Longevity MASTERCLASS: Biological Age, Mitochondrial Repair & The Superhuman Protocol

Ben Greenfield (0:00)

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast.

Gary Brecka (0:04)

If I was to boil my entire career down to one sentence, it would be that the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease. We did not find a single disease ideological pathway that did not either have its roots in the absence of blood oxygen, or was not severely exacerbated by the absence of blood oxygen.

Ben Greenfield (0:23)

Can you give me an example?

Gary Brecka (0:25)

All cancer begins in a hypoxic environment. Sitting is the new smoking. But why is sedentary lifestyle, and why is sitting becoming the new smoking? Because sedentary lifestyle is a foundation for hypoxia.

Ben Greenfield (0:39)

Welcome to the Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond.

In this episode of the Boundless Life podcast, I've got a mortality prediction expert, a molecular biologist, and an engineer who's been beating billionaires at their own game. Gary Brecka, a human biologist who spent 20 years in the insurance world predicting when people would die based on their blood work. And now he uses those same strategies or biomarkers to help people extend life and live a fuller life instead. I also talk with Dr. Anurag Singh, a physician scientist and trained immunologist with more than 50 published papers, 20 patents and 50 randomized clinical trials behind him. He'll talk about the 15 years he spent on one molecule and what that one molecule does to your mitochondria. And then I've got Dave Pascoe, a 61-year-old engineer who is near the top of the Rejuvenation Olympics leaderboard, out-aging tech billionaires without their budgets. And he publishes his entire protocol publicly. It's not what you'd expect. All of the show notes are going to be at bengreenfieldlife.com/ultimatelongevity.

That's bengreenfieldlife.com/ultimatelongevity.

Enjoy. I would love to hear a little bit more about what got you interested in this, because before I came to Miami, you and I talked on the phone. And I always thought you were just some biohacker who was interested in the body and eventually took all the things you learned and started to do with other people. But you had a very interesting start. You were in like insurance adjusting or something like that?

Gary Brecka (2:29)

A very specific area of insurance, which was the science and the predictability of mortality. It's called probabilistic mortality modeling.

So if we got five years of medical records on you and five years of demographic data, we could tell the insurance company how long you had to live to the month. You see, because the database... To the month. To the month.

Ben Greenfield (2:53)

This wasn't like methylation clocks and Horvath aging and telomeres. This was just looking at epidemiological data.

Gary Brecka (3:00)

Epidemiological data, but with the one thing you have to remember that insurance companies have that no other clinical study has, no other medical enterprise has, no other published trial has, no medical enterprise of any type has, is that they know the day, the date, the time, the location and the cause of death for everyone that they've issued an annuity, a life insurance or a reinsurance policy on, even a reverse mortgage. You wouldn't believe the number of financial services products that are actually based on how many more months you have left on earth. And so when you have the endpoint, you can trace it back to causality.

You see, in a clinical study, we know that, for example, obesity shortens your lifespan by X number of years. You know, type 2 diabetes shortens your lifespan by X number of years. This is all data that's used on actuarial tables. How do we put somebody on an actuarial table? But when you talk about specific mortality, they have tens of millions of deaths, and they trace that endpoint back to its causality. If this database could see the light of day, it would permanently change the face of humanity. It would upend modern medicine in a way that would absolutely be catastrophic.

Ben Greenfield (4:16)

And that information is like private?

Gary Brecka (4:19)

The insurance companies are the polar opposite of Google and Facebook. They collect voluminous amounts of information, but they don't share it with anybody. They use it to price financial service products against you. I mean, think about it. They're going to take out a 25 million dollar or 50 million dollar life insurance policy on your life.

Ben Greenfield (4:35)

We're talking like a term life insurance policy?

Gary Brecka (4:37)

We're usually talking about universal life policies that are going to last until the day that you die. So they don't expire after 10 years or 20 years.