Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host, Lisa Tamati. Brought to you by lisatamati.com.

Lisa Tamati: Hi, everyone. Lisa Tamati here, Pushing the Limits. Fantastic to have you with me. Today I am, oh my gosh, I'm super excited. I have a long-time hero of mine, actually someone who's had a massive influence on my life. He is the father of biohacking. He's an incredible entrepreneur. He's the author of many New York Times bestselling books. He is, of course, Dave Asprey. Dave Asprey. If you don't know who Dave Asprey is, I don't know what rock you've been living under. He's had a massive influence on my life because his work has really helped me with my mum's rehabilitation, and with my own health, and he has been really my guru for a long time.  I've learned an awful lot from his books, his lectures, his podcast. 

His podcast is called Bulletproof Radio, which you must go and check out. So to get to speak to Dave today was an absolute honor. He is the founder of Bulletproof and Bulletproof Nutrition. You may have heard of Bulletproof Coffee. It's a very good coffee. He has a whole range of supplements as well and he runs Bulletproof Radio, and has some of the world's leading experts on the show. In fact, a lot that go on his show, I go chasing to get on this show. So he's really the father of biohacking.  

He's a longevity expert. He is famously gone on record as saying he believes he can live to 180, and he reckons it's a conservative estimate, that that's super possible now. I believe him. I think that that's exactly, the way with converging technologies and exponential technology and things like AI and supercomputing, and VR, and AR, and robotics, and all of the sensors, and everything that's coming, we are going to be able to crack the code on our own aging, and age even backwards. So I'm really, really excited. This conversation went in a number of different directions and all very exciting, so I hope you enjoy it.  

Before I head over to Dave, just want to remind you, we have our BoostCamp eight-week live webinar coming up starting on the first of September. If you're listening to this episode later, this has already been, and we will be holding these regularly. I want you to head over to peakwellness.co.nz/boostcamp. It will be in the show notes. 

There we're going to be holding a eight-week live webinar series every Wednesday night, and we're going to be talking around everything about upgrading your life: high performance, longevity, improving your health fundamentals, dealing with stress, resilience, mindset coaching, all the good stuff that we've been teaching for the last few years: the latest in science, the latest in information. So I'd love you to come and join us for that program, which will be an eight-week long live webinar program.  

While I'm at it, I want to remind you too to check out our Epigenetics Program. This is all about understanding what your genes are about, and how to optimise your body to your specific set of genes. So we're talking every aspect of your life here. We're talking your food, we're talking your exercise, we're talking chronobiology, we're looking at mood and behavior, your dominant hormones, how your personality is shaped. All of these things are in your genetics, and can be influenced by epigenetics. 

In other words, everything that's outside of your environment: the food you eat, what all those exercise, what temperatures, all these things affects how your genes are expressing. So if you want to understand your body better, get a user manual for your body. Head on over to lisatamati.com, hit the Work With Us button, and under there you'll see our Peak Epigenetics Program.  So two great programs to check out and if you're into longevity, head on over to nmnbio.nz, where I have my longevity supplement NMN, the company founded by a molecular biologist, Dr Elena Seranova, who's been on the show a couple of times already. 

Her breakthrough product there that I'm now importing down under. So if you want to check that out, you want to live longer, this is the best stuff that we have on the market at the moment. So go and grab some over there at nmnbio.nz. Right. Now, over to the show with Dave Asprey.  

Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Pushing the Limits. Today, we're here with one of my superheroes with me, Dave Asprey. Dave, welcome to the show. I'm super excited to have you here.

Dave Asprey: Thanks, Lisa. I'm happy to be here for you.

Lisa: Oh, it's just absolutely. You're one of my great heroes. You've been a huge influence in my life and my mum's life, and your work is just absolutely phenomenal. So to have a little bit of your time today is just really, really special. Dave, I wanted to dive deep into a couple of things. Number one, your latest book, Fast This Way, which was an absolutely fascinating read, and it's gonna be game changing for so many people. But before we go there, I wonder if you might give the listeners a bit of background for those very few people who don't know who you are. A little bit of why you got into this whole world of becoming the father of biohacking.

Dave: Sure. I used to weigh 50% more than I weigh now, about 300 pounds. In my mid-20s, I had the diseases of aging, pretty much. I had prediabetes, high risk of stroke and heart attack, chronic fatigue syndrome, and arthritis since I was 14. The normal stuff that's supposed to work just didn't work. I tried exercising 90 minutes a day, six days a week on a low fat, low calorie diet for 18 months and I still had a double extra large T-shirt, and it wasn't because of muscles. So I was getting more and more desperate and more and more tired. And just feeling like I had the accelerator all the way to the floor, but I was slowing down. You can push harder, but there's nowhere else to go.  

I finally just said, 'You know, I'm a computer hacker in Silicon Valley. My career is going okay. I'm a little concerned because my brain doesn't work but I can hide that effectively. So maybe I'll just do what works. And I'll start measuring.' I looked at my friends eating their double cheeseburgers with bacon, and I looked at my chicken salad with no chicken and no dressing. I realised, I'm bigger than all my friends. I worked out more than all my friends. I eat less than all my friends. I'm fatter than all my friends. It's not a moral failing. It's not a willpower issue. It's not that I ate too much lettuce. It's that I'm getting crappy advice. 

That opened the door to me to looking at all the systems of the body as a hacker would. Say, okay, we don't know much about what's going on inside the body. We still don't. We know a lot more than we did five years ago, or 10 or 20 years ago. But we still know a tiny percentage.  So it's really about how do I get control of my own biology even if I don't have full knowledge. That led to the birth of biohacking, which is a new word in the Merriam-Webster's English language dictionary in 2018, it was added. My name is actually in there in the online definition, which is totally crazy. So that's how it happened. 

I started Bulletproof along the way. Started the Upgrade Collective, my mentorship group, and Upgrade Labs, which is my new facility, which is way more effective for recovery and putting on muscle and cardiovascular than traditional exercise.

Lisa: Your story is one that I think it could be told over and over again by probably thousands of people listening to this, and even my life. I mean, I've been an ultra endurance athlete, but one of the reasons I ran long was because someone told me I would lose weight. I was overweight as a teenager, and struggling, and then told that I was too fat. So that's what took me into this world. I spent 25 years doing the wrong thing, basically, to come to the knowledge that calories in, calories out was, is not...

Dave: You're not alone. I used to ride my bikes 30 miles a day in my late teens trying to lose weight. I tried running, but I have had three knee surgeries. So that's probably a bad idea. You just, you look at that and you go, 'Wait a minute. In Mother, in Mother Nature's creation, there's really only two ways to exercise. One of them is you pick up rocks. The other one is you run away from tigers, or maybe towards them if you're hunting them.' But we didn't run down our prey. We would sprint at them, and then throw rocks at them or spears or something, and then we'd eat them. Right?  

So the idea that somehow we're supposed to send a signal to our body that we're in a world of plenty when all we do is run. That's what hunted animals do. Hunted humans just keep running without stop. Yet if we believe that's healthy, now we have this weird thing that says, 'Oh, starvation and predation are going to be good for us.' So because we're smart, and because we have the most willpower, we push ourselves and say, 'Okay, let's tell our body to live in a world where there's not enough food and there's always things hunting us, and then we'll be happy.' Magically, it doesn't work like that.

Lisa: No, it certainly doesn't. That's a really good segue into your book, Fast This Way, which I really loved. As someone who has had issues with food and dieting and body image and all those sorts of things that so many of us deal with, when you see fasting you're, like, 'Ugh'. The thing that I absolutely loved about this book was it took away the guilt that so many people feel about it being all about them having a lack of willpower. It also explained the whole biology of why fasting is good for us, and how to get started, and how to do it without the pain and without the suffering, which I found really amazing. 

Because, you get your puritanical types of people that thinks a fast has to be awful. And you have to be so starving and you have to be suffering all the time.  You've really, again, gone and hacked the code on how to actually get the benefits of fasting without all the negative side effects of a puritanical type of fast. Can you explain a little bit of the biology? I mean, this is a deep topic to dive into, but at the core of all this is our mitochondria. So what is fasting doing for us?

Dave: Well, it was... It's a case that I had, had an unfair advantage on fasting because my first big book was called The Bulletproof Diet. I published the first knowledge about this about 10 years ago online. So for 10 years, I've worked with a community of people teaching them intermittent fasting, which is a part of the Bulletproof Diet. It's one of five big things. All five of those have become, like, kind of schools of discipline in healthy eating, which is really neat. But it was a very early book, pointing out that you had to do all five of these in order to hit all the things most likely to mess with your brain and mess with your waistline. 

So that taught me a few things. And my publisher came to me and said, 'Dave, write a book on fasting. Everyone wants to hear it.' I'm like, 'Are you serious?' Step one: don't eat for a while. Step two: it's good for you. Here's some studies. There's like, 20 books out there that say that.

Lisa: Yeah.

Dave: I thought I'm not gonna write a me too book because it's a waste of time. Why would you put all those thousands of hours into writing a book if it's not gonna to be meaningful? So I said, 'Alright, let's talk about the psychology and the biology behind the psychology, or the psychobiology around fasting.' That makes it worth doing. Then I have learned how to fast. I tell the story of going... the first time I fasted, really, was before I started Bulletproof. I hired a shaman to drop me off in a cave in the desert for four days with no people and no food. Like, well, I know I eat if I'm lonely. And I know that when I don't eat, I get hypoglybitchy, or hangry. 

I'm going to be mean to everyone around me. So if I'm in a cave, I'm going to push my fear button, my loneliness button. I also know that if I don't eat six times a day, I'll go into starvation mode, and then I'll get fat and I'll die. Because that's what they told me from the 1970s, right?

Lisa: Yeah.

Dave: So at least since the 1970s, they've been saying that garbage, which is not true. So I said, 'Alright. Best place: cave.' I went and I did it. I tell the story, the psychology side of it, as well as the physical side of it using that. Then with Bulletproof, what I found was okay, yes, there is something called autophagy, which is when the body cleans out old, old cells and old proteins. It's important, it's something that's wired into us, and you don't get it if you eat three meals a day, and you don't get it if you're always eating carbohydrates and lots of sugar. So the way you get it is you go for a brief period of time without food occasionally, and sometimes a longer period of time. 

There's different benefits to it. But it's easy to say that. It's also easy to tell you wake up every morning and go for a 10-mile run. How many people will do that? Very few, right? Because, well, first of all, you're like, 'Oh, why would I do that?' Unless you love running. The same thing, skip a meal, like, 'Screw you, I like eating.' This is a normal human biology thing. That's not you making a decision.  In fact, it's the same part of you, that if you lean on a hot stove and you pull your hand away before it gets burned, you know? 'Oh, good thing I pulled my hand away.' 

But you didn't pull your hand away. Something else pulled your hand and you took credit for it. What was that thing? Well, that thing, that's the one that makes you go, 'Ew, I'm not going to skip a meal. What's wrong with you?' It's exactly the same impulse. It's a survival impulse. So in the, in Fast This Way, I unpack it for you. Say, okay, what if we could turn off most of that so that all of the pain and suffering that you expect with fasting just isn't there? There are some pathways you can activate with basic practices. There's three fasting hacks in the book that remove the pain. Right now, if you go to daveasprey.com/sleepchallenge, 

I've had about 70,000 people go through. It's totally free. You don't have to buy the book. It's like, 'Hey, I'll teach you for two weeks how to fast.' So there's a lot of people and from around the world. I just want people to understand, like, it's not about suffering. So you see thousands of comments in the private Facebook group from people saying, 'I can't believe I just went 24 hours without eating and I didn't even lose focus. In fact, I felt better than I did before.'  That's the trick is that suffering is not required. The puritanical mindset is not required. Just knowing how to not be hungry during the fast. 

Now, 'What do you mean knowing how to be hungry? Fasting equals hunger.' No, it's what you ate before your fast that caused your hunger. When you learn how to eat, you're not hungry for four to six hours. Then there's the three fasting hacks from the book and I'll kinda, you know, give it away here.  First one, if you have a cup black coffee, just black coffee, in the morning at the beginning of a fast, it amplifies your body's ability to make ketones. It actually doubles formation of ketones. Ketones are fat-burning molecules that you get if you don't eat any carbs or if you fast for a while. 

So all of a sudden, that happens. Caffeine itself is a hunger suppressant. There's other huge health benefits from coffee that are very well-documented. Google the name of any disease and coffee and there's probably studies saying coffee's good for it. So there you go. So you had a cup of coffee in the morning without sugar and without any milk in it. Magically, you already, already had a more successful fast. In fact, coffee also increases autophagy. There's that.  Then the second key fasting hack is you can add grass-fed butter and MCT oil. 

I originally created Bulletproof Coffee based on that idea because I noticed that grass-fed, well, yak butter in Tibetan tea in the middle of nowhere in Tibet at high altitude changed how my brain works. So how does this work? So we have all the science behind it. But it turns out that that combination gives you a way more hunger suppressant. The hunger suppressant there's called CCK, which is the Calvin Klein hormone, I like to say. 

Lisa: Cholecystokinin, yeah.

Dave: You nailed it. Even said it right. Took me 20 episodes to say Cholecystokinin three times. But what, what that stuff does is it doesn't just turn on a fullness feeling, called satiety. It also is anti-inflammatory. People drink Bulletproof Coffee and they're like, 'You're full of crap, Dave.'

Lisa: Yeah.

Dave: Then 20 minutes later, 'What just happened? Like, I feel calmer and focused, and I just don't care about food, and snack time came and someone put a bagel in front of me. I didn't want to eat it. Lunchtime came and I wasn't even hungry, but I thought I just maybe should eat.' That's the first day, and they're just looking at you going, 'This is impossible.' Then you say, 'Well, okay, maybe that was breakfast just had calories in it.' But you look at what... This's crazy. Different calories do different things.

Lisa: Yeah. And the prebiotic. That's the other one. The third one, isn't it?

Dave: Oh, yeah. The other one is a prebiotic fibre. This is a kind of fibre that you can't digest. It won't raise your insulin levels or your blood sugar levels at all. But your gut bacteria eat it and they make ketogenic molecules. It's hunger suppressant and it enhances longevity in tons of studies. It's like, 'Oh, you can have a cup of Bulletproof Coffee with some prebiotic fibre blended in.' There's just about no one on earth who can have that in the morning and not be completely full. Some people are gonna say, 'But Dave, there were calories.' Like, 'Yeah, that's funny. Did you want to pay attention today? Because that's called energy.' 

Your brain uses about 15% of energy. How do we measure energy? It's called calories. But fasting isn't a lack of energy going into the body. Fasting is going without. The hallmarks of fasting are insulin doesn't go up and your levels of something called mTOR don't go up. mTOR is something that turns off autophagy.  So if you don't have any protein and you don't have any carbs that raise insulin, your body's still in a fasted state. The people say, 'Well, you can't do that. You can only have water during a fast. That's what the mice had. I saw a study that the mice had only water. So that's what you have to do.' 

Number one, mice don't have espresso machines. Number two, I'm sorry, did you have water during your fast? Because there's a whole group of people who are called dry fasters. They don't believe you can have water during a fast. So your water fast is too permissive. But then, and I write about this as a part of the book, since fasting is going without, you can fast from hateful people. You can fast from all sorts of things, but you can also fast from oxygen. It's called breathwork. It's a big part of biohacking. I've helped to bring that into the biohacking universe. 

So wait a minute, did the mice also do breathwork because I'm pretty sure that if you want to be a puritanical faster, you can't breathe, you can't drink water, you can't have any calories.  They all die. So that's a bad path. Maybe we could choose to go without the things that are causing the biological effects we don't want. So yes, you are fasting when you have black coffee, or coffee with butter and MCT but no protein, or coffee with prebiotics, or tea, for that matter. Just don't put sugar and artificial sweeteners in there and you're good to go.

Lisa: Yeah, that's really a key point. This is all about, like, understanding what the body's doing and not taking this puritanical, 'Oh, I'm fasting' thing to, you know. It's more about what are the things that I'm trying to achieve? I'm trying to achieve autophagy, which is getting rid of the bad proteins and the broken bits in the cells and clearing them out so that they can bring in good nutrients, and do better things, and be more efficient. It's also about being in a calorie deficit but you have to know that the right combinations of things. So if we looked at the supplement side of it, things like activated charcoal and I don't know if you take bentonite clay or those types of things. 

What can we take there that can actually help our body detoxify because our bacteria, especially when we're not well going into this new fasting world, and we have a bacteria, you know, microbiome that's not so great because we've been eating crap for a long time. How do we deal with sort of LPs? The, you know, the stuff that's coming out there?

Dave: This is a big part of Fast This Way is talking about, okay, what happens to all life when it's threatened? Well, there's three things. It's always in order. It doesn't matter if you're a bacteria, if you're a snake, or a zebra, or a human, or a cactus, right? Step one: run away from, kill, or hide from scary things. Okay, that's called fear. The second one of the F words, it triggers about 10 times more attention because it might kill you right now and then it would be the end of the species. So the second thing is, eat everything because famines oftentimes kill people. 

So that's food, right? That gets five times more attention than necessary because there's plenty of food, but your cells don't know that. So they're still driving you as if there might be a famine tomorrow. That's why you want to eat all the doughnuts. Then there's a third F word that all life has to do to stay around for multiple generations. Do you know which one that is?

Lisa: It's, um... rude word.

Dave: Fertility? Is that the word... 

Lisa: That's the one.

Dave: That's the F word you were thinking of.

Lisa: I had that one somewhere else. Then I forgot. What the hell was it? It was... I don't think it's this one. The other one.

Dave: I always try to trick people into saying the other one. Sometimes it works. So. It's fertility, right? So those three things are driving everything that we do. So what's that gut bacteria going to do when it gets threatened? What threatens a gut bacteria? Well, antibiotics or toxic mould in your environment will make your gut bacteria because that is just naturally occurring antibiotics. Then starvation is a threat. So when they're stressed, what are they going to do? Well, they can't really run away. They're gut bacteria locked in your gut, right? They can't hide very well, although some of them will. They'll go into different stages. 

So most of them say, 'Well, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm just going to secrete a lot of toxins because those toxins will keep all the other bacteria from competing with me.' Those toxins are called lipopolysaccharides. Lippo means fat, and they easily cross the gut barrier to go into circulation. They cross the blood brain barrier, and then you get hangry. You get brain fog. You get hypoglybitchy. You get really hungry because your liver says, 'God. Now I have to deal with all these LPS. Can I have some sugar, please? Because the sugar will help me oxidise these toxins, help me get them out.'  

So all of a sudden, you're saying I'm trying to fast but I made my gut bacteria unhappy. So what do you do? Well, you could bind the LPS. That's what I've talked about in Fast This Way is toxin binders work incredibly well for reducing cravings during fasting. I've been using activated charcoal. I've made it part of the biohacking movement. I've been using it for 20 years. There are studies in my anti-aging book, actually, talking about I think was a 15% life extension in rats who take activated charcoal regularly.

Lisa: Cheap, old, activated charcoal.

Dave: Yeah. Which has been around for 10,000 years that we know of in human use. So that one seems pretty safe. But you didn't hear much about it because apparently it's not sold by any big pharma company. They haven't had it patented. I don't know why.

Lisa: Simple. Actually, so taking things that can bind up things in the gut and the toxins is also a big, big factor. What about senolytics and things like Quercetin and Fisetin, are they a part of the fasting conversation?

Dave: There's something else to talk about before we get there. It's that when you start losing fat, your body stores toxic metals, toxic moulds, xenoestrogens, pesticides in your fat. If we biopsied your fat right now, you'd be sort of horrified. So I've had people using my programs lose 75 pounds in 75 days. You will feel like garbage if you do that unless you're taking huge amounts of toxin binders and detoxers because as all that fat melts, all the toxins have to get handled by your toxin handling systems. So that's important when we talk about charcoal and the other things like bentonite clay or even the prebiotic fibre. 

You really have to think about if I'm losing weight, I'm gaining toxins unless I bind them. Then there's a chapter in Fast This Way that's on what supplements are safe and effective during fasting, which ones break a fast, and which ones will make you throw up. You shouldn't take them during a fast. Those ones are pretty useful to know about. Some of the advanced ones are senolytics for sure. I look at probably one of my favorite ones is spermidine.

Lisa: Oh, yeah, spermidine. Thanks for the intro to Dr Yurth. She's been on my show twice and I have spermidine now every day. So thanks for that one.

Dave: You're welcome. I'm pretty darn sure I introduced that to the world of biohacking, but not because I talked to Dr Yurth and the spermidine life guys. It's because there's such convincing studies. I wrote about it in my anti-aging book, in Super Human. But you couldn't buy it at the time. It was a research chemical. The research chemical smells like its namesake. Like, it's not very pleasant. It was very expensive, so you couldn't take that. So I took these probiotics from Japan that are supposed to help you make spermidine onboard because the anti-aging research was so big. 

Then you fast forward a little while and you go, 'Oh, wait, it looks like now there's a supplement available.' So that is, that's a fasting mimetic.  So what I recommend people do during the fast is, you can take fasting mimetics. There's a few other ones that are in the book. That's a good idea. Certainly, minerals are an incredibly good idea. When it comes to things like quercetin, I think the evidence is out. 

You might, if you're trying to turn on senolytics during a longer fast, it's probably a good idea. During a regular intermittent fast, it's probably not a good idea. But I say probably and then if you do it, you're not likely causing harm. But there's a certain amount of oxidation, like oxidative stress, that you want during a fast. A fast is like exercise for yourself.

Lisa: Yeah.

Dave: Right. So if you were to remove all the stressors during a fast, then you wouldn't get the benefits of the fast.

Lisa: This is always the balance between oxidants and redox and...

Dave: So I'd want to put it at the end of the fast if I was going to do a quercetin during a fast. But you can just take moderate amounts during it. If you're doing a multi-day fast, there's an argument for taking rapamycin, and high doses of fisetin, and a bunch of other more advanced anti-aging senolytics. I would say we're still a little bit short on studies that tell you exactly what to do. That's not to say that we don't know what to do because they know how it works. There's a lot of academics and physicians who will tell you, 'Well, we don't, we're waiting for more evidence. 

So don't do anything.' I'm like, 'Didn't you just do a study that... hey, you just did a study that says this probably works, right?' So directionally speaking, shouldn't we do what we think works instead of doing nothing? That mindset is incredibly toxic and it's pervasive.

Lisa: I mean... I actually wanted to talk on that, Dave, so we can go and talk about the current state.  Just interrupting the program briefly to let you know that we have a new patron program for the podcast. Now, if you enjoy Pushing the Limits, if you get great value out of it, we would love you to come and join our Patron membership program. We've been doing this now for five and a half years and we need your help to keep it on air. It's been a public service free for everybody. And we want to keep it that way. But to do that, we need like-minded souls who are on this mission with us to help us out. 

So if you're interested in becoming a patron for Pushing the Limits podcast, then check out everything on patron.lisatamati.com. That's P-A-T-R-O-N dot lisatamati.com. We have two patron levels to choose from. You can do it for as little as $7 a month, New Zealand or $15 a month if you really want to support us. So we are grateful if you do. There are so many membership benefits you're going to get if you join us. Everything from workbooks for all the podcasts, the strength guide for runners, the power to vote on future episodes, webinars that we're going to be holding, all of my documentaries, and much, much more. So check out all the details. patron.lisatamati.com. And thanks very much for joining us.  

The state of our medical system and pharmaceutical-based system, where do you think we're going wrong? Like how can we... Is there a paradigm shift happening? I mean, there is, because you're creating a paradigm shift because people like me are following you and other great minds in this space. Is this, like this is just too big to ignore. The information that's coming out is not always true. Like the stuff that we get fed in the general media. You know where I'm going with this. The whole pharmacological basis to our whole medical system. What's your take on what's happening?

Dave: I, for one, am grateful to our artificial intelligence overlords for telling me how to think so I don't have to think for myself. It really makes me feel safe and lets me just feel like I don't have to do anything. We had a big problem back in about 1997. The FTC in its infinite wisdom decided that they should allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise in the US. That was pretty much they were already out of control and that put them seriously out of control and now something like 50 to 70% of the revenue from the large news networks is from pharmaceutical companies. Imagine what would happen. 

There's other stuff we don't see because we're terrible at long-term consequences and long-term patterns. We're pretty good at short-term patterns. So if I punch myself in the face, 'Oh, it hurt. I know it hurt.' But if you punch yourself in the face, and a week later, your face would start hurting. For years, you'd be, like, 'I wonder when my face hurts every now and then 'cause in the seven days it's too much.'  

Well, check this out. In 1986, we had the swine flu. Billions of dollars in pharmaceuticals made no risk. Then in 1989, three years later, Hong Kong flu. Then four years later SARS. Then three years later, bird flu. Then three years later, swine flu. Then three years later, MERS, which is also one of the COVIDs or coronaviruses anyway. Then it was actually ahead of schedule. Ebola came in 2014, and then Zika, 2016. Then took a little break. Four more years: COVID. So, in each one of these cases, this same thing always happens. What happens is 10 people end up in the hospital, and then they test all 10 of them, and go, 'Oh my god, two of the 10 died. It's a 20% death rate. End of the world. Start selling.' 

They start selling pharmaceuticals, siphoning government money. Government agencies ramp up with huge unlimited budgets, print more cash, all this stuff.  Well, here's the problem: 10 people went to the hospital because they were sick. But 10,000 people had it with no symptoms. But it's not a 20% death rate. In fact, the average that I calculated, this is two weeks into the current pandemic, is that on average, the ones I researched about a 65 times reduction in the death rate two years after they actually announced it. 

So they always say, 'Oh, my god, 10% of people are going to die.' Afterwards, they're like, 'Oh, my god, it was .002%.' But no one ever reports the second one because by then, billions have been spent. Remember, you remember Tamiflu? 

Lisa: Yep, I do. Yeah.

Dave: So Tamiflu was required to be purchased by global governments.

Lisa: Wow.

Dave: My wife is a emergency room doctor from Sweden. The Swedish National Health Authority, and this is a socialised medicine so they don't waste money, and they said, 'This is ridiculous. This is a non-disease in terms of death rate. And this isn't even an effective treatment for it. So we're not spending money on it.' There was a big lawsuit from the WHO or whoever the heck it was, and eventually came down to they had to buy one box of this drug, against their will, for every doctor. So the head of the hospital, 'Alright, guys, hey, everyone gets a free box of drug. You can do what you want with it.' So it ended up in everyone's desk drawers. 

Okay, that is one version of reality. That actually happened. I had it in firsthand. This was, 'Oh, my god, every man, woman and child.' So Rumsfeld, who just died, he actually made a billion dollars off of that because he was the largest shareholder of the company that owned in Tamiflu.  So what's going on here is there's people make a lot of money off these things. It is a business model. As I predicted with COVID, the actual death rate is about 65 times lower than the first reported death rate. That's not to say people aren't dying. They do. 

People die every year from all sorts of things, but the overall death rate is well within the normal variation that you'd expect. 'No, I don't want to get it. Yes, there might be some ongoing problems.' There is zero evidence they're irreversible anytime and someone says, 'Oh, there's irreversible permanent impossible to fix side effects.' Screw you. Right? It's impossible to go to the moon. It's impossible to fly. It's impossible to hold your breath for two minutes. All sorts of crap that actually you can do as soon as you figure out how.  So, yeah, there's some people are sick and some people have passed away, right? 

I know some people have passed away. So this is not to minimise it. It's to say that our reaction was stupid because the actual risk was much lower, but the risk is amplified because it makes money. So we've got to take the pharmaceutical companies away from the doctors. Right now where I live in Canada, it is illegal for doctors to talk about substances that are well-known to work for the current pandemic. Common anti-parasitic medications to start with i and end in vermectin, but I don't want to say it out loud because...

Lisa: You don't want to get taken off air then.

Dave: Here's the thing. I'm not, it's not going to fix or cure everyone, but I just posted about it and there's a dozen comments people going, 'Oh my god, it saved my life.'

Lisa: Yeah.

Dave: Why is it illegal for my doctor to tell me to take it?

Lisa: Yeah.

Dave: That is because of the influence of big pharma.

Lisa: That's because it's off patent. Nobody can make money at it. It's very safe. If they ever say therapeutic, apparently they have to take the vaccine off the market, but we can't do that because there's billions or squillions on the line here. When you're looking at fertility and all those sorts of things, I'm just quite horrified at the, we're going through IVF at the moment since, there's no way I'm touching it, that's for sure.

Dave: It's a weird thing because I identify as vi-curious. Vaccine industry curious. I am not opposed to vaccines. Before the pandemic, I had a leader from one of the companies making mRNA vaccines. They're going to go through proper testing in five to seven years, but they're talking about an Alzheimer's and a diabetes vaccine. Okay. If you look at the big four killers that I wrote about in my book, it's cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, right? So what's the first one that I missed? So if I could get a vaccine for those four and the vaccine was well-tested, you know what? 

I think I might be interested in that because I'm probably going to live 25 more years from that, and I'm probably going to suffer less at the end of my life. Right? Okay. That's math worth doing because that's what kills something like 70%, 80% of people. It is not a specific type of infection. So it's a different equation, and...

Lisa: The people that are dying from COVID anyway are people with comorbidities. Diabetes.

Dave: There's that, and there are a few random rare people who die. I just had Amanda Kloots on the show. I mean, her husband, Nick Cordero, he was 41, didn't have comorbidities. Maybe had some genetics. No one really knows. But he passed away very quickly. You could also argue, well, they intubated him, and they starved him for three weeks without any food and a feeding tube, which didn't seem like a good idea. But yeah, but still, you know, it's a problem because people see things like that. They go, 'Oh, it's so scary.' And you know, it is. If you get sick, it's always scary because we're wired to be able to feel fear when something might be bad. I just think we've got to be rational.

Lisa: This is why we need to be having this conversation around being preventative and being, optimising your health, and intermittent fasting, and fasting, and good food, and good amounts of exercise, and all of these other lifestyle interventions that are accessible to us all. Understanding how our biology works so that we're not stuck in it.

Dave: You're totally wrong. We need to give people fried food if they get the vaccine. That is how we are going to win this battle. It is a war. We have to win the war. It is so ridiculous. But you know what, there are a lot of people, including some really intelligent people I respect, who are either totally caught up in fear, or they haven't done the research that certainly I've seen that says you know what, there are some unknown risks to the vaccine, and there are some unknown risks to the virus. We just have no, we know more about the virus than do the vaccine. So is it okay to say, 'I haven't made my mind up yet. I will be part of the control group.' 

Yes. Is it okay to say, 'You know, I couldn't see my parents and they're at the end of their life. It was totally worth it to take whatever risk is in the vaccine to get it.' I respect both sides.  That's why that vi-curious thing is pretty cool. Because if you identify as vi-curious, which means you're not willing to be vaccine promiscuous, which means, 'Oh, anyone could stick anything in me they want,' but you're also not an anti-vaxxer, which, like, 'No one could ever stick anything in me.' Maybe you're in the middle. In fact, I will tell you right now, 90% of people are in the middle. 

It's the angry people who yell at the extreme anti-vax and the extreme vaccine promiscuous side, they're bullies. They're traumatised people, and you guys can all STFU, okay? Most of us will make our own decisions, thank you very much. If you try to bully and shame someone for identifying as vi-curious now, what have you done? I'm pretty sure you're gonna get cancelled.

Lisa: You're just looking at... Look at the mind body connection. But you're just looking at the whole... Let's look at the science. We haven't had the time. We haven't. I mean, Dr Robert Malone, who you probably know as the mRNA guy, he's saying, look, despite protein, we don't know if it's biologically active with regulators. So it's just too risky. So I'm looking at my situation with my mum, my elderly mum, and myself going through fertility and I'm going, 'No offense. I've got my hyperbaric. I've got my ozone machine. I've got my sauna. I've got my healthy diet. I've got my all of these things. I'm sure I get the other, you know, i- medicine. I'm good to go. Thanks very much.'

Dave: There's a very interesting argument where you say you have to do it to keep me safe. The answer to that is for sure, look, if masks work, keep wearing a mask. Just some evidence: maybe they do based on the evidence, maybe they don't. That whole 2.5 thing. Anyway. Then if the vaccine works, then you should be safe, right? So don't put it on me. It's almost like if someone was to go to you, Lisa and say, 'Hey, I want you not to drive so that I'll be safer when I drive.'

Lisa: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and you're a bad person if you drive. I'm a little bit scared of coming in the future that we're going to be stiff-armed into doing what we don't want to do.

Dave: Let me just be really straightforward, Lisa. Do you pay property taxes? Yes, right? You're stiff-armed into doing something you don't want to do. Do you obey a whole bunch of stupid regulations every time we go to the airport, take your shoes off whenever the hell they tell you to.

Lisa: Yes. Thank you, that was 911 Patriot Act stuff right afterwards. All of a sudden, shoes are unsafe in airports. In some countries, but not others. Just like masks, okay, when you sit down, but not stand up or whatever. Just deal with it. You're already stiff-armed into doing all sorts of stuff you don't want to do. But you don't have to react with anxiety or fear. You can react with intelligence and logic and thought. The bottom line is, that's a human condition. It's a lot better than what we had 200 years ago, which was serfdom and slavery. It's you, how do we put... We are...

Dave Asprey: How do we put white people in Australia? They were mostly prisoners, right? Like, didn't have much choice about that, right? So we have a long history of not having as much control as we want. But we're in a place now where we can choose to give up, really, I'm going to say innate human rights. Medical freedom is one of the most precious rights. That means you have a right to choose what you put into your body and what you don't put in your body from a food perspective, from a supplements perspective, and from a pharmaceutical perspective. No one else has a right to choose. If they try to...

Lisa: This is where I have a huge issue. I mean, I think I told you my story when we spoke last time about my father and not being able to get him intravenous vitamin C in the hospital when he was dying. They took away my rights. They took away my dad's rights. They took, that's where I have issue. Because, and, okay, that's one situation. I'm working on that one.

Dave: My goal is to not die in a hospital. It's a bad place to die.

Lisa: You do not want to be in there. That's why I have everything at home that I possibly can afford. Dave, just before we wrap up because I know you have to leave shortly and I just want to get your take on longevity. You're famously reported as saying, 'I believe I can live to 180.' You think that's conservative estimate even now. You're 47, I believe. Do you, why do you think, and I agree with you, I think we, the converging technologies that are happening right now, the exponential, the AI, the VR, the robotics, the stuff that's coming is just next level insane. What do you think though? We can live, outlive anybody in the history of humanity so far?

Dave: Well, I don't feel comfortable saying that we're likely to live to 500 or to a thousand. I just don't think it's impossible. I picked 180 because today, with no technology assistance, we have people who make it to 120. Not very many. But we know that's possible. These were people who were born when we still fought wars on horseback, that we didn't have airplanes. We couldn't spell DNA because we didn't know what it was. Right? There were no antibiotics. I mean, it was a different world. They're still alive, right? 

Okay, if we can't do 50% better than that over the next 132 years of my life, it's because a comet hit the planet. Or maybe because we destroyed our topsoil with some weird vegan ideology. You need animal poop to make soil and I live on a regenerative farm where we're building soil with pigs and sheep. So you have to know how systems work. So if we don't destroy the planet, then we can do 50% better than today. Because I've run an anti-aging nonprofit for more than a decade, and I've been blessed on my podcast on Bulletproof Radio to be able to interview the luminaries in the field and to know many of them personally, there is no question in my mind.  

We are cracking the core biology behind aging and our ability to replenish and repair and rejuvenate our systems. So it's your job: age a little bit less quickly, prepare yourself a little bit better. Every year, the technology gets better and better. Already, some of the stuff I wrote about the cutting edge of stem cells in Super Human, which was just published, like, a year or two years ago, already one of those treatments, I said, 'Well, you'll probably be able to get this.' It's now possible, a new stem cell chemistry, much easier than the ones that I did, where they tapped into my bone marrow, which I did to write to the book. It actually wasn't, not nearly as bad as people think. 

I mean, you lay there and it feels like pressure, but it's not painful. Everyone describes it as this horrible pain, but I have done it twice. I've had worse pain.

Lisa: You're pretty tough.

Dave: I did pass out. The idea there is it was hard and expensive to start. It's getting easier and cheaper. And it will continue on this path, like everything we do well. People say, 'It's not fair. Global billionaires do $100,000 stem cell treatments.' Like yep, those same global billionaires. They were the ones who put the whole trunk of their car with the first cell phone or mobile phone, right? It cost $50,000 to have a mobile phone and $25 a minute, and they would drive around and do that. Magically, you can get a cell phone for $1 month in Africa now. How could that be?

Lisa: Demonitisation.

Dave: So, my job is to say it's possible, to show it being done, which creates huge demand, which creates huge supply, which drops the price. That's what anti-aging is doing right now.

Lisa : Yeah. I'm on with you. I'm going to be around hopefully to 180 as well with you.

Dave: Alright, let's race.

Lisa: Now, I'm going a few years' head start on you. I'm 53 next month. But, and I think one other, just one other point. You always talk about respecting your elderly and that you learn so much from, and I hate the word elderly. It's a terrible word anyway. 

Dave: It's elders, not elderly. They're very different words.

Lisa: Yes, you, you're damn right there. Actually in my, in my culture, in the Maori culture, we do call them our elders.

Dave: I always use the word elders. Elderly just means frail. Elders means wise and powerful.

Lisa: Wise, powerful with much experience. If we can help our elders retain mental function, retain physical function, which is my goal was with my mum. She's my guinea pig, she's the one... all the stuff you research comes to her benefit. If we can retain that, you know, like, I feel like now at the age of 53 that I'm at the peak of my abilities, my experiences, and I want to maintain this. Now, I don't want to stop my decline as is expected of me because I've reached a certain age. I'm about to go through IVF. I'm going to try to have a baby. 

I'm, I just defy anybody to tell me what I should or should not be doing it this age. I'm determined to use the latest in technologies and stuff as much as I can afford and all the rest of it to live a long and healthy life, and then just share that information, which is,  just exactly what you're doing. But on a bigger scale. Yeah. So I'm very excited about what's coming.

Dave: It's good to have a passion and a mission. There's some interesting studies that show that for some women, perimenopause is a pretty rough time, that women and men actually over 60 tend to be happier. Because we go through this phase of when we're young, we're really worried about what everyone else is thinking about us. Then you go through a phase and you're the middle, the kind of Middle Ages, where you're really thinking more about what you think about other people. Then you get older and you realise that no one was ever really thinking about you anyway. Right? So now, okay, I finally dealt with all my crap.  

So people who have enough energy and don't have medical problems as they age tend to be much happier because they've learned the skill of being happy. It turns out we can teach our younger people that, and the way we've always done that is through coming-of-age rituals. Then you listen to the elders, and we had intact families with older people, and they tell you a few things, and you listen to maybe 20% of it when you were young, but it was pretty valuable because it saved you 10 years of acting like a jerk. 

Yeah, we're just missing that. We replaced with Instagram. So I'm hoping we go back to really awake and aware and powerful elders. Part of the anti-aging community is to have people whose brains work like young people, but the wisdom of ages, and that's gonna be cool.

Lisa: It is gonna be very, very cool. You know, Dave, you've just, you're magnificent. I mean, all your books from Head Strong to Better Baby to Fast This Way to Bulletproof to Super Human, and all of the movies. I watched your movie the other day, the one on toxicity. Toxic, toxic mould.

Dave: It's moldymovie.com.

Lisa: moldymovie.com. People, I've shared that lately on social. Go and check that out as well because this is a silent epidemic that I think most people are not aware of. It all comes down to looking after our health and our mitochondria. Dave, thank you so much for your time today. I really respect what you do. I love what you do.  

I'm just fascinated to... what I'd like to know from you personally, though, is, how the hell do you create such a movement, have such an impact, have... and translate the systems thinking that you took from your, your background in Silicon Valley to this and where did you come up with the idea that we lack a systems biology thing? It's a marvelous analogy.

Dave: For five years, I taught at the University of California every night how to build the internet and cloud computing before it was built. I worked at the company that held Google's first servers before. It was just two guys and two computers and when, it was the Facebook with five computers with customers. So I architected hundreds of systems like that, and my whole thing was how do you build a highly scalable system where you don't know what everything's doing but you still are in charge of controlling it? Because if you don't, they won't pay you. That was how I learned to think like a network engineer.  

It turns out that biology behaves very much like the internet does where we have these little cells, they make little decisions, they communicated very, via various signalling pathways. If you can hack a system, that means you don't know what's in there. That means you can hack the human body. Part of it was desperation, and how can I teach it and translate it? Well, it's because I learned to be a teacher by every night after work, going and being an actual teacher of working engineers, which was really hard. It's a different skill than doing the work. It's sharing the work. 

It was that experience and just a hard-won, Silicon Valley tech stuff that prepared me to be able to share this and then to make a movement.  It's, well, it's kind of hard, but there's two things you have to do. One is, you have to have stuff that actually works, right? The vegan movement will fail, and it is failing right now. Because it doesn't work. People do it, feel good for a little while, then they get sick, and it happens over and over, and is bad for the environment. So give it 20 years, and it'll be one of those weird things we talked about. We all need our grass-fed meat. 

Okay, so number one, efficacy. Number two, I just hopped on a plane whenever someone wanted me to talk about it, and I'm good at talking about it. So I've probably spoken at a thousand live events since I started Bulletproof. Travelled 150 days of the year when there's no artificial destruction of travel. It's not just sharing online; it's sharing in person, and being there, and talking with people, and actually caring. If you do that, you can build a movement. It just takes a lot of time and energy, but it has to be worth it. In my case, I thought it was worth it.

Lisa: It's been definitely worth it. You've got a little student over here trying to emulate what you do on a smaller scale. But definitely doing that sharing this on a regular basis. We've been going with this podcast now for five and a half years and inching our way forward, learning, and I don't have a tech background. To be honest, the whole online world of coaching that I do, but you know, you just keep going and that was, that's one thing that ultra-marathoning does teach you that's good, apart from the, the exercising too much side of it from the, from the psychological side of it. It's very good because you just learn to just grind, to keep going and keep going.

Dave: Just put your head down and keep going. That's what it takes. The more successful you are, the more the crazy 5% sociopaths and psychopaths yell and scream and complain online and you just learn, 'Oh, wow, I'm totally winning.' Every time that happens, it took them 20 minutes to make up something mean about me. It took me half a second to click ban and delete. Just know that that's a sign that someone's listening. So hey, if they say your name or saying your name and your movement's working, doesn't matter what they say.

Lisa: Thanks, Dave. I needed to hear that advice. Dave Asprey, you're an absolute legend. Thank you so much for your time today. I really, really appreciate it.

That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to write, review, and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.