 So, welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. Have you ever wondered if you'd like to live to be a hundred years old? Well, I talk about it in my new book, The Longevity Paradox, but our guest today is going to ask you what it would be like to be a hundred and fifty or a hundred and eighty. Well, my guest, Dave Asprey, thinks he will be a hundred and eighty. He's, of course, the brains behind Bulletproof Coffee, and he's probably one of the original bio-hackers. In fact, he might have coined that word. In December, he released his latest new book called Game Changers, what leaders, innovators, and mavericks do to win at life. And Dave, it was great to be on your podcast on Bulletproof Radio last year, and I'm delighted to have you, Dave Asprey, on my podcast today. So, welcome to the show. Dr. Gundry, I'm happy to be here. Great to have you. So, before we get going, what the heck is a bio-hacker? You know, for the first time in human history, you can look it up in Miriam Websters, because it was added as a new word to the English language at the end of 2018, just a couple months ago. And believe it or not, I'm in the definition. And the definition, when I started using it to build the community of bio-hackers we have today, is that they have changed the environment around you and inside of you, so they have full control of your biology. And it's the environment inside of you, the microbiome, the toxic environment, the metabolic environment, the stuff that you and I have both written about, and you and I have a lot of common views on. That's a big part of what you do, but control might mean I want to get swole, I want to be a muscle band, or I want to live to 180, or I want to be smarter, I want to have more energy for my kids, my job, my career, whatever. Your body, different goals, same mechanisms of control. Okay. So, most people have heard Bulletproof Coffee, I hope, and you hope. So, but I don't think a lot of people, certainly my listeners, may not know your back story. How did all this come about? How did you go from a 300-pound college student to the world's most famous bio-hacker? Well, I spent a million dollars in 20 years hacking my biology. And I started out not just 300 pounds, I was diagnosed from blood tests as being at high risk for a stroke and heart attack before I was 30. I had arthritis in my knee since I was 14. I've been diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, toxic mold exposure, Lyme disease, and pretty much you name it. It seemed like it was all going wrong. But the thing that scared me and really motivated me, it was two things. One, after my second knee surgery before I was 23, I said, never again, I'm going to lose this weight, even if it kills me. I worked out an hour and a half a day, six days a week, went on a low fat, low calorie diet. And at the end of that time, I could max out all the machines in the gym, and I still weighed 300 pounds. And I thought, ah, it's because I'm eating too much lettuce. It must be that. And I realized since then that 90% of how you look is what you put in your mouth and what you put in the world around you. Exercise is the other 10%. I think that's a really good point. And you and I obviously agree on a lot of things, and that's certainly one of them that exercise absolutely has a place. But I think we put far too much emphasis on that part. And not enough emphasis on what goes in our mouth, what goes on us, and what goes in the mouths of things we might be eating. But I think you and I actually share an unusual distinction in that we might be at the very edge of people saying, actually, it's what you don't put in your mouth that matters more than what you do put in your mouth, although they're both important. And that's certainly in the whole bulletproof lifestyle from the very first day. It's like, could you stop doing the stuff that makes you weak? Because it's easier to do that than it is to do more lifting heavy things or whatever the heck. So I kudos to you for helping that message get out there because eating bad stuff is worse than not eating good stuff. Yeah. You got to know who your friends are that goes through your mouth. And I think you're right. Rule number one of the plant paradox, it's not what I tell you to eat that's important is what I tell you not to eat that's going to make the big difference. Okay. Your book, your new book Game Changers is really fascinating and there's a lot of fascinating things in here. Tell me about smart drugs. What the heck are smart drugs? Sure. In Game Changers, I interviewed almost 500 people who've done big things, including you. Things that are world-changing, leading in their categories and said, what are the commonalities? What do people agree on? The three big buckets where people who do big things generally do things to become smarter, to become faster, and to become happier. They do big things because they're happier. They're not happy because they did big things. And it turns out that one of the ways that people do perform better is using either pharmaceuticals or plant-based compounds to improve their cognitive function. We've known about some of these for 50 plus years. They're well-studied. Some of them have famous movies like Limitless, roughly based on them. And I've been using them for 20 years. The idea that they can't work, therefore they don't, is well-entrenched in Western medicine. But when you look at the studies, particularly around Modafinil, one of the smart drugs that I write about in Game Changers, the studies are pretty convincing that it actually does increase cognitive performance in some domains. In my case, brain fog, that was really a problem. And it's gone now. When I eat the right stuff, I perform at a very high level, even for what I would have done when I was in my 20s and I'm in my 40s. But for eight years I took Modafinil. It improved my meditation practice quantitatively with EEG. It improved my relationships. I got my MBA at Wharton while working full-time at a startup. And it basically made me better at almost everything I did. I don't actually benefit much from taking it now. I feel a tiny bump. But it's barely noticeable compared to before. It was like someone turned the lights on. So all of us can benefit. And some of these compounds actually reduce aging of the brain and of other tissues in the body. They improve performance of mitochondria, the power plants and the cells that your viewers are no doubt familiar with. And so why aren't we all using these is my big question. So give me another example that any of us could use every day to help you. There are two of Mother Nature's cognitive enhancers that I would argue the vast majority of great works of literature and songwriting have been written on. The number one is coffee. This is a well-studied smart drug. It's a plant compound. Maybe it's not a drug. It's a new tropic, a cognitive enhancer because coffee is not technically a drug because you don't have to get a prescription for it. You're a doctor. You know what I'm talking about. The other one is nicotine, which is actually more studied than caffeine as a cognitive enhancer. It'll improve your typing speed by 15%. According to a professor from Vanderbilt University, I interviewed on my show since 1988, low doses of oral nicotine and not smoking, which is just bad for you. It will make you old and make you die from various causes. But nicotine itself seems to reverse Alzheimer's disease in studies going back 30 years. So interesting. Those two smart drugs are part of daily life for more people on the planet than not, and they work. Yet somehow new compounds we discovered are other plant compounds like a seaweed extract called apigenin or rosemary extract. And some of these I actually have put into a cognitive enhancement formulas that I take. They show that they work. But most of us just don't think it's possible, so we just kind of happily go out without the same IQ we could have. Yeah, I think nicotine is fascinating. I've always actually taught my patients that nicotine is probably one of the best drugs ever designed for cognition and enhancement, but it's in the wrong delivery device. There are actually very interesting studies of smokers that they actually have a very low incidence of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. And one of my favorite groups to study is the Katavins or Kittavins in the beginning. And they smoke like fiends. They all smoke. They don't have one. They eat a ton of fat. A ton of carbs and a ton of fat. And they have no heart disease. There's never been a stroke. They live into their mid-90s with no medical care. And so you're right. I think nicotine is underappreciated now. That does not mean that I think that means that you're not telling everybody to go out and put a nicotine patch on tomorrow. Even vaping is a bad idea. What I would say is the data says that either oral nicotine as in a gum or a spray or a patch could be beneficial at very low doses. My favorite way is a company called Lucy Gum because most nicotine gum has really bad sweeteners that destroy your gut bacteria as you well understand. I don't put that stuff in my mouth. Lucy made a clean nicotine gum that doesn't have anything bad in it. So you can chew a piece of that and then you get a low dose of nicotine. You need that maybe once a day. And for some people you'll do any amount of nicotine you want to throw up. Your brain doesn't need that. If you do 10 of those a day, it's probably not a great idea. But if you're talking a couple milligrams of nicotine on a daily basis before maybe for me, before I sat down to write game changers, I would use a milligram of nicotine. Before this show I used a milligram of nicotine when I want to really have my brain working even better that little extra edge. I do that. I had a cup of old proof coffee too. It's okay. This is what most good performers do before they go on stage. They have the stuff that makes them bring it all the way. And nicotine deserves a place. Just don't smoke, don't vape. Neither one of those is good for you. Alright, so as an example this is what a spray of nicotine looks like. So I put about one milligram of nicotine under my tongue right now which is going to soak in through my mucous membranes. And my brain's going to work better. And nicotine also raises a compound in the body called PGC1 alpha, which is the same compound that is raised by exercise. This is one of the reasons that people who smoke weigh less. People use oral nicotine probably weigh a little bit less too, although the evidence is less clear on that front. So another powerful drug that you talk about. The world's most powerful drug, and that is breathing breath. Can you give us why that's maybe the most powerful drug there is? Well your body's primary job is to combine food and air in order to make energy. And that energy is literally the form of electrons. Those electrons power your will, they power your thinking, they power your breathing, they power your moving, they power your desire for anything and everything you do. And if your body sucks at making electrons out of air and food, which it does if you're over 40 just by definition, and it does 48% of the time if you're under age 40 based on studies from my last book called Brain Changers called Headstrong. It means we have a problem here. Breathing is one of the ways you can become better at oxygen utilization but even more importantly breathing impacts your heart rate, impacts your brain waves. So for a lot of us we're in fight or flight all the time, which affects your metabolism negatively. And just a few simple breaths or breathing meditation can shift you from reactive mode into rest and reset and planning mode. So learning the skills of breathing like that can improve your sleep, it can improve your relationships and it can lower your risk of almost every disease of aging. So is there a particular way of breathing that you like? I know you talk about it. In Game Changers I outline a couple but one of the simplest and easiest is one that's used by special forces operators and SWAT teams before they go in on a mission or when they need to calm down during one and it's called a box breath and you breathe in for about four or five seconds and then hold your breath for four or five seconds and then breathe out slowly for four or five seconds and if you're advanced you can hold your breath empty for that same amount of time and you sort of breathe in a box like that just four or five of those breaths at a stop light or in a meeting that's really boring, you feel the difference in what your body does. It creates a shift and the shift can be better measured by something called heart rate variability. It's about $100 cents you clip on your ear. I'm an advisor to the company that invented that technology from meditation and I have been since 2008, I've been using this kind of technology for more than 10 years and it really helped me go from when I was heavier certainly my nervous system was overactive on this fight or flight stuff, not because I had any conscious reason for it to be, it just was and I learned to teach myself to get out of that and what I learned is when you do those breathing exercises right, you feel something change in your chest, but when I interviewed these 500 top performers on Bulletproof Radio that became the data set for game changers, a surprising number of them talked about having not just a meditation practice but a breathing practice along with their meditation because it amplifies the effects of meditation and I mean you can lose weight from breathing properly. Well and if you're breathing properly maybe you're not putting food in your mouth that's an effect. Well you're also, you're suppressing your cortisol so if you have extra cortisol you'll have extra inflammation which will put on weight if you're already low on cortisol you probably won't lose weight from breathing. It's interesting as a heart surgeon obviously nothing ever went wrong during any of my 10,000 heart surgeries. No of course ever, but when everything hits the fan, one of my mentors long ago at the University of Michigan said if you don't keep your cool then everybody in the OR is on panic mode, they're adrenaline is sky high and you've got to be the guy who's sitting there whistling and saying isn't it a lovely day and one of the things I learned very early on that helped me is I just slowed my breathing. The worst things got the slower I breathed, exactly what you're describing and that just brings stress levels down and it's an amazing technique. Yeah, no one wants a heart surgeon with shaky hands. No, it's a really bad idea, really bad idea. So 500 people, lots of incredible stories in here and I really like the breathing one. Was there one event, one person who really changed the way you looked at the world? One of them was Eric Kendall who won the Nobel Prize for discovering neuroplasticity and what inspired me about interviewing Eric on Bulletproof Radio was that he's 94 years old and I'm interviewing him at his lab that looks out over Central Park in New York and he's still actively doing research. This is what aging is supposed to look like and when I asked him the question that became the backbone for game changers, I wanted to see what everyone agreed on when they answered this question so I always asked it the same way. And the question is what are the three pieces of advice you'd have based on your whole life experience for someone who wants to perform better at everything they do as a human being. So this includes what you do in the bedroom, what you do in the boardroom and what you do on the athletic field. It doesn't matter, it's your goals but I want to be better at what I do because it feels good to be good at what we do. So Eric scratched his head a little bit and he said, you know, my first piece of advice, have a good wife and he talked about the value of relationships and when you get to the section of game changers that's about happiness and the people who kick ass in their domains, people who've done big things they have strong intact consciously created communities and they have strong relationships at home and either by luck or by design, they have communities that support their relationship at home because it turns out your relationship at home will actually last longer and function better if it's surrounded by people who just want you to win on that. And a lot of times we don't have that in our lives. So whether it was luck and whether that was luck that powered these people to become great at what they were doing or whether they somehow figured out that's what they needed and then did it we don't know but we know it's a common pattern. My big thought here, Dr. Gundry, is that I only have so much energy and time to go out and do stuff and I like doing stuff. So instead of following one guru which I've certainly done at times in my life, learned to bet, learned meditation into bet with the masters and stuff like that, but what if you just asked hundreds of them what they do and then you used a statistician to say, all right give me the code here. That was my intent in writing game changers was to say if I have five minutes, what should I do with it to be a better human? And one of the things that I mentioned in the longevity paradox is don't retire. I have seen so many bad things happen, particularly to men who retire. And it's happening more now in women but as they've become a major part of the workforce is that we are social creatures and we have to be, you're right surrounded by our social organization and one of the characteristics of super old people is this incredible social organization including their spouse that is a huge piece of the puzzle. So it's a great observation. One of the things that struck me, when I was a young man I had most of the diseases of aging or similar things to the diseases of aging. The cognitive dysfunction and the problems with my cardiovascular system the arthritis, just all that stuff. So I started attending an anti-aging non-profit research and education group in my mid 20s and I'm learning from people who are in their 80s, one of our board members was dating someone in her 40s very happily, not because he was a dirty old man but because he was available and he just had that much energy and it was just a normal healthy situation but I just realized this is what old age can look like and I used the techniques of anti-aging to first fix what was wrong and then realize I can go way beyond because the ROI on taking these aging things and doing that for ourselves when we're in our 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, it's a lot higher return, reversing age in an 80 year old is possible but difficult and expensive. Slowing it down by 20 years and 50 year old is pretty cool and that's really become my focus and for 20 years I've run an anti-aging group and that's really powered a lot of what went into the world of biohacking. So you know it's interesting, I got to know in his later years Christian Barnard who did the first human heart transplant from South Africa and Christian was quite the ladies man and when I got to know him he was on his seventh wife and he was in his late 80s and they had a two year old child. Again, this guy was vital into his mid 90s and had sired a child in his late 80s so I don't recommend it folks who are viewing but... Yeah, my first book was on fertility, it was on reversing my wife's infertility and I went into a lot of research, five years of research to write the better baby book and it turns out the man's age as it progresses it does increase the risk of birth defects as well as the woman's age so yeah, I definitely don't recommend that but it is possible. It is possible. Speaking of recommending things you write about that you get regular stem cell injections what prompted that and what are the results? Part of the joy of being a professional biohacker means being able to meet the people doing the cutting edge stuff some of which won't be commonly available for 10, maybe even 20 years depending on regulations and I've been looking at stem cells for 20 years and 10 years ago I said you know I'd really like to get some stem cells because I have a history of chemically induced toxic brain damage according to Dr. Daniel Amon who I think is a friend of yours as well, you're a friend of mine and you could see holes in my brain from living in a place with toxic mold and I have a history of autoimmunity and I have hit my head a couple times so it seems like stem cells could be really good for that. I also have had these surgeries in my knees I used to have pain throughout my body and getting every side of injury injected with stem cells seemed like almost an impossible dream. This is more expensive than a Tesla 10 years ago and you have to fly to Germany or somewhere and it's become way more affordable. The potencies have gone way up and we understand so much more about stem cells now that you can get stem cells taken out of your own body and put back in. Since I'm going to live to at least 180 I think that preventative maintenance now attacking inflammation which is what happens with stem cells. They find the inflammation, they stick to it and they cause it to go away seemed like a really good idea. So I just recently did at DoSera clinics in Park City the most extensive stem cell procedure that's been done on a person all at one time. I had three doctors and I was out for four hours. They put stem cells in my brain, spinal cord every joint in the body, the cosmetic stuff, even the reproductive organs and I'm feeling a difference. My sleep quality is through the roof. I'm getting two hours of REM sleep and two hours of deep sleep on a lot of nights which is that's in six hours of total sleep not in eight hours. That's better than the average 20-25 year old is doing and I'm 46 so something shifted. Interesting. Now I will not argue with you but why not? Those stem cells are coming out of you and so we know they are already in there. Why not do things biohack to activate them to go to where they ought to go? I absolutely do things to activate my stem cells. Some of the gear we have at Upgrade Labs is a company that I started we spun it out from Bulletproof and it's got the kind of equipment that professional athletes, Navy SEALs and astronauts use to recover because the real problem isn't exercising more. The problem is recovering from all the stress which means infections toxins, emotional stress, dietary stress and exercise stress and travel stress and jet lag stress and your boss says all that kind of stress we got to recover from that before we go lift heavy or do whatever we're going to do to put exercise stress into the body. One of those pieces of technology we call it atmospheric cell training and what it does is it removes atmospheric pressure so you're basically at the top of Mount Everest and then it quickly and rapidly cycles the atmospheric pressure on your body which is shown in studies to increase the number of stem cells produced. There's a variety of supplements that do that. I do all of those things and when they pulled my bone marrow out I'm like wow you've got an enormously large cap of stem cells in here compared to what we see and it's great. Now put them somewhere they wouldn't go naturally because I want them right there. As you know my new book is the longevity paradox so I always like to ask you're going to live to be your native. At least I don't want to put a cap on it. Okay let's not put a cap on it. So give our listeners and viewers one thing that they can do today to go on that journey towards longevity. Alright I have one thing that is going to save you about a half a cent a day so it's not going to cost you anything. You don't have to pick up bulletproof coffee or any of that kind of stuff. But first can I tell you why 180 is the number? Sure. Alright I know we can do 120 because you and I have seen it in a few cases. So it is not impossible it is a proven thing. And those people didn't know when they were born. But I think we had the wheel back then and maybe fire. We certainly didn't have antibiotics. We didn't have public sanitation. We didn't understand mitochondria. We hadn't done the human genome project. You couldn't get a lot of the foods you can get now. Supplements weren't available and all of the medical procedures that are available now including heart surgery were totally not available back then. So if they can do it under those conditions I'm pretty sure with conscious choice and intention and just making better decisions not even perfect ones. 120 is eminently achievable with what we have today assuming a truck doesn't hit me. So then I also am friends with the people who are leading the anti-aging research groups. I've been involved in that for 20 years. I know what's happening. I know what's coming. I have compounds that are under NDA that are not for human consumption that increase lifespan of rats by 95%. Am I taking those? Yeah. Might they do something that we don't know about? Yeah. If I can double my lifespan is it a good risk? I think so. So those are the types of things that are coming. You look at all of the machine learning, all the artificial intelligence, the fact your human genome is now free if you're willing to show your data with drug companies are a few hundred dollars if not. You know what? I'm pretty sure we're going to get 50% over the next 100 years. In fact I think it's a very conservative number. The first person to live a thousand years is probably walking the earth today. Now the naysayers would say why would anybody want to do that? This is a big part of the work I'm working on for my next book. It's something that is really personal to me. I mentioned my friend Mike Korak as the guy who is 88 at the anti-aging group. Having spent so much time with vibrant, passionate, older people, my picture of aging is different than what most people watching us today are thinking about. When someone says old, you immediately imagine the stoop shoulders, the walker, tubes, monitors, wheelchairs, diapers, not remembering your own name. It is a dark place being alone in an aging home. That's actually not what happened throughout all of history except for about the last 50 years. What aging looks like is being functional, productive, having family around you and being in a position to give back. The village elder is what's missing. The reason we do so many stupid things today is we aren't benefiting from the wisdom of our elders. There's a couple of things going on there. One is your odds of dying from Alzheimer's disease are pretty darn good. If you're not dead from it, you spend 20 years not remembering the wisdom that you could have shared. Another one is people just don't have enough energy to want to give back. I'm too tired. My body hurts all the time. I have crinky. It's testosterone deficiency. We can fix that. You keep going into these things and you realize, wait a minute, do I get enormous benefit? I have at least 10 friends over 70. You know what? They have steered me around so many problems that I would hit in my 40s that I don't know about them because I haven't done them yet. The world needs a lot more of that if we're going to survive as a world. No, you're right. The village elder has basically disappeared. There's a lot of books I've read on philosophy of aging that the purpose of having a good old age is to actually give back your wisdom to those coming up behind. I couldn't agree more that we've lost that. Like I write in the longevity paradox if it's no good getting old if you can't remember it. There you go. I'm very excited about your book because there's a lot we can do to get younger now and to stay younger if we're already young. It's so much easier today than it was 20 years ago. It's only going to get easier. Thanks for tackling that. Until very recently, if you said you were into anti-aging or longevity, people said simply that can't happen. Therefore, it's a scam. Actually, it's happening all around us. Do you see that 90 year old over there? How did they do it? I want that. When the naysayers come out, it means that you're doing the good work because clearly the status quo sucks. It does. Speaking of status quo sucking, you think kale is unhealthy for us to eat. It might be a bit of an overstatement but I like you. I really care about the microbiome. I spent 15 years of my life on antibiotics for chronic sinus infections. I had a truly wracked gut that is now recovered. Along the way, I got to be friends. Now I'm an investor and advisor in a company called Viome that quantifies gut bacteria at a very detailed level. Their data set from tens of thousands of people roughly a third of people don't have bacteria that can break down oxalic acid or oxalates. What happens is this compound that's very high in kale goes into the blood. It meets free calcium there and extra calcium, as you know, ages you pretty quickly. You should not have extra calcium floating around in your blood but you probably do. When it hits the calcium, it forms micro crystals that then stick in your joints and cause pain. It's associated with brain inflammation, potentially both autism. The worst condition of all that it's associated with is called vulvotenia, which is extremely painful vulva in women to the point they can't even wear underwear. It looks really bad pain and it's caused by these micro crystals. If you're sitting there eating one of these raw kale salads once or twice a day, it's also associated with kidney stones that come from not uric acid but oxalic acid. The producer on the movie that I filmed was a toxic mold called moldy movie. By the way, it's free moldymovie.com. This is kind of my giving back as mold jacked up my health so much. Here's what it's doing. The producer was eating two kale salads a day. She gets kidney stones in the middle of the movie. Well, that's what happens. I actually recommend on the Bulletproof Blog, if you're going to eat kale, forgot to say cook it. It's okay to cook it. Dump the water where mostly the oxalic acid is. Maybe add some baking soda or some calcium to precipitate the crystals out. Raw kale? My sheep. I have a small farm. My sheep will spit out raw kale. It's really not good food. Well, I've actually seen a couple of women who have come to me for hypothyroidism and they basically were having a kale smoothie in the morning and kale salad for lunch and a kale salad for dinner. It was actually suppressing their thyroid function. They didn't have Hashimoto's thyroid out. They thought they had. We didn't take it away from them but we dramatically limited their kale and it solved the problem. If you have some kale once a week and you don't wake up with joint pain, great. Enjoy it. I would say eat the dino kale, the stuff that isn't all lacy. The lacy kale is particularly high in these compounds. There's something else really scary about kale. There's a toxic thing called thallium. It's called the poisoner's poison. It disrupts potassium in our cells. Kale, even organic kale, bio accumulates that stuff like nothing else. When we took lead out of our gasoline, we put thallium in the gasoline instead, which is a thousand times more toxic than lead, which itself, any amount of lead in your body increases your risk of cardiovascular disease dramatically. Now we're eating a food that has oxalic acid and high thallium levels, which disrupts cellular metabolism. We're thinking we're making ourselves healthy. If you love kale, eat some kale. You can also eat some french fries. They're probably equivalent. As I mentioned to you before we started, we always have an audience question. This one's right up your alley. We didn't do this on purpose. We should have actually. The question today is a follower from Instagram asks, I want to throw butter in my coffee, but how important is the type of butter? So, boy, we just put that out over the plate. Dave, take it away. Alright, it matters greatly. The idea for bulletproof coffee came from yak butter tea in Tibet. I was feeling really bad at 18,000 feet elevation and a little Tibetan lady gave me a bowl of yak butter tea and I drank it and my brain turned back on. It was amazing. I said this is totally unlikely. Unexpected, came back to Silicon Valley, started mixing butter and tea and it tasted bad. It didn't work. So I said, Oh, it's a tea. So I go to the Chinese tea store and $500 with a tea later. I find out it still tastes bad and it doesn't work. So then I said maybe it's the butter. I bought 25 different kinds of gourmet butter and two of the kinds of butter made me feel good. They were both grass fed. The butter used in Tibet is from yaks that eat. There was no grass there. They liken, but close enough. It's from animals that ate their natural food. And then coffee worked, but you'd crash sometimes. I ended up developing the mold-free coffee beans that are part of bulletproof coffee and that blended with butter and brain-octane oil is the whole dialed in thing. But the butter itself, if you eat industrial butter, here's what you're getting. I'm talking about feedlot butter, which is what most is out there. You're getting the wrong fats because it's well established that the type of fat you feed the animals or you feed the person affects the type of fat that comes out in the milk. So if you want corn oil and soybean oil, great. Feed those to the cow and now you've got soybean butter. It's kind of like soy margarine, but it was made by a cow. It's still better than soy margarine, but it's not the same as the conjugated linoleic acid, which is an anti-inflammatory fat that's made by grass fed cows. But even more importantly, they feed those cows hormones and antibiotics, which get expressed into the butter as well. You don't want antibiotics or any other fat soluble toxin in the fat that you're going to be eating. So you get the wrong fats and you get a higher toxin load. And that combination of things really changes the product. This butter is simply not the same as this other butter. They're both labeled butter, but one of them is at best neutral and probably inflammatory. And the other one may even be anti-inflammatory and has beneficial fat soluble nutrients in it. And so they're not the same thing. And you feel different when you eat different ones. Yeah, and I'd go even one farther as you know, and I do believe it is the breed of cow or animal with KCNA1 versus KCNA2 and incidentally, interestingly enough, yaks make KCNA2, not KCNA1. Now, although with butter, the interesting thing is most of the KCNA is gone. You're right. And with ghee, which is the cleanest source, is gone entirely. So even if you're eating from an A1 cow that ate grass, it's okay if you're not highly sensitive to use butter. And if you are highly sensitive, you could use ghee. But just to make the world a better place, let's just only have A2. Why do we have all these A1s? That's not a good idea. No, you're absolutely right. That was an economic decision actually originally. And I've interviewed a lot of A2 farmers, particularly from Minnesota, who were actually driven out of business by A1 producers, Holstein business, because they don't produce as much milk and they're not as hardy. And you probably know the story of the original A2 milk company in the Midwest. They were actually driven out of business by the American Dairy Association. It's amazing when running a small organic farm has taught me so much. We had two pigs last year. And these pigs were probably maybe two-thirds the weight of all the other pigs that are out there. And when we brought them into the butcher, the butcher said, what is going on with these pigs? They have the highest yield of any pig that I've had this year. They have more meat and more of the parts that you keep. I got more boxes of high quality pork out of this. And these are 250-pound pigs than I did from 800-pound pigs from your neighbors. Because they're all just fat. And what I was doing, I was well, we practiced intermittent fasting. We fed them only organic raw food and we put brain arcane and charcoal in their food. It completely changes it. But yeah, if you're looking on a per-pound basis, we're stupid. If you're looking on what I want to put on my plate basis, we're doing really well. And we eat a small amount of it, not a huge giant pork chops. But man, that pork belly, it'll change your life, I tell you. But it's all about what the animal ate. So can I achieve the same thing by putting MCT oil on my pork chop? You can get a little bit of that. But what we were doing was we were driving, because pigs and humans have such similar metabolism. Oh, absolutely. We're some of the few animals that use our kidneys to remove toxins, much more so than rats. They all use their livers, which are good. Kidneys are not very good filters for toxins. So pigs are very susceptible to mold toxins, to heavy metals, to endocrine disruption things. So because they're so similar to us, we fed them the same kind of diet that I would eat. And man, it made a difference. But whether there was actually MCT in their fat, I don't know, but we do pour some on top, just in case. I need to have a complete analysis for the next podcast. All right. So where do they find you? Where do they find Game Changers and all your other great books? All right. Well, all the Dave Asprey book collection is on Amazon or wherever books are sold. Game Changers is in stores today. It is the highest-reviewed book of any of the books I've written, almost all five-star reviews because of the format and the style. And the interviews that it's based on are on Bulletproof Radio, 100 million downloads, Webby award-winning podcast, where you want to hear just one specific thing. And I'd also direct your listeners to my book Headstrong, which was on the New York Times Science bestseller list with The Secret Life of Trees and Homo Deuce and Sapiens and other books like that because following your work, they're already familiar with how important cognitive function is, how important cellular function is, and the things you do to make your head work better, make your brain work better, make your brain last longer are so in alignment with the things that you'll do in the longevity paradox. We're like, look, how do we make sure we'll have a memory when we're 100? That stuff matters. And for me, because I lost that in my 20s and I regained it, it's very precious. So that's Headstrong and Game Changers. All right. So thanks for being on the show. This is my first time with you on my show, which is great. I hope I can come back on Bulletproof Radio sometime. Absolutely. We'll schedule it for you. I'm a big fan of your work and I appreciate that you've stepped out of just doing cardiac surgery and heart surgery to say, hey, it's what you put in your mouth might prevent the surgery in the first place. That's a big move for a surgeon. And thanks for having the courage to do it. Well, thanks. So that's it for today. Always good to see you. Thanks for coming on. This is Dr. Gundry because I'm always looking out for you. See you next week.