Can You Age Backwards? with Dave Asprey

Dave Asprey:Get an older friend if you’re young, get a younger friend if you’re old, and that’s one of the simplest things you can do to live longer for both people.

Mark Hyman:Welcome to The Doctor’s Farmacy. I’m Dr. Mark Hyman, and that’s Farmacy with F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y. A place for conversations that matter. And if you want to live long and be super human, then this conversation matters because it’s with my close friend, a brilliant biohacker, one of the leading thinkers in medicine and health today, Dave Asprey, also known as the Bulletproof guy who was the inventor of Bulletproof Coffee. I’m sure you’ve all heard about it. It’s the latest, hottest thing. He’s the founder and CEO of Bulletproof 360, which is the global creator of this phenomenon, Bulletproof Coffee. He’s a two time New York Times bestselling author. He’s the host of the Webby award-winning podcast, Bulletproof Radio, which I’ve been on a couple of times and soon to be a third.

Mark Hyman:He’s a serial entrepreneur, that’s S-E-R-I-A-L. Not cereal because I wouldn’t have him on the podcast, if he was making cereal. He’s a global change agent, he’s dedicated two decades of his life to identifying and working with world renowned doctors, including me, scientists, luminaries of human existence, I don’t want to know who [inaudible 00:01:21]. Innovators to uncover the most advanced methods for enhancing mental and physical performance. Dave’s discoveries and the companies he founded offer tools and enable people the opportunity to take control of body, mind and biology, elevating human performance far beyond what we ever dreamed possible. By employing the principles of biohacking, a term added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in September 2018 with Dave’s influence, congratulations.

Mark Hyman:Dave has lost over 100 pounds, he’s upgraded his brain, he’s learnt to sleep more efficiently in less time, become a very effective entrepreneur, husband, father and overall a human being. And I’ve known Dave for many years, and I keep seeing him becoming a better human being every time I meet him. He’s happier, he’s funnier, he’s cuter, he’s awesome. He’s been featured on so much media like The Today Show, CNN, CNBC, Nightline, Dr. Oz, Steve Harvey Show, and lots more. His impact is really felt on a global scale. He’s a true game changer and a maverick. And I am honored to have Dave be a close friend and a mentor and a teacher. I learn more from him than I do from most medical textbooks. So-

Dave Asprey:Oh my God, thanks man.

Mark Hyman:It’s so awesome to have you on the podcast and we’re going to talk today about something really important. And the title of your new book, Super Human: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever, is quite a claim. Now, I once was talking to you that I wanted to live to be 120 and you’re like, “Why only 120? I want to live to be 180.” And I’m like, “Okay. I guess I could set my sights a little higher.” But it just doesn’t seem realistic. But you’ve written this book that brings together some of the most exciting new research about how we age and how we can unage, literally reverse aging. And you go into such exquisite detail with such great examples and bring in things that most people really haven’t heard about things like ozone and NAD and mitochondria. So I want to really get deep into this with you. So, welcome Dave.

Dave Asprey:Mark, I love getting to hang out with you and spend time with you and that was an amazing introduction. So I learn an equal amount from you.

Mark Hyman:All right, here we go. So when I learned about aging, it just seemed like this inevitable process of disease. And what I learned very early on in functional medicine was that getting older is inevitable, but aging is not necessarily inevitable. But what we think of as aging, as normal aging in our society is the result of abnormal aging. And I recently did my telomeres, I’m going to be 60 this year. And in my telomeres, I’m 39, which is pretty awesome. And biologically I’m younger because I do the things I need to do to take care of myself. So I’m 60 years old, but I’m water skiing, I’m climbing up mountains, I’m doing all kinds of stuff that I was doing in my 20s and 30s and feel fine. So I think it’s really an interesting question about what are those things that cause us to see this abnormal aging? We call them the four killers. So what are those four killers that will most likely kill us as we age?

Dave Asprey:It turns out this is going to be really amazing for a director of functional medicine at the Cleveland Clinic kind of guy. But the first thing you do if you want to live a long time is don’t die. Kind of obvious but if you’re an average person and by the way you’re not average if you’re listening to this episode because you have all the access to the knowledge of Doctor’s Farmacy, which is really a game changing thing for you, but something’s going to kill you. In fact, let’s play the odds it’s probably heart disease, diabetes, cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. In fact, those add up to somewhere around 80% of the likelihood of things that are going to get you.

Dave Asprey:So what if you could cut the odds of those happening to you radically? Well, a couple of things would happen. One, you’d have a higher quality of life, however long it was. So that picture of aging that we all have, which involves wheelchairs, diapers, not knowing your own name, tubes, like it’s a pretty horrific horror movie sort of picture that most people have. And that’s why this-

Mark Hyman:Depends.

Dave Asprey:It depends, right? Because I wouldn’t want to live that long. But what if when you’re 100, you felt like you did know, you looked like you did know-

Mark Hyman:Few more are wrinkled maybe.

Dave Asprey:Few more wrinkles, but you would also have a few more decades of wisdom. And I think we have an epidemic of absence right now because throughout all of history, when you aged, you were venerated, and you were the village elder. People came to you for advice because you probably went through it before-

Mark Hyman:And now they stick in a nursing home.

Dave Asprey:Well, not only that, you’re probably, you don’t remember a lot of this because your brain is fried by eating bad fats and grains and not taking care of yourself. It’s not that you did that on purpose, it’s because we built a food system that does that to you. So what if you had this picture of being fully independent and full of energy and able to share knowledge and give back and to get to know your kids, your grandkids, your great grandkids, and just be of service to your community. And at that point, suddenly aging is different and there’s nothing that says, “I’m 142 and I’ve done everything I came here to do and it’s time for me to go,” Fine.

Dave Asprey:But at least my real goal, Mark, I would like to die at a time and by a method of my choosing. There you go. Right? And if you want it to not be up to you, you’re like, “Oh, I’m not ready to go.” Okay, well there you kind of did something wrong. Or even worse, I’m dying of whatever disease. Right? And you could have done something that didn’t cost you a penny, it wasn’t unpleasant, you just didn’t know what to do. Right? And it’s those things that I’m looking to change.

Mark Hyman:Yeah, so powerful. So in the science of aging, we know a lot now, we know a lot about what causes aging, we know a lot about the mechanisms and in functional medicine there are fundamental laws of nature that we follow in order to create vibrant health. And there are systems in the body that are all networked together that determine the quality of your health or will determine disease. And two of those, well many of them, all of them in fact, are connected whether it’s the microbiome or your hormones or your detoxification system. But two of the central features of aging are inflammation, could be called inflamaging, right? And the mitochondria, which for those listening, those are the little powerhouses of your cells that produce energy when you eat and you breathe, you basically combust them like in an engine.

Mark Hyman:And these little tiny things inside your cells that produce energy in the form of ATP. That is the central quality of your health, which is the quality of your mitochondria. The quality of your health depends on the quality of your energy. And so those two things are things you have written a lot about, and you know a lot about, and we know a lot about what makes those systems go awry and how to fix them. So can you talk a little bit about that?

Dave Asprey:Diabetes is a disease where your cells can’t use food in the form of glucose and air to make energy. It’s a mitochondrial dysfunction, metabolic dysfunction disease. And that disease raises your risk of cancer and heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease.

Mark Hyman:Yeah. Four times the risk if you have diabetes that you’re going to get dementia.

Dave Asprey:Exactly. So could it be that all four of the killers are all tied to metabolic dysfunction, which is tied to mitochondrial performance? It turns out it is. It also turns out that your body has all these amazing repair systems that you can turn on that have been there always that are probably not turned on. And every one of those repair systems is dependent on functioning mitochondria. So when we look at these seven pillars of aging, one of the first ones is mitochondrial mutations. These mitochondria, they’re ancient bacteria that are a part of ourselves now-

Mark Hyman:They look like little bacteria, if you look at them on a microscope.

Dave Asprey:And they have their own DNA, that’s bacterial DNA, and so you could say that, “Oh we harnessed them.” But from their perspective, like we found these mobile petri dishes that walk around and do stuff and were the puppet masters and if we don’t like what’s going on and we just make less energy and then they feel crappy, then they do what we want. So literally they’re driving a lot of the reason that you just unconsciously reached for the cigarette or you reach for the doughnut, it’s because your mitochondria is saying, “I need food right now.” And they’re talking to you. And then you find the doughnut in your hand or you told yourself you weren’t going to smoke today and you did. Who’s pulling the puppet strings? Those little bastards are.

Mark Hyman:Yeah. Let’s get those. We don’t want to get them we want to help them.

Dave Asprey:You do want to help them because when they’re happy, you’re happy and that includes eating the right stuff, it includes sleep, all the good stuff that you talk about on your show Mark. However, they mutate relatively easily-

Mark Hyman:They’re easily damaged.

Dave Asprey:Yeah, right. They’re easily damaged and your job is to teach your body, if one of them has damaged or slow, kill it all the way and replace it with a fresh young one because we have that ability. But if you eat too much, eat too often, eat the wrong things, don’t do what the other things that don’t cost much if anything, then the systems-

Mark Hyman:Like exercise and sleep and relax.

Dave Asprey:Things like that. Yeah, really basic stuff to be honest. But if you do them at the right time or in the right way or with a little bit of structure around them, what happens is the old weak mitochondria get out of the way and make space for young ones. And when that happens, all of the other repair systems can turn on. And there’s other things you can do, people don’t know this, but we have something called zombie cells that I write about in Super Human. And what a zombie cell is, is a cell just like a real zombie. It sits there and it’s not dead really, but it’s not alive really either-

Mark Hyman:Not dead, yet.

Dave Asprey:And it sits there, it makes free radicals, it takes up space and it does nothing good for you, but it adds to your metabolic burden. So what do you do? Well, these are called senescent cells in the aging field and there are things you can do to encourage your body to get rid of senescent cells and they range from some of-

Mark Hyman:Can you hire a pack man to come and clean them up?

Dave Asprey:Yeah. That’s pretty much it. We have little robots that come in and there are people actually want to make little nanobots and stuff, unnecessary. The body is such a beautiful elegant thing. It wants to live a long time, it wants to repair itself, but it’s going to make a decision. Let’s see, doughnut, self repair. And if you let the body decide without intervening, it’s going to pick the doughnut every single time. You know why? Because throughout all of human history, there have been regular famines and if there’s a doughnut, it’s a good idea to eat it in case there isn’t a doughnut tomorrow.

Mark Hyman:That’s right.

Dave Asprey:You know better, we all know better-

Mark Hyman:We evolved in an era where there wasn’t Krispy Kreme or Dunkin’ Donuts every corner.

Dave Asprey:And our cells don’t know that, they’re still stuck in that. So they will self sacrifice, they’ll turn off their ability to save energy, to take care of themselves for the doughnut. So this is just about knowing, Oh, if I brush my teeth, I’m better off. I don’t get cavities. There are basic metabolic maintenance things that I write about in Super Human that we haven’t been taught to do.

Mark Hyman:Yeah, that’s pretty interesting when we look at all the things we do know about aging, right? And all the interventions that seem to turn off aging and turn on youth thing let’s call it-

Dave Asprey:She wrote a book called Youth Thing, that’s a great name.

Mark Hyman:Okay. [inaudible 00:12:45]. It’s fascinating and the things that are showing up in the science now, whether it’s calorie restriction, the only thing that’s been shown to increase longevity reliably in animal models is restricting calories. You eat a less by a third, you live a third longer, but you’re miserable. I don’t want to do that. Then there’s what we call intermittent fasting, which most people mean by that time restricted eating where you eat in an eight hour window. Then there’s true intermittent fasting is maybe fast a day or two or a week.

Mark Hyman:And then there’s fasting mimicking diets and there’s ketogenic diets. All of those activate the same thing, which is this process of self repair and healing that is a natural thing that our body does, but that we interfere with all the time by just eating all the time and eating all the wrong foods all the time.

Dave Asprey:Yes.

Mark Hyman:And your book really goes into how do we reverse that process? How do we understand what harm is a mitochondria, what causes inflammation? How do we shift that? So let’s talk more about these cellular aging forms, cellular aging processes that drive disease and that you talk about as being the cause of aging. So these seven pillars of aging. You mentioned the zombie cells, let’s go through the other ones.

Dave Asprey:Another one that’s really interesting is called cellular straight checkers in Super Human. And people have usually by now heard of something called amyloid plaque, or usually it’s beta amyloid plaque because people say, “Oh, that’s what causes Alzheimer’s disease.” It’s actually not what causes Alzheimer’s disease it’s a symptom of it. But it turns out amyloid throughout the body forms and is a contributing cause of aging. So if you were to say, “Oh, I fixed my mitochondria, but I have amyloid everywhere.” You’re still going to show signs of aging. You’re not going to have maintained your youthfulness. That’s why there’s these seven pillars that support you.

Mark Hyman:What causes them?

Dave Asprey:It turns out inflammation causes it. It’s the equivalent of having a callus or a scar over time. So amyloid plaque in the brain, chronic brain inflammation, which is caused by mitochondrial dysfunction in the brain. But you can have this in your bicep, you can have this in your endothelial cells. It can happen throughout the body and it builds up over time. So when you start saying, “I’m going to live twice as long as mother nature wants.” You’re going to have to do something about this. Otherwise, half your body’s going to be amyloid plaque and you’re going to be walking around like a piece of bamboo, not like a flexible human.

Mark Hyman:So how do you get rid of this bamboo?

Dave Asprey:Well, there are a variety of new enzyme formulas that are just about to come on the market that scientists have been working on the anti aging field that can break these down. In the meantime though, how about this? What if you actually didn’t build them up because you addressed inflammation?

Mark Hyman:Yeah, right? What causes inflammation?

Dave Asprey:Well, what causes inflammation?

Mark Hyman:And how do you get rid of it?

Dave Asprey:Every single time there’s inflammation, it is ultimately coming from your mitochondria. And there are things that signal inflammation to happen in the body and things called inflammatory cytokines, so one of the things you do is you find the habits you have every day that trigger inflammation and you stop doing them.

Mark Hyman:Like?

Dave Asprey:Like eating grain, eating bad fats, eating anything fried in any oil.

Mark Hyman:Sugar.

Dave Asprey:No, sugar is good for you. I mean it.

Mark Hyman:All right. I think this podcast is over now.

Dave Asprey:It’s actually gluten deficiency that we’re all suffering from Mark. Now-

Mark Hyman:Gluten deficiency, lack of sugar. I don’t know of ice cream, I think that’s just key to everything.

Dave Asprey:It turns out if someone was to have three grams of sugar with their meal, if they have a healthy metabolism, it will do nothing to them, but three grams of an inflammatory oil, or damaged oil. What is three grams of fish oil do to you?

Mark Hyman:A lot.

Dave Asprey:A lot. What is three grams of highly oxidized fried oil going to do to you? It’s going to do a lot in the wrong direction. So it turns out sugar, if you’re on a high sugar diet, especially liquid sugar, it is going to wreck your gut bacteria and gut bacteria are a part of the aging puzzle. So I would say though bad fats are more dangerous than sugar and you don’t want to eat either one of them. But if there’s a teaspoon of sugar in a normal meal on occasion, it’s a lesser evil.

Mark Hyman:Yeah. It’s the pharmacologic doses of 150 pounds a year per person. That’s the problem. It’s not the-

Dave Asprey:It’s horrifying, right?

Mark Hyman:It’s not the sugar you put in your food, it’s a sugar added by all these companies in most processed foods.

Dave Asprey:You’re 100% correct. And there are a group of people say, “If you eat a single carb, you’re a bad person.” I term them keto bros or dirty keto. And what’s going on there? Okay. It turns out your-

Mark Hyman:The keto mafia.

Dave Asprey:Good one. Your gut bacteria, they must have soluble fiber, which is a carb like I manufacture soluble fiber. I intentionally put it in my body. In the book, I actually talk about the number of gut bacteria species that I had. It was 48 because I travel 150 days of the year. I cannot eat enough vegetables at restaurants.

Mark Hyman:It’s hard, right?

Dave Asprey:Well, I quadrupled it. I put two scoops of the inner fuel, a prebiotic mix of plant fibers and I put it in my coffee and now I’m at 196 species. Right? And I didn’t have to eat kale, I didn’t have to smell kale.

Mark Hyman:We’ve got an anti kale kick?

Dave Asprey:Absolutely kale’s bad. But what’s going on around this inflammation in our cells that causes these cellular straight checkers is look, if you eat some fried stuff, Oh it’s a special treat. I just eat it a couple times a week. It constantly grates on your system. It’s going to take four days to get rid of all the inflammatory compounds from that and you do that for 20 years and all of a sudden your cells are walking around with less flexibility in way more [crosstalk 00:18:24].

Mark Hyman:We are eating inflammatory mitochondrial damaging diet is our main diet and it is what we talk about all the time. It’s, something that is just so pervasive and that and unfortunately is so easy to get, whereas like you said, “You’re on the road, it’s hard to get vegetables.” I literally go to a restaurant when I’m traveling, and say, “Can I please have three sides of vegetables?

Dave Asprey:And you know it comes four-

Mark Hyman:Four string means-

Dave Asprey:Yeah four string means and all deep fried in like some kind-

Mark Hyman:Oh, my God, the worst was that I was in Des Moines, Iowa doing Obama Television Show and I was like, enter a hotel, I wanted some food. I’m like, “Can I get some vegetables?” Because I’m like, “Well we have green beans.” And I’m like, “Okay.” So they brought green beans and they were canned green beans they were soggy and gross and they were covered with this brown sugar gravy, like a soup of gravy over the green beans. And that was the vegetables.

Dave Asprey:Wow. Did you wash them off with Coca Cola?

Mark Hyman:I suppose I didn’t know what to do. I was like, “Oh, they go what a vegetable.” It was terrible. But I said, “Okay, is there a Chinese restaurant around here?” And then there was, and I went there and I actually had a lot of veggies.

Dave Asprey:As long as they’re steamed, a lot of times you go to a Chinese restaurant, they fry a lot of food-

Mark Hyman:With funky oils.

Dave Asprey:So you get the funky oil-

Mark Hyman:And the steamed broccoli, right? [inaudible 00:19:41] broccoli.

Dave Asprey:And people might say, Dave, you and Mark, you are so picky-

Mark Hyman:Extreme.

Dave Asprey:And extreme. But here’s the deal, if you eat no fried food for the next two weeks and you look at your skin and you look at how you feel when you wake up and you look at your grip strength and you look at every single metric about how good you’re doing, you will improve. So, but I like fried food. Look you can also but say, “I like heroin.” I don’t care, don’t use it. It doesn’t matter if you like it, it’s just not okay.

Mark Hyman:It’s true.

Dave Asprey:And my kids know that and I’ve taken my kids out and said, “All right, let’s go eat serious junk.” So they can feel it.

Mark Hyman:All right. So we talked about the mitochondria mutations. We talked about the cellular straight checkers, we talked about the zombie cells-

Dave Asprey:Let’s just talk about age. Advanced glycation end products. It turns out two of the other pillars of aging are build up of extracellular and intracellular junk. It turns out inside your cells, there are some compounds that your cells are supposed to be able to burn up and get out. So every cell has something called the lysosome inside it. And its job is to burn up extra protein and use it for energy so that you can break it down into its components and get rid of it. But we eat things and we sometimes overtime generate things in our bodies that our lysosomes can’t break down. It’s sort of like carbon incinerator at the dump, but you stick enough things in there that won’t burn, it can’t function anymore. And then you get a big pile of stuff at the dump. So what do we do about that? Well, the easiest thing is make sure that you eat less of the things that cause those things to back up.

Mark Hyman:They’re called AGEs advanced glycation end products. It’s sort of like the crust on the bread or the crispy skin on chicken. It’s like the creme brulee, that crispy thing. That’s basic proteins and sugars forming a compound that accelerates aging is literally called AGEs. And they bind to receptors called RAGEs receptor-

Dave Asprey:You can’t make this up.

Mark Hyman:Fancy vacation in plaques. It’s basically sugar and protein combined together that create this massive inflammatory response and oxidative stress, which then damaged your mitochondria, and creates this vicious cycle of aging and disease.

Dave Asprey:You nailed it. It’s funny when I wrote The Bulletproof Diet, which came out in 2014 but it was based on about a decade worth of experiments before that I wrote, you don’t want to eat AGEs advanced glycation end products because I could feel the difference in my inflammation when I ate them. I knew that they weren’t good because I was fat and old when I was young. So I reversed that. But I’m a good canary. And I’d cited a couple studies, but we also make advanced glycation end products in our bodies when we eat sugar.

Dave Asprey:So you eat these huge doses of sugar, the sugar courses through your body looking for proteins to stick to and it will do that. But in Super Human, I cite new research where we talk about the effects of eating advanced glycation end products versus making them on [inaudible 00:22:36].

Mark Hyman:The best way to eat them? Microwave your food.

Dave Asprey:Microwave your food, and eat Carmel, which is pretty much solid, advanced glycation end product.

Mark Hyman:Carmel my God. Don’t tell me that.

Dave Asprey:Sorry.

Mark Hyman:Carmel is my favorite.

Dave Asprey:It’s so good. But you’re taking milk and sugar and just cooking and cooking and cooking and cooking until it’s a brown sticky-

Mark Hyman:Oh, ruining my life Dave Asprey.

Dave Asprey:You can make Carmel that tastes the same out of plants.

Mark Hyman:All right. I got it.

Dave Asprey:And burns meat is a really big thing when you barbecue it. So well this is-

Mark Hyman:Probably vegetables. Not all really grilled meat. Grilling your vegetables does the same thing as grilling meat. It creates the same toxic chemicals.

Dave Asprey:I go to restaurants and say “I like a plate of broccoli.” And they bring me a plate of blackened broccoli. Like, you ruined it. You don’t do that. So less stripes and less charring, I go to a place, I only eat grass fed, pastured animals or I don’t eat it. Eating industrially raised antibiotic corn and soy fed animals is a great way to age quickly. But I’ll go there and I’ll say, “Please don’t try my steak, cook it gently.” I’d still want to meet Amerie-

Mark Hyman:Low cooked meats?

Dave Asprey:Yeah.

Mark Hyman:That job is my new favorite thing.

Dave Asprey:So good.

Mark Hyman:You put the stuff in there, you put some vegetables and tomato sauce, whatever you put in the oven for three hours, come back and it’s like magic.

Dave Asprey:And it’s done.

Mark Hyman:Child that comes out. It’s like it’s ready.

Dave Asprey:I do a lot of something called sous-vide because I’m lazy. So you use Ziploc, your steak or whatever in a thing, put it in a water broth with a little temperature thingy and you come back 24 hours later and no matter what cut of meat it is, it’s perfectly tender and medium rare and it takes almost no work. And so did I save time and get a higher quality food that tasted good? Because here’s the deal in Super Human, in the Bulletproof type and your work, we are talking about eating foods that are more satisfying, more delicious and more tasty. To the point that someone puts a piece of in big pharma or big food, birthday cake from some commercial bakery versus something that you would recommend or I would recommend you’ll look at that and you’ll say, “That one’s pretty, but I want to eat the thing that tastes really good and nourishing and satisfying.” And your body will actually guide you to the good stuff.

Mark Hyman:Yeah. I’ve noticed that, I mean over the years, I used to eat more junk and crap when I was younger, and now if I walk through a Starbucks case full of all this stuff, or I go in some restaurant, it doesn’t look like food to me it’s like, “Why would I eat that? It’s like a rock.” I’m not going to eating a rock or a piece of wood. But like it doesn’t actually look like food to me anymore, and I don’t want it. It’s not like I’m depriving myself. I just literally don’t actually have an interest in it. And it doesn’t actually look appealing to me and I don’t even think it’ll taste good. If I do taste it, it’s like, I don’t want to eat that.

Dave Asprey:I’m with you there. And people think it’s a little bit crazy. Because I remember when I weighed 300 pounds, I would have the worst cravings and you’d see those scones or whatever in the case at the coffee shop and then you’re like, “Oh, I really want that. And you walk past who just call to you.” Those are your damaged mitochondria desperate for energy going, please eat that. Please eat that. And is same thing now in my pattern matching system, those don’t register as food anymore because they’re actually not food for humans. And now that my pattern matching system is right, I just … Like I said, it can be a rock, it could be a cactus, but you wouldn’t put it in your mouth. So therefore the willpower it takes to do it gone.

Mark Hyman:It’s not a willpower thing anymore-

Dave Asprey:Not at all.

Mark Hyman:Once you rewire your hormones and rewire your brain chemistry, your body will actually want the right stuff. It’ll actually will like it. Now here’s the thing, you have a kind of outrageous claim, you’re kind of an outrageous guy.

Dave Asprey:Just take a while that’s not outrageous.

Mark Hyman:And your outrageous claim is you want to live to be 180?

Dave Asprey:Yeah.

Mark Hyman:No, I don’t think, well maybe Methuselah, but maybe some guy who know birth certificates that claims to lived to be 180 I don’t know. But you don’t want to really just live that long. You want to have a great life, you want to have better sex, super brain power, you want to not get sick. So tell us your secret plan, which is not so secret because you wrote about in Super Human for aging backwards. That will add more years to your life and more life to your years.

Dave Asprey:All right.

Mark Hyman:I want to know that. I’m taking notes.

Dave Asprey:First. I’m going to tell why 180 is a real number and then I’m going to tell you that. Is that a deal?

Mark Hyman:Because I’m buzzer at your job but I’m like curious. I’m like all right. Okay.

Dave Asprey:Okay. So-

Mark Hyman:You better live that long because then at least have one friend.

Dave Asprey:Yeah, I absolutely. We’ll be hanging out.

Mark Hyman:Because I’m already dead. Like it just going to be you and me.

Dave Asprey:I don’t think it’s going to end up like that. A lot of people listening to the show are going to live decades longer than they think. And I want you to go back 100 years Mark, okay. If you’re going to live to 150 you’ve got 90 more years. If I lived 180 I’ve got 136 more years, but let’s go back 100 years. Year is 1919 World War I is ending where many of the battles are fought on horseback. Look at where technology has taken us today and you look-

Mark Hyman:Yeah, I look at it, it’s kind of scary.

Dave Asprey:Yeah. Well, you look in 1950, end of World War II, if you were the president of the US and you wanted some research done, there were massive armies of people with card catalogs who’d go out and do research and six months later they’d do something. You and me and everyone listening to your show today can go online for free in half a second and search PubMed, which is pretty much all of the medical knowledge that we have.

Mark Hyman:Yeah. All the scientific papers that-

Dave Asprey:You and I had to do microfiche, half the people listening don’t know what a microfiche is? Right? This is, by the way, it’s like a photocopy on a tiny little piece of transparent plastic and you’d go to library and check, went out in an envelope and put it on a weird little viewer screen that would amplify it. I’m not even making this up. This is a real thing. You remember it? And then you’d fax it to someone too right?

Mark Hyman:That was actually before fax.

Dave Asprey:That was way before fax. Right. But all of these things have happened.

Mark Hyman:And by the way, a fax machine is one of those things you put paper in and it transmits it in a weird way that comes out in their end with a piece of paper. It’s like kind of an old technology.

Dave Asprey:Let’s see here some people don’t know what a fax is anyway.

Mark Hyman:But I asked them to fax me something and they’re like, “Fax, what? They still do fax?” I’m like, “Yeah, they still do.” The medical stuff, because-

Dave Asprey:Oh cause it’s more private or something. Okay. I look at all of this and you say, okay, you’ve had Dr. David Sinclair on the show. He’s been on my show. I write about his research and the book. And there are thousands of other people that you and I both know who have spent decades working on aging on different facets on each of these seven pillars. And they’re saying, “Our work has borne fruit.” So my supposition is really straight forward, if we know that the oldest person alive today is 120-

Mark Hyman:22.

Dave Asprey:Yep. Give or take.

Mark Hyman:Madam Calmen.

Dave Asprey:There you go. Although she might’ve filled in for her mom there’s a new accusation about that.

Mark Hyman:Oh, you think she was a con?

Dave Asprey:As a matter of fact, do you know the single biggest predictor of whether in areas of Blue Zone on earth?

Mark Hyman:Lack of birth certificates?

Dave Asprey:Yes. It’s a poor economy, lack of education and lack of birth certificates. I’m not joking. Very strong statistical correlation. So there are a few people are only half as old as they say they are probably 20 years younger because their mom had them … So that’s not to say there isn’t fraud there. But if you look back through recorded history, I have a book sitting on my bedside table from the grandson of the caretaker of an Indian guy who was said to be 185 and there’s all kinds of crazy stuff in this book. I don’t know if this is real. The guy died, whatever, 1930s. But you look back through all of the different historical texts, things like traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, there is talk and there is research about long-lived people, exceptionally long lived.

Mark Hyman:I mean the turn of the century, the longest lived people on the planet were the Plains Indians. They had the most centenarians of any population.

Dave Asprey:Interesting. I didn’t know that.

Mark Hyman:They ate was buffalo and a few berries and whatever else.

Dave Asprey:Grass fed buffalo hump, my favorite. In fact, it’s true with buffalo, the most precious part was the fatty hump on the back. And that and the liver would go to the chief and the kids. And it’s the same way with the ancient Mayans. The ruling class would have fish run in 200 miles from the coast, so they could eat fish and they’d give corn to the slaves. Right. And it’s still that way-

Mark Hyman:They had to run pretty fast so the fish wouldn’t rot.

Dave Asprey:They had like multiple handoffs and-

Mark Hyman:Like Pony Express for fish.

Dave Asprey:Yeah, pretty much.

Mark Hyman:The fish express, the sardine express.

Dave Asprey:And first their runners were fast, I think. But it’s just fascinating to me that if we can do 50% better than our best today in the next 100 years, given the amazing technology and the research of people that you and I know, it’s because an asteroid hit the planet. And then my 180 number might not be any good.

Mark Hyman:So what are those strategies? What are those things that add more years to life and life to years?

Dave Asprey:There’s the biggest one, if you were to one day a week, simply not eat, it would change your life in the most dramatic way. The data behind fasting is so strong, but most people listening have the same mindset I did when I weighed 300 pounds. It’s like this, if I don’t eat six times a day, my body will go into starvation mode and then I’ll gain weight. And also I’ll want to kill people because I can’t stand not eating for that amount of time I feel like I’m going to die. And when you build metabolic flexibility, when you use the tips that are in here in Super Human, it turns out you can modulate a hormone called CCK, and another one called ghrelin.

Dave Asprey:CCK is the hormone that makes you feel full and ghrelin is the one that makes you feel hungry. And if you’ve been on a low fat, low calorie or vegan diet, your hunger levels will still be set to the highest weight, body weight that you’ve recently had. So if you went from 300 pounds to 250 pounds, you will have the chronic hunger of a 300 pound person and you will lose. The hunger will win. And that’s why I actually lost way more than 100 pounds. Because if you lose 20 gain 30, lose 30 gain 40 lose 40 gain 50 and you’ve yo-yo. Everyone who’s been fat knows what I’m talking about. You have any fat pants in your closet? I don’t own fat pants anymore. They’re gone. Like I don’t have to worry about that anymore. But it took a long time and a lot of research to get there. So what-

Mark Hyman:But you’re saying, you can fix that?

Dave Asprey:You can fix that in the way-

Mark Hyman:Whatever you are, you’re not hungry like a 300 pound person.

Dave Asprey:No, you can reset your fat hunger point and the way you do that is you get ketones present and you can do this by not eating. You can do this by putting brain octane in your Bulletproof Coffee.

Mark Hyman:There’s always troubles being known when the obesity experts talk about the body’s set point, I mean nobody’s set point was 400 pounds. Extraordinary it doesn’t make sense to me. Your set point is changed based on your metabolism and what you’ve eaten and your weight and it can be unchanged.

Dave Asprey:And this crazy thing that we don’t talk about this more, all it takes is a blood level and ketones as 0.38 and if-

Mark Hyman:Which is low.

Dave Asprey:You’re not a keto dieter person, that’s just not going to mean anything. That’s for one of the hormones, for the other ones, 0.48 these are mild levels of ketosis. You know how you do that? Don’t eat after the sun goes down, don’t have breakfast and have a late lunch. And if you do that, you’ll probably bump up if you have a healthy metabolism. If you don’t, you drink a Bulletproof Coffee in the morning with brain octane, it’ll probably bump your ketones up enough. And all of a sudden this deep level relaxation happens in your body because now you’re not craving food like a fat person. You’ve reset, and these studies are out there where the levels of ketones are there. So breakfast is what we do after you wake up in the morning. Just skip that-

Mark Hyman:Yeah. My wife and I had dinner, it’s finished by six something, and I didn’t eat till like 10.30 the next morning, and I felt great. And I was like 14-hour whatever, 16-hour fast.

Dave Asprey:14 to 16 hours, 18 hours is better. And it’s something that I think because of the great depression, because there have been times where your grandparents probably starved no matter if you’re from Europe or the US? Different causes for that. So we just like how could we go a day without eating? Here’s the deal, you’ll live a lot longer and be a lot healthier if you do that.

Mark Hyman:But they’re these techniques, whether its ketogenic diets, whether it’s time restricted eating or low calorie eating for a week or fasting mimicking diet or just actual fast for a day, all activate the same thing. They all reduce inflammation, they increase your antioxidant enzymes, they increase your stem cells, they increase your mitochondrial repair and cleaning up your mitochondrial function. They increase your bone density, increase your muscle mass, improve your cognitive function. I mean it’s like a miracle-

Dave Asprey:The returns are so high and you’ll see in your muffin top the next day you’ll kind of like, wow, like I have different curves than I used to, or maybe I don’t have a curve I didn’t want one. But you see it very dramatically and you feel a new zest for life when you do this and the first time you do it, you’ll probably feel like crap. Which is why this stuff I write about. Here’s how to not feel crappy the first time you do it. But if you do this every now and then even you build what I’m calling metabolic flexibility. And in my case I was at high risk for stroke and heart attack before I was 30. I was pre diabetic had arthritis in my knees since I was 14. So I had all these fun diseases of aging-

Mark Hyman:Yeah. We should try to get up a picture on the podcast of Dave when he was before.

Dave Asprey:I have this impressive, my favorite fat pictures from Entrepreneur Magazine. I was like 280 pounds and I’m this 23 year old. I’m the first guy to sell anything over the internet before anyone knew what the internet was. And I got penpals, but-

Mark Hyman:You were selling t-shirts?

Dave Asprey:Yeah, that’s my proof of fat picture. But there’s so much that happens around the psychology and emotion of this, but all you have to do is do it once and the next day go, “Wow. That was a little hard and I feel better.” But if you do it the right way, the first day, it turns out the amount of caffeine in two small cups of coffee will double your ketone production. Adding brain octane to your Bulletproof Coffee or whatever the heck you’re having will increase your ketones. So if you can just get your levels up enough, normally it’s four days of fasting in order to do that or you have to eat the bacon only-

Mark Hyman:Those little tricks.

Dave Asprey:So, but these are just things to reduce your suffering as you learn to do this. But where my metabolism is now, Mark, I am perfectly insulin sensitive. There’s a scale that goes from one to 160, I scored one. And my glucose tolerance is high. In other words, I can eat sugar better than most people. I just don’t. And I can metabolize fat as well as anyone else. And I do that mostly. And because I move in and out of ketosis, I’ve built flexibility. So some of the other things that are going to make you live longer, it turns out running marathons isn’t going to make you live longer.

Mark Hyman:No thought on my list.

Dave Asprey:But regular exercises and we’ve been completely deceived. The 10,000 steps a day metric, you know where that came from?

Mark Hyman:Oh, no, actually.

Dave Asprey:And it turns out in the late 1950s a Japanese company and I actually named them in the book, they came up with the first pedometer you put on your belt, the little mechanical thing that would click every time you took a step and they just decided 10,000 was a good number. And so they popularized it until this day we make trackers like I was CTO of a risk tracking company and the data there, there’s no data for that. It turns out that you need to move for 20 minutes a day, just walk. Right.

Dave Asprey:And you could do yoga, you could hold a little bit of vibration, and you use all sorts of whatevers. But just moving around for 20 minutes a day and then once or maybe twice a week, lift something really heavy or do something that makes you pretty much want to throw up like really fast sprint and then stop but do it twice. That’s all it is. Just to raise your heart rate and get it back down quickly. Those two things are going to create the stimulus you need because one of the things that hits us as we age-

Mark Hyman:Those throw up training as we going to-

Dave Asprey:Pretty much, they call it high intensity interval training, but look, lifting something really heavy until you can’t lift it, it sucks. And when you’re done, you can’t.

Mark Hyman:Yeah. I don’t know how people like that. [crosstalk 00:38:42] feel a bike rubber like I started weight training recently I’m like, “I need this big guy kind of encouraging me because otherwise I wouldn’t do it on my own.” I got kind of wimp out, my goal I did three it’s fine, those that do 12 I’m like, “Okay.”

Dave Asprey:It’s that pushing yourself to the limit-

Mark Hyman:But you feel good yeah.

Dave Asprey:That makes the difference. Anyway get help doing that. But we’re talking 15 minutes of pain once a week. And compared to an hour of going to the spin class every day, that actually isn’t going to help you age less. In fact, you might wear out your hips that way. So you save time and you’ve got more anti aging benefits. And if you go for a walk with a loved one, well, did you actually get that time back anyway? You did. So now you’re exercising more intelligently. And speaking of this, occasionally lifting something heavy, one of the other seven pillars of aging is actually just tissue loss. It turns out as we age-

Mark Hyman:Muscle loss.

Dave Asprey:Muscle loss, but also skin. In the book I talk about collagen very specifically, and Bulletproof is one of the reasons everyone’s putting collagen protein in everything, because I started writing about it and talking about it about a decade ago and it’s entered, it’s like, Oh, this actually matters. Your skin is made of collagen. Collagen is the fascia that holds your muscles, it’s the matrix for your bones. It’s terribly important, but your ability to make collagen goes down over time. That’s why you have thin skin as you age. It turns out those things you can do that increased thickness of your collagen. In fact-

Mark Hyman:Help me with my wrinkles?

Dave Asprey:I’m going to help you with your wrinkles, but not just wrinkles, we’re talking about the thickness of your skin, which is really important because along with muscle wasting, sarcopenia, which is a problem for older people. You also get just thinning of all tissues of the body.

Mark Hyman:I remember my mother’s skin used to just fall off like she would touch herself in like it would rip.

Dave Asprey:It would tear. Yeah. Well, you can change the rate of collagen deposition by using light therapy, by getting some sunlight, but not too much, by eating more collagen and by doing less things that prevent the breakdown of collagen.

Mark Hyman:Like?

Dave Asprey:Like, or you could make sure you have enough vitamin C, don’t eat bad fats.

Mark Hyman:The usual.

Dave Asprey:The usual. It turns out so many of the basic habits we’re talking about support the reversal of aging. But then it comes down to something like stem cell exhaustion, which is part of this tissue thing. So you reduce the loss of tissues, you increase the turnover rate of tissues, and then you say, “Well, what do I do about stem cells?” Because you run out of stem cells as you age. So in Super Human, I talk about how I’ve done probably the most extensive stem cell treatment done in one person at one time where I had three doctors working on me for four hours.

Mark Hyman:Total body makeover.

Dave Asprey:Yeah. The stem cell total body makeover with Dr. Harry Adelson. And this isn’t something most of us are ever going to do, frankly, it was kind of painful. However, I’m looking to live to 180 and I would like I’m almost 50, and I’d like my body to remain youthful and to have those reserves of stem cells and to go through and fix old injuries. So that’s what I did and I talk about that, but I also talk about things you can do to make sure that you have adequate stem cell reserves. And it turns out, Mark, it’s the same stuff, like maybe sometimes you should try some intermittent fasting. Maybe you shouldn’t eat bad fats-

Mark Hyman:Maybe you should exercise.

Dave Asprey:Don’t eat grains. And those things are shown in studies to improve stem cells. But one of the things we haven’t hit on too much, but you talked about in the introduction is sleep. And if you want more stem cells, and more growth hormone, all the good stuff you’ve got asleep. So I was looking at my sleep score for the last night.

Mark Hyman:You have the Oura ring?

Dave Asprey:I have the Oura ring. Do you have one too?

Mark Hyman:I got one too.

Dave Asprey:And so I’ve been an advisor to the company for a while because I was CTO of another risk tracking company called Basis while back. So I really know this space while the ring is ridiculous. But I looked at my sleep score last night, I slept let’s see, six hours and 50 minutes, but I got two hours and 50 minutes of REM and an hour and 19 minutes of deep sleep in a hotel when I landed at night.

Mark Hyman:Impressive.

Dave Asprey:So this is-

Mark Hyman:Impressive, let’s see what was mine.

Dave Asprey:Oh yeah. Well let’s compare and see.

Mark Hyman:I want to see mine. Okay. So mine wait, that’s Uber. I don’t want the Uber app. Wait.

Dave Asprey:As you’re looking it up, it turns out as you age, your amount of deep sleep and REM sleep goes down predictably unless you do something about it. So I’m getting more sleep than a 20 year old.

Mark Hyman:I was in bed for eight and a half hours. I slept seven hours and 50 minutes. I had a 91 sleep score.

Dave Asprey:Nice.

Mark Hyman:My total sleep was 750 minutes, but an hour and a half of REM. Deep sleep was 54. Latency was 13 minutes, which means I tell it to make it to sleep. But I had restfulness I was tossing around because I’m traveling. So I’m in California, I’m staying in a friend’s house, I’m in their bed, I’m going to bed late, like I’m on the East Coast like 10 o’clock. So yeah, I mean it wasn’t as good as I’d like, but-

Dave Asprey:It’s still pretty.

Mark Hyman:Yesterday. I got 92 and I had all blues, which is no bad thing. So, but it’s not always like that like …

Dave Asprey:It’s not, but if you do what it takes to sleep better. And I talk about sleep in the book, it’s been a big theme for me, because frankly I was really bad at sleeping and I never wanted to sleep because it seemed like such a waste of time. And now look, if you sleep six and a half hours a night, well you’re in the group of people who lives the longest.

Mark Hyman:Six and a half?

Dave Asprey:Believe it or not, the most granular study ever done about [crosstalk 00:44:12] it’s okay. It’s just that people who need more than six and a half hours of sleep die more often than people need six and half hours of sleep.

Mark Hyman:Now you’re making me feel really bad. I’m never going to make it till 180, I need my eight hours.

Dave Asprey:Here’s the way that works. People who are healthier need less sleep. Or people who sleep better need less sleep. So I am very well rested in my six and a half hours of sleep and sometimes less. But I learned to change things that make me sleep like I’m 20 instead of like-

Mark Hyman:So let’s just touch on that for a minute. We’ve had some shows on sleep, but we talked about food, we talked about the right kind of exercise. We talked about intermittent fasting, and we talked about the sleep issue. The problem in this country is that most Americans don’t sleep well. It’s an epidemic of poor sleep, we’ve reduced our number of hours of sleep over the last 100 years dramatically. We have screens at night, we are wearing the BluBlocker glasses right now-

Dave Asprey:There’s one of the companies I started called TrueDark and it matters the light thing and eating too late are the two biggest things for sleep.

Mark Hyman:Yeah. So I think getting healthy sleep is important and it’s stress response. So things like meditation really help ramp you down, not drinking too much coffee or not having late-

Dave Asprey:After 2:00 PM don’t drink coffee, unless it’s tea caff-

Mark Hyman:Don’t exercise after dinner, don’t eat late, three hours before bed, the BluBlocker glasses, get off screens. I mean, these techniques really work.

Dave Asprey:They work in a way that’s measurable. And throughout history you could just wake up and say, “Do I feel like I slept well?” And then you could turn to your spouse and say, “Did I wake you up with snoring?” But my phone tells me it records if I snore. And I don’t snore very much anymore because if you eat foods that make you inflamed you snore a lot, if you eat the right foods, you don’t snore. And if you keep snoring, then you get it fixed.

Dave Asprey:And when you go through all this stuff, you realize, wait a minute, I didn’t have to spend anymore to learn how to sleep well. And it was cheaper to do that than it was to go on growth hormone and all these other things. So sleep is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to literally age backwards by causing your cells to self-repair in a way they wouldn’t do if you got exactly the same amount of sleep, but it was bad sleep. So I talked about here’s what different kinds of sleep do for you and here’s how to get them. And for me the TrueDark, the patented glasses for sleep that are more than BluBlockers, they doubled my deep sleep. And when I use a specific kind of mushroom extract before bed, I tripled my REM sleep. That’s why my scores were that high. I found out what worked.

Mark Hyman:What kind of mushroom extract, do tell Dr. Dave.

Dave Asprey:It’s an Australian species of a Lion’s Mane mushroom as it can be called Life Cykel makes it. And the guys came on my show and talked about it. And Lion’s Mane is shown in studies to do stuff, but I never felt normal Lion’s Mane when I took it there was no difference. This stuff, because of the way it’s extracted, I think because of the Australian species, my score goes up every single time I take it. So I don’t travel without it. I always take it. The Life Cykel Lion’s Mane, TrueDark Twilight glasses and you can lower the-

Mark Hyman:Do you do the glasses all the time because you wear them during the day. Do you?

Dave Asprey:So TrueDark makes the ones for jet lag and heavy duty sleep and I’ll wear those for at least half hour before bed. So when I was flying to LA last night, I was on a flight around seven o’clock so I put on the glasses that help your brain know that it’s nighttime. So I’m wearing the tinted glasses that are in the red spectrum, not just BluBlockers. BluBlockers don’t do enough for sleep. They help, but they’re not enough. And I do that and I feel great. The ones I’m wearing right now. These are the daytime glasses that blocks 75% of blue lights. We’ve got bright studio lights. I’m on camera for about 12 hours today. And if I stare at bright lights, especially LED lights, I actually get tired after a while. Your brain gets worn out. I wear these, my eyes are happy, my brain is happy all day long.

Mark Hyman:Let me try those. You send me some, I have them in my house. Oh yeah. It actually is more-

Dave Asprey:Made your brand relax?

Mark Hyman:Yes. It’s interesting. It’s like the lights were kind of hurting my brain and now-

Dave Asprey:It’s an unconscious thing. Light creates pressure-

Mark Hyman:I feel like I got relief like someone was stepping on my foot and got off.

Dave Asprey:But you wouldn’t notice this slowly put pressure on your foot. Right? We’re in for another couple of minutes just watch for your brain does.

Mark Hyman:That’s fascinating. Wow.

Dave Asprey:So here’s what’s going on. People listening to this, you stare at your screen and you haven’t turned it down at least halfway during the day. You stare at a bright screen on your computer all day long. You’re underneath bright LED lights and at the end of the day you say, “Wow, I don’t know what’s wrong but I really want a cookie, I’m so tired.”

Mark Hyman:Okay so let’s recap here because this is really important. One, which glasses should you wear when, and for how long and where do you get them? Because you talked about two different kinds of glasses.

Dave Asprey:Got it. So TrueDark is the company, truedark.com and just full disclosure. I started the company, I wrote patents for this company because of the light signs and eyes. I’m really into this, it’s an important biohack and at TrueDark there’s something called Sunset or Twilight, those are the ones you wear before bed. Those are things that happen at night. And then the Daywalkers or what you’re wearing.

Mark Hyman:The Sunset one is the one that you can-

Dave Asprey:Nighttime.

Mark Hyman:Nighttime when jet lag and traveling. Okay.

Dave Asprey:So you do Sunsets for nighttime and Daywalkers for the day and you don’t have to wear them all the time. We make ones that are less yellow than ones you’re wearing. But the bottom line is if you want to be awake, alert, and feel like yourself at the end of a day of sitting in bright lights, if you wear the glasses, you will feel so different.

Mark Hyman:I’m so down. This is great. Okay, well you’re not getting these back but-

Dave Asprey:I heard his intro.

Mark Hyman:I know got on the mic [inaudible 00:49:47]. All right. So let’s go through again talked about different strategies for living to 180 and sleep is key, BluBlocker glasses, all the strategies we’ve talked about. What else?

Dave Asprey:The other thing that is in the book is having connections, having relationships and it all comes back to those dumb little mitochondria we talked about before. If you’re a life form, it doesn’t matter if you’re a cactus or an amoeba or a human, you run the same order of operations. The first thing is run away from killer, hide from scary things. Because there’s something kills you right now, it’s the end of life. Okay? So that’s why we spend so much of our time in anxiety and stress because our automated systems are looking for something that might be bad for you. And this is that we overweight, we over remember the negative things, we don’t remember the positive things.

Dave Asprey:The second thing we do, we eat everything. And that’s why you keep eating junk food. You didn’t mean to eat because your cells are making you do it. The third thing we do, so we have, let’s see, we had fear, we had food, the other one’s also an F word, that involves reproduction. Okay? Because all life forms have to reproduce, right? Okay. So if we spend most of our energy doing those things, those are all the things pretty much everything we’ve ever been ashamed of is come from one of those categories, right? But is there something else that life does? It’s another F word called friend, right? So we are wired in order to do those things. And if you-

Mark Hyman:Community. Connection.

Dave Asprey:Community, connection, have friends, specialize in something and support the people around you. And it’s why we have biofilms on medical implants. It’s why yogurt works, it’s why you can have kombucha. And so we are wired at a very deep level to have a strong community and if you want to live a very long time, you look at those four things and you make sure you don’t have too much stress and you don’t feel afraid all the time. And sometimes you have to go to a therapist, like you’ve got to do your personal work on that one.

Mark Hyman:That’s one of the key aspects of the Blue Zones.

Dave Asprey:Yeah. Poverty and fraud in birth certificates.

Mark Hyman:No. The community. The community. I mean-

Dave Asprey:I’m so teasing.

Mark Hyman:I mean the whole idea, like in Japan, in Okinawa they have the moais which is the parents put together like a group of four or five kids from birth and then they become their community and they go through every stage of life with them.

Dave Asprey:Isn’t that just, it’s beautiful.

Mark Hyman:It’s powerful. I mean I just had lunch with a friend of mine this last weekend. We’ve been friends for 40 years and we’ve been through ups and downs, marriage, divorces, deaths, and it’s just very powerful feeling to be that seen, known, loved, connected. And we have a culture of loneliness. We have a culture of isolation. We have a culture where we’re so separate for each other despite having 5,000 friends on Facebook, we might not have one friend we can call.

Dave Asprey:It happens on a regular basis. Remember when our-

Mark Hyman:So what’s the cure?

Dave Asprey:The cure for that is actually having friends of different ages. And this goes for everyone listening. If you are 70 and you’re looking around and going, “Some of my friends can’t go for walks anymore. Some of my friends are dying.” You better get yourself some younger friends. It’s time.

Mark Hyman:Most of my friends are my biological age.

Dave Asprey:There you go. And if you’re young, the way you stay young and the way you get ahead is instead of making all the mistakes yourself, ask someone who’s already made the mistakes, how to not make them. So your job is to go out and find someone three times your age. That’s how I did what I did. Mark, I was 26 years old. I was fat and tired, my brain wasn’t working and I felt like crap. And I found people who were 80 who had fixed it themselves and they took me under their wing and taught me this stuff. That’s what I’m sharing right now.

Dave Asprey:So you need to find people who are old, the kind of people that you probably frankly don’t see right now because when people hit a certain age, my parents had told me this. I remember the first time I became invisible. People just didn’t look at me. And this is not okay, this is not how you treat the wise elders of our generation. So get an older friend if you’re young, get a younger friend if you’re old. And that’s one of the simplest things you can do to live longer for both people.

Mark Hyman:We had people who are just generally isolated. What do you suggest for them to how to build connections and find friends and …

Dave Asprey:It’s really such a personal thing, but if you’re isolated, it’s probably something you’re doing and it’s probably fear-based. Remember those mitochondria? Things that might be scary if you are hurt, sometime you’re bullied in seventh grade, someone abandoned you when you were young. You’ll still be at an unconscious level looking for that in your cells. And so until you do that deep work and just feeling safe and being connected to people, you’ll probably create that. So a lot of this work is around improve your psychology, improve your emotions. But here’s the trick if you want to do that work and your mitochondria can’t make enough energy-

Mark Hyman:You’re not going to be able to.

Dave Asprey:There’s a study now about will power that proves it, will power comes from electrons that comes from mitochondria. So if you want to improve your situation where you have friends and community, deep connections with people who care about you, well if you’re too tired to get out of bed in the morning you will not do it. So you fix your biology and then you fix your friends.

Mark Hyman:That’s great. Okay. Now there’s two other big things you talked about in the book, which are kind of noble, a little different. And I have intimate experience with both of them unfortunately, which are toxins and ozone.

Dave Asprey:Yes.

Mark Hyman:So let’s talk about what you learned about the role of environmental toxins and heavy metals, particularly in aging. And tell us why it’s important and what we should do about it?

Dave Asprey:These are really big topics. When you get what happens when any animal gets older, they accumulate certain things from the environment over time. And I like to go fishing in Alaska with friends and if I catch 100 pound halibut, I’m throwing it back. Because that’s 100 year old fish full of mercury and nickel and lead and cadmium. And if you catch a young one, then it actually has far less toxins. So kids have less toxins but they’re more susceptible to toxins. And if you look at what happens as we age, mercury, lead, cadmium, thallium if you eat a lot of kale is an emerging big problem.

Mark Hyman:Kale from California particularly.

Dave Asprey:Any kale is full of thallium. It’s the world nature’s strongest attracting of that-

Mark Hyman:Detoxifier. And also arsenic.

Dave Asprey:Arsenic is another big one. Thank you. So if you’re going to live to 180 you are going to be full of metals. Metals inhibit mitochondrial function, they lower your testosterone, they cause hair loss, they cause grain and they cause cancer as well as actually a whole bunch of other diseases. So you’ve got to lower your exposure to them and you have to get rid of them as you live. And there’s compounds I read about called key leading agents that you can take with your food.

Dave Asprey:When I eat sushi, you need the fat from fish. I take chlorella, which is a fracture [inaudible 00:56:51]. Chlorella will bind to the mercury in the gut. So you poop it out. But chlorella will not pull mercury out of your brain. So what you end up doing is over time you lower the incidents of metal entering your body and you slowly remove what’s in your body. And I talk about how to do that in the book. But if you don’t know that metals matter and you’re just going to keep [crosstalk 00:57:10].

Mark Hyman:So can you measure how much metals you have in your system?

Dave Asprey:Yeah, there’s two ways in Super Human that I write about. The gold standard is you collect urine and see what your body’s excreting with or without an agent that may cause you to release more. And then a more common and cheaper way, but less telling is a hair test. And there’s usefulness for both of those. But you can go to a functional medicine doctor and say, “I’d like to do a heavy metals test.” And they’ll usually order a urine test for you. And it’s very common to find elevated mercury and lead. In fact, if you’re over 40 you’re probably going to find it.

Mark Hyman:Let me just share with you as a practicing physician who one, suffered from mercury poisoning-

Dave Asprey:I had it too.

Mark Hyman:And two, have treated literally tens of thousands of people with metal poisoning. And I’ve done tens of thousands of tests. And I would say it’s probably one of the most ignored, and under appreciated causes of chronic disease that doctors don’t know how to think about, test or measure. And personally for me, I lived in China and I got huge exposure to mercury. I don’t have great genes at detoxifying and it destroyed every system in my body. It destroyed my gut, I had diarrhea for years and bloating and pain. It destroyed my mitochondria, I developed chronic fatigue syndrome and it was such an extreme version that my muscle enzymes were high, my CPK was at 600. My liver was affected, my immune system was affected. I started developing rashes and sores all over.

Mark Hyman:I was completely cognitive impaired. I couldn’t focus, think, concentrate, or remember who I was in train of thought this was like 25 years ago and I was so bad and I literally had to become an expert in mercury and heavy metals and detoxification. And I’ve written a lot about it, but I think I would say that for many of my patients who suffer from weird or strange ailments, it’s right at the top of my list of things to look at. And the only way to really know what your body burden is, you can look at your blood, but that only checks 90 days. I mean, if you’re eating a lot of sushi, you’ll see it’s high, but in 90 days you stop it. It’ll go away. You can look at your urine, but urine also wasn’t going to be high unless there’s a current exposure.

Mark Hyman:So if you’re in a lead foundry or you’re eating tons of sushi, you might see a little bit of mercury. The only way to really look at your body burden, it’s to do a challenge test where you take a pill, it’s a key later and you collect your urine for six hours. Hair tests also checked for fish methylmercury, which is where we mostly get our mercury from that also will go away if you haven’t eaten fish for a while. And then there’s another test that looks the blood work that measures the inorganic mercury, which comes from pollution or from fillings. And that’s called the quicksilver test. And that is surprisingly high and people who have a mouthful of fillings and you can see the difference between fish or a dental mercury. And the treatments are depending on the person can be very aggressive depending on what they need to get.

Mark Hyman:I have a patient who’s got this terrible autoimmune disease and we’re giving her intravenous support. Other people can do oral support, there’s medications but it’s a whole process that has to be done safely. And I think your point is really well taken. I think it’s an under served and underappreciated component of medicine. And I hopefully one day we’ll get on board with this because it’s just … I mean it was interesting. There was an article in New York Times that I was quoted in it was based on the Special Forces-

Dave Asprey:Oh yeah. Those guys get lead, right?

Mark Hyman:Yeah. So this guy came to see me who’s job was, he was a special forces guy who was a blast expert. So they would go blow up stuff blow up doors, blow up this, and they had to train and practice and they had indoor practice training and these guys were getting all sick and out. You know, the special forces guys aren’t malingerers, they’re not whiners and not like, “Oh, I don’t feel good. I don’t want to work.” Those aren’t those guys, these are the guys who stay in freezing ice water for an hour and swim. And do 4,000 pushups and don’t sleep for three days. These guys are not whiners.

Dave Asprey:They’re super humans, right?

Mark Hyman:Yeah. And so the guy came in, I’m like, “Okay, well tell me about your job.” Like, “Oh he blows stuff up, we shoot thing.” I’m like, “Oh, okay.” And so I said, “Let’s check your heavy metals.” And they were sky high. We put them through a whole program. He was metabolically his system wasn’t working, he was overweight, he had prediabetes, he had cognitive functioning, had all these immune issues, gut issues, all got better. And then he started sending all these special forces guys to us and we start treating them and they just all got better. And one of them was written about in the New York Times.

Dave Asprey:Wow.

Mark Hyman:Because his medical crew and everybody dismissed him. And he completely turned around. And the guy who was the lead expert at Mount Sinai, who measures bone lead, which is the most accurate way to measure lead in the body. It’s not an easy available commercial test, but it’s a very powerful research tool. He said, “These guys had really high levels of lead.” And he said on the followup test, he saw the levels come way down and he says he’s never seen that in his entire experience. And this is a guy who was an expert in lead.

Dave Asprey:How can you be an expert in lead and not know how to-

Mark Hyman:Because of the body-

Dave Asprey:Definitely not.

Mark Hyman:Because it’s not seen as a problem. Acute poisoning, yes. Chronic poisoning, no. And there’s nothing you “Can do about it.” It’s just nonsense. And there’s in fact an FDA approved drug called DMSA, it’s designed for lead removal and actually removes mercury. So I think for people listening, if you have any strange or weird elements, if you have anxiety, depression, insomnia, autoimmune disease, gut issues, fatigue, cognitive issues, it may well be heavy metals and you need to find a good functional medicine doctor to help you diagnose that. And you go to functionalmedicine.org or ifm.org and you can find a practitioner who may know how to do this.

Dave Asprey:I’m going to go a little bit broader than that.

Mark Hyman:Go.

Dave Asprey:If you are over 50 and you have not gone through a course of chelation, you are not doing aging, right. You have to do this. If you’re alive in the modern world and you want to live to a highly functional old age. And the reason I say this is that the safe EPA limits for lead used to be 20 parts per million and they-

Mark Hyman:Now it’s 40.

Dave Asprey:It was 40 to 20 to 10 to five.

Mark Hyman:To five and now they’re finding even down to one, they’re seeing cognitive impairment in kid’s.

Dave Asprey:Cognitive impairment and increased risk of cardiovascular disease. And now the people who are the experts in lead are saying, “There is no safe limit of lead.” And if you are 40 or 50 you cannot be alive and not have a lead burden in your body. You must remove it. And it’s not that hard. Especially if you’re not really sick. It’s not going to be a big deal.

Mark Hyman:And it’s so strange indeed because medicine just ignores this. But in the Journal Circulation, which is one of the top cardiology journals, there was a paper a number of years ago that showed that if your lead level was over two, which is, “Within the normal limits.” Which by the way affects almost 40% of the population has this level their your risk of stroke goes up 89%. The risk of a heart attack goes up 150%. The risk of death goes up from a heart attack, 55%. And this is more than smoking or cholesterol and it’s like, well why doesn’t your cardiologist talk to you about this?

Dave Asprey:Well, you remember those four killers, those I got the beginning of the interview. All of those are tied to metals in the body and especially [inaudible 01:04:38].

Mark Hyman:Diabetic, can be arsenic, Alzheimer’s.

Dave Asprey:It’s nuts. And so this is one of those things where if you want to feel good, you do this on a regular basis.

Mark Hyman:So what are the basic tips if you’re not going to get a key leaded, what are the basic tips for detoxifying.

Dave Asprey:For detoxifying not just metals or you mean metals?

Mark Hyman:The metals. I mean it’ll all works for everything. But how do you …

Dave Asprey:One of my favorite compounds is glutathione and you can increase glutathione levels by increasing vitamin C, by taking NSC re-cysteine, ion manufacture glutathione pill. You can get intravenous glutathione-

Mark Hyman:Lipoic acid.

Dave Asprey:You do iv glutathione in your clinics, right?

Mark Hyman:Yeah.

Dave Asprey:Yeah. And I would do it at Upgrade Labs in LA for people to recover better. Alpha-Lipoic Acid is another thing, selenium can help and-

Mark Hyman:Zinc.

Dave Asprey:Zinc can help.

Mark Hyman:The natural chelator?

Dave Asprey:Cilantro. But surprisingly, you want to take cilantro only after you’ve removed most of the metal from your body because cilantro can actually move heavy metals into the brain because it’s one of the things that can also penetrate the blood barrier. So you go through and you say, “I’m just going to build some of these in on a regular basis.”

Mark Hyman:Then you need fiber. You need to poop and pee and sweat.

Dave Asprey:Shocking how those work. One of the things I write about in here-

Mark Hyman:Triple P therapy I thought the elder spire.

Dave Asprey:So there’s something called modified citrus pectin where they take the white rind of oranges and lemons and they modify it with an enzyme that is shown to really nicely bind to all of these heavy metals. The problem though, if you start taking large doses of that when you’re young, it can actually do bad things to you. So this is something that you might take occasionally when you’re young and you might take it more often as you age.

Dave Asprey:And in Super Human, there’s other stuff, Mark that people would never know about. And probably something that’s really interesting. I interviewed Dr. Andrew, a new house from Vanderbilt University, wrote the first study on nicotine as a way to cure Alzheimer’s disease. Not smoking, smoking and using tobacco are bad for you, but using oral nicotine, a spray or a gum or lozenge or a patch and there is an argument that I make in Super Human that says, “As you age, you might want to use one or two milligrams.” We’re talking like 5% of what’s in a cigarette. Small amounts of nicotine in order to enhance cognitive function and reduce your risk of Alzheimer’s.

Dave Asprey:And a lot of vaping and smoking all stuff, this is not an argument to do that, but it’s to say small amounts of those will improve cognitive function. They feel good and they are probably, anti aging compounds as long as you don’t overdo it. So I talked about how would you use that? How would you do that? And not some excuse to smoke is certainly not to vape. It’s just looking at science.

Mark Hyman:Do you know that little spray thing you give?

Dave Asprey:Yeah, I was just-

Mark Hyman:You were kind of spraying it under my tongue and get me high.

Dave Asprey:Every time you do it and you feel great, I’m just worried about Alzheimer’s Mark. I mean you’re 60 now. I’m not worried about you.

Mark Hyman:Old time disease. Oh my God. Okay. All right. Now, yeah, metals are real deal and learning how to detoxify, learning how to up regulate mitochondria and fix them. Learning how to cool off inflammation, these are the central strategies around healthy aging. And then there’s other things, there’s this whole technology that you talk about called ozone, which sounds like weird. We’re worried about the ozone layer and aerosol cans, and what do you mean ozone?

Dave Asprey:Ozone is something that most of us know of as a pollutant. It turns out though that it is a free radical and as long as you don’t breathe ozone, ozone is profoundly good for your cells. Because your mitochondria, they look for free radicals and we’ll say, “Oh, free radicals oxidants, these are bad for you.” This is a problem. But it turns out if you don’t have any free radicals, your mitochondria become lazy and weak. So you can use ozone, you can use it intravenously, you can use it rectally, you can sit in a bag with ozone therapy anywhere from the neck down, as long as you don’t breathe it. And you can use it vaginally even, and it has profound anti aging effects. It will wake up bad mitochondria, it will get rid of old mitochondria. It is broad spectrum antimicrobial, it’ll fix infections. I’ve interviewed people who use this-

Mark Hyman:It’s most powerful disinfected on the planet? This isn’t World War I [inaudible 01:08:56] in to the machine. Not-

Dave Asprey:Not the car.

Mark Hyman:Not the car. But Nikola Tesla invented the ozone generator.

Dave Asprey:It’s a little spark gap thing. I have one at home. You have one in your office.

Mark Hyman:I do.

Dave Asprey:And you’re saying, “Well wait, how could this be?” Well, it turns out Dr. Robert Rowen cured Ebola during the last outbreak in Africa with ozone. They’ve been using it on drug resistant tuberculosis. They’ve been used on cancer, especially in Cuba and Russia, places where they couldn’t afford pharmaceutical drugs. So there’s hundreds of papers and studies and more than 100 years of use of this stuff.

Dave Asprey:But most people never heard of it. I will simply say, if you want to live a very long time, one thing that is going to happen is you will accumulate the weird infections of old age. And these are bacteria that take 20, 30, 40 years to start having an impact on you. Mycoplasmas, so all deficient things and they come from mosquitoes, they come from ticks, they come from making out with people. The older you are, the more likely you have done that.

Mark Hyman:They come from your teeth.

Dave Asprey:Your teeth. Yes.

Mark Hyman:Gingivalis, which is a dental bacteria has been shown now linked to Alzheimer’s in the brain.

Dave Asprey:The Alzheimer’s, and also just to cardiovascular disease. Right? So what if when you had a root canal, they used ozone to sterilize it. That’s what I tell you to do in the book. What if on an occasional basis you did some routine ozone therapy because it lowers the bacterial load in your body and it wakes up your cells? It changed my whole life. When I weighed 300 pounds, I’d been exposed to toxic molds, which is another massive problem for people.

Mark Hyman:You need both.

Dave Asprey:Oh, yeah. We’re mold brothers.

Mark Hyman:And I was in your movie, Moldy.

Dave Asprey:You were. That’s right, moldymovie.com it’s still available for free screening.

Mark Hyman:The irony of that, when I recorded that movie, I was actually living in my house, which I didn’t know at the time was full of mold and very shortly thereafter I became definitely ill from mold.

Dave Asprey:I was worried about you. It really mold … It takes away your energy first. It’s a lot like being old actually.

Mark Hyman:Cognitive function, energy, your immune system. I mean it just like wreck ship.

Dave Asprey:I grew up in a basement that had toxic mold, so a lot of the reasons that I know about the aging things, not just the 20 years of running an anti aging nonprofit. It’s also because I felt all of those things in my 20s and you don’t want to go back to that.

Mark Hyman:So ozone, you said it saved your life from the mold.

Dave Asprey:It really did. And I bought an ozone machine and I write about the story in Super Human and I used ozone every single night when I was home for a year and a half and it restored my brain function. It turned my mitochondria back on, and to this day I would credit that with having a huge difference. So people who are old or who are getting older, who are just tired and feeling old, this is one of those things. It’s cheap, you can do it at home, but you need to learn how to do it at a-

Mark Hyman:Rectal ozone.

Dave Asprey:Medical practitioners. Yeah. Rectal ozone. And it’s pretty done safe and remarkably effective.

Mark Hyman:Yeah, it’s pretty interesting. I mean, I was so ill from the mold and I had a whole series of things I’ve talked about before, but essentially I lived in a house with mold. I developed a horrible cough for a year. I had a root canal that went bad and got it taken out. Took an antibiotic, which was called clindamycin, that then caused something called C diff, which is a terrible intestinal infection. Then I broke my arms. I had all this perfect storm of injuries and I literally was knocked to my knees. So I developed colitis from the C diff. I developed gastritis, my stomach, my whole intestinal lining from my stomach down all the way to my butt was just one big raw mess. I lost 30 pounds, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t focus, I couldn’t answer an email, I couldn’t make a phone call.

Dave Asprey:Your eyes lost their sparkle. I mean I saw you and I’m like, “Oh my God, I’m really worried about you.” Like you could tell it. It was bad.

Mark Hyman:It’s true. I was ready to go. Like I was on my way out. And struggled, struggled, struggled. And you talked about ozone and few other people and you talked about ozone, I remembered my patients saying to me, “The thing that really helped me when I was sick and nothing else helped me when there was an autoimmune disease or ticked infections or whatever was ozone.” And I was like, “I always kind of had it in my mind as one of those things that’s less interesting.” Because I listen to my patients, see what they tell me I tried everything but nothing worked except, I paid attention. So I’m like I put together a whole strategy and I went, found someone who did ozone, intravenous ozone. And I remember you can ask my wife, but literally two days in, two days in, I was like, “My brains back online.”

Dave Asprey:It’s that turning your brain only matters the most.

Mark Hyman:My 24, seven pain in my stomach was gone, my colitis was gone, my energy increased. So it was in two days. And then I needed more and I stayed on it. And then I did a tiny something called 10 pass, which is really powerful. We do that in our center at the UltraWellness Center, it’s super controversial, it shouldn’t be because-

Dave Asprey:It worked so well.

Mark Hyman:It’s being done in most countries other than the US on a regular basis. And it’s a powerful modality because it’s an oxidant. So we think of antioxidants as being what we should be taking, like vitamin C and vitamin E and so forth. But we also need oxidants. So it’s a balance. And when you take ozone, it’s a massive oxidant, but it only lasts for a few seconds and then it turns on, it’s like a trigger that turns on your body’s own antioxidant system. It turns on your immune system to fight things like infections, it kills everything that should be killed in your bloodstream that shouldn’t be there. It improves the function of your mitochondria, and it also increases stem cell production.

Dave Asprey:Yes.

Mark Hyman:So it’s like, “Wow, why aren’t we use this?” And it’s super cheap. It’s super cheap because it’s just like this little machine. And yet, I mean, it’s pretty interesting. So I think unfortunately we don’t have enough science. We don’t have big randomized trials. We have a lot of data, but we have textbooks on it. It’s used a lot in Europe, in Cuba, in South America, Latin America. But it’s this kind of surprising therapy that I think is going to hold a lot of promise for many things that we’re suffering from today.

Dave Asprey:I would just say that they can have my ozone machine when they pry it from my cold dead fingers. I mean it is that fundamental. And my daughter scratched her ear on a rose and got some sort of nasty infection on her ears three times the size it should be. This is when you would normally go for antibiotics, my wife’s an ER doctor, so we’re not afraid of using antibiotics, they’re just a last line measure.

Dave Asprey:So we decided let’s try this, so we took ozone and we put it inside a funnel, and even stranger and just held it over her ear. It’ll absorb through the skin. Two treatments of 20 minutes and the ear returned to normal, it was completely fixed. Two 20 minutes treatments.

Mark Hyman:But they used to do that in World War I, they would wrap cloths and soak them in ozone and then they would put them around the wounds to heal wounds because they didn’t have antibiotics back then.

Dave Asprey:And it works. So this is one of those things right? What is it doing in a book about anti aging? If you do this, even once a year, your cells will be healthier for many years and you’ll have a lowered risk, and I’m making some suppositions here based on how things work, you have a lowered risk of many of the diseases of aging because it makes for healthier mitochondria.

Mark Hyman:Can you talk a lot about the science and the research and the studies behind them.

Dave Asprey:It’s real. It’s real. Yeah.

Mark Hyman:I mean it’s powerful. Sort of one of those things like heavy metals. It’s sort of on the diaspora of medicine. It’s like and …

Dave Asprey:I only went to these places Mark, because when I did the normal medical stuff like Oh maybe you should eat healthy and exercise. That crap didn’t work. I worked out an hour and a half a day, six days a week. I went to a low fat, low calories, semi vegetarian diet and I still weighed 300 pounds. And now I was muscular and I was covered in fat and I was tired all the time because I was working out too much. No, it’s not what it was. And the antibiotics I got every month for sinus infections that whole time weren’t helping either because the doctor didn’t tell me about toxic mold, didn’t tell me about toxic metals, didn’t tell me about ozone. If someone had told me those three things when I was 16 the amount of time, energy, suffering and money that went into making me well, would have been 5% of what it is. And it works at every age.

Mark Hyman:It’s pretty amazing. This is such a powerful book, Dave, Super Human: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever. I’m not sure I want to live forever, but I like the option.

Dave Asprey:You can check out when you’re done. Mark, I already know what you really want. You want to die at a time and by a method of your own choosing.

Mark Hyman:I want to die young as late as possible.

Dave Asprey:There you go.

Mark Hyman:So let’s talk about some of these more extreme things because they’re kind of interesting and I think they’re still not ready for prime time, but things like stem cell injections, intravenous laser and neurofeedback. So what is all that about?

Dave Asprey:Well, stem cell injections are shockingly effective. And the fact that there’s any regulatory question about them at all is just an economic thing.

Mark Hyman:Like if they’re your own stem cells.

Dave Asprey:If they’re your own stem cells-

Mark Hyman:Because I have some seen some nasty stuff from people using like weird stuff.

Dave Asprey:The thing is you don’t necessarily know what’s in stem cells from someone else. But if you’re getting your own stem cells and they pull them out and grow them overnight in a lab, so you have many more of them that are stronger and then you choose to put them back in, the logical listener would conclude that this is probably your own tissues and you own them and you can do what you want. In some countries, actually just one country, the US there is a drug company policy that says once the cells leave your body, they magically transform into pharmaceutical substances that are no longer yours.

Mark Hyman:Just like your poop. Your poop is regulated by as a drug by the FDA.

Dave Asprey:That’s why I’ve stopped pooping.

Mark Hyman:That’s why you’re full of it. Oh God. Now, everything makes sense.

Dave Asprey:And I don’t understand the logic here, but I’ve had fantastic benefits from stem cells.

Mark Hyman:Oh gosh, you can tell Dave and I are friends.

Dave Asprey:Oh absolutely. If you’re going to poop jokes on a podcast, you’re friends. And it’s like Mark, I have sent my parents in for stem cells. My own history of three knee surgeries before I was 23, having arthritis in my knees and just old injuries and chronic inflammation for many years I did not start out healthy. So if I can do what I’m doing and being mental with my shirt off at 46 years old-

Mark Hyman:Oh, man, stop bragging.

Dave Asprey:I’m a fat computer hacker by training. Okay, like these are the most unlikely things ever to happen in my life.

Mark Hyman:Ripped on the cover of Men’s Health. All right.

Dave Asprey:But it’s like-

Mark Hyman:We’re talking pair of six packs later.

Dave Asprey:It doesn’t make sense that if I can do it, that everyone isn’t doing it because it’s less work for them, than it was for me. And that’s like I’m the worst possible guinea pig here.

Mark Hyman:So what does stem cells do? And why should we be interested in them?

Dave Asprey:What they do is they go into your body and they find parts of your body where there’s inflammation and they stick to those parts of the body and then they secrete healing factors that cause the tissues there to recover. And I had a family member who was scheduled to go in for heart surgery, for a heart valve problem. And I arranged for him to get stem cells, his own stem cells, from fats taken out and just intravenously injected, not for the heart at all, just for general wellness. And he went in four weeks later to the doctor to do a scan before the surgery and they said, “The problem’s gone.”

Mark Hyman:Wow.

Dave Asprey:He didn’t have to get heart surgery. Now I look at that kind of a result so that’s pretty extreme. But when I look at what happened with the stem cells that I had, it’s amazing. And with my wife Lana, when she was nine, she fell out of a multiple story building playing in a construction site as nine year olds will do. She’s had a frozen neck. So you go and turn her head a small amount in one direction. Three days after Dr. Harry injected her neck, she could turn her neck and she said, “Well, I’ve never been able to do this before.”

Mark Hyman:Yeah. I had the same thing. I don’t know why, but my neck would always go out. I’d have to go to the chiropractor. I would get stuck and a little uncomfortable, painful. And it was just annoying as hell. And Harry injected my neck and-

Dave Asprey:It’s gone.

Mark Hyman:No more pain. It doesn’t go out anymore, I’d never had any discomfort. It doesn’t feel weird I’m like back to new.

Dave Asprey:And you said the keywords back to new. And that’s why I feel good about saying age backward on the cover of my book, because hold on, did my wife just go back to nine years old in terms of she got rid of an injury that’s been there for 50 years, right? Or maybe 40 years. However, I’m not good at math, but same thing here. We all have these things, and as you age, you accumulate these injuries. Oh yeah I limp a little bit whenever I have too much to drink or if I eat gluten or whatever. Oh yeah, my grip is a little bit off. Just getting a little bit of arthritis over here. Screw that noise that is not acceptable, you need to hold the line and maybe even move the line backwards.

Mark Hyman:I think that’s an important point Dave, as most people don’t realize how good they can feel. They just accept the slow degeneration of the human body as a natural phenomenon. It’s really an unnatural phenomenon.

Dave Asprey:Is not how it’s supposed to be.

Mark Hyman:No.

Dave Asprey:And you should die fully functional. That’s the plan.

Mark Hyman:Yeah. Die young as late as possible. All right. Now what about the whole thing about, well, we’re going to just have a bunch of old people who are draining the society, cost services, Medicare is going to go bankrupt. I mean, this sounds like a good idea on a personal level, but is it really a good thing to keep people alive forever?

Dave Asprey:Isn’t Medicare going to go bankrupt anyway?

Mark Hyman:Well, my next book, Food Fix, I’m to talk about how we’re going to save the world by fixing the food system, including the $95 trillion saved that we’re going to save from fixing chronic disease.

Dave Asprey:Yeah. That’ll buy a lot of corn. So let’s talk about this. We need older people full of wisdom who are fully functional. Because guess what, if you are not reliant on the healthcare system and you are actually able to contribute to society, into your family, into your friends, it’s a very different world. And what if everyone listening to the show right now just looked around and said, “Oh my God, I might live to 150.” Would you change the way you take care of the planet? You have to if you know you’re going to be there for a long time, you don’t poop in your sandbox.

Mark Hyman:Yes it’s true.

Dave Asprey:And you think you’re here, you suffer and then you die, and it’s someone else’s problem later …

Mark Hyman:Party hard till it’s over and discover the bang. That’s what my wife thinks we’re all doomed. I’m not so pessimistic.

Dave Asprey:I’ve actually never been more hopeful and optimistic than I am because I know what the technology is doing, not just for anti aging, but for intelligence enhancement, for cleaning up the environment. Our ability to access science and to change the world around us rapidly is never been better. So now that we know we have the power, it’s just a question of using the power to restore our soil to reverse the decline in insect populations, to suck carbon out of the air and put it into the soil.

Dave Asprey:Now if you’re only going to be around for 60 good years and 20 crappy years and you got to have some kids and build up some economic resources, the next generation going to do that. I’ve been around for 180 years I’m just getting going, I just had my 25% birthday Mark. I have decades to fix this shit. Someone has to do it. Maybe it can be us people who get old-

Mark Hyman:I’m in my 33% birthday.

Dave Asprey:There you go. Right? But this is actually what is, like the world is such we have all this cool stuff. We have machine learning, artificial intelligence, we have lasers-

Mark Hyman:We use it, right?

Dave Asprey:Yeah. Well, someone’s got to be around to use it, right? Like all meander for that. I want to get to know my kids and their kids. It’s okay. Right? So that’s why we need older people. We won’t fill the planet, we’ll fix the planet.

Mark Hyman:Well, what’s interesting is people do think that it’s going to be a cost and a drain, horrible, but there’s a guy named James Fritz who did a fascinating study years ago where he looked at people who were healthy, in other words, who exercised to stay at an ideal body weight and didn’t smoke. And he found that they didn’t follow the pattern of most people who die. They didn’t die slow, long, painful, expensive deaths and cost huge amounts of money and suffering at the end of their life and die early. They actually lived longer and they were healthier. And they actually experienced what he calls the rectangularization of the survival curve. Meaning, you basically live healthy and then boom, you fall off a cliff as opposed to slow long decline, which is expensive.

Mark Hyman:So you can die quick, cheap, painless death or you can die a long, slow, painful death, depends on how you take care of yourself. So this is what your book is about, it’s just an amazing contribution to our thinking and paradigm shifting in terms of how we think about aging and health and in introducing some technologies that people don’t think about that are not part of the normal conversation. And it’s so practical, it’s full of such great tips. I’m like, “It’s my bedside companion.” And I really mean that Dave. You are a gift to humanity, your energy, your enthusiasm, your thinking outside the box, your playfulness, I mean it’s pretty freaking awesome that we get Dave Asprey on the planet to help us think differently about how to stay well, get well, and heal ourselves and heal the world. So thank you Dr. Dave. I know you’re not doctor, but I think you are so-

Dave Asprey:Such a high price thank you man.

Mark Hyman:Make sure that you get Super Human: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever, is released October 8th it’s unbelievable book. And you won’t be sorry you got it. And if you would like to share any last words, not today your last words because you’re going to [crosstalk 01:27:00].

Dave Asprey:If you pick up the book and send the receipt to me, go to daveasprey.com for info. I did an interview with eight of the leaders in anti aging stuff that isn’t on my podcast. So there’s an exclusive audio series I’m just giving it away. So give me your receipt to show you bought the book, show your support, and the sample will be there. Mark I’ll send it to you as well.

Mark Hyman:Now you gave me the book, does that mean I have to go in like buy the book now again, to get-

Dave Asprey:Three copies for you.

Mark Hyman:Well, thank you Dave. Thank you for your work. Thank you all for listening. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast and listening to Doctor’s Farmacy, please share with your friends and family, leave a comment. We’d love to hear from you and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and we’d love to hear more from you. And thank you for listening to Doctor’s Farmacy, we’ll see you next week on The Doctor’s Farmacy.

Mark Hyman:Hi everyone, it’s Dr. Mark Hyman. So two quick things, number one, thanks so much for listening to this week’s podcast. It really means a lot to me. If you love the podcast, I’d really appreciate you sharing with your friends and family. Second, I want to tell you about a brand new newsletter I started called Mark’s Picks. Every week I’m going to send out a list of a few things that I’ve been using, take my own health, the next level.

Mark Hyman:This could be books, podcasts, research that I found, supplement recommendations, recipes, or even gadgets, I use a few of those. And if you’d like to get access to this free weekly list, all you have to do is visit drhyman.com/picks. That’s drhyman.com/picks. I’ll only email you once a week I promise, and I’ll never send you anything else besides my own recommendations. So just go to drhyman.com/picks, that’s P-I-C-K-S to sign up free today.