← The Human Upgrade: Biohacking for Longevity & Performance
The Human Upgrade: Biohacking for Longevity & Performance
The Foods That Starve Cancer | William Li : 1481
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- [00:00]
Dr. William Lee
My father's uncle actually turned 100 independent, Sharp of mind, great vision, and he wasn't in a nursing home and he wasn't in a wheelchair. Can we study centenarians? Is there a research program that can do that? And the answer is yes. The last census on this was taken in 2024 was 720,000 people were living where 100 or older. There's a lot of research in Spain, in Italy and other places. Looking at centenarians, we are finding clues that relate to the things that intuitively make sense. They've got better immune system, they got lower inflammation, they got better metabolism, they got better gut health, they've got better vascular health.
- [00:37]
Dave Asprey
What's your take on healthspan versus more life with healthspan? Are we there yet? You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.
- [00:51]
Podcast Host/Announcer
Every breakthrough in human performance comes down to one thing just changing your state. And right now, the science and the technology and the ancient practices are converging
- [00:59]
Dave Asprey
faster than you realize.
- [01:01]
Podcast Host/Announcer
For 50 years, bad policy and stigma blocked scientific researchers from studying some of the most powerful tools for the human brain. And that just changed. This October, the researchers, the clinicians, the guys pioneers in consciousness, tech and psychedelics are all going to be under one roof in Austin. And you can be there too. With me, for the first time ever, I'm hosting and operating beyond Wonderland. Two full days where you'll learn the science and the practice of changing your state. And you'll get to talk to the researchers doing it. You'll learn how these tools unlock a version of yourself you didn't know existed. You'll find talks about altered states with or without the psychedelics. A tech hall where you can try the tools yourself. Breakout sessions, breathworks, ceremony integration, circles, and more. This field is moving really fast, and the people who are here in Austin on October 13th and 14th with me
- [01:50]
Dave Asprey
are going to be years ahead of
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Podcast Host/Announcer
everyone who finds out about this later. Learn more get your ticket now@wonderlandconference.com you're
- [01:57]
Dave Asprey
listening to this because you care about how you age, how strong you are,
- [02:01]
Podcast Host/Announcer
and your muscle mass matters more than you might think.
- [02:04]
Dave Asprey
But work, kids, life. Just a full schedule makes it really tough to get to the gym.
- [02:10]
Podcast Host/Announcer
And Amp fixes that. It's a smart home gym that replaces piles of clunky equipment with one sleek device. And it's so modern, so minimal, so sleek and so easy to use that it won't turn into a clothes hanger. Amp makes working out at home way easier. You just turn the dial Pick a workout and you start going.
- [02:28]
Dave Asprey
No friction.
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Podcast Host/Announcer
And the app walks you through each movement step by step. So you have to think about it. AMP's like having a personal trainer right
- [02:34]
Dave Asprey
beside you, telling you what to do and making it easy.
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Podcast Host/Announcer
You can choose workouts from five minutes to an hour across strength training, HIIT, Pilates, yoga, mobility, and more than 500 different movements. And the reason I like it is that there's intelligence behind it. AMP uses AI to guide your workout and adjust the resistance during each set so every rep challenges your body at the right level. You've never seen an at home gym like this. It literally takes up no, no space on your wall and it feels like something you'd see in Architectural Digest magazine. So you get everything you need, none of the clutter. And it fits into even the busiest days. So if you're ready to make fitness fit into your life, go to AMP
- [03:10]
Dave Asprey
AI and check it out, guys. It's time for a new episode with Dr. William Lee. He's a friend, internationally renowned physician, and he's worked on developing more than 40 new medical treatments for about 70 different diseases. Author of a couple big books, as well as a TED talk called can we eat to starve Cancer. So column a superhero functional medicine doctor. And we're going to go deep and talk about things you can do. It may involve biohacking, may just involve making better decisions or hardcore medical treatments so that you don't die of something dumb because, well, it's just not cool to do that anymore. I mean, it used to be cool to drop dead of obesity and heart disease with a cigar in your mouth and a thing of brandy, but that was like 1980s and things are different at this point. You're not supposed to die. You're supposed to have a six pack and have a brain that works as long as you want. So, William, do you have a six pack?
- [04:10]
Dr. William Lee
I do.
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Dave Asprey
There you go.
- [04:12]
Dr. William Lee
I'm not going to you, but there you go.
- [04:15]
Dave Asprey
I wasn't asking to see anything I couldn't unsee, but no, I, I'm mostly just joking. But in all seriousness, having a six pack might not even be healthy, especially for women. And being too lean is not good for you, but being reasonably, metabolically fit is way better than just about anything else, including having an expensive car or something like that. Did you always have a six pack? Are you one of those people who's just naturally healthy?
- [04:38]
Dr. William Lee
I have had a six pack since I was probably 14 years old.
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Dave Asprey
We really. No one likes hearing that. I think you've now triggered half the audience. Man, I don't say I had a three layer role when I was 14, but it's actually, it's cool. What got you into functional medicine? A lot of healers in this space, they, they were sick. Like, I got to do something. The system failed me. Do you think the system failed you? No.
- [05:04]
Dr. William Lee
You know, my background actually in integration came long before I went to medical school, actually. You know, I've always been interested in topics like culture and food and health and healing. And the humanity really of being healthy was something that always interested me. I grew up in the town of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Very multi ethnic. I grew up with all these folk festivals and people celebrating their background. You know, I mean, here we are, you know, being grumpy about differences. And when I grew up, it was really about celebrating together and showing how everybody's own legacies and backgrounds and traditions actually were valuable. And so when I went to college and then wanted to go to medical school, even though I studied science, part of my brain was always interested in figuring out understanding more about our humanity. And so I did a gap year before I went to medical school. Gap years for people who don't know are really, you know, you force yourself to get off the treadmill, you know, off the hamster wheel in order to be able to go do something that's personally valuable to you. And a lot of times the authorities, institutions don't like when you do that. And my institution was no different. When I went to medical school, they did not like the fact I was taking a gap year. So I always was a little bit of a system breacher, I should say. But I went to the Mediterranean and I was interested in looking at how food and health and culture were intermingled. So I lived in Italy and I lived in Greece, and I was walking the walk long before anybody was talking the talk about healthy Mediterranean lifestyle and going to the markets and watching the grandmothers cook and watching people eating together. So when I went to medical school, what I will tell you is that the system didn't fail me, but I saw a failure in the system. And that failure was the absence of integrating the fact that we are eating, living, socializing, working together, bringing our own baggage, good and bad together, along with all the physiology, which to me felt so important not to, to, to toss out. So, you know, I went four years of medical school. I did internship and residency, internal medicine. I ran ICUs and emergency rooms. I practiced the craft. I learned, you know, the trade craft of, of like hardcore medicine. And later, as you introduced me. I was involved with developing 47 FDA approved treatments for cancer, diabetes, vision loss, all that kind of stuff. So I'm a card carrying, hardcore mainstream dude. But I could never forget the fact that this humanistic aspect of health and healing really had to do with diet and lifestyle and other decisions we can make for ourselves. So when I realized it was an opportunity to bring the hardcore science, which is my background, I'm really a scientist by nature, to study food and physiology and diet and lifestyle and supplements, I realized that, you know what, this is something that nobody else was doing is really bringing that hardcore science into it. And then I felt like I could help to establish the foundational pillars to give credibility to.
- [08:28]
Dave Asprey
I think you've done that, which is pretty cool. You've had a really big impact. And some of the public talks are pretty incredible. What happened when you tested foods against cancer drugs?
- [08:41]
Dr. William Lee
Oh, my gosh, listen, this was my mic drop moment in my career as a researcher. I'd been involved with developing test systems for finding the most potent cancer drugs. Some of them were available, some of them were experimental. Time and time and again, you put these powders and liquids into the system to see if they would work. And we were of course, looking at angiogenesis, which is blood vessels that tumors can hijack to grow and feed themselves. And again, a little. Being a little bit of a system breacher, one day I had this inspiration that we would take. We would, I think we do like 50 drugs at a time. I took 25 of them off the line, okay. And I substituted extracts from foods instead. And I scattered them around. And we put the extracts from foods in little vials that look like they were coming from drug companies. And, and we just ran it. You know, we were just, we just. Everybody's blinded. We just ran it. It was coated, so you don't know what the results were going to make be. And when we unblinded the results, I was absolutely astounded that 50% of the foods that I tested were as, or more potent in these test systems as the cancer drugs. And to me, that was sort of like if this were a compound that you gave to a biotech company, you know, they'd be going public with this kind of information. You know, like, they mean on the stock market, they would, they would, they would be jumping for joy. And here it was food, lowly, lowly food and food extracts that were having these effects.
- [10:19]
Dave Asprey
Now, were you just testing for angiogenesis blocking? This is the growth of new capillaries and blood Vessels to feed, to feed tumors, or were you testing for cancer outcomes?
- [10:29]
Dr. William Lee
Yeah, so the experiment that we're talking about now, that was my mic drop experiment, was really testing angiogenesis in a very, very rigorously isolated system. So you could have. There was no question about what was going on. What we did subsequently was begin taking a look at those same foods and the substances in the foods to look across the entire spectrum of evidence. Right, so let me kind of reframe something for you, which is that when you hear most people talking about diet and lifestyle, or diet and cancer, or diet in any health outcome, the criticism that's always unleashed is that, well, there's not enough evidence, or it's weak evidence, or there's no randomized controlled Trials and the RTCs and the P value isn't actually there. I would argue to you and to anybody that in fact, the evidentiary base for how diet affects our health is much broader than what we have for most pharmaceuticals. And the reason is because pharmaceuticals are by definition very, very narrowly focused on one specific outcome in group of patients. And they don't control for most other things. So what winds up happening is, and they're super expensive, like a hundred million dollars to run a trial, $20 million to run a trial. So you don't have much data for food. We've got food at the DNA level, we've got food at the cell level, we got food at the animal level, we got food at the small patient level, we got evidence at the cohort level, the case control level, and we have evidence at the large population level. And then for a few foods, we actually have real randomized trials to look at this as well. So if you look at, if you stand back and look at the totality of the evidence, there's a lot of evidence to support the. Not so much the cause and effect, but what's in the food. Does it affect cells? Is there plausible biological pathway basis to expect it would actually influence a health or disease outcome in a way. And then let's pull the cloak off of what happens in the real world to see if we actually get that effect. And when you can actually draw a line through all those dots, you have something there that frankly, we don't even have for most drugs.
- [12:42]
Dave Asprey
It's incredible. I've always had a love hate relationship with angiogenesis and people with Angie, who. No, not angiogenesis, although I'd like to meet her and that idea of growing new blood vessels, because when I was running the longevity nonprofit that I ran in my, my twenties I met with guys like Steven Sinatra and Julian Whitaker. These are like two generations ago, leaders in the field of longevity and natural health and all proper MDs. And I actually got on the phone when my dad had a heart attack 25 years ago.
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Dr. William Lee
Yeah.
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Dave Asprey
With Julian Whitaker, and he's like, no, don't do the surgery. His heart will grow new blood vessels. It's called angiogenesis. And if you're going to grow muscle, you have to be able to grow capillaries. And there's benefits to angiogenesis. You just don't want it if you have cancer. So even to this day I'm like, angiogenesis might be good. I don't think I want to inhibit it all the time, but if I have a tumor, I don't want to. So, like tumor detection is more important than blocking angiogenesis. How do you draw the line?
- [13:41]
Dr. William Lee
Yeah, you're asking such an insightful and deep question, and I'm going to serve it up and answer up to you in a way that I think most people can understand pretty easily. And if you're interested in biohacking, I think you'll get this. You know, in most topics in the body, when you're talking about systems and biology, you know, you've got these extremes that you talk about. The glucose spike, the glucose crash. But actually that's not how the body normally runs. The body normally runs a smooth. Up, up the slope, down the slope, up the slope, down the slope. We try. Our body is hardwired to keep things in a physiological state of balance. Think about it as a gyroscope. You know, we're not off, we're off, off kilter most of the time. We've got some really good redundant systems that allow us to age as long as we possibly can without falling off the bicycle, so to speak. The wheels keep on turning in the same coordinated way. Same with angiogenesis. Okay, so in the same way that, you know, insulin actually helps us up to a certain point to bring down glucose, but it's not over expressed. So then we bottom out our glucose. In fact, you know, I would say to your audience, and I know this is kind of a bold thing to say to a biohacker audience, the term insulin spike and crash, those are triggering words because most of, I mean, glucose spike and crash. Because most of the time glucose doesn't spike and most of the time glucose doesn't crash. Most of the time for most of us, okay. Especially if you want healthy aging, it actually sails a fairly regular, more or less Stable way within a zone. And that's how blood vessels also grow. When we need more blood vessels, our body can prompt, coax out a few more blood vessels to grow. Like in a heart attack. For sure you will grow some more blood vessels. But then, you know, when you got enough, it'll stop. Okay. It'll. It'll say, okay, I think we got enough. And then when you don't have enough, when you have too many blood vessels, our body has its own landscaper that actually mows the lawn to mow those extra blood vessels down. So our body actually controls it itself.
- [15:50]
Dave Asprey
What is that landscaper called?
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Dr. William Lee
It is an entire system of endogenous, meaning already inside our body, already pre packed in our body, endogenous angiogenesis inhibitors. And just like a hormone, there's feedback loops so that when you're got too many inhibitors around, well, the feedback loop goes, you know what, let's put some more growth factors out there to grow more blood vessels. So the growth factors and the inhibitors, they don't fight against each other. They just kind of balance you. They're like a. They're like a dial, a volume dial in an old car radio. You know, like, do we have enough? It's a little too loud. Let's turn it down a little bit. So most of the time you can just cruise down the highway with your windows opening, enjoying the music coming out of your car speakers.
- [16:28]
Dave Asprey
That's a great analogy. Now, I've done four different gene therapies for extending my life and being healthier. Yeah. Like on.
- [16:37]
Dr. William Lee
Tell me about them.
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Dave Asprey
So I've done Follistatin a couple times. I've done vegf, which is vascular endothelial growth factor, which made me think of this stuff, and Clotho. So I have upbringing.
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Dr. William Lee
Yeah.
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Dave Asprey
The last one was Clotho.
- [16:52]
Dr. William Lee
Clotho, okay.
- [16:53]
Dave Asprey
And I wrote about Clotho in my longevity book because it's one of these factors that goes down as you age. And when you have more Clotho, you test younger, but it also enhances IQ and intelligence. So I'm one of maybe the first hundred people to get the Clotho gene therapy.
- [17:08]
Dr. William Lee
Wow.
- [17:09]
Dave Asprey
And the effects have been really noticeable. It also has a, a libido effect, which is not a bad side effect. So this combination, I think has done good things for me. Right. And I kind of wonder. We know vascular aging is a major problem for people and we want refreshing of it. And at the same time, we don't want to feed any potential cancer things. So my approach has been, I do whole body MRI and then I do, you know, liquid biopsy things. And I think anyone who, especially if you had the Pfizer bioweapon, that you might want to get an annual cancer check using something that looks for a lot of different types. Because your risks of cancer are higher than they were before. It doesn't mean that you're going to get cancer. It just means that your risk is higher, so you should manage the risk in a better way. But is that a good approach? Like, should I have not done vegf? I don't know. I mean, no.
- [18:00]
Dr. William Lee
Well, listen, I mean, first of all, you are having received a gene therapy. You are a human pioneer. Having received three over the course of your own lifetime means that you're like really a rarity because most people who received even one as pioneers haven't received a second one. So it, you know, you're, you're sort of an N of one study subject that is worthwhile monitoring. And so I'm, I'm actually, I think there's something good for humanity that you're actually monitoring yourself in the ways that you have. It's, it's, it's. I mean, and actually I, I'm quite serious about this. You're sort of a worthy of a case study to look at the long term systematic and systemic effects of what gene therapy can and can't do. Now I will have to disclose that I've been involved in many gene therapy programs looking at vegf, looking at other growth factors for peripheral arterial disease and heart disease, even stroke and many other areas. And so I will tell you, it's an exciting area that for the public, not quite ready for primetime in terms of being able to just whip it out and say it applies. So, you know that everyone wants to be a Dave Asprey, but I would tell you that we're not ready to actually execute this for everyone. That said, what I think is really remarkable is the idea that we are. And by the way, you know that there are FDA approved gene therapies. Now the first one was for a congenital vision loss, blindness disorder that can actually help to restore vision. And now they're looking at gene therapies to restore hearing, for example. I mean, you know, the things that were, what, what's, what I love about what I do as a medical scientist, Dave, is I get to see the impossible become possible. And so a lot of what biohacking is about is about measuring, taking the temperature as we're going along to see where we are so that we can adjust our course, our course adjustment along the way to be able to get more in the direction of where we want to go. Whereas previously, you know, you set off in one direction, like with a sailboat, and you don't pay any attention to your compass point. And before you know it, you're 60 years old if you make it that long and you're nowhere near the shores that you were headed towards. Right. So that's what cloud hacking does. It actually allows you to actually take out your own compass and track how the wind is catching your sails and whether you're going in that direction that you want to go.
- [20:37]
Dave Asprey
Very good analogy. And I see the functional medicine doctors, some of them I work with in the concierge longevity practice called Unlimited Life that we're doing, and just tens of thousands of functional medicine docs who are probably listening to the show right now. I, I see that there's a coming together of a lot of this, where suddenly the, you know, we should have a dashboard that tracks changes over time. And if you go back 15 years, it's like, I know your blood's fine right now. There wasn't, there wasn't a system to track. Well, what did it do over the last five years? Is it trending in the wrong direction? We just didn't think like that. So I've, I'm hopeful. I think medicine is getting much better.
- [21:14]
Dr. William Lee
What I was going to add to your statement about the dashboard is there's a very exciting, futuristic way of looking at it, but there's also a really common sense way of looking at it. And what I try to specialize in, I think, is taking complicated things and making it seem simple. And when it comes to biohacking, you know, it's not that difficult. For example, if you have had a check ledger in the old school and you're monitoring your checkbook and balancing your bank accounts, and if you had a bookkeeper to really keep track of what your expenses are over the course of the year that you have to file for, you know, for your taxes, that's kind of like the bookkeeping, scorekeeping, numerical tracking that we're actually doing with the biohacking community. And while there's a lot of exciting scientific concepts of it, at the root of it, it's really comparing what you recorded last, or starting with recording where you are and then continuing to track where you're going and sort of see what direction things are heading in. Right. Are you, are you increasing your net worth in terms of health, or are you actually, you know, do you have a shortfall? And now you Gotta maybe reallocate your resources. And that's, I think sometimes it's helpful for people to understand, you know, even in the biohacking community that, you know, sometimes we can get in over our own heads with the, with the terminology and the lingo and you know, all the new technologies out. But at the end of the day, day, it's pretty simple. We're balancing our own accounts in terms of how our body is doing.
- [22:49]
Podcast Host/Announcer
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- [23:58]
Dave Asprey
you woke up and you need to
- [23:59]
Podcast Host/Announcer
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- [24:18]
Kalroy Health Sciences Representative
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- [24:52]
Dave Asprey
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- [24:54]
Kalroy Health Sciences Representative
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- [25:41]
Dave Asprey
You know, I've given so many talks over the last 15 years to hedge fund managers, high net worth people, and these guys have more money than they'll ever be able to spend. And the number of times, like, how many of you are putting 1% of your annual income or 1% of your annual net worth into your biology, and they're like, oh my God, I'm not doing that at all. I'm like, well, if you can extend your life by five years, given the value of compound interest, like, this is the best investment you could ever make. Plus, you'll probably have better sex and look better and enjoy your life and, you know, all the benefits of being healthy. And they're like, yes, like, what do I do? And that's where the whole world of longevity medicine is just exploding. And, and I've been able to work with dozens of them directly because of the concierge medical stuff I'm working with. And I'm not a doctor, I just happen to partner with doctors. So we all get to be in the room and do the biohacking and the medical stuff. And what I'm finding is a change in people's mindset. It's like, I actually really do think I can live longer. And it's not I want healthspan, it's I actually want more life. And of course I want healthspan. But, like, everybody wants that. Like, what's your take on healthspan versus more life with healthspan? Are we there yet?
- [26:56]
Dr. William Lee
You know, it's really interesting and I've been speaking about this to different audiences, particularly longevity audiences where, you know, there's this great, exciting focus. So when I put on my scientist hat and I hear about Clotho And I hear about nad and a lot of the, you know, sirtuins and you know, like to me, it's so fascinating to me as a scientist, but I'm a pragmatist as well. And I always tell people as a doctor, you know, you got to deal with real life and real situations in real time. And I always tell people the story that takes me to the science of longevity and which is what I'm really actively engaged in right now. And when I was a kid, I always imagined that living to 100 would be a miracle and also an amazing thing to aspire to. But you know, probably it's not going to happen. It was just this impossible goal. And then fast forward. My great uncle, my father's uncle actually turned 100 independent, Sharp of mind, great vision. He planned his own centenary birthday and invited his own people, planned the menu, gave the welcome speech. I mean, I was, I was so amazed that somebody in my own family could get there. And he wasn't in a nursing home and he wasn't in a wheelchair. You know, it was quite remarkable to me as a proof of concept related to me. That's the key thing it was, it became really close to me that this was possible in a really good way. And by the way, he lived until he was 104, so he entered super ageism. Now that led me to really think about how do we extend extrapolate the biology of current health into the biology of future health? Right. So here's an interesting thing. Can we study centenarians? Is there a research program that can do that? And the answer is yes. And how can you possibly study people who are 100 years old? Aren't they few and far between? And the answer is no. So do you know, Dave, how many people are alive today who are 100 years or older, who have reached 100?
- [29:06]
Dave Asprey
I don't know the exact number, but it's probably a million or something.
- [29:11]
Dr. William Lee
The, the last number that was the last census on this was taken in 2024 was 720,000 people were living where 100.
- [29:21]
Dave Asprey
Okay, it's still pretty close.
- [29:22]
Dr. William Lee
Yeah, you're pretty good. You're pretty good. It must be your clotho gene that, you know, you increased your perceptive numbers. You're reading my mind, you know, through, through. Yeah, exactly. But I'll tell you, think about that. 720,000 people means that you can really do research on that, that kind of a population. And in fact that's what's happening now. There's a lot of research in Spain In Italy and other places, looking at centenarians and now what are we finding? This is just at the tip of the iceberg. We are finding clues that relate to the things that intuitively make sense. They've got better immune systems, they got lower inflammation, they got better metabolism, they've got better gut health, they've got better vascular health, which is what I do. And by looking at their genes and their gut bacteria standouts and by their vascular metrics, we're beginning to just pencil sketch out what longevity actually looks like in present day with these people who are 100 and older. And by the way, the really interesting research is in super agers, super centenarians is 104 and older to 107 and older. You get a group of those people and you try to figure out what makes them different from the people that are 99 or 100. Now you're really getting, getting at these, like, fine details. So we're just in this thin air of discovery. And the fact that we can even do it is amazing. But what we're finding is also amazing.
- [30:51]
Dave Asprey
It's really cool. About seven, eight years ago, I interviewed a longtime friend, James Clements, and James had that same thought that you do. And so he called George Church and said, what genetics make superagers super powerful? Maybe we can do gene therapy for that. And George said, we don't know. So James flew around and gathered samples of genetics from more than a hundred superagers and brought it to George Church. And that led to the creation of our knowledge base is about a hundred or so genes that are more common in superagers. But many superagers don't have those genes. So they help, but they don't cause it. So question for you, what causes it?
- [31:31]
Dr. William Lee
It's interesting. A recent study was published showing that we used to think that genetics were a minor part of longevity. And now we realize it's about half and half your genetics count, but also your environment and your cumulative lifestyle exposures and how you live also count. And so it used to be like a minority of your fate for longevity was due to genetics, and most of it was due to diet, life. So I think that led to, oh, you know, we can just infrared or sauna ourselves to 100. And it's really, you know, life is never that simple. It's never a black and white picture. It's a more refined picture. And I'm actually glad to know that the genes actually play a larger role because it makes biological sense, number one. But also back to what you were talking about like this idea of the future of gene therapy. It also gives us more opportunity to mine those genes that confer longevity and think about how we can deliver them to more people to be able to help them achieve their goals. Because you can't get everybody just to do cardio and high intensity training, you know, like, that's not going to work alone. And I think it just opens more doors for us. So what I think is that it's a combination of genetics, it's a combination of environment and lifestyle. I will tell you right now, stressful situations are not good. So you should always try to. That's why yoga is helpful, meditation is helpful. That's why vagus nerve stimulation can be helpful as well. But right now, just like the entire planet was trapped within the, the dark cloud, you know, in 2000 with the pandemic, right now, we are trapped within this dark cloud of like geopolitics. That's stressful for everyone. You know, that's probably stealing a couple of slices of life away from all of us right now just by being exposed, even if you don't scroll like crazy, just the general environmental stress. So what does that mean? That means that if you're actually tracking your markers as a biohacker, it's worth it to take a look at a finer cut to see if there are any finer changes. Maybe more than once a year you want to take a look at, to see, you know, are things changing. Maybe you want to do four times a year. It also means that you might want to double down on some of the things that you can control that can actually oppose stress. I mentioned vagus nerve stimulation. I think that's actually. I'm really excited by that because, you know, when I was in medical school and we did anatomy class and we were doing dissection, you know, you start in the belly and then you go into the chest and finally you go into the head. You know, I always thought it was amazing that out of our brain comes this thick shoelace nerve called the vagus nerve on both sides of underneath our brain that come racing down our necks into our chest and then ramify into a horse's tail into our gut. I thought it was amazing. And I always thought that it was like the brain's way of telling the gut what to do, but it turns out quite the opposite. 80% of the function of the vagus nerve is the gut telling what the brain to do. And to me, is our gut health able to help our brain health? Yes. But how do we do that to Allow us to feel a little calmer, more confident, more reassured, and generally, can we find joy using our vagus nerve. And these are like soft science. But I think it's really important when we're thinking about the things, the little adjustments we can do to attain longevity.
- [34:56]
Dave Asprey
I love it that you've got so much deep knowledge on this. There's a lot we can do, and some of it's epigenetic, and some of it, I think, is medical. There's about 10 pharmaceuticals that I work with clients, and that I take, not all 10, but probably eight of them in microdoses. Because I think, as you said earlier, pharmaceuticals are really pointed versus foods, and foods are kind of broad spectrum. So sometimes there's a little effect you can get that really nudges things in the right direction. And it's sometimes 5 or 10% of what you would take if you're actually treating something. And so it may take some of that. It may take lifestyle, it may take gene therapy, whatever. But the thing you talked about, about political news and the world outside, that, for me, I think, is the biggest thing that I. I started working on the vagus Nerve and Heart Math Institute, Heart rate variability back in 2004. I started becoming a certified trainer and had to change people's heart rate variability and change my own. And since then, Stephen Porges, who's kind of the polyvagal theory guy's, been on the show and become a friend. And I use vagal nerve stimulation today, and I do neurofeedback. So that even if I see, you know, political unrest and war and all this stuff that's been happening throughout 90% of human history.
- [36:18]
Dr. William Lee
Yeah.
- [36:20]
Dave Asprey
I don't have the same physiological stress response that I used to. So rather than seeing it, feeling stress, managing the stress, like, you know, what things happen. And it's not that I don't care. It's that I have a stress response which enables me to have the energy to care and act, which gives you.
- [36:36]
Dr. William Lee
Which gives you resilience. Right. I mean, because I think that's the other component of achieving longevity, is that you got to be able to bounce back and navigate all these little hurdles and obstacles that life throws us physiologically as well as in our environment. And on the macro level, sort of on the geopolitical level, we have to be able to navigate that. So now that we're connected, you can find out things in remote part of the world instantly with a single swipe. We need more resilience than ever.
- [37:06]
Dave Asprey
We do need more resilience. And some of it is biological. If your mitochondria are running at 20% capacity, you're not resilient. It doesn't matter. And if you have enough electricity and then you have this story, ah, doom and gloom. I'm such a victim. How dare they? I'm talking about Greta at this point. But whatever the things are there, that's not resilience, that's waste. Right? And so resilient people are like, you know, I'm feeling really peaceful, but you probably shouldn't mess with me because I'm also feeling really powerful. Like, I think that's how I make the world a better place.
- [37:38]
Dr. William Lee
Listen, I love what you just said, and I love that you bridged it with talking about mitochondria. Because you know what? If, you know, I'm sure people listening to your podcast are, you know, they know about mitochondria, the power plants of our cell, at the heart of every cell, at the heart of our ability to burn excess, harmful, visceral body fat as well. But what's interesting is that if you knew that you had a precious amount of energy to dedicate towards a fulfilling life on a day to day level, week to week, month to month, year to year, all the way to your final days, and the energy that you have is generated by your mitochondria, why on earth would you want to waste that energy on something that is only going to take away your quality to be able to enjoy your life?
- [38:28]
Dave Asprey
You know, you just paraphrased the Dalai Lama. One of his favorite little meditations, one I sometimes close my talks with, says something along the lines of, every day, I have a precious amount of energy. I am not going to waste it. I'm going to dedicate it to a bunch of things. But, yeah, that's it. You invest it every day. And if you invested in trolling people or worrying or any of that stuff, or even just towards working really hard all the time, you're probably not maximizing your investment. And God knows how many people listening to this right now are writing AI tools to basically trade stocks professionally and to get a tiny little edge. And what have you applied some of that towards applying your own energy every day with the same level that you're applying your financial investments. Like, man, you don't have to be perfect on it, but if you apply any intelligence to that, you're so far ahead of the curve and it compounds every year. So by the time you're 30 or by the time you're 40 or 50 or 100, it doesn't matter. You have a level of resilience and wisdom that's the most precious thing on earth and is actually more important than another 1% return on your accounts. It's just the most important thing.
- [39:39]
Dr. William Lee
Yeah, no, totally. I'm on the same page with you. I would say in fact, overall resilience is dependent upon compounding. The more you compound your health, the more resilient you're going to be. And in fact, if you take away your investment in health, you actually make your. Not only do you become less resilient, you become more brittle. Your health actually has a much harder time springing back when you get hit with whatever in life gets served up. And I think that this is probably, you know, this is the research that study has not yet been done but to take a look at stressors major trauma life events between people who make it for a long period of time versus people who don't make it a long period of time. And then studying the epigenetics to take a look at what those implications are between, you know, something that happens to you versus what you are taking charge so that you actually are controlling your own destiny somewhere, so making a more intentional, deliberate choice. And I think that that's something that, you know, those things are harder to measure on a day to day level, but I think they will come out in your biometrics as you are kind of tracking your own markers.
- [40:53]
Dave Asprey
You should see it in heart rate variability when you wake up. You could see it in VO2 max. You should see it in less than the inflammatory cytokine panels like IL6, NF Kappa, Beta Kappa. What is it? NF Kappa. I always forget that one. NF Kappa Beta. Yeah. I have a weird symbolic logic thing in my brain where anytime I see a variable that's renamed, my brain just completely takes a dump. It's screwed me in economics really bad. But oh well, it still hits me sometimes because I don't, I just see it visually and it doesn't match. So pros and cons of having a weird brain. The idea though of someone listening to the show being able to say, you know what? I decided to try breath work or meditation or vagal nerve stimulation and then being able to track the results, we're still a little bit far away. Heart rate variability is easy. The rest of the stuff to know whether that was it. But do you think we're going to get there pretty soon with AI and just the massive amount of data that we have?
- [41:48]
Dr. William Lee
You know, I think the AI is a enabling tool. To make calculations faster and to integrate information faster. I don't think it's. It by itself is going to make the measurement easier. At some point, you got to still connect something to your body or deliver some thing into some input into a device to be able to measure what's actually happening in our body and what happens in our body in real time. You know, how AI serves it back to us is almost so dizzyingly surreal. It's not even in real time anymore. Like, that's sort of the surprise of AI is how quick things are actually served back to us with a degree of accuracy that it's hard to come, hard to fathom. But I do think that the measurement is challenging. And I think we still need to work on the hardware. It's not just the software. I'll tell you. I'll give you an example of one biohacking tool that I wish there was more investment on. And it has to do with my field is in vascular health, and that's really in flow mediated dilation. So fmd, FMD is for those of you who don't know what it is. It is actually a measure of resilience, indeed of how flexible your circulation is. Because we think of our blood vessels as tubes, but they're actually being stretched and pulled all the time. You know, when you're scared and frightened or running to catch your plane, more blood's pumping, you gotta actually dilate it more. When you're calming, it's a little bit less. When you're standing up, you gotta dilate the ones below because the gravity, there's all kinds of factors. And you know, like now we're like looking at Artemis, right? The mission of Artemis and the astronauts that are in the spaceship. It'd be so interesting to find out like how their flow media dilation is happening. By the way, did you know, because I ran a expert panel at the National Academy of Medicine on space medicine before. Okay. Did you know that blood flow reverses can reverse in space to your brain?
- [43:43]
Dave Asprey
Reverse entirely?
- [43:45]
Dr. William Lee
What? Yeah, for sure. When you get above near Earth orbit and you escape that kind of gravitational pull, for some people, there's actually a reversal of blood flow in the brain. We used to go this way, goes that way. And it's fascinating to think about, and I'm only making the point in the context of resilience. And back to flow media dilation. So how do you measure your resilience? Well, what you do is very simply old school. You put a blood pressure cuff on, you pump it up real hard. So that there's no blood flow to your arm. And now your arm feels cold and tingly and numb. And then you actually take an ultrasound pen and you put it right to where you would normally draw your blood, in the crook of your elbow, and you measure the pulse wave. So before you blow up the. Before you blow up the cuff, it's a bounding pulse. And once you blow up the cuff, it goes flat lines. All right, it's just your arm. And then what you do is you suddenly release the cuff and you kind of see how far and how fast the blood rushes back and is captured again in the recovery of the resilience of your blood vessels. And, you know, what we find is that people who are not in good shape, people who are stressed, people who have high cholesterol, people who are hypertensive, like they don't recover as quickly. And so there are devices out there that some of which are no longer made. And I really, really think as an angiogenesis guy. So anybody listening to this? You know, I, I'm. I am one of the experts in sort of the vascular field. Yeah, you are the. We need more hardware combined with software to create a convenient flow mediated dilation to calculate how resilient our blood vessels are, that what you see in your arm or your finger or your toe is reflected by what's going on in your brain or your penis. You know, and so we. We got to actually know that.
- [45:39]
Dave Asprey
Okay, See, we're getting pretty nerdy, and I think our audience is going to follow this.
- [45:46]
Autotrader Advertiser
Are you really buying a car online on Autotrader right now?
- [45:49]
Dave Asprey
Really?
- [45:49]
Dr. William Lee
At a playground? Yeah. Really? Look at these listings from dealers.
- [45:53]
Autotrader Advertiser
Wow, your search can really get that specific.
- [45:56]
Dr. William Lee
Really?
- [45:56]
Autotrader Advertiser
And you just put in your info and boom. Cars in your budget.
- [45:59]
Dr. William Lee
Mom needs a second, honey.
- [46:01]
Autotrader Advertiser
You can really, really have it delivered.
- [46:03]
Dr. William Lee
Really? Or I can pick it up at the dealership.
- [46:05]
Dave Asprey
One sec, sweetie.
- [46:07]
Autotrader Advertiser
Mommy's buying a car.
- [46:08]
Dr. William Lee
Mommy.
- [46:09]
Autotrader Advertiser
I think your kid is walking up the slide, Kyle.
- [46:11]
Dr. William Lee
Again? Really?
- [46:13]
Podcast Host/Announcer
Autotrader, Buy your car online? Really?
- [46:16]
Dave Asprey
I've talked about this on a few episodes now, and the gold standard is the ultrasound way you talked about the poor man's version of pulse. Wave velocity is one of my favorite markers of longevity because it declines linearly with age. That means you get stiff arteries as you get older.
- [46:35]
Kalroy Health Sciences Representative
Yep.
- [46:35]
Dave Asprey
And you can get consumer grade devices and medical grade devices that measure how long it takes for a heartbeat to reach your wrist. And if you have stiff arteries, it's very fast. If you have super soft arteries, it takes Longer because the force gets spread out into like, think about like putting water into a condom, it'll stretch. Put water into hose, it'll shoot right through. You can measure that. And so my age from a pulse wave velocity perspective is 24. I'm like, woohoo. I've achieved, you know, 50% of my age. It's not the only marker that matters. So I have a hard time with people saying this is my biological age because I have 50 different biological ages depending on what tool you want to use. And like, yeah, we don't have a great way to put all that together that's publicly available. So why don't we just use pulse wave velocity from a heartbeat going to the wrist? You can do that today and it's like 200 bucks.
- [47:24]
Dr. William Lee
Yeah, I agree. And then there's also ways of actually even looking at temperature change related to blood flow as well, instead of an ultrasound probe. Because when you got good circulation, you're bringing the, you're upping the temperature. And you know, we now have, I mean, think about it. You can have a wearable that can detect changes in temperature.
- [47:43]
Dave Asprey
Why do you need a wearable? If you just have a high resolution camera in the room, you should be able to see changes in skin.
- [47:47]
Dr. William Lee
Right. With infrared, unless you're on the beach in the Caribbean. So. Fair point, but, but my point is, you know, I think this conversation we're having speaks to the fact that we can measure real things in our body in real time. It's not just AI and software, it's also the hardware of how we capture it. And that's really the point that I'm making that, you know, I, I'm very excited by where longevity research is going because I think that we understand enough about the fundamentals of the biology to be able to think about what we need to develop to capture things on top of what we already have.
- [48:23]
Dave Asprey
Let's switch gears. Something a lot of people have been talking about, including me for a long time. Step one of understanding how bad these petrochemicals are is, well, can we talk about endocrine disruptors derived from petroleum? And then we say, oh, what about microplastics derived from endocrine disrupting petroleum? And microplastics have been found at increasing levels in human tissue, including reproductive tissue, brain tissue, all over the place, place. And it's been going up a lot. I don't know how much of that is just from more awareness, more testing versus it actually being higher. I think it's actually higher because we've had more time to scrub it through the oceans. But what's your take on this? How important is microplastic? What can we do about it?
- [49:05]
Dr. William Lee
Microplastics are on the radar screen now of public health medical researchers. I don't think it's really impacted in detail yet on people who practice regular medicine. But it is important. I can tell you as a scientist, as a biologist, a vascular biologist, we do know that when you take a look at people who have blockages or narrowing of their blood vessels, this was a study published in the New England Journal of medicine in 2024 a couple years ago, that 58% of people who had narrowing of their blood vessels in their carotid arteries going through their brain, 58% of a group of 257 people, they had plastic microplastic studding, embedding like tiles in the plaques, blocking their going to their brain. And it wasn't just that 58% had it. And I want to call out that number for a second, because that means that 42% of people didn't have it. So it's not a universal thing. But some people are able to accumulate them, and we don't understand why yet. But what's more important is that when you looked at the markers, the biomarkers of inflammation, TNF alpha C reactive protein, you found that those people with microplastics studying their blood vessels and their plaques had higher levels of inflammatory cytokines. All right, that's a correlation. Okay, some other part of this conversation. We want to talk about correlation and causation. Again. It's one of these things. It's like glucose spike and clash. Way overused. Okay. Like, I think that the idea is that, you know, you're finding high inflammatory markers of people with plastic studying it, and it's higher than in people who don't have plastic studying it. It tells you something really important. And then when they tracked these people over three years after their procedure, the people who actually had the plastic in their plaque, not just the plaque, they all had plaque, plastic in the plaque, they had a fourfold increase in the risk of heart attack, stroke, or dying.
- [51:06]
Dave Asprey
Holy crap. So we know that you get microplastic and plaque, and we know that it's bad for you, therefore you shouldn't get plaque at a minimum.
- [51:18]
Dr. William Lee
Well, but I'll tell you also, other studies without plaque have also looked at. Okay, let's back up for one second and talk about microplastics. Were we exposed to microplastics? So many people talk about food packaging, which Obviously, your food that you're eating is in a bag and you rip it open and munch on the stuff inside it, which is probably ultra processed and not good for you and filled with. With bad chemicals anyway that are poisoning your biology. But the plastic is shedding inside the food. So it's obvious that we can eat plastic. But hey, you know what they're finding? They're finding microplastics in chewing gum.
- [51:53]
Dave Asprey
Yep.
- [51:54]
Dr. William Lee
So you're chewing your gum. You're swallowing it. You're not swallowing the gum. You're swallowing the plastics, not the gum. All right. And that's getting to your gut. So a couple of things. They're finding that our food brings plastic into our gut, which then starts to look some evidence that it harms our gut microbiome. That's a problem for all the reasons that we know with the gut microbiome. Number two, we know that some of the microplastics are absorbed from the gut into the bloodstream, which is a problem. Now how else does it get into the bloodstream? And this is another surprise that you're not eating the plastic. We're breathing the plastic. So most of the microplastics we encounter that's been measured actually don't come from our food or water. It comes from the air that we breathe. And a lot of people I certainly know, I was shocked to discover this when it was reported that the most common source of microplastics that are breathed in. Do you know what it is?
- [52:51]
Dave Asprey
I would imagine that it's the dryer in your house or the carpets in your house.
- [52:57]
Dr. William Lee
Great guess. But it's not. It is actually car tires driving on the road.
- [53:04]
Dave Asprey
Yeah.
- [53:04]
Dr. William Lee
Spinning off little microplastics and nanoplastics into the air that you're breathing. No matter where you live. You don't have to live by a highway to do this. You could be live. You know, most of us have a car in our garage and we're a street where people are driving back and forth at a parking lot, you know, at the mall or whatever, at the grocery store. So the point is we inhale microplastics. Now there's a. Now besides the lungs, which then deliver it right into our bloodstream after they get their air sac. Another surprising way that microplastin can get into our body. And this goes. Delivers it right to our brain like a hole in one is actually through our nose when we breathe it in.
- [53:43]
Dave Asprey
So we have just from cars.
- [53:47]
Dr. William Lee
We're breathing in the microplastics the same way that we inhale through our mouth. Okay. And at the. And most people don't know this, but medical people who have done anatomy and studied it knows. And a neurobiologist knows. Right between our eyes, at the top of our nasal turbinates, which are the tubes that bring up the reverse gutters that bring air in when we're inhaling. All right, Are these olfactory nerves. These are little squid like tendrils that are the nerves that sense odor. And that's when we smell a chocolate chip cookie or a pizza or an apple pie baking or Thanksgiving turkey roasting from childhood. Those little sensors are capturing what a dog smells when they're sniffing around. We're capturing that through the back of our nose. These tendrils are out there. And guess what? Those tendrils poke out through basically a grate, window grate, like a screen that you have in the summer. They're just behind the screen, and that is almost a direct passage along your brain. So we breathe in through our nose. We're actually delivering microplastics that might be in the air right into our central nervous system. So implications issues to our brain health. In fact, they found microplastics in human brain tissue so profoundly that. And not everybody gets it, but so profoundly that pathologists have been able to measure a brain with microplastics on a scale. You know those scales where you balance both sides, you put a brain of the same size compared to another brains the same size, one with microplastics. It tips the scale. Right, Right. That's measured. Okay. Wow. Like, that's stunning to me. Like, we're supposed to have a blood brain barrier that blocks harmful chemicals and drugs and stuff like that. And yet we're breathing this microplastic and right through our cribriform plate between our eyes that deliver it right into our central nervous system.
- [55:41]
Dave Asprey
You know what's cool about that spot? That's where I put stem cells and exosomes to get him more into the central nervous system. And it works. You can really feel it when you do that.
- [55:52]
Dr. William Lee
Dave, every time you and I have a conversation, whether it's on a podcast or not, I love the fact that, you know, you're always. You're always a little or a lot ahead of the curve on some of the. Well, so, you know, interestingly, there are stem cells that live like bees in a hive or maybe, maybe like hornets that they're in that cribiform place. And those stem cells actually contribute to developing memory. Now, why would you need memory, developing stem cells in Your cribriform plate, which is what I'm using as a. You know, if you're a biohacker, you don't know the crib perform plate. Now you heard about it. It's actually the, the grate at the back between your eyes at the end of the beginning of your nose, where it originates by your skull, where your central nervous system is with the, with the olfactory, the smell nerves. It turns out those stem cells which are tangled up in those squid like tentacles for. That's for smell. They help you remember smells. So how do you know what a chocolate chip cookie smells like? You don't have to learn it every single time you know it because it's been memorized. And those stem cells that remember the smell will traffic it to your nerve through your hippocampus and deposit the memory of what things smell like. So when you smell, when something you smell reminds you of what came out of your mom's kitchen growing up as a kid. Comfort food, so to speak.
- [57:15]
Dave Asprey
Yeah, right.
- [57:17]
Dr. William Lee
That's what happened. Your stem cells built those memories for years when we were kids. Amazing, right? So here's something interesting, and I learned this from a colleague at the University of Illinois, Chicago, is that one of the unusual findings in Alzheimer's patients is they have a relative depletion of stem cells in their cribriform plate by their nose. Wow. They have a harder time remembering smells. You can give them a cloth with lavender or some other scent and compare what an Alzheimer's or somebody with dementia has compared to somebody who doesn't have dementia or a younger person. And the dementia person has a hard time recalling what that smell is.
- [58:01]
Dave Asprey
That is so fascinating. That's about smell recall, not about ability to smell. Like different nerves.
- [58:06]
Dr. William Lee
Exactly. Exactly.
- [58:08]
Podcast Host/Announcer
Wow.
- [58:09]
Dave Asprey
Sometimes I wonder, am I going to get bored with biohacking? I used to be a very early cloud computing and before that, even just early web one zero tech guy, because I'm like, this is exciting. We haven't figured out this problem before. And I don't think I'm going to get tired of biohacking because we just have so many of these complex hidden signaling networks and interdependencies that even with a lot of AI tools supporting me, I think there's. This is a frontier. Like, I can't think of anything more interesting right now. Even space travel. Yeah. I can go there. If my brain works well enough, I'll just bilocate. Like, it feels like this is, this is where the future is, at least for a while.
- [58:43]
Dr. William Lee
I feel Like, I get to roll out a bit every day. And you know, when I put both feet on the ground, I've got one foot in present day and one foot steps into the future. And that's where the excitement actually is. And there's so many opportunities to think about where biohacking could go. I'll throw one out to you that I've been thinking about that. I don't know if you've, if you have considered this. So you know how the human tongue is constructed? It's constructed in thirds. Do you know about this? So the average, the tongue printer thing,
- [59:16]
Dave Asprey
I've been wanting to do that for neurofeedback, but is there something I don't know about that?
- [59:20]
Dr. William Lee
So the human tongue is made of three components that have to do with muscle and fat. And the tip of the tongue, which is the outermost third, is really muscular and flexible at the same time. And for obvious reasons, you want your tip of your tongue to be able to wiggle around and do all the things that a tongue would want to do.
- [59:41]
Dave Asprey
I do tongue push ups for that. Is that, is that normal?
- [59:46]
Dr. William Lee
Well, I mean this, it's the muscular part of your tongue. The middle part of your tongue actually is a mix between muscle and fat. And it's pretty strong. It's thicker and stronger because once you have food that you've ingested, you need to be able to move it around in a really solid, dependable way. And the third part of your tongue, which is the back of your tongue, which most of us, you know, you can't really hardly see it in a mirror if you open your mouth really wide, but we all know it. The third of your tongue is like the part you don't swallow and choke on. All right, that is a gigantic pillow to allow chewed up food, masticated food, to slide down our gullet, slide down our esophagus. Three parts of the tongue. You got the Cirque du Soleil part in the front, you got the muscular, you know, gold stem Schwarzenegger part in the middle. And you've got this big pillow at the very end to slide all the food down. So when we start gaining body fat, we start accumulating through our metabolism, our dysregulated metabolism, body fat. Do you know that one of the first places the extra fat is detectable is in the hind third of the tongue?
- [60:58]
Dave Asprey
Well, see, there's a whole like consumer biohacking startup to monitor that stuff with an infrared or a red light that bounces into that and wow, that is so Cool.
- [61:08]
Dr. William Lee
Isn't that cool? No, no, I'll tell you now, let me bring it to a real time kind of like scenarios so people can understand not just the theory of what I just said, but actually what the implications are. So the condition of sleep apnea, which, as you know, is really excessive tissue in the back of the mouth that actually compresses your airways when you're really super relaxed and sleeping, that interferes with your breathing. Like, you literally become hypoxic and even becoming anoxic. And you can kind of like threaten your brain function. And so you suddenly the brain panics and wakes you up. Those are people that have sleep apnea that are woken in the middle of the night many times they don't even know it. And guess what? People who actually have sleep apnea have fat back of the tongue. Fat. Or they have fat tongues, because among other pharyngeal tissue at the back of the throat is a fat tongue that kind of seals the deal when it actually occludes you. All right, wow. So think on that.
- [62:09]
Dave Asprey
It's incredible. People just don't pay attention to the effect of the tongue. And a lot of meditation teaching, they say, touch the tongue to your upper palate. I'm like, what does that even mean? It turns out I had a tongue tie about three, four years ago. I had surgery to sever the tongue tie. And if people are listening, are like, what? A tongue tie is that little strip under your tongue. And a lot of people, it never fully releases. So I literally couldn't touch my tongue, at least the middle of it, to the upper palate in my mouth. And when I did that, I had to stretch my tongue and do, like, tongue physical therapy and all these things. But when I did that, it changed my movement, like, my proprioception, the amount of tension in my whole tissue. And so the only people who've mapped this out are like, old Chinese acupuncturists from a thousand years ago. And this is just completely fertile and open territory for medical innovation, for biohacking. That's just the tongue. There's probably. I even say probably the same on the wrist. You know, the Chinese pulse points and that. There's a whole different Tibetan and Korean. And, you know, it's like, probably the Russians did something weird too. Some Mongolian guy is sitting there and he came going, I did that.
- [63:18]
Dr. William Lee
And by the way, you're bringing up another, like, really cool instrumentable marker for health. Do you know that some of the latest research from the ophthalmology retina community. Yeah, at signs of dementia by looking at your optic nerve. You can, you know, the eye doctor, you put your chin on the thing, and they're pulling a puff of air and looking at their. You're. Whether you need a. A cataract. We got a cataract you need to replace. Now people are actually able to look right at the back, which we've always been able to do. But look at changes topographically of the optic nerve, which is like the big fat head of your optic nerve. It goes directly to your brain. Like, you can actually see part of your brain by looking into your eye. And you can see early signs of dementia based on, you know, like, we just saw the moon on the far side. Through the space program, you can actually take a view of the optic nerve to look at signs of change in your brain.
- [64:16]
Dave Asprey
That is so incredibly cool. You remind me. One of my favorite pieces. I have this sort of mini tech museum. I've got the first personal computer ever made. The company that became Microsoft made 2,000 of them. But that's my favorite piece. The second favorite piece is from 1936. It is one of the first devices made to view the optic nerve. It looks like a Klingon battle thing, but it's actually a medical device. Machined brass and all this stuff. But it's ridiculous. You take that, you layer in AI and the speed of human health, progress, and longevity. It's unimaginable, even for me. And I'm a pretty accurate futurist. I'm like, there's so much cool stuff coming. All we have to do is make sure that some overweight, evil politician doesn't tell us we're not allowed to do it. And I just got to say, guys, if you're that person, you're listening to this. Number one, thank you. Number two, I can always go to Abu Dhabi. You can't stop me.
- [65:17]
Dr. William Lee
Well, listen, I mean, we are only limited by our own imaginations in terms of where biohacking and longevity can actually go together. They are really close bed partners. One helps the other, and we can actually do the research now. And AI really helps us accelerate the pace of progress. So this feel that you are attributed to being one of the early pioneers to bring it into the mainstream and raise people's attention that this is an area that, you know, merits momentum. And that's what we have now. We've got this whole world of people that's expanding of people that are interested in longevity. They understand the value of biohacking. They're jumping into the pool to Experience what they can. And what's interesting to me is that the opportunity to really do biohacking for longevity is highly personalized. And that means that it's very difficult to come up with black and white rules. And if you have this, you're good. If you don't have that, you're bad. This is really about you, measuring you. And so this is where clinical trials become quite challenging. And, you know, if you think about the dimensions, the three dimensions of a clinical trial, you can take 100 people, 1,000 people, a million people, and roll them into a clinical trial and see how some intervention at the beginning looks compared to the end. Okay. And you compare the groups with a placebo. But actually for longevity, it's really the individual measuring against where they started at the very beginning and where they wind up and all the data points along the way. And that's biohacking. That's precisely the value of biohacking, is that we all are our own experiments enrolled in a humanistic clinical trial.
- [67:01]
Dave Asprey
Yes.
- [67:02]
Dr. William Lee
Understand how to get to our desired destination.
- [67:06]
Dave Asprey
You're there. And we'll be able to do AB testing soon enough when you can upload your genome to an AI that then creates an artificial cell simulation. So you can say, I wonder what this supplement will do. And people are already doing that. We're just the very beginning of it. And it's expensive. But the Human Genome Project, when they were first doing that, I helped to develop part of one of the data centers for it. It was in Oakland, and it was an entire floor of a data center to hold one person's DNA.
- [67:35]
Dr. William Lee
Wow.
- [67:35]
Dave Asprey
It's called double twist. And now, you know, you can spend probably you can do it for free if you're willing to give up your privacy not to get your whole genome sequence. And so the stuff we're talking about now sounds like it's the future. It's not. The thing is that stuff took 20 years, and this is going to take like 20 months because we're. We're just there. So I've never been more excited about it. And it's. It can be overwhelming for some people. But here's the deal. If it's overwhelming, do some breath work. Like, this is the coolest time ever to be alive. And yeah, there's all sorts of garbage going on. I promise you that in, you know, 1914, there was a lot worse crap going on. That was World War I. And man, that was horrific.
- [68:13]
Dr. William Lee
Right?
- [68:13]
Dave Asprey
And like, okay, so there's good and there's bad all the time, but there's a lot of good coming, and it's up to us to make it real and make it accessible. So I'm I'm all in on that, and I can tell you are too. And William, thank you for coming on the show. And guys, DrWilliamLee.com, he's a leader in the field. You see how he thinks. He thinks the right way about what's possible. And I'll tell you, if you don't have a working vascular system, you're probably not going to live a long time. And good news is it's modifiable. And he just told you how great.
- [68:42]
Dr. William Lee
Thanks for having me on. It's always great to talk to you, Dave.
- [68:46]
Podcast Host/Announcer
See you next time on the Human Upgrade Podcast Foreign.
- [68:55]
Autotrader Advertiser
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 from 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 quality, 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.