Dave Asprey: Hacking The Bulletproof Business

Foreigners. This is Ryan Daniel Moran. Welcome to Freedom Fast Lane. I'm really excited to be joined with somebody today who truly represents the Fast Lane. I'm going to be interviewing Dave Asprey. If you've ever heard of bulletproof coffee or bulletproof anything, then you've been influenced by Dave Asprey. I've been personally impacted by Dave. His new book and a lot of the health principles that he shares have impacted me. But what I've been really interested in is watching his rise in business, which from the outsider's world looks like it's been meteoric, it looks like it's been really fast. But you'll hear him talk about today, how it wasn't an overnight thing by any stretch of the imagination and how a lot of his rise has been due to the fact that his focus has been providing on real value, on measurable results in people's lives. And just by sharing his unique take on things that have worked for him and sharing them with the world and the fact that they've made a meaningful impact in people's lives has really been the secret sauce to his success. He also shares some of his business principles that have worked both in his current business and while he was the executive at hundred million dollar plus companies. And I was really interested to find out the things, the threads that were common among all the successful businesses that he had been a part of. And I wanted to hear what he thought had made his personal brand or his most recent brand, the bulletproof brand, really successful. And his answers surprised me. They were not at all what I expected him to say. So. So I hope you enjoy today's chat with Dave Asprey. Hey, fastlanders. Today I am joined by a man who needs no introduction. I am here with the bulletproof executive himself, Dave Asprey. Dave, thanks for hanging out with us at Freedom Fastlane.

Ryan, glad to be on the show.

Dave, I feel like I could talk to you for hours about diet Modafinil, a bunch of different things.

Have you heard about my new Modafinil diet? You just have a bowl of Modafinil with butter on it and you're totally good to go.

You just crunch it up like cereal.

And yeah, it's like Froot Loops.

Perfect.

Bulletproof cereal we'll call it. But I have lovingly turned, like coined this, what feels like a meteoric rise to success that Dave Asprey seems to have on the outside world. Although I'm sure it was not so much on the inside, which I've lovingly called the Bulletproof Business. I feel like your next book has to be called this because you have done such a great job of both branding yourself as a high level person to listen to. You've changed the world. Everybody knows what bulletproof coffee is. When two years ago was this fringe idea and I was talking with my buddy Abel James and like, what the heck do you mean? You put butter in your coffee and you take smart drugs and now it's like a worldwide phenomenon that feels like you've created. So you've changed the world in what seems like a very short time. But I can't imagine that it was an accident and I can't imagine that it was as quick as the outside world.

Seems to think. Would you comment on that?

Well, you can call it a meteoric rise, but I made $6 million when I was 26 and I lost it when I was 28. I already had an amazing career. I was at the company that first did any cloud computing thing. Google's first servers were in the buildings that my company ran. Like the very beginnings of things. In fact, I'm the first guy to sell anything over the Internet. The first product ever sold was a caffeine T shirt that said caffeine, my drug of choice sold out of my dorm room at UC Santa Barbara. So like I've been at the business thing, you know, I've worked on Sandhill Road, I've been an executive at multiple publicly traded companies. I've been learning how to be an executive, how to grow a company at different sizes and scales for 20 years. And I have an MBA from Wharton. Like it didn't just happen. It is one of those classical. You go out, you train, you work, you learn from the best people that you can find and then you make tons of mistakes and then you execute better each time you do it. Along the way, there's a lot of biohacking that's given me more time, more attention, more creativity, more brain. Stuff like that has certainly given me an unfair advantage. And I'm okay to talk about all that stuff, but it really comes down to getting out of my own way and then having all this experience.

Would you talk a little bit about the evolution of Dave Asprey as a personal brand, at least in the sense that it has become more. I mean, as far as I know, you weren't a best selling author five years ago. You didn't have you hadn't coined terms all over the world.

In my mind, you're kind of the inventor and pioneer of biohacking. Which wasn't even a term a couple of years ago, which, and I'm curious, what carried over from your executive experience before your personal brand's meteoric rise and how did you go about planting the seeds for that? Because you've done it as well as, if not better than, most people who are almost everybody who's trying to build a personal brand than just about anybody in the world.

The funny thing is the goal isn't to build a personal brand. And that's why it works. I already had a really reasonable level of success. I was a VP at a publicly traded company with an executive salary, living on an island with my family.

And I realized that it wasn't really fair that I got to spend $300,000 in 15 years doing the things that I've done to first fix my body and then to just outperform anything that I even thought was possible.

If someone had just told me a few of the things that I know now when I was 20, about human performance, about how the body works, about how the works, the nature of what gets in our way, I would have been a better person throughout my life. I would have been a better entrepreneur, better father, husband, just a better human. And I suffered a lot. I had arthritis when I was 14. I weighed 300 pounds. I still have stretch marks that I'll probably always have.

Looking at all that, what if someone had just written all this down and I had found it and I decided that I wanted to write it down because if only 10 people could avoid the stuff I'd gone through, I would have done an enormous service to people, people. So that was my motivation. Anything else after that is basically gravy. So my personal brand and all that stuff, I just want to help people. And if people don't like what I'm saying, they don't want to read it, they don't have to. And it's that attitude that's like, look, I'm just going to say it like it is. And I say unpopular things like porn is probably bad for your brain, drinking is actually not a healthy activity and it's going to affect you other times. These are not popular messages at all. Eat more butter is a popular message, but the bottom line is this is what works, and this is what works for me. And what works for you may be different. And it's okay that it's different, but we better be talking about this stuff and at least acknowledging that there may be a difference from these behaviors. That is a life changing thing because most people don't recognize that the environment is programming them all the time. I didn't recognize it. No one told me that. But it is, and it does. And now I program my environment, so it programs me, and that's biohacking.

Dave, would you address what you just said? These things that are kind of. They're important to hear, but not everybody wants to hear them. That kind of polarizing stance has made a lot of people pay attention, because some of the advice that you've kind of made commonplace at this point that are.

Known worldwide at this point had its resistance point. At first, I mentioned the example of my buddy Abel putting butter in his coffee and talking about how he was taking smart drugs. And I was like, what the heck? This sounds dangerous. And now it's commonplace. We talk about nootropics on the podcast. You've kind of made them popular. Would you address kind of that initial point? Did some of the things in your message hit a resistance point for you until they were widely adopted.

And they still hit resistance points? I see these people like, oh, I haven't tried bulletproof coffee, but here's why it's bad. It's like, okay, so you can craft an argument to support any position you emotionally believe in. And there are raw vegan guys who publicly say that I'm diabetic. I'm like, well, that doesn't seem to be factually true. There's been a bunch of personal attacks, some from people trying to sell other brands of coffee, and just all sorts of what I would determine is crazy behavior from people. And this is what humans do when an idea threatens them, and disruptive ideas. And my whole career has been disruptive technologies. Like, what do I do? I go through. I find things that need to be broken because they aren't working very well, and then I publicly break them and show a better way. And in technology.

This has created enormous things. It's not that I'm the only one doing this. The whole industry of Internet is about doing that. I just happen to be there near the beginning of the rise of cloud. And that kind of thinking goes for everything. And so, of course, there's going to be people saying, that doesn't work, it can't work. And there's just two words is all it takes. Say, try it. Because we know it's not dangerous to have bulletproof coffee once it's stuff you already have. And then people try and go, oh, I felt different. I get it. The meteoric rise of bulletproof coffee has to do with the fact that it works more so with the fact that it's well marketed or I did some sort of marketing ninja ship. No, I just invented something that has a noticeable impact in the quality of your day and on your cravings, on your willpower. Then I talked about those things as being of value. Most people don't measure the changes in their willpower every day. They don't even pay attention to it. But it's the essence of who and what you are and what you're capable of doing.

I like to say that bulletproof coffee is kind of the gateway drug into all things Dave Asprey, because I've kind of bought into a lot of different things of your philosophy. And the first thing was putting grass fed butter into my coffee. I'm curious though. You mentioned that you go in and you kind of disrupt and break down common knowledge and make a meaningful impact in people's lives in all areas. It hasn't just been in your most recent businesses, but you did it in cloud computing. You did it when you were the first person to sell things on the Internet. I'm curious, you know, you've had tons of success before the bulletproof diet and before your podcast was the number one health and fitness podcast on itunes. What have you seen to be universal across all of your businesses? As far as breaking things down into what creates a meaningful impact for your customers, clients, people who buy into your philosophy, what are kind of the prevailing, the prevailing ideas that you have seen to make the biggest impact in the businesses that you run and create the biggest impact for the people that you're serving. What principles have you found to be universal?

The most, the most important principle is that you've got to love your customer. And I care really deeply about people who drink bulletproof coffee because I understand it's at least I believe, and I really believe this, that when people have more willpower and they get rid of cravings, they're nicer, like they're better people. So it's helping a lot of people. And I feel a sense of responsibility for that. And that means if someone has a, a bad experience with my customer support or with customer service or they didn't like something, I go way out of my way to.

Make it right. And sometimes that means talking to the person directly, which is hard to do. There's so much demand on my time right now.

Every minute of the day is scheduled and I schedule time with my kids and with my wife or I don't.

Get it.

For me to say, all right, I'm going to poke a hole in my schedule because someone who bought some coffee had a problem and really feels like what's going to make it right is a chunk of my time. I'm probably going to do it if it's manageable.

Putting the customer requirements first means that when I make the bulletproof coffee shop, there'll be stuff I do in the back of the house that you never see, like avoiding the use of bleach because I don't want bleach smell in my employees and my customers and I don't want the negative effects of chlorine, the environment and on my customers. Just little things like that. Where is there a way to do this better that isn't cost prohibitive? And if so, can I make it better? It's that thing that works in every business. It's that drive to not be perfect. Perfection is toxic. It's the drive to just be a little bit better. It's those little steps and a constant improvement. And when you do that, it doesn't matter if you're building a slightly more efficient cloud operational management framework in the year 2000 or if you're building some new e commerce site in the year 2015. Can you make it just a little better and always do that? That is the secret.

Dave, I have this perception of you and you can correct me if this is a faulty perception, but it's that you seem like you have no limits.

My perception of you is you release a book, it goes to number one. You have a podcast, it goes to number one. You put butter in your coffee, you start coffee shops and you have. You're the most respected brand of coffee in retail all over the country. It seems like you just decide to go into things and stuff happens, like the waves part or the seas part, and Dave gets what he's going after. Would you comment on if my perception is accurate and how is it that, at least from the outsider's perspective, that when you set a goal, you seem to achieve it and there seems to be no limits to it?

I don't know that I'm always successful. I would like to do that. What it comes down to, though, is that I don't believe that struggle is a virtue. I don't believe it's necessary. I don't believe it makes me a better person. In fact, I think that it's supposed to be easy. And I used to think when I was a much younger, less wise man, that at least if I could make it look easy, that there was a stylistic edge to it. So it's one thing to lift a lot of weight. It's another thing to lift a lot of weight with one arm while winking at an attractive woman. There's a difference. Like, yeah, I barely felt that.

That's that routine, of course, but.

Right, right, but that's that indestructible kind of thing that especially men are raised with. And so you kind of want to be like, nothing can touch me. But it's actually the opposite of that. The reason that I don't see limits like that is I really don't believe in limits. I teach my kids, like we don't say can't in our house and we don't say things are impossible. And.

I've had this conversation with my five year old, he goes, yeah, well, it's not possible to fly to the moon without rockets. And I'm like, okay, I'll change the law of gravity. And it's like, I don't know how to do that yet. But that doesn't mean it's not possible. So I don't see things, anything as being impossible. It's just a matter of knowledge. It's a matter of.

Core assumptions. And what I've learned is that almost every core assumption I ever believed was wrong. And it led to all sorts of bad behaviors. Core assumptions about calories in and calories out lead us to exercise a ton and eat crappy food and then wonder why we didn't lose weight and we feel crappy all the time. The assumption was wrong, the behavior was actually rational. It's just that we kind of didn't get it right at the beginning. So most assumptions are generalities. And you can get around those assumptions when you start questioning them and you start measuring results.

Part of me loves what you're saying, and then the other part of me begs the question, okay, then how do you actually find out what is true? If there are exceptions to every rule, or if all assumptions or all generalities are not necessarily true, how do we. This is more of a philosophical question, but I'm curious by your answer. How do we then find out what is actually true beneath the surface? Is that even possible?

Stop worrying about what's true, think about what works. Okay, I can find a practice that works without any idea of why it works. Now this makes some of the rational skeptics, scientific minded people, really pissed off because there is a very rigid way of thinking that a lot of people have, which is that if I don't know how it works, it doesn't work.

This is anti science, but it's most Common in science, there is no known mechanism, therefore the effect did not happen. Well, I'm sorry. It makes you feel really good to wake up and pray. Whether you're praying to the Flying Spaghetti Monster or to whatever your deity of choice is, if it makes you feel better and it makes you kick more ass and it gives you a sense of mission, then wake up and pray. Whether or not there actually is a Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn't really matter. Did it work is what matters. And the scientist in me wants to know why and how it works. And I'm going to ask those questions, I'm going to explore it, but it doesn't really matter because it works. And if you put working ahead of dogma and ahead of belief, then you'll find that you can do things that you didn't think were possible.

That sounds easy on paper. I've spent a month and a half of my life with electrodes stuck to my head running a lie detector against myself so I can figure out where I'm deceiving myself. This is that 40 years of Zen thing you probably hear about me. You hear me talking about occasionally, and I do it with clients. And it's something that usually makes you throw up and or cry when you do it because you're like, how did I possibly deceive myself so profoundly about the simplest things? And this is why I was acting that way. And I'm pissed off about it. But getting those little automated unconscious biases out of myself has allowed me to make decisions at a speed that would probably be dizzying for a lot of people, or better yet, to feel safe letting someone else make a decision. That's why most people don't execute well at business. They lack trust and they lack the ability to attract the right people into their life and into their companies. There are decisions being made right now for Bulletproof that my direct reports the leaders in the company are making that I don't know about. In most companies, they would have to come to me and I have to say, oh, yes, no, yes, no. Screw that noise. Yes and no is an expensive decision for me. I only save those for the most important things. They might come and say, I've decided to do X. You cool with that? And I'll say, yeah, I'm fine with that. But if they come and say, what should I do? The answer is, I don't know. You studied the problem, not me.

So that is a really unsafe place to be as an entrepreneur. I don't know. The right answer is hard to say because how Many of us were penalized in school for not knowing the answer. Everyone was penalized for that. So what happens is an unconscious response. And what do most people just, most humans do, whether they're CEOs or not? They make up the answer or they take a best guess. My practice is to only answer that question. What should we do? What do you want is, I don't know. Why don't you make a recommendation and then we have a discussion based on that person's knowledge? Because one of my people may have studied a problem for three months and then come to me and said, what should I do? And I got one minute of data and I'm supposed to decide, like, seriously, that's not how it works. But that's how it's worked at every big company where I've ever been. And I'm not going to be that kind of executive. It just doesn't work.

I'm very public about the fact that I have an extremely conservative religious upbringing. I went to college to be a pastor. I'm no longer religious. But I have a history and a desire for things to be very black and white and correct, because I'm trained to think this is correct. What violates this is incorrect. What contradicts this should be cast out. And that type of thinking is very limiting, regardless of what where we're putting it.

This isn't exclusive to religion. There's people who believe there has to be a 9 to 5, and you have to go there. And anything that contradicts that is a scam or relationships have to look like this and this and this and anything that else is immoral. I find it very interesting that you spent time with electrodes hooked up to find out where you're lying yourself. I've never taken it that far, but I have found it very, very true that there are now exceptions to all of these rules, which is kind of a revelation for me in the last five years or so. Whereas before it was very black and white, very true and untrue. This is right, this is wrong. And kind of seeing outside of that, it's almost like seeing the outside of the matrix when you realize there are no rules.

Well, there are actions and likely consequences from the actions. But almost all of that, this is correct or this is not correct. You can say this is ethical or moral, and this is not ethical or moral. And I think there's a good case to say that about some things like slavery and things like that. But when it comes to this is correct, well, no, you could say Newtonian physics. Well, this is correct. Well, no, it's actually just a pretty good approximation of correct, but it's not technically correct. And even our latest beliefs in quantum physics, they're beliefs, that's why they call them theories. So if you stake your sense of safety on the correctness of an idea, you will never be very safe. If you stake your sense of safety on something that's innate, whether it's even true or not isn't that important. As long as you tell your nervous system it's true, then you can be in charge of your nervous system. If you feel these very subtle things going on where. Well, if that's correct, it better be correct. Because if it's not correct, then I'm wrong. If I'm wrong, mommy won't love me, then mommy won't feed me, then I'll starve. This is the, this is the programming everyone has. The programming comes in when we're little babies who can't feed ourselves. It's logical and it's rational. And if you don't have a human brain, those little rules would keep the species alive. Those same rules run for monkeys and antelope. It's like you got to eat, you got to make sure that things that are going to kill you don't happen. So you should be able to run away or kill. And you should make sure that you have sex. And if you just do those, your species is generally going to survive. And we're still wired to do those before we even have a chance to think about whether it's a good idea.

So Dave, I want to dial this a little bit back to this idea of Dave accomplishes what he puts his mind to. This idea of no rules, this idea of.

You accomplishing what seems to be on the outside, very fast, meteoric rises to success again from the outside. I know you've been working on the inside for your entire life.

Let me share this little data point. For 10 years I've been either president, chairman or a board member of the Silicon Valley health institute for 10 years. Every month I met with a world leading anti aging expert and things like that and led them in public discussions on all these biohacking techniques.

That's a lot of time. It looks like there's an external rise. But to be an expert in a field that I don't have a degree in was not a meteoric thing at all. I put in the time to become an expert at speaking. I have 10,000 hours on stage. I used to run the Internet program for the University of California. I taught four nights a week after working at a rapidly growing startup to learn how to be a good teacher. There's nothing meteoric about this. I've been building my ability to communicate complex subjects, very complex subjects, for almost my entire career. So a couple of years ago I said, I'm going to start blogging about some of this stuff that isn't cloud computing because it actually helps people a lot more than a slightly faster server or a better algorithm is going to do.

It's really not meteoric. It comes from learning from the guy who taught John Chambers how to present publicly. I spent four days with the guy. His name's Jerry Wiseman. He wrote a book called. What's it called? Presenting to Win.

How do you learn how to present? Well, you go to one of the world's experts and then you do it and then you practice on stage over and over and over. And that's why I can go give a reasonable talk about biohacking because I know the subject and because I know the art of presenting it in a way that the audience can absorb. But it wasn't meteoric. This is 20 years of hard work that goes into me standing on stage. And on top of that, I hack my nervous system. So my sympathetic nervous system is dominant and I'm in a calm and focused and aware state when I do it. Like, it wasn't easy.

I get, I get that what I'm more mean. Like there's, there's certain areas where you have influenced that happened at least. Again, the perception looks like it's from the outside, has been very quick. Like you, you have the number one health podcast on itunes. You have what? You have a number one best selling book.

The moment I wasn't number one, I was number nine. Oprah beat me. I sold four times as many books as Oprah and she was four points higher on the list. So go Oprah.

Well, you have this, you have this track record of not only succeeding, but kind of dominating the areas that you go, the different channels and the different channels that you go into. We talk a lot about kind of channel optimization here on Freedom Fast Lane, but you kind of go in and it seems like you just kick down doors and you've been number one in health for quite some time now. I'm curious about that process of going into a channel or a medium because you know that it's not going to be overnight that you succeed in something. You know that it's not going to be easy. Even though you have certain assets or certain knowledge that will put you in a position for success. You know that it's not going to be simple or quick to dominate in an industry or a channel or a marketplace, and yet when you go into it, you win. I'm curious how you decide to go into a certain marketplace or a certain channel and how you make those decisions knowing that you only have 24 hours in the day and you still are going to win, no matter what channel or what area you decide to go into.

I don't know that I quite see it as dominating and winning. This may sound cliche or something, but this is a chance to serve people. The Bulletproof podcast. I wanted to talk to all these people that I interviewed, like 210 episodes or something about that number. These are people that I just wanted to pick their brains. They're experts in their field. So if I just had that conversation, I win, and then I record the conversation and I put it up there because some people might care about it. Would you believe that for the first year of Bulletproof Radio, I never looked at my podcast statistics?

Wow.

I wasn't trying to dominate. I wasn't trying to be number one. I was trying to ask the most interesting questions that I wanted answers to in a clear way. And I believe very strongly. There's 13 million downloads of Bulletproof Radio, and if you assume those are listened to, that's something like 50 lifetimes of listener time. Like literally 50 people could live their whole life listening to the podcast. So if I'm producing dick jokes all day long and providing no value to those people, I'm basically guilty of killing 50 people because nothing happened. Or I could help 50 lifetimes worth of hours. I believe that I should ask intelligent questions because I owe it to my audience.

I haven't looked at my rankings on itunes in the last month. I think one of the people on my team has, but we don't review it on a weekly call because I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing. And I truly am not tracking or monitoring or managing that. I use it in marketing and say, yeah, number one ranked podcast because it helps people find it. But that's not why I'm doing it. I'm not there to dominate or win. I'm there to learn some really cool things and to help a lot of people along the way. And that's it. Anything else is gravy. My motivation is different than a lot of people think it is.

Okay, so I didn't know this about your story, and I'm curious then, when you Decided to go in this direction and start Bulletproof. Was there even a company in mind? Or did you just have a message that you wanted to share based on your 20 years of experience?

You know, I already was a VP at a big company. I was flying around the world giving keynote presentations at the highest levels about the future of securing our cloud infrastructure and keeping yourself from having your enterprise hacked and things like that. It's intellectually complex. I'm dealing with CEOs and CIOs all over the planet.

I'm getting paid well. I have company insurance, all that kind of stuff. I started blogging because it sucked to have spent 15 years and $300,000. It sucked to have Lyme disease and arthritis when I was 14 and symptoms of ADD and even Asperger's syndrome until my mid 20s because of all sorts of autoimmune things going on. I spent a lot of time feeling like a zombie and being fat and unattractive and not liking myself and being pissed off at the world and all the things that happen when you're a teenager and you grow up. But it just didn't have to be as hard as it was. And I understand a sense of ease now. I know how to make it easy and how to not struggle and have the same outcome. I'm like, how could I not share that with a few people? My win was if 10 people avoided all the shit that I went through. That is an enormous win. And I've done something meaningful.

Everything else is gravy. That's what motivated me to start this. Why did I start Bulletproof Coffee Lab tested coffee beans? Because when I would fly to another country to give a talk about cloud computing, I feel different when I drink coffee with mold in it and I couldn't find. In fact, I'll tell you, it was in Denver. I couldn't find mold free coffee in Denver. And I really needed a cup of good coffee to give the keynote I wanted to give. And I tried three different places. Everywhere I got coffee. It was bad coffee. And I was like, you know what? I need a source of coffee. That's always going to work for me. I'm going to do the lab testing, I'm going to figure out how to do this, and I'm going to see if 100 other people want to buy this coffee so I can amortize the cost of lab testing and then I can always have coffee that makes me kick ass. That was the goal. Solve problems and see what sticks.

Beautiful.

It's not about dominating and winning. It's about serving.

I'm sitting here and I again, so agree with the message of what you're saying. And I so want you like, I so want to call bullshit on what you're saying, because you can.

There's no way to prove that I'm not just lying right now.

From the outsider's perspective of, you know, we hear so much about model model, the people who have provided what you have achieved, what it is that you want to achieve. But I know for me, I get the best responses from my audience. I have the fastest jumps in the size of my audience, the best feedback from people when I stop caring or trying to be like everybody else and I just have something of value that I put into the marketplace. We talk a lot about starting businesses. Most of my businesses are on Amazon, so we talk a lot about Amazon. And one of the reasons why my companies were so successful is because I stopped trying to do what everybody else was doing and I started doing what was true to our brand. We didn't care about certain manipulations of algorithms and inflating sales in order to make it look like we were authoritative like everybody else was trying to do. There's a place for the optimization of channels and there's a place for tweaks in business for a certain effect. But at the end of the day, most of the reason why we were successful was because we had a very customer centric.

A very heavy focus on the end result that our customers would get. But it's interesting, I'm catching myself and still the outsider's mindset of I'm wanting to hear the hack, I'm wanting to hear like the secret. And you're affirming that that hasn't been a part of your philosophy.

The biggest secret, and this will sound all mushy and weird, but.

The way I make those decisions about what to do next, it actually is what venture capitalists talk about. In a survey I came across a while back, they talk about how important is a spreadsheet versus how important is your gut feel? Having worked at a venture capital firm at Trinity Ventures as an entrepreneur in residence and having sat in the room after the entrepreneurs file out, having told us their dream, and then hearing what the VCs talk about when the entrepreneurs are out of the door was really enlightening. The vast majority of it is gut. Of course we talk about market size and all this stuff, but does the team seem like they gel?

Are we good? That gut feel. You can train yourself to be more aware of your gut feel. Some Deals feel good, some directions feel good, some don't feel good. I absolutely value that, that feeling. And here's the thing. You can value a feeling and think about something, and the thoughts and the feelings don't have to have any relation to each other. In fact, they don't, because feelings aren't thoughts by definition. So to be willing to listen to both of those and to not value either one as being good or correct or right or of more value than the other, I think helps me make really good decisions.

Well, Dave, I just got one more question for you. First of all, thank you so much for hanging out with us at Freedom Fast Lane. You mentioned one thing that was really interesting that I wanted you to just comment on. And you mentioned that you take care of your nervous system so that you're always in a state of flow and productivity. We've had John Amaral here on the podcast, Who's Tony Robbins? Dr. Does Network Chiropractic, which is specifically on the nervous system. It's something I'm very big on. But I'm curious, would you give our listeners one takeaway that they can do to manage their state and taking care of their nervous system to make sure they're in that state of flow on a regular basis?

You should read Steven Kotler's book the Rise of Superman to learn about the flow state. And it turns out you can't really always be in a state of flow because it's biologically really expensive state. It takes a lot of neurotransmitters. There's actually like a hangover from flow when you're in the really intense Supreme Athlete kind of flow. But I go into a flow state usually when I'm on stage and when I'm doing certain types of communication. And one of the biggest triggers for flow is service.

What this means is that whatever your startup is, you better be helping someone and you better believe in what you're doing. Because if you're going through the motions, you may be successful, you may not be, but you probably won't like it. Part of doing something that makes you successful isn't being what you're supposed to be, it's being what you are. And if you build service into what you're doing, whether it's service making it easier for someone to do to get their oil change, that's a service to people because they were going to waste time or pollute the environment or do something wrong and you're going to do it better. That's helping people. And if you don't See it that way, you're not going to get it. So the number one way to take care of your nervous system is make sure you're helping someone every day. Like, it's a simple thing. And I could say sleep better. I could say hack your sympathetic thing with heart rate variability and drink bulletproof coffee, et cetera, et cetera. But seriously, help someone. And the other thing you can do that's free and easy is be grateful. Every single day before bed with each of my kids, tell me three things you're grateful for today, and it can be the worst day of your life. And you're like, well, I'm grateful a piano didn't fall on my legs. Okay, fine. You got one right? There's always something to be grateful for. If you cultivate gratitude and you practice acts of service, you will be more likely to succeed. And there's studies about this stuff, but it's easy to try it and it's unlikely to harm you.

Dave, you have changed my life, both directly and indirectly. You have changed the planet in the last several years. So thank you for hanging out with us at Freedom Fastline and keep on changing the world, buddy.

Thanks, Ryan. Have an awesome day.

I rather enjoyed hearing Dave's, dare I call it, frustration with my use of the word meteoric rise to success. Because I've noticed a thread among extremely successful people, and that is that there are no overnight successes. There are no fast rises to success. There might be strategic rises to success. There might be principles that we all can model on a path to success. But Dave is very clear about the fact that his rise was not meteoric at all. It was 20 years of discipline to arrive at the point he is at now, to be at the position of authority where he can share and be knowledgeable on a topic enough for it to make a meaningful impact in people's lives. You know, this is common among really successful people. It is not some hack to success. It is not some strategy for overnight success. It is not some hack that gets around the system. It is producing value and doing that for a long enough time until you have an audience or a base of customers who are addicted to the value and the impact that you make in their lives. That is what success looks like long term. I was extremely fortunate to be able to get Dave on the show today. Please do me a favor, head over to freedomfastlane.com, go to the Show Notes for this page and give a thank you for Dave for coming on to Freedom Fastlane. Would also love to hear your thoughts on the show. Leave a note in the comments there. Always appreciate your reviews and your subscribing to the show over at itunes. Just do a search for Freedom Fastlane or look us up as one of the top marketing podcasts on itunes and click subscribe. Thanks for listening to Freedom Fastlane and I will see you on the next show.