Jodi: Hi, I’m Jodi Cohen, your host. And I’m so excited to be joined by Dave Asprey, an entrepreneur, a four-time New York Times bestselling science author, and the host of a top 100 podcast, Bulletproof Radio, which has more than 200 million downloads. And you have been biohacking for how many years?
Dave: Well, I coined the term for what we do. So I would say longer than there’s been a term but at least 15 years, probably closer to 25.
Jodi: Well, I’m excited to talk about biohacking resilience. And I’d love to first ask, how do you define resilience?
Dave: Resilience is knowing that you have more than enough energy to handle whatever life brings your way.
Jodi: That’s a great definition. So talk to me about like, what is your routine? What do you do on the daily to kind of bolster your energy?
Dave: Well, there’s two things that are really important. One of them is recovery. So you handle the stress from the day before, or the biological stress and stress can be emotional, it can be spiritual, even. It can be physical, it can be an infection, a heavy workout, drinking alcohol or eating fried stuff, or whatever, these are all stressors, and they all kind of go into the same bucket.
So it’s how much stress went into the system? And how effective were you at recovering?
And so what I’m looking to do is say, the stress that goes into the system, I don’t like useless stress. So if it’s a stressor that doesn’t do anything positive in the world, or in my life, why am I doing it? And can I do it less or stop doing it? So that’s a part of my daily practice. And a lot of that is mindset and mental, and emotional.
And then the other part of it is, alright, how do I recover faster than Mother Nature wants? Because Mother Nature’s goal is make sure that you can reproduce and be around long enough that nothing eat your babies, and then we’re done with you, you can die. That’s just kind of how it is when you’re a life form on the planet. And it’s true, whether you’re a worm or a human, it does not matter. Even a tree follows the same basic rules and those rules are behind pretty much all of biohacking.
What it means, though, is that every day, you have some amount of energy that you put into something and you can put it into folding proteins to stay young, you can put it into hating someone. It’s all electrons. The same electrons that power your iPhone power you but your iPhone gets it from just plugging into a charger, you get it from combining air and food, and turning that into electrons.
And we all know what happens if you have way too many apps open on your phone, and the screen is running on brightness all the time, well, the battery dies before the end of the day. And if you have less apps open, and using less energy intensive ones, you can have your phone working all the time you want it to, doing the most important tasks. Well, you’re the same. So how do you recharge? When do you recharge? And how do you not have more apps open than is necessary?
It turns out most of us have a lot of apps open all the time around resilience that are not necessary. We’re worried, we’re anxious, we have a voice in our head that says things that aren’t even true or aren’t even nice and we believe that voice is us. So for me, my practice is half making sure that I am the best in the world at turning air and food into electrons so that I have the biggest, baddest battery and the ability to deliver as much current to my life force as there is.
And then, okay, I’ve got lots of energy, and then how do I waste it less? So I don’t eat toxins. At least I do my best not to. And I know that if I do breathe dirty air, air pollution or toxins or whatever else, I’m not going to be anxious about it. I’m not going to be afraid. But I am going to say, “Hmm, are my detox systems running really well? Can I keep my fire burning brightly?” and that builds incredible resilience.
What does that mean? It means that I have been measuring my sleep every night for the last 15 years. I was CTO and co-founder one of the companies that gets heart rate from the rest. In fact, the first one to do that. The company got bought by Intel years ago. So I’ve been doing that kind of monitoring. Today I use an aura ring. And I look at, how did I sleep last night? And I get more deep sleep and more REM sleep in six and a half hours than most college students get in eight hours.
As you age, you’re supposed to get less deep quality sleep. So what’s happening there is sleep is not about number of hours; it’s about quality. People are saying, “Well, that can’t be true.” But hold on a second here, if you were say, running a marathon, is it about how many hours it took you to run a marathon? Like, more is better? Or was it about you ran a marathon very effectively in less time and you both got there?
So I want to get the distance but I want to do it in less time, including for sleep, the distance is measured by how well I recovered. And fortunately, I can measure it and I can prove that what I’m doing works. In fact, I’ve taught many thousands, tens of thousands of people how to do that. I have a sleep challenge that is free, that’s on the daveasprey.com site.
And then the next thing I do, that’s really important, I do intermittent fasting most days, and my most recent book was called Fast This Way. And I’ve taught at this point, 70,000 people, in the fasting challenge. “Hey, spend two weeks and I’ll teach you every day, how to effortlessly go without food for 24 hours, or for 12 hours, or 14,” and that’s at fastthisway.com.
The interesting thing there, though, is the reason you do fasting. There’s two kinds of fasting, one of them is a spiritual fast to go deep and edit the voice in your head. Well, that usually requires journaling and resting, and multi days of fasting. And I did that in a cave, while I was writing the book. Well, the working fast is about having more resilience.
So this is a fascinating, Jodi, because if you wake up, and you say, “Alright, I’m going to eat something right away,” well, some percentage of your energy goes right away into your stomach to digest the food to get more energy back later. Well, that means all morning, you’re not performing very well. If instead you have an empty stomach, or there’s a few things you can have that won’t mess with you.
But you do that and then all morning long, all of your energy goes into creation, and thinking and feeling good. And you’re not hungry at all, when you do this right. So you’re not distracted and you’re in the zone. And then lunch time comes around, “Yeah, I’ll have some lunch,” and you eat the right stuff for lunch. And once you do that, for the next four hours, there’s no 2:00 pm crash, you don’t need candy in the afternoon.
And all of a sudden, dinner time comes, “Yeah, I guess I could eat,” and you do that and then you don’t want dessert afterwards. And then you go to bed, and you’re fasting while you’re asleep. And you wake up and you do that, it turns out the same number of calories, radically different amount of resilience. And teaching people how to do that without what they expect, which is, “If I don’t eat six times a day, my body will go into starvation mode, and then I’ll get hyperglybitchy and hangry, and it’ll be the end of the world.”
Okay, this was me when I weighed 300 pounds. That was literally what I believed. And I can tell you the reason I fasted in a cave for four days, that was my first fast because I’m like, “I might go into starvation mode and I know I’m gonna yell at everyone. So if I’m alone in a cave for four days…” I also know that I used to eat when I was lonely. Like, okay, I can just face all that.
But writing a book about the psychology of fasting so you can fast without burning energy on worry about not having enough food, it takes 90 days to starve to death, not 12 hours, but the voice goes, “Oh my God, if you don’t have tacos for lunch, you’re gonna die!” And like, no, that’s not how it works but we feel like it is. So my resilience practice, I don’t eat breakfast, the vast majority of the time. But sometimes I do, just so my body knows, “Hey, sometimes you gotta eat.”
And I good stuff. Based on the Bulletproof Diet, people lost a million plus pounds on that. And it’s what today you’d call a cyclical, clean keto diet with no omega six fats. So there’s elements of no lectins. And there’s elements of carnivore and grass fed and all that. It was just an early, early book that accounted for all of those things in one diet. So I do that. And I have carbs at dinner because they help you sleep better, but I don’t have tons of sugar.
And when you do that regularly, this is what no one really talks about, the mitochondria, the ancient bacteria in your cells that we like say, “Well, they’re the power plants for your cells.” They’re power plants but they’re also sensors of the environment around you and they’re factories, they make electricity, sure, but they also make hormones. And they make peptides, and they make all kinds of signaling compounds in the body. So people don’t usually understand, “Oh, some neurotransmitters are made by these?”
So these are really in control of a lot of our small, automated biological systems. If you eat good fats, which means not seed oils, not omega sixes, more saturated fat, more monounsaturated fat, over about two years, half of the fat in your mitochondria changes to be stable. And when that happens, you have batteries and factories that can make more than they could before. And when this happens, your resilience goes up because your net energy capacity goes up.
So the same time that goes up over time, you’re learning to not be afraid of being hungry, or at least having an empty stomach, even if you’re not feeling hungry. You’re learning to not be afraid of criticism from your mother in law or whatever the heck your stuff is. And all of a sudden, like, “Wow, it’s the end of the day. I got everything done. I actually got to talk to people I care about. I’m full of energy. I want to see my kids.”
“I don’t care if I have to commute home. Some stupid headline from the Washington Post or New York Times or something that was trying to make me fall into a fear state, it didn’t even touch me, because I had resilience. I stayed in the zone. I stayed in charge of myself.” Versus just going to low power mode where you’re like, “I can’t really think about that. I’ll just react about that.” You don’t want to be there and part of that is having the power of eating the right foods and sleeping really well.
Jodi: That’s so beautiful. And what I love is that you have so many cool gadgets. But all of these things are just leaning into your natural body, what you eat, how you sleep, recharging your mitochondrial body. What are some of your other favorite hacks for resilience?
Dave: Well, there’s something called slope of the curve biology that I introduced in Fast This Way, which sounds like a really fancy term. But we have this puritanical idea that you should suffer to improve, there’s actually not data to support that, in fact, the data supports the opposite of that. So, “Oh, you want to get strong cardiovascularly? You must go for a 90 minute run or run five miles every day.” Well, I have data and this is behind one of my companies called Upgrade Labs. We’re in the middle of franchising to at least a hundred locations across North America.
Jodi: Wow.
Dave: Oh, yeah.
Jodi: Congratulations.
Dave: Thanks. But what are the things we do there? We use artificial intelligence, and look at your heart rate as you’re riding an exercise bike really slowly. And then you suddenly accelerate really quickly, for 20 seconds. And you do that twice in five minutes. And you get better results than someone who sits on a bike and sweats their butt off for 45 minutes, five days a week.
Jodi: Wow. So you’re really figuring out how to get the biggest reward, the biggest bang for the buck.
Dave: Yep. And what’s going on there, is the body doesn’t care that, “Oh, you got your heart rate up, and you’re sweating, and you kept it up for a long time.” So if you’re to draw a curve of effort, there’s all sorts of space underneath that curve, like, “Well, there’s a lot of volume there.” What the body responds to and adapts to, is change, the speed of change. So you’re going from really, really slow to, “Oh, my god, there’s a tiger!” to really, really slow.
So teaching the body to be resilient means teaching it to expect and be prepared for rapid change, not for huge volumes of change. So it’s not about being really slow and then really fast for a long time. It’s about going slow, fast, slow, fast, slow, fast, eating, not eating, eating, not eating versus snacking, snacking, snacking, snacking, and these poor old 1970s people think, “It’s all about the calories you eat.” They’re the people who made me weigh 300 pounds, because I believe that.
It turns out, it’s not about the number of calories, it’s about the type of calories and the timing of them. So having an empty stomach. So even if it’s the same number of calories, if you’re eating it in little snacks throughout the day, you’re not going to get results because there isn’t that change. So if you want resilience, you must create sudden rapid change in the body.
The same reason I’ve been recommending cold showers since I started writing in 2011. It’s not that big of a deal. For three days, you’ll say, “Dave Asprey is the biggest jerk ever,” but you stand in the shower and you let the shower hit your forehead and your chest on full cold at the end of your shower. And you’ll last eight to 10 seconds the first time, and you’ll swear.
The second day, you’ll go in and go, “I just hate my life. I’m going to do this anyway. I don’t know why,” and you might go 20, 30 seconds. Third day, you’ll probably go to 40, maybe 50 seconds. So when I say you’ll go, at the end of that you’re like, “I’m getting a headache. My head is tensing up. I’m shivering. I can’t stand it.” But something magic happens the fourth day. The fourth day you go do it and you go, “Wow, this isn’t really hurting.”
And then at the end of it, you go, “I feel amazing. What just happened?” Well, what happened is that three days of short term cold exposure where the temperature receptors are there, results in a change in the mitochondrial membrane, a compound called cardiolipin. Now you don’t have to know any of the things I just said. What I’ll tell you is the fourth day, “Dave Asprey is a hero,” and the third day, “Dave Asprey is a jerk.” What changed? Your ability to make electricity to stay warm.
What does the body do after that? It says, “Any of my mitochondria that can’t make heat in a rapid period of time, get rid of them and build younger ones.” So resilience comes from the ability to push the accelerator and have it go really fast. And what your body wants to do is be lazy and let you get old, and say, “Well, if you push the accelerator, eventually you’ll go fast.” And you’re like, “No, no, no, anytime a cold shower could be coming, you’d better be ready.”
And that means you are ready for any stressor in your life, including getting a sudden illness, including a big emotional disruption in your life, including, “I just wanted to improve and I had to push harder,” or, “I wanted to deal with an old trauma.” It doesn’t matter. But it’s, “Can I accelerate quickly?” So that matters more than the total speed you can go. If it takes you three days to accelerate quickly, sorry, you’re not resilient.
Jodi: I love that. That was a great explanation of cold. So basically, eat, sleep, move, cold showers. What about coffee?
Dave: I mean, everyone knows coffee stunts your growth.
Jodi: You mean your aging process? I love coffee. I’m always up for hearing why coffee is amazing.
Dave: But isn’t coffee addictive?
Jodi: Completely.
Dave: I mean, if there’s something you do every day that makes you feel good. And then when you stop doing it, you feel bad. It’s addictive, right?
Jodi: Correct.
Dave: I was talking about exercise, Jodi.
Jodi: I exercise every day.
Dave: So, coffee and exercise. People who say coffee is addictive, it’s like, “Guys, air is addictive.” Anything that works and makes you feel good, once you get used to feeling good, you’ll stop doing it. At this point, there’s abundant science that says coffee is a preeminent superfood for humans. A reduction in all-cause mortality. Google any disease state you can think of, and coffee, and there’s probably a study on it that says coffee is amazing.
The thing about coffee stunting your growth was a rumor spread in the 1950s by a company trying to sell you an unhealthy, burned grain coffee substitute. So I’m well known for Bulletproof Coffee, which is a company that I started that I’m no longer involved with. And what Bulletproof Coffee is, is mold free coffee, because who would have thought that mold, the ancient enemy of bacteria, which is funny because your mitochondria are bacteria?
So anyway, you get the mold out of the coffee, and you blend it with something called MCT oil, which adds more electrons to your resilience system. And grass fed butter, which changes the chemistry of the water so you can more rapidly use the water in your coffee to make energy. No, we did not know this when I invented it. I funded research at the University of Washington that discovered that.
Jodi: With Gerry Pollock, with the structured water. Interesting.
Dave: Absolutely, yeah. I donated $50,000 to his lab and said, “Could you look at water?” and he said, “Hmm, let’s see what’s going on here,” and that was the end result. Not about Bulletproof Coffee, he just looked at grass fed butter fat and looked at MCT oil, and found that they changed the structure of the water. So that’s one of the many reasons that blending that stuff in instead of milk makes a difference.
So yeah, Bulletproof Coffee, for me is a massive, important thing that I do every single morning. And the good news is that you can do this while fasting. In Fast This Way, I talk about three fasting hacks. So remember, if you’re worried about food, and you’re hungry all the time while you’re fasting, it’s going to suck your energy. I want you to fast for performance, so you feel really good at the end of the day and during the fast.
So it was a high performance fast, not an, “Oh my God, I can’t believe I made it,” fast. And there are three things you can do that make fasting work better and still maintain the benefits of fasting, you can drink black coffee, you drink coffee with butter and MCT oil, and you can drink any kind of liquid that contains prebiotic fiber. So when people get started on fasting, if you’ve never fasted before, you’re like I used to be, maybe you have 80 or a hundred extra pounds on you, maybe only have 40 pounds, but your metabolism isn’t where you want it.
And this is about 60 to 80% of the United States right now, we have metabolic disabilities, I’d call it. Certainly, we have metabolic inflexibility and resilience comes from flexibility. So what you do is the first morning, you make yourself a Bulletproof Coffee, don’t put more butter than you want in there, you don’t have to force it, you can have anywhere from 70 calories all the way up to a couple hundred. If you’re a big guy like me and you have an intense day, the fat will not change your insulin levels. It will still work.
And you can add a scoop or two of prebiotic fiber. And when you do that, as long as there’s no sugar and no artificial sweeteners in there, your body is going to think you’re still fasting but you’re just not going to care about food. So all the energy that would have gone into, “What’s for lunch? What’s for lunch? Is that a cookie?” all of that’s just gone. And it returns to you to do what you were there to do.
And then lunchtime rolls around and you’ve turned your hunger hormones off so effectively. You’re like, “This is weird. I didn’t eat breakfast but I don’t really want lunch. But I guess I could eat some lunch,” and you decide to eat or not eat. And that’s a sense of freedom that most people have never experienced. I didn’t know the difference between cravings and hunger and there was no way I could possibly skip breakfast or I would die. That was what I believed. And it’s just not how it is.
So those are some things that I teach people in the fasting challenge. That’s at fastthisway.com. And like I said, you don’t have to buy the book, it is totally free. I just want people to know, you’re capable of this and 70,000 plus people have done it and the comments are, “I can’t believe I have more energy and haven’t eaten in a day.”
Jodi: It’s a resilience game changer. Is there anything else that we haven’t touched on that you think is valuable to share?
Dave: Yeah. One of the biggest things is looking at light. So there’s two things that tell the body what time it is and they are light, number one and food, number two, the timing of food. Now, I studied distributed systems and artificial intelligence and my career was as a computer hacker. So I look at the body as a distributed system like that.
We know that for the internet and for computers, you need to have a central clock so that you know what time it is and some other computer over there knows what time it is, and then you can coordinate your actions. But if your liver and your digestion think its noon, and your brain thinks its midnight, you will have a less resilient system.
And this is a chronic problem, because the brighter our lights and the more LED, the bright white, blue, even the warm LEDs have way more blue light in them than the sun does, but you can’t really see it, but it’s in there. So what I teach people in Fast This Way is to use glasses. And the ones that I recommend, I wrote the patent for, it’s a company called TrueDark®, that’s one in my portfolio. And these glasses control the four aspects of light. Blue blockers do not do this.
Blue blockers are not enough at night, they’re too much during the day. So there’s four kinds of light and two other aspects of light. And you tune those, and you put on the TrueDark glasses, about an hour before bed, and then you sleep with more deep sleep than you did before, at least I do and the vast majority people I’ve talked to do. So you can measure this and see if it’s doing that. And most people get tired pretty quickly after they put the glasses on, which is good.
They’re just telling your body, “Oh, there’s no light.” So even though you can see, your brain timing system says there’s no light. If you combine that, don’t eat before bed, don’t eat at least three hours for bed, ideally, even more than that and then your body goes, “Oh, that’s weird. There’s no food and there’s no light, it must be dark.” Because when we were floating in the ocean two billion years ago as little organisms, we always ate when the sun was overhead, because that was when the algae was there the most.
So we were soaking up the algae, we got food and light. And to this day, your body’s trying to figure out all the parts. “Is it daytime or nighttime?” And when you just do those two things, your sleep quality goes through the roof, and I have so many people learn how to sleep. But if you eat right before bed, you’ll break it. If you turn on the bathroom light to brush your teeth, and you’ve got LEDs in there, you’ll ruin it unless you’re wearing the glasses or you don’t turn the light on.
This is another huge part of resilience. And we are going to get to the point over the next 20, 30 years where we finally realize, “Wow, when it’s dark outside, it should be dim inside, not bright.” And when we do that, it’s going to have a huge impact on insects and the world around us because right now, we’ve lost 75% of the bugs on the planet are gone. It’s because we have exterior lighting that keeps them from mating and confuses them.
So if you go to my farm, all of my exterior lights are red because bugs can’t see red lights. I can still see but now I can see the Milky Way and I have owls near the house and the bugs don’t want to come to my house. So if you have exterior lighting and you’re hearing this, it’s okay to look like you live in a submarine, get red or at least amber exterior lights for your own sleep quality and to help the environment around you. You want the butterflies to come back? That’s how you do it.
Jodi: That’s wonderful, thank you. And just in case they didn’t hear the number of ways they can work with you and take your challenges, could you repeat that please?
Dave: You can go to fastthisway.com and that’s where you sign up for the fasting challenge. And I want people to know how to feel better than they do today. More resilient, people are kinder to each other and they’re less susceptible to fear based programming, which is a major issue right now. So we need more energy and more power, and more resilience than we’ve ever had and this is part of how I’m teaching people do it. So, fastthisway.com. And the podcast is Bulletproof Radio. You can find it anywhere podcasts are distributed, so one of the top 100 shows out there. And if you want to look at the sleep challenge, go to daveasprey.com.
Jodi: Thank you so much for your time. This was amazing as always.
Dave: Jodi, it was great to see you.
Jodi: Thank you.
