After lunch, I have the opportunity to interview Dave Asprey himself. I want to confront him about the validity of the claims I’ve heard throughout the weekend. I want to ask him whether he really believes in the experiments and products he sells. But when he enters the room, humbly dressed in well-fitted jeans and a button-down shirt, all I can think to ask is whether, despite all his success, he still sometimes feels like the fat, insecure guy he left behind on that mountain in Tibet. I know for me, no matter how healthy I’m eating, or how well my jeans fit, I still feel like my inner eight-year-old chubby kid double fisting butter sammies before bed (a real thing I actually did — I guess I was Bulletproof before it was a thing). So I ask him, and he looks at me with a piercing blue-eyed glare that would make Tom Cruise blush, and says no. “By using a technique called neuro feedback augmented retro framing, I’ve gone back and changed my internal story around that.” With that, Dave Asprey is ushered to his next interview, and I am left to Google whatever the hell he just said. So no enlightenment there. But, for all the fanfare and all the jargon, there was still something about the Bulletproof phenomenon I couldn’t shake. Although I’m not what anyone would consider a biohacker, I was a bit envious wondering around the Tech Hall watching all the bright-eyed believers buy into the stuff Asprey and his band of faux prophets were peddling. Because I came to the conference not just as a correspondent, but as someone who has carefully picked my way through the obstacle course of western medicine. In 2015, I was diagnosed with stage three, triple-negative breast cancer. There is no history of cancer in my family, and I tested negative for the cancer gene. Like many of Asprey’s experiments, there was no logical, proven scientific explanation why I got cancer. It just happened. After seven intensive rounds of chemo that failed to shrink the tumor (even though all available data indicated it should have worked) my doctors and I made the choice to move to surgery. There I was, a thirty-year-old woman having to forego my sexual and emotional peak to make the decision to freeze my eggs and remove my breasts. As ridiculous as all the products were, and as easy as it was to make fun of the people buying them, I couldn’t genuinely judge the Bulletproof believers — because I wanted to believe, too. I wanted a way to not only prevent cancer from coming back, but to program my body to exceed expectations of what it means to be healthy in the first place. “Health is boring,” Asprey told me during our brief conversation. “You want to know who wants to be healthy? Sick people.” He was right, and even though his claims were based on faulty science, he wasn’t wrong for wanting to believe them. Because the truth is, science can fail us. I wanted to feel invincible after nine months of being poked and prodded and cut open in the name of reputable science. I wanted to change my biological narrative. I didn’t want to be the cancer girl anymore, and if it meant putting a strange powder in my coffee or doing yoga on a vibrating platform, I was open to at least trying it. I left the convention as dusk was setting over Pasadena’s Green Street and hurried to my car just before the parking meter ran out (the most exercise I got all weekend). I looked across the promenade where Nerdbot-Con, a nerd and cosplay convention, was being held. Grown men and women in spandex were parading as superheroes and anime characters, fantasizing about a life more fantastical than their own. I couldn’t judge them either; because the nerds, the CrossFitters, and me — under the muscles and stretchy leotards and yoga pants — we were all the same. We weren’t just blind followers of fantasies, but vulnerable optimists striving for something more.