Super Human: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever

Dedication

To my children, Anna (twelve) and Alan (nine), who diligently sat by my side and edited this book in a way that genuinely helped make it better. It’s my sincere hope that when you are both over a hundred years old, you’ll let me help you edit whatever you’re creating. I plan to be there for you.

Epigraph

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

—Dylan Thomas

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction: Your Ancestors Were Biohackers

Part I: Don’t Die

1. The Four Killers

2. The Seven Pillars of Aging

3. Food Is an Anti-Aging Drug

4. Sleep or Die

5. Using Light to Gain Superpowers

Part II: Age Backward

6. Turn Your Brain Back On

7. Metal Bashing

8. Polluting Your Body with Ozone

9. Fertility = Longevity

10. Your Teeth Are a Window to the Nervous System

11. Humans Are Walking Petri Dishes

Part III: Heal Like a Deity

12. Virgin Cells and Vampire Blood

13. Don’t Look Like an Alien: Avoiding Baldness, Grays, and Wrinkles

14. Hack Your Longevity Like a Russian

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

About the Author

Also by Dave Asprey

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction: Your Ancestors Were Biohackers

A hundred thousand years ago, two cavemen struggled to keep their families alive during a particularly harsh winter. As the wind howled, one wrapped himself in animal skins, checked that the fire was big enough to keep his family from freezing, and made the dangerous trek to a neighboring cave. He ducked his head to avoid banging his overhanging brow at the entrance, shivered as he noticed the dark cave was scarcely warmer than the air outside, and shouted excitedly, Thog, I have discovered something amazing. You have to see this! Thog reluctantly wrapped himself in animal skins and ventured into his neighbor’s impossibly warm and well-lit cave, where he saw the world’s very first man-made fire. Isn’t this incredible? the caveman said. "I am using this right now to keep my cave warm. See how happy my kids are? Do you want me to show you how I am doing it?"

Thog was skeptical. He knew fire was dangerous. When lightning struck a tree, the resulting wildfire could burn forests, not to mention humans who were dumb enough to get too close. He and all the other cave dwellers had survived winter (for the most part) without fire. They huddled together and shared their food, and everyone got along. Fire might be harder to share. What if only some cavemen had access to its warmth? No thanks, Thog grunted. I’m good. And he shivered his way back to his cold, dark cave.

One of those guys is our ancestor. And—spoiler alert—it’s not Thog.

Fire was one of the first tools humans discovered to help extend our life-spans, and we’ve been searching for new and increasingly complicated tools ever since. We have a hardwired instinct to avoid death that predates written language and even our ability to stand upright. Our awareness of our own mortality has led us to innovate throughout millennia to avoid dying, which of course means living longer. It is the fundamental drive of the human race, it is what has allowed us to evolve as a species, and we are nowhere near done.

Fast-forward from our caveman ancestor to the beginnings of recorded history, and we find proof that humans have been seeking immortality since we started writing things down. About 2,400 years ago, the pharaohs of Egypt in Alexandria devoted an enormous amount of their wealth and power to a quest for eternal life. In China, Taoist philosophers placed a tremendous amount of value on longevity. To achieve it, they focused on internal alchemy (visualizations, nutrition, meditation, self-control, and even sexual exercises) and external alchemy (breathing techniques, physical exercises, yoga, medical skills, and producing an elixir of immortality using various purified metals and complex compounds). In India, the theme of prolonged life emerged in Ayurvedic texts as rasayana, the science of lengthening life-span.

You could say to yourself, Great, a couple thousand years ago, some crazy people wanted to live a long time. They’re dead now. Except . . . these life-extending self-proclaimed alchemists are part of a lineage of biohackers that includes some of the most influential forefathers of modern science and medicine, such as Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, Paracelsus, Tycho Brahe, and Robert Boyle. (Unfortunately, most female alchemists are not well known because they were accused of practicing witchcraft and killed.) The quest to live longer drove the scientific revolution, and it’s reasonable to say that the technology you rely on today would not exist without our core drive to live longer.

Along the way, charlatans and con artists took advantage of the burgeoning market of life-span extension by selling people on the idea of turning lead into gold. Soon alchemy itself was redefined as false magic. Today it conjures images of wizards in pointy hats. But the reality is that early alchemists were seeking something most of us would gladly trade our gold for: immortality. Humans have literally been working on transmuting our species from mortal to immortal for thousands of years. I’m one of them, and this book is about what it’s been like to work on extending my own life for the past twenty years.

The game has changed now that we have access to more knowledge and data than ever before. Not dying is still the number one motivator for all humans, and it isn’t because we choose it. This desire is baked into us at the subcellular level to the point that avoiding death is automatic. As I was researching my last science book, Head Strong, it became clear that our innate drive to avoid death comes from deeper within us than you might expect.

Your mitochondria, the power plants in your cells that evolved from ancient bacteria, have the same basic goal of any successful life-form—to stay alive. The human body has at least a quadrillion mitochondria scurrying around inside it, each one of them running a program that says, Don’t die. Is it any wonder, then, that you don’t want to die? Those ancient bacteria drive you to focus on behaviors that will keep your meat alive and able to reproduce. I call these behaviors the three Fs: fear (fight off or flee from things that might kill you), feed (eat everything in sight so you have energy to fight off or flee from things that might kill you), and the other f-word that propagates the species. You spend a lot of time on these three priorities, don’t you?

All life-forms—from bacteria to fruit flies to tigers—share the same basic instincts, but we’re the only ones with big enough brains to also make long-term decisions to support our goal of not dying. Ironically, we are often distracted from making good long-term decisions for our longevity by the very instincts that are meant to keep us alive. For example, our desire not to die from starvation leads us to consume too much sugar for a quick boost of energy. This keeps us alive in the short term and increases our chance of dying in the long term. To have a perfectly functioning body and mind long past the age when you can no longer reproduce (at which point you essentially become useless to your mitochondria), you must build practices that prevent you from falling prey to those base instincts that make you a short-term thinker.

So if we’ve been seeking immortality for centuries and this drive comes from deep within our biology, why do people laugh when they hear I’m planning to live to at least a hundred and eighty? Some people stop laughing when they see I’m dead serious (no pun intended), but many act like Thog, shivering their way back to their dank caves.

We’ve already seen that it’s possible to live to a hundred and twenty. The longest verified living person made it to a hundred and twenty-two, and there are scattered but unverified reports of a hundred and forty. Over the last twenty years, the rules in the anti-aging field have clearly changed. If you make good daily decisions that benefit longevity and pair those choices with new technologies that can prevent and reverse disease and aging, it is becoming possible to add at least 50 percent to the age of the longest-lived human. Hence, living to a hundred and eighty is a realistic and achievable goal, at least if you’re willing to do the work along the way to get there. The good news is that even if I’m wrong, I’ll get to enjoy however many years I do have a whole lot more thanks to these practices. If in the end they only help me avoid Alzheimer’s or buy me an extra year with the people I care about, it’s still a win in my book.

These daily decisions and interventions are investments in my future, but they also power my performance right now. Each has its own return on investment (ROI). Some, like eating the right foods and getting quality sleep, may provide a longevity return of 3 percent, along with a better brain right now. Others, like fixing my jaw alignment or strategically using lasers on my brain, might yield closer to a 6 percent return on longevity. Some of the most radical, such as consuming oil containing an unusually shaped carbon molecule that helped rats in a lab live 90 percent longer than expected, may have incredibly high returns . . . if they work at all and don’t cause unintended harm if they fail. Today it is difficult to calculate exactly what longevity return you might receive on a specific intervention, but we do know the ROI comes in the form of more energy now and years of better health later. These are not just any years, but quality years filled with energy and mobility and brainpower, plus the wisdom that comes with living well for so long.

This type of energetic, productive old age is difficult to imagine, which is why many people shudder at the thought of living to a hundred and eighty. When I interviewed Maria Shriver on my podcast, Bulletproof Radio, her response to my mission was I don’t want to live to a hundred and eighty. You can have that! Most of us so badly want to avoid the picture we have of old age—suffering from chronic pain, becoming house- or wheelchair-bound, helplessly relying on care from others, forgetting our loved ones’ names—that we would rather die. Me too. But it doesn’t have to be that way, and I’ve been blessed to interview and befriend a great number of Super Humans who are not only thriving, but also happily giving back to society in their seventies, eighties, and even nineties.

See, not dying will only get you so far. That’s step one. But living longer doesn’t necessarily mean living better. Step two is gaining the energy you need to stop aging in its tracks and start aging backward. Step three is the icing on the cake that takes you from mere mortal to Super Human: someone with the wisdom of age but who heals and regenerates like a teenager. This, too, has been a human goal throughout history. Look no further than the Fountain of Youth, which first appeared in writings by Herodotus, an ancient Greek historian, in the fifth century BC. Herodotus claimed there was a fountain with magical, longevity-promoting water in the land of the Macrobians, a legendary race of people who all lived to be . . . a hundred and twenty. There’s that number again.

Interestingly, in his writings, Herodotus focused on the Macrobians’ diet, which allegedly consisted exclusively of boiled flesh and milk. While I wouldn’t consider those foods Bulletproof, it is fascinating that even back then people had an intuitive awareness that longevity stemmed not just from good genes or good luck, but rather from the environment inside of and around us. And they were willing to make changes to those environments if it meant living longer.

If you’ve read my other work, you’ve probably already noticed that the ancient Greeks were biohackers, as were the cavemen before them. When I created the groundswell movement around biohacking, I defined it as changing the environment inside of and around you to gain control of your own biology. (In 2018, Merriam-Webster added biohacking to the list of new words in the English language!)

Today there’s scientific proof that we can make changes on the subcellular level (aka changes that affect the makeup of our cells, including our mitochondria) that will dramatically extend life-span. When I interviewed stem cell biologist Bruce Lipton, he told me that he was able to keep a line of cells alive in his lab for much longer than usual simply by changing the water in their growth medium every day. In other words, he made sure those cells had a clean environment, and as a result they gained longevity. But they did eventually die because one of Bruce’s lab assistants fell prey to short-term thinking and forgot to change the water in the growth medium. Maybe he was hungry . . .

If you want to live to a hundred and eighty, or even to an energetic eighty, it’s essential to look at your life and ask, What’s going to make me forget to change the (proverbial) water? The answer is, the messages from your mitochondria telling you to fight, to flee, to feed, and . . . you know. Your mitochondria pay attention to the environment around them, and you can hack that environment so those little guys don’t keep you stuck making poor short-term decisions. Unlike Thog or the Macrobians, we now have technology that allows us to change every element of your environment—from your hormones to your nutrition, to the light you’re exposed to, to your temperature, to the very vibration of your cells.

Are these cheats? No. They are tools we can use to control our biology. And what’s the first thing any one of us would do once we gained control of our biology? Not die. The second thing? Age backward. And finally? Heal like a deity so you can keep getting better with age instead of suffering an inevitable decline.

This is exactly what this book will teach you to do. First, we’ll look at the biological factors that cause most of the diseases of aging and how you can stop them. Once you’ve learned how not to die, you’ll learn how to age backward with strategies ranging from simple to cutting edge that will add more years to your life and more life to your years. Finally, we’ll explore some truly radical anti-aging techniques to help you achieve Super Human status. We tell ourselves that the one thing we can’t have more of is time, but that’s simply not true. I’ve seen firsthand how much more life these hacks can give you, both now and in the future.

In case you’re wondering, no, we’re not going to carefully change one variable at a time while we die waiting to see results. I am an engineer and a biohacker focused on outcome, and I want to feel good now. A research scientist or a medical doctor would approach the problem differently. Scientists get old picking apart every detail to gain a complete understanding of something, a venerable use of time that improves the world. Medical doctors most often focus on treating disease (according to medicine, aging itself isn’t a disease) rather than preventing it. However, you are in charge of your own body, and you have the freedom to pick a goal and change multiple factors in your life that might affect the outcome until you get what you’re looking for.

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-f