Biohacking in Space: Prioritizing Prevention to Live Forever

 Dave: [00:00:00] You’re listening to The Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today, we’re going to talk about biohacking your body. Good God, I talk about biohacking all the time. What does it even mean? But we’re going to talk about doing it for Earth versus space. And I’ve got a guest here, a fellow biohacker named Alan Graves, who is CEO of Do Not Age. And the reason I wanted to have this conversation is that years ago, I had a chance to talk with the president of SpaceX. And I asked her, I said, well, you’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars hardening electronics for space. What have you done to harden astronauts for space? 

[00:00:46] And she looked at me, and she said, in 17 years, no one’s ever asked that question. And I’m like, ugh, you can’t have engineers planning to send people to space because those are the same engineers who design airplane seats. And have you ever been comfortable in an airplane? I don’t think so. 

[00:01:04] So we’ve got to have someone who understands biology and someone who understands environmental engineering in order to be able to solve a lot of the problems, including designing buildings and things like that. So today, we’re going to talk with Alan Graves about that unique question. And we’re going to talk about why he has a company called Do Not Age, which is a UK-based longevity company that makes supplements, a lot of which you’ve heard of probably. And we’re just going to have fun talking about biohacking. 

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[00:01:34] Dave: So Alan, welcome to the show.

[00:01:37] Alan: Thank you, Dave. It’s a pleasure to be here.

[00:01:40] Dave: So you’re going to go into space with Virgin Galactic, huh?

[00:01:43] Alan: That’s correct. Yes, I’m, uh, shooting off in, I think, the end of 2025.

[00:01:49] Dave: End of 2025. Did you have to do all kinds of crazy, uh, health tests in order to do that?

[00:01:57] Alan: Not yet. But it’s quite a rigorous training program to be able to go up to space, but obviously, they do it once you’re quite close to already being flown up.

[00:02:08] Dave: Are you old enough to remember one of the first person to shoot a video game called Doom?

[00:02:13] Alan: I do remember Doom. It’s one of the first games I ever played.

[00:02:16] Dave: Ah, me too. So the guy who created Doom was the first person to go to space privately. And I flew in a private jet with him, maybe eight, nine years ago. And he was telling me this story that during his medical evaluations to be able to do this, they looked and said, oh, you have some weird genetic thing where one of the ducts in your liver is backwards, or something like that. So you’re not going to be able to go to space. And he’s like, I got you. And he goes and has this surgery, and he shows them this huge scar where they went in and reversed an organ so that it would match the standard template so he could go to space.

[00:02:53] Alan: Wow.

[00:02:53] Dave: Would you reverse an organ if you had to to go to space?

[00:02:56] Alan: Probably not. I try and avoid surgery where possible.

[00:03:01] Dave: I think that’s a good call. I would leave my organs where they are unless they needed some serious editing for longevity. Uh, but still, it’s an interesting idea. Are you doing this because it’s been a lifelong dream, or is this a publicity stunt for Do Not Age?

[00:03:15] Alan: Neither. What I realized as I got older was first of all, similarly to biohacking, when I was brought up, I was taught aging was not malleable. And then, of course, I realized it was, and that’s why I dived into it. It’s the same thing with space travel. I didn’t believe. I didn’t even think it would be possible for that to happen. And then once I realized it was, I started to look into it and see the response that people have had that have been into space and how it changes their perspective on life and the amazing things they do for humanity after they come back down. And so I decided I want a piece of that.

[00:03:54] Dave: It’s funny. I grew up in a family where flying to space was normal. One of my uncles was a tech entrepreneur, and he was named one of the top 10 most influential investors in private space travel 10 years before the XPRIZE. So our family reunion conversations were about physics, and how to go to space, and like, oh yeah, it’s just like, we’re going to do it.

[00:04:19] Alan: So when are you going?

[00:04:20] Dave: Most of my family works at national labs on high energy lasers and stuff like that. So it was one of those things where, of course, but I realized, I think I lived in science fiction, not to mention the other part of the family was from Roswell, New Mexico, where all the aliens were. So, it’s like, we’ll do this. And now that it’s possible, I looked at sending a single coffee bean to the moon. Bulletproof Coffee, back when I ran the company. I’m working on reestablishing my control over it. 

[00:04:50] But what happened was I was going to send it up with a little extra payload for someone else and get it sent there just to be the first coffee on the moon. And that was for marketing. I don’t know. That’s how humans expand, is through chemistry, including coffee. That was my idea. But maybe just going up with Virgin Galactic is the thing to do. Tell me what you’re going to do to protect yourself from all of the bad effects of EMFs, and ionizing radiation, and all the other things that happen when you go into space.

[00:05:19] Alan: Well, I think, ultimately, it’s about testing. So getting your bloods done before you go. I know that you’re a big proponent of testing as well. I don’t go quite as deep as Brian Johnson, but I do do a lot of testing to stay on top of things and things at [Inaudible] level. Such as an activity, inflammation markers, things like that. And then obviously, I’m going to be relying on the Do Not Age products to keep me healthy. And I think it will work, but if not, then I’ll die on my sword. Won’t I?

[00:05:48] Dave: So testing doesn’t protect you from space. Testing just says whether space damages your DNA and things like that. Same thing. I test everything. I spent 2 million bucks, actually probably 2.5 at this point, over the last 10 or 20 years. I don’t spend it the rate that Brian does, but those tests, you can do them. You can predict what space is going to do to you because we have enough data. 

[00:06:13] Alan: Yeah. 

[00:06:14] Dave: Do Not Age makes enough supplements. I’m assuming you’re going to sneak some onto the rocket. How does that work?

[00:06:21] Alan: Yeah, in my luggage. Well, I mean, the space travel, it’s only for a short period of time. So I don’t need to take any supplements up with me. And in fact, I’m pretty sure I’m not allowed to as well. So you can’t take anything up with you, unfortunately. Uh, the spacesuit is designed very specifically. Uh, it’s made to fit your body.

[00:06:39] You do get to keep it afterwards, so it’s a nice memento. But I will be taking, uh, extra. So rather than taking more supplements, I’ll be taking a higher dosage, if that makes sense. Yeah, things like the SIRT6 Activator. It’s our most popular ingredient. We’ve proven that it repairs DNA. And I think that ingredient is going to be very important for protecting against those things.

[00:07:02] Dave: I was the last guy to interview Dr. Veech before he passed away.

[00:07:08] Alan: Yeah.

[00:07:09] Dave: Dr. Veech was one of the preeminent keto researchers and mitochondrial researchers who’d studied them for 40 years. In fact, he studied under Hans Krebs, who, I won’t say invented, but at least documented the Krebs cycle, which is how mitochondria work. And he was saying in that interview that ketosis is necessary for space travel. If we have ketosis, it’ll protect your DNA. And he was so convinced of it. So will you be keto when you go to space?

[00:07:38] Alan: I will not. I probably won’t be changing my diet too much, to be honest. Like I said, I think I’ve got things pretty much dialed in and optimized now. Maybe except sleep. I still struggle with sleep sometimes. But nobody’s perfect.

[00:07:52] Dave: No one’s perfect. That’s for sure. All right. Then what do you eat?

[00:07:58] Alan: I now have quite a heavy meat diet. That’s what I’m doing at the moment. And I do feel better on it. In fact, I used to be fully vegan for around seven years.

[00:08:08] Dave: Wow. You lasted a long time.

[00:08:11] Alan: Yeah. My brothers were like, oh, you’re just going through a phase. They were quite smug when I stopped being vegan. I switched to pescatarian for a while. And then, obviously, read up a lot of data on the carnivore diet. And whilst I’m not actually on the full carnivore diet, that is the vast majority of what I eat now. I try and stick to high-quality steaks and organ meats as well. I find there’s a lot of benefits from organ meats. And like I said, for me, my test results are looking good, and I feel a lot better. I’ll do it for as long as I still feel good.

[00:08:43] Dave: It’s really interesting how it’s evolved. I was also a vegan, and then a raw vegan.

[00:08:49] Alan: Oof, that must have been tough.

[00:08:52] Dave: Oh, yeah, it was tough. I tried all these different things. And then you feel extra energy, but so many people who are vegan end up with joint pain, and they just wake up always crunchy and sore. It certainly happened to me. And then I started getting autoimmune problems and all these other unexplainable things, but it couldn’t be the vegan diet. 

[00:09:10] And then when I came out with Bulletproof, I’m like, okay, cyclical, intermittent fasting, and keto seems to work really, really well. And you can’t eat all the veggies. A lot of these veggies are screwing you up. And then when the first carnivores came out, and I tried that a long time ago for three months, and it actually screwed me up as well, but it was pure carnivore. 

[00:09:31] What you realize is that there’s not a lot of toxins in meat. But there are some things in plants like the stuff you have in your SIRT6 product, things that you actually need from plants, and that not all plants are created equal. So my prediction was that they’re going to end up going from, oh, I only eat meat, to I eat meat and low inflammation plants. And I’m like, boom, nailed it. That’s what I do.

[00:09:56] I eat grass-fed beef and butter, just like you would read about in the Bulletproof Diet, and I eat a small selection of plants. But what I understand now, and I want to go deep with you on this, if it’s an area that you’re conversing in, is that there’s a bunch of these anti-nutrients, and some of the supplements that you make can help to overcome some of the anti-nutrients from plants, and phytic acid is one that slowly sucks minerals. 

[00:10:23] So if you go to space with bone density and you eat tons of things full of phytic acid, like rice cakes, and oats, and all that, then magically, you can get weaker bones over time. But oxalic acid, which is Chapter 1 of the Bulletproof Diet, it’s probably more nefarious than, I believe, 10 years ago. 

[00:10:43] This is the thing in lacy kale, and spinach, and almonds. And this is an important one, raspberries. So when you eat this stuff, it builds up tiny little crystals over time. And all of our bodies have a different tissue capacity for this. And when you hit capacity, Liam Hemsworth on the vegan diet, after four years, gets a kidney stone made of calcium oxalate.

[00:11:05] And it’s from the damn plants. And the plants don’t want us to eat too many plants because they don’t like it, so we build up over time. I hit it early because I was doing sprouted or soaked almonds with raspberries, and kale, and spinach, and sweet potatoes, and beets, which are all high-oxalate foods because those are super foods. And that’s why I keep making fun of kale, even though spinach is worse than kale, and so are raspberries, even though I love raspberries, but I actually still recommended them back in the day. Now, I don’t eat raspberries. I just eat blueberries instead because they don’t have this.

[00:11:37] Alan: You don’t eat raspberries at all?

[00:11:39] Dave: Do you eat no raspberries either?

[00:11:41] Alan: No, I do. I was asking. So you don’t eat any raspberries at all? 

[00:11:45] Dave: No.

[00:11:45] Alan: I do, but on a very rare occasion. I do try and stick to things like blueberries. I like blackberries as well.

[00:11:51] Dave: Yeah. Blackberries are quite low. It’s profound that people in the anti-aging movement even sometimes are like, well, there’s good stuff, but they don’t look at the bad stuff. And I’m like, well, you should probably avoid the bad stuff or counteract the bad stuff with supplements because the bad stuff is unavoidable. 

[00:12:09] Alan: The way I tend to approach it is try and avoid anything that has large amounts of bad stuff, if possible. And then if I’m then missing out on the good stuff, use supplementation to give me that good stuff. And so, for example, SIRT6 Activator is derived from seaweed, and so it is just the bit that you need rather than any of the other bits that may cause buildup.

[00:12:34] Dave: It makes a lot of sense to me. It’s funny that your stuff online though still says you eat a plant-based diet.

[00:12:41] Alan: Where does it say that?

[00:12:43] Dave: I don’t have the link here, but we put together a bunch of stuff. I think that’s because you were a plant-based dieter. It’s the same thing. When something is said in the press, it’s here forever.

[00:12:53] Alan: Stays forever.

[00:12:55] Dave: So you switched over to grass-fed steak, I’m assuming. Do you eat chicken?

[00:13:00] Alan: Same as raspberries. Every now and then, I will. I try not to be too much of a stickler for it, but it’s not in my core diet. I don’t really believe that it’s particularly healthy.

[00:13:10] Dave: Okay. So we’re very, very aligned on that. And I always put chicken down there below pork on my references. And I don’t think pescetarian works because there’s not enough protein in fish, at least most fish. And if you get that much protein, you’re going to be getting a lot of toxins from it. So I’ll eat fish, but I wouldn’t want to live on it.

[00:13:28] Alan: Yeah. Same here. I really enjoy the taste of fish as well. So that was one that I have overcome. And that was my stepping stone between the veganism and what I do now. I was pescetarian for a little while.

[00:13:41] Dave: What was driving that? I’m really curious. I mean, we’re both biohackers, but which of the arguments for that made sense to you?

[00:13:48] Alan: So I was speaking with– obviously, it’s unfortunate to speak to a lot of the top researchers and scientists in the space. I think it was mentioned on David Sinclair’s podcast as well, about the metadata showing the most long-lived diets, and I think they had veganism quite high on there, but above that, they had pescetarian.

[00:14:09] Dave: Hmm.

[00:14:10] Alan: And so that was one of my decisions, and I think I just knew at the time that the veganism, I wasn’t optimal when I was doing it. Um, and so I needed to make a change, and maybe the change going straight to beef would have been a little bit too much of a jump for me. So I eased myself in.

[00:14:28] Dave: Good work. It’s funny. There’s no data ever showing that the vegan diet makes you live longer because there’s never been a vegan society for more than a generation, right?

[00:14:41] Alan: That’s true.

[00:14:41] Dave: Uh, there are vegetarians, but vegan is very, very rare because the more plants you eat, the more calcium you need to try and balance out all of the anti-nutrients. And you can only get that calcium in those doses from dairy or maybe in Japan from fish bones. There’s some things you can do with small fish that help, but it’s pretty weird. 

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[00:15:04] Dave: Let’s talk about your transition to becoming a biohacker. When did that happen?

[00:15:10] Alan: So it would be probably around 2019 when I really started taking it seriously. And again, the start of 2019 was when I realized it was even possible because, again, before that it wasn’t even in my realm of possibility because I was taught all my life you can’t do anything about how you age. You can’t do anything about your health. You can’t do anything about how long you live. It is what it is. Everybody ages. There’s nothing you can do. And so I never even thought about it. And then I started to hear things, and read articles, and watch podcasts.

[00:15:42] Dave: Beautiful.

[00:15:42] Alan: And, uh, I remember teaching myself to read a scientific paper and listen to a few podcasts because they said, oh, all the data’s here. These things can help extend lifespan and reverse these diseases. And I thought, well, um, I want to check it out. I want to see the data. And so I went and tried to read the scientific paper, and they use all these big words. I didn’t know what all of them meant. So I had two tabs open. I had the scientific paper, and then Google definition.

[00:16:10] And I rewrote the papers in simple English so that I could understand it. Taught myself basically how to read scientific papers from there, and then realize what they were saying was true. And also that has become a staple for Do Not Age because that’s what we do, is we translate the scientific papers and make it easier for people to digest. And so that, from what I did for myself in the beginning, back four and a bit years ago, is now still very, uh, in the DNA of Do Not Age, if you will.

[00:16:40] Dave: It’s really funny. It’s hard to read a scientific paper because the language of academia is one that obscures truth. They choose a passive voice, complex sentences. They use big words, and they can use small words. I think because it makes them feel better. 

[00:16:55] Alan: I think so too.

[00:16:56] Dave: I don’t understand why it should be hard to read those things. So same thing here. I started reading them in probably my mid-20s, and I’m a computer science guy. I’m scientific. I know how to do science, but the vocabulary was completely baffling. But what I would encourage people to do, if you’re just saying this is too much, no, just keep reading the papers. And after you’ve read 30 or 40 of them, all of a sudden, just like learning to read English or something, it becomes clear. And like, oh, now I can follow it. So it’s just teaching yourself a new lens. You had the same experience. I see you nodding. Right?

[00:17:35] Alan: Exactly the same. That’s what I did. Now I can do it, obviously, without having to have two tabs open, but originally, it was very difficult. Obviously, the alternative for people is to look at the Do Not Age emails because we do it for you. But for me, I wanted to really understand it, and so I did it all myself. And like you say, once you’ve done it 30 to 40 times, which sounds a lot to some people, but it’s really not that much. Then you get used to it, and you can do it relatively quickly.

[00:18:04] Dave: Yeah, you can skim through one. And it feels like a superpower when you first get to do it. And every now and then I run across something where it just gets so deep into either equations or into just esoteric cell pathways that–and this isn’t one of the 30 or 40 that I have paid attention to, and then I have to slow down and double check, like, why is that that? 

[00:18:28] Anyone listening, I want you to know you can do this too. There’s no monopoly on that. You can read the Do Not Age emails, where they translate them. I’ve got 3,000 blog posts where I talk about these things. And now, there are AI tools for researchers that will summarize a scientific paper for you.

[00:18:48] I don’t remember the name of it. I have too many AI apps on my phone right now. But if you come across something and you feel like you can’t understand it, you can ask an AI thing to translate it for you at whatever level of understanding you have. And it will do that. So the question is, who paid for the paper?

[00:19:06] Because it’s almost like big pharma might have maybe done a few bad things. And even you mentioned David Sinclair earlier, it looks like some of the original, I think it was resveratrol research, maybe wasn’t– someone faked something back in the day. Did you hear about that?

[00:19:25] Alan: I did. I think that’s disputed, and it was a particular molecule SRT something something they were looking at. Eventually, GSK, as far as I know, did close down the company. But again, I think what David Sinclair has done for the industry is very commendable.

[00:19:42] Dave: Oh, absolutely. He’s been on the show. He’s a friend. And I don’t know that that was his research specifically. I think it was someone in his lab, if I remember that, but there was some controversy over it. The other thing is one of the biggest things that big pharma companies do, and I’ve seen this over the last 20 years over and over, there’s a promising new treatment, whether it’s a device or a drug, they will buy it to kill it because it works better than what’s on the market.

[00:20:09] And let’s face it. If you have something that cures something, well, then the market goes away, and it’s just bad for business. So this has been something they’ve done over and over. So if you want to figure out how to live a long time, look at what the drug companies buy and shut down because that’s where the gold is.

[00:20:27] Alan: Exactly. And this is why I am very happy that we have the protection on SIRT6 Activator. Because I’m already financially free, so nobody’s going to be able to buy it off me. We have the contracts in place with the Gorbunova lab that are in-house researchers, and everybody’s doing it for the right reasons. And so we’re very happy that we can’t be bought out. And of course, as I’m sure you can guess, people have already tried. And we won’t do it, which they don’t like. So I’m sure they’ll come after us some other way.

[00:20:59] Dave: Oh yeah. Uh, venture capital is a double-edged sword. I’m grateful that I raised a bunch of money because it allowed me to fund the creation of the biohacking movement. But from a personal perspective, I’m working now on reacquiring all of the necessary controls in Bulletproof so that I can get it to do what I want it to do.

[00:21:17] But I truly think there wouldn’t be biohacking if I hadn’t worked with external funding on it. It’s a double-edged sword. I recommend entrepreneurs, when I coach them all the time, guys, let’s avoid funding specifically from professional investors. Get your money from true believers, family offices.

[00:21:37] There’s plenty of decamillionaires and billionaires who want to live forever. And actually, they could donate the money or invest in a startup that might work, and the pleasure that a wealthy, wealthy person gets from helping someone become possibly wealthy and helping someone solve a societal problem, it actually feels better than just giving the money away.

[00:22:02] I think there’s room for both. I donated the first $50,000 to the XPRIZE foundation that became Elon Musk’s a 100-million-dollar carbon capture XPRIZE. So it’s okay to donate, but even that is a competitive thing. And I’ve donated a bunch to wells in Africa, and schools for girls, and things like that, mostly to support people who I think are doing amazing work in the world. The water charity, the women’s Alzheimer’s project. 

[00:22:28] But if I can invest in a company where this one has fire, and they’re ready to go solve this big problem, it feels better. So this is a message for everyone listening. You can go to professional investors for money, but their job is to slowly peel away your rights and put controls in place versus people who are true believers in your mission and your cause. And I’m fortunate that many of those people also invested with me. 

[00:22:56] Alan: I think time horizon is a big thing as well. A lot of people think, how can I make a company that makes loads of money straight away? Look at a longer time horizon, and you will win in the long run. Do Not Age could be super profitable if we didn’t do all this research and put millions into research every year, but we’re looking at it long-term, and we’re doing it for people’s health. But ultimately, even if you were looking at it from a business perspective, it’s still a smart move because we’re going to be in a great position in a 100 years time. Whereas a typical supplement seller, 99% of it is all going to be around.

[00:23:35] Dave: It’s true. There’s a lot of pressure on the supplement industry, and in some countries like Canada, they just basically shut down the supplement industry with recent regulations, I’ve lived in Canada straight for 12 years, and I live in Canada and Austin. And it’s almost impossible to buy quality supplements up there. It’s getting harder and harder, and they’re making it almost as expensive as buying pharmaceutical drugs, and it’s drug companies doing that. Are you worried that you’ll just get regulated to only being available for pets or something?

[00:24:09] Alan: No, I’m not concerned. We already overcame. We’ve got to the size we’ve got to, largest element supplier in the world. SIRT6 Activator is obviously a huge deal. We have SulforaBoost as well. We’ve got there within four years of the company being around. So obviously, there’s been a ton of hurdles in that time.

[00:24:29] So any hurdle that any regulator or anybody throws at us, we will overcome it. And again, it helps to be in it for the right reasons because it’s not a matter of, oh, should we do this? Do we need to do this? It’s, we’re doing this. How do we do it? I just see it as problem solving, just like every entrepreneur needs to.

[00:24:46] Dave: That’s what hackers do. If you can’t just do it the normal way, you go around, underneath, or, uh, do something disruptive. You started with three products at Do Not Age. You had NMN, resveratrol, and berberine. And now you’ve got a bunch of longevity products. What’s going on with NMN in the US? Because it’s become very, very difficult to get. Can you walk me through what’s going on?

[00:25:13] Alan: I could do my best. The FDA aren’t very talkative. 

[00:25:18] Dave: Really? The FDA, they’re such good people.

[00:25:21] Alan: No comment, your honor. So what’s essentially happened is towards the end of last year, which is 2022, they announced that NMN couldn’t be sold as a dietary supplement in the USA. Then it turned out to be just like NAC a couple of years before it, where they had said that once, but then after that everybody could still provide NMN. It was no issue. 

[00:25:48] We certainly didn’t see an issue for it because the case of whether something’s a supplement or a drug, if it’s already been marketed as a dietary supplement for a long time, then you can’t then just come along and say, actually, I’m going to make that a drug. But it seems like that’s what they’re doing, and the FDA seems to be on their side. And so I think the less I say about that the better. I don’t want–

[00:26:10] Dave: Maybe because you’re actually selling the product directly.

[00:26:14] Alan: Yeah, but I also think that whatever happens, Do Not Age will always make sure that there’s a high-quality NAD booster available for everybody all over the world.

[00:26:25] Dave: For listeners who are new to the show or new to biohacking, NAD is a very important anti-aging molecule. I’ve written about it in multiple books, and it makes your mitochondria work better. You can do it intravenously, and it declines as you age. And NMN is a potent way to raise NAD. When the first research came out showing it worked better than nicotinamine riboside, I bought a kilo of it from China for $3,000 because you couldn’t buy it in the US at any prices mid 2015-ish, I would guess. 

[00:26:58] And had it tested, and took it, and it probably wasn’t worth the trouble compared to NR because encapsulating your own 3,000-dollar bag of whitish-yellow powder that was suspicious to get into Canada and keeping it in the freezer, it was a little bit extreme. So I went through all that, and I’ve taken NR, and NMN, and niacinamide, all the things that work. And I think it’s an important part of anti-aging, but why did you go with NMN specifically?

[00:27:30] Alan: So NMN, specifically, at the time, was because I spoke to a lot of the researchers in the industry. So when Do Not Age first started, I don’t have a scientific background, so I needed people around me that did. And so I managed to network with a lot of those people. Professor Gorbunova is our lead researcher.

[00:27:50] There’s lots of other people that I won’t mention, but they’re very well-known names that have also been involved with helping us. And the overriding belief was that NMN was superior. We now provide both, so people can choose whether they want NMN or NR. Both are provided at donotage.org. I actually personally take whatever the hell the office sends me, but I don’t know which one is superior because they have very similar results on NAD level, which is, I believe, the most important thing, and that’s what we test them for.

[00:28:28] Dave: Purity is really important. Have you found metals or other impurities in NMN or NR when you purchase it from overseas?

[00:28:40] Alan: We used to. There’s heavy metals in everything in trace amounts, and that will always be the case, but there used to be some pretty bad batches. We had to kiss a lot of frogs before we found really good suppliers of these four ingredients. We now partner with a company called [Inaudible], uh, and they make a fantastic raw ingredient, and they’ve never let us down.

[00:29:01] I think we’re over two years with them now. Obviously, every batch is still tested. Do Not Age NMN is also the only one where the purity is guaranteed to your door as well. So we guarantee it to your door, wherever you live in the world, because part of our mission of extending healthy lifespan for as many people as possible is also important. So we need to make sure that everybody around the world is covered.

[00:29:23] Dave: Yeah, it’s a lot of work to get it, especially around the world. I’ve had so many packages destroyed when I’ve been sending supplements, uh, especially to Europe, or Central, or South America. 

[00:29:39] Alan: Yeah. 

[00:29:39] Dave: And when I say destroyed, I’m calling out Germany, for instance. The number of times German border people, they see a bottle of supplements that should be legal in Germany that a German ordered with their own money, they incinerate them, which contributes to global warming, by the way. I just want to call that out. Bad German border people.

[00:29:59] Alan: And they’re not the only ones as well. There’s lots of other countries. Some are much stricter, but–

[00:30:03] Dave: Australia is another one. Even Canada. I mean, I’ve had my own supplements sent to me for filming, and they arrived slashed open so they could look inside. And you’re like, guys, I was going to film that. And it’s got a big blue sticker on it. So if you’re out there and you’re saying, well, why won’t X company send me things, or why is it so expensive, it’s because you’ve allowed your government to do that.

[00:30:28] And you should make them stop. Just straight up. They are not allowed to do that. You didn’t give them that right. They just took it, and they’re using it against you to keep you sick or restrict your ability to take care of yourself. It’s okay for politicians to get old. It’s just not okay for you to get old. See the difference?

[00:30:48] Alan: Yeah, I think one of the ways we’ve got around that is because we’ve grown, we’ve built facilities in various different places. So we have the USA, we have the UK, and we now have Europe as well, mainland Europe, within the EU. And then the next one, uh, is Australia. And then after that, it’s going to be the Middle East. And so the more localized we can make it, the better.

[00:31:07] AD MARKER

[00:31:08] Dave: So your three products were NMN. They were resveratrol. Let’s talk about resveratrol. And then the other one was berberine. But with resveratrol, what form do you use? Where does it come from, and why is it important?

[00:31:22] Alan: So we use transresveratrol. It’s the best form to use. We actually use synthetic, so again, when we first started, we wanted to use a natural extract and thought that would be superior. And then, thankfully, now we have ways to test these things, and ultimately, the natural extracts, you can’t get as pure, and therefore, they don’t quite work as well.

[00:31:43] And also one of the other things we found is in the supplement industry, a lot of transresveratrol will be shown as part of a blend, or a red wine extract, or something like that, which means that the powder becomes a brown or a dark red color, and there are a lot of bad players that can then hide low-quality ingredients in there.

[00:32:01] Um, that doesn’t mean everybody, but some of them do. And so it’s one of the things we wanted to stay away from. Another thing we were very naive about at the beginning was we actually combined the NMN and resveratrol into one capsule, which we don’t do any longer because of what we know now. NMN is taken on an empty stomach, first thing in the morning. Resveratrol is taken with some source of fat, but usually with the first meal of the day. And resveratrol activates sirtuin 1. I can talk a little bit about the sirtuins if you want.

[00:32:30] Dave: Sure. Let’s do it.

[00:32:32] Alan: Yeah. So essentially, longevity proteins, but for anybody that’s listening, they go around and do the repair work in your body. Aging really is just an accumulation of damage. And then that damage needs to be repaired. When you’re young, your sirtuins, they go around the body doing the repair work very quickly, very efficiently. 

[00:32:51] And as you age, your sirtuins slow down, you have less of it, and these longevity genes need reactivating. And so resveratrol activates sirtuin 1. And there are seven of them, aptly named, sirtuin 1, sirtuin 2, etc. And sirtuin 6 is the most important one, and that’s why we have SIRT 6 Activator. And sirtuin 1 is the second most important one, which is what we use resveratrol to activate it.

[00:33:19] Dave: Why do you use resveratrol instead of pterostilbene.

[00:33:23] Alan: So pterostilbene just doesn’t have enough proof behind it. The only papers I’ve seen that have recommended pterostilbene over resveratrol are ones that where the resveratrol– so resveratrol is very poorly absorbed when you don’t use fat with it. If you just drink it with water, it’s very poorly absorbed, like five to 10%, which is extremely low. So those papers show pterostilbene as having a bigger effect than resveratrol maybe because it’s more easily absorbed. But we believe resveratrol is actually a better activator of sirtuin 1 when it’s taken correctly with a source of fat.

[00:33:59] Dave: So you might do something weird like take Danger Coffee, put in some butter and some MCT, blend it right up, and magically, all of your fat solubles, like vitamin DAKE would absorb even better. Who would’ve thought, right?

[00:34:15] Alan: Yeah, exactly.

[00:34:18] Dave: So that was why you went with resveratrol, and I agree with you. If you properly identify the actives, you can get a synthetic that works really well as long as you’re paying attention to things like isomers. Are you getting bioidentical molecules? Are you getting half mirror image molecules? Did you solve that problem?

[00:34:39] Alan: Yes, we did. Well, I say we did. We paid somebody to solve that problem.

[00:34:43] Dave: Most of us solve problems, right?

[00:34:46] Alan: It’s the same as when I say we do research. I’m not in the laboratory. I don’t do the research. Our scientists do the research.

[00:34:54] Dave: Yeah, you’re just one guy, so you do some of it, but you’re aware of it.

[00:34:58] Alan: Yeah.

[00:34:58] Dave: All right, so you solved that problem. And there’s another thing that happens, especially in the world of pharma, where there’s an assumption that one thing is the important thing. And there’s no actual data or proof that it’s not three things in the right ratios. So they’ll tend to throw away a lot of things that are part of the solution in the eternal quest to find the one active ingredient.

[00:35:24] Alan: Yeah.

[00:35:25] Dave: I think we should just assume there’s always 6.7 active ingredients. And then our whole world would look very different because we would start filtering for complex effects. And this is why biohacking and systems biology is different than big pharma. And even a lot of Western diagnostic medicine is like, well, there has to be a cause. Was it diabetes or lack of sleep? My God, they go together. So that’s why biohacking is creeping in. 

[00:35:52] We’re surrounding and soaking into the world of medicine. And there’s so many doctors who listen to the show because it helps them to think about it differently so they can help their patients better. So I’m always inspired when I see doctors working on longevity, and aging, and performance instead of how to set broken bones. We need both.

[00:36:11] Alan: Definitely. And we do help a lot of them. Again, we don’t reveal their names and things like that because, obviously, they don’t want to get struck off, but ultimately, there are a lot of doctors that reach out to us and say, look, I understand that what I’m being taught, it’s funded by the wrong people, shall we say, and so can you help me with this functional medicine? And we do help them. And so there’s hundreds of them at the moment that we’re helping, and hopefully, we can change that to tens of thousands.

[00:36:40] Dave: Let’s talk about one of my favorite anti-aging products that I’ve been taking for five years now. I’ve given talks on it at higher-end anti-aging conferences. And it’s one that I see that you guys sell. Calcium AKG. This is something that honestly, after you get through your basic stack stuff, should be high on an anti-aging list of supplements. Why do you make it? What does it do?

[00:37:07] Alan: So calcium AKG is the calcium salt form of AKG, and essentially, it’s just that. The calcium salt just makes it’s uptake a little bit easier into the system. Obviously, boosting AKG is what it’s all about. You mentioned the Krebs cycle earlier today. Very important in the Krebs cycle. So for energy, but it’s also important for things like bone density, saving our frailty. 

[00:37:30] The mouse trials, the gray fur turned back to dark fur again. So it wasn’t just saving off grays. It was actually reversing grays, which I think is pretty cool. And we’re yet to see if that works in humans as well. And the biological age, which again, the test that was used is questionable, but seemed to show an eight year reversal in a very short period of time, which is a very positive.

[00:38:02] Dave: There’s a lot of interesting biochemistry around it, but it’s alpha-ketoglutarate. I definitely take a couple of those every night, and I think it’s advisable, but then again, I am at about 84 pills in the morning last time I counted, and something like 40, 45 at night. So I don’t mind a couple extras. But if I could get it down to only 80 per day and know which ones were going to matter, which ones weren’t, I’d be happy to do it, and it would save me some money. 

[00:38:38] Alan: Yeah. 

[00:38:39] Dave: So I’m not suggesting that most listeners would swallow that many pills, or would want to swallow that many pills, uh, or need to. It’s just that when you realize this one does this, this one does this, if it’s within the set of your goals, which you and I both have the, let’s live unreasonably long, and let’s stay as young as we know how to do, some people will go out and spend money on expensive wine, or they’ll go on vacations, or they’ll do whatever, and biohackers, I’m going to spend– for me, when I was younger, it was 20% of my income was on health, and longevity, and wellness partly because I didn’t make that much, and partly because my brain didn’t work if I didn’t do it because I was pretty sick. 

[00:39:19] So fortunately, you and I are both at a different place in our lives, and so we can do that, and I’m encouraging listeners to consider that. It’s not about, well, I can’t do that right now, so I’m not going to do anything. You start with the lowest hanging fruit that are most affordable, and then you work up over time. And if you just do a little bit in your early 20s and mid-20s, the benefits from that are so long because you get compounded interest.

[00:39:48] If you put a 100 bucks in the bank, if they were still paying interest these days, then over time, it becomes a big number. You put just a little bit of care into your biology and into anti-aging, well, now you have 80, or 90, or 100 years of those benefits stacking up. So I wish I would have known what to do better in my early 20s because I was trying. There just wasn’t good data.

[00:40:10] Today, you have amazing data, and you can say, all right, maybe I’ll start with resveratrol. Maybe I’ll start with one of these other compounds, and maybe you’ll match them with where your problems are. You can’t sleep? Do that. Stress? Do that. And you guys have a bunch of cool stuff to do that.

[00:40:29] Alan: Yeah, no, I completely agree. There are some really entry level products that aren’t expensive at all. You’ve got your omega-3s, creatine, collagen. There’s all these things that you can take now that are extremely low cost if that’s what’s putting people off. The one thing I would say is prevention is so much easier than cure. So don’t think because you don’t have huge issues now that you’re not aging every day. And like I say, if you prevent it, it will actually end up costing you a hell of a lot less in the long run than if you try and cure it down the line.

[00:41:02] Dave: Oh, yeah. Prevention is so much more important. It’s one of the reasons that I used to run an anti-aging longevity nonprofit group outside of Stanford University. Palo Alto. And I was maybe 25, 26 when I joined, and I was the only guy under 60 in the whole place. And about 100 people would meet every month, and we’d interview the leaders in the field back when you weren’t really supposed to be doing longevity research because it was impossible.

[00:41:30] And finally, they asked me to be president and chairman of the group because I was so excited about it. And I was just learning from these old guys and older women who were just reversing their age. And they had so much more energy than I did. I’m like, I just need some of that energy. And that was what showed me it was possible.

[00:41:50] And one of the more inspiring things was my friend Mike was 88 at the time, and he’d call me at 11:30 at night just all excited about this stuff. And like, we got to work on this. And I’m getting tired. And he just really had more energy than me. And he ended up falling in love with a much, much younger woman. And people say, oh, that’s stereotypical. It was one of the things where he had the energy and youthfulness in his mind, and his body, and in his energy, that it was a good match. And few people can pull that off. And he’d been doing it for 50 years. 

[00:42:28] Alan: Yeah. 

[00:42:28] Dave: Yeah. What you’re going to look like, or I’m going to look like as we age because of this investment, assuming things go according to plan, we have a much higher chance of this, right?

[00:42:40] Alan: Oh yeah, definitely.

[00:42:41] Dave: How old do you think you’re going to live?

[00:42:44] Alan: I don’t like to put a cap on it. I don’t see why we should. I mean, just with what I’m taking now, it’s going to be, definitely, past 120. And when I say live, I mean healthily, Live for me isn’t about whether you actually breathing in and out or not. Living means a lot. Living means a lot more than that. There’s a lot more to life, but in order to enjoy everything life has to offer, you need to move your body. You need to be able to think with your brain. 

[00:43:11] Dave: It’s funny. 120 is our current best. So you’re saying, I can do at least as good as our current best with all the stuff you’re doing? Is that really your number?

[00:43:21] Alan: No, no, no. I’m going to do a lot better than that, but I’m just–

[00:43:23] Dave: At least 180 is my number because I just want to do 50% better than our current best.

[00:43:29] Alan: Fair enough. But I’m just talking about literally what I’m taking today. If nothing changes and we stop all the research, we stop everything, I just keep doing what I’m doing today, I will be as healthy as I am now when I’m 120.

[00:43:41] Dave: Okay, I hear you there.

[00:43:43] Alan: But because of the exponential increase, we could actually do with some Do Not Age copycats as well. Because imagine if there was 10 Do Not Ages and all this money, 10x the money was plowing into research. It would speed it up even more. But because of human greed and some of the bits and pieces, that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

[00:44:01] But I do still think that the growth in research is exponential. AI is moving in as well, which I believe will help eventually. It’s not doing too much right now. I’m sure you’ve read the recent news articles about trying to find certain molecules using AI. I’m not sure how accurate they are at the moment, but again, the testing and research will show us that in time.

[00:44:24] Dave: There’s some accuracy there. In the very first year that a company called Insilico Medicine was founded, Alex, the founder, and I chatted about it a few times. He using it now for a pharmaceutical discovery, but at the time, he was actually finding natural compounds that would work for anti-aging pathways. And the first supplement based with AI was actually launched by the Life Extension Foundation, and it was with Insilico’s technology.

[00:44:50] That was the almost 10 years ago. So it’s getting better. I don’t know that ChatGPT is very good. In fact, I try using ChatGPT just to see if it could formulate something as good as me, and it was embarrassingly stupid. And it’s just not there yet. The other thing that you’ll understand, AI is trained on history.

[00:45:10] And if you are making the future, it doesn’t work because innovation and discovery is non-linear. It’s an exponential curve. If you look backwards, the curve is like this. And if you look forward, the curve is like this. The creation of new things isn’t going to come just from AI, but it makes it a lot easier to accelerate the curve. So you don’t look at the past only to see the future. You have to see the future and look at the past

[00:45:39] Alan: Exactly. But yeah, an answer to your question, infinity.

[00:45:44] Dave: Infinity and beyond. I like that answer.

[00:45:46] Alan: Exactly.

[00:45:49] Dave: All right. Let’s talk about one of my favorite supplements. Back in about 2012, I launched the first major collagen brand, which was Bulletproof. I pushed collagen peptides on the Dr. Oz show. I like to think I made it into a billion-dollar business. There are have been companies who launched with very similar messaging who’ve exited for $800 million and things like that. You’re still a major fan of collagen peptides, so talk to me about why you’re a fan, and I’m going to ask you about dosing.

[00:46:22] Alan: Okay, so one of the main reasons I’m a fan of collagen peptides is actually the costing as well as the results. Because again, it gives people that. We’re trying to be as inclusive as we can. We try and bring cost down as much as we can, but we’ll obviously never let quality dip. And so with some products, there’s only so far down you can go and still make the best product. Whereas collagen peptides, you can do it at $25, and I believe it’s affordable for everybody. So that’s one of the main reasons I like collagen peptides. 

[00:46:56] The other reason is obviously there’s so much data behind it. It’s extremely proven. It also helps the gut as well. A lot of people don’t focus on their gut. And so it improves the gut. It improves bloating, things like that. Just generally a happier belly. And that’s the main reasons that I like collagen. And I’m sure everybody knows about the help it does for your joints and your skin, etc. I don’t think my skin looks too bad. I’m 33.

[00:47:19] Dave: It definitely helps your skin. There’s great data to show that collagen peptides help your skin and joints. I used to have joint pain throughout my body, especially my knees. Had arthritis since I was 14. And I just don’t have those things anymore. It’s remarkable.

[00:47:34] Alan: How much do you take every day?

[00:47:36] Dave: Well, I do about 20 grams, uh, which is that scoop. And there’s been times when I’ve done closer to 80 grams. Quite a lot of collagen. How much do you take?

[00:47:47] Alan: Only 10. I might consider increasing it. We do have a lot of our members that take 20 grams every day.

[00:47:54] Dave: I now think that 20 grams is a good amount. The question is the ratio of collagen to other things. And I’ve talked about this on other podcasts, but if you eat a lot of muscle meat, which most of us do, then you’re not getting enough glycine. And you get glycine from collagen, or you can take glycine, the amino acid, straight.

[00:48:15] But the reason that I’m not doing super high doses of collagen like I once did, is that when you have lots of these plants that make oxalic acid and all, you can actually convert hydroxyproline, which is one of the amino acids in collagen, into oxalic acid as you metabolize it. So if you’ve been eating spinach, kale, raspberries, almonds are a major source of this, and a surprising number of foods that contain oxalic acid, and you’ve had problems either with kidney stones, 70% of kidney stones now are from calcium oxalate from plants, not from eating beer and sausage, even though people still think it’s beer and sausage.

[00:49:00] No, it’s your plants. So if you’ve dealt with that, or you’ve been a vegan, so then you have this built up level of tissue, and then you start eating super high amounts of collagen, it’s probably not benefiting you as much as about 20 grams would do. So I think that there’s a limit there. And then also, if you have a problem with histamine intolerance that oftentimes goes with having been vegan because it’s the same pathways, you can also find that histidine turns into histamine. So people can get inflammation if they have way too much collagen.

[00:49:32] About 20, I think, is a good number. And again, it has to be grass-fed and lab-tested because some of the brands that moved in Bulletproof’s footsteps were using chicken collagen from non-organic chicken. And that’s just an arsenic antibiotic glyphosate destruction. I wouldn’t feed that stuff to my pets. It’s that bad. But it was available on the shelves at stores. It probably still is.

[00:49:57] Alan: Yeah. Oh, that’s another thing, is a lot of people, particularly older people, I think, still believe that if something’s sold in Walmart or one of these, uh, what’s the other one in the US? The CVS. Then it must be good. They must’ve gone through– so it must be one of the best ones. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works.

[00:50:16] Dave: It’s not how it works. Especially, in the case of Walmart, I’ve been out there to Bentonville where Walmart’s headquarters is. I don’t know if you’ve been out there.

[00:50:27] Alan: I haven’t been there, but I know where it is. Yeah.

[00:50:29] Dave: It looks like Silicon Valley. They’ve rebuilt the entire city. I’ve met with the senior most people at Walmart, and I will tell you, they are very aggressive in a good way about product quality. They really look at things. The Walmart buyer there, who I worked with at Bulletproof, he actually had the TrueDark glasses because he’s like, this makes my brain work. He’s such a believer in improving humanity.

[00:50:54] Alan: Yeah.

[00:50:55] Dave: And that said, they’re also looking at serving people who aren’t going to be able to afford the highest price things. I remember walking in the prototype store there, and we stopped, and I picked up SlimFast. Now, SlimFast is something that I used when I was 16 to try and lose some of that a 100 pounds.

[00:51:12] Well, I wasn’t that heavy when I was 16. That was when I was 23. But still, I used it to try and lose weight, and it was just a crappy canola oil, just unpleasant product with all the bad stuff in it. And I turned over the label, and it said, butter and MCT oil in SlimFast. And I’m like, yes, I’m winning.

[00:51:32] The world is changing. Saturated fat actually does good things for you. And even the guys at SlimFast figured that out, that they wanted efficacy, and Walmart was selling it. So I’m going to say that Walmart is the largest seller of organic cotton and organic foods in the US, and that they’ve said, in fact, they told me, we would buy more organic cotton, but there isn’t any more to buy. So I think they’re working on making the world a better place, especially compared to our friends at Amazon who could give two craps about that.

[00:52:06] Alan: Oh, Amazon’s the worst. Amazon’s the worst by a long way. In fact, we’re the ones that bought all the NMN that’s available on Amazon, um, tested them, and none of them contained what they said they did. There was a few that were close, 80, 85% of what they actually claimed. And then there was another few that was 20, 25%, and then the rest of them, about half, were zero NMN whatsoever.

[00:52:31] In fact, I think what we did was repeated by ChromaDex a couple years later, and they published their results. We didn’t publish ours. We just told Amazon, and said, hey, guys, just so you know, there’s a big issue here. You should remove all these. And Amazon went, thanks for letting us know. We don’t care.

[00:52:48] Dave: Well, at least they didn’t black out your advertising. Yeah, they’ve done some dirty stuff. I’ve seen them shut down people’s stores for telling them things that are truthful like that. So there’s some retaliatory stuff that can happen.

[00:53:05] Alan: Unfortunately, Amazon’s just a race to the bottom. And again, there’s still a lot of people that don’t understand how Amazon works. They think, oh, I’m buying this from Jeff Bezos. And it’s like, no, it’s just a marketplace. And so when there’s no proof needed, you could take some flour, put it into a capsule, put them into a bottle, and make Dave’s supplements tomorrow, and say, yeah, this is unicorn Pooh.

[00:53:30] And then just put it on Amazon, and they wouldn’t do anything about it because they just want to take their cut. And so when you have that open marketplace like that, it attracts all the bad players because they’ll just say, oh, well, I’ll say this is NMN, and I’ll put something really cheap inside and charge a lot lower than everybody else. And then a poor, unsuspecting consumer comes along and goes, oh, I’ll buy that one.

[00:53:54] Dave: It happens all the time, and sometimes it’s even counterfeiting a major brand on Amazon. But if you go to Costco or Walmart and you’re buying something on the shelf, those guys really do vet what’s in there to an extent that I’m surprised. I’m not saying the fish oil isn’t oxidized if it’s the cheap stuff. You want to get the good stuff.

[00:54:16] But the thing that you can do, if you’re listening to this and you’re saying this is wrong, well, take the little extra trouble of going directly to the people who make the supplements and buying from their website. It’s not that hard to do. And you’re willing to leave a tip for a barista who makes you a cup of coffee. Leave a tip for an entrepreneur just by buying from their store. 

[00:54:38] And most of the time now, there’s a little button that’ll fill it out with your wallet information. So it’s not hard to do it anymore, but you’ll probably like your life better in 10 years if you do that because you’ll get the real stuff, and the companies that make the real stuff will still be around instead of there being one monolithic food manufacturing company that makes kibble for all humans. And that’s the direction certain people are trying to take things. And frankly, I’m not going to allow that to happen, and I don’t think you should either.

[00:55:08] Alan: No, I completely agree. And it’s also about things like fillers as well and corner cutting. And, as you mentioned, if there’s just going to be one manufacturer of kibble, for example, then who’s going to hold them to account? 

[00:55:20] Dave: Well, this is a fascinating conversation, and it makes me happy that it was only 2019 when you discovered the biohacking movement. Are you going to come to the biohacking conference next year?

[00:55:33] Alan: Uh, when is it?

[00:55:34] Dave: Uh, it’s going to be mid-summer, and it’s the one that launched the biohacking movement. A few thousand people come. It’ll be in Dallas, coming up here. At biohackingconference.com.

[00:55:45] Alan: I’m a big Texas fan, so yes, I’ll definitely go as long as I’m booked. As long as I’m booked enough in advance. So you’re telling me now, which is great. So yes, I can definitely come. My assistant will make sure I’m there.

[00:55:55] Dave: You’ll find a lot of your people are there because this biohacking thing, one of these days is going to be a thing. Nice. Thank you so much, Alan, for coming on The Human Upgrade today, and I wish you luck in not aging ever.

[00:56:15] Alan: Thank you, Dave. I’ve really, really appreciated it. And thank you for everything you’ve done for the biohacking movement as well.

[00:56:21] Dave: You’re so welcome.