The man who is going to live to 180 (or die trying)
If his fat-burning coffee wasn’t left-field enough, now Dave Asprey is on a quest to achieve near-immortality.
How is Dave Asprey going to celebrate his 180th birthday? He’s 52, so the big occasion is still a way off. Not until 2153, in fact, but he’s already thinking about the guest list.
“Young people and old people together,” he says. “One of the great things we’ve lost in modern societies is the concept of elders. Elders who sit in a circle telling members of the younger generation, ‘I remember when we tried that before, please let’s not.’ I want something like that.”
Asprey is the self-styled father of the “biohacking” movement. A former tech entrepreneur (he claims to be the first person to sell anything on the internet — a T-shirt bearing the legend “Caffeine is my drug of choice” in 1994), Asprey has spent over a decade and more than $2 million exploring every possible health strategy, even doing experiments on himself to prolong his life.
We are talking on Zoom. He looks suitably otherworldly in yellow-lensed glasses (he owns the brand TrueDark, whose specs, he claims, block out harmful blue light) and reckons his “epigenetic age” is 20 years lower than his real age. I think he looks about 51.
It’s surprising that Asprey is here at all because he was an obese young man, weighing 21 stone (133kg) in his early twenties. At the age of 30, he says, he had the body of a 60-year-old and weighed 300lb. But a year later he was trekking in Nepal when he succumbed to altitude sickness and was given a local speciality recommended by Sherpas: coffee infused with yak butter. Asprey went home and adapted the idea into Bulletproof Coffee (coffee infused with butter from grass-fed cows and MCT, a derivative of coconut oil containing fast-digesting fats).
Gwyneth Paltrow, David Beckham, Ed Sheeran and even the former Labour MP Tom Watson declared themselves fans and Bulletproof made Asprey a fortune.
That’s partly how he financed his extraordinary quest for life prolongation. Asprey conducts experiments on himself at his HQ, Alpha Labs in Austin, Texas. There’s a cryo chamber to promote muscle recovery and to boost his immune system. An infra-red light bed aids skin rejuvenation, relaxation and improved blood circulation. Then there’s his atmospheric cell trainer, which recreates altitude conditions equivalent to the top of Everest to enhance respiratory function and promote cell health. Asprey also has a range of machines he claims allow him to complete a workout that would normally take two and a half hours in 20 minutes.
His breakfast sounds hardcore: a hundred daily tablets to boost bone density, mood and cognition. He also injects stem cells into his legs, arms, neck, face and penis in an attempt to stop inflammation and heal injuries. “Nobody ever learnt anything by doing the same as everyone else, right?” he says.
Asprey once kept an ejaculation journal for a year to calculate the best sex performance for his overall health. The result? Men should only ejaculate once a month — it’s something to do with testosterone depletion, apparently — whereas women should orgasm whenever possible. “Works for me,” he says.
To date Asprey has largely focused on nutrition and physical health hacks. Now he has written a book, Heavily Meditated, that delves into the mental side of the journey to super old age.
In the chapter Go Spank Yourself he advises taking an ice bath or lying on a bed of nails and elsewhere recommends we should become more attuned to what our testicles or labia are telling us moment-to-moment. “Most guys having a pint first register any stress or threat through the testicles,” he asserts.
But central to rebooting your mind for the long journey to near-immortality is what Asprey calls the Reset Process. This involves confronting painful life experiences, even showing forgiveness and gratitude.
You can master this process from his new book. Or, for $16,000 (about £12,000) you can go to his neuroscience facility in Vancouver (where Asprey used to live) for the enhanced version, a five-day residential course called 40 Years of Zen (so called because Asprey claims you will experience the equivalent of 40 years of meditation in one five-day visit).
Here’s one example: say you crashed into a tree while learning to ride a bike as a child. It’s time to forgive the tree and the bike, then thank the tree for teaching you to steer the bike. It’s all about disarming emotional triggers, since negative feelings take up valuable energy. But what Asprey claims advanced practitioners of the Reset Process can achieve is extraordinary.
“One of my more difficult cases was a client who is Jewish and a prominent spiritual leader. He was stuck on something and I sat down with him and said, ‘This will be the hardest thing I ever ask you ever do — we’re going to run the reset process on the Nazis.’ He said, ‘What?! How dare you!’ I said, ‘Look, I don’t feel comfortable telling you this but they still have power over you’ … Afterwards he said, ‘My God I had no idea how much I was holding there. What they did was evil, it wasn’t OK to do that to my family, but they don’t have any hold over me any more.’”
Asprey thinks his process might help any British people with a residual fear of Germans. “If your family went through the bombings of the Second World War, there is ancient fear percolating through your society.”
Naturally he has tested the whole thing on himself. In 2019 there was an almighty bust-up at his coffee company Bulletproof 360 when the board tried to force him out. After an advanced version of the process in which Asprey put electrodes on his scalp (to measure electrical activity) and plugged his brain into a computer, he spoke to his former colleagues and forgave them.
They eventually reached a deal, which he characterises as “you get a bunch of money and I get a bunch of money”. He remains executive chairman at Bulletproof and has since launched a new drink, Danger Coffee.
The Reset Process didn’t save his marriage, though. Asprey split from his wife, Lana Foree, four years ago. Foree is a doctor and fertility expert who still lives on the family’s Vancouver Island farm with their children, Anna, 17, and Alan, 15. “Three and a half years ago we decided to consciously uncouple, which is the LA/Silicon Valley way of saying we had a very amicable divorce,” he says.
Did Asprey’s quest for eternal youth play a role in the break-up? Not every wife would stand for their husband rolling over to keep an ejaculation diary …
“Sure, there were times in our marriage when she said to me, ‘For God’s sake, I’m a doctor and you’re an unlicensed biohacker, what the f*** are you talking about?’ But as we were connecting in the course of separation she said, ‘One of the things I’m really grateful for is biohacking has made me a more well-rounded doctor. I did not believe you at first but there is merit in some of what you say, though I don’t believe in everything.’
“We were together 17 years and I consider that to be a successful marriage because I ran the Reset Process on it. I could either say, ‘We split, it’s the end of the world!’ or, ‘Did we both grow? Am I grateful for all the good times?’ Yes I am.”
Asprey still receives considerable flak. Partly due to his unorthodox beliefs on key foodstuffs such as kale — he believes it’s unhealthy because it contains oxalic acid — and olive oil, which he regards as “suspect”. But mostly because he supported the appointment of the controversial US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. Asprey believes self-experimentation is progressive and that there is too much regulation in pharmaceuticals and medicine. “It is antihuman to tell someone that they do not have the choice to put whatever they want into their bodies,” he has said.
Asprey hopes a younger generation will become similarly sceptical of death, perhaps seeing the discontinuation of existence as an annoying lifestyle glitch, like the wi-fi conking out. That’s why he’s opening a chain of 30 clinics called Upgrade Labs across the US and Canada. “There really is no reason to just accept the end,” he says with a shrug. This morning he got up at 6.30am after six and a half to seven hours of sleep. “But I can still be incredibly functional after two hours,” he enthuses.
Then he drank a Danger Coffee and meditated, though sometimes he does breathwork or cardio instead. “The biggest mistake is doing the same thing every day. You hurt your body with overtraining. It should be, ‘What does my body need that day?’”
I discussed Asprey’s ideas with a lot of older people. Many asked the same question: why would you want to live almost 200 years? Some were even looking through the other end of the telescope: how do I check out early courtesy of the assisted dying bill if I get ill?
For Asprey, though, there’s a sense of making up for lost time. At various times in his life he has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, attention deficit disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, oppositional defiance disorder, arthritis, fibromyalgia, Hashimoto’s disease (an auto-immune disease linked to an underactive thyroid), Lyme disease, chronic fatigue syndrome and strep throat.
He says he has now cured his Asperger’s — “I have restored my power plants, I have retrained my eye, I have retrained my ears, I have retrained how my tongue works and how I walk … it took a lot of energy” — and biohacking has helped him to start anew.
“I made $6 million aged 26 and lost it at 28. I’ve been married and divorced. Money, fame and relationships don’t seem to make you happy. What works is doing what I do now.”
So who else might be at his 180th bash? One possibility is Bryan Johnson, probably the world’s best-known biohacker. Johnson is notorious for collecting “night-time erection data” from his teenage son Talmage to compare with his own (his son’s erections last two minutes longer), not to mention giving his own penis electric shock treatment. Johnson has also injected himself with his son’s blood plasma and this year launched his own religion called Don’t Die.
By comparison Asprey comes across like someone on work experience at Holland & Barrett asking if you’d like to try a healthy new muesli. There is distinct “frenemy energy” in the room when I mention Johnson’s name. “Ha! Yeah, Bryan … he’s been on my stage,” Asprey says. “I’ve been friends with Bryan but not close … ”
OK, if not Bryan, who else might be at his birthday party? Asprey’s new girlfriend, Christina Weber, will surely make it. The life coach and “intuitive matchmaker” recently celebrated her 44th birthday, though she doesn’t look a minute over 30. “She’s eight years younger than me and is absurdly healthy so she has a head start to 180,” Asprey says, beaming proudly.
One person who probably won’t attend, even if he is still alive, is the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Asprey has a gym below his in Santa Monica and recently had a new kitchen installed. The builders accidentally routed the kitchen exhaust into Arnie’s place.
“The pipe literally went straight into Arnie’s trophy cabinet and filled it with bacon fumes,” he says. “He was pretty pissed off. But, you know, that’s the landlord’s problem. And also it’s good to let all negativity go. Maybe Arnie needs the Reset Process.”
The Times
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