[00:00:16] Dave: You’re listening to The Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today is an interview that I’ve wanted to do since before I had a show. And this is about the potential cyberpunk future. You guys know I’m a computer hacker. I’m wearing my street cred shirt here. This is a cyberpunk shirt that, Tom Bill, you gave me. 

[00:00:40] Kevin Warwick is a storied figure from my time in computer science and as a computer hacker. And he is probably the world’s first cyborg. They call him Captain Cyborg. Now, the reason they call him that is because he was the first guy to have a chip implanted in his arm the length of a coin so he could open doors and activate lights.

[00:01:04] And we’re going to go into the benefits of this and the risks. So this isn’t one of those, let’s all become cyborg episodes. But if you’re looking at what happens with AI, robotics, biomedical engineering, there’s so much opportunity and risk. And this is a guy who’s famous for it and has been living it for 25 years.

[00:01:30] Emeritus professor at Coventry and Reading Universities. It’s an honor to meet you. I think you were featured in Wired magazine years ago, right? There’s an article on you.

[00:01:41] Kevin: On the cover. Yeah. February 2000. If you look, I looked a bit younger then, which I was, but I have to say, in the academic world, it’s not normal to be on the cover of Wired Magazine. So it’s pretty cool when it happens. You get all academic plaudits, but the Wired Magazine cover tops those, I think.

[00:02:04] Dave: Did you get shamed by other professors for selling out to mass marketing instead of just keeping your academic papers where only seven other researchers read them?

[00:02:13] Kevin: I think you’re quite right as you’re pointing out. I don’t know shame, but it annoys a few academics. So there’s probably one or two academic plaudits that I didn’t get because of the Wired Magazine and things like that.

[00:02:30] Dave: If you’re listening and you’re not familiar with academia, it’s almost like talking to the public about your work makes your work less valuable, which is bizarre, because if you discover something new, that’s meaningful for humanity, I believe you have a moral obligation to stand at the top of the mountain and shout it out because it matters. 

[00:02:53] But in traditional, especially European academia, it’s like, no, you have to be very humble and only whisper it in Latin code. And somehow it’s going to get out there. I think it doesn’t help evolve humanity, but I’m also not an academic.

[00:03:07] Kevin: Yeah. But I really thought it was important to get out there and say what I was doing, and why, and try and give some explanation and open people’s minds because, I think, at the time, first of all, it was technically innovative. And secondly, it was scratching the edges of science fiction as well, which was good fun.

[00:03:29] But so when you’re doing it for real, I think that surprised quite a few people. But it was getting that interaction, I think, with the outside world that I felt was very important. You’re quite right. 

[00:03:42] Particularly in Europe, you’re not supposed to enjoy doing science. You’re not supposed to have some fun, which I always to have some fun doing it. You’re not supposed to get to the outside world and start telling people and appear on television and things like that. I think I did annoy a few academics in how I did things.

[00:04:02] Dave: It’s all right by me anyway. In fact, I think it’s great. And we’ve seen others who’ve been on the show, like David Sinclair in the longevity field, where I’m really active. He went out there and said, we can reverse aging in cells. And some people have gotten mad, and other people said, great. But look, if you can do something magical, then we need to talk about it. And in your case, you did implant something in your arm, and you’re the first person to do that, and that is meaningful.

[00:04:29] Kevin: Yeah, and I think it’s not a normal thing in the academic world. You’re supposed to take a 100 people and do the same experiment on a 100, or 1,000, or whatever it happens to be, and then report statistically on what results you get over the– this was quite a dangerous thing at the time.

[00:04:47] Now, some of it, you can look back and say, perhaps it wasn’t that dangerous, but, at the time, it was dangerous because of the technology we used. When you are the first person to do something, you really are taking a step off the mountaintop. You don’t really know what’s going to be there. You hope you know what’s going to happen. You think you know what’s going to happen. And some things go well. Some things, not so well, but you hope you’re going to be okay at the end of it.

[00:05:18] Dave: You’re a little bit older and wiser now than you were in 1998 when you first had that implant. I was working in the data center business at the time, teaching Internet architecture in Silicon Valley. And I saw that, and I was like, this is really incredible. I was a little bit naive.

[00:05:36] We built the Internet as we know it today. This was a company that had the data center that held Google when it was two guys and two computers, and the Facebook when it was eight computers. Very, very central to the growth of Web 1. 

[00:05:49] And information wants to be free, and Bruce Sterling, and cyberpunk, and the idea that we’re going to democratize information. Over the last 23 years or 25 years since then, I’ve watched corporate interests and governments use it to create a mass surveillance and censorship platform that’s mostly automated.

[00:06:10] This is not the system that I built, and I naively thought that other engineers like me, no one would ever do what the bureaucrats wanted us to do. And I failed to understand that there are some evil people out there. Oh, you want to write a system that automatically shocks people who think the wrong thing? Sure. I’ll write that code for $6. There are people like that out there. Do you still have that implant from 1998?  

[00:06:32] Kevin: No, that implant ended up in the Science Museum in London, to be exact. But I think that’s one thing as a scientist, particularly in the academic world, you live with. And some people say, oh, Albert Einstein, if he knew what his results were going to be used for, he said he wouldn’t have done the work that he did, which is a load of rubbish, really. Of course, he did what he wanted to do. And you know as a scientist, it could be used for good. It could be used for bad.

[00:07:05] And I think all of the implants that I’ve had and been involved with, there are two aspects, and that is good or bad. Maybe medically they can help people in certain instances. I’ve done work with Parkinson’s disease stimulators, which have an obvious way of helping people to overcome some of the problems with the disease.

[00:07:27] But at the same time, you can use exactly the same technology for very negative effects. So I think you just have to live with it and take part in any discussions that are on the ethical side of what you’re doing, whether it’s positive, whether it’s negative. I’m always open to take part in discussions like that.

[00:07:48] There’s not a lot more I can do, I think. I’m a research scientist, and research is taking those steps into, not the unknown, but the little known and trying to push forward the technology and the science that we understand, and hence could be good, could be bad.

[00:08:08] Dave: This’ll be particularly outrageous for people on both sides of the pond here, but I look at research the same way I look at guns. It depends on what you do with it.

[00:08:22] Kevin: Yeah.

[00:08:22] Dave: They’re both useful, and they both could be used for harm. And so this comes down to this weird thing called ethics, and healthy nervous systems, and control systems, particularly on government, that hold people accountable if they do evil things with or without the technology. 

[00:08:40] And I think we have a shortage of accountability in government around the world, where, hey, you’re organizing documents, so you can’t do that. And they’re like, yeah, but you can’t prove I did it, and you can’t catch me, and you can’t enforce it, so therefore it doesn’t count.

[00:08:52] I’m like, you’re a bad person. But we don’t have things to do with bad people. But if they all had implants, and I had control of the implants, I could fix it. So by virtue of that, I should have control of their implants. Does that make sense?

[00:09:05] Kevin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think the same issues are raised by just about any technological– you take something like the telephone. I’m sure there’s a lot of people still at the time, particularly, this is a very bad thing. All my privacy is going, etc. Other people would say, this is a really good thing.

[00:09:31] I can communicate in a much better way. Certainly, it had an enormous commercial potential, and the number of people that have had jobs– I’ve had jobs in the past in the telecoms industry. That’s how I started after leaving school. So there’s enormous commercial. It changes society completely. So is it good? Is it bad? It’s a bit of both, and it depends what you want to do with it, which you were saying.

[00:09:59] Dave: What happened when you connected your nervous system to the Internet? Explain how that worked.

[00:10:04] Kevin: Yeah. I’m not sure whether you can see that. There’s still some scars on there. That’s where it happened. We used what’s called the BrainGate or part of the BrainGate, which has been used in various paralyzed individuals since that time. It consisted of 100 pins with electrodes on the end of them.

[00:10:31] And what the surgeons did was open up my arm, found the bunch of nerve fibers going down my arm, cut away the myelin sheath that covers the nerve fibers, and then fired these 100 pins into my nerve fibers. And it was like that for just over three months for the experiment. I had wires running further up my arm.

[00:10:58] They came out of my body. There’s all reasons why we didn’t implant everything. So it was like bringing my nervous system out of my body effectively. And we connected myself up to the computer, so I had hard wire or wireless, whichever we preferred to do it, connection between my nervous system and the computer.

[00:11:21] And then so we could do a whole bunch of experiments, both monitoring what was going on on my nervous system with hand movements, and secondly, firing signals into the nervous system. And that latter thing was interesting because there wasn’t an awful lot of work. There’d been work really done on more chicken sciatic nerves, which are not that much like human nerve fibers. And so you’re instantly faced with, what signals should we put into the nervous system? What should the voltage be? What should the current be?

[00:12:00] Dave: Level 1 and level 2 OSI model issues. We don’t know the signaling mechanism or even voltage that indicates what’s going on. 

[00:12:07] Kevin: You’ve got it.

[00:12:08] Dave: From a network engineering perspective, it’s weird because it’s not digital. So you solve those problems, right?

[00:12:15] Kevin: As best we could. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Literally having to test things out and seeing, how much voltage and current is okay to push into my nervous system before we cause any trouble and things like that? I didn’t tell my wife what I was doing in the day, that we’d turn the voltage up a little bit. So it was more the power. So in the end, microamps were putting in current, but I think it was 50 volts in the end that was being applied to my nervous system.

[00:12:48] Dave: Since that time, things have progressed a little bit. Some of the things that we do at my neuroscience facility, you can get a signal into the brain just by putting electrodes on the skull, tDCS, or TDaCS through the ears. Even with one piece of equipment we don’t use that induces a current using magnetics, you can do very, very carefully targeted parts of the brain. They’re doing this for depression with high amounts of electricity. But small amounts, people have profound mystical experiences without any drugs.

[00:13:23] And we’re nowhere near figuring all of it out, but it’s better than 20, 25 years ago. And we were doing it at the target of those nerves. You were doing at the ends of the nerves, but doesn’t that hurt like hell, peeling your myelin sheath? Myelin sheath degradation is part of Parkinson’s and ALS. It’s nasty stuff. Were you in a lot of pain when you did this?

[00:13:49] Kevin: No. To be honest, no. I had local anaesthetic. It was a two-hour operation, partly because the surgeons didn’t really know what they were doing until they came to do it. It’s one of those things. And once the local anaesthetic had worn off, I never really felt pain.

[00:14:09] When the power was being injected into my nervous system– it depends what you call it– from a scientific point of view, I never regarded it as pain. It was providing my brain with signals, and really, I could recognize the number of pulses and the frequency. Essentially, the whole thing of signaling to me involved pulses, and it depended how many of them came in the space of time. 

[00:14:38] So one example, I was looking at extending the range of senses. And so I connected up ultrasonic sensors, like a bat sense. So I was receiving pulses of current that increased in frequency the closer the object came. So if something’s further away, bing, bing, bing. And if something comes closer, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.

[00:15:06] And that was pulses that my brain was able to pick up. I wouldn’t have described them as painful. I understood what was happening and could link very quickly. Your brain can link, oh, there’s something coming closer, or something’s further away. Or if you’re moving around, you’re getting close to an object. It was great fun. Great fun.

[00:15:27] Dave: What was that like? Did you get used to having bat powers?

[00:15:32] Kevin: Oh, so much so. We were trying to do it in a standard environment because we had to produce papers on what we were doing. So let’s try it here. Let’s try it there. But one of the researchers, Ian, suddenly brought a board towards me very quickly when I wasn’t expecting it or anything like that.

[00:15:55] It was scary. I thought something was coming for me, and I didn’t know what it was. And it was very much a reactive, moving it, which amazed me that your brain links these signals to what’s going on outside and then responds so quickly. So that was– 

[00:16:15] Dave: That bypassed your prefrontal cortex, which is where you thought you were processing, went straight to your amygdala because it was an emergency situation, which means it really did get built into your brain.

[00:16:26] Kevin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Part of the experiment, when I went home at night, I was unplugged as it were, so I just chilled out normally. But every day, we were doing laboratory experiments. So I got used to it very much.

[00:16:46] Dave: When you took it off or turned it off, did you miss it? Did you feel like you were less than?

[00:16:52] Kevin: The answer is yes, but in two ways really. One, because I’m very much involved with the experiments and we’re trying to get as many experiments done as we could while I was all wired up. But I was very much a lab rat, as it were, a guinea pig, whatever way you want to describe it.

[00:17:11] And to be honest, I think for the whole team, because we’d been working flat out for three months, we were absolutely exhausted. So one of the first responses was just, oof, let’s chill a little bit. Let’s just relax, have a break. Rather than, oh, I can’t live without my ultrasonic sense. 

[00:17:32] It’s nice to know that we can have other senses. Didn’t try infrared, but I’m pretty sure infrared would have worked just as well. But it does open up, how far can we take it? What senses might people like? Would an x-ray sense actually do if we could get that to operate in a safe way? Would that work, etc.? So that’s where it becomes pseudo-science fiction, but you’re doing it. It’s science.

[00:18:04] Dave: Were you a fan of William Gibson’s work?

[00:18:08] Kevin: I think I read or watch the films if that’s easier. I still do. Still do. Even time traveling, although I don’t believe that so much. 

[00:18:24] Dave: Yeah.

[00:18:26] Kevin: Yeah, no, clearly, William Gibson was an inspiration. Yeah.

[00:18:31] Dave: Me too. And Bruce Sterling is, I think, my favorite. I’ve been trying to get him on the show since the start of the show, but he’s hard to pin down. If you’re listening to this, you’ve never heard of Bruce Sterling, I think he’s actually the best writer from the second half of the 19th century, just as a writer for any genre, including historical fiction, his writing about the Enlightenment, as well as the creation of the cyberpunk genre, which is strangely predictive of this conversation, even. 

[00:18:58] He has, in some of his series, humanity in the future splitting in two directions. And one group is called the shapers, and these are the people who are changing biology to allow humans to do things that we can’t do today. And then the other group, he calls them makers. And these are people who are adding cybernetic components. And there’s a core philosophical shift that becomes almost two versions of the species. And that’s affected my thinking on the world.

[00:19:29] We should fully max out our existing hardware and use it elegantly into its full capabilities before we start upgrading our hardware. Write better code so you don’t need a new laptop, but get a new laptop when the code is fully maximized. Do you think that there’s room for expanding our existing hardware before we add in, or should we just go straight to adding parts?

[00:19:55] Kevin: I think it’s both. Why not expand the hardware, software, etc.? And that makes it better when you are all linked up. Hopefully, it can work better, and the better the connection. I think, in a sense, it’s perhaps not the hardware that’s the issue. It’s more the connections and understanding the connections.

[00:20:17] You were describing more external signaling. And if we can do it without being invasive, great. But can we get the resolution that we can get with invasive? So for me, it’s not so much maxing out the hardware, but if we can do that, fine. That’s not going to be any problem. It can help whatever. The exciting thing is more the interface. That’s where the problem is, all the interesting bits are for me anyway.

[00:20:48] Dave: The interface is indeed the problem. And I did an experiment right when I was starting the show. I hand soldered this device that sat around my ankle, and it had little cell phone vibrators– there’s eight of them around it– and a digital compass. So it always vibrate North.

[00:21:08] I have zero sense of direction. Some people have one. I do not. And so I’m a visual reckoner. Some people can just unnaturally know which way North is. I do not know how they do it. So I’m going to teach my nervous system that. And yes, I suck at soldering. So after six weeks, it broke, and I never fixed it.

[00:21:24] But for that six-week period, I knew North. And after a while, I stopped feeling the vibration. I just knew North. My body was like, oh, that’s a reliable signal. And it just stopped. And I get in an elevator where the compass didn’t work, and it would go in a little circle. And I was like, whoa, I don’t know which way it is.

[00:21:38] I lost my geomagnetic sense. That was really based on a satellite. And I still think that if I’d have worn that for a year, I probably would have had a sense of direction because my brain would have automatically and unconsciously correlated the new signal with whatever signal we’re using biologically, probably something in our pineal glands, a little magnetic crystal thing.

[00:21:58] Kevin: Yeah. If you found it useful, probably. If it didn’t really make any use of it, it might still have learned it to some extent. But if it found it useful, then it could really have tuned into it. Yeah.

[00:22:11] Dave: So there’s all kinds of ways of getting a signal in, and having done six months of my life with electrodes on my head, doing neurofeedback to have better optimization and control of my own brain, I’ve been fantasizing for years about a tongue printer for feedback. Because the tongue is nerve rich.

[00:22:28] And for blind people, you can have a tongue printer. You can feel individual pricks on your tongue. So you can put something on your tongue and probably control your brain better than you do through your ears.

[00:22:36] Kevin: Yes, no, I had a research student who is actually an undergraduate student that did that experiment and connected up a little array. I can remember him. Ashley, his name was. 

[00:22:50] Dave: Really?

[00:22:51] Kevin: Yeah.

[00:22:52] Dave: That’s awesome. I would try that.

[00:22:56] Kevin: But he connected a little array, put it on the tongue. And it’s very fast. Very, very fast response through the tongue. And you can send little objects, and letters, and all sorts of things that the brain very quickly learns to understand. So quite amazing. But when he first did it, he wasn’t sure again what electric current to apply so that his tongue was okay. 

[00:23:21] And I think the original argument was whether it should be milliamps or microamps. And I suggested using microamps first of all, and seeing how it went. And he came back in next morning to tell me how it was doing. And his words essentially was something like, aah.

[00:23:39] Dave: The downside of the tongue. 

[00:23:43] Kevin: True story. Yes. Watch when you’re experimenting how far you go to start with. Switch on the lower current and work up.

[00:23:51] Dave: The same thing comes with optostimulation. I used the very first infrared brain stimulator, which was handmade by a guy who sold a 100 of them on Yahoo groups in the ’90s. I put it over the language processing part of the brain, and I left it there for a little too long.

[00:24:08] And for the next, about, four hours, I spoke in garbled tongues. At the time, I made my living giving keynote presentations about computer security. I’m like, I just seriously effed my brain beyond belief. And it came back probably stronger than it was before, but it’s not like problems don’t happen, right?

[00:24:27] Kevin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But you just have to live with them. Yeah.

[00:24:31] Dave: Let’s talk about some of the other problems Since I’ve written big books on mitochondrial function, New York Times science books and stuff like that, I recognize that life is simultaneously, at least within the body, we’re communicating with chemicals, which is the predominant view.

[00:24:50] We’re also communicating with electricity, which we’re figuring out, and with magnetics, which is provable, and now finally with biophotons, which is also measurable, quantifiable. Is not science fiction at all. There’s one photon every 40 seconds from your DNA. So there’s multiple signaling networks within the body.

[00:25:09] And with the longevity venture fund that I’m working with, we’re actually looking at investing in a company that’s using single photons to place signals. We’re hacking the communications network between cells, or cell components, and it’s cool. But what I’m interested in is something called voltage-gated calcium channels. Are you familiar with those?

[00:25:30] Kevin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:25:32] Dave: So I’ve noticed in my own experiments on myself and certainly from reading lots of literature, mostly out of Europe, it seems like certain EMF are not good for cell membranes, particularly because of that voltage. They induce voltage on the cells, more calcium comes into the cell, which causes cell swelling and mitochondrial dysfunction. And it might be the dark side of tech. I think this is like a Neuromancer, to go back to cyberpunk, where there’s the black shakes that everyone gets. Is that Johnny Mnemonic? That was Johnny Mnemonic. Anyway, they get the shakes–

[00:26:11] Kevin: They merge after a while.

[00:26:13] Dave: Right. Are you worried about EMFs with implants?

[00:26:18] Kevin: I always thought of the body more from the electrical point of view. That’s just my background. So it’s a bit of an issue with doctors and medicine, which as you’ve said, is chemical. You have a headache. You take chemicals anyway. Why can’t we do it in terms of the electrical side of things, just apply and do exactly the same thing, but from the electric– all right. 

[00:26:46] I will compromise and agree with maybe electrochemical and electromechanical chemical. We can stretch it because science really has been historically put into little pigeonholes.  I know when I first did at school with valences and things like that, how many electrons are on this? And realizing, doing it in chemistry, it was one thing. And then you do it in physics, and it’s the same thing, but it’s looked at in a completely different way.

[00:27:19] And how you’re looking at the same thing, particularly with the human body, it is a whole mixture, electrochemical, mechanical. It’s all the different things together. And learning what chemical effects an electrical signal has, it’s only through experimentation that you can do that.

[00:27:40] And you’ve got to be a bit wary of it if you’re applying it too much, or too little, or whatever, but if it’s not going to work, if you don’t apply enough, then you have to turn up the volume as it were.

[00:27:50] Dave: If you knew that you had an increased risk of Alzheimer’s or cancer from the work you were doing, would you have done it anyway?

[00:28:02] Kevin: Oh yeah, no question.

[00:28:03] Dave: I don’t expect that. 

[00:28:07] Kevin:  There was a team of four neurosurgeons involved with the experiment, and the main one, Peter Teddy, took me to one side about three days before we actually went ahead with the implant and said, look, this could go wrong. If it doesn’t work very well, you could lose the use of your hand, and you don’t have to go ahead with it.

[00:28:35] And he wanted to be sure that I understood what risks were involved. As it turned out, it probably could have been worse because we were sending signals into my nervous system. Maybe it did affect my brain in a way that makes some problems more likely, and so on. We don’t know that.

[00:28:52] But as a scientist, I wanted to find out. Yes, it could cause something, and I would accept it. I would man up and say, okay, yes, I brought that onto myself doing the experiment. And you can’t be sure. It’s like the Jekyll and Hyde, is a very good science fiction thing. 

[00:29:13] Would Dr. Jekyll have drunk the potion before he became Mr. Hyde if he’d have known what was going to happen? Of course he would. That was the whole point. He wasn’t too sure. He thought one thing might happen. That was part of the experiment. And it’s nice when you’re faced with a Jekyll and Hyde moment yourself. Yeah, of course, you’d go for it. That’s what you’re there for despite the dangers. Yeah.

[00:29:40] Dave: What do you say when someone looks at you and says, but it might not be safe? 

[00:29:47] Kevin: Really, boy, you do get it in the university when you’re about to do something like that, the insurance guys. What’s the university going to be liable for? You’ve got to sign these documents to say you’re not going to suddenly come at them. Almost surely, it’s not going to be safe. I think you take it that it’s not going to be safe anyway.

[00:30:06] You’ve got a decision. Am I going to stay within the bounds of what we already know with the safety involved, or am I going to push the boundaries a little bit? That’s the scientist I am and was. It’s somebody who tries to push the boundaries a little bit.

[00:30:26] Dave: I love that answer. Learning new things isn’t safe.

[00:30:31] Kevin: No, it’s not. It’s not. You try and make it as safe as you can. You try and learn exactly as best you can. But with the nervous system and the brain, there is so much that we do not know. We’ve got a basic understanding of some of it. 

[00:30:48] But even nerve fibers, there’s so much more we need to learn, exactly the things that you were talking about. How much voltage can we apply? How much current can we apply that is safe, and so on and so forth? And you take other parts of the body, and we’re still in a mist of lack of knowledge.

[00:31:15] Dave: I’ve gotten to the point where if someone says, what if it’s not safe? What if it’s stagnant? That’s the opposite. So my new brand of coffee is called Danger Coffee, because who knows what you might do? You have to take a risk. You just take a calculated risk that is safe enough because it’s worth it.

[00:31:36] Kevin: I think that’s it. It’s a calculated risk. Yeah, yeah. But you don’t know. It’s calculated. In a sense, it’s a bit like that. Because you don’t have actual numbers that you can say, this is 20% safe, or 40%, or it’s 50-50 chance of working. You don’t really have that. You think you should be all right from your knowledge, the scientific knowledge, and other people’s experiments, as much as possible. 

[00:32:02] And that’s one thing with the BrainGate experiment that I’m a little bit disappointed to. Although the same implant has been used to help people who are paralyzed and so on, there’s not been a more enhancement set of experiments with the same implant, which, from a scientific point of view, that’s where you get your citations from, and so on. So I’m still waiting. So maybe yourself, or maybe one of the listeners today, if they fancy going for it, get on with it.

[00:32:40] Dave: The idea of human enhancement is something I’ve always believed in. I’ve been taking cognitive enhancers for 25 years. I’ve formulated some. The other thing is I do run electricity over my nervous system, and I’ve done that since, geez, over my brain starting in 1998, actually. I’m using Russian tech that was developed for their space program so you needed less sleep.

[00:33:05] The results are interesting. My nervous system is better myelinated than most humans, which means I have thicker insulation on my nervous system, which means electricity conducts more quickly with less resistance over my nervous system. Are you familiar with P300D, the EEG measure?

[00:33:25] Kevin: Not initially, no.

[00:33:27] Dave: This is a lag time on reality. So for normal humans over 30 or so, there’s about 350 milliseconds of lag time. So if you clap your hands, you think you hear it, but you don’t. Your nervous system gets it. But the first EEG signaling that your brain hearing centers got a signal, that there’s a third of a second that your body decides whether it’s worth showing it to you or not. Decides whether you should be startled. And then it hands you the sound, and it gets slower as you age. I’m still at 240 milliseconds, which is what the average 18-to 20-year-old has. So my response time–

[00:34:05] Kevin: This is you bragging about it at the moment.

[00:34:08] Dave: I am a longevity guy. It’s one of the many measures where my biology is healthier than it was when I was a 300-pound computer hacker. But what I’m saying is that external electrical stimulation can be an enhancement. And what you’re proposing is that internal stimulation with BrainGate could also be an enhancement. So I’m just drawing parallels between those two. And it’s still bragging.

[00:34:31] Kevin: For me, the big one, looking at enhancement, is communication, which, when you consider how we as humans communicate at the moment, it’s really pathetic in terms of what could be possible. At the moment, I have lots of thoughts, and you have lots of thoughts.

[00:34:50] Images, ideas, colors, feelings, all that sort of thing, emotions. And when we’re communicating, we convert them to mechanical signals, pressure waves, or movement, or whatever it happens to be, which is very slow and error prone. And then it gets converted back again for communication over wireless networks, or wires, or whatever.

[00:35:16] So the possibility of connections linking your brain up to the network directly, or your nervous system, if that works, to communicate was always one of my desires to investigate, and beliefs that, yes, we’re going to be able to do that in the future. So future communications will be by thoughts, or brain-to-brain communication.

[00:35:44] It was one thing my wife had for the experiment– two electrodes pushed into her nervous system. And we did send signals, simple signals, like open, close hand, and a Morse code type thing between nervous systems. And that worked fine. And it was great. Interestingly, I felt t quite intimate.

[00:36:08] Probably more than I had imagined when we actually did the experiment. We could feel something between the two of us. Hey, it’s really quite special. But I do believe that in terms of enhancement, for me, the big one, the goal to aim for that would change how we are, to simply regard us as humans, if we could do that, would be very difficult. We’d have something a lot more. Would be communicating directly between brains.

[00:36:39] Dave: There are ways to do that that certain groups have done since the ’80s without having to tap directly in. I’m an external signals guy, but there are ways to get a signal off of a brain and then show it to another brain via existing senses, to the extent that I actually don’t do that with almost anyone at my neuroscience clinic because when you do that, it’s hard to have a firewall.

[00:37:09] Kevin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:37:10] Dave: You pick up the other person’s trauma. You pick up their preconceived notions. You pick up their judgments. So if you could do it with an enlightened guru, that would be good for you, but bad for the guru because he’d probably pick up your crap and then have to go meditate for a while or whatever the guru did to become a guru.

[00:37:30] So it’s like unprotected sex. You want a brain condom if you’re going to do brain computer interface with another human. And right now, we don’t have to do it. And if we did know how to do it, as a computer security professional, most of our security systems aren’t that good. I don’t know that I want to bring computer interface because, seriously, Mark Zuckerberg is going to be putting spam in there, or at least listening to what I do, if not the NSA, right?

[00:37:56] Kevin: Back to the negative side, or using the technology for something you didn’t want. I’m thinking in terms of what I was describing. From an academic point of view, let’s do the research. Let’s make this happen because I think it would be fantastic. But, yes, it opens up all of the negatives you could potentially imagine. Yeah.

[00:38:17] Dave: In fact, I think it’s a Bruce Sterling story, one of the characters– which one was this? One of his epic ones. Probably Neuromancer. One of the characters notes that people are going crazy because they got malware in their eye implants, and they’re just seeing ads 24/7, and they would commit suicide.

[00:38:37] Kevin: Oh, yeah. 

[00:38:37] Dave: Because they just couldn’t get away from spam. And I’m like, oh. Yeah, spammers would do that. The same guys have been clogging our inboxes for both your and my entire lives of having inboxes. So I’m hopeful that as we look at this, we look at the risks in a way that I didn’t when I was younger, even when we were creating cloud computing before it had the name. What are we going to do with this?

[00:39:02] And I think all of the tech has ultimately helped the world, but it’s also created a chance, in fact, a probability of a dystopian future, unless we address leadership and transparency issues in society. 

[00:39:15] Have you looked at longevity, using any of your tech to make yourself live longer, have a really sharp brain when you’re 120? Do you play around with those ideas?

[00:39:24] Kevin: In a sense, no. One of the bunch of experiments we did had that in mind, and that was taking brain cells, which we did from a rat, which was easier, and then putting them in a little dish and letting them grow, culturing them, feeding them, keeping them in an incubator.

[00:39:45] The reason I’m saying this– sorry, I jumped ahead a bit– for me, the key for longevity is the brain. I think we can look at all the other components and say, okay, we can come up with an artificial heart if there’s problems, and we can replace this. But the brain is the critical one.

[00:40:06] And if that changes, is it really you that is living longer, or do you become some other creature over time? Can you stay as you, as it were, keep your brain going? So it was looking at what happens when brain cells die off? Can we add brain cells? 

[00:40:27] Which we were doing in a little dish, just to see if this little robot, which had rat brain– and rat brain cells don’t live as long as human brain cells, so could we replace some? Let’s kill them off in this region here. Let’s apply some new ones, but then the rat has lost the knowledge of what it was doing, of avoiding this thing coming towards it, or whatever, which was interesting. So it was to do with what you’re describing, but I’m jumping ahead there and saying the key issue for longevity, for me, is how the brain survives and what mode it survives in. Is it still you?

[00:41:04] Dave: Certainly, if you lose your brain, you’ve lost the game. And the more I’ve studied, the more I realized that 80% of the nerves from the heart go into the brain, and the heart is a sensing organ, much like the eyes. And so you look at cases like Donald Rumsfeld, one of the most celebrated war criminals of the recent while.

[00:41:24] He doesn’t have a heartbeat. He has a mechanical heart that is a continuous flow heart. And I just wonder if that’s connected to some of the crazy ass stuff that he’s done. I don’t know, but what I do know is that the heart-body-mind-gut connection in the brain, there’s a lot going on. We know that proton spin in the brain changes direction every time the heart beats.

[00:41:52] So there’s a quantum entanglement that’s in another signaling mechanism that’s faster than light even, that’s also going on. So it feels like we haven’t cracked the code enough to know that it’s the brain, but it’s a good assumption. And we know that if the brain goes, the rest of it isn’t worth it. But we don’t know that if you only have the brain, it’s going to be enough. I would want to academically pursue that and figure it out. I just don’t want to keep my brain in a jar trying to talk because that might suck.

[00:42:18] Kevin: Yeah. I had, few years ago, a catheter ablation. I had atrial fibrillation going all over the place at different times. And the catheter ablation, which was part of pathway to what you’re talking about. The treatment was going into the heart and zapping electrical pathways in the heart.

[00:42:43] So to stop it fibrillating, I found it absolutely– didn’t really know about it until I had it, which for me, it worked just fine. But the way the heart is operating, electrically rather than mechanically, or chemically, or anything else, was absolutely fascinating for me to find out first hand. First heart, I guess.

[00:43:07] Dave: Yeah, the timing systems– there’s so much interesting cross systems talk in the body that I think with AI, it won’t be that hard to untangle a lot of. 

[00:43:16] Back in 2018, biohacking was added to the Merriam Webster’s dictionary as a new word in the English language. And people call me the father of biohacking because I started the movement and all years before that. And you, in the same year, in a TEDx talk, said that biohacking was an entry level point into cyborgs. Talk to me about what you meant, what you think about that.

[00:43:39] Kevin: I think it’s more of a philosophical thing than a technological. Maybe a bit of both. You can have different concepts of cyborgs. I’m not one who believes that you have somebody who has part technology and part human and it’s got to be a cyborg. Otherwise, just wearing glasses or riding a bike, you’re a cyborg. 

[00:44:02] So I’m looking at a cyborg as maybe a more science fiction type of cyborg that has abilities that humans don’t have that does involve a more semi-permanent or permanent connection between the technology which is integrated into the human, or the human which is integrated into technology.

[00:44:24] So it’s something like that. So that’s how I would see biohacking as being an entry level cyborg. You’re starting to get into it, and you can do some things, and if you have an implant or you have something connected into your body, as you were describing with learning where North is, and so on, and so forth, then that’s how you’re getting in that direction, but in a basic way. But ultimately, it is more the science fiction, the Arnold Schwarzenegger-type version, or whatever it happens to be, or the Neuromancer, and so on.

[00:44:59] Dave: Yeah, the six-million-dollar man. I think it was the first TV show I know that–

[00:45:02] Kevin: Yeah, yeah.

[00:45:03] Dave: Had that of stuff. There’s some interesting questions that come up around what happens with cyborgs because in the biohacking movement– so I started it in 2011, was the first blog post with the definition, and the first conference was in 2013, 2014 maybe. Yeah, 2013.

[00:45:24] So all of that, it’s progressing, and then a group called Grinders came out. And these are mostly people who do tattoos and body piercings, and they started making their own implants. And I thought about getting a magnet on one of my fingers because you can actually sense electrical fields. That’d be really cool.

[00:45:42]  I did start a medical testing company in 2008 that looked at immune rejection of implant materials. And I recognize my body is magnetic, and it just like, I don’t know the unforeseen consequences of having a magnetic finger. I think I’m going to wait on that one. What’s your take on the Grinder movement? Are you part of it, and is that where you see biohacking going?

[00:46:04] Kevin: I don’t really see myself as part of anything like that, but I’m interested in it. There’s a group in Pittsburgh– if any of are you listening in, hi, how are you doing? Some of the things I think they do are highly dangerous, and I think you must be crazy putting that into your body to find out. But that’s their forte.

[00:46:27] But other things, I think, is very interesting. And even getting things to light up into the skin and so on, it looks pretty cool to me perhaps more from an artistic point of view than a scientific point of view some of it. Good luck to them. Power to their elbow, or whatever they’re highlighting.

[00:46:50] Where we’re failing at the moment is for guys like that to pull that somehow into the academic world, because I’m sure they’re getting some really good results that have scientific interest, but we’re not pulling them in there, and that’s not them physically. It’s the results I’m talking about.

[00:47:12] There should be a journal of biohacking, or something like that, so that people can come at that journal, perhaps from an artistic, perhaps from a medical, perhaps from a scientific [Inaudible] background and get results from experiments like that. And it would have to be a more experimental journal and reporting on things like that, but we don’t have that.

[00:47:35] So, no, I’m interested in what they’re doing. Some of them, I think, I’m Facebook friends with, a number of guys down there in Pittsburgh, and other places. But I wouldn’t classify myself as being one of the Grinders or anything like that.

[00:47:52] Dave: You’re adjacent to them.

[00:47:53] Kevin: I just what I do. If they want to make me an honorary Grinder or whatever, then, fine, go for it. Yeah.

[00:48:00] Dave: It’s your new title. Honorary Grinder and Emeritus professor of–

[00:48:04] Kevin: Yes, Emeritus Grinder, I think.

[00:48:07] Dave: There you go. Same thing. Having had enough surgeries and enough medical issues in my life, I don’t really like the idea of having more implants. And as a computer hacker, if there’s a computer in there, it can and will be hacked. It’s inevitable. And you might not like what happens if you can’t get it out. 

[00:48:33] There are cases you’ve probably heard of, a few people who have electronic eyes that replace their eyes. These are people who were blind. And the company that made the eyes went out of business. And so now they have unsupported hardware in their eyes and no way of getting it out.

[00:48:49] And my call would be for lawmakers in whatever country they’re in, and I don’t believe there is a global law, or that there should be, and anyone who tries to do that is probably not your friend. But in each country, there needs to be something that says, if you have implants that you are selling your source code, all of it must be placed in escrow. And if the company goes out of business, it automatically becomes public source.

[00:49:18] This is why it’s called biohacking, not some other word. Because hackers are willing to create Linux, which is what’s driving our conversation today. So if we don’t like it, then Microsoft won’t tell us what’s under the covers. We’ll just make our own operating system. So if I’m going to have any implant ever, full source code access. Nothing hidden in the cloud, nothing that I can’t change, because then I will know if I’ve been hacked.

[00:49:40] And if it’s under those conditions, there’s no way in hell I’m going to do it. And because of the EMF problems, I think I’m going to wait a little while because the evidence is mounting more and more that having, especially Wi-Fi signals inside mitochondrially drenched tissues probably doesn’t lead to good outcomes.

[00:49:59] I think it’s a hackable problem. We can enhance our biology to be resilient to that. We can turn it off. We can actually change the signal so it’s a beneficial signal. A few companies I’m working with do that. But until those are solved, I don’t want stuff in my head or anywhere else in my body, but I want a laser eyeball because it’d be cool.

[00:50:19] Kevin: Yeah, no, I agree with you with the source code and the technology involved in it. Exactly with what you’re saying. There’s got to be some way of having backups, or replacements, or whatever it happens to be. I’ve been involved with surgeons with the deep brain stimulation, which is a commercial product.

[00:50:37] To an extent, they do have some of that, but the companies that are involved, perhaps financially, seem to be pretty sound at the present time. I say that, and that’ll probably put the death knell on them. But it would be an issue, I think. I think it could be a problem, even in that field, if the worst was to happen and there were company problems.

[00:51:00] So it would be good to have exactly what you’re saying. When you’ve got something implanted, when it’s life-dependent, or who you are dependent no, that you need to have some regulations in place to make sure that this can’t happen, or they can’t just close down whatever and the technology’s gone.

[00:51:22] Dave: This is a thing that’s a constitutional amendment-level protection in my home in Canada, charter of rights situations where, number one, the source code’s available, and number two, no one, under any circumstances, even for your own safety, has the right to force you to have any cybernetic enhancement against your will. 

[00:51:45] And given the last three years where people were forced and coerced into having medical treatments, despite what the Nuremberg Code said, and people have different opinions about that, I don’t care what your opinion is. The bottom line is, it is always wrong to force people to do something medical that they don’t want to do, even if there’s a good argument for it, including their own safety, as we talked about before.

[00:52:08] I can see a very dark future where if we could force people to get one injection, we can also force them to get brain implants. That’s not the world that I am creating. In fact, I won’t allow that world to get created. So I’m hopeful that as we move forward with improving ourselves, as we always have throughout all of history, that we’re mindful of this.

[00:52:28] And with that in mind, you have a great track record of being very early, being an innovator, as do I. Tell me your view 25 years from now of what it’s going to look like with cyborgs and humans. 

[00:52:43] Kevin: I think the big one is the issues with AI. How is AI going to be used per se? So this is not answering the question directly that you’ve said, but how far will AI go, and how will it be relied on and used per se, for itself and given control over this, that, and the other? And particularly with networking, it is being networked more and more with a network. Very often, we can’t really tell if this happens, what are the consequences going to be?

[00:53:15] It’s very difficult to work that out. And in a military scenario, if that is linked in with a financial setup, etc., there could be big dangers, as I think some people in the AI field are recognizing. So we’re getting away from the use of AI in a machine that you can switch off and switch on, and you can decide when it’s going to play and when it’s not going to play.

[00:53:39] This is something that is in control of a scenario, and it could be dangerous. I think then there is a need to move to the cyborg setup. The AI is not working alone, but it’s working as part of you, as a network. Then we’re going into a science fiction scenario. Is it iRobot even, or is it the global network– whatever. Is it the matrix that we’re talking about in the future? And would it occur in 25 years’ time?

[00:54:16] I think history is littered by scientists making miscalculations of how long something is going to take or whether it’s going to be, or whether it’s not going to be. Rather than being a cyborg problem, I’m changing the question to being, it depends how quickly and how far AI is going to be integrated in everyday life. At the moment, it’s going very quickly, but–

[00:54:44] Dave: The reason I started laughing like that is in another life, I was the first person to sell anything over the Internet, and it was a t-shirt that said, caffeine, my drug of choice. And it was over Usenet before the browser was created. And I was an entrepreneur magazine when I weighed 300 pounds, and I’m wearing this double extra large t-shirt. 

[00:55:05] I was just trying to pay my tuition. It was a small business. It wasn’t a big thing. E-commerce wasn’t a word. But they interviewed me, and I said, oh, in five years, there’ll be no more need for junk mail. Let’s be able to get all of our communications on email. And that was, I don’t know, 1993. Was that 30 years ago? And I still get crap in the mail, so clearly, I’m one of those people that history is littered with. That’s why you made me laugh.

[00:55:31] Kevin: I’ve got a better story. In ’97, I went to, the World Economic Forum in Switzerland with my wife. The very first day that we were there, we met up with some guy called Jeff Bezos, who had got this–

[00:55:51] Dave: Back in the day. Right.

[00:55:52] Kevin: Website called Amazon, which I’d never really heard of much before. And formerly, as we were part of the system, had to go to dinner with Jeff and his wife, and we were sitting there talking before we mingled with the other people from different companies and that. And so he asked me, what are you doing? Oh, I’m into robotics, and implants, and so on and so forth.

[00:56:21] He seemed to, I don’t want to say excited about it, but interested anyway. I asked him what he’s doing. We’ve got this website, which at the time, was selling books. That’s really all it did. And he asked me, what do you think? Should we expand it? And so my advice was, no, don’t bother doing that. Exactly what you’re saying. I thought, no, it’s not really going to just stick with the books and make things work for that. You’d be safe on that.

[00:56:50] Dave: Do you still go to the World Economic Forum? Was that like a one-time thing, or is that a regular thing?

[00:56:54] Kevin: For me, it was a one-off. It was interesting, but not a regular thing that I had to do.

[00:57:01] Dave: There’s some interesting schisms there because there were two founders of the World Economic Forum. There was Klaus Schwab, and the other guy a dropped out out of disgust because it was being used in a way that he didn’t like. And they’re big proponents of transhumanism, and I think, given their public statements, they’re the people who would happily put implants in you so that they could feed you bugs.

[00:57:27] I don’t think they’re working for the good guys right now, but maybe when they were founded, they did. You never know if someone goes or doesn’t go what their motivations are because if you’re working to fix a wrong, you might hang out with people doing bad stuff.

[00:57:47] So there are people who get really triggered by that idea, and I’m curious about everything including transhumanism. I do not believe that a dystopian future is what we want. And also believe that if I am in control of my own biology, it’s my right to put any hardware I want in my body. And that I’d be really stupid if I put hardware in my body that someone else controlled because that’s a bad idea. Just imagine if the guys who do TikTok’s algorithm were in charge of what’s in your brain. That’s not good.

[00:58:20] Kevin: Yeah, I agree with you 90%. I’m thinking, again, of medical devices whereif you did end up with Parkinson’s disease and you’re faced with a company saying, we can put something in your brain that allows you to live relatively normal life, and it’s going to apply signals when it thinks that signals should be applied, then how much would you trust them? 

[00:58:48] Would you say, no, I want to stay like I am, which could be pretty awful? Or do I want to go for this? Because you trust them that they know what they’re doing, and they’ve tried and tested, and there’s many people before you that seem to be all right with it, and so on and so forth. 

[00:59:05] Dave: All right. I would totally trust them as long as I can either remove the stuff or I had source code access if I couldn’t remove it. That would be the thing. 

[00:59:16] Kevin: Have it removed, or somebody can remove it– 

[00:59:18] Dave: Yeah, it knows that it could be removed safely, versus those eyes that once they’re in, they’re in. And when I look at AI, and cybernetics, and cyborgs in the future, what I see happening is that there will be large numbers of AI systems vying for your attention, and they will be the best at manipulating you better than the best sociopath.

[00:59:41] In fact, it’s called marketing. We’re pretty good at it already. What we don’t have yet is what I like to call cognitive firewalls. So when we do have augmented reality glasses that you’d want to wear, or even just running on your machine, there’s no reason that every web page you see shouldn’t be rewritten according to my rules for AI to only show me what I want. 

[01:00:02] There’s no reason that every YouTube video shouldn’t be automatically translated into two paragraphs of text instead of watching 10 minutes to see some guy with a weird face that’s probably auto-generated anyway. So it’s up to us to arm ourselves with AI that actually is used to filter reality so that we only get the information we want in a way that’s not manipulative.

[01:00:21] And so if you could have that built in, if you do, it’s called subconscious processing, and it’s very energy efficient because what we’re both seeing and sensing right now is probably 0.1% of all the signals coming into our body gets filtered by your body. I need augmented filtering that’s on board or off board to help me ignore stuff that doesn’t matter and allow me to choose where my attention goes.

[01:00:46] And that’s the attention economy that Wired has written about and everything else. I just want to be the one who trumps what all these bad systems are doing so that I don’t get distracted by nonsense and can stay focused on stuff I care about. Does that sound like it might fit in your future?

[01:01:01] Kevin: I’d go for it. Yeah. I’ll sign up for that. Where do I sign? Yeah.

[01:01:04] Dave: All right. Somebody come start a company with me on that. Not like I don’t have enough companies. But yeah, that’s a blending of computer security, cognitive science, and AI. And it’s the equivalent of my old company, Trend Micro.

[01:01:18] Kevin: Yeah.

[01:01:18] Dave: I need antivirus software for my mind right now, not just for my computer.

[01:01:24] Kevin: See, just as well, we didn’t meet up ourselves at the World Economic Forum. Otherwise, if you asked me what I thought for the future of the company, it would have gone nowhere. Got it completely wrong.

[01:01:36] Dave: I’m sure that’s why Jeff asked lots and lots of different people. And Amazon was a big customer of Exodus Communications where I was a co-founder of their consulting business. And it was an amazing time in the ’90s for the expansion. We’re doing that right now with AI, and we’re right at the beginning. It’s 1993 right now for longevity. 

[01:01:54] Kevin: Yes, yes.

[01:01:55] Dave: And the Internet really hit in ’97, is when it just went crazy. And so right now, the longevity business, the number of small companies I’ve talked with who are going to add five, 10, 15 years to human life, oh my God. The next five years is going to be the biggest ever, and it’s going to make the Internet look small. And once we have 200-year lifespans, I’m going to need that cognitive firewall. Otherwise, I’ll spend the whole time watching TikTok.

[01:02:23] Kevin: Yeah. And this is where it becomes very difficult predicting what’s going to be big, which direction is going to go in, and that’s where Jeff Bezos got it right, I guess, as far as Amazon is– and I got it hopelessly wrong. That’s why I’m not extremely loaded and very successful in business, but no problem. Good luck with it yourself. Hopefully, you get the longevity. You do the Bezos as far as longevity is concerned.

[01:02:51] Dave: I don’t need to be that absurdly wealthy, and if I am, I will be using it for the greater good. That’s for sure. Kevin, it’s been an honor to talk with you. I’ve literally known about your work for 23 years, and we finally got to connect. So thanks for being a pioneer. Thanks for being dangerous.

[01:03:08] Kevin: Fantastic. It’s gone so quickly. I didn’t believe it. 

[01:03:12] Dave: It has. And I truly see you as just a pioneer in being human because you’re saying, it was worth it. I’m going to take the risk, and I’m going to see what happens. And you were willing to accept the risk in order to receive the knowledge. And you did, and you shared it, and it’s academically amazing. 

[01:03:34] And for listeners, there is a dark transhumanist future that’s possible. There’s also the possibility of enhancing your ability to show up in the world in a magical way. And I am well aware of the risks. You be should be too.

[01:03:48] Kevin: Because there’s a link in your brain up to a computer, I think, opens up lots of positives, and some of them, the possibility of thinking in more dimensions. I know I talked about communication before, but the possibility of doing that, just that one thing, you can think in maybe just 10 dimensions, whatever, which a computer of course can do. It can process in all sorts of dimensions.

[01:04:15] This is, again, science fiction, I guess, but it can change how we look at the universe around us. Perhaps it will allow us to travel much better than we can think of traveling at the moment. Because we’ve gone almost nowhere in the universe. Just to the moon, which is like an outside toilet for the Earth. There’s hardly anything there.

[01:04:39] The possibility of doing the Star Trek and travelling out into distant galaxies and so on. It’s got to be easier than actually having to almost pedal into space. So I just hope that we can understand the universe around us in a much more complex way if we link our brains up with technology.

[01:04:59] Dave:  Now you got real metaphysical on us. And there are ways to do that with tech. I referenced one a little bit earlier. You can merge with another person with some of the stuff I’ve done, but those are the same things that mystics do in caves, and the old knowledge from Ayurveda, and Tantra, and yoga, and advanced Zen meditation, which I’ve done.

[01:05:23] Yeah, there’s levels that we don’t normally access. I think it was accessing your operating system and seeing all the stuff that the body throws out before it shows you. I do think brain computer interfaces are a way to do that, whether they’re external or internal. 

[01:05:38] And I’ve had profound dissolving into the universe experiences just using electrodes on my head, putting no signal in. Just turning off useless signals in my brain so I could access things. So there are levels where I think we can go. They tend to look a lot like yogic city powers and things like that, but some people are going there with or without tech. It just seems like the tech makes it easier, and it’s probably better than ayahuasca.

[01:06:02] Kevin: Oh, yeah.

[01:06:05] Dave: Wow. I’m so excited to hear your thoughts on all this. And I love it that you talked about perceiving reality in a different way, through enhancements and augmentation. I think it’s possible. In fact, it’s one of the reasons that I believe we need to know what’s going on on the backend, because imagine if that was possible and some developer turned it off because they didn’t think it was useful. I don’t want that too.

[01:06:29] Kevin: Yeah. Completely, which for sure they’re going to. Yeah.

[01:06:33] Dave: Thanks again, Kevin. It has been a profound pleasure and an honor.

[01:06:37] Kevin: Great to meet up with you.

[00:00:05] Dave: You’re listening to The Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today, we’re going to talk about one of my favorite biohacking topics. It’s hormones. I’m particularly interested in this because as a guy, I had less testosterone than my mom when I was 26. And I became an expert in anti-aging, ran an anti-aging nonprofit group, went on testosterone replacement, medically supervised to physiological levels, and it changed my life.

[00:00:35] And I recommend everyone, even if you’re only 20, that you get your testosterone levels checked, and your other sex hormones, whether you’re a man or a woman, so you know what your baselines are. And I’ve talked about this in many of my books, but we’re seeing more problems today in women. And in my own life, when I decided it was time to have children, about 17, 18 years ago, my wife, at the time, was infertile and had hormone problems and is a medical doctor.

[00:01:06] So we went deep on this, and that was my very first book, was on fertility and hormones in women and men. And it’s been an area of passion ever since because hormones control your mood, and your energy levels, and your happiness. It turns out, I know this is news to some people, but women are not just little men, and men are not large women.

[00:01:27] We have different hormone levels, but we do have similar hormones. There’s very different levels. And women, as we all know, have a very different cycle than men, and there’s life cycles as well. So I wanted to invite someone on who has a very interesting blend of being a board certified chiropractor, a doctor of natural medicine, and a clinical nutritionist.

[00:01:48] Oh my god, are we going to talk about food and lifestyle and hormones in women? Yes, we are. And you could call this functional medicine, but it’s a unique spin on it. And her name is Dr. Francesca LeBlanc. Francesca, welcome to The Human Upgrade.

[00:02:05] Francesca: Hi, thank you for having me.

TIMESTAMP 1

[00:02:07] Dave: Tell me your story. I find a lot of my women practitioner friends who focus on hormones, they had to learn it the hard way because they were dealing with it themselves.

[00:02:18] Francesca: Right. And I think I’m no different than the dozens upon dozens of practitioners who started out on a journey to wellness when they didn’t know that’s what they were on. It starts with brain fog, mood swings, irregular cycles, insomnia, depression, anxiety. 

[00:02:37] And being from a mostly medically-minded family, I’m a very, very type A and compliant patient, and I followed all of the normal standard courses of action in the allopathic model and would just spun wheels for years upon years upon years. 

[00:02:57] And all I could remember was that one day, the last day that I felt “normal,” I felt good, and I was chasing that. So when I really felt like I was just not getting anywhere, I started to shift my thinking. And of course, schooling and career changes helped me broaden my knowledge on holistic avenues of treatment. 

[00:03:24] So then again, years and years and years of that, and finally, diagnoses of things like adrenal fatigue, and PCOS, and estrogen dominance. And that’s where I thought, okay, this is a problem. This is a problem because these are things that are not talked about.

[00:03:42] And it’s even in 2023, I’m still getting patients that these discussions still aren’t happening, that there might be hormone imbalances at play. So that’s really what motivated me and led me to where I am.

[00:03:55] Dave: We first met, I think, five years ago, but I’m trying to remember what conference it was. You were maybe just a little bit pregnant at the time.

[00:04:03] Francesca: I was gigantic. Let’s be honest. Yeah, so we met– I think it was Mindshare. 

[00:04:08] Dave: Oh, it was JJ Virgin’s Mindshare Conference. I’ve been going for years. 

[00:04:12] Francesca: In this California dry heat. And I was struggling to get down the steps of that certain meeting hall. And he came up right behind me and helped me down the steps, and we started chatting, and my daughter, lo and behold, was due on your birthday, and we were chatting away, and I had no idea who you were. I had never heard of Bulletproof Coffee before. I had never heard of biohacking before.

[00:04:45] Dave: In 2018? So you were living under a rock or something.

[00:04:48] Francesca: I know. For real. I’m not kidding. But then, let me tell you, it was like the gateway had opened because once I had Bulletproof Coffee, don’t tell anyone I was pregnant and I drank that, but I was like, oh wow, okay. Something’s up here. And then that is really where things change for me. P.S. She wasn’t born on your birthday. She decided to come a week early, but I started consuming pretty much all of your content that I could.

[00:05:17] Dave: Oh, thank you. To be honest, it’s an honor when people who are medically trained are willing to consider my ideas. I lecture to, I think, 3,000 doctors at the American Academy of Anti-aging medicine, and I just walked up, and I said, guys, I’m an unlicensed biohacker.  And the benefit of that is you can’t take away my license for saying something.

[00:05:43] And half the room was like, yes, and the other half of the room was like, screw you, you unqualified hack. But they don’t understand if you call me a hack, you’re still saying I’m a doctor, so I don’t mind it. Or quack, I guess. But whatever the deal is, thank you, with all of your training and working with patients, for being willing to give my stuff a try. 

[00:06:04] It does help. It works differently, but similarly for men and women. The amount of coffee, timing of intermittent fasting, and all, it’s different. And I really do my best because I started my journey as an author, and now it’s, what, four New York Times bestsellers, with a book on pregnancy, fertility, and healthy babies, because if you were really healthy in the womb, you probably won’t need a lot of the biohacks that I teach.

TIMESTAMP 2

[00:06:35] Dave: So let’s start with hormones and pregnancy. Are you seeing in your practice hormonal changes that affect fertility? Are they better? Are they worse? What’s happening in the world of hormones and fertility?

[00:06:48] Francesca: I don’t actually see a lot of pregnant patients. I see them when they are, of course, frustrated because they’ve tried several allopathic treatments because there’s so many. And then when we start talking about things like PCOS, which I feel like is one of the big drivers, it’s really an unspoken silent cause that I don’t think a lot of women are aware of.

[00:07:20] It’s just so common because of insulin resistance with 60% of women or more walking around with it. The two go hand in hand. And when women between the ages of, let’s say, 30 and 37, spinning wheels, doing fertility treatments, we’re not getting really to the root cause of why they got there in the first place. So it’s frustrating and costly. 

[00:07:47] So I think that more discussions need to be had around, what hormone imbalances have you been walking around with, maybe since you were 18, maybe since you were 16? It’s not the model. The model seems to me, as always, the same– a bandaid.

[00:08:06] Dave: It has been the very profitable business model ever since Morris Fishbein started the American Medical Association to create a cabal, or a trade group, or a monopoly on chemical-based medicine versus all of the other types of medicine like chiropractic, acupuncture, herbalism, all of the stuff that now science really does show have a applicability teams. It works. There’s different ways that you can solve a problem. But you mentioned PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome. What is it, and what causes it? And why is it so common in women in their fertile years?

[00:08:46] Francesca: You have some different forms. There’s two schools of thought. People that believe that there are different forms of PCOS, and I’m by no means a PCOS expert. I should put that up front, but I think that the inflammatory component to most hormone imbalances is really what drives, is the root.

[00:09:11] And where’s inflammation coming from? At the end of the day, whether it’s PCOS, whether it’s PMS, whether it’s PMDD, where is this inflammation coming from? It’s coming in the foundation. The foundation’s broken. What is happening in the gut? What are you not absorbing? What are you leaking out? And why is your liver so sluggish? 

[00:09:31] And I think if you can figure out where the inflammation’s coming from, then you can start to break this down. Because again, a lot of what I hear at least in practice is the traditional abdominal ultrasound for PCOS that really then does nothing because doctors don’t believe there’s anything that you can really do. It’s just the reality.

[00:09:56] Dave: I have definitely spent a lot of time researching PCOS because that was one of the things that was preventing me from being a father. In fact, my wife at the time, and she’s my wife of 17 years, and friend, and co-parent, and things like that. Today, a lot of listeners know of Dr. Lana because we co-authored that book on fertility and just because I talk about my life on the show.

[00:10:21] She had PCOS, and her medical colleagues had said, you’re infertile. You’re not having kids. And I’m like, now we can hack that. So it was nutritional changes. It was detoxing, and it was the role of things like Candida, and mold toxins, and oxalates, and all these other things that happen. 

[00:10:39] And it’s funny because my hormones were broken for the same basic reasons, even though mine got broken in my own life before we met, and hers got broken before we met as well. That was almost like 20 years ago.

[00:10:52] What I realized is that if you want to be healthy, it doesn’t matter if you’re 19 years old or 69 years old. It just doesn’t matter if you cannot get rid of the toxins that are present, or you’re absorbing more than you’re supposed to, or you have these onboard infections. They’re going to jack up your hormones and probably a bunch of other stuff. And it sounds like those are some of the common causes of hormone imbalance.

Timestamp 4

[00:11:20] Dave: In your practice, what are the big things that are damaging detox pathways? What’s slowing that down? 

[00:11:28] Francesca: I live in the Deep South. I live in mold. So I have yet–

[00:11:33] Dave: I live in the Deep South. You got all southern on us right there.

[00:11:38] Francesca: So women that I work with here in Louisiana, nine out of 10 have mold toxicity, and it’s mind-blowing. Every single time, and it’s fascinating to me, but it is facts of the level of environmental mold. And it’s always the same. Everyone panics. Is there mold in my home? And it’s scary because you want to associate black mold, that visible water damage mold, with what’s happening, but it’s simply environmental, and it’s the mold that you can’t see that’s building up over time.

[00:12:13] The chicken and the egg. The mold came first, or the heavy metals. We can’t figure out what came first. We just know that one is slowing down detoxification and the other’s complicating it equally. So heavy metals, again, here in the Deep South– now, I grew up in the Northeast, and I don’t think that the water quality was that much better, but here in the Deep South, the city water is rich with heavy metals. Women are literally taking metal baths, and breathing in mold, and they feel terrible all the time.

[00:12:51] AD BREAK 

[00:12:52] Dave: Let’s see. In my own past, I had actually brain damage from toxic mold, but it wasn’t just that because some toxic molds make xenoestrogens that are a 1,000 times more estrogenic than the kind of estrogens that we make in our bodies. I had a really hard time losing weight, the 100 pounds I had to lose.

[00:13:17] I worked out. I dieted. I went to the ends of the earth, all of my effort and willpower. And I believed that it was because I just didn’t have enough willpower to eat even less. I came across research on zearalenone. Is that one of the mold toxins you’ve worked with?

[00:13:36] Francesca: Yeah.

[00:13:37] Dave: Talk to me about what that does with weight gain.

[00:13:39] Francesca: Estrogen dominance is one of the leading hormone imbalances that complicate weight loss for women, and its root cause is mold in this mold family. It’s an emotional rollercoaster for women because when you talk about the eat less, exercise more, and all of that, when we get to this root cause of mold, this is a journey. 

[00:14:01] This isn’t a, we’re going to apply these binders, and in three weeks, four weeks, this is what you can expect. Sometimes this is a three-to-six-month process because we have no idea how long or how much of this mold has been in the liver creating all this inflammation and brain inflammation.

[00:14:22] That’s what you experienced as well. It’s a journey. It’s frustrating, and it is so closely related to estrogen dominance definitely here in the South and the other moldier states like Florida and Texas. So we see a lot of that.

[00:14:40] Dave: When I did the documentary on toxic mold– and guys, if you’re new to the show, you might not know. moldymovie.com. It’s a gift. It’s a professionally made documentary. The soundtrack is actually from the lead keyboardist and vocalist for Electric Light Orchestra. It has its own soundtrack, and it was as professional as I knew how to do at the time.

[00:14:59] And I traveled around the country, and I talked to leading experts in mold, and people who were affected. And what you realize is that we think of the South as a mold bomb, moldville, and it’s consistently moldy because it’s just wet. But the mold there usually isn’t that bad. The mold levels are there, but the individual species aren’t that bad.

[00:15:20] But if you go to where I grew up, in Albuquerque, or you go to Phoenix, that is desert mold. It’s dormant until there’s moisture, and then it’s hyper aggressive. Everything in the desert wants to kill you– rattlesnakes and scorpions- because it’s a hostile environment. So if you go to a moldy place in Phoenix, it will trash you more than a moldy place in Louisiana, except for New Orleans.

[00:15:42] New Orleans has its own unique species after all the chemicals got mixed around. I generally don’t want to go to New Orleans because you’re just going to get sick, even if you’re highly resilient like I am now, because there’s just so much mold, and it’s like mutated mold, like Spider-Man meets mold. Do you see that as well?

[00:15:59] Francesca: Yes. I don’t go to New Orleans. I do not. I have to go to New Orleans if there is a family function. I’m pretty resilient as well, but I cannot wait to get out of there. I start to feel it. I really do.

[00:16:18] Dave: The guy who did a lot of the air testing for Moldy Movie, let’s see, this is John and Laura Riera from American Air Testing, if memory serves. They owned a bunch of rental properties in New Orleans. And after, the hurricanes and all, they just said, we’re going to exit that area because we can’t keep them mold-free anymore.

[00:16:35] So we are changing the environment around us with things like glyphosate, which, in studies, makes mold worse, and just with things like radio frequencies, like EMFs. You probably wouldn’t know this if you’re listening to this, but a lot of the citric acid that’s in food comes from Aspergillus fermentation, which doesn’t mean it’s necessarily bad for you, but how do they make this modified form of Aspergillus produce more of its toxin?

[00:17:03] The toxin being, in this case, citric acid, they expose it to radio frequencies and EMF that pisses off the mold, so it’s more toxic. So I think we’ve got something going on in the world around us where you just don’t want that. If you’re near a military base, you’ve got all the metal pollution. And you go to San Diego and breathe the mold there.

[00:17:22] That’s the worst place in the country as far as I can tell. And that’s where the most radar is from all the military stuff there. So there’s something going on where our hormones are being disrupted by mold. And if you get mold, you’re much more likely to get Candida. Talk to me about Candida and what that does.

[00:17:39] Francesca: I explained to my patients. If you think about the way the gut and the liver work is a lot like your kitchen sink. You’ve got your sink. That’s the gut. And you have your garbage disposal. That’s the liver. And if one is clogged, how well does the other work? So we have to understand, even if we’re going to go through a mold protocol, that we are also going to go through some sort of intestinal permeability protocol at the same time for that reason. 

[00:18:10] Candida is, if not the most common gut fungus in women, it’s overlooked because traditionally, the symptoms that would be normally associated with, let’s just say, yeast infections aren’t there. It’s not that anymore. For women to come to the realization that we have a fungal issue when they don’t actually have those traditional textbook symptoms, again, it’s a journey, it’s a process, and it’s a little bit of a rollercoaster because sometimes things have to get a little bit rocky before they get better.

[00:18:50] Dave: There’s also a major link between candida infections and PCOS. They go together. And there’s also a link between, ooh, a plant-based diet and PCOS because it turns out that if you eat a lot of these plants that are full of oxalates, which I read about in my most recent book, they can also contribute to PCOS.

[00:19:14] So you end up getting candida, which raises oxalate levels and causes inflammation, and then you get extra calcification there because you’re eating spinach, and kale, and those things you think are healthy, and then you’re wondering what the heck is going on. You’ve got toxic metals. You’ve got Candida.

[00:19:32] If you have toxic metals, the body will allow Canida to grow because Candida will store mercury instead of putting it in your brain. So your body is just swimming in toxins and saying, I’ll let this bad thing happen because it’s not as bad as this other bad thing. And it’s trying to balance all this out, and at the end of the day, you’re anxious and feel like crap all the time. Your hormones don’t work, and you’re infertile. And this is actually the story of living in the US right now.

[00:19:54] Francesca: Yeah. Because you jumped to the diet. You panic. You’re desperate, and you say, I’m cutting out all meat. I’m going plant-based. I did that. Okay. I’m one of them. And then I was vegan just like you. 

[00:20:09] Dave: No kidding. 

[00:20:09] Francesca: Yeah, because I was desperate. I was sick. And, of course, for six months, I was skinny, and it was great until my hair started to fall out.

[00:20:20] Dave: Yeah, malnourishment is great for the first month.

[00:20:23] Francesca: Right. It’s all fun and games. So your hair starts falling out. And that’s the truth. I think that that is what is happening in America. We think that it’s immediately dietary. If I take this all-encompassing, follow this protocol, everything’s going to go away. And sometimes it makes us sick.

Timestamp 4

[00:20:46] Dave: What do you eat today to keep your hormones healthy?

[00:20:48] Francesca: So I’m balanced through and through. I found– 

[00:20:53] Dave: Balanced? What do you mean? You have kale and spinach?

[00:20:56] Francesca: I actually don’t. And I use kale chips, but, following you, I stopped eating kale. I stopped doing a lot of things ever since I started following you. But I find that I thrive at very high quantities of protein prior to, let’s say, three o’clock. So again, I’m– 

[00:21:21] Dave: Are we talking bean protein and bugs or a specific kind of protein?

[00:21:26] Francesca: So I can tolerate eggs. So I do an egg white protein shake, then I eat beef, chicken, fish for my meal. And I do eat some dairy grass-fed, high-fat yogurt. And by three o’clock, I’ve met pretty much what I feel like is my protein goal through a lot of trial and error. 

[00:21:52] Now, on the days when I don’t do that, my blood sugar goes to hell in a hand basket. And from there, everything else starts to break down. I’m so dialed in at this point, I can almost pinpoint what’s happening. And the truth is that sometimes we want to enjoy life as well. So we might go to dinner and indulge a little bit, but I certainly pay for it.

[00:22:19] So I have to be very strategic about my protein, fat, and fiber. That, to me, is most important. And whatever you favor as your protein source– and I tell women that all the time, because if they really don’t want to eat a lot of beef, then it’s just, mix it up with what’s left, but cutting out animal proteins entirely, I don’t think, is smart when it comes to hormone balance.

[00:22:47] Dave: What do you think about when you see these school boards mandating some vegan days at school for kids?

[00:22:57] Francesca: So I think it’s a total disaster because most of these children are approaching those pubescent years. And I think that it is a little like Pandora’s box because, in a way, you’re looking at it from a obesity standpoint. That’s probably why they’re thinking, this is a great idea, because we have an obesity problem because of these junk school lunches.

[00:23:24] So let’s just go on the complete opposite end of the spectrum. And when you look at all the foods that you would consume in a vegan diet, especially for girls– in boys about to be in those pubescent years, I think it could be very destructive to proper hormone levels when we talk about testosterone and estrogen. It’s like paving the way for PMS and PMDD, I think, in girls. I really do.

[00:23:54] AD BREAK

[00:23:55] Dave: I’ve explained to my teenagers that politicians and school dieticians are made out of meat, and that eating only plants is a really bad idea. And so if you’re a politician or a school nutritionist who believes you have any moral rights or scientific reason to use your power to try and prevent kids from eating healthy animal protein, just remember you’re made out of animal protein, and you’re not allowed to do that.

[00:24:26] And it is this big of a deal. So anytime someone tries to use policy or manipulation to try and stop you from eating the foods that make you thrive as a human being, they are not your friend, and they just don’t have the right. It’s not in the constitution. We didn’t give it to them. 

[00:24:43] And if they just try to sneakily do it, I’m sorry, it’s people like you and me, and the other 1,000 people that have been on the show, and the millions of people who’ve heard the podcast, or read books, or any other experts out there. The preponderance of evidence says you should have at least some ground meat every day, and it’s affordable, and it’s on us to make it affordable.

[00:25:10] If I had to choose between eating meat myself and feeding meat to my kids, I would give it to my kids first, as all humans have done throughout all of recorded history until the last 20 years of propaganda. So I’m glad you’re in alignment with that.

[00:25:24] Francesca: Yeah. As a woman, I’ve had a lot of vegetarian, vegan patients over the year, and I’ve actually had to have a few conversations that went something like, perhaps you’re a better fit, better suited for another practitioner because I’m going to tell you my story. And I tell them my story. And when they start to incorporate animal proteins again, they can start to feel a little bit better. So I think as a woman, and I can’t speak for men, but you just feel differently, and you know it. You know it. Yeah, you can’t–

[00:26:04] Dave: There’s an inner calmness that comes from having enough minerals, having enough protein and good fats where you feel like you can handle everything that comes your way. And if you’re limiting your quality protein sources and eating bad fats, it just feels like everything is hard, and maybe you’re not going to be able to make it through the day. God, I felt like that most of my life before I learned how to eat. That’s why I’m so passionate about it.

[00:26:33] Francesca: I know.

[00:26:35] Dave: When it comes to hormones, clearly, getting good fats and good protein is necessary there. But you have a way of thinking about it where you have a hierarchy of hormones. That’s a great analogy.

Timestamp 5

[00:26:48] Dave: Can you walk me through that?

[00:26:49] Francesca: So the way that I, over the years, of course, figured out how to hack my hormone imbalances, thank you for coming up with that because let’s get credit for credit’s due. I did not come up with that. I found that there’s such a large focus on progesterone, testosterone, and estrogen. It’s just what is tested in the office.

[00:27:11] So I started playing around with neurotransmitters, changing my diet to see what would happen, and researching how neurotransmitters work. So I feel like if you approach hormone balance like a business where you have administrators– every good company needs a strong administrative team. The administrators report to the managers.

[00:27:35] Those are your main hormones. And the managers report to the execs. And this is where things get interesting because your admins are neurotransmitters that act like hormones– GABA, dopamine, serotonin. So GABA and progesterone have an interesting relationship, a little bit bi-directional. 

[00:27:55] So we know that if we’re feeling down, if our sleep is junk, if we are very reactionary and we’ve lost our sense of calm, all roads can point to progesterone, but there’s that relationship there with GABA. So you think that you could just support progesterone by getting a bunch of vitamin C and doing all this stuff to boost it, but really what is lesser known is how progesterone acts in conjunction with cortisol. 

[00:28:27] So cortisol and progesterone do this dance. If you’re a stressed out, busy woman, chances are you produce a lot of cortisol, and maybe you have for a while. And now you have this yoyo where you go into states of high to low cortisol. Some people call it adrenal fatigue. Most people say that’s not real. I do. I believe it is.

[00:28:50]  Cortisol is that executive hormone. So if you’re the CEO, you really have to be taking specific measures to support cortisol because cortisol is going to act on progesterone, and progesterone is going to sure act on GABA. Now, when you talk about dopamine, mental health issues and women, whoo, big time, anxiety, and depression, and irritability. 

[00:29:15] Dopamine is usually in the gutter, and so is testosterone. Of course, if you’re going to go to the doctor, they’re going to say, testosterone pellets. This is going to change everything. And for some, it does, but for most women that don’t understand the relationship to insulin, because most women that have low testosterone, nine times out of 10, are insulin resistant. 

[00:29:40] If we’re not addressing what is happening with our blood sugar and we just go on pellets, and I’ve seen this now– I can’t tell you how many times– that’s the patient that feels great for three months and never felt better again, but they’re compliant, and they’re on their testosterone pellets. We’ve never addressed this relationship that insulin and testosterone have. Again, bidirectional. So you as–

[00:30:05] Dave: It’s true for men too, just to call that out. It’s not identical, but yeah, if you’re insulin resistant, you probably have low testosterone. Because you’re insulin resistant, you have more white fat. White fat makes extra estrogen. It does in women and men. So if you’re carrying an extra 20, or 30, or like me, a 100 pounds, around and you have high estrogen, you’re like, I wonder why.

[00:30:23] Francesca: Right, right, right. So again, it comes down to, you can still– and I actually still support the model of bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, especially with testosterone, but you still need to address this blood sugar dysregulation, which is driving insulin resistance. So as the CEO of your hormone health, you’ve got to now manage cortisol appropriately manage insulin.

[00:30:47] But then the lesser-known, which has been really fun over the years because this was a big one for me, was this relationship with serotonin and estrogen. So we know serotonin. Happy chemical, made in the gut, has to uptake to the brain for everything to work really well. Estrogen, again, and serotonin, one can block the other.

[00:31:10] Estrogen in a dominant state is going to suppress some of that. So again, you’re going to the doctor, and your estrogen is low. You’re going to probably get prescribed that. But what is really fun is that you can go in and support the mother hormone, which is pregnenolone, which a lot of people don’t talk about.

[00:31:32] And this, to me, is your other executive hormones. So the mother hormone by which all the other hormones come from, a lot of women do really well supplementing with pregnenolone and then addressing the dietary and, again, detoxification and absorption issues in the liver and the gut to get estrogen where it needs to be without having to go in with the hormone replacement therapy.

[00:32:00] Dave: It’s really interesting, and it’s so individualized. So if you go back, even starting in the late ’80s, early ’90s, the Life Extension Foundation, which has published a magazine about longevity since before longevity was supposed to be possible, just to give credit to them, they said, pregnenolone, there’s evidence that it helps you live longer.

[00:32:21] And so they would make pregnenolone in multivitamins and stuff I haven’t used in many years. But I tried it when I was young and trying to get healthier, and it didn’t seem to work for me. And I got my lab tests. And if you think logically, pregnenolone can turn into anything. It’s the mother hormone. So you might start there.

[00:32:40] But depending on your genetics and probably toxins and lifestyle factors, sometimes it’ll turn into estrogen. Sometimes it’ll turn into DHEA. Sometimes it’ll turn into testosterone, which then could turn back into estrogen. And I found that pregnenolone didn’t do very much for me. And when I tried DHEA, my levels are very low, even now.

[00:33:01] In fact, I first tried DHEA when I was 18. I was just trying to get healthy. And within three days of taking it, I had no libido. And an 18-year-old male without libido, something’s going on there. And to this day, if I take either seven keto DHEA, regular DHEA, within a day or two, zero libido. And I haven’t figured it out to be like, low DHEA. But if you take it, it just doesn’t work because I have some weird pathway that no one’s figured out yet, including me.

[00:33:28] So the variety here is like, okay, get your lab tests. They can work with you. They can work with lots of places to get their labs to see what their sex hormones are. And then say, you could try pregnenolone. You could try DHEA and see if it works. What’s the period of time that you would know if it works?

[00:33:46] Francesca: Yeah, that’s what you always say, even in your book, Smarter Not Harder. That’s what biohacking is. Try it. There’s so many nuances and all of the research. If it works, keep doing it. If it doesn’t, drop it.

[00:34:01] Dave: And just to be able to do that without saying there’s something wrong with me because it doesn’t work. No, there’s nothing wrong with you. It doesn’t work. It’s just because you’re individual, and you will find the right pattern of things that work. And maybe it doesn’t work because you have a toxin that’s blocking it, or you’re living in that moldy house, or your lead and mercury are high, or thallium.

Timestamp 6

[00:34:26] Dave: My thallium levels were high when I was eating kale, and it turns out we know kale is the trash collector plant that raises thallium. What metals are you seeing highest in women with hormone dysfunctions?

[00:34:39] Francesca: Gosh. Aluminum, always. And again, we can blame a lot of the skincare products for that, but aluminum, tin, cadmium, big down here.

[00:34:51] Dave: So tin, where’s that coming from?

[00:34:53] Francesca: The water.

[00:34:55] Dave: So is it the pipes, or is it just in the water itself?

[00:34:58] Francesca: We have lots of evidence that shows the dumping that happened here in the ’80s was loaded with stuff like tin.

[00:35:11] Dave: And who did the dumping?

[00:35:14] Francesca: The government itself.

[00:35:17] Dave: Oh. 

[00:35:18] Francesca: Uh-huh.

[00:35:19] Dave: I can’t imagine they would ever allow something that was bad for the population. That’s shocking. Just shocking. Here’s another idea. A byproduct of aluminum smelting called fluoride. We could dispose of that by putting it in everyone’s water. It’s a great idea. Let’s do that.

[00:35:39] Francesca: Yeah. Gosh, it comes at us from every direction, doesn’t it?

[00:35:46] Dave: What do you do for water filtration in the cell South?

[00:35:50] Francesca: Great question. I have a well that is down several levels of aquifer, and then I have a very advanced filtration system that the water then goes through before it comes into the house. And then, of course, I’ll double, triple-filter the well water before we drink it with RO and then adding minerals.

[00:36:16] But I think one of the things, ironically, that works well for patients, especially the ones that aren’t in a position to invest in whole-house filtration of some kind, are these really inexpensive filters from Home Depot. In the South, it should theoretically last 30 days, but because the water is so heavy, you could change it every 15 days, but a lot– 

[00:36:45] Dave: You’re talking about the one you put under the sink in a cartridge?

[00:36:48] Francesca: Yeah, or even for the bath faucet and the shower head, so that you can just start to reduce your exposure because it is just an insult over and over.

[00:37:02] Dave: This is a really serious issue for people who are working on recovering their health. It’s the water that you breathe and put on your skin. And in many parts of the world now, especially in the US, you can use chlorine to make the water not have amoebas and things in it, which is actually good for you.

[00:37:23] But they also know, by adding chlorine, we cause this number of cases of cancer, like, okay, how many people are going to die of bad water versus cancer? Let’s use chlorine. Now you can say, maybe I don’t want either one, so I’ll take the chlorine out of my house, which would be smart.

[00:37:40] But because governments are cheap, it was particularly in California where I think this started, they said, hey, wouldn’t it be cheaper if we added ammonia and just less chlorine to make something called chloramine? And chloramine is a tiny molecule that doesn’t break down easily and is hard to filter out, and it sterilizes waterways.

[00:38:01] So when they did this in California, amphibians started to disappear from the environment, and chloramine was used as a hospital disinfectant in Sweden until all the nurses got allergic to chloramine because it causes allergies. So I don’t know if they’re doing that in the South, but a lot of governments have started doing it.

[00:38:17] And what that means is you’ve got to up the quality of the filtration in your house. Sadly, those filters you put on your shower head can’t filter out chloramine and the other volatile organics that you would filter out with activated charcoal. Hot water will wear out activated charcoal in about two hours. So your only choice is to be able to put an active charcoal or an activated charcoal filter on for the whole house, and your landlord may not let you do that.

[00:38:46] Francesca: Yeah.

[00:38:47] Dave: So I don’t know what to do there. Maybe there’s a activated charcoal bath bomb you can use, but it’s a conundrum. And I’m renting right now too. I don’t have a whole-house filter, but I have a great RO filter and things like that. And you do your best.

[00:39:02] Francesca: You do your best. Yeah.

[00:39:03] Dave: And also, you could take a cool shower instead of a hot shower. It makes a huge difference. I just do a cold plunge, and half the time, I shower in the backyard. I have a hose hooked up to the outdoor shower that I bought on Amazon, and I’ll just, okay, there you go. Now I’m clean, but I didn’t absorb a lot. And so long, steamy showers in bad water are probably a bad idea, but I don’t know how that maps to hormones versus just general detoxing. Do you?

[00:39:29] Francesca: Hot versus cold in terms of hormone balance?

[00:39:33] Dave: Or just the amount of chlorine and chloramine in water.

[00:39:37] Francesca: It’s scary to me. I also am trying to do my best, and I have two small kids. So when I think about that as a possible concern now, it becomes very overwhelming. This is the kind of stuff that keeps me awake at night.

[00:39:55] Dave: Okay. You’re a medical professional. How do you build resilience and mental calmness so that you don’t stay awake at night? Because that’s bad for you too. And then you get this meta fear, like, I’m afraid of being afraid. And then you’re quoting Churchill and all that. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Timestamp 7

[00:40:15] Dave: No, that’s not true. You probably should fear bullets and things too. So how do you, though, generate that feeling of, I’ve got this handled, given all the stuff you know?  

[00:40:27] Francesca: Honestly, stress management has been one of the biggest techniques– a real stress management technique for me. I  did a 10-day silent meditation retreat 10 years ago. When we talk about the varying degrees of things you can do to manage stress, I’ve gone way to one side to the other.

[00:40:52] And really what works is going to that space that’s quiet at the end of the day. I cannot watch a lot of television at all. I definitely don’t watch the news, let’s be honest. I am so sensitive. I am so easily stimulated that I have to really be consistent with winding down at the end of the day.

[00:41:17] It has to be screen-free. There cannot be blue light. My adrenals will produce cortisol with just a little corner, a blue light coming in from somewhere. So I’m really consistent with that. And I think that’s the one thing that helps me not only keep my circadian rhythm in check, but it’s the biggest, if not most important, thing you can do to balance your hormones.

[00:41:40] I tell a lot of my patients, supplements and diet are really not as good as your intentional moment in every day where you get out of fight-flight and into rest and relax and you commit to it and just don’t blow it off because that is where I think you start to feel like you’ve got a handle on things.

[00:42:04] Dave: I love that answer. It wasn’t what I thought you might say, though.

[00:42:09] Francesca: Okay. 

[00:42:09] Dave: I thought you might say testosterone because if you have enough testosterone, your stress goes down because you just feel like you can handle it. And if you’re low testosterone, you’re also low dopamine. And if you’re low dopamine, you’re low happiness.

[00:42:23] And this is the same for men and women, different numbers, but that relationship there is so strong and so important. So there’s a sense of, I’ve got this. And we’ve all felt it sometimes, and other times, we’ve had this sense of, I don’t have this, but I’m going to pretend like I do, and hopefully, no one will notice.

[00:42:45] And that was the first 30 years of my life. I’m like, oh, actually, every now and then, I have it a little bit. Maybe I can do more of what gives me that. And since you’re focusing so much on hormones, maybe dropping cortisol is a good thing. But you talked about how you believe in adrenal– what’d you say? Burnout? What is it that people don’t believe in? 

[00:43:07] Francesca: Adrenal fatigue. Yeah.

[00:43:07] Dave: Adrenal fatigue. So most of the functional medicine people that I know do believe in adrenal fatigue because they see it in clinical practice all the time. I’ve seen it two times. I’ve had stage 4 adrenal fatigue, where you’re really blown out. And what happens here is your body calls for more adrenaline and cortisol, and your adrenals can’t make it. 

[00:43:27] Maybe it’s toxins. Maybe it’s lack of zinc. Maybe you’re eating the wrong foods. It could be anything, but it just doesn’t work. And you do your best, and it doesn’t matter how much you try. And then you say, oh, I know what I’ll do. I’ll exercise. Maybe I’ll do some cardio. And then you feel like crap for a week afterwards because you cannot recover from it. 

[00:43:49] And then if you go deeper into this, you go, oh, so cortisol is an important hormone. Cortisol is bad because it’s a stress hormone. But then you read the studies, and you realize low cortisol is more dangerous than high cortisol because you’re likely to get an infection you can’t handle stress. So there’s huge numbers of people here on low-salt diets who have low cortisol because they had high cortisol for a while and they couldn’t make it anymore. This happened to me. 

[00:44:17] First time, it took me a year and a half to heal from that. And I slept all the time, and I stopped coffee. And I did all the supportive stuff with salt, and iodine, and all the stuff you’re supposed to do. Second time, it took me about six weeks to heal. And what I did is I had a cup of coffee every morning because it helps you raise cortisol in the morning when it should go up to give you energy.

[00:44:37] Not five cups, but just one cup a day. And I started taking adrenal extract, glandular. And I started using licorice root, which supports this. And magically, you can come back. And now I’m going to go off the deep end. I think you’re going to laugh at me. I said, you know what? I don’t have enough cortisol.

[00:45:00] Screw this noise. I replaced my thyroid hormone. I’ll replace my cortisol. So I found a huge body of research, older research, around cortisol replacement. Not prednisone, but cortisol. So bioidentical cortisol replacement. I took 5mg of cortisol 3 times a day, which is a bioidentical replacement dose. And magically, I recovered like crazy, and I stopped getting sick all the time, and my brain worked way better, and I’ve been doing that for years.

[00:45:30] Francesca: That’s impressive.

[00:45:32] Dave: My cortisol levels are not high. They’re normal. But I also found out that my body probably never made enough cortisol. But I look at cortisol as a hormone. If it’s too high, you should do something about it. If it’s too low, do something about it. And if increasing salt doesn’t work, you can do it because the worst thing you can do is have low cortisol in an emergency.

[00:45:51] Because you just get sick, and you just lay there, and you cannot function when you need to show up for your kids, or for your company, or for your mission, or whatever. And no amount of pushing on the accelerator is going to work if there’s no gas in the tank.

[00:46:05] And so I find that thyroid for energy, cortisol to be able to turn on the energy when you need to, and then testosterone for passion, for your mission. Not bedroom passion, although it works for that too. And men and women, they’re fundamental to being human. And you’re seeing most of your patients don’t have those things working right now.

[00:46:27] Francesca: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[00:46:28] Dave: That’s pretty scary. What do you think that’s going to do to society? 

[00:46:32] Francesca: I think that because of podcasts like this, because of the growing number of podcasts and platforms, you can really, really go down rabbit holes yourself. I’m encouraged by that. Because if you really want to heal yourself, you have an abundance of resources. 

[00:46:54] So if I dial it back to 1999, when I was running down Sixth Avenue to make my doctor’s appointment that I was late to in New York City, of course, stressed out and running, I think about what was available then the Internet had just come out a couple of years before, people weren’t having these conversations. So I’m encouraged because I feel like more people are warming up to the idea.

[00:47:24] Now, am I concerned about what this is going to do for most people that don’t want to do the research? Yes, but I think most people that find you are truly desperate and looking to advocate for themselves because they’ve either followed the traditional allopathic model and they are frustrated, or they’re ready. You think they’ve dabbling. They’re little baby hackers, and now they’re ready to go. Balls to the wall.

[00:47:52] AD BREAK

Timestamp 8

[00:47:52] Dave: It’s interesting. I don’t know the percentages because it’s very hard to measure that. Somewhere around a third to a half of people who find the work that I do are drawn to, like, I’ve tried everything. There’s a way of thinking about this biohacking thing. The other half of biohacking are people who are saying, I know there’s more. I know there’s got to be more.

[00:48:15] And they’re reasonably happy. They’re pretty healthy, but, like, what else could I do? I really want to show up in the world the way that I want. So it’s a personal development, human enhancement, optimization angle. And for me, very low percentages of mitochondrial function.

[00:48:35] My brain is fried. I’m fat. I’m insulin resistant. I have highest risk of stroke and heart attack. I have arthritis. I’m jacked up. So for me, if I would have found me when I was 19, all my stuff was written for if only I would have known. I would have absolutely been one of those, I got to fix myself.

[00:48:54] If you’re under 25, no one fixes their cars up except, I don’t know, you taint your window or something. But in the old days, I bought a crappy car in high school because it’s all I could afford, and then, I’m going to fix it so at least it’ll run. And then, I think I could make it a little faster. And I could make it handle better. 

[00:49:11] And then all of a sudden, five years later, you’ve put God knows how much time and money into the car, but now it’s actually really fast, and it turns well, and it breaks well, and all that stuff. So when did you stop fixing the car and start upgrading the car?

[00:49:23] It’s a continuous line. And I don’t know where the line is on average for followers, so you might be listening to this right now going, I just want to be well. And you may be listening to this going, life’s okay. Maybe you have a couple extra pounds, but I want to kick ass. And it’s the same tool set.

[00:49:39] Francesca: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. For me, it was 10 years of trial and error before I dabbled into the holistic world. And that was through happenstance, by meeting a traditional Chinese medically trained doctor who spoke no English. She operated out of the back of a Chinese specialty food store in Clifton, New Jersey.

[00:50:10] And you had to have a passcode to get to the back. She took no one. Still to this day, never understood a word she had said, but I was desperate, and she had an entire wall behind her of herbs. And based on heat and inflammation, I did what she said. I was sick at that time. So that was the gateway right there, because then I said, this is weird, and there is something to this.

[00:50:36] So in conjunction with chiropractic care, I decided to then take that turn, and change careers, and go down that– but I think that that was the beginning. So the car was revving, the engine was revving, and I was off and running at that point because then it was just one thing after another, and your eyes are opening going, whoa, whoa, whoa.

[00:50:58] Dave: It’s so cool because that enabled you to come up with this hierarchy of hormones. And I wanted to summarize it because we talked about it from the bottoms up. The way that you talk about this is three CEOs or three executives in the hormone health. It isn’t what I would have thought. And it’s cortisol, stress hormone, insulin, an energy hormone, and pregnenolone, which is the root of all the other hormones.

[00:51:23] So if those are the three boss hormones, underneath that, management level would be progesterone, and testosterone, and estrogen. And then the administrative level of getting stuff done would be GABA, and dopamine, and neurotransmitters. So no one else that I’ve come across is looking at that interaction where you’re putting cortisol, and insulin, and pregnenolone as even being related, but those are root hormones.

[00:51:49] And then to look at that mid-level, being the ones that I focus on, which is testosterone, estrogen, and maybe progesterone. And then to tie it to neurotransmitter. So it’s an unusual model. Did you come up with that? Or is that taken from TCM, or– 

[00:52:04] Francesca: No.

[00:52:04] Dave: I’ve never seen it that way.

[00:52:05] Francesca: It was honestly from, so much thankfully, the research that we do have available. And then I have read so many books on hormone health. To name a few, Dr. Sara Gottfried, I’ve read every single one of her books. I’ve read every– 

[00:52:23] Dave: She’sa good friend. Sarah’s great. 

[00:52:26] Francesca: Anna Cabeca, I read every single one of her books. 

[00:52:28] Dave: She’s a good friend and also a total pro. I love this.

[00:52:32] Francesca: So I think, in what I’ve learned, of course, from them, again, biohacking did this work for me, trial and error, and then applying it with patients. I was really testing this out. Does this work? Does this not work? Why did this not work for her? Why did this work for her? And then it just felt– I don’t really like to say cookie cutter because, at the end of the day, there is not one. 

[00:52:59] You cannot take patient A, B, and C and put them all into the same cookie cutter. But what you can do is actually do the things lifestyle-wise, and dietary, and sometimes supplementally to support those execs. Everyone can do that without having side effects for the most part. 

[00:53:22] And then you can go from there. So whether patient A wants to then go bioidentical, you go from there because she’s supporting the execs. Her probability of success with bioidentical at that point is going to be really good, I think. It’s just a really good framework that you can grow and expand on yourself.

[00:53:45] Dave: There’s a hormone that I would have expected to be here that I didn’t see.

[00:53:51] Francesca: Hmm.

[00:53:52] Dave: Can you guess which one it is?

[00:53:54] Francesca: No, I’m scared.

[00:53:59] Dave: Thyroid.

[00:54:01] Francesca: Uh-huh. Very good reason for it. I have, since the age of 22, had near perfect thyroid panel. Near perfect. 

[00:54:16] Dave: That’s not fair. 

[00:54:18] Francesca: Listen. 

[00:54:18] Dave: I’m just kidding, by the way.

[00:54:20] Francesca: I have some strong thyroid genetics in my favor because when I tell you this has been the go-to for several practitioners in that first decade– and again, they weren’t doing full thyroid panels. TSH, T3, T4, that’s the standard. 

[00:54:36] Dave: And for listeners, we need to slow down for a second. If you’re a long-time listener, you’ve probably learned this by now. A cheap thyroid panel from a Western doctor just asked for TSH, which is how much is your body screening for thyroid. But a functional practitioner will look at, did the body respond by making T4 or T3? So that was what Francesca was just saying, but translated, in case– 

[00:54:59] Francesca: Sorry. 

[00:55:00] Dave: That’s okay.

[00:55:01] Francesca: So when I finally parlayed into the holistic route and had my first full, and you can go into that in a second, thyroid panel, I was expecting to see a Christmas tree because of how I felt. And again, I was in good shape. And that is one that I’ve gone back to in my yearly analysis of myself.

[00:55:24] When I look at labs, I am still surprised that every year, year upon year, even after babies, I have not had an issue with my thyroid. So that led me to think, how many people out there are like me? So let’s leave this out of the equation. And that’s why I did what I did. 

[00:55:44] Dave: Got it. 

[00:55:45] Francesca: In terms this model.

[00:55:46] Dave: Just from personal experience, as you haven’t seen it as much, I have found that the toxins that take out your sex hormones quite often also affect your thyroid. And I’ve also seen people replace sex hormones, but not replace thyroid. So then it’s frustrating if you replace your sex hormones.

[00:56:06] So now my desire to do stuff improved because there’s a sense of apathy that comes when you’re low testosterone, whether men or women, different levels. But low testosterone in both sexes will create that mental state that’s tied to dopamine. Okay, a little bit of apathy, like, ah, can’t be bothered.

[00:56:26] But then, if you turn up desire, but you don’t turn on energy, I know I want to do something, but I’m just too tired. And then you get frustrated. So I recommend for biohackers and people who are saying, what’s going on? You probably, if you have extra weight, should look at sex hormones and look at thyroid because that’s the most likely thing. 

[00:56:46] And after that, then you’d go down the toxin path that you really elegantly talk about here. And you’re likely to hit some pay dirt on one of those, but you could start on one versus the other, and just, okay, you start with your sex hormones, everything’s fine. Great. And you’re one of the people like you who has a magic thyroid, or maybe you start with just thyroid, and then you get your electrical levels working, and then your body maybe starts making sex hormones. 

[00:57:09] It could go either way. I don’t know the percentages. I don’t think anyone knows the percentages, but I’d like to ask. People like the couple of experts you talked about, Sara Gottfried, Anna Cabeca, or even better yet, find a functional medicine practitioner who’s been practicing for 43 years doing hormones. And clinically, I’ve seen this, and I’m like, okay, that’s probably going to be very valuable clinical data.

[00:57:39] And this is something else that you now understand because you’re a functional practitioner. Your clinical experience is evidence. And the chemical induced or chemical-based big pharma people say, if it’s not double-blind clinical trials, it’s not evidence. I’m like, that’s a logical fallacy.

[00:57:56] There’s seven kinds of evidence if you can study computer science or philosophy. So what you see over and over in patients matters, and it matters greatly. And that’s why you can come up with these new models.

[00:58:08] Francesca: Mm-hmm. Agreed. 1000%.

Timestamp 9

[00:58:12] Dave: What is the next big things? You’ve seen patterns. You’ve seen patients. The next big thing that you think might become a problem for people, given the way we’ve set up our food system and our environmental systems?

[00:58:25] Francesca: Oh, that is a loaded question. Honestly, I think that we have such a mineral problem. And I know that everyone’s going to snore in your community because they’ve heard you talk about this, and it is literally an entire chapter in your most recent book, but this is one of the things, again, it’s part of my protocol, is addressing the micronutrient panel and getting minerals back to where they are because this level of depletion is scary.

[00:59:02] Dave: I do have a pretty good track record of predicting stuff like this, and there’s a reason that Danger Coffee is full of trace minerals. And if people go to vitamindake.com, there’s my broad-spectrum mineral formula there called Minerals 101. So go to dangercoffee.com, go to minerals101.com, and I’m doing my best to help people with minerals, which is so boring.

[00:59:23] I want to have, like, this is the nootropic that also enhances libido and gives you doubling of lifespan. But if you don’t have zinc and copper, it’s just not going to work. So let’s get everyone their minerals, and then we’ll start on the fancy stuff. Do you have any particular formulas or brands that you like?

[00:59:41] Francesca: Yeah, I actually take Minerals 101.

[00:59:45] Dave: Oh, do you? Oh, thank you. I didn’t even know that. Okay. And guys, if you haven’t heard of this, Minerals 101 is my broad-spectrum mineral formula. It’s at vitamindake.com. Vitamin D-A-K-E.

[00:59:54] Francesca: Two things, especially women with adrenal fatigue. So the liquid minerals, there’s so many brands. Just make sure it’s transparent third-party testing. Go nuts. Pick one. Drinking that in the morning, or electrolytes– just pick. That is such a gigantic step forward in nourishing.

[01:00:18] Not only from a hydration standpoint, but healing adrenals. But the big one for women, massive– when I tell you massive, the magnesium deficiency in patients is mind-blowing because I know how I feel when I don’t get enough magnesium. And you can eat all the pumpkin seeds you want. This is not that conversation.

[01:00:39] This is legitimately knowing what you need and getting it. It’s a game changer for feeling balanced. I find, mental health wise, without proper levels of magnesium, I’m not the same as I am when I do take proper levels of magnesium, and the quality of my sleep changes. So that’s a part of that whole wind down routine at night that I have. It’s magnesium-loaded.

[01:01:10] Dave: Magnesium is so interesting because there’s all these different forms of it that do different things. And I’ve, for 25 years, been saying, I just take my magnesium at night. You take enough to not get the runs. Too much magnesium equals disaster pants. So for me, t maybe a gram or 1.2 grams. For most people it’s about 800 milligrams. I just happen to be large and relatively muscular, or previously relatively fat. 

[01:01:38] Studies, though, when I really got into circadian biology as I was working on my longevity book, which is, if you’re new to the show, if you read Superhuman, you’ll learn a lot about living to at least 180. The peak levels of magnesium in your blood are at noon because you use magnesium to make ATP. 

[01:01:57] And you also use magnesium for sleep. So what I started doing was taking half my magnesium in the morning away from thyroid hormone. And I take half of it at night because you have better energy production and better sleep. So I ended up shifting it around, and you probably absorb it better, but I’m not sure. Any thoughts on timing.

[01:02:15] Francesca: Because magnesium glycinate just really works so well for women in assisting with getting to sleep– 

[01:02:24] Dave: Yeah, glycinate would be a nighttime one. Okay.

[01:02:27] Francesca: Okay, so definitely that. And then women, of course, that have gut issues, and liver issues, and aren’t eliminating regularly citrate, again, at night, Mally is great for all of the women that have hormone imbalances that leave them feeling like they have fibromyalgia, just to be honest.

[01:02:48] So that would be better in the morning. I have patients that do really well with magnesium 3 and 8 in the morning for focus. We see a lot of patients that deal with some sort of ADHD issues, and that, in some mushrooms, works really well in the morning.

[01:03:12] Dave: So psilocybin is what you recommend?

[01:03:15] Francesca: Yeah. 

[01:03:18] Dave: When you said mushrooms, I’m assuming you meant lion’s mane, or chaga, or something. 

[01:03:21] Francesca: There you go. 

[01:03:22] Dave: Not psilocybin, but yeah.

[01:03:25] Francesca: That’s for my face.

[01:03:27] Dave: That’s for evening time on Fridays. But surprisingly, Paul Stamets, who’s been on the show, who’s a friend, and is, the CEO of Host Defense, which is a large mushroom, high quality manufacturer, he has launched a pharmaceutical company, and I’m an investor in it, that is now looking at psilocybin, plus lion’s mane, plus niacin, and it’s a regrowing brains– not just hippocampal neurons, but the entire brain can regrow on that combination.

[01:03:59] So I’m really excited about that as a way to fix the brains of people who’ve, had strokes or head injuries, which is so common. And we’re not going to have time in this episode, probably to get into it, but it’s interesting. If you have a head injury, what happens to your hormone levels?

[01:04:16] Francesca: Mm. From inflammation, we know. We even see, with so much of the heavy metal toxicity, how that infiltrates the brain. We talk a lot about the liver. You test the liver, you find the heavy metals, but we disregard that the metals in your brain, that brain inflammation, that’s real.And I can imagine that those products that are coming, they’re exciting me because they’re going to help a lot of women.

[01:04:43] Dave: They are. They are going to help a lot of women. And we’ve got to get our estrogen-disrupting toxins out. We’ve got to get our metals out, and just get your hormones back generally in line, and eat stuff that has enough protein and good fats. And the body is so much more resilient than we feel like it is, but the resilience pathways that are automatic, if those are blocked, you’re jacked.

[01:05:10] So your job is to unblock those. And then magically, your body will heal itself because it wants to. So I’m glad you’re sharing the message the way you are, particularly doing a great job online. And your Instagram is Dr. Francesca LeBlanc with C. 

[01:05:25] Francesca: Yes.

[01:05:26] Dave: And I appreciate your work. We’ll tag you in the notes on the show. And thanks for being on the episode today.

[01:05:32] Francesca: Thank you so much. I’m grateful to be here.

[01:05:35] Dave: If you liked today’s episode, maybe you should get your sex hormones checked. Seems like a good idea, or your toxic metals checked. Or maybe you should put down the fake burger and replace it with a real burger from a local farmer who treated the animal well and built soil. Because then you’ll feel much better, and it’ll be great. So I’ll see you in the next episode. Just do something to upgrade yourself today. It’s worth it.

[00:00:00] Dave: You’re listening to The Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today we’re going to talk about an organ in your body that you probably don’t think about as an organ. Over the course of the last 10 years, I’ve started to look at my skin the same way I look at my liver, where it’s a major organ in the body, and it doesn’t just sit there and look a certain way and keep you from leaking all over the place. It’s fundamental to your biology, and you can’t live without it.

[00:00:32] And the health of your skin, with more and more data backing this, drives the health of the rest of your body. So if you have inflamed, unhealthy skin, you have inflamed, unhealthy organs. You fix your skin, you have less systemic inflammation. So we’re starting to figure out, is it more that when my insides aren’t good, my outsides aren’t good, or if I make my outsides good, my insides will be good?

[00:00:55] It’s both. And so much of the history of our skin has been, how do I cover it up with paint? And how do I make it look pretty without regard for its health? As a guy who’s planning to live to at least 180, and a leader in the longevity field, and having done nonprofit work in the space for more than 20 years, and written big books on it, and very active in making us live longer., I’m paying more and more attention, not just to how I look, but how does my skin work?

[00:01:24] And if you’ve watched me over the past few years, you can tell. My skin is better than it was before because I’ve been paying attention to it. That led me to discover something called OS-01. And I think this might be one of the first podcasts out there where you heard about this novel peptide that was discovered using basically AI and a new way of finding compounds that work.

[00:01:48] And we interviewed the CEO of OneSkin, and the reason I did that is this isn’t a cosmetic company. This is a skin health company. And its founder, Carolina Reis Oliveira is back on the show today to talk about some new research on specific peptides that change how your skin works, and how it looks.

[00:02:13] Carolina, welcome back to The Human Upgrade.

[00:02:17] Carolina: Thanks, Dave. So happy to be here. Have a lot to share in terms of our research and great findings over the past year or so.

[00:02:27] You were on Episode 944, and I asked you to come on to talk about this brand new peptide. You’d just brought the company out, and since that time, I’ve seen you on Brian Johnson’s counter in a video. I’ve seen you I think with Peter Diamandis, Tony Robbins. Really a lot of the people working on longevity are saying, oh, hold on, there’s something going on here. 

[00:02:51] This isn’t just another lotion, that there’s something going on. So for people who didn’t catch the last episode, fill them in on what OS-01 is and how you found it. And let’s go into the new research.

[00:03:04] We found the West one when we were testing anti-aging products in the market, and we basically saw that none of the products out there were designed to target the cause of aging itself. So we knew based on our knowledge around longevity science, that was a better way to tackle skin aging.

[00:03:27] And one of the main drivers of skin aging was the accumulation of senescent cells, zombie cells, cells that stop functioning well and build up in our tissues and start secreting inflammatory signals that basically induces the skin to age faster. And then we decided to build this platform that would screen for novel peptides that would be able to target specifically senescent cells in the skin.

[00:03:57] So we spent around five years, and we tested nearly a 1,000 peptides, until we got to OS-01. And OS-01 has this great ability of reducing up to 50% the burden of senescent cells in the skin. And we can also prove that it reverses the biological age of the skin when we are able to decrease the amount of aged cells.

[00:04:24] Dave: Okay, so long t-me listeners of the podcast, number one, thank you. You probably remember the interviews I’ve done, or in my big longevity book, I talk about zombie cells or senescent cells in the body. And you’ve heard the episodes that I’ve done about oral compounds you can take, including the supplement’s quality. You take them once a month.

[00:04:46] And then that is enough to trigger your body to get rid of these zombie cells. That’s not going to do as much in your skin, though. There are some people who are now looking at pharmaceutical compounds that they’re trying to put on the skin that are very expensive that may have an effect on that. And I’ve certainly tried those things like rapamycin.

[00:05:06] But what you found is a peptide with fewer side effects than rapamycin. And in fact, no side effects that I’m aware of. And it’s causing the skin to reverse its biological age. Does this work for all skin, or is this just certain kinds of skin? It’s a big claim. It’s as big as David Sinclair’s. We reverse cell aging. So kind of a big deal. So does this really work? Where does it not work? Just talk a little bit more about that.

[00:05:34] Carolina: Yeah, so the interesting part of this peptide is basically that it is absorbed or uptaken by all types of cells, including senescent and non-senescent cells. So imagine that a younger skin, someone around 30s, they will have fewer senescent cells. So the healthy cells will absorb this peptide and will boost their DNA repair capabilities.

[00:06:00] So basically prevent that skin to accumulate senescent cells, which is great because, obviously, it’s easier to prevent than get rid of the senescent cells that you have accumulated. For the older skin types, what we have observed is that they have a higher number of senescent cells. 

[00:06:19] This peptide basically down regulates the pathways that are associated with aging, with inflammation. So it basically activates, again, the DNA repair pathways. And by reducing inflammation, we can see that our own body can eliminate the senescent cells that are present there. 

[00:06:42] So for those that are not very familiar with senescent cells, the most detrimental side is what they secrete, those inflammatory signals. And the peptide has a very strong effect on reducing the secretion of those inflammatory signals, and then brings the skin to the homeostasis state again that it functions well, and it basically behaves like younger skin again.

[00:07:08] Dave: Okay. Younger skin. How much younger? I just did gene therapy that is going to take, if it works like it normally does, at least nine years off my DNA methylation measured age, which should put me firmly– I deal with being around 30. So how many years am I going to lose off of my skin age when I put OneSkin all over the surfaces of my body?

[00:07:33] Carolina: Yeah. So the first study that we did, we did in the lab. When we treated with the peptide only, in the media, meaning that the absorption was higher, we saw a reduction of 2.5 years over a course of five days. So this was the first time that we could validate that we could actually reverse the age of the skin in human tissues.

[00:07:56] But obviously, this is in a lab setting. We did compare with rapamycin. Rapamycin could not reduce significantly the age of the skin. And all of this data is published on a NPJ journal that you guys can find later on our website. 

[00:08:13] Dave: So you took down the pharmaceuticals. Oh my gosh, heaven forbid. Okay. I love that.

[00:08:19] Carolina: Yeah, we described very well the mechanism of action of that peptide for those who are interested. So we were obviously questioning, okay, how long is going to take for humans to reduce their biological age? So initially, we did a small study, just a pilot, with 10 participants. And over 12 months, we could see a reduction of 3.3 years in the age of the skin.

[00:08:47] Dave: Okay.

[00:08:48] 

[00:08:48] Carolina: Yeah. We believe that we can see maybe the same reduction over a shorter period of time. So we’re now repeating the study with a larger cohort. So we have 30 participants in instead of 10. And the main challenge with this study is that we need to collect biopsies. So it’s a more invasive study. It’s very expensive, but once we had this promising result that we can see a reduction, now we want to see, what is the fastest time period that we can actually measure this age reversal effect in human skins?

[00:09:27] Dave: Wow. 3.3 years over the course of a year is impressive. And that’s, I’m assuming, the one that goes on your face.

[00:09:34] Carolina: Yeah, that’s one that we tested with a face product.

[00:09:38] Dave: So no, I’m just seeing the comments here from the Upgrade Collective. By the way, if you’re listening, and you’d like to join in, you can go to ourupgradecollective.com, and you get to be in the live audience. I’m actually watching people on their webcams. They’re watching me, and we’re chatting. And one of our members says that she’s 65 and has weight loss wrinkles.

[00:10:00] By the way, I also have lost 100 pounds, so keeping my skin tight is an important thing. And she says that she really noticed when she ran out of it after the last episode. Now I’m going to confess something. I noticed a difference when I had the OS-01 because I used it before our first interview.

[00:10:18] And then I just didn’t reorder it because people send me stuff. I have more products than any woman I’ve ever dated. I have 50 bottles of crap on my bathroom counter. And it’s not that I’m using all of them. It’s that I wanted to try them, and they just keep coming in the mail. And going, hey, do you guys want this stuff?

[00:10:37] But I used all the OS-01 because I really liked it. But I didn’t reorder it just because my processes aren’t that good. And I still have half the OneSkin body lotion that you sent me because I hate body lotion. I’m going to go to sleep. My sheets are going to get sticky. That’s gross.

[00:10:54] And my clothes will get sticky. So I don’t know why people put lotion on their legs, but I have lotion on my legs now because I saw the new research on the body lotion. And people are seeing really good skin tightening. And since I have lost a 100 pounds, I have a little more skin around my knees than I would like because I used to have really swollen arthritic knees too.

[00:11:15] So I’m like, oh, that’s probably going to tighten up. So yeah, I’ve committed to, for the next year, use the body lotion. I’m going to use OS-01 because the data is that strong, and I’ll be reporting that. It’s also not all I’m doing, just to be really clear. I’ve done IPL. I’m doing this exceptionally esoteric stuff under my eyes that I think is really profound.

[00:11:35] And so I’m going to be stacking therapies, but just for full disclosure, I am now paying for OS-01, and I’m putting it all over my body because I think it’s that important for longevity. And I wouldn’t go to the trouble. The expense is one thing. I can afford whatever stuff I want to put on my skin, but I don’t like taking time in the morning. And what I found is, it soaks in really quickly, so my sheets aren’t sticky, which I like. 

[00:12:04] Carolina: Yeah, it shouldn’t be– 

[00:12:06] Dave: is that the I’ll be good. 

[00:12:07] Carolina: Yeah.

[00:12:09] Dave: And 3.3 years is worth losing. Do people lose 3.3 years every year they use it? So if I use this for five years, I’m going to look like I’m 21 and I can join a boy band? It’s been my dream.

[00:12:21] Carolina: That’s a great question. We don’t know. It’s harder to follow those people for over five years and keep them consistently using the product. The expectation that you could still continue to reduce the pace of aging, maybe not at the same rate, but the fact that we are always slowing the pace of age is already very helpful for slowing down the aging process. But we would need to run a study to validate that.

[00:12:56] AD BREAK

[00:12:57] Dave: Okay. So we don’t know. It’s actually very scientifically honorable to say we’re not sure, but we know this one thing. And what most academics won’t do, but most CEOs will do, and since you both have to figure this one out, you say, we don’t know, but given what we do know about how it works, I would guess. What would you guess?

[00:13:18] Carolina: It will vary for different skin types, depending on the damage. If your skin’s in a very healthy state, you are probably not going to reduce 3.3 every year. Maybe the second year we’re going to reduce two years, and the third year, year and a half.

[00:13:33] But you are always slowing the aging process, which in the end, you’re cumulating those years that you are not aging. So instead, if you’re like 70, after three, four years, you can be 60 because you’re decreasing three, and two, and one, and so on.

[00:13:52] Dave: Okay, so you’re going to see diminishing returns in terms of adding additional years. But you’ll get your 3.3 years the first year, and the next year you might add another two, and the next year you might add another one, and at that point maybe you’re just holding your age on your skin stable so it’s not getting old, even though all your friends are getting old, and you can just walk around and make fun of them. Is that the goal?

[00:14:13] Carolina: I think the goal– 

[00:14:14] Dave: You weren’t supposed to laugh. I saw you smile. That was a mean question. You were supposed to shame me for that, Carolina.

[00:14:20] Carolina: Yeah, I think the goal is obviously be able to reverse as much as possible. I think I can only make assumptions with the data that we have right now. But as science evolves, we can probably make this even a greater reduction than what we have today.

[00:14:47] Dave: Okay. I also believe that it’s going to work much better if you’re not eating things that spike your blood sugar because advanced glycation end products cause skin aging. If you avoid eating omega-6 fats, like seed oils, because lipid peroxidation from those cause advanced glycation in products and are also bad directly for mitochondria in the skin, if you do the biohacking stuff that I’ve been teaching you for a decade, you’ll probably get outsized results from any longevity therapy, including OS-0I, right?

[00:15:17] Carolina: A 100%. Yeah.

[00:15:20] Dave: Okay. Now, one thing that you did is you sent me, for this interview, this squishy bag. I’m not sure that it’s my style for travel, but I’m willing to be open to it. I have a black carbon fiber one that just feels more manly to me. But what was inside? It’s interesting. I’m about to go on a multi-week trip across Dubai. I’m talking with investors there. Going to Turkey, and then Napa. I’m all over the world.

[00:15:55] So you sent me this amazing– this is the face stuff. This is the travel version. And the main OneSkin, full size one looks like this. So one of them is substantially larger than the other, but neither one says how many pumps are in there. So how many weeks do I get from the travel one, and do I have to travel with this big one? How many pumps do I get in each one?

[00:16:20] Carolina: So the smaller one lasts for around the two weeks.

[00:16:26] Dave: Okay, so I need to travel with a big one because I’m gone for almost a month. 

[00:16:29] Carolina: Yeah.

[00:16:29] Dave: Okay, so bring the big one. You taught me that. You also have a couple of different formulas that you have shared. You have the eye formula now that goes around the eyes, and then you have the face formula, and then you have the skin formula. Okay. And your cleanser is interesting too. There’s a whole set of things that– my doctor friends and healthcare friends who are into skin, they actually use 40 bottles of stuff.

[00:17:04] I just have the bottles. I don’t even know what half the stuff does, to be honest. I try it out for a week, but how would I ever know? So I feel like I’m getting a lot of bottles here, but they each do something very different. Okay, the business part of me is like, if you had a left side of your face for a month and the right side of your face for a month, you could sell twice as much.

[00:17:23] And this is for just your jugular, and this is for your armpit. So I don’t think you’re doing that because we’ve talked enough. You’re legit. But, okay, why do I need an eye formula versus a face formula versus a body formula?

[00:17:37] Carolina: We were also questioning ourselves if we needed to develop a product specifically for the eye. And when we were studying the skin around your eyes, we saw that the skin was five times thinner than the skin around your face. And we measured the skin biological age, and was around 20 to 30 years older than just the skin around your cheeks or temples.

[00:18:01] So because the skin is much thinner and age faster, it made sense for us to develop a formula that was specifically designed to treat that specific type of skin. So we actually used eyelid skins that we cultured in the lab. So we got skins from [Inaudible] plastic surgeries. 

[00:18:23] And then we treated this skin with a formula that we combined a higher concentration of the peptide in different actives until we could see a greater effect that we were seeing with our face product. So, for example, the production of collagen with the eye product is 130% more, while the face product is 40% more just because–

[00:18:51] Dave: When you say more–

[00:18:52] Carolina: Compared to no treatment.

[00:18:54] Dave: Okay, but with no treatment, it doesn’t grow at all. It just stays it is or gets thinner. So you’re saying that it was 130% thicker?

[00:19:06] Carolina: The amount of collagen in the skin was 130% higher than the skin that was not treated with–

[00:19:14] Dave: Okay, got it. So you’re not talking about relative differences. You’re talking about there was zero change in untreated skin, and then there was 130% change in– okay. That’s a really big shift. And that was in a month? 

[00:19:28] Carolina: This was in the lab. So this is over a–

[00:19:30] Dave: Oh, in the lab. Okay. Got it. And you have photos of all this probably on your website and certainly in the brochure that comes with it, which is really interesting. 

[00:19:39] Carolina: Yeah. We did clinical studies, and the clinical data with the eye product was also stronger for the area of the eye in terms of elasticity, and hydration, and skin barrier. And all of this is was measured with instruments because it’s not just subjective analysis or, I feel my skin is more hydrated or more elastic. We actually used instruments to quantify the improvement. And we saw that the data that came out from the eye clinical study was the strongest one so far.

[00:20:17] Dave: Why do I keep pumping the eye thing and nothing’s coming out? Thereitcomes 

[00:20:20] Carolina: It’sgoingtocome.

[00:20:20] Dave: All right. I haven’t used the travel one yet. I don’t know if you guys can see it on the camera. It’s just a little drop of stuff. I’m also very lazy. And some people are like judging and saying, Dave, you’re a bad person. No, I just don’t want to waste time in the morning. It’s been two hours exfoliating or something that I don’t do. I don’t want it to take a lot of time. So here’s how much time it takes. I do that. You rub it in.

[00:20:45] Carolina: Yeah, on top of stuff. 

[00:20:49] Dave: All right. So if I do that, I think that’s not very much time. Am I rubbing it in the right direction? Do I have to massage my eyes and [Inaudible] or anything? 

[00:20:58] Carolina: You need apply a little more. You put it–

[00:21:00] Dave: I didn’tputenough on? Two pumps?

[00:21:03] Carolina: Yeah, one pump for each eye, and then make sure that you have a decent amount around your eyelids too. We saw a lot of people that had the eyelid drooping that basically it smoothed out the wrinkles above your eyes, which was really impressive. Yeah.

[00:21:27] Dave: I’m using the bigger bottle. What is it? This one? Yeah, this is what the actual eye bottle, the thing that you would use daily. I’m just using the travel one, which– and it’s nice to have travel ones for short trips. Now, the other thing you sent me was a cleanser. And look, I’m a guy, so I usually just get in the shower, and I don’t use weird body gels full of things that disrupt my hormones. I just use soap, good old-fashioned soap.

[00:21:53] And then I wash my armpits, my other areas, and things like that. And the soap forgets that I used it on the other areas before I wash my face with it, so it’s not embarrassed, and it’s just fine. And then everyone yells at me. Don’t use soap on your face. You’re a bad person. So I finally committed, about six months ago, to using cleanser in the morning and at night.

[00:22:14] And I’ve noticed a meaningful difference. Okay, you guys were all right. Thank you for your support. Instead of soap. So I’m advanced. But you had data that showed with your cleanser specifically, your product absorbs 2.1 times better if you use the cleanser before. That’s very interesting. Why does the cleanser do that?

[00:22:35] Carolina: So the cleanser basically promotes a light exfoliation of your skin. So removes the dead cells, and the impurities, the dirt. And with that, your skin is more open to absorb the product better, absorb the peptide better. So we did the test, the penetration of the peptide with and without the cleansing, and then we saw that there was an increase in 2.1 times when you cleanse your skin with PREP. 

[00:23:11] And if you’re using in the morning, you don’t need to clean again because it’s already clean from the night before. So once a day, and it’s going to boost the effects of the OS-01 face.

[00:23:26] AD BREAK

[00:23:27] Dave: Okay, so I only have to wash my face in the morning and not at night?

[00:23:30] Carolina: Yeah, because at night, your skin’s already clean. So you just apply the product. You just slept and then just wash with water. 

[00:23:39] Dave: I hate washing my face at night. The reason being– if you guys are like, Dave, you slob– no, if you’re going to go to sleep, splashing water on your face before you go to bed doesn’t help with sleep quality. So I don’t mind smearing stuff on my face. So that’s cool. So once a day, cleansing with the OneSkin cleanser in the morning, then put on all the OneSkin face stuff, the OneSkin eye stuff, because I’m already out of the shower.

[00:24:07] I cleaned my face in the shower. I had to wash it anyway. And then I put the body lotion on. I’m just doing arms and legs. Should I be rubbing on my butt to not get cellulite or on my chest? Women have different skin on their chest. Guys don’t. I’m not worried about what I look like in a low-cut dress because that’s not my style. But do I need to really do my chest. It sees the sun, but not that much. Can I skip that?

[00:24:33] Carolina: The body product was basically to treat your skin as a whole. So obviously, there are areas that we all want to improve the appearance, we want to improve the thickness, or you want to basically improve some damage. But if you want to make your skin stronger, more resilient overall, ideally, you would apply the body product in your whole body. I know that for men, it’s a little more challenging if you a lot of hair.

[00:25:06] Dave: I was going to say. I’m not that hairy. I have the Neanderthal gene. This is the only thing I ever got from 23, in me, that was useful. I have the Neanderthal gene for less back hair. So this is a gift. And I’m not a very hairy person anyway, fortunately, probably because I had very high levels of estrogen when I was younger.

[00:25:24] In my early 20s, I had lower testosterone and high estrogen than my mom because I was obese and because all of my testosterone was turning into estrogen. I don’t have that problem anymore, but even so, I don’t like it in my chest hair. So I guess just deal with it is what you’re saying.

[00:25:40] Carolina: Yeah, ideally, as we said, we did this other clinical study in which participants use the body lotion twice a day, and we actually measured how the body treatment impacted our systemic levels of inflammation. So we collect the blood off those participants before they start using the product. Three months after, we measured the levels of inflammation. And for those that were using twice a day, we saw a  significant decrease in the level of inflammatory cytokines, more specifically IL-8. 

[00:26:16] Dave: Okay. That’s big.

[00:26:19] Carolina: Yeah. That’s why, if you are willing to go through smearing product on your whole body, there is a good reason behind why you should do it.

[00:26:33] Dave: Okay, and I will be really clear. I have a lot of friends. Someone was just asking me on the airplane yesterday, flying back home, how do you know all this stuff? Why did you put this together before other people did in the whole biohacking movement? It’s like, because I was learning from people in their 80s when I was in my 20s because I ran a nonprofit group.

[00:26:56] So I have friends, and I cultivate friends who are much older than me because they know all this stuff, and they’ve already made the mistakes that I would likely make. And in fact, David Perlmutter comes to mind, who’s a dear friend and just a sweetheart of a human being. And when I chat with him, he says, one of the things that I miss, I really wish I would have been more aware of sun damage.

[00:27:19] He’s a sailor. He’s always sailing his boat around, and he gets a lot of sun, and so he’s now really aware of it. So I listen, and there is not an old man out there who doesn’t wish at some level that his skin works better. No one wants their face to age, but guys are generally like, I know I look wise now, and it’s okay.

[00:27:42] But still, we’d like to have healthier skin. So I’m fine to put this on. But the real reason isn’t cosmetic. It isn’t vanity. The real reason is reducing systemic inflammation, which I have dealt with my entire life more than most people because of autoimmunity and just the way I grew up. Keeping that down makes your brain work better.

[00:28:03] It makes you live longer. So if you want to have a brain that doesn’t have love handles and is tired, then you should take care of your skin. All right, fine. I’ll start rubbing it on. I’m going to do my cleavage because that’s where the most hair is, but I’ll do my stomach and all the other places, and that’ll work.

[00:28:20] Okay. I’m down for that. One reason too, that I don’t think you can say, but that I can probably say, is that the skin is a very effective route of delivery of systemic peptides. And we know this because if you put sunscreen on your skin, it goes into your blood right away. And you can buy testosterone cream that I used until I had kids. You can just rub it on your armpits, or on your perineum, and it absorbs the same way an injection does. So OS-01, might it have systemic effects?

[00:28:53] Carolina: Yeah, that’s a great question. We believe that it’s not going to penetrate up to the bloodstream, but because it’s changing the levels of inflammation in the skin, that inflammation that would come from the skin will basically impact your body indirectly. So it’s more like maintaining or recovering the health of the skin so your body performs better.

[00:29:25] Because when we do the penetration studies with the peptide, we see that around 5% can get to the dermal layer. So the bloodstream is going to be a little lower, so the amount would be very small that it would get to the bloodstream. So the effect is more by treating your skin, and that outcome would impact the health of your body. Now, unless you deliver from a different, obviously, way, either orally or intravenous, then it’sanother area for us to develop.

[00:30:04] Dave: So you’re thinking about an intravenous OS-01?

[00:30:07] Carolina: Not yet. Obviously in the future. We are interested in exploring.

[00:30:13] Dave: So off the record, you’re the CEO of the company, and you’re highly trained. Is there a possibility that maybe one time some pure OS-01 fell into an IV that was accidentally attached to your arm, just once? Tell me about that.

[00:30:28] Carolina: Not yet.

[00:30:29] Dave: Really?

[00:30:31] Carolina: Yes.

[00:30:31] Dave: Really?

[00:30:32] Carolina: No, we definitely need to run a lot of safety studies before we got to humans.

[00:30:40] Dave: Someone has to be first. Shouldn’t it be you?

[00:30:45] Carolina: When it comes to that, I think we’re probably going to test in the regular animal studies that the pharmaceutical development recommends.

[00:30:59] Dave: Okay, what if you were on a cruise ship 200 miles outside of international waters so that you weren’t subject to any regulatory body? Then won’t that happen?

[00:31:07] Carolina: I’m pretty confident on OS-01 safety. Obviously, it will all depend on the doses. So I think at the lower doses, I could try myself, but yeah, that’s nothing– 

[00:31:25] Dave: We want to know safety and that it doesn’t cause blood clots in everyone who takes it within six months after they take it because we test everything that we inject ourselves with as a species, obviously. But yeah, I’m down for being one of your early trial subjects because I think it’d be really interesting. And I’m happy to go on a cruise with you so we can just use GPS, get right past them. Like, ah, there’s no rules. We can do whatever we want. 

[00:31:53] How about oral? Does it work? If I took capsules, would it have this effect on the lining of my stomach? I know that you haven’t done studies. You’re not recommending it for this, and eating it would probably taste bad, so I’m just talking about, you have a new peptide. How do we play with the new peptide? Come on. You’re doing cutting-edge science here.

[00:32:10] Carolina: Yeah, there are so many possibilities, but there are many studies. I need to understand how it’s going to be degraded in your stomach, how it’s going to be absorbed, the amount that we actually did those. So, so much choice to explore there. Yeah.

[00:32:27] Dave: It’s my job to push you to the future as fast as possible, and it’s your job to be like, I can’t believe he’s asking me this on the show. Dave, shut up and ask me something else. 

[00:32:35] Carolina: It’s hard to cure all tissues aging. Right now you’re focused on the skin, and then eventually, we get beyond the skin.

[00:32:46] Dave: Skin is a gateway to the rest of your body. And if you make the skin healthier, you do make the rest of the body healthier. That doesn’t mean that I’m not going to ask you about doing both. All right, one other off-label use question, because I just have to ask this kind of thing, if I took some of the facial formula and it was on my little finger and I stuck it up my nose, would it have a beneficial effect on the mucosal barriers? Maybe? 

[00:33:13] Carolina: We have not tested it in the mucous. 

[00:33:16] Dave: So there’s no data on OS-01 and on mucosal. So it’s either going to absorb better or worse, and all that. Okay.

[00:33:23] Carolina: I wouldn’t recommend a lotion. I wouldn’t recommend a lotion. I don’t think it’s the best delivery. Probably a spray would work better. 

[00:33:32] Dave: Okay. Maybe you can have a vertical sprayer that’s not FDA-approved for the nose, but it just would obviously go in the nose. I’ve seen other companies do that. Come on, give us the tools. I want to live forever. I need your help.

[00:33:45] Carolina: Okay, we’ll think about that.

[00:33:47] Dave: All right, think about it. That’s all I can ask, is think about it because I do think that the pharmacology that you went through, or just, I don’t know what to call it, the research you did to go through 700 different peptides computationally and then to test them actually on skin cells in petri dishes in the lab, is really cool. And you’ve found something that no one else has. I’m like, I want to play with it some more.

[00:34:12] Carolina: Yeah, and as I said, the results are better than rapamycin, at least in the skin. So there is a huge potential there. It’s just that a lot of studies are required to understand what’s — 

[00:34:25] Dave: I respect that very much. And also, I want to be in the studies because I’m one of those guys. So one thing that you did get from the data is you needed one concentration for the eye. You need another concentration for the face, and another one for the body. Why not just put the higher concentration everywhere?

[00:34:48] Carolina: One is cost in terms of the peptide to make the product available and at a reasonable price for our customers. The other one is that we tried to increase the concentration of the face product, and we test in the skins of the face, and it didn’t improve the results.

[00:35:15] So it’s very interesting that a lot of times, if you have more peptide, but if the skin doesn’t need, or at least in that specific formula, the higher concentration wouldn’t necessarily perform better. But the main rationale is that you have less damage on your body, and then you have more damage in your face, and you have even more damage around your eyes just because the skin around your eyes is thinner and ages faster. So a higher concentration would justify for that specific area. 

[00:35:53] Dave: Okay. So you need to have the right dose. And the right dose that’s not too high, not too low, works better. Who would have thought? Exercise is the same way. There’s a lot of people who are getting too much exercise, a lot of people get too little, and that’s why at Upgrade Labs we’re using AI to determine the right dose of which type of exercise or other input to do. 

[00:36:15] And funny enough, if you have less inflammation in your body, you can handle more exercise before you hit the upper limit. So if your skin was less inflamed, you could exercise more without hitting the wall, or you could do something else stressful without hitting the wall, which is why all this plays together. And I think it is more of an AI problem. 

[00:36:32] There’s some other stuff that you’ve found since our first interview about OS-01 that I wanted to review with you. We’ve talked about reducing senescent cells by up to 50% in the skin better than rapamycin. And guys, if you have compounded rapamycin skin cream, which I’ve used, it’s damned expensive.

[00:36:49] So OS-01 works better and is lower cost compared. So if you’re on an aggressive regimen like I am to live a very long time, this is just more cost effective. But I also am just going to say, if you’re listening to this, this is not Neutrogena. This stuff isn’t cheap, but you are custom manufacturing a novel peptide you discovered in order to make this.

[00:37:11] So it is an advanced anti-aging therapy. But I also have seen studies, and I struggle with this because you sent me the new OS-01 SHEILD, a broad spectrum, mineral-based sunscreen. Guys, sunscreen not based on minerals is dumb. It increases skin cancer risk and introduces endocrine-disrupting compounds.

[00:37:35] That’s like drinking diet soda to, lose weight. It’s worse than water. So the stuff that you’re making is mineral-based. It’s got a clean label, and you studied it. Is there OS-01 peptide in it as well?

[00:37:48] Carolina: There is also OS-01 there. But the penetration of OS-01 is lower because of the zinc oxide. It forms a physical barrier, so it doesn’t allow the peptide to penetrate as well as with the face product.

[00:38:05] Dave: I have seen multiple studies for a long time, and I’ve been an advocate of sun exposure for the skin forever because you need some UVB to increase collagenous thickness because it turns out that sunlight, UVB, not UVA, is a hormetic stressor of the skin. It’s exercise for the skin. So if you’re skiing and you’re in the sun all day, it’s going to be bad for your skin.

[00:38:31] But I think 20 minutes of morning sunshine not just affects your circadian rhythm in your eyes. Your skin has its own circadian rhythm. And you want that UVB exposure. So if I was to use sunscreen on my face, which I still don’t do most of the time– sorry guys, I know you’re probably supposed to, then I would use it after my morning sun exposure. Is that within your recommendations for skin?

[00:38:55] Carolina: Yeah, ideally, you would go out one day, UV index is below three, so you get some sunlight. And if you’re going to stay, obviously, too much out there, or you’re going to stay for the whole day working, apply sunscreen, and you’ll be protected not only from the UV light but also blue light and whatever other environmental stressors, pollution, and so on. There are a lot of antioxidants that also help prevent that production of free radicals on top of the effect of the peptide itself.

[00:39:35] Dave: So we talked about sunscreen. Some people are recommending sunscreen indoors because it blocks the harmful effect of indoor LED blue lights on your skin. What’s your take on that?

[00:39:50] Carolina: My take is that in our case, our sunscreen, it does have some antioxidants that will protect from blue light. It’s harder for us to measure the effect of blue light in the lab. So I can only say, based on our experience, so we couldn’t test exactly how much we are protecting from blue light, but because our sunscreen is safe, we added this antioxidants. It’s not going to cause any harm. So apply your sunscreen and be protected from whatever blue light, UV light, pollution, everything.

[00:40:28] Dave: Okay. And speaking of pollution, some people in the comment thread here from the Upgrade Collective are saying, shouldn’t I wash my face at night to remove pollution that sticks to my skin during the day? So maybe I should use cleanser twice a day.

[00:40:42] Carolina: No, I said that you should wash at night, not in the morning.

[00:40:46] Dave: Oh, you wash at night. Oh, I had it backwards. Okay. So when you wake up, you don’t have to wash your face.

[00:40:50] Carolina: No, because it’s already– 

[00:40:52] Dave: I have to shave in the morning, so I already have to wash my face. Okay, fine. Wash my face at night. Take away all my fun, Carolina.

[00:41:01] Carolina: I think you don’t need to wash your face, for sure. Yeah.

[00:41:06] Dave: All right. Okay,wash at night. If sunshine in moderate doses increases collagen thickness, and then you put on your sunscreen and you do your OS-01 before, after, you’re going to get, in my understanding, the maximum benefits because you have data now that says OS-01 in OneSkin supports DNA damage repair. So if the ultraviolet light triggered some DNA damage, it would be able to fix itself better, right? 

[00:41:36] Carolina: Yeah, correct. And then that’s the beauty of the sunscreen, that because it has OS-01, it can also help repair damage because if you are on the beach or whatever, a lot of times, you are going to still get some sun damage, even though you are wearing sunscreen, unless you reapply every two hours. So the OS-01 is there to make sure that if you get some sun damage, your skin cells will be well equipped to repair that sun damage efficiently.

[00:42:07] Dave: Okay. That makes a lot of sense. Now, the other thing that you found in your research is that there’s, you call it a key aging gene that activates collagen and hyaluronic acid. So everyone listening, I think, knows what collagen is at this point. You need it for thickness, but hyaluronic acid is found in collagen, and it’s found in your joints, in your cartilage.

[00:42:33] And when you get most fillers, if you’re getting injectable fillers, they’re just hyaluronic acid, which is useful because it breaks down over time. It’s a natural compound. And then if you had someone who injected it in a weird space, you can just dissolve it with something called hyaluronidase.

[00:42:52] So it’s a safe thing, and something your body needs anyway. But here, what you’re doing is you’re causing the cells to make more HLA, it’s called. And then when they make more HLA, they’re more hydrated, and then they look better, and then you get thicker collagen as well. What is the key aging gene that’s doing all of this that OneSkin is turning on?

[00:43:14] Carolina: There is not one specific gene. When we suppress inflammation, we are activating all of those genes related to collagen and hyaluronic acid because inflammation basically prevents the activation of those genes. So by suppressing inflammation, we allow the cells that would naturally produce collagen and hyaluronic acid to basically go back to that production. But we also suppress the enzymes that degrades collagen and hyaluronic acid. So like metalloproteinases or hyaluronidase, they are also enzymes that will be degrading hyaluronic acid.

[00:44:00] AD BREAK

[00:44:01] Dave: So if you’re a biohacker nerd like me, you could do a search engine besides Google and search for MMP-9, which is one of the things you’re talking about that’s formed in skin, is a part of aging if you want to get into the details on it, probably more than most people are interested in right now. Actually, there’s something we should share.

[00:44:22] And then I want to talk about how you’re measuring skin age because you developed a whole new clock for that. But you’ve offered listeners a discount, so you guys can use code UPGRADE15 because this is The Human Upgrade, and you go to oneskin.co. Not .com. So oneskin.co. Use code UPGRADE15. Save 15%.

[00:44:43] By the time you’re done with your first bottle, you’ll see a difference. It’s pretty profound actually. And so I think if you’re into advanced longevity and maybe you just want your face to look better, this stuff really is potent, and it works, and it works differently. I’ve used lots of things that do work, and this isn’t the only thing that I use, but the data here is way more robust than you’ll see from some of the brands that are out there. 

[00:45:15] There’s a lot of people just white labeling stuff from the same warehouses and things like that. And a lot of people just write good copy by copying the website, and then they’re just selling garbage behind it. Your research is crazy. It’s way above and beyond what I’ve seen with any skincare brand. So talk about MolClock and how you actually know the age of skin. How does that work, and how did you discover it?

[00:45:44] Carolina: Yeah, so the concept off molecular clocks was first introduced by Horvath and other researchers. And basically, the idea is that we would measure the change in molecular marker. In this case, we are measuring methylation and epigenetic marker. We’re measuring how those patterns in methylation are changing with the chronological age.

[00:46:13] So when Horvath built the first clock, he used methylation data from different tissues of our body. And when we were using Horvath to measure the age of the skin, we saw that the accuracy to measure his skin age was not very high. So we decided to build a clock that was built only using skin samples.

[00:46:37] So now we got a higher accuracy in terms of predicting the skin biological age because we were training an algorithm only with skin samples. We also published a paper on the MolClock and how it predicts the age of the skin better than the other clocks available. So basically, when we have a skin in the lab, we can measure the age of that skin.

[00:47:01] Let’s say the skin is 45 years old, then we can test our peptide. We can test a final product, and we isolate, again, the DNA, and we sequence that methylation profile, and we can quantify the age reversal effect. That’s how we found that our peptide could reverse the age of the skin in 2.5 years. 

[00:47:23] And that’s how we are also measuring that in humans. We are reversing the age of the skin by measuring the methylation profile. So it’s a very interesting way because it’s quantitative. It’s not bias, and it’s the most accurate tool that we have available today to quantify the age reversal effect. 

[00:47:46] Dave: You talked about something really important in there. You talked about the Horvath clock. I was fortunate to spend a couple of days with Steve Horvath, who created the clock. And we’ve done a couple episodes on The Human Upgrade about longevity as measured by the true age score, which is a DNA methylation score.

[00:48:06] And what’s neat is once you do that, you can run your data on your DNA methylation through, we’ll call it different lenses. And the Horvath clock is the most established, we’ll say gold standard, but there are other clocks you can use, which is basically, how do I look at all this data? 

[00:48:22] So you found a way to look at the data specific for skin to say, oh, let’s compare the DNA methylation of skin aging versus, say, blood aging, or all the other markers in the human body. So that is a contribution to the field of aging in general. So now someone else who says, I have my knockoff whatever thing I came up with, they would have to run it against a gold standard clock and go, oh, look, it doesn’t work. So then they probably wouldn’t run the test in the first place.

[00:48:55] Or maybe they’ll have something that works really well, and I’m open to it, but guys, if you’re going to do something in skincare, maybe you should be making your anti-aging claims based on a standard measure. And this is a very, very good one, or come up with one that’s better. I’m open to that too. We’ll do a podcast.

[00:49:12] Carolina: Yeah, I think that the next step would be to have one method that would be noninvasive, that we can collect enough biological samples that we can measure the biological age without needing a biopsy, which we’re not there yet, but I think that would be ideal. So more people could actually get their skin age measured.

[00:49:34] Dave: Yeah, and you actually have– now we’re getting really nerdy, but in your papers, you can use UV, I believe, lighting, but you can light up parts of the face with a very high amplification. You can see wrinkles that the eye can’t see. And that’s another measure of aging, and you guys are totally killing it there. You put it up, and then 30 days later, you can see a difference when you have that– what’s that called? I’m forgetting its name, the imaging.

[00:50:04] Carolina: Visia Skin.

[00:50:06] Dave: Yeah, it’s the one where you’re looking under a microscope and it’s illuminated from the side with something or another. But there’s, basically, different ways that, say, a plastic surgeon would look at your eyes, the skin under your eyes to figure out how healthy it is. You know what I’m talking about. What does that thing–

[00:50:23] Carolina: Yeah, I see. So you’re talking about the instrument that can measure either the elasticity or the skin barrier.

[00:50:33] Dave: Yeah, there’s name for that kind of imaging. It’s some company’s name that I’m not coming up with. But anyway guys, if you aren’t willing to get a– 

[00:50:41] Carolina: Visia.

[00:50:42] Dave: What? 

[00:50:42] Carolina: Visia Skin.

[00:50:44] Dave: Yeah, Visia Skin. That’s the one. So there’s a Visia Skin measure which is noninvasive but nowhere near as good as the MolClock, but MolClock, you’ll have to do a skin biopsy, which hurts. So there you go. Those are the two gold standards. I would like, at a minimum, if you’re looking for a longevity-focused skin cream, that they would have a Visia Skin saying, look, we can see a change over time. And again, if you got a good night’s sleep and you did some other drainage, it might change things on that. 

[00:51:11] Carolina: Yeah.

[00:51:11] Dave: The MolClock isn’t going to be biased by that, so I think that’s a gold standard. So yeah, we got nerdy on that. I think the biggest thing people are going to take away from all this is that there’s a lot of science behind OneSkin. And if you go to oneskin.co, use code UPGRADE15, you can save 15%. Try it for a month. You’ll see what I’m talking about. And I would actually really love it if you just went to Instagram, do a little story, and tag me saying, oh my god, Dave was right. OneSkin does work. So it’s just good to let other people know. And if it doesn’t work, post on that too. We’re a big community.

[00:51:46] Carolina: Definitely, we want to learn, if it didn’t work for you, what’s your skin type? We can obviously get the feedback and see what we can do to make our product work better for everyone.

[00:52:00] Dave: All right, now here’s the final question. If I wanted to, I don’t know, go on the Twinkie diet and just wash them down with beer every day, which everyone knows that would wreck your skin and you would look so bad, is OneSkin still going to help?

[00:52:17] Carolina: It’s going to help. It’s going to have a harder battle to fight.

[00:52:24] Dave: You’re still going tolook like crap. You’ll just look less like crap. That’s my experience.

[00:52:29] Carolina: It’s definitely not a miracle cream, so we need to help our skin look younger, and OneSkin can help, and we also need to do our part.

[00:52:43] Dave: Beautiful. Carolina, thank you for doing the hard work. It’s so easy to start a supplement brand or a skincare brand with no research and no product and just start selling. And it’s becoming harder and harder. It’s almost like the Amazon effect, the knockoff stuff there. And you go to Instagram, there’s all these people without ethics.

[00:53:05] There’s like, oh, I’m just going to legally steal this company’s– and you’re not legally stealing anything. What you’re doing is copying marketing that might have been truthful. And in OneSkin’s case, I think your marketing is truthful. And then you’re selling crap with someone else’s truthful marketing.

[00:53:22] And it’s not ethical. And it’s not even stealing. It’s just making the world a worse place. So I am a fan of just the rigor, going through 700 things, discovering a new peptide, putting it into practice. There are very few companies in the longevity space that do this. And this is why you guys have seen me talk about spermidine.

[00:53:41] The research there took a long time. And there are companies doing spermidine. You hear me talk about Urolithin A. The research took 10 plus years. And there’s tons and tons of other things like that. But for every one of those, there’s literally a 1,000 people selling some herb that they’re buying from China, and whatever the heck it is, without substantial research whatsoever and without testing what’s in it.

[00:54:04] So I just think your rigor is way beyond normal, and it shows in what your product does. So that’s why I wanted to have you back on the show. And if you come up with some new research and a new molecular clock, or the ability for me to stick it up my nose, or take it as a pill, or inject it, or I don’t know where else I’d put it, but I’m open. As long as it’s going to make me younger, I’m all in.

[00:54:28] Carolina: Yeah, thank you, Dave. It’s always good to share with you and our audience our data, and I appreciate the opportunity. And I’ll make sure to keep you in mind whenever we start those tests with our peptides beyond the skin. I think we’ll have next application that I can’t share yet, but you may be interested in that one. So this is the next episode.

[00:54:53] Dave: You know what? Eye drops. We’ve got to talk about eye drops next episode. I don’t know what it’s going to be, but I can’t wait. Thanks, again.

[00:55:01] Carolina: Thank you, Dave.

[00:55:03] Dave: If you guys liked today’s episode, you know what to do. Drink some Danger Coffee because it’s almost like peptides could work better if your body has the trace minerals that are required for you to build thicker skin. And get some OneSkin.

[00:55:18] The code for oneskin.co, again, is UPGRADE15. And if you’re going to make an investment this month in longevity, not just in looking good, this is worth it. Because if it’s reducing systemic inflammation by reducing skin inflammation, you’re killing two birds with one stone. And like I said, I’m doing it. I’ll see you on the next episode.

[00:00:00] Dave: You’re listening to The Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today, you’re going to learn about quantum biology. You might have noticed in the last 100 or so episodes, if you’re a long-time listener, and keep in mind, not a lot of people have heard all almost 1100 episodes of The Human Upgrade. There’s enough hours to qualify for a two-year college degree worth of lectures in these things.

[00:00:28] So you probably have gone through the back catalog. You’ve probably found stuff that’s interesting to you. I’ve been annoyed by the word quantum for a long time. It’s like having a tachyon drive in Star Trek or something that doesn’t actually work, but we just make it up.

[00:00:47] And so I promise that someone out there has the turbo quantum upgrade supreme extreme. And so it’s a word because it’s at the cutting-edge that’s open to misuse. At the same time, tons of emerging evidence suggest, or I would just say, tells us that the world we live in is actually a quantum world.

[00:01:14] And it’s funny because if you go back hundreds of years to the enlightenment, the start of scientific thoughts and trying to decode Mother Nature, we’ve started at a high level, and we’re at a place now where most people who haven’t studied believe that we are chemical beings. 

[00:01:34] If you were to go back a 100 years before the American Medical Association and Morris Fishbein, who really trashed the place, they got in bed with Rockefeller, who was the world’s greatest monopolist, and realized if you could sell petroleum-based chemicals as medicines, that was a monopoly you could get. 

[00:01:57] And so they set about trashing natural medicine, and herbs, and all that sort of stuff, and electrical medicine, which was thriving under guys like Royal Reif and even a little bit of Edison and certainly Tesla. So the old world had the argument of, are we chemical or are we electrical? 

[00:02:15] And chemical won, even though we are both chemical and electrical, because electricity drives chemical reactions. But what we know now is that all of that is nonsense, except it’s really useful models for how the world works. You can use them but they’re not accurate because we know biochemistry isn’t the same as regular chemistry. 

[00:02:38] In fact, there are different degrees in college. Because biochemistry behaves oddly. Why does it do that? Because of quantum tunneling effects inside of enzymes, inside of microtubules, inside the body. And the fact that you can do weird things with enzymes that allow chemical reactions to happen with far less electricity or heat than would normally be required, which is good because we would literally catch fire or burn if we didn’t have biochemistry.

[00:03:03] Which means, yes, we’re electrical. Yes, we’re magnetic. Yes, we’re light. Yes, we’re chemical. And underlying all of that, we are quantum. In fact, reality itself is quantum in quantum physics, quantum computing, quantum biology. These are real things, despite the fact that someone out there is probably selling quantum Cola. And to make this even more complex for you, there are products, including some that I have tried and be like, this stuff works, and it’s crazy.

[00:03:29] And there’s double-blind clinical trials that are starting to use quantum effects to affect our biology. And I’ve even funded research at the University of Washington with Dr. Gerald Pollack around this fourth phase of water that involves quantum effects and how water can enable quantum tunneling.

[00:03:46] And the research showed, surprisingly, that if you mix certain kinds of fats with water and apply heat, it changes the structure of the water in a way a lot of people wouldn’t believe is possible, except you can see it on a microscope, so it must be real because you can actually see it with your eyeballs.

[00:04:01] You don’t have to just feel it with your heart or some airy, fairy quantum thing that’s still real. If all that confused you, yeah, it confuses me too, yet I’m not willing to deny that a quantum reality exists because it does. So, there. That’s our introduction for the show. 

[00:04:16] Our guest, Dr. Clinton, has 15 years of experience working with people on overcoming the health problems that I dealt with when I was younger, things like autoimmune conditions. And frankly, I still have a few of those left, but there are a lot less than they were. A Lyme disease, which I think is almost always mold toxicity. I had both active Lyme and toxic mold brain damage. 

[00:04:41] And Catherine’s an interesting guest and someone for you to learn from today because she had to heal herself, and she’s healed her patients. And what we’re going to talk about today is something that’s really profound. Health is rooted in your connections to other people. And we’re going to talk about quantum biological systems, how they’re connected to the world around us.

[00:05:05] And if you like this episode, you’ll want to hear the one with Dr. Rollin McCraty from the Global Coherence Initiative and several other entities throughout time, just saying, it’s more complex than what we see with our eyes and hear with our ears. With no further ado, Catherine, welcome to the show.

[00:05:22] Catherine: Thank you so much for having me, Dave. It’s an honor to be here, and I am really excited to dive into these topics with you.

[00:05:31] Dave: Give me your definition of quantum. What does that mean? Can I have a quantum Lego set? Because I want one.

[00:05:38] Catherine: That’s coming. The latest Blockbusters have quantum in the name. Like you said, it can get really annoying, but there is this wealth of evidence out there talking about what quantum biology is. And that’s really the study of quantum phenomenon in living systems. And it’s the flow of electrons, of protons, photons of light, phonons of sound, and how they impact our biological system.

[00:06:13] And it started out with this idea, back in the day, of quantum physics with Erwin Schrodinger. This idea that maybe our biology has some quantum effects to it. And like you said so eloquently in your introduction there, the chemical mechanical model of biology has really reigned supreme and still does in medical schools, and mainstream science, and in your doctor’s office, but those ideas are starting to be turned into a layer of understanding, but not the whole picture.

[00:06:52] And that’s where quantum biology comes in. In the early 2000s, we had some amazing researchers who are still doing research out there, Fleming, and Greg Engel, and Seth Lloyd out of MiT. The first two were out of UC Berkeley. These amazing researchers were looking at photosynthetic bacteria and how these bacteria capture a photon of light and then transfer that to the photosynthetic center in the cell.

[00:07:24] And they found that just like the early quantum physicists talked about that duality between our matter being a matter and a particle but also being a wave, and that wave function allows for all those quantum phenomena of quantum tunneling, of superposition, of coherence. And that’s exactly what these researchers found 20 years ago.

[00:07:52] And at first, the scientific community laughed at them. And then when they looked at the calculations, they were like, oh, okay. We are going to start doing the same research. Because what they found was that when a photon of light is captured by these cells, it takes a wave pattern. 

[00:08:12] So it actually tunnels and superimposes and takes multiple different paths to find its fastest path to that photosynthetic reaction center. It acts as a wave until it reaches that center where it completes photosynthesis and the giver of life here on earth. And the really interesting thing that they also found was that it didn’t act alone. 

[00:08:38] When quantum physicists are studying quantum phenomenon in a laboratory, they are cooling everything down below absolute zero where no life can exist. They are shielding the lab from any heat, from any vibration, from any sound. And this is quite the opposite of what’s happening in a living system. So everybody was like, absolutely not. This can’t exist. And what they found was that it was that noise.

[00:09:07] It was that chaos of life that added the coherence that kept that photon on its fastest path. It was like the crowds in a marathon where the marathon runner falls down and they say, come on, keep going, keep going to your goal. Keep going to the finish line. And so that’s what they found. And the evidence has been pouring in ever since then.

[00:09:34] Dave: In quantum biology and just in, actually, quantum physics, a lot of people have heard about that idea that if there is not an observer, then the waveform never collapses into a particle. And in our large human egos, we like to believe that we are the observer. There’s just one problem, and I wrote about this in Smarter Not Harder.

[00:09:58] Your brain doesn’t get the first electrical wiggle of reality for about a third of a second after reality happens. Which means you might have a distributed array of billions of tiny little consciousnesses called mitochondria. They are the observers of reality. And they work together as a collective consciousness, a distributed collective consciousness to focus on reality. 

[00:10:22] And when they’re not there, people say, there’s no observers. Did you sterilize your laboratory? Because there was an E. coli in your drain that was observing reality. And so if you have a truly sterile environment, you don’t really have reality, which, do you know this? Tree falls in the woods, and there’s no one there to– there was the trees were there to see it because there was life.

[00:10:42] And whether you’re talking about chloroplasts or mitochondria, similar structures, those are the roots of conscious observation in the world, according to my beliefs after I wrote Head Strong, my book that went deep on mitochondrial biology. This has to be how consciousness works. And I see that stuff every day at 40 Years of Zen. 

[00:11:01] The implication would be that if you can train your network of mitochondria, your unconscious, to focus on the things you want, you might collapse them down into reality. And then they might be more likely to happen, which is what data shows in multiple guests like Lynne McTaggart, Rollin McCraty, who was just on, and many others have talked about that.

[00:11:22] That’s the secret behind the secret with Jack Canfield, who’s also been on the show. So this is where biology meets consciousness, and it’s so cool. And you seem like one of the few people who would really get this.

[00:11:34] Catherine: It is so cool, Dave. I love looking at the research, and I love being able to point people to studies. But there’s also this validation of what we’ve intuitively known. And you’re talking about consciousness and mitochondria as the observer. And that’s so spot on because really, our genes, our DNA, our mitochondria, the water lining all of our cells in our fascia, it’s liquid crystalline in nature. It’s acting as this antenna picking up on all this information. 

[00:12:12] And you yourself, so many in your audience are hip to the idea of how important light is. But there’s this step before that where sound is coming into play. And these pressure waves of sound are creating infrared energy. And that’s something that the ancient indigenous cultures always talked about, and the Big Bang theory.

[00:12:38] This idea that it starts with this inelastic collisions of molecules creating sound, creating light. And that is the idea behind consciousness, behind everything that you just explained. It’s really incredible to be coming full circle and having research to validate these ideas.

[00:13:05] Dave: In the beginning, there was the word, which sounded an awful lot like, and every major religious tradition has some– even amen is that thing plus, I don’t know– they put the N in from some language 5,000 years ago, but we all have these things out there, and it’s written there, and probably that’s what the Big Bang was, was the first consciousness, at least in this universe, saying, oh, let’s wiggle a little bit and see what changes. 

[00:13:31] And so we can interpret that as a explosion of all this stuff. You can also interpret that as an explosion of consciousness and awareness that’s growing logarithmically, which is probably faster than logarithmically, but it’s growing really quickly, which is why the universe expands. So which one of those stories is real? I think they both are. They’re just different lenses on reality, right?

[00:13:52] Catherine: Absolutely, absolutely. And that’s the nice thing about quantum biology, is that it allows for that interconnection. It allows for multiple paths to be traveled at one time, multiple stories to be true at one time. And people, when I talk about this, they’re like, that’s not what I learned in school. 

[00:14:10] And what about those receptor cells and the key and lock model? That’s what dominates mainstream medicine, is that allosteric model where you have keys floating around, and they find their receptor, and they unlock, and then biological action happens. Now, we know that happens, but what happens before?

[00:14:32] What attracts them is looking like it’s quantum physical in nature. It is vibrational attraction. It is that structured water that lines those molecules, that lines those enzymes, and receptors, and keys, oscillating and vibrating at a certain frequency and attracting each other. So it’s not that one negates the other. It’s that both are true. And that’s one of the exciting things, I think, is that we can have multiple things be true. It’s just a deeper layer of understanding or a different chapter in the book, so to speak.

[00:15:15] Dave: It’s funny. There’s something called the standard model in physics that describes reality really well. And then a guy who’s been on the show, Nassim Harim or Harmeen. I’m forgetting his exact spelling, his last name. The guy from the Resonance Academy. He’s a ski instructor who had an awakening, and he created math that describes reality better than the standard model.

[00:15:37] But because he’s a ski instructor, they canceled his speech at CERN, the big super collider. Because how dare you impinge on our story of reality? And is the standard model true? It’s highly useful and mostly accurate, but it’s not actually true. And probably neither is his model because there’s always multiple ways.

[00:15:56] So I wish we would replace the word, that’s what I learned, to, that’s what I was programmed with. Because possibly there’s three different ways to explain something. I don’t know. Like Lyme disease, or like any of these other health things, or autism, for God’s sake, it’s not one cause of autism. The mostly chemical industrial pharmaceutical complex, in their reality, it’s always one cause.

[00:16:22] And there’s no proof that that’s the case. And in your world of functional medicine, and in the world of biohacking, it’s rarely just one thing. Just like you want to bake bread. All you need is yeast. If you don’t have flour, it doesn’t work. Got to have more than one ingredient to make some cool stuff happen.

[00:16:36] Catherine: Absolutely, absolutely. And that’s really the birthplace of quantum biology, was Erwin Schrodinger, this quantum physicist, brilliant, said, okay, I’m going to walk across the street and talk to the biologists about DNA because I think what I’m doing here applies to life. And that stepping out of the box, which we are not encouraged. to do. We are built in. 

[00:17:02] I love that idea of that’s how I was programmed because it is. We are programmed in school. Medical school especially has all of these imprints, and malpractice, and standard of care, and how dare you step out of the box. But when we do step out of the box, those interconnections and those multiple paths can be traveled for a deeper understanding.

[00:17:30] And again, this can sound so esoteric and so woo, but I’m actually literally talking about scientific understanding, a deeper understanding of biology and how life works, and how stepping out of the box can allow for that.

[00:17:50] Dave: A well-constructed podcast or even more, a well written book has the ability to change your lens on reality, your view of the world. It’s like installing an app on your phone that gives you a new ability. And this is why we have great works of literature, great works of science that stand the test of time. 

[00:18:08] And until the last 10 or 20 years, every kid had to read them because then we all have the same apps installed and we could communicate with the same world, the same frameworks, which is part of consciousness. And so this is a call to you. If you’re a skeptic or a true believer on either end of that, you’ve been programmed. 

[00:18:27] You just have to be curious about it and understand you can explain the same thing multiple ways, and that’s okay. And you’re not going to die if you don’t know the right one, even though you might have failed the test in high school.

[00:18:37] And so I’m open to these thoughts. And one of the studies that I think you’re familiar with was when a biologist and a quantum physicist partnered up to look at protons spin in the brain. Do you know about that one?

[00:18:49] Catherine: Oh, absolutely.

[00:18:50] Dave: You’re only person I know who knows about that. I saw the original thing on PubMed and was like, this is the most important study ever that no one ever talked about. Tell me about it.

[00:18:57] Catherine: It’s fascinating, and I think we should take a little step back and talk about birds first because it helps us understand why this would be important. And this is a well-established theory and understanding of how birds make their annual migration without any map, without any land stops, without their GPS.

[00:19:21] How are they doing this? They’re doing this, it seems, because these photons of light that enter their eyes become entangled. And they become radical pairs. So when you have a radical pair, it’s a free photon that can be paired with another photon of light, and they become entangled, meaning that they are inseparable in formation.

[00:19:49] So like a shoe, if you take a pair of shoes on a trip and you only end up with the right shoe, you know that that left shoe is at home, and you know what it looks like, and you know what the color is and the size. That’s a very simplistic analogy for entanglement. And the same thing can be said for quantum entangled particles.

[00:20:13] And so these birds are using entangled photons of light with the magnetic field of the earth to get an accurate, immediate time shot of where they are and where they need to go to migrate across the earth. Now, this same phenomenon is happening in the cells, in our neurons, in the brain. 

[00:20:40] We have these protons, and the spins become entangled, meaning that once we know about one of those, the other one, the information is ascertainable. And not only that. They live in this relationship, even separated by billions of miles. This is something that is not local. And we can talk about that neat discovery too, but these protons in the brain, the spin of these protons are being informed by magnetic fields.

[00:21:18] And that just opens up a whole new window of how EMFs impact our body, how we might have a sixth sense with that magneto reception, just like the birds in their annual migration do. And it opens up a deeper understanding of how neurons are functioning. We have this idea that it all comes down to electricity.

[00:21:45] Those axons fire, the electrical conduction is sent on its way. And just like you said, that’s actually really slow when it comes down to the math of it. That’s very slow. A fraction of a second is really slow. And we’re finding that the Niels Bohr Institute out of Denmark has done amazing research about how those neurons are actually conducting sound. 

[00:22:13] And that gets turned into a piezoelectric charge through the fascia, through the liquid crystalline structure, and then is turned into that electrical conduction. When you add in an entangled radical pair, then you have this instantaneous communication that’s happening that is something that we have never ever appreciated in modern science. And that study was one of the first. I think it came out last year. Just absolutely mind blowing

[00:22:48] Dave: But what this study found was that we all very recently learned how to watch protons spin in living cells. So they looked at, I don’t remember what kind of animal. It might have been a human, but whatever. I think it– 

[00:23:00] Catherine: Human. Yeah. 

[00:23:01] Dave: What they found was that every time your heart beats, the spin of protons in the brain, all at the same time, would change direction. And that means, with absolute clarity and proof, unless there was some mistake in the hardware, which probably there wasn’t, that we are quantum systems. 

[00:23:22] And quantum is so much faster than the speed of light because nothing is transmitted. Light, something’s moving. But with quantum information, there is no lag time at all, even if you’re on the other end of the universe. If two particles are entangled, you snap your fingers here, that finger snaps at exactly the same time. 

[00:23:38] So given that the cells in our body are talking at a quantum level that’s so fast, dude, we’re so slow. We’re 350 milliseconds. Unless you hacked your brain, you might be a quarter second. If you’re young, you’re not going to see it. And when something changes in your quantum reality, you won’t know it changed because it just looks like reality changed. 

[00:23:58] And we’ve just proven in that study, just by itself, without any of the other data points, that, oh my gosh, we’re quantum. And all the others said that we think is causative, it’s happening, but it’s happening on top of the quantum effects. Which is why if we can go to the lowest levels, we have the most leverage to make efficient change in the world, or in our own consciousness, bodies, and in our own healing, which is where you focus. 

[00:24:23] You talked about fascia, which is an amazingly important part of the body that is, funny enough, made out of collagen. Almost like collagen might have some magic powers. I’m the guy who made collagen a billion-dollar business in the world. So I think collagen is important. Talk to me about fascia, collagen, cells, and gels, and all the other cool stuff.

[00:24:40] Catherine: Our fascia is a network. And there’s some controversy about how that’s defined. Some people are defining it even in liquid form in our lymph, in our blood. But just a traditional definition of fascia is the collagen network, that connective tissue network within our body that connects to each and every cell in our body through those microtubules, through that cytoskeleton of the cell.

[00:25:10] And this connective tissue network is made up of mostly, predominantly, collagen. And when you look at collagen on a quantum level, on a nanoscale, because quantum phenomenon, that’s where it’s taking place, at that level. When you look at it at that level, you see that it’s a triple helix.

[00:25:36] So we’re familiar with the double helix in the DNA, but the triple helix of tropocollagen tubules, they create these small little nano sized tubules. And what we see is in Gerald Pollack, like you were talking about, and his team out of the University of Washington, first identified this structured water, which had been talked about, and theorized, and proposed by many different researchers for a while.

[00:26:05] But he found that against hydrophilic surfaces, we build structured water. And the hydrogens are more tightly bound. It’s this lattice structure hexagonal in shape, like a honeycomb. And as one sheet of structured water forms from the input of infrared energy, then it acts as a template. Yeah, exactly.

[00:26:32] Then as one sheet forms, it acts as a template for more sheets to form. And he started with synthetic, like Nafion and different materials like this. And then he took it to collagen. And he recreated a collagen tubule. He immersed it in water and added that infrared energy. And what you see immediately is that that structured water starts to form not only on the outside of the tubule, but on the inside of the tubule as well.

[00:27:02] And not only that, but that structured water, and that lattice formation, and that liquid crystalline capacity of the water, it’s able to trap energy and use it for biological action. It is able to create a flow of liquid, of water, and protons through that recreated collagen tubule, just like those tropocollagen nanotubules that we have throughout the body.

[00:27:30] And it transports water, and fluid, and protons. It creates this ability for our collagen network, our fascia, to jump conduct protons anywhere in the body almost instantaneously. So now you have this quantum highway of fascia throughout the body that is able to transmit energy information at a scale that chemical, mechanical models just don’t have.

[00:28:02] So it’s really, really fascinating. And I talk a lot with my husband, and thank goodness, he’s such a check on me all the time. He’s like, what do you mean instantaneously? Nothing can move faster than the speed of light. And it’s like, last year, the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to three scientists who are doing work on non-local quantum entanglement, meaning that the scientific world has validated this idea that, yes, we can’t travel in space and time faster than the speed of light, but in a non-local universe, we don’t need to travel through space and time. We can jump conduct there. And that’s what’s happening with protons.

[00:28:53] That’s what’s happening with quantum entanglement, what’s happening with these things that sound just out of this world, woosters kind of science, like the proton spin in the brain being influenced by the magnetic field of the heart.

[00:29:10] The same thing was shown the year before in human cells using light and flavins in our cells, which again are those benzene rings that can hold and capture light information. And when put in a magnetic field, they have a radical pair, and they are adjusting their function as a response to the non-local quantum phenomenon. It’s just really mind-bending.

[00:29:43] Dave: It’s almost like polyphenols and bioflavonoids, which are those anti-aging compounds you read about in my longevity book. Might interact with light inside the cells if you get sunlight, which we’ve been talking about for the entire length of time in biohacking, that those are doing something. And it’s a clear case to never, ever expose yourself to the sunlight because it might benefit you, and then revenues would go down for the drug company. 

[00:30:10] So please, guys, for your own safety, through the financial benefits of Big Pharma, lock yourselves indoors, never go outside in sunlight. And if you do, smear yourself with something to prevent the sunlight from transmitting anything to polyphenols and bioflavonoids. We have to watch out for the profits of our overlords. Okay, there. Now the AI loves me. Okay, we can continue.

[00:30:33] Catherine: Exactly, exactly. You’ve got your polyphenols, and there’s another great study that came out showing that they actually capture those leaked electrons from the mitochondrial electron transport chain and just funnel them back in much like molecular hydrogen, except something that has always been in our world, and that it doesn’t stop there.

[00:31:02] The benzene ring, it’s in our melanin. That, of course, has a function in our sun, but it’s not only that. Melanin is very predominant in the cochlea in the inner ear. So that idea of sound and sound waves creating infrared energy that is captured by melanin is a whole new way to look at hearing. 

[00:31:25] Dave: Do you know what melanin is made out of?

[00:31:26] Catherine: I know that it is a benzene ring composite.

[00:31:30] Dave: There you go. So I got really deep on melanin when I was writing Head Strong, my book on mitochondria in the brain. And it actually informed some of what I do at 40 Years of Zen, the neuroscience mystery school thing that I run. And what makes that dark color in your skin, or neural melanin, which is inside the brain where there’s no sunshine, or ocular melanin in the back of your eye where there’s no ultraviolet, or cochlear melanin, is cross-linked polyphenols called melanoids.

[00:32:03] Guess what the largest source of polyphenols and melanoids is in the US diet? Yes, it’s coffee. So coffee and consciousness actually do go together because it makes it easier for you to make melanoids into melanin. And this is also why if you know someone with really dark skin, you can’t tell how old they are because their skin doesn’t age very much compared to pale skin.

[00:32:30] That’s because when you have more melanin, you can turn light, or heat, or sound into electricity via that piezoelectric effect. So you have it in the brain for that reason. It also acts as a capacitor. And in electrical engineering, a capacitor looks something like this. But it’s basically a way to store a large amount of electricity for instantaneous use.

[00:32:56] And so when you have a strong need for that in the brain, I believe the neural melanin is there in part to help you with that burst of insight. You need it, but you have to recharge it by moving, by making extra body heat through functioning mitochondria that can create heat or electricity. But if they don’t make the heat first, you don’t get the benefits. 

[00:33:17] And that’s why mitochondrial uncoupling is so important and why I’ve had a podcast episode on that. So you get into all these things going, oh my God, our systems are really complex. But if you give them the raw materials, you can believe what you just shared about fascia and collagen. And you can actually look at Dr. Pollock’s work. 

[00:33:36] And by the way, this is a quick shout out. I have funded some of Dr. Pollock’s work through the biohacking conference a few years ago. But he reached out during the pandemic and is at risk of losing his lab. So if you are a large donor who wants to advance consciousness and core cellular biology, you should reach out to Dr. Gerald Pollock.

[00:33:56] And if you DM me on Instagram, I could help you do that. So if someone out there is like, oh my God, I love this stuff, he needs help, and it’s beyond my ability to help him. So at least financially right now, otherwise I wouldn’t. 

[00:34:08] Catherine: I appreciate that. I appreciate that because it’s all of these researchers are not being funded by the powers that be right. NIH, they want you to be researching something that leads to a drug that leads to a device. And so I am really grateful for your sponsorship and your support of Pollock’s work. I have tried to raise money as well. I just did a fundraiser for John Stuart Reid’s work. He’s going to go to Egypt and study sound, and water, and send a sample. I’m sorry. I missed that.

[00:34:45] Dave: I just said, oh, neat. It’s awesome because Egypt is where they knew a lot about sound, right?

[00:34:50] Catherine: Absolutely, absolutely. He’s going to go to the Great Pyramid and the Red Pyramid with a group of vocalists and record that frequency and hope to capture it in water. And so he’s going to look at sound, but he’s sending vials of water from that experiment to Pollock to look for light signatures. 

[00:35:10] Dave: Wow.

[00:35:11] Catherine: Yeah, it’s so cool. And it’s so underfunded, and they’re working at just bare bone capacity. So I really, really appreciate you, Dave. Thank you.

[00:35:24] Dave: Oh, you’re so welcome. And thank you for helping all this stuff. It’s important. Like advanced physics research, we used to have some government funded national laboratories that would do that. And now it’s all gone to mostly private companies who don’t share the research. 

[00:35:39] So there’s a lot of things that we would have known that we don’t know today. It’s just important that the people who are doing it have the ability to do it and then talk about it because you want to know how you actually work so that you can upgrade yourself. You can hack your own biology. 

[00:35:55] What if you didn’t know any of this was going on and you just kept trying to take chemicals? Chemicals work. At least some of them do, and some of them have unintended side effects because of what we’re talking about. So if you know about this, you can better design chemicals or the stuff we’re doing at Upgrade Labs.

[00:36:11] We’re using pulse magnetics. We’re using specifically pulse light frequencies. So when someone comes in, in a membership model, we’re totally rocking their biology in a way that’s unexpected. And it makes a huge difference in how you feel. This is why I’m looking and feeling the way I do now versus the way I did when I was half this age.

[00:36:31] I was pretty trashed in my early 20s. And to be able to come back from that, from Lyme/toxic mold, and chronic fatigue, and fibromyalgia, and all that which are near and dear to your heart, you actually do need to understand fascia and what’s going on. These things are real. 

[00:36:48] So let’s get into some of the work you’re doing here that goes beyond that idea that cells can make electricity through vibration. Talk to me about what structured water does in the body and the difference between drinking structured water versus making it yourself on board.

[00:37:08] Catherine: This is just reminding me, actually. This is a total aside, but Veda Austin does some neat crystallography with water, and she was looking at your coffee, and it makes this beautiful wheat pattern that none of the other coffees make, and so I was like–

[00:37:24] Dave: Yeah, I know why Danger Coffee does that. I don’t think it’s just minerals because it is mineralized. Does mineral water look prettier than regular water, or does it have to be structured?

[00:37:35] Catherine: It has to be structured. Yeah. The difference is between the two is when you are drinking structured water, it’s going to be more hydrating. There’s evidence out there on agricultural research, on research with livestock, on research with humans as well that this is beneficial for our hydration, which benefits so many different things.

[00:37:59] But the idea that we drink eight ounces of structured water and that leads to eight ounces of structured water within us is a fallacy because there’s that transaction that’s happening between the water and the light or the frequency information inside of us. So the ways that we structure water that we drink are very similar to the ways that we structure water in our body. We add energy into it, and that is what structures it. Movement, light, all of those things are going to structure our water.

[00:38:38] Dave: One of the things that structures water is intent. And I will tell you, it’s one of the things that structures coffee. And there’s a very specific reason. By the way, I wasn’t planning to talk about this. You can tell because I’m using my phone as a thing, but the logo for Danger Coffee right here, it actually says danger right on it, but the subtext is “who knows what you might do.” And that intention is there in the coffee. And I think that helps.

[00:39:05] Catherine: Absolutely, absolutely. It totally does. And then we’re taking a step out into that more–

[00:39:17] Dave: Danger Coffee is encoded with the nature of the universe. And when people drink it, they’re guaranteed enlightenment in three seconds or less. That was what I thought I heard you say. Was that it?

[00:39:25] Catherine: Yeah, that’s basically– in a nutshell.

[00:39:32] Dave: All right. That’s not real to be really clear, although it is encoded with some information. We were talking about something else besides– we just finished with coffee. 

[00:39:47] Catherine: We were talking about the difference between drinking structured water and having structured water within us. There’s a relationship there, obviously. Structured water has been shown in research to be beneficial for plant growth and agricultural research, livestock health, human health. 

[00:40:08] Structured watering companies have done such a wonderful job marketing that. People think that’s how you get structured water inside of you, is you drink that structured water and then that’s it. But it’s really the relationship between the water that’s lining our cells and the information, the infrared energy inside of our body. 

[00:40:30] And that can come from sound. Our fascia that we were talking about earlier actually makes sound. We can measure that in a myogram. Our heartbeat makes an amazing beat of sound that helps structure the flow of that water. John Stuart Reid has done amazing research. 

[00:40:50] And Professor Sanjul G., in collaboration, did research about how the beat of the heart helps our red blood cells hold more oxygen, bind more oxygen. Not only that. It increases their lifespan and helps repair some of those red blood cells that are on their way to being dead and dysfunctional. And so, yeah, it’s absolutely amazing.

[00:41:21] Dave: Here’s what that made me think about. Sorry to interrupt for a second there. Donald Rumsfeld doesn’t have a heartbeat. This is true. He has a mechanical heart that’s continuously flowing with no heartbeat. Does this explain a lot of the modern world?

[00:41:35] Catherine: It can.

[00:41:39] Dave: Donald, if you’re listening, I’m sorry, brother. But dude, you need to atone for some of that crap you [Inaudible].

[00:41:50] Catherine: In a nutshell, yes, it explains everything, but really, we have to understand that it is this dance of the water inside of our body and the frequency information that’s creating that infrared energy, infrared light. And we have to remember that our DNA, mitochondrial DNA, our nuclear DNA, they are also a big source of infrared energy, and light, and biophoton emission.

[00:42:23] And so you ask yourself, why are there all of these compounds, and melanopsins, and opsins in places where visible light can’t reach, external light can’t reach. It’s because there’s this communication happening at all times with polyphenols, and amino acids, and our DNA, and the structured water that’s lining it and able to act as a conductor.

[00:42:53] There’s some great research, and it’s actually old, showing that our DNA is as efficient in conducting electricity as a semiconductor. And adding that idea of the structured water that’s lining the DNA, then you have this whole different idea of genes and what’s happening there.

[00:43:18] Dave: I had a professor, I think of physics, maybe from Carnegie Mellon on the show, and I mentioned that elements of biology like DNA and the lining of your nerves exhibit room temperature semiconductor effects. Because all semiconductors are really doing is they’re slowing the speed of electrical flow.

[00:43:42] And they’re subject to something called the Hall effect. And if the Hall effect affects you, then you’re super conducting. And he’s like, biology is not superconductive, hard materials only. Gallium arsenide doping only. Okay. No, either there’s Hall effect or there’s not. So there’s all this cool stuff that you’ve tapped into.

[00:44:03] One of the things that you talked about here, melanopsin sensors, I want to go deep on those for just a second to talk about how incredibly effective they are for biology. If you look at the melanopsin sensors in your retina, it’s about 5% of retinal cells are melanopsin-sensing cells. And that means they receive light.

[00:44:25] They actually receive more light per cell than all the other cells in the retina. And I’ve looked at these in Dr. Satchin Panda’s lab down in San Diego. And you can see them in a microscope, and they’re studded with more mitochondria. That’s how you spot them. And the light that they gather doesn’t go into your optical nerves at all.

[00:44:46] It goes around your optical nerves into the timing system of your brain. And we know the four colors that affect those. So I invented glasses– this is my True Dark company– about eight or 10 years ago that block all of those things plus the angle of light and intensity of light, which are all the variables that control those sensors.

[00:45:05] And when I wear those, I can fly from Victoria, British Columbia, to Dubai and get no jet lag just by tuning the light that goes into the melanopsin centers with true dark glasses. That’s why you see me usually wearing those yellow glasses when I’m under bad lighting. Because it makes that big of a difference for circadian timing, which is totally controlled– that’s not true– which is, first and foremost, controlled by light, then by a bunch of other variables like when you eat, and social interactions, and exercise, and temperature, and probably sounds too.

[00:45:40] But we don’t except you might because you have a quantum sound master class because we know enough now to teach people how to structure water with sounds. Tell me about the master class that you’re teaching.

[00:45:53] Catherine: It actually is a fundraiser for– that’s what I referenced earlier for John Stewart Reid because–

[00:46:00] Dave: That’s cool.

[00:46:01] Catherine: Yeah. So all the prophets go to his research, which is a collaboration with Gerald Pollack. And it just is a look at, like you said, there was the word, and we start with this idea of how that was always something that was prevalent. And then we talk about the Big Bang, and then we get into what sound is. 

[00:46:25] And we all have this idea of sound, but there’s also many different layers, many different frequencies, and hertz, and noise, which I would say has the opposite effect that sound does. And looking at how what sound is really a mechanical wave. And we can take this as far as coming full back to the beginning of the conversation of consciousness.

[00:46:57] And when we look at a neuron and see the neuron begin to move and create these inelastic collisions of molecules creating sound, thus creating infrared energy. And maybe that’s how sound, and consciousness, and conscious thought can imprint water. Because we know that so much research has been done and disregarded by mainstream science, Luc Montagnier, Jacques Benveniste on water memory. 

[00:47:33] And this is really what John Stewart Reid and this upcoming research trip that they are doing in Egypt is looking at, how those water molecules are able to coalesce and trap EMF frequency, whether that be light or sound creating light. And it comes back to some of the work with Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, and Gilbert Ling, and Emilio de Gilche, and the quantum electrodynamic theory of water. 

[00:48:06] And what it says is instead of the structure water that we’ve been talking about lining the cells, in water, just in a glass of water, you can have the same phenomenon, but it’s not this hexagonal sheet like a honeycomb. One researcher describes it as the hydrogens are holding hands. And it creates these domains.

[00:48:32] Some researchers are referring to it as coherent domains versus incoherent domains in water. Some refer to it as an excited state of water versus a ground state of water. And what they’re finding is that these coherent domains are actually able to trap and match the frequency inside of that domain. 

[00:48:58] So if there is a certain hertz or a certain EMF, like Luc Montagnier was doing with HIV and different viruses, that coherent domain of water is able to trap that information and keep it as water memory. And then you can actually– what he did in his research was, he recorded that frequency that was in that domain, sent it to a lab in a different country, sent it to Italy, and they played that frequency on a glass of water that had nucleotides in it, the building blocks of DNA.

[00:49:42] And those coalesced and created the exact same, up to 98 point something percent identical DNA as the virus from which it came from. And so it’s just this incredible idea of sound frequency and the interaction with water, the water inside of us, the water inside of a glass, the water in the world around us. It’s pretty fascinating stuff.

[00:50:14] Dave: Here’s a study that I’m guessing you might not have seen, but you’re very well read, but it’s just from a different domain. Darwin had his theory of natural selection, which is Darwinian. And a little bit dark. You outcompete, and over time, your genes mutate. But there’s some very startling things that happen that break that on its face because mitochondria mutate far more quickly than genes do.

[00:50:40] And some researchers took a bunch of bacteria that could not metabolize lactic acid because they didn’t have those genes. And they put them in, basically, a petri dish full of water where there was only lactic acid as a fuel source and nothing else. So they should all starve to death. Most of them did, but some of them magically sprouted the ability to metabolize lactic acid as a fuel source without the genes to do it.

[00:51:10] I wonder if the structure of the water and really just the information field of the planet might have had something to do with that. That’s the only thing that I can think of that explains that. Have you seen that study? Have you heard about it?

[00:51:22] Catherine: I have. I have.

[00:51:23] Dave: See, you know everything. This is so cool. I love being able to talk about all this nerdy stuff with you.

[00:51:28] Catherine: I wouldn’t say everything, but that study, yeah. 

[00:51:31] Dave: So cool.

[00:51:32] Catherine: It is so cool, and it just opens up this whole new world. Again, I am so grateful that you funded and helped with that research because imagine if we could get more answers about this. Because back to elementary science class, the water cycle, we know that the water on this planet has been here from the beginning. And so what information is present there that we aren’t utilizing and we could be utilizing? That’s an avenue I would love to see more focus on.

[00:52:13] Dave: And I am absolutely sure that you can put information back in water. In fact, one of my dear friends, TK, has a company called Life Force Water. It’s what I was drinking at Burning Man, and it’s infused with hydrogen, which is a whole different podcast. I’ve done a couple on hydrogen, but it uses this crazy apparatus with very high intensity light, pulse-specific frequencies to charge the water energetically. 

[00:52:38] So you’re drinking highly structured hydrogen water. And I’m like, okay. I’m always a little skeptical on this stuff, but I’ve known TK for years. All right, I’ll give it a try. It feels different to me. And the idea that you could get water that way in special packages so you get hydrogen all is cool.

[00:52:56] I don’t have any marketing agreements or anything. I just drank 40 liters of that at Burning Man, and it was very effective. So what I would like listeners to take away from this is that not all water is the same. Your intention structure is water. And if you heard the podcast with Dr. RollinMcCraty, we actually talked about how they can pick up your heart’s magnetic field in a glass of water that’s three feet away from you. 

[00:53:23] I know you and Rollin are friends as well. So for listeners going, Dave, what are you doing here? Here’s the deal, guys. I have been studying consciousness for 25 years. That trip to Tibet, to Mount Kailash, near the holiest mountain in the world, where I had the idea for Bulletproof Coffee, that might be a hint.

[00:53:39] And the fact that I’ve done shamanic training, I’ve been talking about plant medicine since the dawn of biohacking. I’m just talking a little bit more about consciousness and longevity today because it feels like the world’s ready for more consciousness right now, where maybe at the beginning of biohacking people would have just thought I was crazy. They’re dead. Because how dare you upgrade your own biology? But yeah, how dare you not [Inaudible].

[00:54:03] Catherine: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:54:04] Dave: So Quantum Sound Masterclass fundraiser, you didn’t drop a URL there, and I would like listeners to know, if you want to know more about this very new science, where do they go?

[00:54:14] Catherine: I am Dr. Catherine Clinton everywhere. So my website is drcatherineclinton.com/soundmasterclass. I just didn’t–

[00:54:27] Dave: Okay, I’m going to fix that for you because no one can spell Catherine. I know because I sign books, tens of thousands of them. Catherine can be spelled 18 different ways at least. So C-A-T-H-E-R-I-N-E, Clinton. So it’s drcatherineclinton.com, and you’ll have a button right on the front of your website about the sound masterclass, so they don’t have to remember the rest of all that stuff that I already forgot?

[00:54:53] Catherine: Absolutely, absolutely.

[00:54:55] Dave: I like that. So dr, D-R, catherine, C-A-T-H-E-R-I-N-E, clinton.com is where you go to get the sound masterclass. How much are you charging for it? Is it expensive?

[00:55:05] Catherine: It’s $47.

[00:55:06] Dave: All right. There you go. Guys, you want to support a good cause. All the profits go to research, and you’ll probably learn something cool. I haven’t been through the class. I can’t endorse it that way, but through this conversation, Catherine’s on to some stuff about the interactions of the core parts of our biology that are totally invisible to your conscious mind unless you’re in an altered state, about how we can tune those and change those, and how you can change the water you drink, the water in your cells, and how you can use sound to do it.

[00:55:33] I know because some of the 40 Years of Zen stuff, we have very carefully designed sounds that you listen to doing the neurofeedback. We have a patent on 3D sound for all biofeedback, which is a core patent for the tech behind 40 Years of Zen. Because the direction of sound is another thing. Do you want to be surrounded by sound, or do you just want it in one ear?

[00:55:53] All of this stuff matters. And we’re also using specific sounds to induce brain states, like Tibetans have done with singing bowls for at least 5,000 years. So sound has an effect on our biology. And those effects are through the auditory canal which is full of, what was that dark compound in your auditory canal? Oh, melanin. Who would have thought?

[00:56:18] So the fact that you’re teaching a class on this is really cool. I’m looking forward to attending the class myself and learning some more about this emerging type of biohacking. My prediction is that the next 10 years of biohacking is all about frequencies. And I don’t like the word frequency as much as I don’t like the word quantum.

[00:56:37] Because people say, oh, it’s embedded with frequencies. I’m like, oh, really, what’s an avocado frequency? I don’t know, but my quantum angels told me. No. There’s a frequency of color, there’s a frequency of sound, there’s a frequency of magnetic resonance from electrons bouncing around. 

[00:56:50] You got to pick what frequency you’re talking about and how to measure it. So don’t fall for marketing that just vaguely talks about frequencies are beautiful. You got to know what they are. This is real science. It’s not woo. And then when we talk about quantum, there are quantum effects. You can see on a microscope that you can detect with equipment.

[00:57:09] So this is where quantum biology meets ancient practice. And I believe that many of the most powerful experiences I’ve had in my life, whether it’s on the side of Mount Kailash, or at Burning Man, or at an ashram somewhere, are when we’re in a state where we can more closely access our own biology and we can actually go in and even experience quantum state change.

[00:57:33] I know we can create it when we heal other people, when we do sound healing, especially bioenergetics. These are techniques that we can tune our body to do if you believe they’re possible, and you have the right tools. So, I don’t know, a 47-dollar Quantum Sound Masterclass sounds cool to me. I’m in.

[00:57:51] Catherine: What you’re talking about is real. There’s so many different layers of sound. Directionality absolutely matters. Back to John Stewart Reid and Professor Sanjul G., they found that headphones really induce that vagus nerve. And we know that that is good for so many things, anti-aging and inflammation, versus a whole sound immersion.

[00:58:18] And then the different frequencies of sound are really, really important. And I, too, share your same frustration with these words that have always been part of popular vernacular, like frequency, and quantum, and all this stuff, but it’s hard because those are the words that actually mean what we’re talking about in science. So there is this other layer to them as well.

[00:58:46] Dave: One of the brands that I reluctantly work with is called BioQuantum skincare. And Jewels is the founder who has been on the show. And we talk about it, and it’s very frustrating because when I use this stuff, I notice reductions in scars that were very fast and unbelievable, almost, were things that were bumpy. 

[00:59:09] I had a very deep burn on the back of my hand, and there’s still a mark from it, but all of the raising of it just went away in about two or three weeks of using the stuff. She’s like, look, I’m charging the stuff with quantum signatures, and it has an effect. And I know the collagen in my skin is full of water, and I know this is possible, but how she does it isn’t exactly clear to me.

[00:59:29] So do I really want to talk about this? Guys, if it works, maybe it’s all powered by leprechauns. We haven’t detected yet. I don’t know why it works, but when I can see that it works in their studies and things like that, I’m willing to talk about it, even if some people say, Dave’s not a scientist.

[00:59:46] And I’m like, if I’m not a scientist, then you’re a, whatever. What’s the most appropriate seventh grade– you’re a poopy head. If we’re going to do name calling, let’s do name calling properly because my seventh grade naming is strong. So there we go. It’s not about that. It’s about, are you curious about what I’m curious about, and are you going to learn, or are you going to say, this is how it is, and it cannot change? If so, you’re not a scientist, you’re in a religion.

[01:00:11] Catherine: And I would say the same thing about quantum physics and quantum biology. Some of it just doesn’t make sense. And is that because we have the full picture and it doesn’t make sense, or is it because we don’t have the full picture? I would say the latter. And I’m okay with whatever comes next.

[01:00:30] I’m ready and excited for new ideas and not handcuffed to, quantum physics says this, and quantum tunneling– it’s an exploration, and that’s what science should be. And that’s what healthcare should be. And we shouldn’t be relegated to our proverbial boxes because that’s where it dies.

[01:00:54] Dave: Very, very well said. Dr. Catherine Clinton, thanks for doing the hard work of being at the cutting-edge and even teaching people what you know at the cutting-edge. I think it’s fascinating. I’ve enjoyed our conversation so much. For listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, I would love it if you shared it with someone who’s totally skeptical so that I can enjoy their troll comments on my social media.

[01:01:22] Because that’s one of my greatest sources of joy, is when angry skeptics experience cognitive dissonance as a result of my work and then act out. And as I like to say when I open my talks, if anything I say triggers you, it’s because you’re walking around with a loaded gun. Maybe you should get a therapist and unload that, but not on me.

[01:01:45] Have a wonderful day. And I appreciate your time on the interview. Keep doing this stuff. And hopefully, some of our listeners will be intrigued by the class. And guys, relatively cheap. 47 bucks. drcatherineclinton.com. And all proceeds go to support work on basically quantum biology and water, which is super cool.

[01:02:06] And Upgrade Collective, our live studio audience, thank you for tuning in. Guys, if you’d ever like to listen in and actually be part of the chat thread during a podcast, which is super fun, go to our upgradecollective.com, join the collective. I will teach you cool stuff. See you all on the next episode.

[00:00:05] Dave: You’re listening to The Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today, we’re going to talk about something that’s really fun. In the world of nutrition, in the world of biohacking, we used to say, everyone needs 12 servings of grains and three servings of protein, which might include beans, which aren’t really protein, and all sorts of stuff like that. And the idea is that everyone needs is total BS.

[00:00:31] What we’re seeing now, and I’m seeing this in all of the work I’m doing, is personalization. There’s genetics. There’s the stuff that Viome is doing around what’s going on in your gut bacteria. And it’s different between different people. And at Upgrade Labs, we’re using AI to figure out, what are the exact biohacks to use in what order to get you the results you want?

[00:00:54] And it’s time to do this with nutrition so that instead of saying, I’m going to follow this one plan because it worked for this one guy, if it worked for that one guy and you happen to be a 90 pounds Asian woman, who’s 50, it might not be the same diet for you because you have different genetics, you have a different body size, you’re a different gender. All that stuff matters.

[00:01:18] So what do you do about it? Our guests today are returning to the show. We’ve got Matt, who was on Episode 996, and Wade, who was on Episode 807. These are the guys from BiOptimizers. They just wrote a book called the Ultimate Nutrition Bible, and it’s massive. I’m holding it right now, but the idea here is, how do you create the perfect diet for your lifestyle, your goals, and your genetics?

[00:01:45] And this is what matters, because your lifestyle is a part of it. So if you’re eating a diet that’s perfect for a Crossfitter but you actually just sit in a chair all day, maybe your lifestyle is a mismatch. Maybe your genetics just aren’t supporting that, and maybe you have different goals. So like Wade here, he wants to be a balloon animal because he’s a bodybuilder kind of thing. Is that accurate?

[00:02:13] Wade Lightheart: Used to be, but then I became a marathoner recently just to throw a curveball at things. 

[00:02:17] Dave: Are you joking?

[00:02:18] Wade Lightheart: No. 

[00:02:18] Dave: So you’re into self-abuse just straight up?

[00:02:21] Wade Lightheart: Yeah, it’s a Canadian thing. You can appreciate that. 

[00:02:24] Dave: I can. You know the guy who ran the first marathon died as a result of doing it, right?

[00:02:28] Wade Lightheart: Yeah, he did. So they say. 

[00:02:31] Dave: So they say, oh, it’s a– 

[00:02:32] Wade Lightheart: It was called a marathon, but who’s to say that there wasn’t a lot of people that ran a marathon before, but nobody reported it.

[00:02:39] Dave: So there might have been someone who ran that far before and didn’t die. That’s a fair point. And maybe he was just running extra fast because his entire civilization was at risk.

[00:02:47] Wade Lightheart: Yeah, and he just fought a war, I think, too, prior to. So I didn’t fight a war before I engaged in the marathon.

[00:02:53] Dave: Greek people are not lazy.

[00:02:54] Wade Lightheart: Yeah, being lazy 2,500 years ago was probably a death sentence.

[00:02:59] Dave: That’s a good point. In fact, that’s why we still have shame over the fact that our bodies try to conserve energy, and that’s why running marathon’s actually epic one time because it’s just showing that your mind can overcome the lack of inertia from your body. Are you doing lots of marathons or just one?

[00:03:16] Wade Lightheart: No, I just want to do one to actually prove some of the aspects of the strategies we outlined because there’s your goal, your genetics, and your lifestyle. So I was like, okay, how many bodybuilders do a bodybuilding contest and then decide to run a marathon? Virtually none. 

[00:03:32] Dave: It’s supposed to be impossible. In fact, in Smarter Not Harder, you can pick a goal that, did you want VO2 max? And do you want to look like a marathoner, which is lean with big legs, or do you want to look like a bodybuilder, which is more muscle up top that you have to carry around and your knees have to support?

[00:03:51] So you’re breaking some rules to do that. And by the way, I just said Matt and Wade because I know them really well. Matt Gallant and Wade Lightheart is an important thing for you guys to know. And BiOptimizers is their company. They’ve been on lots of times if you’re a long-time listener because they make really good supplements. But we’re not going to talk as much about supplements today, really about the Ultimate Nutrition Bible because I have my perspectives on food like, don’t eat certain toxins, especially if you’re more susceptible to those.

[00:04:22] I had a bone to pick with you guys. So I’m looking at the cover of this right now, and it says– let’s see. I’m just looking at the picture here. We’ve got black sesame. We’ve got farmed salmon. I can tell it’s farmed with the way it looks because it’s not red enough. And then we’ve got nightshade goji berries, and we’ve got white sesame. I think that’s sesame, right? 

[00:04:47] Yeah, I think so. White sesame which is full of both lectins, and phytic acid, and oxalic acid. And you’ve got oats, which are one of the dumbest foods on the planet from a phytic acid and a blood sugar perspective. And you have a little bit of beef in the corner here, but why is the beef not somewhere better? 

[00:05:05] Matt Gallant: So one of the things we say in the book is, there’s no evil foods, which I know I just took a lot of air out of your balloon, right? 

[00:05:14] Dave: Twinkies are not evil. 

[00:05:15] Matt Gallant: Did you read about the Twinkies diet success story? 

[00:05:19] Dave: Absolutely. They still evil. They make you old.

[00:05:24] Matt Gallant: Elevated blood sugar will definitely– 

[00:05:28] Dave: And so will hydrogenated fat. 

[00:05:29] Matt Gallant: So we did experiments in the lab recently, a couple of months ago. And the thing that’s bad about seed oils is something called malondialdehyde, which is mutagenic. So if you look at the research on cell culture experiments with malondialdehyde, which when you have rancid fats, you get a lot more of, it is mutagenic. The cool thing is we tried breaking it down with kApex, which is a blend of pieces. 

[00:05:58] Dave: It’s one that you make. It’s one of your products.

[00:06:00] Matt Gallant: Yeah. And you’re able to break it down into fatty acids. So even something like seed oils, again, there are solutions. And I think even mentally, there’s so much fear being propagated around food. If you go on Instagram for a week and you just get sucked into the food algorithm or nutrition algorithm, at the end of the week, you’re going to be scared to go and buy almost anything.

[00:06:27] Dave: You don’t need fear. You need awareness. But there’s a lot of evidence that linoleic acid, which is the fatty acid that even kApex is to break things down into, right?

[00:06:38] Matt Gallant: Mm-hmm. 

[00:06:39] Dave: Linoleic acid, when it’s a higher ratio of what you eat, it goes into your white fat, and it goes into your brain preferentially before it goes into your other tissues. And it’s what animals eat to go into hibernation. It slows your metabolism, and it appears to change the membranes and cells, and it’s probably the biggest cause of diabetes.

[00:06:57] Matt Gallant: I think one of the core principles in biological optimization or nutrition is the dose creates the effect.

[00:07:04] Dave: That’s a fair point.

[00:07:05] Matt Gallant: So if you eat a kale salad every week, which is one of your favorite enemies, and again, you’re not genetically prone to have problems with oxalates, it’s not going to affect you that much. If you drink one Coke Zero a week with a little bit of sucralose, it’s not going to impact you that much. Of course, if you’re drinking a six pack every day, you’re eating a massive kale salad every day, yes, the odds you’re going to have some issues go up. So even just being aware that you can have a pizza once in a while. You can have a donut once in a while.

[00:07:37] Dave: I’m going to Turkey in a couple of weeks for the Harvest Series. I’ll be doing a five-day workshop with a small group. It’s going to be really epic. I’m planning on eating a baklava every single day because it’s made with European soft wheat instead of American hard wheat. And if you take some good enzymes, like the stuff you guys make, what’s it called? The gluten something. 

[00:07:57] Matt Gallant: Gluten Guardian. 

[00:07:58] Dave: Gluten Guardian. Thank you. I always have a bottle of it with me whenever I go to Europe because I’m probably going to eat a croissant. So you certainly can do graceful degradation. I’m seeing a lot of people, though, who are saying, my joints hurt all the time, and I have interstitial cystitis, and they’re only having a kale salad or a spinach salad once a week, but they’re having a bowl of raspberries every day, and they’re having them almonds every day, and they’re actually building up their oxalate levels to the point that it’s causing crystals in the urethra, so they have to pee all the time. 

[00:08:27] I talked to someone recently. I’m like, just lay off the raspberries for a little bit. Three days later, it’s like, I’ve had this condition for 10 years, and it’s gone. So I’m working on helping people not be afraid, but just be aware. If you do a lot of this, it’s a problem. How does that work out with the Ultimate Nutrition Bible? 

[00:08:42] Matt Gallant: What you’re talking about is biofeedback. And Wade, you’ve been tuned into biofeedback since your early bodybuilding days. Maybe talk about how you use that because self-awareness of what’s going on in your body is a critical part of this whole puzzle.

[00:08:56] Wade Lightheart: Yeah. I do believe that bodybuilders are the original biohackers because they’re overcoming two evolutionary biases. One, having an excess amount of muscle is not biologically productive, and having suboptimal levels of body fat for what’s aesthetic purposes for a bodybuilding competition are also counter to longevity, health, vitality, all of the things that we advocate for.

[00:09:23] However, because we’re overcoming these genetic aspects, they developed a wide variety of strategies to overcome that. And then many of those strategies have been adopted and optimized in the biohacking space. And so when we started out, we didn’t have all the tech that’s available that you advocate for– all these things.

[00:09:41] So we had to get really in tune to how we feel journaling, becoming intuitively aware of how food was impacting us both internally and visually, because that’s what you’re defined by in those contests. And what I can say is that’s helped me understand the dietary cult dynamics. I think that like religion, there is– and Patanjali has Yama Niyama, the do’s and don’ts is the foundational aspect of yoga. 

[00:10:10] And I think people become attracted to a diet because, obviously, what they’ve determined, that whatever they’ve tried is not working. They’re unhealthy, they’re fat, they’re sick, they’re disease, whatever that case is, and they gravitate to some personality that has created some sort of “religion” that says, do this, don’t do that, and it works for a while.

[00:10:33] Dave: Like the vegan diet, six weeks, you’ll feel great.

[00:10:35] Wade Lightheart: Exactly. Or raw food. We’ve experimented. 

[00:10:37] Dave: I was raw vegan too.

[00:10:38] Wade Lightheart: Yeah. And the thing is, the raw food community is a great example. A lot of people get into that community are really sick, and it is the hyper reductionist version of dietary strategies. 

[00:10:55] Dave: So you’re saying that the raw food movement is like the Charles Manson of diets. Is that what I’m hearing?

[00:11:00] Wade Lightheart: Almost. You could say that. You could say that.The point is, for a lot of those people– I was raw food for two years.

[00:11:10] Dave: Okay, me too. So guys, we’re making fun of the raw food diet, but not of you. We both did it for a reason, and the same reason you’re probably doing it. So this isn’t meant to be mean-spirited. It’s meant to be honest.

[00:11:20] Wade Lightheart: Yeah. And you start producing all these results because of the restrictive nature. And then the benefits start to diminish, but you’ve been so indoctrinated with the cult dynamics that you stop listening to yourself. And the good news is data came out to actually expose people’s lack of trust in their own intuitive or observational patterns that help people break out of that. And that’s where we are today. 

[00:11:46] I think most of the dietary experts, whatever they advocate for, have recognized that people fall within a bell curve, and you’re going to have people who are the major advocates in the top two percentile, and the people that are the total haters are in the bottom 2%. And what we’re trying to do is obliterate that and provide a way that you can optimize any diet based on these core principles.

[00:12:08] Matt Gallant: And I have a crazy success story to share with raw food diets. He’s a neighbor of mine. He’s a good friend. His name is Dr. Aris LaTham. You can go check him out on Instagram. He’s 73. He’s been a raw foodist for 37 years. Looks amazing. Full of energy and vitality. But he’s got Jamaican genetics. Obviously, it’s working for him. Now, that’s a big point in the book, is that– and I learned this as a trainer. I used to think the ketogenic diet was for everybody, and I remember one of my clients turned gray. He lost a bunch of weight, but he looked horrible. People tell me, you looked better before.

[00:12:45] Dave: With the gray skin, the sagging face, hollow cheekbones. You lose your minerals, so you turn gray.

[00:12:51] Matt Gallant: Exactly. And then I had some other clients that had digestive issues on a ketogenic diet. We struggled as well as he couldn’t metabolize the fats. 

[00:12:59] Wade Lightheart: Jordan Peterson’s another great example. He’s a guy that went completely carnivore and corrected a wide variety of things. And I’m a plant-based guy, so should I say that, oh, Peterson’s bad because he’s corrected all of his health issues with a carnivore diet? 

[00:13:13] Dave: I think most people who go carnivore for long periods of time actually harm themselves as much as going vegan for long periods of time. And I did the carnivore diet. We didn’t have a name back then, but when I was testing the corners of the Bulletproof Diet, I did about three to six months. 

[00:13:30] But after about three months of just meat and eggs, and I’d raw– not raw, but I had grass-fed butter as well, and man, my sleep quality went away. I was waking up 20 times a night. And something wasn’t right. It turns out I’d gotten leaky gut from it and gave myself an egg allergy during that time. So I would just say it’s fine to do almost any diet for a month. 

[00:13:54] Matt Gallant: Let’s talk about that. When you switch diets, especially when you go from the standard American diet to any type of structured diet, you’ll tend to fix some deficiencies and lower the toxicities. So no matter what diet you’re on, whether it’s a plant-based, vegan, raw food, carnivore. You need to be mindful of the potential deficiencies which change depending what type of diet you’re on. We cover that in the book. So Wade, talk about some of the potential like plant-based deficiencies as an example.

[00:14:24] Wade Lightheart: Yeah, exactly. So there are some aspects of the plant-based diet, particularly for myself, that are suboptimal. And I embrace those constraints as an experimental side, especially being a bodybuilder, because most people say, you can’t be a bodybuilder on a plant-based diet. 

[00:14:41] Dave: You take a lot of supplements because you manufacture a lot of really good ones, so you’re relying on technology to do that, but if you’re in a cave and on a plant-based diet, you’d be unable to reproduce. 

[00:14:47] Wade Lightheart: I think that if you look at the life expectancy for cavemen, they were much less than we have today. So we can abandon those ideologies based on what our ancestors ate. I think we’re living in a completely different environment nowadays, and for myself, for example, I would do pretty well on a standard bodybuilding diet of high protein, moderate carbohydrates, low fat, because I have the genetics that process fats very well. 

[00:15:18] And I have suboptimal genetics for blood sugar regulation, and I have a low satiety, delay. So in other words, I have a tendency to overeat. So understanding that aspect within my genetics, I can go, okay, I’m going to boost my protein content to be more suited for bodybuilding and for satiation. 

[00:15:38] I’m going to eat a big ass salad every afternoon because that helps me with my satiety because I’ll overeat otherwise. And then I’ll supplement with the key elements that I’m not getting in my vegetarian diet so that I can optimize my dietary strategy for my goals.

[00:15:53] Dave: So vegetarian is no different than plant-based. So you’re vegetarian or you’re entirely plant-based?

[00:15:59] Wade Lightheart: Well, I would say that I’m a cheegan in the fact that I eat eggs or dairy recreationally in social situations.

[00:16:10] Matt Gallant: That’s how he parties.

[00:16:12] Dave: Got it. So you have no standards.

[00:16:14] Wade Lightheart: Yeah, I have very high standards. Most people wouldn’t be aware of them. And I don’t recommend people to follow my diet. I’d rather people understand how did I optimize the diet for me based on my goals and my personal interests? That’s what we’re advocating.

[00:16:30] Dave: This is a really important conversation. You said something earlier that’s worth repeating. I also noticed that bodybuilders are very good biohackers. And the reason I started the biohacking movement is I wanted to get bodybuilders, and my extreme longevity friends, and neuroscientists all in the same room, along with a few NASA people, and special forces people, and pro athletes, because those are the areas where we’re pushing the boundaries of humans, but they weren’t talking before that. 

[00:16:59] And I had Frank Zane on the show a while ago, one of the most conscious people I’ve met. He plays the flute for an hour a day, and it’s this semi-enlightened guy. But the stereotype is that bodybuilders are meatheads. And it’s not true because you notice, if I do this, I get this. And that is at the core of biohacking. And the reason I haven’t published every single supplement I take, or here’s what you should do in a day.

[00:17:27] It’s because I don’t want people to do what I do, because like you, I’ve been creating what works over 20 years for my biology as a 6’4 guy who used to be obese and had chronic inflammation, and fibromyalgia, and all these things wrong with me. And my goal too, I’m going to live to at least 180, and I want my brain to work amazingly well, and I want to look reasonably good and have a body with enough muscle to keep me alive for a long time. I don’t want to, have massive bowling ball shoulders.

[00:17:53] It’d be kind of fun, but I’m not willing to do the work for that. The goals are so different. I would not feel comfortable if I said, here’s all the stuff I take because I know a whole bunch of followers– and I’m sorry, guys. I know you want me to do this. You would try to do the same thing, and it would probably make you sick.

[00:18:07] So what I’m doing is very similar to what you guys are doing in the Ultimate Nutrition Bible. I’m saying, if you’re like this and you want this, you should use this supplement. So I’m working on a series of videos about different supplements, and why I take that one, and why you might want to take it, but I’m not publishing a list with doses for everything because your dose will vary by you. 

[00:18:29] And I think it’s the same with steak, or salad, or anything else. So you have a really good approach here. I would say it’s a step beyond in the Bulletproof Diet. If you guys have ever seen the roadmap on it, these are more likely to be good. These are less likely to be good. So if you want to cheat, just cheat in the middle instead of going all the way to the Twinkie diet, washing down Diet Coke to cancel it out. 

[00:18:54] So it’s not like if you cheat on your diet, you have to just punch yourself in the face over and over and feel like crap for a week and have food cravings, which is what I used to do. The cheat day was really a bad idea because that cheat day equals four days of cravings. So when someone opens the Ultimate Nutrition Bible, how do you start?

[00:19:14] Matt Gallant: It’s definitely a choose your own adventure kind of book, so depending on what you’re interested in, what your goals are, you can jump to that chapter and read that. Of course, if you want to read it cover to cover, go for it. It really just depends on what your goals are. One thing I want to harp on, which has been proven with a Twinkie diet, it was proven with a guy doing a McDonald diet, is that when people lose weight, no matter what diet they’re on, their biomarkers improve. And if people gain weight, no matter what diet they’re on, their biomarkers get worse. So now– 

[00:19:51] Dave: Hold on. Gain fat, you mean? Because you gain muscle or more skeletal mass. Okay, right.

[00:19:57] Matt Gallant: So that’s a really important point. Again, if people want to lose weight, your biomarkers will get better no matter what diet you’re on. 

[00:20:05] Dave: So you like Ozempic.

[00:20:08] Matt Gallant: Let’s talk about that. So one of the key points we talk about in the book is starvation survival mechanisms. And both Wade and I have been victims of those, and maybe you have as well, where you diet too hard, too fast. And my experience of that was for my wedding, I’ve been losing weight steadily. 

[00:20:26] I went from 220 down to 185, and I’m like, okay, I’m going to lose the last 10 pounds, and I’m going to do whatever it takes. I started literally sprinting in the jungles of Panama, doing crazy things up the hill and just push my body to the absolute limit. And after the wedding, I was hungry for about two years and regained almost all of it. And Wade, maybe talk– 

[00:20:49] Dave: Your thing.

[00:20:50] Matt Gallant: Your story.

[00:20:50] Wade Lightheart: I did the same thing when I competed my first Mr. Universe contest. I gained 42 pounds of fat and water in 11 weeks after 11 months of extreme dieting on it. 

[00:21:00] Dave: Forty two pounds? 

[00:21:02] Wade Lightheart: Yeah, 42 pounds. So I went from Mr. Universe to Mr. Marshmallow. And that was an aha moment because I realized the difference between a performance-based diet and a health-based diet. So I had literally suffered the consequences of a performance diet, sacrificing everything. This is not a good idea long term. And that really started me on the journey to understand your microbiome and its influence. 

[00:21:28] And then going back to the book, to answer your question circularly, we basically outlined five basic goals that people can choose to start moving towards. And then we have a pyramid of nutritional decisions to consider at every stage once you reach your goal, even before you get to that goal, or if you’re choosing another goal, because 97% of people who engage in a diet are going to regress backwards. 

[00:21:56] So we want to invert that to make 97% successful. And people such as yourself and the people you bring on the podcast, the experts, have created those tweaks for themselves so they can sustain it for life. And it goes into that nutritional pyramid of decisions.

[00:22:13] Dave: And I very much appreciate you talking about that on the bodybuilder side. I know so many fitness competitors who I’ve consulted with, and they’re like, I never looked better and felt worse. It is a very standard thing, especially for women. I think it’s worse for women than for men.

[00:22:30] Wade Lightheart: Especially as they’re young. When they’re young, the girls that are attracted to that, it’s–Scott Abel probably wrote the best books on that. So if you’re a fitness competitor, I would refer to Scott Abel’s work. I think he identified metabolic issues, and he’s trained more fitness competitors than anyone else and felt that that was really important because so many young girls are destroying their metabolisms, they’re destroying their ability to have children or to be metabolically robust, and it’s a real problem.

[00:23:01] Matt Gallant: Yeah. So one of the things we talk about is you need to make your body feel safe as you’re losing weight.

[00:23:06] Dave: Thank you for that. 

[00:23:07] Matt Gallant: And one of the strategies to do that is you can do refeeds, whether it’s once a week, or you can do diet breaks. Now, a diet break doesn’t mean you’re eating whatever you want or however much you want. You tend to go at maintenance. So calorie cycling– again, there’s a lot of different ways– we have a whole chapter dedicated to that– is one of the best strategies. Because when you go back to maintenance, your body’s like, okay, I’m safe. I’m safe. 

[00:23:32] And then once you’re psychologically ready, you can go back into another dieting phase. And then once you reach your ideal weight, there’s another diet you need to do, which is the reverse diet. So let’s talk about homeostasis and breaking homeostasis. This is really important. So again, homeostasis means your body wants to be in balance. Our bodies don’t want to change. 

[00:23:54] Change is a threat. If you gain too much weight, whether it’s muscle mass or body fat, obviously, it’s more likely that animals are going to eat you. If you lose too much weight, again, the starvation survival mechanisms kick in and fight back. So your body is always striving for homeostasis. With reverse dieting, we’re taking advantage of that, and let’s say you’re down to 1,200 calories, which for you, would be obviously an extremely low-calorie intake.

[00:24:22] Dave: Geez. I might as well just fast.

[00:24:24] Matt Gallant: Exactly. And again, when people bodybuild, they’ll get down to really extremely low levels because that’s what it takes sometimes to get to that incredible conditioning. The strategy is to add 50 to a 100 calories a week until you go back to maintenance. Now, I know that sounds extreme, but one of my coaches, she would reverse diet for the same amount of time that she took to get into shape. 

[00:24:52] Wade Lightheart: That’s a fitness competitor shape at national level competitiveness.

[00:24:57] Dave: And what’s the body fat percentage for women as fitness competitors?

[00:25:00] Wade Lightheart: Usually, if you can get down to 10% and then you get into single digits, that’s where a lot of women– and it’s going to vary. There’s also set point data. So in other words, some people are just not predisposed to get to that single-body fat percentages.

[00:25:18] Dave: Also, boob size has a lot to do with that. There’s a substantial amount of fat if you have large breasts, then you’re never going to get as low for total body, but everywhere that’s not a breast can do that.

[00:25:30] Wade Lightheart: And most fitness competitors are using breast augmentation strategy to create the feminine characteristics and, I would say, suboptimal for health, body fat levels for women. For a typical male competitor, you’ll be in single digits. In a natural competition, maybe between eight and 10, if you get into the professional level of the no restrictions on drug usage. So that’s a natural competitor at 8%. Then you can get into that 5%, 4%, 3% range, which is really bad for your health.

[00:26:04] Dave: I’m doing strategies right now to increase my body fat because, for longevity, I think nine is better, but with all the metabolic hacks. I effortlessly am maintaining this, so I actually pay attention for longevity because too low is not good. 

[00:26:20] Matt Gallant: Yeah, I think everybody’s got a sweet spot. And again, one of the things to pay attention to back to biofeedback is, how much is your body fighting back? Is hunger out of control? Do you feel good? Is your energy low? Is your energy high? 

[00:26:34] Dave: I feel great. And I’m never hungry. I have to make myself eat.

[00:26:38] Wade Lightheart: I’ll give you a great example for myself. So I don’t have awesome genetics for bodybuilding. In fact, I have very poor genetics by the sport, and getting into an 8% body fat level for me is difficult. My body would regularly feel the best at around 12%. And recently, I decided to make a comeback and did the Olympia at 50.

[00:27:01] And afterwards, I wanted to see, how much weight would I gain post-contest before I would start adding lean body mass. So I was like, what’s my safe zone. And here’s a shocking fact. I went from 8% body fat to 15 before I gained a single gram of lean body mass. DEXA scan.  

[00:27:27] Dave: There’s one word that comes to mind. Vegetarian.

[00:27:31] Wade Lightheart: I think it’s mostly understanding your set point. Now, I have friends who stay in single body fat percentages, but have a very difficult time gaining weight. So they’re on the inverse of that equation. So it really comes down to, for me, that 10 to 12 range is optimal. I feel really good at that range. My brain operates, I think, at its optimal level at that range. And when I start getting into those single digits, my body starts creating these fighting mechanisms. And that’s something to become aware of in your own dietary journey.

[00:28:02] Dave: Okay.

[00:28:02] Matt Gallant: And let’s talk about the other side of breaking homeostasis. So the one strategy with reverse dieting is we want to maintain it. And again, as you’re increasing calories, you’re fooling your body. Your body’s not noticing, and people tend to not gain any body fat or very little. So you can rebuild your metabolism. So for anybody who’s got a destroyed or damaged metabolism, again, reverse dieting is amazing. 

[00:28:26] But on the flip side, let’s say you want to lose body fat or gain muscle mass. Then you need to break homeostasis. So bodybuilders, of course, there’s the stimuli, which comes from resistance training, but you also need a calorie surplus, and we recommend typically about 300 calories a day of surplus because your body needs that extra energy to synthesize the lean muscle mass. 

[00:28:53] Of course, you need enough amino acids in your body. You need mTOR activation. So typically, four meals a day is a good sweet spot. Some bodybuilders back in the day used to do six meals. Your lifestyle gets so hard.

[00:29:07] Dave: I did that in the ’90s when I worked in tech. And I was just so trying to lose weight. I was going to the gym all the time and said, I’ll go into starvation mode if I don’t eat six times a day. And it didn’t work.

[00:29:18] Wade Lightheart: One caveat too, I think, that needs to be clarified, when I’m doing this, this is with no TRT, no hormone optimization, no exogenous hormones of any level under that condition. 

[00:29:31] Dave: Why wouldn’t you take care of yourself?

[00:29:33] Wade Lightheart: Because under the rules of natural bodybuilding, you’re not allowed to use those agents. You’re under water testing. So that is an isolated aspect of non-hormonal manipulation, because I think once you add hormones, say, if I was to optimize my testosterone as a 50-year-old, and I’m an advocate of people using TRT and hormone augmentation and stuff, bodybuilders go to super physiological dosages. 

[00:29:59] But I think for the average 50-year-old, at my age, I’m probably a great candidate for hormone replacement therapy. I just wanted to do the experiment with these constraints so that I could give you legitimate information for the general public and say, yeah, that’s what you can do as a 50-year-old guy with suboptimal genetics, suboptimal testosterone levels, suboptimal muscle mass.

[00:30:20] What can you do with augmentation that are advocated in the biohacking space? A lot better. So I suspect, as my 60s and 70s, I can be in superior form than I am now with all the tech that’s available.

[00:30:33] Dave: I went off of testosterone. So I’ve been on testosterone since I was 26 because I was tested, and I had lower testosterone than my mom, and I had excessive white fat. My testosterone very quickly turns to estrogen, still does if I don’t block it, and that’s probably a genetic thing. Okay, got it. I use an herb called chrism. If I stopped taking that for three days, I’m like, oh, look, tender nipples that are perky. And that’s not the look I’m going for.

[00:31:03] I’ve had boobs most of my life. It was embarrassing. All the guys in my family do. I don’t have them now because I learned how to block it, so I’ve been on it, but I went off it for almost three years when I was testing the Bulletproof Diet and I was getting my lab tests, and I could get my testosterone up to about 700 if I did everything perfectly. High-fat diet, enough protein, proper sleep. But I’m also starting a company that’s half a billion in revenue, and I’m a dad. So I don’t think it’s particularly sustainable for most people, but you should test. And if you don’t need it, don’t do it. Yeah. 

[00:31:37] Matt Gallant: They use psychological aspect by everyone, and Wade is a rebel. So we have a whole chapter on the psychological side of dieting. So for Wade, when he creates an incredibly challenging goal, like being a vegetarian, competing naturally in a bodybuilding show, it really motivates him. It creates this incredible challenge that he gets excited about. 

[00:32:03] Now, I’m a questioner, so for me, I need to understand all the scientific nuances. I want the proof. I want to understand the mechanisms. So those are just some of the differences between us. And you’re probably also a little bit on the rebel side.

[00:32:19] Dave: There’s a condition called oppositional defiant disorder, and I actually–

[00:32:24] Wade Lightheart: It’s called thinking.

[00:32:25] Dave: Yeah. It’s called thinking and acting, and I actually had that because I had Asperger’s, and ADHD, and ODD, and OCD as a kid. I had the whole list. Actually, I was an A student, which was surprising.

[00:32:40] Wade Lightheart: D attitude.

[00:32:41] Dave: Yeah, exactly. And in fact, they wouldn’t let me be valedictorian in high school because my attitude was so bad. But I’m like, I have the higher scores. Yeah, but you’re an asshole. And it was all true, so yeah. And actually, I can tell you that was partly toxic mold and partly– strep throat grows when you have toxic mold.

[00:33:00] And if kids get strep throat a lot, they develop antibodies to one of the strep things. And then that creates changes in the brain that makes you more OCD and ODD. So I used to have to scrunch my face, and I’d have to stim all the time. And there were certain things I had to do three times, all that kind of crap.

[00:33:15] But it also meant, like that Rage Against the Machine Song, fuck you. I won’t do what you told me. So yeah, for me, doing the Bulletproof Diet, I tried all this shit that was supposed to work, and it just didn’t, and so I thought it was my fault. And then I realized, maybe it’s just dumb. So then eating way more fat than it’s supposed to work did work, and it’s worked for a lot of people as long as it’s the right kind of fat. 

[00:33:39] And that leads me to this next question, though. You’re talking about calories. This is what big food does to tell you that you could drink 10 Cokes a day because there’s x number of calories and the old Weight Watchers. You can swap a scoop of ice cream for three Graham Crackers, whatever the hell they did. Calories are stupid. Why are you guys counting it?

[00:34:01] Matt Gallant: I’m super excited to debate this one with you.  So there’s two camps. There’s the calories in, calories out camp, which tries to simplify everything to just pure thermodynamics.

[00:34:14] Dave: Doesn’t work.

[00:34:16] Matt Gallant: We’ll get to that. There’s another camp, which I think you’re a part of, which wants to believe in other variables that change the equation. Now, here’s what I’m saying, and what we’re saying in the book. Both camps are right. And there’s a whole chapter called the Optimized Metabolism, which we present, let’s say, a more accurate version of calories in, calories out. 

[00:34:40] First of all, no animal can escape the laws of thermodynamics. in this reality, meaning that if you have a calorie surplus, you’re going to gain weight. If you’re burning more energy than you’re eating, you’re going to lose weight. However, here’s the part which you’ve been talking a lot about. 

[00:34:59] On the calories outside, there’s a lot of sub-variables that can increase or decrease the amount of energy you’re burning. One of the big ones, which we’ve experienced many times is anabolism. So when you’re really anabolic, your metabolism can go up 20, 30, 40%. I’ve seen as much as a 100% increase with some extreme bodybuilder experiments, which we’re not going to talk about.

[00:35:27] Wade Lightheart: Look at the calorie consumption of, say, wide receivers in the NFL who are just doing sprint after sprint after sprint all day long. They’re consuming massive amounts of calories.

[00:35:37] Dave: 10,000 calories.

[00:35:37] Wade Lightheart: And they’re at 5%, 4% body fat, these gods that have speed. And they’re slamming McDonald’s every day because of the metabolic output that they’ve put forth with regard to their sport. And then you see them after they retire, and they just balloon up and can’t figure out what happened. Of course, many of those guys have superior genetics to even be in the NFL.

[00:36:01] But again, as you age, your metabolism, these factors he’s talking about on the calories, those start to diminish excessively unless you’re engaging in the biohacking practices, which you’ve been advocating for years to invert the metabolic decline. So calories in, calories out is a general concept with a lot of assumptions inside of it. And we’re trying to break down those assumptions because if you follow a diet strategy and just go with the calories in, calories out, eventually, you’re going to fail.

[00:36:33] Matt Gallant: So one of the things we talk about is it’s better to– you don’t want to be decreasing calories constantly and get down to, as one of my clients got down to, 800 calories on a Bernstein diet, and her metabolism was destroyed. It’s better to focus on increasing calories out and getting to a reasonable amount of calories.

[00:36:54] So let’s start with some other things. Thermic effect of protein. One of the reasons why diets work so well is because people increase their protein intake, which the general ballpark for thermic effect of protein is 25 to 30%. So here’s another concept. Net calories–

[00:37:11] Dave: Just to translate that thermic effect, it takes about 30% of the calories in protein to digest the protein. Exactly. There you go.

[00:37:19] Matt Gallant: And there’s an anabolic effect from the protein. So now you’re getting the anabolism calorie burn on top of that. Here’s another big one, and you wrote an entire book on, mitochondrial function. That’s another metabolic boost. And anything you can do to improve your mitochondrial function will help improve your calories out.

[00:37:39] Here’s another one, which I’ve experienced many times doing 40 Years of Zen. Pushing your brain hard and deep. When I’m doing a 40 Years of Zen, I almost need to double my calorie intake. And I won’t gain any body weight because that’s how much energy the brain’s burning.

[00:37:55] Dave: There’s an executive chef and unlimited food when people are spending five days at 40 Years of Zen because I found they couldn’t do the intense mental work to reprogram themselves unless I fed them crazy amounts of food. And so the brain can do, what, about 20% of your calories if you’re pushing it hard? So I say it’s like running a marathon with your brain, or doing CrossFit every day with your brain. There’s some other things, though. 

[00:38:20] Matt Gallant: Yeah. There’s one more big variable, which–

[00:38:22] Dave: And then I got some questions for you.

[00:38:24] Matt Gallant: Which you do as well. Cold exposure.

[00:38:26] Dave: Thank you.

[00:38:27] Matt Gallant: So cold exposure does two things. One, there’s heat loss, especially in the cold plunge, anywhere from 300, 500 calories that your body has to replace, and then there’s the brown fat activation. Brown fat is mitochondrial rich fat. And the more cold exposure you do, the more brown fat you build. So those are all variables that you can, again, manipulate to increase calories out. So again, calories in, calories out is accurate. It’s scientifically true, but where a lot of people miss the boat is, they don’t focus on improving the calories outside.

[00:39:05] Dave: So if it’s scientifically true, my favorite drug is zeranol. Zeranol and is an extract of zearalenone, which is a mold toxin that’s 10,000 times more estrogenic than human toxins. And it’s not a drug that humans take, but what we do is we manufacture it in little waxy pellets and put it in a cow’s ear, and then it basically melts into the fat in the cow. That cow will get fat on 30% less calories than a cow that hasn’t been treated. 

[00:39:37] Matt Gallant: So what’s the mechanism? Again, it’s decreasing calories out. Do you know how it’s doing that?

[00:39:42] Dave: I don’t believe it’s decreasing calories out. The cows are just as active. So there is no evidence that there’s a–

[00:39:48] Wade Lightheart: Oxygenation of the cow, which is going to lead to increased body fat, such as females have a higher level of body fat than males. And this is an issue for men as your testosterone drops. Now your estrogen to testosterone ratio becomes suboptimal and you’re eating the same diet, and you’re like, oh my God, how come I’m gaining so much weight? I haven’t really changed anything. And this is something that virtually every middle-aged guy experiences.

[00:40:15] Dave: And they’re doing the same workouts they did before. The estrogen levels are higher, even if their movement isn’t lower. They haven’t heated up their house. So they’re not changing calories out in a meaningful way. 

[00:40:26] Matt Gallant: The anabolism piece is changing. And again, when you’re on TRT and if you use steroids and you’re keeping your estrogen in check, the amount of calories you’re burning is incredible. And of course, if your estrogen is too high and your testosterone is low, it changes the anabolic environment. So that, to me, is the variable that’s changing in those situations. 

[00:40:49] Dave: When I was 23 and decided I was going to lose that a 100 pounds of fat, no matter what, I went on a low-calorie diet. It was always less than 2,000 calories a day, and I went to the gym six days a week.

[00:41:03] Matt Gallant: You were doing cardio?

[00:41:04] Dave: I was doing 45 minutes of cardio. I couldn’t run because of the arthritis and knee surgeries, so I would get on a treadmill at a 15-degree incline carrying a weighted pack for 45 minutes, and then I would lift legs or arms or something. So half weights, half cardio, six days a week. I took Sundays off, and I did this for 702 hours or 18 months, and I literally had a 46-inch waist when I started and when I was done.

[00:41:26] Matt Gallant: So let’s talk about metabolic adaptation. 

[00:41:28] Dave: Mm-hmm. 

[00:41:29] Matt Gallant: When you’re losing weight or decreasing calories, again, our bodies want homeostasis, so it’s always adapting. Cardio, especially, doing excessive cardio, just increases the speed of that metabolic adaptation. So in our opinion, cardio, as far as just cardio machines and that repetitive motion, doing the same thing over and over again, your body adapts to that, and it just doesn’t work.

[00:41:59]  Let’s say that week 1 of walking a treadmill, doing an elliptical, whatever, the amount of energy you’re burning compared to, let’s say, week 12, doing the exact same thing is completely different. Your body has adapted and decreased the amount of energy. So we’re big believers. And of course, weight training being the foundational type of exercise you can do. Swimming is great because you’ve got the heat loss, plus you’ve got a good cardio form.

[00:42:25] Dave: And some breathwork too, holding your breath. Yeah.

[00:42:27] Matt Gallant: Yeah. Rebounding is great. Go ahead.

[00:42:28] Wade Lightheart: And just to further extend on that conversation, recently, did the Olympia and then went into endurance training, completely different training. So I knew that I had suboptimal mitochondrial VO2 max, which is an essential point. So what did I do? I went to the labs every day.

[00:42:46] Dave: Upgrade Labs.

[00:42:46] Wade Lightheart: Yeah. I went to Upgrade Labs. And I actually moved close to the lab so I could leverage the tech there. And I was doing [Inaudible] cell, and I’m doing the lymphatic drainage to handle the inflammation in my legs from the increased running. And I’m doing cryotherapy every day to help reduce the inflammation from my training.

[00:43:04] Now, what’s interesting is I’m now doing an excessive amount of cardio than what I was doing, preparing for a bodybuilding show. And even though my mitochondrial function, my VO2 max went up so I could run a four-hour marathon, my body fat was actually increasing during that time. 

[00:43:23] So it’s inverse to the idea that a lot of people think, I just need to exercise more to lose the body fat. As I exercise more, my body became a fat storing machine. So the body becomes its function, I think, is something people have to recognize. So manipulating these components based on your goals and outcomes, I think, becomes a key factor, and we’ve identified how to do that specifically for whatever your goal is inside the book.

[00:43:52] Dave: So what I’m hearing here is that there is no way to know how many calories you burn every day.

[00:43:57] Matt Gallant: It’s changing all the time. 

[00:43:59] Dave: It is. It is.

[00:44:01] Wade Lightheart: And it’s a simple observation. Am I gaining body fat, or am I losing body fat because a calorie surplus is required to gain body fat?

[00:44:09] Dave: Unless you’re on estrogenic drugs.

[00:44:11] Wade Lightheart: It’s still relative because what you’re saying is, okay, you’ve suboptimized your metabolism, and now whatever calories you’re taking at that point based on those metabolic manipulators, you’re now in a body fat gain situation as opposed to, let’s say, I went on high levels of testosterone and growth hormone, maybe I could eat the same amount of calories and, all of a sudden, be gaining muscle and losing body fat. So without a complete understanding of this picture, the average person is caught in a paradigm of blindness, which will lead them to fail. That’s why 97% fail.

[00:44:49] Dave: The really important point here is that if you’re gaining fat, just cutting calories is probably not the strategy unless you do something else. And that’s present in your book. And I want everyone hearing this, especially women– I know so many women who are just always low-calorie. They’re constantly hungry all the time. They’re eating the wrong stuff. And they’re saying, I’m still fat. I have to eat even less. And I fell for this when I was 300 pounds.

[00:45:12] I was starving myself, and I was working out really intensely, which changes cortisol, which changes fat deposition, changes how anabolic you are. So you can talk about calories in and calories out, and I acknowledge what you’re saying there, however, if you cut your calories and assume that’s what’s going to make a difference, it might not. And it doesn’t make a difference because your body adapted.

[00:45:37] And then the calories out, you can measure how many potato chips on the treadmill you’re allowed to eat, and you get six potato chips for an hour of running or something, which is nonsense. But what you also don’t know is, today, it was snowing, and I was outside for two hours, and you just burned another 300 calories. So calorie burn is completely unknown for everyone.

[00:45:58] Matt Gallant: Let’s talk about another huge variable, which is great sleep. So they did experiments, again, comparing people that slept eight and a half versus five and a half hours of sleep. This is a really important point, when they were losing body fat, the amount of lean muscle mass that the five-and-a-half-hour group lost was exponentially higher than the eight and a half.

[00:46:24] Because, again, when you get that first stage of sleep, you’re getting growth hormone production, and then you’re getting testosterone production during your REM sleep. So if you’re not getting high quality sleep, your ability to burn body fat gets extremely compromised. So for anybody on any diet, whether it’s muscle building or fat loss, you got to get your sleep in order. And again, that changes the anabolic equation.

[00:46:46] Dave: And there’s two variables there. One is the amount of sleep, and the other one is the quality of sleep. And I think it’s healthy and normal for people doing excessive training or maybe even excessive dieting to get more sleep than is normally necessary. And the studies that I’ve seen, there’s now three of them looking at millions of people, the longest lived people are getting an average of six and half hours a night.

[00:47:16] But that doesn’t mean that they’re doing that during intense training. So the more you train, the more you’re dieting, the more your quantity and quality has to go up. And I’m still at six and a half hours a night on average. I get about an hour and a half of REM and deep. And over the past year or so, I’ve gotten substantially leaner.

[00:47:39] And so I’ll end up writing another book or some other stuff about that, just maybe share it on the blog, but one of the big variables there for me is thyroid. I had Hashimoto’s since I was 26. And if you’re new to this world, Hashimoto’s is not immune condition where your immune system basically lowers your thyroid function. And thyroid is what determines how many calories you burn.

[00:48:05] So I’ve been treating this with thyroid hormone since, I don’t know, 25 years or something, and it absolutely changes your brand, changes your life. I think most people over 50 would do really well on an eighth or a quarter grain because all people lose thyroid as they age and it’s an anti-aging hormone. Unless your tests are high. You should test it before you do that. 

[00:48:28] So thyroid will stick to almost anything. Even electrolytes, it will to. So I was lazy in the morning. I’m like, I’ll just wash it down with coffee. And I knew it was a bad idea, but I’m like, how bad could it be? So I hadn’t measured myself in a while, and for anti-aging sand metabolic purposes, you want your TSH, which is how loud is your body asking for more thyroid. You want it to be at one or below. 

[00:48:52] And a lot of times, you go to the doctor, like, oh, you’re fine. No, you’re not fine if you want to live a long time or be lean. Mine was at four because I wasn’t absorbing the thyroid. So one of the things I did as I became religious about having thyroid next to my bed, I take it right when I wake up, and then I don’t have anything for 20 minutes. So it was a chance to absorb.

[00:49:11] And that is one of the reasons it worked. And I made some nutritional shifts as well. And so I want people listening to understand, if you’re gaining weight, fat, for no reason, just cutting calories probably isn’t going to work unless you have the stuff that’s in the Nutrition Bible, unless you’re manipulating the type of calories you’re eating because there’s a huge anabolic effect.

[00:49:37] And that’s why I’m still in the calories in, calories out isn’t very useful, because you don’t know what percentage of the calories you ate was used to process the calories. And as we said, protein, 30% of it doesn’t get absorbed. It gets basically used to absorb the rest of it. And likewise, if you’re having an equivalent amount of chocolate cake, it’s a completely different equation. And a super biohacker biochemist can probably make some estimations. 

[00:50:06] The thing I like about the Ultimate Nutrition Bible is that you don’t have to be a biochemist to do that. You’re providing basic heuristics to say, do this or do that. And so the reality is that calories in, calories out is complex. And calories out is almost unknowable. And at the end of the day, there will be people on low calories who gain weight. And that was my thing. But you fix the metabolism, and then the body burns more calories. 

[00:50:33] So you’re right. The body burns more calories as we don’t know how many it’s burning. So to match the two, one thing that I’ve measured– and when you go into Upgrade Labs, do the cell health analysis, and we’ll do a pretty accurate basal metabolic rate. And last time I checked, mine’s 2,400-ish, and I’ve had mine as high as 3,000 with various things. 

[00:50:52] That means I need 3,000 calories a day to maintain my current state if I don’t do more activity, or do a cold plunge, or think really hard at 40 Years of Zen, or any of that stuff. So at the end of the day, there’s this amazing thing called hunger, as long as it’s not a craving. And if you’re hungry, you probably should eat. You should eat the right stuff. 

[00:51:15] Matt Gallant: I want to talk about what we call the simplest secret. It’s in the book. And Wade uses, successfully, almost every pro athlete. And it’s something you probably do. Most people do this unconsciously. And Wade, talk about the power of eating the same thing on a regular basis, because this solves what you just mentioned. 

[00:51:35] You’re eating the same thing almost every day on a weekly basis, and you’re using even something as simple as a tape measurement and a scale, you’re able to see if you’re succeeding or not. And just before I cue it up to Wade, the cheapest way to see if you’re making progress is a scale and a tape measurement.

[00:51:55] Wade Lightheart: And a mirror.

[00:51:57] Dave: Yeah, the mirror is the most important nutritional tool because even the scale can lie.

[00:52:01] Matt Gallant: Yeah, but the scale with the tape measurement doesn’t lie. 

[00:52:04] Dave: That’s true.

[00:52:04] Matt Gallant: So if you’re measuring your waist, or if you’re a woman with wider hips, and you’re measuring your hips, and your hips went down, or your waist went down, and your weight stayed the same, then you probably gained some muscle mass and lost some body fat. Let’s talk about the simplest secret.

[00:52:17] Wade Lightheart: I will. I want to qualify that for months. I’ve watched manipulations that I can–bodybuilders are great at manipulating their physiology. I’ve seen myself fluctuate six to seven pounds in lean body mass in a 24-hour period through hydration, carbohydrates, restriction, dehydration, all of these components. So you can gain lean body mass–

[00:52:39] Dave: As a percentage, but not by pounds.

[00:52:41] Wade Lightheart: Oh, yes. Oh, no, by pounds. And I’ve got the data rate. You could go check it at your labs. It’s all in the computer, where I actually– 

[00:52:47] Dave: You demonstrated water freeing body mass?

[00:52:49] Wade Lightheart: Yeah, absolutely. And it’ll blow your mind. So you can game those things. You can’t game the mirror. And that’s what everybody is really referring to. But the simplest secret, basically, the average person has about 25 meals in their recipe, their regular going. So the idea of diets are restrictive is a bad idea, but I’ve crafted about 12 specific meals that fit my calorie components that satiate me, that feel good, that deliver the required nutrients in the right amounts to sustain me for my objectives. 

[00:53:29] And that’s what we’re advocating, is pick your go to 12 meals. And then you can rotate in and out. I do four meals a day. That works for me. And I got some variants in each one of those meals, and I’m happy, and it’s easy, and I don’t have to think about it. I don’t have to worry because if you get into that situation where you’re thinking about your food, it’s a quick spiral down to the hell with it.

[00:53:51] Dave: Right.

[00:53:51] Wade Lightheart: And you blow the diet, and then you go through all the negative self-talk.

[00:53:55] Dave: And also, you never know. You go to a restaurant, the calorie counts at restaurants are off by 100% quite often. And the quality of the oils and things like that, the quality of the protein, it’s completely different.

[00:54:10] Matt Gallant: No, and I think, as Wade mentioned, it gets rid of decision fatigue. But there’s another huge advantage. It makes it really easy to decrease calories. Let’s just do a simple example. Let’s say you’re eating six eggs for lunch every day, you’re having an omelette, and you’re not losing body fat or weight and you want to lose weight. You can go from six eggs to four eggs. It makes it really easy. You don’t need to calorie count. You just need to be reducing the portions. 

[00:54:36] And one guy that’s been incredibly successful with that strategy has been Stan Efferting. His vertical diet is a really great diet. He works with a lot of the top-strength athletes, power lifters, etc. And one of the main things he manipulates is just literally the amount of rice they eat, white rice.

[00:54:53] So when they want to gain body weight, they just keep increasing the amount of rice. And when they want to decrease their body weight, body fat, he just lowers the amount of rice. So it makes it really easy to change one thing or two things. And again, you’re just looking at the scale tape measurements, and then you’re just changing the amount from the meals you’re eating.

[00:55:14] Dave: There’s also something called the Randle Cycle. And when you get the percentage of fat in your diet above about 30%, you store fat, more likely. So what I found is that most people today have broken cell membranes because of eating far excess omega-6s. So it usually takes about two years to replace half the fat in your body. 

[00:55:37] So you go on a 50% fat diet for two years eating only saturated fats and some monounsaturated. And after two years, you wake up one day, and you’re like, you know I just don’t want a half a cup of butter in my coffee anymore. The cravings went away. And at that point, you can start doing things like increasing protein.

[00:55:58] And, all of a sudden, for me, after I did that the dieting stuff that’s supposed to work started to work. But when I had broken metabolism from just fat in my body, the wrong kinds of fat, no matter what I did, I wasn’t getting results. So talk to me about percentage of calories from fat versus meat and rice.

[00:56:16] Matt Gallant: Yeah, let’s talk about– again, is really applicable to anybody on a ketogenic diet. So the first phase of a ketogenic diet, let’s call it phase 1, it’s the first two weeks. You go from not ever having to force your body to use fat as energy to adapting and building what’s called lipolytic pathways. And people go through the keto flu, which MCT oil or ketones completely solves for anybody.

[00:56:41] Dave: Maybe some charcoal too.

[00:56:42] Matt Gallant: Yeah, yeah. From there, there’s phase 2. It lasts, typically, maybe three months. And that’s really where your body’s learning to use fat as fuel. And that’s where you really want a high percentage of fat. And once you get to phase 3 or phase 4, you can start decreasing the percentage of fats and increasing your percentage of protein. Now, what does that do? 

[00:57:05] Again, you’re going to decrease your net calories because of the thermic effect of protein, increasing anabolism. And one of my coaches, Kevin Weiss, who used to compete against Wade, who’s a world record holder in powerlifting and bodybuilding, that was his strategy. So he would use a ketogenic diet to get absolutely shredded on bodybuilding stages.

[00:57:25] And all he did was increase the percentage of protein. And you can go up to even as high as 50, 55% protein. And in the book, I created this chart, which gives you all the different types of protein, animal proteins, in terms of percentage of fat, percentage of protein. So all you need to be doing is changing the type of animal protein or fats you’re getting.

[00:57:51] For example, last night, I went to Daidu, had some lard and things like that. But as you’re increasing the amount of protein and shifting to lower-fat cuts, you’re going to find it a lot easier to burn body fat. So that’s one thing. Another thing I want to talk about, which is personal to me, and again, we talk about in the book, if you’re on a ketogenic diet and you don’t do a nutrigenomic test, again, you’re doing yourself a disservice. 

[00:58:19] And this is a relatively new discovery for me. I don’t have good genetics for saturated fats. And my lipid profile hasn’t been great. So now what I’m doing is I’ve decreased the amount of saturated fats. I’m still eating some, but not as much, and I’m increasing my monosaturated fats with olive oil or macadamia nuts.

[00:58:36] Dave: That’s a recommendation that I’ve made since the Bulletproof diet, is that if after two years of high saturated fat, you’re still having higher LDL and you think it’s a problem, you can measure if it’s a problem by looking at Lp-PLA2. Then what you do, especially the APOE situation, we’ll just call it that, is increase your olive oil and macadamia and maybe some avocados, but not avocado oil because it’s largely fake and because it’s largely oxidized, and avocados have a relatively high omega-6. So I like what you’re doing there.

[00:59:12] What I wouldn’t want to see is people with more normal genetics going all monounsaturated. It’s way better than doing polyunsaturated. In fact, there’s a company that I’ve been backing since the very first starting called Zero Acre Farms that’s now making a monounsaturated oil for restaurants. 

[00:59:31] Matt Gallant: We saw your post.

[00:59:32] Dave: You saw the posts on that. So this is really cool because I’d rather always have olive oil than crap oils. But if I ate only olive oil, it would slow my metabolism and wouldn’t do well for me. And again, there’s some genetic things in here as well. And the reason I talked about that two-year window is a lot of people, when they go keto, they go Bulletproof, they go carnivore, their LDL goes up.

[00:59:54] And that’s happening because they’re clearing liver fat. My liver fats under 1% now. All my visceral fat is at the low end of the range for an 18-year-old. And it typically goes up as you age. So the way you do that, though, is if you go on these diets, it can be really scary, but it doesn’t have to be scary.

[01:00:16] It’s one of those things, okay, if it’s temporary and it’s causing damage, you can see if it’s causing damage. So you’ve dialed in the right kind of fat and you’re doing that with testing or people can just try it, but it takes a couple of years of being consistent. And if you’re saying, I’m consistent, but I really like the French fries in totally rancid canola oil twice a week, it doesn’t work.

[01:00:35] Wade Lightheart: Yes. 

[01:00:35] Dave: So you have to be religious about it. But there’s something else I wanted to ask you about, and it’s Charles Poliquin, who was a good friend. I dedicated one of my books to him. He noticed that people will deposit fat in different parts of their bodies based on hormone levels. So if you have the round belly, that’s a cortisol problem. If you’re putting fat in the back of your arms or on your hips, it’s a different hormonal thing. What do you guys think about that?

[01:01:03] Wade Lightheart: Yeah, I totally agree with Charles. I think Charles was a complete genius, and he’s observing the elite of the elite, the most ritualistic and a regimented athlete. So the variance and practical applications that he was able to develop, I, for myself, follow exactly in that category. I will deposit body fat in my stomach area, and I’ll swell actually, if my adrenaline goes– so if I go on the road and I’m doing a lot of trips and I’m doing stuff, I’ll see a fluctuation of anywhere between five and ten pounds.

[01:01:41] Dave: And that’s mostly water from aldosterone or what?

[01:01:43] Wade Lightheart: Yeah, exactly. Because again, that estrogenic pathway, it becomes suboptimized. Testosterone goes down. My estrogen goes up. I start to feel bloated, a little fat. It’s not a regular fat. It’s a weird–

[01:01:58] Dave: Spongy. Yeah.

[01:01:59] Wade Lightheart: Jelly. Yeah. It’s like a jelly hangs out over your pants, going, God, I better go home. And you get back home, you get some good sleep. You stop the caffeine for a few days. You stop the drive. And then within five or six days, you deregulate back. And that’s what I think all biohackers at the highest level get to do because of testing personal observation and understanding the tactics to go along with the strategies. You start getting tactics to mitigate the strategic goals that you’ve outlined within the diet strategy that you’re using.

[01:02:36] Dave: I’ve said this a lot. If you wake up with love handles that weren’t there the day before, they’re probably not fat. They’re inflammation. And that means it’s your fault. It’s something you did. Maybe it was pulling an all-nighter. I did that at Burning Man. I wasn’t really strong the next day. Or maybe it’s flying all over the place, or you ate a really bad meal, or you were just too stressed, or you got in a fight, but something in your life.

[01:02:59] Wade Lightheart: Sounds like the average trip that we do. 

[01:03:00] Dave: All the above. And there are also ways to handle that. I actually increased my cortisol intake. I use cortisol as an anti-aging bioidentical herb. I also don’t make enough cortisol, so I can, oh look, I’m going to be crossing– I’m flying to Turkey for this thing that’s coming up here, the Harvest Series, and then I’m going to go to Dubai, so I’ll bump my cortisol by five milligrams a day, which gives you a lot more resilience, which means I don’t have to make adrenaline because cortisol does something different than adrenaline. I’m not raising it above where it should be. I’m just making it where I want it to be.

[01:03:31] So all these are variables if you’re a professional biohacker. So there’s so much nuance in this. And I think you guys captured it really well. Something that I can see you tried to do in the book is you’re saying, you can do any diet you want. Here’s how to succeed on a vegan diet.

[01:03:47] I don’t think you’re going to live as long or be as fertile no matter what you do as a vegan. You’d be a vegetarian and blow it off. I just haven’t seen very many– I know, basically, three vegans who are older, who haven’t broken bones and aren’t having all this weird aging stuff. And so it’s exceptionally rare and probably genetically based.

[01:04:08] So I wouldn’t want a listener to say, okay, I have ascribed to this philosophy for whatever reason, whether it’s vegan or zone diet, doesn’t really matter, but I’ve identified my personality with his diet, so I have to succeed on this diet. Dude, either your diet works or it doesn’t work.

[01:04:23] And if it does work as a vegan, you’re getting all the results you want, you’re exceptionally unusual, and I still predict that within five years, you’ll most likely have oxalate kidney stones from all of the plants you’re eating. So there’s that.

[01:04:36] Wade Lightheart: So here’s the challenge that I’ll put out there because I’ve been vegetarian for, what now, 20 some years. 

[01:04:42] Dave: Yeah, vegetarian, you can do. Sure.

[01:04:45] Wade Lightheart: But I would say that my diet is 95% plants. And what we’ll do is we’ll say, hey, the person who wins will give the eulogy at each other’s funerals. So if you outlive me, because we’re about the same age, you can give the eulogy at my thing and say, I told you, and inversely. How about that? Is that a fair idea?

[01:05:05] Dave: Yeah. Right.

[01:05:06] Wade Lightheart: I think having constraints– 

[01:05:08] Dave: Here lies a man who was wrong.

[01:05:09] Wade Lightheart: Yeah. 

[01:05:09] Matt Gallant: I beat your ass.

[01:05:11] Wade Lightheart: I won. So again, the book’s about ending the diet wars. And Matt and I have what would, on the surface, appear polar opposite strategies. You’re somewhere in between the two of us. And I think robust discussion in the experimentation of what is optimal is important. And I’m on the extreme side. I think you’re on the extreme side, Dave. And I think Matt’s on the extreme side, and our listeners are probably somewhere in the aspirational stage of one of those strategies.

[01:05:44] And then that’s the idea behind it, is you don’t have to be like me. I’ve got my own set of goals, my own set of rituals, my own set of plans. And I like constraints. I like extremism. I like ridiculous experiments that may be suboptimal. And maybe inside of that, we discover some things that would be really extraordinary.

[01:06:01] Dave: And to be really clear, all of us are willing to take risks to do that. And if you’re listening, you may or may not be. I did 4,500 calories a day for almost a year when I was testing the Bulletproof Diet, and I was actually planning to gain weight. I cut my sleep. I stopped exercising. 

[01:06:18] I’m like, I’m going to only gain this much, but I’m going to have this huge calorie surplus. So I should have gained 20 pounds, but actually grew abs during that time. And I put them up on social media. And then Joe Rogan said it was fake, which was funny, but I think might have had a bone to pick at the time.

[01:06:34] But it wasn’t fake. It was like, what just happened? And you could say it’s because you were eating more protein or whatever it was, but I was forcing myself to eat this incredible calorie surplus. The Kerrygold sticks, a full stick of butter every day. And I took a lipase. I couldn’t buy kApex at the time. You didn’t make it.

[01:06:53] So I took lipase to make sure I was absorbing all the fat. I wasn’t having greasy stools, all the stuff that happens if you don’t absorb fat. I’m like, this shouldn’t be possible, but it’s working. So that was a risk. In fact, it probably made me older. I don’t think it was good for me in the slightest.

[01:07:07] So if you’re listening, you don’t have to go to extremes. What I think you want to do, though, is start looking at results, as they say in the book, get a tape measure and a scale, or coming to Upgrade Labs and do the whole cell health analysis, or work with your doctor, and all that. But if you’re not getting the results you want, if you look at the Ultimate Nutrition Bible, I think there’s a lot of new knowledge in here. You guys think about it in a different way.

[01:07:28] Matt Gallant: There’s 875 scientific references.

[01:07:31] Dave: That’s it? 

[01:07:31] Matt Gallant: Yeah, that’s it. 

[01:07:32] Dave: Slacking off.

[01:07:34] Matt Gallant: Let’s talk about where people can get it. So ultimatenutritionsystem.com/dave. Not only have we written this book. We spent a week in the Hollywood Hills. We filmed the entire course, filmed the entire book. Not only do you get the book and the entire video series. The original draft of the book was a 1,000 pages.

[01:07:59] So we took all the supplement content. People get an instant downloadable PDF. There is a summary of every scientific reference in another PDF, another book, that people get for free. You get three cookbooks for free, including a plant-based one, including a carnivore one, including a paleo one, and you get some other goodies. So you get all of that at the ultimatenutritionsystem.com/dave.

[01:08:24] Dave: All right. So you guys heard that. The book is called the Ultimate Nutrition Bible, and the website is ultimatenutritionsystem.com/dave. And I mentioned earlier, these are the guys behind BiOptimizers who make really, really good supplements. And in fact, I use your gluten supplement. I take MassZymes with every meal, and that might be one of the reasons that I’m succeeding, because I actually absorb everything I eat. A lot of people don’t.

[01:08:49] Matt Gallant: Read outthe data. It turns protein into a pool of amino acids and peptides in 30 minutes. We test it against every other enzyme, and it’s destroyed all of them.

[01:08:58] Dave: It’s a really good one. And also, I actually had an occasion to take antibiotics recently, which, generally, I don’t like to do that. It was a right call for me. I got some mold in an RV, so I was getting a little bit of a throat infection. I’m like, I’m just going to take– so predictably, you get the runs after that. So when I went off the antibiotics, I had the things.

[01:09:23] So I took P3-OM, which is your probiotic, and a bunch of fiber and stuff like that, but it resolved in one day. And I actually tried another kind of probiotics the first day. Didn’t work. So it was the P3-OM that really did it. And that’s where you design that for. So guys, I just want you to know, Matt and Wade are solid in the work that they’re doing in the world as they make cool stuff.

[01:09:50] And go to ultimatenutritionsystem.com/dave and pick up their book and get all that cool stuff. Oh yeah, there you go. Use code DAVE, and they’ll give you 10% off and tons of freebies, way more freebies than I do with my books. I film courses, but I haven’t written five extra books to just give them. So congrats on being highly productive. If you like this episode, you know what to do. You probably should read the book. It’s worth it. And maybe you’re lazy. Just buy the book, and then just watch the videos. That works too.