THE 60 MILLION DOLLAR MAN
“There’s a lack of large-scale, long-term research to back up many of Asprey’s more grandiose claims”
Bio-hacking CEO Dave Asprey has developed his controversial Bulletproof plan into a global wellness brand. Should you buy in?
As the pre-eminent pioneer of the bio-hacking trend, Dave Asprey has spared no expense in upgrading his body and mind. Now, he has turned his divisive Bulletproof life plan into a global brand, pledging to make you fitter, younger and more focused. But can he deliver?
Ten days before we met at his home in British Columbia, Dave Asprey went to a clinic in Park City, Utah, where a surgeon harvested half a litre of bone marrow from his hips, extracted the stem cells and pumped them into every joint in his body. He proceeded to thread a cannula along Asprey’s spinal column and injected stem cells inside his spinal cord and into his cerebrospinal fluid. “And then they did all the cosmetic stuff,” Asprey told me. “Hey, I’m unconscious. You’ve got extra stem cells? Put ’em everywhere!” Everywhere meant his scalp, to make his hair more lustrous; his face, to smooth out wrinkles; and his “male organs” for – well, you can use your imagination.
It was an expensive and invasive procedure, which is all the more striking since there’s nothing wrong with Asprey. Nothing wrong, that is, other than ordinary human ageing – which is not part of his plan. Asprey, who is 45, has made the widely publicised claim that he expects to live to 180. To that end, he intends to get his own stem cells injected into him every six months, take 150 supplements a day, bathe in infrared light and hang out in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. So far, he has spent at least a million dollars hacking his own biology. Making it to 2154 will certainly take several million more.
Currently, Asprey is best known as the creator of Bulletproof Coffee. He is the reason that everyone was whipping butter into their Americanos a few years ago. Asprey estimates that people have drunk more than 150 million cups of the stuff since he first posted the recipe online in 2009. Various bottled versions are now among the highest-selling iced coffees at Whole Foods. But while coffee is what put Asprey on the map, his aspirations are far grander.
Asprey has parlayed the success of his coffee into one of the most coveted roles of the modern era: that of the lifestyle guru. Over the past decade, he has published five books, two of which – The Bulletproof Diet and Head Strong – were New York Times bestsellers. His podcast, Bulletproof Radio, has legions of devout followers. Asprey happily shares his opinions on how regularly men should ejaculate (approximately once a week) and how long they should sleep (six hours are good; eight hours are too much). He thinks you should go to Burning Man (it’ll activate your creativity) and stop eating kale (it contains trace amounts of oxalic acid).
At a moment in history when the mistrust of institutions seems endemic, Asprey is a man suited to his times. He has no medical degree or nutritional training beyond self-study. Depending on who you ask, this makes him either a visionary who is willing to explore bold new frontiers, or a huckster who overstates the results of mouse studies. Where the gurus of the 1960s promised access to arcane spiritual secrets, Asprey cites research and sells gadgets. Yet the underlying appeal is not so different: your life needs to change, and this man can help you do it.
WEIRD SCIENCE
A few years ago, Asprey and his wife, Lana, a physician, concluded that the Bay Area of San Francisco wasn’t the best place to raise their kids, so they relocated to Canada, where they live in bucolic splendour. Their property features an extensive vegetable garden, a small flock of sheep and two pigs named Brussel Snout and Sven. I tried not to get too attached to them, as they were due to be butchered in the near future.
Asprey’s home office, which he has named Alpha Labs, features a cryotherapy chamber, a bed of infrared lights and an atmospheric cell training pod that virtually transports you from the top of Mount Everest back to sea level within a few minutes. There’s a flotation tank that Asprey doesn’t use much any more; washing the salt off his skin feels to him like a non-optimal use of his time. He now prefers his “virtual float tank”, a spinning pod that uses high-frequency sounds and strobing lights to drop his brain into a meditative state.
Inside the flotation tank, I spotted a smooth, pale sphere the size of a ping-pong ball. I assumed it was a new, advanced device, perhaps for tracking oxidative stress. “It’s a ping-pong ball,” Asprey told me. His kids like to play.
In person, Asprey is affable with an undercurrent of intensity, like a father you might meet on the school run who casually mentions that he does ultramarathons. Not that Asprey would ever run an ultra, of course – in one of his podcast episodes, he warns: “Aerobic exercise may be destroying your body.”
By Asprey’s account, he has been adjacent to many major developments of the internet era. In college, he was “the first guy to sell anything over the internet”, he told me. (It was a T-shirt bearing the slogan, “Caffeine is my drug of choice”; buyers faxed him cheques.) He “taught working engineers how to build the internet” via a teaching job at the University of CaliforniaSanta Cruz’s Silicon Valley extension. He worked for the company that hosted Google’s first server.
Despite such success, Asprey didn’t feel like his best self. Over the years, he had been variously diagnosed with (or had self- diagnosed) Asperger’s, attention- deficit disorder, obsessive- compulsive disorder, arthritis, fibromyalgia, Hashimoto’s disease, Lyme disease and chronic fatigue syndrome, among others. At his heaviest, he weighed more than 133kg.
At first, Asprey followed the standard medical advice for losing weight – eat less, move more – but even when he was working out for 90 minutes and eating fewer than 1,800kcal per day, he wasn’t losing weight. “I got healthier, and I was probably stronger,” he said. “But I still weighed the same amount.” Doctors were no help. They took one look at him and assumed that he was sneaking Snickers bars.
Asprey comes from a family of experimenters. His grandmother was a nuclear engineer, “and the other side [of the family] is from Roswell. So, I’ve got aliens and radiation. That explains a lot of it.” Fed up with conventional options, Asprey decided to experiment on himself. He tried out a low-carb diet he had read about in a bodybuilding magazine and lost more than 20kg. “That taught me that what I eat matters more than how much I exercise,” he said. Then, he ordered £1,000 worth of smart drugs from Europe, which pepped him up just as he had hoped they would. He promised himself he would learn more: “‘Every night after work, I’m going to go home and read about this stuff.’ And I did that for four years. Every night, I would just study.”
LEVELLING UP
Asprey’s roving curiosity ultimately led him to the Silicon Valley Health Institute, a collection of Bay Area residents who would gather to discuss health, nutrition and longevity. “I met people who were 88 years old, but were young and vibrant and dating people 40 years younger than them in a loving, normal-relationship kind of way, because they [came across to] the world that way,” Asprey said. “You’re not supposed to be able to do that. You’re supposed to be in a wheelchair, in a retirement home.”
As Asprey continued to experiment on his body, he was also experimenting on his mind. He took personal-development workshops, explored his traumatic birth (his umbilical cord had been wrapped around his neck) and used an EEG machine to train his brain to be less reactive.
In the mid-2000s, Asprey was still working for various tech companies. In his spare time, he began to put some of the information from the health institute online in the form of a blog. Many of Asprey’s preoccupations – biofeedback, the dangers of fluoride in drinking water – were familiar, fringey New Age ideas. His masterstroke was to adapt them for a tech- obsessed culture.
After feeling like an outsider for much of his life, Asprey was thrilled to discover that the rest of the world was finally beginning to catch up with him. In the hyper-competitive environment of Silicon Valley, people were looking for whatever edge they could get. Tech executives began to tout the benefits of meditating. Psychedelics were no longer the domain of hippies. Start-up founders were flying shamans in from Peru on private jets for ayahuasca ceremonies. Celebrity CEOS started to discover they were more than just brains: Jeff Bezos got swole. Mark Zuckerberg started training for a triathlon.
“It’s anti-human to tell someone they do not have the choice to put whatever they want into their bodies”
Bio-hacking was the perfect ethos for the moment. It took Silicon Valley’s preoccupation with productivity and added a dash of LA in the form of wellness, self-help and vague spirituality. The time was ripe for Asprey, a man who knew how to help you “get a better return on your meditation investment”, who claimed he could feel when his mitochondria were underperforming.
Bulletproof initially launched as a food and beverage company, selling coffee and supplements. Asprey also opened a flagship coffee shop in Santa Monica, where the baristas were called “coffee hackers” (you can stand on a vibrational platform while you wait). The products took off, and Bulletproof was soon doing brisk business online. Even so, Asprey never expected to secure venture-capital funding – “We’re in too many categories; we’re not a fit” – but it turned out that the money disagreed. “We think lifestyle brands are important,” Asprey’s eventual funder told him. In 2015, Bulletproof got $9m in funding from Trinity Ventures, an early investor in Starbucks.
Two years later, Asprey opened Bulletproof Labs in Santa Monica, a gym-like facility stocked with his favourite tools. At the lab, you can be cryogenically frozen for two minutes, or zapped with electromagnetic pulses that allegedly improve circulation, promote bone healing and relieve the symptoms of depression. Asprey’s business has since received tens of millions of dollars in investment, and he now plans to roll the Bulletproof Labs concept out to further locations, under the name Upgrade Labs.
A MATTER OF TRUST
For Asprey, bio-hacking is a form of empowerment. As wearable devices become increasingly sophisticated, even those of us who are neither particularly wealthy nor scientists have the ability to turn our bodies’ confusing signals into clear, personalised data. Asprey dreams of a world in which, instead of deferring to medical experts and profit-driven drug companies, we all become experts in our own systems and experiment on them at will.
Unsurprisingly, this has made Asprey suspicious of government oversight. “Regulation led to the food pyramid that causes heart disease and diabetes in unprecedented numbers of people,” he told me. “And it got us an incredibly slow-to-innovate medical system that’s now being disrupted. It is anti-human to tell someone that they do not have the choice to put whatever they want into their bodies… It’s unethical that I need to spend $150 and an hour of my life to get a permission slip to take a substance. There is no reason for that.”
All of this self- experimentation is not without risk, of course. Asprey once took a nap surrounded by ice packs, since cold exposure has been said to correlate with increased resilience. He woke up with first-degree burns. And some of Asprey’s more
extreme interventions – such as having stem cells injected into his brain – are not yet supported by studies on healthy humans.
Most of Asprey’s acolytes aren’t likely to take things as far as he does, but even low-key bio-hacking has potential consequences. The Bulletproof diet advises deriving 50-70% of your calories from saturated fats, several times the 10-15% that the NHS recommends. While nutritionists have begun to distance themselves from the 1970s belief that saturated fats are harmful to the heart, that doesn’t mean going hard in the opposite direction is a good idea. Alongside anecdotes about devotees who lost 20kg on the Bulletproof diet, you’re likely to find those about someone else who received alarming results on their lipid panels after they began putting two tablespoons of butter in their coffee every morning. In any case, there seems to be a paucity of large-scale, long-term research to back up many of Asprey’s more grandiose claims.
Fad diets tend to succeed based on black-and-white, anxietystoking pronouncements. Asprey asserts that kale is toxic, that legumes are inflammatory and that gluten should be avoided by everyone, not just those with coeliac disease. If you follow his advice to the letter, you’ll spend a hefty amount on dietary supplements with names such as Neuromaster and Unfair Advantage. The evidence for their ability to “provide brain-enhancing energy” is not as definitive as Asprey often makes it sound. “Cognitive enhancement is most likely a zero-sum game,” says Murali Doraiswamy, a neurologist and physician at Duke University Health System. “When you enhance certain cognitive functions, it usually comes at the expense of others.”
In his books, podcasts and blog posts, Asprey is an enthusiastic proponent of several companies that he either owns or has a stake in: the one that sells black stickers you put over your digital devices’ lights; the one that sells five- day, $15,000 Iq-boosting retreats that promise to put your mind in the same state as that of a Zen monk who has been meditating for 40 years. He has suggested that most coffee beans are tainted with toxic mould – and happens to sell mould-free coffee beans. It’s hard to tell where his desire to educate ends and the sales pitch begins.
MODERN GURUS
Back in my hotel room that evening, I sipped on a Bulletproof Fatwater and tried to determine whether my mitochondria felt any perkier. It was difficult to say. Here’s the dilemma: a lot of what Asprey says makes sense. Our lifestyles could use a little hacking. We’re tethered to our electronics, anxious and overworked and not sleeping enough; we self-soothe with the very processed foods that are likely to make us feel worse. At times, we question the wisdom of our health-care system, or whether those responsible for our care always have our best interests at heart.
It’s not so outrageous to feel that something is wrong with the way we have been incentivised to live our lives. At the same time, we’re unhelpfully inundated with information about what the cause of that feeling might be. The internet is full of studies and articles and dubious Facebook posts. Did you hear that aerobic exercise is actually bad for you? Did you hear that kale has arsenic in it? Did you hear that putting collagen in your coffee will make your hair glossy? Sorting out what’s nonsense from what’s legitimate is, frankly, exhausting. If you opt into the current trend – intermittent fasting, or krill oil, or cryo – are you a sucker? If you opt out, will you be left behind, foggy brained and unvital, as everyone else goes on to conquer the world?
Most of us have felt it: the desperate desire to have someone just tell us what to do. Doctors hem and haw, speaking in hedged probabilities and avoiding bold claims. Asprey, by contrast, is happy to tell me that there are “absolutely” several ways to reverse Alzheimer’s, that he can more than double the average lifespan and that we can all take control of our own biology to make our bodies do exactly what we want them to. That’s the premise of his business. But now, perhaps more than ever, nuance is exactly what we need.