Bulletproof Coffee: Boost Your Energy With Fasting With Dave Asprey

Want to know the secret to fasting without the crash? One strategy is to drink bulletproof coffee. Oma’s guest in this episode is Dave Asprey, the Founder of Bulletproof and is known as the “Father of Biohacking.” Dave shares how fasting cleanses your body and increases your energy levels. They also tackle intermittent fasting, why you shouldn’t try to make health your guiding motivation when it comes to fasting, and so much more. Tune in and learn some exciting things about boosting your energy levels.

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Bulletproof Coffee: Boost Your Energy With Fasting With Dave Asprey

We have an amazing episode and an amazing superhuman guest. We have none other than Dave Asprey, the Founder and Creator of the famous Bulletproof coffee. He is a three times New York Times Bestselling Author and the host of the Top 100 Podcast, Bulletproof Radio. He’s been featured in major media outlets like CNN, Fox News, Dr. Oz Show, the Joe Rogan Experience and hundreds more.

He is known as the Father of Biohacking, as a result of working along the side with doctors, scientists and mystics to unlock new levels of happiness and performance. He’s also an active investor in the wellness space. He is the Founder of Bulletproof Media, Upgrade Labs, TrueDark and 40 Years of Zen. We are welcoming Dave Asprey, the superhuman. We’re all going to have such an amazing experience. Welcome, everyone and welcome to the show with Dave Asprey.

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Dave Asprey, how are you?

I am well.

You look well. You radiate. You glow. I’m a big fan of your company Bulletproof. I can admit to the world that I have coffee with Dave every morning. My husband went away for a minute, so I could say, “I’m having coffee with Dave every morning.” This is something that everybody needs to understand. This is not only coffee. When I get it, my kids drink it. My daughter Ananda is very aware and she’s reading your book now because I want her to know the cause of inflammation. I want her to know why her name is Ananda. I want her to know the light being that comes into her world as you, Dave, that teaches this next generation to preserve light and full potential. Thank you so much for being here.

You’re welcome. It’s awesome that you have a teenager looking into this stuff. My kids drink Bulletproof coffee and they have since they were one because a small amount of coffee with a large amount of good fat in it is good for kids. If you do the stuff around inflammation, they talk about the stuff around having more energy in your cells. You’ll stay young and it’s a lot easier to stay young than it is to reverse aging.

The side effect of that is that you have a ton more energy to do whatever you want. When you’re young, you mostly want to hang out with your friends, but at least you’re paying attention and you’re not tired and you’re not de-focused the whole time. I found that when kids have more energy, they’re nicer to each other. When they get low on energy, the blood sugar drops or their cells don’t work very well, then they turn into the Mean Girl movie.

That is applicable to us, growing up. We need to understand that principle and those skills that you’re teaching. Coming back to what you’re teaching in your book, Fast This Way. How did that title come? Is it the, “Walk This Way?”

I was thinking about Rock This Way. There’s a picture of most people fasting where it’s gone, hungry, shaky, I don’t feel good and I’m deprived. The real picture in Fast This Way is it’s the highest value thing you can do if you measure things from a return on investment. I don’t mean investing dollars. Everything you do, you invest energy in it. How much energy did you put in? How much energy did you get out? If you are reading this show and how much attention you spent and how much time you spent, did it create more energy and value for you when you’re done? If so, it was good. If not, then you didn’t make a good choice to read it. It’s our job to make sure that people get more out of it than they put into it.

When you look at fasting, let’s say you were going to make breakfast. It’s going to take you energy, time and money. You skipped breakfast, so you got all three of those back. Right away, you’re already ahead, but then there’s a return that comes that morning because you have more energy and focus that morning than if you’d eaten a typical breakfast. Over long periods of time, the return is you don’t get diabetes, Alzheimer’s, cardiovascular disease or at least. You have a lower risk of them. Let’s say you save time now, feel better now and feel better long-term. You didn’t have to spend anything. You got paid upfront to get the benefits. It’s like, you to the bank and they give you money and they keep giving you interest.

This is what entrepreneurs need. There’s wisdom badly now is because now is the time entrepreneurs are on the frontline of this new world and they need the right condition to be able to focus on their innovation and to tap into this new world. Without the things that you’re teaching, we’re basically left with the old paradigm, belief system and the lack of. You know so well that there’s no such thing as the lack if you understand who we are. I love that about you. In your book, I was surprised when you said, “You shouldn’t even try to make health your guiding motivation when it comes to fasting.”

Health is dumb. I’ll be straightforward about it. Now, let’s go to your daughter. When she wakes up every morning, is she thinking about her friends or cute boy or does she think about her health?

Friends and cute boys.

Health is number seventeen on her list of priorities. You get into the mid-twenties. Are you thinking about your career and getting some or do you think about your health? It comes a little bit later in life and like, “Is it about my family? Is it about finances? Is it about making my mark in the world,” and where’s health? You’re trying to motivate yourself with something that is a background thing. Do you know who cares about health? Only one group of people, sick people and I’ve been one of those. That’s why I know about it. If you’re sick, health is your top priority, but that’s because you’re at the bottom of the pit. If you’re not there, then health will never be a divine motivator for you.

What is the motivator? It’s kicking ass. Having enough energy to do whatever you want, control your thoughts and biology. Looking the way you want to look and achieving what you want to achieve. You wake up in the morning going, “I want to do something amazing.” That’ll get you out of bed. “I want to be healthy or I want to live an optimal life.” Optimal means you made a trade-off. I don’t want trade-offs. I want no trade-offs. I want to wake up and rock everything I do, feel amazing, be connected to everything and have a ton of energy left over at the end of the day. That will get me out of bed, but health, no way.

That was amazing wisdom is coming straight from you, the health guru. You’re like a guru. You’re so advanced. You come from the future. I believe that.

Some people are very future-focused, and I know a good handful of them who think like I do. It’s rare, but it comes with a downside because if you’re always thinking about the future, I’ll say it takes work to think about the past. I have no idea what happened, whether something happened a week ago or a month ago because all of my sensors are forward-facing. “It was in the before time. Stop bothering me.” That’s rough as an entrepreneur because, “When did you do that?” “I don’t know. Ask my calendar because I don’t store that.” It’s a way of thinking that some people have.

You become to have that conversation around this mystical aspect of who you are. Who’s Dave in the mystical aspect? You took me to this discovery in your higher path in the book that I read, your books. You found yourself in this cave.

I didn’t only find myself there. I realized there was some stuff going on. I was afraid of being hungry because I learned that hypoglybitchy was real. If you like to be nice to people or you like to not look like a jerk in front of people. If you know that you’re going to go into starvation mode if you don’t eat six times a day every 2 or 3 hours, which is what they tell you. It doesn’t even make any sense, but also, you know that you’re going to act like a jerk. You’re genuinely afraid of that. I’m like, “I know I have an issue there.” Also, I picked up from other work I’ve done. I had some part of me that was afraid of being alone, where you’d rather be in a relationship that isn’t a great relationship because it’s better than no relationship.

I’m like, “Drop me off in a cave.” I hired a shaman. He put me in a cave for four days with no food and people. He picked me up after that so that I could face all of that simultaneously and there’d be no food to eat. Even if I would not have the willpower to fast, then I would not have much choice. I could lick a rock or something. That was a good thing because there’s a spiritual aspect of fasting and there’s a performance aspect of fasting. They’re entirely different. We can have a working fast during the week that makes you kick more ass, but if you look at every spiritual tradition, there are reasons that they do fasting.

When they’re doing fasting, it’s not a working fast. It is a spiritual development thing. It works for spiritual development because there are three steps to it. One of them is that your body takes energy and puts it into digesting food. It takes work to break it down. If you’re not digesting now, then the energy that would have gone into the food goes into thinking and feeling. When there’s no food in your stomach and there hasn’t been some for a little while, your body starts making ketones. These provide more energy for neurons in the brain than glucose does. Now you think, “All the energy that would have gone into digestion is for my brain and I’m running a higher energy fuel for my brain. No wonder after two days of fasting, these mystics and people who fast in caves and all of these longer-term spiritual fasts, they’re doing it to get there.”

The third thing that most people don’t write about, and this is in Fast This Way, it’s that when you haven’t had food for even a relatively brief period of time, your sensors open up. This is your body’s way. The mitochondria in the body. They’re saying, “There’s no fuel.” You’re going to have to connect with the world around you so you can find something to eat. Your smell, taste, and little vibrational sensors are harder to quantify, but they also exist open up.

You’re more perceptive of the world around you. You have enough energy to process that information and enough energy to watch what’s going on inside. If you then go eat something, even a banana. It doesn’t matter if cheeseburger or banana. It’s not going to make much difference. Your body then stops focusing on the outer and giving in for the inner and it starts working on the banana. You want it to be working on you, not working on the banana.

That’s such important information. If you’re reading this, you have to allow it to learn from this lesson. This is beautiful. Thank you for sharing this because you speak the truth. It’s so crystal clear to me. Your energy and vibration are crystal clear. The fact that you’re breaking it down the way you’re breaking it down in your books and your teaching when you speak on stage about fasting. I love that you’re bringing this connection to fasting with food and what it means to fast with thoughts. The concept of the power of meditation. Can you share your wisdom around this?

What fasting means is going without. You can say, “I’m going to fast from junk food.” That’s called eating healthier and you can say, “I’m going to fast from alcohol. That’s abstinence.” You can fast from porn. There’s a whole movement around that. You can fast from sex. I talk about all these types of fasts, but the idea that fasting means only drinking water that’s because that’s what mice did in laboratory studies because mice didn’t have much choice about it. Most spiritual traditions, at least have you drink tea or some other things.

I’ve identified things that you can do during a fast that turn off wasted thoughts about food and give you extra energy without breaking the fast. That seems to be an important thing. I think you’re asking me something probably more mystical about that where at the end of the book, I talk about fasting from hate. What’s happening is that whenever your body thinks you need something, the body is doing that to keep the body alive.

This ancient system is present in bacteria, trees, and in every life farm. It runs these four things in order. This comes from my research in artificial intelligence. Part of my degree is in that and I’ve spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley building complex systems. The weird thing is that each little component of the system will do this basic set of things, but when you have enough things doing those same basic things, crazy complexity emerges. For us, here’s what’s running us. These ancient bacteria, there’s a quadrillion of them in our bodies. They sense the environment around you and decide whether they’re making energy, making neurotransmitters or hormones. They’re calling the shots way more than we like to think.

They aren’t very smart because they’re bacteria. They don’t have brains. They don’t understand time. They don’t understand the future. They’re very simple but very fast. The first thing that all life forms do is an F-word, called fear. It’s a run away from kill or hides from scary things because if all lives don’t do that, then something would eat you and you’d be an unsuccessful life form and you’d get evolved out of existence. Ten times more energy goes into fear. The next thing that’s killed all life forms is an F-word called food because the famine is a big issue.

This is why we eat everything. All life forms say, “Run away from scary stuff and eat everything.” They eat everything. That’s why when someone puts a donut in front of you, the doughnut yells at you and says, “Eat me,” and you say “No.” Eventually, the little cells in your body are like, “If you don’t eat it, we’re going to turn up your anxiety. We’re going to turn down your energy until you’re helpless.” When energy goes down, your willpower goes down. Now, I found a study in Fast This Way. Fifteen percent of the average person’s thoughts every day are about their next meal.

Now, if you’re an entrepreneur, if 15% of your thoughts were about your business or about your mission instead of about tacos, you might find a performance improvement. Fasting will teach your body not to think about the food at all. In fact, if they use the fasting hacks in the book, someone can put the most delicious meal in front of you at 10:00 AM and you’re like, “I’m not hungry.” Instead of saying no, there isn’t even a question to say yes. That is liberating in terms of focus and energy. Those are only two of the F-words. The third F-word that all life has to do to stay alive for generations. Can you guess what it is?

Maybe that would be too much of a bad word.

Clearly, you’re thinking of fertility. That was that F-word in your mind.

In French, in my mind.

There you go. It is that F-word. This gets three times more energy than it needs. Think about this. Is there anything you’ve ever done in your life that you’re ashamed of that you wish I hadn’t done that wasn’t one of those three things?

That wasn’t?

It’s all the things you’ve done that you’re ashamed of came from one of those three ancient bacterial behaviors.

Outside of it?

Every mistake you’ve made and every bad thing you’ve done.

Does it have to do with it?

It’s either because you were afraid of something. It wasn’t actually scary, but your body was afraid of it, so you avoided it. You procrastinated.

Of course.

Let’s say you ate that stuff you wish you didn’t and you went on those dates you wish you hadn’t, but maybe it was fun. This is the source. These are all ego behaviors. They’re ancient bacterial behaviors. The saving grace is the fourth F-word. The fourth F-word is a friend and all life does this. Bacteria get together. They make yogurt or kombucha, trees make a forest, sheep make a herd, and humans make a community and a tribe.

That’s why we’re wired in our bone marrow throughout the body. We take care of our young people. We take care of our older people. We specialize. We’re wired to be nice to each other. It doesn’t work very well if you’re afraid, hungry, and have no love. All of these things, the body says that I need to be saved ten times more than they needed to be saved. The number one fear in the US, of any fear in a survey, do you know what it is?

I’m guessing it’s dying.

All fear is the ultimate of death, so that’s accurate. When you ask people, “What terrifies you,” what action could you take that would be the most terrifying?

Starving.

It’s not starving. It’s not snakes on a plane. It’s public speaking. Here’s the thing, though. You know that you’re not going to die if you go up on stage. It’s factual, but it sure feels to your body like you’re going to die. When you think you need something, you let your body believe that you need something. When you let that rule, but you know in your brain that you don’t need it, then the body’s in control and you’re not. With food, it takes you at least two, probably three months to starve to death. When you tell yourself, “I’m starving,” because it’s almost lunchtime, you’re not starving. It’s only your body lying to you.

What fasting is, it’s going without. You can go without anything that your body thinks you need to stay alive that you don’t need. When you fast from hate, the reason that you’re thinking all these bad things about other people, that’s your automated defense systems. The meat operating system that’s sending you little signals to hate other people because they might be threats and all the things like fear and greed and envy and all that stuff is accounted for by this ancient system like that. It’ll send you emotions then you’ll make up stories about them. You want to be a good entrepreneur. You get as much of that garbage out as you can. It so happens when you do fasting, it gives you enough energy to tackle the first of the F-word, which is fear.

You get that 15% of your thoughts back. You can do the spiritual side but in the meantime, if it’s Monday morning and you’ve got a kid hanging off your arm and you’re trying to focus, having more focus, not less, is a good thing. Over time, having the ability to make more electricity in your body is always going to benefit you. Ultimately, at the end of the book, it was like, “Why don’t we fast for four hours?” Can you go four hours out thinking about, think about another person or another thing? It’s exceptionally difficult. Most people can’t do it.

The reason that I know these things to be true is I wrote Head Strong. It is a deep look at mitochondria in the brain and the body combined with some emergent behaviors from complex systems knowledge. This explains all the Eastern traditions and Western medicine stuff that we know about inflammation and other things, a uniting theory. As entrepreneurs, your company is a reflection of your own energy, especially when it’s a younger company. That means that if your cells are a shit show, in other words, you’re physically not doing a very good job of turning errant food into electricity.

You will have a feeling of anxiety that is in your tissues. It’s always there. It’s like a background hum. That shows up in your company too. When you’re dealing with fear, when something that might be a threat to your company feels like it’s a threat to your life, you will respond to the first F-word, which is a run away from kill or hide. You will not respond with integrity and the behavior that will let you win. When you get your energy clean, you end up being able to make a company that has the right resonance in it.

I’ve had about a thousand entrepreneurs come through my neuroscience program called 40 Years of Zen, which has meant to replicate decades of meditating in five very intense days. I’ve had a chance to talk to a lot of entrepreneurs and people. It’s amazing how many of us are succeeding because we’re still trying to prove to the bully in 7th grade that we’re better than they are. If you’re building your company because you have something to prove to other people, you’re doing it wrong. You can succeed that way. You can succeed using anger as energy. I certainly did that at the beginning of my career. It’s painful and it creates suffering for you, but you can still succeed. The success that you have is fleeting.

When I was 26, I made $6 million at the company that held Google’s first servers. I was a cofounder of the consulting part of the company. What happened was I looked at another friend at the company. We’d all made more money than anyone had any business making. Magically I said, “I’ll be happy to make $10 million. If $6 million doesn’t make you happy, I promise you $10 million will make you happy.” It’s because if you’re trying to prove something, you’re running from something, you’re running from failure, you’ll never be satisfied.

If you flip it around and say, “I’m moving towards something because it’s something that’s worthy,” and you do it from a place where your energies, you’re making energy in your body well. You’re not wasting it on thinking about muffins and thinking about whoever was mean to you or those things. You end up recruiting a better team. You create a better company culture. You end up doing as much work on yourself as your company grows as possible.

If you don’t, I’ve seen way too many entrepreneurs. They get successful and they hit the wall and drug overdoses, massive unhappiness and divorce. This is because you didn’t scale your energy and your personal development practice along with their company. I would probably spend at least 3 and sometimes 4 hours a week working with basically either therapist-type people or meditation-type experts in addition to all the other stuff I do on my own. That’s the only way I can scale what I’m doing. I’ve got five companies now, including Bulletproof. They’re all growing and succeeding and I’m touching the lives of millions of people and Fast This Way came out. It’s doing very well because I’m willing to talk about the cave.

I’m willing to talk about the psychological side of fasting. Also, tell people you don’t have to suffer. You won’t be hypoglybitchy and hangry. You have to know how to do it. I’m very motivated because of my first big book, the Bulletproof Diet. It was the first big book that talked about keto as a performance enhancer and talked about intermittent fasting. I started sharing this in 2010 and the book came out in 2014.

If you look at it over the last several years, keto has become, “If you have another carb, you’re a bad person.” You’re being keto all the time. I’m watching it wreck, especially women before men, but it’s not a good long-term strategy. It’s great to do it sometimes. It’s a cyclical strategy. I wrote about this because I broke myself before I even wrote a word about it doing too much keto and doing vegan too, which is also not a good plan.

I see the same happening with fasting, especially for women when you look at that. It’s like, “If fasting feels good, I should do it every day. In fact, I should do it even longer.” You end up at this weird place where, “I only have one meal a day, but when I sleep, I don’t feel like I slept when I wake up and my hormone cycles are off.” If you’re a guy, “I wake up without the kickstand I normally have in the morning and now my hair is getting thin. What’s going on here?” You can over fast and especially with women. Fasting is a tool. You use the tool, but you don’t have to use it all the time. I wanted a book that would be out there that would guide people towards kindness towards yourself and all these practices versus extremism.

I’m from Europe, so when I came to this country, it was all extreme. I see women in gyms. They look like men and it’s like, “What’s going on?” This extremism is a power ego trip. I’m glad you stepped into your own power to share this information that saves millions of people. I truly believe that.

It’s important. To be honest, writing books is the lowest hourly rate of anything I do because people say, “Authors are,” no. You do not get rich writing books. It takes thousands of hours to write a good book like that. I write books as part of my community service and that’s my job to share the knowledge. I’m not going to write it down if I don’t think people get more out of the book than they get. It would have been very easy to write a fasting book. Step one, don’t eat for a while. Step two, it’s good for you. Here’s a bunch of studies.

There are several books I got. This is the, “How do you do it for ten plus years, how people lost a million pounds doing it without being hungry. I did that and it worked for a while, but now, I’m not doing it because it didn’t work for me.” This works for everyone if you do it tuned for you. For me, it’s important because when you do this right, you have more energy for that fourth F-word of being nice to other people.

Don’t you think it has to do with how you’ve built in your DNA no matter what? We’re talking about epigenetic. You’re teaching something that’s basic that we can all do and we don’t have to ask and understand all the science behind it because you have done it. It’s pretty cool that my kids can read your book and appreciate it. It’s incredible. An 80-year-old can start from scratch and do that, so as my ten-year-old. That’s powerful stuff, David.

Thank you. Speaking ten-year-olds, my son was 9 or 10 when I was writing the book. He said, “Daddy, I want to try fasting.” I said, “You’re a little young for fasting. You want to skip breakfast, that’s fine, but it’s not appropriate for kids to do fasting because it can stunt their growth.” That’s a time when epigenetically, they need a signal that there’s so much nutrition and food and good fats available that you can grow to the fullest epigenetic capabilities they’ve got. They set the body up to thrive. If once a month they want to fast for 24 hours, it doesn’t matter, but if it’s a regular practice, it’s not good.

“Daddy, I want to try fasting.” I said, “As long as it’s not a regular thing, you can try it.” He said, “I’m going to go 24 hours without eating.” When you’re that age, it is a long period of time. I said, “Why don’t you use some of the fasting hacks, so you won’t be hungry.” He goes, “No, I’m going to have water. I want to see if I can do it.” He was like, “I’m hungry,” but he did it. When he had ended it, he goes, “You’re right, daddy. Fasting is the best spice. That’s the best meal I’ve ever had.” He does not want to fast ever since, but he feels totally safe if he doesn’t have breakfast because he doesn’t feel like it.

We have taught our children, especially in Europe, that it’s the end of the world if you don’t have breakfast. That is BS. I write in Fast This Way. I wrote about a flight to Dubai. This is eighteen hours in the air. The stewardess comes by and I’m fortunate. A friend bought me a ticket, so I’m flying Emirates first-class, where they have a bathroom and a very high level of service. She goes, “Here’s your menu.” I said, “I don’t want any. I’m not going to eat on the flight,” because if you eat when you’re in mid-air and there’s no air, you always get inflamed and you feel bad. It doesn’t matter how good the food is. It’s not the time to eat. She looks at me like, “You can’t do that. You’ll die.” She was concerned for my safety. I said, “It’s okay. I’ll have some black coffee later, but I’ll brew it myself because I like my beans.”

She goes and she gets another stewardess to try and convince me to take the menu. Another stewardess walks over. Her name was Jacqueline. She goes and I said, “No, I’m not eating on the airplane.” She goes, “You’re Dave Asprey.” I said, “Yes,” She goes, “Come with me.” We go up to the gallery and she has the Bulletproof coffee beans, the MCT oil, the butter and all that stuff. She’s totally on the Bulletproof Diet. She has the glasses. My company is called TrueDark that makes these glasses for sleep. She’s like, “I totally get it. I’ll make you a coffee when you’re ready.” It turns out a lot of flight crews are doing Bulletproof and they’re doing intermittent fasting.

They’re doing even the circadian glasses, the TrueDarks, because that’s the hardest job ever, biologically with all the time zone disruption and all. She was cool with me not having a menu, but when our parents teach us that you’re going to die if you don’t have breakfast. It turns out eating when you’re not hungry is like taking your car to the gas station and pumping more gas in and they won’t fit. You’re like, “It’s time to fill up with gas.” You either need gas or you don’t.

We can be relaxed about this. Most people, though, only know cravings because we eat stuff that makes us crave. If you’re hungry within an hour after your last meal, you ate the wrong stuff. You should go four hours between meals without wanting to snack. If you need a snack all the time, something you did cause that.

That was a-ha big moment. Thank you for sharing this. This is very critical information. That audience is like, “I want to follow him. I want to fast. I want to be like him. I want to be superhuman.” The one action step that the person reading can do now to be able to fast, what is the first thing that he needs to do?

You can realize that the minimum fast when you’re getting going, especially if you have some weight to lose, is twelve hours. It’s better to go 14, 16 or 18, but 12 is the very minimum. Think about it for a minute. If you could have dinner a little bit earlier now. Let’s say you have dinner and you’re done eating at 6:00. If four hours after dinner, you didn’t eat and then you slept for eight hours, that was twelve hours.

An early dinner and no midnight snack gave you a very basic fast. You woke up at 6:00 AM and you could eat. Now, you wake up at 6:00 AM if you went to bed at 10:00. You get your twelve hours, but no one eats at 6:00 AM. Maybe you wait a couple of hours. “I ate at 8:00 AM and I did 14 hours without food or maybe I went until 10:00 and I did sixteen or I went until noon and I did an eighteen-hour fast.” All you felt like you were doing was skipping breakfast. It’s not that hard.

That is so mind-blowing. It’s that we’re conditioned and our habit works for us instead of we’re working for ourselves.

If you wake up with nine hunger, the way I did my entire life because I didn’t know how to eat, it’s going to be hard because, “I got to eat something.” What that means is that the food you had for dinner the night before was incompatible with you. You should wake up not hungry. If you wake up hungry, there was probably MSG or there was Omega-6 or there are five classes of foods that cause cravings that we eat. We eat those foods because in the course of human evolution, the whole not starving is important.

We’re happy to eat foods that are not ideal, but they’re better than starving. They all have a downside because plants evolve without the first F-word, fear as well. They can’t run away. They can either hide or fight with people. They hide by wrapping themselves in spines, bark, and hard shells. Most of them cover themselves with toxins that make them unpalatable and not safe to eat.

If you were to walk outside, in fact, if you were to eat the flowers in the vase behind you, you would feel like absolute crap, you’d get sick and maybe even enough to go to the hospital, but they’re still plant-based. They’re just not food. It’s not that big of a stretch to do it. If we can eat this, is it going to be the thing that gives us the most energy and satiety because all foods have three components to them?

They have the amount of energy in them. Energy is good. It’s also called calories and we need calories because our body uses them to make energy and thoughts and vibrations and all the stuff we do. It also has nutrients. They maybe have some Vitamin C or some zinc or whatever. This is where most common nutritional stuff ends. They have anti-nutrients, things that are bad for you. These are the things that plants put in there for a variety of reasons. Mostly to keep animals from eating too much of them.

We sit there and we ignore that. You get these crazy people going, “That’s a high nutrient-dense food because it has no calories and it has lots of nutrients.” They ignore this. Using that logic, you could have a bowl of cyanide with vitamins on top and they’d be like, “It’s high in vitamins. You should take that.” They’re not even looking at the toxins. The toxins are what drive anxiety, cravings, brain fog and exhaustion.

It would be easy if I could say, “This food’s always bad,” and I can. Margarine, red food coloring like MSG is not good for any humans. Some people don’t feel it as much as others, but it’s always bad, but there are these things in the middle. Different people have different levels of sensitivity. For example, there’s a thing called the nightshade family of vegetables like potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants, bell peppers and spicy peppers. They are members of the deadly nightshade family.

Now, a substantial number of people, probably half but at least a third, have sensitivities to some of those. That means, if you eat it, you may not know it, but it makes you hungry or it makes you gain weight. It makes your brain work a little bit less. Maybe it gives you rheumatoid arthritis. Those classes of food cause about a third of rheumatoid arthritis or you may have genes where it doesn’t bother you and you can eat them.

Is it bad or good? It’s neither one. It’s epigenetic but knowing that these are a very common source of cravings, you can take them out for a couple of weeks and eat them and realize, “If I eat those, I wake up and my joints hurt my grip. My hands are puffy. My grip is weak in the morning.” “If I don’t eat those, I’m fine.” Those are foods that are not compatible with you. If you were starving, you’d eat them.

Since fasting teaches you that you’re not starving, you can choose foods that don’t give you cravings because it’s not that cravings are inconvenient. Cravings take you out of your game. If you want to show up for your family, you want to show up for your business and you ate something that made it harder to show up. Is it any wonder that you’re going to eat a donut?

It reminds me of applying kinesiology. How we listen to our body and become the technician in the lab at the same time as you did. That’s your story. You became the lab, the Guinea pig and all this at the same time.

Saving time is a massive part of it. I think I’m the laziest person on the planet because if I could spend less time to get the same results, I totally would. Biologically, your body’s wired. It will not waste energy. One of the things you can teach is if you eat carbs or eat anything all the time, six times a day, the cells are like, “Let’s see here.” It takes a lot of energy to keep ourselves young and strong and able to quickly be ready to spring into action or since there’s always food, why would we put biological energy into that? You end up accumulating cells that are weak.

They’re strong enough in a world where there’s always food all the time, but you suddenly say, “I’m going to go for a brief period of time with no food.” The cells look around and go, “We’re going to have to be able to make energy when we’re not constantly being shoveled glucose.” That means some of these cell components need to be replaced and they’ll go through it. They’ll find the weak parts and kick them out. They’ll grow new younger ones. That’s why the long-term benefits of fasting are so powerful, even if it means skipping breakfast.

In Europe, it’s like, “Eat your breakfast.” “Give me a break.”

If you look at what you eat for breakfast too, in Fast This Way, I talk about it. If you have a lot of weight to lose, you might want to have a breakfast of fat and protein for a month before you start intermittent fasting in order to reset some hormonal things. If you eat the traditional French breakfast, which I’d love to eat, which would be several croissants and some espresso, that’s not a good breakfast. Having carbs and sugar for breakfast sets you up to be hungry all day long and think about food. Having only fat in the morning, you can stay in a fasted state. This makes some people very mad because they are like, “You have to have only water.” In the book, you learned about three fasting hacks that you can use. If you look at the biological pathways of fasting, you’re still getting this.

In fact, I’m teaching people how to do this for two weeks as a gift for readers. Go to FastThisWay.com. You can sign up and I’ll walk you through daily lessons from the book to understand how to use the tools to turn off cravings. If you’re going to do a weekend fast and there’s a two-day spiritual fast at the end of this, where it’s one or two days where I’m going to teach you the spiritual aspects. The main part is how do I fast in the middle of a busy working day to get more energy than I had before? That’s a massive win for entrepreneurs. You can choose to do the personal growth work or you can go to your kid’s soccer game and not do that. Either one’s okay.

Thank you so much for this gift. Not only entrepreneurs, but we all need this. We all need this pure direct knowledge. This is conscious knowledge.

It comes from many years of working with people in the Bulletproof community, losing a million pounds. There’s a lot of street smart in it. Before that, it came from me weighing 300 pounds, having chronic fatigue syndrome and all the diseases of aging before I was 30. High risk of stroke and heart attack, cognitive dysfunction, arthritis and all this stuff. I didn’t want to deal with that anymore. When I started the work that I’m doing now, the blog was called the Bulletproof Executive. No one had ever talked to entrepreneurs and people in the world of technology, people in Wall Street and in business because we tend to burn ourselves up. There’s always more work to do and what we care about is probably not having abs, although that’s nice.

What we care about is, “Did I have enough energy? Did I have my brain working? Could I make good decisions? Could I be creative? Could I go into the states that I need to do my work?” I wrote the blog saying five people are going to read this. If they avoid all the crap that I went through biologically, it’s going to change their lives way for the better. I’m happy if that’s all that ever reads it because if someone had written that blog for me when I was nineteen, it would have saved me $300,000 and many years of suffering. Everything above that is like, “A few more people were interested. Maybe I’ll make some coffee that doesn’t make you want to hit people after you drink it,” and stuff like that. That’s how it all works.

I’m immensely grateful for your larger-than-life achievements because I do feel that you are the pioneer of this. You are. You invented the biohacking term. You don’t have to answer this question if you’re not feeling comfortable. What’s the meaning of life to you? After all, this is done. Let’s say you’re 180 and you’ve completed your mission. You made this impossible dream possible. You’re 180 in the beautiful light that you are as the super Sadhguru of the world and you’re teaching us now this new way as you go in deeper in your higher path.

Life is continued evolution. The world will evolve whether or not I’m here, whether or not you’re here. It’s going to do what it’s going to do. It’s a very big, very complex system. It’ll end up wherever it’s going to end up. To me, the meaning of life is to continue evolution as rapidly and as best as you can. That means finding the tools, finding people who’ve already been there and learning from them. To be honest, most of the stuff that is the framework for biohacking came from people three times my age because when I’m in my twenties, I led a nonprofit anti-aging group where most of the members were 60, 70, 80.

We’ve been studying this stuff for thousands of years. Most Tantra, Taoism, Ayurveda, traditional Chinese medicine and even European traditions of alchemy are all around immortality. They’re all around how you evolve the spirit and the body to work better. It’s a many thousands of years thing that people have been working on. When I’m 180, my goal is to die at a time and by my chosen method. If I’m done before then, great. If I’m done after them, I’ll stick around but the point is I get to pick. Along the way, there are no wheelchairs, tubes, diapers and not remembers my name. That’s not going to happen.

As I see it, because I see vibration and whatnot, but you’re in the quantum field, you are working on the 5th dimensional and higher dimension as I see you now. You’re still tapped in and if you being the bridge to others so they can too walk into this bridge and perhaps have a sense of understanding, which is beyond understanding because what you accomplish is sometimes completely beyond understanding.

It is true that some of the things in my books, I can see that they are true. There were enough bread crumbs where they have to be true, so you can try it and see if it works. It makes researchers mad. “You don’t have a study that says that’s true.” You don’t need a study to say it’s true because you can try it. It’s unlikely to be more harmful than the French fries and Cheetos that you’re reading. The risk is low and if it doesn’t work, then don’t do it. Many of the things that I’ve done several years afterward, studies do come out. For instance, Brain Octane Oil, which is the MCT oil that I’ve made for Bulletproof for many years. Five or six years after, I chose that one subtype. It’s the most expensive and rare of the MCTs.

A study came out that shows it’s four times more ketogenic than the most common MCT oil. I could feel that it works better for cognitive function and that’s why I prioritize that and one of the other MCTs because you noticed they work better, but the science wasn’t there. There was science for this whole big bucket of different oils that are allowed to be called MCTs. It’s cool when studies come out. I couldn’t tell you why you had to blend Bulletproof coffee for it to work and it drove me nuts. I funded research years ago at the University of Washington and Dr. Jerry Pollack came out and he did research on what your body does when you drink water. It vibrates the water near your cell membranes and basically heats the water.

When it does that, the water changes its thickness. Once it’s changed from regular water into useful biological water called exclusions on water, then your body can use it for folding proteins and making ATP and making energy. Now, people say, “That’s BS.” No, you can see it on a microscope. This is not quantum fairwater. This is visible. I’m not saying that quantum fairwater can’t work. We don’t know about lots, but this isn’t waving a magnet over your water. This is hard science from the University of Washington. He found that both MCT oil and grass-fed butterfat forms the largest exclusion zone that he’s seen.

What that means, when you’re tossing these things in a blender and you blend it up, it works way better than if you eat a pat of butter and drink a cup of coffee. As a science guy, I’m like, “That shouldn’t be true, but it’s very true that there’s a difference. Now we know the difference and I can say, “I discovered this,” but the genesis for Bulletproof Coffee was I’m in Mount Kailash, which is the holiest mountain in the world. In a remote part of Western Tibet. I’m feeling like crap at 18,000 feet elevation and a Tibetan lady gives me a bowl of yak butter tea. I drank it and I felt amazing. I’m like, “What?”

It took me a lot of experimenting when I got back to Silicon Valley to figure out what was going on here. What I found is if you use the wrong butter, it doesn’t work. If you use the wrong coffee or the wrong tea, it doesn’t work. The biggest variable is it’s got to be grass-fed butter and you got to blend it. That made me mad, but now I know. I shared this with millions of people before we had the science because you can tell it works.

It does work. I use it. When you put the butter in the coffee as I do, that’s what I do.

The recipe for Bulletproof is you brew the Bulletproof beans. They’re lab-tested to be free of those toxins that form when coffee is fermented. You brew it. You put butter and you put some brain octane, MCT oil in and you blend it for at least twenty seconds. It looks like a latte, but it doesn’t work nearly as well if you put it in there to float.

I don’t blend it.

You have a whole other level.

I’m happy because I know instantly what it does to me because I’m so sensitive.

I can tell you’re super sensitive. I get a lot of people who are very intuitive who come to 40 Years of Zen because someone was like, “My business coach told me to,” but people who are most sensitive when you blend it up, like shamans and spiritual masters, every one of them who’s tried Bulletproof coffee is like, “This sharpens my abilities.” Blend it.

I’m going to do it right after this.

You’re going to have an amazing day afterwards. It’s a whole other level.

Thank you so much. I’ll be speaking to my groups and why not. I know we’re about to close. Are there any other words of wisdom that you could share for like 30 seconds or anything that you want to share with the audience, especially the entrepreneurs?

I would invite you to come to FastThisWay.com and join 25,000 people where I’m teaching them how to fast all at the same time in a community. You’re doing it so you can show it better for your company, for your family, for your community. You will not be hungry. You won’t be hangry. No hypoglybitchy. It’s a power upgrade and it’s very important to learn how to do it because it turns down the noise in your body.

As you turn down the noise, you’re tapping into your intuition and you’re tapped into your higher self because I see you in a physical body and I see you as this higher self. Divine love, my friend. You are an exceptional live being. Thank you so much for being here.

It’s been a pleasure. Namaste.

Important Links

• Bulletproof
• Bulletproof Radio
• Bulletproof Media
• Upgrade Labs
• TrueDark
• 40 Years of Zen
• Dave Asprey
• Head Strong
• Bulletproof Diet
• FastThisWay.com
• Bulletproof Executive

About Dave Asprey