Dave Asprey - Time Is NOT Your Most Valuable Resource

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float, Shark with your boy.

My boy, Matt Wolf.

Hey, what's up, everyone?

Yo.

How's it going?

It's going great.

How's your morning been?

Energized.

Energized, huh? Yeah. How did you energize it by.

Well, a little bit of bulletproof coffee. Because I honestly did make one this morning. Nice. And speaking with the one and only Dave Asprey. Nice. Of bulletproof coffee and other ventures which you'll get into.

Yes, yes. In.

Author of many books. Yeah. All right. So, yeah, I feel great. And honestly, like we've been so in full disclosure, Matt and I, after probably for the last 15, 20 minutes, we've been just unloading from that interview, this interview that you're about to hear, and how we have been doing a lot of this kind of consciously and sometimes unconsciously with diet and just how. I love how Dave corrected me, by the way. And you'll get to it. But like, energy. You'll see what he corrected me on. I'll leave that open loop there. But like, energy as a whole, I feel fricking great. And I know you do, too, because we've been talking about it for sure. And you said you've been losing weight, too. What? You're down like £10 in the summer.

Oh, dude. I'm back to, like, my high school weight right now. I'm at 195. It's the first time I've been under 200 since college.

From what? Like, really quick, Just for listeners.

So what I've been doing has been focused on just being very intuitive with my eating being very. I eat when I'm hungry and I stop when I feel like I'm satisfied. So that's really it. You know, I don't like restrictive diets. I don't like feeling like there's things that I need to cut out. Or when I go to a restaurant, there's things on the menu that I can't have. I often choose the healthier options these days when I go to restaurants, but I don't like thinking that there's things on that menu that I can't have. So I don't diet. I just sort of intuitively eat. I intermittent fast. So I don't eat my first meal till afternoon. Like every day. I might have a tea or a coffee in the morning, but I don't eat my first meal till afternoon. And then when I do eat, it's just when I feel hungry, when I start to feel that, that Feeling creep up that, like, oh, I've got. I'm a little bit hungry now. I should probably eat something. And then I eat until my body feels satisfied, and it's just really paying attention and being in tune with my body. I have not done any special diets or anything other than that, and I have. It's been the most effective weight loss plan for me so far. Now, this isn't advice I got from Dave Asprey, this.

No.

So the stuff that he's talking about is not super relevant.

I'll give you a high five. Well missed.

There it is nice.

I mean, just to. I. I'm in the same boat. That's. That's the interesting thing is because, like, Matt and I haven't really talked a lot about this, but, like, right now I have abs for, like, the first time in my life. And even my wife. Holy crap. Well, I'm sitting down. I know.

Sitting down. Be easier to show me.

All right.

Check it out, bro.

Let's see.

Oh, there's maybe there's also, like, a suntan line where I got fried the other day. UV rays are out of control these days.

Global warming getting off topic here, Joe?

No, but I. I seriously am in the best shape of my life, and I feel like a lot of it is completely related to what we'll talk about with Dave.

Yeah.

Directly and indirectly. But, dude, energy. I think that's like, my big takeaway here is we have so much fucking energy, all of us.

Yeah.

And there's so many ways that you can finally realize you have this. And diet is a great way. There's obviously a million other ways. Meditation and just mindfulness, all that stuff.

But we're going to get into a lot of that in this interview now.

So. Cool, man.

Before we jump into it, though, I do want to give a disclaimer about this episode.

We.

We only had about 40 minutes with Dave. He's very, very, very busy. He's very, very structured with his time. So we decided because we had a limited amount of time with him, we would kind of skip the backstory portion of our episode. We didn't really get too deep into how he decided to create Bulletproof Coffee and how he developed all of his various companies and things like that. And the reason being he's got some amazing books that goes into those backstories. He's got his own podcast, and he's got a blog that has tons of amazing content on it. He's been featured on a ton of other podcasts where he's given his backstory. So there's just so many places that you can kind of get his backstory and how he got into Bulletproof Coffee. So we decided to just kind of jump straight into the meat and just kind of start picking his brain on the things that we were very fascinated by.

Yeah, Dave's amazing. You can look him up. There's a lot of information you could just simply Google. But I mean, you're going to know him from Bulletproof Coffee. Of course, that's his main flagship brand. But there's a lot of other spinoffs. New York Times bestseller of what eight different books have been best selling, number one ranked podcast for a long time in the health and wellness industry. Super badass. I highly recommend his books, his podcast, which will link everything in the show notes here. And also he gave a really cool resource that I want to just make sure that you get a hold of is the Bulletproof Diet roadmap. And we'll link that as well. It's a freebie. It's on, on, on his bulletproof website because we get into a little bit of that diet and how that relates to not just you as an entrepreneur, but just everyone you know and living a great life full of energy. So a lot of stuff about Dave. He's an amazing dude and very generous with his time with us too.

Yes. And this episode is sponsored by Ahrefs.

The one and only Ahrefs.

And that's spelled A H R E F s dot com. This is our favorite SEO tool. And I'm not just saying that because they paid us to say it. We really used it before they paid us to say that 100 truth. But you know, one of our favorite things to do with Ahrefs is real, real simple. They actually have an area where you can go in, you can plug in a keyword that you're thinking you want to rank for on Google and it's actually going to show you the results on, on Google. It'll basically show you, here's the top 10 things that rank for that keyword on Google and you can literally see how many backlinks that that thing has. Then you can click on the, the amount of backlinks and see who's backlinking to them and you can literally reverse engineer that. The off page SEO of the top 10 ranking things for the keyword you want to go after.

You know how I see Ahrefs and I just finally it formed in my mind. Remember Game Genie?

Game Genie, Yes. Like cheat codes?

Yeah. Well, yeah, but that thing like you had to, like, hook it onto your cartridge on the nes, Nintendo. This is the fuck. This is the game genie of SEO and business online.

The game genie of SEO.

Well, it's because you're seeing the behind the scenes. You're getting access to this information that. That is not public access. You have the cheat codes. You literally have the cheat codes. Like, exactly what you said. Just, oh, these are the keywords. If I had X number of backlinks, or you can even do it with images too. You know, AHREFS will do that. It's like, dude, you would never have known that without ahrefs.

Oh, dude. It's an amazing tool. We've probably been subscribers of Ahrefs for two years now. Maybe.

Maybe more, actually.

Maybe even more. We've been using it for a long, long, long, long time. Amazing, amazing tool. That is a H R.

And you can get it for a simple little dollar a day trial. It's actually for seven bucks, you can get a seven day trial@ hrefs.com and they have a bunch of tutorials and stuff at their website and their blog and also on YouTube. So good stuff. And good people, too.

Yeah, great people. Great tool. We love it. Go check it out. And then, final note, this episode, we're taking notes for it on. On it for you. So if you want to get all the notes from this episode, all the biggest takeaways, strategies, tactics, tools, resources, any of that kind of stuff that was mentioned, go to hustleandflowchart.com comp and you can download the notes on this episode for freezel.

Freezel. Hey, I was gonna say that.

Ha.

What the heck?

All right, let's go talk to Dave Asprey.

Hey, Dave. Welcome to the show.

I'm happy to be here, guys.

Yeah. Thanks for your time. I know. Yeah, you're. Oh, man. How many businesses are you running now?

I believe it's running or sort of founded. Different animals. Right? If you're a good entrepreneur, you shouldn't be running any businesses.

Good point.

You hire people to run businesses for you. Because if you're a good entrepreneur, you're probably a crappy operator.

I love how we're starting that way because I was actually.

Can I just, like, say that?

Yeah, you definitely can. So how many have you founded to date?

I have to count.

Yeah, yeah, I think it's somewhere.

It's somewhere around six. I mean, I've got Bulletproof is obvious. We spun out Upgrade Labs from Bulletproof, which is its own company with its own venture financing. I hired Martin Tobias to be the CEO of that company. So I'm chairman and founder and we've opened a couple of facilities in LA and looking to open them across the country. I've got 40 years of Zen, which I definitely founded and created, which is neuroscience brain upgrades for entrepreneurs and celebrities and athletes and people like that. And homebiotic, the company that's anti toxic mold spray with healthy bacteria. And true dark or true light, the sunglasses that you always see me wearing indoors that give you more energy if you're getting eye stress, stuff like that. So those are the big ones and there's a few other ones floating around. My media company that does my podcast and my books and stuff like that.

Yeah. And that's what I love about, like, we were talking mutual buddy Mike Koenigs, and. And both of you guys, you guys just jive really well because you're always talking about optimizing just the human experience in your brain and leveraging tools in so many different ways. But then it comes to business. For us entrepreneurs listening here, it's ways to leverage your energy, your time. Like you said, willpower, right before we hopped on here is so key. And I love that you brought up the distinction of leadership and. And actually it was more founding, but there's a tinge of leadership there. Like you said, you're gonna have a meeting with the bulletproof folks over there. So it's not running the company. So how does that delineation of your time in all these businesses that you have this touch in, how do you kind of figure out how to delegate your own time and apply the right amount of energy to where you really think it's used best?

Well, the first thing you do.

As a human being is you got to set your values and your priorities. Mine are that my health comes first, because health is what drives your energy and your performance at everything, including as being an entrepreneur. So I put that first, and then next comes family, and then work is a close third. And then within the context of work, I prioritize my companies based on the difference they're making and my level of responsibility and things so clearly bulletproof, my main company is front and center there. But even there, inside the company, what are the things that only I can do? That's where I prioritize it. If someone else can do it, why would I be doing it? So strategic laziness is another name for that. And I learned a lot of this from a guy who's also familiar with Mike Koenigs is Dan Sullivan, who runs a company called Strategic Coach and it just comes down to a personality type. Many, many entrepreneurs have adhd. The odds of it happening there are exceptionally high, especially if you're a founder, early stage kind of person. So if that's the way your brain works, of course, and if you like to help people, you're just going to say yes all the time, and you're going to come with all sorts of crazy ideas that'll break your team and all. So your job is to hire people who can catch those crazy ideas and help you to filter them and tell you, oh, that was a stupid idea, and tell you, that one's a good idea. But if we do it now, we won't do anything else. And to help to corral all that stuff.

In my case, what ends up happening is I just make stuff that I can't buy. I wanted that. No one made it, so I guess I'll have to go make it.

If it's in the realm of what Bulletproof does, I always put it there first because I have investors, I have venture backers and a fiduciary responsibility and intellectual property assignment agreements and all that kind of stuff. And if it has nothing to do with Bulletproof and something like this mold spray or the glasses or whatever, then I'll actually chat with my board and be like, all right, maybe I should go start this thing. Are you guys cool with that? And they usually are, as long as I'm not running it. So it's one thing if I take the idea, I file a patent, I find a founder, and I say, all right, let me help to fund you, and I'm gonna give you advice and get you liftoff. And I do that a lot.

Yeah. And I think that's interesting. And that's one of the questions that we had, is let's say your board said, okay, Dave, yes, you have the green light to go start this new venture, whatever that is. What would your first steps be for launching that new product from scratch? And kind of any steps you can minimize that risk.

Here's the thing. For me today, I'm unlikely to do this. I keep a stable of ideas in my head, and I'm much more likely to meet someone who's thinking like I am on it, who I decide. And my judgment's getting better. I decide is going to be a good founder and operator up to 1 million or 5 million or 10 million or maybe even bigger. And then I say, all right, I'm going to write a check to you. I'm going to give you the idea, and we're going to probably spend a weekend brainstorming, getting stuff up and running. And after that, I already have resources in place who can spin up a company. I already have attorneys and accountants and people like that that I've worked with before. So it's basically here, plug and play into this thing and go do it. And we'll talk in a couple weeks. Because I'm putting my time, my full time work is. It's bulletproof and I do two podcasts a week and I am a father of two kids and a husband and I've got a life. So there. This is the area where most entrepreneurs fail. And it's this word called trust. And you've got to trust the person that you hire to do that to do a good enough job, and then check they won't do as good a job as you would do. And so a lot of people get hung up because they're saying, all right, I'm doing great. I hired an employee and everything they do, I micromanaged and I hired three employees. And then when they hit about seven employees, their head explodes and their revenues tap out at around a million or so. And they're unhappy because they don't trust anyone. They micromanage everyone. Everyone around them is uncomfortable. And so what I'm doing is kind of the opposite of that. It's like, look, you better not fail because that would suck probably more for you than for me. And here's the stuff to do to succeed. Go do it. And then if they go do it, then I have sort of positive points that, okay, this person is one of those people who does what they say they're going to do. Those people are vanishingly hard to find. And in that case, then, all right, here's more money or more help or more whatever the company needs. So far, I've been mostly lucky. And sometimes you have people who run into this problem, and this is something that blocks entrepreneurs and the people that are on your team, your cto, your coo, your cfo, whatever, there aren't that many actually evil people out there, thank God. It's about 2 to 4% of the population are sociopaths and psychopaths. And they know it and they take advantage of that. But there's a much larger group of people. I don't know how big it is, but it's probably.

20% of people. And these are people who.

They act kind of like a sociopath or psychopath in that for them to progress, for them to feel like they won, someone else has to lose but they don't know that they're that way. So you can sit down and they'll swear they would win. They'd pass a lie detector test and say, it wasn't my fault, I didn't do it, it's because of X. But if you take off the blinders, like, look, you did A, it led to B. They'll deny that they did A, because they have so much trauma in their life that they cannot fathom a universe where they did something wrong, therefore it was something else. And so they're unable to perceive the reality they're operating in. And this is just part of human nature. And a lot of this came out of the work I did in Head Strong. It comes out of transpersonal psychology. But basically, if you get people like that and you put them in a top role, it can be really terrible because they don't recognize the things they're doing that don't work. And then they will hide them from you, not because they're evil, but because they're traumatized.

So for those folks, do you have like a mechanism or a way to identify those traits almost immediately from, like, I'm sure you're not going to throw them in a leadership role, but is there a way to kind of seed these people out or maybe potentially shine that light on something in their traits that they can change and improve potentially?

You know, I wish there was a really good way to do it. But think about it. If you were a sociopath or psychopath and you wanted a job in a company and you knew that you were going to take advantage and you're going to be Machiavellian and do all the nasty stuff, you would do everything in your power to hide it from people, wouldn't you? Right. So it's not going to come out in an interview with someone like that. What is going to come out, though, is in reference checks and when you call and the people you're doing reference check on say, yes, they worked here from this date to this date, and that's all they say. There's a pretty good sign that something's wrong there.

That's right. I've definitely had to do that with a couple people before in the past. Like, not going to say anything else on that part.

You ever see that old video where that was a video or a. A gif. But there's this letter that's a glowing recommendation. And then at the bottom scrolled in, it says, actually I wrote this letter while the person was looking over my shoulder. So just take every other line and you toss out every other line. And it's like the most scathing negative thing you could ever say about. Oh my gosh, it's like a famous Internet meme, but.

It'S kind of like that. So you also have to ask yourself though, look, if you worked with someone 10 years ago or even five years ago, everyone evolves as a human being. And if you give someone a negative reference, you gotta ask how much of that is you and how much of that is them. Right. Because that is, I mean, you can really affect someone's future doing that. So I tend to not give negative references unless there's really clear malfeasance or something like that. But the degree of positiveness is something that any, any great recruiter is going to know how to do a reference check probably better than anyone listening to this call. Unless the company you're running is a human resources company.

Right.

There's an art to reading, to reading someone and asking the right questions and saying, hey, you know, what was it like to work with this person? And you can generally get a sense of it in the non verbals.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. With body communication, tonality, all that. Yeah. So, yeah, it's interesting. How do you like, do you ever check yourself? Maybe it's in certain scenarios or if it's potential stressful scenario, Are there ways that you look inward to your own traits and.

Some mechanisms you use to kind of keep improving these little facets of your own personality to improve to your best potential self?

My answer will be, not probably the right answer for a lot of people, but I've spent four months of my life with electrodes glued to my head doing deep personal development stuff. 40 years of Zen. The reason I opened that facility is so I'd have a neuroscience, a neuroscientist working for me and I could actually make hardware and software for these altered states of meditation and high performance. So I tend to do that. Like I plug myself in and I'll go spend half a day or a day at the facility in Seattle and tune my brain up. And I just get more ROI on the time I spend doing that than I do on traditional meditation. I'm also a fan of Dr. Barry Morgolan. Let's see his website's Energy for Success. And he's, he's been on the Bulletproof radio show a couple times. In fact, he was the most downloaded guest. Surprisingly, he's. He's basically the real life Dr. Strange, like the surgeon from UCLA who goes to China and like sweeps floors in A monastery becomes 1 of 12 Living grandmasters of the traditions of Lao Tzu that are only handed down orally, like. And he's a very good friend. But I'll do his. He has an app and I'll do his meditations. And those are some powerful things and stuff like that. And then also, I'm married to a sane person.

That does help. Yes.

Yeah. And so sometimes she'll say, you're acting like a jerk or something. Shut up. No, I'm not.

Well, the fact that you are listening to your spouse also says something about not everyone is taking that feedback or listening to feedback from others that they trust around them.

I think it's huge, you know, and also sometimes the feedback is wrong and sometimes it's wrapped in fear from your team or whatever. And that's really the hard part of being an entrepreneur is, you know, how do you know the most difficult thing if you're running a team of even more than probably three people? Look, you are. And as the team gets bigger, the size of your throne gets bigger and bigger, both for what it can do to your own ego, but also for what people will tell you. So when things are not going wrong, your team isn't going to want to tell you because you don't want to let down.

What, in all cases, a father figure or a mother figure or the authority figure. And humans are wired for authority. When we're very, very young, there's always an authority figure, which is a parent, because they're the ones who decide whether to get food or not. We act a certain way towards kings and presidents and CEOs and whatever, but what that means if you're the CEO, you don't know if anyone's telling you what's true or what they think you want to hear. And then everyone in your org is playing a story about what they think you want and giving you that, and it's not even what you actually want, it's just what they think you want. It's pretty frustrating, actually.

Yeah. Yeah, I could see that. So how do you identify these false stories that as a leader of a variety of companies, obviously you're not hands on day to day. So you have these selective times that you get this feedback. Are there ways to filter that and then actually see, hey, this is truth? This, not so much.

There's two books I'm going to recommend for this, both by the same author who's, I think, one of the wisest guys out there right now. The first one for how do you get that feedback is called the 48 Laws of Power by Robert Green. If you want to understand how any especially larger company works, this is the book for you. And it's kind of Machiavellian. In fact, Machiavelli's in it. But this is a study throughout the ages in all cultures of what humans do to get power and maintain power. It talks about the use cases where different types of leaders do different things to get the truth. All the way from having an army of spies to more clean, having a consigliere and things like that. Then the other book by the same author that just came out and I interviewed Robert Greene about this last book on bulletproof radio is called the Laws of Human Nature. That book has a lot of information about how to spot people who are coming in with envy.

Envy is one of the most destructive emotions for you as an entrepreneur and for the people on your team. And envy is really, really rough because it's completely invisible to you. Like, you will not know when you have envy.

It never manifests as something that's obvious. And so when people are envious of you and they're on your team, it's super toxic. But they probably don't know they're doing it, and you probably don't know they're doing it. But Robert Greene goes into that in great detail. And this isn't about like, you know, being safe or anything like that. It's like, look, there's an antidote for mba. As long as you just have enough wisdom to realize that you're feeling that and to see if it's affecting someone on your team, there's an antidote for that. It's just a matter of knowing it's happening. So my challenge to grow myself and to grow Bulletproof and to let these other companies do what they're going to do.

It's really to just become better at being aware of what's actually happening versus the story I tell myself about what's happening.

I like that.

Now, I have a question. If you were to start a business from scratch. This is actually a question that came from one of our community members. If you were to start a business from scratch, what specific steps would you take to minimize risk and maximize growth? Are there some kind of go to items that you would make sure that you're focused on when starting a new business?

The person who asked that isn't an entrepreneur, are they?

They are, actually, yeah.

So let me get it straight. They want to minimize risk, get a job.

That's true. True. Kind of ish. Yeah.

You don't want to minimize risk. You want to take risk that has greater returns than the risk you're taking. That's the way entrepreneurs think. If you want to minimize risk, seriously, get a job with the government.

There it is, the government job.

Yeah, it's true. I don't think that person's got to be an entrepreneur. I think they need to, they need to. I don't know, I'm kidding to a certain point. But seriously, you're not going to maximize growth if you minimize risk. They're not supposed to go together. You know what's going to maximize growth? Investing heavily. You know what happens if you invest wrong and you invest heavily? You've taken a lot of risk because you put a lot of capital at work or you put a lot of time out and it's just, it's okay to take risk. Just don't take fatal risks. Right?

Yeah.

So the way to ask that question is what is the most risk that I can take to fuel my growth without sinking the ship? That would be the appropriate way to think about it. And what are the steps I would take for that. If you're just starting a business from scratch, one thing that makes a huge difference is having enough money, so possibly raising money or finding a way to get short term revenues. A lot of people know this. When I started Bulletproof, I had just moved to a new country. I'd been working as an entrepreneur in residence for almost a year for a big vc, which is a really swanky job title, except it means that you get, let's see, you get basically a half to a third of a normal salary. So you do that for a year. I'm like, I don't have cash at all. I just moved to a new country, we just got a new place and here I am. I want to start a new company and I don't have money to fund it. I have a day job. I was a VP at a big company, so I wasn't poor, but I didn't have any free cash. So someone called and said, hey Dave, there's these hedge fund managers around the world and they want to learn how to upgrade their brains. Can we hire you to fly with us and come and get us in the door? These hedge fund managers, this was a giant investment bank. I said, sure. So they wrote me a check for something like 25 or 40 grand or something. And I used that money as the startup capital for Bulletproof.

I didn't raise any money until we were doing 25 plus million in revenue. I was Able to bootstrap it off that much.

Wow.

Having enough money in this case, I was like, I'll go get some money. Fortunately, I had a knowledge set that hedge fund managers were interested in. But you can do that. So, look, if you need to go drive an Uber at night to have enough money for your company to be successful, go drive an Uber. There's nothing wrong. Like, look, I need enough money. And then your first hire, your very first hire is not a cto. It's not a VP of product. It's the smartest executive assistant you can find.

And someone who likes to help and is totally willing to do everything that you don't want to do. So I love it when I get to talk to a room full of especially younger entrepreneurs. I'm like, how many of you do your own laundry? Everyone raises their hand. I'm like, you're all fired. You're not acting like entrepreneurs. Seriously, someone else can do your laundry, pay for that, and then take the extra 20 minutes that saved you the extra hour or sometimes six hours that gave you back and use it to make your company grow. And so if you have an EA who can answer emails for you or at least filter them for you, who can schedule all this stuff that needs scheduling and can call whatever vendor and say, we don't know anything about how WordPress works. What do you do? And how much would you charge? Here's the thing. You can hire someone who has very little experience as long as they can do this amazing thing. It's called adulting.

And adulting is the art of going to YouTube and Google and figuring out how to do stuff you don't know how to do. And that's it. So you just need someone who's willing to take risks. In other words, don't hire that first person says how to minimize risk. I'll tell you the first person I worked with in this kind of role at Bulletproof. He was very good at solving problems, and he had almost no experience base. He was in his early 20s. And I'm like, just go do it. He said, how? I said, I don't know. Go figure it out. And the truth of the matter is, I did know how to do it. I sold the first thing that was ever sold over the Internet in the early 90s. I was an entrepreneur magazine when I weighed 300 pounds.

But I didn't have time to tell him how to do it. So I'll tell you, that guy made mistakes that cost millions of dollars. And you know how happy I am about that. I'm super happy about that.

Of course you are.

Right. Because those mistakes also led to many more millions of dollars coming in the door. And then you clean it up later. So when you want to get started from scratch, hire the smartest problem solving person you can to help you manage your life. And the next person is hire someone who is a problem solver, who's eager to learn and doesn't know what they don't know and will go out and do stuff, even though some of it, if you have more experience, you'll smack yourself in the head. But what it's going to do is it's going to free up huge amounts of time and energy for you to do the stuff that you should be doing.

And see, this goes back to that willpower, the waste slash, you know, trying to retain or generate as much energy in yourself. And that's why I love. You know, you, you have the goal, which I'm very confident that you'll get there. At 180 years old, you'll, you'll still, you know, that's. That's kind of the number that you have out there. But time is the biggest thing. I mean, that's the valuable resource that we all have.

No, it's absolutely not. Oh, this is the mistake every entrepreneur makes. I'm so happy you just made it.

Thank you for stopping me too. Go for it.

I used to believe that. I believe that for a lot of my life. It's energy.

If you don't believe me, if you ever gone out drinking and woke up the next morning, how valuable was that first hour.

Of the waking hour?

You woke up in the morning hungover. How valuable was the hungover hour?

Oh, yeah, we're useless.

Exactly. So time is not the variable, it's energy. Energy. It's how you feel. Because if you feel great and you only have five minutes, you can do it and you feel like shit and you have an hour, you still won't do it.

It's so true. You're right.

It's how you feel. It's your energy. That's all that matters. If you have enough energy, you can start six companies and have kids and do cool stuff and still sleep at night and like your life. And if you don't have energy, you might be able to do it, but the whole time you'll be suffering.

All right, that was like a total reframe, and I'm just taking a second to digest that. I love it. Thank you.

You're welcome.

So this is sort of a bit of a shift Here. But when it comes to bulletproof coffee and the brand of bulletproof coffee, it's almost kind of become like a xerox of coffee. It's sort of. There's so many coffee shops now selling butter coffee, not bulletproof coffee, but butter coffee. Have you seen that kind of stuff as, like, competition to your brand, or have you seen that as sort of improving the awareness of what you're doing?

You know, when I set out, I said to my team and publicly, I.

Really hope that when we're done, everyone on earth puts butter in their coffee instead of milk because milk takes away coffee's superpowers. And we know why. That said, the bulletproof coffee beans are free of toxic mold, which causes a lot of people, including me, to not drink coffee or to feel crappy and to want to hit people when you drink coffee. And since that's not so nice, we have a sustainable advantage because our coffee beans actually don't produce the same effects as coffee that has other stuff in it. So I'm very happy to see butter coffee. There are a few places that have sort of borrowed the brand and said, oh, we're going to call this bulletproof. And we do a really good job of sending polite cease and desist letters.

And companies usually, they're usually true fans like mom and pop coffee shops going, oh, we love your work, David. Listen to bulletproof radio all the time and we'll change it to bomb proof, whatever. Or quite often they're just like, can we buy your beans and your brain octane oil? Because we'd like to make the real thing. And it's like, yes, let's chat about it. So I feel good there. There's one thing, though.

There's a kind of entrepreneur who's fueled by just making money. And look, if that's what you're doing, you're kind of looking for a job, really. And you might be operating on a different set of principles than the kind of entrepreneur who says, I'm going to go solve a problem for society and get paid to do it. And you'll know if you're the parasitic kind of entrepreneur, if what you do is you see something out there and you say, I'm going to do that same thing, but I'm going to do a shittier job and sell it for cheaper. And to the people who tried to copy bulletproof like that, they've all failed or they're in the process of failing. Because here's the news flash. People notice the difference in product quality and the old days where you could sneak crappy stuff in. They're going away because of these things called reviews and this thing called social media. And people talk about stuff like that. So just my ask for you, if you're thinking about that is do it better than the thing that you want to copy. Evolve things. Don't devolve things. And when I see people putting 19 grams of maple syrup and sugar and corn syrup and whatever, and putting mold in their butter coffee thing and saying, oh, it's the same thing. And when people drink it, it doesn't have the proper effect. I engineered the Bulletproof diet. The book has sold, I don't know, somewhere near a half a million copies globally, and people have lost more than a million pounds on the bulletproof diet. But if you trick someone by using the wrong ingredients, you're like, oh, yeah, it's the same thing. Don't worry, don't worry. And you put milk protein isolate in it, which is completely. Doesn't work the same way. You know that that's actually bad for people. Like, there's business karma for stuff like that.

Yeah. Unfortunately, the folks aren't researching it the level that you guys are, you and your team. And yeah, they're kind of blindly just going about it to see in the trends, it seems like. And, and like you said, it's not leading with light. It's not. It's not benefiting society as a whole. They might just be hopping on a trend. So I think they would be, yeah, very wise for them to study.

Just don't be one of those. It's unnecessary. The world is full of all kinds of ideas. And if you suck at ideas, that's okay, because guess what? Most people who are good at making ideas are terrible entrepreneurs. So the myth of the crazy inventor in a garage, all you have to do is find one of those and they're all over the place. And some of them have amazing stuff. Use your art of discernment to figure out which of the ideas have merit and then to figure out which of the crazy inventors are going to form a trusting relationship with you. And the reason most crazy inventors stay in their garages and don't live in penthouses is that they don't trust an operating entrepreneur to partner with them because their inventions are so precious to them that they won't let go. And so if you find one of those people says, yeah, I'd like to partner with you. I'm willing to take risks instead of minimize risks. And this is my baby, this is my invention. I Want to share it with the world. And I feel like I will have failed if I made this cool thing and no one got to see it. That is someone you should work with. They should be your cto, your chief scientist. If you get someone who says this is my baby and no one else can touch it ever, great. You're probably going to die with no one knowing what you did. And your invention won't benefit the world. So just filter for that. If you're not the idea guy.

That's powerful. That's good. Now, while we're on the topic of talking about just food in general, butter, coffees and bulletproof and all these different things, what are some other kind of go to necessary diet related, maybe specific foods or ways of eating like intermittent fasting and things like that to enhance the energy in entrepreneurs that are listening here.

All right, I'm going to have to plug a couple things I do because I've just spent so many years in my career on this. So this isn't meant to improve bulletproof sales. And if it does, it probably won't change my life.

Go for it.

Blunt about that. All right. One is you're probably not getting enough collagen protein, if any. And we evolved as humans to eat the whole animal because they were hard to kill. So you would boil the bones, you'd make soup out of your rabbit, you'd eat everything. Your skin, your bones, your hair. It's all made out of collagen. And collagen also carries electrical signals throughout the body. So you got to eat some. And you can do bone broth and stuff like that. Or I make collagen protein bars that are the number one selling bar at Whole Foods that taste really good. I would recommend getting some collagen. You put it in your bulletproof coffee, we make an unflavored one for you. Or that alone will shift the amino acid ratio of the proteins that you eat towards having more glycine. And glycine is less inflammatory than people who eat way too much muscle meat, which is most people. So it's the right kind of protein.

Another thing that's really important is in fact the shortcut to this. You can Google bulletproof diet roadmap on the bulletproof website and you can download this thing for free. It's the meat of the bulletproof diet book and it'll tell you, look, these are the proteins, these are the fats, these are the carbs. These are the ones to eat, these are the ones that might be causing problems. They're suspect you don't know. And these are the ones that are kryptonite. Don't eat those. So if you're listening to this and you think, oh, I'll just eat fried stuff every now and then, stop eating fried stuff. It causes more damage than smoking. Just don't do it. If it's fried, it's not food. And if you did that one thing, you'd probably perform better. And then there's meal timing stuff. In that same book, the bulletproof Diet, I wrote a lot. This is a diet for human performance. I wrote a lot about what do you do in the morning? And what works for most people is instead of having that fruit and carbs and all that stuff in the morning, which sets you up for thinking about food all day long, don't do that. If you think about food all day long, you're not thinking about building your company. You're not thinking about anything other than what's for lunch. So you got to kill that voice in your head so that you can free up willpower. The way you do that is you have only fat for breakfast or you have no breakfast. So intermittent fasting. And I helped to make intermittent fasting what it is today with that book. There's two flavors of it. And the first is you just have tea or coffee with nothing in it in the morning. And that helps. But a lot of people, especially high energy entrepreneur types, we need energy during that, especially when you're first getting used to it. So you have a bulletproof coffee in the morning with no collagen protein, with no protein, no carbs of any form. And what that does is that allows your body to stay in the same ketogenic state that comes from fasting or comes from sleeping, basically. So coffee, at least the amount of caffeine found in two cups of coffee doubles ketone production, according to a UCSD study. And then brain octane oil, which is an ingredient in bulletproof coffee, also boosts your ketone production. So you drink this bulletproof coffee in the morning, you stop thinking about food until probably one or two in the afternoon. And all that time is like, I'm in flow, I'm in the zone, I can get stuff done. And from an energy perspective, you're better off than you were if you had the bagel for breakfast.

And I can speak to that every single morning. That's exactly what I do. And I know Matt, and you're pretty much doing the same thing as well. And like you said, it's usually about one, maybe two o' clock Is where. All right, I could go for some food now.

Yeah, but it's not that, like, I'm so hungry I could kill someone and eat them. Kind of feeling, right?

No, not at all. It gradually rises up and you know what I like to do is just throw a little fats in there, maybe some almonds or something to kind of subdue that. If. Yeah, if it's just a gnarly craving, then just.

Imperfection is not required. Right. Do what works. It's interesting because Bulletproof, the coffee and the protein bars and supplements for energy and all that, it came about the growth of interest in the blog. It was first Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and then simultaneously, it was Hollywood and the music industry. And Wall street is where it took off. Because you think about it, these are the worst. Oh, and then pro sports came some time in there as well. These are the worst crucibles of human performance because in all of them, you have to look a certain way and you have to have a huge amount of energy and you never get to rest. So in Hollywood, you have to look good and remember your lines and be able to emote for 12 hours a day wherever you are. And it's a rough life. And there's a lot of really unhealthy celebrity actor people and musicians. You're on the road all the time. And so, I mean, I've had the great honor. I went backstage with Pink Floyd and had bulletproof coffee with the band and Third Eye Blind Steven Jenkins. And I cooked salmon on stage before they let the crowd in. And I'm like, oh, my God, this is so epic. And Steve Aoki and I keep missing each other, but he's been bulletproof for a long time. And we're going back and forth, but these guys, they put out energy like no one's business. And so, like, yeah, I've read about this. Five years ago, I tried bulletproof coffee and it worked. So the lesson from all this is when you launch your company, number one, spend your money on an efficacious product. It has to work. You can't just have a sticker on there that says, oh, it works because people will figure it out. But when it's noticeable, that's going to carry you more than anything else you could possibly do. And then use the language for the people you're going after. For me, guys, I want people like me. I'm a Silicon Valley CEO guy. For me, it's about energy focused cognitive function before that, and it's about hacking my health and having control before that. No one talked about hacking your health. No one talked about the audacity to just take control and make your body do what you wanted. You were sort of the victim of your environment. And if you were the fat entrepreneur, whatever. And the shift over the last 10 years has been the people like Jack Dorsey. He's openly talks about, yeah, I do one meal a day. And we tweeted about bulletproof coffee years ago. And.

He'S actually taken some heat from people saying, how dare you do this? It's like the guy's CEO of two public companies, he's kind of a badass.

And so when you get people sort of the, I don't want to sound mean about it, but the nutritional Muggles who just have no idea what's going on and what they're capable of criticizing entrepreneurs who say, I eat, you know, grass fed meat only because it makes me feel better and I can focus better. I'm a nicer person. Like, that's just how it works. And if someone disagrees with you, they're allowed to disagree. Like they can. They can have my french fries. I'm totally cool with that.

Have all the fried food you want. Go for it.

Last sort of question on that same topic. It should be a quick one. I've seen people on social media mention that they gave up bulletproof coffee, but they're doing bulletproof tea now, where they take green tea and they mix MCT oil and grass fed butter into it. Is that as effective or is that just completely wrong?

There's nothing wrong with it. MCT oil. There's four different kinds of MCT oil and some of them work and some of them don't. And a lot of the knockoffs of bulletproof, they use the cheap stuff that's widely available. In fact, did you know the most common MCT oil is used for fracking? Because we have so much of it, they actually inject it into the ground. You can sell that stuff. I don't sell that stuff. I sell the rarest of them. That raises ketones the most. But if you take brain octane oil, which is that rare, unusual mct, and you mix it with Matcha is the best tea to mix it with because it has the most polyphenols and stuff like that, it's actually really nice. And you can put some butter in there as well. There's nothing wrong with doing that. Coffee and tea have different polyphenols, different antioxidants, and you won't get as much caffeine from the tea. And it turns out that caffeine does raise ketone production. So there are mornings where I will have a bulletproof coffee, and then a little later I'm like, you know, I'm going to have some bulletproof Matcha, sometimes with brain octane, and sometimes I'll just have straight up Matcha because I already got my butter with the coffee. So there's absolutely nothing wrong with doing that. And there are some people who just, for whatever reason, they don't. They don't handle coffee well. So, yeah, do the bulletproof tea just use brain octane, not mct. The other difference is that my experience with brain octane is that it doesn't cause disaster pants the way generic MCT does.

I think. Yeah, yeah. I've heard of stories. They're not good. All right, so before you get you out of here, I'm curious really quickly, actually, because you mentioned, do you have one kid or two kids?

Two.

Two. Okay. So how do you integrate them into your entrepreneur journey? And I know you have a lot of fun with him. I know when I was listening to the Mike Koenigs podcast with you and him, you're going to play ping pong. That's amazing. You're so integrated. It sounds like.

Do you bring your kids into this whole entrepreneur journey, or do you just let them be and develop it on their own?

My kids go to a Waldorf school. We're about to start homeschooling, and I talk openly about what I'm doing. So they know what I do at work and why I'm taking a call. Now it's pretty much open book. And at different ages, they're interested in different things. You know, I. I told My son, who's 9, about to turn 10, hey, do you want to. Do you want to go to the bulletproof all hands meeting today that I'm going to be leaning? And he goes, that sounds boring. I want to go to the computer museum. All right, go to the computer museum.

Cool.

And that's all good. But when he says, I'm interested, then you double down on that. I don't think you can make your kids be entrepreneurs, but you can encourage them to be curious about everything and to look at how do I solve problems.

Both my son and my daughter walk around and they say, I wonder why that's that way. And then I'll tell them why it's that way, to the best of my knowledge. And then I'll say, hey, can you think of a better way? Maybe there's a company to be done there. And there's companies everywhere that haven't been formed. They're just, they're all over the place. There's a problem. Someone just has to think of a solution and figure out how to sell it.

Love it, love it, love it.

Well, awesome. Dave, thank you so much for your time today. Now, after listening to this episode, is there anywhere you want to send the listener?

I would say go download Bulletproof Radio if you listen to this. You like podcasts, bulletproof radio top 0.1% of all podcasts downloaded. Top 500 for five years running. And I interview you entrepreneurs sometimes, but it's always about human performance, whether an example of it or how it works. And I think that your audience would love that.

They will. I love it. So I'm sure they will, too. Thank you, Dave. I appreciate your time. And go have fun with your team now.

All right, talk to you guys later.

See you later.

Bye.

Thanks, everybody, for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, for taking the time to listen. We want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliffs Notes version of every episode where you can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out, all of the resources, sources that they laid out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have a nice simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreenprofits.com find this episode that you just listened to, and give us your email address and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening.

Go get it.

We love you.