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Lewis HowesLewis Howes

"These DAILY HACKS Healed My Body & REVERSED MY AGE" | Dave Asprey

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Dave AspreyguestLewis Howeshost
Oct 11, 20191h 6mWatch on YouTube

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Transcript

  1. 0:00 – 0:34

    Why “living to 180” shouldn’t mean frailty, dependency, and cognitive decline

    1. DA

      Most people who are hearing 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. It's unnatural. It's not necessary. It's not what's happening for people who do even a few of the things here. [upbeat music]

  2. 0:34 – 2:31

    Lewis’s stubborn belly fat problem and the sleep–hormone explanation

    1. LH

      Welcome back everyone to School of Greatness podcast. We got my man, Dave Asprey, in the house.

    2. DA

      My man.

    3. LH

      Good to see you. You've got a new book, Super Human: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever. So we're gonna talk about how we're gonna live forever today, but you, we were talking about a little bit before we started about hormones.

    4. DA

      Yeah.

    5. LH

      And I met with a nutritionist about six to seven months ago, 'cause I felt like I've been working really hard as an athlete, eating well, training hard, but I haven't been able to get that, the feeling-

    6. DA

      [laughs]

    7. LH

      ... the, the final little belly fat gone.

    8. DA

      Yeah.

    9. LH

      And I was like, "Why is this happening?" You know, I'm a big guy. I work out.

    10. DA

      Yeah.

    11. LH

      I get up early. I do the right things. So why am I not at the fitness level that I truly wanna be at?

    12. DA

      It-

    13. LH

      And I, and I met with this nutritionist.

    14. DA

      Yeah, yeah. What'd he say?

    15. LH

      And I did all the blood work and all the-

    16. DA

      Oh, cool

    17. LH

      ... you know, I did all the sampling.

    18. DA

      Yeah.

    19. LH

      And he was like, "It doesn't matter how well you eat, how hard you work out, two-a-days, um, it comes down to sleep and hormones." He was like, "Your hormones, you have too much estrogen-

    20. DA

      [laughs]

    21. LH

      ... and you're not able to burn that extra fat-

    22. DA

      Yeah

    23. LH

      ... with that amount of estrogen-

    24. DA

      Mm

    25. LH

      ... and you're not producing enough testosterone." And he said, "The human body is not designed to be running as hard as you're running it at this level of life."

    26. DA

      Mm-hmm.

    27. LH

      Right? It's designed to be sitting by a tree and laying in the sun for 30 to 60 minutes a day and, you know, getting lots of sleep.

    28. DA

      Yeah.

    29. LH

      Not running your mind to the extreme amounts of pressures and stresses that the human body does today. And he said, "Here are a lot of things we can do, but truly it's gonna be hormones that you'd have to master first."

    30. DA

      Nice.

  3. 2:31 – 7:13

    Testosterone and thyroid: bioidentical hormones, delivery methods, and tradeoffs

    1. DA

      Hormones affect everything. There's a whole chapter in Super Human on using hormones for anti-aging. There's a lot of fear around testosterone replacement, mostly because in the '70s, you know, the-

    2. LH

      The roid rage

    3. DA

      ... they're using non-bioidentical testosterone.

    4. LH

      Yeah.

    5. DA

      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.

    6. LH

      Wow.

    7. DA

      No one did that sort of stuff. It was even hard to find a doctor who could order labs.

    8. LH

      Yeah.

    9. DA

      And it turns out I had more estrogen than my mom.

    10. LH

      You were [laughs] wow.

    11. DA

      At 26.

    12. LH

      You, were you also like, what-

    13. DA

      Three-

    14. LH

      ... 80 pounds overweight or something?

    15. DA

      300 pounds. Yeah, I was about 80 pounds overweight then. Yeah.

    16. LH

      Wow.

    17. DA

      And, uh-

    18. LH

      More estrogen than your mom

    19. DA

      ... and less testosterone than my mom.

    20. LH

      [laughs] And you were how old?

    21. DA

      My mom's kind of buff. [laughs]

    22. LH

      How old were you?

    23. DA

      I was 26.

    24. LH

      Wow.

    25. DA

      And so my, my health was, it was a complete shit show. I, I mean, I, 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, I have stuff like massive stretch marks.

    26. LH

      Mm-hmm.

    27. DA

      And it turns out I went on testosterone and-

    28. LH

      At 26?

    29. DA

      At 26, and it was one of... that and thyroid hormone, 'cause my thyroid was completely messed up. I'm hoping your, your nutritionist, uh, looked at your thyroid levels.

    30. LH

      Yeah.

  4. 7:13 – 9:00

    NAD decline around 40, mitochondria, and what ‘Super Human’ is trying to solve

    1. DA

      And there's a- another chapter in here about something called NAD, which, which is pronounced as "nads," but we're not talking about that.

    2. LH

      Yeah, yeah. [laughs]

    3. DA

      [laughs] This is a, an antiaging compound. And I'm right ... There's, there's ... You're making me think of this 'cause I just read the whole book, the audiobook-

    4. LH

      Yeah

    5. DA

      ... the first time ever.

    6. LH

      That's-

    7. DA

      I read the whole thing in a sitting

    8. LH

      ... it was like five days.

    9. DA

      Yeah.

    10. LH

      It's the worst thing ever.

    11. DA

      [laughs] It was a lot. But it, it really makes it stick in your mind.

    12. LH

      Uh-huh.

    13. DA

      So there's a thing here. When people hit about 40, especially athletes, they, they start saying, you know, no, just almost to a T what you said. I'm pushing hard, I wake up, I eat the right stuff. I'm, you know, I'm, I'm a fit guy, but there's something not quite right.

    14. LH

      Mm-hmm.

    15. DA

      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. And-

    16. LH

      Yeah. The last time I had you on, you s- everything was about mitochondria-

    17. DA

      Yeah, yeah

    18. LH

      ... and the brain, right?

    19. DA

      Yeah.

    20. LH

      Yeah.

    21. DA

      That was for Head Strong.

    22. LH

      Mm-hmm.

    23. DA

      That book was cool because I didn't expect this, but do you know, uh, Homo Deus and Sapiens? Those, like, real famous books about ... You ... On the New York Times monthly, like, science book list, which is sort of the, the baller list-

    24. LH

      [laughs]

    25. DA

      ... my book was sandwiched between those two books.

    26. LH

      That's cool.

    27. DA

      Which I, I never targeted or expected. A- and it, I just got an email. I was like, like-

    28. LH

      That's great

    29. DA

      ... this is the coolest thing that's ever happened to me. But that was just all brain, brain, brain. Super Human is more look, like, now that your brain works, now your, your body works, how do you keep it around for a lot longer? And of course the, so some mitochondria, but there's seven things that make us old. Mitochondria's just one of them. And it turns out-

    30. LH

      Hmm

  5. 9:00 – 10:29

    Pillars of aging (Part 1): energy failure and ‘cellular straitjackets’

    1. DA

      And one of them is mitochondrial, uh, mutations or, or essentially i- insufficiency. So this means your cells can't make enough money, or enough money [laughs]

    2. LH

      [laughs]

    3. DA

      Enough energy for you to make enough money. Uh, 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.

    4. LH

      Mm.

    5. DA

      And then bad things happen.

    6. LH

      And you get old.

    7. DA

      Yeah.

    8. LH

      Yeah.

    9. DA

      And so if, if that's one, I, I wanna make sure I don't repeat myself and-

    10. LH

      Yeah

    11. DA

      ... I'm pulling these from my head.

    12. LH

      Mitochondria.

    13. DA

      Yep. So mitochondria's the first one. The next one is something that I call cellular straitjackets. And it, it's fascinating that everyone's heard of beta amyloid plaque, 'cause, oh, we have Alzheimer's disease, everyone has amyloid. But what you don't know is amyloid forms throughout your body in all of your proteins, and it's basically cross-linked proteins that are inflexible. And you get more of this as you age. And it turns out there's things you can do that are coming online right now that'll break it down, but there's also a lot you can do just to prevent it from forming, because it's almost like a cellular level scar tissue.

    14. LH

      Hmm.

    15. DA

      So you've taken plenty of hits, uh-

    16. LH

      Yeah. I have

    17. DA

      ... you know, as an athlete, right? So you know what scar tissue in an elbow or a knee or hip or something does.

    18. LH

      Mm-hmm.

    19. DA

      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 gonna live to at least 180 like I am, you might want it to happen a little bit less, otherwise I'm gonna be walking around pretty stiff-

    20. LH

      Yeah

    21. DA

      ... when I'm, when I'm old, and I don't really want that.

    22. LH

      Okay.

    23. DA

      [clears throat]

    24. LH

      So how do we eliminate that?

  6. 10:29 – 15:16

    Inflammation triggers: fried foods, grains, nightshades, and the kale/oxalate warning

    1. DA

      Well, that one ... I mean, we can go through in detail on each of these things. Um, 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 g- low levels of inflammation, that's what does that.

    2. LH

      That builds up, yeah.

    3. DA

      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, and literally the cells can't move the way they're supposed to move.

    4. LH

      Mm-hmm.

    5. DA

      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. [laughs] I wish it wasn't that way, 'cause I like a croissant like the rest of us.

    6. LH

      I, I love croissants. [laughs]

    7. DA

      But they're just not good for us.

    8. LH

      Yeah.

    9. DA

      And some people are more sensitive than others.

    10. LH

      Yeah.

    11. DA

      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.

    12. LH

      Yeah, yeah.

    13. DA

      Thank you.

    14. LH

      Yeah.

    15. DA

      Uh, and, uh-

    16. LH

      Yeah, Dr., um-

    17. DA

      Gundry

    18. LH

      ... Gundry talks about nightshades.

    19. DA

      Yeah.

    20. LH

      Yeah.

    21. DA

      Yeah. So I, I ... 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, who's a good friend, focuses on those very heavily. And there's other stuff that comes in plants, like heavy metals. It, it's a major cause of aging. There's a whole chapter on heavy metals.

    22. LH

      Wow.

    23. DA

      Uh, um, did you know kale is the number one source of thallium in our diet? Thallium's called the poisoner's poison.

    24. LH

      So we shouldn't be having kale?

    25. DA

      No. Kale's gross. Have you eaten it lately?

    26. LH

      Oh my gosh. I di- uh, yeah, but they put it with ... saute with butter and some garlic.

    27. DA

      [laughs]

    28. LH

      You know, it's like-

    29. DA

      You have to torture kale to make it taste good.

    30. LH

      So no kale.

  7. 15:16 – 17:48

    Pillars of aging (Part 2): zombie cells, fasting, and “crazy billionaire” vs. accessible tools

    1. DA

      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. Ooh. And they sit there, and they take up space and resources. They make free radicals, but they don't do their job anymore. So is 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. Hmm. And these seven types of aging, these have been studied b- by a lot of people I've interviewed o- on my show. And in 20 years of running an anti-aging nonprofit, I've gotten to know the people doing the research. So decades of knowledge has gone into this. You know, we finally understand this. You know, uh, David Sinclair, by the way, that's a guy you should have on the show if you haven't. Uh, he is, uh, a guy who's just written a, 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 our cells backwards 'cause now we know why we age and what to do about it." Wow. Like, straight up, you don't do that as an academic unless you are sure. It ... we're, we're actually at the point where we know these seven things will do it. Wow. If you have a car, you know that you wanna keep your car for a while, you should change the oil, change the tires, and, and do the maintenance schedule. But if you only do half the maintenance schedule, the car isn't gonna make it. Well, these seven things in Super Human are the seven things that you account for. Okay. Because if you don't do all seven of them, you're not maintaining your chassis very well. Yeah. Like, you're, you're gonna have a problem. Yeah. And 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 r- right now. For those, most people won't go on the drug cocktail, uh, that you can get because it costs about 500 bucks, and it's still considered experimental. All of my anti-aging friends are like, "Oh, yeah. [laughs] I'm gonna do that once every year for- Right ... for the next while 'cause 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, a $50 supplement or something, and then the stuff that's free that stops the problem in the first place. Right. So the deal is you don't have to go out and do it, but anything the crazy billionaires are doing, if it costs $10,000 right now, it's gonna cost $200. 200 bucks. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

  8. 17:48 – 23:09

    Regeneration deep end: full-body stem cells, recovery, and lower-cost joint options

    1. DA

      Yeah. Yeah. It ... You s- we ... Just by raising awareness, you're gonna go to your insurance company and be like, "Hey, man, why can't I get this? Because I don't need knee replacement if you give me stem cells in my knees." Right. And I've done ... I write about it. I share the whole experience. I did $120,000 whole body stem cell makeover, uh, in Utah at- By yourself? Uh, well, I mean, I had doctors doing it, not me. Right, right, right, right. But yeah. Wow. So I, I went in, three doctors. Uh, Dr. Harry Adelson led it and a neurosurgeon from Johns Hopkins named Marcella Um, and then, uh, Amy Killen did the cosmetic stuff. So I'm unconscious for four hours. They're pulling a half a liter of bone marrow out.

    2. LH

      What? How do they do that?

    3. DA

      Um, they go in through your, your hip, the iliac crest.

    4. LH

      Oh.

    5. DA

      I've had that done twice. Once I was awake, actually. I ... With no, no, uh, anesthesia.

    6. LH

      Oh my gosh.

    7. DA

      I have a video-

    8. LH

      They take bone marrow out.

    9. DA

      Yeah, the video, you see them, like hammering on this thing, and then they go, "Eh, eh, eh."

    10. LH

      Oh my God. [laughs]

    11. DA

      Like, right on the bone. [laughs]

    12. LH

      In the bone?

    13. DA

      Look at your face. [laughs]

    14. LH

      Gosh, man.

    15. DA

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

    16. LH

      Ah.

    17. DA

      [laughs] So I did that.

    18. LH

      When was this?

    19. DA

      Uh, let's see. I did that about a year ago.

    20. LH

      No way.

    21. DA

      And-

    22. LH

      How much do they take, bone marrow?

    23. DA

      A half a liter. I mean, it's a good amount of bone marrow.

    24. LH

      Wow. So what do they do with that?

    25. DA

      Well, they take it, they get the stem cells out of it, and then they re-inject them throughout the body.

    26. LH

      Wow.

    27. DA

      So I had stem cells from my fat and my bone marrow. I had them injected every joint in the body, knees, hips, every- all along the spine, inside the spine, along the spinal cord with a cannula-

    28. LH

      [laughs]

    29. DA

      ... into the cerebral spinal fluid-

    30. LH

      What?

  9. 23:09 – 24:26

    Sleep as an anti-aging lever: tracking, deep/REM sleep, and light control

    1. DA

      So do, do you track your sleep on your, on a ring or anything?

    2. LH

      I, I need to get the Oura Ring. I'm supposed to get one soon.

    3. DA

      Oh, man. Well, I'll-

    4. LH

      It's amazing, right?

    5. DA

      Yeah. I'll email Harpreet if you want, but let me, let me show you a sleep score here that's ... Here we go. So I slept six hours and 50 minutes.

    6. LH

      Uh-huh.

    7. DA

      Two hours and 50 minutes of dreaming sleep. That's way more than a 20-year-old gets in eight hours of sleep.

    8. LH

      Really?

    9. DA

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

    10. LH

      So I gotta track this so I know-

    11. DA

      Yeah

    12. LH

      ... if my sleep's working or not.

    13. DA

      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.

    14. LH

      Wow.

    15. DA

      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, the preeminent blogs on sleep hacking. And, you know, 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-

    16. LH

      Mm

    17. DA

      ... has changed.

    18. LH

      Mm.

    19. DA

      And that will reduce your risk of the things that are most likely to kill you, as well as make you younger.

    20. LH

      Better sleep.

    21. DA

      Yeah.

    22. LH

      Wow.

  10. 24:26 – 28:40

    Pillars of aging (Part 3): intracellular junk, extracellular toxins, and avoiding AGEs

    1. DA

      All right. So we got-

    2. LH

      We got-

    3. DA

      Mitochondria, zombie cells, cellular straitjackets. All right. There's buildup of gunk inside the cells. I call it, uh, intracellular junk.

    4. LH

      Okay.

    5. DA

      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. It 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. Mm-hmm. Well, that's happening in your cells right now. Wow. 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 into the incinerator 'cause they don't burn. Mm-hmm. Right? [laughs] 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 in ... or burned vegetables for that matter. Uh, in the Bulletproof Diet, I wrote about the dangers of eating advanced glycation end products, and the problem was there was only two studies. [laughs] But we know that they form any time y- 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- Mm ... get caramelized. That's advanced glycation end products. You can make that crème brûlée or that, that crusty meat. So good. Uh- It- it's... I don't know why they taste good, 'cause they're really bad for you, but yeah- Yeah ... they taste good. So if you just- Don't eat those burned things. Yeah. If you go to a restaurant and say, "Could you not blacken my steak?" Uh-huh. Right? And, and it's, it's a... You just don't wanna eat that blackened- Yeah ... super burned stuff. And if occasionally you have a caramelized crunchy crust on your steak, great. Make it brown, not black. Yeah. Right? Like, you don't have to be perfect. But when you do that, when you eat those things, now we know they go in and they just stick right in the lysosome, and now your cells- Mm ... can't burn all the other bits of protein, so you end up getting eventually zombie cells- Mm ... because of that. Yeah. So let's put less stuff in there that's harmful. So don't spike your blood sugar levels. Don't eat burned food. Right. Okay. Big difference, okay? Got it. Then there's accumulation of stuff outside the cells, right? And this is another different set of problems, and there it's amazing that sometimes fasting makes a really big difference for this. Fasting does everything, huh? It does, but you can also bind toxins by taking things that bind toxins. You have these heavy metals that are inside the cells and outside the cells. As any animal ages, things that bioaccumulate get worse and worse. So if, uh, I like to go fishing, uh, 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. Mm. And the reason you do that is the fish is probably 100 years old, and it, it's probably going to lay a lot of eggs, which is good. Ah. You sh- you should let them reproduce. But even if you wanted to eat it, that fish has 100 years of eating other fish. Oh, wow. 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, like, gray hair and hair loss- Wow ... and stuff like that and wrinkles and skin. But the, 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 wanna actually go through and remove the toxins as you go. Yeah. 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 Super Human, I... like, I take this fiber supplement. [laughs] 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 and those things. Mm-hmm. So that's- Right ... an example of a toxin that could be outside of cells. One of the other seven pillars of aging is the telomerase. Number five? Yeah, I think this is number five. Yeah. Oh, the telomerase, the one that- Well, we had, we had, we had ta- we had toxins inside the cells and outside the cells, like the build-up. So you have intracellular. You have extracellular is number five. Okay. Extracellular? Extra. E-X-T-R-A. Extra. Extracellular. So inside and outside the cells. Yeah. And then- Let's see. Number

  11. 28:40 – 33:43

    Pillars of aging (Part 4): telomeres, cancer risk, and peptides like epitalon

    1. DA

      six would be telomerase. And this is something- These are the ends of the, the g- or the ends of the DNA? What is it? The- They're different than the ends of the DNA. It, it's essentially... imagine it like a wick. If you have a cell, every time it divides, you take... y- you subtract one unit from the wick, and that's called the Hayflick limit. Uh-huh. So it's normally about 37. So if you have normal telomerase, you can copy a cell 37 times, and then it won't, it won't do anything. Hm. And at that point, you get zombie cells. Gotcha. So what you wanna do then is figure out a way, how do I add more pieces onto that wick? Mm-hmm. 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, any time you increase growth of your cells like a young person, you increase cancer risk. Mm. So it turns out in here, I... like, well, there's four things that are gonna kill you if you're average, and... cancer, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's, and diabetes. Really? 80% of people listening to the show, one of those is gonna get you. Really? And usually, diabetes is a, a precedent of 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. Mm-hmm. Could... just that alone is- Right ... a huge advantage. There's a lot of people who actually- They don't... yeah ... they're in a food desert. It rains all day or whatever. Yeah. I go to 7-Eleven or I can go to the dollar store. Like, which one- Yeah. There's no food there. Uh, not yet. We'll get some good collagen bars- Yeah ... into Whole Foods. There you go. Or Whole Foods into 7-Eleven one of these days. But, uh, what's going on with the telomeres is now there are herbal compounds that are shown to increase the length- Really? ... of telomeres, but they cost a couple grand a month. Oh, man. That's a lot. Well, it's, 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. One of the nutritionist's young peptides, yeah. Oh, excellent. Yeah. Oral or injectable? Injectable. Okay. That's, uh... let's talk about that. There's a chapter- Is oral better or what? Is it- Uh, depends on what they are, but injectable is good. There's a whole chapter o- on SARMs and peptides in here as well. Oh, okay. Because... and this is the cutting edge stuff. I love that the nutritionist is doing that- Yeah ... because licensed nutritionists and doctors, it's a gray zone for them. Mm-hmm. And they should be completely free to, to- Yeah ... help people use them, but because they're not pharmaceuticals- They're not a drug. Yeah. Yeah, they're not a drug, but it's injectable, so there's, there's like weird- Yeah ... regulatory zones. He was saying this is, like, what every doctor is talking about- Mm-hmm ... in all the conferences- Yeah ... and all the research- Yeah ... is, like, now coming out as- You know, healthy and natural and fine I've, I've been on it for 10 years. Wow. Right. And it's crazy what happens, 'cause this one, in 2003, of course I'm an anti-aging guy, so you know, you, 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, right? So you're thinking, "All right. I wanna live a lot longer. I got seven pillars of aging. Telomeres matter, so I'm going to use this peptide." And one of the reasons I wrote Super Human [laughs] Lewis, is that there's no one who's really going to market that. Th- those are- Yeah ... not patentable. Yeah. But they're something that all of us need to know about, because I wanna live in a world full of people who are older and full of energy and, and- Mm-hmm ... full of wisdom. Because when I was 26, the reason I know all this stuff, I magically made my way to an anti-aging non-profit group, and I was learning from people two times and- Wow ... almost three times my age. Mm. Uh, one of my really good friends, Mike, there was in his mid-80s, and he's on our board of directors. And the first night I meet him, we're out till 11:30 at night talking about all this stuff. Like, this guy has as much energy as I do, and he's l- like way older than I am. Like, how did he do this? And you just realize it's possible, it's just unusual. Mm. So if it can be done, how do you do it? And so I feel that if, when we have a world full of people who have the wisdom of having experienced things, enough energy and enough desire to give back- Yeah ... it, it saves the rest of us a lot of time and energy- Right ... to have that, the, the village elder actually not- Right ... not have Alzheimer's disease and not be in a hospital. Yeah. Right [laughs] That's powerful, yeah. So that's, that's a big part of my mission, and getting this, a $50 thing that makes your telomeres longer, that's a pretty good ROI. That's pretty sweet. Yeah. It's already out there, or is this something you're gonna be- It's called ep- it's called epitalon. It's here. It's not something I make. I'm, I'm not selling that stuff. I'm just telling you about it. Epitalon? Epitalon, E-P-I-T-A-L-O-N. And I forget which chapter it's in, but- Okay ... uh, I describe it, and if you ask your- Great ... nutritionist they'll probably know about it. Okay, cool. And, and there's things that speed healing, something called BPC-157. You've probably tried that one. Mm-hmm. It's one of the injectable ones. Uh, it works. And there's, uh, other ones, um, something called TB500. And, uh, you go into this- Oh ... 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 wanna deal with that, or my brain isn't working. My brain wasn't working, I had arthritis [laughs] , I was fat, I was a high risk of stroke or heart attack. I had pretty much the diseases of aging before I was 30, and it sucked. And like, I'm not going back. [laughs] Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So

  12. 33:43 – 39:28

    Pillar of aging (Part 5): tissue loss, collagen, sunlight dosage, protein, and mTOR timing

    1. DA

      now you've got me asking myself, what is number seven? I know number seven is here, um, to make sure my memory still works. Yeah. [laughs] Uh, number seven is, uh, loss of tissue. Okay. And as we get old, you imagine that real thin- Mm-hmm ... uh, real thin skin. Yeah. So I actually talk about the rate of collagen loss- Mm ... and then what you can do about that. And if you are going to live for 100, 150 years, it, it's almost like having an investment and bank account that compounds. So if you're saying, "I'm just gonna take aging the way it normally comes," you're gonna have really thin skin when you're old. Or you could- Right. Wow ... you can- There's a loss of collagen, huh? Yeah. It's not just collagen, but in that case it's an example of collagen. Yeah. So yes. It's fat, it's collagen- Yeah ... it's whatever, yeah. And there a combination of exposure to light. There's things like red light therapy or just getting some sunshine. Not too much sunshine, but not no sunshine either. 20 minutes a day or so, yeah. Yeah. And, and a lot of the, a lot of times we just naturally say, "Kale's good or kale's bad." Kale's way more bad than good, but I'm not gonna say kale's bad. Right. Right? I'm gonna say the right amount. You eat kale a couple times a week, fine. Right? And it's the same thing with sun. It's not bad, but getting a sunburn is bad, and getting- Right ... none is bad. So it's like- Yeah ... the correct dosage- Sun all day can cause cancer. Yeah. Right. And it just- Skin disease, yeah. Right. All sorts of, of, you know, aging, photo aging. Mm-hmm. 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- Wow ... I actually cite the studies in the book that say, okay, you can change the rate of tissue decline. And you, 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. You don't... Yeah, there's no one who's protein deficient in America, right? N- no. And even pe- It's not like you need so much all the time. No. I was a raw vegan for a long time. It, it made me really unhealthy, like it does almost everyone. And- [laughs] Sorry guys. It's true. It's true. I, I mean, you and I both know- Yeah ... friends who really went in on it like I did, and, and eventually you're like, "Man, I'm actually not well." Yeah. And then you recover. I just did it, I did that in like 2003, I think. [laughs] Yeah. And, uh, I just remember the hellish feeling. Rick Rubin was just- Yeah ... on my show talking. He's like, "I was 100 plus pounds fat for 17 years because of the vegan nonsense." Like he was- Wow. [laughs] He was pretty fiery about it. Wow. But it, it... So th- there is a big backlash coming. But here's the, 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. Mm-hmm. 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. Right? Yeah. And so the protein recommendations in here are, um, defined based on body weight and all that, but they're much lower than most people think. And if you wanna live a long time, you don't need a lot of protein. So what do you eat instead? You eat vegetables and you eat the right kinds of fat. Mm-hmm. And that's just critically important. If you do that and then you do the things that manipulate a hormone, uh, called... Actually, I think it's a signaling compound, not a hormone, called mTOR. It's called mammalian target of rapamycin. And I wrote about this in The Bulletproof Diet and in the context of aging. mTOR makes you build muscles. However, if it's chronic elevated, it makes you grow cancer cells.

    2. LH

      Mm.

    3. DA

      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 wanna s- like, y- it's like a spring. You push it down, push it down, and then you like gonna go boing, and then you put on muscle like a madman.

    4. LH

      Sure.

    5. DA

      And then you suppress, suppress. So get this. Fasting suppresses it.

    6. LH

      Mm-hmm.

    7. DA

      Exercise, like weightlifting, suppresses mTOR, and coffee suppresses mTOR.

    8. LH

      Really?

    9. DA

      So what would happen if you didn't eat breakfast, so now you fasted while 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.

    10. LH

      Right.

    11. DA

      And what's gonna happen is you just got a much higher ROI on your exercise-

    12. LH

      Mm

    13. DA

      ... because you did the things in the right order. And after that, by not eating too much protein, you keep your mTOR low.

    14. LH

      Ah.

    15. DA

      So you age less, but you still have the muscles you want-

    16. LH

      Sure

    17. DA

      ... in less time. 'Cause I'm super lazy. I, I, I don't wanna wake up early and exercise twice a day like you do.

    18. LH

      Yeah.

    19. DA

      That sounds like an enormous amount of work.

    20. LH

      It's a lot of work.

    21. DA

      I, I wanna play ping pong with my son. [laughs]

    22. LH

      Yes, exactly. [laughs]

    23. DA

      That's more fun, right?

    24. LH

      Yeah.

    25. DA

      Uh, so it's like how do we get an ROI on exercise? Everything in Super Human is through the lens of ROI 'cause, I mean, you've, you've seen Upgrade Labs.

    26. LH

      Mm-hmm.

    27. DA

      I have this at home.

    28. LH

      Right.

    29. DA

      I have a million-dollar lab. I could spend eight hours a day on rejuvenating technologies and get nothing done.

    30. LH

      Right.

  13. 39:28 – 43:08

    Colonics and the gut microbiome: when they help, when they disrupt, and measuring diversity

    1. LH

      That's great. Have you ever done a colonic?

    2. DA

      Uh, I just did one right before I came in. [laughs]

    3. LH

      Okay. [laughs] You're clean.

    4. DA

      I have done a colonic.

    5. LH

      Well, what are your thoughts on colonics? Are they helpful in-

    6. DA

      They, they-

    7. LH

      ... eliminating toxins, or do they help the cells in any way?

    8. DA

      They-

    9. LH

      Will they support this or?

    10. DA

      They can be if they're done right. The, the first time I did one, I used to have really bad gut problems when I had toxic mold exposure and I was ... Uh, you know, this is in the '90s sometime. Um, so I was much heavier and just not, brain not working the way it is now. Uh, and there was a lady in Silicon Valley. It was like a super sketchy setup and, uh, you know, you go to this apartment and, and-

    11. LH

      Wow

    12. DA

      ... it was like, ugh. And I decided that really not much good is coming out of this. Um, but then again, I had chronic gut inflammation from what I was eating-

    13. LH

      Yeah

    14. DA

      ... so I wasn't gonna heal anyway 'cause I was eating the wrong foods. And, um, since then, I had a friend say, "Dave, you should go see this guy called The Colon Whisperer."

    15. LH

      No way.

    16. DA

      He was actually here in Beverly Hills.

    17. LH

      Shut up.

    18. DA

      And yeah, Donna Gates actually told me about him. Donna Gates wrote the, the Body Ecology Diet, which is basically where the GAPS diet came from. So she's l- like a luminary in the field, uh, in, from the, the previous generation of, of health influencers.

    19. LH

      Wow.

    20. DA

      And so-

    21. LH

      Colon Whisperer.

    22. DA

      [laughs] This guy, he's ... I think he was 90, and he's-

    23. LH

      No way

    24. DA

      ... probably still operating. He had walked from the southern point of South America all the way to the US like in, in the 1930s or something.

    25. LH

      Gosh.

    26. DA

      Like, it, it took him almost a year to walk up here to, to, to... And he has this place in Beverly Hills, and he does all the Victoria's Secret models.

    27. LH

      Shut up.

    28. DA

      I'm not kidding.

    29. LH

      He's 90?

    30. DA

      Uh, y-

  14. 43:08 – 1:01:51

    Immune “reset” experiments, forest-based boosts, and a simple weekly plan (fasting, sleep, movement, stress)

    1. DA

      ... 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, they happen every single day, and your immune system kills them.

    2. LH

      Right.

    3. DA

      That's just how, how it works. Well, natural killer cells, okay, I went for the heavy-duty hack.

    4. LH

      [laughs]

    5. DA

      Pull my blood out, I think it was 19 vials of blood.

    6. LH

      Wow.

    7. DA

      And they cultured it for a while, grew my natural killer cells, and we injected 2 billion of my own natural killer cells back-

    8. LH

      Wow

    9. DA

      ... to reset my immune system to be 20 years younger. Now-

    10. LH

      Wow

    11. DA

      ... that's something that is ... You have to fly to another country to do it.

    12. LH

      [laughs]

    13. DA

      It is pretty far out there. However, it really made a difference.

    14. LH

      Really?

    15. DA

      Crazy difference, actually.

    16. LH

      Where'd you go, Panama?

    17. DA

      Uh, let's see. For that one-

    18. LH

      [laughs]

    19. DA

      ... that would've been just Tijuana.

    20. LH

      Yeah. [laughs]

    21. DA

      Uh, but you actually do all the blood draws and stuff in the US-

    22. LH

      Mm-hmm

    23. DA

      ... and then you fly... And that's, they can do five people a month with the amount of, of growing of these cells.

    24. LH

      Wow.

    25. DA

      It, 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.

    26. LH

      Huh.

    27. DA

      I lost 3% body fat in those 10 days.

    28. LH

      No way.

    29. DA

      When fat's metabolized, I have the, the data, I have a machine-

    30. LH

      No way

  15. 1:01:51 – 1:06:36

    Wrap-up: redefining old age, book details, and where to follow Dave

    1. DA

      And this is what aging used to be, Lewis, and this is what i- is lacking. Most people who are hearing this are going, "Why would I wanna 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, yeah, your back hurt a little bit, but you know, you aged, but you were, you were venerated as, you know, the village elder, as having wisdom and, and respect. And as you did this, eventually you got sick and you died. And it might take you a week. It, it might take you-

    2. LH

      Yeah

    3. DA

      ... a day or two, where you just go to bed and you wake up dead, right? This is how it normally works. This long protracted period of, of convalescence and being an invalid, it's unnatural.

    4. LH

      Yeah.

    5. DA

      It's not necessary. It's not what's happening for people who do even a few of the things here. So take that picture. You get rid of it and you say, "When I'm 100 years old, I'm gonna be-

    6. LH

      Healthy and-

    7. DA

      ... playing with my grandkids. I'm gonna be giving back to my community, and I'm gonna have 100 years of experience to share."

    8. LH

      Wow.

    9. DA

      And do you know how much 100 years is? Think about 1919. We were fighting World War I on horseback.

    10. LH

      Wow.

    11. DA

      They still used cavalry in World War I, okay? And when people say, "Dave, how do, how dare you think you're gonna live another 134 years?" [laughs] 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.

    12. LH

      Right.

    13. DA

      You could only listen to a radio show controlled by three big media companies, right?

    14. LH

      Wow.

    15. DA

      E- everything is easier and faster and more fun and more exciting, and the anti-aging field is, is based on decades of modern research and based on centuries of research in monasteries, in traditional Chinese medicine, in Ayurveda.

    16. LH

      Yeah.

    17. DA

      Every major lineage of medicine has anti-aging at its core.

    18. LH

      Yeah.

    19. DA

      The modern scientists that, 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-

    20. LH

      Hmm

    21. DA

      ... not turning lead into gold.

    22. LH

      Wow.

    23. DA

      So the, the advances of modern science were all based on people trying to live forever.

    24. LH

      Wow.

    25. DA

      This is in our, it's 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, is... You have to understand, old age means I look good, I feel good-

    26. LH

      Mm-hmm

    27. DA

      ... I'm independent, and I'm wise because I've learned from my mistakes.

    28. LH

      From all the mistakes, yeah.

    29. DA

      And I'm still having good sex.

    30. LH

      That's great.

Episode duration: 1:06:36

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