I Take 150 Pills a Day (But This One Is My Workhorse) | Resbiotic : 1513

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: The Human Upgrade: Biohacking for Longevity & Performance
Episode: I Take 150 Pills a Day (But This One Is My Workhorse) | Resbiotic : 1513
Date: August 4, 2026
Host: Dave Asprey
Guest: Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec, MD, Double Board-Certified Physician, Lung & Microbiome Researcher, Inventor of ResBiotic

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Overview & Main Theme

This episode centers on the often-overlooked role of lungs in overall health and performance—especially how the "gut-lung axis," a newly recognized communication network between the gut microbiome and the lungs, shapes inflammation, resilience, and longevity. Host Dave Asprey and guest Dr. Vivek Lal discuss cutting-edge research on the lung microbiome, reveal the science behind Resbiotic (the world’s only probiotic targeting this axis), and break down how specific bacterial strains can profoundly affect lung immunity, inflammation, and even athletic performance. They also delve into related topics like breathwork, the impact of antibiotics, longevity pathways (especially MMP9), biofilm, and self-experimentation in health protocols.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Gut-Lung Axis & Lung Microbiome

• Discovery of the Lung Microbiome:
  Traditionally, lungs were believed to be sterile, but Lal and others (starting ~2006-2007) found this was incorrect. Lungs have a low-biomass but crucial microbiome impacting inflammation and disease resilience.
  [08:00-09:30]

• Why Lungs Matter in Biohacking:
  We breathe 20,000 times daily; the lungs process 30+ pounds of air each day, far exceeding food intake. Yet, very few wellness conversations focus on optimizing lung health.
  Dave: “You eat two, three times a day ... But you take 30 pounds of air ... we don’t pay a lot of attention to that.” [11:31]

• Mechanisms of Communication:
  The gut communicates with the rest of the body (including the lungs) via the vagus nerve, lymphatics, bloodstream, and microbial metabolites—forming the “gut-lung axis.”
  [04:51-05:29]

• How Probiotics Impact Lungs:
  Gut bacteria interact with lung health directly (by microaspiration) and indirectly (via postbiotics—bacterial secretions that enter the blood and modulate lung inflammation).
  Dr. Lal: “These bacteria create metabolites… that downregulate or upregulate inflammation... and that goes to the lung, downregulates directly and indirectly.” [15:30]

Antibiotics, Genetics, and Immune Programming

• Long-Term Effects of Antibiotics:
  Overuse disrupts both gut and lung microbial balance, possibly producing lifelong negative immune consequences.
  Dr. Lal: “Antibiotics can mess up your immune system for the longest time... not just antibiotic. You talked about the genetics, right? The genetics is just one part of the equation. The genome is one part of the equation. What about the epigenome or epigenetics?” [18:30]

• Resilience & "Second Hits":
  Many people with “perfect” health ended up hospitalized with respiratory infections because their baseline lung resilience was poor due to inflammation or poor microbiome composition—often unknown to them.
  “We saw in the pandemic many people who were healthy looking alike ended up in the ICU. We don’t even know why. Perhaps their lungs were not resilient enough at baseline and they didn’t even know.” [10:53]

MMP9: The Critical Longevity Pathway

• What is MMP9 & Why It Matters:

  • MMP9 (matrix metalloproteinase-9) breaks down collagen, drives neutrophil (immune cell) inflammation, and is implicated in diseases like COPD, asthma, and even joint degeneration.
  • Dr. Lal: “MMP9 is high in anything that’s going to kill you. You have less MMP9, you extend lifespan.” [23:38]

• Probiotics as Pathway Modulators:
  The ResBiotic formula downregulates MMP9 and related inflammatory pathways (including NF-kB and NLRP3 pathways), mimicking the anti-inflammatory effect of steroids, without the side effects.

  • Dr. Lal: “That’s the primary pathway. You give these bacteria cocktail... MMP9 pathway is down regulated.” [22:21]

• Practical Implications:
  Targeting MMP9 isn’t just about respiratory health; it may also extend to longevity, tissue repair, and system-wide inflammation reduction.

Biohacking Application & Self-Experimentation

• Athletes, Firefighters, Vapers, Smokers, Chefs, Kids:

  • Probiotic lung support benefits not only chronic disease patients but also athletes (improved VO2, lung recovery), people exposed to smoke (wildfires, kitchens), and those seeking immune resilience.
  • Dr. Lal: “Nothing is more satisfying than... my pulmonologist doesn’t believe... my VO2 has gone up... I used to get allergies with California wildfires every year and now I don’t get it.” [59:46]

• Breathwork & Lung Training:
  Practices from yoga, pranayama, and regular breath training enhance lung capacity and even shift the lung microbiome—and thus immune function.

  • Dr. Lal: “Lung training, breath work does change your lung microbiome and can lead to inflammatory pathways being downregulated.” [46:34]

• Importance of ‘N of 1’ Data:
  Both Dave and Dr. Lal advocate for self-experimentation, tracking, and personalized analysis versus blind faith in population-level guidelines. Regulatory constraints often stifle innovation and individual adaptation.

Manufacturing, Formulation, and Future Innovations

• Resbiotic Approach:

  • Developed via pathway analysis, in vitro and organoid models, multi-year clinical trials, and synergy testing among three key strains and select botanicals targeting lung inflammation.
  • Dr. Lal: “Product level clinical trial is the future. That’s what we are building... it’s expensive, it takes a lot of effort.” [56:07]

• Broadening to Inhaled & Postbiotic Formulations:

  • Lal’s company is developing an inhaled version for direct lung application and exploring dead/postbiotic bacteria that can confer immune benefits without needing to be alive.

• Biofilms & Mold:

  • Mold exposure and interkingdom interactions worsen lung inflammation; creating "beneficial biofilms" may protect not only lungs but also medical devices and other organs.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the overlooked lung microbiome:
  “Most people have heard of the skin microbiome... but a lung microbiome is something I don’t think anyone’s heard of.”
  — Dave Asprey [06:38]

• On MMP9 as a game-changer:
  “MMP9 is the next sirtuin... MMP9 is high in anything that’s going to kill you. You have less MMP9, you extend lifespan.”
  — Dave Asprey [23:11, 23:38]

• On regulatory constraints:
  “There needs to be a middle ground. And what we are doing in the biohacking world now, the emerging science with biohacking, which is amazing. I think the future is...”
  — Dr. Lal [34:23]

• On personal empowerment:
  “This new time of citizens taking things in their own hands is the way to go... We need the self-experimentation privilege. It’s not even privilege, it’s a right.”
  — Dave Asprey [36:07, 36:30]

• On bringing research to practice:
  “Unless I convert that into tangible products and bring it to consumers ... I’m not doing my impactful duty. So this is all for impact, but you have to close the circle.”
  — Dr. Lal [74:18]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:00–02:00] – Introduction to lung resilience, breathwork, microbiome basics
• [05:00–07:15] – Discovery of lung microbiome, NIH Human Microbiome Project
• [10:00–13:00] – Personal lung history (Dave’s mold/asthma), role of baseline inflammation
• [15:00–16:30] – How gut probiotics influence lungs (postbiotics, microaspiration)
• [18:15–19:45] – Lasting effect of antibiotics, impact on immune programming
• [21:40–25:00] – Deep dive into MMP9, collagen breakdown, anti-inflammatory strategies
• [27:10–29:40] – Biohacking tales, MMP9 in oyster poisoning, shockwave therapy
• [31:04–32:30] – The NLRP3 inflammasome, alternatives to steroids
• [46:40–48:00] – Breathwork & changes to lung microbiome, call for large-scale research
• [53:34–54:21] – Children, strep, allergies, and proactive immune support
• [59:02–61:32] – Impact stories: athletes, firefighters, chefs, vapers, and young people
• [66:01–67:36] – Peptides, the future of postbiotic and microbial signaling
• [69:06–72:00] – Regulatory obstacles in food/supplement innovation
• [73:24–74:18] – Need for scientist-entrepreneurs to bring research into real-world use

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Engaging Takeaways for Listeners

• Lung health deserves as much attention as gut and brain health; breathwork, environment, and probiotics all play underappreciated roles.
• Long-term immunity and resilience are built—and eroded—by the life-long interplay of microbes, chemicals, drugs, and environment.
• Modulating inflammation at the level of MMP9 can impact diseases, aging, and physical performance.
• Innovation in supplements now parallels drug-level rigor in R&D, but without regulatory gridlock—enabling “citizen scientists” to safely test new protocols.
• Everyone who breathes is a potential beneficiary of lung microbial optimization: from asthmatics to athletes to heavy-duty city dwellers.
• Biohacking is personal and regulatory systems should empower, rather than inhibit, safe self-experimentation.

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Episode in a Nutshell

Through a highly technical yet engaging conversation, Dave Asprey and Dr. Vivek Lal explore the underappreciated role of lung health in systemic inflammation and longevity. They unveil the revolutionary potential of targeting the gut-lung axis, specifically the MMP9 pathway, with specialized probiotics like Resbiotic—developed over a decade of clinical and molecular research. Listeners gain actionable insights into breathwork, self-experimentation, and the future of truly integrative, data-driven biohacking.

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For further details, see clinical trials and PubMed on “Resbiotic, gut-lung axis, MMP9.” For Dave’s chosen protocol, visit resbiotic.com (code DAVE20).

Transcript

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

We eat three times a day, but we breathe 20,000 times, 20 times a minute. Your lungs at baseline since childhood were primed to be susceptible for inflammation. We saw in the pandemic many people who were healthy, looking alike would end up in the ice heat. We don't even know why. Perhaps their lungs were not resilient enough at baseline and they didn't even know. But lung training breath work does change your lung microbiome. It does change your lung flexibility. In layman terms.

[Dave Asprey]

You sit with your hands here, and you, and you breathe in and out different speeds. Lower lungs mid lungs here. And then you put your arms up like this and do it. So you're hitting all three lobes of the lungs. I think it really shifted my health. It did something good to my lung.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

My kids have been on it for the last five years and guess what? Like, they don't get strep, they don't get allergies, they don't get their yearly viruses. I have to believe that this is not just fixing a problem. It is changing their immune system. And they're changing the respiratory immune system.

[Dave Asprey]

You're listening to the human upgrade with Dave Asprey. Why won't your stress budge no matter what you do? You're doing the work. The cold plunge, the breath work, the supplements. And your nervous system is still running hot. Here's the problem. Every recovery tool you use only works when your body believes the threat is over. And if your nervous system never gets that signal, it stays in survival mode regardless of what you stack on top of it. The direct line to that signal runs through your vagus nerve. When you stimulate it, your parasympathetic nervous system activates, your body, shifts out of fight or flight and into the state where real recovery happens. Zenbud is the tool I reach for to make that shift happen. It sits on your ears like a headset and uses focused ultrasound to reach your vagus nerve directly. Just five minutes daily is all you need. In clinical studies, participants experienced significant improvements across stress, mood and sleep after just four weeks of use. Many people notice it in their first session. Check it out at Zenbud Health and use code DAVE15 at checkout for a discount. Your biohacks are only as good as your nervous system's ability to recover. This is the missing piece. Maybe you've got your nutrition right and you're sleeping well. You take the supplements, you do cold plunges, red light therapy, breath work, and a full stack of biohacking protocols. But why does the same health challenge keep showing up Tyler Watson studies this pattern. He says the missing piece isn't another supplement or something. Surface level fix. Sometimes the issue is a hidden pattern in your body in something called cellular memory. Tyler made something called the cellular alignment technique and he helps people identify what those patterns are so you can shift out of them and stop getting the same outcomes. So you're not chasing symptoms, you're chasing the underlying trigger of the symptom. If you want to understand what's driving you back into the same health and save years of time, money and energy figuring it out, visit fastest that's fastest change.com. it's really interesting. You're going to hear about something that is new to the world of medicine and biohacking today. You might have heard about the gut brain axis in every infomercial ever. And it's real. The communication between the gut and the brain is incredibly important. And that's why we look at probiotics and things like that. And you've probably heard of the heart brain connection, which is another really important set of nerves. That thing you've never heard of is the gut lung axis. It's a real thing. And I say it's a real thing because our guest today discovered it as a double board certified physician working with neonatal intensive care units and looking at what's going on with this. And it ultimately led to, amongst many other inventions, the world's only probiotic that affects the gut lung axis. And it's something that I started using long before I even met the company because I'm like, this is interesting science. So our guest today is the inventor of it, who's quite brilliant and I'm not even going to read all the stuff he's done because, well, you can look it up. But an accomplished medical professional who's also done drug development work, who's making a probiotic that is not a drug but is approved. We'll talk about that some more. And his name is Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec. Welcome.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Thank you, Dave. It's a pleasure talking about the gut lung axis. And you know how we got here. It's fascinating how all of these axis came about, right? Like when people ask me, how does the gut communicate with different parts of the body? I've always said it connects to everything. And then we came up the concept of the gut X axis in algebra. You remember how we used to write any unknown was an X. So seriously, believe that the gut can communicate with any unknown of the body?

[Dave Asprey]

Is that through the vagus nerve or through some sort of chemical or electrical.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Absolutely. So vagus nerve, but the lymphatics, the blood vessels. Right. So all these metabolites from what we eat or the microbiome or all these other molecules enter the lymphatics, enter the blood circulation, and can reach different parts of the body, different axis, different organs, and create effects there. Downregulate inflammation there. That's the gut X axis. And we were the ones to develop the gut lung axis and how gut metabolites affect the lung inflammation and lung health. All right.

[Dave Asprey]

Speaking of lungs, you have a really deep, resonant voice. Have you hacked your lungs? Like, were you always like that?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

I used to be a swimmer.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh. That's why breathe. Okay.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

And maybe rest. Lung support is helping further. But no, I think it's about. It's about biohacking your lungs. People don't think about it. Don't you realize? How many times have you heard about wellness and lung? Not many times. Right. Like 10 years ago, when I used to talk about air as medicine, people used to laugh because we also have. You know, what I've not told you is we also have patents on inhaled probiotics or inhaled things.

[Dave Asprey]

I want.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

And it's just that the regulatory environment is such. I had to start it as a company called Alveolus Bio, which does inhaled therapeutics. So that is going the therapeutic route when it'll be out, you'll see. But air is medicine. Why just food as medicine? Right? We eat three times a day and food becomes medicine, but we breathe 20 times a minute, 30 times a minute. So what we breathe in every second does make your lung resilient to or susceptible to a second hit or a third hit.

[Dave Asprey]

And most people know don't breathe smoke, don't breathe microplastics, you know, have an air filter. At least listeners on this show have heard me say for years, mold all this stuff in air. But we've probably heard of the skin microbiome, and we may have heard of, like, an eye microbiome on some weird episode. And certainly there's a vaginal microbiome and all that, but a lung microbiome is something I don't think anyone's heard of.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

How did you discover this? What's in there and what does it do?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

So in late 2000s, I think it was 2006 and 2007, NIH came up with the Human Microbiome Project. Lungs were not even an organ. Right. We all thought that lungs were sterile. So our lab. I was a professor at University of Alabama at Birmingham. Our lab and several other labs around the world started looking at the lung microbiome. So there is a lung microbiome, but different from the gut in the sense that gut is pretty rich in microbiome. The lung microbiome is extremely low biomass, but it doesn't mean that it's not there and it's not important. So it's low in biomass, but it's critical in making the lung susceptible to inflammatory pathways or resilient to it, you know. So we started studying the mechanisms. You know, I was a lung molecular biologist and we were looking at individual mechanisms or molecules which would increase inflammation, you know, for copd, asthma, all of these things, how the collagen in the lung breaks down. We were looking at all omics, right? Metabolomics, proteomics, micro adenomics, microbiomics, and found that microbiomics was very, very effective in trying to accomplish what we were doing. And that's how we started sequencing lung samples, starting from neonates, because I was a neonatologist, starting from all these premature infants and then adults with copd, asthma, and found there was a very peculiar lung microbiome which would make them either resilient or susceptible to inflammation, even if you control for everything else.

[Dave Asprey]

So, and the microbiome, is this just one bacteria or three or how many?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

No, the whole phyla of, you know, firmicutes. Right. So then we extracted those, took it to the lab setting, grew them on organs, like organs on chips, and did a lot of gain of function, loss of function there, and then figured out which exact organisms would decrease inflammation the most and in what ratio. So that went in. So it was almost 10 years of work that went inside the, you know, the product we launched. And it was fascinating because we created all these animal models, also germ free animals, where you take out all the bacteria and then just put this specific one, or you take out bacteria from deceased humans and put it in, in their lungs and it totally changed how they reacted to a second hit. You know, it was fascinating.

[Dave Asprey]

Maybe you'd know this. And this has driven me crazy for years. If you take germ free mice, you can feed them anything you want and they're lean and ripped and healthy, right? And then think, well, wait, so that means that bacteria are generally bad for us, but then if you give them the wrong bacteria, they just get messed up. You give them normal mouse poop, they're dysfunctional. Yeah. But we also know that, that they were really good before the bacteria. So why are germ free mice so incredibly strong?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

I think it's a balance.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

That the bad bacteria are probably overpowering the good bacteria. That's when you take it out, it sounds like they're strong.

[Dave Asprey]

So you got rid of the bad guys and so you didn't need the good guys.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Yes.

[Dave Asprey]

And then in the real world, of course, you can't control your exposure to bacteria. Oh, does. Does wearing a mask make any difference?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

It creates a difference in, you know, inhaling. It depends on what mask. Right. The N95s with the particle size would make a difference because it's a particle size. What is important, what reaches the deep lungs or not.

[Dave Asprey]

Like, it could stop a bacteria. Right. But probably not viruses. Or smaller than 2.5.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Exactly. It's smaller than 3. Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay. And you know, smoke is going to go right through it. Exactly.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Smoke is going right through it. And all these micro particles in the skin, smoke in wildfires, etc. Going right through it. And these are such small particles that you don't even realize until the damage is done, you're already inflamed. And, you know, that's what makes you susceptible to the second death. We saw in the pandemic, many people who were healthy, looking alike, would end up in the icu. Right. We don't even know why. Perhaps their lungs were not resilient enough at baseline. And they didn't even know. Yeah, you know, they were inflamed at baseline. They didn't even know. And then they were tipped over by the virus.

[Dave Asprey]

I'm particularly interested in lungs because, like I said, they're a major source of what you've taken every day. You eat two, three times a day, and you take 30 pounds of air that you're breathing all the time, and you mix them together, and that's what mitochondria do. So we don't pay a lot of attention to that. And, you know, inhalable gases, things like carbon or a xenon gas and all those. Those are interesting. But the. The reason for me is I grew up in a basement full of toxic mold. I had asthma as a kid and all the other things you'd expect. I took antibiotics every month for about 15 years because of chronic sinusitis and all the stuff that happens with mold and the asthma went away as a kid, and. But every now and every now and then, you'll hear me cough. And it's adult asthma. I've had it, you know, diagnosed properly with a spirometer and all. And it's generally pretty darn controlled, like, I don't need an inhaler or anything like that, but it just makes me cough and it pisses me off because I'm a biohacker, should be hackable. And so I have been using respiotic for a couple of years and I think it's made a difference. You know, it's. It's really hard to separate out one variable. And I live a terrible life for a long time. I fly 50 to 75% of the days of the year. I'm not home, I'm in hotels with fragrances and all this stuff. But I'm incredibly resilient. But I don't want to cough anymore. What's going on with my lungs?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Yeah, your lungs at baseline, since childhood were primed to be susceptible for inflammation. Right. That's what we call asthma here in this case. So whenever there is a second hit or an exposure, you cough. So the treatment for that or the long term therapy for that would be how do you biohack your lungs in a way that at baseline their susceptibility goes down.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, resilience.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Resilience increases. Right. And that is what we are trying to achieve with creating that balance in the microbial molecules that go into your body and then to the lungs.

[Dave Asprey]

So when I take the resbiotic capsules, these are the firmicutes, specific species you've identified. Firmicutes. Firmicutes. How do you say that?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Yeah, firmicutes or firmicutes, it doesn't matter with lactobacillusia.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay, got it. And if you guys read my books, there's a ratio of this to bacterioides and that can even determine obesity. So I take it orally, though I did think about opening one and just sniffing a line of it, but it has herbs in there. It seems like it might be bad.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

It might be bad because of that. But we are creating an inhalable version with only the bacteria. Wait for a couple. It's going through the FDA thing because. Yeah, yeah, that. Yes, that is coming.

[Dave Asprey]

And if you think of all the stuff you go to the drugstores, all kinds of stuff for breathing, and there's all these inhalers and things. And if we could just fix it by fixing bacteria, much like we fix IBS and even ulcers by. Oh, it's H. Pylori. So there's a bacterial thing that's a part of the equation and probably an immune thing that's mediated by the bacteria. But if I eat the bacteria, the asbiotic, how do they get into my lungs?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

We have more than 10 bacterial cells in the body compared to a human cell. Right. Trillions of them. So if you see contextually, we are nothing but a bunch of bacteria. So when you take these bacteria into the gut, these bacteria affect the lung in more than two ways. Right. One is every minute we are microaspirating, even now we are micro aspirating. So what is in the gut could colonize the lung by microaspirations, but that's not a whole lot, especially when you're an adult. If you're extremely small, then you microaspirate more. But these bacteria create metabolites which are absorbed into the lymphatics, into the blood vessel.

[Dave Asprey]

It's basically postbiotics.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

It's postbiotics or bacterial secretions, you call them that, Right. So it's small chain fatty acids, or they down regulate or upregulate inflammatory things in your blood, and that goes to the lung, downregulates directly and indirectly into the lungs. Right.

[Dave Asprey]

So one of my favorite Wired magazine headlines over the years was, your body is surrounded by a cloud of fart and poop bacteria. And the article said that if you're in a, say, a conference room, even two hours after you leave, if they sample the air and run DNA samples, they can identify who you are because they pick up all of your gut bacteria, can match it to your microbiome. So. Well, A, that's gross, but B, that's how life actually works, whether you like it or not. So if I take a probiotic and then I. Or am I just inhaling anyway?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

No, no, because there's proof that even in toilets, right, like after flushing, what do you call it? Plume, Right.

[Dave Asprey]

Hold your breath when you flush.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Hold your breath when you flush. Does some components reach your mouth? It's not that easy to get to deep lungs. It's difficult. That's why even the inhaled thing that we are creating, we had to go through a lot of particle engineering that you have to particle engineer it in a shape and size that could be inhalable into deep lungs. Otherwise everything got stuck in your upper airways.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, it's surprisingly difficult to work with bacteria. One of my very smallest companies, Homebiotic, we have a environmental spray that helps to compete with mold and man keeping that stuff alive. Put it in a diffuser. No, it dies. So you got to figure out and not kill it and get it into the lungs.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

That has been the, you know, we have global patents on it. That has been the challenge, you know, keeping them alive. While particle engineering with specific. You have to use specific pressure Temperature specific excipients. We had to partner with the people who had developed the first inhaled insulin to do that. You know, it took a couple of years. Here.

[Dave Asprey]

Wow.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Yeah. Maybe. Maybe that could go in your room. Spray.

[Dave Asprey]

It could. I think your new product should be. You ever heard of like poop pourri?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

You know, I think you need one of those. That's like a probiotic just to make sure you don't inhale anything you don't want to. Don't inhale anything you can't uninhale.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

There. Fascinating.

[Dave Asprey]

I always look back and say, I do not have great genetics and I've been able to overcome lots of that. Sorry. It's pretty well known by listeners, but I haven't talked a lot about asthma as a kid. Just the whole mold thing, constant strep throat and all that. Not so fun. But I often wonder, okay, those years of antibiotics, I know that they trash my gut and I've still got some sensitives I probably wouldn't have otherwise, but I'm generally like, doing all right. But I've never thought about what those years of antibiotics did to my lungs. When people overuse antibiotics, what happens inside

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

the lungs similar to what happens to the rest of your body? You know, you are totally screwing up the balance of bacteria, the good and the bad bacteria, and that can last forever. We've seen these premature infants who have been in the ICU on antibiotics. They have long lasting effects for years. You know, they can get more infection, they can get more susceptible to other things. These premature infants who have chronic lung disease as a preemie, get COPD early. Can you imagine if you control for everything. So their lungs are inflamed for a long time. Their lungs are susceptible for a long time. So the short answer is antibiotics can mess up your immune system for the longest time. It is a known fact. And not just antibiotic. You talked about the genetics, right? The genetics is just one part of the equation. The genome is one part of the equation. What about the epigenome or epigenetics? Everything, Antibiotics, microbiome, everything affects your epigenetics, which affects the genome. So your genome could be affected by. Through the epigenetic factors around it, which. Which some believe that plays a bigger role than the genome.

[Dave Asprey]

I'm. I'm in that camp. I mean, biohacking itself is kind of a restatement. Change the environment around you and inside of you to have control of your biology. Does the environment turn genes on? Of course it does. And there's more to it. Than that, but that's kind of the thing. But I, I do think about germ free mice. So if you are already trashed as a kid with antibiotics, what's the harm of just popping some amoxicillin in month one and doxycycline in month two and just kind of cycling through all the cylinds on a regular basis just to keep those little bastards from causing inflammation?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

See, the reality is we still don't understand what these good bacterias do to you. Right. You know, I can claim I'm this smart microbiome scientist and whatnot, but you know, from the. There's so much which is unknown. Right. You know, I didn't believe in anything, but now I'm understanding the only thing I believe in is that I don't know anything. Right. We are still touching the tip of the iceberg. So the short answer is, what these antibiotics do sequentially is not entirely known. We do know that they create an imbalance in the bacteria and every human being's bacterial milieu could be different, you know, and how that antibiotics affect that human being be different. So they create a disruption in the bacteria. The good bacteria could go down and could last for a long time in that, you know, lower abundance. And the bad bacteria, if it's triggered by an infection or something, could totally overpower the good bacteria, so to say. So you fall sick more, your immune system is messed up, you get various chronic inflammatory diseases after that. And there are several pathways which are affected by this. Right. Several inflammatory pathways, NF Kappa B pathway, MMP9 pathways. And not everything is known. What we know is in the long run, if you control for everything, antibiotics do cause more inflammation, more infection risk, and more badness. Yeah, for sure.

[Dave Asprey]

Now you said a word there that triggered me. I have an MMP9 fetish. Talk about MMP9 and longevity. Because it's such an important thing.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

No one knows about it. No one knows about it. And you know, I did all my research on that. Right?

[Dave Asprey]

Did you really?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Yeah, like for the last 15 years. So before getting into I did not believe in this. I was in molecular biology. Right, Right. We were starting studying how MMP9 in the lung drives neutrophilic inflammation. How, how does this, you know, inflammation happen? It's all driven by MMP9. So MMP9 is metalloproteinase 9. It's essentially a protease which breaks down collagen anywhere. Right?

[Dave Asprey]

Amen.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

And you know, lungs have a lot of collagen. If you break down the collagen with MMP9 there's something called a tripeptide ACPGP which is created that dries neutrophils and creates neutrophilic inflammation. And it's such a cyclic process. Once that starts, it doesn't stop. The main pathological signal in COPD and bronchiectasis and neutrophilic asthma and several neutrophilic disease sinusitis is the MMP9 pathway. And guess what these bacterias are doing? So that is the primary pathway. You give these bacteria cocktail that we have the respiratory raspy, lung support three bacteria cocktail. MMP9 pathway is down regulated. So we are using these bacteria as a drug to down regulate MMP9, down regulate ACPGP and downregulate neutrophilic inflammation. That's how the anti inflammatory effect is happening in the lungs. Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

So guys, mark my words, I'm a futurist and I've been right a huge amount of times. Way ahead of the curve. MMP9 is the next sirtuin and if that didn't mean anything to you, that's okay. Sirtuin's been kind of the assert pathways. I wrote them in my longevity book. This is a lot of David Sinclair's work. They're really important longevity pathways. MMP9 is high in anything that's going to kill you. You have less MMP9, you extend lifespan.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Absolutely, absolutely. That is why next we are going to longevity and we're using the same pathways, same bacteria in a different application. Because you need to balance what you give for what organ. Right. So MMP9 pathway is so relevant not just for lungs, I'm just saying lungs because we have studied that the most.

[Dave Asprey]

But different organisms insert all the tissues anywhere there's collagen.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Absolutely.

[Dave Asprey]

Your joints have repair cells that are rebuilding your tissues constantly. But when you put them under enough stress over enough time, those same cells will flip and they start actually breaking down instead of regenerating. And once that happens, the process of inflammation just keeps going. But the good news is that joint damage doesn't have to be permanent. Turns out those cells can be switched back. And that's why the scientists at Kalroy developed cardiogenics hp. In a placebo controlled trial, people taking cardiogenics HP saw major improvements in joint regeneration biomarkers and they could see increased joint space. On imaging we're talking about 67% reduction in pain scores and an average 50% increase in the distance they could walk. In just 90 days of taking cardiogenics now this matters to me because I was diagnosed with arthritis in my knees at age 14 and I've had three knee surgeries and I never want to have another. So keeping track of my joints so that they always function even when I'm 180 is a really big deal. And I do take cardiogenics. If you'd like a deeper dive into the science, check out the human upgrade episode 1338 where I interviewed a research microbiologist who advises Kalroy about the formula. Kalroy also makes arterosil hp, which you've heard about on the show, I've written about in my books and I've taken for more than a decade because the research is so strong for cardiovascular. Kalroy leads with real science every time and it shows. So go to kalroy.comdave for the research, a discount and a video 45 day money back guarantee. For a deeper dive into the science, check out episode 1338 link below. Men, your skin is 25% thicker and oilier than your girlfriend's. That means that flowery smelling skincare she uses probably won't work well for you. Caldera Lab makes high performance skincare specifically designed for our skin. All of their formulas are clean. No synthetic fragrances, silicones, parabens or phthalates. That means that they're not going to spike your estrogen the way those nasty chemicals do. And the great is their Anti Aging Lightweight serum. It's got vitamin C, aminos and adaptogens that firm your skin and reduce fine lines because, well, you don't want wrinkles either. At the end of a four week study of the great, 97% of men agreed that their skin looked better. Your skincare routine doesn't have to be 50 different complicated steps and scraping and blending and all that stuff. Stuff. If you just want one simple product that really makes a difference, that's the great. So just brush your teeth, smear it on, you're good to go. Visit calderalab.com Dave Use code Dave for 20% off your first order. This is easy and it works. So anyone who's had oysters, Bad oysters. There's two kinds of bad oysters. There's the kind that paralyze you and kill you. You're not going to get those in a restaurant. And there's the kind that make you feel like a truck hit you for a long time. You sweat all night long. You might throw up, you get diarrhea, but then it's just body pain for weeks that's because Those bacteria raise MMP9. That's what it feels like. It's breakdown of collagen throughout the body. So I was in Vegas two years ago and I ate an oyster. Apparently eating oysters in the desert, even at a nice restaurant, bad idea. And like, man, this sucks. And I have loose collagen junctions anyway, genetically. So, man, I felt that I was just miserable. Yeah. So I did a whole bunch of research, and the only thing I could find that dropped MMP9, because I didn't find your stuff. You got to do more marketing. No one knows what it is, but yeah, it was shockwave therapy.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Wow.

[Dave Asprey]

So getting these, like, essentially ultrasonic, like, vibrations into the body markedly lowers it. So I went everywhere that I had pain and I shockwaved it. You can go to a clinic and get this done. And you know what? It all went away. Like, the pain went away the next day.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Amazing.

[Dave Asprey]

And other than that, I can't find anything that drops MMP9. But in one of my books, I wrote about it as a longevity thing.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

But you know, you know about MMP9. This is fascinating. No one knows about this. People talk about it. And then I had to deviate from it because people don't know about it. And it's so important. And guess what increases it the most? It's a proteobacteria, the bad bugs. You know, the E. Colizer, everyone, you know, lipopolysaccharide increases. In all our animal models. We put a little bit of LP as lipopolysaccharide to create the neutrophilic inflammation to show that our thing works. It is fascinating. They published so much about it in the last 15 years. Our chief medical officer and our group. Oh, my God. So MMP9 is the pathway to target not just for lungs, but also many other inflammatory things throughout the body. And proteobacteria, the bad bugs increase this. Bad things happen. Lactobacilli based formulations like our formulation RSB11 strains, specific strains down regulate the MMP9 pathway, decrease inflammation across the body.

[Dave Asprey]

Incredible. There's. There's probably another hundred really important longevity pathways that should be on the list, but this one doesn't get any attention in the world of biohacking, frankly, or medicine. Even Going back to my. My first big diet book, which was called the Bulletproof Diet. And guys, danger Coffee, not bulletproof. Got nothing to do with those guys. Not even friends. But. But I read about endotoxin, and it's just, look, when you have dysbiosis which, okay, 15 years antibiotics. I'm kind of a pro at that. What it does is it makes this lipopolysaccharide that crosses the barrier of the gut to some degree or another and just wreaks havoc. And one way of wreaking havoc, but not the only way is MMP9. What are the other ways it wreaks havoc?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

So there are other pathways such as the NF kappa B pathway. You know the NF kappa B, it's called the inflammazone. Right. It's a pathway which steroid affects the most. So what we are seeing with these firmicutes or lactobacilli formulation that we have, it down regulates NF kappa B pathway. Also very similar to what steroids would do, but hopefully without the side effects.

[Dave Asprey]

Are you hitting the NLRP3 pathway?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

NLRP3, that's part of the inflammation.

[Dave Asprey]

We gotta hang out and I'm sort of joking. Fetishes, these are just areas of extreme interest. But not with that, you know, that other vibe. Okay. This is critical for aging. I almost wrote a book about NLRP 3. It's so important. Can you walk us through what that is?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

And what respiratory does for is inflammasome. And it's triggered not just by proteobacteria but by several other molecules. Like there is something called RAM, there is something called CD44. There are several molecules which go through some central inflammation pathways. And one of the central inflammatory pathways is this NLRP pathway. It's called the inflammasome pathway. Right. NF kappa B and NLRP pathway where if you trigger that pathway, you get overall inflammation in the body. And this is just dumbing it down a little bit. But if you target it specifically with specific molecules or you know, antibodies, etc, you could downregulate inflammation. And that's the primary pathway where steroids go through. And that's why steroids are so good. And downregulated inflammation. Just that steroids have a lot of side effects. Right. So that's why we don't want to go there. So we are trying to find alternate mechanisms to down regulate that NLRP pathway. And that's where probiotics specific strains are critical, like what we use in rezbe.

[Dave Asprey]

Approaching it from a bacteria perspective is really cool. And I got into that because one thing that causes NLRP3 to go up is mechanical friction.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Yes.

[Dave Asprey]

So if you're jogging all the time and you start getting fibrosis, even in Superhuman, my longevity book, Cellular stiffening, this change of Tissues throughout the body, which is fibrosis. The trigger is NLRP 3 and upstream from that is endotoxin. Mechanical insults, mold, toxins and other things that raise it. So the whole longevity picture from biohacking is have less toxins so that you don't activate the pathways and then use supplements, probiotics, and heck, use pharmaceuticals to block it.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Yeah. And this used to be there in ancient medicine. We just ignored it, Right? We just ignored it. And we doctors created all the problems. We doctors and scientists. I didn't believe in it 15 years ago, honestly, you know, but this is the opportunity to bring some science into the space and document it. I think that is what is lacking. This thing works. So we are trying to document it with papers and clinical trials, et cetera. Now this works.

[Dave Asprey]

Well, thanks for supporting the Beyond Biohacking conference and all. And I love getting really solid science because as a consumer, as even a citizen scientist, look, I want results and I don't care if it works for everybody. I've got to figure out what's going to keep me from being disabled or in a lot of pain. Right. And you're saying, what do you mean being disabled? Guys, I bought disability insurance when I was 26 because I wasn't sure. Right. I was way sicker than you would ever imagine. And I got like the whole lottery ticket full of just the bad genes, like Ccl2, you know that gene?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Absolutely.

[Dave Asprey]

It upregulates Nlrp3. So I get inflamed when you don't buy stuff. And okay, maybe gene therapy will fix that one. But like, so I had to learn this because I just don't like to suffer very much.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

And you don't need a MD degree or PhD degree to learn this. Right? That's what is exciting. Because I had a drug development company, I still have a drug development company. And I never thought that I'll get into this side of the world, the biohacking and the supplement side. But what I realized is 60, 70% of the adults in US are already doing it. We need it and we need it. Yes, drug development is great, but it's a 10 to 15 year process. It's a hundred million undertaking. We can't do it at scale. We could do it on selective things, but this, we could actually educate and do it at scale and people can get their health in their own hands.

[Dave Asprey]

I had the honor of interviewing Dr. Marty Macari, the head of the FDA, on stage back in November. And he talked about how just embarrassing the cost and time to develop a New drug is. And just. Just swore on a. We didn't have a stack of Bibles. But he, he put his full force like we are going to modernize the drug approval process because there's no excuse, there's no excuse for taking a $10 million development project turning into $100 million because the FDA got involved.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Exactly.

[Dave Asprey]

And so I really, truly believe they're going to make it easier. And you know, your inhaled probiotic idea, that's one of the things that should be fast tracked. Because if you look at the number of people whose lives are being improved by that, there's no reason he's. 15 years of just paperwork.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know, there's almost like there needs to be a middle ground. Right. That is just too long and too expensive. And then on the other hand, all these conglomerates had made a mockery of supplements. Right. Anything was being put out. I think that. I think there has to be a middle ground. And what we are doing in the biohacking world now, the emerging science with biohacking, which is amazing. I think the future is.

[Dave Asprey]

Here it is. And this idea that we are actually already there where you could say, hey, if you're using our new whatever product, install this app, do this thing, give us a little bit of data and you can see in broad populations. And I've been working on that for a long time with upgrade labs where give me enough physiological data, we get a lot of data and tell me the stuff you're doing. It doesn't even matter if it says. And we're going to tease out all of the things that no one thought about like the. They just discovered 400,000 new antibiotics. Did you see that paper?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh, no. Antibiotic resistance. Now that's done. Thank you. AI right.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Exactly.

[Dave Asprey]

And this is interesting. Just the week we're recording this, the FDA just. Or not. Is it the FDA or American cardiologist thing? Probably those guys. This is not very good. The cardiologist people who had 70 years to fix a problem. So I'm not going to trust them. But. Sorry, guys, I'm just teasing.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

No, the lipid fat.

[Dave Asprey]

They did just add C reactive protein to the list of recommended screens. For 15 years I've been shouting, screw your cholesterol. Look at CRP and homocysteine and LPP. So they finally did it. But they're years behind. But at least it's there.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

So at least it's there.

[Dave Asprey]

Are you hopeful?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

I'm hopeful. But this needs to move so fast. So this new time of Citizens taking things in their own hands is the way to go. I think that will prompt even the officials to go faster, you know, these organizations to go faster. So I think we'll have to just take things in our own hands, health in our own hands, educate ourselves, biohack ourselves. Right?

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah. And I didn't hire anyone to be my health daddy. So I appreciate the recommendations of a government authority. Their track record has been very poor in terms of nutritional recommendations and even some of the medical recommendations, because government people generally aren't doctors. So I appreciate the recommendations, but the control is mine. They're not allowed to say they have it. I mean, they can say whatever they want, but they're just wrong. So we need the self experimentation privilege. It's not even privilege, it's a right. So I'm hopeful that one of the states may be Texas. Cause we have our own Federal Reserve and our own guns. So maybe we'll just say, you know, in this state, you have a right to experiment. You want to use a drug off label. As long as you sign this paper and your doctor signs the paper, you can just do it and it's okay.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Because the reality is I can honestly find a problem in every single approved drug if I dig down the papers. You know, we used to have these journal clubs. I could tear apart any paper in the best of the journals published. Right. That's the reality. That's a reality. And drug development, you have put in so much money into it, eventually someone wants to see some results and many things come out which are not the best out there also. Right. And just because it has not gone through that process doesn't mean it doesn't work. So. Absolutely, there needs to be a middle ground of self experimentation and taking health in your own hands.

[Dave Asprey]

There's also this weird thing called clinical data, which means doctors in the field noticed it worked. Like, hey, I give everyone this drug and then their rosacea goes away. Maybe, maybe they could use it off label without a permission slip. Yeah, seems kind of important.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

And I'm a person of statistics and I've done a lot of, you know, statistical work. Whatever recommendations come out, they are at the population level. But you are an N of 1. I am an N of 1. Right. For me it could be 100% or a 0%. How do you know that? So generalizability of most of these things are questionable at best. I think one thing we could do is question everything.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, it works. And we just need to take the jackboot off the neck of doctors. One example there and this one makes me really happy is Modafinil. So Modafinil is a narcolepsy drug. It's a performance enhancing drug that's very well established to increase, really, intelligence. And I was on Nightline 15 years ago. I was the limitless drug. I'm the only guy without a bag on my head. Yeah, I took it to get through business school. I've been out for 25 years. So. Well, the White House, everyone's taking Modafinil because it allows you to focus without ampiness, without all the meth stuff from taking amphetamines and all that. And frankly, most people taking amphetamines should have been on Modafinil first, but it's a more expensive drug. So how about. And by the way, getting a prescription for that for 10 of the last 15 years, it was like pulling teeth. So you shouldn't have to. You shouldn't have to beg to try a drug or a probiotic, for that matter. Like, you're right.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

And unfortunately, the whole system, the medical system and the scientific system is built around the notion that that is good and this is bad. You know, I think that needs to change. There has to be a middle ground. There has to be equipoise. All I'm asking from my medical peers and scientist peers, at least have equipoise. Unless you have tested it, how can you say that is bad? At least test it and say that's bad. Right. Just because it's not gone through the FDA doesn't mean it doesn't work. Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

I remember years ago, I was on some kind of medication and I asked the doctor, I'm like, hey, you think you can take vitamin C with this? He goes, no. And I go, I don't see any reason why you wouldn't. And what's your reason? He goes, well, it's not studied. And I looked at him, I said, well, lotion isn't studied with this therapy. Why do you think I can use lotion? He goes, good point. Vitamin C is probably fine, but it doesn't have to be studied for you to think. Right. So. And, you know, to be really clear, some people screw themselves up with supplements. You can load yourself up with Chinese herbs and your liver is going to be happy.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

You can take peptides that are incredibly powerful, but you can do them the wrong way and not have good results, but they're much less likely to be deadly than Tylenol.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Good point, good point, good point. Yeah. There's so many things like that, right? So many Drugs like that, which are approved and could be so bad for you. Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

Here's a cool drug, Telmisartan. You know the drug?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Yes.

[Dave Asprey]

It's a blood pressure.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Blood pressure thing. Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

Well, it turns out that Telmisartan is one of about a dozen pharmaceuticals that in multiple trials are associated with extending lifespan. And guess what? Telmisartan blocks the angiotensin. NLRP 3. Yeah, that's a secondary effect. It looks at angiotensin, but another effect. So I will do a half a dose of telmisartan every two days to lower my NLRP3 and thymosome because I know genetically my CCL2 genes make me more predisposed. If what I just said didn't make any sense, that's okay. It shouldn't unless you're really into this stuff. But the bottom line is most doctors won't prescribe it. So I buy it from India because my dogs would actually. But I don't want to go to the trouble. But it's like all this stuff we know you can load your genetics into just an untrained AI and probably learn more than anything. And you could even ask about the type of probiotics that are in yours and say look at mechanistic pathways. Look at my genetics and tell me if this is. You're going to get stuff that's better than almost any human.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Absolutely. And then layer with like a gut test or a microbiome test and then the interactions and the pathways come out. It's so fascinating. We don't know anything, you know, every. It humbles me so much anytime, you know, I see those results.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, I was. Because I've had gut problems. They're really, they're fixed. My gut works great if I eat the right stuff. But for most of my life I've had just a messed up gut. From my stuff we talked about. I could clear the room with the best of them if I ate the wrong thing. And so I kind of got obsessed with this. And at the second ever biohacking conference there was a US microbiome. They ended up getting shut down. And I was just like, I gotta know what's going on, I gotta know. And finally I met Viome and in fact their first thousand test kits were sold at the biohacking at test kit. And I'm good friends with Naveen and I'm an investor and on his board of advisors. Full disclosure and all that, but he's been a mentor as well. And finally I got my first results back from that test like, now I know what's going on in there. I really am bad at oxalate. And I feel like we're just at the beginning of getting enough data across the population. Have you ever explored remote tribes in the Amazon and looking at ancient probiotics to see if they affect the lungs?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

I personally would love to do that. Just have not had the time or the resources to do it. Every organ. Every organ. Right. Like these ancient tribes, we know that some people have tried to get their gut microbiome for athletic performances, etc. Right. Do they have amazing lungs? They probably do. They probably eat cleaner, breathe cleaner than all of us. And over time, their lungs have evolved and the guts have evolved into microbes which facilitate this. Right. If you take those and experiment and then give it to a regular population, that might create a difference. Absolutely.

[Dave Asprey]

Have you heard of the Enhanced Games?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

I have not.

[Dave Asprey]

Super cool. So a couple years ago, I was one of the signatories for the Human Enhanced Declaration at Oxford, and there's a couple hundred high level college researcher people in the room, and I said, well, guys, when I was really sick, I went straight to the World Anti Doping association website to find a list of things that work. Yeah, yeah. And of course, they're kind of laughing. And so the Enhanced Games are coming up here, I think May or June. Okay. And I had the founder on the show. They're gonna be in Las Vegas, and they're taking the top four most popular Olympic events. And they're saying, look, you can compete using anything you want. You have to do under a doctor's care, and we all have to know what you're doing, but there's no. No limits. You want to be on testosterone, fine.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Right.

[Dave Asprey]

Just don't take levels that are gonna give you a heart attack or something. So they're gonna break every world record, probably by 20% in those events, saying this is what humans are capable of when regulators get out of the way and they're not gonna be putting athletes lives in danger.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Not know that. But wow, fascinating.

[Dave Asprey]

So you got to get involved in, like, you have, like, super lung probiotics and have. You know that.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Yeah, we're trying to get it through NSF also now, like, so that it can officially.

[Dave Asprey]

There you go. Yes. I'm microbial doping for the Olympics.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Right.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh, that's so cool.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Microbial doping. Yeah. Inhale and. And to the gut.

[Dave Asprey]

Right.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Okay.

[Dave Asprey]

Can we talk about lung training?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Yes.

[Podcast Announcer]

Yes.

[Dave Asprey]

Is it a scam or is it real?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

It is real.

[Dave Asprey]

How's it work?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

One of my Favorite books is breed.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

You know, so lung training, all this yoga, pranayam, etc. That my grandmother used to tell me, which I did not do. Swimming and exercise. Right. It does change your lung compliance, it does change your lung flexibility in layman terms. And most importantly, it does change the lung milieu, like the microbiome, the composition. There have been some studies saying that that changes. We don't know egg or the, you know, chicken story here. What comes first. But lung training, breath work does change your lung microbiome and can lead to inflammatory pathways being down regulated.

[Dave Asprey]

For about five years, when I was, this is right as I was starting the biohacking movement, I did Art of Living breath work every morning. Religious, I mean, for five years and at friends with Sri Sri and you know, still a big supporter of that. And so the way this stuff works is you sit with your hands here and you. And you breathe in and out different speeds. Lower lungs, mid lungs here. And then you put your arms up like this and do it. So you're hitting all three lobes of the lungs. And I think it really shifted my health. It did something good to my lungs. And I think there's something to it.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Yeah. And a lot of people, I'm not deep into it, but a lot of people believe, a lot of educated people and people who understand this field and I trust believe in this. I don't really endure daily. Right. There's something called anulom, vilom, there's something called pranayam and yoga. It's all breath or. Yeah, yeah. And what I know for sure, it changes the microbiome of the lungs and the gut. What I know for sure is that changes your vital capacity, which changes a lot of other things. Right.

[Dave Asprey]

So breath work changes your lung microbiome.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Yes.

[Dave Asprey]

You're the only person ever to discover that, I imagine.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Yeah. And I want to do a large study on that. You know, it's just I want to do a large population level study on that.

[Dave Asprey]

I could go with the Art of Living guys because they have a lot of people who do it. Or Joe Dispenza would be great for that. You do a lot of breath work with Joe and he's already getting the data with Emit Patel down at UC San Diego. So.

[Podcast Announcer]

Yeah.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

And that could be the underlying mechanism why that helps in lung diseases and other things. Right.

[Dave Asprey]

Wow, this is so cool. I talked about bacteria a lot, but 2 billion years ago there were ancient bacteria floating around that became mitochondria and dun dun dun dun. There was ancient fungus and they met and they fought like Godzilla and Mothra. Okay, so we gotta talk about mold. So inhaled toxic mold, what does it do to the lung? Microbiome.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

That's bad things. So when we talk about microbiome, we get stuck on the bacteria, but we forget the viruses and molds.

[Podcast Announcer]

Right.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

So the microbiome is the kingdom interaction. No one studies this. That's what I keep telling people. You have to study what the bacteria does to the mold and what the mole. So what we know in preliminary, you know, studies is whenever there are specific kind of molds, it changes the bacteria composition, you know, and it changes the inflammatory pathways and of the lungs. So to your point, what specific mold do with specific. If you have a layer of, you know, forest of your bacteria and you put specific mold in that, and if it is a favorable layer, that mold might not do much. But if it's an unfavorable layer of bacteria, that mold might synergistically act and create badness. Right. So I think that is what happens. Inter kingdom interaction.

[Dave Asprey]

It certainly does. And you know the old story about the discovery of antibiotics. I forget the guy's name. Probably Petrie. He has a petri dish and he's got bacteria growing in it. And he tests a cantaloupe mold and. And then the bacterial died. Oh, that's penicillin.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Penicillin.

[Dave Asprey]

So we know we can break up bacteria with this. And what ended up happening? When I was a kid, I was living in a basement that had been flooded and then, you know, dried out. We didn't know anything about toxic moldies. So I just had all these weird things, you know, bruising, behavioral things, ocd, odd, adhd. Just. Just the long list of mold toxic stuff that we mostly understand today. But what happens when bacteria is threatened by mold? It forms a biofilm.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

It does form a biofilm. And biofilms are bad. Yeah, not just for regular lung health, but, you know, you talk about biofilms and several diseases. Several diseases, right. Like cystic fibrosis, all these bad diseases. Even for medical equipments, you know, IV lines, catheters, etc.

[Dave Asprey]

Brain implants,

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

biofilms are bad. So we have toyed with the idea of. Because we know, you know, these biofilms are bad. We've toyed with the idea of creating beneficial bacteria layer, which could be, you know, these. Which could be these equipment or devices could be immersed in that so that the biofilms are not form. Right. So even in. We were talking to an I bank, guess what? Like all these lens where they're stored, etc. The biggest issue is of infection and what is in that liquid. We were thinking about creating a beneficial bacteria liquid for all these eye banks.

[Dave Asprey]

So pretty much back before refrigeration, we would take vegetables and we pickle them with bacteria. So you want to pickle, pickle everything

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

with eyeballs with good bacteria to downregulate the MMP9 pathway. To downregulate the NLRP pathway.

[Dave Asprey]

That's really smart. So then they'd be implantable for longer. That, that is genius. And it's such a. A natural. More of a biohacker, systems thinking way than the. The old medical chemistry solves everything, you

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

know, because it just makes sense. Right. And if it makes sense. Okay, now I can go back and do the test and try to prove if, if it is right or wrong. Right. But we need to think out of the box, essentially.

[Podcast Announcer]

Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

This is, this is just so fascinating to me. So we've got, we've got pickled eyeballs. But one of the things that, that does happen, in fact, is a very common symptom of toxic mold is recurrent strep throat. And streptococcus makes a lot of endotoxin and it also makes a toxin, or at least a fragment that triggers immunity, especially in kids. So I ended up getting something called pans or pandas.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Yes.

[Dave Asprey]

And this is great because it gives you what I call it. Odd oppositional defiant disorder. It's like that rage against the machine song is playing in your head. The F you I won't do what you told me. And before you can think, you've already started arguing, like, why am I arguing? I don't even know. And so we'll just say I might have been high grades, but I was an absolute terror as a kid. And I know that this had a lot to do with it. And it's mediated through Interleukin 6NF Kappa Beta. All the things we just talked about. Probably MMP9, although I didn't know.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

And the dopamine and serotonin, you know how the neurotransmitters get affected.

[Dave Asprey]

So you get an autoimmune thing that's caused by mold affecting bacteria. And where was I getting it? In the lungs. Right. I used to get bronchitis a lot, so there's a lot of bacterial signaling. And I've seen companies make probiotics specifically for recovering from antibiotic use, but I've never seen anyone talk about how do I fix my lung bacteria after antibiotic use. Is that in your roadmap yeah, it is.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

And part of that is the inhaled.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Inhaled bacteria that we are, that we are trying to create. Even the gut lung access product that we have raspy lung support that, you know, we have not even launched it for kids. My kids have been on it for the last five years and guess what? Like they don't get strep, they don't get allergies, they don't get their, you know, yearly viruses.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

And I have to believe that this is not just, you know, fixing a problem. It is changing their immune system and they're changing the respiratory immune system. Yeah. You know, to make them more resilient to these second hits. Like, you know, it's essentially MMP9 down regulation at the epithelial level. And guess what? Everything is lined by epithelium. Right. So, yeah. It's fascinating how these things change you from inside out.

[Dave Asprey]

This is one of the most fun conversations because you know, things that very few even physicians know. And you've been working on these pathways for 15 years and it's really easy to spend up a supplement company SC people. If I get pitches every week, so. And so is an entrepreneur. They got tired, they started a supplement company and like, oh, nice job. You got some Ashwagandha in there. Like, you know, but, but there, there isn't any.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

And you know, I didn't want to start a supplement company. I, when I saw I had a biotech pharma company when I saw that 70% of the adults, irrespective, will take the supplement, we wanted to scientify the supplement industry and bring that here. And I had the infrastructure to do that. Right. We had all these in vitro labs, in vivo labs, we had the clinical trials to do it, so we did it. And, and you know, even then we don't do individual ingredient clinical trial, we do product level clinical trial. You know, you can mix three things and claim that, okay, one was, you know, one is showing some benefit, etc. But how do they perform together? Is one ingredient inhibiting the other? Is one synergistic with the other? So we do the whole formulation, you know, patent it and then do all the testing with that and the clinical trial with that.

[Dave Asprey]

There's good reason to do that because under current regulations and all, and I, I don't want more regulations, I want less. Except if you lie, you go to jail. I like that one. You know, if you product claims, FTC's got that handled pretty well and as they should, you need to be truthful. But when, wait if you were out there and you had a supplement that had vitamin D and cyanide, you can make vitamin D claims. Right. But you might want to test whether

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

the whole formula works.

[Dave Asprey]

Exactly.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

And that is what product level testing is the future. And that's what we are building res biotic on. Right. Like, it's difficult, it's expensive, it's, you know, it takes a lot of effort and a lot of brainwashing. The brainwashed people.

[Dave Asprey]

It does. Because a lot of people, you tell them, oh, you know, probiotic can do this. They go, no, it can't. I'm like, how do you know?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

How do you know it's even alive there? You know, you put some, you know, ginger with a probiotic. How do you know the probiotic is alive? It's probably all dead by the time.

[Dave Asprey]

Huge problem with people taking. And then your stomach acid. Yeah, exactly.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

So you have to have.

[Dave Asprey]

How do you keep resbiotic alive when you take.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Yeah, so we have these, you know, stomach acid resistant capsules that we use and you know, you have to have the CFU count high enough that. And then we have done like third party stability and whatnot.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, that makes sense. And you've got some herbs in there too, and a couple I'm not even familiar with. And this is also quite unusual to put herbs and probiotics together. How did you know what to do?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Absolutely. We were one of the first ones. Right. So we had the luxury of having these pathway analysis softwares when AI was not a thing.

[Dave Asprey]

Drug company guys.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Yeah, yeah. So one of my fundamental questions was, yes, probiotic will fix it. Will it fix it today? It'll fix it in two months. Right. So. And there are several bioactives in ancient medicine which have been used. So we came up with a list of. With pathway analysis and with data analysis, top 20 botanicals which would affect the lung pathways. Then we had to figure out what were the top ones targeting MMP9 pathway because we were going after. That's what those are. That's what those are.

[Dave Asprey]

So I'm never going without resident.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Then we came up with like five or so. Then we had to test which one doesn't inhibit our bacteria.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

So we did a lot of inhibition testing in the lab, et cetera, and then which ones synergistically downregulated MMP9 in the best manner. So that's how the formulation came about. And then we tested the formulation in organoid models and then the clinical trial. So it was a good five to seven year process. Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

So my Favorite supplement. Companies who've been on the show multiple times have experts with your level of understanding and most of them took 5 to 10 years to come up with their innovation. And it is very similar to a drug process, but it didn't cost as much as a drug process because you're making a consumer product using the kind of thinking and analytics from the drug industry minus $90 million of regulation that added nothing except money for attorneys.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Right, agree. And you know, we used a lot of of university resources for this. You know, I was a professor at University of Alabama and, and we used a lot of university resources for the initial thing and that's when we had to license out the technology from the university when we spun out the company. So a lot of money and effort went into this. You know, the lung product.

[Dave Asprey]

Absolutely.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Wow.

[Dave Asprey]

Well, thank you for, for just doing the hardcore science and it's, it's a very different story. And, and yeah, I would say my must have supplements on my shelf and I take, you know, 150 pills a day. I have no problem with that. I have the most expensive pee on the planet, carefully designed for my genetics and my goals and all that kind of stuff. But my very favorite non negotiables are the ones that have been through 5, 10 years of detailed clinical development before they even shelves because they work and they work much better than, you know, random thrown together stuff. And I also think single ingredients are just fine when you know what you're doing. But it's fascinating that story about how you came up with this. It's really important. I think listeners will respect that.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

It's extremely important. Going from the bedside to the bench and then back to the bedside, going through human iterations, taking samples from humans, going to in vitro models, then animal models, then doing clinical trends, getting back as a product. But none of that would matter if the consumers didn't feel the effect. I think my biggest satisfaction is not that it is the best selling respiratory probiotic in the world or it's scaling fast, etc. There are now many coming out. You know, we created the category, right? Respiratory health, we've created the category and now many are coming up. But the biggest satisfaction is when people call us on the phone, hey, my pulmonologist doesn't believe, hey, my coach, he's an athlete and you know, my coach doesn't believe that my VO2 has gone up and, or my, you know, FEV1 has gone up. Like functional residual volume has gone up. I get calls like, hey, I used to get all These allergies with California wildfires every year. And now I don't get it. I get calls about like, you know, firefighters who have inhaled all kind of things and who are feeling better now. So, you know, whether it is chronic lung disease, you know, customers, or whether it is athletes or whether it is firefighters, or whether it's industrial workers, or whether it is just someone who wants to boost their lung immunity. Right. I get calls from all kinds of people. Nothing is more satisfying. And it's a running joke that anyone who breathes is a customer now. So.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, it's a fair point. You know who you left off of that is people who work in kitchens.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Absolutely.

[Dave Asprey]

Even just at home, if you cook every day, the number two source of air pollution after smoking is. Is cooking fumes.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

And I was gonna say that's a huge problem. That's a huge problem. You know, the studies that they're so much more prone to all these chronic lung diseases. Another big thing I left out of there was people who smoke. I did not know that was a category. You know, when we launched, we didn't think all these young folks who smoke or vape were a category, but we started getting calls that. And I never thought of it this way, right? They're like, my doctor just tells me to quit and I'm trying.

[Dave Asprey]

I can't.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

What do I do in the meanwhile? So I did not know that was a category. And that has become a great category for the younger people who are aping

[Dave Asprey]

shreds your lungs way worse than smoking.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

It's horrible. So what do I take while I'm doing it or while I'm trying to quit or. Of course you want to tell them

[Dave Asprey]

to quit, but I always tell them, you know, you should quit vaping and tick up smoking. Okay, I don't, but it's actually provably less harmful. But maybe you should go to heated tobacco or maybe a lozenge or, you know, get an ALP lozenge or not lozenge, little sachet. Any of the things is better than breathing it, right? But you want to get down to a comfortable, healthy, low nicotine level. But not zero, probably.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We should have a day where all these air conditioners have these inhaled probiotics Senate. And we're inhaling that, right?

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, well, I think it's coming. And some of the things that are kind of more futuristic. So I had a chance to talk with the President of SpaceX a while ago and I said, all right, you guys have hardened electronics. Go to space, right? She's go, of course we know how to do that. We've done that forever. I said, great, what do you do to harden astronauts? Because if we're going to get to Mars, the people who get there are going to be blind. Their gut bacteria are trashed. Right. And we can't handle that. And lungs are a big part of it. So part of the story of becoming a multi planetary species is probiotics in the environment and in the people who go to space. And it's not studied at all. As far as I can tell, it

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

has not been studied. And yeah, that's the future.

[Dave Asprey]

Well, building human resilience through lungs, through bacteria is not something I would, I would have predicted at the beginning of biohacking. But man, the fact that you're specifically targeting MMP9 because you studied it for a decade is remarkable. And if you look at this long list of nasties that affect your lifespan, it's on there. And no one has ever spoken about it that you talk about. I'm very impressed.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Even now when I go and talk about it, many people don't know about it, so know I don't to deviate from the topic. But in my view that's one of the most, you know, important pathways, right, for longevity, for collagen breakdown, for inflammation in general.

[Dave Asprey]

Well, I think I will be increasing my dose of resbiotic and that's what I do. But like the fact that that's what you're targeting, I did not know that. I mean I, I read your first research on it and said, oh, I know I want to have my lungs healthy because I have a history of asthma, I'll take it. But now the why is really strong.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Yes, MMP9 pathway and we made it synergistically just to target that. And we have so much data, we have published data and I present that in these pharma conferences or biotech conferences when I speak, or academic institutions. But I think it's about time. People need to know what MMP9 is and the benefits. I'm glad you are aware and you're spreading the word here.

[Dave Asprey]

Well, there are, I'm guessing probably 20,000 physicians who listen to the show and it's been running for 14 years now. And so a lot of longevity docs right now are going into AI and saying, what the heck is MMP9 guys? You're going to see the same studies I did and go, oh my God, how did we not know? And it's because until very recently there was no one who could stack rank Across a population, which inflammatory cytokines or pathways were most important? And this is one that drives all the ones you study, like NF, Kappa Beta and IL6 and all the things that are signs of inflammation. You were looking at the smoke and MMP9 is a lot closer to the fire and maybe the wood is these bacteria and endotoxins. Yeah.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

No, look up Resby lung support and studies on PubMed or Google and type MMP9 and you'll see a lot of studies even published on that, you know. Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

So that's our big learning for today, guys. If you're into peptides, actually there's probably peptides that affect MMP9.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Are there probably. Probably. I don't know of anything claiming to do that, but I'm sure, yeah, we can find them. We can find a microbial peptide. You know, have you heard of.

[Dave Asprey]

You talk about microbial peptides there?

[Podcast Announcer]

The future.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

That's the future. And that's the secret. Right. So we talk about all these peptides, but we talk about all these probiotics. What if we can create probiotic peptide that would directly affect the pathways. Right.

[Dave Asprey]

So people probably wouldn't think about this, but there's an ancient Japanese practice. They ferment thousands of things over years and years and make this postbiotic slime.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

And you take it and it affects all kinds of pathways in the gut because these are microbial signaling compounds and. Yeah, butyric acid, really common in ketosis and a healthy gut, that's an easy one. But the peptides made by bacteria that are beneficial, no one is studying that.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

And, you know, now we have started using several postbiotics in some of our other products, like the GLP1 product or we have created the first osteobiotic now for arthritis and stuff. Yeah. So we are using these postbiotics, which are not the secreted butyrate or something for these bacterias, but we just heat and activate it and keep it, keep it intact. You know, that's where all the peptides and cell wall and S layer and everything is still intact. They just don't replicate because they're not light, you know, but it's a signal and you know, it's a higher dose and you know, you need a higher dose, but the signal is there. And we've done comparative studies like it works.

[Dave Asprey]

It's remarkable, the idea that dead bacteria are going to do something. I used to think, oh, that's dumb. But I came across a study years ago, they were looking at sterilizing water. So well, if you filter the water and remove everything, you get one effect. If you UV sterilize the water and drink all the dead bugs that were in it. Not bugs, but dead bacteria. That you get a very different and beneficial immune response even though you don't get sick.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

And that's true. The postbiotic world is just heating up. And I think, I think that is path breaking because now you don't have an issue of stability now you can go into food and functional food. Food will change. Right. It's not just supplements anymore. We can put it into food, we can put it into gummies, we could put it anywhere. So yeah, dead bacteria. If you could prove it works, it actually works. Wow.

[Dave Asprey]

Seems a lot safer than what they're doing right now. Over 16 states they're taking MRNA rabies vaccine baits and putting them out for animals to eat. Rabies is not really a problem in the us like four people a year die from it or something. It's kind of gone. But in the company, of course, it's a company who's selling this stuff, they're saying, oh yeah, there's a chance it'll spread to humans and other animals. Oh well, it's completely unstudied. So would I rather have dead bacteria or some weird MRNA that I'm exposed to without my consent? I just think in the precautionary principle that all of Europe would do, we should look more at what you're talking about and maybe less at population wide experiments with mRNA, because the last one didn't end up very well.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

It did not end up very well. And we all know, right? We all know. But the dead bacteria thing, we get dead bacteria everywhere. We are breathing some now, you know, we are breathing some now and you know, it's everywhere. If you could just test it and make sure that it creates the effect. Why not? I think that's the future of food, you know, categorically, because supplements will move into food. Functional biohacking will move into food for sure.

[Dave Asprey]

In fact, the only barrier to that right now is regulatory. Yeah, so I ran into this all the time, you know, even MCT Oil. So it turns out there's four kinds of it. The one that companies like Onnit would sell it was, it doesn't work. It literally doesn't raise ketones. And probably as bad for you because it escorts endotoxin across the barrier. But they could call it mct. And I made the one that was much more expensive, the C8. That kind of led the industry because it's the One that raises ketones the most. But if I put it in the food aisle, I couldn't tell people what it did. And if I put it in the supplement aisle, no one buys it. So the idea that the Food and Drug Administration says that you can't make health claims for foods is absurd.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

It's absurd.

[Dave Asprey]

And I know that the current administration there, you know, Bobby Kennedy, I'm grateful for the changes. I've spoken with them. I'm truly just stunned that it's shifting that fast.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Time, right?

[Dave Asprey]

It is about time. And this isn't all political. It's just like, hands off my food. But we still have this issue. Not that long ago, there was a cherry farmer said cherries are good for heart disease because there's research. And of course they came and seized his cherries and destroyed them because he was selling an unapproved drug. I mean, it's absurd. And so I ran into that a few times where I was trying. How do I tell people the truth that is science backed and still provide a product that's clean?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

It's just crazy. You can't say that beets are doing something good as a food, but you put it in a supplement and you can make the claim. It's just crazy.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah. So I'm really hopeful that they just back off on that. We can say, you know what, some foods do some things for most people and they don't for others. Beef, kind of a good food for at least 51% of the population. And if you're APOE4, beef is non negotiable.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

That just came out in science last week. Exactly. And yeah, there's so many things like that. Right. Like and talking about heart association. Right? Yeah, yeah. Red meat and fat. Oh, my God.

[Dave Asprey]

It's crazy. But we can measure everything now.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Yes, yes.

[Dave Asprey]

And what I sense in your work is your truth seeking. Right.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Okay.

[Dave Asprey]

What are the things that actually work? Let's put it on a plate and let's see what it does. Absolutely right. You've got a chip, a biochip, and say, all right, it either works or it doesn't. It doesn't matter if you believe it works. Does it work?

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Yeah. And with a. I firmly believe that there is a lot of science and I've learned it. I've, you know, I've been a. I was not a believer. I'm a convert. Right. So I've learned In the last 15 years there's a lot of science out there. We just have to prove it and show it. And that's Our expertise, we can do that. So I'm doing that in reverse, you know, and, yeah, and, and then science doesn't sell unless you know how to sell. Then you have to sell.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh, you said that. I learned this in Silicon Valley when I was in the tech industry because I was teaching at the University of California. Web and Internet infrastructure. I say this protocol is elegant and works way better. And then some company would come along with a crappy thing and they would win. And it used to just make me angry. And I just finally realized, oh, it's the company with the best marketing that wins. So my job is to know the best, trust technology and to actually know it, because I understand and then know how to explain it so that people will make effective, beautiful, efficient systems that don't break.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

And it's such an art. You know, I've been humbled and I'm learning that it's difficult, right, for us, people like us, coming from this scientific and academic and, you know, Dr. Background, it's, it's not second nature. So I've learned this over years. And this is an extremely important skill to have. You have to, to know how to sell good science and because I think it's more of a duty for us.

[Dave Asprey]

It is absolutely a duty. If you're an inventor, you make something that doubles human lifespan and it stays in your garage because no one ever used it, you're a failed inventor. It doesn't matter if you made the thing, if no one discovers it.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

And everyone asks me, right, like, why entrepreneurship? I'm double board certified, doctor, and I went into med school to make an impact, then realized, you know, after three years of residency, three year of fellowship, two years of research, that unless I do research, I can't make a bigger impact. And then after doing research in academia, what I realized was everything. 99% of that would stay in the papers, stay in the academic system just to please my bosses or et cetera. Unless I convert that into tangible products and bring it to consumers, whether as drug or thing, I'm not doing my impactful duty. So this is all for impact, but you have to close the circle. You have to take discovery from the lab to the humans, otherwise you're not doing your duty.

[Dave Asprey]

Well, tons of respects, because there are many, many academics, fewer these days, but many over the last 20 years who would shame their colleagues for talking about the research in public. You didn't use the Latin words and keep it in our cloister. If you did something that's worthy, you shout it from the rooftops. Yeah, absolutely.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Industry used to be a bad word, right? In academia. I'm trying to, like, advocate for changing that. Academic entrepreneurship has to be encouraged. A lot of technology lives there, but they just try to, you know, get grants for that. Right. Like the. The real thing is how do we get back to the patients or consumers. Yeah, I think that is essential.

[Dave Asprey]

The other thing that's, that's really sad is a great number of medical and biohacking innovators who are the. The lab nerds. They make something great, but they don't know how to partner. So then a con artist, a narcissist, a sociopath comes and just basically steals it. It happens over and over. Which is why, even if you're an inventor, you say, I don't want to do marketing. It's not my thing. That's cool. At least get good at discernment so that you work with partnership.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Yeah. Find the right people around you. That's extremely important. Right.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah. Just to help others who are doing the work you're doing, who are unknown today and may do something great. I want access to what they're doing. And so that's part of the reason I do the biohacking conference. We invite all the people on stage, you know, like, let's give a talk. Let's get people excited about science. It's so cool. And I'm really impressed with that, especially after this conversation, with the level of thoughtfulness into how you do what you do. So you're hitting the pathways that I also believe are really important after a lot of research. So I'm stoked. And I'm going to double my dose in any upper limit to Rosebiotic. That's the first question.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

No, I triple the dose, especially when it's like low season or allergy season and I don't see any side effects. So, yeah, doubling the dose is very, very reasonable.

[Dave Asprey]

I think I'm in. Well, if this convinced you that you ought to be controlling MMP9, same way you upregulate NAD and Sirtuin pathways, which you should go to resbiotic.com, use code DAVE20. Of course you get a discount. And I'm serious. This is the coolest thing. And this is going to be all over five years from now when everyone's talking about MMP9, right up there with all the big guns. Vivek, thanks for coming out to Austin.

[Dr. Vivek Lal Ivec]

Dave, thank you. Pleasure and wonderful. Just your insightfulness and depth of knowledge about this is fascinating. Fascinating. And thank you for having me.

[Podcast Announcer]

Very well.

[Dave Asprey]

See you next time on the Human Upgrade Podcast.

[Podcast Announcer]

The Human Upgrade, formerly Bulletproof Radio, was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider carefully read all labels and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.