I just went back to a diet that was maybe healthier. And it was that trip where I first had yak butter tea on the side of Mount Kailash, like the holiest mountain in the world. And this little tibetan woman gave me yak butter tea when I was feeling like garbage. 18,000ft elevation, things like that.

And my brain turned on. That was my oh, I'm learning this weird stuff from a culture I don't know anything about. And then I brought that back and that led me to create this idea of clean coffee and putting butter in coffee. McT oil came from another place and then magically, bulletproof coffee was born. And now danger coffee is my new brand.

Mari Llan
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I want to talk about mold toxicity because I've spoken about it a ton on this show. I personally struggled with it for a while, and for me, it came out as acne, which is something I still deal with. But I managed to get rid of the mold. I also had candida staff, heavy metals, and as someone who's, like, been living a healthy lifestyle for a long time, I was shocked to find that out. So tell us, were you living a healthy lifestyle?

That's the thing that I reflect on, you know, because I was doing hit workouts every single day. No rest. Oh, an overtrained woman. Who would imagine that that might wreck your hormones. It does it to guys, too.

Dave Asprey
It just takes us longer. Right. Salmon every day. Farm caught or farm raised? Sorry.

Mari Llan
Just, yeah. Reflecting back, I think I thought I was living a healthy lifestyle, and now I've really sort of realized what that means. Tell us about your mould experience and how you cleansed from that. Well, I grew up in a basement in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that had been flooded, and I had mold exposure from an early age. We didn't know it at the time, you know, it was a nice house with a nice basement.

Dave Asprey
Like, who would have known? So I had nosebleeds, like, ten times a day. It's a frequently occurring symptom with toxic molds. I also had rashes, I had asthma, and a lot of behavioral disorders. I was diagnosed with ADHD and Odd.

You know what that one is? No. Oppositional defiant disorder. Oh, so think of the rage against the machine song that. Fuck you.

I won't do what you told me. Like, pretty much you have that running all the time in your brain. That may have served you, though at some point. You know, it probably did, but it does come with just a lot of anger. And I also had Asperger's syndrome, which is on the spectrum of autism, and I say had, which makes people get triggered because they have a belief that you can't reverse that, and you absolutely can.

It's a very, very arduous process that requires first fixing core issues and then reprogramming movements, eye patterns, hearing. It's a lot of work, but all those things came about from being really unhealthy as a kid. I don't think Asperger's, in my case, was caused just by mold, although it's a common trigger for autism and things like that. It's also a genetic thing because my grandmother has an advanced degree in nuclear engineering, and all of my aunts and uncles, except for one, are on the spectrum. So there's that.

Mari Llan
So when you discovered that you had mold from these symptoms, what was your first step? Because I know it can be a really stubborn toxin. Oh, wow. Well, let's talk about what mold does. I did a documentary called Moldy movie, and it's free.

Dave Asprey
Moldymovie.com dot. Just go watch it. If anything I'm saying like that. Be real. Got a dozen top doctors and a dozen people like you and me who were just taken out by this.

And what mold does is it grows in houses when there's water damage, including condensation, and 100 million homes, according to the experts in the documentary homes or businesses or cars and things like that, they have toxic mold right now in the US alone, so it's a massive problem. And mold is the cause of Lyme disease. What? Yeah, I've been diagnosed with active Lyme. And when I say I've been diagnosed, I mean I owned the lab company that did the diagnosis of my Lyme disease.

Mari Llan
So that doesn't have to come from a tick. You can get bitten by a tick, and you can get Lyme disease, but the people who get chronic Lyme. 90% of them have toxic mold that took their immune system offline, and Lyme is a symptom of mold. You fix the mold, and the body gets rid of the Lyme. Now, this totally triggered some Lyme people who identify as only Lyme.

Dave Asprey
This information comes not just from what I've seen in 20 years of working in the mold and Lyme and chronic illness space, but on my podcast, I interviewed an expert from UCLA who did a genetic analysis and showed just comprehensively that although the symptoms overlap, 90%, 90% of the time, it's mold, not lime. So 10% of the time, it could be just lime, in which case, go down the line path. By the way, I did take antibiotics for a year to try and cure the lime, but you can't get rid of lime if there's mold on board. Okay, so what does mold make? Mold itself.

When you're breathing it or getting it on your skin, it is an immune system irritant. It can cause allergies, just basically dead mold will do that. Mold also makes mycotoxins. These are toxins separate from the mold itself. And when you're talking about something like coffee, the mold is long dead.

It's been roasted and brewed, but the toxin is heat stable. And that's why danger coffee says mold right on the label. Some other brands I might have been associated with in the past don't say mold on their label anymore. Mold free, meaning. Yeah.

In other words, the coffee's lab tested for mold. Wow. And I think it's really important, because along this journey, as I was figuring things out, I gave up coffee for five years. Wow. Because one thing that mold does is it causes your immune system to go into almost like a fight or flight response when you're re exposed.

People who've had mold, they walk into a moldy building, and their nervous system gets dysregulated. It's a cell danger response. So I gave up coffee because I noticed after I drank coffee, I would get jittery and anxious and then tired, and I'd want more coffee, and I thought I was allergic. Well, I came back from that trip to Tibet, and I went to a place in Mountain View, and I had a really high end cup of single estate coffee. And it was like the lights turned on.

The angels are singing, like, oh, God, I love coffee. And by the way, that's a caffeine tattoo on my arm. Oh, I love it. So on brand. That's crazy that you had to give it up for five years.

Oh, I barely remember them. I mean, is it fair to say that a majority of the coffee you're getting at a regular coffee shop is moldy? Well, I love local coffee shops, and so I don't want to pick on anyone in particular. I will say that in the US, there are no laws protecting us from mold toxins in coffee. But in Japan, China, Europe, and most of South America, there are government limits on mold toxins in coffee.

And on an old video, I have the former president of the specialty coffee association talking about how when he was in Japan, they rejected 1000 shipping containers full of coffee beans because they had mold. And I said, what did you do with it? He said, we sent it to the US because it's legal. I am not making this up. I did not cause governments around the world to make mold standards.

But people say, well, it's roasted. It goes away. On my website, there's a post with 36 studies supporting what I'm saying. And most people who don't think there's mold in coffee heard me on one of the three times I was on the Joe Rogan show, he decided to say there wasn't mold in coffee after a company he owns started directly competing with bulletproof. So there was a financial motive for that.

And the evidence is very abundant. And here's how you can tell if you're getting mold in your coffee. So some of the studies say 80%, some say 90% of coffee is moldy. It might be 70%. And the degree and type of mold are also something that matters.

So when you drink a cup of coffee and you have to pee right away afterwards, is your bladder full or not full? It's not full. So what system in your body is making you pee? I guess your kidneys, right? It's your kidneys and bladder.

And they're doing it to protect you. Because the toxin that's most common in mold and coffee is called ochratoxin a, which is a kidney and bladder toxin. That's what I had. There you go. I had it too.

In my house. Right. What that means is if you have most coffee that has Ota in it and you drink it, your body says, oh, my God, get it out of here. And then you pee right away. And there's like a half a cup of pee.

When you drink clean coffee, it actually hydrates you, especially when there's electrolytes and minerals like danger coffee, but it doesn't give you the pee response. Right. So if you want to monitor how much OtA you're getting or one other toxin from plants. The frequency that you need to pee is a really big variable. You should pee when your bladder is full, not have to pee before it's full, unless you're getting rid of toxins.

Mari Llan
Is there a difference between, I mean, this might be a dumb question, but like a cold brew, an Americano, in terms of the amount of mold, no. It doesn't affect the amount of mold at all. Studies show that mold makes it through the brewing process just fine so it doesn't get broken down. Actually, let me correct that. Studies show that mold toxins don't survive the brewing process.

Dave Asprey
The mold is long gone, but the poison that's left is there. Think of it that. Think of it like penicillin is there, even though you're not eating the mold, where penicillin comes from. So when you do cold brew, this is funny, too, because when I was a vegan, especially raw vegan, like, oh, I do cold brew coffee. Like, newsflash, it's still roasted.

Mari Llan
But anyway, I need to tell my husband this because he's a cold brew fan. So what cold brew does is it limits your ability to get the, actually a lot of the dissolved good things in coffee. So a heat extraction of any herb is going to get more out of it. And the reason people do cold brew is because it limits some of the bitter compounds. Or you could roast the coffee properly and get higher quality coffee, so you get less polyphenols that way.

Dave Asprey
But there's no studies, nothing I've ever seen, that says you get less mold that way. You just get less coffee nutrients. If you do an Americano or a french press with a metal filter, then you get coffee oils. And there's two camps around coffee oils. One of them says they might raise cholesterol, therefore they're bad for you.

I don't worry about cholesterol unless it's oxidized, because, well, that's what the science supports. There are some other variables, like APOB, that matter, that are not cholesterol, but coffee doesn't affect those. So coffee oils in multiple studies reduce inflammation in the brain. So they're plant essential oils. I drink Americanos when I'm at home, almost exclusively.

So what do I have in here? I have a double shot Americano that I just pulled right as I was running out the door off my espresso machine. I can't wait to try it. I have it in my pantry ready to go. So what should you drink?

I would say to get the most benefits, look at french press or no paper filter methods or espresso. Okay. But if you're worried about cholesterol, it might be up, it might be down from that. Just paper filters reduce the soluble fiber you get from coffee. That's a prebiotic.

And they take away those oils that I think are good for you.

Mari Llan
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P u r s u I t, back to mold cleansing. Oh, we didn't finish the other part of mold. No, we didn't go back to that. Okay, so I wanna hear if you did. Did you do supplements, diet?

Dave Asprey
All the above. I'll tell you the protocol in a minute. Give us the protocol. You still have to understand what mold does. Okay.

Okay, so we have, the mold itself is a strong immune system activator. And then we have the toxins from mold. They're called mycotoxins. And the toxins from mold are very, very small, fat soluble molecules. They look a lot like cholesterol, and the body can't see molecules that size.

It's below the level of our immune system for most of them. So they directly poison mitochondria, and they wreak havoc, depending which of the about 200 toxins there are in mold that really affect humans. And you can be suffering from an allergic response to mold or from mycotoxin exposure directly. And what makes it even more complex is your immune system eventually can recognize some mycotoxins and have an immune response to the compound, but not the mold. So if you want to get rid of mold, it's helpful to know what you have.

In my case, I had exposure to, among many others, something called zearalenone. Have you heard of that one? No. This is my favorite, mycotoxin, because anyone who still believes in calories, in, calories out, including some of my friends in the bodybuilding community who believe that a kitkat is the same thing as an orange, because calories, you can manage your body weight that way until your biology completely breaks. Well, zearolenone is 10,000 times more estrogenic than human estrogen, and it absorbs through the skin.

So the dust in your house or that musty blanket, or you could breathe it. So this is one of the things I had, is why I was so obese, why my testosterone was so low. Right. In fact, why does it. Because estrogen leads to weight gain or weight retention.

Mari Llan
Okay. Yeah. And it also leads to, you know, basically softness in your muscles. I used to have man boobs and, you know, the whole nine yard now industry's not dumb. Like, what could we do with this?

Dave Asprey
They concentrate that mold toxin into a little waxy pellet, and you put it in an industrial beef cow's ear. It soaks in through the blood vessels there, and the cow gets fat on 30% less calories. Oh, my God. Wait, are we eating this moldy beef? I don't.

I eat grass fed. Yeah, right. But, like, this is, this is what's happening to the grain fed. Yeah. It's not that the.

The meat itself is moldy. It's that a very potent estrogen gets added to the cow. Wow. And is it still present in the meat? Well, it's fat soluble, and there's extra fat in the meat.

Wow. But the important thing for those of us in the fitness area, if anything on the planet exists that makes you fat on 30% less calories. Your story about calories in, calories out is bullshit. It is provably wrong. Now, might they be a variable that's worth tracking?

Yes. Does it give you a license to, say, a diet Coke and a Snickers bar cancel each other out because calories. No, there are other factors at play. I love that you're saying that, because this has become a big community on TikTok, and, you know, there was a period of time where I would share what I was eating every day, and people got very angry about it because I do believe in quality of food. I think it's the most important thing.

Why do you think people get angry at that stuff? They get angry because it makes them feel bad about themselves. Like, if you shouldn't, they. I mean, listen. Like, I.

Did you just laugh at that? That is so dark. I lost 90 pounds through eating. That makes me so happy. Thank you.

Mari Llan
But I felt bad about myself. I did. Because you lost 90 pounds or before? No, before. Yeah, I did, too.

I felt bad about myself, and that was my motivator. And I think people get angry when they hear me say that because they look at themselves and have this feeling of, like, I'm victimizing them in a way. But do you ever get those fat protesters who are like, fat is normal. Of course. Fat is healthy.

Dave Asprey
And they come to. They stop coming to my page. Cause I made fun of their moms. This is inspiring me. No.

When people are gonna troll you, they're not your people. I know. I barely read my comments anymore. At this point, I just pay someone to ban and delete those people. Oh, I love that.

Like, seriously, they have no right to come into your living room and take to shit on your couch. Why would you let them come under your page and just, like, attack you without asking questions, without being curious, without any desire to help anyone else? 100%. So people like that, they're just not your people. I have no issues.

So what I usually do the first time a troll comes is if they say an immature comment, I literally respond with your mom. Cause, like, we're gonna go to 7th grade insults and bullying. Like, let's do it right. And then they just lose their mind because, well, you're gonna lose your mind if you're eating crappy food because you can't regulate your emotions. That was me.

Me too, man. I used to be a jerk. I still kind of am, I guess. If I make fun of people's moms. I had been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.

Wow. And I no longer meet the characteristics for it. Isn't it amazing you can heal these incurable things? I think it's absolutely incredible. Like, when I look at my weight loss journey, that has to be just my favorite part of the whole thing is the fact that I can function and keep improving my mind.

Mari Llan
The way I treat people, the way I show up every day. Let me ask you this. Yeah. If you had to choose between having your current body but your old mind or having this mind and your old body, like, what would you swap the way you feel mentally for the way you look? This mind?

Because I just. I was so miserable. That's what it's all about. I would happily weigh 300 pounds if my brain worked. Yeah, because I never want to go back to just not being able to think and just.

Dave Asprey
Just being lethargic, no matter how much willpower I applied. I like to say that fat people are willpower athletes. Right. You have less energy in your cells because your metabolism is broken. So whatever you have, you put towards willpower, which is prefrontal cortex and the brain.

Well, your lower energy. And you're constantly telling yourself not to eat, even though your body's telling you to eat. So you're grinding every day, like fighting the cookie. And some days you lose, and the cookie wins. But you were fighting the whole time before that, unless you've just given up and convinced yourself that it's healthy, which it isn't.

So I have a lot of compassion, both for myself. When I was. Was heavy, because I did everything. I went to the gym 90 minutes a day, half weights, half cardio, six days a week for 18 months straight. When I was 300 pounds.

How much do you think I weighed at the end of that? I know, because I researched you, and I know your story. But 300 pounds, 300 pounds? Yeah. That's sad.

It's sad. And I was stronger, no doubt, but 46 inch waist didn't change. And why do. Why was that? Well, if you don't have enough testosterone and you have lots of estrogen from your environment or from your white fat cells converting testosterone to estrogen, and your thyroid is low.

Oh, and then you're overtraining, like I was. So now your cortisol is high. Mm. It's no wonder. And you see a lot of people going to the gym between, about, oh, 18 and 35.

And I guess this works so well. Like, look at me, you know, I took my shirt off on Instagram. Great. And then after that, like, well, I'm working out even more, but it's not there. I had a couple guys over for dinner two weeks ago, and they're both, you know, big shoulders.

Guys have been lifting weights for 25 years, you know, total gym rats. And they both have these pot bellies, and they're just looking at each other going, I've never worked out this hard to be this fat. Like, I work out every day. Guys do it every other day. The other day, go to a yoga class or just chill, like, meditate and get your cortisol down, because the cortisol around your stomach, like the pregnant belly sort of thing, is a cortisol issue.

It's different than, say, an estrogen issue, which gives you subcutaneous fat everywhere. I don't know how old you are. But you look, I think, a lot younger than you really are. And everyone comments on your physique. How often are you training?

All right, so how old do you think I am?

Mari Llan
48. I'm 51. Okay, so not bad. Now, the lab tests, they're all over the place, depending on which aging metrics you use, but they're all a lot younger than that.

Dave Asprey
So part of it. How's your skin? Because I was obese, I have extra skin. I have these marionette lines. And some of my favorite trolls online are like, you look old.

And of course, the answer for that is, that's not what your mom said. Bam. Anyway, but, guys, I have stretch marks. And I have extra skin on my ass, too, because I lost 300 pounds, because I went through health things that most people never, ever have to face. And my brain works great.

And I'm 6% body fat. They also say I'm not 6% body fat. $26,000 medical grade scale from upgrade labs. I test myself three times a week, and I average the scores. Maybe I'm lying.

Or maybe you just have an ego problem and you should step away from the muffin. Muffins were my problem, by the way. Dude, muffins are toxic. Although I, like, they're gorgeous. I mean, there's nothing better.

Yeah. I look at, like, cold plunge as a way of experiencing pain. Yeah. And so is a muffin. Just the muffin feels good, right?

The pain comes. Cold plunges, muffins, super comparable. But how often are you exercising? Right now, my regimen is 20 minutes a week. That's insane.

Now, most people didn't hear that. They heard me say 20 minutes a day. 20 minutes per week. I heard you say that on an interview, and I was like, I must have misheard him. I will also admit, for the past two weeks, I've done an extra hour of just functional movements, which is not my normal routine.

I've been working on some neurological re patterning, which is mostly not heavy weights. It's like activating muscles that I don't activate well. So my chain from my foot up to my shoulder is in the right order. So I guess you could say that's working out. But it hasn't changed my physique.

I probably changed my posture a bit.

What a guy who used to work out 90 minutes a week down to 20 minutes a week. Well, I don't just pick up rocks, and I don't run away from tigers, which are the two forms of exercise we've always done. And when you go to the gym. The biggest thing is we concentrate the rocks into plates and we lift those up. And instead of running away from a tiger, you can stand still and tell your body you're running away from a tiger with chronic cardio.

About ten years ago, when I started, like, when I wrote the first big biohacking book, I'm like, guys, high intensity interval training works better per minute than chronic cardio, and it doesn't wear out your joints, by the way, I've had three knee surgeries. You want to keep those knees. They're useful. What I started doing was looking at what can artificial intelligence and the very latest breakthroughs in biohacking do for us. And my most recent book is called smarter, not harder.

In order to write that book, I had to open the world's first biohacking clinic I opened under Arnold Schwarzenegger's office in, I think, 2014. It's in Santa Monica, right? Yep. It wasn't Santa. It's a bulletproof.

Mari Llan
Yep, I've seen it. Yeah, we shut that down, though, because Santa Monica looks like the set from the walking dead right now. That's why I live here now. Yeah. A lot of people have fled to southern California, which is really sad.

Dave Asprey
So we opened that, and I brought in a million dollars worth of biohacking gear that I used on myself. I'm like, this should be available for all of us to see how you can feel. But over that time, we've got a lot of data from people, and we know what works and what doesn't work. And it's not like, oh, I just did some squeezy pants or some red light therapy over here. You can buy that stuff for, like, $99 on Amazon.

Just doesn't work. So we're using medical grade gear in the right order based on your biology and your goals. And it's like we tell you the recipe and we help you go through the right things in the right order. And because of that, there are five or six ways to put muscle on way faster than just lifting rocks there. There's a way to get six times better Vo two max in 15 minutes a week than 5 hours a week.

So you can literally stop doing most of your cardio, and your Vo two max will be higher when you do that, as long as you're using the AI tools. That's why we're opening an upgrade. Labs here in Austin likely end of next month. Wow. We're waiting on one more piece of electrical panel equipment to open.

Mari Llan
Wow. So this whole world of. Oh, you mean AI and technology can tell us what to do. And even better than that, at the biohacking conference, that's at the end of May, beginning of June in Dallas here. By the way, did we give you a pass?

No, you didn't, but I'd love to. Okay, I'll get you a pass. After this, I want to come to the lab and the conference. Okay. Once the lab is open, you're in and the conference biohackingconference.com and I'll get you a pass.

I would love to be fun. It's just not that long of a drive to Dallas, so a lot of the tech that went into that is expensive. And knowing what supplements to take, knowing what to do is hard. So I'll be launching a new tool for people, an AI tool that's been in development for two and a half years with millions of dollars spent on it. That tells you, let us help you figure out your top goal.

Dave Asprey
Let us tell you exactly what supplements you need, what biohacks you need, and what lab tests you would use to track it. So this is a tool, and it'll track your wearables and all that stuff, too. So this is a tool that basically says, oh, do I want to be younger? Do I want more muscle mass? Do I want to be more lean?

Do I want my energy back? Do I want to manage stress better? Do I want to be smarter? We just tell you, here's the shortest path to do it, because I found this is terrible marketing, but I'll do it anyway. My last book, smarter, not harder, I talked about the laziness principle and people, you might as well just talk about death or taxes.

People hate laziness because it's in all of us. So I believe that laziness drives all human progress. And it's because there was a farmer, he didn't want to plow the fields himself, so he, oh, I could harness an ox and then, oh, I could buy a tractor. Right now I can have a computer guided tractor where we just don't want to waste our time. And that's actually a sacred thing.

But people judge themselves, right? It's a very weird, like, self torture thing. Yeah, it's an ego thing, too. I feel like it is, right? And I will just freely say I want every ounce of energy that I can apply today to go to the highest good for myself, for the people around me.

And the highest good includes joy. But if I'm putting all of it into, like, a workout I hate, how am I going to have any energy left to be happy afterwards. It doesn't work like that. So I said, I'm going to take all this data and I'm going to have an app that just makes it so you don't have to spend $2 million the way I did to reverse my age and fix myself and all that. If I knew then what I know now, I probably had maybe a $50,000 problem because I was really, really sick.

And for most people who feel like, oh, my gosh, I'm tired all the time, I have all these weird issues, and I'm fat, it's probably going to cost you very, very little. You just have to know what to do. So the AI tool that I'll be launching at the conference, it's got everything I've ever said, all eight books, 3000, counting blog posts, 1200 podcast episodes, and all the research behind it. Incredible. So that's going to be happening because biohacking, if you just were to go through all the stuff I just listed, that's the same amount of content as a two year college degree.

So if you're a big biohacking fan, thank you and welcome. But I want to be able to guide people who are just, I don't care. I have stuff to do. Like I'm a dad, I'm a mom, I'm going to be with my kids. I don't want to study.

Yeah. So that's why I'm launching this new tool for people. Incredible. I can't wait to see it. It's going to be cool.

Mari Llan
So 20 minutes of exercise per week. I have to know what your diet's like. Do you follow a carnivore diet or do you kind of like tinker it based on what's going on? My first big book was called the bulletproof Diet, and people have lost a couple million pounds on it. I think it sold about 600,000 copies now.

Dave Asprey
And you see it echoed in a lot of newer nutrition books. They're on the same path. Chapter one of the book, avoid these plant toxins, including lectins, phytic acid, oxalates, histamine and omega six fats. So if youre going to do keto, this is all from the bullet diet, do keto for short periods of time come out of it. And when youre doing keto, protein quality and fat quality matter.

Right. So the whole clean keto thing, first book on that. And thats still what I do. Youre keto all the time. No, use keto as a scalpel and im 6% body fat.

What the hell business do I have being keto? Right. I don't want to get any leaner. So you can use keto for mental performance, and you can also just use MCT oil for that, because I know a guy like, I made MCT oil also into a billion dollar business. It was like an unknown supplement that made you poop when I.

When I started bulletproof. And so what's going on there is I'll go in ketosis if I want to deal with a certain issue or I want to lose a little bit of weight, which isn't an issue. On a typical day when I'm not fasting, I will eat 200 grams of animal protein. And I do that because, funny enough, I weigh 200 pounds, and that equation works in my longevity book. I went through all the research saying you might want 0.6 grams of protein per pound of body weight, and they say, but as you get old, you should go up to 0.8 because you start losing muscle.

But when I go to 0.6, I start losing muscle, and I don't feel good. Right. So maybe some people do all right on that, but I think between 0.8 and 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight is good. Except even saying that is nonsense, because have you ever heard of sarin nerve gas? No.

So back in some of the very early terrorist attacks in populated cities in Japan, some terrorists made sarin nerve gas and put it on a subway. Sarin comes from beans. It's a plant based protein. Uh oh. So when plant based people tell you, don't eat animal protein because this one animal protein is bad for you, we could say, but butt sarin nerve gas, you could also say, snake venom is a protein you probably don't want to eat rattlesnake venom because it has this weird spike like protein in it.

So maybe the quality and type of protein is an important variable. And if you say 200 grams of protein per day, that would give you license to make me crickets. Okay. And to make me eat soybeans, which might be worse than crickets, I don't really know. I'm not eating either one of them.

So that's why I always say animal protein. Because animal protein, whatever source it is, whether it's dairy, if you're not allergic, beef, which is the best, or lamb or not as good, but still, okay, chicken or eggs, right? Those are the things that actually have the amino acids that your body needs and a lot of other cofactors. If you do 200 grams of those kinds of proteins, you get results. If you do 200 grams of industrial processed plant protein.

You don't get the results. So the idea that calories matter lets you sell junk food. The idea that protein matters lets you sell junk protein. The reality is that it's the quality and type of protein and the availability in the body that says what works. If I was talking to a devout vegan, I would say, oh, no.

For you, you need, let's see, 1 gram per pound. You would need 3 grams a protein per pound of body weight. Because you insist on eating plant proteins. Good luck with that. Just to make up for the lack.

It'S only one third as available as animal protein. You're going to have to eat three times as much. And if you're a whole food, um, vegan, you have to eat all the carbs that come with that protein. So you're going to eat like six pounds of beans, right? And I don't want to be around you after that.

You probably don't want to be around you either. You can't do it. So you're going to have to go to non whole foods, plant based, which is highly processed plant protein. You still need to have three times more than I do. That's why using the fewest words possible, but still being truthful is so important.

Calories matter, but they are not the only variable. In fact, they barely matter. And the quality of your protein is so important. Oh, and the quality of your fat. Try and do everything I just said on canola oil versus any saturated fat.

It doesn't work, especially over time, because canola oil and similar seed oils break your cell membranes and they do it over time. It takes two years to replace half the fat in your cell membranes. So start eating french fries all the time. Two years later, you replaced half. Two years after that, you're 75%.

It's so weird when people go and start putting butter in their danger coffee, what's going to happen? They start switching out these bad oils for the first two years. You feel like you are going to die if you don't get more butter. Your body is like, oh, my God. Vitamin K, conjugated linoleic acid.

Like all the saturated fat. My hormones are turning on. I'm fixing my brain, it's so good. But after two years, you go to put like a half a stick of butter in your danger coffee. And then you go, I just don't want it.

And you go down to like a tablespoon and this happens reliably. And I've seen this with millions of people. Why? Because you fixed your cell biology just by having enough saturated fat. And now some people are triggered.

If you are triggered, you are now going to war with all of India where ayurvedic medicine has been teaching ghee for 5000 years. And I'm just telling you, there's more people in India than there are you. And they are right. At least their grandmothers were. So you should watch out.

You shouldn't piss them off. Ghee is the best thing ever. I love ghee. It's fantastic. I use it all day.

Mari Llan
So my one question for you, are you eating different types of red meat all day or are you sticking with the same kind? Because I feel like I eat. I eat red meat all day. Like, I have beef for breakfast, steak for lunch, steak for dinner. And sometimes I'm like, should I be?

Dave Asprey
Are you pure carnivore? I've dabbled. I did it for a while to heal my acne, and it worked pretty well. And I've also done keto. Now, I would say I'm maybe 85% carnivore.

Mari Llan
And I have a few vegetables here and there and potatoes. If you're still having issues with acne, let's talk about what it is, because I know what it is. What do you mean? We'll get to it. Let's finish the questions here.

Okay.

Dave Asprey
If you look at type of meat kind of that hierarchy, um, if you go to, uh, daveasprey.com and just search for roadmap, it's probably daveasprey.com roadmap. Um, I have a thing, it's like a one page you print out on your refrigerator, and it tells you quality of animal protein in order, quality of fats in order. So you are right. Steak, actually, bison is slightly better than steak. Um, then steak then, or any beef, it can be ground then lamb.

Right? And I didn't mention pork earlier. If you can find from a local farmer, pasture raised pork that didn't eat corn and soy, it's magical. I built a regenerative farm and raised at least 100 pigs over the years. Oh, my God.

Like, really good pork. The fat is very similar to ours, and it's just like, it nourishes you in a different way. But industrial pork is not a good choice unless you don't have any money. You're like, I could eat this, like, weird soy cricket patty, or I could get the cheaper cuts of pork and learn how to cook them. The pork is way better protein, and it's quite affordable.

So that's what I would do if I was on a really strong budget. But what I do now is I primarily eat steak and lamb, and then once a week I'll have fish, usually sushi, because, well, I like sushi. Okay. So sometimes you will go out and enjoy yourself. You're not always.

You can get grass fed in almost any city now. Like when I opened what became the upgrade cafe in Santa Monica, it was the first all grass fed place with no seed oils in LA. Wow. And now when I'm in LA, there's at least 250 restaurants that offer grass fed steaks. You can go to Arowan and get grass fed steak at the counter because now there's demand for it and it makes me so happy.

So, yes, I go out here in town, there's a place called the well. It's great. They have two different grass fed steaks on the menu and they don't use any seed oils in the restaurant. So I like to go there and you can do this, but what I won't do is go to a restaurant and say, oh, look, they have the crispy onion blossom thing cooked in shit oil, right? And these other weird foods that are all chemically.

I just don't do that because I like my brain, I like how I feel, I like how I look, I like how I move. It's not worth it, right? So I'll fast. Or if I'm going out with friends to, say, a chinese place, which they always cook with bad oils, I just eat a steak before I go. So I'm pretty much, my protein comes from beef and it comes from lamb and it comes from sheep yogurt, which is all a two protein.

Mari Llan
I need to try that, but I'm afraid of dairy. You know, I do not tolerate cow dairy. Even a little bit. Even the raw, like the raw, a two grass fed from a local farm stuff, I get acne, I get serious brain fog from caseomorphine. Sheep protein is very different.

Dave Asprey
It's much more compatible with humans. Where do you get your sheep yogurt from? You can buy it almost at any city I've been to in the US. Oh, just go to any of the natural stores. There's different brands.

Mari Llan
Okay. Yeah. Do you go to local poshes here? The blue truck? I've been to local pastures.

Yeah, I like that spot. Yeah, there's, I mean, Austin's full of good stuff. I'm so happy to be living here and I just, I want people who are listening to this and saying, but I can't afford that. And then if you're feeling angry guys. I used to put truck parts in boxes for a living.

Dave Asprey
I welded Toyota trucks in the early nineties. I'm sorry if you ever drove one of those. I suck at welding, but literally five years auto parts warehouse. I used to work at Baskin Robbins scooping ice cream to pay for my university, so I have not always had an unlimited food budget. You can eat the way I'm talking about, which is a low toxin quality protein quality fat.

You can eat surprisingly affordably, especially if you tolerate eggs. White rice and eggs cooked in butter is cheaper than McMuffins and it's so much better for you. And if you can't afford the grass fed ground beef, then what you would do is you would get the non grass fed ground beef, which isn't as good, but it's still way better than anything else. And you can get that stuff for ninety nine cents a pound if you buy it in bulk and you look around for specials. You can also go to restaurant supply stores and they will sell you ridiculously cheap things like my lamb chops.

The good ones, not the shoulder chops, but the rib chops. They're $6.79 a pound. I love that you're pointing this out because it's a comment I see over and over again. You know, about the exclusivity of health, so I think it's important that we're transparent on that. Why do you think I have acne?

Mari Llan
I'm stuck on that now. If you want to hear the rest of this interview, tune in Thursday for part two. Thanks for joining us on the Pursuit of Wellness podcast. To support this show, please rate and review and share with your loved ones. If you want to be reminded of new episodes, click the subscribe button on your preferred podcast or video player.

You can sign up for my newsletter to receive my favourites at mario Allen.com. It will be linked in the show notes this is a wellness out loud production produced by Drake Peterson, Fiona Attucks and Kelly Kyle. This show is edited by Mike Fry and our video is recorded by Luis Vargas. You can also watch the full video of each episode on our YouTube channel channel at Mari Fitness. Love you, Power Girls and Power boys.

See you next time. The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individual medical and mental health advice and does not constitute a provider patient relationship. As always, talk to your doctor or health team.

Dave Asprey Part 1: Biohacking, Mold Toxicity, Over-Exercising & Keto Diet Myths

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1: Introduction and Achievements

2: Dave Asprey's Health Journey

3: Mold Toxicity and Health

4: Diet Myths and Insights

5: Closing Thoughts and Future Directions

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