Stem Cells in Every Joint? How Dave Asprey Actually Hacked His Age

0:00 WELCOME FROM THE DRAKE PASSAGE

Dr. Yi Song: We are so happy to have Dave Asprey here. He is the father of biohacking, and we want to talk about how he has been doing with the new therapies he did recently, and also how he started his journey. Dave, thank you so much for being here.

Dave Asprey: It is my pleasure. Thanks for having me, and thanks for going on this amazing trip to the Antarctic. It has been so much fun.

Dr. Yi Song: I know, we are in the middle of the Drake Passage and it is really rocking, but Dave is doing great because he has been doing some energy work. So how did you start your energy work journey?

0:42 TWENTY FIVE YEARS OF LONGEVITY WORK

Dave Asprey: When you look at longevity, I have done gene therapy. I coined the word biohacking, and I have been working in the field for 25 years, even though I am a computer hacker by training. I do not have any formal medical training, even though I lecture to doctors and run a concierge medical practice along with a doctor and some other people for high net worth clients who want to do whatever it takes to live a long time. This is my passion, and it is also my career. I have written multiple New York Times bestsellers on different aspects of aging, but I did not really talk much on the energetic front until my most recent book, which is called Heavily Meditated.

When I started this biohacking movement, in the first year I said there is a reason you should put butter in your coffee, and coffee is good for you, not bad for you. You might want to consider using a laser on parts of your body, like a red light or a laser, and you should do some cold plunges and electrically earth yourself occasionally because it drops static charges. So that was enough for people to say Dave is crazy. But there is enough science behind those things, even though they were all kind of new ideas. Even the intermittent fasting idea was new in the first big book. What do you mean skip breakfast? That cannot be. So there is a rate of change.

2:00 BIOHACKING BORN ON MOUNT KAILASH

Dave Asprey: During all this time, the idea for biohacking came to me on the side of Mount Kailash, which is considered the holiest mountain in the world, in a remote part of Tibet. At least if you are Buddhist or Hindu, you are supposed to go there once in your life and walk this arduous high altitude trek around the mountain to get closer to enlightenment. So I have studied with shamans and with different lineages. Some Chinese, some Indian, Native American, South American, in order to understand the consciousness part of it.

For the past 10 or so years, I have run a neuroscience company that can compress 20 to 40 years of daily meditation into five really hard days. We glue computers to people's heads and teach them a method to rewire their stress response so they do not get stressed by things that used to stress them. I have spent six months of my life with electrodes glued to my head for hours every day doing advanced meditation practice. So if you ask, what energy thing am I doing? I do not know. It is one of those, or an amalgamation of all these things.

The problem I have seen with meditation in general is that you can go to YouTube and search "meditate," and you could do it entirely wrong and not know it. So you go to a meditation teacher or like the monastery where I went. I am sitting cross-legged on the floor meditating, and there are 50 people in the class. We are doing it for 10 days without talking. So if I meditate right and the teacher notices, I am going to get a raised eyebrow and a nod. That is it, for a couple of hours. Grab a computer that samples a thousand times a second. It is like warmer, colder, warmer, colder, until I find the state, like a little doorway that you did not know existed.

So I have been doing that for a very long time. You develop an awareness called interoception. That is an awareness of where the energy is in your body and what its state is, and then how do I change it, how do I direct it. And then, why does it have to be in my body? Hold on, I am just riding around in this body, my energy can be totally outside my body. You can do this with breath work, or psychedelics, or fasting, or being in darkness. Heavily Meditated is kind of the list of all the ways to access these beautiful altered states of healing, of evolution, and even of forgiveness. What am I doing? I am doing all of that. It is a continuous awareness, like how you know how hot you are right now or where your body is in space. There is also a feeling for where the energy in your body is, where it is going, and how to make it go where you want. Over time I have developed that ability, and I help people learn how to do that at 40 Years of Zen, which is my neuroscience company.

4:43 FIVE DAYS EQUAL FORTY YEARS OF MEDITATION

Dr. Yi Song: So are you still attaching wires to your head when you are meditating?

Dave Asprey: Every now and then. Not every day. It takes a little bit of time to do it. The idea is literally five days of doing this, about eight hours a day, and you have the same brain waves as someone who has done 40 years of daily meditating. So if you do this once a year, you are far ahead of where you would have been. Having done it that many times, I can usually, unless I ate something I should not have eaten or had some wine, which I very rarely do, but if something screws up my biology I am not bringing it right now. Someone has to do a bunch of breath work or take a nap or whatever. But generally speaking, anytime, I can turn on one of those states because I have become familiar with them.

Dr. Yi Song: So do you do your meditation in the morning or in the evening, during the day, or whenever you feel like it?

Dave Asprey: Whenever. Right now there might be a five minute period where I am like, I am not doing it right now. So I will just go in. Some things take hours to get into a state, but if you learn the state you can go into it. If I get bored in a board meeting I can literally say, let me turn on Kundalini. I am having little mini orgasms, not quite big enough to start thrashing around, but okay, I can activate that energy whenever I want. I am not saying it to say, look at me, I have this special power. It is just that anyone can learn how to do these things if you know they are possible. You learn how to drive your body the way you might learn how to lift with proper form, or how to run the right way, or how to do a perfect yoga pose. There is an energetic equivalent to that, and you can also learn it.

6:21 FROM 300 POUNDS TO A HEALTH MOVEMENT

Dr. Yi Song: So then did you start the biohacking idea while you were in Kathmandu, or did you already have that idea before you went?

Dave Asprey: I had run a longevity nonprofit in Palo Alto for several years. I went there because I was 300 pounds, and I had terrible brain fog and all these autoimmune things and I could not figure it out. I started hanging out with people in their 70s and 80s running this early life extension idea. I was the only person under 60 in the room. I was learning from my elders and they were giving me all this incredible knowledge. I started getting healthier and stronger.

Then they said, will you be president of this organization? So I am running the org, and every month we would bring in the luminaries in the field of longevity and I would get to interview them in front of an audience of about 100 people. It was incredible to get mentored by those masters of the field. Meanwhile, I am a computer hacker, a Silicon Valley tech bro, but this is what I did for fun.

The problem I had was that no one under 40 would ever come to a meeting. If you are under 40, you do not really care about longevity. You might say you do, but really, unless you are highly traumatized and afraid of death, you are probably worried about your career and your family and your tribe and your impact on the world, because that is where you should be focused. So I thought, if everyone started doing this when they were 18, their path through life would be so much bigger and brighter with less suffering. If only someone had told me this when I was younger, it would have really helped me. Longevity just had a branding problem.

Dr. Yi Song: Back then when you were 18, we did not have all these technologies, like the gene therapy we did recently. We have newer knowledge now, but we had so much back then. The information was just not evenly distributed.

Dave Asprey: One of the things that helped me lose 50 of the 100 pounds I had to lose was ketosis. The keto diet. Everybody has heard of that now. You did not hear about this in the late 90s. There was one guy doing it, Robert Atkins. He wrote the book in 1972, the year I was born, that had all the information I needed that would have kept me from being obese. And I am not saying you should eat the Atkins diet. It has its limitations. My book, The Bulletproof Diet, has sold more than a million copies now and helped kick start the keto revolution we have today. But I do not do the keto diet. My advice was to do keto for brief periods because it will help you lose weight and be smart. So I do that. But people misinterpret it. The knowledge was there. It was not distributed, and I could not be made to care about it because I did not see how it would apply.

9:42 LONGEVITY HAD A BRANDING PROBLEM

Dave Asprey: So as I was walking around this mountain, three months of travel in remote parts of the world, with no mobile service for any of it. So I was not distracted by social media. In fact, there was no social media in 2004. Back then, there was no social media. Good old days. I just had some time to think. Longevity had a branding problem. So biohacking came about to say, how do I bring neuroscientists, bodybuilders, longevity doctors, performance and personal development, and even shamans into the same room to talk about how we make humans better at every level? And how do I do it in language so that if you are 20 years old or 120 years old, you are going to care? Biohacking came out of that journey.

I came back and I got the domain, and now it is a new word in the English language. I did not trademark the term. My attorney said, you should protect this. I said, no, I want this to be a societal movement that lasts long beyond me. I do not need to own the name. Today I own Danger Coffee, which is my new coffee company. People have probably heard of Bulletproof, the old company that I started, that I do not have anything to do with now. So I trademarked those terms, but biohacking is for all of us. It is just a movement that says basically, you change the environment inside you and around you to have control of your state. If you are tired of being anxious, tired of being tired, tired of being fat, tired of whatever it is, maybe you should be a biohacker. And maybe you are not tired of anything. You are just saying, I want to be even happier. I noticed I put on a few pounds. It does not matter. It is not about fixing something that is broken. It is about choosing your state. Most of us want to be happy, connected, full of energy. I do not know that many people who have those. So if that is your goal, be a biohacker. Set up the environment around you. Learn how to change the things inside you. And then maybe you can have that. And if not, the journey to get closer to that, what else are you going to spend your time on?

11:23 TWENTY YEARS OF RED LIGHT, PEMF, AND LASERS

Dr. Yi Song: So then you also experimented with many different things. What are the treatments you actually stick with persistently?

Dave Asprey: I have been doing red light therapy since before it was legal in humans. I had a device for race horses when I started doing this. I launched the first consumer red light therapy company years ago, which I have since sold, called TrueLight. Now there are hundreds of companies making good devices. It may seem obvious. So yes, red light, that is one of those things. It was not obvious. People literally thought it was crazy. They would say, that cannot work, that is dumb. And I would say, have you seen the studies?

One of the first devices was made by a guy in a Yahoo group. He sold maybe 100 of his little handmade infrared brain stimulators. For a couple of years, it was my favorite biohacking device. You put it on your brain for two minutes and your brain would just wake up, and it was really noticeable.

Dr. Yi Song: So you would use a helmet?

Dave Asprey: No, it was just a little thing, looked like a pill bottle, and you would just run it down the middle of your brain for up to two minutes. Then one day the guy announced, you know guys, I fixed my brain so much that I just got into medical school. The guy's brain was not working at all before, and he just erased everything because he was like, I might have sold an unlicensed medical device. But I still have that in a drawer somewhere. I have been using light therapy consistently.

Dr. Yi Song: So right now you are using a big panel?

Dave Asprey: I have a big panel at home. I am traveling, so I have two different lasers with me and an LED pad, like a small pad this big as well. I usually travel with at least one laser and one LED. I do electrical stimulation sometimes, pulsed electromagnetic. I have been doing that for 20 years. In fact, Upgrade Labs now has locations in Canada and the US and soon in Dubai. It is a place you can go in and use the big expensive equipment that really only professional sports teams or astronauts or someone like that would use, in order to get access to equipment that no sane person would have at home.

Dr. Yi Song: So is that PEMF, or what is the equipment you are talking about?

Dave Asprey: It is all of the above, and it is combined. We have about 10 different technologies for human enhancement and longevity, powered by an AI background that tells you what to do for your biology. It is a membership model like a health club. UpgradeLabs.com is the site.

13:39 UPGRADE LABS AND UNLIMITED LIFE

Dr. Yi Song: So is that the VIP longevity you have?

Dave Asprey: Upgrade Labs, think of it like a relatively high-end health club membership. There are about a dozen or so locations open and more coming. And then Unlimited.life is a very high-end life extension program where we work with clients for one year straight. I have partnered with the longevity doc out of Toronto who has been doing this for 30 years, Dr. Tim Cook, and the people who run the Dalai Lama Foundation and Oprah's Foundation. So we take our clients, do tens of thousands of dollars of lab work to understand everything about them, how long they are likely to live given their current state, using internal proprietary statistical analysis. Then we tell them what to do.

It includes coaching on a weekly or monthly basis. It includes a trip to the Amazon to spend a week with me and with the doctors that really go deep on your lab work, and to do some shamanic type work. It also includes a week at 40 Years of Zen, which is my neuroscience brain training company. So if a client wants to really expand their horizons and live longer, Unlimited.life is how I do that. It is the most fun I have had in years, because every tool is there. You need some kind of weird transpersonal coaching thing because you actually just have anger. You do not have a mitochondrial problem. Let us talk about that. Or you have anger, but it is caused by a gene that gives you too much of a neurotransmitter, and you cannot break down dopamine or catecholamines. So we can go after a problem from any angle.

Sometimes you think it is you. You think, I am a moral failing, I am just angry all the time, I cannot pay attention. No, it might be your biology. It might not be you, it might be your body. Then we can reprogram the stress response. We can change what is happening inside your cells with the right nutrients or the right pharmaceuticals or the right hormones, or maybe you need surgery on something. Whatever it is, I am going to find it and get there.

15:53 HORMONES, ANGER, AND THE LAZINESS MYTH

Dr. Yi Song: So if you find out a person's problem is an emotional issue, then you would address it mostly with meditation treatment? Or are you also going to use something else?

Dave Asprey: Let me be really clear. I have not met anyone who does not have some emotional stuff they would like to improve. And for some people, it is a primary driver, even of some of their biology. There is usually some guilt about it. What is wrong with me? Well, probably nothing is wrong with you. It is either your body trying to keep you safe, or you have biology driving it. So we unpack it, and then they are going to go to 40 Years of Zen with the neuroscience. We will show you in your brain and in your body how to change your body's response to things it thinks are stressful that you do not want to be stressful anymore. You can shut that down.

Then we will take them to the jungle with our shaman and we will do energy work with them. We also have top executive coaches. Jacques Cousteau's daughter, Celine Cousteau, is one of our coaches, as well as very high level executive coaches. So there is community and there is coaching on an ongoing basis where we go deep, not quite at therapy level, but at coach level. The combination of neuroscience, deep meditation, shamanic work, sweat lodges, and getting your labs right is quite amazing.

We had one client, very high up in the finance industry, very bright, and she was just kind of flat. We look at her hormones, and her thyroid was not where it should be, and some of her other sex hormones were not where they ought to be either. So we corrected those. You see her a month later and it is like a different person. There is no longer a wet blanket on her. She is sitting up straight, just as smart as she was before, just as high performance in her life, but bubbly. She said, this is how I was supposed to feel all this time, and I did not know. I thought it was maybe I was not exercising enough. I was not. So it can be fun and beautiful to unlock what is really causing this. And I will tell you what it never is. It is never that you are lazy. There is no such thing as laziness. It is that your cells do not want you to waste energy you do not have, and they will not let you. We just think that is because we are lazy.

Dr. Yi Song: So what if some people are really content with what they do and they are happy with it? Do you want to change them?

Dave Asprey: I do not want to change anyone. They have to want to change. It is not my job to change people who do not want to change.

18:53 MEDITATION WITHOUT GUIDANCE CAN BE DANGEROUS

Dr. Yi Song: So do you ever send people to Kathmandu, to do where you did the study?

Dave Asprey: I have not sent them there. That is one of many different lineages I have studied. This was at Kopan monastery. It was a beautiful experience, and that was 22 years ago, so I assume it is still a beautiful experience, but I do not know.

One of the problems we have historically is that every spiritual lineage has its secrets. I remember I was at this monastery, and they had the bookshop, and then in the back there was a locked cage of books. I asked, what is in there? They said, our temple's secret. I asked, why not let me read them? They said, well, you might go crazy for one reason. And they are serious. Meditation is not a safe practice. Some people do go crazy from meditation, especially if they do not have the right teachers. If you do not have the right guidance, you can really go crazy. In fact, the faster the path, the more likely you will fall off and go crazy. This has been written for thousands of years.

I would just say that the time in the world now is for us to take the proprietary secrets from different lineages. These are part of the human manual for our operating system, and we all need access to these things today. Some of the secrets are percolating out into the world. The kind of breath work I do with clients sometimes, especially in the jungle, is derived from some ancient practices in yoga. Some of it is from holotropic breathing. Stan Grof, the guy who invented psychedelic therapy in the 1950s, I co-hosted a workshop with him when he was 94 for some of my students. He is a master of the field, and he uses breath work to replace psychedelic therapy, to replace LSD. So that was secret knowledge once, these special breaths, like you can use them to stay warm when it is really cold, like Wim Hof does, but these are very ancient. They were hidden. And some of the energetic practices, like Reiki or Qigong or Neigong, which is something very few people have studied, but I think maybe more important than Qigong. There is beautiful knowledge in all of these, but if you do not know they exist, or you cannot get the knowledge without studying for 10 years in a temple and shaving your head, which I did do in Kathmandu even though I did not have to.

Dr. Yi Song: So how long did you stay there?

Dave Asprey: I was at the temple for 10 days, and then I spent another week or two in Kathmandu, and then another 21 days in Tibet.

Dr. Yi Song: So when you send people to the Amazon, do you use psilocybin or those types of things, or ayahuasca?

Dave Asprey: It is optional for clients who choose to do it.

20:42 STEM CELLS IN EVERY JOINT AND THE BRAIN

Dr. Yi Song: You also talked about, after you had stem cell treatment, you would use the laser precision on the head to guide the stem cells.

Dave Asprey: Yes. When our clients are interested in stem cells, there are many different ways to do stem cells. I have probably done more stem cells than any other human alive, but I do not know.

Dr. Yi Song: How many times have you done it?

Dave Asprey: I have done every joint in my body, starting at the toes all the way up to the top of my head, twice. I have done countless intravenous treatments and spot treatments.

Dr. Yi Song: On average, how many times do you do intravenous umbilical cord stem cells?

Dave Asprey: I usually do my own stem cells for intravenous.

Dr. Yi Song: Oh, you use them.

Dave Asprey: Yes. I am not above using umbilical cord, but I do not do that in the US. In the US they do not allow healthy practices. The place where we bring our members is our partner in Costa Rica. There they make the stem cells directly from a single umbilical cord that is well tested in the lab, then walk them over so you get actual living cells. When people want the software upgrade, all Unlimited Life members get 40 Years of Zen to reprogram your software. If they want hardware in the brain, we take them to our stem cell partner. Then we get a functional MRI of the brain. We use magnetic stimulation and focused ultrasound to allow the stem cells to enter a specific part of the brain and guide them there. The differences are really profound. This is, I think, the most cutting edge brain hardware upgrade in the world. Some people do not want to do it. It is not cheap. It is $100,000. But they also do your face, your hair, any joints that hurt, and your brain. It is five and ten stays with hyperbaric. It is a whole program, like something from science fiction, but it is real, it is happening today.

Dr. Yi Song: When you want to do the hardware of the brain, do you only do intravenous, or do you actually do intrathecal injection in the brain protocol?

Dave Asprey: It is just intravenous. You do not really want to inject into the brain. I have done stem cells injected into my cerebral spinal fluid, I think three times. That was the only way to get them at least kind of a little bit past the blood brain barrier. I have done that three times, and there was some risk from that procedure. It is painful. Sometimes I got a cerebral spinal fluid leak, and that was miserable. Other times the pressure was too high. Fortunately, that is not something you have to do anymore. I have done it three times. It is much easier to do intravenous with targeting, with magnetics and laser stimulation and TMS.

Dr. Yi Song: Did you feel a stronger sensation after the cerebral spinal fluid injection?

Dave Asprey: I am not sure if the CSF was particularly noticeable, but all the times I did that I also injected the rest of my body, so you have a whole body inflammatory response, especially in the early days before I really knew how to do it right. It felt like a truck hit me for two weeks. You do the whole thing in five days, that is a lot. It is much easier now. If you do joints, it is kind of hard for a day or two, but it is not bad.

Dr. Yi Song: Exactly. I have done my joints, so I know what it feels like. For me, I do not feel that much pain because I do not have a lot of problems, but I have the ACL tear and I never had surgery. So I used the stem cells, and now my knee is fine. But I have a higher pain tolerance than a lot of people. A lot of others, when they do it, they feel more, and also people really wait until late. They already have joints worn out or pain for 10 years before they could not solve it, then they say, maybe I should try stem cells.

Dave Asprey: A lot of stem cell doctors do not have a lot of experience with stem cells. They took a couple of courses and now they are in stem cells because they can make money that way, and it actually works fine. But when you have experience with treatment, there are certain drugs you can use that radically reduce the inflammatory response. So I think we have it down where it is going to hurt for a day or two. If you do knees and hips, it is supposed to hurt, but it is not unbearable by a long shot. We pair it with hyperbaric.

Dr. Yi Song: Right after the treatment, if you use the right light locally, you use other treatments together, then usually after 24 hours it should be much better.

Dave Asprey: Correct.

Dr. Yi Song: So when you do stem cells, you only go to Costa Rica, and then when you do it in the US you just use your own body.

Dave Asprey: I use exosomes in the US, or my own cells. Even using my own cells in the US is a bit sketchy, because they have to be culture-expanded, and the FDA does not like that either. So it is unfortunate. I know the new leadership at the FDA. I just interviewed the head of the FDA, Dr. Marty Makary. He is actually a huge fan of stem cells and peptides. So I think the US regulations are changing quickly. Florida is opening up, I think. Texas is going to open up. There is no reason that any regulatory agency in any country should stop you from using your own stem cells in your body. They do not have that right.

Dr. Yi Song: But your own stem cells age with you too, and you have already done so many treatments, so your own stem cells are 25 years old.

Dave Asprey: My stem cells, the ones that I have banked, are 10 years younger than I am. What is interesting is we are right on the edge of being able to reverse age the stem cells using some gene therapy. We are working on that. So once I have banked, I am going to de-age them and then I will have my own stem cells from when I was 18.

Dr. Yi Song: That is a good plan.

26:55 MINICIRCLE GENE THERAPY AND KLOTHO

Dr. Yi Song: So recently you did the gene therapy by the company Liz Parrish runs?

Dave Asprey: No, this was with MiniCircle. MiniCircle is a company based out of Austin. They developed the technology to tell cells in your body to make more of certain compounds for about two years after an injection. Their early studies of folistatin, one of the longevity compounds, show that increasing it in the body with their gene therapy makes your measure of longevity about nine years younger than your current age. For some people it was 30 years. Turning on folistatin is really good for you. Lung density goes up, body fat goes down, and you are younger.

I have also done VEGF, which gives you a healthier cardiovascular system. And then I have done, just recently, Klotho. I am one of maybe 100 people in the clinical trial for that. Klotho is a longevity compound I wrote about in Superhuman, my big longevity book. I wrote about it because I wanted to be able to do it, but you could not. Now you can actually buy Klotho for injection, which lasts for a little while. You can do gene therapy, and that lasts for a long time. The difference is noticeable.

Dr. Yi Song: So this one is different from Liz Parrish's company.

Dave Asprey: Liz Parrish is a friend. We are working with Liz Parrish, with the stem cell company, on ways to improve stem cells and to get gene therapy with humans. Liz's approach looks like it will last for maybe five or 10 years. Hers uses, I think, like a hollowed out virus.

Dr. Yi Song: Yes.

Dave Asprey: Yes, inside there is nothing but the outer shell of the virus, and inside is all the code we want. So you put that in and it becomes part of your genome and lasts for a long time. So I am very interested in doing that. It is still very expensive. Liz, I have talked to Liz twice on my show. Interviewed her, and she is a friend, and a very fun human.

Dr. Yi Song: So this one you actually did is with MiniCircle. Do they also use a virus as a vector?

Dave Asprey: No, they use a plasmid. That is something that we are now offering through Unlimited Life. Our members get access to that, and right now you have to leave the country in order to do it. Depending on what country, there are different regulations, but the US does not allow that yet, though they are probably about to.

Dr. Yi Song: For this therapy, do you just do it once and then?

Dave Asprey: You do it once. You need to do it every three to five years. I think it is a good idea to do it every year if you can afford it, but even every two, three, or four years is going to make a huge difference. If you inject it and your biological age drops by nine years, then you wait a few years and you do it again, and it drops by nine years again. It still works. The idea for all these is that they are expensive now, but they come down in price over time, naturally, just like mobile phones were $50,000 when the first ones came out, and now they are $5.

29:46 WHAT KLOTHO DID FOR LIBIDO AND COGNITION

Dr. Yi Song: Did you feel a significant change after you did it recently?

Dave Asprey: Yes. Klotho was something I really wanted to do for a long time. Some of it is around cognition. My brain just feels sharper. But the biggest shift that we know Klotho does is around libido. Having a healthy libido is a sign that your longevity program is working. So I feel like, yeah, I am old, I do not really have thoughts about intimacy very often, whatever. But if you see a shift in that, it can come from doing Tai Chi, or breath work, or all sorts of different exercises that can restore vitality. The difference between life force energy and libido is marketing. We use libido to create things in the world. When you are feeling depleted, you are depleted. So Klotho definitely reversed that.

Dr. Yi Song: So you basically feel more vibrant in the intimacy aspect.

Dave Asprey: That is a good way to put it. I was just going to say horny, but yes.

Dr. Yi Song: So how do you deal with that?

Dave Asprey: Very carefully.

Dr. Yi Song: All right. So basically the theme of what you have been doing is really about early prevention and early action, right?

Dave Asprey: Some of it is, but a lot of it is reversal. I had all the diseases of aging before I was 30. I was pre-diabetic. I had chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, terrible brain fog. I had been on antibiotics for 15 years, three knee surgeries, arthritis, gout, all the stuff you get when you are old. My testosterone was lower than my mom's at 26, and my thyroid was almost undetectable. The technical term was, I was a shit show. If I can look like this and have this energy at the calendar age of 53, and I identify as being somewhere in my mid to late 30s, if I can do it, it is probably easier for you. A lot of this was reversal. If you are listening to this and you are 20 years old, it costs almost nothing to shift your habits, so all the bad stuff does not happen until much later. That is the highest ROI of our lives. Just do a few basic things when you are young.

Dr. Yi Song: But if you look at the people in your program, they are already very into making these changes.

Dave Asprey: Not necessarily. They are quite often people who have spent their life accumulating wealth, building businesses, and they did not pay attention. Now they are saying, I am 50, I am 60, I am 70, and I actually want to live another 20, 30 years longer than I am supposed to. Why did I not invest in this sooner? I am just going to go all in right now. So we have some people who have never done any longevity work, and they see the biggest shift because there is low hanging fruit everywhere. We have other people saying, I have really been working on this. They come in and we find what they missed, and we put them on the accountability program. We have community with other people who are really like, wow, let us have dinner and talk about the stuff that really matters. That is a big part of this too. You do not have to reverse your age all by yourself.

Dr. Yi Song: But most people, like you said, they do not think about it when they are in their 20s or 30s.

Dave Asprey: They will, though.

32:54 TEENAGERS, SCENT MAXXING, AND ESSENTIAL OILS

Dave Asprey: Actually, right now I see a lot of teenagers who are more open-minded about these things. It is pretty funny. You teach them you can have control of how you feel. What teenager does not want that? You have better skin. Who does not want that? And if you are a teenager listening to this and you are doing that scent maxxing, I just have to tell you, fragrances are bad for you. Do not do that. Use essential oils. It will be heavy later in life. Why would you want to lower your testosterone to smell good? It is the dumbest thing I have ever heard of.

Dr. Yi Song: So what kind of essential oil do you use?

Dave Asprey: I will say what kind I do not use. Lavender is highly estrogenic, and in a study, six weeks of using it on men caused man boobs. So I would not put lavender on babies. It is a hormone. Use it for medical healing, but do not just put it everywhere. That is not one I would regularly use. I am more of a fan of sandalwood and things like that.

Dr. Yi Song: For the essential oil, it should be personalized too, right?

Dave Asprey: Very much.

Dr. Yi Song: I think sometimes people kind of abuse them. They just do not know.

Dave Asprey: Even tea tree oil, also very highly estrogenic. So I would use tea tree oil if I had an infection, but I would not just smear it on. Do not do that. Do not do estrogen therapy that comes from a tree.

Dr. Yi Song: So would you choose the essential oil based on somebody's DNA test about their hormone profile?

Dave Asprey: I have not seen a DNA connection to aromatherapy or to essential oils, but there might be one out there. It is not my top area of expertise. So I typically work with either a shaman or a Chinese doctor, a TCM person who is really familiar. Then you personalize it and put it on acupuncture points. The other thing I do, there is really good research about essential oils and sleep, and rotating the smell when you are asleep can incredibly increase your intelligence and your memory. So I have a machine I am testing right now that puts a different essential oil into the air each night.

Dr. Yi Song: So you use a diffuser and put different essential oil or a certain blend?

Dave Asprey: You just change what you smell during the night. Since smell and taste are some of the most primordial things, the brain says, oh, the scent environment is changing, I guess I should grow more neurons. Sounds like a plan.

Dr. Yi Song: So would you just put it on your nightstand?

Dave Asprey: Yes.

35:39 EIGHT HOURS AND EIGHT GLASSES ARE MADE UP NUMBERS

Dr. Yi Song: Do you sleep eight hours per day?

Dave Asprey: No, I do not. The reason for that is science. There are three major studies that show the people who live the longest sleep six and a half hours a night. Eight hours is a made up number. If you need eight hours to wake up fully rested, your odds of dying of all causes are much higher than someone who needs seven hours. But if you needed eight hours and you only got seven or six, your odds of dying go up even more. What I am saying is healthy people need less sleep. The less toxins you get, the less useless stress you get, the less sleep you need. If I was lifting really heavy, working all the time, under a heavy emotional load, I would need more than six and a half hours. But right now I get about six and a half.

Dr. Yi Song: I just cannot sleep more than seven hours. I wake up and I feel rested. I feel energized.

Dave Asprey: There is nothing wrong with that. You should celebrate. Thank God you got an extra hour compared to people who are not as healthy as you. So eight hours is made up. And by the way, eight glasses of water a day is also a made up number. How big were the glasses, how heavy was the person, how hot was it? You can tell it is a made up number. It is dumb. Hydrating for the sake of hydration is actually pathological, because you need salts in your water so that your cells can use the water. At Upgrade Labs we measure cell hydration in every member, and a great number of people who drink tons of water have dehydrated cells because they are washing all the salt out of their body. So eight glasses a day is dumb. Ten thousand steps a day was invented by a Japanese pedometer company in the 1950s. It is a made up number. There is no science behind it. If you are a guy with one leg, is 10,000 steps a day healthy? No. These are made up numbers. You have got to find what works for you. If you do it all right, when you wake up in the morning, you are refreshed. And if you are tracking your sleep and your heart rate, your heart rate variability will be higher if you did everything right, and lower if you did something wrong.

37:25 WHERE TO FIND TRUSTED INFORMATION

Dr. Yi Song: That is very good advice, because we are so inundated with all this different information, all the noise. So how do we know what is the right information, and what is not?

Dave Asprey: Just go to DaveAsprey.com. I will tell you for free. AI is helping a lot on that front. We are going to be a good place for that.

Dr. Yi Song: Even when you look on AI or ChatGPT or any AI, there is so much information, and sometimes it can be conflicting too.

Dave Asprey: You have got to go to prompting, that is for sure.

Dr. Yi Song: So do you have an AI tool too?

Dave Asprey: I do. If you go to axo.health, we do lab testing and offer some advice based on my body of work.

Dr. Yi Song: Very nice, very informative conversation. We are looking forward to having more insights from you.

Dave Asprey: Beautiful. Thanks for having me on.

Dr. Yi Song: Thank you.