One of the Slowest Aging People on Earth Reveals ALL His Secrets | Dave Pascoe

The one thing that most everyone seems to have in common, regardless of what their lifestyle is, is they're not eating processed foods. They're eating some sort of foods, meat or vegetables that they are preparing themselves. It's not coming out of a box or a bag or anything like that. Those of us that are not eating processed foods are the ones that are aging normally. The people that are eating all the processed foods with all the chemicals and the dyes and all the other stuff added are aging worse.

Hello, everybody. Welcome Back to the Dr. Joy Kong podcast. You know, this is where I want to share all the good stuff in the world when it comes to health and longevity and wellness. And I'm inviting exceptional guests so they can share their tricks and secrets and knowledge with you. And today I'm super excited because I have Dave Asco. Yes. So Dave has been known to be a very successful biohacker because he was able to biohack his age to a point where he is literally aging the slowest of all humans on earth. So there was some kind of competition that everyone was posting their pace of aging and yours is the slowest. And you beat people like Brian Johnson, who everybody knows about, because he spent over $2 million a year on his health regimen. And there's a documentary about him on Netflix, but you only spent about $15,000 a year, yet you were achieving better results. So Dave actually has the chronological age of 62 and a half, yet he looks like he's a 38 year old. So I've seen him in person at our clinic, and it's mind boggling how good he looks. And he's got a six pack. So we want to know how Dave is achieving this. So, Dave, I want to welcome you to the show so you can share your. Your secrets if you're willing.

Well, thank you for having me. It's fun to get to hang out with you again today. Really appreciate that.

Yeah, absolutely.

For the record, though, I. I need to need to clarify. I am not aging the best.

Oh.

Because at my best, I think I was ranked sixth on the Rejuvenation Olympics leaderboard, but at the time, Brian was ranked seventh. So I was beating him for over.

A year and a half.

Yeah, over a year. But there were people that were doing better. And right now I've actually moved down in the ranks for two reasons. One, because they changed the rules of the Rejuvenation Olympics, and I wasn't aware of that initially. So I started testing at my worst because I wanted to know, like, what would happen if I tested after being sick or what would happen after I was in Italy for 30 days and completely changed up my diet. What would happen after I went through a period of like very physical and psychological stress. So I love to experiment. I'm just a constant experimenter. So I did these experiments, but to my surprise, they changed the rules on the competition. And it's no longer going by your best pace of aging. It's going by your three best tests over a three year period. And I, my best pace of aging already aged out, so it's dropped me down the leaderboard as far as averages go. And some other cool, really cool people have come up now above me with some amazing pace of ages.

So I see. Well, you know, I myself have some doubts about the, these tests because I've also heard of people having significant variability between when they take the test or even when they take the test on the same day. There may be quite a bit of difference, so I'm a little leery about it. However, it can be a great gauge of where you're at when you compare to yourself. I think it's a, it's a fun exercise, but the bottom line is how are you physically doing and how do you look? I do think how you look make a big difference. But yeah, some people don't take care of their face and their skin very. So the rest of their body may be aging at a different speed, but I think the face is also a reflection of the rest of your body. So I think how you, how you move, how you look, how you're able to communicate and your mental state and just your physiological parameters, I think those are really, really great ways of looking at aging. And the biological age is a tool, but I don't know if I can hang my hat on it 100%. So what are your thoughts on that?

Oh, no, I totally agree. I don't, I don't completely rely on that. In fact, you know, I, I jokingly go by my best pace of aging, which was 38, because I know that other big biohackers and people that are using their epigenetic age as their, their, their tagline for whatever, whatever they're promoting tend to use their, their best, their lowest that they can find. It may not be their recent. So I just played, I just played the same game.

How did you even start to play the game? Like what made you jump in there and enter the competition?

That's an excellent question. I didn't even know there was a competition, to be honest with you. I was just using True Diagnostic probably about almost two years before the competition. I was using them just as just one more test that I could take to validate that the things that I was doing in my life, like my lifestyle, was benefiting me and not hurting me. Because I. I do take a fair number of supplements. So I want to know, like, I do a lot of blood testing because I want to know, hey, is this damaging me in any way? Because you always hear the. The horror stories like, oh, my gosh, if you take so many supplements, you're going to ruin your liver and your kidneys. And it's possible if you're. If you're. If you don't know what you're doing and you're taking the wrong things and you're taking them in the wrong amounts, you can do yourself some damage if you're not paying attention. So I try to be really careful with stuff like that, and I do a lot of testing. And True Diagnostic was just one more of those tests. And so one day I. I had gotten my third test with them, and an email came in right about the same time that I got my results back. And I thought it was something important about my test. And I realized, oh, it was just a marketing letter, but it was marketing the fact that there was this new competition, and it was called the Rejuvenation Olympics. And I'm like, oh, wow, this is really cool. I'm looking at the people on the leaderboard, and of course, Brian Johnson. At that point, I think it was number one on the leaderboard. And who is this guy? And found out he was some supposedly a billionaire that had sold Venmo to PayPal for like $800 million or something. And I'm looking at his score and I'm looking at mine, and I'm thinking, wait, can this be right? I'm actually beating this billionaire. No, this can't be. So I submitted my results, and I thought for sure somebody was going to come back and say, no, no, you're misinterpreting that. You're definitely not beating this billionaire guy. Or they were going to come back and say, oh, yeah, he is beating the billionaire. And since it was kind of a cooperation between True Diagnostic and this billionaire, would they allow me to beat the billionaire? Right. They updated the leaderboard, like, about a month and a half later, and then he moved down from number one to seven, and I was number six. And then that's where we stayed for a good eight months.

I see. Okay. All right. So your pace of aging was 0.66. Right. That's the last. You know, so just everyone knows if you're aging as you're supposed to, it will be 1. So 1.0 will be exactly at your expected. So if you're over one, that means you're aging faster than you should, but if you're a lot less, that means you're aging a lot slower than everybody else. So what is the record? What. What is the slowest one that people have seen?

Oh, my gosh. I think there's somebody on the leaderboard right now with a 0.47.

Wow.

I. I've heard telling that there's a 0.3 something out there.

Wow. Okay.

Fascinating. Because at the time when I joined, the information they had was from a cohort called from the town of Dunedin, I believe it's in New Zealand. And they had studied. They studied these people and followed them for many, many decades. And they thought at that point, the very best that anybody could get was 0.6, I think 0.6. And I was 0.66. So I. Yeah, I thought. And so did everybody else. That was the best it was possible to do. But then people came out and broke that, so.

I see. Well, that is the Olympics. That's kind of the tradition.

One person to show it's possible, and then other people.

And. That's. Right. And now we have a new standard. So. Well, still, it's remarkable. 0. 66. I mean, that you're. You're two thirds the regular person's pace. So how do you think you're. You've been able to achieve it? Like, if you have to give somebody, like, a quick Cliff note and just tell them, like, what kind of things did I do that got me to age so slow?

Well, it's interesting in that some people are that way genetically, because there are things that they've identified that are considered longevity genes. Some people have them, some people don't. I unfortunately don't. And I was able to show that in my testing because my two earlier tests were not that good. I think my first pace of aging test, I was a 0.8 something. My next one, I was a 0.7 something.

That's still good.

And then finally the 0.66. So I was at least able to show improvement. Like, I knew what I was doing was taking me in the right direction. But the. The main thing that I did between the 0.8 and 0.7 to get to 0.66 unbelievably, was I cut out all processed foods and I'D always suspected that that was an issue, but I was fascinated to find that as I. I watch interviews now with people that are in the top positions in the Rejuvenation Olympics, when I've really paid attention to what they're doing, I'm amazed because everybody is doing something totally different. We have completely different diets. Some people are vegan, some people are carnivore, some people are. There's even a guy that's eating hamburgers. But, I mean, I think in his case it's completely genetic because we've not seen any low scores for him. It's all been high. But the one thing that most everyone seems to have in common, regardless of what their lifestyle is, is they're not eating processed foods. They're eating some sort of foods, meat or vegetables that they are preparing themselves. It's not coming out of a box or a bag or. Or anything like that. They're not doing the fast foods, typically. And so my theory, and this is only a theory, I can't prove this, but the more people have slung this by it, they're like, you know, that could be plausible. My theory is that those of us that are not eating processed foods are the ones that are aging normally. It's the people that are eating all the processed foods with all the chemicals and the dyes and all the other stuff added are aging worse because of the stuff that's damaging our health.

I see. So they're pulling the average up. The average, bad. But in comparison, just because you're doing the right thing, you're. You're simply going back to how we should be, you know, from a few hundred years ago when we didn't have all this. Not even a few hundred. A hundred years ago, that seemed to be the case. Yeah. So we just went back to how it should be. Of course we have better. We still have better science and better medicine. I mean, just at the point that we are living longer than a hundred years ago and sleeping well.

I mean, sleeping well obviously has. Plays a big part. I mean, almost everybody that's been interviewed, you know, for the. For the leader. Oh, really has really locked in their sleep. And most people have some form of exercise that they're doing, something that makes them sweat.

Yeah, but this is fascinating, right? This can help a lot of debates because everyone is in a different camp. You know, some people are more inclusive, saying, oh, you can do whatever that's most befitting to your health. But there are definitely people who are more entrenched in different camps then they Think that you really, to achieve optimal health, you have to be a carnivore or you have to be a vegan. You know, there are people who are very much sticklers. I've done the vegan diet once for about eight months, so it wasn't long because I thought that, that there was enough evidence that indeed animal protein and animal source, you know, products are going to be detrimental. And since then I realized that there's really. No, there's not. You know, the evidence that's suggesting such is probably because of how these animal proteins were obtained is not the fault of the animals and, and of, you know, what they're giving us. It's really the fault of people who are handling it, who are, who are raising these animals. So that's.

And most of the meat studies were done upon people who are eating processed meats. It wasn't on people that were eating grass fed grass, finished meat. I would love to see those studies. I think that makes a huge difference.

Did you have any journey with your diet have you made besides getting rid of the processed food?

Yeah, I mean, because as a kid I was, you know, always eating just whatever mom made. And my mom was, you know, pretty lazy as people come. She didn't. She just loved to take things out of a bag or a box. You know, we're talking about Hamburger Helper or, you know, Shake and Bake, all those really cool new things that came out in the 60s and the 70s. You know, that was just the best thing since sliced bread for moms, you know, on the busy moms. And so, you know, we ate a lot of that, which probably led to the autoimmune disease issues.

What about your siblings, were they having trouble too?

Yes. Yeah. My brother used to have unexplained migraines. Didn't know what that was all about. My sister, I'm not exactly sure what she had. We were just sick kids all the time. I didn't know that was anything unusual. I just assumed that was normal because it seemed like we were always sick with something.

Oh, gosh. Okay. And then how did you discover the relationship between what you ate and your health?

I was a really observant kid. Like even at an extremely young age, I had a lot of questions that I like to ask. And my dad was not a very patient person. He was not a good person to be around children, let's put it that way. Apparently his father was far worse and my dad thought he was a good improvement. But no, not so much. Anyway, I would always ask questions that My dad would tell me were stupid, right? Every question I asked was a stupid question. And so I got told to shut up all the time because I annoyed him with my questions. And so I learned at a very early age, don't ask questions, just observe. And I really believed him. I thought I was stupid. So I had terrible, terrible self esteem issues for a long, long time. So because I thought I was dumb, I paid extra, extra attention to what I thought smart and successful people were doing. And I got to use my own parents as a good example of what I thought you should not do based on what I saw other people doing. Like, okay, so for example, for example, I would see that they were people in the world who lived in really, really nice houses. They seemed to have like very nice things. Other people, you know, not so much like really, really poor. I assumed we were middle class because we were somewhere in between and we weren't any different than like the neighbors or any other kids in my school. But I wondered why there was this disparity. And so I tried to observe, like, what were the people doing that were really, seemed to be very financially successful? You know, they were doing things like going to college, they were constantly learning, they were constantly improving upon themselves, whereas the other people were just sort of going through life. They weren't planning, they were just letting life run them rather than them deciding what they wanted to do and go for a target, go for a goal. I watched couples on how they interacted. I would see, like really, really loving couples that just got along, like best friends. And then I would see others that would bicker constantly or roll their eyes when the other person spoke, you know, just so much dislike between them. And I thought, oh my gosh, when I grow up, I definitely don't want a relationship like these people. I want to be like, you know, these guys. So what are these guys doing that makes their relationship so successful? How do they get along so well? And then when it came to aging, same thing. I would see really, really old people that just looked like old, young, older, young people. Because no matter how old they were, it could be like in their late, late 80s and they'd still be very vibrant, just super energetic and just on the go and just doing stuff all the time. And then I would see people half their age that were broken down, beat up, just looked like crap and they would feel like crap and they'd have aches and pains. I thought, well, wow, what is it these old people are doing that are so vibrant? Because I want to do that so As a kid, all I could do was look at what they were doing. I couldn't tell what they were not doing. So, for example, I saw they were eating a lot of fruit and vegetables, eating healthy stuff. They weren't eating the fast foods or the junk stuff. Right. But I didn't realize that they weren't eating processed foods. Typically, they were eating stuff that they were making themselves. I didn't figure that out until much later in my life, unfortunately. So, like I said, I always tried to observe and follow what successful people were doing, because as like, Jim Rohn and Tony Robbins like to say, success leaves clues. Right. And I picked up on that very early on in my life.

Hmm. Yeah. So seeing these old people of the healthy stuff they were eating. So did you actually implement. Did you think, okay, they eat all these fruits, vegetables, let me eat some more of these?

I did. My lunches were always amazing. I mean, people would comment on my lunches because I would have, like, an apple, an orange, a banana. I'd have carrots. I'd have celery sticks. I'd have radishes. I'd have cucumber. I mean, every different fruit, vegetable combination I could think of, I would have them chopped up in little Ziploc baggies, and they'd be part of my lunch as a kid. And even, you know, when I went to work later on as an adult, I'd have these just huge spreads of food like that. But like a peanut butter and honey sandwich I ate every day. Not the most healthy thing in the world, but I thought it was healthy at the time. Right. I didn't realize that as time went on, they started substituting terrible trans fats and bad oils into the. The peanut butter. That didn't used to be there when I was a kid, but it became, you know, they put it in there later. Stuff like that that I didn't know was an issue and all that honey. I didn't know what the honey was doing to my blood sugar or my glycemic index. You know, I know that now today, because, you know, we're aware of CGM that will track stuff like that. So I learned from that.

Okay.

But I could control my lunches. I still couldn't control my dinner, so I just had to eat whatever mom made.

Oh, my goodness. So then, of course, when you're an adult, you have full control over, you know, everything you're putting your body. Then you were always health conscious, I assume?

Yes and no, because I went through some really dumb periods, I think, in my 30s where. Well, no, let me go back even earlier. There were times in college that, you know, I would eat in the dorms and I would. I would eat like. It's just absolute horse, right? Just everything. Everything just loading up my tray and. But then I would continue to work maintenance and security in the dorms during the summer or during the breaks when the dorms were closed. So I wasn't getting dorm meals, and I didn't know how to cook anything for myself. And I didn't have any stove or oven or anything in the. In the dorm to cook with. So a lot of our maintenance crew would go to. There was a restaurant at the time. I don't even know if it still exists anymore. It used to be called Chi Cheese. So because we were broke college kids that didn't know any better, we would go there for the free chips and salsa and drink beer for the calories. And that's what we existed on because we just assumed calories were what we needed to thrive on.

Right?

And salsa were just something that was tasty and. Oh, okay, so there was some healthy stuff in salsa, Right?

Right.

Then later, like in my 30s, I was doing really dumb stuff. I thought it was healthy to eat a can of tuna every single day for lunch.

Oh, I see.

Until one day when I heard or read that there was a problem with tuna containing heavy metals like mercury, and I investigated it. I found on the EPA's website that they had recommended that adults only have like one or two servings a week. And I think for children, it was less than that. I think it was like one or two servings a month because of the amount of lead that. Or mercury that can be building up in your system. And so I thought, huh, I wonder if I've got an issue like that. So I went to my family doctor at the time, and I asked him to get a mercury test. And he's like, why do you think you need a mercury test? And I explained that it was on the EPA's website that that's an issue. He's like, you can't believe everything you read on the Internet. And I'm like, wait, this isn't just the Internet. This is the government's website, right? This is somebody that we should be paying some attention to. Maybe they know what they're talking about, and I want to know. He's like, well, this is. That's baloney. He says, oh, I'll give you the test. He says, but it's a complete waste of time. And so two weeks later, he Calls me in a panic. He's like, what was your environmental exposure again? And I said, I don't have an environmental exposure. I got that from eating tuna. And he's like, no, no, this is impossible. Your mercury levels are just ridiculously high. You had to have been exposed to it somehow. And I said, yeah, my exposure was from eating tuna. That's my only exposure. You wouldn't believe me. And so this was about the time I had started massage school. It would have been around 2001. I remember mentioning this to one of the doctors that was one of the professors there. And he said, oh, we can put you through a chelation program. I'm like, what's that? He goes, well, there's. There's some actual prescription chelators that you could take, but they're really hardcore. He said that. I don't believe you need that. He says, I. I think we can put you on some protocol of some supplements that I think will do the same thing. So he had me doing, like, a lot of chlorella, spirulina. What else he had me doing at that point? Just distilled water. Because distilled water has basically no minerals in it. And by consuming the distilled water, things that are in a higher solution tend to get pulled into things that are in a lower solution. So as I am putting all this distilled and no mineral water in my body, it was leaching the minerals and heavy metals out of my body intentionally, just for this brief period of time for this chelation program. And the chlorella and the spirulina were helping to bind to the mercury. And I think there was a few other binders that he had me taking, but at the time, I. I didn't know what they were or why. I just followed his advice. And so after doing this for a month, just a month, I went back to this doctor and asked for a retest. And he's like, no, it's ridiculous. You're not going to get rid of it. You are stuck with this for life. And I said, well, I don't believe that. He goes, I don't care what you believe. It's just not going to happen. Nothing's going to change. And so we argued and argued, and finally, just exasperated, he's like, okay, we'll do the test. And so my results came back, and he again was completely incredulous. He's like, your mercury levels are like half of what they were before. This is impossible. I said, no, it's not impossible. I said, you want to know what I'm doing. He's like, well, no, because it's not even possible.

Are you serious?

No, he refused to listen to anything that I was doing.

I mean, this is his chance to learn and grow and expand. And I just, I see that happen with a conventional doctor so much all the time.

Yeah, that's my typical experience with the medical world. So, yeah, I fired that doctor and ended up getting a new one. But I continued on with the protocol. And then I think it was in about three, four months, my mercury level was back down to almost non existent. And today it's non existent except for when I came back from Italy because eating a lot of the fish there, their fish tends to be high in mercury. And so I noticed I had just minute levels of mercury after that. So I did a little chelation protocol and removed those two. So I mean, I've gone through periods where I've done somewhat smart things and somewhat dumb things, as we all have.

Yes, it's pretty impossible to live perfectly.

And I'm still a constant experimenter, so I'm positive I'm still doing some dumb things, but at least I'm learning.

Me too. Welcome to the club of the human race. But there you're doing a lot of things that are right. So I want you to kind of share what you're doing because majority of them are right. Otherwise you wouldn't be aging as such a slow pace compared to everybody else. So, and let's talk about your diet. Like how did you settle on your diet these days? So you are, you are pretty lean and you don't restrict calorie. And how do you approach what you eat?

Well, I'm super active, which I think contributes to why I'm so lean. Because there's a different times during my year that I'll be doing marathon training. So I'll be doing a lot of high mile running. There are times. Well, most of the time I still do P90X which is an extreme workout program from the 90s, I believe. Yeah, I think it was, I think it was 1998 when I first began doing that. And I've been doing that ever since.

That's more of a strength resistance training, right?

Yeah, it's a mix. It's like there's strength resistance days and then they're cardio days and they're intermixed. So it's a 14 day program? Well, it's actually a 90 day program, but there's 14 days worth of different workouts. So you're not doing the Same workout, you know, two days in a row. You've got full two weeks before you repeat the same workouts again so you don't get bored. But it's extremely extreme. It's one of those kind of things where most people start it and they will quit before they get two weeks in. Because in your first two weeks you are just so freaking sore. Every muscle in your body gets utilized muscles you didn't even know you had. And so you're, you're moving around and you're just like, ah, it hurts to move. And, and I always tell people, look, if you can stick with it for at least two weeks, your body will adjust, it'll get acclimated to that and then it won't be any big deal. And you'll love the results that you see. I again had those self esteem issues as a kid and even, you know, through teenage years, even more so. College didn't help me much either. But it was probably later into like my 40s when I started doing P90X and started seeing my body composition change. I started getting some, some confidence because I really liked the way I looked and I liked the way people were responding to me because they seemed to like the way I looked too. And that was a plus. That was a big motivator and that's why I keep doing it today. There's so many other workouts programs that I've tried.

That's something you do on your own or do you go somewhere to do it?

No, it's a DVD program. So I just do it in my basement.

Okay.

And I've tried other like Beachbody type. The company is Beachbody that produced it. I've done many of their other workouts. There's like Tap Out, Tap out xt, which are mixed martial arts things. I've done insanity. I've even done Brazilian butt lift exercise. It's like I've done them all. Really. I've tried them all because, just out of curiosity. But I always come back to P90X because it's the one that gives me the best results. So I know I sound like an infomercial for P90X. I don't even know if they still sell it anymore. I think you can find it on Amazon. But it's, it's not like I'm not an affiliate or anything. It's just when I find something that works, I really brag it up.

Right. So you do you still do that? Like you said two weeks at a time and then you take two weeks break?

Oh no, it's no, it's just a continuous cycle of two weeks. Yeah.

Okay.

But you get what they call muscle confusion. Because if you did the same workout all the time, at some point your body gets adjusted to it and you plateau, you don't see any gains. But as long as you're doing different muscle groups, different functional movements, you don't get bored and your muscles don't seem to get acclimated. It kind of keeps them confused, like, I don't know what's coming next. Right. And. And then it helps for the. The growth.

Okay. So you think what you eat, I mean, what you do. Exercise has a lot to do with the fact that you're lean. It didn't really matter that much what you ate. So.

But.

But I'm sure you are designing what you ate as well. But exercise is gonna.

Just a good point.

Yeah. Improve your metabolic. So. So everything is turning over, Right?

Yeah. Because I see amongst my running friends, they assume that because they're putting on a bunch of miles and they're burning off calories, that they can eat anything they want. And to some extent, that's true. They're eating a ton of sugar. I mean, tons of sugar. And they are eating anything they want and they are burning it off. And lots of fat, you know, as well, very unhealthy food. And it ends up showing in the body composition. They tend to carry a lot of subcutaneous fat, like actual visceral fat, which is really not healthy. And then all that sugar is, you know, just driving your blood sugar and your insulin levels crazy, which is terrible for your pace of aging. So they assume they can eat anything they want. They look healthy, but metabolically they're wrecked. They just don't realize until something happens down the road. And then they're like, oh, this came out of the blue. I have no idea why this happened. It was because of the bad diet.

To do with, you know, some people. You've heard about people who just literally drop dead when they were a picture of health. Right. They look. They're exercising all the time. Look fantastic. But. Yeah. What's not going well underneath.

That's why I say on my website that I'm targeting longevity, anti aging, health, fitness. And I think I even have something else in there. I can't remember what that was now. And people have asked me, aren't those all the same thing? No, no. Each one of those is radically different. And it's for those reasons that you can be just metabolically destroyed and still be like a fitness model. And look good on camera or to the public, but inside you're just a disaster. Or you could be really super healthy and have no muscle mass whatsoever and end up becoming sarcopenic as you get older, which is not good for your longevity. You'll very possibly slip, fall and break something because you don't have the muscle strength to hold yourself up anymore. So that's, that's not healthy. And there's. Longevity is one thing. Anti aging is a totally different thing. You can live to be a really long, really long life and look like an old roadmap too. Or you can continue to stay young looking, that's the anti aging part. And work for longevity as well. So that's why I see those as being too completely distinct but related things.

Yeah, yeah, good point. Yeah, yeah. I considered myself an anti aging doctor and the side effect is that you're going to live long. But my primary goal is to keep you youthful and keep you function at an optimal level. So, so what is your diet like?

And I was going to say just look at you. I know it's working.

Thank you.

I know you live what you preach.

So it's, Yeah, I, I do, I, I try. I mean, I, I still slip up.

Right.

I, I went to a noodles house, had phenomenal noodles with truffle oil. It was, it was phenomenal. But at the back of my mind it's like, well, this is a lot of some simple carbs. It may not be the best, but, but there's also a part that's, that's joy of life. Right. You also want to experience. So how much, how much joy did I give you and how much that extend your life and make you happy. So there has to be a balance. If you're bombarding your body with all that all the time, it probably is not good. But maybe once in a while allow yourself to experience some of the small little pleasures and miracles. It's okay. So that's kind of how I'm looking at it.

I totally agree. That's why I'm relatively low carb most of the time. But there's times where I intentionally will do some high carbs because my body needs to at least understand what carbs are and how to process them. It needs to remember, it needs to have that metabolic flexibility to be able to handle that. Same with sugars. Like if I go to a birthday party and they have birthday cake, I'm going to have a piece of birthday cake. Usually I know it's not going to kill me. I know it's not the most healthy thing for me. But every once in a while you need to challenge your blood sugar and let your insulin raise up. It keeps your insulin sensitivity intact.

How often would you allow yourself such splurge.

Sugars? Not that often, to be honest with you. That's usually a very rare treat. Carbs, fairly often. Like I actually had to start adding carbs back into my diet intentionally like rice and sweet potatoes, because I was getting far too lean. And although the, the high output that I was doing with, you know, marathon or half marathon training or. And the P90X would tend to burn a lot of calories, right. And I don't have a lot of body fat. So when I start burning that kind of, you know, those kind of calories and energy, it burns muscle. And at my age, it's getting so much harder to put muscle on, I can't afford to keep burning it off.

So you, you notice your muscle mass was getting smaller?

Oh, absolutely, Yeah. I can, I can tell it when I'm doing my workouts because all of a sudden I'm not able to, you know, lift the same amount of weight that I was lifting before. Like generally when I'm doing everything right, I can see a steady improvement where like maybe once every couple of weeks I can add another five pounds and then keep going. And I can see the build, you know, in my body. I can tell the difference. But I can also see that when I'm doing like a period of a long fast, like I used to do five day prolon fasts because I knew they were healthy. For me, it's very good to tear yourself down occasionally, have some good autophagy, and then allow all those stem cells to proliferate and rebuild. Right. But when you're too lean, they don't recommend it. And I'm definitely too lean. I'll lose 8 to 12 pounds depending on how physically active I am during a five day prolon fast. And I don't have 8 to 12 pounds of body fat to lose. It's always muscle mass. Even though they're giving you like some like, I think it's like liquid glycogen. It's supposedly it's supposed to be to fuel your muscles so that you don't burn your muscle. It's supposed to be for muscle sparing and for normal people that have a good amount of body fat, that works. But when you don't have body fat, there's nothing else to burn but muscle. So I can't do long fasts anymore.

So once you introduced Back the carbs. How did you notice your workouts and your muscle?

My energy levels improved. My run performance did better, and I'm able to keep going, like, keep increasing weight during my workouts.

I see. Okay, interesting. So. So you add some. Some amount of carbs and at least.

Like, every couple of weeks, I'll go out with friends to my favorite restaurant, which is Ford's Garage here in Detroit. That's in Dearborn. And, you know, I'll always. I'll start with this enormous berries and gorgonzola salad, which is, you know, larger than my head, but that's the typical size of my salads anyway, so that's not unusual. That's a meal in itself. So people laugh at me because I'll do two meals. I'll eat this berries and gorgonzola salad before everybody else starts. And then when they order their burger, I order another burger, and it's typically a mushroom and Swiss burger with avocado and an egg, sunny side up. And then I'll do a side of broccoli and a side of Mac and cheese. So the Mac and cheese is just. Just throwing in the carbs just for the heck of it, to give my body something to, you know, to deal with.

Yeah. Okay. And do you consume a lot of protein?

Yeah, yeah, I do a lot of. I do a lot of meat that's typically in every dinner. I do a lot of protein, like whey protein. So I'm trying to keep protein consistently high.

Yeah. Okay.

Now, meat, as far as my dinners go, it's usually one gram per pound. I don't weigh that. I mean, I probably should, but I roughly know that if I, you know, if I'm in a building phase and not. Not an autophagy phase, because I'll. I will cycle those. I'm trying to do at least. I'm saying at least 90 grams a day, if not more of protein.

Yeah. There's such a vast array of opinions when it comes to diet. You know, some people believe that, oh, you shouldn't eat plants, definitely. You probably have met people like that. Right. Very, very advent that. That they're bad for you to kill us.

Right. Terrible.

Lectins run away, so they're going to poison you.

So it's ignoring the fact that when you cook them, you can cook them in such a way that you can, you know, cook off the lectins and pour them out like lectins and beans and lentils or, you know, if you're cooking oxalates in your greens, you can Pour those things off when you boil them. So, I mean, there's ways to avoid those bad things.

And you don't avoid dairy right at the moment?

No, I've been avoiding dairy like the plague for months and months and months lately. I've thrown some dairy back in because I'm doing a whole new experiment. So I'm doing some kefir. I'm doing things like, you know, parmesan cheese. I'm, I'm trying to very, be very intentional about improving my microbiome right now. So I'm trying to do more fermented things. I'm throwing kimchi into the mix. I'm doing some saccharomyces boulardi. I'm doing some lactobacillus. I forget the total, forget the strain now. But they're both known for longevity and so and, and sauerkraut and things called gut shots that you can buy at the health food store, which is basically cabbage juice. I'm doing more things very intentionally that way and then throwing in some, like, green banana powder and some psyllium fiber and some inulin. Very little bits of all of this, because if you start too high, you're going to become a gas monster, and you don't want to do that. Yeah.

I just recently got really excited about making my own yogurt and it's really cool. You've heard about the, the strain El Ruderi that people are, are making. So. Yeah, getting some of the, the strain and using organic. If I can get raw milk, I'll get raw milk. But organic cream and, and milk and using inulin as the prebiotic is so much fun.

I've been wanting to do that for a long time. So maybe.

Yeah, yeah, you have to try it. And you can just use a regular pressure cooker. There's a yogurt setting or you can buy yogurt maker, but it's so easy and I couldn't believe I can make my own yogurt. So that's my, my new extra curricular fun activity.

I think I'm gonna buy a yogurt maker.

Yeah, it's, it's fun. It's fun because I'm using my pressure.

Cooker all the time. So I, I, I wouldn't be able to, I wouldn't be able to keep the yogurt brewing if I'm using the pressure cooker for other things. So I definitely need something separate.

Yeah, it's just a nice feeling. It's kind of like making bone broth. Right? It's like there's always something brewing.

You're.

Something is going like. It's like a, you're brewing life, you know, things are happening. So it's a, it's a, it's a nice thing. Which reminds me, I need to make some bone broth.

I want to make my own kombucha too.

Oh yeah, I used to do that, but mine never comes out as good. I think I was so scared of putting sugar, so I need to put more sugar.

I have a kitten and I haven't used it yet, but I want to. And I'm the same.

Yeah.

Frustrated about the kombucha in the store because, you know, when I first started buying it, it had like 4 grams of sugar in it and then it went to 8, then it went to 12 and now it's at 16. And now I noticed some of them are back down a little lower. And when I investigated it more carefully, it's because they're using erythritol, which is a, you know, sugar alcohol. And they don't have to list it as sugar on the label, but it's still just as bad for you. So. Yeah, so that annoys me too. So I've just, I've just stopped all store bought kombucha because I don't like to the amount of.

They added erythritol. What, so they can reduce the sugar count, Right?

Yeah. On the label it shows less sugar, but they've just replaced it with a sugar alcohol instead.

I see. Okay.

Which technically doesn't count as sugar, but it's sugar. Some of those technicalities they get around in labeling.

Well, yeah, I think the jury is still out exactly how these things are affecting the body. Right.

From what I've been told or what I've read is that our microbiome is still affected by the sugar alcohols just like they are sugar. Right. So it may not affect our blood sugar and our insulin like sugar would, but it keeps the bacteria in our microbiome alive that eats those that cause us the cravings for sugar. And I've noticed this myself when I've cut out all sugar after about two weeks, my craving for sugar just completely goes away. In fact, now when I normally do something like that birthday cake or something that does have sugar in, tastes disgusting to me.

Oh, really?

It's just too sweet?

Yeah.

So because I'm used to berries as being my sugar, like blueberries or raspberries, that's sweet to me. Whereas most people would say that's not sweet. But by comparison, you know, These ridiculously physiological amounts of sugar that we're used to having in every packaged product that we don't even know it's in there, but they put it in there anyway. We, we just get, you know, over accustomed to those. And when you remove all those, just a little bit of sugar does the job.

Yeah. There's so many ways to make delicious and very tempting food, but healthy.

I.

This is, I think Instagram figured out that's what I like. So I keep getting these incredible recipes and a. So fun. You can eat, you know, flatbread that's very low carb, but super healthy. Like, I just got this. I saw this recipe. I want to try it. It's just frozen berries mixed with some chia seeds, and then you can dip into dark chocolate and you. So you just leave in the, in the refrigerator and then you get this, like, cold, you know, this delicious berry chocolate treat.

That sounds a little bit about like my, my morning breakfast. I do a chia nut berry spice bowl and I throw a lot of cocoa powder in it. But it's got chia, it's got mixed berries, it's got like every chopped nut and seed imaginable. And I even throw in various spices, which most people would say that sounds disgusting. But in combination with all those, it's not bad, especially because I load it heavy with cinnamon.

But such a good idea.

The side effect is that the spices also help. They're antimicrobial because I've made big batches of these where I've had to throw them away because I'd start to see, like little molds growing in it. But when I throw the spices in, never molds. I never, I never.

The cinnamon is definitely one you use, right?

Oh, my gosh. I use everything. Like, I'm serious. Like coriander. I'll use oregano. I'll use. Really? Oh, yeah. I mean, paprika. I mean, like, everything in my spice cabinet goes in there except for garlic. I've tried garlic and it just. It's horrible. But yeah. And I've got the whole list on my website of all the various spices. I can't even think of them all off the top of my head.

That's. That's great. So you're sharing your. Your tricks on your website. That's cool.

I put everything exhaustively that I do on my website. Just give it all away for free because I'm not trying to make money off of people. People keep saying, you should write this in a book. You could sell this. I'm like, yeah, But I'm not. I don't. I want to share this. I want it available to people. I don't want them to have to shell out their hard earned money just to get, you know, information that's valuable. Oh, so I just give it.

Oh, that's great. That's great. But you can still put together a book. It would be beautiful. But yeah, you already have all the material. Um, so, so your, your website, can, can you give it to, to the audience here?

Yeah, it's davepasco.net.net okay. P, A, S, C O E. Yeah.

Okay, so, so let's, let's move on to the next big subject, which are supplements, because, you know, it's food, exercise, supplements. It's a lot of people in the biohacking space, I think they have FOMO syndrome when it comes to supplements. The moment they read about something being really good, you know, for some kind of physiological function, then they think, oh my God, I have to have it. So how do you look at how we should approach supplements?

Well, it's funny because, you know when I tell people that my pace of aging is as good as it is because of just eating clean food without processed foods. Right. And then I believe that everybody's pace of aging that is good is good for that reason. Because I know people that are on the leaderboard that even have better paces of aging than me that don't take any supplements at all. Like Julie Gibson Clark. I love talking about her on every single podcast that I'm on because she's a working mom. She doesn't have the kind of money to spend on doing this test all the time, which is what's made her drop off the leaderboard, unfortunately, because now the new rules are you have to have at least three tests a year, and she can't afford to do that. That's just crazy because those tests are getting more and more expensive.

$700 a test.

Yeah. And if you want their new, their new pace of aging along with their health together it's like two grand for the fully comprehensive test. It's phenomenal information. But, you know, you've got to have some really disposable income to be doing that at any kind of regular interval. So I like to refer to her because she's gotten this great pace of aging that was better than Brian's and mine and was not doing a whole bunch of supplements. She's just extremely physically active. She likes to go out rucking, so she's sweating all the time. She lives in Arizona, so that Helps with the sweat. And she makes all of her own food. She's always cooking. And so right there, that was the first sign to me. Okay, so, yeah, let me go back a little bit. That was one of the things when I joined the Rejuvenation Olympics that I was really excited about because their tagline was crowdsourcing longevity, which to me meant that with all of us contributing and joining this competition, we're gonna, like, all get together, share notes, and figure out, like, what's the least common denominator? Like, what are we all doing that's in common? What are some of us that are really successful and doing a lot less than the rest of us? You know, what are those key things that they're doing? Because that's what we should all be focusing on. Right? Again, trying to. Trying to learn from the most successful people. That was my excitement about joining this competition. But to my disappointment, my extreme disappointment, the organizer of this competition, namely Brian, never. Never contacted any of us. Even all the people that were beating him, you would think that he would want to know, like, wow, what are you guys doing that's making you more successful than us? Yeah, well, he did find out because he ended up sending a questionnaire out to all of us, which was supposed to get published through the Rejuvenation Olympics. So we all answered the questions about what we were doing, what supplements we were taking, all the interventions we were doing that never went anywhere except for. I think. I'm sure he saw it, but it never got shared with the rest of us. And then we were also very disappointed to find out that Brian's public response to all this was, oh, just do what I do. Buy my nutty pudding, take my longevity mix, use my snake oil, because that's going to give you longevity like me. It's basically the message that he gives.

One thing that's not. I mean, like, I have a friend who's a biohacker. She did a post on Instagram looking at. Because she bought all this food from Brian Johnson, but they came in plastics and just, you know, she said, tastes horrible just the way it was made. She just couldn't believe it. And, yeah, what a shame. You know, I think a lot of people will love to trust and believe his product to. To accelerate them into this longevity game. But, yeah, and I think they even had. So after feeding people things with plastics, they have things that help you detox from plastics. So.

Yeah, well, they'll sell you a microplastics test kit. Right. Which is, to me, is laughable. Because the microplastics are building up in our tissue, like our brains and our organs. If it's floating around in your bloodstream, you've got some big time issues going on. I mean, you must have had some very recent exposure. And that's what a blood test is going to look for. It's going to find microplastics in your blood. The only way they're going to know if it's in your tissue is if they do a biopsy. And nobody's going to be giving you a brain biopsy. So that's not going to happen. And there's absolutely nothing that we can do about it. So why would you take a test to tell you the results of something if there's absolutely nothing you can do about it other than just stop, you know, eating things that are, you know, wrapped in plastic. Right. Or stop storing your food in plastic. Store things in glass, you know.

Well, I've heard some people doing microplastics detoxification, so I have to look a little deeper into that.

I've heard that even doing a sauna treatment, you can sweat out microplastics because if it is in your skin tissue, it will go out. But if it's deep in organs, yeah, that's, that's a challenge. That's a bigger challenge.

I love your anecdote about Sue Julie that she was able to not take any supplements and achieve, you know, like, beat people who are spending way, way more.

And so I will answer your question about the supplements because I'm getting to that in a very roundabout way. But one more point I wanted to make about this is that if you, if you've ever heard like, you know, Ryan Smith or Hannah Went, the founders of True Diagnostic, although when they speak on their podcast, they talk about how the tests were developed and early applications for why they were used. And they're, they're very accurate tests according to experimentation, like they originally. I keep saying they're originally designed, but I want to be careful about that wording. They were originally utilized in forensic medicine to help determine the age of cadavers within, you know, within a plus or minus number of months, accuracy. And they're used to be able to help age refugees that come into the country that don't have any paperwork, so you can at least determine, you know, whether their Social Security eligible or not if they become a citizen. So it has those uses. But going through a lot of the, the literature and the paperwork on what, how the test was designed specifically for. If you had like a cadaver for example, you don't know if that cadaver, while they were alive, had any particular diseases, like, were they a diabetic, did they have heart disease, did they have high blood pressure in some way? I mean, whatever it was that they might have suffered from in life, you don't know if they had those issues. So those issues need to not affect the test for epigenetic age. So they very specifically looked for epigenetic SNPs that would not be influenced by disease state. So Matt said, you have to consider that the people that are on the Rejuvenation Olympics leaderboard, myself included, just because you have a slow pace of aging or a younger epigenetic age, it doesn't necessarily mean that you are metabolically healthy. Because again, you could have heart disease and you could have high blood pressure, you could have diabetes and still have a good pace of aging or a young epigenetic age, just by design of the way that the test, the clocks were developed. So that's why it's just one number. It's not the only number. And so with that in mind, people ask me, why do you take all those supplements then? If you think that just having a good diet with no processed food is all it takes to be younger and have a young pace of aging? Because that's not the whole story. The health, the metabolic health is a big aspect that people don't consider when they just think of the pace of aging test. So I take very specific supplements to address higher level organ systems. Like, I'll take specific supplements for eye health because my dad suffered from both wet and dry macular degeneration. And by going through his genetics and mine, I know for a fact that I inherited at least three genetic markers from him for macular degeneration. So I'm being very intentional about making sure that I get supplements that are good for my eyes, like, you know, astaxanthin, zeaxanthin, there's luteolin and there's lutein. I'm not gonna try anyway. There's a bunch of different supplements that are very, very good for the macula and the retina and the eye in general. And I take all those specifically because I want to avoid having the macular degeneration like my dad did. And just because you have the genetics for something, it doesn't mean that you're going to get it because lifestyle overrides genetics or epigenetics overrides genetics. So that's why I take a bunch of a lot of the supplements that I take. Because I want to make sure that, you know, my liver and kidneys are functioning well. I want my heart good because I don't want heart disease to take me out. I want my brain health to be very good. I don't want to suffer from Alzheimer's or dementia at some point. And there are different supplements that are beneficial for those conditions. There's some supplements that are good for mitochondrial health, which helps your energy. You've got things like NMN or NR nicotinamide riboside. They're very good at helping your body create nad, which is, you know, one of those rate limiting factors when you, your body needs to produce ATP, which is the fuel for our cells and that keeps us alive and energetic. And so I take all these different supplements to address deficiencies that I find that I have through testing to make those deficiencies go away and to try to keep my different organs in the best health that I can.

Right, so you're tailoring your particular biology by using targeted extracts, herbal extracts or whatever new molecules that we have discovered.

And so I do ton of testing, like I'll blood test every single month and I'll do a huge range of markers in the chest. I do spectracell micronutrient analysis analysis every so often. I'll do hair tissue mineral analysis to see like what's building up in my tissue. I found that I had way too high of calcium through, through hair tissue mineral analysis, which is fascinating because, you know, back in the day they used to tell everybody that you're all calcium deficient, right? You need milk to build strong bones. And so we were all taking calcium supplements. And oddly enough, after doing that for several decades, they found out that women were suffering osteoporosis even worse than they were before. And of course they linked that to taking the wrong kind of calcium. Right. The calcium they tend to put in most of our foods when they fortify them is calcium carbonate, which is basically chalk. Apparently from what I've read on this, that our bodies. Well, your tongue is usually like the chemical sensor in your body when you're tasting your food. Your tongue is telling your brain what is coming in and it's telling your stomach which acids and things to produce to help break these things down. So everything, you know, the gut brain axis, it's all tied together with your tongue. As your body knows what it's taking in, it senses that you've got this calcium coming in. So your body then says, okay, I know I've got calcium coming in at the moment, it's not available. So I'll just borrow some from my bones because I know this other stuff will come and replace it later. So it borrows calcium from the bones that your body uses in its metabolic processes. But then that calcium carbonate comes in and doesn't get utilized. It's not. It doesn't. Not really bioavailable. It just sort of passes on through and that's how you end up leaching calcium out of your bones. And all these women ended up with, you know, osteoporosis over these decades. But yet you still see calcium carbonate as the calcium supplement that gets added into all of our food supply, which is very annoying. And almond milk and everything else that you look at, you'll obviously calcium carbonate on there anyway, huge digression. But it's just shows you how all this stuff is connected. I was taking calcium supplements now at the time, I was also eating very good, clean, a lot of greens, right? Very healthy greens, which are very rich in calcium. So I didn't need to supplement calcium. I was already getting plenty through my diet. And by supplementing, I was taking on too much calcium, which again, at the time I thought, well, no big deal. Calcium is water soluble. I'll just pee it out, right? No, it builds up in your tissue and you can get like calcium deposits in bones, like in your joints. You can get calcium deposits in your heart. So, like, calcified heart is a extremely bad thing to have. Which of course then led me to go to my cardiologist and go get a, you know, what was it? A calcium coronary CT scan just to validate that, you know, I hadn't screwed up my, my heart by doing all this supplemental calcium over these decades, you know, and then various other tests. So all these little things matter. You can't always go by marketing, right? They even tell us today that everybody's deficient in magnesium, right? There's lots of marketing about that. That may be true. I'm not saying it's not. There's probably a lot of the population that's not getting it. But if you're eating a lot of foods that are very rich in magnesium, you probably don't need it. So maybe you are just peeing that out and no harm, no foul. I don't know if there's any issue with too much calcium or, I'm sorry, too much magnesium building up in the body, that I don't know yet. Maybe that'll turn out to be a problem. Decades from now, they'll figure out, like they did decades ago about calcium we'll see in time. All this stuff matters, but that's why I like to test, not guess, so that I know what's going on in my body. You end up getting people that just take these supplements like Ryan's Longevity Mix, that's got all these things in there that sound like they're great and they're all put in there. But I got invited to a Zoom call once by a, by a health group. I was a surprise guest. And speaking to all these people, like many of them had been in Brian's BP 5000 group, that was his test group for his original batch of products. They did all the testing that he claims that they've done on it. And like every single one of them was complaining that they had to drop out because it was giving them gastric distress in some way or another. And I thought that was odd. So I started looking at what the ingredients of the supplements and the dosages of things that were in it. And I thought, well, no wonder. I mean, sure, some of the studies say that it's beneficial to have this amount of supplement X or Y, but many times you can't just jump into that dose. You have to start with something small and build yourself up to it so that you can build a gut tolerance to it. Otherwise you're going to have, you know, disaster pants or, you know, gas and bloating and, and feel nauseous. It's. Anyway, so that's why I'm not a big fan of people selling a mix of things that sound healthy, because studies say that those ingredients are healthy without you testing to find out what you really need and can your gut handle that amount.

Yeah. So how many supplements are you taking?

That's the key question. I think at last count on my website, it was like 130 different supplements, which worked out to about 170 individual capsules. Because sometimes I'll take two or three of a particular supplement and maybe 20 or so of those might not be that many. Maybe there's are powders. That number has changed since I put that on the website because I'm. I'm constantly experimenting with different things.

Almost hard to have room for food when you drink that much water. Trying to down these supplements, it would.

Seem that way, but it's funny when you watch me take my supplements because I'll do roughly 90 in the morning with breakfast and about 90 with dinner. And I do those in about maybe six handfuls.

I see.

Okay, so I'll do like, like 15 pills at a time, throw them back, wash it down with a little V8 juice. Because if I tried to wash that down with water, I would gag. It would, it would make me like, want to vomit. But something thick like a smoothie or V8 juice, it just slides right down. You don't even notice.

I like your idea of targeting your particular vulnerabilities with certain supplements. I think that's totally, you know, very reasonable. What I don't think it's a good way to approach it is the FOMO approach that I heard this is good, so I better get on it. And then people end up taking so many. I'm a believer in giving your body the foundation of what it needs. And then it would just do the rest for you. Because just think of it, you, you yourself made yourself some whatever decades ago from a single cell, right? The cells know what to do if you just give it all the things it needs, the basic ingredients. So. But a lot of basics are missing in modern life. The basic nutrients, the minerals, amino acids and antioxidants and all that. So I'm very much a proponent of replacing what we don't have enough of. But to put a lot of things on top can be a little dicey. So if you have to recommend a few supplements that you think are really important, that can really make a difference in the, in, in, in. In their health, the pace of aging, etc, which ones would you recommend?

Oh, I mean, again, as far as pace of aging, I don't think any of them matter. Right. It's just don't eat processed foods. I think that's going to make the big difference, the pace of aging for health in general. Again, it, it depends on so many things. And that's not a cop out if you, if you consider how complex our bodies are, are. Every body is individually different. We're different genders, we're different ages, which, I mean, obviously women need a lot more of certain supplements than men do at different times of the month. You know, there are, at different ages, we produce less NAD for one example. Right. And we might need to start supplementing as we get older. There are many other supplements like that that our body requires more of or that we produced naturally. And now we're not producing as much of as we did previously. So gender matters, age matters, your genetics matter, the rest of your lifestyle matters, your gut microbiome matters. Like how much of these supplements are you actually absorbing? What's, what's really bioavailable. And that can vary depending on what your gut microbiome is like. And again, what your Genetics are like a certain people are genetically disposed to, you know, potentially reacting differently to these supplements or not at all. So we're so individually varied. Again, that's why I'm opposed to anybody selling some one product that's supposed to work for everyone. Right. It's especially if it was designed for one person specifically. And that one person says, oh, what I'm doing should be extrapolated to the entire population and you all should do exactly what I'm doing. No, that's. If you look at how medicine is going today, I'm sure you've seen this. The direction for medicine is personalized medicine. It's not one size fits all. We learned decades ago one size fits all does not work for everyone.

And that really kind of, you know, reminds me the beauty of a system like Chinese medicine or Ayurveda because it's exactly very personalized. Each person, they're going to look at your tongue, look at your, you know, feel your pulse and, and listen to your entire history and then tailor make each person's medicine. Right. You go to Chinese pharmacy, they give you a pinch of this, a pinch of that because it's according to what your system requires. So now we're coming. Yeah. Or recognizing the complexity of each person. What about other hacks, other, other tricks? So we talked about infrared sauna, which I love. It's a great way to gently detox.

It's my favorite hack, if you want to call it a hack, just for the reason you mentioned and there's so many others. I mean, yes, it helps you sweat out a lot of things. So you're detoxing. It's so good for your skin. It opens your pores, it cleans your pores. It can really help your skin glow from that. For me, a vanity thing is I've noticed it really helps melt away like all of my subcutaneous fat. Gives my arms and body a very vascular look because they don't have that subcutaneous fat that's there drives people crazy when they're trying to draw my blood because my veins are super squished and flat because there is no, you know, fat there. But, but it looks amazing. And I to sauna use it helps increase, you know, heat shock proteins. I mean, it just does so many good things for your body. It helps with protein folding. I mean, I could go on and.

On in the sauna. What's the temperature you use?

So my infrared sauna, well, it's a little different now because I just got a new thermostat. But my thermostat would go up to about 140. And then I tricked it out to go up to about 158. And with the new thermostat, it can go up to about 168, 170, which is pretty hot for an infrared sauna. But I also push it higher because I added four near infrared floodlights into the corners. So that helps, you know, heat the air up. So I've got the, the regular far infrared that comes from the panels. I have the regular infrared that comes from the door glass. And then I have the near infrared in the corner. So I'm getting all the, all three while I'm in there. And I'll do that for. It depends. It depends on what I'm doing. If I'm in there. Maybe just meditating. Yeah, it's typically maybe 30 minutes. There's times when I, because my particular sauna, it's clear light Sanctuary 3, it's. The whole front of it is glass. So you're not, you don't feel like you're stuck in a box anywhere if you're claustrophobic at all. This doesn't bother you? And I have a flat screen. It's on a big swing arm and I'll swing it out right in front of the, the sauna doors. And I'll watch Netflix while I'm in the sauna. My favorite show and like 45 minutes to an hour can go by and I realize, oh my gosh, I've been in here this whole time.

That's right.

Yeah.

You know, you don't want to leave because you're in the middle of your show.

Action really helps a lot when you're sweating your butt off.

What about cold plunge is all the rage. Are you doing that at home too?

Yeah, you know, I got into that for a while in, in Michigan. It's hard to do cold plunges because they freeze solid, especially this time of year. I have a chest freezer that I bought that is in my backyard. It's a seven foot chest freezer. Bought it at like Home Depot. I mean, it's just a regular freezer for storing things. And I, I followed some information that I got online of how you can caulk the seams to seal it all in. And I have it on a appliance timer so it only comes on for maybe 15 minutes in the middle of the night each night. And it maintains its temperature so I can get the water pretty much to whatever temperature I want. And it maintains that by only running that Short period of time. And that works great for a while. The problem with that is, you know, I tend to, you know, sweat a lot and work out a lot. And I also tend to use a lot of lotions on my skin. And when you're sweating and you have lotions and things like that, you either have to go take a shower first before you get into this cold plunge, which is not practical. In fact, it's rather annoying. You tend to want to go into it, like straight out of doing a workout or a sauna session because you want to do that contrast therapy. Like the heat, cold, heat, cold, and the sweat builds up, the oils, lotions build up. I don't have any mechanism to clean that. And so it gets a little scummy. It can get some mold and bacteria growing, which is not healthy. And so I end up having to scrub it out and bleach it, drain it, you know, of course, refill it, which is a huge outlay of, you know, water that could be expensive. So practicality wise, just didn't work for me. So instead I, I just utilize cold showers instead. I'll do a normal warm shower and then at the end I'll just turn the hot completely off, which in the winter time in Michigan is brutal. And so I'll do that. Or I mean, I can also just come out of the sauna and go right into my backyard in the wintertime, you know, and I'm getting like the cold, frigid air from outside. I even did a video one time when the temperature was like minus 10, I think, and posted that online because I was out there and as long as the sun was shining on me, I felt good because I had the radiant heat. But you could just see my breath coming off like a dragon and it was just cold as heck out there. Wow.

Okay. That's another way to do it. Or roll on the snow.

That can be rough though, because, you know, snow, those ice crystals, they can be really sharp and they will tear up your skin if the snow is not real light and powdery. So you have to be careful about what kind of snow you're going to roll in. I've tried it. That's how I know you try.

That's great. That's awesome. Any other thing that you, you do that you, you think may help somebody?

Oh, gosh, I do. I do so many things. I mean, I've got, I have a Carol bike, which I absolutely love. It's an AI driven bike.

What kind of bike?

Carol C A R O L. Okay. It's an AI driven bike. It's a, it's called a re hit. So it's high intensity interval training, but multiple intervals. And their typical protocol is it's like a seven minute session basically. And you do that every day. It doesn't sound like much because you're doing two 20 second all out sprints, but you have like a two minute warm up. You do a 20 second sprint just as fast as you can pedal, two minutes to recover, and then another two minute or a 20 second sprint followed by a two minute cooldown. Those 20 seconds feel like an eternity, but it really makes a big difference. I thought it was a gimmick really when I first saw it. And even when I first bought it and used it for several months, I felt like it wasn't doing anything for me because I wasn't realizing it's an AI driven bike. So it's constantly gauging your performance and it's constantly changing the resistance up each time to match how much better you're getting. And so when I felt like I wasn't improving, I was and didn't realize. And the way I found out that I was was, well, two things by accident. One, I have this thing I do every year which is getting ready to come up again. The American Lung association has a, what they call their four Fight for Air climb. And I, I do that every year with my friends. It's a great way of raising money for, you know, ala and my mom actually passed from metastasized breast cancer in her lungs. So. So there's that. You know, I kind of do that for, for her as well, but, but I participate in that every year. And last year I didn't get to train. Usually I'll, I'll start running in preparation for this because the way they do it here in Detroit, you run the bleachers of Comerica Park Stadium. So you're running up and down the bleachers all the way around the stadium. It's a great workout. Really burns out your legs again. Every year I would train for that. Might do a bunch of stair work in preparation. But last year I was so busy I did Italy for 30 days, so I didn't get to do any training. I was up in my attic as soon as I got home from Italy because I was tearing out old insulation and putting in new. And next thing I knew it was like, oh, okay, well, I guess we're doing the Fight for Air Kleim tomorrow. And so I did it with no training whatsoever. I felt really good that day. I had fun. But when I looked at my time afterwards, again, it was like one of those Brian Johnson moments. Like, wait, what? I had beat the time I had of my previous five years. And I'm like, wait, how can that be? Because I haven't trained. I've done nothing. Again, I wasn't thinking about the Carol bike as being training. So it didn't occur to me then it was the Carol bike until I was getting ready to do with Team World Vision, I was preparing to do a climb of Mount Kilimanjaro. And so I had to do the training program for that, to get acclimated and ready for that. But again, because I was in Italy and I was up in the attic, I wasn't doing the training program like I was supposed to. So by the, by the time I finally had time to start, I jumped right in at 6 miles. Instead of building up slowly like a couple of miles at a time and gradually getting to six miles. My first six mile run, my time was better than my six mile run after a full year of training the year before.

Yeah.

And I'm like, what? How can this be? And then so I'm like really just struggling, trying to think, what am I doing? Then I realized it's this silly Carol bike. I mean, it's, its whole purpose is to increase your cardiovascular improvement. Right.

So you're already doing well with your, the P90X, right? You love it. What made you add this bike into your regimen?

Because before I started doing marathon training, I always used to do sprints. I would put on a weighted vest and go do sprints. I got up to like where I was wearing 50 pounds of weight and I would just run like as fast as I could for as long as I could. Take a break and do that again. Because to me, that seemed like it was more useful. It was more practical as a life ability or life skill to be able to run away from something quickly or chase somebody or something down quickly. And I used to, I used to love it because I would race any kid, any teenager I would challenge, I mean, like a 50 year old. And I was challenging teenagers at races and I would always whip their butts, you know, and it was because of my sprint training that I could do that. But then when I switched up and started marathon training, well, that's, that's completely the opposite. That's very long endurance stuff, going slow. But later, throughout the years, the science started coming out saying that, no, really, the sprint training is more beneficial, not the endurance training. It's so for health wise, cardiovascular fitness, VO2 max, all the things that matter for longevity, the sprint training or the high intensity stuff is the better form. So I knew I needed to go back to doing that again. But I'd lost the ability because I hadn't been training to to do that with the weighted vest and go outside and I couldn't very well do it in the wintertime here in Michigan gets very icy and it's slippery and I'm not looking to go break a hip or anything. I had had slip and falls previously in the past and done elbow damage and shoulder damage. In fact that was part of what I came to see you for originally. When I look back on that, it was a slip and fall that tore my rotator cuff the first time and then later on doing some crazy push up challenges that messed it up even worse. The trail bike was a great way for me to be able to do high intensity interval stuff all throughout the winter and not have to worry about the outside.

Yeah, it's fantastic. I have to look that, look that up. Yeah. So for the sake of time, unfortunately we have to wrap it up. Even though it's, you know, you're giving way lots of great information. I think, I think it's really sparkling people's ideas of how they can do this for themselves. So Dave, I know you freely share, you know, generously share lots of information to help others and so your website is just davepascal.net correct? Correct. Pasco spelled at P A, S, C.

O E. And I have all the biohacks that I do. All the crazy stuff that we didn't get to in this discussion. It's, it's all out there.

Maybe we'll do a part two. Yes, yes. If you want to mention briefly the next couple minutes, you know, your other hacks, you can give people a preview.

Oh sure. I was also going to say I can be found on Instagram at Dave Pasco in case you're looking for me there. So I do posts on that and people are trying to encourage me to start my own YouTube channel, which I have a channel. I just haven't posted anything there yet. So that's probably going to come. But gosh, some of the other biohacks that I like to do, toys I have, I have a biocharger in my living room. It's a fascinating piece of equipment if you've ever seen it. It's, it's enormous. It's the centerpiece of my whole living room. It's, it's got a Tesla Coil in it. It's produces about 70,000 volts of electricity and it's got programs in it for just about everything that you can think of. And trust me, it works because being an experimenter, I've turned it on full blast and used it like thinking this, not respecting the power that it has, and made some dumb mistakes with it that I won't repeat, but yeah, but it definitely works. What else? I mean, I've got like a PEMF mat in my bed. It's a beamer. You have a beamer that you have in your office? So I use my beamer every morning and every evening for, to help blood flow throughout all the little capillaries and things to my body. There's probably dozens I'm forgetting right now.

And then there's an explosion with technology. So I'm still bringing in new things into our office. But, yeah, it's a very exciting time to live. So if we just sustain ourselves a little bit longer, I think some transformative technology is going to come our way. Yeah. So just, just eat healthy, do your exercises, get some good rest, sleep, and then wait for the breakthroughs.

Well, yeah, we've. We've actually forgotten to mention the obvious, haven't we? Stem cells and exosomes.

Stem cells. Yeah, stem cells. It's, you know, we know, right. And you are, you, You've. You have utilized it, right? You. That, that's one piece that, that you brought into your regimen. So what do you think that did for you, the stem cells?

It made a big difference for the rotator cuff impairments that I was suffering from, because before seeing you, they had gotten so bad. They were to the point where I couldn't sleep on my, on my sides at all. I just, I'm forced to be a back sleeper and I can't sleep on my back all night long because that gets uncomfortable. So I have, I feel like I need to roll to a side, but I can only stay there for just a few minutes before that starts to cause a pain and I have to roll to the other side. So I was having just very restless sleep from that. And so once I saw you and got the therapeutic dose, it made a big difference. I was able to sleep on my sides. Okay. Now I think I need, I probably need at least one more treatment to be 100%. But my range of motion improved. I mean, obviously after doing your, your treatment, I did like my own, like rehab, I would call it, where I did a lot of stretching, trying to, you know, slowly not force, but, you know, work that range of motion back into my ability again. So now, you know, full range of motion over my head. And, yeah, it's a big difference.

Right. And it's not just fixing a local issue for you. It's rejuvenating your whole body. Because we've seen that in research. That's what it's doing for. For the animals, when we can study how long they live since they. They only live in gen, on average about 20 months. So we've seen what it does to their longevity and to their health span. So I think it's a phenomenal thing to add to the regimen. Of course, I'm, you know, I'm a, I guess, biohacker as well, even though I'm a doctor. But I do all these things, you know, a lot of things you talk about, I do as well. And stem cell therapy is definitely one of the cornerstones, I think, to just using the intelligence of the cells to dial everything back to a younger state. So you can. You can progress and degrade, but then it will bring you back, right? You do the regular infusion, and it brings you back to a younger state. So, yeah, it's a phenomenal tool.

And one more thing I want to say about that, that I want people to know is that I. I've had people offer to give me stem cells for free to promote their clinics, and I have turned them down. I went to your clinic specifically because of all of the great content that you put out and because of your credentials and because I know that you really know what you're talking about, because I've really looked deep into you, and I paid my own way for your. You did not give me free. I want people to know you didn't give me free stem cells just to be able to brag on you. And it was still the best money I ever spent. And I want people to know that because I know a lot of people come on podcasts and they are like, you know, quick quid pro quo, right? They're getting something for something. Right? That was not the case with me. I gladly paid, and it was like I said, it was worth every penny.

Oh, thank you so much. That is a very important point. Because that's true. That happens a lot in this phase that, you know, people are scratching each other's backs and. And you came to me, I didn't know you. And then you trusted me and you. You wanted the therapy from. From, you know, basically the. With the protocol that I designed. So that means a lot to me. And I'M so glad that you are seeing the benefits and then you're getting even more rejuvenated. So, yeah, I look forward to continuing the journey with you and continuing to share with everybody else. So thank you so much, Dave. I appreciate you.

Thank you. It was great.