Change Your Brain Every Day - What Does the Future of Anti-Aging Look Like? With Dave Asprey

Episode Date: January 1, 2020

There have been major breakthroughs in the science of anti-aging in the last few years, and this week’s guest, author and Bulletproof 360 founder Dave Asprey, has been testing and using these methods to hack his own biology in order to share the results. In this episode, Dave and the Amens discuss some of the latest science that can keep your eyes from going bad, or even keep yourself from going bald.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome back. We are here with Dave Asprey having just the most fun and learning new things about how to take care of your brain and your body

and your eyes and your fertility organs. Crazy. I have a question, Dave. You mentioned in the last episode, you were talking about the glasses that you're wearing. They have this sort of cool factor, but you're not wearing them for that reason. You're wearing them because they actually block blue light. And I have a question about that because I think that's really important. I'm getting a little weary of all of the experts out there talking about how to not sleep. Okay. Because you can't not sleep. And so I like that you're talking about the importance of sleep and blocking blue lights

at night. It's really important. But my question is, because I have blue light blockers in my glasses and you mentioned that's not blocking all of the lights and that's a really good point can you get those glasses that you're wearing in prescription yes and there's a lot more of them coming right now okay so these are called true dark and what's interesting during the day these block 75 about 75 of blue light if you get no blue light coming into your eyes during the day your body doesn't know it's daytime.

So the ones that block all the blue won't work. Your prescription glasses with a coating only block about 40%. So you'll still get digital eye strain at the end of the day, but you'll feel better than someone with no glasses. But the real trick, and this is the TrueDark patented technology, these glasses, they're called the TrueDark Sunsets. These block all of the frequencies of light that interfere with sleep. So these go way more than blue blocking. And when you wear these, it's like noise-canceling headphones for your eyes. And I've been able to

eliminate my jet lag when I fly anywhere on the planet using the color of light coming in my eyes. So the deal is blue blockers at during the day, it's too much. If you block all the blue lights, you want to block some, but at night, even if you block all the blue light, you didn't do it right. So what I do is indoors under bright lights, like in the studio today, I'm going to wear the daytime ones from true dark and the nighttime ones I put on after the sun goes down. Interesting. And here's the effects of this. And I write about this in superhuman. I went to a very detailed kind of eye hacker doctor, the level two eye specialist. And she said, Dave, I've never seen someone your age. I just turned 26%. That's 26%

of my minimum acceptable age. So I. So I just turned 47. But she said, Dave, your eyes have none of the reduction of flexibility that we expect at your age. You can still read the finest print that a teenager can read. And I've not seen anything like that. Like this is unheard of. So whatever you're doing, keep doing it. I think it's your glasses and your supplements. So I take these and I made a supplement called Eye Armor. And I take several of those a day to support the tissues in my eyes.

Because let's face it, if I'm going to be 180, I would like to be able to look at my beautiful wife and to see the scenery. I'd like to be able to hear everything and have a brain that works. Those are the most important things. After that, I'd really like to be able to walk around and have full control of my sex life and my ability to use the restroom. Those are really important. And that's what people think aging is going to be, is having none of those. And that's not true. Aging is an accumulation of wisdom, energy, and power, and having a body that works perfectly normally. And eyes are part of that. And these are true dark glasses. Interesting. Thank you.

So there's a chapter in the book I'm really interested in called Don't Look Like an Alien, Avoiding Baldness, Grays, and Wrinkles. So I'm screwed, but I don't know, maybe I can get this back. I decided to just like cut it all off

because, you know, when you don't have much, it's all over the place. Hey, Jason Statham is like one of the hottest guys in Hollywood. Oh, it's so funny. I went to just like cut it all off because, you know, when you don't have much, it's all over the place. Hey, Jason Statham is like one of the hottest guys in Hollywood. Oh, it's so funny. I went to the barber and I showed him a picture of Jason Statham, the actor. And I'm like, can you make me look like him? And at the end, I'm like, he showed me me and I'm like, oh, I can't pay you.

You made me look like The Rock. You've got to say Jeff Bezos. I love them both. So it's all good. You should have paid him. So tell us what's in that chapter. And I mean, is that really true? Could I have avoided the bald head of mine, which of course I got from my mother's father. It turns out there's three kinds of balding, three things that cause it. And most people are familiar with a testosterone analog called DHT. And that's in some people what causes it, but in others, it's not that. There is a genetic cause. I have the same thing. All the men on both sides of my family are completely bald. I've managed to do pretty darn well given that genetic legacy. In the book, I talk about it's receding a little bit, but not too bad, and I'm working

on that. We've just turned on this huge amount of knowledge about how we can control what our skin and our cells do, and we're doing that with light sometimes. And the reason light is so powerful for making hair grow back, or at least keeping hair healthy, we're talking about red and infrared light, you can get caps that do it, there's treatments you can get at various hair salons or beauty salons. And what in fact, the company that makes the glasses even has a panel you can put up next to your head with the right frequencies in it. But the idea there is the cells in your skin, in your scalp, they make energy in the form of electrons using mitochondria.

So there's a decline in mitochondrial function in the scalp because we get poor blood flow. So this is going to sound dumb, but even just massaging your head, you get a little massager off Amazon that does things. I rub your head all the time. There you go. You can also outsource it to a loved one, right? But getting the blood flowing there, and you know very much about blood flow inside the brain and blood flow on the very surface there, it's a problem because a lot of people don't touch their head regularly. And how do you get the blood to move there when there isn't that much going on? surface there, it's a problem because a lot of people don't touch their head regularly. How do you get the blood to move there when there isn't that much going on?

Red light, infrared light, and massage can help. Then there are other compounds that we're now just discovering that cause hair to grow. I write about something called Carbon-60, a compound in the book that is used for anti-aging in rats. They extend their maximum lifespan by 90% to 95% in multiple studies. That is like doubling your lifespan. In fact, if I thought I was going to live to 90% and that stuff worked the same way on humans, which it might, there, I've got my 180 already. And there's a

few other things in the book that can, oh, 20% increased, 10% increased. There's all kinds of stuff that has those effects. Some studies are small, some are in mice, almost no studies in humans because if you're 120 years old, whatever they started studying 120 years ago was probably like ground up mercury mixed, bat heads or something. I mean, our medicine has moved on. So I'm going to go with the animal studies and the mechanistic action. But for hair, you get blood flow, you get the light, you can do oxygen or ozone treatments.

And the things that we've most heard of, the compounds that block DHT formation, aren't going to help with bioenergetic causes of baldness, but they occasionally create a basic chemical neutering effect in men where they turn off all hormone production that can just be really destructive to your quality of life. There's a lot of Facebook groups for people trying to solve that problem. So I would say I'm not a fan of the oral pills for that. But when you take enough collagen, Bulletproof put collagen on the map as a nutrient worth doing, you will usually see your hair grows faster, grows healthier, grows thicker. And so the idea is you stack all that up. There's also something called copper

tripeptide, which is really important for skin thickness and for hair growth. So now you can get a copper tripeptide serum that you put on your head. And Dr. Amen, if you'd been able to 20 years ago, have access to these technologies and said, you know what, three times a week, I'm going to do something. I get out of the shower, I'll smear some stuff on there, or I'm going to sit at my computer and I'm going to use this light on my head. Your hair might look really different than it does today. I'm reading that chapter for sure. Hack your longevity like a Russian. We only have two more minutes in this podcast, but I'm very curious about this. The Russians have always thought about hacking the human body differently than we have in

the West. Oh, we're not talking about our election. Okay. Fair point. Yeah. Hack your body like you hack an election. It's a whole tagline. So going back even to the Olympics 30, 40 years ago, they were willing to push humans beyond what's reasonable. And so the mindset, how do we change ourselves to do what we want? And when it comes to this, there's small signaling molecules called peptides that our bodies make. And in Russia, they figured out a bunch of these things that you can use topically, you can take orally or even inject that radically make you act like a young person. Originally, they came from young animals, and now they synthesize these things. One of the compounds in that chapter called epithelon, a $50 injection,

by the way, it is not approved by the FDA in the US, although in Russia, it's used commonly. And epithelon increases telomere length dramatically, way more so than almost any other treatment, and it's 50 bucks. But there's another company selling a supplement that costs a couple thousand dollars a month that also links those keelbears. If you wanted to attack that pillar of aging and support it, maybe this is the way to go. The future of anti-aging is definitely, in some meaningful way, tied to this research on peptides that came out of Russia.

There's a whole chapter on what are they, what do they do, and how would you use them today? I have a question. Okay. So on the peptide front, that's becoming a big thing in anti-aging medicine. I know that. Oh, yeah. Because for a long time, well, even still, growth hormone used in therapeutic doses, not used in sports medicine doses like for athletics, is another thing that a lot of people are really interested in because they feel like it helps people to age slower. So hold that because that's really important. When we come back, we're going to talk about Dave's top tips to be superhuman and maybe

even live forever. If you're enjoying the Brain Warriors Way podcast, please don't forget to subscribe. So you'll always know when there's a new episode. And while you're at it, feel free to give us a review or five star rating as that helps others find the podcast. If you're considering coming to Amen Clinics or trying some of the brain healthy supplements from BrainMD, you can use the code PODCAST10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or a 10% discount on all supplements at brainmdhealth.com. For more information, give us a call at 855-978-1363.