Bulletproof coffee and living longer
Posted on: 2016-08-08 3:58 PM At a futuristic new coffee shop here you can get a cup of joe with a pat of grass-fed butter and a teaspoon of “brain octane oil.”
Welcome to California, folks. This is biohacking central.
The Bulletproof Coffee stores will sell you more than just alternative caffeine. The in-store chairs omit an electromagnetic field, the lighting changes by the time of day, and a panel on the floor is specially designed to decharge guests’ static electricity.
Dave Asprey, the author, tech investor and podcast host just opened his second Bulletproof Coffee location here and plans to open at least one more outside of California before the end of year. The goal: to bring the concept of biohacking to the masses.
As fans of the podcast know, Asprey vows to live to at least 180 years old due to biohacking.
And what is biohacking, you ask?
"The art and science of manipulating your environment to get the best results possible from your body," he says.
His beliefs are controversial, and not shared with some in the medical community.
"For him to make that claim [that he’ll live to 180] isn’t based on any evidence because he can’t point to any one or any group of people who have done what he’s talking about, and it’s not testable," says Dr. Steven Barrett, the founder of Quackwatch.com.
Asprey says he's spent over $300,000 to "hack his own biology," which includes a cryotherapy lab at his home in Canada. He's built a large following online. His podcast has over 20 million downloads, and he has over 300,000 followers on Facebook and 135,000 on Twitter.
Coffee, at a price of $4.25 for a small standard cup, is the main star of his mission. The pair of shops in Santa Monica and the Downtown LA Arts District are the result of Asprey’s aim to repurpose coffee with the intention of turning it into a “performance-enhancing substance.” Asprey says he found ways to eliminate the parts of coffee that didn’t benefit him, including the jitteriness and the “crash,” as well as maximizing the potential goodness of the brew.
Venture capital firm Trinity Ventures, investors in Starbucks and Jamba Juice, gave Asprey $9 million to help him build his Bulletproof-biohacking vision into a brick and mortar reality.
Dan Skolnick, a partner at Trinity, says that no one has impacted his health and life in general more in the last 10 years than Asprey.
“I always grab a cup of Bulletproof coffee when I go in there, and I couldn't tell you if it's the coffee I'm feeling the most or the lighting or the electromagnetic waves. One thing you'll notice once you get into biohacking is that people feel things in very different ways,” Skolnick told USA Today.
