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April 11, 2025 • 41 mins
Biohacking is a multi-billion dollar industry because people are using it to feel superhuman. Biohacking helps you to look and feel younger, prevent and reverse disease, live longer, have more energy, better sex, moods, sleep and anything else you can imagine.
So we've brought in the father of Biohacking to tell you all about how it works, what supplements and modern technology you can use, and to give you some simple steps you can start biohacking your body right now.
TOPICS DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE:
- What is biohackling?
- Biohacking your internal and external environment
- How to enhance your mitochondrial function and have more energy
- Biohacking your sleep, gut, oral health and everything else
- Anti aging and health span vs. life span
- Biohacking safely and making results last
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Josh Dech - CHN (05:23.586)Dave Asprey, a huge welcome to Reversible.
(00:01):
Butter! (05:36.596)I am super happy to be here and share some biohacking stuff and just talk about all the cool things going on with the gut.
Josh Dech - CHN (05:43.83)You and me both, know, biohacking is a conversation I don't think we have enough. And I think it sort of sits in two spheres. One, they say hacking isn't the thing you have to do. There's no such thing as quick fixes and hacking sounds like a quick fix. The other is what the hell is hacking? So can you kick us off really quick, Dave? What is biohacking?
Butter! (06:05.592)Biohacking is a new field in the world and I struggled for more than 10 years running a non-profit longevity and anti-aging group in Palo Alto, California. And I could never get anyone under 60 to pay attention to this precious knowledge about how to extend human life. And I realized it's because when we're young, you don't care about longevity.
I get you care, but it's like number 25 on the to do list. because at that point in life, you're looking at how do I get my energy where I want it? How do I show up in the world? How do I do the personal development? Like, how do I make all this work? How do I build my relationships? And biohacking, when I finally came up with this definition, it's, it's the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you. So you have full control of your own biology and
Strangely, there's a few people going on going well, this is a man's game like no no no 60 % of my followers from the very early days till now are women because women are better biohackers on average than men because for most guys Like well if it's not actually like bone sticking out Below the neck. We're probably okay, right?
Josh Dech - CHN (07:27.366)Hahaha
Butter! (07:31.39)And women are used to having regular changes in their bodies and paying attention to them. And guys don't pay attention until something's really broken. In my case, before I was 30, I'd hit 300 pounds when I was 23 years old. I'm 4.8 % body fat right now. Like I'm crazy lean. I'm never hungry. I've helped people lose millions of pounds with the stuff that I talk about.
But I also had chronic fatigue syndrome, terrible brain fog, and I had all these things. So my body was not reliable. So I learned to pay attention and learned how to change it. And the lesson that came through from biohacking is your body listens to the environment around you more than it listens to you. And there are ways to make it listen to you, but it's just so much less work to change the environment around you to get what you want out of your body than to trying to just will it.
And my first big book was on fertility because the mother of my children was infertile when I met her. And we had one child at 39 and one at 42 with no IVF just by changing our environment to enhance fertility and for women's health. And a huge part of it, of course, is the microbiome.
And even the microbiome itself, you can biohack. You change the environment for your microbiome, including the environment outside your body, and then your microbiome shifts. So there's this beautiful dance between your conscious mind and then your body and then your body and the world around you and inside of you. And you realize these are within your control and it removes a lot of the, like the
the guilt or shame around effort and trying. Like when I was that heavy, I remember I said, I am going to lose this weight and it's the most important thing I could ever do. I don't want to have another knee surgery, having surgeries in your early twenties over and over because of arthritis in your knees. Like what the hell? Like am I old? So I went to the gym. I said, I'm going to lose the weight. And
Josh Dech - CHN (09:21.026)Hmm.
Josh Dech - CHN (09:38.018)That's rough.
Josh Dech - CHN (09:42.945)You
Butter! (09:47.04)I went six days a week and I did 90 minutes a day, very reliably for 18 months. Okay. Before I would, you know, go to school more important than dating. didn't matter if I was sick. Didn't matter if I didn't get sleep. I went to the gym and at the end of 702 hours, you know, that's the amount of time I actually spent exercising over that 18 months. I still had a 46 inch waist and I still weighed 300 pounds and
Josh Dech - CHN (10:10.573)Well.
Butter! (10:15.712)I just remember sitting at Carl's Jr. I'm with a group of friends. I'm thinking, I'm having the chicken salad with no dressing and no chicken because of calories. Right? And I'm just constantly hungry all the time. And every time I'm hungry, like, I'm just going to lean into the hunger. And I'm just going to assume that's the feeling of losing weight. It wasn't working. And I exercise more than all my friends combined. They're eating double Western bacon cheeseburgers and I'm eating nothing and I'm still fat. It's clearly a moral failing because I'm not trying hard enough.
Josh Dech - CHN (10:25.901)Wow.
Josh Dech - CHN (10:46.297)That's devastating,
Butter! (10:46.771)Or it is and I know a lot of people men and women who are stuck there. They're like I'm fat. I know I'm fat I don't like it that I'm fat, but I've tried everything and I just realized I was doing the things that were supposed to work that don't and I made a commitment I am going to do the things that work and I'm gonna stop doing things that don't work even if they're supposed to and I'm gonna follow the data
And at this point, people have lost literally millions and millions of pounds with the books I've written and the things I've recommended. I've pissed off a few doctors and I've also recruited more than a few doctors going, my gosh, this really works. And I've started upgrade labs, which is now a franchise. have 30 locations opening. And this is a place where people come in and radically transform their biology.
(00:22):
Josh Dech - CHN (11:25.176)You
Sure.
Butter! (11:43.755)instead of going to the gym and adding more stress into your life because exercise is stress. It turns out we have technology that lets you recover really well. So we can do a tiny, tiny amount of stress exercise with no sweating required. And then the recovery and people get all the results and more that they expect from exercise. But you don't have to suffer as much. Here's an example.
Josh Dech - CHN (12:09.079)Wow.
Butter! (12:11.406)If you were to go to a spin class five days a week, you 45 minutes to an hour, that's a lot of commitment. Let's say you're going to do this just for two months. Now, most people think I will have sweated so much of work so hard. I'm going to get all these results. Well, you'll improve your cardiovascular performance by 2%.
Josh Dech - CHN (12:31.128)That's depressing.
Butter! (12:33.038)It is depressing. But if you go into an upgrade labs and you use the AI bike, you will do 15 minutes per week. That's five minutes three times. During that five minutes, you won't sweat and you'll barely work hard and you'll improve by 12%. So you're getting a 94 % reduction in the amount of cardio you do. And better result. Well, it's the amount of time you spend brushing your teeth will
Josh Dech - CHN (12:58.264)Two please.
Butter! (13:02.464)every week, you can do your cardio in that time. And the free energy from just that one thing, the free time as a father of two teenagers, I got nine companies who writes books and does podcasts and all that. I
Every minute matters and I just I don't want to eat stuff that I think is making me lose weight that makes me gain weight and I don't want to do things in my life or in my environment that I think work but that don't so I just teach people here's what to do and bioacking man. It's like
tens of millions of people around the planet in every country you'll find biohackers. The biohacking conference is in May 28th in Austin, biohackingconference.com. We have 4,000 people coming in, including like top experts on fertility and female hormones versus male hormones, because they're different. There's common rules between the two, but you just realize there's all this stuff and it's not medicine. It's something else.
Josh Dech - CHN (14:03.018)Yeah, you know, really is. mean, biohacking, could argue bio optimization. I think a lot of the reason why we're so sick and so fat and so just chronically ill, mean, North America is the gut disease capital of the world by far. And with that branch extends all the other diseases. I like that you bring up environments because I think a lot of the time we hear the word environment and our first instinct is to say, well, it's.
the room I'm sleeping in or the color of my curtains. Like these aren't your environments per se. It really is the air you're breathing. It's the food you're consuming. It's what's inside and outside the sunshine you are or not getting and what you're doing in a lot of these ways is you're sort of, I'd say that our Western world is no longer compatible with human biology, the way that we live our lives, right? And so what you're doing is creating means for people to
recreate this compatibility with their environment through means of technology which allows them to go back to what they should have been if they're still living barefoot in mud huts. Is that a fair assessment?
Butter! (15:07.98)No. It's because optimization has a really dark side to it. And it's, I only have this much I have to optimize. So to get this, I'm going to give up this. What we're doing with biohacking is we're expanding and becoming more efficient.
Josh Dech - CHN (15:08.972)Good, hit me with it.
Josh Dech - CHN (15:26.893)Gotcha.
Butter! (15:33.578)So imagine if, you know, your, your phone, well, I have to optimize what I'm doing so I don't burn up my battery. Or you could say, I just have a battery that's twice as big and I'm going to do it more effectively. And that's what's cool about hacking. You don't have to give up a to get B right. And one way to get A and B is to optimize and to slice and dice. And while I can get three quarters of a and three quarters of B and I get no, just double your energy output.
Josh Dech - CHN (15:45.548)that.
Butter! (16:01.1)And you're saying, well, Dave, sounds like a bunch of BS. Here's the data. In my big book on mitochondria and the brain, and actually also my longevity book called Superhuman, you make some amount of electricity and heat and energy in your body. You take about 30 pounds of air that you breathe every day and some food or maybe body fat or maybe muscle if you're doing it wrong.
And you'll combine those and you make electricity. And if you do that really well, you've got all the electricity your body can make. But 48 % of people under age 40 have early onset mitochondrial deficiency.
(00:43):
and everyone over 40 has mitochondrial inefficiency and it's called aging unless you do something about it. Now I'm the guy who had chronic fatigue in my 20s so I was probably running at 20 % of my capacity and I learned how to fix my mitochondria and I learned how to expand the amount of energy my body makes and then I learned how to allocate it more effectively in my thoughts, in my emotions, in my unconscious bodily responses and...
You waste a huge amount of your energy every day dealing with stuff in your food, in your air, in your water, in your lighting, in your sleep patterns, even in your thoughts about tacos. The average person spends a third of their time thinking about their next meal because their body is craving something. All of that is hackable and it's not a lot of work. You just have to know the rules and I can teach them to you.
Josh Dech - CHN (17:22.072)You
Josh Dech - CHN (17:34.54)I'd be very much looking forward to hearing what those rules are. So there's a lot of listeners right now who are very interested in biohacking their bodies to improve their health in every aspect. You know, I like to say if you give me a hammer for long enough, eventually everything looks like a nail. And so I know the gut very well. I reverse what's supposed to be irreversible diseases. However, there is an aspect in there that I don't know what I don't know, because it's not my field of expertise.
Butter! (17:57.422)Yeah.
Josh Dech - CHN (18:04.502)I've not talked about biohacking a lot myself. So tell us Dave, enlighten us, blow our minds. What are these first steps to biohacking?
Butter! (18:11.406)Okay.
I'm gonna teach you what your body's operating system does. And before we get there, just a word about the gut. I was on antibiotics every month for 15 years because of chronic strep throat or sinusitis when I was young. I had the most trashed digestion. I had the intrinsic ability to clear a room by my mere presence, if you know what I'm talking about. Like I had a wrecked gut.
Josh Dech - CHN (18:39.8)I don't know what you're talking about.
Butter! (18:43.051)And I just thought that was how it was. And of course that was tied to the inflammation throughout my body. And so I've gone very, very deep on gut bacteria. I'm an advisor and investor in Viome, one of the companies with the most data on what's going on in the gut since they first were started about eight years ago.
And I like that test. So just the gut function thing has been a massive, massive part of biohacking because that's the environment inside of us. But there's another microbiome that no one knows about. It's your mitochondria. So two billion years ago, or maybe 4.3, depending on which math you like.
If you remember seventh grade biology, there were some cells floating around in the ocean. And then these little bacteria met the cells. The cells took over the bacteria as mobile power plants. And that's your mitochondria. That is total nonsense. The reality is this. There were some bacteria floating around. Bacteria have intelligence. They can form communities. They can make decisions about how to live. They're very dumb, but they have intelligence.
They found a mobile petri dish that looked like a cell. moved in and they took over and they never stopped being in charge. And you today are actually driven by mitochondria. You just don't know it. So inside your body, there are more mitochondria than there are bacteria in the human gut. So we always say, your microbiome, there's more bacteria than cells in the body, but get this.
In your neurons, there's 15,000 ancient bacteria on average called mitochondria. In your heart cells, there's 15,000. This goes for men and women. And women have a superpower because in your ovaries, you have 100,000 mitochondria per cell. Way more density than men. In fact, I think that's why women have a special kind of intuition most often. Because, yeah, mitochondria, okay, what do they do? They connect to the world around you and they detect it very, very rapidly.
Josh Dech - CHN (20:34.4)Interesting thought.
Butter! (20:45.27)And then they talk to each other, decide what's going on, decide what their local response will be, decide what to tell you is happening in the world. And you hear about it a third of a second after your mitochondria made the decision and they will send you the emotion, go along with it. And you can say, Dave, that sounds like bullshit. What's the, what's the proof? Well, my neuroscience company, which is called 40 years of Zen. People come there for five day intense brain upgrades. I've got neuroscientists and
Josh Dech - CHN (21:01.133)He
Butter! (21:14.606)You know, lot of trauma resolution and just a lot of rewiring of your brain. I do it to my own brain. Well, you can measure the lag time. If I clap my hands, you think well, it took some time for the sound to get to my brain, then I heard it. But your body got the signal and your auditory processing parts of the brain don't even get the signal for a third of a second. It's like a little window for censorship for your body to tell you like, let's make a decision and let's not let them know we're in here.
And if you've seen a cat move, cats have, they're 10 times faster than humans. So their lag time is very slow. And that's why it looks like they can do crazy stuff. It's because they don't have the same lag time. So we like to think we're responsible for everything in our body, but we're not. You lean on a hot stove and then you go, you know, I noticed that's really hot. I think I should move my hand. No, you jerk your hand away. You go, good thing I moved my hand away, but you didn't move it.
the automated system that doesn't want you to know what's in there moved in. So if we have trillions of ancient bacteria in our cells talking to each other, forming a distributed collective consciousness and doing sneaky things, I wonder who they talk to. Of course they're going to talk to the bacteria in your gut, because bacteria always talk to bacteria. They do it all the time. And when I say talk to, what does that mean? Well,
Josh Dech - CHN (22:29.677)Hmm.
(01:04):
Butter! (22:40.236)The bacteria in your gut communicate with each other via chemicals, via movement, via electricity, and via light. They actually make photons. They're called bio photons, and these are measurable. This is not the woo kind of science. I'm not opposed to woo stuff. I meditate. I do all kinds of spiritual esoteric things. exactly, yeah. We'll hang out with Joe Dispenza, right? So.
Josh Dech - CHN (22:59.298)which is measurable in itself.
Josh Dech - CHN (23:04.504)You
Butter! (23:06.612)What does this mean? It means that there's multiple languages that bacteria speak to each other and your gut bacteria talks to your body and vice versa. That means when you change what you put in your stomach or even change the stressors that your body is under, the gut bacteria will change. And when they change, they can change for things that are good for your body or bad for your body. And they'll talk to the body. What I
What I figured out is in biohacking, there's there's an operating system for all life that we are based on and your gut bacteria based on. And I want to teach our listeners how life makes decisions because this creates so much freedom and ability to change yourself. All right. Okay, this is this is like my biohacking one on one stuff and it's so cool. So I don't care if you're
Josh Dech - CHN (23:55.744)I'm so interested. I'm all in. Let's do it.
Butter! (24:05.87)a blade of grass, a slime mold like a politician or sorry, I had to say it, you know, or a human. We all follow these things without your brain having to do anything. Number one, if something is scary, run away from kill or hide. Okay. This is fear. These are all F words that run your entire life. So this makes a lot of sense because if something's going to eat you,
Josh Dech - CHN (24:09.921)You
Butter! (24:35.02)or burn you or whatever, you have to go and you're all in on that. And so it's fear and it comes first always for everything alive. Now a plant may respond to fear, they can't run away, they have roots. So they grow spines or they grow toxins or they have a defense mechanism. bacteria have their own defense mechanisms, bacterial toxins is what they're called and they're in your gut. fear, the next thing. Well.
Eat everything because famines are the things if something doesn't eat you if you don't have something to eat, it's the end of your species. If you're a dumb bacteria and you don't know what else is around you. bottom line is fear and then food. What other F word would life have to do to stay around for many generations?
Josh Dech - CHN (25:25.393)Dave, it's gotta fuck.
Butter! (25:28.246)I was thinking fertility. Good job, man. Yeah, it's kind of one and the same, right? So fear, food, and fucking. In this case, yeah, I might have set you up for that, but it always makes me laugh. And if you just said fertility, I would have joked that I was saying the F-bomb. So you can't win on that. And funny enough, my very first book was called The Better Baby Book.
Josh Dech - CHN (25:28.504)I was thinking.
Josh Dech - CHN (25:38.07)I got led into that one to be fair, but keep going.
Josh Dech - CHN (25:49.634)Hahaha
Butter! (25:55.574)And it was about fertility in humans because you know, we couldn't have kids and I we use biohacking to restore my wife at the time out of her fertility and it's magical what happens but understanding. Okay, if you're automated systems, every single day all the time we're going, is it scary? Can I eat it? Can I fuck it? Okay, I just explained every bad decision you ever made in your life, Josh.
Josh Dech - CHN (25:55.699)I love it.
Josh Dech - CHN (26:24.47)I would agree with that.
Butter! (26:25.718)Every time you procrastinated, every time you backed away from something, every time you ate all the Ben and Jerry's twice, and every time you went on the date with those two people you probably shouldn't have gone on a date with at the same time or whatever the heck mistakes you've made in your love life, it was your mitochondria making it seem like it was a good idea to do it at the time. And then afterwards you're going, why did I do that? You didn't do it, your ancient bacteria did it.
Josh Dech - CHN (26:40.138)Hahaha
Butter! (26:53.996)And they did it in partnership with your gut bacteria. So this gets to be really interesting. Well, you say, well, that's dark, but what else is in there? Well, the next F word is friend because all life supports its own species and the world around it. It's just how the world works. It happens and it happens automatically. And especially in humans, but in all animals, the final effort is forgiveness.
(01:25):
Which means you let go of things over time in humans. looks like evolving. but in an animal you'll see this, you know, a predator almost eats a deer. The deer shakes off all the stress drops it and then goes back to eating. Right. And humans get stuck because we get stuck in fear and that makes us see the world more, more dark.
more darkly if that's a word as darker than it is. And it makes us think about food all the time. And it makes us turn to either no intimacy or I'll say unhealthy kinds of intimacy. And what happens when you remove inflammation, you increase your energy and you allocate your energy better is you shift out of fear, you shift out of hunger.
and you shift out of lust and fear becomes peace. Hunger becomes nourishment. Sex becomes nourishment. And you have so much more energy for your community and for yourself to evolve. And a major trigger for this is setting up your environment for success. What I had going on in my gut was after all these antibiotics,
I tried being a vegan, I tried being a raw vegan, I tried, well, what they now call carnivore, but I was testing out the Bulletproof Diet, which is one of my big books, the first big book on intermittent fasting and plant toxins, it turns out. And I had something called lipopolysaccharides. I'm guessing your audience knows about those, maybe?
Josh Dech - CHN (29:06.882)Well, if they listen to every episode, sure hope they better by now, but keep going. Let's pretend they don't.
Butter! (29:11.576)Okay. So I mentioned run away from kill or hide. Well, bacteria don't have legs. They're not good at running, but they're pretty good at killing. So when there's a lack of food for them or there's another bacteria that's competing with them, bacteria fight with chemicals. Right? So they make toxins and a common gut toxin is called LPS or lipopolysaccharide. And I had these in spades.
And when gut bacteria are stressed, which happens from eating highly processed foods, they even get stressed if you have, if you stay up all night, they have a circadian rhythm and there's, look, I didn't get good sleep last night. I'll make more toxins this morning because you stayed up last night. So they're, just trying to stay alive. And if they feel hunger or they feel a threat, they're going to make more toxin. And if you have a leaky gut, which so many people do, because we have all these
these things that people say, that's a superfood. I mean, no, it's not. It's something that shreds your gut and pokes holes in your gut lining. You probably don't want to eat that unless you're starving. But we do all these weird things to our guts. And then the lipopolysaccharides can leak through the gut. And then they inflame your brain, they inflame your joints, and they give you a muffin top that wasn't there the day before. Muffin top doesn't change overnight. If it does, it is not fat. It's inflammation.
And inflammation is what happens when your mitochondria are not making energy very effectively. So controlling LPS is a major part of biohacking. Set up the environment in your gut so it's a healthy environment, so you have less toxins. And if you have the toxins, what do we do about it? And one of the biggest biohacks from the very beginning of the first blog post about this is activated charcoal. This is a 10,000-year-old remedy that you can take.
that sticks to lipopolysaccharides and other toxins in the gut so they don't go into your brain and your joints. Instead, you poop them out. And it's amazing what happens when you do something as simple as that to reduce chronic pain, to reduce all sorts of things you wouldn't expect. And we also have all these abilities to tune what's happening in the gut. I've spent, about two and a half million dollars on reversing my age, on repairing my health.
Butter! (31:33.71)But I've done this over 20 years. I don't do that on an annual basis. That seems a bit absurd. Yeah. And I think that would be really hard on the budget. But I did a lot of this because I was desperate in the early days. And then I realized, my gosh, I don't have to stop doing that because there's new levels of how you can feel and how you can reverse your age and things like that. the way I model what's happening in the gut is,
Josh Dech - CHN (31:37.272)A little excessive.
Butter! (32:03.404)You, I think at this point, everyone's heard of probiotics, right? This is, okay, take a bacteria that has a certain ability and it'll probably grow in the gut if you take it for a while. And I've talked about a bunch of different ones on my podcast and I've interviewed creators of them for years. And it's really cool because you can have some that are, that make a certain compound you couldn't otherwise have access to. But probiotics by themselves are of limited utility.
Butter! (32:36.944)Let's see, are you picking up a leaf blower in the background?
Josh Dech - CHN (32:40.683)absolutely, yeah.
Butter! (32:42.882)Give me one second, I can get that turned off. Yeah.
Josh Dech - CHN (32:44.098)true true
Butter! (33:02.86)Normally I have them schedule it, not when there's an interview, and I think we did, but he's right outside this window instead of on the other side of the house.
Josh Dech - CHN (33:10.38)Good news is we could hear everything you were saying, so it's not that big of a deal. All of my audio guy's bit of a wizard.
Butter! (33:16.448)Okay, cool. There, it just stopped. I was like, this is getting louder, not quieter. I thought it was the neighbors. Okay. probiotics. Take some bacteria, eat some yogurt, whatever. Well, there's a lot of questions. Some of the probiotics that you're taking might actually cause inflammation by increasing histamine in the body. But you might have to play around with which ones you take.
Josh Dech - CHN (33:20.664)Yeah, you're grand.
(01:46):
Josh Dech - CHN (33:38.392)Absolutely.
Butter! (33:42.926)The next thing that's really cool is prebiotics. Now, prebiotics are the food that the good guys like to eat. And there's a lot of unusual advertising about these.
And some are stronger than others. And some people say, well, that's just fiber. There's soluble fiber, which is prebiotic fiber. And there's insoluble fiber, which is usually rougher on the gut and doesn't feed bacteria that well, but can sometimes provide sort of like a scaffold for the bacteria to grow around. But I'm relatively skeptical of insoluble fiber being highly good for the inside of the gut just after a lot of research and experience. So.
You can tell how old someone is by looking at their poop. Because older people have less diversity of species and they have less total bacteria. So what if you had the poop of a young person as you age? Would you be younger? Well, the evidence is yes. So when I wrote Superhuman, which is my big book on longevity, well, so I gotta do something about this. So I started taking a prebiotic
blend that I made primarily based on the sap of a tree called acacia gum and some other things. I quadrupled the number of species of bacteria in my gut in three months. And I've learned not to trust the government to tell me what to eat or what to do with my health because they stuck at it. They had forever. So.
Josh Dech - CHN (35:06.2)Hmm.
Josh Dech - CHN (35:11.958)You and me both.
Butter! (35:16.962)That said, the USRDA for soluble fiber is something like 20 grams, and most people don't get it. I took 40 grams a day. It was like a few scoops. I put it in my coffee, or I put it in a smoothie. And then I'm getting massive longevity levels. And when I first started doing that, you have to ramp up, because otherwise you're just farting all the time as your bacteria adjust. You take probiotics when you do it. But after a little while,
All of a sudden you have a gut that works way better than it did before. But we're not even done because we've only talked about prebiotics and probiotics. And in the last few years, postbiotics have come online. So if the idea is I take food for bacteria in my gut, which is the prebiotic, I take the bacteria and then they eat the food and then they poop out little bacteria poops that have special powers. Well.
What if you could just take the bacteria poop directly? That's what post-biotics are. It's the beneficial compounds made by gut bacteria that you hope are growing in your gut despite your environment. And I've had, in the longevity book, I wrote about a couple molecules that you actually couldn't buy when I wrote that book that are available now. And common examples are spermidine and urolithin A. And...
Josh Dech - CHN (36:17.655)Yeah
Butter! (36:38.434)These compounds are really good for longevity and mitochondrial function. To get your Olithin A, you're gonna have to eat about two pounds of pomegranates and be lucky enough to have special bacteria that can digest that in order for you to get enough of this precious compound that bacteria make, or you could just take a pill that has it in it.
So post biotics, when you take them, they cause the good bacteria in your gut to make more of those compounds anyway. So it's like the bacteria are looking around, they're going, hey, some other bacteria must be making this Bermudene molecule, I should make some too. So you can manipulate your bacteria that way. And the final thing that's really intriguing is parabiotics. Have you talked about those on the show before? Sweet. I'm a super nerd on this bacteria stuff. So
Josh Dech - CHN (37:19.094)Never once before,
First time.
Butter! (37:25.782)That means you're a parabiotic virgin.
Josh Dech - CHN (37:28.49)I am. Yes, you can have my V-card Dave. I'll tell everybody you took my V-card.
Butter! (37:33.268)All right. So I read this study and it drove me crazy. It was from 20 years ago. I was looking at water filtration, which is another thing that's important for your gut. And they show that filtering dirty water, if you drank that, it had one effect. You have clean water.
But killing the things in the water with an ultraviolet light and then drinking the water full of dead things had a much stronger beneficial immune effect. So it turns out now there's a few companies making parabiotics, which are dead bacteria. And dead bacteria are a signal to the live bacteria and they're dead of certain species and they act as a signal to cause the body to make more of what you want and to manipulate the body like,
I could have been exposed to this. I might as well respond as if I was exposed. So the whole map of what do you do to fix your gut aside from hydration and not eating stuff that kills bacteria in your gut like like preservatives and food colorings and all that stuff. As you say, I got to eat prebiotics and the stuff that feeds the guys I want. I'm going to take probiotics and make sure the guys I want are there.
I'm going to take post biotics to give my body those benefits and to tell the bacteria they should make some of that. And I'm going to take parabiotics, which are going to signal the body to be ready for other things. And if you do that and you bind some toxins in the gut with things like activated charcoal, maybe bent night clay, and you take, just eat real foods, then you might find that your gut gets better.
(02:07):
But it might not, and there's reasons. Where do you want to go from here?
Josh Dech - CHN (39:16.344)Great question. So here's something I'd love to throw back to you. So in the case, what I do, I specialize Crohn's colitis, very reversible conditions, much of the time, and very. So glad that you're on the same page here. So you get somebody comes in with extreme dysbiosis. And one of the things that they hear is, well, I should take some prebiotics, but your overgrowth, the amount of LPS you're producing, right, exactly. So you're putting gasoline on a fire. It's gonna mess you up real bad. And so.
Butter! (39:22.914)Yet, very.
Butter! (39:36.362)No. I'm fuck you up.
Josh Dech - CHN (39:44.664)Help our listeners, I've talked about this before, I want to assume every episode is someone's first episode. So talk to us about the risks and dangers of prebiotics, like throwing gasoline on a fire, and what order you might want to consider some of these things in if you're gonna DIY your gut and your...
Butter! (40:01.866)All right. I've had substantial dysbiosis in my life and. geez, this is going back before I wrote a write about the same time I was writing my first blog post around around Bulletproof Coffee and biohacking and just launching the movement. So 2012 ish. I got some artichoke. I guess it was Jerusalem artichoke syrup.
This is all fructo oligosaccharide or FOS, which is a prebiotic. And I said, well, I know my guts messed up. It was messed up because I had done what we now call carnivore for three months. Felt great for the first couple. And after that, I started getting leaky gut, which oftentimes happens. That's why I recommend cycling in and out of ketosis, not being in it forever. But I said, I'm just going to add this into my coffee. And I gained 20 pounds in a week.
Now, it wasn't 20 pounds of fat. It was 20 pounds of inflammation because I just poured gasoline on the fire of bad bacteria in my gut and they had a little party in there. And yeah, I was farting all the time, but I just couldn't believe it. I'm like, I can't wear my pants. I'm panicking because I've been really obese. I'm like, I'm moving in the wrong direction really rapidly. So I quit taking it. So sometimes you need to stop eating anything fermentable for a little while. And
A shout out here to Donna Gates, who wrote a book called The Body Ecology Diet. I don't know if you had a chance to interview her, she's a friend and she's got to be about 80 now. And if you look at the GAPS diet, which your listeners have probably heard of, that is basically a photocopy of the Body Ecology Diet. And what I think you're gonna find if you have a sensitive gut is that...
Things that are supposed to work may not work. And there's two primary reasons. One of them is that half the probiotics that are supposed to be healthy, including stuff like sauerkraut or yogurt, can have bacteria that cause histamine when they degrade things. When you're making histamine in the gut, histamine causes inflammation. It causes that water retention.
Butter! (42:15.956)And that stuff you may have to manipulate the type of bacteria you take And now i'm probably going to piss you off here If your gut's totally wrecked I don't have any issues with just taking some antibiotics that are going to kill stuff in your gut and resetting it Whether it's through fecal matter transplant where you take a good friend who's healthy and you put their poop in your butt Sorry, I think there's technical terms for that. There's great evidence for that You can even take pills now that are well
Josh Dech - CHN (42:36.792)Yes.
Butter! (42:42.744)full of shit, but they were. So you might want to do it that way or just take kill everything and then take or kill as much as you can and then take a bunch of probiotics and some prebiotics and just reset there. It's okay. It's not politically correct, but sometimes it's easier to do that than it is to deal with a gut that's just overflowing with bad bacteria. It's gonna be very hard to shift that. It is much cheaper and easier to get data about what's going on in there.
Viome, I think is about 300 bucks and they'll give you a list of everything going on in your gut and how and what it's actually doing and also make some food recommendations and things like that. You can also get things like custom probiotics. But what's also interesting and maybe just because people who've heard multiple episodes of your show haven't heard as much about your oral microbiome. Have you guys talked about that much?
Josh Dech - CHN (43:37.196)We have had a couple of biological dentists we had Jerry Curatola on recently. Not published at the time of this recording, but I imagine it will be shortly. Fascinating stuff to look at the role of the oral microbiome. Absolutely.
Butter! (43:41.752)Okay.
Butter! (43:49.807)It is insane. If you think about it, your mouth is the top of your butt. So your gut microbiome starts in your mouth. And in the 10 years or so or eight years of working with Viome, they started out with a poop test.
Josh Dech - CHN (43:56.984)In less eloquent terms, yes.
Butter! (44:12.91)Looking at RNA to see like what's the DNA making and pretty soon it evolved to an oral swab and It's to the point that they can look at the bacteria in your mouth Not in your poop just in your mouth and they can with something like 95 % confidence diagnose stage one oral cancers just by the bacterial composition and with a half a million people's samples of poop and saliva and mitochondria from a stick of blood
Josh Dech - CHN (44:34.296)amazing.
Butter! (44:42.144)you can predict gut bacteria from oral bacteria. And a common mistake that people make is they use something like scope or Listerine and they just kill everything in their mouth. Right. And they wonder why their gut screwed up. Well, it turns out those mouth washes that sterilize everything do something really bad. They also stop nitric oxide formation, which increases your heart attack risk if you don't have enough of it.
(02:28):
Josh Dech - CHN (44:55.256)It's a nuclear bomb, you know.
Butter! (45:11.68)So I look at my mouth biome as being as important as my gut microbiome. And before I go to bed, after I brush my teeth and I have all sorts of things to make sure my gums are clean, because it turns out oral health keeps you alive for a long time. Well, after that, I repopulate my oral bacteria with an oral probiotic. And doing that changes your gut microbiome for the best.
So before I go to bed, I, yes, because I'm a super nerd and I love to get good sleep and I used to get horrible sleep, I put a lozenge in my mouth with a good bacteria. I put in a bite guard because if you want to live a long time, you need to not let your molars get short over time. So you put in a bite guard. And then if you really want to not have morning breath and you really want to breathe well and have more oxygen in your brain, I put a piece of tape over my mouth. It's called breathing tape or mouth tape and
It doesn't work that well for having conversations as you're trying to go to sleep. But if both people's mouths are taped, it works really well. But you do that and you wake up and now you've had moist environment in your mouth the entire night. You didn't have dry teeth and you have really good bacteria growing in your mouth.
You also don't get yellowing of your teeth in the same way. You breathe better and it affects your gut bacteria and it actually makes your poop smell less. Okay, that last part I made up, but probably.
Josh Dech - CHN (46:43.405)Probably, I mean, I have the exact same night time routine. Night guard, oral probiotics, the works, I'm with ya, yeah.
Butter! (46:48.194)Yeah. And it's kind of gross to think about it, but really that's the start of your butt. So you might as well plant the seeds at the beginning and oral probiotics actually tastes good. So you're fine.
Josh Dech - CHN (46:54.827)You
Josh Dech - CHN (47:02.564)You know Dave, I want to respect your time. I know we're actually stopping mid-conversation here, but unfortunately this could be hours and hours long as you've been doing this for 30 years. So I know you've got to get off to another meeting here, but really quick before I let you go, I mean you're everywhere, so people know your name, they know where to find you, but where would you like to direct our listeners today?
Butter! (47:24.327)Something we didn't talk about but is worth it is go to danger coffee calm and This is my new brand of coffee. I'm not involved with bulletproof any longer the reason this is interesting is that danger coffee has a therapeutic dose of trace minerals and electrolytes including ones that in studies bind directly to toxins in the gut like lipopolysaccharide so
Josh Dech - CHN (47:51.896)Come on.
Butter! (47:53.402)There's a whole link between environmental toxic mold or toxic mold in the body which signals bacteria to make more biofilms I Have dealt with toxic mold a lot. So danger coffee has no toxic mold in it I know because I'm very sensitive to it and I lab test this coffee and then I add These specific binders it's called humic and fulvic Right and this allows minerals to get into the body, but it also binds to toxins in the gut, which is what
humic and fulvic do in lots of studies. So if you're going to drink coffee, coffee is a prebiotic, it has soluble fiber and has polyphenols that feed the good guys in the butt in the butt in the gut. And so since you're going to drink coffee anyway, you might as well get coffee that doesn't have the micro toxins and coffee that has binders in it. It tastes like great coffee because it is you can't tell these things are in there unless you look at it and like why is that coffee is slightly like slightly dark color.
Josh Dech - CHN (48:30.904)Both!
Butter! (48:51.586)It's because there are minerals embedded in it. So I would invite you to try Danger Coffee and see if your gut likes it. I know your brain will.
Josh Dech - CHN (48:58.828)I love it. I'll make sure I put a link in the show notes. Dave.
Butter! (49:01.27)Sweet. And then, of course, Dave Asprey on social media and all that kind of stuff. can find me there. The Human Upgrades, the podcast. And thanks for having me on.
Josh Dech - CHN (49:09.462)It's been an absolute treat getting to chat with you here. We really appreciate you coming by.
Butter! (49:14.562)Thanks, Josh.
Josh Dech - CHN (05:23.586)Dave Asprey, a huge welcome to Reversible.
(00:01):
Butter! (05:36.596)I am super happy to be here and share some biohacking stuff and just talk about all the cool things going on with the gut.
Josh Dech - CHN (05:43.83)You and me both, know, biohacking is a conversation I don't think we have enough. And I think it sort of sits in two spheres. One, they say hacking isn't the thing you have to do. There's no such thing as quick fixes and hacking sounds like a quick fix. The other is what the hell is hacking? So can you kick us off really quick, Dave? What is biohacking?
Butter! (06:05.592)Biohacking is a new field in the world and I struggled for more than 10 years running a non-profit longevity and anti-aging group in Palo Alto, California. And I could never get anyone under 60 to pay attention to this precious knowledge about how to extend human life. And I realized it's because when we're young, you don't care about longevity.
I get you care, but it's like number 25 on the to do list. because at that point in life, you're looking at how do I get my energy where I want it? How do I show up in the world? How do I do the personal development? Like, how do I make all this work? How do I build my relationships? And biohacking, when I finally came up with this definition, it's, it's the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you. So you have full control of your own biology and
Strangely, there's a few people going on going well, this is a man's game like no no no 60 % of my followers from the very early days till now are women because women are better biohackers on average than men because for most guys Like well if it's not actually like bone sticking out Below the neck. We're probably okay, right?
Josh Dech - CHN (07:27.366)Hahaha
Butter! (07:31.39)And women are used to having regular changes in their bodies and paying attention to them. And guys don't pay attention until something's really broken. In my case, before I was 30, I'd hit 300 pounds when I was 23 years old. I'm 4.8 % body fat right now. Like I'm crazy lean. I'm never hungry. I've helped people lose millions of pounds with the stuff that I talk about.
But I also had chronic fatigue syndrome, terrible brain fog, and I had all these things. So my body was not reliable. So I learned to pay attention and learned how to change it. And the lesson that came through from biohacking is your body listens to the environment around you more than it listens to you. And there are ways to make it listen to you, but it's just so much less work to change the environment around you to get what you want out of your body than to trying to just will it.
And my first big book was on fertility because the mother of my children was infertile when I met her. And we had one child at 39 and one at 42 with no IVF just by changing our environment to enhance fertility and for women's health. And a huge part of it, of course, is the microbiome.
And even the microbiome itself, you can biohack. You change the environment for your microbiome, including the environment outside your body, and then your microbiome shifts. So there's this beautiful dance between your conscious mind and then your body and then your body and the world around you and inside of you. And you realize these are within your control and it removes a lot of the, like the
the guilt or shame around effort and trying. Like when I was that heavy, I remember I said, I am going to lose this weight and it's the most important thing I could ever do. I don't want to have another knee surgery, having surgeries in your early twenties over and over because of arthritis in your knees. Like what the hell? Like am I old? So I went to the gym. I said, I'm going to lose the weight. And
Josh Dech - CHN (09:21.026)Hmm.
Josh Dech - CHN (09:38.018)That's rough.
Josh Dech - CHN (09:42.945)You
Butter! (09:47.04)I went six days a week and I did 90 minutes a day, very reliably for 18 months. Okay. Before I would, you know, go to school more important than dating. didn't matter if I was sick. Didn't matter if I didn't get sleep. I went to the gym and at the end of 702 hours, you know, that's the amount of time I actually spent exercising over that 18 months. I still had a 46 inch waist and I still weighed 300 pounds and
Josh Dech - CHN (10:10.573)Well.
Butter! (10:15.712)I just remember sitting at Carl's Jr. I'm with a group of friends. I'm thinking, I'm having the chicken salad with no dressing and no chicken because of calories. Right? And I'm just constantly hungry all the time. And every time I'm hungry, like, I'm just going to lean into the hunger. And I'm just going to assume that's the feeling of losing weight. It wasn't working. And I exercise more than all my friends combined. They're eating double Western bacon cheeseburgers and I'm eating nothing and I'm still fat. It's clearly a moral failing because I'm not trying hard enough.
Josh Dech - CHN (10:25.901)Wow.
Josh Dech - CHN (10:46.297)That's devastating,
Butter! (10:46.771)Or it is and I know a lot of people men and women who are stuck there. They're like I'm fat. I know I'm fat I don't like it that I'm fat, but I've tried everything and I just realized I was doing the things that were supposed to work that don't and I made a commitment I am going to do the things that work and I'm gonna stop doing things that don't work even if they're supposed to and I'm gonna follow the data
And at this point, people have lost literally millions and millions of pounds with the books I've written and the things I've recommended. I've pissed off a few doctors and I've also recruited more than a few doctors going, my gosh, this really works. And I've started upgrade labs, which is now a franchise. have 30 locations opening. And this is a place where people come in and radically transform their biology.
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Josh Dech - CHN (11:25.176)You
Sure.
Butter! (11:43.755)instead of going to the gym and adding more stress into your life because exercise is stress. It turns out we have technology that lets you recover really well. So we can do a tiny, tiny amount of stress exercise with no sweating required. And then the recovery and people get all the results and more that they expect from exercise. But you don't have to suffer as much. Here's an example.
Josh Dech - CHN (12:09.079)Wow.
Butter! (12:11.406)If you were to go to a spin class five days a week, you 45 minutes to an hour, that's a lot of commitment. Let's say you're going to do this just for two months. Now, most people think I will have sweated so much of work so hard. I'm going to get all these results. Well, you'll improve your cardiovascular performance by 2%.
Josh Dech - CHN (12:31.128)That's depressing.
Butter! (12:33.038)It is depressing. But if you go into an upgrade labs and you use the AI bike, you will do 15 minutes per week. That's five minutes three times. During that five minutes, you won't sweat and you'll barely work hard and you'll improve by 12%. So you're getting a 94 % reduction in the amount of cardio you do. And better result. Well, it's the amount of time you spend brushing your teeth will
Josh Dech - CHN (12:58.264)Two please.
Butter! (13:02.464)every week, you can do your cardio in that time. And the free energy from just that one thing, the free time as a father of two teenagers, I got nine companies who writes books and does podcasts and all that. I
Every minute matters and I just I don't want to eat stuff that I think is making me lose weight that makes me gain weight and I don't want to do things in my life or in my environment that I think work but that don't so I just teach people here's what to do and bioacking man. It's like
tens of millions of people around the planet in every country you'll find biohackers. The biohacking conference is in May 28th in Austin, biohackingconference.com. We have 4,000 people coming in, including like top experts on fertility and female hormones versus male hormones, because they're different. There's common rules between the two, but you just realize there's all this stuff and it's not medicine. It's something else.
Josh Dech - CHN (14:03.018)Yeah, you know, really is. mean, biohacking, could argue bio optimization. I think a lot of the reason why we're so sick and so fat and so just chronically ill, mean, North America is the gut disease capital of the world by far. And with that branch extends all the other diseases. I like that you bring up environments because I think a lot of the time we hear the word environment and our first instinct is to say, well, it's.
the room I'm sleeping in or the color of my curtains. Like these aren't your environments per se. It really is the air you're breathing. It's the food you're consuming. It's what's inside and outside the sunshine you are or not getting and what you're doing in a lot of these ways is you're sort of, I'd say that our Western world is no longer compatible with human biology, the way that we live our lives, right? And so what you're doing is creating means for people to
recreate this compatibility with their environment through means of technology which allows them to go back to what they should have been if they're still living barefoot in mud huts. Is that a fair assessment?
Butter! (15:07.98)No. It's because optimization has a really dark side to it. And it's, I only have this much I have to optimize. So to get this, I'm going to give up this. What we're doing with biohacking is we're expanding and becoming more efficient.
Josh Dech - CHN (15:08.972)Good, hit me with it.
Josh Dech - CHN (15:26.893)Gotcha.
Butter! (15:33.578)So imagine if, you know, your, your phone, well, I have to optimize what I'm doing so I don't burn up my battery. Or you could say, I just have a battery that's twice as big and I'm going to do it more effectively. And that's what's cool about hacking. You don't have to give up a to get B right. And one way to get A and B is to optimize and to slice and dice. And while I can get three quarters of a and three quarters of B and I get no, just double your energy output.
Josh Dech - CHN (15:45.548)that.
Butter! (16:01.1)And you're saying, well, Dave, sounds like a bunch of BS. Here's the data. In my big book on mitochondria and the brain, and actually also my longevity book called Superhuman, you make some amount of electricity and heat and energy in your body. You take about 30 pounds of air that you breathe every day and some food or maybe body fat or maybe muscle if you're doing it wrong.
And you'll combine those and you make electricity. And if you do that really well, you've got all the electricity your body can make. But 48 % of people under age 40 have early onset mitochondrial deficiency.
(00:43):
and everyone over 40 has mitochondrial inefficiency and it's called aging unless you do something about it. Now I'm the guy who had chronic fatigue in my 20s so I was probably running at 20 % of my capacity and I learned how to fix my mitochondria and I learned how to expand the amount of energy my body makes and then I learned how to allocate it more effectively in my thoughts, in my emotions, in my unconscious bodily responses and...
You waste a huge amount of your energy every day dealing with stuff in your food, in your air, in your water, in your lighting, in your sleep patterns, even in your thoughts about tacos. The average person spends a third of their time thinking about their next meal because their body is craving something. All of that is hackable and it's not a lot of work. You just have to know the rules and I can teach them to you.
Josh Dech - CHN (17:22.072)You
Josh Dech - CHN (17:34.54)I'd be very much looking forward to hearing what those rules are. So there's a lot of listeners right now who are very interested in biohacking their bodies to improve their health in every aspect. You know, I like to say if you give me a hammer for long enough, eventually everything looks like a nail. And so I know the gut very well. I reverse what's supposed to be irreversible diseases. However, there is an aspect in there that I don't know what I don't know, because it's not my field of expertise.
Butter! (17:57.422)Yeah.
Josh Dech - CHN (18:04.502)I've not talked about biohacking a lot myself. So tell us Dave, enlighten us, blow our minds. What are these first steps to biohacking?
Butter! (18:11.406)Okay.
I'm gonna teach you what your body's operating system does. And before we get there, just a word about the gut. I was on antibiotics every month for 15 years because of chronic strep throat or sinusitis when I was young. I had the most trashed digestion. I had the intrinsic ability to clear a room by my mere presence, if you know what I'm talking about. Like I had a wrecked gut.
Josh Dech - CHN (18:39.8)I don't know what you're talking about.
Butter! (18:43.051)And I just thought that was how it was. And of course that was tied to the inflammation throughout my body. And so I've gone very, very deep on gut bacteria. I'm an advisor and investor in Viome, one of the companies with the most data on what's going on in the gut since they first were started about eight years ago.
And I like that test. So just the gut function thing has been a massive, massive part of biohacking because that's the environment inside of us. But there's another microbiome that no one knows about. It's your mitochondria. So two billion years ago, or maybe 4.3, depending on which math you like.
If you remember seventh grade biology, there were some cells floating around in the ocean. And then these little bacteria met the cells. The cells took over the bacteria as mobile power plants. And that's your mitochondria. That is total nonsense. The reality is this. There were some bacteria floating around. Bacteria have intelligence. They can form communities. They can make decisions about how to live. They're very dumb, but they have intelligence.
They found a mobile petri dish that looked like a cell. moved in and they took over and they never stopped being in charge. And you today are actually driven by mitochondria. You just don't know it. So inside your body, there are more mitochondria than there are bacteria in the human gut. So we always say, your microbiome, there's more bacteria than cells in the body, but get this.
In your neurons, there's 15,000 ancient bacteria on average called mitochondria. In your heart cells, there's 15,000. This goes for men and women. And women have a superpower because in your ovaries, you have 100,000 mitochondria per cell. Way more density than men. In fact, I think that's why women have a special kind of intuition most often. Because, yeah, mitochondria, okay, what do they do? They connect to the world around you and they detect it very, very rapidly.
Josh Dech - CHN (20:34.4)Interesting thought.
Butter! (20:45.27)And then they talk to each other, decide what's going on, decide what their local response will be, decide what to tell you is happening in the world. And you hear about it a third of a second after your mitochondria made the decision and they will send you the emotion, go along with it. And you can say, Dave, that sounds like bullshit. What's the, what's the proof? Well, my neuroscience company, which is called 40 years of Zen. People come there for five day intense brain upgrades. I've got neuroscientists and
Josh Dech - CHN (21:01.133)He
Butter! (21:14.606)You know, lot of trauma resolution and just a lot of rewiring of your brain. I do it to my own brain. Well, you can measure the lag time. If I clap my hands, you think well, it took some time for the sound to get to my brain, then I heard it. But your body got the signal and your auditory processing parts of the brain don't even get the signal for a third of a second. It's like a little window for censorship for your body to tell you like, let's make a decision and let's not let them know we're in here.
And if you've seen a cat move, cats have, they're 10 times faster than humans. So their lag time is very slow. And that's why it looks like they can do crazy stuff. It's because they don't have the same lag time. So we like to think we're responsible for everything in our body, but we're not. You lean on a hot stove and then you go, you know, I noticed that's really hot. I think I should move my hand. No, you jerk your hand away. You go, good thing I moved my hand away, but you didn't move it.
the automated system that doesn't want you to know what's in there moved in. So if we have trillions of ancient bacteria in our cells talking to each other, forming a distributed collective consciousness and doing sneaky things, I wonder who they talk to. Of course they're going to talk to the bacteria in your gut, because bacteria always talk to bacteria. They do it all the time. And when I say talk to, what does that mean? Well,
Josh Dech - CHN (22:29.677)Hmm.
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Butter! (22:40.236)The bacteria in your gut communicate with each other via chemicals, via movement, via electricity, and via light. They actually make photons. They're called bio photons, and these are measurable. This is not the woo kind of science. I'm not opposed to woo stuff. I meditate. I do all kinds of spiritual esoteric things. exactly, yeah. We'll hang out with Joe Dispenza, right? So.
Josh Dech - CHN (22:59.298)which is measurable in itself.
Josh Dech - CHN (23:04.504)You
Butter! (23:06.612)What does this mean? It means that there's multiple languages that bacteria speak to each other and your gut bacteria talks to your body and vice versa. That means when you change what you put in your stomach or even change the stressors that your body is under, the gut bacteria will change. And when they change, they can change for things that are good for your body or bad for your body. And they'll talk to the body. What I
What I figured out is in biohacking, there's there's an operating system for all life that we are based on and your gut bacteria based on. And I want to teach our listeners how life makes decisions because this creates so much freedom and ability to change yourself. All right. Okay, this is this is like my biohacking one on one stuff and it's so cool. So I don't care if you're
Josh Dech - CHN (23:55.744)I'm so interested. I'm all in. Let's do it.
Butter! (24:05.87)a blade of grass, a slime mold like a politician or sorry, I had to say it, you know, or a human. We all follow these things without your brain having to do anything. Number one, if something is scary, run away from kill or hide. Okay. This is fear. These are all F words that run your entire life. So this makes a lot of sense because if something's going to eat you,
Josh Dech - CHN (24:09.921)You
Butter! (24:35.02)or burn you or whatever, you have to go and you're all in on that. And so it's fear and it comes first always for everything alive. Now a plant may respond to fear, they can't run away, they have roots. So they grow spines or they grow toxins or they have a defense mechanism. bacteria have their own defense mechanisms, bacterial toxins is what they're called and they're in your gut. fear, the next thing. Well.
Eat everything because famines are the things if something doesn't eat you if you don't have something to eat, it's the end of your species. If you're a dumb bacteria and you don't know what else is around you. bottom line is fear and then food. What other F word would life have to do to stay around for many generations?
Josh Dech - CHN (25:25.393)Dave, it's gotta fuck.
Butter! (25:28.246)I was thinking fertility. Good job, man. Yeah, it's kind of one and the same, right? So fear, food, and fucking. In this case, yeah, I might have set you up for that, but it always makes me laugh. And if you just said fertility, I would have joked that I was saying the F-bomb. So you can't win on that. And funny enough, my very first book was called The Better Baby Book.
Josh Dech - CHN (25:28.504)I was thinking.
Josh Dech - CHN (25:38.07)I got led into that one to be fair, but keep going.
Josh Dech - CHN (25:49.634)Hahaha
Butter! (25:55.574)And it was about fertility in humans because you know, we couldn't have kids and I we use biohacking to restore my wife at the time out of her fertility and it's magical what happens but understanding. Okay, if you're automated systems, every single day all the time we're going, is it scary? Can I eat it? Can I fuck it? Okay, I just explained every bad decision you ever made in your life, Josh.
Josh Dech - CHN (25:55.699)I love it.
Josh Dech - CHN (26:24.47)I would agree with that.
Butter! (26:25.718)Every time you procrastinated, every time you backed away from something, every time you ate all the Ben and Jerry's twice, and every time you went on the date with those two people you probably shouldn't have gone on a date with at the same time or whatever the heck mistakes you've made in your love life, it was your mitochondria making it seem like it was a good idea to do it at the time. And then afterwards you're going, why did I do that? You didn't do it, your ancient bacteria did it.
Josh Dech - CHN (26:40.138)Hahaha
Butter! (26:53.996)And they did it in partnership with your gut bacteria. So this gets to be really interesting. Well, you say, well, that's dark, but what else is in there? Well, the next F word is friend because all life supports its own species and the world around it. It's just how the world works. It happens and it happens automatically. And especially in humans, but in all animals, the final effort is forgiveness.
(01:25):
Which means you let go of things over time in humans. looks like evolving. but in an animal you'll see this, you know, a predator almost eats a deer. The deer shakes off all the stress drops it and then goes back to eating. Right. And humans get stuck because we get stuck in fear and that makes us see the world more, more dark.
more darkly if that's a word as darker than it is. And it makes us think about food all the time. And it makes us turn to either no intimacy or I'll say unhealthy kinds of intimacy. And what happens when you remove inflammation, you increase your energy and you allocate your energy better is you shift out of fear, you shift out of hunger.
and you shift out of lust and fear becomes peace. Hunger becomes nourishment. Sex becomes nourishment. And you have so much more energy for your community and for yourself to evolve. And a major trigger for this is setting up your environment for success. What I had going on in my gut was after all these antibiotics,
I tried being a vegan, I tried being a raw vegan, I tried, well, what they now call carnivore, but I was testing out the Bulletproof Diet, which is one of my big books, the first big book on intermittent fasting and plant toxins, it turns out. And I had something called lipopolysaccharides. I'm guessing your audience knows about those, maybe?
Josh Dech - CHN (29:06.882)Well, if they listen to every episode, sure hope they better by now, but keep going. Let's pretend they don't.
Butter! (29:11.576)Okay. So I mentioned run away from kill or hide. Well, bacteria don't have legs. They're not good at running, but they're pretty good at killing. So when there's a lack of food for them or there's another bacteria that's competing with them, bacteria fight with chemicals. Right? So they make toxins and a common gut toxin is called LPS or lipopolysaccharide. And I had these in spades.
And when gut bacteria are stressed, which happens from eating highly processed foods, they even get stressed if you have, if you stay up all night, they have a circadian rhythm and there's, look, I didn't get good sleep last night. I'll make more toxins this morning because you stayed up last night. So they're, just trying to stay alive. And if they feel hunger or they feel a threat, they're going to make more toxin. And if you have a leaky gut, which so many people do, because we have all these
these things that people say, that's a superfood. I mean, no, it's not. It's something that shreds your gut and pokes holes in your gut lining. You probably don't want to eat that unless you're starving. But we do all these weird things to our guts. And then the lipopolysaccharides can leak through the gut. And then they inflame your brain, they inflame your joints, and they give you a muffin top that wasn't there the day before. Muffin top doesn't change overnight. If it does, it is not fat. It's inflammation.
And inflammation is what happens when your mitochondria are not making energy very effectively. So controlling LPS is a major part of biohacking. Set up the environment in your gut so it's a healthy environment, so you have less toxins. And if you have the toxins, what do we do about it? And one of the biggest biohacks from the very beginning of the first blog post about this is activated charcoal. This is a 10,000-year-old remedy that you can take.
that sticks to lipopolysaccharides and other toxins in the gut so they don't go into your brain and your joints. Instead, you poop them out. And it's amazing what happens when you do something as simple as that to reduce chronic pain, to reduce all sorts of things you wouldn't expect. And we also have all these abilities to tune what's happening in the gut. I've spent, about two and a half million dollars on reversing my age, on repairing my health.
Butter! (31:33.71)But I've done this over 20 years. I don't do that on an annual basis. That seems a bit absurd. Yeah. And I think that would be really hard on the budget. But I did a lot of this because I was desperate in the early days. And then I realized, my gosh, I don't have to stop doing that because there's new levels of how you can feel and how you can reverse your age and things like that. the way I model what's happening in the gut is,
Josh Dech - CHN (31:37.272)A little excessive.
Butter! (32:03.404)You, I think at this point, everyone's heard of probiotics, right? This is, okay, take a bacteria that has a certain ability and it'll probably grow in the gut if you take it for a while. And I've talked about a bunch of different ones on my podcast and I've interviewed creators of them for years. And it's really cool because you can have some that are, that make a certain compound you couldn't otherwise have access to. But probiotics by themselves are of limited utility.
Butter! (32:36.944)Let's see, are you picking up a leaf blower in the background?
Josh Dech - CHN (32:40.683)absolutely, yeah.
Butter! (32:42.882)Give me one second, I can get that turned off. Yeah.
Josh Dech - CHN (32:44.098)true true
Butter! (33:02.86)Normally I have them schedule it, not when there's an interview, and I think we did, but he's right outside this window instead of on the other side of the house.
Josh Dech - CHN (33:10.38)Good news is we could hear everything you were saying, so it's not that big of a deal. All of my audio guy's bit of a wizard.
Butter! (33:16.448)Okay, cool. There, it just stopped. I was like, this is getting louder, not quieter. I thought it was the neighbors. Okay. probiotics. Take some bacteria, eat some yogurt, whatever. Well, there's a lot of questions. Some of the probiotics that you're taking might actually cause inflammation by increasing histamine in the body. But you might have to play around with which ones you take.
Josh Dech - CHN (33:20.664)Yeah, you're grand.
(01:46):
Josh Dech - CHN (33:38.392)Absolutely.
Butter! (33:42.926)The next thing that's really cool is prebiotics. Now, prebiotics are the food that the good guys like to eat. And there's a lot of unusual advertising about these.
And some are stronger than others. And some people say, well, that's just fiber. There's soluble fiber, which is prebiotic fiber. And there's insoluble fiber, which is usually rougher on the gut and doesn't feed bacteria that well, but can sometimes provide sort of like a scaffold for the bacteria to grow around. But I'm relatively skeptical of insoluble fiber being highly good for the inside of the gut just after a lot of research and experience. So.
You can tell how old someone is by looking at their poop. Because older people have less diversity of species and they have less total bacteria. So what if you had the poop of a young person as you age? Would you be younger? Well, the evidence is yes. So when I wrote Superhuman, which is my big book on longevity, well, so I gotta do something about this. So I started taking a prebiotic
blend that I made primarily based on the sap of a tree called acacia gum and some other things. I quadrupled the number of species of bacteria in my gut in three months. And I've learned not to trust the government to tell me what to eat or what to do with my health because they stuck at it. They had forever. So.
Josh Dech - CHN (35:06.2)Hmm.
Josh Dech - CHN (35:11.958)You and me both.
Butter! (35:16.962)That said, the USRDA for soluble fiber is something like 20 grams, and most people don't get it. I took 40 grams a day. It was like a few scoops. I put it in my coffee, or I put it in a smoothie. And then I'm getting massive longevity levels. And when I first started doing that, you have to ramp up, because otherwise you're just farting all the time as your bacteria adjust. You take probiotics when you do it. But after a little while,
All of a sudden you have a gut that works way better than it did before. But we're not even done because we've only talked about prebiotics and probiotics. And in the last few years, postbiotics have come online. So if the idea is I take food for bacteria in my gut, which is the prebiotic, I take the bacteria and then they eat the food and then they poop out little bacteria poops that have special powers. Well.
What if you could just take the bacteria poop directly? That's what post-biotics are. It's the beneficial compounds made by gut bacteria that you hope are growing in your gut despite your environment. And I've had, in the longevity book, I wrote about a couple molecules that you actually couldn't buy when I wrote that book that are available now. And common examples are spermidine and urolithin A. And...
Josh Dech - CHN (36:17.655)Yeah
Butter! (36:38.434)These compounds are really good for longevity and mitochondrial function. To get your Olithin A, you're gonna have to eat about two pounds of pomegranates and be lucky enough to have special bacteria that can digest that in order for you to get enough of this precious compound that bacteria make, or you could just take a pill that has it in it.
So post biotics, when you take them, they cause the good bacteria in your gut to make more of those compounds anyway. So it's like the bacteria are looking around, they're going, hey, some other bacteria must be making this Bermudene molecule, I should make some too. So you can manipulate your bacteria that way. And the final thing that's really intriguing is parabiotics. Have you talked about those on the show before? Sweet. I'm a super nerd on this bacteria stuff. So
Josh Dech - CHN (37:19.094)Never once before,
First time.
Butter! (37:25.782)That means you're a parabiotic virgin.
Josh Dech - CHN (37:28.49)I am. Yes, you can have my V-card Dave. I'll tell everybody you took my V-card.
Butter! (37:33.268)All right. So I read this study and it drove me crazy. It was from 20 years ago. I was looking at water filtration, which is another thing that's important for your gut. And they show that filtering dirty water, if you drank that, it had one effect. You have clean water.
But killing the things in the water with an ultraviolet light and then drinking the water full of dead things had a much stronger beneficial immune effect. So it turns out now there's a few companies making parabiotics, which are dead bacteria. And dead bacteria are a signal to the live bacteria and they're dead of certain species and they act as a signal to cause the body to make more of what you want and to manipulate the body like,
I could have been exposed to this. I might as well respond as if I was exposed. So the whole map of what do you do to fix your gut aside from hydration and not eating stuff that kills bacteria in your gut like like preservatives and food colorings and all that stuff. As you say, I got to eat prebiotics and the stuff that feeds the guys I want. I'm going to take probiotics and make sure the guys I want are there.
I'm going to take post biotics to give my body those benefits and to tell the bacteria they should make some of that. And I'm going to take parabiotics, which are going to signal the body to be ready for other things. And if you do that and you bind some toxins in the gut with things like activated charcoal, maybe bent night clay, and you take, just eat real foods, then you might find that your gut gets better.
(02:07):
But it might not, and there's reasons. Where do you want to go from here?
Josh Dech - CHN (39:16.344)Great question. So here's something I'd love to throw back to you. So in the case, what I do, I specialize Crohn's colitis, very reversible conditions, much of the time, and very. So glad that you're on the same page here. So you get somebody comes in with extreme dysbiosis. And one of the things that they hear is, well, I should take some prebiotics, but your overgrowth, the amount of LPS you're producing, right, exactly. So you're putting gasoline on a fire. It's gonna mess you up real bad. And so.
Butter! (39:22.914)Yet, very.
Butter! (39:36.362)No. I'm fuck you up.
Josh Dech - CHN (39:44.664)Help our listeners, I've talked about this before, I want to assume every episode is someone's first episode. So talk to us about the risks and dangers of prebiotics, like throwing gasoline on a fire, and what order you might want to consider some of these things in if you're gonna DIY your gut and your...
Butter! (40:01.866)All right. I've had substantial dysbiosis in my life and. geez, this is going back before I wrote a write about the same time I was writing my first blog post around around Bulletproof Coffee and biohacking and just launching the movement. So 2012 ish. I got some artichoke. I guess it was Jerusalem artichoke syrup.
This is all fructo oligosaccharide or FOS, which is a prebiotic. And I said, well, I know my guts messed up. It was messed up because I had done what we now call carnivore for three months. Felt great for the first couple. And after that, I started getting leaky gut, which oftentimes happens. That's why I recommend cycling in and out of ketosis, not being in it forever. But I said, I'm just going to add this into my coffee. And I gained 20 pounds in a week.
Now, it wasn't 20 pounds of fat. It was 20 pounds of inflammation because I just poured gasoline on the fire of bad bacteria in my gut and they had a little party in there. And yeah, I was farting all the time, but I just couldn't believe it. I'm like, I can't wear my pants. I'm panicking because I've been really obese. I'm like, I'm moving in the wrong direction really rapidly. So I quit taking it. So sometimes you need to stop eating anything fermentable for a little while. And
A shout out here to Donna Gates, who wrote a book called The Body Ecology Diet. I don't know if you had a chance to interview her, she's a friend and she's got to be about 80 now. And if you look at the GAPS diet, which your listeners have probably heard of, that is basically a photocopy of the Body Ecology Diet. And what I think you're gonna find if you have a sensitive gut is that...
Things that are supposed to work may not work. And there's two primary reasons. One of them is that half the probiotics that are supposed to be healthy, including stuff like sauerkraut or yogurt, can have bacteria that cause histamine when they degrade things. When you're making histamine in the gut, histamine causes inflammation. It causes that water retention.
Butter! (42:15.956)And that stuff you may have to manipulate the type of bacteria you take And now i'm probably going to piss you off here If your gut's totally wrecked I don't have any issues with just taking some antibiotics that are going to kill stuff in your gut and resetting it Whether it's through fecal matter transplant where you take a good friend who's healthy and you put their poop in your butt Sorry, I think there's technical terms for that. There's great evidence for that You can even take pills now that are well
Josh Dech - CHN (42:36.792)Yes.
Butter! (42:42.744)full of shit, but they were. So you might want to do it that way or just take kill everything and then take or kill as much as you can and then take a bunch of probiotics and some prebiotics and just reset there. It's okay. It's not politically correct, but sometimes it's easier to do that than it is to deal with a gut that's just overflowing with bad bacteria. It's gonna be very hard to shift that. It is much cheaper and easier to get data about what's going on in there.
Viome, I think is about 300 bucks and they'll give you a list of everything going on in your gut and how and what it's actually doing and also make some food recommendations and things like that. You can also get things like custom probiotics. But what's also interesting and maybe just because people who've heard multiple episodes of your show haven't heard as much about your oral microbiome. Have you guys talked about that much?
Josh Dech - CHN (43:37.196)We have had a couple of biological dentists we had Jerry Curatola on recently. Not published at the time of this recording, but I imagine it will be shortly. Fascinating stuff to look at the role of the oral microbiome. Absolutely.
Butter! (43:41.752)Okay.
Butter! (43:49.807)It is insane. If you think about it, your mouth is the top of your butt. So your gut microbiome starts in your mouth. And in the 10 years or so or eight years of working with Viome, they started out with a poop test.
Josh Dech - CHN (43:56.984)In less eloquent terms, yes.
Butter! (44:12.91)Looking at RNA to see like what's the DNA making and pretty soon it evolved to an oral swab and It's to the point that they can look at the bacteria in your mouth Not in your poop just in your mouth and they can with something like 95 % confidence diagnose stage one oral cancers just by the bacterial composition and with a half a million people's samples of poop and saliva and mitochondria from a stick of blood
Josh Dech - CHN (44:34.296)amazing.
Butter! (44:42.144)you can predict gut bacteria from oral bacteria. And a common mistake that people make is they use something like scope or Listerine and they just kill everything in their mouth. Right. And they wonder why their gut screwed up. Well, it turns out those mouth washes that sterilize everything do something really bad. They also stop nitric oxide formation, which increases your heart attack risk if you don't have enough of it.
(02:28):
Josh Dech - CHN (44:55.256)It's a nuclear bomb, you know.
Butter! (45:11.68)So I look at my mouth biome as being as important as my gut microbiome. And before I go to bed, after I brush my teeth and I have all sorts of things to make sure my gums are clean, because it turns out oral health keeps you alive for a long time. Well, after that, I repopulate my oral bacteria with an oral probiotic. And doing that changes your gut microbiome for the best.
So before I go to bed, I, yes, because I'm a super nerd and I love to get good sleep and I used to get horrible sleep, I put a lozenge in my mouth with a good bacteria. I put in a bite guard because if you want to live a long time, you need to not let your molars get short over time. So you put in a bite guard. And then if you really want to not have morning breath and you really want to breathe well and have more oxygen in your brain, I put a piece of tape over my mouth. It's called breathing tape or mouth tape and
It doesn't work that well for having conversations as you're trying to go to sleep. But if both people's mouths are taped, it works really well. But you do that and you wake up and now you've had moist environment in your mouth the entire night. You didn't have dry teeth and you have really good bacteria growing in your mouth.
You also don't get yellowing of your teeth in the same way. You breathe better and it affects your gut bacteria and it actually makes your poop smell less. Okay, that last part I made up, but probably.
Josh Dech - CHN (46:43.405)Probably, I mean, I have the exact same night time routine. Night guard, oral probiotics, the works, I'm with ya, yeah.
Butter! (46:48.194)Yeah. And it's kind of gross to think about it, but really that's the start of your butt. So you might as well plant the seeds at the beginning and oral probiotics actually tastes good. So you're fine.
Josh Dech - CHN (46:54.827)You
Josh Dech - CHN (47:02.564)You know Dave, I want to respect your time. I know we're actually stopping mid-conversation here, but unfortunately this could be hours and hours long as you've been doing this for 30 years. So I know you've got to get off to another meeting here, but really quick before I let you go, I mean you're everywhere, so people know your name, they know where to find you, but where would you like to direct our listeners today?
Butter! (47:24.327)Something we didn't talk about but is worth it is go to danger coffee calm and This is my new brand of coffee. I'm not involved with bulletproof any longer the reason this is interesting is that danger coffee has a therapeutic dose of trace minerals and electrolytes including ones that in studies bind directly to toxins in the gut like lipopolysaccharide so
Josh Dech - CHN (47:51.896)Come on.
Butter! (47:53.402)There's a whole link between environmental toxic mold or toxic mold in the body which signals bacteria to make more biofilms I Have dealt with toxic mold a lot. So danger coffee has no toxic mold in it I know because I'm very sensitive to it and I lab test this coffee and then I add These specific binders it's called humic and fulvic Right and this allows minerals to get into the body, but it also binds to toxins in the gut, which is what
humic and fulvic do in lots of studies. So if you're going to drink coffee, coffee is a prebiotic, it has soluble fiber and has polyphenols that feed the good guys in the butt in the butt in the gut. And so since you're going to drink coffee anyway, you might as well get coffee that doesn't have the micro toxins and coffee that has binders in it. It tastes like great coffee because it is you can't tell these things are in there unless you look at it and like why is that coffee is slightly like slightly dark color.
Josh Dech - CHN (48:30.904)Both!
Butter! (48:51.586)It's because there are minerals embedded in it. So I would invite you to try Danger Coffee and see if your gut likes it. I know your brain will.
Josh Dech - CHN (48:58.828)I love it. I'll make sure I put a link in the show notes. Dave.
Butter! (49:01.27)Sweet. And then, of course, Dave Asprey on social media and all that kind of stuff. can find me there. The Human Upgrades, the podcast. And thanks for having me on.
Josh Dech - CHN (49:09.462)It's been an absolute treat getting to chat with you here. We really appreciate you coming by.
Butter! (49:14.562)Thanks, Josh.
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