Dave Asprey wants to live until 180.
A former Silicon Valley tech expert, Dave is the founder of Bulletproof, a health and fitness venture that aspires to help people “upgrade” their mind and bodies, and eliminate brain fog and other injuries.
Central to Asprey and the Bulletproof lifestyle is his special branded drink, Bulletproof Coffee, which is a unique recipe of special coffee beans, MCT oil and grass-fed butter.
Asprey claims the addition of butter in his special morning cup of coffee puts your body into a fat burning mode that can put an end to food cravings and help you lose weight (We’re currently putting the hot beverage to the test and will be back with some results in the next few weeks).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEOJmBsLiMQ
In the meantime, we caught up with Asprey to talk about “bio-hacking”, an exploit on which he’s spent $300,000, and from which he says he has lost over 7 stone in weight. As he explains it, bio-hacking is “the art and science of changing the environment around and inside you so that your body and biology will do what you want it do.”
Sound odd? Let’s find out his top tips for “upgrading” your body
“[Bio hacking] is a very different mindset to medicine or just exercise, although some of the main bio-hacks come out of weight lifting. Some come from the military. Some come from ancient Tibet. Different people studying extreme conditions of the human body.”
Living on a private farm somewhere in British Colombia, Asprey has packed his living space with the sort of cutting-edge technology that keeps professional athletes in shape. As this short documentary will show, Asprey frequently puts himself through sensory deprivation, cryotherapy (putting yourself through extreme cold to destroy or slow down diseased muscle tissue) and more to keep his mind and body in tip top condition.
As he tells me partway though our interview, he wants to live until 180 (“That’s not a made-up number. I might not make it, but I’ll be dead, so it won’t matter.”)
But what exactly is bio-hacking, and how can a regular person start upgrading their body?
As Asprey explains to me, the difference between simply going to the gym and bio-hacking is “bio-hacking takes all aspects of your biology”. This is more than just looking good, losing weight and getting ripped. Instead bio-hacking is meant to be a more all-encompassing goal.
So the first step to bio-hacking ourselves? Getting more sleep.
Asprey says downloading a sleep tracker to our phones is the first step to hacking our bodies to be more productive. A progressive alarm clock app can also be helpful for beating the flagging feeling you get early in the morning as you don’t waste energy jerking yourself awake.
“In the old days of alarm clocks, it’d just go off and you rouse yourself. What progressive wake ups do is figure out where you are in a sleep cycle, and if I say, ‘I wake up at 8am and I say I’m willing to give it a 20 minute window’, it will work to gently get me out of bed. I don’t get violently woken out of bed. So all that energy you would use to rouse you out of bed can now be used for pleasure, for learning, in relationships. It’s just free.”
The next step for bio-hacking is reducing the amount of time we spend staring at white screens.
For Asprey, “junk light” can be as harmful as junk food, so sticking your iPhone into night mode all day can reduce the burning sensation behind the eyes you feel after a day spent on the internet. Computer extension Flux can also be helpful in reducing exposure to white and blue light.
“Looking at a bright white screen before sleep turns off melatonin (a hormone that can help with sleep disorders) for four hours. That is not ok. Screens like this are way brighter and whiter than it is outside and you’ll basically cook your eyes. Turn your screen down late at night.
“You might be surprised at how much energy you get when you don’t spend so much time filtering out bad light from the environment around you.”
What’s most interesting is Asprey’s claims that all this free time and extra energy has helped him gain close to 20 IQ points with a little help from Dual and Back Training (which you can try out here for free).
“It’s a dumb thing where you look at locations on a grid and listen to a number or a letter. You have to visually look at one thing and then remember another. It scrambles your brain and is so stressful to keep doing it over and over again. But if you have the discipline or a friend to challenge you, a 10 point IQ jump is very possible. What happens is you change the amount of working memory you have.”
Dave Asprey’s a compelling speaker, and while his ideas can be a little bit out there at times – and he certainly has his detractors – there do appear to be nuggets of old timey good advice that a parent or teacher might give you.
Go to bed early. Eat your vegetables. Stop staring at a screen all day. Stay hydrated. Read more. And most importantly, look after yourself.
Or has he puts it.
“It doesn’t have to be perfect, you just have to move in the right direction. The Bulletproof lifestyle is all about moving in the right direction.
“When you do that, the amount of energy you have every day goes up. The amount of pain you experience goes down and your emotional regulation goes up.
So give yourself a leg up. Stop doing the things that make your brain flop all over the place because you’ll actually be nicer to your friends.”
What do you think of Asprey’s claims about “bio-hacking”? Email us: Hello@JOE.co.uk, or message us on Facebook.
