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Transcript
- 04:23 Why did you start producing your own coffee?
- 08:19 Mold and mycotoxins in coffee
- 12:20 MCT oil
- 17:42 Caffeine can bulletproof your brain
- 23:22 Coffee and weight loss
- 28:31 Upgradedself.com
- 33:04 About Dave
Wendy Myers: Welcome to the Liveto110 Podcast, I am your host Wendy Myers. Today I am interviewing Dave Asprey, founder of the amazing site bulletproofexec.com. Today we’re going to be having a little coffee talk about how you can bulletproof your coffee. You’re likely unaware that there are molds and mycotoxins lurking in your coffee that maybe giving you headaches and other unpleasant side effects. Today you’re going to learn a lot about coffee you never knew before. I’m really excited to have my guest on the show. Dave Asprey is the founder of bulletproofexec.com and upgradedself.com He is the technology entrepreneur who spent 15 years and over $300,000 to hack his own biology. Dave lost 100 pounds without counting calories or excessive exercise and upgraded his IQ by more than 20 points. Dave has cultivated the idea of being bulletproof— the state of high performance where you take control of and improve your biochemistry, your body and your mind helping you perform at levels far beyond what you’d expect. You can find all kinds of amazing products and toosl on his site to bulletproof your body and your mind. His site’s really neat. I definitely recommend checking it out. So Dave thank you for being on the show.
Dave Asprey: Wendy, it’s my pleasure.
Wendy Myers: Well, I’m excited to have you on the show because my dad was an obsessive coffee connoisseur. He would talk to me for hours about coffee and all about his different roasts and he loved to roast his own coffee. He had all kinds of bags of different green coffee beans and he liked to talk to me of the different new ones, flavors of coffee, the acidity, chocolate flavors and things like that. He loved telling me the story of one coffee bean that is really rare and it’s really really expensive and it’s eaten by an animal who then excretes it out of its feces and these beans are somehow prized amongst coffee connoisseurs. So I happen to know a lot about coffee. But when I heard you on another podcast, I had never heard about anything that you were talking about and it really intrigued me. So I’m really excited to have you share your knowledge with my listeners.
Dave Asprey: Thanks Wendy. That coffee you’re talking about is called civet coffee or Kopi Luwak. Do you want to know why it’s so prized?
Wendy Myers: Why?
Dave Asprey: Well, it’s prized because those cats, the civet cats that eat coffee beans, they pick only the perfect coffee beans, ones that don’t have any bug bites or any mold growing on them and ones that are perfectly ripe. So they’re selecting the beans better than any human could, and then instead of allowing the beans to either dry up and spoil on the outside or fermenting the outside of them off the way we do when we process our own coffee, it uses enzymes in its stomach to remove the outer layer of the coffee fruit to expose the pit of the fruit which is what we call the coffee bean, and, of course, then it poops it out. So you’re a getting a super highly processed, in a good way, coffee bean. The problem is it’s covered in poop. Haha.
Now, this is why monks and people years ago figured out that this is some kind of amazing coffee. I imagine the first guy who figured this out was out of any other kind of coffee though and then what we have going on today though is uncool. I recommend people to not try this even if you get the chance to spend 10 or 20 dollars for a cup of civet coffee. The reason is that there are farms where they’re force-feeding these cats not the good beans. They’re not roaming around, they’re actually feeding them like we do geese when we’re trying to make foie gras. So they’re caging them in small cages and treating them inhumanely in order to make this incredibly expensive coffee. So you’re not getting the good coffee because the animals didn’t eat the right beans plus you’re torturing an animal to get an overpriced cup of coffee.
Wendy Myers: Oh no. There’s a factory farm, civet factory. Haha.
Dave Asprey: Amen. There is and it’s not okay.
Wendy Myers: Of course. So why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and why you decided to start producing your own coffee because you have your own farm in Costa Rica. Am I correct?
Dave Asprey: I don’t own the property itself. I partner with the growers.
Wendy: Okay.
Dave Asprey: So I decided to start making my own coffee because I had to give up coffee for about 5 and half years. I used to weigh 300 pounds and I started getting really severe brain fog in my mid-20s. I had a career that was just getting going. I was doing pretty well. In fact, I was the first guy to sell anything over the internet. I sold caffeine t-shirts out of my dorm room over the web. I was the first person to sell anything over in the internet, kind of like the very first working example of E-commerce. So coffee has been a part of my academic success but I had to give it up because I would drink it and then I would feel good but I’d also feel kind of agitated and then I would get sore joints or headache or crash. I couldn’t stay awake in a meeting and I’d have to get another cup and I would do this boing boing boing all day long on ever increasing amounts of coffee. For those five long dark years when I had no coffee, I would, maybe once every few months, I’ll just have one cup and see how it’d go.
Sometimes I’d drink it and I’d say hooray! I’m healed, I can drink coffee again and then I would have coffee again and I would feel really crappy and after a while I realized it’s wasn’t me. It was the coffee. Some coffee affected me differently than others. So being a computer hacker by background, I reasoned there must be some kind of a rationale for this. I’m going to figure it out. So I started reading and I looked at agriculture research and toxicology research and health research and really dug in on the coffee processing methods that we use and I realize that there is really a big difference in the levels of toxins that come from mold and a couple other sources. These are very common in coffee and they’re actually known by the coffee industry. The problem is that it’s economically expensive to get rid of them, so they end up either not testing them or not measuring them or, in some cases in other countries, setting limits that are still too high. For me, when I could engineer a perfectly clean cup of coffee, the problems with coffee went away and I discovered that there is a whole new level of mental clarity. I could really function more like a smart drug than like the normal coffee beverage that I enjoyed.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, you’re nice enough to send me a bag of your coffee about month ago and I’ve been enjoying that every day. It’s really really good because I’m writing a book right now and it really has honestly helped me to focus better than when I had just my regular organic coffee that I have been drinking for a while. I feel like I really have fewer of those moments where I can’t remember finding a word or losing my train of thought.
Dave Asprey: The losing-your-train-of-thought thing is pretty interesting. It definitely happens on lower quality coffee. It doesn’t mean that the coffee doesn’t taste good–coffee can taste really good and still have mold toxins in it. One of the ones that I targeted in the bulletproof testing phase is limited in Europe to 5 parts per billion. So I’ve had a few people say “Well, if there’s mold in that coffee, I’d see it.” News flash, you cannot see 5 parts per billion. But the European Union knows that it is not good for you so they limit coffee to five parts per billion of that toxin. There is no limit in the U.S. What that means is that when coffee isn’t good enough to sell in Japan or South Korea or other parts of Asia or in Europe, where do you send it? You send it to the U.S. because hey, they’ll drink anything. That’s literally what’s happening in the coffee business right now and it’s not okay.
Wendy Myers: So, tell me more about the molds and the mycotoxins that are found in the coffees and how exactly do they affect you?
Dave Asprey: Sure. It turns out that molds, toxins are not just in coffee. They’re an endemic problem in grains of all types and in all industrially processed and preserved foods. We’ve known about mold toxins for hundreds and hundreds of years. There is a Bible reference to burning houses that have black mold in them. There are early examples like the Salem Witch trials we now believe were caused by a type of fungus that grows on rye called Ergot. Which also is a derivative of that fungus is LSD, the famous hallucinogen. So some of these different forms of fungi will actually create defense mechanisms and a very famous one is penicillin. Almost every antibiotic we have today is manufactured by tiny little mold colonies and they make this to say “Hey! This is my cheese.” Or “This is my wallboard.” or “my soil” what they’re doing is they’re engaging in chemical warfare with other different species of bacteria or different species of mold.
And they’re doing that in a natural selection process. Once they make nastiest compounds that kill the most things, it guarantee that no animals will eat what they’re growing on and it guarantee that no other bacteria or fungus will eat what they’re growing on. So it’s just a natural thing. The problem is that these things have a very negative impact on us and are hard to measure. In the way we evolve, we evolve to be able to eat a piece of food or a cup of coffee, whatever it is. And either we get sick or we don’t get sick and if we get sick, we get better. But the next day, we eat something that’s not at all infected. What we’re doing now though is we’re mixing coffee from a whole bunch of different plantations all of which is fermented without adequate controls in place so that we end up getting a daily dose of chronic low-grade fungal toxins. This creates low grade background stress that affects how you feel. I’m not just saying it affects how you feel. We measured this because I’m really into upgrading myself and quantifying the brain and all. So we asked 54 people to drink, for four weeks, the bulletproof upgraded coffee beans and for four weeks to drink another brand of coffee–a very common coffee you’d find on most street corners.
We measured their cognitive functions—seven different measures of function—twice a day. So it’s a pretty involved, pretty annoying test. What we found was on five of seven measures of cognitive function, there was a noticeable improvement in how people felt and how they performed on the bulletproof upgraded coffee beans. So this put some numbers behind what I’d already figured out because when I drink most coffee, I feel really unwell. I’m still sensitive to these fungal toxins. I tended to be a canary because twice my house has had toxic mold growing in it and my immune system got very sensitized to these things. In fact, I have lab tests showing very high reactivity to eight of the ten most toxic molds. So, unfortunately for me, I have had that exposure, but it means when I drink a cup of coffee that may taste amazing and delicious and say organic and fair trade and all that stuff, none of that matters if what’s in that coffee is slowing human performance. Yes, I’m a canary but what I found is that there are a lot of other people who just perform better when they don’t put these things that slow you down in their daily cup.
Wendy Myers: Well, another way that you set your coffee apart from others and to bulletproof it further is by adding MCT oil which is really interesting and also grass-fed butter. So why do you recommend adding this to your coffee?
Dave Asprey: Sure. So the full bulletproof coffee recipe is the upgraded coffee beans which are measured and designed to be as free of these toxins as we can get. Then, you add grass-fed unsalted butter and the cheapest source of that is a company called Kerrygold. They sell it at Trader Joe’s and places like that, Costco carries it even. What you do is you blend the coffee and brew the coffee along with an oil called brain octane oil or else to make upgraded MCT but the very strongest mental focus comes from brain octane. Brain octane is extracted, it’s about 4% of coconut oil. So it’s 18 times stronger than coconut oil, specifically to help you have mental function. When you blend these things up, you get this amazing creamy beverage. It’s like drinking the best latte you’ve ever had. It doesn’t taste buttery or oily or greasy or gross.
Most people are very skeptical in the idea. They try one sip and it’s like a light turns on. Their body tells them right away, “You should get more of that. You want that kind of fat in this body right now.” And that type of butter has some positive effects. The brain octane oil also has other positive effects on what’s happening in your brain and the coffee itself is shown in many many studies to help you do things like focus and pay attention and that’s why we drink it in the first place. It’s just that people always assume that when you’re done with the coffee, you’re going to crash and lots of people say “I can’t handle coffee, I get jittery” or “It’s the caffeine.” News flash, for most people it’s not the caffeine because if you can handle a coke or a pepsi or tea or chocolate and you can’t handle coffee, it’s the toxins, not the caffeine that’s causing your problem. There are lots of people who started drinking coffee again because, like me included, coffee used to make them feel bad, but clean coffee, like the upgraded coffee, made them feel good and when they added the butter and brain octane, it created like a whole new level of consciousness.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I really love the addition of the MCT oil to the coffee because I do intermittent fasting a few days a week and when you do the coffee and MCT oil, it doesn’t break your fast. So I can get a little bit of brain fuel and a little bit energy for my body without breaking that fast.
Dave Asprey: Let’s talk about intermittent fasting for a minute. There’s a community of people, a lot of body builder types, who would practice this don’t-eat-for-18-hours-a-day. So you have dinner and you don’t eat until 2 o’clock or 4 o’clock on the next day. As a formerly obese guy, I used to have to eat every 3 hours to keep my energy up and even when I lost a lot of the weight, I still find I’d eat 6 times a day. So I took an intermittent fasting few years ago and what I found was that, around 11 or 12, I was starting a cold, and I’m a little bit cranky and a little bit slow because I was running out of food and I am capable of doing a full intermittent fast but that’s right in the middle of a work day. I have stuff to do. I’m not just lifting weights and going home and taking pictures of my abs or something. So I devised this idea of bullet proof of Intermittent fasting which is covered in the bulletproof diet book that’s coming out in March.
People can just go to bulletproofdietbook.com and get the free chapter and the infographic that explains a lot of this. But what I found was that if you added the upgraded MCT oil, which is on the site on upgradedself.com, to the coffee beans that are also there and of course with the butter, what you’re doing is you’re giving your body fat calories but you’re telling your body that there’s no protein and no sugar. It turns out that your fasting mechanisms don’t get triggered by 100% pure fat. They only get triggered by sugar or by protein. So you’re not getting the benefits of the fast. In fact, in some cases people who had been doing traditional intermittent fasting with no butter or brain octane or anything, they break through plateaus when they add fat back in. It really strongly pushes your body into fat-burning mode and it keeps your energy up all day long.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. It’s counter intuitive to eat fat to burn fat. But it really works since it really has helped me complete my intermittent fasting schedule, that’s 16 hours.
Dave Asprey: There’s also a post I wrote about 6 months ago about intermittent fasting in women. Since my first book was about fertility and a lot of really detailed research, in fact there were 1300 references that went in to that book, I realized that a lot of women don’t do as well in intermittent fasting as men do. It tends to hit them hormonally first. So by adding the fats back in, a lot more women can benefit from intermittent fasting than otherwise would. So not only do you feel better and have more energy and lose weight better, but you tend to have more regular hormones and it works throughout the month versus normal intermittent fasting which is a lot harder for women and in fact is more stressful.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I never thought I would be able to do an intermittent fasting because I had the same thing you do. I have a little bit of hypoglycemia and I needed to eat really often but doing MCT oil or, sometimes when I ran out of that, I’d do some coconut oil and it helps push me through. So I read really interesting article on your site where you talked about how caffeine can bulletproof your brain. Can you explain this a little bit?
Dave Asprey: Caffeine has been identified as a brain-enhancing substance for years and years. So we know that caffeine improves things like short term memory from lots of studies that are out there and if you google caffeine and memory or caffeine and brain, there’s lot of stuffs that will come out. Even the military has caffeine pills for people. So we all sort of intuitively know that caffeine has a boosting effect but what a lot of people don’t know is that coffee itself has other compounds in it that are not as well known. For instance, if you ask the average American what beverage has the most anti-oxidants in it, they’re going to tell you red wine, which is totally not true because coffee stomps all over red wine. It is the number 1 source of anti-oxidant in the American diet. More than fruit or vegetables or any other thing, that’s the most. That is pretty amazing!
Wendy Myers: Yeah. That’s so interesting. I love drinking my coffee, feeling like I’m doing something healthy for myself because I love my coffee. Haha
Dave Asprey: It makes a lot of sense. There’s a downside to coffee and I’m sure some of your listeners are going, “What about adrenal function?” because people who are highly stressed, especially chronic stress that doesn’t end, they will have problems with their energy levels, have problems with their adrenals. Adrenal fatigue feels like your immune system isn’t working, you’re tired all the time, you sleep a lot and don’t get rest. I’ve had adrenal fatigue, it’s no fun. We do know that mold’s toxins make adrenal fatigue worse and we do know that coffee with mold toxins causes anxiety and jitters and crankiness much more than adrenal fatigue. So, my experience has been that as I was recovering from adrenal fatigue, I can drink the clean coffee especially bulletproof coffee made with those ingredients. A cup in the morning and it actually gives me my energy back and it makes me feel good. It doesn’t harm a recovery from adrenal fatigue. The only time I recommend people to avoid all coffee is when they’re in stage 4 adrenal fatigue. If you are bedridden and you don’t have chronic fatigue and all, you need to make a decision – is this an adrenal issue or is this not. My experience has been normal amounts of coffee that is lacking the toxins has life enhancing qualities and it can be really really healthy for people.
Wendy Myers: I absolutely agree with you. I have clients with adrenal fatigue. I am almost completely healed of my adrenal fatigue. I still have a little bit of ways to go. But I think you can drink one cup of coffee a day, healthy mycotoxin mold-free coffee, and you just have to make sure in other areas of your life, that you’re getting enough rest and you’re not too stressed out, I think you can absolutely work it into a program where you’re healing your body.
Dave Asprey: There are some coffee oils that have the effects in the body that most people aren’t aware of but they can affect inflammatory path ways in a positive way which I did not know when I started doing research on coffee. So it really depends on what’s in that grinder when you’re making your coffee. And I created the upgraded coffee beans because I couldn’t go somewhere, even online, reliably buy coffee that works that made me feel good. I can occasionally find something that was pretty good. But then I’d order the same name from the same harvester-roaster the next week and it wouldn’t have the same impact. So I realized that I needed to standardize the quality and come up with some standards so that I could reliably have a cup of coffee that always had the same effects of making me feel good. That may sound a little bit obsessive, but if you’re going to drink coffee, I don’t know like my career I’ve ran strategy for two different companies with more than a billion dollars revenue I’ve had a great career as a senior executive and if I drink that coffee I lose 4 hours.
And for me, 4 hours is like an eternity. Like today I have 9 hours of calls and meetings and had a 15-minute break during the whole day. To lose 4 hours because I had bad coffee, if most of the time when I drink outside coffee, I’m going to have a performance lag, “Ouch! That really adds up.” That’s why I made the coffee. I made it for myself and I thought maybe I few other people want to try it. And I was not aware that it would have such a cognitive boost for everyone until we did that little study and until I just got so many feedback, like thousands of emails from people saying “I can’t believe that this does that. I thought it was just a placebo effect, that that was just me. I tested myself and, no, it’s real.” So I have no problem standing out in front of anyone and say, “This is a real fact that you can measure yourself. All you need to do is try.”
Wendy Myers: So, why don’t we talk a little bit about coffee and weight loss? Because this is a question I believe a lot of people have. So a lot of people are told to avoid coffee when they’re trying to lose weight because it can make you acidic and other people say, drink it because it increases your metabolism. What do you think?
Dave Asprey: There are great studies showing that caffeine enhances thermogenesis which is fat burning. So people who say coffee makes you gain weight, the only way I know coffee would make you gain weight is if the coffee is so moldy that it stresses your body out and then affect your cortisol levels in a major way and maybe your higher cortisol can make you gain weight. From what I know, from the body building diets and communities, coffee is not something that makes you gain weight. If you put soy milk and sugar in it, all bets are off, or even NutraSweet’s, same difference. So I’m talking about pure coffee not some adulterated beverage with all sorts of strange things added at your coffee house.
Wendy Myers: So what do you think about Starbucks and Coffee Bean coffees most people are drinking? It goes without saying but, Haha.
Dave Asprey: One of the studies that I came across had found that in a particular year, 93% of South American coffee had levels of mold toxins in it that they can detect using relatively simple tests. Another one showed 60%. So if you’re buying from any large coffee house that gets coffee from all over the world and mixes it together, you’re going to be getting appreciable levels of these toxins. There’s also the problem that Europe and much of Asia reject coffee that has levels of mold toxins about five parts per billion. So it ends up in the U.S and there is no legal standard for this here. So your odds of getting a bad cup of coffee in the U.S of from any coffee house, not to single out any of any those you mentioned, are much higher. This is a regional problem in the United States because of the way our government is not taking care of the people in our country. So what I did is I created my set of standards that goes far beyond the European regulation standards because these are the what-I’m-going-to-put-in-my-body standards and these are the things that make me perform best and it turns out they make a lot of other people perform better too.
In terms of coffee and acidity, I just have to call BS on that one. Your body is like a battery. If you get rid of acidity, you have no stomach acid and then you will be unable to break down the proteins that you eat and you’ll get food allergies. So most of the writing about acid versus alkaline foods involves taking the food burning it and then taking the ashes and seeing whether they’re acid or alkaline. Here’s a news flash, your body is not is not a furnace and you’re not a robot that’s powered by coal. So you don’t actually burn things, you metabolize them. And when you put a highly acidic lemon or lime into your system, you’re actually putting acid in the system and the fact that it may make your system more alkaline doesn’t make sense from that mechanistic perspective that goes behind the acid-alkaline balance.
On my diet which includes at least 400 ml of coffee that’s a couple cups of coffee and sometimes 800 per day about a stick of butter a day, 70% fat and lots of red meat and things like eggs and stuff like that, I have to worry about being too alkaline. So all the writings and all the people who started to talk about acid-alkaline balance, say on my diet which doesn’t have a lot of vegetables, but has a ton of these ‘acid-forming foods’, that I should be a walking acid bomb or something. And I’m actually too alkaline. If I take too many alkaline minerals it makes me dizzy. So the evidence in my experience for coffee being a problem of causing excess acidity it is my coffee “No, it doesn’t because I’m too alkaline not too acid even though I drink a lot of it.”
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I don’t agree with the whole acid-alkaline theory of diet either. Like you said it’s total BS because we can’t control our acid or alkalinity through our diet. It’s not what people think it is.
Dave Asprey: Well, you sort of can but instead of going through the trouble of all these alkaline foods, there’s this is amazing thing they sell at the grocery store. It’s called baking soda. And if you want to be more alkaline take some baking soda, put it in water and drink it. Your whole system will shift to be way more alkaline. It’ll even change your respiration rate as your body tries to balance out this huge amount of alkalinity. You don’t need to go juice some strange vegetable from South East Asia in order to get alkaline. You can be as alkaline or as acid as you want. Drink vinegar or baking soda. It’s really simple.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Well, I hate that the proponents tell you to avoid meat and dairy and things like that because those tend to be known as more acidic but it’s ridiculous because you need those foods to be healthy.
Dave Asprey: Yeah. We should make up some other word like ‘flongbatic’. Like, “Watch out! Those vegetarian foods are flongbatic.” It’s not a meaningful word the way they’re using it because we don’t burn our food before we digest it.
Wendy Myers: Exactly. So can you tell the listeners about your site upgradedself.com? I was perusing through there a couple of months ago and I was really impressed at the lineup of products that you have on the site.
Dave Asprey: Oh thanks. Wendy, what I did is I decided that I was going to break some convention and the only unifying element on upgraded self, which is where I put the product, the once that I’ve created, is that things that make you perform better. So I have something called the whole body vibration platform. It’s called the Bulletproof 5 and you can stand on it and you vibrate up and down 30 times a second, which really dramatically increases your energy levels and lets you do exercise in far less time. It’s something I use on regular basis in my home office. And it goes from there to the coffee beans and the brain octane oil. I also have some chocolate and vanilla that’s tested using the bulletproof process to be as free of the common toxins that are formed in chocolate and vanilla as possible. So what you’re getting is extremely clean chocolate, in fact it’s raw chocolate, as well as this amazing ground-up vanilla bean. So if you want to make a latte or mocha, you put your brewed coffee with the brain octane oil and the butter in your blender and then you add some vanilla, real vanilla from some real vanilla beans that are processed with a 10-day process that prevents the spoilage that usually happens in vanilla, or you add some cocoa butter.
If you’ve never had real cocoa butter added to a latte like that before, it’s amazing. You taste coffee and then the after note is all chocolate. So you can do these amazing things and what you’re getting is a full breakfast. You’re going to drink coffee at breakfast anyway, now you didn’t have to make a separate smoothie, you didn’t have to go cook a couple of eggs, you toss everything in the blender. We also have a couple of protein products. My favorite one for adding to the coffee is called upgraded collagen. This is collagen, the connective tissue from grass-fed cows. The normal source of collagen is gelatin which most gelatin come from really unsavory sources. Gelatin turns to jell-o so you don’t want to put that in your coffee. It also tastes like socks. So hydrolyzed collagen is enzymatically broken down already and it’s heat stable.
So when you put it in your coffee it makes the coffee a little bit frothy. It doesn’t change the flavor but you get a burst of this protein that is the building block for your bones, for your skin and for your hair. So people experience really good improvements in their health when they have collagen as a protein source. Your grandmother used to make soup–she boiled bones and all and then that soup would get gelatinous overnight. That’s where we got our collagen throughout history. Well, we don’t have a source of collagen in our diet and our bodies are largely made out of the stuff. So you owe it to yourself to get it in your diet somehow. I’m too lazy to make bone broth on a regular basis so I put collagen in my coffee sometimes.
Wendy Myers: That’s really interesting. Haha. I’ve never thought of doing that.
Dave Asprey: Just try. It tastes really good and makes a little bit foam on top. But it doesn’t change the taste and your body could use that collagen.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I need to go on a little shopping spree on your website. There’s so many neat little products on there. Just like yourself, I’m really into getting the best of everything and I love that you’re really really meticulous about sourcing your ingredients and finding the highest quality top of the line products to bring to your clients. So, thank you for that. Like I said, I’m going to treat myself to some more MCT oil on bulletproof coffee. Haha.
Dave Asprey: Thanks, Wendy. Make sure that when you do the MCT, don’t do just the upgraded MCT, try the brain octane. It’s three times stronger than MCT oil. So if you feel difference from the upgraded MCT, just one time, try it. I’m actually working right now on getting smaller size sample bottles so that I can send people a sample so that they can experience them the difference. You really do get a much bigger mental boost from the pure stuff of the brain octane.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I’m going to try that I just read on coffee and MCT oils. So thanks for that tip because I probably would have bought the older version.
Dave Asprey: Yeah, they’re both good. The older version is more affordable and it certainly works but you might as well get three times more concentration and it’s not a lot more expensive to get that and it’s noticeable.
Wendy Myers: Why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit more about you and what you’re up to these days?
Dave Asprey: I am spending a lot of my time today on bio hacking, on improving my health and my performance in ways most people probably aren’t familiar with yet but will be. There’s a whole bunch of stuff happening both in the military and in professional sports, things like stem cells. So I’m searching for technologies and I’ve got a whole bio hacking lab here at home full of them that I can use to increase my mental and physical performance. I’m not doing this because I want to be a superhero or dominate other people. I want to do this because I’m interested genuinely in making sure that I feel good all the time, living a very long time, and not dying of a chronic, degenerative disease. Since I was obese for the first half of my life, I had arthritis in my knees when I was fourteen. I’m still working on reversing some other immune condition that came about from living at houses with toxic mold.
So I didn’t start out with a great genetic pallet. I wasn’t the strongest person by a long shot. I have a screw in my knee, three knee surgeries. So I’m working on reversing the effects of those things, more on wiring the brain and the mind-body connection. And I’ve been spending a lot of time lately on coaching some very high-performance executives and bringing them through a program called 40 Years of Zen, where in 7 days of really focused, really difficult effort, you can put your brain in the same state as someone who has spent 40 years doing daily Zen meditation practice. This for me, the first time I did it, was one of the more transformative experiences because it taught me to get out of my own way. I’ve come to the conclusion that when people want to become more aware and want to perform better, the very first thing that you just have to do is you have to fuel the brain right which means eating enough of the right kinds of fat and then you have to remove the road blocks which are these toxins that I’m pulling out of the foods that I put on my site because those get in the way of you making progress.Once you’re there and you got enough energy in your brain and you’ve pulled out the road blocks, what do you do next?
That’s when you start training your nervous system and training your brain and do the things you want them to do. You end up addressing weaknesses and learning to pay attention all day long, how to speak without stuttering or saying ‘um’, how to get over chronic anxiety that you have. Those are things that I’ve done for myself. In fact, I used to have a mild stutter and I’ve been spokesperson for a couple of these billion-dollar companies onstage. I’ve been on CNN and Nightline, and things like that. And this is because I trained my nervous system using technology after I learned how to fuel it properly. So I want to help a more people to do these because the goal for the bulletproof executive website is to share the things that I’m incredibly fortunate to have been able to do for myself because I had a brief doubt of fortune when I was a young man. No one taught me that stuff and I spent a lot time and money, I wasted a lot of time and money figuring out what didn’t work. So I want to get it out there. I want it shared and I want to find other things that work and share those. I put all this info on the site for free. It’s there, you can read it, you can download the infographic that tells you how to fuel your brain. It took months to make it and it’s free to download, bulletproofdietbook.com has the latest download for that. And I’m working very hard on my book launch in March.
Wendy Myers: And you have your own podcast too as well, right?
Dave Asprey: Yeah. We were just ranked number 1 on iTunes in health category. We finally beat that Jillian Michaels from The Biggest Loser which is, to me, really funny because I’ve got lots of readers who have posted how to lost 100 pounds in usually 6 months or less without some of them exercising at all. It just comes off and there’s no food craving. There’s no will power, you’re just have to know the right things. One of the things I used to feel guilty about when I was trying to lose weight was that I somehow felt like I didn’t try hard enough. And it turns out that was all a mistake. You shouldn’t have to try to lose weight. When you get all the variables right, it’s effortless. So bagels lose their power over you and you don’t have to keep telling yourself, “I’m going to exercise will power and not eat.” What you need to tell yourself is, “When I eat the right stuff I don’t have to exercise will power.” So sharing that kind of message has been popular but I am afraid I’m never going to have a popular TV show because it’s boring to watch fat people drink bulletproof coffee and lose weight effortlessly without crying, suffering or chasing bags of Cheetos.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Haha. Congratulations on your podcast being number 1. Everyone’s trying to beat out Jillian Michaels. Haha
Dave Asprey: I was amazed when it happened and I actually don’t even track the rankings. A friend emailed me. Jimmy Moore from ‘livin la vida low carb’ emailed me saying, “Hey, Dave. Did you notice this?” I said, “No, I didn’t notice. How cool was that.”
Wendy Myers: Haha. Yeah I had Abel James on the podcast last week and he was talking how thrilled he was when you finally beat her out so, congratulations. Haha
Dave Asprey: Oh thanks. Yeah, Abel’s a buddy as well. Me and him did a lot of stuff together.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. He is really a nice guy. Well, Dave thank you for coming on the show. I just love your insight in the coffee and the idea of making it bulletproof. It’s so brilliant. A lot of people drink coffee and it’s yet another area of one’s diet that can be cleaned up and detoxed. You guys know I’m big on detoxing. So, thank you so much for sharing your profound knowledge of coffee.
Dave Asprey: You got it. Thank you so much, Wendy.
Wendy Myers: And listeners, if you want to learn more about health and diet and detox, you can find me on myersdetox.com, you can follow me on Facebook and twitter at iwillliveto110 and I am also on Youtube. Thank you so much for tuning in and remember water is the most essential element on earth because without it, you can’t make coffee. So thank you so much for listening to the Live to 110 Podcast.
