Dave Asprey explains how he created bulletproof coffee after a trip to Tibet left him sick. He describes his health struggles and the biohacking philosophy behind adding butter and oil to coffee for sustained energy and mental clarity.
When I was 16, I started getting stretch marks. I was fat, and the weight just kept coming on no matter what I did. And I tried dieting, and I tried different things, and I felt like a failure. I started getting brain fog. And I realized that no matter how hard I pushed that there were times when I just didn't have what it took to do my work, to show up, to have energy. And I just felt like something was wrong. But it was worse than I thought, because I went to the doctors, and they said, dave, you've got a high risk of stroke and heart attack, and you're not even 30. And I realized I'm an engineer. The doctors aren't helping me. They're telling me something's wrong, but they have no clue. So I decided that if I can hack the Internet, I could hack this. What would happen if I did the things that aren't supposed to work? So I decided to go to Tibet to learn meditation from the masters. And I ended up at a monastery, where I spent 10 days in mostly silence, meditating and learning about meditation, and decided to go to Mount Kailash, which is the holiest mountain in the entire world. And there I am at 18,000ft elevation, 10 degrees below zero, and I'm feeling really crappy because there's no oxygen. And then a little Tibetan woman gave me a bowl of yak butter tea, and I drank it. And in about five minutes, I felt my brain wake up, and I felt better than I had in a very long time. Even though I should have been feeling terrible, it stood out so much. And when I came back to Silicon Valley, I said, I'm going to try butter and tea in various combinations. And that ended up being the genesis of bulletproof coffee.
There's a new fad that promises to give your daily cup of joe an extra kick of energy.
Have you heard of bulletproof coffee?
It's called bulletproof coffee. Bulletproof coffee look smarter and think faster. I've been drinking that Bulletproof coffee.
Bulletproof coffee instead of milk is butter.
That's butter.
Tastes pretty good.
I will need a cup of it every hour.
What I came up with was something that tasted amazing, but it turned my brain on every single day. And I used that power from the meditation I learned from bulletproof coffee from all these other biohacks to give me the energy to be working full time as a vice president at a big company while starting bulletproof and being a father of two young children. And what it all comes down to is the fact that you can turn on more energy in your body in ways that most people have never heard of. This is based on Nobel winning science. This is based on 500 interviews with World experts. We have this unlimited power inside of us that we can tap into and it comes from aligning things in your physical body, in your emotional body, your spiritual body so you get enough of those lined up that there are things you can do. There are levels of power that you have. There's energy that's in there and has always been in there but it's hidden. Here's the deal. The world's a better place when you're well fed, when your biology works the way it was meant to work and when you have that, you can actually raise your iq. You can live longer but along the way you're going to feel a lot better, you're going to have more energy and you're going to like your life better. That's why this matters. And that was the birth of bulletproof.
Sam.
