by Dave Asprey
Besides, testing out one variable at a time is nearly impossible. If you were to take one supplement for a month to see how it works but you decided to take a different route to work one day, you accidentally changed a variable … did that impact the outcome? What about the breakfast you ate or the socks you wore? There are countless variables in our environments that are changing all the time, and I have no interest in keeping track of them all. I want more energy now and for the next hundred and thirty-four years, and I’m willing to change however many variables I need to in order to increase my chances of getting that result.
This is personal for me. Until a decade ago, I never thought I’d make it past eighty, never mind aim for a hundred and eighty. Starting at a young age I was overweight and chronically ill, with arthritis in my knees when I was just fourteen. By the time I was in my twenties I was prediabetic and suffered from brain fog, fatigue, and dozens of other issues we normally associate with aging. My doctors told me I was at a high risk of heart attack or stroke before I was thirty. In short, there was no reason to believe I was going to live a long and/or healthy life.
Thanks to some wise elders I began working with in the nonprofit anti-aging field, I learned it was possible to prevent additional damage to my cells and even reverse some of the damage that had already occurred. In my late twenties, I decided to invest 20 percent of my net income each year into hacking my biology with nutrition, supplements, lab tests, treatments, technologies, and whatever it took to learn more. There were some years when this was more difficult than others, but there is no higher return on investment than more energy now, likely with additional years of functional life later.
With the help of amazing anti-aging doctors and a community of folks who’ve been studying longevity since I was in diapers, I was able to take my biology into my own hands. I reversed my diseases and symptoms and began literally aging backward. If I can turn things around after such a poor start, you probably can, too. And the good news is, as these interventions gain popularity and demand for them goes up, the price of them is going down. One of my main goals with this book is to bring these little-known methods out of the shadows of anti-aging circles and into the mainstream so they will become even more accessible.
Not only can you make changes that allow you to live longer than you think possible, but you must. We all have a moral obligation to live well for as long as we can to develop our own wisdom and share it with future generations. By choosing to live longer, you are not taking anything away from anyone. Instead, you are giving yourself an opportunity to share more with the people and the world around you. I see it as our duty to ensure that we are able to share our life experiences, and—just as important—to make them worth sharing.
This, too, is not a new concept. We used to value the wisdom of tribal elders who taught young people how to avoid the mistakes of past generations. If you made it to old age, you were considered a great source of knowledge. But now the people who’ve lived long enough to develop that wisdom are usually too sick or tired to share it, or else they don’t even remember it! This is a crime against humanity. But we can change it.
When you have as much energy at eighty or ninety as you did at twenty-five, you have a tremendous potential to positively impact the world by sharing your wealth of information gleaned from relationships, experiences, successes, and mistakes. If you take that kind of energy and intelligence and put it to work, you can literally improve the world for future generations. Now you’re the tribal elder who’s leading the hunt because you’re full of energy and you’ve been around a long time, so you know where all the animals are hiding.
Contrary to common fears, our living longer won’t lead to overpopulation and environmental ruin. If we use our advanced wisdom and energy to create a world in which everyone had access to a quality education and reproductive health care, we’d actually start to see negative population growth.
Americans may struggle to envision a world where we live past a hundred years old, but the governments of countries like China and Russia are investing in anti-aging technologies because they realize that it gives them a tremendous competitive advantage in the world economy. It costs a lot of money to keep reeducating new generations of workers, not to mention caring for a sick and aging population. What if instead of being sick, old people were productive and happy citizens who could contribute to society in their final years?
That is the future I plan on sticking around to see. If you knew it was possible, how would you change your daily decisions and priorities now? In this future, it’s not your unborn grandchildren or great-grandchildren who are going to have to deal with the effects of the environmental problems we’ve created; it’s you. Instead of making a mess in your own sandbox, you’d invest in improving that sandbox so you can enjoy it for the unexpectedly large number of years to come.
This is why I am donating a portion of the advance from this book to organizations like the XPRIZE Foundation, which is funding massive initiatives to improve the world’s oceans, soil, food supply, and education system, not to mention exploration of space. Thanks to more computer power, more research, and more money going toward fixing the world’s biggest problems, change is happening at exponential rates. Whether you know it yet or not, you’re part of a race to fix the planet so it supports a population that can live beyond a hundred and eighty. It’s up to you to either participate in that race or get out of the way. Go back to your cave if you like, but don’t stand in the middle of the road slowing everyone else down.
My goal is to share the techniques with you that have given me the greatest return on my investment of energy, time, and money. It’s easy to spend eight hours a day on an anti-aging protocol, but then you’re not actually gaining time because you’re spending so much of it on these efforts. Instead, I want you to learn how to stop dying, reverse aging, and heal with Super Human speed in the least possible amount of time and with minimal effort.
As you read this book, I hope you’ll create your own prioritized list of things to do to live longer and better based on where you are now and where you want to go. Most likely, you won’t try everything in this book. And that’s fine—it’s not a contest. Perfection isn’t required. Even I haven’t tried out all of these strategies yet (but I’m getting close!).
Yes, some of these technologies are more expensive than others, although many of the most powerful are the least expensive. And while certain interventions are a rich person’s game today, that is changing; you can now access a lot of anti-aging technologies for a fraction of what they cost ten years ago, just like the smartphone you have now is far more capable and less expensive than the models that debuted a decade ago. When you start with the most accessible and simplest lifestyle hacks and selectively choose a few affordable technologies to extend your life (or even just your health), you’ll buy yourself time so you can afford to wait for the rest to come to you. What could possibly be a better investment than that?
The slope of innovation is steeper than ever, and change is unstoppable. Are you in or are you out? I’m all in. Join me.
PART I
DON’T DIE
Widen your relationship to time, slow it down. Don’t see time as an enemy but an ally. It provides you with perspective. Aging doesn’t frighten you. Time is your teacher.
—Robert Greene, The Laws of Human Nature
1
THE FOUR KILLERS
THE CURIOUS CASE OF DAVE ASPREY
Until the age of five, I was a normal kid with few health problems. Then my family moved from California to New Mexico, and something in my biology changed. I started acquiring health problems normally reserved for people far older than I was. Today I recognize that my bedroom, which was in the basement of our new house and covered in water-damaged wood paneling (it was the 1970s), was full of toxic black mold. My own home was silently aging me, but nobody, least of all me, was aware of this at the time.
For the next two decades, I suffered from joint
pain, muscle pain, asthma, brain fog, extreme emotions, and even weird, frequent nosebleeds. Out of nowhere, my nose would start gushing, and I had unending strep throat that came back every time I finished yet another round of antibiotics. After I got my tonsils out, I started getting chronic sinus infections instead. My body didn’t properly maintain blood pressure, so I often got dizzy, and I was easily fatigued.
At the age of fourteen, I was diagnosed with full-blown arthritis in both of my knees. I remember going home after receiving the diagnosis from my doctor, thinking, How can I have arthritis? That’s for old people. I had always been chubby, but now I was becoming obese. I developed tons of stretch marks, which also disturbed me. Weren’t those for pregnant women? I was just a kid!
And can we talk about man boobs? I grew mine when I was sixteen, which would make anyone self-conscious, especially a teenager. The only other guy I knew with a matching set was my grandfather. My hormones were dysfunctional, just like those of my aging relatives. Between the stretch marks and the man boobs, you’d never catch me with a shirt off. The very thought terrified me, and I’d never in a thousand years imagine that thirty years later, there would be a full-page shirtless photo of me in Men’s Health magazine talking about how I used the techniques in this book to get rid of that flab and replace it with abs.
When I got to college, I kept putting on weight until I had grown a size 46 waist. And my knees got even worse. I played intramural soccer, and my kneecap would become dislocated, so my leg would suddenly fold sideways in a sickening way. I got used to falling over unexpectedly when it happened. Besides the pain, this made dating really awkward. Who wants to date an obese twenty-year-old who might fall down at any moment, with stretch marks, man boobs, arthritis, and the lack of confidence that comes with having such things? Oh, and someone who was so fatigued that he often forgot names, was socially awkward, and could barely focus, even when he really tried? Not too many people, unsurprisingly.
More important than my lackluster social life was the fact that my body was aging before its time. I was well on my way to prematurely developing all four of the diseases most likely to kill you as you age—heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and cancer—or, as I call them, the Four Killers. These diseases are all deadly, and each of them is on the rise.
Right now, about one in four deaths in the United States is connected to heart disease—that’s roughly 610,000 people who die from heart disease each year. Meanwhile, more than 9 percent of the population of the United States has diabetes, and that number rises to 25 percent for people over the age of sixty-five. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 5 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s, and this number is going up, too. The death rate due to Alzheimer’s disease increased a full 55 percent between 1999 and 2014. And last but not least, 1.73 million people in the United States are diagnosed with cancer each year, and more than 600,000 of them die from it.
Suffice it to say that if you don’t die in a car crash or from an opioid addiction, chances are that one of these Four Killers is going to drain your life and your energy (and your retirement fund) before you die in a hospital. It was certainly looking like that would be the case for me—and sooner than most people, given how sick I was.
In the 1990s when I was in my twenties, my doctor used blood tests to determine that I was at a high risk then for developing a heart attack or stroke. My fasting blood sugar was a whopping 117, which put me solidly in the range of prediabetic. I didn’t have Alzheimer’s, but I was experiencing significant cognitive dysfunction and often left my car keys in the refrigerator. And I may not have been at an obvious risk of cancer, but guess what nearly doubles your risk of certain cancers (including those of the liver and pancreas)? Diabetes1—which is also a risk factor for Alzheimer’s.2 Guess what else dramatically raises your cancer risk? Toxic mold exposure, which I had also experienced.
Even obesity itself is the second largest preventable cause of cancer. Your risk goes up the more overweight you are and the longer you stay that way.3 Bad news—75 percent of American men are obese, and so are 60 percent of women and 30 percent of kids.4 No wonder the Four Killers are on the rise. Are you going to let them take you out?
I still didn’t know what was causing me to age so quickly when I began a quest to discover how to fix my body. In the mid-1990s, we didn’t have Google yet, but we had AltaVista, and I worked at night teaching the engineers who were literally building the Internet. This meant I had the good fortune of having access to information that most people didn’t. I started doing a ton of research and buying whatever I could find that might help me slow down or even reverse my symptoms. I simply couldn’t imagine even more stretch marks or more joint pain as I got older.
An important part of this journey was connecting with one of the first medical doctors who specialized in the study of anti-aging, Dr. Philip Miller. Seeing him required what was a tremendous financial investment for me at the time, but I was desperate. My first visit with Dr. Miller was like nothing I’d ever experienced. He ran new kinds of lab tests that regular doctors at the time didn’t know existed, including the first real hormone workup I’d ever had. Then he sat me down and gave me the bad news: I had Hashimoto’s thyroiditis (an autoimmune condition that causes the body to attack the thyroid) and almost no thyroid hormones, and my testosterone levels were lower than my mom’s. (He had done a workup for my mom not long before, so he wasn’t exaggerating when he told me this.)
The news could have been devastating, but I was actually excited to have the hard data. I felt in control for the first time because I finally had real information and knew exactly what I needed to change. This was proof that it wasn’t just a deficiency in my effort or some sort of moral failing. It’s common to see your hormone levels drop off around middle age, but not in your twenties. Now I had proof that I was aging prematurely and not just lazy, and I was determined to turn things around.
Dr. Miller and I came up with a plan for me to restore my hormone levels to that of a young man using bioidentical hormones and continue to track my data. The hormones made an enormous difference right away. I got my energy back along with my zest for life. It gave me so much hope to know that I could actually reverse some of my health issues, which I now knew were common symptoms of aging. So when I heard about an anti-aging nonprofit group in Silicon Valley, now called the Silicon Valley Health Institute (SVHI), I decided to check it out.
As I sat there at the first SVHI meeting listening to people who were at least triple my age, I felt completely at home. These were my people, I realized. I had more in common with them than I did with most of my peers, except these people had decades of wisdom I didn’t. After the meeting, I stayed for a long time talking with a board member who at eighty-five years old was kicking ass and full of energy in a way that was amazing and seemed totally impossible to me—but that I was inspired to replicate.
For the next four years I focused completely on learning as much as I could about the human body. I studied medical literature, read thousands of studies, talked to researchers, and spent all my free time at SVHI learning from seniors who were actively reversing their own symptoms of aging. This completely changed the way I thought about health, as well as aging. I learned that there is no one thing that causes disease or that leads us to age. Instead, aging is death by a thousand cuts, the cumulative damage caused by little insults stemming mostly from our environment.
Then in the year 2000 I found a former Johns Hopkins surgeon who ordered a litany of tests, including some allergy tests that showed I was highly allergic to the eight most common types of toxic mold. That was the smoking gun. In order for my immune system to be sensitized to those toxic molds, I must have been exposed to high levels of them, which wreaked havoc on my cells. This was one of the unexplained environmental factors that had made me age so rapidly.
My premature aging makes complete sense to me now. Mitochondria, which are bacteria embedded in most of our cell
s, power our energy production. Back when we were single-celled creatures, we became host cells for ingested bacteria. Over millions of years of evolution, the host cell became humans, the ingested bacteria became mitochondria, and today neither of us can survive without the other. Mitochondria are not of human origin; they even have their own DNA. And what has posed a lethal threat to bacteria since the beginning of time? Mold.
This means the very powerhouses of my cells were constantly engaged in a battle with their mortal enemy, and this fight left behind many casualties. When cells are under chronic stress, their mitochondria cannot make energy efficiently. This leads to an increase in the production of molecules called reactive oxygen species (ROSs), also known as free radicals. ROSs are unstable molecules that contain atoms with unpaired electrons, making them highly reactive. When an excess of free radicals are present in cells, they cause a chemical reaction that damages your cellular structures in a process called oxidation.
This is exactly what happens as you age, whether or not toxic mold is present in your life: Mitochondria function steadily declines, leading to an increase in free radicals, which damage your cells. In response, your body sends vitamin C from food to the liver so it can produce antioxidants, which fight off free radicals. The problem with this process is that it leaves you without enough vitamin C to produce collagen, the protein in the connective tissue of your skin, teeth, bones, organs, and cartilage. Vitamin C interacts with amino acids to build collagen, but only if you have enough of it. Your body will gladly sacrifice healthy blood vessels and skin in favor of fighting off free radicals that are draining its energy source.
This is precisely why I had stretch marks and vascular issues (manifested as nosebleeds) and why most people don’t develop these symptoms until they’re much older. The fight in my body between my onboard bacteria and mold left me constantly depleted of antioxidants. And my mold-damaged mitochondria also laid the groundwork for prediabetes, poor blood flow to the brain, arthritis, cognitive dysfunction, and, according to one doctor, a high risk of stroke and heart attack. I was still in my twenties, but I was biologically old because my mitochondria were slowing down. And it really pissed me off.