Why You Should Listen –
Dr. Billy DeMoss is the founder of the Dead Chiropractic Society, a coalition of Southern California chiropractors who meet monthly to discuss chiropractic philosophy and advancements. He expanded DCS in 2008, when he created California Jam. The Cal Jam conference invites world-renowned experts in public health and global sustainability to educate and empower people who find natural solutions more attractive than harmful man-made ones, and Dave will be a keynote speaker at the conference in 2017. Dr. Billy also heads his own innovative practice. On today’s episode of Bulletproof Radio, Dave and Billy talk about nerve function, the spine, vaccines, drug use, music, recognizing a good chiropractor and more. Enjoy the show!
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Announcer: Bulletproof Radio, a state of high performance.
Dave Asprey: You’re listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today’s cool fact of the day is that there are 43 different pairs of nerves that connect the central nervous system to every part of your body. A dozen of those nerve pairs are connected to the brain and 31 are linked to the spinal cord. Your spinal cord contains about 13.5 million neurons and those neurons each contain somewhere between two and 10,000 mitochondria each. It turns out that group of nerves at the base of your spine are the most sensitive ones, and that alone is one reason you might want to try a standing desk and you might want to keep those mitochondria strong which is the topic of my next book.
It seems like everything you do has to do with your mitochondria. Wait, that’s because you die with them. A quick question for all of you hard-working entrepreneurs; in dealing with your day-to-day paperwork ever brought about feelings that resemble anything close to joy, satisfaction or ease? I didn’t think so.
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All right, before we get going, we talked about standing desks. What if you don’t have a standing desk or you’re just not going to use one, and you don’t have time to go for a nice walk which is what I recommend you do. You could do what I do which is right behind my standing desk, I have a Bulletproof Vibe.
This is a whole body vibration plate that Bulletproof makes. It’s easy to use, you’ll see results in about 15 minutes or less per day. Sometimes I stand up for five minute between meetings. It vibrates you up and down, 30 times a second. It’s incredibly energizing. Vibrating yourself like that, we’re just finding out through Gerald Pollack’s work that it changes some of the water in your cells. When you shake water up like that, it can change the alignment of the water. You may say, “Oh, that sounds like woo-science,” you can say that all you want. Gerald Pollack is the Head of Water Journal and a Professor at UW and he’s speaking at the Bulletproof Conference.
It turns out that water in your cells, the viscosity of that water has a lot to do with how effective you’re making energy. Moving your body helps you to have water that lets you make energy more easily. That’s just how it is. You’ll find that there are a lot of chiropractors who use a Bulletproof Vibe but you can use it at home and it’s one of the coolest things I get to play with every single day.
I do a couple of yoga poses on it, do a plank pose and then I look like I’m ripped all the time. Okay, that’s not all I do but still, it’s kind of cool, and I don’t look like I’m ripped all the time.
Right now, as we are speaking, Brock, my trusted cameraman is making bizarre cheerleader-like gestures to me and I have no idea what they mean. Brock, what are you trying to tell me to do?
Brock: Tell the people what you’re standing on because you’re glowing weird.
Dave Asprey: Am I glowing weird? Can you see me glowing?
Billy: Nope.
Dave Asprey: Brock, is it possible that the glowing is actually coming from your perception of reality?
Brock: Yes, absolutely.
Dave Asprey: As we are speaking, I am shining infrared, blue and red LEDs on the soles of my feet. Should have gotten a pedicure, I knew it. Why am I doing that? Well, I’m experimenting. There are tons of nerve endings on the feet and light is drugs and I’m actually using drugs that are stimulating my energy. I’m actually feeling really amp-y from this, it’s kind of a cool thing.
This is like a cheap knock-off thing from China. There’s lots of different wavelengths of lights you can use. One of these, I have dozens of light devices and I’m actually launching one that has 40,000 red and infrared LEDs on it that you lay in for 20 minutes that like recharges your body. It’s pretty amazing. That’s part of the new Bulletproof Labs Biohacking Gear.
Anyway, checkout the Bulletproof whole body vibration platform. It’s called the Bulletproof Vibe. Not the Bullet Vibe, that’s a totally different thing, the Bulletproof Vibe and that is available on Bulletproof.com. Thanks very much. I’m sorry I’ve been wasting so much of our guest time talking about my feet, but he’s a pretty patient guy or so I hear and today’s guest is Billy DeMoss. He’s a bad-ass electric guitar playing and surfing chiropractor, owns DeMoss … You know what, Billy? I don’t know how to say your last name right. Am I saying it right?
Billy: DeMoss, you said it right.
Dave Asprey: DeMoss, I always feel like- … The enunciation on the E.
Billy: I’ve heard everything, man. I’ve heard it all, so yeah, DeMoss.
Dave Asprey: DeMoss. DeMoss, all right “dee,” “day,” “dee,” “day.” Anyway, all right so sorry Billy. Billy DeMoss. I should know that one, you see someone on Facebook all the time you can always hear their name. By the way, my last name is pronounced “ass-spray” if you’re in seventh grade, just so that’s all clear to everyone.
Billy: That’s good for me too.
Dave Asprey: For the rest of you, “Asprey” works fine, but hey.
Billy: I’m just going to call you Dave if it’s easy, that’s all right?
Dave Asprey: I’m down with that!
Billy: Okay, cool. You can call me Billy D, then you don’t have to worry about that either.
Dave Asprey: All right, Billy D. Billy is the founder of the Dead Chiropractic Society, a California coalition that discusses chiropractic philosophies and advancement. What’s cool about Billy is he expanded on the group that began Cal Jam. Cal Jam is a really cool event where more than 1,000 chiropractors/musicians get together and talk about all of the things chiropractors do, which is a lot more than cracking your back these days.
They’re functional medicine practitioners in a variety of ways, depending on their specialty and focus. It’s kind of cool to talk with this big group of people, serve them Bulletproof coffee and watch them make music, with the exception of bluegrass, which no one actually likes.
I say that, my father’s a bluegrass musician, and so I just have to say that every now and then, in case he’s listening. Hi dad. He is listening. All right, okay, Billy, do you play the banjo?
Billy: No, I don’t play the banjo. That’s one instrument that-
Dave Asprey: Do you have any friends who do?
Billy: No. I actually have a cousin that does, but he’s kind of a little bizarre to begin with, anyways.
Dave Asprey: It happens.
Billy: You know what, it’s a happy instrument, though, you never hear a sad song with a banjo in it. Just think about it next time you hear a banjo. They are always a happy, uplifting song.
Dave Asprey: It’s true.
Billy: Yeah.
Dave Asprey: You’re a musician, so you probably know the tool they use to tune a banjo. Do you know what it is?
Billy: No, I don’t.
Dave Asprey: Wire cutters.
Billy: Okay, wire cutters.
Dave Asprey: Sorry banjo friends, just kidding, we just like to pick on you because you don’t have teeth. Now my dad’s really going to give me crap about this. Anyway, that’s what Cal Jam is. It’s a group of very happy, very friendly chiropractors who all play music together and hang out, and we serve Bulletproof Coffee and it’s pretty cool.
I’m actually speaking there next year, in 2017, so Billy, welcome to Bulletproof Radio. We are, today, going to talk about maximizing human performance. We’re going to talk about the electrical system in the body, the nervous system. How you can actually live longer by paying attention to it. I’m going to push you a little bit at the beginning.
Billy: Oh, good. I like that.
Dave Asprey: All right, I come from a family of scientists. All of my aunts and uncles, master’s degree scientists. My dad has a master’s degree, I am a computer science guy. We all know, flat-out, that chiropractors are- … I think the technical term is quacks, right?
Billy: And charlatans.
Dave Asprey: Oh, I thought charlatans were people who didn’t have some sort of quasi-medical degree, and quacks were people that did.
Billy: Right.
Dave Asprey: Okay, so that is a reputation that, actually, many people in my family had. In fact, I’ll just throw them out there again, since I’m picking on my dad. For years, I wouldn’t see a chiropractor, because there’s no science behind that. Then he finally saw one, and his back hurt less. It was like “this is amazing.” I had no idea.
There’s a perceived notion. What is chiropractic? Define it and talk about what it is, because I think, for people who have never tried it who might still be in that “it sounds like a bunch of woo-woo science,” walk me through what is the universe of chiropractic? Where does it start, where does it end?
Billy: Well, it’s funny you say that about your parents, too, because I was brought up with the same thing with my parents being in total disbelief. They thought we were quacks, too. I was a chemistry major and I already applied to dental school, because my mom was a dental hygenist. She wanted all four of her sons to go to dental school. I was exposed to a Meric chart, which is a chiropractic chart which explains that the brain through the spinal cord nerves coordinates all the function, all of the organs, and the organs also speak back to the brain.
If there’s complete communication there, you’re going to have a healthier individual. If there’s interference from misalignment, pressure on nerves, interference with nerves, then you’re going to have susceptibility to disease. What chiropractors do is they look for that subluxation for that interference and remove that, allowing the body to express more potential.
I was a chemistry major, science head, and I saw that chart and it made sense to me. I went home and I told my parents I decided not to go to dental school. I was going to go to chiropractic school, and my mom almost choked on her food. She got up, she walked in to start cleaning the dishes before we were even done with dinner and she mumbled on the way out “you’re wasting your life,” because she had been programmed by all the propaganda and all the biases that have been out there, basically, put out there by the AMA.
I mean, initially, the AMA, I think, was in the ’70s had a focus to not only contain chiropractic, but also limit the chiropractic profession and through a great landslide court case we won that they no longer can really have that same propaganda bias.
Dave Asprey: The American Medical Association is not a government body. It’s a private industry trade group to protect physicians with MDs, right?
Billy: Right.
Dave Asprey: They were found guilty, was it of racketeering in what they did against chiropractic profession?
Billy: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they just wanted to get rid of us. They had a whole “Quackwatch” system.
Dave Asprey: Oh, you’re talking about Stephen Barrett and Quackwatch.
Billy: Well, yeah, he’s a different cat. He’s another one of our good friends in chiropractic, does he love you too?
Dave Asprey: Here’s the thing, about 10, 12 years ago, my work in anti-aging, I realized that every one of the pioneers in different fields who I’d interviewed, all of the ones who were the most ass-kicking were all targeted by Quackwatch.
I was kind of sounding like “I want to be targeted by Quackwatch someday.” I’m not a quack because I’m not a medical professional. I don’t have the licensing to do that. Last week, in USA Today, there was a big article about Bulletproof. I was talking about how my goal is to live to 180, and I’m doing every single thing I can to make that happen.
They get Stephen Barrett from Quackwatch to come on and say “there’s no evidence he’s going to live to 180.” There’s no evidence how long anyone’s going to live, because we have things like buses that run you over. I’m not saying I’m going to live, I’m saying I’m doing everything. Anyway, I posted this amazing gratitude post on Facebook, because I’m like “this is awesome, I finally got to be mentioned by Quackwatch.” That has been one of my career goals, and it finally happened.
I’m like thank you. I’m thinking about getting a Quackwatch tattoo with a heart on my shoulder, I’m so in love with Stephen Barrett for basically honoring me by putting me amongst some of the people I respect the most. Stephen Barrett, if you’re listening, I love you man, keep up the good work.
Billy: Doesn’t the guy have anything better to do though? That’s what I always wondered.
Dave Asprey: He makes a lot of money from big pharma, I thought.
Billy: He probably does, and that’s just not the-
Dave Asprey: We’re not sure.
Billy: Right.
Dave Asprey: We think he acts like it.
Billy: Right.
Dave Asprey: We didn’t want to say anything disparaging about him because I love him so much.
Billy: Right.
Dave Asprey: Stephen Barrett, Quackwatch. By the way, everyone listening, if you don’t know this site, it’s basically the best science trolling site ever. If you want to learn how to be a science troll, the rest of it goes like this. Find a reference to something that you fervently believe in, find someone who disagrees, and then call them just any insult and post a link to PubMed.
Bascially, PubMed plus personal insult equals science troll, and that’s Quackwatch. I love it, it’s really a good art, and being a science troll takes a lot of personal development. You need to suppress your human emotions, and what’s left there is mostly the animal-istic side. I could go on about my love for them, but anyway, it’s sounds like you’ve had the same experience.
Billy: Yeah, I have a lot of those trolls, especially in social media. You know what, Dave? Sometimes I almost feel like I’m getting soft if I don’t have the trolls coming at me.
Dave Asprey: It is a sign of success, but Billy, there’s something you can do, and I don’t know, it seems like you kind of enjoy it a little bit, you know?
Billy: I love it.
Dave Asprey: I don’t want them to get in the way of the actual work I’m doing. I found out this amazing equation, and it’s one I’m really public about. It goes like this. It takes a science troll, probably like five or ten minutes, they have to get really angry, red in the face, they have to Google something they don’t know anything about, post some links, and then insult me personally.
That takes some time and energy. The response, it’s like Aikido, all you do is you click “ban, delete.”
Billy: “Ban, delete,” I do it all the time. It’s power, dude.
Dave Asprey: Half a second, versus 10 minutes.
Billy: Right.
Dave Asprey: Like I always win, it’s like I feel so good about that. Yes, just for people listening, you probably already know this if you get on my Facebook page, there is respectful disagreement where we’re nice to each other. I don’t insult people. I’m not mean to them. I expect people to be polite. You can come on to me and say “Dave, the vegan diet, what about this, what about this?” We could have a really good conversation and you might teach me something, you might change my mind.
You come on and you call a bunch of other people a bunch of names. I will kick your ass out of there so fast.
Billy: Right.
Dave Asprey: I feel absolutely nothing but joy and gratitude for the ability to do that. Let’s be nice to each other.
Billy: Right, but you can always tell the difference between a troll and somebody that actually has a legitimate question or legitimate concern, and you can answer those questions. Many times, whatever you feed these people is never going to be enough, because they’re just going to keep digging, and digging, and digging.
It goes against their whole paradigm that they’ve been brainwashed into believing that health comes from the outside in when it’s already an inside job.
Dave Asprey: I do have a couple bones to pick with you.
Billy: Okay.
Dave Asprey: Not that I would troll you, because you’d probably just hang up on me and..
Billy: No, I’d ban and delete you. No, I wouldn’t do that to you.
Dave Asprey: I’m just kidding. You are very strongly-spoken out against drugs, like any kind of drugs.
Billy: I think drugs should be utilized in crisis emergency situations, but there’s no way you’re going to tell me or try to tell me that drugs improve health in any way.
Dave Asprey: Aren’t there some drugs that improve health in some circumstances?
Billy: Name one.
Dave Asprey: Piracetam.
Billy: Okay, what does that do.
Dave Asprey: Piracetam is a very well-studied and older smart drug that increases neuron health, increases your ability to handle hypoxic situations without causing your own cell death. The only side effects that we know it has is it slightly increases your use of aacetylcholine, and it slightly amplifies the effects of caffeine.
Billy: Okay, I didn’t know that. You’re teaching me something today.
Dave Asprey: What I’m saying is-
Billy: I like to keep it simple. To me, there’s so much stuff out there, I just like to live congruent to my gene expression and do things to stay on that track. I just know that there’s got to be some negative side effects if there’s something you’re getting back, some benefit out of it. If you’re saying there’s no negative side effects?
Dave Asprey: I guess what I’m saying is that the benefits might outweigh the side effects. It’s the same with food, right?
Billy: Right.
Dave Asprey: Right, like caffeine, okay, you’re definitely a fan of coffee, so am I. Right? Too much caffeine is not really good for you.
Billy: No.
Dave Asprey: If you have long genes, you can’t excrete caffeine, you might need to drink less of it, or none of it. There’s individual variations, but I get uncomfortable when I hear a dogmatic dismissal of a technology, because there’s probably a case where it’s useful. I will agree with you that taking a drug to solve a problem that is an environmental problem, first and foremost.
Billy: A lifestyle problem, right?
Dave Asprey: Yeah, it’s a poor idea and it’s not the right way of solving the problem, but it’s not the wrong way to solve the problem if the normal stuff doesn’t work.
Billy: Right, and again, you can take that to things like marijuana, which in some people, it enhances their creativity. Obviously, those are things that you can’t argue with. You could take speed if you need to drive your car, and it’s gonna save your life. Those are going to be, in my opinion, exceptions to those rules.
I haven’t heard of this drug that you just mentioned, so I need to do some research on it. Can you name any other drugs?
Dave Asprey: Well, piracetam is interesting. In your research, it’s not in the physician’s desk reference, even though it’s manufactured by SENDOZ Pharmaceuticals in Europe. It’s one of those smart drugs that’s in kind of an orphaned status in the US. You can buy it, but not at Walgreen’s, even though it’s phenomenally popular. It’s just one of those kind of gray zone things.
What are some other drugs? Naltrexone, low-dose Naltrexone works really well for auto-immune patients without substantial side effects, even though high-dose Naltrexone is what you use for heroin addicts. That’s one that’s changed a lot of people’s lives. However, another one, Metformin, that I actually took for a while, it’s an anti-diabetes drug. I didn’t have diabetes, it causes a lot of genetic expression for light caloric restriction, and in fact, a lot of anti-aging enthusiasts use it. I stopped taking it when I found out it causes mitochondrial dysfunction. I don’t do anything that makes my mitochondria weak.
Billy: Right, right.
Dave Asprey: Metformin is off my list now. It’s one of those double-edged things where it might be a good thing to keep your blood levels down. Some of these drugs are very close-
Billy: Yeah, but you can do that stuff in a short-term.
Dave Asprey: Yeah.
Billy: I mean, yeah, that’s fine, but I’m saying, to be on that for the rest of your life is going to have some kind of detrimental side effect in the long run. I’m going to stick with living congruent to genes, and eating foods, making sure I lead a life filled with just movement and exercise.
Dave Asprey: Okay.
Billy: I’m big on normalizing posture and normalizing restrictions and subluxation of the spine. I’m big on sleep. Maybe there’s situations when if you’re traveling to a foreign country and you’re way out of your time zone where it would be advantageous to take a sleeping pill, I get that kind of stuff, but that’s not stuff that’s really going to, in my opinion, perpetuate a person’s health.
Dave Asprey: I’m with you there. Let’s talk some more about spinal health. I have some questions about air travel and spinal health and some things, maybe you can tell me, because you’ve looked a lot more at the spine than I have. I did some weird things on my own biology that will be of interest to other people listening to this, as well, I think. What is a subluxation? Explain it exactly, how do we know it’s there, how can you scientifically prove that it’s a subluxation? Just walk people listening through the thinking behind subluxations.
Billy: First off, you just do an in-depth consultation, and find out what’s going on with the patient, find out is it neck pain that radiates into their arm and hands, or does it radiate into their head, or is it low back pain that radiates. You’re getting ideas of where there may be subluxations, and then you do a spinal exam, where you go through and you feel the spine, usually when the vertebra are out of alignment, they’re going to be sensitive and sore. You may see some inflammation around the subluxation area. You may feel muscle spasm, then we run therms on the spine, which will check for temperature along the spine, which is another indicator.
Dave Asprey: That one’s very scientific. Talk a little bit more about that. A skeptic listening right now, who goes “well, there’s nothing going on in the spine,” walk me through what happens when you run a therm on the spine? A thermographic analysis.
Billy: It just checks for asymmetries and temperature along the spine, which is a function of the nervous system, as far as vascularity is concerned. If there’s imbalances, that’s just one of the cues that we use to discern whether a person is subluxated or not.
Dave Asprey: Here’s the deal; if it’s all in your head, why is there heat in one part of the spine and not heat at the other part of the spine that matches it?
Billy: Exactly.
Dave Asprey: There is actually a physical thing happening.
Billy: Right.
Dave Asprey: Now, the next step would be how do we know that that physical thing means anything? Like, because it hurts there might be one of the signs, but what are the other reasons we know that subluxations matter?
Billy: Then again, we can check ranges of motion through inclinometry, which is digitized measuring of the range of motion.
Dave Asprey: Got it.
Billy: Typically, when a person’s subluxated, they’re going to have restricted range-of-motion. Then, right after an adjustment, you’re not only going to see typically, a reduction in a person’s symptoms, but you’ll also see improvements in range-of-motion, you’ll see inflammation decrease. You’ll see muscle spasms decrease. Over time, you’ll see radio-graphic changes on X-rays as far as improvement in posture and alignment.
Dave Asprey: What we’re seeing here is the patient reports pain, the physician hears about the pain, palpates the pain, measures the temperature differential caused by the pain, measures the limitation of movement caused by the area that’s in pain, does an intervention, which involves pushing on the vertebra or doing other adjustment-like things. Then, the pain goes down, the temperature regulates, and the patient has movement again.
Billy: Yes, but we check, also the conductivity of the muscles in the spine through an EMG.
Dave Asprey: Wow, right.
Billy: When there’s a muscle spasm. We’ve got objective measurements, we’ll document what’s going on. We don’t want to base it just on a patient’s subjetive complaints, because, again, we know that that’s going to be so variable in so many different people.
Dave Asprey: That doesn’t sound scientific at all, no wonder people call you charlatans.
Billy: Right. I know, the thing to me is it’s the clinical results we get. I’ve been doing this for 31 years Dave and I don’t ever have a question that I’m going to get results with people as long as they follow through with what we ask them to do. Yeah, I’m big on nutrition, too. They’ve got to eat a diet that’s not pro-inflammatory and get them on things like fish oils and get them drinking simple things. Like drinking more water. I’m big on getting people to get extra vitamin D, uh take probiotics to help that microbiome that’s been nuked and destroyed from antibiotics people take now. Again, just try to get people back on track living the way they’re supposed to.
This body is the most amazing healing machine on the planet, and we’re all hard-wired to express health. It’s just so many people are sick and having health issues because of the fact that they’re not playing by God’s rules. They’re not playing by rules of the universal intelligence that governs this whole universe that we live in.
Dave Asprey: Now, one of the things I noticed for several years, when I would eat dairy protein, like basically milk, one of the vertebra in my neck would shift almost a quarter inch, half an inch to the side, within ten minutes of eating it. It would hurt, and you could feel it, and it wasn’t before I’d have the meal and I’d lose range-of-motion in my neck and it would hurt like heck. You could sort of push it back in, it would pop out. I don’t have that response anymore. I still get a little bit of stiffness, but nothing like that.
I used to think I was kind of crazy, but it was absolutely predictable, and it was predictable to a point where I could eat something and go “I didn’t think it had milk in it,” I’d get the symptom, then I’d ask. Oh yeah, there was milk in there, I just couldn’t see it. It was as close to double-blinded as you can get. What’s going on there?
Billy: Here’s the deal, all the neurons coming from your brain who come down the spinal cord and out to the nerves to various organs, and problems with restriction in the flow of the energy over those nerves can cause dysfunction in those organs and glands. Again, also, if you irritate a specific organ. Let’s say you’re a smoker, Dave. Which, I know you’re not, but if you smoke, you’re going to irritate the tissue in your lungs, which is going to send information back to the brain, which will cause reflex spasm in the muscles around that are, which can pull the vertebra out of it’s proper position. By not smoking, you’re not going to recurrently cause that same cycle to adapt.
Same thing, if someone’s eating spicy food or dairy products, that’s going to irritate the stomach. The nerves that feed into the stomach, say from the mid-back, say from T-5 down to T-7, those nerves are going to be affected, and it’s going to cause a reflex spasm there. We call those visceral somatic reflexes. There’s also somato-visceral reflexes, where problems in the spine cause- … Say somebody’s got a subluxation in their mid-back area, that can cause problems … Somato-visceral can cause problems in the visceral called stomach issues. A lot of people come to us with let’s say mid-back pain. We start working on them, adjusting them, and as a consequence of getting adjusted and their pain goes away, their stomach issues clear up.
Half of my practice is kids. They don’t come to me with back pain, they come to me with things like ear infections, asthma, or eczema, or their colicky. I just have a lot of kids come in lately with reflux, and the alternative is they can go to an MD and they can get drugs for these things; typical inhalers, the antibiotics, the tympanostomies, the tonsillectomies, or we can go through a trial of conservative care. Which doesn’t take anything out or put anything in, and remove whatever interference it is that’s causing a decrease in that expression of that person’s potential to be healthy. Yeah, maybe if the kid is using too many dairy products, that’s going to create mucus in the body. That’s going to precipitate things like asthma or ear infections.
We look at the whole picture, we don’t just look at a person’s symptoms and say “let’s get rid of the symptoms without ever addressing what caused the problem to begin with.”
Dave Asprey: You’re saying that a problem in the spine can cause a problem in the organs, or a problem in the organs can cause a problem in the spine?
Billy: Exactly, it’s the same. It’s just like if you have a heart attack, the nerves that feed into your heart are the same ones that go down your arm. That’s why you have pain down your arm when you have a heart attack, because it’s the same nerves.
Dave Asprey: If you treat the arm, it doesn’t affect the heart, and that’s what..
Billy: No, it doesn’t, it’s just a referred pain because it’s the same neurological levels being affected.
Dave Asprey: Then, in your experience, even if the pain in the back came about as a result of say, ulcers, or some sort of stomach-localized issue. By manipulating the back, treating the subluxation. What’s the mechanism if we know it? It’s okay if we don’t, just means there isn’t one. The mechanism by which that works to affect the stomach. Do we understand how that works?
Billy: Well, the nerves control the functions of the stomach.
Dave Asprey: Right.
Billy: The brain controls all the organs and glands from the spinal cord through those nerves, and if there’s any impingement or restrictions on range-of-motion, it sends mixed signals to that area of the spine which can cause abnormal aberrent functions in those organs and glands.
Dave Asprey: That makes sense, if you’re essentially losing current in the nerve, it’s not going to function as well.
Billy: Right, just think of it as a dimmer switch. If you turn the dimmer switch down a little bit, you’ve got less function, you have less acid in the stomach, you have decreased respiratory function. A lot of it has to do with just increases in sympathetic tone in the spine, too. What happens many times when you’re subluxated it puts you more into fight/flight. You’re going to have increased cortisol, you’re going to have high blood pressure. Cholestorol’s going to be elevated, you’re going to have increased heart rate.
See, the body’s designed to go into that sympathetic fight/flight mode in periods of emergency, but it shouldn’t be stuck in that. That’s why so many people have so many varied health issues in the world today is because of poor posture from basically just sitting their entire lives. Sitting on a sofa watching a TV set and then not getting any motion put in their spine, which is so, so important for human health.
Dave Asprey: Talk to me about the atlas, like the very highest part of the spine. I’ve had some really weird atlas adjustments from friends, and it seems to be a really impactful part of the spine that a lot of chiropractors don’t work with now. What is the atlas, why is it important?
Billy: Well, it’s the first bone in the neck, it’s actually where the spinal cord’s the thickest. You’ve got contact with the brain stem there. In fact, we’ve called it “the mouth of god,” because if you can get that area lined up, basically what it does is it just opens up the flow of energy through that foramen magnum, which is the opening of the skull, through that area, into the rest of the spine.
There’s so many nerve endings in that area, there’s so much proprioception in that area. You’re affecting it on so many different levels. It’s probably the most powerful area of the spine to adjust, and there’s chiropractors that basically adjust that vertebra, and that vertebra only, and they get dramatic results. It’s just like there’s many different techniques with the chiropractic, but their focus is always removal of nerve inter-expression. Allow a person to express more of their potential for health.
Dave Asprey: How would a person who doesn’t have much experience with chiropractic possibly know if they’re going to a good chiropractor who has all these special skills. It seems like there’s like 5,000 different specializes of chiropractic. You know what, also to different skill sets and trainings, how do you know?
Billy: I think the most important thing is you have to trust a referral from somebody that you trust. Somebody that’s obviously thinks the same way you do. There is very esoteric techniques within chiropractic, and that’s going to attract the whole different people than would probably come to me. I’m more structural, I’m more mechanically based, but also, I take that structure and that mechanical base and I relate it to the vitalistic properties of what we do as chiropractic.
Again, I come from a science background, so I like to see numbers, I like to look at alignment, I don’t want to just say “you know, these things are happening because of the power of the universe.” I want to understand why that stuff happens.
Yeah, that’s a difficult question, but I think the biggest thing that a patient needs to really be concerned with is do they feel comfortable with a doctor? Basically, when you go to a doctor, you should, in a sense, be interviewing the doctor, and at the same time the doctor needs to be interviewing the patient. Maybe sometimes it’s not going to be a good fit for both of you. When people come in to me, there’s people that I know I can work with and there’s people I know that I can’t work with and I’m sure it goes both ways.
I’m not telling people to be doctor shoppers, but first thing, find a referral from somebody that you truly trust that’s going to a chiropractor they truly believe in. I can’t think of a better answer than that.
Dave Asprey: Find someone you trust, there isn’t really a good quantitative way to do that. I’ll tell you my first chiropractic experience. I was working at Exodus Communications. This the company that held Google’s first servers and when the internet was first exploding, most of the internet was running in our buildings in the early days.
I came to work one day and my low back kind of hurt. It got worse and worse, and by noon, my boss looked at me and she said “Dave, you’re green, and like you’re walking hunched over, like, you need to go to a chiropractor.” I was to the point where I couldn’t handle the pain, and I have a pretty high pain tolerance, and it was as bad as I’ve ever felt. I literally went to the … I don’t think Google was a customer yet, then, they hadn’t started. Whatever YellowPages.com or something.
Billy: Right.
Dave Asprey: I went to someone down the street, some random chiropractor and went into his office and I was pretty close to either passing out or throwing up from whatever this weird low back pain was. It turns out I was living in a house with toxic mold, I had all sorts of inflammation in my body, and I was commuting for an hour and a half each way for a 14-mile drive and it was crappy life.
He did a little X-ray and said “well, you have all the symptoms of a ruptured disk,” and he did one adjustment on me, and I almost passed out from the adjustment. No, I almost passed out when I stood up, just from standing up, the pain was too great. He did one adjustment on me and I was completely fine. It was like literally the pain completely went away, completely stopped and I was just blown away. I had never experienced that. I went from believing I was in the office of the witch doctor to believing “well, they know something.” Then, the next thing that I’d been raised to believe was that you don’t go to a chiropractor because you get addicted to it. You have to go in every week because they’re going to loosen your joints, to they always slip out, and then they’ve got you in their grasping clutches and all this kind of stuff. That didn’t happen, right? In that situation, my back didn’t go back to hurting that way.
I always had upper back pain, constant upper back pain for years and years that some chiropractors are able to help with and the pain that’s gone today. What about that claim? That fear that I had, that if you get adjusted too often, your back will become loose? Any evidence of that?
Billy: No, I don’t believe that, and I think what you’re asking is that is it something that you get addicted to. I posted this yesterday. If chiropractic is so good at alleviating that pain that you went through, wouldn’t you want to do things on a periodic basis to prevent you from having to go through that again?
The pain isn’t the problem, that’s what I try to get people to address. The problem is that you’ve got pressure on the nervous system. The pain is the fire alarm that’s going off in the building. You just went over and took the batteries out of the fire alarm, there’s still a problem, there. That’s why you take X-rays and then you set goals over time to normalize postural issues, like the work that Dean Harrison does about restoring the curve. Again, the pain’s going to go away in two or three weeks, but do you want to fix the underlying problem.
We can also look at discs in the spine, and if there are areas that are degenerating, it would make sense to me to do things as much as you can to rehabilitate that disc and prevent it from getting any worse. It’s not really that hard to do those kinds of things, but it’s something that takes time. Then, once you’ve done things to correct these problems, it would make sense to me to stay on some type of maintenance basis. Like you go to the gym and get all buffed out and go “okay, I’m done going to the gym now.” You do that to maintain what you’ve built up.
See, what people need to understand is chiropractic’s great with pain, it’s great with addressing a lot of people’s problems. That’s not what we do, what we do is we just allow your brain, through the spinal cord to express more of its potential to be healthy. Also, if we could do things like Dean’s work. Dean Harrison, who you had on your show earlier, if you do some of that stuff, you’re going to prolong the life of the spine. If you can prolong the life of your spine, you’re prolonging the life of the nervous system, which, in my opinion is going to prolong that life so you can get that 180 years like you’re looking for.
The problem is most people sit all frigging day, and when you sit all day, you destroy L4/5 disks, you destroy the curve in the neck, and that’s why people have all the health issues. Again, we were never designed to sit as a being. We were never designed to take our cars and crash them into each other at 70 miles an hour. The things that we do in chiropractic is trying to reverse some of the events that we have in our lives that contribute to abnormal posture, misalignment of the spine, which causes not only the nerve irritation and pain, but causes organs to not function at higher percentage.
Also, a big goal is to prevent spinal degeneration and osteoarthritis. It’s just like going to a dentist. It’s no different, you know? You go to a dentist, you get your teeth cleaned, and I go three times a year. Am I addicted? No, I just know that it’s good for my teeth, plus it makes them look better. The reality is when people go to a chiropractor, they always feel better afterwards. It’s not like we force people to come in here. Here we go again, they come in because they know that they have better clarity of thought, they have more energy, they sleep better. All of these attributes that a lot of people, they’re a response.
It’s not like I’m holding some type of voodoo gig in front of them to brainwash them to coming in to see me, and it’s not like I’m that good looking or anything that has people come back. It’s the results that people feel when they get adjusted.
Dave Asprey: Well, one of the most powerful types of evidence we have is called clinical evidence. There are a class of people who have done some very impressive mental gymnastics to ignore clinical evidence. Literally, when there’s clinical evidence that flies in the face of a double blind study, the clinical evidence is perpetuated by a liar.
In the world that I live in, anytime we find something that didn’t meet our expected results, it’s the most interesting thing in the world, because it means that there might be a way into that system. There might be a way to hack the system. Then you question whether it really happened and how it happened and whether you can replicate it or not. At this point, it’s pretty clear you can replicate a chiropractic adjustment. We have a way of replicating them. It’s called chiropractic school.
It’s call Cal Jam where thousands of people who do this get together and talk about what works and what doesn’t work and what they see in patients. That’s the front line of innovation is “what worked for most of my patients?” When do you think that this will be more widely accepted? I think chiropractic has made huge strides in the last 10 years. Do you consider it to be widely-accepted now, or do you think there’s room for it to grow?
Billy: Oh, I think it’s way more accepted than when I got- … I started practice 31 years ago, I thought I was a duck my first few years of practice. I’ve been called a quack all the time. The reality is people are starting to see the failures of medicine. It’s everywhere. You’re seeing all the atrocities from the unnecessary surgeries. It’s my opinion, based on my research that 90% of surgeries probably would be unnecessary if people utilized more conservative, alternative methods of healthcare.
Also the same thing with probably 90% of drugs would be unnecessary if people changed lifestyle and exercise and thought happy, loving thoughts and got adjusted and got proper rest and proper sleep. See, we were brought up in a medicine cabinet. We were brought up in a world where the TV gets people to believe in whatever this dogma is, this old paradigm that we’re just going to treat your symptoms and not address the cause of your problem, and people are waking up to that.
There’s obvious evidence here in California with SB-277. Now, they’re forcing the whole vaccine issue on people; it’s because more and more people are getting on board with doing their own research and looking at things objectively, and studying things rather than just blatantly believing everything that they’ve been told on TV or by the doctor that was also raised and schooled in that whole paradigm, which everything is achieved through drugs and drugs only.
People are sick of taking drugs. The reality is people are being more proactive about their own health and they’re doing their own research and they’re thinking for themselves a lot.
Dave Asprey: You are outright opposed to all vaccines?
Billy: Yes, until you can show me that number one, that there is proven efficacy to that vaccine, and number two, you show me that they’re 100% safe.
Dave Asprey: Okay, I just had a bio-ethicist on the show a little while ago. Show me something that’s 100% safe.
Billy: I shouldn’t say 100% safe. Right, right.
Dave Asprey: That’s an unfair standard, okay.
Billy: If you can show me, number one, that they work.
Dave Asprey: Okay.
Billy: Number two, that they have some degree of safety.
Dave Asprey: Got it, so like all things have risks. Chiropractic, some number of people.
Billy: Of course, but you’re talking about minuscule risk and that’s why we have the lowest malpractice rate of any healthcare profession.
Dave Asprey: Right, so you want an acceptable level of risk and an acceptable level of efficacy.
Billy: Right.
Dave Asprey: You’re right, many of the vaccines have terrible efficacy like the flu vaccine.
Billy: Zero.
Dave Asprey: Which, as far as we can tell, it’s a marketing scam.
Billy: It is.
Dave Asprey: You go to the drug store, and you have your big signs “injections here.”
Billy: You can get them in the airport now, too. You walk and they’ve got a little screen at the airport.
Dave Asprey: Wow.
Billy: HPV’s another scam. So is the Hepatitis B. When you vaccinate these kids, day one, when they’re born, when their spine and their nervous system and their brain is the most crucial developmental phase of your life and you’re injecting in toxic heavy metals when there’s no blood/brain barrier. To me, it’s ludicrous. Again, I just want to say “hey, if it’s safe and effective, yeah, let’s do it.” I haven’t seen that in the research. There’s no research supporting that. It’s all research done by the pharmaceutical industry proving their own warrant for their own drugs.
Again, I’m not a drug guy, I don’t like taking drugs. It’s just hard for me to think about sticking a needle in my arm or my kid’s arm, or even my pet’s arm to try to confer this mythical type health, which to me, you inject in all those toxic chemicals, you’re only asking for some type of toxic affect on that system.
Dave Asprey: You’re looking at the risk/reward thing here too. I’m very concerned about vaccines. I’m not convinced they all work, I’m not convinced they’re a panacea, and it seems like there’s a genetic propensity for autoimmunity in about a quarter of the population, that makes them very poor candidates for receiving vaccines or at least receiving them on the schedule that’s propagated now, which is hyper aggressive.
Billy: Way hyper aggressive.
Dave Asprey: My wife is a European-trained physician, worked in an emergency room, western trained doctor at Carolina Institute for people, it’s one of the top 10 med schools on the planet, very well-respected. When she came to the US, she was actually appalled. She does fertility work now over Skype for clients around the globe, so she sees vaccination procedures around the planet because that’s where her clients are. It’s very different in the US.
Billy: Right.
Dave Asprey: It’s almost like the drug companies had a hand in creating some of the legislation around selling vaccines.
Billy: You know that’s the case. Come on, man. Big pharma’s the biggest lobby in government, come on man.
Dave Asprey: Of course.
Billy: They’ve got the biggest voice in the media, I mean, they control the media.
Dave Asprey: We know that big pharma’s out of control, I think even people who have died in the wool, supporters of big business doing whatever the heck it wants, they have to see that there’s some bias in the research there and the bias has been very well proven.
Billy: Right, so why can’t people translate that to something like vaccines? It’s like for some reason, we’ve taken that vaccine and we created this holy water that if you even question, that you’re a quack or charlatan or you’ve got something. I just want to see the research. Just do this research project, Dave. Let’s take the un-vaccinated versus the vaccinated, and let’s look at the amount of medical care that each group gets.
It would be a simple study, we’ve got all the HIPAA records, let’s see how many drugs the vaccinated group gets. Let’s see how many autistic kids they’ve got. Let’s see how many kids with allergies and autoimmune diseases.
Dave Asprey: There’s a bit of a selection bias there, right? The fact that you get vaccines probably means you’re more likely to get medical care whether you need it or not, and the fact that you didn’t get a vaccine may mean that your mom locked you in a closet all day.
Billy: Yeah, but you can look at things like asthma versus a kid not having asthma. You can look at a kid that’s labelled autistic versus kids that are non-autistic. Those are the things that I’m talking about. I get the thing, if you’re a druggie and you love vaccines, you’re going to go to the doctor more often. If you’re somebody that thinks like me, I’m only going to go to a doctor in a crisis or emergency. I mean, don’t even understand why people go to pediatricians, but that’s me.
You’re going to a pediatrician is a visit where you’re just basically going to be sold a paradigm where your body wasn’t created right and you need these drugs pumped in to make you stronger and healthier. I just don’t buy it. Same thing with my pets. I have three cats, don’t think I’m weird because I have cats, but I would not take my cats to a vet unless they need it.
One of my patients is a vet and he runs the cat hospital, and if there’s something that my cats need, I’m going to go there. Typically, I feed my cats raw foods, they get plenty of exercise, they get a lot of love, and guess what, they’re going to express health, short of getting run over by a car, or attacked by a raccoon or whatever, and that’s when you need veterinary care, that’s when you need medical care, when there’s an emergency or crisis in your life. Otherwise, I’m going to stay away from as much medical care as I can on my life.
Dave Asprey: I think you’ve got a point there. If I break my arm, I know where I’m going to go.
Billy: Right.
Dave Asprey: If I’m tired all the time, I can tell you what happened when I went to the doctor when I was tired all the time. He told me maybe I should eat healthy and lose weight. When I said, I believe my actual quote was something along the lines of “no shit, Sherlock.” I’d weighed 300 pounds, I had been working incredibly hard, working out six days a week, cutting calories, all that stuff. Didn’t lose any weight. My western physician couldn’t tell me how to lose weight. He told me vitamin C would kill me. Didn’t know who Linus Pauling was, who won a couple of Nobel prizes, there, and took a lot vitamin C.
I finally just said “you know, I’m going to have to learn it myself.” I probably could have gone to a chiropractor. Back when this happened, we hadn’t invented the term functional medicine. I probably could have found an ortho-mollecular practitioner, which is a precursor to functional medicine. I find a lot of people listening to the show today, they’re overwhelmed. They go “how do I find someone who’s in alignment with these things?” How do I find a chiropractor who’s going to support nutrition that works. There are chiropractors who are raw, vegan chiropractors, right?
Billy: Right.
Dave Asprey: Raw vegan diet probably isn’t going to work for you if you’re human.
Billy: No. I’m a paleo guy, all the way. I follow your stuff to a T. That’s what I loved about your book. I got a second book, thank you for the gifts, by the way.
Dave Asprey: Oh, you’re welcome.
Billy: The chocolate went like that, the coffee’s being used.
Dave Asprey: Nice.
Billy: The book was the second one I had because I got the first book at JJ’s gig last year, and I loved it, I read through the entire book. One of my employees kept wanting to borrow my book, and it’s one of the rules I have. I don’t loan CDs, I don’t loan DVDs, and I don’t loan books, because you never get them back. When you sent that book, I signed it and gave it to him.
Dave Asprey: Smart.
Billy: Yeah.
Dave Asprey: It’s one of those things that where there’s such a variety of opinions out there that it’s really hard for people to know how do I pick a western doctor, how do I pick a chiropractor. I have a list of a few Bulletproof practitioners on the website. It’s a small list. I find you asking your friends is often times, not okay. You live in a small town, you live in a city, in the Midwest. There may be 45 chiropractors from different schools and different schools of thought and different types of education. It could cost you $3,000 by the time you visit each one of them twice to see if you like them.
Billy: Right.
Dave Asprey: Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, how much time do I do it? Here’s a question; how often should someone go to the chiropractor? Like you go to the dentist three times a year. How many adjustments is the right number of adjustments for someone?
Billy: That’s going to depend on a lot of variables.
Dave Asprey: Yeah.
Billy: One’s going to be the age of the patient. Obviously, I just had a kid that came in with severe reflux, had been everywhere else first, Dave. Then they were recommended to put the kid on Zantac, and she didn’t want to do that. Then she put a post in one of the holistic moms group on Facebook and they said “go to a chiropractor.” They brought her, they took the kids two adjustments to clear the kid. Whereas, you’ve got somebody that’s a geriatric that comes to you that’s got massive amounts of scar tissue, degeneration. It’s going to take them longer.
It’s dependent on how far out of alignment you are. They’ve got severe forward head carriage, it’s going to be harder to fix than somebody that’s got moderate. There’s all types of different variables you have to take into consideration. At the same time, you do re-exams to document, objectively, their improvement over time, not just basing on a sentence.
The problem with what I do and what we do in chiropractic, is the results are so dramatic that the pain typically will go away in a few visits, but we don’t want people to think that their problem’s corrected. The ultimate goal is to normalize posture, restore range-of-motion, make sure all the other indicators, the object definings, the EMG, the therms, and the range-of-motion have come back to normal limits.
Then, after that, recommend maybe once every three, once a month, it depends on a person’s priorities, too. If their health isn’t a huge priority, they’re not going to need to come in as much as someone that wants to be more high-performance, you know?
Dave Asprey: I hear you there. One of the things that most profoundly affected me about chiropractic is that when my son was born, I caught him. We delivered him in the home. We had a midwife, and we were close to an emergency room and all that kind of stuff. I had an emergency room doctor in the room, because my wife was the emergency room doctor.
Anyway, it’s convenient that way. When my son came out, they get a little smushed on their way out pretty often. For the first five days of his life, he wouldn’t sleep more than 20 minutes. He’d make these weird sounds and he’d move his arms in a strange way. I looked at him and I was like “you know what, I think he’s actually like in pain, in his neck.”
Fortunately, at the time, we were near a guy named Peter Fysh-
Billy: I know Peter well.
Dave Asprey: You know Peter?
Billy: He’s great, yeah.
Dave Asprey: Gem of a guy, he’s the only chiropractor, at least at the time, who had written a textbook accepted by western medical doctors. He was famous for going to pediatric ICUs, walking down rows of babies on oxygen, touching their neck, just touching with one finger, and magically they don’t need oxygen anymore.
This is one of the world’s top guys for babies. We took Allen in there and he set this brand new baby down on his table and he said “Dave, I’m going to touch the back of his neck with the pressure of a nickel resting on the table.” That’s the amount of pressure this takes. He touches Al’s neck, and literally, he just went “god” just melted on the table. He slept for 16 hours straight, and after that, the problem was gone.
The noises and the moving hands was gone. He had something stuck and it took almost no pressure. It was just a tiny bit at just the right spot. By the way, Peter Fysh was a computer programmer for many years, and he got tired of that and decided he’d be a chiropractor. He’s a hacker, like that was what he did.
Billy: Right, right.
Dave Asprey: You see stuff like that, it’s very hard for me to reconcile that with “that’s a bunch of crap.” It’s not. It’s just a very different skillet, it’s a skillset that’s very hard to prove.
Billy: It’s pretty hard to measure, too. How do you measure that?
Dave Asprey: I don’t know, but Allen’s pretty strong and healthy today. I think he would not have grown the same way, had he had constant neck pain as an infant. Maybe he would have crawled his way out of it, I have no idea, right?
Billy: Right, but the reality is a lot of these kids come to us with these health issues and they’re prescribed drugs.
Dave Asprey: Yeah.
Billy: I think the drugs, over time, whether it’s disrupting the normal microbiome, which all the antibiotics do.
Dave Asprey: Yeah.
Billy: You’ve got all the neurological drugs, which can screw up brain function. That’s why we’ve got so many kids that are screwed up these days. I try to just get people to understand that if you want drugs, great, do the drugs. If you want to figure out what the problem is, let’s address posture, let’s address restriction of the spine, let’s get kids off dairy, let’s minimize the amount of sugar that they eat. Get them drinking more water. Getting them outside. Whatever it takes to get them to move a little bit.
I don’t know how old you are, but when I was a kid, we went out and we’d play football and basketball and we actually moved. We didn’t sit on a computer all day and play video games. I grew up with pinball machines, but I didn’t grow up with video games. It’s not hard to get somebody to be healthy, you’ve just got to get them back on the track, get them where they need to be to express health. It’s not hard.
Dave Asprey: Absolutely. We’re coming up on the end of the show, and I always love getting a chance to ask a few of the hard questions around chiropractic, because there are still some people who just think there’s nothing to it. My entire experience of it is that it’s been incredibly helpful, and chiropractors that I’ve known have been some of the more forward-thinking and curious and electrically-aware people. They’re using quantitative data in their practices, and they’re seeing results that are repeatable, which is what I’m looking for in people who support my biology for me.
The question I have for you, now, is given that you’re a chiropractic practitioner and a musician, what’s your favorite album of all time?
Billy: Oh man, that’s a good question, I’m a big Tom Petty fan.
Dave Asprey: Okay.
Billy: I would say, probably his first album, I love it to death. I also love Highway to Hell by AC/DC. That’s a tough one. Damn the Torpedoes is a great album, too.
Dave Asprey: Awesome.
Billy: Tom Petty’s probably my biggest influence. In fact, I’ve seen him probably- … I’m a Grateful Dead-head for Tom Petty. I drive all over, and I’m a big fan of Wilco, too, right now, I don’t know if you’re following them.
Dave Asprey: Okay.
Billy: Do you like Wilco?
Dave Asprey: I do like Wilco, yeah.
Billy: Yeah, good, they’re a musician’s band, you’ve got to have a little bit of a musician’s head to get your head around that stuff. You’ve got to listen to it a few times, too.
Dave Asprey: I hear you there.
Billy: That’s not a tough question, though, but that was a tough question.
Dave Asprey: It’s not a tough question, that was actually a diversion before the real tough question.
Billy: Okay, good.
Dave Asprey: The real tough question is if someone comes to you tomorrow and says “look, I want to kick ass at everything I do, like I want to be better at everything.” What are the three most important things I need to know, what would you tell them?
Billy: First, you’ve got to get your head straight. You’ve got to visualize what you want to do. You asked the question about what to look for in a doctor is that that doctor has to have that certainty on what they’re doing. They have to have a self-confidence. With people, you’ve got to wake up with that passion, that drive to do what you want to do in life.
That’s why I created Cal Jam is because I see, not only, the lack of people’s awareness of what chiropractic’s about, but I’m also concerning- … We can drink all the Bulletproof coffee we want to drink, but we won’t have a planet to live on, we’ve got big issues, you know what I’m saying?
Dave Asprey: Yes.
Billy: Cal Jam’s about chiropractic, it’s about eating healthy, it’s about bio-hacking, but it’s also about global sustainability. For me, that gives me purpose and drive when I get up the morning, so I do everything that I have to do to achieve my goal. It’s not like I’m just kind of like walking through my day trying to figure out what I’m going to do.
Every day of my life is almost, in a sense, preordained to what I’m going to do. You’ve got to have that in your life as purpose and drive and motivation to accomplish that. If you want to be the best at the best, then you’ve got to prepare. The first thing’s got go come from your head. I’m really big on the spine and the nervous system, that’s the most neglected part of people’s health. People don’t understand how important it is to have proper spinal mobility, to have proper alignment, to have proper expression of nerve flow.
It’s just like if you want to be 120-watt light bulb in a 70-watt world, then you’ve got to do things to make sure you’re functioning 120 watts. Then the third thing is I’m really big on eating foods that vibrate. I mean, you talk about your vibration plates, those things are great because they vibrate cells, it gets you moving. They shake up your whole lymphatic system, they create muscle spindles to fire, and creates all this nerve energy that goes to your brain. The most important nutrient for your brain happens to be motion.
I’m big on getting people to move any way that they can. Again, get your head straight, eat right, get adjusted, I’m on the fourth one, you only gave me three.
Dave Asprey: It’s all right.
Billy: Is just to eat super, super clean. Eat foods that have a high vibrational tone. Eat foods that are loaded with minerals and vitamins, that’s why I use a Vitamix, and that’s why I juice a lot and I do all low-glycemic foods, and that way, I’m not only my body and my cell these high vibrational food, but I’m, at the same, cleaning my body out. Most people eat crap, toxic food that has no energy in it, it clogs up the entire system and it leaves a person craving more because the body never got what it needed to begin with and that’s why people are always hungry.
I eat like so little food, but I’m full when I eat because I don’t overeat. I’ve learned to, when you go out to dinner, to eat less. People that live longer eat less, and they eat lower calories, but they also eat super clean foods that are congruent, they are foods that the body was always designed to eat.
Like, I’m not a big fan of white flour. I don’t know where you’re at, you’re not into it either, but you can’t eat foods that your body was never designed to eat.
Dave Asprey: Yeah, grain in general, whether it’s gluten-free or not is a poor substitute for food, but it’s better than starving to death.
Billy: Yeah, it is, I got you on that point, and I totally agree with you, 100%. You’re asking me for a person that wants to live at their highest potential, that’s not something they’re going to want to eat, I think.
Dave Asprey: Yeah.
Billy: It’s okay to do it once in a while. Dave, I’m not a zealot about this stuff. Every once in a while, I’m going to break down and have some tiramisu, you know, I’m a human being. People see you doing something wrong once in a while like “oh, I can’t believe you’re eating that, dude.” I’m going “well, I didn’t say I was Jesus, man, I’m not, you know, perfect.” I think the more good things you put into your life, it’s going to minimize the few bad things you do once in a while.
Dave Asprey: That’s true.
Billy: I never said I was perfect.
Dave Asprey: That’s totally true. Also, if you put the tiramisu into a smoothie, it doesn’t count.
Billy: Right, yeah.
Dave Asprey: On that note, Billy.
Billy: Put the bass in there, too. You know, the Bass-o-matic. I don’t know if you remember that?
Dave Asprey: Oh, yeah, that’s right, just fill it right up.
Billy: Right, so I’m excited you’re at Cal Jam now.
Dave Asprey: I’m excited to come and speak, I’m really looking forward to it. Everything I’ve heard from the Bulletproof Team, who was there this year, it was a fantastic conference and I couldn’t get it on my schedule, so, I’m excited to give a keynote there. I’ll give you guys some useful knowledge you can bring back to your patients and your practices and your own lives. I’ll do my very best there.
In the meantime, where can people find out more about you and your work, Billy?
Billy: They can go to CaliforniaJam.org, or you could e-mail me at BillyD@CalJam.org. I have a website DeMossChiropractic.com. Spelled D-E-M-O-S-S, chiropractic. I’m really big on Facebook, that’s probably where you got some of my anti-drug things on there. BillyDeMoss at Facebook.
Dave Asprey: Awesome, Billy, thanks for being on Bulletproof radio. I look forward to hanging out with you next year.
Billy: We’re good to rock, baby.
Dave Asprey: If you enjoyed today’s show, here’s what to do. If your back is hurting or you’ve never been to a chiropractor, you might put it on the list of things to consider. If nothing’s wrong, you’re feeling great, everything’s running, maybe you don’t want to do it right now, it’s been my experience that there’s times where it’s been really, really beneficial for me when I’m stiff or I’m sore, I can’t explain things, weird headaches, not sleeping right, and it’s helped my family, it’s helped my kids. It’s one of the many things that I do to perform at a high-level.
Billy and I have no financial relationship, nothing like that. I think this is worthy of your attention. If you’re going to look at tuning your body like a race car, like a high-performance machine, if there are parts of your nervous system that are not conducting electrons efficiently, that you can measure with quantifiable tools, either you’re just going to say “I guess it’s just happening for no reason and I’m going to leave it there,” or you’re going to do something about it. This is a group of people who focuses on doing things about that.
I think it’s rational and intelligent to consider it as something that you can do, and it is something that I do. If you haven’t tried it, you might try it, and if you decide you’re not going to try it, to say that there’s no science behind it is actually inaccurate.
Billy, thanks again for being on the show.
Billy: Thanks for having me, Dave.
