Meet the Man Who’s Telling Everyone to Put Butter in Their Coffee

But what if someone came along and told you that there was a shortcut? Meet Dave Asprey, a successful entrepreneur that sold his first company for $6 million when he was 26, realized he was overweight and unhealthy, then sought change. He then began on a long journey  to “biohack” himself. After 15 years and $300,000 later, Asprey claims to have lost 100 pounds and increase his IQ points by over 20 through his “Bulletproof Diet”, check out his before and after photos below:

But what’s insane is this, Asprey claims that his Bulletproof diet will give you the results you need with minimal exercise and — wait for it — EATING BUTTER EVERYDAY! From my minimal research, the idea of the Bulletproof Diet is that it’s basically an upgraded version of the Paleo Diet; a high fat, balance protein and carb diet. You eat high dense nutrient foods while avoiding anti-nutrients. Basically, you ingest a lot of healthy fats in order to burn bad fat. Dave’s work has been featured on Men’sHealth, Forbes, CNN, msnbc, VOGUE, and more.

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down to Dave to talk about his history and how he came up with his crazy diet. In this exclusive interview, Asprey talks about why his diet works, his message to harsh critics, and why limiting your orgasms to every 30 days as a man will lead to a healthier and happy life.

I was out here to meet some friends, had a series of meetings. I run the Silicon Valley Health Institute. I’m the chairman of the board. It’s a 20-year-old anti-aging nonprofit group. I came down to moderate the meeting and hook up with the other board members, and we had the head of the Neurology Department from UCSF down to give a talk about brain function. It was pretty cool.

I kind of have been a biohacking health freak for a long time. What most people don’t know is that I am the first guy to sell anything over the internet — literally, the first example of e-commerce in all of history. I sold Caffeine T-shirts out of my dorm room while studying computer science at UC Santa Barbara. I was featured in Entrepreneur magazine and like 80 other other magazines — I think I was like 22 at that time. This was before the web browser was really manufactured. I realized that I like caffeine; I sell Bulletproof Coffee, that’s what I do. I realized that there were no T-shirts for people like this, so I started a T-shirts company. And I put this idea together and when I went to Usenet and the communities I already knew, I told them, “Hey guys, I am one of us, and I have these cool things. Do you want it?” What I did not expect was that I would sell those T-shirts in 12 countries the first month I started selling. So it’s kind of cool that I paid for my undergrad computer science studies by selling caffeine T-shirts over what became web and then the cloud. It bodes well being an entrepreneur if you are kind of young and scrappy. So there was a year in college I was working Baskin Robbins — I got this ginormous muscle right here from scooping all the time [laughs]. Fortunately, it’s gone now. But I was like, “What a waste of my life. I have zero interest in doing this. So what am I gonna do that is in line with my passion?” And you did the same thing — I am going to find something. That’s the mindset that makes good entrepreneurs later in life.

It’s been 15 years and I’ve spent $300,000 upgrading every system in my body that I could think of, and I am still doing it; I am not done. I will be done when I die. So, how did I get started on this? I weighed 300 pounds, and this is actually kind of funny — if you are fat, you actually know that you are fat and you like it that you’re fat. Who’d have thought, right? So, I was working out. I said, “I’m really gotta get rid of this.” I had three knee surgeries before I was 24. I had arthritis before that. I had chronic sinus problems. I wasn’t very healthy. But I was becoming already a successful entrepreneur. I made six million dollars when I was 26; I did well. But I was working out six days a week, an hour and a half a day, and I wasn’t losing weight. And I looked, and I’m like, “Wait, my friends are eating French fries.” I was eating the damn chicken salad at Carls Jr. or something, and why is it I was really eating less calories and working out more, and I am still this fat after years of trying this? So I started saying that something isn’t right here, and being a computer hacker by way of background — computer science, I work in computer security — I’m like, this can be hacked. There’s got to be something else here and I started paying attention to these things. That worked till I lost 50 pounds in three months when I eliminated gluten and a lot of carbs from my diet. But it wasn’t a classical carb diet; I was just eliminating some of the toxic things. But then I got stuck, and the other 50 pounds needed four years. You see this a lot when people go on the Atkins diet or something; they’ll lose half their weight and then they got stuck. Well, getting past what’s stuck requires a nuanced understanding, kind of like you can get past the outer firewall if you’re hacking a company but if you want to get into the inner sanctum it’s going to take something else. So I just applied that idea, which is very much entrepreneurial. In fact, hackers and entrepreneurs think exactly the same way. You come up to a barrier, something that’s stopping you, and you say — if you are a quote normal person — you say, “Oh there’s a barrier. I guess I’ll stop.” And if you are a hacker or entrepreneur — it doesn’t really matter — you go, “There must be a way around.” You will start poking and prodding, looking and feeling; pretty soon you blow the thing up, dig a hole through it, dig under it, whatever it takes. You kind of have to be got to be unstoppable. And that perspective on everything, including your health and your human performance, you need to do it for your company, and you can do it in yourself. The other thing that’s really important for all those three disciplines is numbers. If you are not watching the data, and you’re a computer hacker, you are not really hacking if you don’t know how many packets did I send, how big were they, things like that. Same goes if you’re an entrepreneur. What are the metrics from your company? How’s it growing? How’s it not growing? Where are you spending money? Where are you not spending money? And on yourself, where are you spending energy for yourself? Where are you getting return for what you do for recovery? Where are you expending the most energy,  and where are you getting the most return? Very few entrepreneurs have been taught this. And they should be taught this in business school actually, if they go to business schools.  I’m fortunate I went to Wharton, but I did it when I was 30 after I’d already had a very successful career.

They actually did. This guy named Stew Friedman, one of my professors who wrote a book called “Total Leadership.” And it was the craziest exercise ever. You go through and you actually identify where you are spending your energy and what’s giving you return, and pretty soon you’re like, “Oh wow, I spend 80 percent of my energy where there is no return at all. Maybe I can do something more efficient.” And when start thinking of your energy the same way you think about the other things in your life, all of a sudden it’s like, “Wait, I have more energy. I have more time. And I can get more done.” And it’s not about just achieving more but it’s about achieving more of what you want to do. And it doesn’t matter if achieving more is adding 20 iq points here or adding 20 percent month over month growth in your company. Whatever it is there you have got to apply that energy in a certain way and don’t waste it.

I get a couple of people who say I’m full of shit. There is this 16-year-old kid who really doesn’t like what I have to say. On the Joe Rogan show, I mentioned the data for my book, my book with 1300 references that is widely published. I mentioned that if your mother was a vegan that the odds of you having a lower IQ and inferior genetic expression were higher,[/highlight]and I think I offended him, but I am not that worried about it. So do some people criticize the diet? Sure, the radical low fat crowd straight out of the 70s who are still doing that, yeah they don’t like it. But for the most part, people love it. Anyone who tries it, within a week, they say, “Wow, My brain turned back on for the first time ever.” And then they in two weeks go, “I lost like 8 or 10 pounds in two weeks.” Frankly that’s easy to do; any low carb diet will do that. That’s water weight. But then, 90 days later, like, “I lost a pound a day for 90 days. I would win ‘The Biggest Loser’ right now except that it would be the most boring TV show ever because the guys who are on the rapid fat loss protocol that does that, they don’t even have to exercise.” They are like, “Oh I just had some Bulletproof Coffee, and then I wasn’t hungry for a while. Oh look, another pound fell off! Damn!” So there is no chasing potato chips and crying. And really, what is happening here, because biohacking is a system thing, we’re hacking your willpowers as much as anything else. By using Bulletproof Coffee, which if you haven’t heard of this, Bulletproof Coffee is grass-fed butter, my upgraded coffee beans that have no coffee toxins that cause cravings and performance problems, as well as medium chain triglyceride oil, something that I manufacture; it’s six times stronger than coconut oil for giving you energy. So you put these three things together, you blend it, and when you drink it you will have no food cravings whatsoever, total focus and no hunger for about eight hours. So food becomes optional. Right now, let’s say, you are an entrepreneur, okay, and you’ve told yourself that “I am not going to eat a bagel today.” So then, someone sets the bagel on the table in front of you, and when that happens, the part of your brain that’s 10 times faster than your thinking brain goes, “Bagel, eat!” And you go, “No! Stop!” “Bagel, eat!” “Stop!” so you go back and forth. Every time you go back and forth you are making a decision to not to eat a bagel. Every decision you make comes out somewhere from your energy. And we have science. I just blogged about this, and we show that willpower is a finite thing, and you can wear down your willpower. So if you’re an entrepreneur, do you want to wear down your willpower kicking ass for your company? Or do you want to wear down your willpower by looking at a bagel a hundred times every minute going, “No, no, no”? That’s what we’re doing. Bulletproof Coffee turns that off, and that’s one of the many reasons that it does what it does for people,  because they stop being distracted by other things. When you lose distraction, you gain focus. And yeah, that sounds a little crazy — how is this coffee recipe doing that? Well, it just works. If you can’t feel it on day one, you’re in the 2 percent minority. Everyone else goes, “It sounds gross, but it’s amazing.”

So the Bulletproof Diet and Bulletproof Coffee aren’t going to turn off your fight-or-flight response. Other biohacking tools will definitely do that, and that has been a big part of my own progress. But, what they do is they control your cortisol levels so intermittent fasting can do good things to make you more resilient. For instance, and more resilience can affect your cortisol. But one of the things that people don’t understand when they are on a low fat or like a vegan diet is they’re stressing their body out, because you’re telling the body there is a famine, and your flight-or-fight response will get triggered in a different way by sending a signal from the environment that there is a famine. And you say, “ I think I’ll have a salad with no dressing.” There is almost no calories in the salad; what you’re telling your body is, “Oh my god! There is no real food here.” The human mind is made out of fat, your hormones are made out of fat, specific kinds of healthy unoxidized, non-mechanically separated weird fats, but fats nonetheless. So, if you’re going to tell yourself that there is a famine so all I ate was a few leaves I found, and you do that everyday, your body will get stressed out just like they do in a famine. So, the idea of eating just less calories and having more energy is biologically lame. You don’t put less gas in your car and expect it to go further.  If you want to be a high powered entrepreneur, you better fuel yourself very consciously, and eating the low fat chicken breast, and some skimpy vegetables, or even worse pizza and Red Bull, is not going to work. It’s not going to end well. And you’ll do what a lot of young entrepreneurs including me do: you burn yourself out, you get adrenal dysfunction, you get overweight, and you basically burn up your health and resilience that you should be saving for when you are 50. And you’ve burned it by the time you’re 30. So, in my case, when I was 26 — actually that was when I made $6 million — I must have been 24 when I did this. I was working at 3com, which is one of the pioneers in the networking industry that’s now been acquired, I think, by Dell. So, I’m sitting there and I realize I have no idea what happened in this meeting, like I’ve been there the whole time and I’m like a zombie. And I was feeling like that some days I was strong and that some days I wasn’t, and I couldn’t figure it out, so I burned myself out so hard growing my career already, and of course I was eating the wrong stuff and was exercising too much, which also burns out your adrenals, and I was exercising inefficiently which also put more stress on the body that doesn’t return anything, so I was making all these mistakes. So, I started to feel it in my stress response, and I didn’t know it was my stress response. I just felt it in my brain: fog and fatigue, and just tiredness and lack of drive and all that. So that was when I went and I got a $5000 scan where they inject a radioactive sugar in you, and then they tell you to think while you’re inside the scanner — it’s called a SPECT scan — and when I was trying to concentrate I had zero metabolic activity in my prefrontal cortex. No activity.  So wow, that was kind of a big thing to discover.  The interesting thing about discovering that though was that, hm I knew that I had room for improvement. While was I doing this though, I was getting my MBA at Wharton while working full-time at a startup we sold for $6 million. So, my brain had problems but I was still kicking ass, and what I would suggest to any entrepreneur out there is that your brain is not perfect by a long shot and you are still kicking ass. But if you take a small amount of your energy in your time and you put it back into upgrading the systems in your body, it will pay for itself 10 or actually more like 500 times over and what you could do for your company and for whatever it is you are trying to change.

A lot of people say it’s expensive — it’s just not. If you’re used to ramen, it’s expensive. But let me tell you, ramen isn’t really food. Like you will pay for the ramen a lot — you’ll pay for it five years after you started eating it. But you’ll get essentially type II diabetes, cardiac dysfunction, rapid aging, inflammation, all sorts of bad things are going to happen to you, but if you are young, you can handle it for a while. But when things stop working, it’s going to take a lot of time and energy and money to come back to where you should have been anyway.Trust me — I know, I did it. So, let’s talk about grass-fed butter. Kerrygold, a very widely available brand, it’s $3 for half a pound of butter. It is one of the cheapest foods on a per calorie basis and on a per satisfaction basis. So my typical breakfast is upgraded coffee beans mixed with two tablespoons of grass-fed butter, and I am not hungry for six or eight hours. Like today so far, I had that, a little bit of my MCT oil, butter and some coffee, so that probably cost about a buck at most. So then I had four ounces of smoked sockeye salmon, and if I was really hungry I would’ve had more butter with that too, but that was all I wanted. And I don’t remember what time it is now, but it’s like later in the day, and so far, the salmon was about six bucks at Whole Foods. If I wanted to save money I would have gone to Costco and I could’ve bought a pound of it for $10 or $11. So far for today for me, I’ve spend $5 on the Bulletproof Diet. For dinner, well, I’m on the road, I’m traveling, I’m probably going to get sushi with a friend. But if you wanted to be, you know, the cheap entrepreneur, let’s get some grass-fed meat for you. You go to Whole Foods it’s 10 bucks a pound. Do you have a freezer? If you don’t have a freezer they are $300 at Costco for a half-size chest freezer. Buy one. And then go online and I tell you how to get grass-fed beef. It cost about $5.50 for a whole pound of super high quality amazing beef. So, if you do that, you are not going to eat the whole pound of beef, unless like you are working out really heavy, or you’re really big or something, you will probably eat half a pound of beef. So now you’re looking at about $2.50. So let’s say you’re really scraping bottom — screw the beef and buy some eggs. A dozen eggs in the farmer’s market in the Bay Area is about 6 bucks. In the town, it’s closer to 4 to 5 bucks.  That’s a lot of protein, and it’s a really good quality fat in those things. Oh, and I guess some vegetables. Vegetables are nice. They’re not an absolute requirement all the time if you’re really scraping bottom, so you go to the farmer’s market and get the cheapest, freshest, nicest vegetables, or you can go to a place like Whole Foods and pay a lot more for vegetables — or, buy the frozen ones. This is amazing, but the frozen vegetables are fresher than the vegetables you buy fresh because they were frozen right after they are picked, and the other one sat on the back of a truck for a couple of days getting here. They freeze them right in the field sometimes; other times, it’s right next door to the field. So, you’re gonna cook it anyway; it doesn’t matter whether if is frozen. In fact, you’ll get more of vitamins from the frozen, so you can save money on essentially frozen green beans is a good way to do it. So you can get some vegetables, you can get some kind of roughage, and that’s gonna be a pretty good day. You can use the protein powders as well. I have collagen — two tablespoons of that you get 30 grams of protein a couple times a day. You can just put that in any kind of smoothie you want, so it’s not expensive what you’re doing. It is just three things that most people don’t understand about nutrition. And it comes down to does it have the right stuff in it to start with? Is it the right macronutrient? Is it protein or fat or sugar? What is it you are trying to do? What’s the effect it’s going to be?

I’ve tried most of them. I was a raw vegan for a while, and that actually gave me a lot more food allergies. I wish I haven’t had done that. Several of my most ardent Bulletproof followers are still recovering years later from going on raw vegan diet and realizing, “Oh wow, it wrecked my body.” Another friend who is actually an employee at Google –really amazing guy, martial artist, very, very bright — went on a raw vegan diet and 18 months later this guy has terrible food allergies, brain fog, and all these other problems. So, I’ll tell you flat out that you feel good for the first, maybe three months, on a raw vegan diet because of what I call “the vegan trap.” You have a six-week period where it takes your nervous system to form a new habit, so you just get used to doing something. Well, for the first few months you feel great on the vegan diet because it hides a mitochondrial energy deficiency because of the excess omega 6 oils in it. So the short version is, it makes you feel good while letting some systems start to not work. So by the time you start wobbling and not feeling so good, you’re already totally convinced that the diet works. So it’s not the diet; it’s something else. So you spend the next, you know, 9 or 10 months looking around for “Why am I not feeling so good?” And a few people do it for longer than the others, and yeah, there’s a few vegan endurance  athletes and people like that. But nonetheless, if you took the vegan endurance athlete and you gave him a steak, they’d be a better endurance athlete. Like that’s just how it’s going to be. So that is one thing. Then there is Atkins. Atkins works really well for the first half for the weight you have to lose, and the second half — protein is too inflammatory. Atkins himself was an amazing pioneer of nutrition. There is a bunch of diets out there, and it goes back to that order of operation; all of them are missing one of the two things. Most diets focus on vitamins. I am sorry — you should get your vitamins in real food if you get your toxins from mother nature. Oh wait, we live in a world where all the toxins to speak of are not from mother nature; a vast majority of them — including the flame retardant in this nice couch I am sitting on — did not evolve naturally. So I am absorbing it through my skin right now. Does that mean that I must make sure that I get all my vitamins from carrots? No, it’s a ludicrous thought, so you should be taking vitamins if you want to survive and thrive and live a long time and not get cancer or things like that. The odds are improved if you take enough of the right kind of nutrients. And it shouldn’t be poorly formed, cheap ones either; it matters. If you are a young entrepreneur and you’re on a budget, vitamin D and magnesium are the two that matter the most, and probably some vitamin C; that’s a really good idea. As you get older, you’ll probably want to invest more on these things as you could afford them because they will have great returns in terms of health.[/highlight]

Let’s talk about farming and what it does to mother nature. You look at those nice rows of fields that are all farmed and all — how much biodiversity do we have there? We don’t. It’s not a natural ecosystem whatsoever. So the idea that we are going to support people on vegan diets by farming and growing soybeans and wheats and making seitan — you know, seitan’s that fake meat product that is almost all MSG and gluten — it’s not something that makes for healthy kids. It’s certainly — as the author of a book on fertility and epigenetics — it’s not something that leads to healthy children and healthier grandchildren. It degrades our species multi-generationally. So this is not in line with the philosophy that vegans are attempting to do if they are environmental vegans. And then you have the “I am not going to kill” vegans. And this is a tougher one; if you have an aversion to killing, it’s tough, because you’re still killing things everyday. The circle of life includes both life and death.

But you say, “Alright, I am only going to eat tofu. That going to be my protein source.” But how do you think that soybean was cut down? By a tractor. What did the tractor leave in its wake? Turtles, bunnies, rabbits, grasshoppers, snakes. So, if you’re assuming that by destroying the soil by making people do farming, and then taking relatively low caloric density, high fiber, high water food put on a petroleum-driven truck driving at a very long distance, or even better yet, on an airplane from Peru, so you can eat your “fresh” vegetables that didn’t have very many calories and probably made you very tired. It’s not sustainable for the Earth; it’s not sustainable for you as a human being. So you have to step up to the fact that you are worth it and it’s okay to ethically kill an animal, and I learned that from a Tibetan lama in Lasa. So I will tell you if you are a vegan, don’t eat chicken; you are killing a lot of animals, and besides, chickens are terribly treated. But if you eat a grass-fed cow that was raised by someone you know or someone you know is ethical, then I think you are actually doing something that was great for the soil, great for the planet biome and great for the environment and the ecosystem around you. So if you do that, not only are you are helping the planet, you are helping the ecosystem inside your body, and you are going to give yourself some nutrients as nourishment that are pretty important.

There is a longstanding tradition of paying attention to orgasm and human performance. The Taoists are famous for this. Taoism is actually a quest for immortality. They are looking at what are the things you can do to live a long time. And the Taoist equation for orgasm for man only — it is not true for women — is that you take your age in years minus seven and you divide by four. And it gives you a number, and that number is the number of days that should occur between the times you ejaculate. You can have a orgasm as long as you can do that without ejaculating, but those are essentially the same things for most people. The Taoist also say that if you really want to live a long time, you should only have an ejaculation every 30 days, and you should make sure that the orgasm does not last longer than a half hour. And I’m like, “Holy crap! A Half-hour orgasm? All right. Now they really got my attention! This could be fun,” so I decided I’d construct an experiment. I’d be a guinea pig like I always have. So I talked to my wife about it, and she thought it was hilarious. She said, alright, fine. And I said, “Alright, let’s test it first,” and I got a base line, like how do you feel on an average day, and on a scale of 1 to 10 it’s like a 5. On some days it’s a 7, some days it’s a 3. But just write a number down every day and say this is about how I’m doing, my satisfaction with my life, with my job and my family, how much energy do I have, and munge it into a number; it’s not that scientific. But if you do it it over time, it gives you a signal, and you are looking at the change in the signal — that’s what’s most important. So then I first did that every eight days. And what I found was that during the eight-day experiments was that the satisfaction of my life went up, and towards the end of the week, funny enough, I had more sex, because since you’re not having an orgasm, “Let’s do it again.”  So then I graduated on to the more difficult one which was the 30 days. That took several attempts to get it right. That was a huge act of will power.

The part of you that wants to go out and ejaculate all the time is the same part that runs your “fight or flight” response. It is what I call the labrador in your head. If you think about what a labrador does — labrador retriever, the big floppy dog — they are like, “Oh look! Cat poo! I’ll go eat it!” Right? So, they’ll eat anything, right? Is that a human behavior that causes problems? Yes it is. And then “Oh, a stick! I’ll chase it!” Is distractibility a major issue for most people? Yes it is. And then “Oh look a leg. I’ll go hump it.”; that’s the other problem. So those are big three things that everyone does that gets in their own way. So all right, I have turned off the “Oh look, I’ll eat cat poop” because my Bulletproof Coffee turns off food cravings. I am nourished and satisfied and eat the Bulletproof Diet the rest of the time; I don’t have food cravings because I’m not starving anymore, so I satisfied that part of my inner labrador. And then I went in and said, alright, let’s do the sex thing. And then at that point you’re training the inner labrador basically to wait. You teach your dog to stay, and they’ll stay until they’re done. This is doing that for your own nervous system. Napoleon Hill went around and interviewed some of the most successful entrepreneurs and most powerful and wealthy people of his day — this was I think the 30s, 50s? Something like that? A long time ago, and what he found was that many many of them had realized that if they wanted to have their full faculties and their full energy available, that they practiced this idea — not that you never have sex; that’s a very different thing actually what happens when you control the amount of time. Now that I’ve measured the data, including the 30-day data, this is amazing but I’m happier going 30 days without having orgasm than I am having orgasm every 3 days. I have more energy and I am happier. And now I recognize, because I’ve learned to see the pattern, that there is an orgasm hangover. So if I ejaculate, the next couple of days I am less satisfied with life, I am less happy, I’m more tired and I’m crankier. So what does that mean? That means If I have less orgasms — I have more sex. That’s a good thing, right? And if I have more sex and I have less cranky days with less energy, that’s also a good thing. So basically, I followed the Taoists’ rules of 8 days or more, and I am happy to go 30 days. So that sounds incredibly weird except well it works really well, and no one talks about this stuff, except I do because I’m a biohacker; you know that’s the way it is.

Number one: The most powerful thing you can possibly do to perform better is gratitude. It sounds a little weird, but you can actually measure the effect of gratitude on an EEG machine. So if you’re walking around, and you haven’t practiced gratitude, and you haven’t practiced the other one, which would be number 2 on the list, is forgiveness. So if you’re not thankful for the things you’ve got, and you are holding a grudge, you will suck as an entrepreneur compared to what you can do when you stop holding grudges and you realize that almost nothing that happens is about you. It’s not personal; you just take it personally.  When you learn to let it wash over you, you get out of your own way. And that’s the trick to being a good entrepreneur, and honestly a good human being, is to get out on your own way. And I am fortunate that the technologies I’ve used and some of the other practices have helped me do that, so got to get your gratitude and your forgiveness down. On top of that, the next thing would be you need to fuel your hardware, and this comes down to the Bulletproof Diet, things like that; Bulletproof Coffee is a part of the Bulletproof Diet. But giving yourself enough of the right kinds of fat will make you live longer; you’ll have better hormones, better sex, better physique, everything, it just comes together. And I guess that’s number 4, if you assume gratitude and forgiveness are separate. But I’ll add one other thing in there: You need to have really good relationships. And this is separate from the gratitude thing, but the people you chose to put in your life are really important. So pick the most awesome friends you possibly can, and be the most awesome friend you possibly can, and this includes whether it’s for your significant other or your friends, because if you do that you will be much happier and you’ll perform better and basically you’ll make the world a better place. So not the list you probably expected, but those are the things that matter the most and you can just do it faster and better with technology.