Bulletproof founder Dave Asprey thinks he’s figured out why Australian men are the second longest lived men on the planet. It’s not mindfulness apps or Medicare.
Dave Asprey, 52, who came to fame with his fat-soaked Bulletproof Coffee brand and who claims to have coined the word “biohacker” is coming to Australia to teach his methods for reaching his stated goal of 180 candles.
In an exclusive interview with Forbes Australia, ahead of the Wanderlust Wellspring event, he talks about the Australian paradox of longevity, what the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement is getting right – and wrong. And why you don’t have to spend US$2 million, like he has, to join him on his 180th birthday.
It’s 9am in Romania and Dave Asprey has just woken and is on his first Bulletproof coffee – mould-free and chock full of concentrated MCT oils – but he’s not turning on his Zoom video.
“I got my six and a half hours of obligatory sleep, which is the number that makes you live the longest, and I’m just not quite yet presentable,” he says.
Most large studies suggest 7–9 hours is optimal. What happened to the obligatory eight hours of sleep?
Well, if you need more than six and a half hours of night to be fully rested, that means that you’re less healthy. Your odds of dying from all-cause mortality are much higher at eight hours a night than they are at six and a half hours. But if you need eight hours, you should get eight hours and then you should work on becoming healthier.
You’ve been at this biohacking thing for more than two decades. Is the world catching up to you?
For almost a decade I ran a longevity non-profit group in Palo Alto, California, and I couldn’t get anyone under 60 to come. I was the only guy under 60, and I’m learning the secrets of longevity from my elders, some of them in their 80s. And I realized the things that make old people young make young people powerful. I restored my health, and I lost the 100 pounds of fat. And I made my brain work again, and I got rid of all these problems.
But then I didn’t stop. I got smarter and faster. Now, the calendar thinks I’m 52 even though the lab tests don’t agree, and I’m on the cover of my last book with my shirt off. As a fat computer hacker in my 20s, I couldn’t have imagine that. I look like I’m some kind of weird model. It’s still a little bit mind-blowing to look at that transformation.
It’s now a $36 billion industry. It’s an idea I came up with and started sharing on Twitter 14 years ago. It became a new word in the Merriam-Webster’s dictionary and my name is in there.
Did you coin that word?
Absolutely. [The Oxford English Dictionary actually says the first usage was in the Washington Post in 1988] I needed to rebrand the longevity movement because young people don’t listen to longevity, because we don’t care when we’re young. It’s more important that you find your mate and make your mark in the world, and then you notice when you’re 40 or 50 and it’s already too late.
“Australian men live a very long time, they eat their steak and that’s correlated with living a long time.”
Dave Asprey
You’ve said you want to get to 180. What are the latest breakthroughs that make you think you might get there?
It’s shocking what’s happened in the last five years. I’ve had stem cells injected in every joint in my body, and my skin, my hair, my reproductive system. But in the last two years, I’ve used focused ultrasound to open the blood-brain barrier and allow stem cells into the central aging clock inside my head to make that 20 years younger, and to increase the function of my memory centres. I’ve had gene therapy that makes the average person nine years younger on their lab tests and some people 20 or 30 years younger.
The criticism always levelled at such treatments is that they’re elitist and expansive. Do you see them becoming more democratised in time?
I always laugh when I hear that. Every book I’ve written, nine of them now, I say, ‘Here’s the principle, here’s the free version, here’s the low-cost version, and here’s what the crazy billionaires are doing that proves it works at the extreme.’ Take stem cells. You could go to Thailand for it. And it’s gonna cost, five, 10, 20 grand, maybe $100,000. You can also take a supplement for a couple hundred dollars a month that releases stem cells into your body. Or you could do intermittent fasting that does it for free.
The role of biohacking is to say, ‘If we set the world up around us so that we thrive, then we feel better, we perform better, and we’re actually better people’. It starts with nature. Get better curtains that block out light because the amount of street light that leaks through your windows increases depression by 69%. Turn off the LED lights inside your bedroom, the little twinkly ones on your chargers. Just tape them over. Gosh, sleep in a cave and live longer and lose weight. It actually works like that, especially if you go into the sunshine too.
And the cool thing is for your readers in Australia, you have amazing sunshine, and sunshine is a nutrient. Light sends huge signals into the body, as important as food, so people who go out and get 20 minutes or an hour of sun in the morning and then have some darkness at night, it changes how your brain works, it reduces depression, it helps your blood-sugar regulation. Sunshine is free, darkness is free. This is not for elitists. It’s about knowing the manual for the human body.
How do the medical authorities view you when you say things like this that go against the mainstream?
The functional medicine and longevity doctor communities absolutely love my work. I’ve lectured to thousands and thousands of doctors about these topics and they love it, and they use my books in their practice. Yet, if you go to a hidebound old, big pharma-style doctor who thinks he knows everything and hasn’t read any research in the last 20 years, they’re going to think that I’m the Antichrist. And I’m okay with that.
Anyone tied into regulating the sale of pharmaceuticals, they will tell you only pharmaceuticals can heal, yet if you go back a hundred years … sunshine was used to treat infections. And I’m just saying that we might have gone a little bit wrong because the view of single systems in the body is wrong. There’s a recipe for thriving, and it involves air and water and food and light and timing and movement.
According to United Nations figures, Australian men have the second longest life expectancy at birth in the world, but Australian women are 12th. What’s going on there with all the beef and beer Aussie blokes consume?
The beer probably isn’t really good for anyone. Alcohol has been shown in hundreds and hundreds of studies to be pro-cancer, and pro-inflammation, and pro-Alzheimer’s. But there’s something going on, whether it’s the quality of the Australian food, the refusal to eat some kind of vegan nonsense, I think that’s part of it, and this’ll be controversial, but the availability of sunshine is a health factor. I’m not saying you should go out and get sunburned and sunbathe all day, just saying that sunlight is a nutrient. I’ve lived in Canada. There was no sunshine up there and it makes people sad. You go to Australia, they’re not sad. I moved from Canada to Austin, Texas, in part because I needed more sun. I do 20 minutes, pretty much naked, in the mornings. I got leaner, I got stronger, I got faster, and I got smarter. I’m only outside for an hour a day, but man, it changes everything.
“When I go to a MAHA thing, there are people who voted for either candidate. They just want their kids to be healthy.”
And Australia has been an early, early adopter of biohacking. I flew out there in 2014 to give some talks about it and Australia has some of the best butter in the world. The quality of butter actually matters for your health and Australian beef is some of the best in the world and the culture there it’s very outdoor-oriented. I was really impressed. I’m excited to be coming out again for Wanderlust because there’s a vibrancy there, and it shows in these interesting numbers that Australian men live a very long time, and they eat their steak, and that’s correlated with living a long time.
Where you think you might still have room to improve?
I had really serious health problems as a kid. I’ve had arthritis since I was 14 years old, in my knees. And I’ve had chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. I had brain damage from toxic mould. And the only things that are left from that are that I still have stretch marks from when I was fat. I’m still working on some of the advanced functional movement things … And I actually just co-invented an experimental topical that appears to grow eyebrows back. I’ve had Hashimoto’s, a thyroid condition, since I was a teenager, and your eyebrows get really thin. My eyebrows are becoming bushy in two weeks with this new stuff … Do I really care about my eyebrows? No, I don’t care in the slightest, I’m a dude. But if it could be done, I want to figure out how do we crack the code for having full control of our biology? How do we make our minds focus the way we want? How do we make our bodies do what we want? I look in the mirror and I’m like, how can this be my body? It doesn’t match my reality growing up. I fly all over the planet, I don’t get sick, my brain works.
By all measures I can think of, I’m getting younger even though my stress levels are higher. I have nine companies, I write big books, I have podcasts and stage shows, and I am so happy. I’ve got this. And this is not what I had in my 20s.
Dave Asprey’s business interests
| Business | Description |
|---|---|
| Bulletproof 360 | Founded in 2013, best known for Bulletproof Coffee and a range of health and wellness products. |
| Upgrade Labs | Established in 2017 as the world’s first “Human Upgrade™ Center,” offering biohacking technologies and services for health and performance. |
| The Asprey Group | Parent entity that has housed or acquired several ventures, including Realize Me. |
| 40 Years of Zen | Professional training and coaching company focused on peak performance through neuroscience-based programs. |
| Qualia Life Sciences | Health, wellness, and fitness company linked to Asprey’s broader biohacking interests. |
| Realize Me | A data-driven self-tracking and personal optimisation platform acquired under The Asprey Group. |
| TrueDark | A company focused on sleep and circadian rhythm optimisation through specialised eyewear. |
| Dave Asprey Box | A subscription box service curated with biohacking tools, supplements, and wellness products. |
| Good Soul Hunting | A talent and executive search venture tied into the wellness and conscious leadership space. |
| Asprey Venture Syndicate | Investment arm through which Asprey backs startups and technologies aligned with biohacking and human performance. |
If you could drop one piece of mainstream health advice what would it be?
Whenever they tell you to eat less meat and less saturated fat, they are working against your interests. They need to stop doing that. The evidence is too strong that red meat has always been the most valuable source of nutrition, and the type of fat found in butter and sheep and cows, that fat is something that stops fatty liver and helps you have a strong brain, helps you build your testosterone, helps you build your hormones. So when they try to make you go vegan and eat a bunch of grains, they’re doing it for economic purposes. And I’ve got to say this, when has any government ever been right in their health advice?
So what’s Make America Healthy Again getting right?
MAHA is paying attention to a smoking gun … We are spraying things on our soil and on our people and on our food that are 20-year problems. This is why testosterone is plummeting in men and women to the lowest levels ever, and this is terribly dangerous because testosterone drives dopamine in your brain. Dopamine makes you care about doing things that matter in the world. So we have a bunch of people who have low energy and they’re kind of apathetic because they’ve been poisoned.
“The only risk is that some overweight bureaucrat is gonna say you’re not allowed to do the things that make you live longer and thrive.”
So what MAHA is getting right is they’re insisting on real science instead of the drug industry-censored science where they throw away data that doesn’t support what they want to do. And by focusing on the question of why are people getting sick and saying we’re look at everything, including the things that no one’s allowed to look at, like the environmental pollution.
What’s MAHA getting wrong?
Where I think MAHA is getting it wrong is the same as all of medicine. They try to treat each of us as if we’re the average in the middle of a curve. No one is average. We’re a mix of some things that are above average and below average. Each one has a unique biology.
“Over the last 10 years, I’ve gathered the brainwaves of more than 1,000 high-performing CEOs and pro-athletes and celebrities.”
This recent thing about Tylenol [paracetamol] being associated with autism, there is evidence for that. And there’s also evidence that fevers in pregnant women cause other problems. So it’s really complex, but what’s changing is we know that there are some people who are genetically susceptible to autism. Me, I’m one of them. I had autism as a kid, and I was able to reverse it in my early 30s, and it took a lot of work to do this.
Now I know exactly which genes I have that made me susceptible, but I would not have had it was it not for things like Tylenol, which removes glutathione, which my body doesn’t have enough of, and a couple other nutrients that I needed that we didn’t know that I needed. So we’re gonna personalise this. Everyone on the planet should be able to get a cheap genetic scan to say, you have a special system for you. You need more of this vitamin and less of this other vitamin and don’t eat this stuff, or eat more of that stuff. Then a lot of the chronic stuff just goes away.
*Health authorities, including Australia’s TGA and the AMA, maintain that paracetamol is considered safe for use in pregnancy, with no proven link to autism.
In 10 years, what will be mainstream that that sounds like science fiction now?
Your AI, without any doctor’s permission or any government permission, is going to be able to tell you exactly what to do to get the results you want. Right now, my company Upgrade Labs is gathering a 187 million data points per client per year who comes through the program. Blood tests, all these detailed performance characteristic of your brain and your muscles and your blood. We see how they change and we already know how to make them much stronger and fitter, faster than ever before in less time. But all of humanity is gathering this data and we’re putting it into these systems that are learning, so you’ll be able to say here’s what I know about myself and the AI will know a lot about you and based on that just tell me what to do.
No one need be an expert in biohacking because we are right at the point with AI of having the operating system manual for your body. And your body is unique from any other body on the planet. ‘Here’s what to do today in the least possible dollars, least possible time, least possible effort to reach the goals you want’. You wanna live longer? Do this. You wanna be stronger? Do this. You wanna be smarter? Do this.
That’s happening. The only risk is that some overweight bureaucrat is gonna say you’re not allowed to do the things that make you live longer and thrive, but that’s not sustainable. They cannot hold the line against all these people saying ‘my kids are sick. I will make them well’. It’s an inalienable right to be able to do that by any means necessary.
What will you be talking about at Wanderlust?
I’m going to be talking about longevity. And we’re at this beautiful inflection point where it isn’t guesswork. We don’t need to just hope around longevity. So I’m going to share that information. You could do 1,000 things to improve your health, but no one’s gonna do 1,000 things. I’m gonna share the top five things that work for everyone, which is gonna be really fun. And I’m also going to teach something that’s part of longevity that’s just entering the awareness: stress from your emotions does make you old, and there’s really good science for that now. So what do you do about it? Over the last 10 years, I’ve gathered the brainwaves of more than 1,000 high-performing CEOs and pro-athletes and celebrities, and we’ve trained them how to remove things that piss them off, how to remove triggers.
So I’m gonna teach this process. It costs $20,000 to spend five days with my team of brain engineers, but I’m gonna teach that $20,000 technique to the entire audience so that they can have that skill. So next time someone cuts you off in traffic, instead of taking a deep breath, being stressed, and not running them off the road, you actually won’t get stressed, so you don’t have to take the deep breath. This is about permanently turning off things that irritate you so that you’re just, you have more energy to do what you want.
Among 40-odd speakers Wanderlust Wellspring is also featuring such biohacking luminaries as [the mostly plant-based] David Sinclair, Wim Hoff and Gabrielle Lyon.es
