860 Age Backwards, Biohack Your Life and Be Super Human with Dave Asprey

This is episode number 860 with New York Times bestselling author, Dave Asprey. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur.

And each week we bring you an.

Inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness.

Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

Buddha said, To keep the body in good health is a duty, otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear. We've got one body, one body that we get to live with, that we're born with. We make certain decisions throughout our childhood, our teens, our 20s, our 30s, and so on. that determined the quality of our life, how we eat, how we sleep, how we think. The environment that we cultivate or the lack of environment that we have to support our life drastically affects the quality of our life. And this is all about how to optimize, how to age backwards, how to biohack your life. What are those things that you could be doing differently that you didn't have the tools or resources to in the previous years? What are the latest advances in technology? What are the latest strategies, habits and rituals that you can be doing? Even if you just did one thing differently to optimize your life, it could drastically transform the quality of your life. And Dave Asprey is here to talk about how to do that. He is the creator of the widely popular Bulletproof Coffee, which I have pretty much every week. Host of the podcast, Bulletproof Radio and author of the New York Times bestselling book, the Bulletproof Diet. and through his work, Dave provides information, techniques and keys to taking control of and improving your biochemistry, your body and your mind, so they work in unison, helping you execute at levels far beyond what you'd expect without burning out, getting sick or allowing stress to control your decisions. And he was described by Men's Health as a lifestyle guru and his body hacking gym, Upgrade Labs has more than 15 different technologies in two different signature locations dedicated to improving mental physical performance and recovery. I've been in there and tried a few different things. I love it in there. And it's got a new book called Superhuman. It's out right now. And in this interview, we talk about Dave's seven pillars of aging, of how to understand them. And he'll tell you what type of lifestyle changes you should make to have longevity in your life. And I asked him to distill this down to seven key pillars because there's so much information out there. We talk about the truth about kale. Now, I eat a lot of kale and there's surprising destructive things that kale have that are also found in many healthy foods, quote unquote healthy foods that he talks about and shares those informations. Talk about the importance of figuring out your own body in order to know what you need to do to boost your mitochondria, your immune system and overall functionality. how to fight cancer with nature and essential oils. This was powerful. And five simple but powerful things everyone can do right now to feel better, stronger, happier and live longer. I know you're gonna love this one. If you are looking to optimize your health, then this is for you. And if you know someone in your life who maybe has some challenges in their health, maybe they're picked on a few extra pounds lately, maybe they feel more lethargic or they have trouble sleeping lately, or they feel overwhelmed and stressed, then send them this interview. You can pay this forward by being the hero and champion of someone's life by just sending them this message and say, Hey, check out this free interview on the School of Greatness. The link is lewishowes.com/860 and ask them what they got out of this for their lives. Hold them accountable, help them, send them a couple of tips you get from this as well and really support someone in your life, whether it's a friend, a family member, a parent, a child, someone in your life that you think you want to support and be holding more accountable to their health as well. This could be a powerful one for them. Or just send the link on the Apple podcast or Spotify link or any podcast app that you listen to. Just send this over to them. I'd love for you guys to connect and be a part of the community on the School of Greatness podcast and help each other improve each other's lives. That's what this is all about.

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And now without further ado, let's dive into this interview with the one and only, Dave Asprey. Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness podcast. We got my man, Dave Asprey, in the house. My man, good to see you. You've got a new book, Super Human: the Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and maybe even live forever. So we're gonna talk about how we're gonna live forever today. But we were talking about a little bit before we started about hormones. And I met with a nutritionist about six to seven months ago. 'cause I felt like I've been working really hard as an athlete, eating well, training hard, but I haven't been able to get that feeling, the final little belly fat gone. And I was like, why is this happening? You know, I'm a fit guy, I work out, I get up early, I do the right things. So why am I not at the fitness level that I truly want to be in? And I met with this nutritionist, and I did all the blood work and all the, you know, I did all the sampling. And he was like, it doesn't matter how well you eat, how hard you work out, two days, it comes down to sleep and hormones. He was like, your hormones, you have too much estrogen and you're not able to burn that extra fat with that amount of estrogen and you're not producing enough testosterone. And he said, the human body is not designed to be running as hard as you're running it. at this level of life, right? It's designed to be sitting by a tree and laying in the sun for 30 to 60 minutes a day and getting lots of sleep, not running your mind to the extreme amounts of pressures and stresses that the human body does today. And he said, Here are a lot of things we can do, but truly it's going to be hormones that you'd have to master first.

Nice. So, I like this guy already.

So, tell me about hormones and what you've learned and do hormones affect how long you live as well as your health or does it affect everything or does it just affect some things?

Hormones affect everything. There's a whole chapter in Super Human on using hormones for anti-aging. There's a lot of fear around testosterone replacement mostly because in the 70s, you know, the roid rage, they're using Non-bioidentical testosterone. So these are pharmaceuticals that mess up your liver and seriously spike your testosterone way beyond normal levels. When I was 26, I did what you did. And this was 20 years ago. No one did that sort of stuff. It was even hard to find a doctor who could order labs. And it turns out I had more estrogen than my mom.

You were, wow, 27.

You were also like, what, 80 pounds overweight?

300 pounds. Yeah, about 80 pounds overweight then, yeah.

More estrogen than your mom.

And less testosterone than my mom.

Wow. And you were how old?

My mom's kind of buff.

How old were you?

I was 26.

Wow.

And so my health was a complete shit show. I mean, I try to talk about this and say, guys, if I can do the things that I've done, it's going to be a lot easier for you because you did not start out. I still have like massive stretch marks. And it turns out, I went on testosterone and... At 26.

At 26.

And it was one of that and thyroid hormone because my thyroid was completely messed up. I'm hoping your nutritionist looked at your thyroid levels. Yeah. Because they start to decline a little bit around 40 and even a tiny decrease in thyroid, this is the thermostat for your body. If it goes down a little bit, like, oh, that's normal for your age. Who cares for your age? You should have the testosterone levels of a 30-year-old when you're 70 or when you're 170. So if your body doesn't do it, then you say, Am I in charge? Or is some that's designed to have children and then die quickly, which is pretty much all life forms. Right. Maybe you just should take over. So that's what I did. When I was testing the Bulletproof Diet, I went off testosterone for a couple of years to see if that was a variable. And I found out if I slept really carefully, I did all sorts of things. I could keep myself at medium levels, but if I wanted to be medium high, that using supplements works way better. So the three ways you're going to want to look at testosterone, first step is just look at stopping your testosterone from turning into estrogen. and there's herbal compounds and there's pharmaceuticals that can do that. The second thing you'll probably want to do is look at adding testosterone and you want the bioidentical, the same stuff your body makes. There's basically three or four ways you can do it. There's topical, which is a cream or a gel you put in your armpit or I think the technical term is the chode. The chode. Okay, but kind of down there.

Yeah.

That's actually a great way to go. The problem there is that if you're around kids or anywhere could transfer, that could be a problem. So you're going to be careful there. The benefit to having especially the cream is that if you had a very tiny amount of the cream and it happened to get on your partner in certain areas, it has been named Scream Cream because it has very strong effects on women.

So that's burning or a negative scream or more of like a sexual scream.

As in, I've never had that much blood in that region of my body before and could we please these go again, kind of activities to not be too crass about it. So it's a kind of a well-known anti-aging trick that obviously you would want to let your partner know about this, but it's not enough to do anything physiological just other than like I really, really, really like how I feel right now. So if you have topical testosterone, that's a side hack. You also can inject it. You do that a couple times a week and that's really effective. It's just a pangs, you got to do it. Or right now I have pellets basically my upper butt cheek.

I think you mentioned this to me last time I saw you. Yeah. So you implanted pellets that release slowly over four months.

So once every four months you go and they make a super tiny incision, enough for one stitch basically, and then they stick the little pellets in there and they just dissolve. So then you don't have to think about it.

You don't have to inject it every.

Two times a week. You just don't have to think about it. Does it hurt? No, it's really minor. I mean, it's weird that- Minor surgery. If you get a massage, like you have a little muscle knot, that's not a muscle knot, that's testosterone. and just don't squeeze it real hard because- They'll explode. No, they're like little beads, kind of. They wouldn't explode, but you know, you.

Just don't wanna crush them.

How does that work? Is it effective? Totally. So my levels should be, if I tested right now, about 900, which is.

Where I'd want them to be.

I wonder what I'm at. I don't even sure what I'll have.

To check the labs.

Probably 650, but I don't know, you're still pretty muscular. How old are you? 36. 36. So yeah, I mean, you're getting right to that point. And there's another chapter in here about something called NAD. which is pronounced as Nads, but we're not talking about that. This is an anti-aging compound. And I'm right, you're making me think of this because I just read the whole book, the audiobook. The first time ever, I read the whole thing in a sitting.

Five days is the worst thing ever.

It was a lot, but it really makes it stick in your mind. So there's a thing here, when people hit about 40, especially athletes, they start saying, you know, just almost, to a tee what you said. I'm pushing hard, I wake up, I eat the right stuff, I'm a fit guy, but there's something not quite right. Oftentimes it's declines in NAD. So, what I've done is I've done 10 intravenous infusions. We do this at Upgrade Labs and it's pioneered for drug and alcohol addiction.

But it's a mitochondrial restoration protocol. Yeah, the last time I had you.

On, everything was about mitochondria in the brain, right? Yeah. That was for Headstrong. That book was cool because I didn't expect this, but you know, Homo Deus and Sapiens, those real famous books about-- on the New York Times monthly science book list, which is sort of the baller list. My book was sandwiched between those two books.

That's cool.

Which I never targeted or expected, and I just got an email. I was like, this is the coolest thing that's ever happened to me, but that was just all brain, brain, brain. Superhuman is more, look like now that your brain works, now your body works, how do you keep it around for a lot longer? And of course, there's some mitochondria, but there's seven things that make us old. Mitochondria is just one of them, and it turns out it's one that might be an underpinning for many of the other things.

What are the seven things?

Seven things are, I call them the seven pillars.

Okay.

And one of them is mitochondrial mutations or essentially insufficiency. So this means your cells can't make enough money or enough money, enough energy for you to make enough money. So what really happens there is I wanted to make enough energy to repair a cell. I couldn't make enough energy with the food you gave me or with the state of the cell. So I didn't repair the cell. And then bad things happen.

They get old.

And so if that's one, I want to make sure I don't repeat myself.

When I'm pulling these mitochondria.

Yep. So mitochondria is the first one. The next one is something that I call cellular straight jackets. And it's fascinating that everyone's sort of beta amyloid plaque because, oh, we have Alzheimer's disease, everyone has amyloid. But what you don't know is amyloid forms throughout your body in all of your proteins and it's basically cross-linked proteins that are inflexible and you get more of this as you age. And it turns out there's things you can do that are coming online right now that'll break it down, but there's also a lot you can do just to prevent it from forming. because it's almost like a cellular level scar tissue. So you've taken plenty of hits as an athlete, right? So you know what scar tissue in an elbow or knee or hip or something does. Imagine each cell, every time it gets inflamed, it just wants to get a little bit more scar tissue. This is happening. If you're going to live to at least 180 like I am, you might want it to happen a little bit less, otherwise I'm going to be walking.

Around pretty stiff when I'm old and.

I don't really want that. Okay, so how do we eliminate that? Well, that one, I mean, we can go through in detail on each of these things. That one, it turns out what you eat really matters because if you eat stuff that makes you inflamed, or if you have an autoimmune condition, or if you have environmental allergies and you don't deal with them, that constant chronic low levels of inflammation, that's what does that.

That builds up, yeah.

Yeah, so you're talking 20, 30 years after this stuff starts and all of a sudden just bad stuff is going on in your body and you don't know why and literally the cells can't move the way they're supposed to move. And what's going on there is you eat fried stuff on a regular basis. You eat those grains, the whole grains you still think are healthy even though they are shown to cause inflammation in all humans. Sorry, I wish it wasn't that way because I like a croissant like the rest of us. I love croissants. They're just not good for us. And some people are more sensitive than others. And for me, there's something called the Nightshade Family. And I wrote about this in the Bulletproof Diet, by the way, I saw it right there. Thank you. And Dr. Gundry talks about nitric oxide.

Yeah, yeah. So that was one of the four.

Categories of plant toxins that might be a problem for you in the Bulletproof Diet. And Dr. Gundry, who's a good friend, focuses on those very heavily. And there's other stuff that comes in plants like heavy metals. It's a major cause of aging. There's a whole chapter on heavy metals. Did you know kale is the number one source of thallium in our diet? Thallium's called the poisoner's poison. So we shouldn't be having kale?

No, kale's gross. Have you eaten it? Oh my gosh, yeah, but they put.

It with sauteed with butter and some garlic, you know? You have to torture kale to make it taste good.

No kale.

I don't know that no kale is necessary, but- I thought leafy greens was the thing. Leafy greens, some of them, but there's a difference in lettuce and kale, a very big difference. You know I have a farm, right? I've got sheep and pigs.

If I give them raw kale, they spit it out.

I'm not even kidding, there's a pile of raw kale, they will not eat it.

I can put it in the compost, the worms will eat it.

Right. Wow. Interesting. So you're not supposed to be eating kale. Kale is high in oxalic acid, which causes systemic inflammation going back to that. Very high in it, actually. Kidney stones and gout are happening in all kinds of people who eat too much kale, especially raw kale. So I wrote a post actually a couple of years ago. It's like, hey, cook your kale, dump the water, add some baking soda to precipitate out these micro crystals. Because one of the things that kale does, if you eat a lot of it, those micro crystals start circulating around, they bind with calcium, and they stick in your tissues. Like that. In women, there's something called vulvodynia, where the crystals form in the labia. And then it's really painful even just to sit down. What about... Cook your kale is all I'm saying. Don't eat it every day.

Cook your kale.

Don't eat raw kale.

What about kale chips now?

I guess it's kind of cooked a little bit, I guess. Yeah, they're cooked, but you want to like wash the stuff out. It's a really strong toxin that the plants use to keep from being over eaten. kill them. Yeah, right. They don't want us to kill them. So that's different than lectins, but there's stuff like that that's out there. But here's the thing. You don't have to be perfect about it. It's not like kale's good or kale's bad. If you're doing two kales a day, you're probably going to get kidney stones or other bad stuff over time. I was a raw vegan. I did a lot of kale. It was not good for my joints. It's not good for most people. So that said, wow, can it taste good with bacon? Hell yeah. So small amounts. If you're having a side dish of collard greens and kale, whatever, just eat it and enjoy it. But if you're doing it on purpose to ramp it up, It's actually not going to make you superhuman. It's probably going to increase systemic inflammation, which is going to increase your risk of the four killers I write about in the book, like diabetes and things like that. Kale doesn't cause diabetes, but systemic inflammation does. So it's like, stop taking these thousand little cuts that we take in our life. Just take less. You don't have to be perfect. And if you can find the foods that are triggers for you, so for me, I can eat some kale occasionally. If I eat a lot of it, I really feel it. But the nightshades, they trash me, and I love them.

And the main nightshades are, is that tomatoes?

Is that? It's spicy peppers, eggplant. I know, cayenne. I grew up in New Mexico. You're not supposed to eat it. Well, no, you can probably eat it just fine. A third of us, if you have the genes I do, I eat it and I have the knee pain. I've had three knee surgeries before I was 23. I had arthritis since I was 14. It's caused by those. If I don't eat them, I have no pain in my back. If I eat them, it comes back reliable every time. But if you don't know it, and you're saying, well, I have this kind of crunchiness and it's always there. You have to find out what's causing it because if you allow it to happen, when you are 60 or 70, you're gonna hate your life, right? And if you fix it now, your energy level goes up right now and you love your life right now and when you're old, you won't look or feel old. So it's that important that we figure that out. So that's kind of the cellular straight jacket. Inflammation causes this cellular level scar tissue to form.

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Then there's zombie cells, which is one of my favorites.

Is this three?

Yeah, this is three.

Zombie cells.

Yeah, zombie cells are cells that should die but don't. And they sit there and they take up space and resources. They make free radicals, but they don't do their job anymore.

So the best way to kill those off is to fast?

Turns out fasting causes autophagy, which is one of the ways to do it. And there's a few drug protocols I write about in here, and some other supplements, one called fisetin that comes from strawberries and seaweed, that are shown to remove senescent cells. And these seven types of aging, these have been studied by a lot of people I've interviewed on my show. And in 20 years of running anti-aging nonprofit, I've gotten to know the people doing the research. So decades of knowledge has gone into, you know, we finally understand this. David Sinclair, that's a guy you'd have on the show if you haven't. He is a guy who's just written a book that says, straight up, I've spent 30 years studying aging at Harvard. And you know what? I feel safe now saying that we can turn the biological clock in ourselves backwards because now we know why we age and what to do about it. Straight up, you don't do that as an academic unless you are sure. We're actually at the point where we know these seven things will do it.

Wow.

If you have a car, You know that you want to keep your car for a while, you should change the oil, change the tires, and do the maintenance schedule. But if you only do half the maintenance schedule, the car isn't going to make it. Well, these seven things in Superhuman are the seven things that you account for because if you don't do all seven of them, you're not maintaining your chassis very well. You're going to have a problem. So to get rid of these zombie cells, fasting is a big deal, as well as some of these other new things that are coming online. and what's neat here is I can actually tell you exactly when and what is happening. And right now, for those most people won't go on the drug cocktail that you can get because it costs about 500 bucks and it's still considered experimental. All of my anti-aging friends, like, oh yeah, I'm gonna do that once every year for the next while because it's worth $500 and they feel better and their immune system works better and they're noticing a difference. So I'm talking about the stuff that crazy billionaires do. the stuff why it works, the stuff that you can do that's very affordable, you know, $50 supplement or something, and then the stuff that's free that stops the problem in the first place. So the deal is you don't have to go out and do it, but anything the crazy billionaires are doing, if it costs $10,000 right now, it's gonna cost 200 bucks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just by raising awareness, you're gonna go to your insurance company and be like, hey man, why can't I get this? Because I don't need knee replacement if you give me stem cells in my knees.

Right.

And I've done, I write about it, share the whole experience. I did a $120,000 whole body stem cell makeover in Utah. On yourself? Well, I mean, I had doctors doing it, not me. Right, right, right. Yeah, so I went in, three doctors, Dr. Harry Adelson led it, and a neurosurgeon from Johns Hopkins named Marcela, and then Amy Killen did the cosmetic stuff. So I'm unconscious for four hours. They're pulling a half a liter of bone marrow out.

How do they do that?

They go in through your hip, the iliac crest. Oh. I've had that done twice. Once I was awake, actually, with no anesthesia.

Oh my gosh.

They take a video. Bone marrow out. The video, you see them hammering on.

This thing, and then they go, in the bone? Look at your face.

Gosh, man. It doesn't hurt. Everyone says it hurts. It's just this, it's the weirdest feeling I've ever had. It was intense, but it wasn't pain. It was, it was more like fingernails on a blackboard intense.

Ah.

So I did that. What was this? Let's see, I did that about a year ago. No way. And how much did they take bone marrow?

Half a liter.

I mean, that's a good amount of bone. Wow, so what do they do with that? Well they take it, they get the stem cells out of it, and then they re-inject them throughout the body. So I had stem cells from my fat and my bone marrow. I had them injected every joint in the body, knees, hips, all along the spine, inside the spine, along the spinal cord with the cannula, into the cerebral spinal fluid, into face, hair, male reproductive organs. Pretty much everywhere you can put a stem cell in a human, I did.

All at the same time. In four hours. Yeah. So, let's say you had to be in pain for a few days afterwards.

You know, the first two days were pretty tough. I couldn't move. Mostly from the spinal stuff where they.

Put it inside the spine. Oh, my gosh, man.

Every joint though, so they're injecting through a needle or through a- yeah, just a needle. And they use a 3D x-ray machine or ultrasound and they to guide the needle to go right to get it along this. But you know what?

You're asleep.

Yeah, you're asleep. You wake up and you sort of, I look at the pain.

Oh, I got a little pain, yeah.

It was the first two days were just not happy. But you know what? This is the sort of thing, I'm very unlikely to have spinal stenosis when I'm 80, because my spine is rejuvenated. And all of the old injuries that I've had are just going away or have gone away. And really dramatic stuff. Even my wife, frozen necks, and she was nine when she fell out of a two-story building. And three days after she got injected, she's like, I can move my head for the first time all the way. This is amazing. So how much of it is this.

Placebo versus-- I don't really-- Science, you know?

Oh, for stem cells, there's a huge amount of science.

I mean, I wonder how much of it is like, okay, it's been injected. Now I can feel confident to, you.

Know-- I think that she's had other treatments. I mean, she's an ER doctor. trained, you know, trained in Caroline Skinner's Institute. She's had lots of people work on it. And she was just not even expecting that sort of like, yeah, inject all these spots, whatever. So for her, it was that. And then they also do the reproductive organs. We've had a couple kids. Wow. And she's 50. And so both of us had our reproductive organs done, and she was just completely floored, like, massive changes. So. so you could say, okay, Dave, that is a ridiculously, you could buy a Tesla for that. Here's the deal. I want to live an extra-- yeah, well, so I'm a guinea pig, so we worked a deal. Yeah, exactly. And two, and I have other friends who've gone through the full treatment, because I'm really serious about living a long time, but it shouldn't cost that much. It will be $12,000 in a little while. It's coming down fast, fast, fast. The differences in how you feel are profound. So if that's an example of what a crazy biohacker would do, Okay, let's say you're facing a hip replacement or joint replacement. Would you go in and spend $5,000 instead of getting the replacement? If you had a 50% chance of not needing a new joint, most people would, especially if they're insurance company would do it, because the joint replacement is 25 grand and growing your own tissues back is five grand. Let's do that. And so a lot of superhuman, I'm going to talk about that kind of stuff saying, maybe you should know it exists. but there's so many things that are free and cheap that can regenerate something. Let's talk about knees. I mean, you and I have talked about knees before, but there's something called Prolozone that I talk about here. They inject ozone gas. It's $150 injection into your knee and it causes cartilage to regrow. And I've seen x-rays before and after people and I've seen the difference in my own joints. So it's pretty strong stuff. And have you ever heard of injecting ozone in a joint? No. Most people haven't, but the science has been going back since World War I, 100 years of science, and it's just unknown. So I interviewed and got to know the pioneers in that space, the people who are the top in the field, and I talk about it in the book saying, here's what ozone therapy does to restore mitochondria, number one of these aging things. So you go through this and there's kind of the story of what it's like to do these things, but also here's what you can do right now to increase Stem cells, by the way, fasting seems to be really effective for like sleep and fasting.

You can do the trick.

Those are crazy things, but then how do you sleep? That's kind of a big deal. Do you track your sleep on your ring?

I need to get the Oura ring.

I'm supposed to get one soon. Oh man, that's amazing, right? Yeah, I'll email Harpreet if you want, but let me show you a sleep score here that's, here we go. So I slept six hours and 50 minutes. Two hours and 50 minutes of dreaming sleep. That's way more than a 20-year-old gets in eight hours. Really?

Oh yeah, and an hour and 19 of deep sleep here.

So I gotta track this so I know if my sleep's working or not. Right, and I can tell you if you're getting an hour, more than an hour, I do an hour and a half of deep sleep, you're getting more than most people. And over time, as you age, there's a decline in REM and deep sleep. Those are what keep you young. so I sleep like a young person.

Wow.

And I did that on purpose. I did not used to be good at sleep. I learned how to do it. I've written the preeminent blogs on sleep hacking. And when people talk about blue blocking glasses, they're not enough. I started a company called TrueDark that does actually patented glasses for sleep that are more than blue blocking. And you wear those right before bed, and I don't get jet lag when I use them. And like all these crazy things, because now we know the science that we didn't know 10 years ago. so our ability to sleep like young people has changed and that will reduce your risk of the things that are most likely to kill you as well as make you younger.

Better sleep. Yeah.

All right, so we got mitochondria, zombie cells, cellular straight jackets. All right, there's buildup of gunk inside the cells. I call it intracellular junk. And our cells have these things called lysosomes and their job is to take broken down parts of the cell or parts food metabolism and digest them and use them. So it's sort of like a furnace that burns waste or burns garbage. So if you went to the dump, there's an incinerator. But what if you put stuff in the incinerator that wouldn't burn? Eventually it gets full and you can't use the incinerator because there's no more space to put stuff in. Well, that's happening in your cells right now. So companies are working on enzymes you'll be able to take that will help to remove that. In the meantime, What you do is you put in less stuff in your body that your cells can't break down. So in other words, don't put the hunks of metal under the incinerator because they don't burn, right?

Right.

So to solve this problem right now, the easiest thing to do is don't eat a lot of sugar because sugar helps to create something called advanced glycation end products, or AGE, and don't eat burned meat. or burn vegetables for that matter. In the Bulletproof Diet, I wrote about the dangers of eating advanced glycation end products. And the problem is there was only two studies. But we know that they form anytime you eat sugar, the sugar goes into your, if you spike your blood sugar level, it goes in and it browns your tissues the way onions get caramelized. That's advanced glycation end products. You can make that creme brulee or that crusty meat. I don't know why they taste good because they're really bad for you, but.

Yeah, they taste good.

So if you don't eat those burnt things. Yeah, go to the restaurant and say, could you not blacken my steak? And you just don't want to eat that blackened super-burned stuff. And if occasionally you have a caramelized crunchy crust on your steak, great. Make it brown, not black. You don't have to be perfect. But when you do that, when you eat those things, now we know they go in and they just stick right in the lysosome and now your cells can't burn all the other bits of protein, so you end up getting eventually zombie cells. because of that. So let's put less stuff in there that's harmful. So don't spike your blood sugar levels, don't eat burned food. Right. Big difference. Okay. Got it. Then there's accumulation of stuff outside the cells, right? And this is another different set of problems. And it's amazing that sometimes fasting makes a really big difference. It does everything, huh? It does, but you can also bind toxins by taking things that bind toxins. You have these heavy metals that are inside the cells and outside the cells, as any animal ages, things that bioaccumulate get worse and worse. So I like to go fishing, and so I'll go up to Alaska with friends once a year. And if you catch a 100-pound halibut, you throw it back. And the reason you do that is this fish is probably 100 years old.

And.

It'S probably going to lay a lot of eggs, which is good. You should let them reproduce. But even if you wanted to eat it, that fish has 100 years of eating other fish. Oh, wow. full of mercury and nickel and cadmium and all the things that will mess up your cellular metabolism, give you gray hair. There's a whole chapter here on gray hair and hair loss and stuff like that and wrinkles and skin. But the real issue here is you and me are the same way. So if you eat food, you need to eat clean food and you want to actually go through and remove the toxins as you go. Otherwise, when you're 100 years old, you have 100 years of toxin buildup of these things that don't naturally leave of the body. So in superhuman, I take this fiber supplement, take activated charcoal, and do these things that allow the body to just naturally eliminate these things. Otherwise, they will go in and they'll be in your liver, they'll be in your brain, they'll be in your skeleton, and they'll be in your nervous system. And over time, all the diseases of aging are associated with metal buildup and those things. So that's an example of a toxin that could be outside of cells. One of the other seven pillars of aging is the telomerase.

Number five?

I think this is number five. Are the telomerase the ones that- We had toxins inside the cells and outside the cells, like the buildups. You have intracellulars, you have extracellulars, number five. Okay. Extracellulars. Extracellular, E-X-T-R-A. Extracellular. So inside and outside the cells. Yeah.

And then, let's see, number six would be telomerase.

And is it the ends of the gene, or the ends of the DNA? What is it? different than the ends of the DNA. It's essentially, imagine it like a wick. If you have a cell, every time it divides, you subtract one unit from the wick, and that's called the Hayflick limit. So it's normally about 37. So if you have normal telomeres, you can copy a cell 37 times, and then it won't do anything. And at that point, you get zombie cells. What you want to do then is figure out a way, how do I add more pieces onto that wick? The only problem is if you add too many pieces onto it, it increases your cancer risk. but what if you could reduce the number of things? So really, regeneration, anytime you increase growth of your cells like a young person, you increase cancer risk. So it turns out in here, I'm like, well, there's four things that are going to kill you if you're average, and cancer, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's, and diabetes. Really? 80% of people listening to the show, one of those is going to get you. Really? And usually diabetes is a precedent to the other three. So let's assume we're not average because you can read the book and you can do the things and you and I aren't average because well, we have the ability to order the food that we want. Okay, just that alone is a huge advantage. There's a lot of people who actually don't, they're in a food desert. They're in grains all day or whatever. Yeah, I can go to 7-Eleven or I can go to the dollar store, which one, there's no food there. Not yet, we'll get some good colgin bars into Whole Foods. Already in Whole Foods into 7-Eleven one of these days. But what's going on with the telomeres is now there are herbal compounds that are shown to increase the length I've got some telomeres. But they cost a couple grand a month. Oh man, that's a lot. Well, it's insane, but there's a Russian peptide, which is a small group of amino acids that's injectable.

That's been studied since 2003. Peptides are the biggest thing right now.

Oh yeah, I've been using them for years. Oh, excellent. Oral or injectable?

Injectable.

Okay, let's talk about that. There's a chapter on oral better or what? Depends on what they are, but injectable is good. There's a whole chapter on sarms and peptides in here as well. because this is the cutting edge stuff. I love that the nutritionist is doing that because licensed nutritionists and doctors, it's a gray zone for them and they should be completely free to help people use them, but because they're not pharmaceuticals.

They'Re not a drug.

They're not a drug, but it's injectable. So there's weird regulatory zones.

He was saying this is what every doctor is talking about at all the conferences and all the research. now coming out as healthy and natural and fine.

It's been on it for 10 years. And it's crazy what happens because this one in 2003, of course, I'm an anti-aging guy, so you hear about it and you say, all right, I'll try it. And you inject it for 10 days once every six months and it dramatically lengthens telomeres. So you can do that and it costs 50 bucks. So you're thinking, all right, I want to live a lot longer. I got seven pillars of aging, telomeres matter, so I'm going to use this peptide. And one of the reasons I wrote Super Human, Lewis, is that there's no one who's really going to market that. Those are not patentable, but there's something that all of us need to know about because I want to live in a world full of people who are older and full of energy and full of wisdom. Because when I was 26, the reason I know all this stuff, I magically made my way to an anti-aging nonprofit group, and I was learning from people two times and three times my age. One of my really good friends, Mike there, in his mid 80s, and he's on our board of directors. And the first night I meet him, we're out till 11:30 at night talking about all this stuff. Like, this guy has as much energy as I do, and he's way older than I am. Like, how did he do this? And you just realize it's possible, it's just unusual. So if it can be done, how do you do it? And so I feel that if when we have a world full of people who have the wisdom of having experienced things, enough energy and enough desire to give back, it saves the rest of us a lot of time and energy to have that, the village elder actually not have Alzheimer's disease and not be in a hospital. That's powerful. So that's a big part of my mission. And getting a $50 thing that makes your telomeres longer, that's a pretty good ROI. That's pretty sweet. It's already out there or is that.

Something you're going to- It's called Epitalon.

It's here, it's not something I make, I'm not selling that, so I'm just telling you about Epitalon. EpiTan, E-P-I-T-A-L-O-N. And I forget which chapter it's in, but I describe it. And if you ask your nutritionists, they'll probably know about it. Okay, cool. And there's things that speed healing, something called BPC-157. You've probably tried that one. It's one of the injectable ones. It works. And there's other ones, some called TB-500. And you go into this and you're saying, wait, but all of these are under $100 and all of them have really really strong effects. So if you're dealing with something like, oh, I have an injury or this hurts or I'm looking at this aspect of aging and I don't want to deal with that or my brain isn't working, my brain wasn't working, I had arthritis, I was fat, I was at high risk of stroke or heart attack, I had pretty much the diseases of.

Aging before I was 30.

And it sucked and I'm not going back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So now you've got me asking myself, what is number seven? I know number seven is here to make sure my memory still works. Number seven is loss of tissue. And as we get old, you imagine that real thin skin? So I actually talked about the rate of collagen loss and then what you can do about that. And if you are going to live for 100, 150 years, it's almost like having an investment in a bank account that compounds. So if you're saying, I'm just going to take aging the way it normally comes, you're going to have really thin skin when you're old.

Or you could, you've got a loss of collagen, huh?

Yeah, it's not just collagen, but in that case, it's an example of collagen. So, yes. Bad, it's collagen, it's whatever, yeah. And they're a combination of exposure to light, there's things like red light therapy.

Or just getting some sunshine.

Not too much sunshine, but not no sunshine either. 20 minutes a day or so. Yeah, yeah. And a lot of times we just now say, kale's good or kale's bad. Kale's way more bad than good, but I'm not gonna say kale's bad. I'm gonna say the right amount, eat kale a couple of times a week, fine.

And it's the same thing with sun.

It's not bad, but getting a sunburn is bad, and getting none is bad. So it's like, it's a correct skin. It's done all day, it can cause cancer.

Yeah, right.

And it's- Skin disease, yeah. Right, all sorts of, you know, aging, photo aging. However, if you get some sunlight, including UVB without sunscreen, it actually increases skin thickness. And if you're eating collagen at the same time, so you have the building blocks for skin, I actually cite the studies in the book that said, okay, you can change the rate of tissue decline. And you go through here and you say, all right, What's causing this loss of tissues? Well, stem cell exhaustion. So if your stem cells run out, as they do over time, they become less effective, you get something called sarcopenia, muscle loss. So eating the right amount of protein, and by the way, it's less protein than everyone thinks.

Most people eating so much protein, it's increasing cancer risk. Yeah, there's no one who's protein deficient in America, right? No.

It's not like you need so much all the time. I was a raw vegan for a long time that made me really unhealthy, like it does almost everyone.

One.

And sorry, guys. I mean, you and I both know friends who really went in on it like I did. And eventually you're like, Man, I'm actually not well. And then you recover. I just did it. I did that in like 2003, I think. And I just remember the hellish feeling. Rick Rubin was just on my show, he's like, I was 100 plus pounds fat for 17 years because of the vegan nonsense. He was, He was pretty fiery about it. So there is a big backlash coming. But here's the thing. If you're eating industrial meat, which is what 99% of people are eating, it's also making you old and fat and giving you cancer. So the only answer is you eat grass-fed meat and you only need a couple ounces of it. You only need a lot, right? Yeah. And so the protein recommendations in here are defined based on body weight and all that, but they're much lower than most people think. And if you want to live a long time, you don't eat a lot of protein. So what do you eat instead? You eat vegetables and you eat the right kinds of fat. And that's just critically important. If you do that and then you do the things that manipulate a hormone called, actually it's a signaling compound, not a hormone called mTOR. It's called mammalian target of rapamycin. And I wrote about this in the Bulletproof Diet and in the context of aging. mTOR makes you build muscles. However, if it's chronically elevated, it makes you grow cancer cells. So you're saying, how do I get muscles? You want low mTOR, except when you have high mTOR. So what you do, there's three ways to suppress mTOR. And you want to, like, it's like a spring. You push it down, push it down, and then you're like, gonna go spoing, and then you put on muscle like a madman, and then you suppress, suppress. So get this, fasting. Suppresses it. Exercise, like weightlifting, suppresses mTOR and coffee suppresses mTOR.

Really?

So what would happen if you didn't eat breakfast?

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Fidelity Brokerage Services member NYSE SIPC. You fasted through your sleep for eight hours. You wait till noon. you have your coffee, so now you're fasted, now you've had coffee, and then you lift heavy things. Your mTOR is fully suppressed, and then after that, eat your protein, eat some steak, even have some carbs if you want, just don't eat your sugar bombs. And what's gonna happen is you just got a much higher ROI on your exercise because you did the things in the right order. And after that, by not eating too much protein, you keep your mTOR low, so you age less, but you still have the muscles you want in less time. 'Cause I'm super lazy. I don't want to wake up early and exercise twice a day like you do. That sounds like an enormous amount of work. A lot of work. I want to play ping pong with myself. That's more fun, right? So I was like, how do we get an ROI on exercise? Everything in superhuman is through the lens of ROI. 'Cause I mean, you've seen Upgrade Labs. I have this at home. I have a million dollar lab. I could spend eight hours a day on rejuvenating technologies and get nothing done. So then the question is, what takes the least amount of time and energy? And it's all about energy even more than time. And what gives you the highest returns? So how much energy do I have right now? How much time do I have right now? What goal do I want? And then what do I do? And sometimes it's three minutes of cryotherapy and that's all I'm going to do. And other times it's much more complex. So everything in superhuman is through that lens of how much energy and time do you have to invest in this stuff and what did you want to get out of it? Because frankly, Most people don't need a whole body stem cell makeover unless you're either at this point pretty wealthy and plan to live a very long time. But if you're in a lot of pain and you've been in a car accident and you've had arthritis and things aren't working, maybe you want to do it in just one joint. Or, you know, like there's, there's all.

Of it, but you're showing all the things you can do.

This is meant to be the way to understand what's available.

Have you ever done a colonic?

I just did one right before I came in.

You're clean.

I have done a colonics.

What are your thoughts on colonics? Are they helpful in eliminating toxins or do they help the cells in any way? Will they support this?

They can be if they're done right. The first time I did one, I had really bad gut problems when I had toxic mold exposure and I was, you know, this is in the 90s sometime. So I was much heavier and just not, brain not working the way it is now. and there was a lady in Silicon Valley. It was like a super sketchy setup. And you go to this apartment and it was like, ugh. And I decided that really not much good is coming out of this. But then again, I had chronic gut inflammation from what I was eating. So I wasn't going to heal anyway because I was eating the wrong foods. And since then, I had a friend say, Dave, you should go see this guy called the colon whisperer.

No way.

He's actually here in Beverly Hills. Shut up. Yeah, Donna Gates actually told me about it. Donna Gates wrote the Body Ecology Diet, which is basically where the GAPS diet came from. So she's like a luminary in the field and from the previous generation of health influencers.

So, Colin Whisperer.

This guy, I think he was 90 and he's probably still operating. He had walked from the southern point of South America all the way to the US, like in the 1930s or something. Like it took him almost a year to walk up here. and he has this place in Beverly Hills and he does all the Victoria's Secret models. Shut up.

I'm not kidding.

90? You go. Most fascinating guy I've talked to in a long time. Wow. And he's putting tubes and there's a microscope and he's like, look, you could see this stuff coming out. But he'd been doing this for 50 years. And he'd, you know, pulse the pressure and push here and push there. And I tell you, you come out of there, it wasn't uncomfortable at all. But you come out there, like, I am super lean. Like, you could see my abs. So there's inflammation stuff. and so if you get a colonic every day or probably even every week, it's going to disrupt your gut bacteria, your bowel flora, it's not going to be a good thing. And in here, I write about the number of bacteria in my gut. I quadrupled the number of gut bacteria, which is a really important bacteria in your gut. You want them. And it's a number of species. So I went from 48 species to 196 species. Colonics are going to probably take you in the wrong direction there. But if you're sick or you have toxins, you want to get rid of that stuff. It's probably worth so I made something called Inner Fuel. It's a Bulletproof prebiotic. I put it in my Bulletproof coffee now. And I quantified using the Viome test. It's like a $200 test that tells you the number of species and type of species and what they're doing in your gut. So I was at 48, so I can't get enough vegetables when I travel. So then I developed these three plant-based resins basically like it's tree sap that gut bacteria love and you put that in the coffee, you can't taste it. and I drink it and now I'm at 196 species. It turns out as you age, there's a predictable decline in your gut bacteria. Just by looking at your poop, you can actually tell within four years how old someone is. So what if you had a young person's gut bacteria? You can do that, right? So that's all hackable. We just didn't know what to do. No one knew what direction to go in, but now Viome has data on 100,000 people's gut bacteria. Right. we know there's something called acromansia that gets grown from fasting. So you need to occasionally not eat and that'll recycle the lining of your gut more effectively. So you could look at this and go, there's just too much here. My head's going to explode. But here's the deal. At the end of every chapter there's a set of bullet points. It says, just do these things. You don't have to know all the whys, but most people want to know why. So you're going to forget all the whys, but the bullet points are organized so you can say, all right, consider doing this. Another thing, you're worried about cancer, let's say. So maybe you're doing the telomerase lengthening thing. Well, natural killer cells are the way you stop cancer. So right now, everyone listening to this interview, you have cancer cells in your body. They happen every single day and your immune system kills them. That's just how it works. Well, natural killer cells, I went for the heavy duty hack. Pull my blood out. I think it was 19 vials of blood. And they cultured it for a while, grew my natural killer cells, and we injected 2 billion of my own natural killer cells back to reset my immune system to be 20 years younger. Now, that's something that is, you have to fly out of the country to do it. It is pretty far out there. However, it really made a difference.

Really?

Crazy difference. Let's see, for that one, that would have been just Tijuana. But you actually do all the blood draws and stuff in the US and then you flat, and they can do five people a month with the amount of growing of these cells. It's a pretty unusual thing. But the reason I did that is, okay, what happens when you get your natural killer cells up? Well, here's what happened to me. For the first 10 days after I had that treatment, I peed 10 times a day and my bladder was always full. And I wasn't drinking any more water than normal. I couldn't understand it. I lost 3% body fat in those 10 days. No way. When fat's metabolized, I have a machine a $26,000 machine that measures body fat from Upgrade Labs.

It's one we use on our clients.

When you stand on your whole body. Exactly. So I get to go in and do that. So I'm like, no, I have the data. It was just linear. And I had to buy smaller pants. I went from basically 13 to 10% body fat. And this was amazing. But what was going on is I had all these immune cells flittering around going, can I get rid of toxins? Can I get rid of old cells? Can I get rid of senescent cells? and when fat is metabolized, just like a camel's humps, fat turns into water. So I was literally turning my fat into water. It was unbelievable. And this was because I weighed 300 pounds because I had so much systemic inflammation. Some of those compounds were there.

For lactate.

That's nuts. So you're saying, all right, I'm not going to do this crazy thing because I don't like needles and because it's expensive and because it's inconvenient and maybe I don't want to live to 180. So I found a study, because I always find the weird studies. It turns out that going for a walk in an evergreen forest, that smelling the terpenes, the oils from the trees, raises your natural killer count by 20%. So you can buy a type of essential oil called Hiroki Spruce Oil that is shown to raise your natural killer cells. It'll cost you like 20 bucks. So there you go. There's always a way to do the same thing. the free way is go for a walk in a forest. The cheap way is get some of this essential oil and occasionally pour some on your pillow. You don't have to be perfect with that. Just expose yourself. You put behind your ear, whatever makes you happy, mix in your cologne. I don't even wear cologne. It's bad for you. At least most of it is. Make it organic if you're gonna do it. And then the real expensive thing is I'm on an aggressive anti-aging regimen or I have cancer or an immune issue. I'm gonna go for cultured natural killer cells. But it's a It's a thing. I just want to try the gnarliest one so I can tell you the story of it and then explain the science and then tell how to get the cheapest possible thing that's going to move the needle for you.

Yeah. I love all this. Oh man, I gotta start applying it more and go to upgrade labs more and everything.

Let's hack you, man.

That would be fun. That's what I want to do. For the person listening who is overwhelmed, what would you say are five to 10 things they could do tomorrow. All right. And consistently to just live a better life. Let's talk. That's going to help their health.

-With aging and everything.

-Just everything. Like overall, I'm going to feel better. I'm going to look better. I'm going to have less pain. -More energy.

-Easy. Yeah. Okay. Number one, this is going to be very expensive. Stop eating for a day. Okay. A whole 24-hour fast. 24-hour fast. And When I was fat and you told me to do that, it actually made me angry. I'm like, I have to eat every six hours, otherwise my body will go in starvation mode. And besides, if I don't eat every six hours, I want to kill people. I had an unstable blood sugar level and really bad metabolism. So if you're one of those people, do it on a Saturday and just warn your family and just suck it up. And if you're like, I can't do it, if you have only fat and you can have coffee, you can have tea, no sweeteners, any of that kind of stuff, if you put Bulletproof Coffee, just brain octane, no collagen, brain octane and butter. And ghee. Yeah. Ghee or butter, just a very small amount of butter. But a teaspoon of brain octane, that'll turn off hunger for most people fasting.

So it actually becomes very effortless. Can you do that while you, as a 24-hour faster?

You can do that coffee times.

One or two is okay.

Coffee is great, actually. During a fast. It's not going to mess up the fasting. It improves it. In fact, the amount of caffeine in two cups, two small cups of coffee. In other words, most of us drink one medium, which is two smalls, is shown in a study from UC San Diego to increase, to double ketone production, to increase ketones. Ketones make you full. So normally, if you don't have your coffee in the morning, you're going to be really full. You drink your coffee and you're less hungry from the coffee. And that's pretty cool. Now we know why it's a hunger suppressant. You put the brain octane in there, it bumps your ketones up even more. and all of a sudden you're like, oh yeah, I guess it's lunch time. I could eat maybe I'll have a little bit more of this coffee and I'm good to go. And then at nighttime you might be a little hungry, you go to sleep anyway, you wake up the next morning fasting, doing that once a week or even once every two weeks will make you live longer, feel better, turn your brain on, everything shifts in your metabolism. And if that's too much, just try skipping breakfast and having a late lunch.

So just learn and learn to teach your body that if you can go without food for a brief period of time, you'll be better off. That's true. If you have a dinner at At six, and then you finish by seven and you just say, I'm gonna wait till dinner the next day. Yeah. Right, you try to go to bed early.

There's your 24 hour fast. It's not that big of a deal.

It's not that hard.

Yeah.

I might do that today. I had dinner at five yesterday.

Yeah.

Four, five, and I'll probably just wait till five today.

No, a cup of coffee, water.

Yeah.

Water, okay. Oh, water's great. Now, one warning, okay? If you just got off an airplane, if you had a heavy workout, if you had a huge fight with your spouse, or if you're ovulating or about to menstruate, those are probably not the best days to fast because you have already enough demands on your body. You just finished a marathon? It's okay. Do it at a time when you're not exceptionally stressed biologically or emotionally or physically. Doing that will change everything. It doesn't cost you anything. It requires a minor amount of willpower. The little hack with Bulletproof Coffee really works and you still get all the benefits of fasting. I've interviewed top to ask them that question specifically because my understanding of it is that a little bit of fat during a fast won't activate insulin, won't do any of those things. So it's okay. There's pretty good science behind it. I went really deep on that. Gotcha. So step one, don't eat. Step two, learn to sleep. And I write the whole chapter in Super Human about sleep is just full of sleep hacks I haven't talked about. Here's one thing that just dramatically matters, blackout curtains. And that means no light comes around them. There's a study in Japan of 800 people 60 or so, 60 years old or more. And they found that the amount of light coming around curtains from just the average street light was enough to increase depression by 63%. Oh my gosh. So you're still going to sleep. You tell yourself you don't have a problem. I look at my phone, I still went to sleep, I slept all night, but you got garbage sleep. It's about the quality of your sleep. I showed you my sleep score. That's just highly effective sleep. So here's what to do. Dim the lights in your house or turn them off. It should be dim at night because your body's listening to the color of the light. If you have the bright bathroom lights on at 2:00 in the morning when you go pee, the rest of your night is trashed for the quality. So I have red lights in the bathrooms.

Really?

Where do you get the red lights? Just Amazon red LED bulbs. They're cheap. So you have a little nightlight that does that. I wear the true dark glasses before I go to bed, which have helped me a lot. There's other things you can do though. Raising the headboard of your bed by six inches, just raise the height so your bed's at an angle like this. Not a real sharp angle, it's just six inches. All kinds of changes in blood flow that are associated with the reduction of aging.

So you mean raise the, so you're.

At an angle a little bit? Yeah, put blocks under the head of your bed. So yeah, so just it tips a little bit. And it turns out laying perfectly flat, animals never do that. They always find a hill and put their head up a little bit. Except for us, we have perfectly flat beds. And there's all sorts of blood dynamics, blood pressure changes in the brain that have to do with at night the brain washes itself out using cerebral spinal fluid. It works better when there's a bit of gravity to help it come out. No way. Yeah, who would have thought? You meant what, three inches work or no? Probably, but six inches is what's studied. You can buy wooden blocks that just put the better.

Interesting. All right.

It's like these are just little things, but learning to sleep well, the true dark glasses for me doubled my deep sleep. That was the final thing.

Wearing that before you go to bed. Yeah, for at least a half hour.

If you're watching TV, you have them on.

Yeah.

And if you're using your phone, just make sure it's super dim and things like that. And everyone talks about it, most people don't do it. And you got to understand, there's a 48-hour lag time. You look at bright lights tonight, the next night's sleep will be affected as well. But we're really sensitive to lights way more than you think. I think. So you'll see me, there's lots of pictures on social media. I'm wearing kids evening, I'm wearing these kind of red aviator glasses, and they're actually patented with the spectrums that they're blocking. And yeah, I just tell people I'm a professional rock star. I don't know.

That plus my stupid looking shoes, and they're like, I'm pretty sure this guy's weird. I like that.

I think Cisyn's trying to buy that company. Oh, I hope he does to like rebuild it up. I love Five Fingers. You know about the studs on my... That's cool. What are the studs for? Those are Mayan crystals. And they're on the toe chakras. And so they make like a DNA helix that comes up each leg to the middle to raise testosterone. Shut up.

I'm totally...

I was like, I just bought them on Amazon. They're there to piss off a good.

Friend who hates my shoes.

Okay, that's funny.

I like the story about testosterone. I like that. like that. Okay, so that's a 24-hour fast.

Honestly, better with those tips. All right, so far we haven't spent anything other than wood blocks on the bed, right? Yes, six inches. Okay, and I gotta say though, if you were to monitor your sleep, the Oura ring, everyone I know who's got one has improved their sleep. I mean, my mom, like everyone who has one is like, I didn't know, but I do this one thing and I actually get a better score. It just raises your awareness because we're not good at knowing if a good night's sleep or a bad night's sleep? You gotta measure it. Yeah. So it is liberating, but it's, you know, a couple hundred bucks, right? That's real money, but it's worth it. Okay, next up, to live a lot longer. This is the be healthier, generally.

Yeah.

Don't eat fried stuff ever. I don't care if it's fried in, like, in the fat vegetables. No, not fried vegetables. You take a Brussels sprout, you deep fry it, it's gonna taste good, it's.

Gonna be bad for you.

And here's why. The amount of inflammation in the body from one meal with fried things in it, I don't care if it's fried fish or fried potato chips, it doesn't matter. That increases inflammation for two days. A cigarette is four to eight hours. Literally, you're better off to smoke a cigarette than you are to eat a plate of french fries. Okay. And it's that big of a deal. French fries you can't have? Well, they're fried. Here, bake the damn french fries.

It's not that hard.

You bake them and put really good butter on them afterwards. It tastes the same. No, but when you go out, that once baking it with butter. I know. So it's because restaurants are, they fry them in the worst oils that have been reused. You got to just say no. And you look at it like, that's not food. I don't do that. It's not. And look at the sleep quality when you eat fried stuff. Look at two days later, what does my skin look like? It is just not worth it. It's true. Save that. Save those calories for something that's really good. Eat ice cream instead of french fries.

It's a much better trade off. I did that all day.

Seriously, ice cream is way less harmful.

I can have ice cream? Okay, done. All right, so don't eat fried stuff, Amber.

In terms of other things that you can do for anti-aging, I talked a little bit about the 24-hour fast, intermittent fasting, fasting for more days. Basically, any time that you skip food or reduce your calories is going to be good for you.

So you said four days?

I've done a four-day fast, and you get really massive metabolic changes after 48 hours. hours of fasting. Really? And the first few days suck, but if you do that brain octane bulletproof coffee trick, it's not that big of a deal.

After that, you feel amazing.

48 hours. Yeah, after 48 hours.

Even two days. Yeah, yeah.

The second day is when you just think about food all the time. All the time, you're like, I need to eat. You're just so used to true habit. Yeah, right. But then once you just have it.

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Better and learn to eat less, you do really well. But if you chronically eat less, so you're always hungry, your life sucks. The thing that's shown to reduce aging the most is actually cutting your calories by a third. Well, all the people who do that, I know maybe a dozen of them, they're all super thin, like I'm cold all the time, but I got used to it.

Your life sucks.

Don't do that. No. Who wants to live to 180 under those conditions?

No one.

No one. But it turns out, not eating for a brief period of time, so here's what happens. Your cells in your body, they go, oh, I guess if I can't go this amount of time without eating, I must be weak. They actually remove that part of the body, the little ancient subcellular components, and they build new younger ones that have the energy to take it. So it's almost like weight lifting for yourselves, but you don't have to lift weights. You just told them, hey, become resilient. And so if you do those things, you're going to see magic changes to your health. And let's talk about exercise. Okay, we all know that exercise is good, therefore more exercise is better, right? Oh, there's a dose response. Certain types of exercise, yeah. Well, it turns out there's two different sets of research that overlap. And here's the minimum necessary exercise to live a long time. Every day, 20 minutes of walking.

That's it.

You don't have to breathe hard, you don't have to do anything crazy. Moving more is good. Walking up and down the stairs, it's not exercise really, it's just moving. And then once a week, or twice if you want to, more if it makes you happy, for 15 minutes, do something that makes you want to throw up. What that means is run a sprint, rest, sprint, rest. High intensity interval training. and there's a new exercise bike called Carol. They did a bunch of research. They have a nine-minute workout that doesn't make you sweat. And all it is is 10 seconds of super intense, like a tiger's chasing you running, followed by as rapidly as possible, calming down. And then doing it again and then calming down. It turns out it's the rate of change of the heart rate that's causing the benefit.

Interesting.

So you do that twice a week. You lift really heavy things until you can't anymore, run really fast until you can, and then pause and do it again. you do that twice a week. So it's one or two brief bouts of pain. The rest of the time I went for a walk with my dog or my kids or a colleague at work. That will keep you young. You can do more, but it isn't necessary. And each of those will resuscitate mitochondria. They'll cause blood flow changes. So we're not asking you to go out and like hit the gym for an hour a day. Most people like me, I used to do when I was 300 pounds, an hour and a half a day, six days a week, half weights, half cardio, reliably. I took off Sundays. I was like, I don't care if I'm sick, I don't care if I have final exams, I'm going to the damn gym, I'm not going to be fat anymore, I will not have another knee surgery. After 18 months of that, I still weighed 300 pounds. And I said, well, at least I'm strong. I'll go play laser tag. Okay, high risk sport, right? I squat down, I twist, blow my ACL, another knee surgery. And I was like, man, I did it. I swear to God, I have the records. I did it every day. I was on a low fat diet. It was like, that was one of the things that was like, man, this isn't working. If exercise is good, more is better. Bad logic. The right dose, the right amount of exercise is good. I just gave you the minimum dose. If you do that, you can walk for 20 minutes a day, you can skip a meal, and you can pay attention to what you do before you go to sleep and make sure that you sleep really well. If you just do those three things, it will change your entire life. You might want to add some stress management on top of that. Meditation is a good thing. I run a neuroscience institute where we use electrodes on your head so you could do 40 years of meditation meditation in five days. I've done four months of that. That's why I can write books and run a company and do all the things I do. But here's the deal. Breathing exercises. I did Art of Living for many years. It's a form of breathing that came out of India where you put your arms in different positions and it moves things around your lungs. There's box breath breathing, which I talk about on the site. There's ujjayi breathing. Go to a yoga class and learn pranayama. Learn how to breathe and learn some form of meditation. I don't even care what it is. if you do that for five minutes a day, 10 minutes a day, again, it's more meditation better. It turns out the fast path of Buddhism, keep in mind, I discovered the idea for Bulletproof Coffee in Tibet learning meditation from the masters. Wow. So, I'm into this stuff, but the fast path of Buddhism, they warn you in the ancient tests and modern psychologists, well, you could get fully enlightened in one lifetime, but a lot of people go nuts. There are people who are saying meditation is dangerous. Okay, I would say it's way, the risk reward is very strong on that. But here's the deal. Just because some meditation is good, you're not a bad person if you didn't meditate for an hour and you don't need to meditate for eight hours to be a good person. And you might want to go to Vipassana if that's, if you feel called to it. But it's not about doing a lot. It's just like exercise. If you make it a mountain, you won't do it. So you slept better than you did. You meditated for at least five minutes.

Maybe with some breathing exercises in there.

You skipped a meal. It's not that hard. And if you do those things, I write in the beginning of the book about the four killers, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer's. If you just did those four things, to avoid the four things I mentioned, to avoid those four things, your risk of them goes down so much that you're no longer average. Those aren't going to be the four killers for you. You probably will have a 20% chance of those taking you out and an 80% chance of something and if you do the other seven pillars of aging, at least mostly right, the odds of something taking you out, it's gonna be a truck hitting you when you're 120.

Right, right, right. Or maybe you're going on a rocket ship to space to try something.

Or maybe you'll die in bed, but during exercise in bed, and that's not a bad situation either, right? Exactly. And this is what aging used to be, Louis, and this is what is lacking. Most people who are in this go, why would I want to be 180? There's diapers and tubes, and you don't remember your name and you're entirely dependent on other people. and you feel your brain going away. And man, this is not what aging was ever like throughout all of history. Most of the time, people were, yeah, you're back a little bit, but you aged, but you were venerated as the village elder, as having wisdom and respect. And as you did this, eventually you got sick and you died. And it might take you a week, it might take you a day or two, or you just go to bed and you wake up dead. This is how it normally works, this long protracted period of convalescence and being an invalid, it's unnatural, it's not necessary, it's not what's happening for people who do even a few of the things here. So take that picture, you get rid of it, and you say, when I'm 100 years old, I'm gonna be playing with my grandkids, I'm gonna be giving back to my community, and I'm gonna have 100 years of experience to share. Do you know how much 100 years is? Think about 1919. We were fighting World War I on horseback. They still used cavalry in World War I. Okay, and when people say, Dave, how dare you think you're going to live another 134 years? I know a lot of people doing the research. We have PubMed, we have the internet, we can find knowledge effortlessly. Heck, we can listen to podcasts. You couldn't do that a long time ago. You could only listen to a radio show controlled by three big media companies, right? Everything is easier and faster and more fun and more exciting, and the anti-aging field is based on decades of modern research and based on centuries of research in monasteries, in traditional Chinese medicine, in Ayurveda. Every major lineage of medicine has anti-aging at its core. The modern scientists that we revere, like Francis Bacon, all of them were working on something called natural philosophy, also known as alchemy. Alchemy was the art of immortality, not.

Turning lead into gold.

So the advances of modern science were all based on people trying to live forever. This is in our core DNA to do this. Now we can actually do it. And it's the coolest time ever to be alive. You have to understand, old age means I look good, I feel good, I'm independent, and I'm wise because I've learned from my mistakes. And I'm still having good sex.

That's great.

Oh, and you're eating bacon.

I like it, man. You know, when they say you look better with age, that should be a compliment of you doing the right thing.

Absolutely.

So I hope to constantly look better the older I get. I love it, man. Superhuman. It's out right now, the bulletproof plan to age backward and maybe even live forever. Make sure you guys check it out. Tons of research in here. It's very thick.

Lots of great stuff.

But you can also just go to the end of the chapters, read the bullets. Yep. And here's the thing you need to do right now to improve. You don't have to dive into all the research.

But check it out, guys. And where can I get it right now? You can. In the best place. You can pick it up anywhere that you like to buy books online. It's at Barnes & Noble, it's at Amazon. And if you send a copy of your receipt to me at daveasprey.com, I have a series of eight interviews that I've done with leaders in the anti-aging field that are not a part of my podcast. They're just kind of a confidential, limited series. I'm just giving those to people just to say thanks for buying the book. Love it, man. And I gotta say, look, if people have read your book and they haven't left you a review, just go do it. People, authors oftentimes don't express how important that is.

It's so important.

And like, I read my reviews. You read yours on Amazon? Absolutely, man. Because you want to know how did I do? It's the most direct way. And if you tell people that it was a book worth reading, so if you haven't reviewed your Mask of Masculinity.

Or any of Lewis' other books, go review them. If you like Superhuman, go review that too. Leave a review. Let them know one part of the book that helped you the most and how it's improved your life.

It's super helpful. Check it out. You're on social media. You're on Dave.Asprey on Instagram, DaveAsprey.com, Bulletproof.com.

For all the cool Bulletproof stuff that I make. Get the Bulletproof coffee for the fasting. It'll make you less hungry. Oh yeah, I promise.

I haven't eaten since, what, it's been.

Like 20, it's been 19 hours now. But you did Bulletproof this morning or not? Yeah. I've had it for the last like two and a half hours. I've been sipping on it, still got a little bit left. And I don't feel hungry. So, I'm gonna go another five or six hours. Have my 24 hour fast while I'm talking to you. try some of these other things. So, Dave, thanks for constantly getting big for all of us. Thanks for constantly doing the scary things a lot of us don't want to do to show us what's possible. And I acknowledge you, man. I appreciate you very much.

Thanks for coming on. Thank you. I appreciate your work, Louis.

You're changing the world in a good way. Thanks, bro. Appreciate it, man. There you have it, my friends. Again, if you found this powerful for you, really reflect on your life on what is missing in your health that you know you could just be doing a little bit extra in certain areas. Are you eating a little bit too many of those foods that you know are actually hurting you and making you more unhealthy? Are you not getting the proper sleep? Are you on your phone too much or technology before you go to sleep? Are you checking things right before you wake up? You know, what are the things that you are missing? what are the deficiencies in your life that you aren't doing well and what could you start implementing more of? And what are the things that you are doing well? You know, sometimes we focus on the negative a lot, but I want you to also to focus on what are the things that you are doing well that you heard from Dave in this interview. Maybe it's something small that like, yeah, I'm doing that pretty consistently and that's a good thing. You should celebrate that. Continue to celebrate the things you're doing well and then just add one new thing. Don't try to do all this. Don't try to do everything so crazy overnight. Try to do one new thing moving forward and add that into your routine. I believe that will help you in many ways, as it always does for me. And sometimes we get off track. You know, we get consistent with one thing. I'm to blame for this. I'll get consistent with one thing. I'll get up at 4 45 every morning, work out at 5 15 for months, and then I'm traveling and I'm eating sugar again, and then I get off track and I'm not my sleep and I sleep in a little later and these things kind of tail spin off, right? So we got to get back on track sometimes. And I want you to get back on track, whether you're on track currently, add something new. And if you're not on track, then start to apply something in your life to really optimize this. You've got the opportunity, you got the tools. It's just about you being motivated enough and you knowing that your mission in life should be bigger than just yourself and not being at optimal health. Because you can get healthier by the little decisions you make every single day. And I know it's not fun sometimes, but I much rather be healthy than sick. And being healthy is a lot more fun than being sick. And when we aren't healthy, we don't make as good a choices. You know, we stress out more. We don't have the energy to build our businesses and have the life of our dreams and all these things. So really focus on that and add one thing to your life. I want to tell you how much I appreciate you, how much you are deserving of love, of support in your life. And you deserve to be healthy. You know, you've got this one body, and you were provided this body at birth. And it's your responsibility to take care of yourself, to take care of this body so that you can really take care of the people around you, the to care about you, the people that look up to you, the people that rely on you. You know, you're modeling your life every single day by the actions you take. And people see your life as a model. And I want to ask yourself, how do you want to be looked at? How do you want to be admired as someone who is committed to their life, to their energy, to their health? into the well-being of those around them or as someone who, you know, who has been struggling for a while. And we all go through this. I went through a time when people called me Louis for being fat Louis. You know, it doesn't feel good. You know, it doesn't feel good to be reminded when you're not in an optimal life or you're not in shape. It doesn't feel good because you're reminded of that every single day you look yourself in the mirror. So I have a lot of empathy if you're not on track. But just do yourself the favor and do one thing every day moving forward that you heard from here that you could apply something small that you could apply and start building off that one thing. You deserve it. You're so deserving of it. And as Buddha said, to keep the body in good health is a duty. Otherwise, we be able to keep our minds strong and clear. Do it for yourself, for your mind, for the longevity of your life, and do it for the people that you care about who want to see you live healthy, passionate, loving, free for a long time. I love you so very much. I hope you feel loved in your life today. And as always, you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.

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