Dave Asprey

I could be nasty and summarise this book in one sentence: fast for 16 hours a day and make sure to drink Dave Asprey’s Bulletproof Coffee. Because it gets a little bit annoying (more than annoying) that he promotes his own products on almost every page of the book.

But to be fair, I chose to buy and read this book from beginning to end for a good reason. I am interested in intermittent fasting. Asprey seems rather more than interested — he’s obsessed. A lot of what he writes is his own show more experiences with fasting. So some of it is interesting and he writes well. I’ve read other books he wrote which I enjoyed more. And I did try Bulletproof Coffee. Once. My partner still makes fun of me for that. show less

I've read this book as a Blinkist book summary ...so the review is based on this summary, not on the full work and therefore there are limitations in both the summary and my review of the summary. But I came away thinking that it was really a bit of journalistic hacking. Interview a few people who have been successful in life and who seem to be mavericks and make a book out of it. What's missing from here is the interviews with all the mavericks who did the same sort of things but who fell show more by the wayside and were never heard of again.
And the are some pretty strange things here ....like limit your sex life to one orgasm a week (for men). And it's strange but the more of these sort of "self-help" books I read, the more of the same stuff seems to keep coming up: like eat well (the mediterranean diet). Exercise, Get a good night's sleep. ... Ok all good advice but I probably only need to read one self-help book that says this and throw the rest away.
Anyway, here are some extracts that caught my eye in the Blinkist summary: Learn the secrets of biohacking.....Your body and mind are interrelated aspects of a single, overall whole, which is ultimately rooted in your biology. By intentionally manipulating that biology, you can bring your body and mind into better harmony with each other and your goals. Biohacking is the practice of doing just that......The principles are built on an understanding of human biology and psychology, while the applications are derived from interviews the author, Dave Asprey, conducted with 450 highly successful individuals. [What about the interviews with those who were unsuccessful?]
Biohacking enables you to update and adjust your mental and physical operating system.
Why bother with biohacking in the first place?....Well, the short answer is that your body and mind’s operating system is outdated. It was built around the needs of our prehistoric ancestors, who evolved in a world much more hostile than ours your nervous system [evolved] to keep you focused on the three fundamental factors of a species’ survival. We can call them the three Fs–fear, food and, for the sake of politeness, let’s call it “fornication.”
We spend much of our time chasing after power, money and physical attractiveness. Why? Largely because they help us secure safety, food and sexual partners......Meanwhile, our powerful urges to seek out safety, food and sex can lead us by the nose, taking us away from our goals.....The point isn’t to renounce food, sex or safety. It’s to take control of our automatic thoughts and behaviours around them, putting our more rational selves in the driver’s seat.
To truly benefit from biohacking, you need to know your goals.
First, identify your true passions in life. These are the things you love doing so much that you feel excited just thinking about them.....This brings us to the next tactic, which begins with distinguishing between your means goals and your end goals.
Your means goals are the things you want to achieve in order to achieve something else.
We have an unfortunate tendency to become overly fixated on means goals, like making money.
To achieve your goals with biohacking: prioritize and avoid decision fatigue.
None of those decisions are necessarily overwhelming in and of themselves, but cumulatively they take a toll and leave you increasingly exhausted as the day progresses. That’s decision fatigue.
The simplest way to avoid it is to minimize the number of decisions you have to make each day. And the easiest way to do that is to automate as many tasks as possible
For instance, creating a capsule diet. This is a collection of five or six healthy meals that you cycle through. That way, you can avoid having to make all the decisions involved in planning meals.
Taking charge of your diet requires you to overcome emotional eating.
Taking charge of your diet requires you to overcome emotional eating.
Out of all of the high-performance individuals the author interviewed, more than 75 percent of them said their diet was the most crucial factor behind their performance levels.
This is part of a larger phenomenon called emotional eating. This is when we habitually seek out food when we’re feeling sad, stressed, angry, bored or even joyful.
For a healthier approach to food, identify your emotional eating triggers and eat like your grandma.
Correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation, of course, but if there’s a consistent pattern of overlap between your hunger and certain emotional states, then there’s a reason to be suspicious of that hunger.....What did grandma eat? Lots of vegetables, plenty of protein-rich foods and a daily tablespoon of fish oil.....And how did grandma eat? Moderately and infrequently.
To get a good night’s sleep, identify your chronotype and adjust your sleep schedule accordingly.
The key to biohacking your sleep is to identify your natural sleep pattern and adjust your sleep schedule accordingly.....So, which chronotype are you? One way to find out is to use your next vacation week as an opportunity to conduct a little experiment. Simply let yourself go to bed and wake up when your body feels like it.
To benefit from exercise, you need to counteract its shortcomings and drawbacks....First, if you think that all you need to do is exercise a little each day, without making other lifestyle adjustments, you could end up being a mostly sedentary person who happens to do intense movements from time to time. In fact, a six-hour bout of sitting can negate the benefits of a one-hour workout........[I missed the second} Third, aerobic exercise leads our bodies to produce the stress hormone cortisol. This, in turn, triggers the creation of oxidative substances that make us age faster and cause inflammation.........to avoid sitting too much, invest in a standing desk. To learn how to move your body properly, consider working with a functional movement coach. And, finally, to counteract the negative effects of aerobic exercise, add strength training to your workout routine.
To preserve more energy for higher pursuits, minimize the amount you use for sex......From an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense that we would put so much energy into sex......your energy is a finite resource. The more of it you allocate to sex, the less of it you’ll have to allocate to other aspects of your life.......you can sublimate–that is, re-channel–your sex-bound energy into higher pursuits, like creative projects, you’ll have more energy to devote to them......To minimize the effects of orgasms on men and maximize their effects on women, the author recommends that men limit themselves to one orgasm per week and that women seek out more frequent orgasms–at least two per week.
Fear is one of the biggest obstacles to success........Finally, we come to the third F–fear.......we feel a lot more fear than is warranted by our present conditions. Fear triggers stress, which in turn drains our energy and eventually leads us to feel burned out.
Second, fear takes us out of the present moment. That’s because fear is usually about something negative that might happen in the future,
Third, fear discourages us from taking the risks that lead to success.
You can overcome fear by giving yourself safety cues.
Fight your fear in two ways at once by doing a guided meditation. The calm voice of the instructor will send a signal to your subconscious that everything’s okay, while the meditation itself will bring your mind back into the present–away from worries of the future, where fears tend to lurk.......Another cue to try is to visualize yourself in a happy place.
Finally, try to feel gratitude for as many things, people and events in your life as possible–even your failures, which you can reinterpret as helpful learning experiences.
keep a journal in which you write down three things for which you’re grateful every morning,
Final summary
The key message in these blinks: Our bodies and minds are held back by unhelpful patterns of thoughts and behaviours, which revolve around food, fear and sex. By understanding how our bodies and minds work, we can overcome these patterns and enhance our ability to generate, preserve and deploy our time and energy. With a clear conception of our goals and by carefully setting our priorities, we’ll be in an optimal position to succeed.
Actionable advice: Stop using the word “can’t.”
When you say you can’t do something, what you really mean is that you don’t have the resources, the skills, the confidence or some other prerequisite for doing it. And that condition can be overcome.
Ok there are some sensible suggestions here but I didn't get the impression that any one of these things was anything other that normal sensible living and was not the sort of things that mavericks did to shake the world up. In fact Kepler, who did shake the world up was an unhealthy, borderline nut case. Isaac Newton, similarly....though not sure about the health side. He certainly didn't have many friends.
Anyway, the bottom line for me is that I'm not rushing out to buy and read the full original book. Two stars from me. show less

Dave Asprey is famous (in some circles) as the guy who invented Bulletproof Coffee, which is both a concept and a business. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Asprey seems to be one of the first — if not the first — of a new breed of bio-hackers. As a young man he was quite sickly, showing many signs of premature ageing including arthritis. He decided to try out a few things — actually more than few things — which range from the reasonable to the completely bonkers. Some of these seemed show more to work. In this book, he has decided to share what he’s learned over two decades of using his own body as a guinea pig.

While the book seems to be evidence-based and heavily footnoted, Asprey is not a doctor and this is not credible medical advice. That doesn’t mean it’s not interesting: much of it is. The least-crazy things he suggests (like using a sleep monitor app on your phone, or taking Vitamin C supplements) are things I quickly adopted, at no risk to my health. Some of the later stuff is a bit too edgy for my taste.

I do however agree with his core idea that humans need not become decrepit in our 70s or 80s, and that we absolutely need to die by the age of 120. The ‘maybe’ in the title of his book shows that he’s not convinced that immortality is an option — and his own personal goal is a 50% increase over what is now believed possible. In other words, he wants to live to 180. I wish him luck, and I salute his optimism and ‘can-do’ spirit. I hope he’s right. show less

Dave Asprey's latest book has some interesting material. The beginning parts of the book are, well, beginner parts. If you're familiar with the health research over the last few years you won't find much new here -- circadian rhythms, making sure to eat enough fat (including saturated), other relatively basic things like that. The later parts get into more advanced things, and I did learn a few interesting ideas that I plan to research more. Red light therapy, lesser-known supplements like show more PQQ, and seriously bleeding-edge things like SARMs all provide fodder for the more advanced health nut/biohacker. I have a few qualms with how cavalier he is about taking one or 2 studies as gospel for a given topic, and was a bit annoyed by constant self-promotions for other products he sells. (The author is clearly a successful businessman.) I'd suggest to do your own research before making any decisions for anything in parts 2 & 3. But the science is generally good and I learned some new things, so it was a worthwhile read. show less