The School of Greatness - 860 Age Backwards, Biohack Your Life and Be Super Human with Dave Asprey

Episode Date: October 9, 2019

We all want to maintain our youth. Our goal is to be attractive, healthy, and energetic as we age. What if there were ways beyond basic diet and exercise regimens that could literally reverse aging? But what if we could defy our own biology? There are many ways to stay young and live a healthy, productive life. But maybe those methods aren’t enough. Maybe if we lived at the intersection of technology and health we could actually live forever. On today’s episode of The School of Greatness, I talk about the things you can do to maintain your health with a master biohacker: Dave Aspery. Dave Asprey is the creator of the widely popular Bulletproof Coffee, host of the podcast Bulletproof Radio, and author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Bulletproof Diet. Dave 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 signature locations dedicated to improving mental and physical performance and recovery. His new book Super Human: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever is out on October 8th everywhere books are sold online. So get ready to learn how to maintain your health and energy as you age on Episode 860. Some Questions I Ask: What is the BulletProof diet? (12:45) What are the seven things that make you old? (17:25) How do you get a better ROI on your workout? (46:50) What are five things you can do for better health and less pain? (55:30) What are the five health killers? (01:09:35) In This Episode You Will Learn: How to get to your ultimate fitness level (9:27) How to keep your body young (16:55) Key steps on maintaining your health and energy as you get older (40:17) The power of your immune system and “killer cells” (52:00) Five simple tips to improve your overall health (55:45) Why fried food is worse than cigarettes (1:02:40) The incredible benefits of intermittent fasting (1:03:55) If you enjoyed this episode, check out the video, show notes and more at http://lewishowes.com/860 and follow at instagram.com/lewishowes

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 twenties, our thirties, and so on that determine 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 and 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. We 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 going to 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 to say, hey, check out this free interview on the School of Greatness. The link is lewishouse.com slash 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. 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, Superhuman, The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever. So we're going to talk about how we're going to live forever today, but we were talking about it a little bit before. We started about hormones. And I met with a nutritionist about six to seven months ago

because 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, the feeling, the final little belly fat gone. 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 at? And I met with this nutritionist and I did all the blood work and all the sampling. And he was like, it doesn't matter how well you eat, how hard you work out, two a 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. He said the human body is not designed to be running as hard as you're running it at

this level of life. 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. 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. I like this guy already. 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 Superhuman on using hormones for anti-aging. There's a lot of fear around testosterone replacement, mostly because in the 70s, you know, the... 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 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. Wow.

At 26. Were you also like, what, 80 pounds overweight? 300 pounds. I was about 80 pounds overweight then, yeah. Wow. More estrogen than your mom. And less testosterone than my mom. And you were how old? My mom's kind of buff.

How old were you? I 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. 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 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 something that's designed to have children and then die quickly, which is pretty much all life forms. 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 want 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. And that's actually a great way to go. The problem there is that if you're around kids or anywhere it could transfer, that could be a problem. Yeah. So you want to be careful there. That could be a problem. Yeah. So you want 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's been named scream cream

because it has very strong effects on women. Like burning or a negative scream or more like a sexual scream? As in I've never had that much blood in that region of my body before, and could we please go again? Right, right. Kind of activity to not be too crass about it. Sure. So it's 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 the pain because you've got to do it. Or right now I have pellets in basically my upper butt cheek. I think you mentioned this to me last time. 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. No way. Yeah, 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 if you get a massage, like you have a little muscle knot. That's not a muscle knot. That's testosterone. Just don't squeeze it real hard because it'll explode. No, they're like little beads kind of. They wouldn't explode, but, you know, you just don't want to crush them.

And 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 mean, sure, I'll have to check the labs. You're probably 650. But, oh, no, you're still pretty muscular.

I'm still strong. 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 audio book. For the first time ever, I read the whole thing in a studio. It's like five days. It's 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 don't know.

Just almost to a T 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, it was pioneered for drug and alcohol addiction, but it's a mitochondrial restoration protocol. Yeah, and the last time i had you on you 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 uh homo deuce and sapiens those like real famous books about on the new york times monthly like 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, now that your brain works, now that 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. 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. And then you get old. Yeah. And so if that's one, I want to make sure I don't repeat myself when I'm pulling these from my head. Mitochondria? Yep. So mitochondria is the first one. The next one is something that I call cellular straitjackets. And it's fascinating that everyone's heard 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 will 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 a 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. But they're just not good for us.

Yeah. And some people are more sensitive than others. Yeah. 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. Yeah, yeah. Thank you.

Yeah. And Dr. Gundry. Gundry talks about nightshades. 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 is called the poisoner's poison. So we shouldn't be having kale? No. Kale's gross. Have you eaten it lately? Oh my gosh. Yeah, but they put it with sauté with butter and some garlic. You have to torture kale to make it taste good. So 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 story. Very high in it, actually. Kidney stones and gout are happening, and all kinds of people eat too much kale, especially raw kale.

So I wrote a post actually a couple years ago. It's like, hey, cook your kale, dump the water, add some baking soda to precipitate out these microcrystals. Because one of the things that kale does, if you eat a lot of it, those microcrystals start circulating around. They bind with calcium and they stick in your tissues. 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 wash the stuff out. It's a really strong toxin that the plants use to keep from being overeaten. To not be killed. Yeah, right. They don't want us to kill them. 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 a 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. Yeah. Right? So. Small amounts.

If you're having a side dish of collard greens and kale, whatever, just eat it and enjoy it. Yeah. Right? 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, eggplants. That one is so good. I know, cayenne. I grew up in New Mexico. You're not supposed to eat it. Well, 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 reliably 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 going to hate your life. 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 straitjacket. Inflammation causes this cellular-level scar tissue to form. Then there's zombie cells. It's 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 agents, 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 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.

Like 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. 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. 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 going to 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 that crazy billionaires are doing, if it costs $10,000 right now, it's going to cost $200. $200, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Just by raising awareness, you're going to 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, I 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. Right, right, right. Yeah, So I went in. Three doctors. Dr. Harry Adelson led it. And a neurosurgeon from Johns Hopkins named Marcella. And then Amy Killen did the cosmetic stuff. So I'm unconscious for four hours. They're pulling half a liter of bone marrow out.

How do they do that? They go in through your hip, the iliac crest. I've had that done twice. Once I was awake, actually, with no anesthesia. Oh, my gosh. They take bone marrow out? Yeah, the video, you see them like hammering on this thing, and then they go. Oh, my gosh. 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 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 marrow. 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 cannulae, into the cerebrospinal 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, at least. You know, the first two days were pretty tough. I couldn't move that well. 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.

They use a 3D x-ray machine or ultrasound and they 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 like a tornado. 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. How much of it is placebo versus science? 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 had other treatments. I mean, she's an ER doctor. Gotcha. You know, trained at Carolin Skin Institute. She's had lots of people work on her. Wow. 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 of kids and she's 50. And so both of us had our reproductive organs done and she was just completely floored, like massive changes. So you could say, okay, Dave, that is a ridiculous, you could buy a Tesla for that. Here's the deal. Number one. You could live an extra.

Yeah. Well, so I'm a guinea pig. So like, you know, we worked a deal. Yeah, exactly. And two, and I have other friends who've gone through the full treatment. It's like, I'm really serious about living a long time. But it shouldn't cost that much. Like, 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 a 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? Amazing. Most people would, especially if they're insurance company, would do it because a journey replacement is $25,000 and growing your own tissues back is $5,000. Like, let's do that. Right?

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. Like, 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 a $150 injection into your knee, and it causes cartilage to regrow. And I've seen x-rays before and after with 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 a lot of things. Right, right, right. Sleep and fasting are those. You can do the trick. Yeah, those are crazy things. But then how do you sleep, right? Like that's kind of a big deal.

So do you track your sleep on a ring or anything? I need to get the Oura ring. I'm supposed to get one soon. Oh, man. It'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 of sleep. Really? Oh, yeah, and an hour and 19 of deep sleep here. So I got to 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 what keep you young. So I sleep like a young person. 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 of 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 burned 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 product.

So you can make that crème brûlée 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 just- 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. If occasionally have a caramelized, crunchy crust on your steak, great. Make it brown, not black. You don't have to be perfect. When you do that, when you eat those things, now we know they go in and they

just stick right in the lysosome. Now your cells can't burn all the other bits of protein. You end up getting, eventually, zombie cells because of that. Let's put less stuff in there that's harmful. So don't spike your blood sugar levels. Don't eat burned food. Big difference. Then there's accumulation of stuff outside the cells. And this is another different set of problems.

And it's amazing that sometimes fasting makes a really big difference for this. Fasting does everything. 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. And it is 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 the body. So in superhuman, I'm like, all right, take this fiber supplement. Take activated charcoal. Yeah. 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 of the diseases of aging are associated with metal buildup in those things. So that's an example of a toxin that can be outside of cells. One of the other seven pillars of aging is the telomerase. Number five?

I think this is number five. Of the telomeres? We have toxins inside the cells and outside the cells, like the buildups. You have intracellular, you have extracellular is number five. Okay. Extracellular? Extra, E-X-T-R-A, extracellular. So inside and outside the cells.

Yeah. And then? Let's see. Number six would be telomerase. These are the ends of the DNA? What is it? They're different than the ends of the DNA. It's essentially, imagine it like a wick. If you have a cell, every time it divides take you subtract one unit from the wick and that's called the hayflake limit so it's normally about 37 so if you have normal telomeres you can copy a cell 37 times and then 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. 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. 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 eating 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 collagen bars into Whole Foods. We're going to get 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 of 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 peptides for years. Oh, excellent. Oral or injectable? Injectable. Okay.

Let's talk about that. There's a chapter. Is oral better or what? Depends on what they are, but injectable? Injectable. Okay, let's talk about that. Is 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 your 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 like weird regulatory zones. He was saying this is like what every doctor is talking about at all the conferences and all the research is like now coming out as healthy and natural and fine. I've been on it for 10 years. Wow.

Right, 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've got seven pillars of aging. Telomeres matter. So I'm going to use this peptide. And one of the reasons I wrote Superhuman 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 was in his mid-80s, and he was on our board of directors. And the first night I meet him, we're out until 11.30 at night talking about all this stuff.

I'm like, this guy has as much energy as I do, and he's way older than I am. 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 get back, it saves the rest of us a lot of time and energy to have the village elder actually not have Alzheimer's disease and not be in a hospital. Yeah.

Right? That's powerful. Yeah. 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 be- It's called epitalin.

It's here. It's not something I make. I'm not selling that. So I'm just telling you about it. Epitalin? Epitalin. 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 nutritionist, 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, something called TB-500. you go into this and you're saying, wait, but all of these are under $100 and all of them have 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 and heart attack. I had pretty much the diseases of aging before I was 30 and it sucked. And like, 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. Right. Wow. 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. It's fat, 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 something, yeah. Yeah. And a lot of times we just have to say kale's good or kale's bad. Kale's way more bad than good, but I'm not going to say kale's bad. I'm going to 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 the correct dosage. Sun all day can cause cancer. Yeah. Right. And just- Skin disease. Yeah. Right. All sorts of 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 say, 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, 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. And sorry, guys. It's true. 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 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 talk. He's like, I was a hundred plus pounds fat for 17 years because of the vegan nonsense. Like he was pretty fiery about it. But 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 don't need a whole lot, yeah.

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 rampamycin. 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, it's like a spring. You push it down, push it down, and then you're going to go spoing, and then you put on muscle like a madman, and then you suppress, suppress. So get this. Fasting suppresses it. Exercise, like weight lifting, suppresses mTOR. And coffee suppresses mTOR. So what would happen if you didn't eat breakfast, so now you fasted, you were asleep 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 going to 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. Because 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.

That's a lot of work. I want to play ping pong with my son. 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 because, 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 i'm like 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 yeah right 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 wanna 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 wanna do it in just one joint.

Right. Or, you know, like there's areas. You don't do all of it, but you're showing all the things you can do. So 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 colonic.

Well, what are your thoughts on colonics? Are they helpful in eliminating toxins? 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. This was in the 90s sometime. I was much heavier and just not working the way it is now.

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. And Donna Gates actually told me about him.

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 from the previous generation of health influencers. Colon 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 U.S. in the 1930s or something. It took him almost a year to walk up here. And he has a place in Beverly Hills, and he does all the Victoria's Secret models.

Shut up. I'm not kidding. He's 90? Most fascinating guy I've talked to in a long time. Wow. Okay. 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 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 of 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 I've, in here, I write about the number of bacteria in my gut. I quadrupled the number of gut bacteria, which is a really important thing. You want 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 it. So I made something called Interfuel. 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? And we know there's something called acromantia 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 to the country to do it. It's pretty far out there. However,

it really made a difference. Really? Crazy difference, actually. 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 the data. I have a machine, a $26,000 machine that measures body fat from Upgrade Labs. It's the one we use on our clients.

When you stand on, you'll hold it. Yeah, exactly. So I get to go in and do that. No 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. I'm 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. 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%. 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 it. Just expose yourself. Put it 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 going to 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 going to go for cultured natural killer cells. But 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 try to get the cheapest possible thing that's going to move the needle for you. Yeah.

I love all this stuff, man. I got to start applying it more and go to upgrade labs more and everything. Let's hack you, man. That'll be fun. That's what I want to do. For the person listening who is overwhelmed, what would you say are five to ten things they could do tomorrow and consistently to just live a better life?

That's going to help their health. With aging and everything. Just everything. Overall, I'm going to feel better. I'm going to look better. I'm going to have less pain. More energy. That's easy.

Yeah. Okay. Number one. This is going to be very energy. That's 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.

So 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. Right. And just suck it up. And if you're like, I can't do it, if you have only fat and no – you can have coffee, you can have tea, no sweeteners, any of that kind of stuff.

If you put a Bulletproof coffee, just brain octane, no collagen, brain octane and butter. And ghee, yeah. 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 as a 24-hour fast? You can do that a couple times.

One or two is okay. Coffee is great, actually. During a fast. Yeah. It's not going to mess up the fasting process. 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

lunchtime. I could eat me. 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. It's true. If you have like a dinner at 6, and then you finish by 7, and you just say, I'm going to wait until dinner the next day. Yeah.

Right? You try to go to bed early. You have coffee in the morning. 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 5 yesterday. Yeah. 4, 5, and I'll probably just wait until 5 today. No. Have a cup of coffee, water. Yeah. Water okay? Oh, water's great.

Yeah. Now, one warning. Okay. A cup of coffee, water, water okay? Water's great. Now, one warning. 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. Go eat. So 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 experts 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 bad things. Really? So it's okay. There's pretty good science behind it. I went really deep on that. Gotcha. Okay. So step one, don't eat. Step two, learn to sleep. And I write the whole chapter on superhuman 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 want 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 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. And 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... Just put blocks... 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.

Really? 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 cerebrospinal fluid. It works better when there's a bit of gravity to help it come out. No way. Yeah, who would have thought? Even at, 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 TrueDark 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.

So 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've 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. So you'll see me, there's lots of pictures on social media. I'm wearing, it's 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 stars. 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 Sisson's trying to buy that company. Oh, I hope he does to like rebuild it up. I love five fingers. And you know about the studs on there. That's cool. What is it You know about the studs, don't you?

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 making that up. 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. I like that. Okay, so that's 24-hour fast. Learn to sleep better with those tips. All right, so far we haven't spent anything other than wood blocks on the bed, right?

Yeah, six inches, yep. Okay, and I got to say, though, if you were to monitor your sleep, everyone I know who's got one has improved their sleep. Gosh. 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 we've got a good night's sleep or a bad night's sleep. You've got to measure it.

Yeah. You've got to measure it. So it is liberating, but it's a couple hundred bucks, right? Got it. That's real money, but it's worth it. Okay. Next up, to live a lot longer. This is to be healthier.

Don't eat fried stuff, ever. I don't care if it's fried in the fat. Fried vegetables? No, not fried vegetables. You take a Brussels sprout, you deep fry it, it's going to taste good, it's going to 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, no one's 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 that, you're 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 those calories for something that's really good. Eat ice cream instead of french fries. It's a much better tradeoff. I did all day. Seriously, ice cream is way less harmful. I didn't have ice cream? Done.

Okay, done. All right, so don't eat fried stuff ever. 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 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. 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 chewing. It's a habit. Yeah. But then once you ditch the habit, you're like, oh, okay. I just realized I don't need it. If you were just to sleep better and learn to eat less, you'd 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. I'm cold all the time, but I got used to it. Your life sucks. Don't do that. That's not good. 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. 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 weightlifting 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? There's a dose response. Certain types of 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. 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 there. So you do that twice a week. So you lift really heavy things until you can't anymore, run really fast until you can't, and then pause and do it again. You do that twice a week. So one or two brief bouts of pain,

and 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 every day. I was on a low-fat diet. It's like that was one of the things I was like, man, this isn't working. So 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 can do 40 years of 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, is 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, like, 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. That's true. So, 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 do a vipassana 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. Yeah, that's it. 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 else. And if you do the other seven pillars of aging, at least mostly right, the odds of something taking you out, it's going to be a truck hitting you when you're 120. 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? And this is what aging used to be, Lewis. 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 hurt 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 where 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. You say, when I'm 100 years old, I'm going to be playing with my grandkids. I'm going to be giving back to my community. And I'm going to 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 use cavalry in World War I. And when people say, Dave, how dare you think you're going to live another 134 years? I know the 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. The thing is, now we can actually do it. And it's the coolest time ever to be alive, as 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. I like it, man. You know, when they say you look better with age, that should be a compliment of you doing the right things. Absolutely. So I hope to constantly look better the older I get. I love it, man.

Super human. It love it, man. Superhuman. It's out right now, the Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward. Can maybe even live forever. Make sure you guys check it out. Tons of research in here. It's very thick. Lots of great stuff. You can also just go to the end of the chapters, read the bullets.

Here's the thing you need to do right now to improve. You don't have to dive into all the research. Check it out, guys. Where can I get it right now? 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. And I got to 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 you haven't reviewed your mask of masculinity or any of louis's

other books go review them if you like superhuman go review that too leave a review uh 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 uh you're on social media you're on dave.asprey my... 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?

I did Bulletproof this morning. 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 going to last two and a half hours. I've been sipping on it. I've still got a little bit left. I don't feel hungry. I'm going to go another five or six hours. Have my 24-hour fast while I'm talking to you.

Thanks, Dave. Try some of these other things. Dave, thanks for constantly being a guinea pig 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. I acknowledge you, man. I appreciate you very much. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. I appreciate your work, Lewis. You're changing the world in. And I acknowledge you, man. I appreciate you very much. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. I appreciate your work, Lewis. You're changing the world in a good way.

Thanks, bro. Appreciate it, man. There you have it, my friend. 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? Sometimes we focus on the negative a lot, but I want you to also

focus on what are the things that you are doing well that you heard from Dave in this interview. Maybe it was 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 getting 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've 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'd 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 of 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 people that care about you, the people that look up to you, the people that rely on you. 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, and to the well-being of those around them? Or as someone who has been struggling for a while. And we all go through this. I went through a time when people called me Lewis for being fat Lewis. And it doesn't feel good. 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 should not be able to keep our

mind 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, 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. ស្រូវនន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវន្រូវ� Bye.