Becoming a Super Human with Dave Asprey

While 90 years seems like a fairly old age to be living until, our guest for today thinks that in the next 50 years, humans could be reaching ages as high as 180. We are joined in this episode by Dave Asprey, New York Times bestselling author and CEO of Bulletproof, True Dark and 40 Years of Zen. Dave joins us to speak about his new book Super Human, which discusses ways to reach far higher ages than we thought possible. Our guest speaks about the many health issues he struggled with as a child and how he discovered that holistic wellbeing is affected by a mixture of epigenetics, trauma, and biology.

He gets into how his trauma affected him, and how he discovered that his birth story played significantly into this. Dave also speaks about his journey to discovering all kinds of lesser-known and practiced approaches to health and age prevention. He discusses Stan Grof’s research, a meditation retreat in Mount Kailash, and how he found smart drugs and brain hacking long before their popularization. We also speak about alpha, beta, delta, and theta brain waves, covering when each is most active, how they affect our behavior, and what Dave is doing to optimize them using technology at 40 Years of Zen. Finally, Dave speaks about the seven main contributors to aging that appear in his book, and what we can do to combat those processes in our bodies.

This episode was sponsored by BLUblox. Get 15% off my favorite blue-light-blocking glasses from BLUBlox at https://blublox.com/muscleintelligence using the code MUSCLE

Timestamps

• An introduction to Dave Asprey, writer of Super Human who aspires to be 180. [1:58]
• Reaching holistic health approaches through a body-first or mind-first approach. [4:52]
• The failure of Western medicine to help Dave’s struggles with health as a child. [8:35]
• Combined causes of Dave’s problems: epigenetics, trauma, biology. [9:48]
• Dave’s traumatic birth story and its connection to some of his health struggles. [11:32]
• Stan Grof’s and eastern philosophies about trauma and its effect on personality. [15:20]
• Internal traumas and the way they affect our personalities and habits. [16:48]
• Parenting styles and their potential to cause or reduce trauma kids experience. [18:46]
• What caused Dave to go on meditation retreats in Nepal and Mount Kailash in Tibet. [20:03]
• How eating pig’s ears for collagen in Tibet helped heal Dave’s knees. [24:14]
• Dave’s journey with smart drugs, brain hacking, and higher cognitive performance. [25:50]
• Benefits of neuro-feedback and dangers of self-administering it. [28:58]
• What super brains are and how 40 Years of Zen optimizes brain patterns. [30:37]
• Neural circuitry and specifics of how Alpha, Beta, Theta, and Gamma waves function. [33:20]
• What Alpha, Theta and Delta waves feel like and how to access them naturally. [37:18]
• Why waking delta is not a good state for everybody. [39:47]
• How to live to 150 years old by avoiding the things that age you or cause death. [42:49]
• The role telomeres, stem cells, and mitochondrial mutations play in aging. [47:59]
• Ways that intracellular/extracellular debris and cellular stiffening cause aging. [53:29]
• Ben and Dave’s experiences building testosterone with supplements and more. [1:00:06]
• How Dave uses testosterone pellets and whether they are painful to get inserted. [1:01:42]
• Sexual applications for testosterone cream, PT-141, and MSH. [1:04:21]
• The uses of peptides for longevity. [1:06:37]
• How gratitude, diet and, sex can increase happiness. [1:08:40]