Dave Pascoe: How I Slowed My Aging with Labs, AI & Strategy

I’m thrilled to bring you Dave Pascoe—a former network security architect turned longevity athlete and biohacker—whose measured approach to anti‑aging is both rigorous and refreshingly practical. We trace Dave’s journey from teenage hacker to data‑driven health optimizer, the telomere wake‑up call that shifted his mindset, and how he now tracks biological age with epigenetic testing (including the DunedinPACE “pace of aging” algorithm popularized by TrueDiagnostic). We also unpack the Rejuvenation Olympics—what the leaderboard actually measures and how to think about it without the hype. If you’ve heard buzzwords like “pace of aging” and wondered what they really mean, we translate them into plain English here. 

From there we get tactical: why Dave cut out ultra‑processed foods (we touch on the NOVA classification so you can spot them fast), how he reframed running and training, and why VO₂ max is one of the strongest fitness predictors of longevity. We compare sprint work vs. endurance for healthspan, dive into SHBG and testosterone (and why carbs, stress, and training load matter), and talk sleep, meditation, and the often‑ignored lymphatic system—including why movement is non‑negotiable because your lymph relies on muscle contraction to flow. Expect clear takeaways you can apply this week: food upgrades, training levers, recovery basics, and lab markers that actually move the needle. 

Finally, we open the hood on Dave’s AI‑driven supplement schedule—how he used large language models to de‑conflict ~100+ ingredients into practical AM/PM dosing, and why he’s building a personal GPT that ingests labs, wearables, and genetics for personalized protocols. We also level‑set on gene‑therapy hype, “exercise in a pill,” and influencer blueprints versus fundamentals. The mantra we land on is simple: “Comfort is good, capability is better.” Listen in for the frameworks, the mistakes to avoid, and a preview of Part 2, where we’ll walk through Dave’s public playbook so you can build your own. 

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Topics Covered:

[00:09:13] Biohacking the human body.

[00:13:31] Pace of aging tests.

[00:19:14] Marathon training at 50.

[00:33:11] AI-driven health optimization.

[00:48:30] Fasting and carbohydrate cycling.

[00:57:45] Longevity and quality of life.

[01:02:14] Supplements and their effectiveness.

[01:06:12] Gene therapy and health optimization.

[01:12:56] Importance of exercise for health.

[01:16:54] Longevity and daily exercise.

[01:22:04] Bad science in health products.

[01:26:24] Get up and move.

[01:30:39] Free resources for healthy living.

Resources discussed: 

TrueDiagnostic’s DunedinPACE

Dave Pasco Official Website

Chapters

• 0:00 Teaser
• 1:24 Intro
• 6:27 Defying aging with technology
• 9:13 Biohacking the human body
• 13:31 Pace of aging tests
• 19:14 Marathon training at 50
• 20:49 Health food misconceptions
• 26:38 Caregiver stress impacts health
• 28:56 Mindset shift in running
• 33:11 AI-driven health optimization
• 35:15 Supplement dosing complexity
• 42:06 Testosterone and supplements
• 45:52 Testosterone and lifestyle habits
• 48:30 Fasting and carbohydrate cycling
• 51:08 Genetic data and AI integration
• 57:45 Longevity and quality of life
• 1:02:14 Supplements and their effectiveness
• 1:06:12 Gene therapy and health optimization
• 1:10:05 Importance of movement for health
• 1:12:56 Importance of exercise for health
• 1:16:54 Longevity and daily exercise
• 1:22:04 Bad science in health products
• 1:26:24 Get up and move
• 1:30:39 Free resources for healthy living

Transcript

Dave Pascoe:
Are you a hacker?

SPEAKER_03: Yeah.

Dave Pascoe: Oh, yeah. I was one of the original hackers when I was in high school. I don't want to name the automotive manufacturer, but one of the big three. I was all over their network. Later in my life, I ended up as a contractor working on their network security. I realized that, you know, a human body, our body, is just a very, very complex machine. And I thought, wow, if I'm collecting all of this data for this operating system or this database or this application, and I'm figuring out how it's performing and being able to tweak all these little nerd knobs, basically, to get more performance out of them, why in the world are we not doing something like that for the human body? We don't stop exercising because we get old. We get old because we stop exercising. As cells divide, these telomeres get shorter and shorter and shorter. And there's an actual limit to how long we can live right now. And assuming that I was doing everything correctly, I wanted to take this test. I believed that it was going to tell me I had the telomeres of a 20-year-old at age 50. So I took the test, I got the results back, and I was shocked. It said I had the telomeres of a 68-year-old. Oh my gosh.

Andres Preschel: Hello and welcome back to the NeuroPhysio podcast. I'm your host Andres Bruchel, helping you discover your science to optimize your life. Today's guest is my friend Dave Pascoe. We crossed paths and met at the Austin Health Optimization Summit. We were introduced by Simland, which was just absolutely appropriate between two biohackers and I mean, Dave is an incredible guy. He's literally defying aging unlike anybody else. He's the former leader of the True Diagnostics anti-aging leaderboard. And I mean, he's just an absolute wealth of knowledge. And I was very humbled when he mentioned in Austin that he's a fan of my podcast. I mean, Jesus, you know, he's someone that I look up to and that I'm so inspired by and for him to be a fan of this show is just a huge compliment to what we're able to accomplish with the incredible guests that we bring on here and obviously the incredible listeners like yourself that make this show possible. So, thanks to Dave for joining us, thank you for watching, and I highly recommend, before you tune into the show, or while you're tuning in, to visit Dave's website. It's DavePascoe.net. DavePasco.net. I mean it is just an extraordinary encyclopedia. Basically everything he's done, everything he's doing, and he's going to do as it pertains to his health, his performance, and his longevity. I mean everything from daily routines and meal plans to his personal guides on sprouting, microgreen, suburban gardening, cookware, his supplements lists, his latest experimentation, his testing and results. I mean, it's just incredibly, incredibly valuable. And, you know, there's something to say about folks that don't just practice what they preach, but actually measure every step that they take. That really is just so impressive. Like, I try my best to do something like this through my podcast and my Instagram blog, but this is very, very, very well done. So, anyway, I recommend that you check this out, tune in, and I'm confident that there's something valuable that you're going to gain. Even with just, I don't know, one or two minutes that you spend on a site, I guarantee you're going to learn something. It's unbelievable. So anyway, thanks again to Dave for joining us. We're going to do a part two of this episode in the next few days, where we're going to focus specifically on the content on his website and go a little more in depth on his results. Today's show is a little more about his overwhelming beliefs around aging, how he's using AI to create everything from systems and further optimizations and iterating a supplement stack and much more. Some of our thoughts on the anti-aging protocols of Brian Johnson and like-minded people and much more. It's a fascinating episode and it's a great intro to Dave. Very comprehensive and I can't wait to have it back for a part two. So hopefully you'll join us for this podcast and for that one. So stay tuned and I'll see you on the other side. All right, we're back. We're here with Dave Pascoe, and we're going to jump into a fun episode on AI-driven health optimization, defying age and lowering our rate of aging, and potentially bashing on some influencers and low-tier science. So Dave, welcome to the show, man. It's great to have you. It's really great to be here. I've been a fan for a very, very long time. That's unbelievable. I know we met at the health conference in Austin, the Health Optimization Summit, and you came up to me and mentioned that, and you made my day, man. It's great to have someone like you, someone who is just an absolute pioneer in the longevity and anti-aging scene, give me that little confidence boost there. So I appreciate the compliment. Thank you so much.

Dave Pascoe: And it was fun that we got to have Sim Land actually do the introduction for us.

Andres Preschel: That was really cool. That was really cool. For those who know who Sim Land is, yeah, great guy. He's been on the show before. He's a mutual friend of ours. And that was a proper biohacker introduction right there.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

Andres Preschel: That was cool, man. Well, why don't we start with why? Like I said, you're an absolute pioneer. You're a legend here in the biohacking space. And you simply defy aging. So why don't we start with maybe your age and why, without being too intrusive. And tell us a little bit about why you do what you do, man.

SPEAKER_00: Well, let's see, what's today? Today's Monday? Today's Monday. Turning 63 on Thursday, so.

Andres Preschel: Incredible.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. Wow, look at that. Coming fast.

Andres Preschel: Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

Andres Preschel: So you're a Leo.

Dave Pascoe: Yes, sir. Right on the cusp. Nice. Almost Virgo. Yeah.

Andres Preschel: Nice, there you go. Love it. Love it. And I know you have a background in, if I'm not mistaken, in security engineering?

Dave Pascoe: Yes, I was a network security architect and engineer. I've done, wow, I've done programming pretty much all my life. My very first programming language I learned in 1977, which I know sounds like a long time ago for a lot of people that might not have even been born then. But yeah, I've done application development. I've done database performance and tuning, application performance and tuning. Yeah, I've done so many different things in my career, but all very technical stuff.

Andres Preschel: Are you a hacker? Not a biohacker, but a hacker? Yeah.

Dave Pascoe: Oh, yeah. I was one of the original hackers when I was in high school. Are you serious? Oh, yeah, I'm dead serious. I hacked into our county's computer system. I could have changed any grade of any student in the county. Are you serious?

Andres Preschel: No way.

Dave Pascoe: Dead serious. Yeah. I hacked into, and I don't, I don't want to name the automotive manufacturer, but one of the big three, I was all over their network. Um, prior to later in my life, I ended up, uh, as a contractor working on their network security, which was actually two of the big three. I worked on their network security. So.

Andres Preschel: What do they call it, a white hat hacker? Is that how it goes?

Dave Pascoe: The good guys, yeah. The good guys, right? The white hats, the bad guys, the black hats. When I was in high school, I wasn't really sure which hat I wanted to wear. I shouldn't say that. No, I was always wanted to be a good guy. I might not have always done good guy things when I was first learning, but it was just fun. And that's why I decided to get into that as a living. Just when I thought, if it's this easy to be walking through corporate networks, this, it shouldn't be, you know, somebody needs to be out there locking this stuff down. And I just thought, wow, what a great profession that would be.

Andres Preschel: Wow. You almost look like you would rock one of those anonymous masks. You know what I mean? That's funny. Do you own one of those, to be honest?

Dave Pascoe: I don't, but maybe I should get one. I think I'd probably look a lot better.

Andres Preschel: Awesome. So tell us, how did you make the transition from being a security engineer and hacker to an age-defying biohacker?

Dave Pascoe: It's funny that, you know, at some point during my stint, you know, doing database performance and tuning and application performance tuning, even operating system performance tuning, I realized that, you know, a human body, our body, is just a very, very complex machine. And I thought, wow, if I'm collecting all of this data for this operating system or this database or this application, and I'm figuring out how it's performing and being able to tweak all these little nerd knobs, basically, to get more performance out of them, why in the world are we not doing something like that for the human body? And so that was decades ago. We're probably talking 30 years ago that I came to that realization. The problem was 30 years ago, you couldn't really get blood tests. There was no at home consumer labs that you could do. I tried going to my doctor and asking for blood tests, but 30 years ago, and maybe even still the same, not even maybe, definitely still the same today. If you go to see your doctor and ask for a blood test, they're typically going to just shake their head and say, no. Wait for your annual physical.

Andres Preschel: We'll cover maybe 30 biomarkers.

Dave Pascoe: Right. If that, yeah, you're really, and if they're going to, you know, look at testosterone or any hormones, you're very lucky. It's usually the basic, you know, CBC, CMP panels. Yeah. Yep. And so I told my doctor, I wanted to, you know, my testosterone, I wanted to look at my estradiol, my estrogen. And he started laughing at me. He's like, if men don't have those, women have estrogen and estradiol. And he laughed me out of his office. Are you serious? Yeah, yeah. And I'm stunned as I'm leaving his office, like, OK, this is my doctor. He's a professional. He's been to medical school. How does he not know that men have these things, too? But that was kind of typical for the profession. Hopefully, it's not still today. I know there's a lot more functional medicine doctors out there now that really understand hormones. But the general GP, maybe not.

Andres Preschel: And that's, I mean, that's obviously that's the first line of defense for most people, but if they don't do comprehensive testing and they don't detect anything beyond the normal range, which is also, you know, a controversial topic, then how can they make recommendations on how we're supposed to move forward or what specialists we should or shouldn't see, you know? So I think inevitably that's how A lot of biohackers harness their passion for applied science and health optimization is they realize that they can't do, they can't get that comprehensive testing from their standard, you know, medical practice. So you have to go out of their way. You have to take that into their own hands and boom, you know, now you have biohackers and obviously there, there's such thing as overdoing it and there's such thing as making it or giving yourself the impression or others the impression that you have it all figured out that has its own line of, you know, uh, issues and hazards and risks. But, uh, it seems like you found a good blend of both worlds. So, you know, over the years, how have you kind of. done your own thing and figure it out on your own while simultaneously, you know, playing it safe, working with experts, you know, how did you find that, that middle ground?

Dave Pascoe: It's always been a challenge. Um, I will try to, you know, take things that I'm looking to do and pass that by somebody that knows more than me. If it's somebody that I truly believe does know more than me, because like I said, it's a lot of the general doctors don't seem to know that stuff. Otherwise, I'd just have done my own research, just looked up everything I possibly could, you know, PubMed and Googling things and trying to learn about various markers and medicine, just learning how the body works at a cellular level.

Andres Preschel: And what are some of the, what's some of the feedback you've gotten from your testing that has shown you that you're in fact on the right track?

Dave Pascoe: So different epigenetic age tests as I was going through my iterations of, say, cleaning up my personal care products, nailing down my exercise, getting my sleep tuned in, you know, I could see that the pace of aging score, you know, was getting younger and younger at each iteration. And then when I finally cut out all processed food, that's when I ended up with my lowest score that coincidentally beat the millionaire who started the Rejuvenation Olympics contest. And I was beating him then for that entire year of 2023.

Andres Preschel: without a team of scientists who are tens of millions of dollars spent each year trying to accomplish this. So for those who don't, yeah, we'll get into that. But for those who don't know, what is the pace of aging tests and how do those Olympics work?

Dave Pascoe: So there's a company called True Diagnostic, and they do epigenetic age testing and a pace of age testing. It's based on the Dunedin pace. That's the name of the algorithm. It's based off of, I believe it's a study of a town of Dunedin, New Zealand, if I'm not getting that incorrect. I think it was like a 50 to 70 year follow-up study of this population. Hopefully, are you looking this up right now? You can validate. Yeah, yeah. I think something not true. But yeah, through the course of that population study, they believed that the slowest pace of aging that one could possibly have was 0.65 at that time. And my pace of aging at that point was 0.66. So we thought that was pretty close to the best you could potentially get. Now these days, I think people have found some really weird hacks. They're probably doing some supplements that are modifying their methylation to make the scores look better. And so there's people with ridiculously low scores, like 0.3 something. It makes me wonder how much you can really trust in that at that point.

Andres Preschel: Mm-hmm. And so you said your score is around 0.65.

Dave Pascoe: Yeah, mine was 0.66. That was my best apogenetic age test.

Andres Preschel: So technically speaking, you should be celebrating your birthday every 18 months or so?

Dave Pascoe: That's about right. Yeah.

Andres Preschel: Yeah.

Dave Pascoe: That's nice.

Andres Preschel: Awesome. And in the process of… you know, unlocking lower biological age, what were some of the stepping stones that you feel had the biggest overall impact? I know you mentioned them briefly just now, you know, the processed foods and the sleep, but can you maybe elaborate on exactly what that looked like? What were you doing before and what changes did you make? And how did you gain the feedback outside of that test that assured you that you're making the right changes?

Dave Pascoe: Well, I could see in my blood work, too, that things were improving, you know, just because I was eating cleaner. I was always doing lots of fruit and vegetables, grass-fed beef, things of that nature, but… You know, like anybody else, I was busy. I was working on remodeling my house, so I didn't always have time to cook. So there were times I would, you know, stop at Taco Bell or get a pizza delivered, you know, just quick stuff like that. Good food. I mean, tastes great, but I didn't realize What a difference it made once I quit doing that completely. And that's when my pace of aging changed drastically. I was no longer doing anything that came in a bag or a box, nothing that had an ingredients label. You know, everything was just, we're talking about like fruit, vegetables, meat, um, legumes, nuts, seeds, mushrooms, just all natural foods. Nothing that was created.

Andres Preschel: Right. So sticking to the periphery of the grocery store, you know, that whole food doesn't need to market itself. It just is what it is. And obviously so many of us are out of touch with that. And we are victims of, we fall victim to the trillions of dollars that are dumped into marketing these processed foods. It's interesting. I don't know if you're familiar with the ANOVA classification for food processing. But basically it's a way to classify the different degrees of processing that, you know, food undergoes. And I think once you get to like a NOVA level three or four, the higher grades of food processing, one of the characteristics of these foods is that they are marketed as healthy, meaning there's a lot of greenwashing. They are, you have, you know, cholesterol free or low fat on the label. Basically they, they have to go out of their way to make these health claims to appear healthy. Otherwise it just looks like a lump of garbage. You know, but so, so people see that and I think just knowing that, that kind of knowledge gives you the awareness that you need when you enter a grocery store that you're being exploited. You know, the reward mechanisms in your brain are being exploited. Whereas the food that's really good for you, there's nothing to say about it. It just is what it is. Um, so that's a, you know, uh, thank you for sharing. And I want to know specifically, when did you start incorporating this? You know, as you said, you're 63 years old. When did you have this sort of like wake up call? I understand your passion stemmed from the parallels that you drew between systems engineering. And health. But when did that passion ignite that real desire to turn things around? And, uh, yeah, about how long ago was that?

Dave Pascoe: when I found out that I wasn't doing everything correctly like I thought it was. It was around 2012. I was training for my first marathon. I was just turning 50. And I thought, oh, wow, starting a marathon at 50. But that was a little out there. But everybody, including my parents, told me I was nuts, told me I couldn't do that. And I'm like, why? Why not? The question like you can't even just spurred me on to make me want to give it a shot. And so I was doing, I was doing my marathon training. Um, yeah, again, I thought I was doing everything right. I thought I was sleeping okay. I thought I was eating good. I was still doing processed food at the time, but I was eating good, but I considered good processed food. Things from the hell. What's good processed food? Well, I mean, if you walk around your health food store today, most of that stuff is crap, I hate to say. I mean, what I know now is that a lot of that stuff has canola oil in it, which is not a great oil. It's high in sugar or in sugar alcohols, which again, still aren't good for you. I don't care if it's not real sugar. You know, maybe it might be low caloric, caloric, or it might even be low glycemic. It's still not good for you. So we just like try to make things in different shades of healthy. All right. Now I lost my train of thought.

Andres Preschel: I'll tell you what, I want to expand there. So I like that you're saying it's not good for you. So you're not saying that it's bad for you. You know, you're saying it's not good for you. That's an important distinction to make. You know, I think there's a lot of fear mongering in the health optimization, biohacking, longevity realm around certain food types. And obviously some foods you could say are bad for you, like alcohol, just from a molecular, energetic, caloric density, toxin perspective, it's bad for you, right? I was even doing a cup of wine every night. What was that?

Dave Pascoe: I was doing a glass of wine with dinner every night too, just because I'd heard that was healthy.

Andres Preschel: Yeah, I mean, every once in a while, I think a glass of red wine with people that you love can be healthy. It can have its mental and social benefits, but I think overall, I think it's generally overdone. But anyway, I think it's an important distinction. It's not like these sugar alcohols and stuff are bad for you. I guess they could be. We don't have enough research to support the fact that they are, but they're not good for you.

Dave Pascoe: I don't think they're friendly to our microbiome. And I think there's ways the microbiome reacts to them as if they're still sugar. I mean, it still seems to feed the same gut bacteria that make you crave sugar. And once you cut all those out, your cravings for sugar goes away. It takes about two weeks, I've found. But once you eliminate all those, you don't have those cravings for sugar or carbs like you did before.

Andres Preschel: For sure. And so when you were preparing for this marathon that everyone told you you couldn't do, did you start to face some kind of issue with your health that inspired you to take a deeper dive?

Dave Pascoe: Well, it was because I was curious. I was trying to listen to things about human optimization and better performance, better run performance. And I found a guy who had a blog at the time by the name of Ben Greenfield. Probably heard of him. He's a little more well-known now than he was back then. But I was reading his blogs, which were really, really long. And then I found out he had a podcast and I'm not sure what year that started, but I began listening to that because he had a lot of tips on, you know, human performance. And so I was trying to, trying to do everything that, you know, he said would help as far as I know, he was a triathlete. So running was all I was doing and I just wanted to get the best out of it that I could. And I heard, I think I'm pretty sure it was from him, if not some other blog or podcast at the time, about a thing called telomeres, about those being, you can look at them like the little cap on the end of your shoelace that keeps your shoelace from unraveling. It's kind of something like that. It's a marker at the end of your chromosomes that delineate where like say one gene begins and another one ends. And apparently as cells divide, these telomeres get shorter and shorter and shorter. And there's an actual limit to how long we can live right now, which is about 120 years. And it's called the Hayflick limit. And it was discovered by a Dr. Hayflick. And I heard about this test for telomeres, and assuming that I was doing everything correctly, I wanted to take this test because I believed that it was going to tell me I had the telomeres of a 20-year-old at age 50. So I took the test, they got the results back, and I was shocked. They said I had the telomeres of a 68-year-old. Oh my gosh, it was 50. I'm like, Whoa, wait a minute. My, my life is going to be shorter than expected. Like, okay, what the heck? I mean, I'm healthy. I'm doing all the healthy stuff. So why am I going to die sooner? You know, apparently according to the, the knowledge at the time, why am I going to die so much sooner? This doesn't compute. So I took a consult with the company. They don't exist anymore, but, um, The first thing they asked me was about my life. I knew that, you know, diet, sleep, exercise, I knew those things had a lot to do with, you know, lifestyle. So that's what I started talking about. And they're like, no, no, no, we want to hear what your everyday life is like. I thought, okay, it's kind of weird. I don't know why this has anything to do with anything, but all right, I'll play along. And so I started explaining that, okay, I'm a network security architect and engineer. My job is really stressful. If we have a breach or I'm in the middle of doing upgrades to firewalls, you know, worldwide, I've worked 36 hours at a stretch before, you know, just to get everything done or to get everything, you know, locked back down again. So yeah, it's extremely stressful. I'm training for my first marathon. Oh yeah, I do P90X as a workout. And for anybody who's not familiar with that, that's a really extreme workout program from the, I don't know what year, the 90s maybe.

Andres Preschel: That's the OG. I remember doing P90X with my dad back when he first started his fitness journey. I'm talking like at least 15 years ago.

Dave Pascoe: I'm still doing that today.

Andres Preschel: No way. Muscle confusion, huh? Exactly.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

Andres Preschel: He's the man. That guy, I mean, that guy crushed it. That guy was like, he's still in great shape. Oh, for sure. But I mean, way ahead of the game, just from an entrepreneurship, you know, niche fitness perspective, just absolutely legendary guy.

Dave Pascoe: I watched the stuff he's still doing today on Instagram, and I'm just blown away.

Andres Preschel: Really? Yeah. Yeah. That guy is really impressive. So anyway, you started doing P90X.

Dave Pascoe: And then I told him, oh yeah, and by the way, I'm also the sole caretaker for my parents, both my parents. They both came down with cancer at the same time, and so I moved back from North Carolina to Michigan to take care of them. And they're like, whoa, whoa, okay, wait. We've seen short telomeres before in people that are like type A personalities, have really stressful jobs. We've seen it in endurance athletes who we have put on very high miles and are kind of beating their bodies up. And we've seen it in the caretaker of elderly parents. And you, my friend, you have the trifecta going on. You are killing yourself with stress. And I'm like, whoa, stress. I hadn't considered that. And they said, you are just basically going from one stress to the next stress to the next stress. And I thought, wow, yeah, it's true. I wasn't thinking of it in that way, but I was thinking of, you know, each, each thing that I did was sort of an escape from the other. Oh, wow. And so they recommended I begin doing things like, you know, yoga and meditation, which make me laugh because those are things I used to do all the time. But because I got busy with all those other things, those fell on the floor. So I had to start doing more yoga and meditation, bring that back into my life again. Try to find some bliss and find ways to come down from the stress before I went from one thing to the next thing to the next thing. And change my mindset about them. Running, for example. I hated running. I was only doing this marathon training because, you know, our church was getting people together to raise money to build wells in Africa for World Vision. And I thought the cause was a great cause. And it was a good opportunity for me to learn from established marathon runners of how to do marathon running and how to fuel, how to train. It was just a great opportunity all the way around. But the process of running itself, I hated because I'm not a very good runner. I run very slow. I run like a brick. I'm not graceful at all. So I had to change the way I looked at running it. Like, for example, I was running by a hospital one day and looked up at the hospital windows. And I imagined for a second that I was a person that was in one of those hospital beds. Right. You're, you're stuck there and you're in bed, something seriously wrong with you. And you're gazing out the window cause you have nothing else to do. And you see this guy that's out running on the road and you think, wow, I wish I could be that guy. And then it occurs to me, I am that guy. I don't have to run. I get to run. Wow. I am so blessed that I get to do this. And it's just now it's a complete mind shift.

Andres Preschel: Wow. Well, that's, um, that's, that's very moving. And I can resonate with this in the sense that I too hate running. And I recently started a, a sprint club. And the other day we were standing out there on a Saturday at 9am in the hot sun, Miami. And I actually said a word for word, exactly what you said. I told my friends, I said, guys, we don't have to be here. And I paused for a second, and they all looked at each other, they're like, what is this guy talking about? And I'm like, I looked at them, I locked eyes with them, and I'm like, hey, we get to be here. This is an opportunity to do something that most people can't do, that is objectively helping us to get stronger, to get wiser, and to build this brotherhood. And it's incredible that, you know, we share this insight and that it's a privilege to get to stress your body in a way that so many people across the world, you know, don't get the chance to do. And exercise truly is a privilege, you know, and like they, as it's often said, you know, you don't have, you don't know what you have until it's gone. And I have my, one of my top mentors, his name is Dr. Wes Smith. He's the head of nutrition and physiology at the University of Miami. At the footer of every email, he's got a quote that goes, We don't stop exercising because we get old, we get old because we stop exercising. Bingo. You know? Yes. You're living proof of that, man. So running, P90X, and is that still within your arsenal? Are those your heavy hitters?

Dave Pascoe: Yeah. In fact, I'm training for a half marathon right now. Oh, sweet. Only because, um, last year my half marathon was going to be, uh, I think it was going to be my last one. It's just, it's too many miles. It's kind of hard to put on the body.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

Dave Pascoe: I would love to do maybe five. to eight miles a day. But, you know, much beyond that is, yeah, it's too much. But last year, about two weeks before the marathon, I got COVID. And so I had to defer my marathon to this year. So now I'm having to go through all the training again. And I don't mind. I still run terribly. I'm slow, but I don't hate it. I'm not out there hating every minute of it. I'm actually kind of enjoying it now.

Andres Preschel: Wow, that's incredible. I admire you. I want to start, at some point, distance running. I have one of those type two fastest fivers. I've always been a sprinter, but I'll tell you what, I know that there's a lot to gain, mostly mentally on the other side of that. So I admire you staying committed and really becoming a runner through this process. That's amazing.

Dave Pascoe: Well, you know, it's funny because I think that you were on the right track of being a sprinter. I was a sprinter before I started doing marathon training. I don't know why I heard that sprinting was really good for you. And now I've heard the reason why it's like high intensity interval training. It's very good for you. Probably much better than endurance running as far as longevity is concerned. And it's better for your VO2 max too.

Andres Preschel: Yeah, it's great for VO2max. That's, it's, that's the thing. It's so underrated. I mean, sprinting is, you can do it anywhere you want and it's extremely functional, evolutionarily consistent with survival and thriving as a species and it increases your VO2max. Like everybody should be sprinting.

Dave Pascoe: It's far more practical too. I mean, how often in life are you going to have to run 26 miles to either chase somebody or get away from somebody?

Andres Preschel: Yeah, but the mental calluses you build with long distance running are, that's what I really, that's impressive. So, that's incredible. I appreciate you sharing the story and calling that in for us. Why don't we do a little transition into this topic that I think you and I are both fascinated by. I'd love for our listeners to eavesdrop on this conversation between the two of us on AI-driven health optimization. You know, how are you using artificial technology, sorry, artificial intelligence to determine how you're going to live your life, what supplements you're going to take, where you're going to take them, etc. You know, to structure this health and performance system, how are you using artificial intelligence?

Dave Pascoe: Yeah, I've been working the last eight weeks feverishly. And when I say feverishly, I'm not kidding, because I'm very intense when it comes to analyzing things. And so basically from the time I wake up to the time I go to bed, I've been wasting my summer. I mean, it's been beautiful. And Michigan summers are so short, right? I should be outside and enjoying it, but no, I've been stuck inside on my computer because I just, I'm so obsessed. I've been working on a whole new supplement program using AI. I've always realized that the current supplement program I'm on, I designed it for simplicity, but I always knew that just by separating my supplements out into AM and PM supplements, it's not the most desirable because there's competition for absorption and mechanism of action with a lot of the supplements that I've been taking. So with the use of various AIs, I've been using Perplexity, CLAWD, GROK, and CHAT-GPT to analyze all of my supplements to try to figure out, you know, which ones are more sedative, which ones are more stimulative, to properly divide them into AM and PM type supplements, which ones need to be taken on an empty stomach, which ones need to be taken with food, which need to be taken with fat, and try to divide these up into into dosing schedules where they are not going to conflict with each other. And I didn't realize how big of an undertaking that would be because you have different minerals that need to be taken at different times because they'll conflict with each other. You know, polyphenols and catechins need to be taken at different times. Many things need to be taken away from other things just because of interactions. So it was way more complex than I had ever really imagined it was going to be. And there was no way in the world I would ever be able to do this if not for the development of artificial intelligence, thank God. And so perplexity was really good at giving me a lot of the data on individual supplements. Grok really wasn't very helpful at all, I hate to say. Claude was really good at assessing out different things that would conflict with each other, but Shad GPT outshined everything as far as being able to handle the complexity of the entire supplement stack and developing a schedule of when each thing should be taken. And originally I had, well, I shouldn't say I had, but the AI had developed 20 different dosing schedules throughout the day, which was just not practical at all. And so I had to go through and tell it, Hey, look, I need this down to maybe six or seven. And I know this isn't going to be completely optimal. There's going to be some, you know, things that I'm going to have to, you know, we're going to have to do that maybe aren't the best, but we need to get this down to something smaller and more doable. And so another few weeks of working on that, we finally have something that I keep, you know, keep running it through iteratively, and it's always nitpicking at certain little things, but finally have a dosing schedule. It's about seven different doses a day. With the major boluses still being, you know, for breakfast and dinner, but there will be some, like I have to take, I'm on a thyroid medication. I have to take that first thing in the morning on an empty stomach apart from everything. And then I'll have, you know, a pre-workout stack that I'll take before exercising. And then later after exercising, I'll have what I call breakfast. It really comes around noon though. And there's a good, a big stack there. And then there's a afternoon stack, there's a dinner stack, and then there's a bedtime stack. And so that's fairly workable. Now it's just a matter of implementing that, which is going to be kind of challenging as far as, you know, separating these things out into pill binders to make things easy. So I usually do about a month at a time in advance. Nice. And how many supplements are we talking? I was originally doing roughly 120. 120 different supplements. Yeah. Wow. It's lower than that. I don't know what the count now is because I did, I was able to eliminate a lot of different things using the AIs. I mean, I knew that there was some overlaps and things, but there were a few things that were complete overlaps that I was able to get rid of. There's some things that are similar. They're, um, but the complimentary. So I still kept those because they're going about the, the same, they're tackling the same problem, but from different pathways. So they were complimentary. So I kept those. Um, yeah. So that's where I'm at right now with, with that, but I'm also using AI and this is what I've transitioned into just yesterday. Actually two days ago, I'm using chat GPT to help me. to look at my entire full genome and to be able to glean any kind of information that I can get from health data. Now, I've used other tools. I've used Prometheus with my 23andMe and my Ancestry data, so I've gotten some really good information out of that. But I've had my full genome sequenced, and I wanted to run those through tools to get as much information as possible. For some reason, Prometheus is not letting me upload that. I think it's just because it's too large. ChatGPT can't action it because it's too large. And so I've had ChatGPT talking me through installing Ubuntu Linux under my Windows load and using various genetic tools to whittle this down to pieces that I can then upload into chat GPT so it can make determinations.

Andres Preschel: That's incredible. I think the only other person I've met that takes more supplements than you is Joe Cohen, the CEO of South Dakota Genetic Reports. Actually, it's funny. He just bought a place here in South Beach, so we're neighbors. I've been meaning to get him on the show. Technically, I had him on for a brief stint, but I want to go. He was living in Tel Aviv, yeah, in Israel. Yeah, for sure. Cool. And, and one of the questions that I have for him, and I have the same question for you is, you know, considering that you guys consume, you know, all whole foods and a wide variety of nutrients, do you feel like that can be redundant, um, to an extent, you know, for example, you mentioned how you were, you started 120 with the AI, you realized that there was some redundancy, uh, but have you brought, you know, food into the, into the mixture there and considered I didn't see there.

Dave Pascoe: That would probably be a next step. Although a lot of the supplements I take I don't know if they're complete overlaps with food. For example, yes, some are, because I know I'm taking things specifically for eye health. So, you know, the carotenoids, the zeaxanthins, astaxanthins, the lutein, the luteolin, you know, all the things for eye health I probably could get from food if I ate enough of the, you know, the colored fruits and vegetables. It's not always easy, though, to get enough of the colored fruits and vegetables. So the fact that I'm still taking these supplements, you know, it's just, it's covering my bases, basically. And just, again, it's supplemental. So it may be more than I need. I don't mind if I'm peeing that out because I have three genetic markers. for the same macular degeneration that my father had suffered from.

Andres Preschel: Right, so then you want to make sure you get a super physiological dose of these specific nutrients to prevent onset of issues that you're genetically predisposed for. Yeah.

Dave Pascoe: But then there's other supplements I'm taking. I'm taking a lot of things to increase testosterone, right? Such as? Well, boron I know is one, although I'm not taking that for testosterone. My cardiologist actually recommended that one for heart health. So, that's the reason why I was taking it. It was later I found out that, you know, it was helping testosterone quite a bit. I have a high sex hormone binding globulin, so I'm taking various things trying to, you know, eliminate, or not eliminate, but to lower that. I'm taking like alpha-ketoglutarate, which I'm probably not getting from my diet, right? I mean, so I'm taking a bunch of things that are not coming from diet. Probably more those things than that.

Andres Preschel: Right. For sure. Yeah. Definitely. And I know we were recently having a conversation in the DMs about high SHBG and I want to make sure that we cover that for the folks tuning in because you can have high testosterone, which I think most people would want, especially men. But if you have high SHBG, sex hormone binding globulin, you're free tea. spirals, you know, in the wrong way, out of control. So why don't you tell us a little bit about, you know, your impression of SHBG and what you're doing to lower it. I know you mentioned you're eating a little more frequently and I hadn't mentioned any more carbohydrates, but I'd love to understand how you think about SHBG and what you're doing about it.

Dave Pascoe: Well, when you mentioned that you were doing more carbs, that sort of lit a light bulb in my head. I have been very low carb for way too long. Yeah. And I've always known it's a problem, because when I get I'm very seasonal. When I'm in run training, I burn tons of muscle because I don't have any body fat. And then when run training is over, you know, during the winter is when I bulk back up again with muscle. And then I start that cycle all over again in the spring when it's time to start running. Not good, because at my age, it's so much harder to put muscle on as I keep getting older. So I don't want to keep doing that. I don't want to keep stripping muscle off. So I was going to begin fattening up anyway. And I don't care if I can't see my abs. It's great to walk around with a six pack and it's fun to show it off. But I don't mind if I cover those over a little bit just to be able to get more carbs to carry me through run season. But in doing that, yeah, I'm sure that I'm going to start seeing in my blood work, because I've only just started adding the carbs back in, I'm sure that my blood work is going to show me that, you know, free tea is getting higher because, you know, sex hormone, vitaglobulin is coming down. I was taking things like, I'm trying to think, stinging nettle, I think was one of the things I was taking. I think, you know what, that was for DHT.

Andres Preschel: There's another one, I think it was, was it calcium degluterate?

Dave Pascoe: I am taking calcium degluterate, but that's for estrogen, I thought, to get rid of excess.

Andres Preschel: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's for excess estrogen. Yeah. Well, I guess one of these cases, I think that was- And in addition. I think- Tongkat Ali? Yeah, exactly, that was it. Tongkat Ali, I was taking for high SHBG and boron, actually. Yeah. and even then my shpg didn't budge i think it was like at 60 now it's at 59 uh well last time i did a blood test was 69 59 but i have seen a pretty dramatic increase in my total and free t even though the shpg is high And I still think I'm under consuming carbs. And the way that I typically explain this to folks is, you know, I typically say something like, you know, testosterone is a hormone that does a lot. But I think overall, especially for men, is it reinforces and grows in proportion to lifestyle habits that are consistent with our reproductive capacity. So, you know, if we're getting stronger, if we're… And obviously it motivates reproduction and that increases libido, it increases confidence. You're a little more social, right? Like all these habits are linked to reproduction. And if you effectively manage stress, you see an increase in T and you increase your reproductive capacity. But if you have too much of a hormetic load of, you know, stress, So that could be physical, physiological, psychological, or the above. Then SHBG is going to shoot up and down regulate testosterone and make it less bioavailable to keep you from pursuing behaviors that are linked to reproduction because your body goes, well, we're stressed. Why would we try to reproduce when we're stressed? We can't afford to reproduce when we're stressed. And so you start to see a down regulation. And, you know, if you look at, here's the mistake that I think people like you and me tend to make because we're obviously, we know so much about health and we look at all these studies and a lot of these studies are done on disease populations, right? Like for example, the therapeutic benefits, like there's this thing as therapeutic ketosis for folks that are obese, that have type diabetes, right? They have these like saturated glycogen stores. They have over-consumed carbohydrate relative to how much they're spending. and now they interfere with insulin sensitivity, with leptin signaling, et cetera. That's a big issue. But if you look at us, we're on the polar opposite end of the spectrum, and in our case, doing the low carb, we're spending so much carbohydrates, the most efficient fuel source, that if we start arguing consuming, the relative stress load now is higher, and now your body's gonna go, well, we're too stressed to reproduce, let's tank T and increase SHBG to keep us from reproducing, but now all of a sudden we don't get the benefits that we're looking for in our training to begin with. So in my case, you know, I was definitely adopting a lot of the habits that I was recommending for, especially for the disease patients I was working with at the time. So I was doing like chronic intermittent fasting, low carb, even ketogenic some days. And man, I mean, my total T I think dropped down to as low as like, I don't know, 600, which for me is pretty low. You know, now I'm back over a thousand. And the biggest change that I made, as I was describing on our DMs, the number one change I made was I'm fasting way less and I'm eating way more carbohydrates. But it takes being active, you know. And, you know, if you're like, this is running, you need carbohydrates.

Dave Pascoe: You know, and I kick myself because I knew years ago that I should be cycling in and out of periods of ketosis or, you know, low carb. I should be cycling that, not doing it constantly. But it got to be a habit, right? And you know, I set these habits and these habits just kind of flow. And then I forgot all about cycling. Oh, and that's, that's the other thing that the AIs have helped me also with as far as my supplement program goes, which things need to be cycled and how often and when.

Andres Preschel: Oh, there you go. Wow. And how do you keep track of all the supplements? Do you have alarms built in throughout the day or throughout the week or is it on a calendar?

Dave Pascoe: Well, because this is all new and I haven't actually implemented this. I mean, I've just worked out the plan. The implementation is coming. It's probably going to start this week or next week. The plan would be, yes, to have some alarms that would go off that would tell me when to do what. Like the levothyroxine for the thyroid medication, first thing upon waking, right? And now at least an hour after that, I have to wait before I can take my pre-workout supplements. And then ultimately, you know, I want those good, you know, depending on the supplement, a good 30 to 60 minutes prior to working out so that they hit their peak right at, you know, while I'm doing the workout. And then once the workout's finished, yeah, then I guess it's time that I could do breakfast. And so, Ruth? So those things hopefully aren't really going to be regimented by the clock. They're going to be regimented by what I'm doing and when I finish, that type of thing. But then later in the day, there's going to be back to a clock schedule again of when dinner is because I want that many hours before bedtime because I want to have an empty stomach for bed. I sleep better. My sleep scores are always better when I'm not digesting. Plus, it's better for your longevity anyway, because when you're sleeping, that's when your body is doing all of its natural rejuvenation and repair. And if your body is instead diverting all those resources to digesting a big bowl of food, you're robbing yourself of that rejuvenation capability.

Andres Preschel: Yeah, it takes a lot of energy to digest food. It's pretty incredible. And then do you, how are you using AI to look at those like, you know, genetic SNPs and have you taken that into consideration for the supplements as well?

Dave Pascoe: Well, that was the plan. That's what I'm hoping to do with the genetic information. It's just been really difficult to take, you know, a full genome and get it into chat GPT. So that's why, you know, working in Linux to, with all these different genetic tools that I'm not familiar with, but I'm, you know, CHAT GPT is teaching me to pair those down so I can get things that are workable into CHAT GPT, and then hopefully it can give me some insights about, you know, the supplements that I'm taking based on my genetics.

Andres Preschel: For sure. I was trying to do something similar the other day and I found so far what's worked best for me is I built my own GPT for health optimization and I just added that genetic file and a word document for my geneticist as like the knowledge base with like recent blood work. I just found that that's easier because then it's like, for example, like I'll use this, I'll snap a picture of like a menu If I'm going to go out to eat somewhere and I'll say, hey, you know, based on my genetic profile and the kind of exercise I want to do today and how I feel, you know, what's the best item on the menu? And it'll take me through the different mechanisms and it'll tell me, oh, look, you have a histamine sensitivity or, oh, don't get this because you have MTHFR, you know, and it'll kind of piece things together. I found that's pretty good, but I found that the times that I was just like having a regular conversation or opening up a standard chat, if I uploaded all this data, I would get overwhelmed. And have you been using this to, to determine, um, you know, aside from supplements and, and, uh, you know, genetic considerations, have you tried using AI for anything like, you know, call it peak performance or flow states or productivity?

Dave Pascoe: Oh, I'm constantly using AI like all day, every day, asking it every question that comes to mind. But you targeted something I wanted to pinpoint on. You mentioned creating your own GPT. That's exactly what I'm working toward. I want to create a custom GPT and feed it all of this data. So I've got like, this genetic data I want to give it. I want to give it all of my supplements. I want to give it my blood labs monthly. I intend to give it my Aura, Whoop, and Garmin data daily if I can, hoping to write some scripts using the APIs that I can download that into like a Google Docs or Excel file that I keep out in Google Drive and then point ChatGPT to all of that data. So that at any time I have questions, it's got all of my physiology to look at and work with.

Andres Preschel: And as a former security architect, is there any concern about putting all this information into AI?

Dave Pascoe: You know, it's funny. I know a lot of people are very concerned about like their 23andMe data that now that it's been sold and what they're doing with that. I could care less. I'm basically a DNA whore. My DNA has been spread across so many different companies that I don't care. You know, what are they going to do with it? Right. I've never had children. So if they want to clone me, fine. You know, that's great. I don't know what damage they could possibly do with that other than to maybe deny me insurance and some future date because of some genetic abnormality that I have. But as far as I know, I don't have any genetic abnormality, so I'm really not worried about that as a possibility either.

Andres Preschel: You know, my dad's not the most controversial guy in the world, but he's a physician and he's pretty, pretty big on privacy. And he has a theory where, and this was years ago that he came up with this bizarre theory. He thinks that, you know, putting your genetic and DNA info online, sending it to these companies is a huge mistake because he says that, you know, the mafia, for example, or some kind of hacker can come in and sell that to insurance companies. Or they can understand, you know, if you're genetically fit to have an organ harvested to feed one of their, I don't know, one of their mafia bosses. I told my dad, I was like, listen, that may or may not be true, but in this day and age, if anybody really wants to get your data, your DNA, they'll find a way to do it. You know, like I'm not going to give up the opportunity to learn about predispositions that I have, which by the way, I, What I've learned about my DNA has just completely changed my life and I can prove it. Just knowing that I was predisposed to Parkinson's and the correlation between early onset Parkinson's and my history of ADD and taking Adderall and what happens to the substantia nigra, the basal ganglia, all this stuff. Are you kidding me? If I didn't know that, the opportunity cost would be greater than the potential risk I'm taking in putting my DNA out there. Um, that's obviously not everybody, but I think in general, if someone really wants your DNA or your data, they're going to get it somehow.

Dave Pascoe: Absolutely. I mean, having been in network security, I know that nothing is safe. Yeah. Wow. You know, a determined hacker is going to get in anywhere they want.

Andres Preschel: Wow. So what's the, what's the best that we can do to protect our, I mean, I guess we can't, but if we wanted to have some kind of protection, what should we do?

Dave Pascoe: Oh, some kind of protection? I mean, there's a lot. I mean, many, many layers of protection. Sure. You know, it's funny because one of the criticisms I hear about my supplement program, or at least my whole program, is that I do everything, right? They're like, this guy isn't strategic at all. He just does everything. And I'm like, duh, of course you have to do everything because it's your weakest link. Whether you're talking about your health or whether you're talking about securing a network, it's the one weakest point that somebody is going to find and exploit. That's the thing that's going to take you down. So if you don't account for every single potential possibility, Something's going to get you and something's always going to get you, right? I mean, there's really, it's no avoiding that in life, right? You're going to die eventually, regardless of this whole don't die movement. Until such a time as somebody develops a way that can make us live forever. But that doesn't exist today. And there's absolutely nothing that we can do right now. that will make us live forever. All the supplements, all the diet, all the exercise. I mean, it'll make us live healthy until the day that we drop, but it's not gonna make us live forever.

Andres Preschel: I imagine that your pursuit of longevity isn't so much about wanting to extend your lifespan for the sake of more moments, but it definitely, I'm sure it has something to do with improving the quality of this present moment, right? These efforts that we make to live longer I guess in some way are supposed to improve our quality of life now. Do you find that that is certainly the case? You know, as you incorporate the habits and the systems that theoretically help you live longer, do you feel better in the present moment every single time you do?

Dave Pascoe: Oh, absolutely. I feel better and more capable today than I did in my 30s. No way. Yeah. Seriously. Well, in my 30s, I wasn't in great shape, but I mean, I thought I was, but apparently I wasn't. I wasn't eating very good at all, kind of eating crab. So I went from eating really healthy as a kid to 30s where I thought diet didn't seem to matter and then waking up about in my 40s and figuring out, okay, that was dumb. Let's go back to what I was doing as a kid because that makes more sense. And so, yeah, I noticed it in my run performance. I noticed it in my P90X workouts. Just in every way, I've been getting better and better. And even as a kid, I was watching people as they got older and trying to figure out, like, why are some people aging really well and other people are aging terribly? And I could see the patterns of things that, you know, the healthy people were doing and unhealthy people were doing. I saw, you know, even going through high school, I kind of used all of my high school friends as sort of experiments in my own mind, watching what they were doing and knowing.

Andres Preschel: I hope this was like a single blind experiment at least. I hope they didn't know they were being studied for better or for worse.

Dave Pascoe: Nobody ever knew they were being studied, no. But I observe everyone. As a kid I had so many questions and my parents had no patience for questions whatsoever. My dad especially would always tell me my questions were stupid and tell me to shut up. And so I thought that I was stupid. I mean, I really did. I thought, why is it that every time I ask one of these questions, which I thought was a very profound question, and now looking back as an adult, I realize, yeah, it was a very profound question. It's just that my dad didn't know the answers to them. So it was annoying to him because he couldn't answer those questions, right? But him telling me I was stupid, I believed I was stupid. And so I thought, why is it that everybody else in the world seems to get this and I don't? So not being able to get answers, I had to just observe everyone around me and say, all right, so what are they doing and what should I be doing? And so every adult was an experiment to me or a teacher to me, just by observation. And so watching those really old people that were very vibrant, I saw that they weren't drinking lots of alcohol. They were getting good sleep. They were eating good food. I would see people like, you know, in their thirties and forties that were just completely burnt out, you know, look like crap, felt like crap. And they were heavy partiers, heavy drinkers, you know, didn't sleep very well, constantly doing alcohol, smoking. It was obvious. And it wasn't like we didn't know those things. You know, the warnings were out there. Everybody knows that those things were bad, but for some reason people just assume, oh, it's not going to happen to me. So they just do it anyway. And so I observed those people in high school, knowing full well that those people that were smoking and doing the heavy partying and drinking, you know, not sleeping, we're going to age faster. And the reunions have proved that out. Very true.

Andres Preschel: Wow. And, and, um, who would you say you observe and admire today? You know, who are the people that you look up to today?

SPEAKER_00: That's a great question. Hmm.

Dave Pascoe: There's really not a lot I hate to say. Um, I mean, there are a lot of people in the biohacking space that I'm impressed by. You know, they definitely know the stuff. I don't know if they're necessarily living what they know. I mean, it's funny cause I listened to a lot of gerontologists and they talk about, you know, what's, what's healthy and what isn't. And I don't always see them practicing it. Hmm.

Andres Preschel: Why do you think that is?

Dave Pascoe: Because many of them will flat out say, we don't know for certain if this particular supplement is good because the studies haven't been done. And I'm thinking, well, why wait? If the supplement's not going to hurt you, why not take it and try it and see what it's going to do for you? Now, Matt Kaeberlein, for example, smart guy, really great guy. I met him recently, but I didn't really like his Out to Span podcast. He is, he's a longevity researcher. He recently started doing TRT. And the guy looks phenomenal. He looks amazing. I mean, when I saw him in person, I didn't even realize it was, I mean, I thought, I didn't know it was him. He passed me by in the hallway. He got like maybe 30 feet away and I was like, Matt? And he stopped and turned around and he came back. And I'm like, holy crap, because his hair looked amazing. His skin was great. He was jacked. I mean, just total transformation. So I was very pleased that here's a guy that's, you know, finally starting to listen to some of his own advice basically and taking it. But not all of them do that. I don't know why. Wow.

Andres Preschel: That's, that's really something to think about. but they're waiting for a study to prove to them that something works before they'll try it. Right, the hardcore scientists. Yeah, they're almost, I mean, again, this isn't, I really hate it. This has such a negative remark or connotation, but it's just the reality. They're almost too careful. And I think being too careful is dangerous.

Dave Pascoe: Yeah. I mean, it goes both ways, right? Being not careful enough can be dangerous to your health.

Andres Preschel: Definitely, there's a fine line.

Dave Pascoe: Yeah, there's just so many people doing gene therapies right now.

Andres Preschel: Yeah, to me, that's super sketchy. Yeah. And I would never, I would never. Very sketchy.

Dave Pascoe: It's been offered to me. The same people that, you know, offered it to that millionaire, who I keep not mentioning, that went off to this private island and got his gene therapy. It's been offered to me as well. And I told the guys, look, I appreciate it, and I'm going to pass it this time, only because right now I don't need phallostatin gene therapy. I'm still capable of building muscle on my own. When I get to the point where I can't, yeah, then maybe phallostatin would be the way for me to go. But I would like to give it at least five or 10 more years. I want to see how the people that have taken it now fare down the road. And, you know, I'm starting to hear rumblings through other podcasts that some of the people that have done it haven't always had the best of experiences, even though… Really? Yeah. Even though most of what we're hearing is all good, there's some rumblings that there's some stuff that's questionable. What can happen? Well, now I heard recently on the Optus Band podcast that Matt Camberland was talking about that somebody had some, I would be taking this quote out of context, but somebody had a very negative response to it. And that's about like all I really know.

Andres Preschel: Man, that's sketchy because it's not like you can just hit the undo button on that. Yeah, right. That's pretty terrifying. It makes you wonder.

Dave Pascoe: No, sure, there's a lot of great gene therapies coming down the road that I'm really excited about. No, for sure. There's TERT, you know, for the telomerase activator, which would be wonderful. I'm still working on lengthening mine. But, you know, there's all kinds of great stuff. And Liz Parrish, if you're familiar with her, she's had most of them already. So she's doing great. She looks phenomenal when you see her in person. So, I mean, that's given me lots of hope that gene therapy, you know, down the road would be great.

Andres Preschel: Yeah. You know, I mean, I think you can identify with what I'm about to say. I feel like it's great that we have access to those options. Obviously they're not the most efficacious, at least, at least not yet. The safest, almost efficacious, at least not yet. But I feel like they often distract us from the necessary effort and knowledge and wisdom we need to gain. When it comes to mastering the fundamentals that are going to do most of that work for us, you know, just because that option is there. I feel like it's almost like it's, it's similar to like, um, these GLP ones, like Ozempic and semaglutide, they almost like, and again, I know this is I'm, I'm flirting with the borders of controversy here. It's almost like when we know that we have the option to do the GLP ones or the gastric sleeve or liposuction, like people. almost like they have it in the back of their heads and they kind of justify their behaviors or their, their lack of motivation to enable the, the, the, the, the real fundamental habits that are going to help them prevent something like that, or get most of the way there to call it optimal health, right. Being in, you know, great mental, physical shape. Um, and that's, and that's a problem, you know, because by the time that they start pursuing these outlets, now they're in a danger zone. And that danger zone can have some really serious consequences.

Dave Pascoe: People want the cheat code. People don't want to put in the work. They just want to take a pill instead of exercising. Yeah, my dad was that way. I mean, you hear from like Dave Asprey, he wants to do the least possible, you know, that he needs to do sleep wise, you know, exercise wise, whatever, if he can hack it. So in his case, a hack is a shortcut. In my case, I look at hacking as just a way to optimize what you're going to do naturally and go above and beyond what you can do naturally. I talked about this at Radfest, but I know there's now peptides that people can take that supposedly simulates exercise. So these peptides will give you the metabolites that exercise will produce. And people are thinking, well, that's great. That's exactly what I've been waiting for, because I just want to sit around. I don't want to do exercise. I want to take a pill or do an injection. And that will be my exercise. That will take the place of it. But what people don't understand is that's not all exercise does. That's not all exercise gives us. And I explained to the crowd, which actually got applause, which really surprised me, was that our cells are living creatures, right? And as all living creatures, they have to eat and they have to excrete their waste. So, you know, the nutrition part is pretty easy, you know, as we eat and digest food, it goes through our bloodstream, follows all these tiny little capillaries that go to every single cell in our body, and it deposits these nutrients into the interstitial fluid around the cells, and then the cells, you know, uptake through their membrane whatever they need. Great, you know, that's fantastic. But now on the other side, these cells are going to produce waste. They're also going to produce signaling molecules, you know, that they communicate to all the other cells in the body with, right? And they excrete these out their cellular membrane into that same interstitial fluid. But now, you know, we don't have a pump like a heart pumps blood to bring nutrients in. We don't have a pump that takes waste away. The only way that, you know, the interstitial fluid moves and the lymphatic system moves is either through massage or muscle movement. Okay, so if we're not moving every muscle in our body, you know, all day long, every day, then the cells in that area are just stewing in their own waste, right? Which is pretty gross when you think about it. And that's why, you know, we think that we're doing our elderly grandparents a favor when they're getting to that age where we don't think they should be living alone anymore. And we tell them, okay, it's time to sell the house. You're gonna come move in with us. You're gonna live with us now. We think that's a great thing, but in reality, we're not doing them any favor because when they're living on their own and they're taking care of a house and they're moving around every day, they have a purpose, they're living. But when they come and live with us, And now they don't really have a purpose. They don't have anything to take care of. They just sit in a chair all day and watch TV. That's the beginning of the end. When you start sitting, of course they say sitting is the new smoking. That's why. So if you're sitting around all day, all that waste is now just accumulating around your cells. So now you're just poisoning your cells. You're also impacting the ability of the signaling molecules of those cells to move and get along to the other cells in the body because it's trying to get through all that built-up waste. So if you think about it, we do therapeutic plasma exchange to clean out all the waste out of the bloodstream, you know, all those degraded proteins and things like that. But there is no therapeutic plasma exchange for the lymphatic system. Right. We have to take care of both systems. We have to clean the blood and we have to clean the lymph. And again, the only way to clean the lymph is to move. So all these people say, I want exercise and a pill. Well, wonderful. But if you're still not getting up off your ass and moving, you're just going to be aging yourself and poisoning yourself slowly.

Andres Preschel: And I mean, it's like you could put it in a pill because outside of what you're describing, which is absolutely fascinating, and I just recently started looking into the lymphatic system and I started doing, you know, for example, I've got a trampoline out there that I use every morning to get the lymph activated and I've been doing gouache on my face. Oh, yeah, yeah, I have mine right there. I'm having here outside of my balcony. I've been doing the the gua sha for the face I obviously I exercise but then outside of all the stuff that I guess you could put in a pill Even then it's like, you know when you're Among other people for example, and you have that endorphin response among them Kelly McGonigal wrote about those in her book the joy of movement. She's incredible Stanford psychology PhD and TEDx speaker You know, she writes about how exercise is something that is so important as a species and it's beyond gaining muscle and the metabolite, you know, whatever. It's like you're among other people, the endorphins you produce around those people help positively reinforce what you're doing. And there's an increase in oxytocin and it lowers your blood pressure. And I mean, there's just, you get this like high, right? It helps improve insulin sensitivity. I mean, there's just so much that you can never put in a pill. Again, you know, as soon as these brilliant marketers are saying, all right, now we have exercise in a pill. Oh, finally, you see, now I don't have to exercise, finally. It's like, oh my God, you're making a huge mistake. It's like the same, that's the kind of thinking that harms people that fall victim to the ANOVA classification that I was describing at the beginning of the show. You know, oh no, but this says fat-free on it. Oh, no, but this says it has no cholesterol in it. Yeah, the food that you're being, you know, that's being marketed is hurting you. And the reason that you're under that impression is because It's so processed it needs marketing to be sold. You know, anyway, I'm going to be the first person online to absolutely bash this exercise pill as soon as it comes out.

Dave Pascoe: Yeah, same here. Well, I'll be the second person then. How's that?

Andres Preschel: I'll fight you for it. We're going to do a lot of people justice. Absolutely.

Dave Pascoe: Well, and I was going to say too that, you know, exercise, it even goes beyond muscle strength and VO2 max, obviously, right? Because it depends on the type of exercise you're doing. As we age, we have to have muscle strength, right? We don't want to be starting… Bone mineral density.

Andres Preschel: Yeah.

Dave Pascoe: Bone mineral density. Sure. And the VO2 max again for longevity, but you also want to have flexibility, right? That's really going to be important because we end up getting really stiff as we get old. You also have to have balance. Really important because so many people like fall, fall and break something. So that's, that's a double-edged sword, right? You can be, um, You can have great balance, but if you do a slip and fall or say some grandchild or something bumps into you with their tricycle and knocks you over, if you're not flexible, you're going to hit the ground hard. You still need flexibility to be able to do the role, you know, to do the role and save yourself from breaking a hip. So, yeah, there's so many different levels to exercise that don't bring take care of.

Andres Preschel: You were mentioning something I'm very passionate about, which is, you know, how we treat the aging population. And you were describing how, you know, we take our elders and we put them in our homes and we just go out of our way to take care of them and how dangerous that really is. We think we're doing a good thing for them, but we're not. Recently, a couple years ago, I moved to Uruguay for a year. And in the meantime, my grandparents, who were living with my aunt and uncle in their home, decided that they were going to live here on the beach in my apartment. And it's an old Art Deco apartment. It's a two-story building, and I was in the second floor. And so they had to take steps up and down every single day. And I was so happy that they were doing that, so, so stoked that they were doing that. And, you know, when I came back… My aunt and uncle were expressing like, oh, thank, you know, thank God that they're going to come and live with us again, because even though, you know, sometimes it gets a little too crammed in here, like, oh, you know, at least they're not like going up and down steps. I was like, are you kidding me? Like, that's one of the best ways that we're taking care of them, that they're taking care of themselves. Like, they're contracting muscle fiber every single day, no matter what. Like, that is huge. You know, that's so important. They were like, Andres, just stop. They have to be comfortable. I was like, are you kidding me? And now now they're staying in a home in the guest home that my aunt and uncle have beside theirs. And they actually set it up so that they don't have to ever go upstairs. They set up their their bedroom downstairs and everything is downstairs now. And it just frustrates me that they don't see eye to eye with me on how important this is for the longevity. I think my grandpa might turn around because he just turned 90 and his recent passion, he's a genius, his recent passion is actually longevity. He's been reading all of Peter Ruttillo's books and all the Harvard studies on aging. And I mean, he's really, really digging in. I think he's even taking rapamycin, if I'm not mistaken. Like, he's like really backhacking now. But I need to have a conversation with him and tell him how taking daily steps up and down is probably one of the best things you can do. So anyway, thank you for the reminder. Yeah. Comfortable is good, but capable is better. Wow. That's great. Is that original? Yeah. Just as we were talking. Are you serious? No way. Oh, wow. That's really good. Thanks. Wow. That's great, man. You should put that on a book or something. That's really good. That's great. Well, uh, before we, before we sign off here, I wanted to ask you a little bit about, you know, your impression of this guy, whose name you're not saying his name. I think his name rhymes with dry and Bronson. Um, uh, but anyway, I want to get your thoughts on, on his, you know, impression of longevity and anti-aging and what it represents on, uh, you know, In the big picture, what do you think he's doing right and what do you think he's doing wrong?

Dave Pascoe: I can tell you that many of us who were in the original leaderboard for the Rejuvenation Olympics were very frustrated with him and still are because Well, I mean, I joined the Rejuvenation Olympics because there were so many big names on that list originally. You had, like, Tony Robbins on there. You had Peter Diamantis. Like, some really fascinating people. And I thought, because the tagline at the time was crowdsourcing rejuvenation, I assumed that they were going to get together, like this Ryan, I'm going to call him Ryan, I'll just say Brian, that Brian was going to get like the top 10 or 20 people together and form a mastermind and say, all right, look, what are we all doing in common? And what are we all doing that are different? And let's try to find the least common denominator of the things that we're all doing that have us with this really great pace of aging. Let's figure out what that is. And then let's all make sure we're doing that. And then we let everybody else know. As any good researcher, good and ethical researcher would. You would think, right? But no, that's not what happened. Instead, he turned this into this marketing experience where he's like, OK, well, we're going to just forget all these other people exist. We'll pretend like I'm number one and you guys all need to do what I'm doing. You need to buy my nutting pudding. You need to do my longevity mix. You need to buy my olive oil. And so, yeah, people left and right are buying all of his products. But if you stop and think about it, there was like 20 or 19 others of us that aren't using any of his products. And we're getting the same benefits, if not better. Like in my case, like again, I was ahead of him. So, all right. The question should be, well, what is Dave doing? And what are the, you know, the other top four people doing? Nobody thought to ask that question. So it's just frustrated all of us. In fact, because he didn't leave and bring us into a group, we all sought out each other. And now we have like side conversations as a group about what we're doing. So he did put out a questionnaire to us that we all filled out. So he got the information about what we were all doing. And then he never shared that with the rest of us or anybody else in the world. He just took that information and used that to his own advantage. No way. So we were not very pleased about any of that. Yeah, so and that's where my disappointment with this particular individual began. And of course, it did not end there. For sure.

Andres Preschel: I mean, look, I think we can all admire something about Brian Johnson and his approach. I think he's obviously a genius. He's done very well for himself. And I think he, in some ways, is… Yeah, go ahead.

Dave Pascoe: I can say that I admired the guy who invented Blueprint. Project Blueprint was created by Dr. Oliver Zollman. Okay. Oh, wow. Brian was the lab rat. Right. Okay. He was the first one that was being studied. So there's a big distinction there.

Andres Preschel: Thank you for that distinction. That's very important. Thank you. And I will express a similar level of gratitude for that specific project, thanks to that individual. Yeah. So I think, you know, I'm not… trying to judge his character per se, but I think that the way that he's made this a totally for profit business based off of, you know, frankly, bad science, and I don't say, I don't mean bad science. I mean, it's just not efficacious, given the grandeur that it has and the exposure that he's been able to leverage doing something that only works for him. I just think it's very misleading. I mean, if you look at the hierarchy of scientific evidence, it's anecdotal evidence. It's what works for me. What works for me isn't going to work for you. It's the lowest tier. The highest tier is systematic reviews. Right.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.

Andres Preschel: And so you take your anecdotal evidence, you spend millions of dollars on, you go, all right, well, you know, here are my results. All right, let me sell supplements because they're going to help you do something similar. That's like the biggest lie. You know, that's just anyone with even some inklitude. Did I just make that word up? Inklitude? Somebody with even basic awareness of the scientific method will know that it's bogus, but obviously the mass population doesn't know that. They see this guy and defying agent like a vampire, they want to buy his olive oil. And I think they even tested his dark chocolate and actually had, if I'm not mistaken, higher than average heavy metals in it. And then the food that he was selling was not very bio-individual or even the highest quality. Someone found the back end link to another service that he was white labeling. It's kind of sketchy like I get it like I understand I appreciate I really appreciate and I admire the um intention but one of my favorite quotes of all time by Elizabeth King goes process saves us from the poverty of our intentions. Intentions are relatively poor compared to the process that they're followed up by or rather followed up with So I think he has yet to find the process that's going to help him bring his intention to help folks find their blueprint for health optimization to life.

Dave Pascoe: Sure. I keep saying that there's an algorithm. There is no algorithm yet. Yeah. He keeps saying that, you know, AI is going to wipe us all out. Okay. Well, that's one scientific, you know, sci-fi interpretation. Another sci-fi interpretation is that, you know, AI is going to become our teachers and it's going to educate our children. And it's going to raise us up better than we've been raised already, much more respectfully. And it's going to, uh, it's going to help us. And what it thinks that we might be failing at today, it's going to work on and try to improve in the next generation. And so that's a more helped, uh, not helpful. Yeah. More helpful, more hopeful. outlook on where AI is going to come rather than it just wiping us all out off the planet. Because once we're all off the planet, what's its purpose? It has no purpose anymore. So it's not going to get rid of its own purpose. Yeah. I mean, at least we don't know. I mean, it could do anything. Well, yeah, I guess it could do something, but right now the only thing it's there to do is educate us at the moment. So yeah, who knows? Yeah.

Andres Preschel: Well, Dave, this has been great. I have just one more question for you before we sign off, and it's actually technically two. My final real question for you is, you know, if you could put a word, message, or a phrase on a billboard somewhere in the world, what would it say and where would you put it?

Dave Pascoe: Oh my gosh. I knew this question was coming and I didn't think about this in advance.

Andres Preschel: You gave me a good one-liner recently that I think you could repurpose, but that's just me.

Dave Pascoe: Uh, comfort is good, but capability is better. Is that the one you're talking about?

Andres Preschel: Yeah, that's a good one.

Dave Pascoe: That's a good one. I'm going to have to try to remember that. Um, if I could put it out on a billboard somewhere, what would it be? Well, I mean, it's kind of lame, but it would be just get up and move. And I need to take that advice to heart more often because I've been sitting so much working with AI recently.

Andres Preschel: Oh my gosh. After this podcast, we're both getting up and getting our 10K steps in. How about that?

Dave Pascoe: Yeah. I probably need to go do my run for the day. So yeah.

Andres Preschel: Nice. Sweet. So get up and move. And where would you put it?

Dave Pascoe: Where would I put it?

Andres Preschel: Yeah.

Dave Pascoe: Oh, like, you know, um, in front of everybody's computer screen. Nice. That's total BS off the cuff, right? Nice. Great.

Andres Preschel: I should have had a much better answer prepared for that. I didn't. I think more people need to just get up and move. I mean, I think people overthink it. So many people think, all right, unless I'm going to the gym, this is not even worth it. Unless I have the hour, hour and a half to get to the gym. It's like, just stand up. Just walk around your apartment, put your shoes on, maybe go outside, like get the sunlight for a minute. You know, just start small, let it compound from there. Like any movement is better than no movement, anything. And a lot of times those small minutes end up adding up to more than the hours that you'll spend in the gym. You know, five minutes here, 10 minutes there, it adds up. It compounds. Amen. I'm agreeing with you. I'm going to go right outside immediately after this. Great. Same here. I'm going to take my dog with me. Nice. Cute dog. And then Dave, I wanted to ask you, you know, where can people find you if they want to learn more about what you do and how you do it? Where can they find and connect with you?

Dave Pascoe: I am on Instagram at Dave.Pasco. I have my website where I list every single thing that I do, all completely for free. It is DavePasco.net. And I also have a YouTube channel. Which I have not populated yet with anything. So I need to do that soon, but I have subscribers. And if you want to subscribe to me, it's, it's under Dave Pascoe's plural URL. So I will have content out there within the next month or so.

Andres Preschel: Wow. I mean, I'm looking at your website now. This is absolutely incredible, man. I have so many different. Oh my gosh. People tell me it's a little overwhelming. Yeah.

Dave Pascoe: People tell me it's overwhelming and I've got so much more stuff I need to put out there.

Andres Preschel: You've got, I'm looking at your daily routines here, your morning routine. Wow, this is unbelievable, man. Oh my God, what a wealth of knowledge. I'm gonna make sure I link to this in the show notes and point people in this direction. This is great.

Dave Pascoe: I mean, I've literally spent thousands of hours listening to podcasts, YouTubes, reading Audible books, PubMed, basically everything, all day long. I've been doing it for decades now.

Andres Preschel: Research got the everything that I can glean from that and making it actionable I can tell you spent a couple hundred hours Rewatching American Psycho because you've got his his face his Yeah, you got his his face wash routine That's hilarious.

Dave Pascoe: I've somebody actually did a YouTube video of me and use clips of Bale Christian Bale. Yeah from that. Yeah. Yeah, what a great actor racked me up Definitely hilarious Wow, and I'm looking at some of your meal plans.

Andres Preschel: I just had some muscles for my Breakfast on sourdough.

SPEAKER_00: I did too. Just yeah this morning.

Andres Preschel: Oh, really? Yeah, I love muscles Man, this is incredible, man. Seriously, kudos to you. I mean, your website is really something else.

Dave Pascoe: Well, it's stuff that I want people to know and have for free because when I went searching, it was either not available or you had to pay somebody like thousands of dollars to get. And it's still like that. I mean, everybody that you meet, every influencer that's out there, they have a program. They have something they want to sell you, which is great. I mean, I don't, I don't knock them for that. Everybody needs to make money. Needs to be a business. For me, this isn't a business. This is just something I do that I enjoy. So I give away everything that I do.

Andres Preschel: Oh my God. Man, I should have done my homework. I should have checked out your podcast a little more. I'm sorry, your website more in depth because everything that you're doing here is just extremely impressive and inspiring. We can do a part two. Everything from your suburban gardening to your microgreens and your sprouting. This is unbelievable. Yeah, we can do a part two if you want. I mean, I'm kidding. You should do a part two just on your website. Absolutely. Twist my arm.

Dave Pascoe: Ow, ow, ow.

Andres Preschel: Let's do that. Let's schedule a part two and we'll make it happen. We'll go through your website together.

Dave Pascoe: Yeah. I mean, cause if you can't find good food, then just grow your own. Yeah. It's, it's hard to know who to trust, like what they're putting in your food, what they're putting in the soil, what they're spraying on your food. I mean, everything is, um, people are taking shortcuts, you know, for the bottom line, trying to make that almighty dollar. But yeah, shortcuts aren't doing us any good. They're actually harming us. So we need to find ways to do things ourselves then so that we know we're doing it right.

Andres Preschel: Yeah. Dave, I can't thank you enough, man. Thank you so very much for joining us.

Dave Pascoe: This was so much fun. Like I said, I've been a big fan of yours for so long, so it's really cool to sit down and talk with you.

Andres Preschel: I'm so honored, man. Thank you so much. And I'm a fan of yours, too. All the best, and I'll see you soon for a part two. Sounds great, my friend. Take care.