Hacking Your Body with Dave Asprey Part One

A Personal Note from Orion

This week I am speaking with someone whom I look up to in many ways, and who is revolutionizing the way which we can take control of our body and health, and biohack our way to long, healthy lives. His research and knowledge on toxic mold literally saved my sister’s life! Dave Asprey may have become notable due to his Bulletproof Coffee, but he has contributed so much more than that to helping us improve our health and our lives.

From injecting stem cells into your brain to finding the diet that helps you lose weight, we share the ways in which you can look and feel younger, smarter, and stronger… as Dave says, “nothing is impossible” – no matter what any medical professional or fitness trainer says, you can achieve the body of your dreams to support the lifestyle you want.

In this Episode

[05:42] — Dave introduces himself and explains more about who he is and his experiences and credentials.
[06:33] — We learn more about Dave’s introduction to biohacking, which started around 30 years ago. He also mentions The Better Baby Book, then goes on to give his definition of the term “biohacking.”
[09:42] — Orion asks Dave what we can do with stem cell therapy. He reveals that he plans to live to be at least 180 years old. He goes into quite a bit of detail about the stem cell retrieval process, as well as the culturing process.
[11:30] — Dave explains more about what he wanted to do with stem cells in his own body (and what he’s already done with them). He’s gone so far as to have stem cells injected into his “boy parts,” to use his term.
[14:17] — Dave’s wife had a similar procedure done, which clearly had a very positive effect on her as well.
[14:50] — What are the three top lessons Dave learned from hacking his body?
[16:55] — The Bulletproof Diet, in a nutshell, is a diet designed to create maximum willpower. The side effects are more energy and a complete decimation of food cravings.
[17:57] — Dave explains some details about how certain foods are good for some people, but can have negative effects on other people. For more information, you can read The Bulletproof Diet or start cooking from Bulletproof: The Cookbook.
[19:32] — Dave has a gift for Stellar Life listeners! You can download The Bulletproof Diet Roadmap, which tells you everything in the book in one page.
[20:14] — There’s a difference between brain octane oil and MCT oil, as Dave explains here.
[21:19] — Dave explains why he started the Bulletproof business. He gushes about his gratitude for being able to help people.

About Today’s Show

‏‏Hi! Welcome to Stellar Life podcast. I’m your host, Orion, and today my guest is somebody that I was waiting for months and months on end in order to be able to speak with him. Man, it was worth the wait, he is brilliant and I like everything about him. His name is Dave Asprey, he is the founder of Bulletproof Executive, he is a Silicon Valley investor and technology entrepreneur who spent two decades and over $300,000 to hack his own biology. Dave lost 100 pounds without counting calories or excessive exercise, used techniques to upgrade his IQ and lowered his biological age while learning to sleep more efficiently in less time. Learning to do these seemingly impossible things transformed him into a better entrepreneur, a better husband and a better father. How amazing is that? He is the creator of the wildly popular Bulletproof Coffee. That coffee with butter that some of your friends are swearing by. He is the host of the radio show, the number one health podcast, Bulletproof Radio. Dave has millions and millions of listeners and he’s the author of New York Times bestselling book, The Bulletproof Diet which is one of my favorite books. I have two copies and I was actually at the opening party for the book that Dave held. That was a unique experience, that was the first time I met Mr. Dave Asprey, and then I saw him at a Brendon Burchard event, and then I saw him at the Bulletproof conference which is his conference which is incredible. This man is changing the world one technology at a time. Because the information is so important and so dense and because Dave is so amazing, I decided to do something really unique and special with this episode and I just split it into two. One is about hacking your brain and one is about hacking your body. This is part one about hacking your body. Dave and I spoke about stem cells, how you get stem cells from your own adipose tissue and bone marrow, where you can inject in your body and what it does for you. It was really interesting because of the Bulletproof conference, there was this stem cell doctor who showed us a video of an arthritic dog and the dog was a 12 year old dog, couldn’t walk up or down the stairs. You saw the video, you cringed, you felt so sorry for that dog. And then a few months later, couple of months later after they injected stem cells to the dog, the dog starts walking really well and then three months later the dog is jumping and that was extraordinary. There is so many new age technologies out there, so many new technologies that are not included in the normal medical world. There’s a lot of information and Dave and I talked about some of it here and some of it in part two. This man is fascinating and I encourage you to sit and listen, this was also a pretty entertaining episode as well. If you really enjoyed this episode, please review and share with your friends. I know that some of the information here can save someone’s life, so please share it with somebody else. Ladies, if you wanna join me on facebook/groups/stellarlife, I would love to have you. If you wanna know more about the episodes, go to www.stellarlifepodcast.com and you could also find more information about me, if you wanna reach me or contact me personally, and now onto this incredible show. Hello Dave and welcome to Stellar Life podcast. How are you doing?

‏‏I’m doing well and I’m happy to be on.

‏‏I’m so happy to have you. I just love everything about you and everything that you do and how you help people. I find you to be a heartfelt leader and you’re on the cutting edge of technology and biohacking. Let’s start by sharing a little bit about who you are because there are few people in the world that still don’t know who you are. Let’s go into how do you define biohacking.

‏‏I’m Dave Asprey, I’m the founder of Bulletproof Coffee and I am a professional biohacker, probably the world’s first professional biohacker. I run the Bulletproof Radio Show we’ve got about 15 million downloads. I’m a New York Times Bestselling Author. I use to weigh 300 pounds and decided that I should hack my biology and I’ve spent almost two decades and almost a million dollars now creating every system in my body I possibly could. Bulletproof is where I do my human performance work. I run the 40 years of Zen neuroscience training center for executives in Seattle, Washington as well that’s like a little side project as my personal brain mechanics. I like to share all the stuff that no one told me when I was young, fat and tired all the time.

‏‏How did you find the term biohacking, like what drove you?

‏‏I’ve spent 15 years in the anti aging field as president or chairman or board member of The Silicon Valley Health Institute. We had all these people come through and give lectures to the public about what’s happening to keep us young so we can live a long time and have all this energy. I was the only person under 60 in the room. We were four minutes from Google’s headquarters, in fact we were there before Google was a company, we were in operation. The group is almost 30 years old. For 30 years we were studying how to live forever and no one from Google will come to the meetings, they’re always just older people which is great because that’s the population that they care a lot about. The only problem is that it’s a lot easier to be younger when you’re young than it is to get old and then reverse it. If you start early, you can do cool stuff. Biohacking was this idea that said look, there’s a lot you get out of taking 12 year biology when you do it younger. In fact, my first book was how do you do it in the womb, what do you do before and during pregnancy to have the healthiest genetic expression in your kids.

The only problem is that it’s a lot easier to be younger when you’re young than it is to get old and then reverse it. Click To Tweet

‏‏Is it The Better Baby Book?

‏‏Yeah that’s called The Better Baby Book. The idea is if you accept my hypothesis here that you have a lot of control over your environment, biohacking is this word that personally didn’t exist before. The definition is the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so that you have full control by your own biology. I didn’t trademark the term, I did not register it or anything like that. I could have, as the original user of it. The only problem is that I wanted to build a community around it so the Bulletproof Biohacking Conference this year had 3000 attendees in Los Angeles and 100 attendees four years ago, so this is a movement, a community movement and I’m one of the leaders but I don’t own the term, I just originated it and popularized it. It’s got elements of anti-aging, elements of sports performance, elements of military science, a lot of neurobiology, psychopharmacology, anti-aging medicine but it’s not about any of those one things. It’s about using all this knowledge so that you can make your body do what you want. For one guy it’s I want to get swoll, for another person it’s like I just want to have really stable happy energy at the end of my work day so I can go home and be a good parent for my kids. Very different goals. It doesn’t matter, you’re in charge of your biology, what signal will you give your body so it would do what you want, that’s what it comes down to.

‏‏I saw you at the Bulletproof conference. The first time I met you was at your party where you launched the Bulletproof Diet Book. I didn’t understand the level of impact that you had until I attended the Bulletproof Conference and that was probably one of the most fun conferences that I’ve ever been to.

‏‏Thank you so much. It was also the most fun conference that I’ve ever been to, if I do say so.

‏‏It was like, “This is gonna be my every year conference.” And I go to so many of them but I drop so many of them but this is a must. At the conference, you spoke a lot and you had many speakers that spoke a lot about stem cell therapy. What did you learn, what can we do with stem cell therapy?

‏‏I have spent a lot of energy this year on stem cells. The reason is that I am planning to live to at least 180 so I might as well get started being young now cause I’d like to have this level of health and performance or better for the rest of my life until one day I decided I’ve had enough then I can be done. Until then, I just wanna feel good. I want my brain to work all the time. With stem cells, I went and I had my stem cells extracted from my adipose tissue.

‏‏I saw the video and it looked so painful, and you didn’t faint.

‏‏I Facebook Lived at least one of the two procedure where I am literally answering questions on my phone and I pick up the phone and you can like see the round parts of my butt and they’re sticking these giant needles into the little fat tissue like the limb handle area and they’re like, “There’s almost not enough fat here.” As a former obese 300 pounder, I’m like, “Yes I win!” Anyway, they pull some fat out. I didn’t show you the video cause people would have thrown up at the conference but there’s a video where they’re hammering into my hip bone, looks like a little chisel, and it goes, “djuk djuk djuk.” They pull out some bone marrow which you don’t have to do but I wanted two kinds of stem cells. then they concentrate the stem cells. In my case, I actually have my stem cells cultured which is unusual in the U.S. but very common elsewhere. What they do is they put it in a culture medium so you can take your stem cells and expand them a lot. I have enough stem cells bank right now to do about 40 full stem cells procedures and that came from just pulling out to do just one procedure. I wanted to address every old injury I’ve had as someone with chronic inflammation for my whole life as well as obesity and various injuries. I’ve had three knee surgeries, arthritis since I was 14 in my knees, I had stem cells injected in my knees, I injected it in an old shoulder injury and you have that stem cells so let’s use them, where else can they go? I put them in my face around my hair.

‏‏Actually, you look younger, I can’t explain it, you look radiant.

‏‏Thank you! I do look younger. Hundreds of people have said it so I believe it, otherwise people are just being nice.

‏‏I’ve been following you and I saw it was on the airplane it was you were coming back from Burning Man and you had this gorgeous tan on your face and you looked awesome and you talked about the stem cell.

‏‏I think it helped and usually I look a little old when you get back from Burning Man you’re so drunk sleep and you might have accidentally ingested some sort of substance besides butter and coffee. I’ve heard that that happens there but I wouldn’t know. Normally, you’re kinda drawn out but I was feeling pretty good and I am looking more youthful and the ones in the face really made a difference. Other things that you can do, I had them injected intravenously so they go wherever they’re needed in the body so they just live in your blood. The final thing that I also showed a little bit of on stage at the conference that your listeners will probably cringe at is I had my own stem cells injected into my boy parts. You can have some stem cells injected into your penis and they do it in the glands under the tip and they do it into the part that gets bigger like where the spongy part is. Basically the idea is more youthful responsiveness. I already had a problem that I was too youthful there, I just realized I should be even more youthful. It is known and people will be complaining about this probably that the skeptics. If you don’t believe me, there’s no way that I can prove it to you without taking my pants down and I know you skeptics are probably like that but seriously it’s not gonna happen. Here is the deal, it does make a difference for size. Are there clinical blinds, double blinded clinical studies on that, actually I have seen a study, whether you’re going to like it or not I have no idea. Bottom line is it worked pretty well before, it works better now. I would call that experiment a success and my wife also had a similar procedure done although she has different plumbing there and it was even more dramatically effective for her after having couple of kids and she looks better on stage.

You can have some stem cells injected into your penis and they do it in the glands under the tip and they do it into the part that gets bigger like where the spongy part is. Basically the idea is more youthful responsiveness.

‏‏She had a toe-curling orgasm, right?

‏‏She had not just one toe-curling orgasm but the toe-curling became much more common. It was already a lot of them, it just frequent, almost unstoppable. Now with the toe-curling, it’s been an added bonus for her and I blame the stem cells not me.

‏‏What are the three top lessons that you learned from hacking your body?

‏‏The first thing is that if a doctor or trainer or someone, it doesn’t even matter if they’re a medical professional or whatever else. If they say something’s impossible, they’re the wrong person for you. If they say, “I don’t know how to do it,” that’s cool. Or, “No one’s ever done that before that we know of,” that’s cool. But if they say, ”You can’t do that.” I don’t wanna be rude about it but I’m sorry, I am going to do that. The fact that you say I can’t do that is irrelevant to me. They also say that you can’t speed but magically most of us do. What happened in there? Someone has to do it first. For me, I actually believe there probably have been a few people who lived to 180 but it’s extremely rare and I don’t know any of them personally but I’ll do it anyway. I don’t actually care whether it’s been done before. Here is the fun part, if I don’t do it, I’ll die trying. How do I lose?

‏‏You’re such a rebel. I like it.

‏‏That’s one of them, you set a goal, you may have to approach it differently. My background is computer hacking. I have a specialty in my undergrad degree in a subset of artificial intelligence and I really have looked at building the internet as we know it today. I used to run a program for the University of California to do that. The internet is weird because you know what your phone can do? Everything else is someone else’s gear and you can’t even look at it but somehow it all works and we can do weather maps of the internet and all that stuff. It turns out managing complex systems is an art and a science and it’s different than the way we used to look at engineering and that way of thinking has now permeated our engineering culture, an even popular culture. When I started doing this 20 years ago, there wasn’t even anyone to teach it. This has been my path and turning that around back on the system of my own biology when it was just functional saying “I don’t have to know everything about it, I just need to know enough to tilt it in the direction and I’ll do what I want.” That’s been really a profound improvement for me.

Managing complex systems is an art and a science and it’s different than the way we used to look at engineering and that way of thinking has now permeated our engineering culture, an even popular culture. Click To Tweet

‏‏What is the Bulletproof Diet in a nutshell?

‏‏Bulletproof diet is a diet designed to create maximum willpower. The side effect, you have a lot more energy. You probably need less sleep. A lot of people report needing an hour less sleep because they have more energy from it. The biggest thing maybe is just complete decimation of cravings. If you don’t have food cravings anymore, all the energy that you put into saying no to cravings, it actually comes back to you. You can now use that energy for something useful. Just think about this, someone sets a plate of donuts in front of you and then inside the voice says eat the donut! No! Eat the donut! No! You go back and forth on that conversation and that takes a lot of energy. What if someone set the plate of donuts there and you’re like I don’t care? You have all that extra energy, you could go binge watch Breaking Bad again with all the energy you saved from not saying no to the donuts. You can also do something more valuable but here’s the point, it doesn’t matter. You’re wasting that energy. In the Bulletproof Diet, what’s happening is you eat more of the foods that make you strong, you eliminate the foods that make you weak, and there’s a bunch of foods that can make one person weak but not another person weak. It is sinful to say that red bell peppers are good for you because one in five people get rheumatoid arthritis from red bell peppers. For the other 80% of people, they’re good for you. You should say they’re good for some people and they’re awful for other people. The same is true for potatoes, and the same is true for raw kale although that’s actually probably not good for anyone compared to say cooked kale. I write a lot about that just because it’s one of those weird health myths out there. You go through this list of suspect foods, you end up with a diet where you’re in ketosis, this fat burning mode, some of the time you cheat to be in ketosis by using brain octane oil, a supplement that I manufacturer that you put into your food that raises your ketone levels as if you’re fasting, as if you’re on an advanced extreme paleo diet even though you’re not. You can still enjoy some carbohydrates and you basically cycle in and out of ketosis. When you do that, everything in life is easier because you have more energy in the brain, you have less information in the body and you feel amazing all the time. I did this for myself cause I felt like crap all the time and I just got tired of it.

‏‏If somebody wants to know more about the Bulletproof Diet, they should get your book, The Bulletproof Diet.

‏‏They should get my book and there’s a cookbook too and I’m using it as a mouse stand here. See the nice pictures of steak and avocados? These are different recipes than you’ve seen before because they’re recipes designed to create a food high. What you’ll find in those books is all this information but I have an offer for your listeners. For free you can go to the Bulletproof website and download the Bulletproof Diet Roadmap. One page you print out, put it on your fridge, and it tells you everything that’s in the book on one page. It doesn’t tell you the why but it tells you the how and that what and it’s literally a road map. I’m gonna eat some protein, what proteins are really good for me, what proteins might cause problems and what proteins should I just never eat? Same thing for fats, same thing for veggies. You wanna really feel good for two weeks? Just do what it says, eat all the foods in the Bulletproof Zone and avoid the kryptonite foods and you might be amazed on how much energy you have.

‏‏I love your product. I’m using them. I’m using the MCT oil, brain octane oil.

‏‏MCT oil is something that a lot of companies are selling now but MCT oil, there’s different kinds of them today. Some of them doesn’t work. It’s not about period thing, it simply doesn’t raise ketones. They don’t tell you that in the label but it’s a problem. That’s why brain octane is a subset of them.

‏‏I like your collagen powder and I like all your yummy candy, healthy candy.

‏‏The protein bars with collagen? It’s like chocolate.

‏‏Thank you so much for creating all that. You really help a lot of people and I really appreciate it and I know that you’re doing it from your heart because you’re such a heartfelt leader and you really care about people.

‏‏I do really care and some people picked that up and some people, especially the sort of more, the more bully people like there’s got to be a reason, this is all a scam. I’m like you know what, if that’s what you’re coming from, then don’t read the stuff, don’t buy my products. It’s okay. You can actually read my stuff and not buy my products. The reason I started this, I was a VP at a big company. I had a very nice paycheck and stock options and they flew me around the world to give keynote presentations about antivirus software. I fly to Singapore, fly somewhere else, usually business class, stayed at four star hotel, shake hands with a bunch of executives. It was not a bad life to be honest but it wasn’t nearly as satisfying as what I do now. I started the blog and I wasn’t looking to start a business If somebody just told me this when I was 16 or 20, it would have absolutely made my life so much easier and so much better, so much less suffering and struggle that if just five people read the Bulletproof Blog I would have won. I would done a really important thing to just change somebody’s life. I get cards or emails or messages every week from people who, it’s hard to even talk about it just cause some of it is so emotional. At the conference, I had multiple people come up and just break down and, “You changed my life, you saved my life.” People with really bad diseases who got rid of the stuff that was making them weak and all of a sudden they’re like I can walk again. I’m just grateful to be able to help people that level. That’s why I do this. There’s a lot of others things I can do that might be less work but this is the most fun and it’s the most beneficial.

Your Checklist of Actions to Take

✓ Do your own research into stem cell therapy to understand what it’s capable of. There have been huge breakthroughs; it’s not just about cloning sheep anymore.

✓ Come up with one specific thing that you want to change about your body. Instead of trying to figure out whether you can do it, figure out how to do it.

✓ Download the Bulletproof Diet Roadmap, print it, and stick it on your refrigerator. Try to become more conscious of choosing foods that it encourages.

✓ Take it a step further: commit to following the Bulletproof Diet Roadmap exclusively for two weeks. You may find you don’t want to stop.

✓ Experiment with your diet and keep a detailed log. Some foods are good for most people, but bad for a few. By figuring out which foods don’t work for you, you can tailor your diet.

Links and Resources:

About Dave Asprey

Dave Asprey is a, biohacker, Silicon Valley investor, entrepreneur and the man behind Bulletproof® Coffee. He is the founder of Bulletproof Nutrition, which reaches more than 1.5 million visitors monthly. His top-ranked podcast, Bulletproof Radio, has 7+ million downloads. He has also been featured on the Today show, Nightline, CNN, and in Financial Times, Rolling Stone, Men’s Health, Vogue, Marie Claire, Slate, Forbes, and more. He lives with his family in Victoria, British Columbia.