Dave Asprey

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Dr. Dominic D’Agostino is an Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular Pharmacology and Physiology at the University of South Florida Morsani College of Medicine and Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Humans and Machine Cognition (IHMC). His research is focused on developing and testing ketogenic diets, ketone supplements and amino acid formulations for a broad range of therapeutic and performance applications. Dom previously appeared on Bulletproof Radio to talk about mastering ketosis, and he’s back with more great information. Today Dave and Dom talk about mitochondrial efficiency, chronic diseases, increasing ketones, ketone salts and esters, mitochondrial physiology, the Krebs cycle and more. Enjoy the show!

Today’s episode is brought to you by FreshBooks. To claim your 30-day free trial, go to www.freshbooks.com/bulletproof and enter “Bulletproof Radio” in the “How You Heard About Us” section.

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Speaker 1:      Bulletproof Radio, a state of high performance.

 

Dave:  Hey, it’s Dave Asprey with Bulletproof Radio. Today’s cool fact of the day is that most people talk about measuring ketones, these fat burning molecules in the urine. You pee on these little test strips. Did you know that ketones can be detected just by smell? The simplest ketone is called acetone. That’s actually nail polish remover, and it leaves through the lungs and can give you a sweet, fruity smelling breath. If you stay in ketosis for long enough, the primary ketone will not show the same intensity in your urine, but you can definitely measure it with your breath. In fact, I have a ketone breath meter somewhere in my stack of toys, and I imagine today’s guest probably has more of them than I do.

 

Before we get on to today’s guest, if you haven’t heard about Fresh Books yet, listen up. These folks are on a serious mission to help small business owners save time and avoid a lot of the stress that comes with running a business. As a small business owner myself, I pay a lot of attention to not wasting my time and not wasting my staff’s time, and one of the things that makes a big difference is pain free invoicing for freelancers and small business owners. Using Fresh Books, you can take about thirty seconds to create and send an invoice, and you get paid online because Fresh Books gives your clients tons of ways. They can just pay you with credit cards or other ways, which can seriously improve how quickly you get paid. In fact, customers get paid five days faster on average. You also get an instant notification to tell you whether your client’s looked at the invoice the second they view it, so you don’t have anymore excuses from people saying they never received an invoice that you know they got.

 

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I’m a little bit of a coffee snob. I love trying new coffee, but I learned a few years ago that I don’t like how I feel when I try new coffee because there are extensive problems in coffee with mold toxins and other things that just simply aren’t Bulletproof. I enjoy the taste, but I don’t like the after effects. That’s why I developed the original Bulletproof process to create Bulletproof, and we developed a medium roast profile that has a ton of flavor. I wanted a little bit more variety in my coffee, so we’ve been working for the last year with one of the top coffee tasters on earth, Paul Songer who trains the judges for the Cup of Excellence, which is like the world championship of coffee. I am so pleased to announce two new roasts of Bulletproof processed coffee beans. These are mold free, independently lab tested coffees, and they’re made at our Bulletproof plantations. We just changed how we roast them.

 

The first new roast is called the Mentalist. It’s available in whole bean and ground. It’s a medium to dark roast, kind of right in the middle there. It’s got dark cocoa and vanilla aromatics that open up to a rich, full-bodied coffee with some cherry sweetness and notes of almond and caramel in there as well. It’s profoundly good. I’ve been putting it in my espresso machine, and man, it’s crazy. You take it, and it’s engineered to taste amazing with butter and brain octane oil. A lot of coffee tastes bitter and weird when you put butter in it. Not this stuff because we built it that way.

 

The next one is for you. If you really like your dark flavored, dark roast coffee, it’s called French Kick. It’s a dark roast, but it’s not charcoal. It’s smooth and sweet. It’s pleasantly almost a little bit smokey, and it’s got baking chocolate notes, but it finishes really clean and has a medium body. This is one of the few dark roasts coffees I like. I am not a fan of those burned things that you might find at the corner coffee shop. This isn’t one of those, but we pushed it as close to dark as we could get and still maintain that flavor for you. You will be amazed at how you feel when you have this coffee, just like you are with our existing coffee. Now you’ve got a whole palette of coffees you can play with depending on if you like espresso, French press, immersion, or just drip brewing. However you like your coffee, you can do it, and you’re going to just be amazed at the flavors. I’m excited to share these with you.

 

Today’s guest is someone who’s been on this show before. In fact, several years ago, he was somewhere around episode eighty guest, and it’s none other than Dr. Dominic D’Agostino. He’s an associate professor at Morsani College of Medicine at the University of South Florida, travelling senior research scholar at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a neuropharmacologist, and he’s probably best known as one of the top ketogenic diet researchers out there, specifically looking at neurological diseases, cancer, and other chronic illnesses. Certainly one of the bio-hackers I respect the most. Dominic, welcome to the show.

 

Dominic:         Thanks for having me Dave.

 

Dave:  I wanted to have you back on the show because it’s been too long and because we had such a fun time on the first show. We’ll put a link in the show notes, so people can go back and hear the first interview, which was, I think, one of the very early ones you were giving about ketosis in the overall public sphere as far as I know. I learned a lot on that one, realized we had some similar recipe ideas around chocolate and huge amounts of fats and how it could make you feel amazing. Before we jump into the main reason, which is I had Dr. Veech on the show recently. Dr. Veech is a major researcher in ketones as well, and he had some really interesting comments on things I had not heard anything about in the ketone community. We’re going to get into that stuff.

 

For people listening who aren’t super ketogenic already, let’s talk about just ketogenic diets in general, do a little bit of a primer, catch up from one of the top researchers in the field here. If you’re a longtime listener, you probably already know what ketosis is, but we are now getting two, sometimes a little bit more than two, million downloads a month on Bulletproof Radio. There are lots of new listeners who are just getting into this, so we’re going to go a little bit basic on ketosis. Then we’re going to go deep on what kind of supplements should you be using, what kind of diet should you be using, and we’ll just have lots of fun because we always do. All right, what are the top benefits of a ketogenic diet that you’ve come across in your research? You know stuff about this that most people don’t. What is it, just the two cents version, and then, what’s it doing for people that you’re seeing in the labs?

 

Dominic:         The history of the ketogenic diet is really interesting. We wrote a three part article, actually, with Travis Christofferson. I think he’d be good to have on your show. It’s on Rob Wolfe’s podcast. It’s “The History of the Ketogenic Diet” part one, two, and three if your listeners want to check that out. I got interested in the ketogenic diet because it mimics the metabolic physiology of fasting. We knew for centuries if not millennia that fasting is very effective for controlling seizures when drugs fail. Millennia, a thousand years ago, they didn’t have drugs. The diet was designed to mimic the physiological effects of fasting and prevent seizures. That was the original application was specifically for seizures that result from oxygen toxicity that are experienced by the Navy SEALs using a closed circuit rebreather.

 

That work has expanded to a broad range of other seizure disorders, including things like glucose transporter type I deficiency syndrome, Angelman syndrome. We have other models of seizures we’re looking at. Neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, traumatic brain injury, wound healing. Cancer is a big area of research in our lab. We have three people just working on cancer right now. Then performance in extreme environments, so that could be resilience against hypoxia, resilience against extreme increase in oxygen or pressure. These are the things that we’re looking at. We’ve broadened out into many different applications. My original application was very esoteric.

 

Oxygen toxicity seizures are experienced in a pretty small subset of the environment. The limits are pushed with hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Oxygen toxicity is a limitation of hyperbaric oxygen therapy and will limit the therapeutic efficacy of oxygen therapy, hyperbaric. That’s used for things like carbon monoxide poisoning. You can really only go to about three atmospheres, two point five to three atmospheres of hyperbaric oxygen if you have carbon monoxide poisoning. If you could go to five or six, if you were to put someone in ketosis, we have evidence that you could go to five and be okay and probably push the limits of safety. Then you could push the carbon monoxide molecule off the hemoglobin molecule with enough oxygen. That’s sort of the area that we’re going into to make diving for special ops safer and to decrease the side effects associated with the high pressure oxygen over time.

 

Then from the work that we did on that project, we observed all these other benefits. That expanded into a number of other projects that we assign PhD students to or post-docs to, and they are just running with it. We’re doing a lot of pharmacokinetic studies, a lot of safety studies on the racemic salts, and also, we’re comparing the R versus racemic and various formulations. We probably got twenty different formulations that we’re looking at. The most important thing, for me, is to establish that they are, not only efficacious, but also safe. I think safety is the number one priority. I’ve served on a lot of different panels to assess the safety of other types of ketone esters and salts, so I’m very familiar with the whole body of literature, very familiar with Dr. Veech. He’s one of the first people that I reached out to. Actually, one of the first ketone esters that we tested, but it wasn’t effective against oxygen toxicity seizures because you also have to elevate acetoacetate in a certain ratio. Then that got me to look into my own methods of development and looking at different esters from there.

 

Dave:  If you’re listening to this and going, “What the heck? Racemic mixtures, hyperbaric stuff,” we’re getting pretty deep on this. The reason this is so profound is that … In fact, I’m working on a new book about mitochondrial functions. I’ll have to ask you a few questions off air about some nuances of ATP formation. What’s happening is we have something called the Krebs cycle inside our cells, and this is how your cell makes ATP and how it turns food into electrons. You use those electrons to, basically, run your brain, run your cells, run your pumping systems, basically everything in your body. It’s an incredibly complex thing, and it was only hypothesized, theorized in 1937. In the last eighty or so years, we’ve come to understand what is, really, a little semi-conductor inside our cells that has amazing properties. That it’s affected by light. It’s affected by temperature. It’s affected by all sorts of environmental things.

 

We thought for years it only burned glucose except if you were really, really sick. It turns out that when it goes into its fat burning mode, ketosis, that, essentially, things that shouldn’t be possible become possible. I think you and I, Dominic, are not the first people to figure this out. Probably the first people to figure this out were thousands of years ago when they were fasting in caves because after four days of fasting your brain wakes up. You’re like, “Wow, I feel amazing even though I’ve had no food. What’s going on?” What’s going on there is what happens when your mitochondria have more power because they’re using ketones or at least have different power. What you’ve done is you’ve opened this giant maze because you start out by looking at oxygen toxicity in special forces divers, such a niche thing, and all of a sudden, you’re like, “Wait. Alzheimer’s, ALS, Parkinson’s, heart disease, diabetes.” Is there any chronic disease that you don’t think ketosis would help?

 

Dominic:         Yeah. That’s a good question. From a neurological perspective, all neurological diseases are linked pathophysiologically to energy disregulation.

 

Dave:  Yeah.

 

Dominic:         Alzheimer’s disease, the gold standard for assessing someone with Alzheimer’s dementia is the PET scan. A dim PET scan shows impaired glucose metabolism, and ketones can fill that gap and help you restore brain energy metabolism. You generate more energy per oxygen molecule with ketones than you do with glucose. For example, the energetic efficiency of the mitochondria is increased, so the electron flow through the mitochondria to generate the hydrogen ion gradient that spins the ATP synthase is greater. You have less reactive oxygen species produced when you generate ATP from ketones than you do with glucose. Dr. Veech probably went into how oxidizes chio and then you have less superoxide anion production.

 

That actually attracted me because oxygen toxicity, the theories were that it was generating reactive oxygen species. Then that was contributing to the seizures, but it’s really the source of reactive oxygen species is the mitochondria. If you enhance the bio-energetics of the cells by enhancing mitochondrial ATP production, then you don’t make as much superoxide. Instead of throwing antioxidants onto the brain and trying to prevent oxygen free radicals during it, why don’t we just enhance mitochondrial function? Then we could preserve the bio-energetic state of the cell in the face of the oxidated stress, which it would be the high oxygen content. That’s why it works. You can say that with a number of epilepsies, so the ideology of epilepsy is largely unknown for many cases. Nutritional ketosis and fasting work independent of the ideology across all different seizure types by enhancing the bio-energetic function of the brain cells. I think we’re just beginning to understand how that’s working, and it’s not one pathway like drugs to heart, one pathway. It’s many different pathways synergistically working together in syncrony to enhance and preserve brain homeostasis. That’s really important to understand.

 

That’s metabolic physiology, and it’s important to distinguish metabolic biochemistry from metabolic physiology because a biochemist, which Dr. Veech is a biochemist, and he’s very knowledgeable, and he also has knowledge about physiology. When you view it from a systems level, that’s truly important to understand even the neural control of autonomic regulation, so how it’s impacting our central nervous system, which are things we’re looking at. We’re studying the effects of ketones on anxiety. Just simply reducing anxiety, we find it’s like a whole other variable. We see a thirty percent reduction in anxiety. We just presented this work in Budapest last week. The reduction in anxiety may be contributing to the delay in seizures that we’re seeing, so we need to weed all this out. There’s many factors.

 

Dave:  I’ve been giving some talks. I gave a talk at Jim Quick’s SuperheroYou, like a brain hacking summit, this weekend, and I’m talking about the bio-energetic effects of anxiety. It burns energy to focus on stuff that like a brain paying attention uses more electrons than a brain doing nothing or a brain at peace. If you’re burning more energy because you’re worrying because you have bad programming and you’re hungry, of course hunger makes anxiety worse. If you have hunger, which is a problem with energy regulation, there’s not enough energy and that’s why I have a hunger signal, of course anxiety is going to be worse. What do you do? Eat enough so that you’re not hungry when you’re done eating would be a good way to start, add more fat, and get some ketones in there and magically, people, they feel less anxiety. You actually quantified it, which is awesome.

 

Dominic:         Yeah. When you achieve a flow state, your brain energy metabolism goes down or that the cross talk in your brain is shut off. When you achieve a flow state, you dynamically activate the areas of the brain that you need for the specific task while tuning out the others, and that’s important to understand. I think that being in a state of ketosis may help with that, and some drugs help with that too. Nutritional ketosis is very effective we think.

 

Dave:  It’s one of those things where if you look at mitochondria as being really important, ketosis because it affects so many different parts of the mitochondria is probably the biggest hack you can do to have better functioning mitochondria. Are you familiar with Dr. Shallenberger work on ozone therapy?

 

Dominic:         No. I get that question a lot though because a lot of people ask about ozone therapy from cancer and for other things.

 

Dave:  The similarity it has with ketosis is that it changes the NAD plus to NADH ratio by adding electrons directly from ozone, like there’s a free electron in ozone. You end up having a mitochondrial effect that is not dissimilar to the stuff that you’re doing, but the reason I’m asking is he has found that about half of people, forty-six percent of people have early onset mitochondrial dysfunction before age forty as measured with breathing oxygens. Essentially, looking at oxygen consumption rates. Okay, that’s one in two of us has broken mitochondria and don’t know it. With the work you’re doing around mitochondrial uses of ketones, just like you said before, you’re reducing free radicals here. You can actually fix that.

 

I’m spending a lot of my energy working on, how do we take people who don’t know that their mitochondria are jacked and then getting them jacked in a muscle building jacked kind of way? My goal is if you were to take one of my cells out and look at it under a really fat microscope, you’d see incredibly ripped and muscular mitochondria just completely covering the thing. I don’t want to be a body builder on the surface. I want to be a cellular body builder. I’m focusing on, what are the things I could do to grow better and stronger mitochondria? Given all of your ketone research, what are ketones going to do for someone listening to this who wants to have better functioning cellular energetics, like better mitochondria?

 

Dominic:         That’s a good question because they work through multiple mechanisms to enhance mitochondrial efficiency and also, ultimately, from a more long-term perspective, mitochondrial biogenesis.

 

Dave:  Yeah.

 

Dominic:         ATP production is limited, and if we do isolated mitochondria, there’s a state one, state two, state three. You can characterize how the ATP is being limited, and one of the states is reduced TCA cycle intermediates. You could have reduced energy flow to the mitochondria to produce ATP. Now ketones, being in a state of nutritional ketosis is anaplerotic. It helps generate the Krebs cycle or the TCA cycle intermediates, so it sucks in alpha-ketoglutarate. All these are elevated by twofold. They’re even up to threefold higher in the brain and in the serum. When you’re in a state of nutritional ketosis

 

Dave:  Let’s pause for a second for people that are listening. The TCA cycle is the same as the Krebs cycle. This is how we make ATP in our cells. Okay.

 

Dominic:         The Krebs cycle should really be called the Kremp Georgia cycle because there’s a guy in Hungary who also probably did most of the work on the cycle. It’s kind of interesting history there. Generating Krebs cycle intermediates is one way, so increasing the bio-energetic molecules that create energy is one way. Increasing oxygen flow to the mitochondria, the ketones enhance. One thing we’re looking at it our wound model is vasodilation. Ketones seem to couple. They help couple the energetic state of the cell with oxygen and substrate flow. It seems to enhance the vasodilate areas that need it most, which would be in ischemic wound. In our aged model of ischemia where the wounds do not regenerate efficiently, we can do a Doppler blood flow measurement and show a thirty percent increase in blood flow to the wound tissue, which has a ninety percent deficiency in ATP production because it’s not getting enough. Then that was shown years ago, showing a thirty percent increase in brain blood flow or oxygen brain blood flow with ketosis.

 

Dave:  Now, what about burn victims and people with injuries outside the brain? Is that still going to be really effective?

 

Dominic:         Yeah, we think so. Of all the things that we’ve tested so far and the model of wound healing, the ketones are one of the most effective things that we’ve seen. What’s interesting with all wound healing therapies are tried topically where you put the substance on the wound. Where what we’re doing is inducing acute and sustained nutritional ketosis with a supplement by altering metabolic physiology from a systems level, just by lowering blood glucose. We know that if we give an acute bolus of exogenous ketones, blood glucose goes down. If you bring blood glucose down by virtue of decreasing, making your blood less sludgy, you’ll increase profusion of the tissue. It lowers blood glucose. It elevates ketone levels. It also elevates adenosine levels, which is a potent vasodilator. It helps to profuse the tissue.

 

Just getting back to the mitochondria, it’s anaplerotic, so you get more TCA cycle intermediates. You get more oxygen and substrate to the mitochondria. It enhances the bio-energetic capacity, the electron flow through the mitochondria. It helps, obviously, to generate the reduced intermediates that drive the electron transport chain through the anaplerotic reactions. Then there’s less reactive oxygen species production. At the semi ubiquinone site of the mitochondria, there’s less superoxide. Making superoxide at the level of the mitochondria could be damaging because that superoxide, if it goes to hydrogen peroxide in the presence of copper or ferric iron, you can generate reactive oxygen species through the fenton reaction. That can directly damage the mitochondrial membrane and decrease mitochondrial efficiency. You get electron leak. Then you just make less ATP. That’s four things right there. There’s probably about ten things in my head that I could talk about. TCA cycle intermediates, electron flow, more oxygen, less production.

 

There’s a lot of ways. Even taking a step back, the role it has on glucose homeostasis and all the other signaling pathways that could be activated. That gets into a whole bunch of secondary reactions or signaling pathways that I could talk about. Importantly too, from … I described to you acute things that can enhance energy, mitochondrial production. Then we know that ketones are more than just an energy metabolite. They function as a histaminase inhibitor class one and two. There was a science paper-

 

Dave:  Talk about the impact of that. Just people listening don’t know what that is.

 

Dominic:         Okay. If we’re in a state of ketosis and we have beta-hydroxybutyrate elevated in our blood stream, that’s impacting gene expression in a way that’s altering our physiology over time. It’s decreasing oxidated stress. It’s conferring protection against aging and oxidated stress over time by increasing activity of things like superoxide dismutase, by activating a whole genetic program that parallels our calorie restriction. We know all the benefits of calorie restriction have been really talked about in the literature. It’s easy to find that literature on PubMed. One of our colleagues, actually, and collaborators from Yale, Deep Dixit, contacted me and did a lot of work with calorie restriction and fasting. He said, “We think beta-hydroxybutyrate may be like the metabolite that’s actually conferring all these benefits to fasting.”

 

Dave:  Wow.

 

Dominic:         Contacted me, and we formulated a diet. We basically took the standard diet and formulated a diet with our ketone ester. We collaborated with him, and he ran a study. He found that elevating beta-hydroxybutyrate suppresses the NLRP3 inflammasome. That inflammasome is linked to a whole host. It’s like the hub inflammasome that kicks on the inflammatory cytokines that are associated with many age related chronic diseases. It was published in Nature Medicine. It’s like the gold standard of scientific publications.

 

Dave:  It’s kind of interesting. Bulletproof intermittent fasting where you have Bulletproof coffee made with brain octane in the morning at the end of the fast to help you sleep. Brain octane raises BHB more than MCT oil and more than coconut oil. I’ve been doing that every morning for more than seven years now, and it’s completely changed my life. I believe it’s a mitochondrial energetics thing.

 

I also think that one of the reasons caloric restriction works, and by the way, I have no scientific basis for this other than I’m a systems guy and I’m a bio-hacker. Mitochondria, when they’re burning sugar, when they’re burning anything, they do produce free radicals, so if you eat less food, you make less energy, you have less free radicals, you get less damage. Therefore, that could confer some of the benefits, but they come at substantial cost as well. You’re cold and tired and having less energy sucks. I like to be exploding with energy, but I don’t want to die when I’m fifty. How do you manage to have more energy without incurring the damage from the energy? That’s my quest right now, and I think ketosis is at the core of it.

 

Dominic:         Yeah. Your brain octane has been something that has been a staple in what I do. The C8 is a pretty potent … The more we’re studying these synthetic, expensive ketones and ketone esters and ketone salts, but the more that we look at what’s in brain octane C8, the more impressed I get. It’s a little bit biased because in rats, they have such fast, hepatic metabolism that you get blood ketones levels … You get the same effect as a ketone ester as you do with C8, so you can easily get-

 

Dave:  In rats, but not in people, right?

 

Dominic:         Rats. Yeah. The C8’s interesting because it goes directly to … It actually profuses the liver with the oil when you drink it instead of going through … Instead of it being packaged into chylomicrons and going through the lymphatics. You get obligate oxidation of the fatty acids exclusively in the liver, and not much C8 actually escapes the liver if you keep the dosages even in the moderate to high range. It almost completely gets oxidized in a healthy liver to beta-hydroxybutyrate. The MCTs and C8 especially, they’re not esterified. It’s poorly esterified. It doesn’t get transported by CPT1, the carrier, and it can be independently go right into the mitochondria. It doesn’t need a lot of carriers.

 

We also found another benefit of MCTs that I didn’t know until I did the metabolomics is that they readily cross the blood brain barrier. Not only do ninety percent of it gets generated, eighty to ninety seem to be generated into beta-hydroxybutyrate. Then what does get into circulation can readily cross the blood brain barrier. I thought fatty acids didn’t, but short chain and medium chain do. We only took tissue when we took the hippocampus out and did metabolomics on it. We found pretty high levels of C8 and C10. We did MCT and C8. Yeah, so the MCTs are very versatile, ketogenic compounds that can be … They taste good. You can formulate so many great carriers.

 

Dave:  Some of them though. This is something that I’ve helped to push the MCT thing out there. There are companies selling some that contain C6, which is a really strong gastric irritant, so you end up, frankly, shitting out the rest of your MCTs when you have that. Then C12, which is good for you. It’s doesn’t go to BHB. It acts like a long chain fat, but it’s legal to call it an MCT. You’re seeing coconut oil companies pretend that there’s a sixty percent MCT when it’s really fifteen percent of the MCTs that actually work. I’m seeing a lot of slimy marketing activity. I’m sure you are too. MCTs, at least the ones that work, they’re just like step one of ways you can increase ketones. You’ve got like two other ways of increasing ketones that I wanted to pick your brain about here because I synthesized my own esters three years ago. It was thirty thousand dollars a kilo. I’m like, “I can’t even afford to take these myself, but I took like two samples and it worked.” Then there’s salts too.

 

Dominic:         What ester was it that you synthesized? Do you remember?

 

Dave:  I would have to look in my notes, but I worked with a third party lab. It came in a little vial, and it was insured when we shipped it because it was so darn expensive. Gees, I’d actually probably have to open up an old email to find it.

 

Dominic:         Actually, yeah, the first time, this goes back to 2009, that we acquired different ketone esters and to test which ones were going to be effective against oxygen toxicity. My original proposal to the Office of Navy Research was to feed it for one week because I was convinced that you needed to keto-adapt the animal or at least get levels … The tissue saturated, the brain. I only had enough to really give one dose, and I did it thirty minutes prior to a super deep oxygen dive. I was like, “I don’t have enough to really run the study that I want to do, but I have enough to give one dose prior to.” We gave one dose prior to the dive, and in every single animal we dove, we saw an astronomical increase in the latency of seizure. We published that, and it was like a five hundred and seventy-five percent increase in the latency of seizure. That pretty much outdoes all anticonvulsants that the military has looked at for this.

 

We still have not gone back and did a study where we feed it continuously. We’re doing some work now, but I was basically figuring if it’s this effective just getting one dose in an animal that’s eating a high carbohydrate diet prior to the dive, really, that’s what the military wants. They don’t want to have to feed something for a week. They want to give like one shot, and then hit your mission. We have long-term chronic feeding studies for other disorders, but when it comes to oxygen toxicity, we’re really just looking at a single dose prior to the mission. We screened out the different types of exogenous ketones in that project in the beginning and identified the one that was most effective and just been really focusing on that. Getting that synthesized was a project. It was a lot of back and forth with the chemist.

 

Dave:  Yeah. I don’t think that problem is solved, but manufacturing that stuff is just complex. People listening like, “Big companies can just make whatever they want.” This is one of those game changing supplements that has the possibility to transform a lot of athletic performance and a lot of … If you want to feel young when you’re old, have mitochondria that work. The average seventy year old has half the mitochondrial function of someone who’s thirty, and it’s one of the reasons it sucks to be old. Let’s get ketones in older people, and magically, they’ll get up and dance. It’s that big of a difference. I’m very hopeful, and I don’t think Bulletproof is big enough to fund the kind of manufacturing research that’s required to do this. It is a giant project, but I’m working on it, and I’m supporting everyone I know in every way I can including just by talking about how important this is.

 

Let’s talk about salts before we get into esters. There’s a hierarchy of ketones. The first thing you do is you go on a low carb, high specific fat diet. That alone can put you in ketosis. Atkin’s, stuff like that. Then the next thing you could do is add brain octane, which is basically the Bulletproof diet, which gets you in ketosis. Especially in the morning, do this Bulletproof intermittent fasting. No carbs in the morning. No protein in the morning. Extra, extra fat in the form of brain octane as much as you can take without filling your pants. You do that. Like, “Okay, something different just happened.” I can get my levels up to point eight or one point oh in my blood just from brain octane. Nutritional ketosis starts at about point eight. Then from there though, there’s ketone salts.

 

Talk about what the salts are, the four kinds of salts, what are the pros, what are the cons, and if you could, address what Dr. Veech in his interview was like, “Some of these based on whether they’re bio-identical isomers,” this is called basically mirror image molecules of each other, whether that’s an issue or not. Walk me through the salt story.

 

Dominic:         Yeah, it’s important to address the ascemic issue because it can create a lot of confusion. I’d like to address danger. Are they dangerous, and are they efficacious? I think that’s what I’ll address upfront. When we approach this question, it’s important to distinguish and separate someone’s opinion from the scientific fact and what has been published and observed in the literature. I listened to about half of the podcast. I was driving, so I don’t remember all the …

 

Dave:  I get it.

 

Dominic:         I doubt that he referenced any papers when he said ketone salts were dangerous.

 

Dave:  Yeah, he did.

 

Dominic:         I’ve sat on many boards, and it was actually in talking with him it was a concern that I had because we were testing a number of different compounds. The ones that were most effective for my applications tend to be the ones that were racemic.

 

Dave:  Explain what racemic is for people listening who don’t have the chemistry background.

 

Dominic:         Yeah. Probably be good to look up the word “enantiomer,” and it’s a stereo image of when you think of your hands as the mirror image of it. The molecules in your body … Most drugs that we consume actually are racemic, so if you go back to general chemistry when you did all the stereo chemistry of the molecules, and you were studying that, if your listeners out there had general chemistry, you probably remember. You probably came across the word racemic. If you pull out your general chem book, you can look up the definition of that. Essentially, there are molecules in your body, amino acids, lactate for example. L-lactate would be the physiological enantiomer, and D-beta-hydroxybutyrate would be the physiological enantiomer. The opposite enantiomer has a configuration that would mirror it sort of like two hands coming together. Depending on the specific metabolic pathways, the body will reject it or consume it or some may have a weak interaction at the receptor if it’s a drug or a stronger interaction with a receptor.

 

I studied lactate, the effects of lactate like ketones. Lactate is an alternative energy substrate. Before I got into oxygen toxicity, I was looking at hypoxia. Lactate is actually a very effective fuel. When you exercise, your body produces a lot of lactate, and the lactate actually goes to your brain and functions like ketones. It’s an alternative energy substrate, and through the Cori cycle, it gets recycled back to glucose. I was interested in using lactate to preserve, protect the brain from hypoxia and ischemia. Alpha L-polylactate is something that I was interested in. As a cyclist, it’s in a product called Xytomax, and I was interesting in developing different forms of lactate.

 

I saw that racemic lactate was being used as Ringer solution. Any heart doctor, any medical doc out in the field, when you’re shot, when you lose blood, when you’re in the emergency room, they fill you up with Ringer lactate, which is racemic lactate. According to Dr. Veech that would be dangerous. That would kill you, but it saved millions of people’s lives. They always use racemic lactate for that.

 

Dave:  For people who didn’t take general chemistry, imagine that every molecule in your body likes left-handed things, but sometimes you have right-handed things. It’s still a hand, but it’s not the same hand. Sometimes it’ll fit into the glove-like receptors in the body. That’s a gross simplification, but the idea there is that they’re almost the same, but they’re just mirror images. If we’re left to our own devices biologically, we typically make the L form, but the opposite form we can make in the labs. When we use it as a food supplement or as drug, it does all sorts of cool stuff in the body including sometimes kill you. Quite often, it’s useful.

 

Dr. Veech concern when he was on the show was that if you’re going to be magically raising ketones, which, frankly, give you superpowers. You get more energy than you had before, like Captain America kind of stuff. You want to make sure that you’re not doing something that’s going to give you cancer or increase oxidated stress or otherwise shorten your life or mess you up. Dr. Veech had a pretty good concern here, and what you’re saying now is kind of the counterpoint that says, “Okay, here’s all these times when we use the wrong hand in our bodies, and it completely saves lives, and it completely works,” which is a pretty powerful argument I’d say Dom. You got a point there.

 

Dominic:         We don’t progress as a species unless we move forward on truth. From my perspective as a scientist, the truth should be in the science. If there’s evidence out there that racemic salts are dangerous or that   lactate is dangerous, it saved millions of lives in the emergency room and on the field. That using these racemic compounds are dangerous, there’s just no evidence. One could ask the question, is one optimal over the other? I know lots of work was done early on on Ringer’s lactate, and they compared L versus racemic, and there was no change in metabolic state, on its buffering capacity, and its capacity to save people’s lives. I would assume the same thing would apply for ketones, but we’re interested in studying that. That’s why we’re studying that now.

 

Dave:  There are people selling it right now who haven’t tested it.

 

Dominic:         Yeah.

 

Dave:  What do you think about that?

 

Dominic:         Yeah. I was a little bit concerned until I went … At about the same time that marketers started commercializing ketone salts was about the same time that I was on various panels, expert panels to really spend weeks just going through the literature to see if these things could have any potential for danger. I just couldn’t find any. I kind of wanted to find something because I thought people, marketers were jumping the gun, but I couldn’t find evidence to suggest that they were dangerous or less efficacious. To that argument, you see Ringer’s lactate has been used for decades.

 

The DL, the racemic beta-hydroxybutyrate has been used for decades to treat a disorder called MADD. MADD stands for multiple acyl coa dehydrogenase deficiency, MADD. The kids with this, the ketogenic diet doesn’t work for them, but exogenous ketones do. They’re given very high doses of pure sodium beta-hydroxybutyrate to stay alive. This has been published. There’s lots of publications on it. There’s a publication in the Lancet, which has an impact factor of forty-five showing the safety and efficacy of sodium racemic beta-hydroxybutyrate given in massive quantities to kids over years to manage their disorder. That’s just one example.

 

I was going through a list of emails this morning with parents that have kids that have glucose transporter type one deficiency syndrome. For reasons, a lot of these kids tend to be picky with their diet, and they found these ketone salts on the market. They ordered them, and I’ve gotten emails from parents that said when their child drank these ketone salts they literally just woke up. It’s like they came out of a coma, and they’re energetic. They’re lucid. They’re active for hours until it starts to wear off, and the ketones come back down, and then they dose them up again. You have like four companies out there making them, and they’re all … They have sodium beta-hydroxybutyrate in it, but there’s also potassium and calcium and magnesium.

 

I know Dr. Veech talked about the sodium being an issue, but sodium has not been an issue for all the applications that it’s been used for. The products on the market, they spread the beta-hydroxybutyrate across a number of different monovalent and divalent cations. That’s really important, and that’s really what I want to do is formulate something that has at least a dozen or more different carriers of beta-hydroxybutyrate. You can use a list of amino acids, calcium, sodium, potassium, magnesium. I have magnesium beta-hydroxybutyrate right here I was just testing. I just took pure magnesium beta-hydroxybutyrate and can get up to about a half of a millimolar by itself with no GI issues with this particular magnesium product. You can envision getting about six different either amino acids or monovalent, divalent cations and formulating something that tastes good. That’s really important too because some of them don’t taste good. They need to be buffered.

 

When we talk about ketone salts, a lot of people just think sodium. I have a sodium free ketone salt that I’ve been testing that has no sodium in it, and it tastes really good and gets me up in the two millimolar range. The sodium is not really an issue. I personally don’t have an issue with sodium. When you’re on a ketogenic diet, your insulin tends to be a little bit low, so you excrete a little more sodium. If your RDA is like twenty-five hundred milligrams per day, you should probably be taking more like thirty-five hundred or four thousand. That would allow for a pretty significant amount of sodium beta-hydroxybutyrate to get your ketone levels up without any problems at all.

 

Dave:  I actually target four to six grams of sodium in my diet per day, and there’s abundant evidence that that is safe. In fact, lowering it to the current limits that the FDA recommends actually increases heart attack risk in studies. Sodium, if you’re a salt sensitive hypertensive, basically you have high blood pressure from salt, two percent of people are like that, restrict sodium. For the rest of you, if you’re stressed, you need more salt. Go for it. It’s fine. If you take the salt with ketones, okay. That’s totally cool.

 

Dominic:         It’s funny. That’s about what I get per day too. I get my sodium load. For awhile when I was testing just the sodium, I was getting about ten grams per day, and I didn’t have a problem with that.

 

Dave:  I’ve done ten a day, and it helped me recover. I don’t need that much now, but absolutely. It’s just fine.

 

Dominic:         Especially if you’re out … We live in Florida, so it’s like if you’re sweating, if you’re outside working out, I think ten grams a day may actually be optimal. If your energy levels are low, just take in some sodium with ketones, and it’ll wake you up and energize you.

 

Dave:  When I was in South America, I was doing some high altitude mountaineering at Mount Cotopaxi in Ecuador. I was literally adding a teaspoon or two of sea salt to my water bottle and so amino acids. All my other climbers were like, “What the hell are you doing?” I’m like, “I’m feeling good is what I’m doing.” You need the sodium. It’s one of those things where if you’re doing too much salt your body will tell you very abundantly.

 

Dominic:         Yep.

 

Dave:  We just pissed off half the physicians in the country. Sorry guys. Read your science.

 

Dominic:         When people talk about the dangers of a high sodium diet, we’re administering the sodium in processed food with refined carbohydrates, which spike your insulin. The insulin makes you retain the sodium, so that sodium retention, it’s really not about sodium intake. It’s about sodium retention, and insulin causes you to massively retain sodium. Just look at someone who’s done a pre-contest physique dieting for a body building show or something. They go from calorie restriction or low carb to high carb, and just going high carb, that insulin spike with sodium, they blow up so fast. It’s the insulin really that’s causing the sodium retention. Your insulin levels are suppressed on the Bulletproof diet, on the ketogenic diet, low carb. If your ketones are elevated, a part of ketogenesis is driven by suppression of the hormone insulin. You are excreting more sodium just by virtue of keeping your insulin low, driving beta oxidation in the liver. That whole process is just excreting more sodium, so it makes sense to get more into your diet. That’s good because I like the taste of salty food.

 

Dave:  I actually travel with a little vial of salt. Some restaurants don’t put salt out. I’m like, “What’s wrong with you?” I just put it on myself. I have a question for you about mitochondrial physiology here. I’m writing my next book. It’s like how do you hack your mitochondria, and I’m really into it. One of the things that really matters is the size of the mitochondria because if you basically move molecules apart a little bit, it takes a lot longer, there’s a percentage, for these little electrons to move. One of the concerns about using ketone salts is that if you’re using the racemic form that it’s going to reduce mitochondrial NAD, which causes oxidation of chio, which basically increases the redox span between these two parts of the electron transport system.

 

If you’re listening to that and you’re going, “What the hell did Dave just say,” what I’m saying is if you imagine that you have to take this little packet, an electron, you have to move it from step one to step two to step three. If you move the steps further apart, it’s going to take a lot longer. If you have to do it a hundred thousand times, all of a sudden, that increase in distance becomes really meaningful. Are you concerned about that?

 

Dominic:         No because I understand the metabolic biochemistry of it. What our lab does is this top down approach where we feed the ketogenic diet or we feed ketone supplementation, and then we go back and look at the brain tissue, the skeletal muscle, and we do metabolomics. What we see is all the evidence points to enhanced, more robust mitochondrial function. We can look at using electron microscopy. We can count the number of mitochondria, and now we can also look at the morphological structure of the mitochondria. I just got back from Budapest, and I was talking with an MD PhD over there that has hundreds of brain tumors. He said even in low magnification when you look at a tumor, the mitochondria, the inner mitochondrial membrane is all mucked up. Even in low magnification, you can see total crystallosis.

 

You can see malformed mitochondria. Some of them are enlarged. Some of them are small. Some of them are split in two. A lot of times, you see them forming little circular structures, which means they’re stressed. Then in healthy tissue, we just see a very dynamic dispersal of mitochondria and also the ability to mitochondria for them to migrate, for example, in brain tissue to the synapses where there’s robust bio-energetic processes happening. A lot of electrochemical radiance being shifted from firing action potentials and things like that. The mitochondria are sort of transported through the cell in different ways. In healthy cells, what you see is they all have the same uniform circular, football kind of shaped structures. Then in diseased tissue or diseased model, you just see a range of different mitochondrial sizes and shapes and morphology. With the ketogenic diet or animals or humans are fat adapted. You do see more mitochondria, and people have reported this. We have a lot of tissues to look at.

 

The architecture of the mitochondria are more consistent with healthy mitochondria. They have a more intact cristae and that’s really where all the action is happening, the inner mitochondrial membrane right at the level of the cristae. That’s really the indication of the bio-energetic capacity of the mitochondria, the health of the inner mitochondrial membrane. That’s held together by different substances and probably most important being cardiolipin. In cancer, you find a shift towards more immature cardiolipin, so the inner mitochondrial membrane doesn’t stay together. With the ketogenic diet and with healthy mitochondria, you see a shift towards more mature cardiolipin that holds the … Plays a big role in mitochondrial health and mitochondrial efficiency by preserving the integrity of the inner mitochondrial membrane. That’s really a function of ketones, the ketogenic diet, a healthy compliment of essential fatty acids, phosphatidylpoline, phosphatidylserine things like that that can enhance healthy mitochondria over time.

 

Dave:  It’s such a complex topic, and that’s why I decided that my next book needed to be about mitochondria. I’ve been following the work of guys like Nick Lane, and I just realized everything I’ve ever done that really made a huge difference including back in the day I used to shine an infrared LED, one of the first LEDs you could get, on my head where there’s the most mitochondria. Light affects mitochondria dramatically, so I’ve been doing a lot of light based interventions for mitochondria for more than ten years. I see what happens when I mix ketones, which is our topic, with other things like cryotherapy that actually makes mitochondria work better because they get a little smaller when they’re colder, so electrons move faster with ketones. You stack ketones on almost anything that makes you perform better, and you’re like, “Oh, something magic happens.” I’m excited to explain this in a way that is less sciency, but it’s pushing my limits of being able to simplify because it is such a complex topic.

 

Dominic:         These books won’t make you simplify, but these are excellent books that …

 

Dave:  Hold those still. I’ll read them. “Mitochondria” is one of them. Who wrote that one?

 

Dominic:         Yeah. There’s a number of authors, so there’s editors basically. There’s probably to dozen authors to get into the level of detail that you need to. In here, you have a whole bunch of authors.

 

Dave:  Okay. Got it. Those are basically medical textbook level things.

 

Dominic:         Scheffler is the author of this book.

 

Dave:  I may have that one. I don’t have the “Mitochondria and Cancer” book. We’ll put the names of these … There’s probably twenty percent of people listening to this right now are in the medical or healing field. It’s amazing the number of emails I get from people who are like, “I’m at this big hospital, and I’m doing this kind of research.” They listen because we’re willing to go deep enough, and there’s tons of people who aren’t in medicine at all who are just like, “Is it really true that you can do this?” Of all the guys I ever talk to, you’re one of the top ketone experts out there. Ketones are a superstar when it comes to performing at a new level. I wouldn’t be sitting here today without ketones for really more than a decade because my brain was such junk without them to be perfectly honest.

 

Dominic:         Yeah. I don’t think I could do … I just flew in over night last night, and I’ve been awake for … I’m not even counting the hours now. I don’t really think I could function in the capacity that I do with the productivity that I have been doing to get tenure recently at my university-

 

Dave:  Congratulations by the way.

 

Dominic:         Thank you. It took a lot of over nights, working on grants and publications and things like that. I don’t think I could do it if I didn’t follow a nutritional program that allowed me to have the resilience and just stay up night after night and work on things. I’m in a pharmacology department, so I’m really supposed to be working on drug research. When the drugs didn’t work for the type of seizures I was looking at, and I found out that the ketogenic diet through the Charlie Foundation was being used at John’s Hopkins for hundreds and thousands of kids and that it worked about sixty to seventy percent of the time even when drugs failed, I realized it was something I had to look into.

 

Then when I realized that you can actually create exogenous ketones to mimic that, then I got really interested because that’s like the combination of nutrition and pharmacology to get … It was accepted. Doing high fat diet research for neurological diseases in a pharmacology department is a little strange, but if you’re developing a dozen or more different types of synthetic agents that can mimic that neuro protective state of nutritional ketosis, that’s something you can build a career off of. I realize I’m very fortunate that I just stumbled across Dr. Veech and Henri Brunengraber who’s at Case Western. He helped me out a lot. Sami Hashim, Theodore, he’s like ninety-six or ninety-five now, ketogenic diet guy. These are like the pioneers in the field, and these are super smart guys who really understood metabolic physiology. Dr. Cahill, George Cahill at Harvard Medical School did the experiments fasting subjects for forty days, and he passed away a few years ago. When I was in my post-doc, I was calling him up all the time. I was calling all these guys up. I was probably really annoying to them.

 

Dave:  They probably loved it. I don’t think you’re annoying at all. You know what it’s like when someone who really cares about something calls up. I get calls like that sometimes, and you’re like, “Of course you want to talk about it because it’s your life’s work.”

 

Dominic:         Yeah. They had great stories to tell, a lot of stories. They were inspired that a younger guy was picking this research up, and they inspired me just because of their background that this was something real that I needed to get into more and study for the applications I was looking at.

 

Dave:  From a personal perspective, about three months ago I got food poisoning, and I threw up so hard I passed out, and I smacked my head on the tile and got a concussion. I actually seized for a few seconds. It helps to be married to an emergency room doctor, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that I used every possible way of raising ketosis that I had on hand, which was basically brain octane oil. I absolutely did that, and I took a bunch of mitochondrial energizers. I manufacture a bunch of them, and I pretty much have all of them on hand because I’m always hacking my mitochondria. I use red lights and other things like that, infrared and recovered very quickly, didn’t get any long-term damage. Even with that, for about a week I was kind of a zombie. My working memory was shot. I couldn’t remember words. I swore a lot. All kinds of weird stuff.

 

I think if I hadn’t had ketones present in my body during that time, I would probably still be swearing. I would not have recovered at the rate that I did. I did neuro feedback and a bunch of other stuff. I came back actually remarkably quickly. Thanks for pointing out the things you point out in your work. Because of that, I knew what to do. That’s not the sort of thing you Google for. I also have hyperbaric oxygen downstairs. We talked about that earlier. I’m lucky to have a human hacking lab. I look forward to the day when that knowledge is just common sense, and when a kid takes a hit on a football field, which happens tens of thousands of times a year, that we actually put them on ketones, and we put them in hyperbaric, and we do all those things because that will actually change enormous numbers of lives. Just huge lives.

 

Dominic:         Yeah. I get emails from parents, and their kid, they’re high school or even PV football, they’ve gotten a concussion. They ask, “What’s the best way to get my kid into nutritional ketosis?”

 

Dave:  Keep answering that.

 

Dominic:         Yeah. I get a lot of questions. People ask, “Are ketones” … It sounds like they’re a panacea for everything. Soon we’ll be saying they can cure the common cold, and when I think about it-

 

Dave:  They do.

 

Dominic:         I see three colds a year, and it’s been about seven years since I’ve been on a ketogenic diet, and I’ve only had one cold that I can remember. One or two maybe. It was just little sniffles. We get less colds as we age, but I went from getting two or three a year to one or two that I can remember over the last six or seven years. That’s really strange for me, and that’s through a lot of stress. Usually, stress always triggered it because right around finals time when I was in college, I would always get a cold.

 

Dave:  I’ll sound like the first chapter in the mitochondria book. Everything your body does is based on mitochondria other than your red blood cells that don’t seem to have them. If you could do anything that just even gives you a ten percent boost in the way they function, it’s ten percent more of everything including immune function, including everything in the body. I look at that as the ultimate hack for the body where of course your immune system is going to work better because anytime a cell needs to respond to an invader, it’s got more energy. If you have more energy, you’re going to do a better job. I think that works at the very micro level and at the very macro level. I’ve used ketones to build my company, to write my books, to be a better parent, and you could use sugar as well. It just doesn’t work as well, and so I don’t. I’m not sick like I used to be.

 

Dominic:         Yeah. Ketones are an easy sell for me because I was a patch clamp electro-physiologist in my PhD. That’s what I did with electro-physiology, with patch clamping, and I did something called a wholesale perforated patch where you take a glass electrode, and you put it on a neuron. You don’t dialize the cell, but you seal onto it. Then you have nystatin and the pipette, and it pokes little holes in the membrane, and then you gain electrical access. Then you get the action potentials and the membrane potential. It was very clear to me even early on in my doctoral work that we’re just like a bunch of batteries, and we have these bio-energetic potentials.

 

That was completely driven by ATP, ran the pumps that created the membrane potential. When I would deenergize the cell either by cutting off the substrate or cutting off the oxygen, which my background is looking at hypoxia, that’s when life ceases to exist. That’s when you shut off the energy pathways, and you can’t maintain that membrane potential. That membrane potential really is the definition of life. It drives all the biological processes that we call life. Preserving the ATP levels and the bio-energetic state of the cell with ketones, it just made a lot of sense to me. That’s when I first started studying lactate, and then other alternative energy substrates, and I came across ketones. It seemed such a versatile thing. There was ways to do it through fasting with the ketogenic diet. Then I discovered other ways to enhance ketone production. It was really like a super fuel. If you’re at the gas station and you have four choices to choose from, it’s the super high octane stuff. I wanted to study that.

 

It was a pretty easy sell for me especially since all these other therapies, all these other disorders will respond to this type of metabolic therapy. It’s a very powerful metabolic therapy that has so many different applications. If you look at my CV or what I’m doing, it looks like I’m all over the place, but that’s just because nutritional ketosis or therapeutic ketosis can be applied to so many different pathologies.

 

Dave:  It takes you there. If you follow the ketones, you are going to realize that they’re responsible for just about everything we do because they have more energy in them than sugar does. More energy means doing more.

 

Dominic:         Fat does too.

 

Dave:  Fair point. Fat, which drives ketones.

 

Dominic:         I always like to preface it by saying, “Being fat and keto adapted.”

 

Dave:  There you go. That’s a good point. Now we’re over a little bit on the length of the show, and I know you’ve just got off an airplane from Budapest. I appreciate you making time to be on Bulletproof Radio. I’ve got one more question for you that I’m sure you don’t remember your answer for because it was a couple years ago last time you were on the show. If someone came up to you tomorrow and said, “I want to kick ass at everything I do. I want to be better at everything I do. What are the three most important things I should know,” what would you tell them?

 

Dominic:         Get enough sleep. The most important thing is just to follow what you’re passionate about. I think even if you have … You probably run into people who follow a crappy diet and don’t get any sleep, but if they’re really driven from a gut level and very passionate about what they’re doing, and if what they’re doing is not self-serving and it provides a service for someone else, then they become more intrinsically motivated to work harder and be more successful. I would say, sounds cliché, but follow your heart or just follow really what you’re passionate about. If you follow nutritional ketosis and proper sleep and get sunshine or fresh air and exercise on top of that, then you’re really going to kick ass.

 

Dave:  Love it.

 

Dominic:         You got to focus on what you’re passionate about and just don’t have any fears and go for it.

 

Dave:  I knew you were going to say ketones in there, and you didn’t.

 

Dominic:         I said diet, yeah.

 

Dave:  There you go.

 

Dominic:         Fortify that passion with nutrition and sleep and everything else. Nutrition and that includes ketones.

 

Dave:  There you go. I love it. Dominic D’Agostino, where can people find out more about your work? Are you going to write a book for all of us at some point or something? What’s the deal there?

 

Dominic:         Yeah. I’m thinking about it, but right now, I think what’s important for me is to build a big foundation of research that the book will be about. I’m really deep into doing that kind of research. We have a lot of research projects that are going full steam right now, and in the process, I’m writing a lot of manuscripts and reviews and book chapters and things like that. That will ultimately become part of probably a book in the future, so I’m entertaining that thought. Ketonutrition.org is a website that I maintain and basically just put a bunch of links up there. Metabolic optimization is also a website that I started and did a few podcasts and intend to have more people on that show.

 

Dave:  Beautiful.

 

Dominic:         Those two links right there.

 

Dave:  Thank you. I look forward to having you back on Bulletproof Radio maybe in another six or eight months. It’s always a pleasure.

 

Dominic:         Thanks for having me Dave.

 

Dave:  Don’t miss out. To keep getting great videos like this that help you kick more ass at life, subscribe to the Bulletproof YouTube channel at Bulletproofexec.com/YouTube and stay Bulletproof.
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Why You Should Listen –

On today’s special episode of Bulletproof Radio, Dave is actually the one being interviewed. During a trip to Europe, he met up with our friend Tony Wrighton in London for his Zestology podcast. Listen as Dave answers questions about positivity, exercise, hormonal tips, technology hacks, processing fats, combatting mold and more. Enjoy the show!

 

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Announcer:    Bulletproof radio. A state of high performance.

 

Dave:  You are listening to Bulletproof radio with Dave Asprey. Today’s cool fact of the day is that every day British people drink about 165 million cups of tea. That’s a lot of tea. What you don’t know, though, is that that tea should be protective against stomach cancer except it’s not because stomach cancer rates are higher than it should be given that amount of tea consumption in Britain. There is a reason for this. The reason is because of the British habit of putting milk in tea. It turns out that milk protein called casein sticks to the antioxidants in tea and coffee called polyphenols, and when milk interacts with polyphenols it inactivates them so your body can’t take advantage of it. Even though Brits love their tea, if they would just put butter in their tea, the way Tibetans do, instead of milk, they would have less stomach cancer. That said, if you like your tea, go ahead and drink it. No one’s going to hold it against you.

 

Are you looking to eliminate the feeling of being stuck in your life? You’ll want to check out the Unmistakable Creative podcast. They recently talked about the power of experiential learning and how it’s important to learn things by doing rather than just learning about the theory. To get creative, go to podcastone.com or download the free mobile app now.

 

Today’s podcast is going in a different direction than what you used to because it’s actually me being interviewed live in London by Tony Wrighton and from Zestology. What you will find is a really cool interview. There was an audience of about 200 people and we had more people outside who couldn’t get into the venue. It was a really cool chance to just chat about things that you might not often here on Bulletproof Radio. If you have a chance to watch this one on YouTube, definitely take it. If not, that’s all right, listen up and you will hear an awesome interview.

 

Tony:  Ladies and gentlemen, the founder of Bulletproof, the man who is a New York Times bestseller, and more importantly than that, he’s got us all putting delicious, big blobs of butter in our coffee. Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Dave Asprey.

 

Cool, you get to make the entrance right from the back and make it a bit more dramatic.

 

Dave:  I feel like I’m on a talk show. This is awesome.

 

Tony:  Did you realize how popular biohacking is in this country and in this city? We probably could have filled this three or four times over and we’ve been turning people away over the last few days. Did you have an idea of how big your movement and the movement of biohacking is becoming?

 

Dave:  I know it’s getting bigger globally, but I haven’t seen this much interest in the UK so far, so thanks for showing up. I’m honored. It’s cool. This is our movement, anyone’s a biohacker when you start paying attention to stuff. I pushed the button on the word, but there’s a lot of personal work that people are doing.

 

Tony:  Yeah, the word and also, I think, any great movement has to have a good gimmick. Let’s start by talking about the coffee. There’s been, I think it’s fair to say that Brits are slightly more skeptical than Americans in general, and there has been some skepticism. Is that fair to say in general? We’re slightly less willing to adopt things. There has been some skepticism in the press, The Guardian said it tasted bitter and oily, but there’s a lot of people here who love it as well. Is there a sense that this is now almost becoming mainstream do you think?

 

Dave:  It was The Telegraph who said that the Bulletproof Diet was “everything wrong with America in a diet.” I thought that was a better quote. That’s because the British press is very trustworthy and credible, right? When you’re a skeptic, it’s very funny what some of the latest neuroscience shows, about 2% of the corpus callosum, that little network of nerves that connect the two halves of your brain, you have the logical side and the emotional, intuitive side, when you’re a skeptic you’ve taken the 2% of those that are really good for going back and forth and you’ve trained them as a firewall to block any interaction between the two house of your brain. The rest of us who are actually getting shit done, we’ve actually paid attention to those nerves and uptrained them so we have better interhemispheric conductivity so we can actually sense whether something is working instead of being afraid that it might not work. I love skeptics because what you do is you make them a proper cup of Bulletproof coffee, which means it’s not bitter and oily because they made it right, and then they drink it and you go, “How do you feel?” A half-hour later, 95% of the time there like, “Oh my God,” and 5% of the time like, “I’ve got to go to the bathroom.” I’m okay with either one for skeptics.

 

Tony:  Who here has tried Bulletproof coffee before? Who here hasn’t? Ha-ha. We are serving it. If you’re a bit worried about being totally wired, then we are serving decaf as well a little bit later on, as soon as our urns heat up.

 

What about Bulletproof coffee for athletic performance? Is that starting to take off? I’m thinking, obviously, we love our sport here in the UK, might we see the likes of Chelsea and Arsenal football club following a Bulletproof Diet or at the very least drinking Bulletproof coffee in the morning?

 

Dave:  I don’t really follow celebrity people that much, this last weekend I got a picture from the Bulletproof Coffee Shop in Santa Monica from this guy, I think he is well known, it was David Beckham. He came there twice. He came there one day, and came back the next day, so I know he’s tried it and he was cool with having his photo taken. Unfortunately, I wasn’t there to meet him. Also, we sponsor the LA Galaxy where most of the UK soccer pros when, I guess, they’re done here.

 

Tony:  Yeah, when their past it a little bit.

 

Dave:  Yeah, but it’s a start. It’s American soccer, it’s got to happen.

 

Tony:  I’m thinking in terms of high-performance, I know some of these endurance athletes now are switching … Obviously, 20 years ago the thinking was “You’ve got to load up with extra carbs.” Now, is there a sense that the athletic community following high-fat diets as well? Does that work if you are trying to break records, for example?

 

Dave:  It’s still controversial. I think for certain types of endurance sports you want to start out in fat burning mode, you want to be fat adapted, but you might want to switch to carbs at a certain point. There is a wall, but Bulletproof and these kind of techniques, it moves the wall way out, but you can still hit it. I don’t have any problem when someone’s like, “I’m on 75 miles of running,” I don’t know what that is in kilometers, sorry, but, “I’ve run a lot a lot, more than a marathon. I think I want to have some sugar now.” I’m like, “Good, go for it. There’s nothing wrong with that. You might want to put some things that add exogenous ketones in so you can have both energy pathways going at the same time.”

 

I’m convinced that, right now, Brain Octane, or in the UK, thanks to the regulatory people, High Octane Oil, is the number one source of exogenous ketones in the world’s diet right now because it’s the oil that converts most quickly to ketones. Of course, athletic people want to do it in a big way. Surfers are all over the stuff like, “I can get more energy per cycle out of my mitochondria,” which might matter when there is a wave of holding you underwater for a while and things like that. I’m seeing it in strength athletics, I’m seeing it in endurance athletics.

 

the mistakes that some people are making, in my opinion, is they’re going into ketosis and staying there forever. The cyclical ketosis approach that I outlined in the book seems to work better for most people. If you have cancer and if you’re one of those genetic people where you just love it and you feel that you’re never good on carbs, that’s cool, but I think that that’s the exception, not the rule.

 

Tony:  It’s obviously getting bigger, isn’t it? You’ve got a lot of people in here who come to see you today. Any plans to open a coffee shop in London?

 

Dave:  Absolutely I have plans to open a coffee shop in London.

 

Tony:  That would be quite popular.

 

Dave:  Just one?

 

Tony:  A couple of other London-centric questions. Am I right in saying you don’t like taking the tube?

 

Dave:  Does anyone like taking the tube?

 

Tony:  It’s very quick, it’s an easy gateway to get around. Tell us about your experiences going …

 

Dave:  I have a unique radar. I’m one of the 28% of the world who have genes that make us more susceptible to toxic mold. In fact, it causes mitochondrial weakness in me. When I’m in a place that’s moldy, sometimes within seconds and always within minutes, I’ll feel it, I’ll feel it in my brain.

 

I used to commute out here a lot, like once every month for about two years. I worked in Cambridge so I would fly, I’d get a couple of extra days in London. I remember one day I took the tube to go see the British Museum. Like, “All right, this is going to be really fun.” I’m on the tube and I’m starting to feel really, really weird, like seeing colors kind of weird. I walked down this long, tiled, dank hallway, the ones with white tiles on them that are just nasty. By the end of it, I’m like, “Okay, I’m getting tunnel vision,” so I was like, “I’ll just hold my breath.” It started to go really fast. I will say I was really not happy, and people who’ve been exposed many times, like I have, to toxic mold they know this feeling. You’re like, “I have to get out of here.” I’m taking the escalator stairs two at a time, and this very polite gentleman comes on overhead speakers and he’s like, “Would the gentleman charging the escalators please stop.” I’m like, “Charging? That’s using a credit card.” I couldn’t process what he was saying, and I’m sure I scared people running up the escalators.

 

I went outside and breathed and it took like eight shots of coffee to turn my mitochondria back on because caffeine changes this thing called cyclical amp, which is an enzyme that helps you make your ATP work again. Basically, I felt crappy all day. I can tell you, as a matter of fact, that the air in the tube is absolutely horrible. You’ve got pollutants, you’ve got chemicals, and you got this environmental thing going on because it’s always wet and it’s always dark. If they did air quality monitoring in the tube, no one would take the tube. It’s that bad for you. My wife, Dr. Lana, who does fertility coaching for global clients, including a few people who live in London, flat out, if you’re trying to get pregnant don’t take the tube. It makes a difference.

 

Tony:  Who’s getting Uber on the way home?

 

Dave:  Just hold your breath.

 

Tony:  Let’s talk about supplements, then, Dave. I know you’re not always willing to exactly talk about what supplements you’ve taken, but tell me what you’ve taken today.

 

Dave:  You’ve just reminded me, actually. I need some water, though. I have a little baggy.

 

Tony:  We’ve got your bottle of water here.

 

Dave:  Excellent.

 

Tony:  This, presumably, isn’t all of your supplements for the day?

 

Dave:  When I travel I do, basically, three bags a day. I need a spoon, a lighter, and a needle. Let’s see if I can figure out what’s in here.

 

Tony:  It’s quite a lot in there. It looks like there’s probably 20 pills in there or something like that.

 

Dave:  Something like that. This is relatively light.

 

Tony:  This is a live pill-taking on a podcast. Don’t know whether that’s been tried before, I don’t know whether we should ever try again, but we’ll see.

 

Dave:  Let’s see, I don’t know if I can tell you what all the white ones are, I know there’s some Aniracetam in here, that looks like gamma-Linolenic acid … No, that’s actually vitamin E, mixed tocopherols and tocotrienols. There’s an adrenal extract, astaxanthin, which is really important when you travel, Brain Octane capsule, which helps absorption of everything else, adaptogenic herbs, turmeric, there’s an upgraded aging in here. That’s bilberry, I’m really working on eye health because it runs in my family to get macular degeneration and because I have light sensitivity.

 

Tony:  What’s that half a pill there? What’s that?

 

Dave:  The half a pill right here? That is one of two things, let’s see if I can tell you which one it is. It is either an aromatase inhibitor, which prevents testosterone from converting into estrogen, which tends to happen a lot in my family just historically. I used to weigh 50% more than I weigh, my body will always convert testosterone to estrogen more aggressively than normal so I cycle on and off of these on occasion. It’s either, that or it could be cortisol. If you don’t want to be jetlagged and you get a prescription for cortisol, take micro doses of cortisol and you don’t get jet lag. It’s awesome.

 

Tony:  Wow. As you start to take your pills, I just wonder …

 

Dave:  I’ll just do it like this, watch.

 

Tony:  No way.

 

Dave:  It’s not that hard.

 

Tony:  Did you throw it in your shirt? It’s like magic.

 

Dave:  Didn’t you learn how to drink a pint?

 

Tony:  I was never good at that, downing a pint at once.

 

Dave:  It’s the same technique just drinking a lot of beer

 

Tony:  Good effort. Did anyone here recognize everything that Dave called out? Anyone? Okay. A few, she pitched half-half. Come on, put your hands up and give us a proper … Yeah, okay, a few of you. That’s pretty impressive. Quite a few of your smart drugs in there. What would you say to people who are well up for taking anything natural, which is most of what you recommend, but obviously, smart drugs are not necessarily natural in the same way that chemical compounds?

 

Dave:  Nootropics are an interesting category because they include natural compounds, but they also include pharmaceuticals. In the States, to get [parasitin 00:13:53], when I first started taking it, which is technically a pharmaceutical, even though in the US it is one of those “does not exist,” it’s not in the book for doctors. If you go to a normal doctor and say, “I am taking this,” and they can’t find it. There’s a blind spot. They consider it an orphan drug in the US, which is funny because it’s been around for 60 years, it’s made by Sandoz Pharmaceuticals and is anything but an orphan, it’s a very well-studied drug. It’s just … It’s impolite, and it’s actually not Puritan, going back to the US sort of thing, to take drugs that make you better. You have to be sick to take a drug but if you’re already well and you take a drug, clearly you’re a bad person and you probably also have sex.

 

Tony:  There are also people that say, “I don’t take drugs, I just get everything I need from my diet. I don’t believe in all this extra stuff, I just believe in getting the nutrients that I can from my diet and I eat well.” I kind of know the reply that you’re going to say but I wanted to ask you that anyway because I feel that that’s a common complaint of people who take a lot of supplements like you just have.

 

Dave:  When someone says that, the easiest thing is I just say, “How’s that working for you?” The reason they’re asking me these questions is because it’s not working for them, and sometimes you can say, “Your pants are too big, sorry.” Like it’s not working for you, you can just point it out for them. “You look like crap,” is another way you can say that without meaning to be rude or anything, but you’re like, “Let’s talk about this.” The real point here is, look, if you’re only going to get your food from mother nature and your vitamins from mother nature you, should receive all of your toxins from only mother nature. No EMFs, no junk lighting … Let’s see, you should no petrochemicals, no plastic, no plasticizers, no endocrine disrupting chemicals, no coal dust, no mercury at the levels we have today, and the list goes on and on. No stress, like modern stress. Basically, go put on a toga and live in the hills.

 

By the way, you need to grow all of your own food because the food you’re eating now has nothing to do with the food that would be coming from your own garden because a lot of it was picked a year ago and it’s not fresh and it doesn’t have the nutrients in it and it’s been hybridized. I would say that they’re living an absolute fantasy. These are hard facts. You should counteract all this crap that comes into your body with just natural stuff. It’s like I like to run marathons wearing high heels and my hands behind my back. Why would you do that? You could if you wanted to.

 

Tony:  That’s a pretty comprehensive answer. What about in terms of people living in this city and are keen to make it as London-centric and is British-centric as possible? I, personally, feel the cold a lot, much more than I ever did in my early 20s. I feel like today, the middle of summer pretty much here, and it’s pretty cold, it’s not a particularly warm country. Are there any supplements that we could take, firstly, to alleviate that, and secondly, I’m sure a lot of people have really been given pause for thought by what you said about the tube. Are there any supplements that they could take in terms of offsetting those symptoms? the answer might be no, but I guess it’s worth asking.

 

Dave:  To stay warm, there’s an interesting amino acid called L-Tyrosine that up-regulates your thyroid function a little bit. You can take 500mg in the morning, and if you don’t feel super ampy and jittery it’s probably going to help you that. Green tea extracts could make a difference, L-Theanine could potentially make a difference, and anything that upregulates your mitochondrial efficiency or mitochondrial function is probably going to help with that. I would also say, if you’re cold all the time, have you had a comprehensive thyroid panel? It is so common for people to have a thyroid that isn’t working very well, even in their mid-20s. If you go to the normal physician here they’re going to give you a test for TSH, which is one of seven different ways your thyroid can break. If that hormone is okay, they’re like, “You don’t have a problem.” You’re like, “But I’m cold, and my skin is dry, and I am tired all the time. Those might be problems, Doc.” Then you have to arm wrestle them until they agree to order a comprehensive panel, and it’s like, “Oh, you’re not converting T4 to T3 the way you should, it’s not a hormone issue it’s a conversion issue.” I would say, if you’re cold all the time, it’s worth really digging on thyroid first and foremost. You may be able to help with just iodine. It’s really hard to say until you have the data.

 

Tony:  Okay, I will. I guess there may be an adrenal component of that as well.

 

Dave:  There can be an adrenal component and in Chinese medicine they’ll just tell you this amazing thing, drink hot tea, green tea not black in China, and wear a jacket. There’s actually a belief there that if you’re cold all the time, especially when you travel, that it depletes you and that you actually work better when you’re a little bit warm. One of the Chinese guys I work with who is trained with … He can actually sit in the snow and melt a circle around him kind of guy, he was like, “When I travel I always have a jacket and a little cap stay warm especially on airplanes.” I like, “You could melt glaciers, dude.” He’s like, “Yeah, but I don’t want to waste my energy on that.” So you might just dress warmer.

 

Tony:  Yeah, that’s not quite the advice I was looking for, but if it’s all warm. What about mold? that was the second part of the question. Is there anything that we could take to alleviate those issues, bearing in mind sometimes it’s the only way that you can get across London and that is to take the tube.

 

Dave:  Sure. What I would look out there is glutathione which is one of the major detox things in your body, can be very, very powerful. If you can’t get glutathione, just vitamin C could make a difference, alpha lipoic acid could make a difference. Those are very limited as to how they’ll help you, but they can help you. I prefer … I make glutathione, you can tell I going to be biased in that direction, but I make it for a reason. Then activated charcoal, which is another thing that I manufacture, is shown, in fact it’s in the US military protocols for dealing with people who’ve been exposed to mold toxins, is one of the things that can bind them. So does bentonite clay, and so does a prescription drug called cholestyramine. I don’t think you need to be fearful because that’s also not so good for your performance.

 

What you want to do though is recognize, If I get in the tube and I come out and a half hour later I have really weird sugar cravings that I’m not used to, there’s a reason for that. Those sugar cravings are happening because your body is like, “I need to oxidize a lot of really bad things that just happened to me,” and it’s basically calling out for energy. When that happens, and this is going to sound crazy, have some sugar. When I came out of the tube and I had my eight shots of espresso, I was putting sugar into them. I don’t like sugar, I don’t even think it tastes good in coffee, it ruins coffee, but I wanted the sugar as a medical substance to give me a short burst of ATP. It makes you feel better, and you have to deal with the side effects of the sugar later, but it’s a lot better than feeling crappy when you come out.

 

You may also be like, “I ride but you but I feel just fine.” What’s happening there is you’re one of the people has really good genes and you don’t get an inflammatory response. Here’s the problem, those toxins, they cause damage to your DNA, like oxidative DNA damage. There’s two kinds of stress for the body what is called hormetic stress, what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. Remember the Princess Bride in that movie, a little bit of poison every day so that you’ll be immune? Mold doesn’t work like that. Unfortunately, it causes damage.

 

If I’m the canary, I’m one of the one in four, and you’re the non-canary we both come off, and I might be like, “God, I feel like crap. I want to take a nap and I want to eat a cookie,” and you’re like, “What’s wrong with you?” Well, you’re still paying the biological cost for those specific mycotoxins. You’re not playing the inflammatory cost that happens because my immune system recognizes things that yours doesn’t, so you have an advantage except that you’re not aware of it, so you might expose yourself to it every day, which … I have 1200 studies on the website about OTA and stuff that’s found in coffee, and another 1400 about aflatoxin, and there’s a whole bunch of other molds. We know these things, that is a technical term. I always want to say bollocks here, but I don’t know how to use it so would make no sense. It bollockses you up. See I misused it entirely, but basically, it’s bad.

 

Tony:  I’m glad you mentioned charcoal tablets because one of the things that is Brits really like, we really, really like it and our social life is based around it, is going to the pub. We do like the booze up, most of us. Who here drinks at least very occasionally? Who here doesn’t drink at all? Okay, probably 70 or 80% of the people do drink.

 

Dave:  This isn’t representative of the UK at all

 

Tony:  No, most bars … Yeah, exactly. If people want to go to the bar without feeling too guilty what is the most Bulletproof drink that they could have?

 

Dave:  You want good quality vodka, and you can have that with lime or lemon and a little bit of sparkling water or club soda sort of things, you don’t want the sugar. Here’s the magic thing about good vodka anyway, it’s distilled and charcoal filtered which means instead of having your liver and kidneys do all the work, you outsource the work to technology and then you’ve got the pure substance that came out as a result of that. Unfortunately, it’s not all foamy and amazing looking in a big mug, I don’t know how to make that happen with vodka, but I suppose you can put it in your Bulletproof coffee.

 

Tony:  Obviously some vodkas are distilled from wheat. They say all the gluten is gone out of it, but some celiac’s won’t have wheat distilled vodkas anyway. What would you say about that?

 

Dave:  I recommend potato vodka for that difference, but here’s the thing. 20% of people are sensitive to nightshade vegetables and potatoes are a nightshade vegetable. If I eat potatoes the muscles all along my spine get knotted up and my joints hurt for a week, so I generally don’t eat them because the nightshade family has these things called lectins. Many foods have them, but the ones that are particularly aggressive, and lectins are proteins that stick to sugars in your body. The sugars that line my joints are the kind that potatoes like to stick to. When I eat those I’m like, “Wow, I feel like I did when I was 22. Everything in my body hurts all the time.” For me, maybe a potato vodka isn’t a big deal, except I can drink either kind of vodka and I just got a little drunk from them because, really, they’re highly distilled. Unless you are extremely sensitive, I don’t think anyone is going to feel the difference there.

 

Tony:  I was under the impression that tequila was actually potentially purer than vodka. I don’t know quite why I thought that, but what would you say about tequila?

 

Dave:  Tequila is made from agave which is the sexiest new vegan thing. Agave nectar, which is basically high fructose corn syrup for hippies. Here’s the problem, these are giant cacti. I grew up in New Mexico, they grow right south of the border there, and there is something like 200 species and only one of them is really fit for human consumption, but they keep overgrowing and overharvesting them. They take all the other species that weren’t even that well recommended for it, so when you’re getting your agave nectar, blah, tequila, bottom line, it’s not really going to matter. What really matters though was the worm organic.

 

At a certain point, we’re talking distilled and filtered beverages, the reason I say vodka is better is they’ve actually taken more out in the distillation process because there’s no coloring left some of the trace compounds aren’t there, but for the average person any of the distilled alcohols that are distilled and filtered, pick one you like and you’re going to be so high in the Bulletproof spectrum compared to, say, drinking beer. I don’t like that answer, that’s just how the biology works out. You’re lucky here, red wine still has issues with ochratoxin A, the same stuff that’s in coffee, but the European limits on the good stuff here are pretty decent. If you were to drink a dry white French wine, or even a French red, the limits are 2 parts per billion, if they actually test the wine which a lot of it isn’t. If you’re drinking from a high-end vineyard, especially one that uses old world techniques, you’re probably going to be okay unless you’re allergic to yeast, which tons of people are and don’t know. If you drink wine and you normally don’t feel quite as good as when you drink vodka, you’re always going to have less biological work when you drink vodka.

 

Tony:  Yeah, you cover alcohol drinks in the Bulletproof Diet Roadmap as well, don’t you?

 

Dave:  Yeah. It’s actually a whole separate roadmap, it had to be that big. It’s all free on the website.

 

Tony:  Did you test it all yourself?

 

Dave:  I did. I went to university in … I remember at least two or three classes.

 

Tony:  It’s actually really useful, the Bulletproof Diet Roadmap. I, yesterday, was feeling great, and generally consider myself to eat quite healthily, and stopped on the way to work at Sky and treated myself to some hummus. Within about 15 minutes, I felt the inflammation. I thought, “I’ll check the Bulletproof Diet Roadmap,” and you talk quite a lot about chickpeas and how inflammatory they can be. I know it’s quite random, but a lot of people would consider hummus to be relatively healthy, why is it so inflammatory?

 

Dave:  Okay. There’s two plates in front of you one is full of guacamole and one is full of hummus, why would you ever eat hummus? I would say go for the guac. The reason is these are legumes, they’re full of these lectins. They are actually different lectins than the nightshade ones, but for a lot of people, way more than is acknowledged, they cause problems. The other issue is that they have storage and contamination issues. When you take something like a relatively high protein bean and you soak it, like you would in order to make hummus, what happens during the soak time? Normally, you get microbiological activity. You get bacteria, and you can get a yeast or a fungus growing. One of the things that is a well … Isn’t even talked about in the wine industry or the coffee industry, but it is something that I do test for, is called biogenic amines.

 

These are things like histamine, is a biogenic amine, tyramine is one. You’ve heard of cheese migraines? that comes from tyramine. For some people getting a little bit of that, because you’ve soaked these things for a while and then you blended them up, and then if you’re getting them from a container in the grocery store, after you’ve made a perfect Petri dish, you got some bacteria and all from the air, you’ve got some moisture, you’ve got some … You blend it up and then you just let it sit there for a while. It’s not surprising you get that effect.

 

Same thing, you go to one of these raw vegan restaurants … Here’s what I always do when I go there. If I’m going to eat one of those desserts that taste delicious but probably have agave and honey in, like I’m not having any cards today or whatever but it’s going to taste good, you just say, “Did you make it today?” If you eat that you’re going to feel great. If they made it two days ago and you eat it, you should expect to feel a little bit zombified and to have food cravings afterwards and it’s because of what happened between when it was made and when you ate it. This whole food safety thing, it actually really matters.

 

Tony:  Just one more question on food. I think for a lot of people it would seem to be a small leap between putting butter in coffee and eating cheese, but cheese is, on the Bulletproof Diet Roadmap, pretty much the worst thing. Tell us a little bit about cheese. I ate quite a lot of it last week, and then afterwards I thought, “Maybe that didn’t quite agree with me the way I thought it did.”

 

Dave:  You could eat American cheese which would be even worse. Processed cheese food. “Cheese food product” it’s called on the label. Truly. That’s just weird chemicals and whatever residue is left over after real cheese. Here’s the main ingredient of cheese, it’s caseine, which is milk protein. That stuff is highly inflammatory, and it does correlate with levels of liver cancer, and I generally recommend most people avoid casein as much is reasonable. There are trace amounts in butter, some people who are truly sensitive have to have ghee instead of butter to remove casein, but when you minimize the amount of casein you get, you feel much better.

 

There’s also … This is what happens in cheese. You have a set of nutrients here, there’s milk, and you have some enzymes, and then you have some bacteria, and then some yeast or some fungus, depending on what kind of cheese you have, this nice blue veiny thing. And then warfare starts. Since neither one of them has knives and guns and things like that, what they do is they start making chemicals to basically kill the other one and then you eat what’s left when there’s smoking rubble and one side is left. There’s a lot of weird compounds in there that aren’t well-recognized. One of my favorite ones is Roquefortine C, Roquefort. There’s actually a mycotoxin called Roquefortine C, and we know it’s bad for you. It’s like, “You can handle it,” and actually, you probably can handle it.

 

Dependent on your biology, you’ll handle it better or worse, but I have this crazy idea with Bulletproof that handle as few things as you really need to handle, so why do you want to handle that? it could be because I like stinky cheese on my salad, at which point, great, acknowledge that you’re not only doing something good with the cheese and say, “All right, fine, I’m going to deal with it. I will take some charcoal, or I’ll just be tired, or maybe it’ll have no effect at all because I’ve identified that stuff isn’t a suspect food for me, I’m totally fine with it.” Most people I know who give up cheese for a couple of weeks, they think clearer, they have fewer food cravings, they have less muffin top, their skin looks much better, you can see it in the skin most of all, and it’s a subtle thing. It’s like, “I had this cheese, I feel fine,” and then check yourself one day, two days, three days, four days later as different layers of inflammation unveil themselves.

 

I will tell you, I have kids and I live on an island where literally the cows that I eat, eat the grass from the front part of my farm, so I’m as local as you can get. Maybe once a month, I’ll make Bulletproof pizza. I will use grass fed, local cheese, and I’m still somewhat sensitive to it, but I can tolerate that reasonably well, but every time I do it, the day after my thinking isn’t as good. It’s not like my thinking isn’t pretty good almost all the time now, I’ve dialed that in. I used to have brain fog all the time I couldn’t remember words, what was I going to say, why did I open the fridge, where are my car keys, all that stuff has become effortless for me. It just doesn’t happen even if I only got three hours of sleep or something, actually, like I did last night, I’m totally fine. I can bring it. If I have cheese, a couple of days later, I’m just not … I’m 80% there, but I’m not 100% there.

 

it’s that nuance, when you start paying attention to, “Wait a minute. Why do I feel like this right now?” That really can instruct you a lot. No one told me 20 years ago, when I started taking notes on this, that what I did four days ago could have an impact on me. It drove me nuts for years. I thought I was fine on gluten, so I would eat gluten on one day and the next day I was really fine, but the day after that, I was really not fine. To know there’s a lag time when you eat cheese is kind of important knowledge that hasn’t been out there.

 

Tony:  That’s quite hard to track isn’t it? I did want to ask about tracking. Who here tracks in some way some aspect of their lives? just put your hands up. Okay, so most of us. Who here is wearing a tracker? Not that many. It’s quite hard to track, as far as I have found, I’m a bit of a tracking geek and I’ve got a feeling my obsession with tracking isn’t necessarily healthy. In terms of being able to track something like, “I ate cheese and a two days later I felt bad,” I haven’t found anything that does the job particularly well. Have you got any recommendations for tracking?

 

Dave:  There’s a free app called Food Detective, it’s one that Bulletproof developed, and it’s free because it’s actually important stuff. What you can do with that is shortcut a little bit. If you’re truly sensitive to a food, you use this app in the morning, it gives a baseline heart rate. Not heart rate variability, just heart rate. Then you tell it what you ate, and you get your heart rate before and after a meal. If there’s something in a meal that you’re sensitive to, it’s going to raise your heart rate by about 17 beats a minute within 90 minutes after you eat. You could use this, which is maybe less of a tracking thing, but maybe more of a detective thing.

 

I advise people to track what you hack. There is something called exposome, and this is a word that was invented maybe seven years ago. This is a set of all the environmental things around you that you’re exposed to over the course of your life. It’s thousands of time bigger than the human genome. Because I have no idea if the planetary alignment really makes any difference or not, but it’s something you’re exposed to, and if you want to eliminate that variable, you might want to pay attention to that.

 

The idea of tracking could be really misleading. You know why cholesterol is so feared? because it was one of the first things we could track and blood, so we obsess about cholesterol even though it turns out it wasn’t that terribly useful after all. I get these, going back to the skeptics, “You can’t change more than one variable.” I’m like, “That’s a laughable statement. Everyone is changing tens of thousands of variables a day, you just don’t know what they are. What path did you take to work today? does that affect your drug trial outcome? no one knows because no one ever tracked it, but it wasn’t the same every day.” This idea of only changing one variable at a time is laughable, and it doesn’t work when you’re testing supplements. You want to be attention to that when you’re tracking.

 

It’s better to pick a goal and say, “What are the variables that I can think of that might affect the outcome?” and just focus on that one outcome and change all of the variables that might do it until you get what you’re looking for. Then you can zoom in and change five or ten things. If you were to try every supplement on the market for one month to see which one worked, two things would happen. One is you would die before you tried them all. The second thing that would happen is that you would probably miss a lot of the things that are multifactorial.

 

The biohacking approach is, “I wanted to change X. Why don’t I take every supplement that, in the study, can change X and see if I get where I want to go and then back off?” My first several years of trying to change things biologically, only one variable at a time, and it’s a hopeless, fool’s errand. It doesn’t work, and it’s a lie to yourself because you already changing every variable every day. You just aren’t paying attention to them.

 

Tony:  I tend to think that some of the tracking devices that are coming out now actually would almost have a detrimental effect on your life because of the lack of focus that comes from wearing an iWatch that tells you every time you get a Whatsapp message when you could be going more in depth into whatever you’re doing you agree with that

 

Dave:  Absolutely. I was CTO of Basis, a wristband company, the first one they got heart rate off the wrist the way that Apple watch does now, and Intel bought that company for $100 million. I can tell you categorically that the type of information that you’re getting from those watches is very suspect. It’s suspect because, calories burned, I read a post naming studies. 50% of the calories you burn have nothing to do with how much you move, so how are these watches doing that? What is useful is did I move more or less than yesterday? that’s a useful data point, but the calorie count is just pure fiction. It has no basis in reality. If you look at the cost of interruption, I spent 10 weeks of my life with electrodes glued to my head doing the 40 Years of Zen program and things like that, I’ve had my own EEG at home since 1997. When the phone rings you absolutely see, you go straight into fire or flight, you go into beta right out of alpha, right out of theta, all the places where intuition, and creativity, and calm focus come from. Every time an alert comes through, it basically kicks that part of your meat operating system, what I call the Labrador brain in the book. It says, “Look, threat, right now,” and this takes you out of productivity mode, out of focus mode.

 

I turn alerts off on pretty much everything I think I get text message alerts but almost no one texts me and I would turn those off if everyone started to text me. I don’t get any email alerts. If my phone rings, I will get that alert although I probably won’t answer it because I’m likely on a call already. When I’m not on calls, I put my phone in airplane mode because I really … If you don’t have an appointment, you probably can’t reach me unless you’re my wife.

 

Tony:  It’s just good for the important parts of the body to have it in an airport mode isn’t it?

 

Dave:  It’s certainly not going to harm them to have it in airplane mode.

 

Tony:  Let’s just check has anybody got their phone in the pocket and it’s not an airport mode at the moment? just put your hand up. It’s okay we won’t judge.

 

Dave:  Here’s the thing, look where my pocket is. Notice my pocket as far away from the important stuff.

 

Tony:  You buy trousers, that’s good.

 

Dave:  Hashtag biohacker pants.

 

Tony:  One thing I’ve asked everyone on this podcast is what is one book that you would recommend that’s had a really profound impact on your life, and one tip for living with more energy, vitality, and motivation. One book and one tip.

 

Dave:  One book and one tip. It’s hard to pick just one book because I’ve read thousands, and a lot of them are boring biological books, but let me go back to the book that I read when I was 16 called Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, kind of a classic. The reason I’ll go back to that is they tell you to set goals and focus on them every day, real basic biohacking stuff. It’s not biohacking at all, but I wrote this goal down and I said, “By the time I’m 23, I want to have $1 million.” Why? Because I thought $1 million would make me happy. Turns out there’s not much correlation there. No one told me that. I can tell you it categorically didn’t work because I made $6 million when I was 26, but I didn’t make $1 million when I was 23. Still, I thought it was a good book. It actually really affected my career.

 

I would just say if you’re reading that book, or any of the other books like that, the latest book that’s worth reading is the Code of the Extraordinary Mind which just got published by Vishen Lakhiani. A really good book that has some of that kind of stuff and some more modern stuff in it. What will happen is you can get what you ask for, and the same thing goes when you’re tracking yourself. If you’re tracking calories, “I’m going to eat less calories today,” you’re going to get what you ask for. You’re going to have less energy. Just make sure that you’re very, very conscious and aware in the language that you use when you’re setting a goal because if you set a biohacking goal, or a life goal, or a success goal, or whatever it is, your body is stupid and it might interpret those goals very literally. Make sure you run it through the logic filter as well as oh-that’s-what-I-thought-I-meant kind of filter.

 

Tony:  What about one tip for living with more energy and vitality?

 

Dave:  Probably the easiest thing to do is to get higher quality sleep. This is going to sound a little bit weird, but healthy people need less sleep. If you want to get good quality sleep, doing anything that makes your biology work better is the right approach. If you need 10 hours of sleep at night, your chances of dying of all-cause mortality are much, much higher than someone who sleeps six hours a night. That actually is a symptom. It’s okay that you’re getting 10 hours of sleep to recover, but you need to start looking at that really carefully. If you just have to have eight hours of sleep, maybe that’s all right, but actually, a need for lots and lots of sleep, unless you’re doing something like heavy workouts every day, you’re a professional athlete or something, there is something not right in your biology. Pay attention to the quality, not necessarily the length of your sleep. That’s probably the biggest thing you can do.

 

Tony:  I’m sure I’ve heard you say before you only sleep six hours a night or less?

 

Dave:  Let’s see, I do track that, it’s probably the one tracking thing that I do that’s pretty straightforward.

 

Tony:  What do you use to track it?

 

Dave:  I use an app called Sleep Cycle. In the last 1178 nights, my average time was six hours and one minute. It’s trended up by one minute in the last year.

 

Tony:  I feel like there’s some sleep experts who would say it’s not enough.

 

Dave:  Do they look tired?

 

Tony:  Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to take a little break there. Think of your questions that you would love to ask Dave. Obviously, the bar is open for vodka and tequila, but not beer. You can also mingle at the back, we’ve the stalls you can obviously go and collect your Bulletproof goody pack whenever you like, they’re all at the back. We’ll come back in 15 minutes time with the Q&A. Give it up for Dave Asprey, ladies and gentlemen.

 

Tony:  We are ready with our second part of our podcast. Who has a question for Dave? I feel that this man with a red shirt has been so enthusiastically sticking up his hand. Shout out your question and we’ll go for it.

 

Ocant: I will stand up and shout it out. Dave, you talked about high-performance could you say …

 

Tony:  Okay it’s a question about low performance and how to react when you don’t feel like you’re acting optimally at high-performance, and what’s your name?

 

Ocant: [Ocant 00:42:58].

 

Tony:  Ocant.

 

Yani:   My name is Yani.

 

Tony:  Johnny?

 

Yani:   Yes, close enough.

 

Tony:  Very polite as well. Dave?

 

Dave:  Recovery is one of the highest performance activities you can do. If you’re postsurgical, or you have something you’re working on and you have massive adrenal fatigue, the state of high performance you’re going after is high-performance rest. Sleep quality is high-performance sleep versus low-performance sleep. If you are in a place where you hurt yourself in an athletic event or something like that, the exercise recommendations are going to change, and this is going to sound a little bit weird, but working out really hard when you’re sick or when you should be recovering probably isn’t going to help, so number one back off. Number two, that whole thing about cyclical ketosis is really important. You probably are going to benefit from having moderate, non-sugar carbs at least some of the time, and there’s good evidence for that. There are people who recover just fine on pure ketosis, however, I think if you test them both you figure out which one works pretty well.

 

Some of the supplement things are very different if you’re dealing with injuries or post surgical stuff, depends on where the surgery is. A lot of the stuff that I like turmeric, vitamin E, fish oil like DHA or EPA or krill oil, they make you bleed. That’s a good thing if you’re four days after a surgery or six days after, depending on how deep and what they did, but if it’s right before surgery I don’t think your surgeon’s going to be that happy when they poke you and you leak everywhere. What I think you want to do there is look at recovery and rest as some of the most important things where you can modify your performance. Those are not low-performance states at all. Performance doesn’t mean you’re moving, it means you’re doing whatever you’re doing better. At that point, all you’re doing is getting unsick or recovering from a major trauma, which is surgery or something else.

 

Tony:  Super stuff. We’ve got three or four seats here and two there if anyone is milling around and wants to come and sit in the front, you’re very welcome to come down here. The chap who is perched on the table thing over there with a black T-shirt. What’s your name and what’s your question?

 

Francis:           Thank you, I’m Francis. How many times have you been asked …

 

Tony:  That’s Francis asking the top three things for high-performance.

 

Dave:  I’ve never heard that question. The top three things to kick the most ass. I actually give different answers each time because you’ve got to mix it up a little bit. This will be a funny answer, I’ve never answered it this way, but there’s three voices in your head and there’s one answer for each of those. The three voices in your head are there to keep the species alive forever, and if you were to design an animal that wasn’t very smart, you’d just have to have these three things in there and you would have a species that would go on until the meter strikes or something.

 

The first behavior is run away from scary things that might eat you, and that’s pretty good. The second one is eat everything so you won’t starve to death. The third thing is have sex with everything possible to make sure the species reproduces. Now, this is the Labrador brain, if you’ve read the book, and these are the core operating principles of your meat. The very fiber of your being, that’s what you’re wired to do because you don’t need your monkey mind in there at all to survive as a species. We can have all sorts of bad things happen, and we’d still probably have really stupid humans a while from now if we could just do those things right.

 

That means that the top three things you can perform better is to own each of those voices in your head so that instead of having the dog that jumps on you and humps your leg and slobbers on you, you have what’s more of was a service dog inside of your head where it sits and it behaves and you put a piece of popcorn on its nose and it won’t eat the piece of popcorn until you tell it to eat the popcorn, and it doesn’t hump anyone’s leg unless you tell it it’s okay and it’s going to be fun, and things like that. It comes down to understanding that those three urges are actually not you, those are your meat. Having that perspective really gives you that ability to say, “All right, that’s a behavior, it isn’t a weakness. It’s actually a built-in behavior that automatic. Now that I have awareness that it’s automatic, I then can take control of that behavior and I can train my nervous system the way you would train a dog.” When you do that, you’ll find that you can perform better at every single thing you want to do and you don’t even have to drink coffee to do it.

 

Tony:  I know you mentioned heart rate variability, you did that today, is that something that can help with that?

 

Dave:  Yeah, for the run away from scary things heart rate variability training is one of the ways to do it. For the food thing, all you need to do is get your blood ketone levels up to 0.5 and your … There’s two hormones that change. One is called ghrelin, which is I’m hungry all the time hormone, and the other one is called CCK, which is actually by Calvin Klein. CCK is the fullness hormone. 0.5 is below nutritional ketosis. Can Brain Octane oil, in most people, bring your levels up that high before it causes disaster panics? Yeah, because Brain Octane actually doesn’t cause disaster panics very easily. NCT oil does cause disaster panic quite easily, but Brain Octane has a very different effect and it’s much more ketogenic. If you can get your ketones up just enough, there, the dog stops trying to eat everything because it’s like, “I’m too full to eat everything.” It stops running away from everything because you’ve trained it to sit. All you have to do is deal with that third one. That’s a longer discussion.

 

Tony:  What questions have we got here? Lady in the front row. What’s your name and what’s your question?

 

Kate:   My name is Kate and I don’t tolerate caffeine very well …

 

Tony:  The question is Kate doesn’t tolerate caffeine very well. She is wondering if she can get the same benefits from decaf as from the normal Bulletproof coffee.

 

Dave:  I would have phrased that as, “Kate is weak.” Just kidding. In most of the studies about the benefits of coffee, they are based on polyphenols, decaf works just fine. In fact, what I’ve been doing for about the last year, I was going to talk about this at the conference, but I’ve intentionally upped my coffee dose. Bulletproof coffee has different it’s called pharmacokinetics, which is the delivery system for trimethyl xanthine caffeine. When you mix it in with Brain Octane, with butter, when you blend, it you’re doing all sorts of things that affect how that is absorbed by the body. It turns out that if you do that with just a normal coffee that’s caffeinated, you’re going to want less coffee than if you drink normal coffee where you drink it and you crash, then you drink it and you crash all day.

 

I could drink 5 cups of regular coffee because I had to, but I don’t really want to drink 5 cups of Bulletproof coffee even if I’m drinking a black because it’s just too much for me. I usually have two good size cups of coffee. I’ll have one in the morning and a couple of shots of espresso. At lunch, I just pour Brain Octane on my food if I’m going to have lunch. On a day like this where I’m traveling a lot, I might have two Bulletproof coffees, but at home, I have three more decaf coffees because the benefits stack up in studies from decaf.

 

The problem with the decaf is that, even here where there are some standards, they’re not that tight, but there are some standards around one of the 25 molds in coffee that I test for. They’re twice as high for decaf coffee, and because decaf coffee is always moldier because they would never use good coffee to decaffeinate it because it ruins the flavor. When I make decaf, we use lab tested coffee and then we use a Swiss water process and carefully control humidity. The Swiss water plant is very near to where I roast so we can do this high quality, low toxin decaf.

 

I actually react really poorly to decaf coffee, much more so than caffeinated coffee when it’s just run-of-the-mill. Even if it’s really good tasting, high-end coffee I get a lot of anxiety from it, physical anxiety, from the mycotoxins in it. I would just say be careful with the decaf you drink, but you get more benefits and more polyphenols.

 

there is emerging evidence you need two grams of polyphenols a day, which is quite a lot, and I actually can’t tell you off the top of my head how many grams of polyphenols are in a cup of coffee but it’s on the order of 100mg or something like that probably depending on brewing technique.

 

Tony:  Good? Great. Right, who’ve we got? Lady there with her hand up.

 

Natalia:           Hi, my name is Natalia and I would like to know how to …

 

Tony:  Natalia wants to know how to maintain positivity or and you said a positive charge.

 

Dave:  I had to determine whether you are talking about electrically grabbing myself, I want to keep a negative charge by my side, I don’t want to keep a positive energy to get you there. There’s something I do with my kids every night, and it’s really, really important. What I do is I sit down, they’re six and nine, and I say, “Tell me something you did today that was a win.” A win is something that you actually worked on that happens and then I go, “That’s awesome. You did it.” The next step is, “Tell me something that’s a fail.” A fail is something you worked on that you didn’t get, and we celebrate that even more because that means that you learned something because you were pushing yourself because if all you have is wins, you’re not trying very hard. That completely removes the fear failure from my kids because they actually get praise for failure. I do the same thing with my employees, not quite at that level, but even in my own internal dialogue it’s like, “This didn’t work, won’t do that again.”

 

From there I go on to, “What’s your act of kindness for today?” You find one thing that you did that day where you were actually kind to someone. I met some homeless person in France yesterday. She was out at 11 o’clock at night with the baby. She could’ve been out with a baby just because she knows she’ll get them a sympathy, I don’t really care, it still sucked. I gave her whatever, I don’t remember what currency was in my pocket, but it was a lot more than she was expecting. It didn’t change my life, but it might’ve changed hers. There, I got my act of kindness. I also tip heavy because I’m in a place in my life where doesn’t matter if I throw in an extra couple of whatever the local currency is, but it actually matters to the person serving the food. Or you hold the door, or you put someone’s luggage out, it doesn’t really matter. Just recognize that you did something kind every day.

 

then we do three gratefuls and these are three things that happened that day that you are grateful for that just happened that you didn’t plan, you didn’t strive for, you didn’t try for. I don’t believe it’s possible to have a negative attitude on life if you focus on gratitude every night, and maybe every morning if you’re feeling really crappy. If that doesn’t work, heart rate variability training. For me, 10 weeks of having electrodes on my head during 40 years of Zen style training learning when I’m lying to myself, pretty much anytime it’s a negative thought I’m like, “There’s my ego again. Go pump that leg over that ego, I’ve got shit to do.” You just recognize what’s you and what’s not you. The negative stuff that you’re recognizing as, “I’m not feeling positive,” that’s actually your meat operating system betraying you. That’s my perspective.

 

Tony:  Awesome. Who next? This man here.

 

David: David again. You push a higher fat diet and as there’s a lot of debate …

 

Tony:  It’s David asking about high-fat and recent debate over …

 

David: APOE4.

 

Tony:  Yeah, that one.

 

Dave:  I would say that the science isn’t in on APOE4 but there’s some really interesting discussions. When people talk about high-protein or high-fat, it doesn’t mean anything. The same thing as plant-based and vegetable-based. For instance, my favorite animal-based protein is snake venom, so clearly all protein is deadly and you should never eat at. My favorite vegetable protein is sarin nerve gas, which is actually a lectin, so you should never eat those either. When someone says high-fat diet, “that’s a high-fat diet fad,” they almost never talk about specific fats, and when talking about high-protein they don’t talk about specific amino acid ratios or di and tripeptides, but that’s actually where the metal hits the road.

 

I would say if you’re dealing with that, look at your inflammation markers which are really, really important. Look at the other markers that you’re paying attention to. Experiment, but one of those types of fats that gives you the most ketosis more than any other fat is Brain Octane. That stuff isn’t going to have the same effect on cholesterol, in fact, it has almost no effect on cholesterol in the studies that I’ve seen. You can push one sort of fat, maybe you want to push olive oil, maybe you want to push only DHA, but until someone looks into those things, I think it’s dangerous to say you should be on a high-fat or a low-fat diet. Because, actually, high amounts of the right kind of fat is what I recommend for people, and even then it’s a pretty big range from 50 to 85% depending on what your goals are. Without lab tests for you, I think it’s going to be a very long time before we can say, “This is one genetic marker,” ignoring the other million of them that are out there, that “everyone should do this.” Well, this is a directional thing for you with APOE4 but what do the labs they with your own thing.

 

And speaking of all the genetic things, in about a month I’m doing this thing called HLI where I’m having my entire genome sequenced and doing IBM Big Blue kind of data analysis stuff on it, so I’m hoping to learn a lot more very interesting things you don’t get from 23andMe. Eventually, we will do that for everyone.

 

Tony:  23andMe is the sequence of finding out much more about your DNA then you’ve ever been able to before if you’re just a normal person.

 

Dave:  It’s a partial sequencing for 99 bucks, thanks for pointing that out. The full human genome was $100 million that Craig Venter spent to do his and now I don’t know how much it costs because I worked a deal, but it’s still pricey.

 

Tony:  Has anyone done 23andMe? Useful, just I’m waiting for the results. It takes ages to wait for the results. Good. Anyone at the back want to ask a question? I am aware that … Lady in black.

 

Actia:   My name is Actia. I wanted to know if you could comment on the effect …

 

Tony:  Great. Actia asking about Bulletproof coffee specifically for women and hormonal.

 

Dave:  There is a great blog post on this called something like Bulletproof Fasting and Women and I go into a lot of detail on this. My first book, the Better Baby Book, had an enormous amount about female hormones, infertility, and things like that. The people who are saying, “You shouldn’t have coffee because of hormones,” are concerned about cortisol from coffee whereas many of the studies, in fact, almost every study of coffee and cortisol is using instant coffee because scientists don’t know there’s a difference. In Europe, where there is a standard, it’s much, much higher for what they call soluble coffee or instant coffee. They’re actually testing things they don’t know the testing, and it’s usually not stored very effectively. It’s in a lab, there’s humidity, and it’s not very well-controlled but they don’t quantify what’s in the instant coffee before they test it because, in their mind, coffee is coffee. I find that there’s a difference and that there is a likely difference in cortisol, depending on whether there are compounds that directly attack the adrenal medulla, which mycotoxins that are found in coffee do actually do.

 

I would say purity of coffee matters, and timing of coffee matters. For women, I suggest protein in the morning, especially if you’re having a hard time with your hormones, and you might actually need to not drink coffee or only drink decaf coffee. It happens. It happens with guys, too. There’s nothing wrong with doing, say, green tea, but I know women who can’t tolerate green tea either for various reasons. There are also weird things that happened when your cortisol can convert … What’s the one … There’s an Eastern European one where your cortisol converts to one of the … To testosterone, I think, if I’m remembering what this pathway was. It was completely bizarre. It was 1 in 400, globally, who have it but 1 in 40 Eastern European women have it. You ran into things like that where it’s very, very individualized.

 

if you’re having issues with hormones, a high-fat diet is a very likely a good thing to do, Brain Octane is very likely a good thing to do, and if you’re like most people, coffee, one cup in the morning, maybe when you first wake up if you wake up like a zombie, or an hour or two after you wake up if you wake up happy and bright early in the morning like those people we all hate. The timing could matter, and you might need to have it with food. There are some people where, even if they put protein in the coffee, it’s not enough. Your mileage really can vary and there’s nothing wrong with saying, “I don’t want to do coffee,” but I still would encourage you to play with Brain Octane, and you can always use chocolate.

 

Tony:  Good stuff. Right, who have we got? The chap in the pink shirt.

 

Henry:            Hi, Dave. My name is Henry. What is the most …

 

Tony:  Henry is asking what is the optimal amount of exercise for someone to do who just wants to be healthy and wants plenty of time to rest as well?

 

Dave:  The New York Times called me “almost muscular,” which is the best quote ever because if you want to live a long time, that’s how you want to look. You don’t want to look like a balloon animal, no offense because if you want to get swole, that’s cool, that’s biohacking and that’s where you want to take your body, but your [altodine 01:00:43] go up substantially if you’re carrying too much muscle mass. That’s an interesting thing. If you’re too lean, that’s another issue. Going down below 10% body fat for men or women, it might look hot according to the current standard, but it is not the look of a healthy animal that’s going to live to 180 the way I’m planning on. You actually need to be a little bit heavier than that, I’d say probably like 14% as long as the fat is composed of good stuff, it’s got adequate amounts of DHA and EPA and not lots of Omega-6 and things like that.

 

it also is going to depend on your own biology. Some people respond very differently to exercise. I can put on muscle very easily, it’s in my genes. Andy Hnilo, who is a friend, he runs Alitura, I had him up to the lab on Vancouver Island. He’s like half my age, he’s 30 but younger than me, and he is a cover model for Oakley, dripping in veins and just absolutely ripped, but I outperformed him on the ARX machine doing chest presses. He was pissed, you could tell. It’s a genetic thing there, he’s clearly in better shape than I am. You have your own genetic differences. I respond very well to weight-bearing exercises like that.

 

if you look at what your body does, look at where you want to be from a fat perspective and do, I would say, the minimum amount of exercise you require to do that, and then, and here’s where it gets really weird, move a lot. This means go for a walk, I like the Bulletproof Vibe because it’s kind of like a walk but in a lot less time. Sometimes you just don’t have time for a walk. Do yoga, do stretching, but just don’t count that as exercise. Take the extra time you have and apply it to movement, which is neurologically beneficial. It raises something called BDNF, brain derived nootropic factor, which causes you to actually grow new neurons and you’re going to get the most benefit from that. You could probably, if you’re younger, push yourself harder, “I’m going to work out four times a week, I have extra time to sleep.” You could. You could also meditate in half that time and probably get more benefits.

 

Tony:  Great. Let’s come down from the chap in the stripy shirt.

 

Mike:   I want to ask about protein fasting. I haven’t been able to find much information other than what you’ve written on it …

 

Tony:  Mike asking about protein fasting, how you managed to find that much information about it out and about, and is it a good thing if you’re training a lot.

 

Dave:  If you’re planning to put on a lot of muscle, and you’re training a lot to just put on mass, you might want to skip it for a while. It’s really important to allow the cells in your body to clean themselves out. There is good studies, I cited several of them in the diet book, this is not something that is commonly understood. How many of you here have tried one day a week protein fasting? Now leave your hand up if you notice a difference from it. Almost all of the hands stayed up. It is kind of amazing what it does. You’re like, “Why would that make sense that I am thinner right here after I did that? I got the same amount of calories, I actually ate more carbs than I did which means I’m putting in glycogen. Something is happening here.” As an anti aging, high-performance, I want to live a long time, I want to feel good while I’m living a long time, I think there’s really a role for it, but if you’re really working on a protein bulking phase, don’t do it for six weeks. At the end of six weeks, you might really want to do that because your cells are going to benefit from that.

 

It’s really tough like for the Hollywood people with they’re expected to look chiseled muscle with no fat, but they’re also supposed to look good when they’re 60. Those two things actually are opposite ends of the teeter-totter. Be careful where you’re going because you’re looking for something now, but you want to look at the long-term effects on that depending on what your goals are.

 

Tony:  Tim Ferris wrote about the Four-Hour Body, which is obviously such a famous book in the diet space, and he talked about a cheat date, didn’t he, where he would just go out and eat absolutely anything. Is it fair to say that even Tim Ferris himself might offer slightly different advice now?

 

Dave:  Tim can speak for himself. He is putting Brain Octane oil in his tea and coffee when he was on the podcast he was talking about he’s putting better in his coffee and he’s doing more cyclical ketogenic stuff, which he’s written about. That was one of the diets he talked about, it was one of the more extreme diets in his book, the Four-Hour Body. I’ve emailed him pretty regularly, and I have great respect for him. I also think he just had Lyme disease, which he was pretty public about, and that also can affect your mitochondrial function, and it affects your body’s desire for fat and the amount of neurotoxins that are still circulating. I imagine that he will modulate and change his program over time for him.

 

I know lots of people who really benefit on the low-carb diet. There’s nothing wrong with it if it works for you, and that’s the biggest thing about biohacking. When I saw that I was like, “Beans? why would you choose beans for core density? that’s why white rice is there because white rice has less crap in it.” The Bulletproof perspective is avoid the things that cost you and don’t provide any benefit, and that’s why on a cheat day … I used to do cheat days back in 1997, ‘98 when I was really trying to lose weight. I was like, “I’ll do this Atkins thing.” The problem with cheat days is they cause cravings for four days afterwards. I don’t want to deal with cravings. I have stuff to do, cravings take energy away from you and I have no desire to ever feel a craving again, and if I do it’s my fault. I did something to cause the craving either I know what it is or didn’t. I can tell you, if I went out and did a cheat day like that, my performance is going to suffer and I’m gonna have lots of cravings. I think that’s true for most people unless they’re young, exercising all the time, getting lots of sleep, and super healthy. When they hit 30, and when they hit 40, the cheat days become more and more expensive, and the recovery from the cheat day is an expensive thing.

 

I recommend something kind of similar. You have a high ketosis but you don’t intentionally ingest margarine, gluten, and all sorts of other MSG, whatever fake colored candy sprinkles in your ice cream those things actually have no benefit, there’s no reason to put this in your body. The opposing argument there is, “Yeah, but people like this, so not having to be strict this makes it easier so people will have more willpower.” My will power equation is it’s a limited thing, and cravings suckle power more than anything else so I will do everything in my life to eliminate craving.

 

I would say read Tim’s book, it’s a really good book. I’ve read it and there’s all kinds of good information in there especially bodybuilding, putting on weight, high-intensity kettlebells, you want to swim a lot, total immersion. There’s all kinds of good stuff in there, it’s just different approaches and he does write about cyclical ketosis, which is the basis. It’s like a low toxin cyclical ketogenic diet is what the Bulletproof diet is.

 

Tony:  Good. Who have got?

 

Abby:  Hi. My name is Abby. I have …

 

Tony:  Okay. Abby has been on the Bulletproof Diet for a year and finds at times you plateau a little bit. What would Dave recommend for pushing through the plateau?

 

Dave:  If you are plateauing one of the things that I didn’t write about in the book that’s really helpful, is an actual real fast where …

 

Tony:  Please don’t hold the speaker like that.

 

Dave:  No, it wasn’t that. It was starting to do the reverb thing where it was resonating with power, and was going to be bad.

 

A full fast of 24 or 36 hours. You take it easy, you want to do it on a Saturday when you’re not working and things like that, that can sometimes be really amazing. It’s hard at first if you’ve never done it, but that can help. If you’re in recovery from something or you’re super tired and getting over being sick, don’t do it. For women, it matters where you are in your cycle when you do that. You don’t want to be super bloated, and swollen, and cranky because that’s not a good time to fast.

 

Tony:  Great who else? Hello, what’s your name?

 

Monica:           Hi. My name is Monica. I’ve watched your documentary Moldy. Do you have any tips …

 

Tony:  Monica has watched the documents Moldy and is looking for tips on how she can clear her house of mold herself without calling in the pros.

 

Dave:  If you can figure out how to remove mold from your house without calling the pros you will be a very very wealthy person. It is difficult. You can buy commercial grade ozone generators that can break down some of the toxins, but you need to know what’s in your house and you need to do a before and after test. I use Homebiotic, the natural bacteria that comes from soil that competes with mold, and I spread that around my house as more of a preventative thing. I just had a big leak, up on Vancouver Island my ice bath overflowed. Happens to all of us, right? It went under the floor, it was really bad. I pulled out some of the floor tiles, put in big fans and misted a gallon of Homebiotic, which is way more than any sane person needed to use. I dried it out, though, very quickly so I didn’t get any mold. If I did have mold, I would want to physically remove the mold. What I would do is you bring in contractors, you scrape it, and you don’t want to be the one doing that if you having symptoms.

 

When we filmed Moldy, the documentary, the whole camera crew and I put on these spacesuits, tie back everything, duct tape for wrists, respirators, and goggles, and Kenny hoods, and all that kind of stuff. Even the camera crew who weren’t particularly sensitive were completely zombified. They were like, “We didn’t believe you until today.”

 

We went into this really badly water damaged house, and you see the footage where I’m pulling off perfectly normal looking drywall and on the back of it is black slime. You can’t see it, is the problem, but you can measure it in the air. The first thing to do is actually determined that it really is a problem by measuring the air and work with an inspector to tell you how big of a problem you have. If it’s a small thing you might be able to do it, but it’s hard to do.

 

I would look at things like ozone and natural cultures to approach it. I don’t think you’re likely to get all the way well. One of the guys in the documentary, his house had been hit by one of the hurricanes. He was in the medical profession, and he hadn’t taken out the drywall in his basement. He was like, “We had the house remediated,” and I’m like, “I’m not walking into that house, sorry. I will feel like absolute crap,” but my producer, Kiki, she didn’t know she was mold sensitive when we started filming the movie, I was kind of guessing that. She walked into the basement to look at it, and she came out and she had a full-blown panic attack. As in curled into a ball like, “I don’t know what’s happening but I feel like I’m dying,” and, literally, I just hold her while she twitched. That’s not an uncommon response when someone who’s been exposed before goes into a moldy building because your biology is like, “Oh my God, there’s something in here that’s going to kill me. I don’t know what it is,” but you feel it. That guy was not well. He was not well because he didn’t remediate it right. This is one of those things where often times the best way to remediate something is arson.

 

Tony:  We’ve got time for a couple of more questions. Chap in the black T-shirt, and then will come to the guy in the front with a red shirt.

 

Tim:    Hi Dave. My name is Tim and I wanted to ask what is your opinion on hacking …

 

Tony:  Tim wants to know about hacking your gut bacteria.

 

Dave:  I have spent probably $100,000 on gut bacteria. I took pig whipworm eggs about 10 years ago, which is one of the more aggressive ways of hacking the bacteria. In fact two weeks ago I took some rat tapeworm larva. I’ve been doing those for the past six weeks or so. I just did a podcast with Dr. Sid Baker about that, they’re delicious, a little crunchy. Just kidding. They’re invisible, just tastes like saltwater.

 

There are things you can do, the vast majority of them don’t stick is the problem. You’ll get some benefits from saccharomyces boulardii, which is a kind of yeast that eats candida as a fuel source, that works for most people. Some of the soil-based organisms can work, Primal Defense, cryptococcus, there are some species of clostridia that actually fight clostridium difficile, that can make a difference. The problem is that so much of the time, especially when you have an overgrowth in parts of the gut called SIBO, you’re just not going to get what you want. Most of the things that are commonly recommended like, “Oh, eat yogurt,” lacto bacilli can actually cause a histamine response. I wrote a blog post, if you’re interested in the gut you have to read it, it’s called Why Yogurt Makes You Fat and Foggy. I’m like, “Here’s the species in yogurt, here’s the studies that show what those species do.”

 

The problem is you have not a lot of knowledge of what’s in your gut, and you have, within 24 hours of taking a test of what’s in your gut, it will shift depending on what you eat. If you don’t have an overgrowth in your small intestine, you would want to eat more prebiotic’s. If you do have an overgrowth, you don’t eat zero fermentable carbohydrates whatsoever, and maybe even take an antibiotic that’s not metabolized to kill things and then rebuild them. It’s very customized, but the one thing that I do know is very important is that the family, you can’t supplement those but they grow when you feed them polyphenols. It’s one of the reasons that brightly colored vegetables, and dark leafy greens, and blueberries … What are the other two big polyphenol sources?

 

Tony:  Chocolate and coffee.

 

Dave:  Those feed as probiotics, those kinds of bacteria. Soluble fiber is important. Turns out coffee has about a gram, you want to have 2g of soluble fiber in a normal sized cup of coffee and that’s actually a meaningful amount of it, especially when it comes dozed with polyphenols. People don’t generally recognize that. When you combine it with fat, like butter and Brain Octane, those are suppressive of bacteria in the gut, but if they suppress everything and then you feed it you’ll shift the ratio. I’ve seen a few results and things like that that show that effect happening, but not enough that I can guarantee it. These are mouse studies results that I’m talking about. Someone actually tested butter and coffee in mice in China. Cool.

 

Luca:   Dave, you talk about technology hacks, I think you said 40 Years of Zen is probably …

 

Tony:  Luca asking about technology hacks. What are the best ones, apart from 40 Years of Zen, and what’s coming up in the future? what can we expect? Technology and health innovation is moving so fast, isn’t it?

 

Dave:  It’s amazing. Both innovation is happening, and our ability to change our environment is remarkable. In about ‘96 I was following all of these crazy brain hacking groups on Yahoo Groups, if they even still exist, I don’t know. This guy figured out that if you shine in infrared LED, this is one of the first infrared LEDs ever made, it’ll go into the brain and it’ll turn on mitochondria in a very meaningful way. I bought this device, it was handmade in a pill bottle, and he was like, “Don’t use it for more than two minutes because you might cook your brain.” He had had such profound effects that over the six months when he was marketing this as a homebrew thing, he actually turned his brain on to things like, “I’m done. I’m going to med school now.” Completely changed his life.

 

For years this was one of my most precious biohacking tools because it made my brain turned back on. Let me just tell you really quick, this is a fricking infrared LED for 20 cents. I put it over the language processing part of my brain because, unlike Tim Ferris and speaks like 15,000 languages and learns them in five minutes, I actually don’t process sound the way most people do. This is probably something that’s from just the way my brain formed in the womb, something with the brainstem. I process sounds one level up in my brain compared to most of you so you filter sounds out better than I do, it takes you less effort than it does for me. When my wife speaks Swedish or French, I hear, “blah blah blah,” and I try and pronounce the words back and I don’t say the same words they say to me. I genuinely don’t hear it so it’s really hard. I’m like, “All right, I’m going to hack that,” so I put the thing here and shine it for two minutes. For the next six hours, I spoke in garblish. I couldn’t put my words together. I tried to speak and other strange sounds would come out of my mouth. It’s a 20 cent piece of technology, maybe two bucks with a heat sink and a power supply. That’s interesting.

 

there’s a whole new wave of light based technologies coming out. There’s stuff around ultraviolet B, which has been filtered out of like these windows filter out UVB. In fact, none of us receive ultraviolet B, but if you listen to my podcast with Stephanie Seneff, we need ultraviolet B to activate vitamin D to get vitamin D sulfate, and UVB has a direct effect on our mitochondria, it’s part of our hormone signaling system. Infrared light is also important for that. You’re going to see huge innovations in specific frequencies of light and what they do to the body. In fact, when I introduce the new stuff, I’ve got some new things coming out around that that are really cool, but there’s a wave of innovation that no one’s ever even imagined because we couldn’t do it even five years ago. It’s all LED and laser-based.

 

Tony:  I used one of those devices that shines light into your ears to get over jet lag. Have you use that?

 

Dave:  The human charger?

 

Tony:  The human charger. Not really. I stayed up slightly later but I still woke up early the next morning.

 

Dave:  It’s a cool idea. There is a nerve there, and the nerves are light-sensitive. I’ve used a laser on a nerve in the ear and on the trigeminal nerve that seemed to work, but I know people who love the human charger.

 

the one that I found was more effective for me for just activating the brain was actually a nasal light. The human charger was dorky enough on an airplane, try sticking a flashlight up your nose. Actually, they’re designed for it, they have a little clip here, and there’s infrared and Ruby one, and those shine just on the base of the brain going up through the very thin part of the skull back there, so I think there are ways to get light into the brain and that could be a good way to do it. There’s debate in the community. Whenever you innovate, there’s always going to be these professional skeptics and haters who make up a bunch of crap, and sometimes they’re right, but if their gut response is immediate skepticism, they’re just like fundamentalist people. They’re not going to think, they’re the people who always say no, and I tend to respond to them the way I respond to my two-year-old, who also always has no, you’re like, “Good for you,” and then you go about your business.

 

Tony:  We have time for one more question. Who’s got a really good question? No pressure. You seem confident.

 

Christian:       It’s a good sciencey kind of …

 

Tony:  Science. We might have one afterward.

 

Christian:       My name’s Christian and I was wondering to get back to the APOE4 issue ….

 

Tony:  This is a really good question from Christian, by the way, guys. It’s going in-depth with fat again coming back to that and how we deal with it and process it.

 

Dave:  There’s a supposition that if you have APOE4 and you have any kind of saturated fat, the LDL particles will go out. That is not a true statement. Saturated fat includes C8 and C10 oils which are, technically, saturated but do not behave like saturated fats unlike the other MCT oils that are saturated and do behave like long chain fats. That’s one of the reasons I recommend the stuff that I do versus MCT which includes some things that behave like long chain fats. What I think you mean is if you eat a long chain saturated fat, the LDL particle count will go up. If those go up, but your HDL also goes up, your triglycerides drop, your homocysteine drops, your LPPLA drops, and your C-Reactive protein drops, does that not play into the overall risky equation that we get from looking at LDL-C? it does because if the LDL-C is damaging arteries, by definition, you’ll have an enzyme, Lp-PLA2, is the enzyme that will be expressed from the damaging of your arteries.

 

If you’re worried about that, and I know some people who are very focused on that, look for Lp-PLA2. If you have damage, you have damage. If you have high LDL and you don’t have damage … Did you know high LDL makes it easier to put on muscles? It makes you more resilient to certain kinds of poisoning, there are actually benefits to LDL. It’s not a bad thing as long as there is an inflammation and damage, so show me the evidence. If you have the APOE4, you have high LDL, show me that it’s causing damage then you need to change.

 

Tony:  Good stuff. Thank you, Christian. One more. Who have we got? Hello.

 

Jenny: I have a nine-month-old baby …

 

Tony:  Jenny. Just to repeat the question for everybody listening and everyone here, you’ve got two kids under the age of three and you’re wondering what to feed them for breakfast and what the levels of protein and fat and carbs and everything else should be.

 

Dave:  Kids benefit from a few more carbs than adults. I don’t give my kids carbs, I don’t give them any carbs in the morning especially fruit because it turns them into whiny, crankypants. They get protein and fat in the morning, and cucumber if they want some veggies. At lunch, they may or may not have Bulletproof style carbs, not sugary things. Than at dinner, there is usually carbs. Timing seems to matter, and this really affects their behavior. They each to get an espresso cup full of Bulletproof coffee made with lots of Brain Octane and some collagen, and that really helps them stay calm and focused because their little meat operating systems which say, “Eat everything, especially if it’s sugar,” they shut the hell up and then the kids can focus on being kids and playing and not hitting each other and things like that. That’s a big benefit.

 

for variety, avocados can be really good, and there’s a ton of things you can do with vegetables and you really want to work vegetables in. If it’s fats, good but the prototype meal for the Bulletproof Diet is cover a plate and vegetables, add a moderate amount of high-quality protein from animals, and then cover it in fat. If you skip the veggies, it doesn’t work as well. If your kids … The magic is steam the veggies, take a third of the veggies, toss them in the blender, butter, Brain Octane, collagen if you want, a little bit of vinegar and some spices, whatever you want want to teach them to like later in life, and some salt. Blend the crap out of it until it’s creamy and really good, and then spoon it back over the veggies. Even kids who don’t eat vegetables that come to visit our house, they take one bite of that and they’re like, “Give me more.” That becomes one of the primary things on their plate, and then you can add in whatever the protein is. You’ll find that kids thrive on that because they get way more fat in that way, and it gets them to get their veggies in every day.

 

Jenny: You would do that for breakfast too, then?

 

Dave:  Absolutely. Especially if you’re running out a variety.

 

Jenny: You wouldn’t feed porridge? What I’ve done sometimes when I have that

 

Dave:  If you’re doing porridge, I would definitely include fat. Kids don’t do too well on straight carbs. I’m a fan of the rice porridge is versus the oatmeal ones. There are lots of problems with oatmeal, but if it really works for you and for your kids, oatmeal is fine just get organic. It’s really important, especially it’s not grown here. American oats are terrible.

 

Jenny: Ideally I should move away from that?

 

Dave:  Yeah. By the way, my kids eat mochi, white puffed rice, you bake it. It’s interesting if you made porridge or rice, and you refrigerate it, it forms a lot of resistant starch. It’s one of the reasons sushi is good, you get a lot of resistant starch in cooked and cooled rice. The same also with porridge, if you cook and cool it, it totally changes the amount of beneficial probiotic starch in there, prebiotic starch, so that’s a neat trick.

 

Tony:  Awesome. Dave, this has been fantastic thank you so much. It’s been brilliant. Thank you all for coming. The podcast will be published this weekend. Give it up for Dave Asprey. Thank you very much.

 

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Why you should listen –

Gunnar Lovelace is a serial entrepreneur in nonprofits, technology, fashion and real estate. Most recently he is the founder and co-CEO of Thrive Market, an online wholesale buying club on a mission to make healthy living easy and affordable for every American family. On this episode of Bulletproof Radio, Dave and Gunnar talk about food co-ops, marketing healthy food, food politics, the grocery supply chain, the power of your vote, McDonalds and more. Enjoy the show!

Today’s episode is brought to you by FreshBooks. To claim your 30-day free trial, go to www.freshbooks.com/bulletproof and enter “Bulletproof Radio” in the “How You Heard About Us” section.

 

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Speaker 1:      Bulletproof Radio: a state of high performance.

 

Dave:  Hey, it’s Dave Asprey at Bulletproof Radio. Today’s cool fact of the day is that more than 17.4 million Americans are food insecure. It means they have limited access to adequate food and nutrition because of price or geography and only about 6.9 million Americans are food secure. Those come from a real data source, but I got to wonder, what about the other people who are not food insecure and food secure? Because we have like 300 million people and we only have 6.9 and 17.4. There must be a big middle of people that are foodish insecureish, but whatever it is, there are giant numbers of people who live nowhere near a grocery store that even has fresh vegetables. Seeing an apple versus a can of applesauce is a rare occurrence. That’s pretty scary.

 

If you haven’t heard about FreshBooks yet, listen up. These folks are on a serious mission to help small business owners save time and avoid a lot of the stress that comes with running a business. As a business owner, it’s really important to be able to see everything. Which clients still owe you, which invoices have been paid, and how your business is doing right now on the dashboard and you get that from FreshBooks. Using FreshBooks, you can take about 30 seconds to create and send an invoice and you get paid online because FreshBooks gives your clients tons of ways they can just pay you with credit cards or other ways which can seriously improve how quickly you get paid. In fact, customers get paid five days faster on average. FreshBooks is offering 30 days of unrestricted use to all Bulletproof listeners totally free right now and you don’t need a credit card to sign up. To claim your 30-day free trial, go to FreshBooks.com/Bulletproof and enter ‘Bulletproof Radio’ in the ‘How You Heard About Us’ section.

 

Before we get going on today’s episode, if you haven’t had a chance to check out Bulletproof: The Cookbook, it’s time. This has been a phenomenally successful book. It just came out and it’s got 125 Bulletproof recipes using tons of really, really good ingredients that support your biological function, that support your performance every day. There are amazing desserts, desserts I have served at Yahoo’s headquarters recently. There are just amazing meals. Cauliflower bacon mash is one of my favorites. You’ll find some amazing good stuff in there. Check it out. You can buy it on the Bulletproof website. You can buy it on Amazon. You can buy it on Barnes , Noble. Wherever books are sold.

 

Today’s guest is Gunnar Lovelace, who’s a social goods serial entrepreneur who founded Love Heals, a conscious jewelry company that funded the planting of one and a half million trees and sponsored 500,000 malnourished children. He’s currently the co-CEO of Thrive Market, which is an online wholesale buying club who’s mission is to make natural and organic eating more affordable for everyone. He’s also a bio-activist.

 

Gunnar, welcome to the show.

 

Gunnar:          Hey, it’s great to be here. Love your work and excited to be on the show.

 

Dave:  Likewise. We’ve had a chance to meet in person lots of times and we’re supporters of each other’s companies so it’s an honor to get to have you on the show. Your story is pretty unique. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to have you on is you’re a high-performance entrepreneur and I want to pick your brain about what you’re doing with your mission for healthy food and I also want to pick your brain about what you do for your own biology to support it. Two directions that our listeners would be interested in.

 

Gunnar:          Put me to work. I’m at your service.

 

Dave:  All right. One of the things that surely affects your decision to start Thrive Markets is that you were raised by a single Latino mom. You lived here illegally in the U.S. for eight years.

 

Gunnar:          Yeah.

 

Dave:  Your mom wanted to feed really healthy as well as she could, but let’s face it. No matter where you are food costs money, right? Healthy food costs more money right now so when you were a kid you maybe didn’t have enough of that. Did that shape your view of the world? Did that shape why you decided to start Thrive? Why you feed 50,000 people?

 

Gunnar:          Yeah, absolutely. It’s growing up really poor and seeing how she struggled to make healthy choices was a primary impulse for me in why we started the business. There were months at a time where we lived off of rice because that’s all we could afford. It’s been a life-long interest of mine. One of the things that I was really fortunate with was that in spite of our financial adversity, my mother was well educated so she did know that eating healthy was really important so she made a lot of choices that prioritized that opportunity, even though she was struggling financially.

 

When she remarried, my stepfather was running a food co-op, which we still run today. We got exposed to a group-buying model through a food co-op and that was really how the genesis of Thrive came about was seeing a 21st Century … How do we build a 21st Century co-op?

 

Dave:  I think there are probably a good number of people listening right now who don’t actually know what a food co-op is. If you grew up granola, you know and if you didn’t, you might’ve never been in one or if you’ve been in one, you just thought it was a grocery store. Can you walk me through what is the difference between a food co-op and a hippie grocery store?

 

Gunnar:          Yeah, so a food co-op is a membership store out of a retail location where people pay an annual membership fee to be able to access … Typically, they get some kind of discounted pricing when they make purchases at the health food store. They typically run as a hybrid health food store/membership community. People that are members get slightly better pricing. For me, when I’ve thought about health and wellness, and I think you guys see this the same way is how do we strip out the hippie-ness but keep the heart and soul so that we can reach millions of new Americans that want to access healthy living for the first time. I think that’s our mission as a business is to really transcend the ideologies and really reach people everywhere. But having that personal experience growing up with a food co-op and seeing the impact it had with building community with people and making it more affordable for people. I almost felt like there’s got to be a way to do something like that online for the 21st Century.

 

Dave:  It’s really a tough situation when … I look back at what happened when I was a kid that helped me to form why I’m doing Bulletproof. For me, my parents also wanted me to eat healthy. We weren’t desperately poor by a long shot. We weren’t stupendously wealthy either. I would say just middle class, but for me that meant liquid squeeze margarine and low-fat Grape-Nuts and all sorts of just horrible crap that was toxic for my biology. Today now we still have this idea where okay, I’m going to “eat healthy” and you seem like you’re pretty fortunate. Your mom had financial limited resources, but she had some reasonable knowledge where she actually succeeded in feeding you healthy, maybe because she was feeding you more the way her parents ate and less the way whatever the current magazine of the 1980’s told you to eat, which was desperately wrong in almost every direction.

 

For me, I’m like all right I was a beast as a teenager. I have stretchmarks till that I haven’t figured out how to hack. Grew up with all sorts of autoimmune things, just issue that were caused by these things. I’m like, “All right, I want to do this right,” and that’s one of the things for me. It’s not that hard when you get the rules right.

 

For you, you’re like it’s not that expensive when you get the rules right, but how do you use your business to help people eat the right stuff versus just stuff that’s labeled as healthy?

 

Gunnar:          Yeah, I think that’s the big important question. I wouldn’t claim to have an exactly right answer to that. I think it’s an ongoing evolving question that gets answered a lot of different ways to different communities. I think for us the way we’ve constructed our model is that instead of making the traditional retail markup that people pay when they go to a health food store, we pass all of those savings along to our members through $60 a year and it’s like Whole Foods meets Costco. For every paid membership, we give a membership away to a family in need. If you can’t afford the $60 to get access to wholesale prices to have healthy products shipped to your home wherever you are, you can still get a free membership through our giving program. That’s one way we do it.

 

We also invest in educational content so we just shot a video course with 22 videos which is like, how to read a label, how do carbs turn into sugar, and why you should care about toxic ingredients in your cleaning supplies, and just basic stuff that you and I know and most of the listeners know, but Americans, a lot of people just don’t know this information. Education, when we think about access and making healthy living accessible to everybody, we see it as a function of price, geography, and education. Selling previously premium products for less, geography in that we ship it to people wherever they are, if they’re in a food desert, and then education in terms of providing content that helps people understand why they should care about these issues and doing it in a way that informs and inspires them.

 

I think to your lead-in on the fact, there’s 43 million Americans on food stamps, as an example. The largest source of calories for them is soda. We know what that’s doing to their bodies.

 

Dave:  Maybe it’s diet soda. They don’t even get calories for it and it does worse things to their bodies like … Man, that’s a losing proposition in every way, right?

 

Gunnar:          Yeah, exactly.

 

Dave:  All right. Let me ask a hard question. I don’t know the answer to this because I haven’t dug around on the Thrive website. Do you guys sell anything with sucralose in it?

 

Gunnar:          I don’t think we do.

 

Dave:  Would you?

 

Gunnar:          No. No. I’m going to go dig around myself.

 

Dave:  Okay.

 

Gunnar:          4,000 products, it’s hard to vet everything personally, but I’ll definitely check on that. We have a very, very stringent guidelines. We’re the largest retail in the country that sells only non-GMO foods at this point.

 

Dave:  That was my next question. What’s your deal? So no GMO. What about canola oil? Do you allow that?

 

Gunnar:          Yeah, there’s canola oil. Yeah, yeah. It’s non-GMO.

 

Dave:  It’s such a slippery slope, right?

 

Gunnar:          I know. I know. I know. The thing is, so the way we approached it is we’ve … Instead of trying to be the most outrageous puritans, we’ve really taken a big tent approach. That means that people are going to buy healthy, healthier marshmallows and that’s what’s going to motivate them to get into the ecosystem, we’ll choose to sell some marshmallows that are not filled with toxins and preservatives. Obviously there’s sugary content. Then we have an opportunity to be able to have a larger conversation with them. That isn’t necessarily the right decision, but it is one strategy.

 

Dave:  My kids love s’mores. There’s a fire pit right behind the camera here. We built it. The kids absolutely know how to roast marshmallows. Are they allowed to eat ten of them? No. Do they get two organic marshmallows with the Bulletproof chocolate? I put it on a Mary’s Gone cracker. You guys probably sell Mary’s crackers, right?

 

Gunnar:          Oh, yeah.

 

Dave:  There you go. Actually don’t really like the Mary’s cracker taste, but they’re kids. That’s what a s’more is to them. They don’t know what graham crackers taste like and I’m okay with that.

 

Gunnar:          Right.

 

Dave:  Right? That kind of perspective like, “All right, you’re going to do something that isn’t perfect, but does that mean you’re going to slather it with cyanide and glyphosate and lead and mercury and then it eat? No. You do the least harmful thing. I totally support that. That’s why the whole thing I do, it’s all in a spectrum. This is really crappy and you shouldn’t ever eat that. This is not that good for you, but you’ll probably survive and you can overcome and this is probably good for you. I totally support your big tent approach there, because honestly you’re going to eat canola oil, eat the non-GMO canola oil. It was a win for the day. You did one thing better, right?

 

Gunnar:          Right. Our shared friend, Dr. Mark Hyman, one of the great aha moments for me in this journey a couple years ago when we first met him, he was presenting at Saddleback Church, which is the largest mega-church in the country. Designed a meal plan with Pastor Rick Warren and there were thousands of people in the audience. It was syndicating live to hundreds of churches. He’s there talking about avocado cacao pudding and quinoa and coconut oil to a very mainstream conservative audience. I was just floored at how mainstream this conversation is going now. I think that’s really exciting. Health and wellness transcends ideology. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you live, what you believe, everybody wants to feel good in their bodies and everybody wants the same thing for their children. Where you and I are in the business of helping people get healthy.

 

Dave:  Now what percentage of the Thrive customer base is organic preppers?

 

Gunnar:          Organic … What?

 

Dave:  Preppers.

 

Gunnar:          Preppers?

 

Dave:  You know there’s a television show called Preppers, like people that are preparing for disaster so they’re stockpiling for the … I’m just wondering because you guys sold bulk.

 

Gunnar:          I think it’s pretty small. We actually don’t do that much bulk. It’s everyday sizes.

 

Dave:  It’s everyday sizes, but the reason I’m asking that, it’s a little bit humor, but it’s also like, “Look, most preppers tend to be relatively conservative, but it doesn’t matter.” You want organic food and if you wanted to plan to eat for a year without having to go to the grocery store, which is actually not a bad idea to be able to be prepared for that, at least several months of food for emergency supplies is prudent I would say. At least if you understand our food supply, it’s prudent. If you do decide to do that, do you want to stockpile genetically-modified corn malt and you’ll just eat that with a spoon or do you want to have good food?

 

Gunnar:          Right, totally.

 

Dave:  If you have good food, then cost becomes important and then you have to eat from what you have on hand. Then bulk buying or just cost-effect buying, it’s not even bulk, it becomes terribly important. I imagine that you have some people there, but like you said, it transcends all ideologies so it doesn’t matter if you’re doing it because you want to be gentle to Mother Earth or because you think an apocalypse is coming, you still want food that makes you feel good, right? That’s why everyone cares about it.

 

Gunnar:          Yeah, it plays to people’s self interests in such a powerful way and as we know, it benefits them, their communities, the economy with $300 billion a year spent on lifestyle diseases like diabetes every year and the environment, shifting from toxic conventional supply chains to organic and regenerative. I think it’s a … For me it’s such a gratifying organizing principle to be part of and I’m grateful to be collaborating with you on it.

 

Dave:  Talk to me a little bit about what you do to support farmers. How does Thrive work with the supply chain? I’m really interested in how you do that. What kind of farms do you work with and what’s your relationship there with the food producers themselves?

 

Gunnar:          We’re just starting to get into that, but we’re doing a push into private label on products where we lose money but we now have to provide them to our community or we have low margins. For example, coconut oil. That’s an area where we needed to get more margin on the product. We went to our primary partner and he’s got a fantastic Fair Trade ethical supply chain in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. We were very, very careful about looking at their supply chain and then we really tell that story to our community. What’s happening now is that consumers are waking up to the fact that they want to vote with their dollars and they really value transparency. Yes, they want to get great products at a great price, but they also want to believe and support in things that align with their values. Our ability to do the work and really make sure that we’re working with ethical supply chains and then be able to share the details of that with our community creates a level of resonance and education that’s differentiated than a traditional retail environment.

 

Dave:  I think that’s really important. I read some things about regenerative farming and carbon farming. Are you doing specific things to support products that come from carbon neutral farming?

 

Gunnar:          That’s a new … The whole regenerative farming movement in general is amazing and a lot of studies coming out showing it’s the fastest way to sequester carbon and produce truly nutrient-dense food, create great jobs. I’m on the board of a local regenerative agriculture non-profit and help raise the money for them. I think it’s a really exciting area for the American economy in general for all the reason I listed. It’s very, very new in terms of the supply chain and so farmers are just starting to … There’s all questions about how do they do labeling and standards.

 

There’s not a lot that we’ve been able to do around that actually in our supply chain but we’re having those conversations every week, every month with our partners, our co-packers, our vendors, and really working to encourage them either to move toward those practices or selecting vendors where they can handle the scale of volume that we need. Part of the challenge is you can get really small farmers that can handle a small amount of volume, but because we’re selling 20,000 to 50,000 units per month now, the level of volume that we need in a partner is differentiated. That’s part of the cart/horse issue. We’re excited about investing in farms long term to really make that a whole picture.

 

Dave:  I saw an interview with the head buyer for Wal-Mart a while back. This was maybe four years ago. Whoever it was, I don’t remember the person’s name or even whether it was a man or woman. It was a thing I read. They said, “Look, I would love to put organic cotton in every product sold at Wal-Mart. There’s just this little problem. There isn’t that much organic cotton produced on the surface of the planet. If we had access to every piece of organic cotton, we couldn’t do it so we don’t do it.”

 

Gunnar:          That’s right.

 

Dave:  Are you going to run into that scale? Where yeah, everyone wants organic blueberries, but there just aren’t enough organic blueberries.

 

Gunnar:          Yeah, we already deal with it. Actually one of the things that I’ve been thinking about is that there’s a need for a transition label. The challenge with organic certification is it’s a three-year process. It’s really expensive and it’s really impacting our ability to meet the demand. Now we’re forced, as an economy, the import massive amounts of organic produce and food from countries like China and South America, which you got the whole carbon impact of shipping that and all the supply, other types of supply chains. I think there’s a real opportunity for us to come up with another label that it doesn’t mean … You’re not applying chemicals or fertilizers to it and it has the same guidelines as organic, but people know it’s a transitional label.

 

Dave:  It’s really tough. The plantations that I work with for the Bulletproof coffee beans, they’ve never been sprayed, never will be sprayed. They’ve been owned by the same families for a long time. It would take more than one year’s worth of profits to pay for the organic certification.

 

Gunnar:          Right.

 

Dave:  For small farmers, organic certification is … You have to have a separate job in order to do it. My small farm where I live, I’m on 32 acres and we’re putting into production for the first time. It’s relatively simple to get organic certification because it hasn’t been productive farmland, but even then I almost put asphalt paving on the road coming in, which would have killed my organic certification. How many places don’t have asphalt roads? Well, that would’ve … Because there’s a petroleum thing that’s involve with that.

 

Gunnar:          Right.

 

Dave:  Now I have a dirt driveway still. I don’t know. Maybe we’ll put gravel on it. These little things, people eat food. Ah, it’s organic or it’s not organic, but oh, it’s organic from China. We have no idea whether those were enforced in China and Mexico. We have no idea how long that food sat, how fresh it is, but at least it was organic. I fully support that. This is at least small-farmer based, non-GMO. There’s a variety of things. What you get down to is farming’s a system. It’s a whole set of practices with thousands of decision points. How do you know that the majority of them were done in such a way to support the world and support the people who eat the food? That is a tough standard to make and to enforce. I support that effort, but it’s going to take a while.

 

Gunnar:          I think it will, but I think there’s a real opportunity there. I think it could be done in a thoughtful way that would make really expand access and production pretty quickly.

 

Dave:  Where I live, up here on Vancouver Island, I’ve seen a few of the local grocery stores actually purchasing farmland where they’re going either into partnership or just outright purchasing it and saying, “Look, we need access to high-quality organic local vegetable. We’ve got to guarantee access. We’re serving our communities. Buying from a farmer doesn’t guarantee that we’ll have what we want so we might as well just do this.” Are you going to buy a bunch of farmland, employ a bunch of farmers, and basically be a vertically integrated thing?

 

Gunnar:          It’s funny. I was just talking to some of our investors yesterday about that. For us, it’s a sequencing issue. There’s a very real likelihood in the next two or three years we’ll end up vertically integrating and then building really showcase regenerative farms.

 

Dave:  Yeah, I’m considering the same thing with coffee because I would want to work with the people I work with now, but I just want to make sure that everything is done right. Right now, I know that because I have my lab testing at the end of the process, but if there was an opportunity to partner more with the growers or to even work directly with a plantation for long term, like, “Look, if your name’s going to go on the label, it better be done right and not just mostly right either.”

 

Gunnar:          The majors are doing this. I just saw an article yesterday. Costco just helped a farmer in San Diego buy 1,200 acres across the border in Mexico to launch a big organic farm. Costco funded it precisely for this issue. It’s one of the fastest growing segments of Costco’s business is organic food and they have the same issue. They’re at enormous, enormous scale and they can’t get their hands on the product. This is a problem now that’s systemic. The good news is it creates demand and there is a bottleneck with the certification process, but the market is going to have its effect and there’s going to be a lot of solutions that come up in the next five to ten years that meet that demand.

 

Dave:  It’ll be really interesting too though like what happens, let’s say, with a membership model like Costco or with Thrive, let’s say. Let’s put on our futurist hat. In ten years from now, Thrive is the ginormous multi-billion dollar thing and let’s say you have access … We’ll say control of 10% of America’s cropland.

 

Gunnar:          That’s a big number, but okay I’m going to play with you on that.

 

Dave:  Okay. I’m just making up these numbers. Let’s say a meaningful percentage of this stuff. It’s very different in a world like that. Let’s say Wal-Mart has this slice. Costco has this slice. Thrive has this slice. Safeway has this slice and whatever. Amazon has this other slice. Who knows what the future looks like, but essentially there’s a series of big companies, some nicer than others, who are now vertically integrating into this thing. What happens with the control of the food supply then with things like small farmers? Where do they fit into that ecosystem? What do you think will happen with vertical integration? What’s the best model for that when you think about this going out more than five years.

 

Gunnar:          I don’t think we have to own farms specifically. I think that there’s way for us to be supportive to farmers in a way that gives us the stability and guarantee of output while not being intensely hierarchical that’s destructive to small farmers. Even like on the regenerative agriculture piece, one of the things that I’ve been talking about with the board there is we need to create free educational tool kits that are turnkey for farmers that depend upon one of the seven major bio-zones that you would have in the U.S. and you could just follow these free, turnkey programs how to convert your farm into a regenerative farm. It gives people step-by-step educational content that helps them do that. I think there’s a lot of ways that we can be very beneficial in the ecosystem, particularly as we get scale and the amount of money it takes for us to have a tremendous impact for people starts to be a smaller part of our overall revenue base. I think we’re going to be able to leverage that in really dynamic ways.

 

Dave:  Some of the things that a lot of people don’t know, I saw this shocking statistic like 90% of small farmers have a day job. They cannot put food on their table by farming. They can put … Actually, that’s not true. They can put food on their table. They just can’t put money in their bank account with small farming, even if they go to the local farmers’ market on weekends and all that. They’re not quite making ends meet. The amount of work, oh my God. Some of our family friends, they’re on five-acre farm, which is plenty big enough to grow way more food than you could ever eat in a fertile valley like where we live. Even with feeding a couple cows and raising everything, it’s just 16 hour a day, just huge amounts of labor and at the end of the day, by the time you’ve paid for animal food and you did all that stuff, it’s like break even. To the point they’re thinking about shutting the farm down because they just can’t do it.

 

I think most people would say, “Oh, I’m supporting small farmers,” and they go to the farmers’ market and they try to negotiate for a dollar off. That might’ve been the only dollar of profit that was out there.

 

Gunnar:          Right, right.

 

Dave:  Do you think that Thrive and what you’re doing with Thrive might have the power to change that? To make it easier or make it more profitable? With these tool sets?

 

Gunnar:          The beautiful thing about our model is that we cut out all the middlemen in the supply chain, right? That allows us to work with partners where they can actually make more money working with us. It’s simpler. It’s easier. We can tell their story in a really beautiful way with our content and recipes and videos, talk about their supply chain, and they can make more money and still pass savings along to our members. When you think about a traditional supply chain, there’s the grower, the manufacturer, the brokers, the distributors, the slotting fees, the retail games, the pay to play, all the stuff that happens in shelf space and pay-to0play games and by being able to cut all of that out and go direct to consumer to our members with a really efficient supply chain, we’re actually able to pay more to our partners and pass the savings along to our members. It’s a win/win/win for everybody.

 

Dave:  Most people listening to this don’t know about the incredibly complex and Byzantine grocery supply chain. If a product costs $1 at the register, can you walk through who gets what percentage of that dollar for the average product that you might sell on Thrive?

 

Gunnar:          It really depends on the product and the product category. Let’s say something costs $10 because that’s an easier one to …

 

Dave:  Sure.

 

Gunnar:          If it’s $10, the actual brand that actually manufactures that, not even the farmer, but just the brand, depending upon the margin and what type of product they’re selling, they’ll be lucky if they $3 to $5 of that $10 that’s sold at retail. Then the rest of that $5 to $7 goes to the brokers, the distributors, and the retail player and all the retail pay-to-play games that happen on the shelf space.

 

Dave:  People listening to this right now, think about that number. If you spend $10, the person who manufactured and produced that product got $3 of that $10 and the rest of it went to inefficiencies in the supply chain.

 

Gunnar:          That’s right.

 

Dave:  That’s why when you go with something like eCommerce, you’re basically taking that $7 and you’re redistributing it in a different way, but on the other hand, if you go to Whole Foods and you have access to fresh stuff that you might not be able to get online and you have access to a whole suite of products that are generally hard to get in one place. It’s an interesting conundrum because what’s the cost of convenience and do you really care if the producer of that product got $3 or $4?

 

My take on that is actually you should care whether the producer gets $3 or $4 because if you’re dealing with an ethical producer, they’re going to make better products versus squeezing every last nickel out. I find there’s two types of consumers out there, at least when I’m working on the Bulletproof side. There’s what I call the mercenaries. They’re like, “I want to eat the cheapest food possible.” To that mindset, it’s almost like a victory to squeeze a nickel out of the food that they’re eating. Then there’s other people who say, “Look, I want to eat the highest quality food, first, that is most affordable, second.”

 

I’m in that category, right? I want food that makes me feel amazing. I’m willing to pay more for it, but I don’t want to pay a lot more for it but that extra value I’m getting? I’ll pay for quality and if I was starving, I wouldn’t pay for quality, except even then, if you have only a dollar to spend on this meal, you’re going to buy the highest quality meal you can get for a dollar. You’ll always do that, but when you have more than a dollar, are you willing to spend $1.10?

 

How do you differentiate between the mercenary, like I want the very, very cheapest thing possible, versus I want the best thing possible? How do you navigate that for consumers who come to Thrive? How do you guide them in that direction?

 

Gunnar:          Yeah, I think for us what’s cool is again we’re big tent so we’re happy to have both those consumers. Because it’s such a disintermediated supply chain where we’ve cut out the middlemen, we can pay our brands more. We can pass along really significant savings of 25% to 50% off these products to the members and we can cover our costs so we break even on the products. That plays to self interest and whether or not you’re really, really scrounging and you’re optimizing every dollar or whether you’re interested in the lifestyle and want to vote with your dollars and you’re really interested in the absolute highest quality, you’re still … We can appeal to both of those consumers and it’s really easy for us to work with both of those.

 

We work with a lot of other types of consumers. It’s people that are in food deserts or people that aren’t near a health food store to begin with or they’re in a low-income neighborhood or they’re a community of color. There’s all sorts of … We have a lot of different demographic groups that we interact with and support and what’s cool is over half of our customer is in the South and the Midwest. Most people would think that our customer base is concentrated in California and New York. What’s really exciting for us at the business is that we’re helping people access healthy food, often for the first time because they can afford it. Our buyer, the person who’s buying from us at Thrive, by and large is a woman. She shops at Target or Kohl’s. She’s accessing healthy food often for the first time because she can afford to do it and she wants to do it, but it’s been out of her reach, historically.

 

Dave:  Yeah, that’s really helping people in a meaningful way. I applaud that. I’ve been on lots of road trips and for a long time I’ve eaten in a certain way, because when I eat stuff that maybe other people tolerate better than I do … I have a history of obesity and autoimmunity and all. This stuff kryptonite to me. I eat it, I’m going to feel awful. I don’t like to feel awful, especially when I’m driving across the country or something. There’s lots of times you’re like, in this entire state, there’s only two places where I really wanted to find something to eat and that’s not to say that I feel like I’m being persnickety or something, but you’re like, “Look, I don’t know how you possibly deep-fry a salad, but every restaurant in this town deep fries their salads, probably because they didn’t have any fresh lettuce.” I’m not joking actually. That was in Scotland, not in the U.S.

 

It’s one of those things where you realize, “Okay, this isn’t food in the way I define food, because if I eat it I’m going to feel crappy. Certainly, I’m not going to perform at my best level and that’s what I do every day.” Having a shift like this that says, “All right, even if you live in a town like that, now I can get the food that I want and it’s affordable,” that changes things in a way that having a Wal-Mart downtown won’t do, right?

 

Gunnar:          Yeah, I think for us one of the benchmarks that we try to really aim our business at is can we sell healthy alternatives at the same price or less than the conventional equivalent? We sell a KIND bar for the same price or less than a Snickers bar. We sell 70 loads of non-toxic laundry detergent for less than a big box retailer will sell 70 loads of laundry detergent with hormone and endocrine disruptors. For us, when we’re look in our catalog and how do we provide products, what we’re trying to do is make the products equal in price to the conventional equivalent or less. If we can do that, that’s hyper scalable.

 

Dave:  But Gunnar, endocrine disruptors smell so fresh.

 

Gunnar:          Exactly! So fresh and clean. I saw an ad yesterday that I just … I can’t say the name obviously, but it was for one of the big CBG cleaning companies and it was an ad on a major site and it was touting as if it was a big exciting thing. It was, “Made of 90% cleaning ingredients!” Then under it says, “Keep out of reach of children.” I was just like, “What an odd ad.” To think that that’s even an effective ad to advertise that your cleaning products are made of 90% cleaning ingredients without even specifying what that even means and then have this bold warming that you got to keep the cleaning product out of reach of children. I was like, “This is completely insane.”

 

Dave:  Last time I checked water was a cleaning ingredient.

 

Gunnar:          Right.

 

Dave:  I don’t even know what that means.

 

Gunnar:          Right.

 

Dave:  It’s amazing what people will buy. We’ve certainly trained them that way. I want to shift gears a bit, since we’re talking about endocrine disruptors and hormones, things like that. When we’ve had dinner together, you talked about being a self-proclaimed hypochondriac. You really are monitoring what’s going on with your biology. What do you do? What do you obsess about the most? Where’d that come from?

 

Gunnar:          I think it’s like deep survival fears. Growing up really poor and we inherit some of these thought forms and patterns from our parents. My mother was very, very concerned all the time. I think we’re all confronted with our various neurotic, intellectual conditioning that we all have various flavors of it. One of mine is hypochondria. I’m gratefully much better than I used to be, but I used to just obsess about cancer and heart disease as a teenager. I would just be like … I’d feel a lump under my lymph node, I’d be like, for months completely terrified that I was finally going to die of lymphatic cancer, a 13-year old boy. That kind of …

 

Dave:  That’s true hypochondria. Okay, cool.

 

Gunnar:          Yeah, yeah, yeah. Full blown. At the same time though, that led me into understanding and pursuing information about health and wellness in a powerful way and it led me to having to look at other types of interpersonal skills and development so looking at fear and what’s the root of the fear and having really honest conversation with oneself about where that arises from. It’s been both a blessing and a curse.

 

I know you can understand that one with your own journey. I think those are … We’re all confronted with those in different ways and none of us are all that unique in the fact that we all have our mixed bag of cards that make us who we are.

 

Dave:  It’s funny. I used to wonder if I was a hypochondriac, especially back in 1992, people are like, “You’re a hypochondriac.” I’m like, “Actually, no. I just feel shitty.” There’s a difference. I actually did have autoimmune stuff. I am kind of fat. Okay, it turns out there was a connection between what I ate and what I did and whether or not I got a sinus infection again or one of those things.

 

Like you said, it’s a curse, but also it means that you have a very survival-based motivation that says, “I’m going to learn about this stuff and I’m going to get it right because whether it’s perceived threat or an actual threat, I’m going to own this stuff because I don’t want to walk around with that hanging over my head.”

 

Gunnar:          I know for me and I know in your work, your work is really vulnerably and honestly sharing the depths of your personal challenges. I think that, as we move through those challenges that we’re all dealt with, we actually become better human beings as we’re able to be honest about our ability to move through these things and still be effected by them periodically. It inspires other people to confront their own challenges at a very profound level. I think I used to be overweight as a teenager too and for me it wasn’t the physiological, autoimmune stuff that you were up against. I was depressed.

 

That’s the other part of obesity and being overweight is there’s an emotional component to it. A lot of it’s the type of food we’re eating, but it’s also a lot of people feel hopeless in their lives or they’re depressed or there’s emotional issues that are unresolved. I think there’s such an amazing conversation for us to have now about these issues holistically and food and lifestyle is a critical part of it, but then also really getting access to the tools that give us a way to empower ourselves from the traditional fears and beliefs that we’ve been conditioned with.

 

Dave:  A lot of that programming you get in the first seven years, it runs in there. You think that programming is actually your personality and it’s not.

 

Gunnar:          Right.

 

Dave:  That knowledge, that model, it isn’t taught in school. They don’t teach you that in college. You go through this whole education process and you come out of it and you’re just as programmed as you were before. Then you have to …

 

Gunnar:          Or more so.

 

Dave:  Yeah, maybe more so. Then you have to sit down and go, “All right, how am I going to deal with this?” I’ve found that for most people, you need to hit a pretty bad place in order to take a look at it. Otherwise you can live a relatively okay life fully programmed. It’s a life of mediocrity so to speak, but if you basically hit a wall along the way, you’ll probably have to look around a little bit more.

 

Gunnar:          It’s desperation, right? We get backed into a corner and we either are going to work through it or we literally won’t survive. I think a lot of people can relate to that desperation and I think that it’s one of the things that’s driving people to so passionately vote with their dollars and try to understand companies that support their values. The personal development movement. There’s so many aspects to it that I think it’s the darkest dark, the lightest light and people want to empower themselves in a way that’s truly transformational right now.

 

Dave:  You talked about voting with your dollars. We also have a presidential election. What do you think is more important for someone to do: to support organic stuff and to buy organic foods or to vote for one candidate or another?

 

Gunnar:          I think they’re both important.

 

Dave:  That was a politician’s answer. Come on, man.

 

Gunnar:          Yeah, it is. It is. I actually think that ultimately I think what’s interesting is … We work with Environmental Working Group, EWG.

 

Dave:  Yeah, I’m a supporter as well.

 

Gunnar:          Ken is amazing. I heard a speech he gave and it was really interesting. In the 60’s, the government drove all sorts of amazing innovation around Clean Water Act and all sorts of things that we just take for granted today that are part of the bedrock of how we maintain and manage our society and our economy. None of those types of regulations can get passed today period. We live in a dysfunctional political system where even the most rational ideas just get completely polarized. I think we’re in a place now where innovation used to be driven in the 50’s and the 60’s from the government, top down, and I think we’re in this really exciting place now where innovation is being driven from the bottom up, from people voting with their dollars. You have companies like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s all scrambling to try to figure out how to stay relevant in the 21st Century to a consumer that has a different sets of values than they positioned themselves for.

 

Dave:  Right. Where you spend your money will likely have a bigger impact than whichever person you vote for in a major election like that.

 

Gunnar:          Right.

 

Dave:  It didn’t use to be that way, but it sure looks to be that way to me. I say that. I live in Canada, right? That’s my perception of how things work now. I think every time I spend a dollar. Where’s this dollar going? Does it go to something that I want to have happen? If not, can I spend that dollar somewhere else? Because every one of those dollars is a vote and it’s probably no more or less expensive of a vote than the other ones.

 

Gunnar:          It’s interesting. We are in a time where particularly if you’ve got some educational access and means, you’re going to use a phone and a computer that was probably made in very compromised labor conditions. Most of our phones were made in really devastating circumstances. We are inherently participating in a global economy now that doesn’t represent the true cost of making the items that we consume. I think that’s one of the great challenges that we face, which voting with our dollars and transparency is going to drive a lot more awareness around what are the true costs of the products we consume? Not only to ourselves, but to other people in other communities and the environment.

 

Dave:  It gets a little more complex, too. What would happen if a company approached you and they had organic produce that was raised by prisoners who were not paid a living wage?

 

Gunnar:          Right.

 

Dave:  What would you do?

 

Gunnar:          Yeah, we wouldn’t take that. That’s completely …

 

Dave:  Wouldn’t that be better than GMO crops produced by prisoners which is happening in the U.S. right now?

 

Gunnar:          Right, yeah.

 

Dave:  It’s such an ethical slippery slope. By the way, I would do the same thing. I’d say, “Guys, that’s not cool.” Privatized prisons? Not okay. You’re using prisoners as labor like that, no, not okay.

 

Gunnar:          Yeah.

 

Dave:  It’s an ethically slippery slope. I hope that people listening to it is they realize it matters where you buy your stuff. It matters which stuff you buy and it matters way more than you think because it comes down to are the people you’re buying it from going to take what’s left after all of the costs are done and are they going to do good things with it? Are they going to act like Costco? They pay much more than other retailers and they have good benefits. You have a philosophical decision that says, “Your employees all get the same benefits you do as a CEO,” right? Does it matter to someone who’s buying a jar of peanut butter online? Well, it should matter.

 

If people realize that they don’t have to spend more, then it’s basically a free thing you get when you buy it. That’s my perspective. Every time I spend something, I get that for free. It goes down to if you’re going to go into the store … I go to the register with an employee there instead of the self-serve checkout. You know what? I like jobs. I want people around me to have jobs because when they have jobs they’re happier. When no one has a job, people generally steal stuff from each other and it’s not a very nice place to live.

 

Gunnar:          Yeah, yeah. That’s one of the challenges with the whole sharing economy now. There’s so much disruption. Technology is going to disrupt traditional jobs in a much more quickly than they can shift to new types of jobs and it’s going to create all sorts of interesting and dynamic and potentially dangerous populous strands that cause all sorts of dynamic issues for us as a society. I think the thing that is so exciting though, back to the voting with dollars piece, is that we are in a world where the biggest companies have quarterly earning reports and it doesn’t actually take much of a contraction in their business to send them into really deep profound hand wringing.

 

Now we’re seeing the first organic hamburger in Germany from McDonald’s. We’re seeing General Mills has now announced that its entire supply chain is going to be non-GMO and Campbell Soup is going non-GMO. It doesn’t actually take that much of a slow-down or a decrease in revenue and profit for these big companies to suddenly see that they actually need to wake up to the demands of this consumer that is gaining steam and using the Internet to educate and empower themselves and to vote with their dollars.

 

Dave:  That is very true. I have seen such rapid change in the 20% revenue fall for McDonald’s. I wanted to just dance in the street. The funny thing is, I don’t see McDonald’s. When I drive down the street, my brain stopped identifying that as a place to eat so the logo doesn’t have an effect on me. The store doesn’t. When people say it’s by McDonald’s, I go, “Where’s McDonald’s?” It’s not a landmark because I literally learned to not see it. I don’t know how you recover from that. My kids, they know that that’s not a place you go for food.

 

One of our nannies decided that she wanted to go to McDonald’s to get, and yes this is embarrassing, to get coffee. There’s Bulletproof coffee at my house all the time, right? She was out and about with the kids. I wasn’t that happy about it, but she took the kids to the drive-thru and they’re like, “You can drive through to get food? Oh my God,” because we don’t do fast food.

 

Gunnar:          Right.

 

Dave:  She rolls the window down and my daughter who’s maybe five at the time, she sees that you can talk to this speaker and our nanny says, “I’d like a coffee,” whatever and Anna just can’t help herself. She goes, “I’d like a poopie chemical latte, please,” which to her was like the worst thing you could possibly ask for, right? Because she knows that McDonald’s puts chemicals in food and that is the brand value of McDonald’s to my kids. Every one of her friends at school, all of them, same thing. McDonald’s does not equate food. It doesn’t equate fun. It doesn’t equate happiness.

 

You know what? I’m not sure that selling an organic hamburger is ever going to recover from that. They might’ve destroyed their brand by destroying the ecosystem and by doing all the bad stuff they did. Maybe the brand will recover. Maybe they’ll do enough good that it’ll recover. It’s going to take an awful lot for me to want to ever eat there again. I just don’t have a fundamental trust there.

 

Gunnar:          Yeah, yeah. I agree. I think there’s a real credibility gap there. That said, you look at the way, and obviously Chipotle’s been going through massive issues with the breakouts that have been happening, but they’ve invested in a way that’s really differentiated and I think it has translated as a brand. They’re investing in farms and organic and regenerative agriculture and I think that’s translated to them as a brand. Ironically, they used to be owned by McDonald’s and McDonald’s sold Chipotle and Chipotle got religion on appealing to an inspirational consumer and it’s really driven a lot of success, notwithstanding the recent issues on their breakouts.

 

Dave:  Are you a fan of Clayton Christiansen? The disruptive technology author? Are you familiar with his work in strategy?

 

Gunnar:          I’m not, but I’m a fan of disruption in general so conceptually I think I’m a fan.

 

Dave:  I had disruptive technology in almost all of my job descriptions throughout my time in Silicon Valley. It always something I worked with. Clayton, I actually got to work with his consulting company once, he’s a famous Harvard guy who coined the term disruptive innovation. You’d probably enjoy his book. I forget what it’s called, but he had a big book about it. What he did was he looked at the history of hard drive manufacturers in Silicon Valley. Because it’s such a fast cycle there, you can study things that happen there in other industries. He started out by looking at railroads and how railroads disrupted each other and got disrupted and went through tech.

 

In hard drives, what happens is these upstart young Turks come along and 18 months later, they’re buying the companies who said, “Ah, that stuff will never work.” Right? Literally, 18 months later and it happens over and over. He studied why does disruption happen and what I’m seeing is the stuff that I cut my teeth on in Silicon Valley where the telephone companies got disrupted by data centers, by cloud computing, and social media and all this stuff happened, it’s happening in food right now.

 

Companies like Thrive, companies out there who, like Chipotle, they came out of nowhere and the big guys are kind of scratching their head going, “What do we do? We don’t even know what to do.” What you do is your revenues decline a bunch and then you get acquired and then they gut your storefront and put their logo on your store. I think some of that’s going to happen over the next few years in a way that no one would ever predict except Clayton. He would predict it. That’d be a good book for you to read.

 

Gunnar:          I think one of the interesting facts is you look at like Whole Foods is the largest retailers that people recognize in the health and wellness movement. Now there’s other people like Kroger and Costco that are in the system, but their market cap is $10 billion as one of the largest retailers and the most famous retailer for healthy food and they’ve really galvanized the movement in a way. They’ve had their challenges and their problems and they’ve got their reputation, but they really brought the movement together in a really powerful way and we’re all the beneficiaries of that now with our new models.

 

I think you look at their market cap relative to, say, Chipotle, which is one of a dozen fast food companies in this country and it has two and a half times the market cap, $25 billion. One of several fast food companies in this country is two and a half times the size of one of the largest health food providers in this country. That’s really an interesting fact in terms of where the market is going and how much opportunity there is for this thing to shift.

 

The sales for natural and organic products is $50 to $75 billion a year for the food itself growing at 15% per year. Even at the size, it’s still only 4% of the national CPG economy. Even at the size, only 4% of total consumer package good sales is natural and organic products. That, again, just shows you how this is going to go over the next 10 or 20 years. People are going to move towards accessing food that is healthy and putting products on their bodies which is nontoxic and I think we’re in a really unique, blessed situation to be able to facilitate that journey in a way that’s authentic and meaningful and empowering to people. That’s, to me, super exciting.

 

Dave:  It is a really cool time to be working in this strange area of providing the right food to people so that they feel amazing, which goes beyond health food. It wasn’t this easy without the Internet, without the cloud, without all the technology that supports it now. It’s really cool and now’s the time for that. This disruption is a lot of fun. Certainly what you’re doing with Thrive is a part of it.

 

Gunnar:          Yeah, yeah.

 

Dave:  I have a question for you that you probably would have predicted if you’ve listened to any of the shows before. If someone came to you tomorrow, Gunnar, and they’re like, “Look, I want to perform better at every single thing I do in my life,” based on all the stuff you know, not just your business, what are the three most important things I should do? What advice would you have?

 

Gunnar:          My important pieces are getting enough sleep, courageously facing my fears every day, and eating well and getting exercise. I feel like if I do those three things … I slipped in a fourth there by eating well and getting exercise. It sounds like basic stuff, but just the simple thing of eating simple foods, chewing it well, not eating complex meals, not eating two hours before you go to bed, going to bed early, getting enough sleep, and then really doing the interpersonal work of like we all have issues that we’re confronted with in our life. The opportunity for us is to meet those issues with love and courage and recognize that we’re not going to get over them instantly and it’s a process, but to the extent that we can meet those things that we’re afraid of, we will be better, strong human beings that can add a lot more value to the world.

 

Dave:  Very well said. Thanks a lot of being on the show. People can go to ThriveMarket.com to learn more about this and to get some food at a good discount. Have an awesome day, Gunnar.

 

Gunnar:          Yeah, it was great, great to be with you. Thank you so much.

 

Dave:  If you enjoyed today’s episode, you know what to do. Go onto iTunes and click, “Hey, I like this show,” so then other people can find it. There’s some sort of rating/review process. I forget what it is, but if you go in there and say, “You know, Bulletproof Radio is helping me,” that will help others. We just crossed 30 million downloads and climbing.

 

That is 65 entire human lifetimes, if I did my math right, depending on how long you believe you’re going to live. It is my responsibility to not have murdered 65 human beings by making crappy content. I put everything I have into this show for you so that you can learn something and walk away after you hear every show knowing something you didn’t know before that’s going to help you perform better.

 

Have a beautiful day and thank you.

 

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