Dave Asprey - Super Human - The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever

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-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.