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

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СКАЧАТЬ positively impact the world by sharing your wealth of information gleaned from relationships, experiences, successes, and mistakes. If you take that kind of energy and intelligence and put it to work, you can literally improve the world for future generations. Now you’re the tribal elder who’s leading the hunt because you’re full of energy and you’ve been around a long time, so you know where all the animals are hiding.

      Contrary to common fears, our living longer won’t lead to overpopulation and environmental ruin. If we use our advanced wisdom and energy to create a world in which everyone had access to a quality education and reproductive health care, we’d actually start to see negative population growth.

      Americans may struggle to envision a world where we live past a hundred years old, but the governments of countries like China and Russia are investing in anti-aging technologies because they realize that it gives them a tremendous competitive advantage in the world economy. It costs a lot of money to keep reeducating new generations of workers, not to mention caring for a sick and aging population. What if instead of being sick, old people were productive and happy citizens who could contribute to society in their final years?

      That is the future I plan on sticking around to see. If you knew it was possible, how would you change your daily decisions and priorities now? In this future, it’s not your unborn grandchildren or great-grandchildren who are going to have to deal with the effects of the environmental problems we’ve created; it’s you. Instead of making a mess in your own sandbox, you’d invest in improving that sandbox so you can enjoy it for the unexpectedly large number of years to come.

      This is why I am donating a portion of the advance from this book to organizations like the XPRIZE Foundation, which is funding massive initiatives to improve the world’s oceans, soil, food supply, and education system, not to mention exploration of space. Thanks to more computer power, more research, and more money going toward fixing the world’s biggest problems, change is happening at exponential rates. Whether you know it yet or not, you’re part of a race to fix the planet so it supports a population that can live beyond a hundred and eighty. It’s up to you to either participate in that race or get out of the way. Go back to your cave if you like, but don’t stand in the middle of the road slowing everyone else down.

      My goal is to share the techniques with you that have given me the greatest return on my investment of energy, time, and money. It’s easy to spend eight hours a day on an anti-aging protocol, but then you’re not actually gaining time because you’re spending so much of it on these efforts. Instead, I want you to learn how to stop dying, reverse aging, and heal with Super Human speed in the least possible amount of time and with minimal effort.

      As you read this book, I hope you’ll create your own prioritized list of things to do to live longer and better based on where you are now and where you want to go. Most likely, you won’t try everything in this book. And that’s fine—it’s not a contest. Perfection isn’t required. Even I haven’t tried out all of these strategies yet (but I’m getting close!).

      Yes, some of these technologies are more expensive than others, although many of the most powerful are the least expensive. And while certain interventions are a rich person’s game today, that is changing; you can now access a lot of anti-aging technologies for a fraction of what they cost ten years ago, just like the smartphone you have now is far more capable and less expensive than the models that debuted a decade ago. When you start with the most accessible and simplest lifestyle hacks and selectively choose a few affordable technologies to extend your life (or even just your health), you’ll buy yourself time so you can afford to wait for the rest to come to you. What could possibly be a better investment than that?

      The slope of innovation is steeper than ever, and change is unstoppable. Are you in or are you out? I’m all in. Join me.

       PART I

       DON’T DIE

      Widen your relationship to time, slow it down. Don’t see time as an enemy but an ally. It provides you with perspective. Aging doesn’t frighten you. Time is your teacher.

       —Robert Greene, The Laws of Human Nature

       1

       THE FOUR KILLERS

      THE CURIOUS CASE OF DAVE ASPREY

      Until the age of five, I was a normal kid with few health problems. Then my family moved from California to New Mexico, and something in my biology changed. I started acquiring health problems normally reserved for people far older than I was. Today I recognize that my bedroom, which was in the basement of our new house and covered in water-damaged wood paneling (it was the 1970s), was full of toxic black mold. My own home was silently aging me, but nobody, least of all me, was aware of this at the time.

      For the next two decades, I suffered from joint pain, muscle pain, asthma, brain fog, extreme emotions, and even weird, frequent nosebleeds. Out of nowhere, my nose would start gushing, and I had unending strep throat that came back every time I finished yet another round of antibiotics. After I got my tonsils out, I started getting chronic sinus infections instead. My body didn’t properly maintain blood pressure, so I often got dizzy, and I was easily fatigued.

      At the age of fourteen, I was diagnosed with full-blown arthritis in both of my knees. I remember going home after receiving the diagnosis from my doctor, thinking, How can I have arthritis? That’s for old people. I had always been chubby, but now I was becoming obese. I developed tons of stretch marks, which also disturbed me. Weren’t those for pregnant women? I was just a kid!

      And can we talk about man boobs? I grew mine when I was sixteen, which would make anyone self-conscious, especially a teenager. The only other guy I knew with a matching set was my grandfather. My hormones were dysfunctional, just like those of my aging relatives. Between the stretch marks and the man boobs, you’d never catch me with a shirt off. The very thought terrified me, and I’d never in a thousand years imagine that thirty years later, there would be a full-page shirtless photo of me in Men’s Health magazine talking about how I used the techniques in this book to get rid of that flab and replace it with abs.

      When I got to college, I kept putting on weight until I had grown a size 46 waist. And my knees got even worse. I played intramural soccer, and my kneecap would become dislocated, so my leg would suddenly fold sideways in a sickening way. I got used to falling over unexpectedly when it happened. Besides the pain, this made dating really awkward. Who wants to date an obese twenty-year-old who might fall down at any moment, with stretch marks, man boobs, arthritis, and the lack of confidence that comes with having such things? Oh, and someone who was so fatigued that he often forgot names, was socially awkward, and could barely focus, even when he really tried? Not too many people, unsurprisingly.

      More important than my lackluster social life was the fact that my body was aging before its time. I was well on my way to prematurely developing all four of the diseases most likely to kill you as you age—heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and cancer—or, as I call them, the Four Killers. These diseases are all deadly, and each of them is on the rise.

      Right now, about one in four deaths in the United States is connected to heart disease—that’s roughly 610,000 people who die from heart disease each year. Meanwhile, more than 9 percent of the population of the United States has diabetes, and that number rises to 25 percent for people over the age of sixty-five. СКАЧАТЬ