You've Been LIED TO About Calories & Losing Weight! (TRUTH BEHIND DIET & LONGEVITY) | Dave Asprey

Summary

Impact Theory Podcast with Tom Bilyeu

Guest: Dave Asprey

Episode Title: You've Been LIED TO About Calories & Losing Weight! (TRUTH BEHIND DIET & LONGEVITY)

Release Date: February 28, 2023

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Episode Overview

In this compelling episode, Tom Bilyeu welcomes Dave Asprey—entrepreneur, “father of biohacking,” and author of Smarter, Not Harder—for a no-holds-barred conversation on weight loss, the myth of “calories in, calories out,” diet complexity, cellular biology, biohacking, and even the frontiers of hacking human spirituality. Dave shares his personal journey from obesity to optimal health, unpacks first-principles thinking on nutrition and exercise, and offers actionable hacks for those seeking smarter, more efficient approaches to health and longevity.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Myth of “Calories In, Calories Out”

• Challenging Conventional Wisdom: Dave asserts that weight loss is not as simple as eating fewer calories than you burn. The conventional model fails to account for biological complexity, hormonal factors, circadian rhythm, food types, and more.
• Personal Context: Dave shares his history of obesity, overtraining, and frustration:

  “When I didn’t lose 100 pounds… I thought I was eating too much or I wasn’t working out.… It’s not reasonable.” (13:06)

• Overtraining and Cortisol: Excessive exercise without adequate recovery can raise cortisol, promoting fat storage.
  • “You can’t lose weight when you’re overtrained … cortisol goes through the roof.” (04:00, Dave Asprey)

Three Arguments Against “Calories In, Calories Out”

• Timing Matters—Circadian Biology:

  “If you eat X number of calories at noon, you get one response. Eat it at midnight, you get another … The body does different things with the same exact number of calories based on when you eat it.” (14:19, Dave Asprey)

• Digestibility & Absorption: Not all calories are metabolized equally; some calories (e.g., plant with antinutrients, olestra in chips) literally pass through, undigested.
• Hormonal/Pharmaceutical Impact: Drugs like zeranol for livestock induce fat gain on fewer calories due to hormonal effects (increasing estrogen).

2. How Biology Complicates Weight Loss

• “Meat Operating System”:
  • Dave explains we have an autonomous “meat operating system” (MOS) that processes environmental signals, drives behavior unconsciously, and often overrides willpower—particularly around food.
  • Quote: “There is a system in our body that is very much faster than our brain and it does all sorts of things to you, and then you take credit for it.” (06:58, Dave Asprey)
• Mitochondria as Environmental Sensors: Each mitochondrion acts like a “tiny computer,” picking up signals and influencing cell behavior.

3. Practical Hacks & Strategies for Fat Loss

• Intermittent Fasting: Still a foundational tool, but not always sufficient.
• Eat in Sync with Circadian Rhythm: Prioritize meals when the body is most insulin-sensitive (i.e., during daylight hours).
  • Referencing Sachin Panda’s work: “In 90 days, her type 2 diabetes went away. She lost a ton of weight just by changing when she ate.” (16:35, Dave Asprey)
• Macronutrient Order: Eat veggies, protein, and fat before high-glycemic foods to blunt glucose/insulin spikes.
• Better Protein Choices: Animal proteins are superior to plants for muscle synthesis and fat loss due to both amino acid profile and bioavailability.
• Emphasis on Minerals: Many biological processes, including mitochondrial efficiency and stress adaptation, rely on optimal intake of minerals (magnesium, calcium, potassium, etc.).

4. Smarter Approaches to Exercise

• REHIT > HIIT > Traditional Cardio:
  • “Reduced Exertion High Intensity Interval Training (REHIT)” is more efficient and effective than standard cardio or even HIIT.
  • “It’s only 10 seconds of high-intensity exercise … You get six times more improvement in VO₂ max in a tiny fraction of the effort and time.” (65:28, Dave Asprey)
• Slope of Curve Biology: The speed and shape of stress adaptation matter more than total “work done” (area under the curve): brief, sharp impulses trigger adaptation sans chronic stress response.

5. Biohacking Spirituality & State Control

• Spirituality Defined: States of compassion, empathy, equanimity; linked to emotional regulation and sense of meaning.
• Upgrading the Mind and State: Utilizing neurofeedback, breathwork, heart rate variability (HRV) training, and addressing cellular health as preconditions for accessing higher spiritual/emotional states.
  • “It is very hard to teach yourself to have that state when your body can’t make enough energy.” (80:10, Dave Asprey)
• HeartMath and Biofeedback: Training HRV as a feedback signal for emotional well-being, resilience, and heart “entrainment” with others.

6. Quantum Biology, Consciousness, and Body Intelligence

• Beyond Chemistry: Our bodies operate chemically, electrically, quantumly, magnetically, and via light signaling.
• Distributed Intelligence: Intelligence isn’t just in the head; the body “stores” feelings and trauma in tissues (e.g., hips for women), suggesting a physical-energetic continuum.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "There are tons of people… who just say, 'I’m just going to work out every day and I’m going to eat less… and then they don’t lose weight… It just doesn’t work.” (04:09, Dave Asprey)
• “Calories in, calories out… It's an oversimplified, lazy way of thinking about weight loss. And it’s actually cruel to fat people.” (14:26, Dave Asprey)
• “If you can do that level of exercise, you’re already reasonably healthy, so you can keep up that regimen until you can’t anymore.” (44:48, Dave Asprey)
• “My unconscious and my meat operating system values saving time and money and energy because it’s lazy. So why don’t we use that as our motivator?” (36:22, Dave Asprey)
• "I actually love being lazy. … I don’t want to do more work than is necessary to get that done. … It makes all of us more effective to identify the stuff that takes our energy, stuff we don’t like to do, and to remove it from our lives however we can." (76:13, Dave Asprey)
• “What if there was an AI-driven system that allowed you to get six times better cardiovascular improvement … in a tiny fraction of the time?” (35:23, Dave Asprey)
• “You can broadcast [love] and receive [love]… they’re trainable skills with electrodes. And that’s why I wrote a quarter of Smarter, Not Harder about the things that let you access spiritual states more quickly than sitting in a cave meditating.” (112:07, Dave Asprey)

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Important Timestamps

• 01:00 - Tom Bilyeu introduces Dave; opening thesis on why simple calorie math fails.
• 02:44 - Dave’s most potent hack for weight loss: Intermittent fasting (and why it can fail for some).
• 04:00 - Overtraining, stress, and why it stalls fat loss.
• 13:01 - Fundamental reasons why “calories in/calories out” doesn’t hold up; three destructive counterarguments.
• 16:35 - Circadian biology and the importance of meal timing, with reference to Sachin Panda’s research.
• 22:20 - Difference between calories and nourishment; why not all calories or foods are equal.
• 34:22 - The “laziness principle”; using evolutionary wiring to hack motivation and compliance.
• 61:40 - The biohacker’s take on exercise: REHIT and maximizing slope-of-the-curve biology.
• 76:13 - Biggest real-life game changer: Embracing laziness as a positive force.
• 80:10 - Foundations of hacking spirituality; why biological and emotional upgrades matter.
• 113:07 - Training the ability to receive and broadcast love; linking ancient practice and technology.
• 119:29 - Practical recommendations for neurodevelopment, auditory/vision/proprioceptive training.

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Bonus Insights

• Case Against Extremes: Dave critiques both carnivore and vegan extremes, advocating for less inflammatory plants and the importance of soluble fiber for gut health.
• Minerals and Evolution: Historical context on why ancient civilizations valued salt, herbs, and minerals; links to modern supplementation needs.
• Biohacking Tools: Upgrade Labs and AI-driven training methods are discussed as real-world applications for smarter, not harder, results.

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Final Takeaway

Dave Asprey and Tom Bilyeu’s wide-ranging conversation challenges dogma in nutrition and wellness and underscores the importance of critical self-experimentation, harnessing evolutionary and biological nuance, and thinking beyond one-size-fits-all solutions. Whether recalibrating how you eat, move, recover, or connect emotionally and spiritually, the episode is both a synthesis of current biohacking thought and a practical guide for those seeking the truth—and results—behind the science of weight loss and longevity.

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Transcript

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[Tom Bilyeu]

What is up everybody? I'm really excited to have the father of biohacking back with us again. Dave Asprey has had an incredible journey from inventing bulletproof coffee to writing his latest book, Smarter, Not Harder. He breaks down how to control your body's operating system to maximize your well being with minimum effort, and he's used this knowledge to reverse his own biological age by 11 years. So today we're going beyond the intermittent fasting you may associate with Dave and digging into how to eat the right calories at the right time of day. We also put to rest the ideas of calories in, equal calories out, and discuss how you can actually lose weight without a calorie deficit. And we explore if hacking spirituality is going to be the next big I hope you guys enjoy listening to this episode as much as I did recording it, and if you do, please leave a review. It really is the best way to support the podcast so that we can reach more amazing people just like you and help them be legendary. I'm Tom Bilyeu and welcome to Impact Theory.

[Dave Asprey]

Dave Asprey, welcome back to the show, Tom. I love being here in LA and just checking out your awesome set.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Thank you, man. So you've got the new book Smarter, Not Harder. You talk in the book about how when you were younger you did things not in the most intelligent way. I'm curious with all of the hacks and stuff that you've put together that you document in the book for somebody that's at the beginning in their journey and they want to do that basic like, I just want to lose weight as a proxy for other things. Well, let's start with that. What's the most potent hack that you have for somebody that wants to to really trim down.

[Dave Asprey]

If you just want to lose weight, the most important thing you can do is you can do intermittent fasting. That was our last interview. The problem is that sometimes it doesn't work. So most people will go out and do what I did. When I was in my early 20s, I weighed 300 pounds. I said, I'm going to lose weight, and it's the most important thing in my life. And I was an early adopter of being obese. But right now it's more than half of people.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So my whole family was early adopters. It's crazy. I remember as a kid thinking, my family is different, Right. Because they were all obese. And I didn't have that word back then. You can guess the word that was floating around.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh, yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But I remember thinking, wow, this is weird. Why is my family so heavy and other people's isn't? It was a strange thing. Obviously, that becomes a huge part of what pushes me at Quest. But being an early adopter of that, then because you. One of the things I found interesting, and I'd heard you say this before, but in the book, you detail it out, I think a couple times where you're like, I was a size 46 waist. I was going ham, I was working out, I got really strong, but I was still a size 46 waist.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now, does this have to do with the energy metabolism?

[Dave Asprey]

There are several things that cause that to happen, and one of them was overtraining.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Overtraining.

[Dave Asprey]

You can't lose weight when you're overtrained

[Tom Bilyeu]

because you can't outrun a bad diet or because you're breaking cortisol.

[Dave Asprey]

Cortisol goes through the roof and.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And it scraps the fat.

[Dave Asprey]

It absolutely does. There are tons of people, especially women today, who make. They do the same thing I did, and they say, I'm just going to work out every day and I'm going to eat less. And I know I'm going to lose weight because calories in, calories out. And then they don't. It just doesn't work. And then they get frustrated. So then they work out even harder and they do what I did. Oh, I'll take the chicken off the chicken.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Are they not in a caloric deficit?

[Dave Asprey]

Because.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So this is one of the most fascinating arguments around calorie in, calorie out. So are you saying. So there is for sure, for sure complexity.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That we'll get to in a second. But I want to. I want to attack this head on. So do you have to be in a caloric deficit in order to lose weight?

[Dave Asprey]

No.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And if you are in a caloric deficit, is it possible to maintain your body fat percentage and or increase your body fat percentage?

[Dave Asprey]

If you're in a caloric deficit, you probably won't increase it. However, the studies show that when you're in a caloric deficit for long periods of time, you go crazy. And these are studies that were conducted in caves with people where there was really no level of control. The guy who wrote about them with the most detail was Gary Taubes in his classic good calories, Bad calories. So the idea that you're going to just use willpower to stay in a caloric deficit forever, it actually is cruel and it doesn't work. If it did, we would all easily lose weight.

[Tom Bilyeu]

When you say doesn't work though, what do you mean it does it break? Because people just get fed up and they're going to go eat?

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, people will do that. In fact, the number of people who are Breatharians who wake up with empty candy bar wrappers next to them, it wasn't me. Data happens. And what happens is the meat operating system takes over and says, you're going to eat. And if you want me to pretend you didn't eat, that's no problem. There's a separate intelligence that runs your meat. It's what I call the meat operating system in the book. It does stuff before you can think about it. And if you've ever caught yourself reaching for a cookie that you said you wanted to eat, who the hell reached for the cookie? It wasn't you, dude.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's one of the most surreal things that happened to me. So I would be a stress eater if I hadn't done a lot of work. So we were just talking before we started rolling. There was a period this last year was working 120 hours a week. No one should do it. It's terrible. I don't want anybody to be impressed. It was out of poor decision making that I ended up working that much. But it was the first time in my life where I suddenly I actually understood how people end up eating out of stress. Because I would find myself walking to the cupboard, opening it up to get something because I only eat what's on my meal plan.

[Dave Asprey]

And I was like, what is happening?

[Tom Bilyeu]

So I would have gotten set my computer down, gotten up, walked across the room, reached for the cabinet, all before my mind kicked in and I was like, whoa. Some part of me knew the way you're feeling will be alleviated by eating this thing. It's a very discomforting feeling. Feeling of how much I could do. Sort of in zombie mode.

[Dave Asprey]

It's worse than that. We are all in zombie mode all the time. Because when I snap my fingers right now, you picked it up right away. Right. Except if we were to put electrodes on your head and measure your brain waves, it takes for the average person about a third of a second before the brain gets the first electrical signal that something happened. So what was happening in the third of a second between when it actually happened and when your brain got a signal, and then you had to think about the signal to figure out what it was? So we're all running with a third to a half a second lag time on reality, but we can't see it. And there is a system in our body that is very much faster than our brain and it does all sorts of things to you, and then you take credit for it. And a lot of what is in Smarter, not harder, is how do we get a signal into that automated system. It's actually a separate intelligence that keeps your meat alive. If you removed all of your human stuff, who's making you breathe, who's making you pull away from heat and things like that? There are reflexes in there.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Would it be true to say this is the difference between the conscious and unconscious mind, or are you trying to delineate something else?

[Dave Asprey]

It's something else. The unconscious mind is a part of that system, but there's a distributed system of decision making throughout the body. Each mitochondria and probably some of the other subcellular parts is an environmental sensor in and of itself. It's a tiny little computer that picks up a signal from the world around it, and then it decides what to do and it does that and it talks to its other little friends. They have a little system called quorum sensing, which is like voting. It's similar to the way crypto algorithms were. So your little things are deciding what's going on in the tip of my finger right now. Your brain is never going to get that signal yet. This is a part of your meat. And if they decide that there's something hot there, they're going to send a little alarm signal up. And eventually all these different systems that are made of tiny little compute nodes come up with a consensus, and eventually it makes its way through your nervous system up to your brain. And then your brain figures out what to do with the signal. And it's that lag time where, well, the hand moved away. So we've all accidentally rested our hand on A hot surface and we jerk it away. Good thing I pulled my hand away before I got burned. You didn't. Your automated system pulled the hand away and you took credit for it. If we could acknowledge that there is absolutely a system that does things before our brain can do it. And the measure in the brain here is called P300D and it's just how quickly can your brain sense reality around you? How fast is your nervous system? Young people say an 18 year old is usually around 250 milliseconds. And people in their 30s, 40s, 50s gets a little slower with age. You get to about 350 milliseconds. I'm still at 250 milliseconds because I've hacked my brain. I do all the weird stuff that I do. So my nervous system and brain's ability to sense reality is, you know, about 0.1 seconds faster than average for my age. But even so, I have a meat operating system. It does things and a lot of our anxiety that we think is emotional anxiety, it's actually physical anxiety. Something's wrong in the system. The system maybe doesn't even know what it is because it's some weird toxin that didn't exist in nature, or we're eating the wrong stuff, or we're in an endless caloric deficit.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. So I wanna. Anxiety is interesting and we'll definitely come back to that. To, to wrap the calories in, calories out.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh yeah. So I got a couple things.

[Tom Bilyeu]

This is like one of the most hotly contested things. Sort of like it seems like it's getting more and more narrow. So what I want to understand from you because as far as I can tell, the people that get really agitated when you say that, it isn't just a simple math equation. I think what they're saying is effectively that if you put a bit of chicken breast in a bomb calorimeter that it is going to give off however many kilojoules of energy when burned. Fine like that. I, I don't have a beef with that.

[Dave Asprey]

I don't know if you do plain physics. Unfortunately it's not how biology works, but it's physics.

[Tom Bilyeu]

We'll get into the statement of how biology works in a second. So first I want to see if I can neutralize some of the people on this. So what I would say is, okay, cool, I'm with you on that. The body however, though, is a chemical processing plant that's influencing what you're calling the meat operating system, which can do things like get people to do things subconsciously. And maybe that one is even less interesting or controversial than the idea of at a cellular level. They're coming up with a quorum, they're deciding what to do and they're turning things on and off. We had talked about, I think it was in our last time together, where mitochondria will actually become less efficient depending on the type of calorie that you consume. And so getting into the complexities of that. So I'll be interested to read the comments and see if we just alleviated some of the. Yes, if you put it in a bomb calorimeter, it's going to kick off that much when you burn it.

[Dave Asprey]

Cool.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes, if you are chronically in a caloric deficit, you are going to lose fat. But once you get into the day to day realities of living a life, the, the one last thing I will plant while you're here to steer me if I go wrong is there are certain drugs that you can take. Now, even before we get to drugs, if you're a type 1 diabetic, you can eat and eat and eat and starve to death because you can't store fat. That's the one that I, I never, I haven't seen the argumentation. I'm sure it's out there and people will forgive me for my current ignorance. So, all right, with all of that laid down so that people hopefully argue with you if they see differently, that it's a slightly deeper part of the argument. So did any of that strike you as untrue?

[Dave Asprey]

None of it struck me as untrue. The bomb calorimeter thing is interesting because if you put a piece of chicken in a chamber and you heat the chamber with a known amount of heat until it incinerates and then you measure how much additional heat you got, that's great. Put the chicken in there with some non caloric flame retardants and it's going to require a lot more heat to get the heat out of the chicken. But they never talk about that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What does that mean? You're saying that there's the equivalent of that in the human body?

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, if you put a flame retardant on the chicken, it's hard to burn. But they don't question how much energy it takes to burn the chicken, they only question how much energy they got from burning the chicken. So isn't it reasonable that there are things that inhibit metabolism, even if you eat X number of calories? And there's three things that absolutely destroy all of these calorie trolls and the calorie trolls are generally people who've never been fat or people who have fetishized starvation. And they're unhappy people. They're usually people who spend an enormous amount of time in the gym and genuinely believe that that you can cancel out a Snickers bar with a Diet Coke. They are wrong. And when they perpetuate that stuff, they're actually causing a lot of harm to normal people who are trying to lose weight and follow bad advice. I went to the gym for 702 hours and went on a low fat, low calorie diet when I didn't lose 100 pounds. And the entire time I thought I was eating too much or I wasn't working out in that 90 minutes a day of half weights and half cardio. It's not reasonable. It may work for some people. Here's three arguments why calories in, calories out don't work. Number one, if you eat X number of calories from Y type of food at noon, you'll get one biological response. Eat it at midnight, you'll get another.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Why?

[Dave Asprey]

Because of circadian biology. The body does different things with the same exact number of calories based on when you eat it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is that nutrition partitioning, meaning it's going to burn it or store it as fat?

[Dave Asprey]

Or it'll store it as fat. You're more insulin resistant in the middle of the night. Melatonin makes you insulin resistant. Okay, so your blood sugar response varies greatly based on that. The fact that you can gain weight from the same number of calories depending on when they're eaten destroys calories in, calories out. It's an oversimplified, lazy way of thinking about weight loss. And it's actually cruel to fat people the way I was. The second thing is uranium has a million calories per gram. Actually, more than that. I found the math on it once. So if you ate a gram of uranium, you should be really fat and be fine for years, Right? You mean you can't process uranium? You mean. Oh, how about coal? Coal has a lot of calories in it. Oh, you can't process coal. Oh. So it apparently isn't about calories and calories out. It has to be the right calories that go in, not the. So, wow, different calories do different things. Who would have ever admitted that in a blind calories in calories out sort of world? The third destruction of the calories in calorie out myth is a drug that's used in animal husbandry. It's called zero. It's an extract of zarellenone, which comes from toxic mold. It's a synthetic bio xenoestrogen that's a thousand times stronger than human estrogen. They concentrate this toxin, they put it in a cow's ear so it'll enter through the skin where it's thin in the air, circulate throughout the cow, and the cow gets fat on 30% less calories. It saves ranchers a lot of money.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What's it doing? What's the.

[Dave Asprey]

It drives up estrogen, which causes you to gain weight on less calories. So if this drug can exist and if they use it today to increase yields in agriculture, and if farmers who are making hundreds of millions and actually billions of dollars can measure feed efficiency to see whether X amount of calories from this food makes the animal fat or not, the calorie in, calorie out. People are gym trolls and nothing else.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, that was very pointed. So let's take these one at a time.

[Dave Asprey]

So the first one, nutrition partitioning.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So the body is making a decision as to what to do with the calories that it's intaking. And so you have a lever that you can pull there. So the example that you gave is timing of eating.

[Dave Asprey]

I'm sure there are others. That's probably the biggest one. This is based on Sachin Panda's work at the Salk Institute. And I've gone down and visited his lab, interviewed him a while ago, in fact, you should have him on the show. He's a fascinating guy. And he writes about how his mother in India just stopped eating when it was dark. And in about 90 days, her type 2 diabetes went away. She lost a ton of weight just from changing when she ate. She didn't change what she ate at all. So the body has a system that says during the day when it sees bright light directly overhead, it expects the largest number of calories. And this goes back 2 billion years to when we were basically bacteria floating in the ocean. You have the most algae to eat and the most sunlight. And we're trying to figure out a timing signal to synchronize all the systems in the body. So when we are single celled organisms and we want to start working with others of our little single celled species, we all needed to agree on what time it was. So to this very day, there's a timing system in the body called the SCN in the brain that's primarily controlled through 5% of the cells in your eyes. When it turns on melatonin, because it's dark outside, melatonin makes you insulin resistant. And when you're insulin resistant, what you do with calories is different. You don't take blood sugar and put it in to burning it to make electricity, to make ATP and turning ATP to adp, the things that we do. You'll actually take it into storing fat. And that's how it works.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay. So very, very complex process.

[Dave Asprey]

It is a complex process. It's not just nutrient partitioning, but it's circadian biology. There was a Nobel Prize for this kind of work that was rewarded for I think the clock or awarded for the clock gene sometime in the last five or six years. It's relatively new science. But circadian biology really does show the timing of food changes everything.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, the second one can't process certain nutrients. Is this where we get into kale and things that have anti nutrient properties? Like would there be a way to eat so that I could cancel? So if it's not a diet Coke, that cancels out my candy bar. Are there things that I could eat? We had on the glucose goddess. She'll have to. Jessie. I forget her last name.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, she's interesting.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And she basically talks about that, that hey, if you eat your. Now I don't remember if she said that it would impact your fat accumulation. But assuming that there is a positive correlation or causation between the amount of glucose in your bloodstream and the amount of fat that you store, she says that you can blunt the glucose response by eating your vegetables. Your I would assume high fiber items prior to the things with that would otherwise have a high glycemic load.

[Dave Asprey]

Veggies and protein first actually. And fat just you have have dessert for dessert, not for your appetizer. And you will have less of a blood sugar spike which probably will cause you to put on, to put on less fat. But not always. If you have a blood sugar spike and you've just worked out then that drives something called insulin. Insulin, which is similar to insulin like growth factor which is related to human growth hormone. So bodybuilders actually will do a heavy workout. Then they'll drink a bunch of maltodextrin to spike their blood sugar so that they can put on muscle more. But that's because there's high demand for it. If you're in a system where there's not a high demand for glucose and you spike a blood sugar, you're likely to store fat.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, and how far do you think that we could push that? So if I wanted to eat junk food, let's be honest, that's what I would want to eat.

[Dave Asprey]

Sure.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But I want to pretty dramatically blunt that effect.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh, yeah, let's talk about that. This is another great example for calories and calories out. You could take something called olestra. Have you heard of this?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Isn't that what makes you not metabolize fat?

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah. Oh, it also makes sense.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. Leaky anus or whatever it was in the packaging of potato chips. And I was like, I do not want anything that has leaky anus.

[Dave Asprey]

But it does block fat digestion. You can also take various carbohydrate blockers. Some of them are plant extracts, and they're basically blocking any of the enzymes that break down carbohydrates to release sugar. So now you've eaten calories, but you didn't digest them. And I guess we're not bomb calorimeters. Oh, right. If such a drug is possible. And calories in, calories out also doesn't matter. And then the trolls will say, oh, but those calories don't really count because you ate them but you didn't absorb them. So I'm like, oh, so it's about calories absorbed and calories out. But they don't ever talk about that. They don't talk about what you put in your mouth. So yeah, you can also take binding things like citrus pectin and some other things that slow digestion or even prevent digestion. I don't think it's a good idea to take a carbohydrate blocker, a protein digestion blocker and a fat blocker because then you're going to have undigested food that makes it through your system and you're going to be pooping out pieces of food. Oh, you could just drink alkaline water. It'll do the same thing if it's alkaline enough because it stops stomach acid from working. But whatever it is, you can control whether those foods even get digested and absorbed. And the scary thing is Mother Nature knows this. And this is part of what I'm writing about in Smarter, Not Harder. Plant proteins generally come packaged with a protein blocking agent, Tryptase inhibitors. And they do this.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Why would that be a plant protective mechanism? So assuming that all the weird stuff that plants do is because they don't want you to eat them.

[Dave Asprey]

Yep.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is it to get the consumer to be malnourished?

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, it's so that you can't use my plant based protein so you won't eat me. So most of human plant eating throughout history has been this Is a great way to stop a famine so I don't starve to death. How do I remove the most toxins from this plant so it causes the least harm and provides the most calories as apart from the most nourishment? Because those are different things.

[Tom Bilyeu]

To find the difference, please.

[Dave Asprey]

Calories are something you burn to make energy. Nourishment is things you use as building blocks for your cells. You need minerals, you need polyphenols, you need specific lipids, and you need specific amino acids. You don't really need specific carbohydrates to build cells. Less than half a percent of your body is carbohydrate at any one time.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so plants, I. When I get this far in our conversation, we will get to the third one here in a second. But when I get this far in the conversation with you, I always feel like you're going to to say, don't eat plants. But you don't.

[Dave Asprey]

No, I do not believe that not eating plants is smart. And the carnivore guys, I actually predicted this at the beginning. I said, you guys are going to end up eating less inflammatory plants. Because very few people do well over long periods of time on a carnivore diet or on a vegan diet. I did the carnivore thing when I was writing the bulletproof diet book. I went three months with no carbs, just ate meat and eggs. And I did have butter, which some people would say isn't carnivore.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Some people would.

[Dave Asprey]

They can't make up their minds. I gave myself autoimmune issues I didn't have and food allergies I didn't have because I gave myself leaky gut because I was having no soluble fiber. And it's not a good solution. My sleep quality went down and down.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I want to push on that. So why is no soluble fiber going to break the tight junctions in the epithelial lining of your gut?

[Dave Asprey]

It's because of bacteria that eats the mucus in the lining of your gut. Akkermansia.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so you get rid of the bacteria that stops them from doing that.

[Dave Asprey]

No, the bacteria doesn't have any mucus to eat anymore because mucus is made out of carbohydrates. So it goes to town on your gut lining. Interesting. Okay, so what I would say is, is going carnivore for 30 days a great idea? Hell yeah. Reset your gut bacteria, get rid of all the bad actors in there. It's. It's great. And if you wanted to increase butyric acid Formation, which is one of the most important things that your gut bacteria are doing. You could eat lots of collagen. And I'm the guy who made collagen a billion dollar industry. I'm kind of a fan. Right. Collagen can ferment in the gut to become butyric acid. It doesn't always, depending on what gut bacteria you have, they call that animal fiber. So if you're going to go carnivore, you should be just eating a lot, like a lot of collagen along with your steaks and your organ meats. And after a month of that, you're going to do where it goes, oh, I guess I'll have some carbs. Just have less. Less inflammatory carbs. There's a great argument for herbs and spices as being Mother Nature's original multivitamins. That's why we had first salt trading routes through Asia. That's because salt is where minerals come from, rock salt. And that was all we had as supplements. And we are made out of salt water like is in the ocean. So getting enough of that salt was precious. The next thing they added on top of that was spices and herbs. So they were trading these not just because they tasted good. They're training these because these were sources of rare minerals that you couldn't get otherwise and polyphenols that were useful for you. So all of herbal medicine is based on those two things. And I think eating no plants at all is a bad idea. I also think eating a wide variety of rainbows without looking at the pros and cons of each one of those plants is a fool's errand. And there is no historical record of humans ever doing that. We did not have frozen blueberries from Peru. We were cavemen. We just didn't. We ate what was seasonal, what was around us. And there were a few precious things that we traded with people who lived far away for that provided things like manganese or zinc or something that we needed. And those were herbs.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Man, it's so interesting. I don't know how people figure this stuff out. So, okay, you're. You're back in the day and you are just absolutely slaughtering people to get their spices.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And what we're saying is there was ancient wisdom, I don't know what else to call it around. Ooh, eat these things, Feel better or something. And you're saying that that is because you go, there's actually two sections of Smarter, not harder, that talks about minerals. So you're like, load up on raw minerals. And then Charge up on raw.

[Dave Asprey]

Raw minerals.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So can I not get minerals from eating animal flesh?

[Dave Asprey]

You don't get very many minerals from animal flesh. You'll get some iron, but most of it is in the organ meats.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And because that's just as it processes carbohydrate. Let me see if I understand the process.

[Dave Asprey]

Sure.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I don't know how the minerals end up in the soil other than through excrement. So this becomes a chicken and egg problem. But let's just say for a second that we're at the level of healthy soil. So the soil has minerals in it. The minerals get absorbed by the plants. Certain plants, yep. We eat those plants. We thusly get those minerals are. From an evolutionary standpoint, our body has grown expectant that we will eat these sources of carbohydrate that do have these minerals in them. Or from an evolutionary standpoint.

[Dave Asprey]

So that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's option A. Option B is same scenario up to the animals eat the stuff with the minerals, so they eat the plants. We then eat nose to tail. So we're eating the organs. The organs, in processing the carbohydrates that it ate, retain trace minerals from what they ate.

[Dave Asprey]

They use the trace minerals. They don't just retain them. They have the minerals in them because they need those minerals to do their function as organs.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do we store minerals and do animals store. Store minerals and body fat?

[Dave Asprey]

Not very many. We store toxic metals in our body fat. But there's not a lot of. Of any metal in your body fat that I'm aware of.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I don't want to derail on that. But is that to trap it?

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, it's to trap it. So when you biopsy body fat from

[Tom Bilyeu]

people, does poison get stored in body fat?

[Dave Asprey]

Absolutely.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay.

[Dave Asprey]

It's one of the reasons that I write about Rapid. I have a protocol on daveasprey.com where I talk about the Rapid Fat Loss Protocol. And it's how. How to lose weight faster than you're supposed to. And it's got all these warnings. I had a guy lose a pound a day for 75 days, and you just start releasing. Well, you have to take glutathione and charcoal and all these toxin binders because otherwise you get profound brain fog because you're dumping metals and pesticides and your fat is full of that stuff. It's ridiculous. Fat also, though, creates estrogen. It turns testosterone into estrogen. And I'll show you some pictures. Actually, I just found him when I was moving to Austin a couple months ago. They're polaroids from a photo shoot I did for Entrepreneur magazine when I was 23, when I weighed 300 pounds. And I'm like, I can't believe I wore a double extra large T shirt. But my estrogen was so high and my testosterone was so low because of the body fat and toxic mold, that I'm very androgynous in the pictures. That's weird. And that's what happens from fat. But the fat was storing mold toxins, estrogenic mold toxins, rather than sticking them in my liver and my brain.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, super interesting. Going back to. The organs are using the minerals in just cellular function.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah. So a lot of biological processes use enzymatic reactions. And this is why bomb calorimeters are a poor model for this is in biochemistry, we take a reaction that would have required a lot of heat, and we do it with very little heat using what's probably quantum tunneling, but using enzymatic reactions. So enzymes allow a chemical reaction to happen with a lot less energy. Energy than otherwise would be. That's why biochemistry is different than physical chemistry or just normal chemistry. And the people who are saying, well, if I burn it, give me chemistry. Well, if you wanted to get something done chemically with just raw chemicals, so you want to break something down, you pour some acid in it, it requires a lot of heat. But if you're in a biological system and you don't want a lot of heat, there are more elegant solutions to do this, and they're almost always based on enzymes. And. And enzymes are almost always based on something like boron or zinc.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is that because it's a facilitated chemical reaction?

[Dave Asprey]

We believe, and this is outside my official pay grade, I don't have a degree in this. I haven't studied like the wing it with me. Yeah, I haven't said, like the materials science elements of enzymes. So, you know, guys, if you're a PhD, please help. I'm actually interested. But as I've had it explained from people who are these kinds of people, when we're doing a reaction in the body, say to make body heat or something like that, we're not using it with a BIC lighter and flame and burning something. Something and oxidizing it at all, we're using a more elegant approach that requires moving electrons around, and we do that with enzymes so that it doesn't make as much heat, so that it's the most elegant, efficient system that, well, probably that you can evolve. And it just works differently than burning stuff. So burning stuff is a model for physical chemistry. But you actually take classes in biochemistry because we don't do it the same way in life. Right. There's a. There's a required elegance. If we had to light ourselves on fire to do stuff, we wouldn't work very well. We're not steam engines.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's really interesting. So I know nothing about chemistry, but as you were saying that, that was sort of. My guess is I think of the body. I got this going to be debated as to whether it's conscious and intelligent. I don't think of it as conscious and intelligent, but I do think of it as they have their own agenda. They've got programming and they run that programming. And so if you need something like a. If a raw physical chemical reaction is just two things collide and they will do the same thing every time versus putting it in a system that has little workers that move things around and take care of, they facilitate that reaction. Okay, that makes intuitive sense to me though I'm sure I'm way off the reality. So I want to really understand this using of the, the minerals. So our, our organs, all animal organs are using the minerals to facilitate these

[Dave Asprey]

transactions, creating complex chemicals that allow life itself to happen.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But you need those minerals to make all of that work.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, you need minerals to make your mitochondria work. If you don't have magnesium and calcium and potassium at all in the body, you don't have a body. You just have a lump of gooey stuff. They're required for life and they're required for thousands of different reactions in the body. And what is elegant and I would argue intelligent in your meat. Your meat is blindingly fast and blindingly stupid.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But it is fast and stupid. It's quite a combo.

[Dave Asprey]

And we are blindingly slow. That's like a third of a second delay. We don't even know we have it. Right. But we're incredibly intelligent. So we have these, these two opposing systems which work well in unison to keep you from getting eaten by tigers and to keep you from starving to death because you saved some food for winter. Right. So it's kind of been a successful system. There's 8 billion of us floating around. But you were asking about some other aspect of that around.

[Tom Bilyeu]

No, just. I'm trying to understand minerals because I know it becomes a big part of your, the overall thesis of the book.

[Dave Asprey]

But we. I got it. Here's what, what's happening. It's stupid, but it has a stack ranked list of important processes and a signal for each one. So it says I have a thousand things that need magnesium. But this Guy's only taking 200 milligrams a day and he needed 1.2 grams. So what do I not do? Right? It's kind of like, you know, you're playing one SimCity or something and you're like, okay, I don't have enough resources. Do I allocate it towards building muscle or do I allocate it towards, you know, making more mitochondria, towards making the brain work better? We don't generally get to say what happens there, but what the body will stop doing is getting rid of old burned out zombie cells. It doesn't need to do that to stay alive now because it cares about the now. But if you give it enough minerals, it will do that as long as it gets a signal that it's worth the work. The thesis behind Smarter, not harder is that our systems are elegantly lazy and that we are lazy as a result, and that there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, laziness has driven all progress in humans. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm going to paraphrase something from the book which I found interesting. So when people come to me in my sort of realm, it's often, always, why do I have this grand ambition? But I feel super lazy.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And I explained something similar to what you go into in the book. Obviously have a lot more detail, but that evolution has given you two impulses. One, go hunt and make sure that you provide. And the other is make sure that you don't use more calories than you absolutely need to. Otherwise you have to go hunt too much.

[Dave Asprey]

It's too risky.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Um, in the book you talk about how that's actually embedded down at every single cell has that impulse, which I thought was a pretty useful insight. It's what you open the book with. Why does this matter so much? How do we integrate it?

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, it matters so much because certainly when I was overweight and just hitting at the gym and all that it comes to goes, I'm not trying hard enough. I'm lazy. Something must be wrong with me because I don't want to do this. But when you understand that that laziness motivates you to do things better. We have cars because we were too lazy to walk. We have fire because we were too lazy to shiver under a blanket. We have blankets because we were too lazy to shiver without a blanket. Everything we've ever made that makes life good is because we didn't want to do something, yet we blame ourselves for that. Have you ever had someone come home and say, I just saved $400 on a pair of shoes. No, no, never that particular one.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Sure, I get the idea.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh, okay, Good deal. How many times would that same person, not naming names, say, I just spent $300 on the shoes of the handbag? We don't focus on what we spend. That's effort. We focus on what we save. And it's incredibly motivating. And companies know this. Save $5 is actually more important to us than spending $15. Like, what the hell? So your unconscious and your meat operating system values saving time and money and energy because it's lazy. So why don't we use that as our motivator? And what I teach people to do in Smarter, not harder is to say, well, the history of let's take exercise as one of the domains you pick up rocks or you run away from tigers. All exercise is some type of that. But what if there was an AI driven system like the one we have at upgrade labs that allowed you to get six times better cardiovascular improvement in a tiny fraction of the time of going to a spin class? Would you do it? And the answer is, most people would say, heck yeah. I only have to spend five minutes three times a week and I get more results than going to an hour class five times a week. I'm in. Well, there is such a system. It's driven by AI, it's customized for each person and all that. But when you do it, you're still not motivated to go do it because no one's motivated to go to the gym. You could say, I'm going to use my willpower. I'm going to form a daily habit. I'm going to pat myself on the back and say, I'm a good person. Or you could say, you know What, I saved 55 minutes today. And you focus on how much time you saved and that strangely motivates your hardware. And you're like, oh, I'm going to do this, I'm going to go save an hour. So you're willing to go do five minutes. But if you said, I'm going to go spend five minutes, you wouldn't have been willing to do it. And that's the laziness principle. And just understanding it's a good thing that you don't want to waste your life doing stuff that doesn't work very well. And the reason that I spent a portion of my life writing the book book is that I want people to have their time and their energy back. I am not happy that I spent 702 hours not losing weight at the gym following bad advice because there are things that are so much more effective than what people do. So most of us buy a gym membership and we don't go. We say, well, I have it. I know that I could go. I know that someday later when I'm not feeling this lazy, I'll probably go. And this is why there's 4. $400 million a year of gym memberships that no one ever uses.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I want to close the loop on weight loss. So the third thing, just because I said that we would cover it, was the zero.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so you've got the cows getting fat on less calories.

[Dave Asprey]

Yep.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So we're able to. What's the. What's the mechanism that's breaking down? Is it just the increase in estrogen? And estrogen's job is to.

[Dave Asprey]

To signal fat storage and.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh, God. Okay, so now I'm way beyond what I actually understand.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But. Okay, so obviously, women have. Women actually have more testosterone than estrogen, but they have way more estrogen than men have.

[Dave Asprey]

Correct.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It is my understanding that women store more fat than men on average. And it is my understanding that the reason they do that is, if you think about fertility, they would need to have extra resources around to be able to carry a child, nurse a child, et cetera.

[Dave Asprey]

So they don't just store more fat, they store more EPA and especially dha, especially in their thighs. Brain development for a child. Yes. That's where the first child has a higher iq, in part because it got all of mom's fish oil that was stored in her fat for the baby. My first book was on fertility, so I went really deep on this.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, super interesting. So. So we'll put that in the bucket of hormonal effects.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So in fact, going back to just calories, not a calorie. Am I correct that if you were to put a woman on artificially high levels of testosterone that she would begin losing body fat?

[Dave Asprey]

She would absolutely begin losing body fat. She'd put on muscle mass as well, too. Right. She might also get a low voice and body hair if you did too much of it. But body composition is massively controlled by the amount of testosterone you have. So you get these. Usually it's the same calories in calories out people, and they're saying, well, if you just work out hard enough, then you'll somehow grow testosterone. Even though testosterone is related to the quality of your sleep and eating enough saturated fat. But saturated fat has calories, so they're oftentimes opposed to that. And you're supposed to somehow eat low fat things and gain muscle mass and raise your testosterone. It doesn't appear to work that way at this point. On a high saturated fat diet with grass fed protein, inadequate protein, it's very important if you're trying to lose weight. It helps with the toxin flushing out thing from the fat, it helps with protein, helps with cell membranes. And people have lost more than 2 million pounds on the bulletproof diet. And yeah, it pissed off all their calories in, calories out people, but it's a lot easier to not be hungry all the time and to lose weight. And that's what I want people to understand is if you're hungry all the time, you're probably doing it wrong. There's nothing wrong with being hungry. Every now and then you should teach yourself to not feel like you're going to die when you're hungry. That's what fasting is for. But when you eat, it's getting enough usable protein. And something we haven't talked about, that's also in the book, plant based proteins have a lower biological availability than animal based proteins. So if you eat a piece of steak that's at the very high end and you eat eggs, it's in the middle and milk is about in the middle. And plant based proteins like rice protein and soy protein and all those things are much, much lower. So a gram of plant protein is not the same as a gram of animal protein when you're looking at putting on muscle or losing weight.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so from putting on muscle perspective, I'm assuming this is an amino acid profile question.

[Dave Asprey]

Availability and profile, they're different.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay.

[Dave Asprey]

It's called DIAA is the measure of that, but it's just a digestive. I'm going to butcher whatever it stands for. Digestive, digestible, available amino acids. Something to do with digestion. Yeah, I just remember what the acronym stands for. But you can look it up. Okay, what, what you'll find there is that just because there are amino acids in something, if there's something that blocks your body's ability to break the protein down into them, it's not a digestible protein. Right. And if, if you don't believe me, your hair's made out of protein. Like have a hair salad. You can't digest it, it doesn't do anything. So we know intuitively that what I'm saying has truth in it. But what we don't know is why

[Tom Bilyeu]

can't you digest hair if it's, you

[Dave Asprey]

don't have the enzymes to break keratin Down.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting. Yeah, but if I did, I could eat hair.

[Dave Asprey]

I'm sure there's an animal out there, probably a worm or something, that is totally happy to eat hair otherwise. Or cockroaches. In other words, we'd have piles of hair built up like we do artificial fur fibers everywhere. Nothing can eat that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Wow. Okay, that's super interesting. Okay, so now we, I think have a pretty neat container on fat loss. But now talk to me about why, why, why can't I work out hard enough that I can meaningfully lose weight? Like if I had a reasonable amount of calories, I'm, I'm maybe a tiny bit over maintenance. We know it's not as simple as I eat a hundred extra calories, therefore exercise 150 calories and you're going to lose weight. So we know there's complexity in there. But why? Like if somebody came to me and said, tom, in the next six months I have to lose weight and I can either exercise or diet, I'd be like, all day diet.

[Dave Asprey]

Amen.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Right? Just, just. I now wouldn't be able to explain why it works like you can. But it, it is certainly anecdotally just obvious to me in terms of what I've done with myself, my wife, everybody that I know. It's like if you clean up your diet, you're gonna be way better off. But why? Like, if I, like when I think about a marathon runner or somebody that's. And in fact, let me make a statement I believe to be true, and maybe it's not. But, um, I used to have an employee that was an Olympic level swimmer, so he never went to the Olympics, but he was like one place out from Baltimore. And he said that he would just eat an unimaginable amount of junk food and McDonald's french fries, all of it. And he was like, I, I could be misquoting, but it was something like 10 or 11,000 calories a day. And he said, Tom, I had six pack abs at all times, but he was like, the amount of swimming I had to do was so insane. That's why. So is it just that, oh, you can get there, but you're going to have to be professional athlete level of working out or is he lying wrong?

[Dave Asprey]

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[Dave Asprey]

If you can do that level of exercise, you're already reasonably healthy, so you can keep up that regimen until you can't anymore. Most people today are not metabolically healthy enough that even if they had all the willpower in the world that they would be able to do that amount of exercise were that unhealthy.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But can I ask a pointed question on that? I know you're going somewhere, but if you have somebody like that, so they're metabolically healthy, they're eating terribly, but. And my assumption here is because their muscles are screaming for glucose, because you've just beaten a life, you've used them so much. It is my understanding that when your muscles are in need of glucose, you don't actually need insulin to get the glucose into the muscle tissue, which means your glucose levels would remain low. And whatever damage glucose does to the, or sorry, insulin does to the system, making the cells insulin resistant, making it harder for you to put the fat on, making pre diabetics so on and so forth. If I'm right about that, that that would be why that person doesn't become metabolically unhealthy even though they're processing a lot of food that would make somebody else metabolically unhealthy. Because the way this guy described his diet, if I wanted to break somebody's metabolism, I'd say eat 10,000 calories a day of McDonald's. Like, just go. God, I can feel the comments lighting on fire generically meaning you're eating all the fried food, the bun, the like, everything, everything. So maybe now you need either. If anything I just said is incorrect, let me know.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay, so you're just saying if you swim a lot, like an absurd amount.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yep, exercise.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, exercise. Although I think swimming's in particular an important part here because of all the. He's basically teaching his body to make more body heat by being in a cold Environment. So swimming is actually a form of cold therapy as well as exercise. And you can get cold therapy without exercise that does that when you drive. More thermogenesis that way. It's called mitochondrial uncoupling. There's a metabolic benefit to that. But the reality is this is a person who has enough thyroid, has enough testosterone at the start, and probably has one of those genetic profiles that's less susceptible to toxins in the environment, but. But they're not bulletproof. I had a friend who was like that. He was a semi professional cyclist. You know, friends with Lance Armstrong. You know, rode the hundred miles a day sometimes for fun, just hardcore. Pizza, beer, hot dogs, junk food, 10,000 calories a day. No, he wasn't.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's a whole nother level.

[Dave Asprey]

He was, he wasn't doping. He was just a semi pro cyclist. Okay. Um, no, he wasn't actually competing. He just rode with all the guys competing and just, Just an amazing guy. He was also an early inventor of blade server technology. It was a foundational Internet thing. So he died on Sandhill Road at 46 of a heart attack. This is not uncommon for people who exercise at that level, who eat junk food. If you exercise at that level, you have to eat even better because you're putting an extra load on your system. And if you are blessed the way I was not and you were not with a system that's resilient to mercury and resilient to mold, doesn't have systemic inflammation, doesn't have extra blood, clotting, isn't susceptible to pre diabetes, all of which I. If you're blessed with one of those, you shouldn't abuse it. You could probably live a really long time if you were to use a little bit of biohacking techniques and you were to apply the right amount of work for your body to feel good and get the muscle you wanted, you'd also probably have a lot of extra time left over. But if you love swimming for four hours a day and it's not just endorphins driving you, then you should do that. But if you do that and you combine it with junk food, the fact you can eat junk food doesn't mean it's not harming you. The fact you don't get fat from it doesn't mean it's not harming you. You look at the labs of marathon runners, of triathletes. These are not the labs of healthy people. They're labs of people who could be profoundly healthy if they weren't over training and pushing themselves over the limit. So if you want to run a marathon, do it. But don't convince yourself that you're doing it to be healthy. You're doing it to prove something to yourself, and that's valuable. First guy ran a marathon, died. That's why we celebrate the marathon. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

No, it's interesting you talk about that in the book, if I remember.

[Dave Asprey]

I think I do. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so we one just to. To ask directly, am I off base with the. If you use the muscle, you need less insulin to get less insulin.

[Dave Asprey]

I don't believe you need no insulin because no insulin person is a dead person. Insulin's kind of important. That's very important. So. Absolutely. And if your muscles are screaming for insulin, or sorry, screaming for blood sugar, they will need less insulin to get the blood sugar in. They'll absorb it quickly. And this is why, you know, you can eat some sugar and then do 20 squats, just air squats and your blood glucose won't spike as much.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, I, I really have tested this, so this is really interesting. In fact, let me. I'm going to run something by you. Maybe you'll even know what's happening. Okay. So I was working 120 hours a week. I start getting dizzy and I'm like, well, clearly a brain tumor. Go to the doctor. You should have called me and have some salt already. Yeah, the, the doctor was like, no, no, this isn't. Do they do all the scans and everything? Don't know. Don't know, don't know. He was like, hey, are you by any chance stressed? And I was like, yes. And he was like, okay, it could be that, like, try to relax and see if it goes away. To say that I relax would be a lie. But maybe push, you know, meditation a little bit more. Try to one just knowing that it wasn't a brain tumor. That also helped. And so it slowly goes away. And so I'm like, okay, cool. Christmas time. This Christmas that just passed comes along and I have learned the lesson that you were just talking about that I can regulate my blood glucose by working out. And so, uh, 98% of the year I eat clean, but during Christmas, I let myself eat whatever I want, regulated only by discomfort with having a body that I no longer recognize as mine.

[Dave Asprey]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so this Christmas, I thought, oh, I'm gonna run an experiment. I'm gonna wear a continuous glucose monitor the whole time, and I'm gonna keep my levels below a hundred and see if. For the day.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So for the day, if I can keep My. My average in the mid-80s. How do I do? So I keep my average in the mid-80s. I'm. I'm like, this is. I have found the cheat code to eating badly. I'm like, this is amazing. One, I'm maintaining my physique because I'm working out. Two, I normally would resent working out over a holiday like that, but because I had a goal, it made it fun. And so I was like, wow, this is really cool. I cannot believe this is working. And then I got dizzy, and I was like, whoa. And I was keeping my blood sugar in the. On average, for the day, it would have spikes, but on average for the day, I was at 84, 85. So I was like, this is amazing. And then I started getting dizzy again. And immediately I always ask the question. I've had the scan, so I know it's not a brain tumor. And if somebody. If I have a symptom, I always say, what would I tell somebody that came to me? And I'm like, 100% it's something you're eating. So I'm like, okay, well, I'm. I know I get this when I'm really stressed. I'm eating food that's clearly stressing my body in some way. Will this go away if I stop eating the junk food? I stopped eating the junk food, and it went away. So I'm like, okay, what. What is actually happening? Like, what's the. Is it paralyzing the cilia in my ear? Like, what's going on?

[Dave Asprey]

You had adrenal dysfunction because your adrenals couldn't make enough cortisol to keep your blood pressure high. So there's two reasons people get dizzy that don't have to do with their inner ear. And it's usually not the inner ear if it's vertigo or, like, that weird thing you get from swimming and standing upside down with it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It wasn't that. It was. Imagine drinking.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And then when you lay down, the world spins.

[Dave Asprey]

It's low blood pressure. Really? Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So one thing I didn't.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah. When you get stressed, your body loses the ability to make enough cortisol and adrenaline to keep your blood sugar.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It wasn't lightheaded.

[Dave Asprey]

Right. It's different. It's. It's a dizzy feeling. I know. I've had low blood pressure my entire life. It's a genetic thing.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting.

[Dave Asprey]

So the spinning feeling like that. So if you would have had a big glass of water with some salt in it, or better yet, some electrolytes, like.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Like that, I'm going to test this.

[Dave Asprey]

Which would have increased your blood pressure.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm so skeptical right now. That seems impossible. That that would be because I've had low blood pressure where you stand up and be like, whoa, it wasn't that.

[Dave Asprey]

It wasn't bad at all. So if you've had that, but you've never had chronic low blood pressure, that's low even when you're sitting there.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Not that I know of.

[Dave Asprey]

No. What I think would have fixed, you have high blood pressure. When I'm stressed, it turns out you can have both. At first, you get high blood pressure, but when cortisol stops working and your adrenals run out of the ability to do this, by the way, they need minerals to do that. You might have been low on minerals, but then your body says, all right, I can't do this anymore. And that's burnout. Right. So stress is high blood pressure. Adrenals, let's just burn out of a person. But yeah, you get adrenal burnout.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So because I didn't feel burned out over Christmas, let me tell you, I felt awesome.

[Dave Asprey]

You felt awesome. All right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I mean, other than I'm having a lot of sugar, so maybe some joint pain.

[Dave Asprey]

But I mean, if you're not experiencing low blood sugar at all, I definitely

[Tom Bilyeu]

wasn't low blood sugar. Okay, good.

[Dave Asprey]

So you don't have low blood sugar. That's the thing to rule out. The next thing to look at is, is blood pressure. You can get a blood pressure cuff, but when people are doing 120 hour weeks, or even when you're just dealing with jet lag, which is also profoundly biologically stressing, those little cells in your body don't understand. You just move five time zones and then they, they send you feel like crap signals. What works remarkably well is supplementing your body's ability to handle your adrenals. So step one would be licorice root. You take a couple little licorice root capsules that help support health, healthy levels of blood pressure.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Can I eat licorice?

[Dave Asprey]

It's full of gluten and sugar. But if you could find something that's free of gluten and sugar, like little tiny black ones that are really strongly licorice flavored, those work as well. If you get too much of it, it's probably bad for either liver or kidneys. I don't remember. But licorice root itself is, is a good herb for that. The second thing would be adaptogenic herbs that help your body turn off stress. And the third thing would Be actually adrenal glandulars, which is what actually I use.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Adrenal glandulars.

[Dave Asprey]

It's extract of the adrenal gland. Land of animals. Just like you would take liver powder. This is adrenal powder. When you take that, it lets your body's adrenals work better. I promise you that if you're working 120 hours a week, you're pushing way beyond your biological capacity. So what you do then is you supplement your biological capacity. The fourth thing you would do, which is what I also do if I'm going to be traveling to Dubai or somewhere overnight and wake up and feel normal, is you take a small amount of bioidentical cortisol, like you would thyroid hormone. Cortisol is not a bad hormone. Is that over the counter? No, it's prescription. It's called Cortef. It's a drug that's been around for, geez, like 70 or 80 years. And you take a very small amount, 5 milligrams of that, and you might feel a little angry for a minute or two as it metabolizes, and then you get your energy back. So this is how you take someone who's reached burnout and you. You allow them to recover faster from burnout and you allow them to perform. So you can stand up on stage even when you've been flying for 32 hours because of a flight delay, and you still want to show up and be yourself. You can do that, but you better manage your adrenals. Starts with salt, actually, before salt.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Salt's for the blood pressure.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah. And your adrenals need extra salt. Minerals. Yep. So you would use salt and trace minerals. So, like, here's what I do. I land in the morning somewhere else on the planet where my body has no idea what time it is. I have. It's going to sound like a plug, but it's not. I have danger coffee. Because you need coffee to raise your cortisol, to tell yourself it's morning, that's normal, and I need the minerals anyway. Or I could take a mineral supplement, actually, and I take a mineral supplement, then I take my licorice root, then I take 5 milligrams of Cortef, and I take an adrenal glandular, and I take adaptogenic herbs. And when you do all that, your body's like, I got this stress. I can handle this. And you can move the wall way out. You can still hit the wall, but you can get a lot of speed before you hit the wall. So if you're working 120 hours a week. And you do this to push through and to get the product to launch. And you do that for three.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Three weeks.

[Dave Asprey]

It's going to cost you, but it's going to be a high performance. Three weeks and it's going to cost you less than if you just did it with willpower alone. There are tools for managing our state and the world and for making our meat handle way more stress than it thinks it can without taking damage.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Our meat handle.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, your meat has to handle more stress. Literally, your meat is doing this. It's not. You got it? Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay.

[Dave Asprey]

Fair.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay. So coming back one more time to why can't I work out enough to beat a bad diet?

[Dave Asprey]

Well, there is such a thing as an obesogen, something that's just pro fat storage. It makes you store fat. An example would be MSG. So MSG, when you eat it, will raise restaurant revenues by 30%, because people who get MSG get profound sugar cravings, and then they order more soda, more alcohol, and more dessert. So if you're eating someone with MSG all the time, you're going to eat more. It's just how it works. MSG also affects your ability to regulate your blood sugar effectively. So that's an example of one of those things. And when you get some of these other things, like artificial colories, artificial flavorings, they have an effect on the gut bacteria. And that's another thing that the calories in, calories out, people absolutely hate. And I read about this in the Bulletproof Diet, my big diet book. There's actually a continuous cages form of obesity, and I wrote about a couple of cases of it also on my blog, where people would get scratched by a chicken and a certain kind of bacteria gets into their body and you can't lose weight no matter what from. I said bacteria. It's actually a virus, as I recall. But it's treatable, right? It is a condition, though, that you can pick up that is infectious. That should not be possible. I don't know how that one works, but the cases of it are crazy. People are like, I was completely normal weight, and then I got this scratch, I got an exposure, and then I just got fat and I stayed fat. There's also very clear evidence from mice and humans. You can take gut bacteria from thin people who are usually calories in, calories out trolls, because they've never had to deal with obesity. You can take their bacteria and put it in a fat person and magically the fat person starts to lose weight. In fact, they can lose all of their weight from a fecal transplant. You can then take the fat person who gut bacteria, which is higher in firmacutes versus bacteriadides.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What the hell is firmicutes?

[Dave Asprey]

Two different phylum of stuff in your gut bacteria. But basically the ratio of these two controls whether your body is likely to gain more weight or lose more weight. So you take the fat person's gut bacteria, put it in the thin calorie troll, and then when they can't lose weight, no matter what they do, then they have to face reality that it's not the way they really, really, really want it to be, no matter how much their mothers yelled at them when they were young. Which makes than growing up bullies.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I have a feeling you've spent a lot of time with people talking about calories in, calories out. Okay, so what then? If I have a person whose diet is like on point, so they're not. They're literally following every bit of guidance you've given at that point. Is exercise going to be beneficial in losing fat or is that always just a look? It's you work out for something else completely. Don't even think about it.

[Dave Asprey]

For fat loss, it might be mildly beneficial. And people will say, oh, you do lots of cardio for fat loss. The only type of exercise that I would recommend for fat loss specifically is something I write about in the books. It's not like just running, running good, more, running better is kind of the way we think about it. But any sort of cardio, there's very different patterns you could can make. And the best analogy is music. Okay, we could have just a bunch of static or just like city noise and it's just random, right? Well, noise is bad for you. But then you take that same pattern and you rearrange it into a beat and all of a sudden, oh, that's not noise, that's music. It's the same amount of energy. It actually is energy in the sound. Right. But magically, how you order it, how you arrange it changes things. It's the same with cardio. So there's something called Zone 2 training, which you can really only do with a heart rate monitor. And there's an equation in the book, and I don't have it memorized off the top of my head. But there's a very narrow window. I think it's around 70% of your maximum heart rate. And when you work out at that level, which is pretty much you can have a comfortable conversation without being winded, but you're Almost winded. But you're probably not going to be able to feel yourself there. You have to have a monitor. This is a rate where your body will burn fat and it drives your metabolism. It's metabolically very beneficial for you.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And that's a steady state.

[Dave Asprey]

It's a steady state, but it's at a very specific narrow band. If you exceed the band, it's not beneficial for fat loss. If you go underneath the band, it's not beneficial. So there's studies that show I think it's an hour and a half of that a week has good effects on fat loss and on metabolic function. But an hour and a half a week is a pretty big investment of time. I prefer what we talk about in the book as rehit, reduced exertion, high intensity interval training. Training. And the big thing, how does that differentiate from hit?

[Tom Bilyeu]

High intensity interval training.

[Dave Asprey]

With high intensity, you basically sprint for a minute and then you walk for a couple minutes. Then you sprint from minute, walk for a couple minutes. You do that three times, four times.

[Tom Bilyeu]

When I looked into that, the guys that like swore by it were shredded.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh, yeah, it totally works. HIT works, right? And it gives you conditioning in less time and it's metabolically really beneficial for your mitochondria. What REHT does though, is it takes. Give me those initials again. Rehit re H I T. Reduced R E H I T. They dropped an I in it for some reason. But it's reduced exertion high intensity training. And what it is is an AI driven algorithm. And by the way, upgrade labs, you can go to ownandupgradelabs.com if you want to open a facility that does this and all the other biohacks in here. But what's interesting with Rehit, it's only 10 seconds of high intensity exercise. But the principle that drives that is the principle that supports every one of the biohacks in the book. It's that there's a way to get a signal into your meat operating system to make it change. And if you can drive the signal in very quickly and then take it away very quickly, you adapt. But if instead you push the signal on and you leave it on for a while, the body doesn't adapt very well. It just gets dropped. So the idea is you play with the edge and then return. Play with the edge and then return. What most of us do though, is we maybe go to the edge and then we hover around 75% of the edge as long as we can until we feel like crap and then we're all sweaty, we get endorphins. And then we go about our day and think we did the good thing. It turns out with rehat, it's how quickly can I spike my intensity without going over? And then what's going over at the top? Going over is when you produce a state of disequilibrium where you actually destabilize this systems in the body. So you create stress that's long lasting, but you, you have to do this very quickly. So you're riding on this bike and it's like really slow and there's an AI algorithm reading your heart rate and it's like, no, you're going too fast and you're like bored and all of a sudden it's like terror. And then it gets really hard to pedal. And you have to pedal as hard as you can for exactly 10 seconds. And then, and this is where it gets really interesting. There's a voice in your head looking at your heart rate. It's like, okay, you made it. And then as rapidly as you can, you return to normal heart rate. And it's the speed that you return from stress to normal that tells the body that it was safe.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So, okay, hold on, don't pass past that fast. So, all right, I create this peak. I get good either using the AI or whatever at knowing I need to come right back down, but the amount of time it takes me to get back to neutral is going to have a lot to do with my current level of fitness. So.

[Dave Asprey]

And your current level of behavior, Tell

[Tom Bilyeu]

me more that violates what I think I know.

[Dave Asprey]

If you were to, to go for 30 seconds or a minute like you would in high intensity interval training, what you said is true, or you're doing a 10 second spike like that, it, it dumps a lot of glucose, right? It causes an immediate response, but it doesn't destabilize the body the way running for a minute would. And so then what you're doing is you're telling the body you have to be able to do something really difficult. But then as soon as it's done, you're safe and you can return. If you wanted to hack this, instead of doing normal high intensity 1 minute intervals and I write the full instructions in the book and smarter, not harder, what you would do is you can't do this on a, on a treadmill because you can't make the treadmill go fast enough and be steep enough. What you do is you'd go to a park and you'd walk so slowly like you're bored like you're like kicking an acorn level board. And then you would sprint with every fiber of your body as if you are going to die for 10 seconds. And then when you're done, you'd probably lay on your back and just like do deep breathing relaxation exercise as fast as you can, drop your heart rate. And that is more effective. When I say more effective, Tom.

[Tom Bilyeu]

More effective at losing fat.

[Dave Asprey]

No, at V2 max increasing, which is correlative fat loss. If you were to do 5 days a week spin classes over 6 weeks, you'll get a 2% VO2 max improvement. If you were to do re hit 3 times a week for 5 minutes, you would get a 12% improvement. It is 6 times more improvement in a tiny fraction of the effort and time. It's that big of a deal. It's a hack. It's a little window to tell the body to do that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So what, what is it about the rapid reduction in exertion that tells the body get better at this? It just, it's so counterintuitive.

[Dave Asprey]

It's one of the foundational principles in the book. I call it slope of the curve biology. We like to think using kind of our lazy algorithms in our brains that it's area under the curve, it's the amount of work you do that that's what has merit. Like, that's the struggle, that's the strive. But what the meat operating system is listening to is how much work could I handle and still be okay? So it doesn't like the grind. It's lazy, but it will listen. If you tell it, oh look, you can do this and still be safe, but if you tell it, you can do this and go into the danger zone and be in a state where you're not safe and then you're just going to grind it out using your willpower over time, your body can do that. It just doesn't adapt as well.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Man, this doesn't make sense to me yet. I understand what you're saying. It doesn't. It breaks something intuitively. So to the area under the curve. Okay. I've always had the thought when it comes to the transformation I put my own body through, I always thought of it as I have to give my body the impulse to adapt or die.

[Dave Asprey]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so I put it under massive amount of strain and I say I'm not going to stop, so you better get good at dealing with this. And that feels like. And again, I could just be wrong, but it feels like that was exactly how I added muscle and lost fat was by really putting myself in a sustained, difficult position.

[Dave Asprey]

It works. When I did my 702 hours in the gym, I could max out all the two of the machines. I got stronger, didn't lose weight, but I got stronger. It just was not very efficient for the amount of time it took to do that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But what I get, the impulse, though, if the meat suit is like, oh, man, we're really going to be under these intense periods where I have to run really fast for a long period of time or whatever, and if I don't, I'm not going to survive. I get why it would adapt. If it's like, oh, I can handle that and all is well, why does it adapt?

[Dave Asprey]

Why it changed?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Because it's all. What I. What I think you're saying, and it may just be that I'm misunderstanding, is that you're giving it a peak, that it knows it's fine, it can handle that. But if it knows it can handle that, why change?

[Dave Asprey]

What the AI system is doing at upgrade labs is we're driving you to the edge of it. So the body is concerned that it's going to die, but it didn't. And if you take the body to the point where it's concerned, it's going to die and it stays there, There's a name for that. It's basically terror, but it's cellular terror. The cell danger response. All these things happen. Right. And then the body takes a long time to adapt, and then you spend a lot of your electricity on a stress response, not on an adaptive response. What we're doing is we're turning on a very specific signal that tells the body, adapt without all the stress.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Got it. So to put it in my language, I'm giving it a very acute adapt or die impulse, but I don't sustain that. So that it becomes a stress response which somehow mitigates or slows down the adaptation.

[Dave Asprey]

Exactly. Every bit of electricity and. And building blocks and minerals and calories and everything else that you put into a stress response that wasn't static, an adaptive response, or your body getting stronger, it's actually wasted. So what I believe is that the vast majority of people listening to the show want to. Want to exercise, but they don't actually want to exercise because we live in lazy meat suits. Right. So what do we do about that? Well, one thing is you could say, I'm just going to teach you how to just grit your teeth and build a habit and force yourself to do it and read some books about grit and fetishize waking up at 4 in the morning, switch sweating on yourself. You can do that and it works. It's just very expensive. What I'm arguing is that for everyone who's not going to do that, and kind of replaces that by looking at Instagram videos of people doing that who probably aren't actually doing it, but they recorded it all one morning and now they're eating French fries. Well, maybe if you just use the techniques in here and did something for 10 or 15 minutes a day that saved you 45 minutes a day, and you were motivated by saving 45 minutes, you'll probably be a lot more likely to do it. And I know that if you give me an hour at an upgrade labs even once a week, I can fix your cardiovascular. I can give you enough muscle mass that you won't deal with the problems of not having enough muscle as you age enough to have a working metabolism. We can work on your brain and make it work better with neurofeedback, and we can work on your cellular metabolism so you become better at turning food into electricity instead of fat. And we can also train your stress response so that your body doesn't go into that cell danger response, into that terror mode, into the anxiety thing that we're like, I don't know what's wrong, something's wrong. I don't know what it is. It's probably my spouse. It's probably this, all that anxiety that we have, that's also trainable. You can do all of that in an hour. Or you could go to a spin class and have someone yell at you while you sweat and spandex. I just think our time is more valuable than that. All right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Proprioception. Yeah. Is that the word for what you were just describing about the, the meat suit saying, I either am or am not in danger?

[Dave Asprey]

No. Proprioception is a sense of your body knowing where it is in the world and your mind knowing where your body is. So it's. Proprioception allows you to catch a ball and someone throws it at you. And if you didn't know your hand was in the world, and really, if your hands didn't know where it was in the world, it has its own distributed intelligence, then you'd miss the ball or smack you in the face. It's what allows us to know our body's upright and things like that. It's also something, though, that measures the amount of stress on a joint and decides how much your muscles are allowed to do to keep you from being injured. One of the Hacks in smarter, harder. Actually, about four or five of them involves hacking your proprioceptors. So your proprioceptors are measuring what's happening. I'm just going to do the example of a curl here. So if I'm holding a dumbbell, which I need someone to hold here. Danger coffee. All right, so now I'm going to do a curl. And there's a lot of minerals in here, so it's heavy. But what I'm doing with this weight in my hand is the weight is accelerating at gravity Speed, which is 9.8 meters per second squared, which means that when I throw it up, when I catch it, it actually physically weighs more. And when I wobble like this, it weighs more from the wobble. My smart wrist, my hand, my elbow, my shoulder, they all know that I'm wobbling, and they know that this weight may weigh more than it actually weighs. So they know hold back, because if you wobble, then it's going to weigh more. So you can't possibly do all of the force necessary here because you get injured. If instead you have an artificial intelligence driven machine that's putting weight on the arm that has no gravity at all, all of a sudden, then I can actually use all of the muscles in my bicep to do the exercise. And I'm going to fight really, really hard. And it's going to feel insane, but I'm going to be able to put more foot pounds of pressure because my proprioceptors didn't worry about gravity. So I talked about how to remove gravity from resistance systems, either with tech or just with, you know, resistance bands. Even. So this is also slope of the curve biology. How do I show the muscle that it's capable of doing something that it thinks is dangerous? And once you do that, it's like, oh, I guess I could do that. And then it adapts really rapidly. What we use at Upgrade Labs is, well, we have a big machine that's driven by AI that does it. But at home, there are some things that work better than others. So for very basic weightlifting stuff, you don't even buy elastic bands. Just knowing that lowering a weight slowly is important versus flopping weights up and down. You get more return on investment from a slow, eccentric movement. That's just how it works. So I talk about the things that they just work better than lifting rocks and running away from tigers in the book.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. So it's the idea of the body being willing to. Not even necessarily. What I was going to say is being willing to adapt because it's getting the impulse. But it's really the difference between the. What we talked about earlier. If you give it a sustained impulse that stresses it out. You have to deal with all of that. If you give it a, From a weightlifting perspective, an additional variable of gravity where it has to hold something back, you're not able to give it the peak. This is easier because I've seen the graphs in the book.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Where you talk about how by removing the. The read on gravity or the body's need to account for the potential increase in weight based on wobbling or moment momentum or whatever, that you can actually push that spike higher but bring it down a lot faster. It's very interesting. So is this only possible with AI and finely tuned equipment or are there things that we can do at home that are going to allow people that same rapid onset of adaptation?

[Dave Asprey]

Everything in the book has an at home version that you can do. What we're doing is we're using AI to discover new principles like that narrow band of exercise that causes you to burn fat and you can't go above or below. Or the idea that you can have a certain slope of resistance curve that's driven by AI. You have to go to an upgrade labs for that and own and upgrade labs.com. i'm seriously rolling this out across the country. People have signed up for dozens of them. But in the meantime, every one of the chapters, the part on the brain, the part on like spirituality and meditation, the part on cardiovascular, the part on muscle, the part on stress resilience. For each of those, I talk about techniques that work better than what we've always done. And many of them are free and some of them are low cost. And then some of them are the examples of the highest level tech that demonstrate that it's possible. The fact that you can get 6 times more improvement in VO2 max in 6 weeks is unheard of. It's just, it's shocking. And there's several university studies backing that up. So given that it's possible, maybe you can do better at home even if you don't have all the equipment, just because we know it can be done. And I'm still resentful of my 702 hours of eating lettuce and going to the gym all the time and not losing weight because I didn't know all this stuff.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What in everything that went into writing smarter, not harder. What was the biggest game changer for you in real life where you're like, whoa, this one has just a disproportionate effect on your life or cuts back the time, whether it's sleep, diet, exercise,

[Dave Asprey]

it was actually the laziness principle. So I've just finally identified that I'm lazy. And you and I have both built $100 million companies. I have eight companies right now and a New York Times bestseller every couple years. But I'm profoundly lazy, right? And I used to kind of feel guilty about that. And when I just realized it's in. It's in my meat, it's a part of human progress. And you could even argue that I did all those things because I was looking to avoid doing something else.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But did that just let you let yourself off the hook and not beat yourself up for being lazy, or did it actually inform.

[Dave Asprey]

I actually love being lazy. I freely meant no, I don't want to do it. I don't want to do more work than is necessary to get that done. I want someone else to do that. And it makes me a more effective person. And it makes all of us more effective to identify the stuff that takes our energy, stuff we don't like to do, and to remove it from our lives however we can. And I'll be straightforward. I like going for hikes, but I don't really like going to the gym compared to playing with my kids. Right. I will do it if it's necessary. I just don't want to. And instead of feeling like I'm a bad person for that, recognizing that, okay, I don't want to. So how do I get the results? And just being at peace with that and then motivating myself with savings and being excited about. Not about the money I saved or the time I saved instead of the time I spent. It makes it a lot easier to stick with things. So just say, I'm going to do something hard because I'm a good person. I'm going to grip my teeth and do all that. Clearly I've done that. Right? I just don't have to anymore. In the book, you go into spiritual hacks.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Talk to me about that. The you also, you're careful to delineate different kinds of spirituality. So it isn't just the meditation, monks, Himalayas, all of that. So what is spirituality for you? How do we hack it, and why does it matter?

[Dave Asprey]

So the definition of spirituality is kind of like the Supreme Court definition of pornography. I can't define it, but I know what it is when I see it. Right. And can you say that a specific state of bliss that someone experiences is a spiritual experience or a blissful experience. The answer is, I don't ask them. They'll tell you. Right? And that's okay, because the way we perceive reality is actually valid. And we also know that different people have different lenses on reality. We have different filters that we either teach ourselves or that society teaches us. And at a minimum, with spirituality, there's a sense of inner peace, a sense of happiness, a sense of equanimity, which I talk a lot about in the book. In Buddhism, there's three levels that we talk about. There's the lowest level of spiritual growth, which is having empathy for other people. Some people just have no empathy, right? You start waking up. That's why I can feel other people's pain. But there isn't that particularly enlightened. Because having to feel other people's pain, even when there's nothing you can do about it, you don't really want to, isn't always a good thing. So you go from there to compassion, which is wishing well for others, even if you don't take on the pain of having empathy with them. You can have empathy, but you don't have to when you have a state of compassion. So you can just. It's a feeling, it's an actual thing. And you can measure compassion with neuroscience, and that's what one of my companies does. But this, the state above that is called equanimity. And this is where you can choose your state and maintain your state no matter what is happening in the world around you. So even if you have empathy and you have compassion, if you have equanimity, you can be the monk who meditates in the middle of a hurricane, and nothing can take you from your chosen state. And that is a pretty powerful side of spirituality. And it's actually profoundly dangerous. That's why it's named Danger Coffees. Like, who knows what you might do when you are unprogrammable, when you will always do the right thing and no one can sway you from your chosen state. You are an enormously powerful person who's capable of great deeds of kindness and peace.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What does it take to get there?

[Dave Asprey]

I believe that the fastest path for that is starting at your cellular biology and working your way up. It's very hard to teach yourself to have that state when your body can't make enough energy, when you're getting this signal from your meat operating system, that's like something is wrong. Something's profoundly wrong. I don't know what it is. And what it is is you're swimming in toxins that are inhibiting your body's ability to do it. So when the body feels like it's nourished and safe, it's just easier to do the hard work. And then you start looking at things that are mostly, I'm going to call it, in our emotional body. And so you work on your emotional stuff, trauma resolution and things like that. And once. Why do you call it emotional body? It's a word from transpersonal psychology.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Don't know what that is.

[Dave Asprey]

That's a field that was started in 1956 by a guy named Stan Grof. Stan was a Freudian licensed psychologist in Czechoslovakia, which is what it was called back then, not the Czech Republic. And he used lsd, which he purchased from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals with a license to treat 3,000 patients and had profound effects. And he's like, this Freudian stuff doesn't work very well, but this other stuff does. And I had the great honor of interviewing Stan on my show and hosting an event with him when he was 94 years old. He's the inventor of holotropy breathing, which you may have talked about on the show before. So Stan ended up creating the field of transpersonal psychology, which is where a lot of the trauma resolution stuff that you hear about. You'll hear Gabby Bernstein, who's become a friend, talk about ifs internal family systems therapy. You'll see a lot of the trauma resolution stuff came out of Stan Groff's observations of what happens to people just early on in their life.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But does this intersect with the meat suit?

[Dave Asprey]

Are you saying that trauma stories stored in the body. Okay, stored.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Define that, please.

[Dave Asprey]

Well, you can ask most women what happens if they get a really deep hip massage. And the vast majority, like 80% of women, they don't know why they just start crying like, like strong emotions come out. Because women store emotions in their hips.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Women store emotions? How? So tell me what a. An emotion is at a biological level. So you were just saying you can measure compassion. So I imagine you. Okay, it's brain waves. Like there's a signal that we can pick up on from the body. So what is the signal of an emotion?

[Dave Asprey]

You push on that part of the body. Yeah. And a strong feeling happens. A really strong feeling.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Serotonin stored in the gut. Is there a neurochemical stored in the hips? It's.

[Dave Asprey]

So now you're making an assumption that we're chemical based systems when we're not.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh, we're about to go off the rails. I love it. Take me there. But this sounds crazy. So what if we're not chemical based.

[Dave Asprey]

We're exclusively chemical based.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, that's very different.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay, so we are simultaneously chemical and electrical. And I could go get my electrical stimulation thing and show you how electrical you are.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Right?

[Dave Asprey]

Yep, yep.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, I'm with that so far.

[Dave Asprey]

So we're chemical, we're electrical. We're also provably with hard science, quantum. Okay, I knew that you'd love this one. So this is from you.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So we have chemical, electrical, quantum.

[Dave Asprey]

We also have magnetic and light signaling inside the body.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay.

[Dave Asprey]

All of these we can prove the existence of with physics measurements.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is that it? Chemical, electrical, quantum, magnetic and light.

[Dave Asprey]

Yep, that's all that I know of. Okay, fair. There may be some vibrational physical. Vibrational thing in there as well, but hell, I don't know.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so we'll. And the possible unknown very wide, like

[Dave Asprey]

sound, vibration probably does something.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So let's zoom in on quantum. When you were saying that we're not just chemical, is that the one that you were aimed at?

[Dave Asprey]

Yep.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay.

[Dave Asprey]

Well actually no, I was aimed at electrical because I mean if I touch the hip and I get an electrical signal, it's a lot faster than a neurochemicals.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, I'm stored is the word that I'm going to be zooming in on. That's the part where I don't know. I don't know.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Hey, I love expanding my mind and realizing new things. The thing I'm always optimizing for is my brain is a prediction engine. I want to make its predictions better and better. But storing emotion in the body I cannot yet meet with anecdotal evidence of my own. Give me your gut instinct. Maybe this isn't the area you feel

[Dave Asprey]

completely comfortable when we say stored is that there's information sensing proprioceptive pattern here. And when something bad happens, information sensing information field. So yeah, information sensing everything in the environment's information. Okay. Proprioceptors pick up information field.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Something I should have you defined because

[Dave Asprey]

I don't know what that is. Oh yeah. So probably the most accurate reflection of how the universe works is information field theory.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay.

[Dave Asprey]

Which is that everyone is actually just a field of information. Everything is a field of information that all intersect. It's extremely quantum physics. But it's like hard math quantum physics stuff. So information field theory. I'm just going to say even if we get out of the hard physics side of that, we just say that. That there are parts of your body that have their own ability to sense being injured. Right. So the elbow got injured. So now it hurts. Whenever you try to do something that's going to cause the injury again, you can treat that with electrical stimulation. I write the stories in the book, like what I did with Steven Kotler. So you put electrodes on to force the body to do it anyway because there's electricity making the body do what it thinks it can't do. And as soon as the body does it and it doesn't get injured, it's like, oh. And then it doesn't hurt anymore and the pain just goes away. Well, there was actually a little decision made in your elbow about that where it thought it couldn't, so it sent you pain to make sure you didn't. Well, what other parts of your meat operating system are making sure you don't? It turns out there's a lot of them in there. And one of the things that happens is when would that be in the hip, though? You know, why it's in the hips and why isn't it in the brain like the heart? You still think that you're your brain. And I would just argue, like, what would happen if your entire body was a prediction machine, not just your brain, because there is clearly a distributed intelligence throughout your body.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes,

[Dave Asprey]

sure.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So let's dive into that. So, Phineas Gage. I'm sure you know the story.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh, yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Working on the railroad. For those that don't know, a like 5 foot 3 inch diameter tamping rod shoots up through his. Under his chin, out through the top of his head.

[Dave Asprey]

I don't think it was 3 inch diameter.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Dude, this thing was.

[Dave Asprey]

It was big.

[Tom Bilyeu]

3 inches radius. Radius.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Uh, and no, it would be diamond.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, it's a diameter, not radius. I was thinking radius. Like, dude, that's big.

[Tom Bilyeu]

No, no, no, it. It is big.

[Dave Asprey]

It was a railroad spike.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It was.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, not small.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Big when I said because they. I mean, he went on tour with this thing. It's big. However big most people are thinking it is bigger than that. It is crazy. Never loses consciousness, but he loses a tea cups worth of brain, which I. I just can't even fathom anyway, changes his life forever. And he's never the same. People say it fundamentally changed his personality or just a total shit show. So if you damage somebody's brain, what we think of as them, while maybe only ultimately a small part of what the universe thinks of as them, because there's all the intelligence in their fingertip and all that. I totally acquiesce to that. I have no problem with that whatsoever. But when I think of me, I think of the way that I process data, I think of the voice in my head, all of that. I think of my ability to control emotions.

[Dave Asprey]

All of it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If you damage my brain, that is going to radically alter. Now, to your point, if you wildly disrupt my microbiome, it could wildly affect my moods. And so I would feel like a different version of myself. So I am totally in that camp. But when you damage the physical structures of the brain, certainly there is a profound change in you, which I'm putting in air quotes.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Any disagreement so far?

[Dave Asprey]

There's a profound change of your behavior. And if you identify yourself as your behavior, then what you say is true.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Depends on how far you're going to push behavior. So if. If the way that I think through a problem is behavior, sure. If my ability to process what I call processing data, like, I can't do math in my head, but some people can. And they don't even understand someone like me, for whom numbers just don't appear. Like, I don't. I don't understand people that are like, oh, the answer.

[Dave Asprey]

Just what do you mean?

[Tom Bilyeu]

That is so surreal to me. So anyway, I could go from either not being able to do it, or something happens, and now I can. Because so much of our talent is something that was being tamped down. Stops being tamped down.

[Dave Asprey]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So again, here's another example that would. I call it behavior. I don't know that I would, but maybe it falls in behavior. The brain. Two hemispheres connected by something called the corpus callosum.

[Dave Asprey]

I know.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You know, but for people at home that don't. If you sever that, the person will now have two distinct personalities. One of them can be a devout atheist, and the other is a believer. And they'll. They'll sit there and argue. And if you cover one eye, you'll get. Obviously it's cross. So if you cover the right eye, you're talking to the left hemisphere. If you cover the left eye, you're talking to the right hemisphere. You will get different answers from different sides of the brain. You can hide things from one half of the brain. It's bananas.

[Dave Asprey]

My mom's corpus blossom was severed.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Really? What. What happened?

[Dave Asprey]

It was for epilepsy. It's a treatment. It's a barbaric old treatment for apple.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Indeed it is.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So you know this firsthand.

[Dave Asprey]

Would you call that behavior? Certainly. It affects behavior.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It does 100 brain injuries.

[Dave Asprey]

The easy one is traumatic brain injuries. I mean, I took a titanium knee to the head of Burning Man a while ago, and I Mean, I. I sent him.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Knee to the head.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What does that mean?

[Dave Asprey]

Thunderdome. You know the. From like Mad Max Thunderdome. They have one of those at Burning Man. Okay. So I was with a friend and we were trying to hit each other with big Q tips and her titanium knee clocked me right in the head. When we were like flying through the air and I was like, seriously addled for probably a couple months to the point. I remember I. I got really mad at Tim Ferriss for something he didn't do and sent him an angry email. And I apologized later. I was like, sorry too. But it, it. I mean, I was swearing all the time. I couldn't, like, go fish with my kids. Right. So my perception of myself changed. But did I really change? I don't know. I did some.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I would say, yes, 100%. In no uncertain terms.

[Dave Asprey]

Interesting.

[Tom Bilyeu]

As a result of the physical structures

[Dave Asprey]

of your brain just getting rocks. Yeah, but then why did I change back when I did hyperbaric and I did all the other neurofeedback stuff?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I mean, to oversimplify it, because you healed and so the way that your brain was processing process, why didn't you change into something else completely?

[Dave Asprey]

Well, I. I've been editing myself my entire life with as much consciousness as I know how. That's what the whole upgrading yourself part of biohacking is. I'm conscious.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do you feel that you're limited by the physicality of your brain?

[Dave Asprey]

Not yet. Not at all.

[Tom Bilyeu]

This is so interesting. Okay, wow.

[Dave Asprey]

I have a whole company that does brain upgrades on people. Like, like software for the brain.

[Tom Bilyeu]

We neither of us disagree with that.

[Dave Asprey]

So, like, you can totally change.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm saying that you're. What you're changing is the physical structure of the brain. You're saying maybe it's not that you

[Dave Asprey]

can change software without changing physical structure.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Agreed. So, okay, we're miscommunicating because I agree with that. But I believe that the behaviors are born of the physicality and that if you were to talk to

[Dave Asprey]

a worm,

[Tom Bilyeu]

it would be perceiving and processing the world in a way that would be so alien to a human that we just.

[Dave Asprey]

You're like a phrenologist.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That is a phenomenal, interesting way to interpret this.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay, I'll just. For people listening.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh, yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

There are people who believe that you could tell what someone's brain was doing by where the bumps on their head were because, like, this part of the head able to do this. But you have this so mapped out physically. But all of the data That I have from brain scans. I have the largest database of high performance, high resolution scans in the world right now for 40 years of Zen.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

And it's actually network behavior within the brain. It's not at all the physical structures

[Tom Bilyeu]

and the network behavior of the brain is not correlated to the physicality of the brain.

[Dave Asprey]

If parts of the brain aren't there, it's not going to work. But a part of the brain can be there.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So don't rush past that. If that's true, it feels like we're in agreement. So this table I would posit, because I'm a physicalist, I don't even know what they call it. I don't believe. I don't believe that this table could ever possibly contemplate the universe in the way that you and I do. I think that there would be a lot of similarities between you and I,

[Dave Asprey]

even though there are differences. I don't think the table is thinking

[Tom Bilyeu]

because of the structure of our brains that the table won't have because it doesn't have that same structure. Do we agree on that?

[Dave Asprey]

I believe. Well, I don't know. That it's because the table doesn't have the same structure.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting.

[Dave Asprey]

What.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What is it anchored to?

[Dave Asprey]

It may be entirely possible. I don't know. But it may be entirely possible that if we took a group of monks and it's going to piss you off. That's kind of what I'm saying.

[Tom Bilyeu]

No, I love it.

[Dave Asprey]

I just want to take a group of monks and divine goddesses and we sit around the table and we love the table table for six months straight and just infuse it with the best possible energy. Yep. Will the table become conscious? I kind of don't think so. But I'm not going to claim to be an expert in that and that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting. Okay, so do you have a thought around what it's anchored to? So for me, I. And I get. This is a very high level. It's a very sort of. What's anchored to what?

[Dave Asprey]

Our consciousness. Oh.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It probably will ultimately boil down to that. So let's just start there.

[Dave Asprey]

I think your consciousness is anchored to all of your body, not just your brain.

[Tom Bilyeu]

We agree on that.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay. So that's why if you are one of those people who thinks that you can bring yourself back to life by freezing your body, don't freeze just your head. Freeze your whole body. You're going to need that. That's a really important point.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, so here's an interesting thing. I think if you did that, you could Bring back a lot of what you think of as you, but all of a sudden wouldn't feel right. There'd be problems. But that the 90% of who you think of as you would still be there is my gut instinct. The irony that I would say gut instinct while saying that is is not lost on me.

[Dave Asprey]

I'm glad you caught that. That's funny.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But yeah, I have a feeling that the vast majority of of who we think of as ourselves is that. But I agree with you so violently,

[Dave Asprey]

like on your list. We haven't talked about quantum biology yet.

[Tom Bilyeu]

We haven't. I still haven't.

[Dave Asprey]

This is why I don't freeze my body. And I have some friends who I know and respect who choose it. Like Joe Polish is a good friend who's. Yeah, I'm all in. Might as well. It's a backup plan. Ray Kurzweil, same thing. We know now because of a very recent study. We only just figured out how to look at proton spin in living systems. And what they found is that all of the protons in your brain change their spin exactly in conjunction with your heartbeat. And if proton spin is changing in a coherent manner throughout your system based on your heartbeat, your quantum system, if the protons were not changing their spin all in unison, they would not be quantum coherent with each other. So this is something that, that I think I hit it up on my Instagram page, but it's something that most people just. It's like an advanced physics paper. But literally, if your heartbeat is controlling proton spin throughout your entire system, you're quantum. And that's how it works. So there are quantum effects that we actually just don't know much about that allow a lot of the realm of the truly advanced spiritual practice that's been written about all over the planet for thousands of years. All this weird stuff that I kind of don't like seems to be happening repeatedly.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Can you give me an example?

[Dave Asprey]

Oh, the ability to read someone else's mind. Like why do we keep talking about that if it isn't possible? And why do I know people who can do skills scarily good stuff at that stuff? Well, probably it's some kind of quantum thing. I don't know, the mechanism of action.

[Tom Bilyeu]

This is where I think you and I start to disagree. So when I don't understand, I just stop it.

[Dave Asprey]

I don't understand.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, but I get uneasy when people are like that. I don't understand is a fill in for all the magical claims that people make are probably really real. And we just don't understand them yet. You and I talked about this last time otherwise I'd go into it the whole spoon bending banacheck things.

[Dave Asprey]

Interesting.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But let's stick with quantum for a second so that I think you have some. I think you have your finger on something that either I'm just so ignorant that I think it's self evidently it's just obvious or I'm bang on. So here's how I look at that. Okay, if. If it is true that the world is. The universe is quantum which I don't know enough to challenge that. So I've just always assumed quantum we don't understand how it functions yet but. Or at least how the macro and the quantum connect. But we know that the quantum mechanics is there and it helps us do things like gps.

[Dave Asprey]

So.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, cool. So I certainly believe that we live in a quantum world. So if that is true then it seems self evident to me that of course every system, whether it's a planet or biology is a quantum system.

[Dave Asprey]

And this table is a quantum system 200% which is why I'm not sure if it can think, but I don't think it can.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So but that and I think that's where I. Our frames of reference are so different.

[Dave Asprey]

I don't.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That felt like a non sequitur. So to me quantum systems and consciousness are in no way shape or form related. Like they're just two in. In as much as if I say that my consciousness isn't tied to blood flow. Of course without the blood flow I cannot have consciousness. So without the quantum everything I'm sure just falls apart or whatever. Right thing that I can't understand or predict. But it isn't the same as oh well, if this all exists at the quantum state then the physicality doesn't matter. So I'm going to start making predictions. Okay, you tell me if these predictions are going to predict your.

[Dave Asprey]

Your belief system. Okay, this is interesting.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If this starts to break down then I'll at least understand why that felt like a non sequitur to me. Okay, so question. Quantum entanglement seems to be the part that non physical lists I'm making that word up. Grab onto and say okay, information theory quantum says that you can have. Well no, no, no. This is my understanding of why people are interested in information theory and how it relates to quantum mechanics is the following that you can have two particles, I forget which ones separated by the the entire universe. And if they are quantum entangled they will instantaneously communicate to each other and. And communicate they won't. Now, there's some people that say even information cannot travel faster than the speed of light.

[Dave Asprey]

They're not actually communicating. They're simultaneously changing, which is a form of communication. But there isn't a signal going between them that we know about.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes, I'm rounding that to communicate. I don't know what word you would slide in there.

[Dave Asprey]

They're just always in the same state without communication.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm going to push back on that. I just want to acknowledge for everybody in the comments that understands better than us, but I find this really interesting, so I'm going to keep going. So the tests that they've done show that until they're quantumly entangled, you shoot them in opposite directions. They are now the universe with the cross. When you look at the first one, you create its state. So it was in. In a quantum superposition until it was measured. Therefore, it's not like, oh, I just have, like, let's say it's red. I forget. Up and down.

[Dave Asprey]

So I think.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Or left and right, whatever. Up and down, let's say. So I look at this one. It isn't just that you're now recognizing that it is up and that the other one is down. You can actually do something that makes this one up and thusly. Then instantly my word communicates that that one is down across the entire universe. Okay, we are now at the edge of even what I can recite sounds

[Dave Asprey]

like quantum entanglement to me.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Cool.

[Dave Asprey]

There may be a physics major who tells us that we missed some important point, but I don't think so.

[Tom Bilyeu]

We're close. So my prediction is because of that is why you're saying that the way our brains work or the way that we view ourselves, consciousness can't be physical or at least can't be purely physical. Is that an accurate assumption?

[Dave Asprey]

It's not because of that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so what leads you to the statement that we're not the physicality of our brains? Or at least not just.

[Dave Asprey]

Well, there's the physicality of your brain, but there's also the signaling of your brain. If you're the physicality of your brain, then if you don't breathe for three minutes, why do you stop being you?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Why do I stop being you?

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah. In other words, if your brain, physical structures are there, but there's no electricity flowing in them, you're not there. So the model that I find works best is that parts of your consciousness are non local and that you have amazing antenna systems throughout your body. They're called DNA and they're called mitochondria, and they actually do act. And so they've been structured to look like antennas. And so I think that there is a part of you that is non local, and there are computer scientists who would. Absolutely.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Non local, meaning I could blast the mitochondria off into space and I would maintain my current. I would be exactly the same.

[Dave Asprey]

What we get into here becomes the realm of philosophical and spiritual stuff. But the definition of what is you. Right. Then you just have to start talking about how do some of these people talk about all of the spiritual things, the yogic siddhis that we talked about last time? How is some of that cities? S I D H I. These are defined superpowers that have been documented in rare humans throughout recorded history.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Like being able to read somebody's mind.

[Dave Asprey]

Sure. Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm going to need to see that documentation.

[Dave Asprey]

So you. Oh, sure. Just. Just Google it. Albert Delamuda writes a good book. It's like a good translation of yogic studies. He's a shaman who's a good friend. He even wrote a book with Dr. Perlmutter, who's a brain scientist who's also a good friend.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But what level of mind reading do you think is capable?

[Dave Asprey]

Depending on the person who has the skills. I've met some people, people with profoundly strong abilities. And we know the military has been working on this stuff since at least the 60s.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Doesn't mean that it's going to work.

[Dave Asprey]

No, but. Yeah, but I will say people who.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And I don't know if this pick up, this proves what you're saying or contradicts it, but I have a feeling that once we're able to get a fine enough level of detail from the brain, whether that is neuralink or whatever, that we will be able to. They can already do rudimentary thoughts to pictures or brain waves to pictures.

[Dave Asprey]

Kernels. Way ahead. Brian's company, K E R N E L. There's a guy who was a founder of Braintree. Yeah, I had him on the show. Oh, you had him on the show.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Cool.

[Dave Asprey]

I haven't had him on my show yet. He's a smart guy, but he's put $80 million of money into a really good brain scanner. He's, I think, way further ahead than

[Tom Bilyeu]

what's he trying to do.

[Dave Asprey]

He's trying to get a sense of every single signal happening in the brain simultaneously.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so is it that you think there are some people that can pick up on those signals, that there is some sort of. Because I can get. How in some Way our brain, our. Our ecosystem, the human ecosystem, not to over localize it to the brain. I can get how some of that is using quantum entanglement to communicate between cells, maybe I don't know. But I don't get how or why two different people would be momentarily quite quantumly entangled.

[Dave Asprey]

Maybe because your power of observation looked at their quantum bits. I'm totally making this up. But it's just a supposition. Looked at their quantum bits and then maybe you can just entangle with another quantum thing that will like we. This what's happening with the whole realm of the quantum biology stuff. And this is like hardcore quantum, like we can make quantum computers. This isn't like the quantum woo field. There's an entire system that's controlling some of our biology. It's controlling some of life and some of the world around us that we know almost nothing about. What's doing it. Quantum. The quantum, the realm of the quantum. Quantum biology, Quantum effects are controlling reality in a way that we barely understand. So if you're looking to do biohacking and you're saying, well, we know we have this, this black box. I know that if I do these things, I get this response way more than statistics would predict. And we don't know why it's happening yet. That's where science is. The cutting edge of science always is. Wow. That shouldn't happen. Based on what I believed. I'm going to have to go dig deeper on that. And the realm with the most fertile territory for exploration around consciousness right now, around spirituality is actually quantum science. And the earlier realm and the realm where I'm spending most of my time on that is actually looking at electrical and magnetic and do certain senses, blood flow of what's happening on the brain so that we can tune the brain so that it works better. But we don't tune it by adjusting physical structures. We tune it by adjusting connectivity between physical structures so that we're saying this part of the brain, a broadman's area or something, needs to talk to this part of the brain. But this brain isn't speaking the right language or the volume isn't loud enough at this certain frequency. So let's show the brain what it's like like to do that. And the brain goes, oh. And it adjusts its electrical behavior without adjusting its physical behavior. And that can have profound effects on how you feel, how you treat other people. And why don't you think that's physical?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Why do you use. Why is electrical flow non physical?

[Dave Asprey]

Well, this show is Going out to people over a combination of fiber optics and probably some copper signaling, some wireless. Now, we don't have to change the copper to change what we say. Right. So the different sounds, same physical infrastructure. Wouldn't your brain do the same thing?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, I just.

[Dave Asprey]

I.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It, I suppose, is a definitional adjustment I have to make to make sure that I'm tracking what you're saying.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay. So the physical hardware of the brain can carry different thoughts without changing. It's harder each time you have a new thought. So why don't we teach the electrical stuff to send signals in a different order that change your emotional state or your spiritual state and.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Whoa. Okay. I was with you until you said spiritual state. So define.

[Dave Asprey]

You have an aversion to spiritual state.

[Tom Bilyeu]

No, no, no. I want to understand it. All right, so I understand, obviously, thoughts, but when you say a spiritual state, what does that mean? Earlier, you called spirituality a feeling.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah. There are feelings. Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So right now is it the same to say emotional state and spiritual state?

[Dave Asprey]

Usually not, because some emotions are spiritual emotions and some of them are not.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting. Tell me, which is what?

[Dave Asprey]

So a feeling of oneness and connectedness and the pure love of God, which, if you've never experienced that, would probably sound like a bunch of bullshit. But people have experienced are like, I don't know what that was, but that was something different and it was new. And they're. They're trying to. It's like if you were colorblind and someone's trying to say, you know, that's blue, and you're like, it's not blue. It's the same color as that. And you could argue to the ends of the earth because they have a.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So it's an emotion that's transcendental.

[Dave Asprey]

It's probably got. Transcendental is a good name. These are things that people can train their brains to pick up. And this goes down to the idea that we all have filters on reality. And when you start undertaking spiritual training, you start realizing that there's more that your body can pick up and your mind can pick up in the world around you, including some amazing spiritual states.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So do you think it's. That we're. So is a spiritual state a tuning into a broadcast?

[Dave Asprey]

Yes, it's tuning into a field. Interesting. And one of the lower level, but beautiful spiritual states is love. And you say, well, love doesn't exist. How do you prove love exists? And then we could talk about quantum entanglements of hearts or something.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, so now let me ask then.

[Dave Asprey]

So.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So love feels Very localized to me. But if what you're saying is accurate and spiritual feelings are transcendental feelings and it's tuning into a broadcast, are you saying that love is being broadcast?

[Dave Asprey]

I am broadcasting love right now from right here. And I'm doing it because I've trained myself how to do that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What's unrequited love?

[Dave Asprey]

That's a very interesting and odd question. So this is when you let someone

[Tom Bilyeu]

tell you why I'm asking that.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, I'd love some context. Because unrequited love is just love where you send love and you don't get love back.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The reason that I'm asking that is, as you were saying that, I thought, okay, my wife and I love each other. It's a really awesome feeling. It's sustained over time. It's a back and forth. And then I thought, okay, if, if she's picking up what I'm broadcasting and I'm picking up what she's broadcasting, and that is, is love, then are you the. There is a really strong and horrible feeling when you like something that doesn't like you back.

[Dave Asprey]

Doesn't have to be. That's just trauma.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting. So. Well, first, before we go off on another tangent on that, so if, if spiritual states are receiving the broadcast, is there just messiness to it's both receiving it and the way that you feel about what you're receiving or lack thereof?

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay.

[Dave Asprey]

So every time you experience a physical or an emotional trauma, you, your body, your meat operating system automatically puts a filter in place so you don't do that again, you don't feel that again, you're not vulnerable to that again. You won't surrender to that again, you won't experience it again. So over time, you get more and more and more hidebound and crusty and angry and bitter and mean and unkind

[Tom Bilyeu]

because you're no longer receiving the. The broadcast.

[Dave Asprey]

You're no longer receiving the broadcast, you're no longer feeling it. And then when you start doing trauma work, you start doing emotional work, you start realizing, wow, a lot of these emotions don't make sense. Because if I love something, why do I have to feel pain if it doesn't hold me back? Why. Why isn't my body doing that to me? And then you do the inquiry work and you do the emotional work on that stuff. And eventually you're like, wow, I can turn on this love thing and I can do it at will and I can do it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Are you turning on the love thing? Are you receiving. Receiving the broadcast?

[Dave Asprey]

You can do both. You can broadcast and receive.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And I want to better understand if I'm broadcasting. This is interesting. I'm going to ask a question that a spiritual person like yourself is probably going to hate, but you won't offend me is. No, no, no, not like that. Just that you'll think I'm approaching it

[Dave Asprey]

from the wrong direction.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So broadcasting love and receiving love, I, as I try to adopt your framework, don't feel like they will be experienced in the same way.

[Dave Asprey]

They're separate skills. Actually, you can broadcast love without being able to receive love and vice versa.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting. And so from a well being standpoint, let's say that I'm really good at broadcasting, but I'm not really good at receiving or vice versa. Which of those two curses would be the better?

[Dave Asprey]

So my own path, I wasn't good at either one. Then I learned how to broadcast love via a combination of spiritual practice, neurofeedback, all the different experiences. But then I had to do additional work on being able to receive love because a lot of people learn that it's not safe to receive love early in life where you're actually desperate for love when you're a small baby or when you're, you're really little. And then something bad happened, something maybe that wasn't even anyone's an on purpose thing. And then some part of you realizes, well, I wanted, I felt like I was going to die if I didn't get it, I didn't get it. Therefore I'm going to close myself off to it. So yeah, receiving love, receiving gratitude, those are different skills than feeling them. And they're trainable skills. And they're trainable skills with electrodes. And that's why I wrote, you know, a quarter of smarter, not harder is about the things that let you access spiritual states more quickly than sitting in a cave and meditating, which is how we used to do it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So what does let you receive it?

[Dave Asprey]

Well, one of the easier things to do is breath work in conjunction with meditation. It just works faster to put you in certain states. And those certain states, yes, you can measure those states with electrodes. So they're real states. One of the easiest ways to start working on that is heart rate variability training. You ever tried that?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I have only ever tried to adjust my HRV through exercise.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay, so you can do exercise and sleep and diet to do your whole night. HRV. In 2008, I joined the advisory board of a company called HeartMath. And they were the first company to realize you could train this as a feedback signal. So you'd put a little clip on your ear and you had a little. Now it's an app on your phone. And then you breathe in and you make the light turn green. But to make the light turn green, it doesn't just turn green when you breathe in, you start doing something and there's no word for it. And what you're doing is you're changing the spacing between your heartbeats to make it more complex, but also more rhythmic. So instead of having an even heartbeat, da dum, da dum, da dum, da dum, your heartbeat's like, da dum, da dum. So it doesn't match between each one. So I don't know how to tell you to do that, except we'll breathe and just make the electron green. And as you learn to do this, stuff starts to change. And the way you feel, the way you connect to the world changes. And what you're actually doing is you're editing the amount of parasympathetic rest and reset versus parasympathetic. Parasympathetic versus sympathetic or fight or flight. So this is a something. And I talk about that smarter, not harder. It's one of the many different technologies that allows you to have more control of your nervous system so you can better sense reality and so you can better choose your state. Because if you don't do that, you're not going to feel that sense of heart opening, which is probably, in fact, not just probably, but is mathematically related to what the Buddhists would call loving kindness. So, okay, I can change the. The spacing between my heartbeats at will. And if I find my body going into sympathetic fight or flight, I can say, stop it. And then I can turn it back. And I took. Let's see. This is one of my. One of my favorite stories. I was working with the Silicon Valley hardware software engineer, hardcore rationalist, probably a little bit Asperger's like I used to be. And I got him to do this training. And he. After about eight weeks, he said, dave, I got it to the hardest setting. I learned how to do it, and I did it for an hour. I know you told me just to do 20 minutes, but I did an hour. And I think I experienced bliss. And I started laughing because in my entire career in Silicon Valley, I've never heard an engineer use the word bliss before. That's not what engineers do.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And he did that just by altering

[Dave Asprey]

his heart rate variability, but he was consciously altering it, not just trying to eat a food that made his body more resilient because total heart rate variability as a measure of resilience. But your ability to go from my heart is not highly variable. And then do that thing, the thing that I can't tell you the words for, but turn the light green, and I'm doing it right now, and it changes the variability of heart rate. You can also change the amplitude, the strength of your heart rate. Some people are stronger broadcasters than others. And when I go on stage and Tony Robbins or somewhere, there's an audience of 10,000 people, do I, before I go on stage, intentionally adjust my heart rate variability so that it is high and turn up my amplitude as much as I'm capable of so that I can feel the audience and they can feel me? Yeah. Is there math that says this is real? Actually, yes, there is. There is a magnetic field around your heart. It's tipped at 8 degrees to the left. It's shaped like a big donut, a torus. And we know which direction the fields on it move because we can measure it with sensitive physics detectors. We also know that magnetic fields continue infinitely into the universe. And we know that systems will pick up each other's magnetic fields. No quantum required. When you have high heart rate variability and you walk into a stall with a horse, the horse will match its heart rate variability to you. And if you're tweaking and you walk into the stall, the horse won't let you ride it because it picks up your heart. This is why they use horses as therapy animals, because they're biofeedback machines for heart rate variability. So is what I'm doing here some sort of weird, manipulative tech wizardry? No. You can do heart rate variability just by learning basic meditation. I just found a faster way because I'm a nerd, I think.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It was in the book and then you've said it here today. You used to have Asperger's.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, used to.

[Tom Bilyeu]

How did you stop?

[Dave Asprey]

Well, first you address cellular toxins and things that are causing neuroinflammation so your nervous system is uninflamed. Then you retrain the nervous system to do what it never learned to do when you were young. In my case, it involved learning social skills. It involved retraining my auditory processing systems. It involved retraining my vision systems. And I'd say I'm 70% of the way there on training my proprioceptors, because when you have Asperger's syndrome, you're getting so much environmental input that is not filtered Properly by your nervous system that it's very hard to pick up on what's important and what's. What's not important. So you become stupidly good at pattern matching and recognizing systems because you're dealing with an enormous volume of data and most of it's just static in your system. So when you remove the things that are causing the static, and then you do the work of becoming aware of all the signals you never learned to do before, then at some point, say, well, this person no longer meets the criteria for Asperger's syndrome. I used to live, everything was from the neck up. I'm a rational being. I'm a meat robot. And I just realized that's actually not how the system seems to work. I am simultaneously rational, as in I have a degree in information systems and AI and an mba and I, you know, I do truth tables and irrational and that I have feelings and I can simultaneously hold both states. We're all like that. We just. It's actually scary to consider the fact that you have an irrational being in the state, the same meat suit as your rational side. I just got comfortable with that and decided to tame it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is there a process that people can. I can only imagine how many people, especially now as the rates of people being on the spectrum are skyrocketing, that would love to know if there's a system that they can use to do that.

[Dave Asprey]

The most that I've written about that is in my book called Headstrong. This is a book about how to fix your brain and how to make your brain work better than it did before. If you were to do the recommendations in that book and you were to do some additional neural training that I probably touched on in there, you could, you could get a lot of results there. The stuff I just mentioned here, I'll just tell you the resources for it. Vision training is something you can do with a variety of things, but look for a developmental ophthalmologist. And these are people who study how the eyes and the brain work together with proprioceptors in the body. I spent six months doing really difficult vision training exercises, learning how to move my body. Again, you can look for somatic therapy to learn how to get the systems in the body wired into the brain. I still do that today. And then you could look at auditory integration training or AIT therapy. For every one of those, there's probably a Wikipedia page, which is the new Snopes that says that they don't work. Wikipedia, you suck there.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Wikipedia is the new Snopes yes.

[Dave Asprey]

It's entirely run a big pharma companies have a big, big influence on there and there's, there's about 200 trolls who run Wikipedia and they fight with each other to see who's the biggest troll. It's fantastically beautiful and it's anger.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's hilarious. I used to have a Wikipedia page and then for some reason they removed it.

[Dave Asprey]

I still do, but it's super uncomplimentary right now. But there's like wars could be because

[Tom Bilyeu]

you're calling them trolls.

[Dave Asprey]

It could be Dave.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Where can people follow you?

[Dave Asprey]

Go to daveasprey.com you can find all my books, all the cool stuff, podcasts, 40 years is in and own and upgrade labs. It's all there. So daveasprey.com is the single hub for all the Daveness.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I love it guys. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe and until next time, my friends, be legendary.

[Dave Asprey]

Take care. Peace.