Feel Amazing And Build A Bullet Proof Business, With Dave Asprey

So if you want to have more willpower from your business, you want to be less of an. At the end of the day, and you're talking to someone on your team who's screwed up, and you don't want to be a total jerk. Like, having yourself properly fueled just matters as a human being. So that's why I'm talking about this. You don't have to go buy my stuff. It just works better if you do. Sorry. So, I don't know. What were you saying? That's okay.

You're listening to Business Lunch with Roland Fraser. This is your seat at the table. Welcome to the show. This is Darren Clark, the producer, and we are so happy you've tuned in. Today we have the American entrepreneur that founded Bulletproof Nutrition, Inc. Dave Asprey has written five books, and Men's Health described him as a lifestyle guru. So listen today for his advice on business managing your entrepreneurial role, leading a team, finding confidence when you don't have credentials, and lots more. It's packed with excellent takeaways, so be sure to share this episode with your smartest friends. But before I go, we're launching a new contest this week where we're giving away iPads, iPhones, AirPods, all kinds of cool Apple stuff, and it starts tomorrow. All you got to do is go to businesslunchpodcast.com contest to enter. And we've got a lot of exciting stuff happening this month. But without further ado, let me hand you over to Roland and Dave Asprey.

This is exciting. I am so happy that we had the opportunity to have you come out and chat with us. It's such a great story. Tell us the story. What's the story? Your story of how you became so passionate about optimizing your health.

When I was 26, I made $6 million. Problem was, I lost it when I was 28. That sucked. But during that time, I was fat and my brain basically stopped working. And I just said, I'm old. Like, I have brain dysfunction. That would be more common in someone who's 70. Like, literally, I can't remember things. And I literally, I was at high risk for a stroke and heart attack. I had arthritis in my knees since I was 14. Like, I don't want to be old anymore. Like, I'm not even 30. So enlightened self interest. You could say, okay. And when my doctor told me vitamin C would kill me, I just said those two words that none of you say often enough in your companies. You're fired when people aren't Performing. And you've worked with them for a while and they're still not performing. It's time for them to find something that they're good at, which isn't what they're doing now. So I said that to my doctor and I said, I'm going to have to learn this myself. Fortunately, I was a computer hacker. That's My career hasn't been in tech. So I turned that around. It's a system we don't fully understand, but we can change it. That's what it's about.

So what does it mean to be bulletproof? And where did that come from?

Bulletproof is interesting. I wanted to write this book that eventually was the Bulletproof Diet, and it was about what can you do to turn on a brain for Silicon Valley executives, engineers, techies. Because no one was talking to people like me. It was, if you want to be a pro athlete, it's this. Or you want to be some guru yoga person, that's another thing. And all those are useful. But there wasn't anything for me. And I'm flying on my first Virgin Atlantic upper class thing.

Yeah.

Sitting next to this big influential guy named Herb Kampere at the little bar that they have. Yeah. And I was talking about my book. And he goes, you want to call it Executive Performance Optimization? That's the dumbest name I ever heard of. You need to call it something like bulletproof. And it just stuck in my head, really.

So on a flight, free advice on a flight.

That's how I named my company. But the reason it stuck, though, is everyone wants to feel like Superman and Superman is bulletproof. And I got. I got a lot of crap from people saying you can't bulletproof. Like, don't, you know, like, guns are bad? Like, I don't know. I grew up in New Mexico. Everyone I know had a gun. But the point is, it's nothing to do with that. It has everything to do with how you feel. And when you're bulletproof, you feel like you have the energy to just handle whatever life brings your way. That was what I wanted to evoke with the brand.

Nice. Did you consider any other names? Like, did you have anything else that was kind of in the running?

I hired the woman who did the first logo for, actually Starbucks and a bunch of early Microsoft logos. You have to change the name of the company. I'm like, screw that noise. No, we're bulletproof and we're staying bulletproof. So I would. No way. Never going to change that.

Nice. What advice would you give Our audience here on how to choose and build a brand.

All right, first thing, let's talk about that name, Bulletproof. If you're going to name your brand, the last thing that you need to think about is thinking about what. What it is you do. It's only about how you feel when you say the word. And this is something. If you read my book Headstrong, you understand you have a sensing network embedded in your body that looks for threats and things to have sex with and.

Things to eat, the Labrador brain.

And it thinks about this way before you get to think about it. So it gets first choice. It's going to feel something before you can think about it. So you're like, I have this cerebral, really cool name. Screw that. It's how you feel first and then what you think. And most of us, when we name companies, we think about it, and then you just kind of ignore the feeling. It's an afterthought. Do it in the right order. So did you feel it in your gut that's the right name?

What's the biggest challenge that you had that you faced so far with branding, and how did you overcome that with branding?

There were a few times when someone, like the early days would go on Twitter, something bad would happen somewhere, and they'd say, how dare you tweet about being bulletproof on a day when something happened somewhere? And I'm like, you know what?

Anytime there's a tragedy, you should change the name of the company.

Yeah. And here's the deal. Don't we all need resilience every single day, especially when bad stuff happens? Yes, we do. And that's what we stand for. And no, I'm not going to stop tweeting. That's not what this is about. What this is about is how do we become better humans? And I fundamentally believe I mentioned those three things that your body will do. Run away from killers, run away from, hide, kill scary things, eat everything, have sex with everything else. Well, the middle one of those, eat everything. We can turn that off right now. That's the whole thing behind bulletproof coffee. And the other thing that drives a brand more than the name, more than marketing and all that stuff. Does your product actually work? If you're selling crap, your brand won't go.

Something not quite so bulletproof wouldn't have been as strong.

It wouldn't have been as strong. And also, if you drank it and you didn't feel the way you do, all those celebrities you saw talking about in that video, I don't know those People, I didn't pay them. They did that for free. Like Jim Carrey licked Bulletproof coffee off the counter on TV like I don't know, a month ago. I haven't met Jim Carrey before. I'd like to, but they do it because they're like, I totally drink this because I feel good on camera. And it's all organic because product efficacy. So you gotta build something that works really well. If you don't get your product dialed in, you try and build a good brand around a shaky product, you're a scammer. Sorry, you gotta fix that.

Did you now internationally, are you doing anything internationally yet?

International is really tough. I think a lot of companies go international too soon. And I certainly did that. I'm like, well, everyone wants this, so let's do it. It's unusual for a company with venture dollars and all that stuff to, to be fueled by books. So I've hit the New York Times a couple times and bulletproof diet's in 15 languages now. Half a million copies. Headstrong is eight languages. I sold more copies of Bulletproof Diet per month in Japan than I did in the U.S. did you really? So 180,000 copies in Japan. And I showed up there for a book signing and if you've ever been to Japan, it's a kind of conservative culture and at the book signing they're lifting their shirts up to show me their abs. And like this doesn't happen in Japan. Like it's just not okay. And like, wow. So huge passion there and my entrepreneurial service to others things. It's time. Let's Japanese language. Let's brand everything. Let's bring it there. I've only raised $30 million in venture capital. That's not enough to launch in Japan and launch in Germany and launch in the UK and in Australia and in Canada and in the US because you've got to have supply chain R and D, legal new labels. $30 million is a big war chest, but it's not big enough to be a global brand. So as the company evolved, as I got a more experienced board of directors, which is something that all of you should have as well, they actually said, look, it's time to actually not do international. Close your warehouse in Europe, ship to the people in Europe from the US Even though it costs more in shipping, you're going to be able to service them better. And they were right. Instead of doing a half assed job internationally, I'm doing a stellar job in the US and, and they can buy anything they want internationally. So by kind of keeping some powder dry, to go international with a full launch in a country is a much better strategy.

Makes sense. So you mentioned getting different directors and things like that. How is the evolution of who was initially part of Bulletproof and who's part of Bulletproof now? How has that evolved over time?

Bulletproof is not a normal company. I started this as a blog, and it was. I was making a quarter million dollars a year. I was head of global evangelism for a public company. So my job was to live on an island and then fly somewhere, give a keynote at a hotel like this, and then fly home and do some strategy work. It's pretty cushy. And I wrote a blog for myself when I was 20, and I didn't do any list building. I didn't do any of the stuff you're supposed to do, until one day I'm like, wow, a lot of people are doing this. I guess I should sell coffee. So it was unstructured. And when it got to the point where I wanted to raise money, I went out to friends and family and I said, hey, guys, this is never going to be a venture investment. This is a company. We're in too many spaces, but it's got legs. So give me $50,000 convertible note here and 50,000 there, and I'll have a little bit of money for inventory. It'll be good. And my VC friends said, actually, this is venture fundable. And they came in with almost $10 million in the first round. I'm like, all right, now I need a board of directors. And what a board of directors does is they hold you accountable. And because if you're in this room, the odds are that you're probably a bit of a crazy entrepreneur, which means you'll do 10 things when you really should only do two. And the role of your board of directors is to tell you, sit down and stop doing that. You're going to break the team. And your job is to not hear them at all and ignore them until they yell at you really loud. Which is exactly what I did. And eventually I heard them, actually, they have a point there. And a year after this happened, my board of directors said, you know, Dave, the only time you've really been unreasonable, like, you're one of the most stable CEOs we've worked with, but it's like you couldn't hear what we were saying when we're telling you to do less. And the truth is, I did not hear what they were saying until I think they said it 20 times in different ways before it clicked. And it's okay if you have that, but if you don't have that level of people who've been there 25 or 105 times and you haven't been there, if you don't have that backing you up, you're missing out on something. So if you don't have investors, you get, whether it's an advisory board or board of directors and do what they say. That's the hard part for us.

How do you pick those people? So for everybody here, it's like, get an advisory board. Get directors. Okay, cool. How do I pick them?

If you're going to get people who invest in your company, those are the best board members. If you get the right people to invest because they have skin in the game, you can get an advisory board and give them a little bit of stock, but you don't want to give away a huge amount of stock. You want to give away, you know, small amount of stock, but you want them to have skin in the game. So I like to, in fact, I'd like to tell you, if you can get real serious advisors who are going to help you run the business. You want people who've done multiple businesses like this before, and you either want to pay them in addition to giving them equity or get them to invest, even if it's $25,000. Right. Just enough so that they're more a part of it than just giving you stock. And you're interviewing them and they're interviewing you. And the deal is, have they succeeded? Have they walked the entire way? And the same thing goes with your senior leadership team. Something that's happened. Bullshit is a Young Co. Since 2011, basically. And the people who help you get to a million dollars are not the people who are going to get you to 10 million. The people who get you to 10 million are probably not the people who are going to get you to 25. And the people who get you to 25 probably aren't going to get you to 100. And those guys probably won't get you to 500.

And we say, who got you here? Won't get you there.

There you go. And this is the hardest part for entrepreneurs because the people who help you, these are your friends, they're your team, your coworkers. And what you want to be able to do there is not, for instance, over title everyone, okay? You're 25 years old, you have a company, everyone's a C level officer. Do you know how many sub million dollar Companies with four employees need three C level officers. Zero. Right. Hire managers and directors because it's a lot less painful if two years from now when you want to hire someone who's been in the industry for 20 years to be your senior vice president and they're going to need to be senior vice president. So if you're planning to scale your company to multiple levels, don't over title. It's actually not an act of service to take someone who truly in a normal job would be a manager or director and make them some big titles.

Can'T ever put them back down. And then if you bring people in that need to have those titles, it's.

It'S really, it creates pain and it can actually make people leave the company who shouldn't leave the company. Some of the hardest conversations I've had as an entrepreneur are with people who are my friends and on the mission with me and say, you know what, I'm going to hire a boss for you and I know you reported to me, but none of us can have more than seven direct reports without our heads falling off. That's kind of the upper limit. And if you're a CEO, you should have less than seven direct reports because your job isn't to be just a people manager. You might have a day job besides management. So what do you do? Well, that means you have to bring in people who are senior. And if you cue your team up to say, look, we're going to keep hiring people, then you have a team who can stick with you the whole time through. The other thing is you want people who aren't building their own little towers of control. If you see that, just fire them right now. You just don't need that. Seriously, it doesn't matter how good they are at their job, fire them because you want someone who's like, how do I do less? How do I get this off my plate? These are people who will share their jobs and the people who are secure in who they are and secure in what they do. Like, thank God I don't have to run product and branding and marketing. Can I give one of those to someone else so I can do a better job of whatever I'm doing? Those are your people and those are the ones who will help you scale and scale and scale.

So did you start with kind of friends and have any kind of challenges in working with those people as you had to bring more experienced people in, or did you kind of start with without that?

You know, I started on a real shoestring. The truth Is I have two young kids. I had lived in Silicon Valley for a very long time and a few other places. And I just moved up to outside Victoria, British Columbia. And I'm like, I'm going to start this, but I already have a day job. So I hired like a kid basically to sort of help out on stuff. I'm like, you're going to do a terrible job compared to what I could do. But I'm too busy being a VP and a dad, so just get something to move. And this is a great way to start a company on a shoestring. Because I didn't have any revenue, I'm like, it just helped blog mechanics, that kind of stuff. And then I brought in another guy who was much less experienced, but who had a history with me of showing he could solve problems. And if you're young and scrappy as a company, you can bring in people. Look, your job is, I'm just going to give you an unstructured problem and you go find a way to do it knowing full well that they won't do as good a job as you. But you don't have to micromanage it. So it's a huge gift. I started out with that strategy because we didn't have any funding. And I'm like basically taking a piece of my paycheck and pay people. But I thought the mission was worth it because if five people read the blog and it changed their lives, I'm like, great. It's a small act of service. As it got more. As it got bigger, it's like, okay, I'm going to hire more people. But I always hired, for the first time, 5, 10 million. I always hired people who were not very experienced, and I paid for it later and I was okay with that. And if you have funding or you're a little bit bigger, it's really a good idea to bring in someone who's a little bit more senior so that you can help provide direction. Because if you get a company that's full of enthusiastic people who haven't navigated these waters before, they'll get there. But there might be some bodies along the way. And if you have a guide on the safari who kind of knows where the potholes are, you might get there more intact and then spend less money. So it's a question of capital efficiency.

So you have executives now, board of directors and things like that. You have a really cool program called 40 Years of Zen. Could you tell us about that? And also, do they go through that program?

There's kind of a question out there, is it ethical to hack your employees? And I think the answer is yes, it's actually your responsibility. The definition of biohacking is you change the environment around you and inside of you so they have full control of your biology. So all employees at Bulletproof get a bunch of stuff that helps them just have more energy because we're nicer to each other when we're not hungry all the time and when our brains work. So a bunch of my senior leadership team has gone through this thing. It's a five day neurofeedback program in Seattle. For 20 years I've had electrodes glued to my head, basically becoming a better, higher performing human. And I started a facility about a $2.5 million neuroscience facility in Seattle, mostly so I could have access to neuroscientists my own brain. And I bring a few executives through as like a five day intense thing to replace years of meditation. So some of my board have been through and some of my senior team has been through at their option. And I think it's a really good thing to do that and what this translates to for you guys. If you have people you're working with and they're really producing for you, invest in personal development programs for them. It's really important. And this is, you know, the way I do personal development is with computers because I'm a dork. But if you're not sending them out for a leadership training, for management training where they can become both better at the business but also better as human beings, you're actually not getting a very good return on the investment that you make in your people. So I consider that to be part of just being. It's really a good company.

Yeah. And then it gives them a total understanding of the company and what you're trying to do and accomplish too. Right?

Yeah. It also makes it easier, that thing I said about brands. But when you're really tuned in with your nervous system, you can actually feel the brand. So you get more in tune with the signals your body's telling you. And that means when we're in a meeting, we have a really clean culture. We don't get in big fights and meetings and there aren't a lot of bad feelings. And sure, people piss each other off sometimes, but it's super clean. It's the best place I've ever worked. Of course, I'm the CEO. Maybe people hide stuff from me. They do that when you're CEO, But I trust my team.

So. Bulletproof coffee. I just tried it Myself. Tell us about it. What is it and why coffee? How did you come? Because there was no coffee in the market and you saw a big gap.

Well, when I started the blog it was all the rage to sell information products. They're great because they're high margin, right? And I'm a contrarian. I'm like, now I want to sell physical products just because obviously I want to hate myself because of inventory management, supply chain freshness, all that, like all the complexities of that. I've loved coffee, but I gave up coffee for five years because when I would drink it I would get like super cranky and jittery and just not feel good. And when I came back from that trip to Tibet, I realized some coffee doesn't do that. Some does. And I just dug in on the science and came up with these special mold free coffee beans that didn't cause these symptoms. The market size for clean lab tested coffee was absolutely zero.

Yes.

Like, well, maybe I can sell 100 bags and offset the $10,000 in lab testing that I want to do on all this stuff. So I'm just going to throw, throw it out in the market. And this thing with butter is super legit. I've developed this recipe and adding the brain octane and things like that, I just kind of put it out there knowing that the market for butter and coffee was zero. Unless you're a tribe in Ethiopia, which I didn't know about at the time. This was literally complete experimentation. But part of this was around creating a movement around it. And the deal is you feel it, it's not subtle when you drink it. And so people are like, good God, I want to do whatever it takes in my life to feel that way every day. That's why I open the coffee shops. Just try it one time. That's why we do so much sampling. We do hundreds of events every year because people walk away going, you know, I think I'll start meditating because I don't want to feel this way. I think I'll start exercising. Like I'll do whatever it takes because that feeling is so precious.

What's in it and what is it? Just yak butter coffee.

There's three things. There's the bulletproof lab tested coffee beans and you brew the coffee, you add grass fed butter instead of milk. The deal with milk is milk has protein that sticks to the plant compounds in coffee so you can't use them. So milk takes the goodness out of coffee. Even though it tastes good. Fat from milk doesn't do that. Thus butter and then brain. Octane oil is an extract of coconut oil. That's about 5% of what you find in there. So it's basically the Everclear of coconut oil. You put that in there and it converts directly to energy in the body and it can't be stored as fat. So basically it's a quick metabolizing fat that your brain loves. So you put that in there and you're like, what just happened? But I stopped caring about the cookie and I maybe had to buy new pants if I drank it every morning. But things got easier because I obsessed about food a lot less. So that creates that kind of feeling of freedom because one of those big three boys in your head shuts the hell up. And for me, that was the first time it ever shut up. As a 300 pound guy who's like ending meetings early because if I didn't go have a chicken breast I was.

Going to kill someone, what's the best way to integrate that in your diet? Is it a multi times a day thing? Drinking in the morning, what is your optimal consumption strategy?

So I'm going to share this with you guys, this isn't a plug here. I'm just going to tell you you feel different. If you feel different, your willpower is biologically derived. So if you want to have more willpower from your business, you want to be less of an at the end of the day and you're talking to someone on your team who screwed up and you don't want to be a total jerk. Having yourself properly fueled just matters as a human being. So that's why I'm talking about this. You don't have to go buy my stuff. It just works better if you do. Sorry, I don't know what were you saying?

That's okay. I was saying, what's the optimal consumption strategy of that?

So in the morning, wake up, have bulletproof coffee and there's a ready to drink cold brew. If you don't want to make it yourself. I brew it myself. I like it hot and blended and fresh and good. And then you might have some breakfast, you'll have less breakfast. Or you just have it in place of breakfast. That's what most people do. Optionally, you can add the collagen protein we make if you want extra protein. And then at lunch you might have a cup of coffee, you might not. But take the oil, make little travel packets or just have it at home, pour a little bit on your food, it's good on sushi, it's good on salad. It has no flavor. So if you get that food two, three times a day, I just have it with every meal. I'm never hungry. Today I'm like, oh, I was too busy. People kept talking to me in the hallway, doing selfies. Great. I didn't have lunch. I don't care. Am I low on energy? Am I starving? No, because I don't feel like I'm going to die. I can go 24 hours without eating because I can burn fat. That's what did it. That's why you just add that to your day. And we make the collagen bars full of oil, too. The deal is, get the oil multiple times a day, and seriously, everything gets easier. That's the whole plan.

So the fat is good. And eat fat to lose weight effectively, because it's good and it satisfies those cravings and all, is kind of a contrarian approach. How has that helped your brand? Or has it?

Being contrarian is awesome. So I've had the fortune to speak on a Tony Robbins event a few times. And you go to the firewalk, and that first time, you're standing at the coals, and you look down, and that little voice in your head, that's not you. It's those dumb little bacteria. It says, if you step on those coals, you will die. And then your conscious brain is like, but I want to step on the coals. And you have this inner dialogue like, okay, I'm going to do it. And then you take that first step, and then you feel liberated because you overcame the voice in your head. Well, putting butter in your blender for the first time is the same thing as walking across coals, because every voice in your head is going, you're going to die if you eat butter on purpose. Only bad people eat butter. Like, what a great entrance for the brand, right? It's great.

I love it. So a lot of people might be afraid to take the stands that you do on health without being a doctor with all these degrees and all that kind of stuff. And I see it hold a lot of people back. They think I'm not credentialed enough or qualified enough or credible enough. What advice would you give those people in pursuing the things that they have researched and believe strongly in, like you have?

I gave a keynote at the American Academy of Anti Aging Medicine last year to 3,000 physicians. And I stood up and I said, guys, I'm an unlicensed biohacker. And what that means is I can tell you the truth, and no one can take my license and you know what they did? They clapped. Because they're all afraid. So if you have a credential and a license, especially in something like medicine, it's hugely valuable. My wife is a doctor. Like, they study way more, they know 10 times more than I do about what they do. I'm not going to break a broken or fix a broken arm and all that kind of stuff. They're great at that. And they know physiology way more than they ever will do. I understand mitochondria and biology to the point that like big name doctors are on the back of the book and that doctors all over the country use my books in their practice for patients. I think I know something here. And so my offering to you would be, look, you don't need to know everything that someone who's credentialed or something. You need to know something different. And you better be right. So do your work. I spent 20 years running a nonprofit group in the anti aging field. I've interviewed now like 600 experts in the field and dug deep on the science. And you don't have to go that far necessarily. But if you read it on a blog somewhere, you knocked off the blog and now you're an expert, you actually might hurt people if you're providing advice like that. And so be conscious. And if you don't know, it's okay to call an expert. Especially academics, they love this because oftentimes no one values their work. Like, hey, I think I'm going to do this. Can you tell me if it's good? Can you improve it for me? People love to help. This is something I didn't understand as a young entrepreneur. When someone has a lifetime of experience and you want to hear about it, it actually feels really good to help another person. And they will help you. So if you don't feel like you know enough, then find someone who does and ask if they'll tell you. And funny enough, they just will.

So how do you communicate to people who say all fat is bad because that's what they've heard for years, or all cholesterol is bad. What do you tell them? How do you answer that to help them overcome that?

There's sort of two classes of people like that. There's the people who actually ask the question. And there you have a conversation, you talk about the story, you can talk about the science. Those are people who are curious. And one of the things that drives me nuts is when people say, I'm going to be an X kind of diet activist, like, I met a plant Based diet activist, like, here's your job. If you're any kind of diet activist, shut up and eat. And if someone asks you why you're eating what you eat, then you have a conversation. But if you feel the need to go out and tell people what to do, you're completely doing it wrong. So when people come and they say, what is this about fat or cholesterol? It's like, here's the deal, do you like testosterone? Do you know what it's made out of? Cholesterol? Do you like estrogen, progesterone, adrenaline, cortisol, vitamin D? All these things? In fact, do you know what the cells in your body are made out of? They're made out of tiny droplets of fat. That's called your cell membrane. Do you know that you're eating crappy fats and not enough of them? And if they say, what about so and so doctor? There's only like a dozen of these low fat mafia doctors left from the 1970s who are still telling you to eat that way because it simply doesn't work. And they're all dying of their own advice.

It's a self liquidating problem. I like exactly how do you. Now you said brain fog was a challenge for you before and I know, I have friends that say, you know, I've just got a brain fog. I don't know how to get past it. How do you avoid that and keep your brain on as much of the time as possible?

Every time you have brain fog, it's your fault. That's the first thing to understand. You did something, you just don't know what it was. One of the tenets of the whole bulletproof lifestyle bulletproof approach is stop doing the stuff that makes you weak. And you do that before you do the stuff that makes you strong. And there's so many of us out who are like, you know, I'm just going to go and learn how to carry a 50 pound kettlebell. And you're like, maybe you should set down the one you're already carrying before you try and get strong enough to carry the other one. It just like, as a lazy person, wouldn't it be easier? And it's the same thing with brain fog. So it's almost always something you're doing with your sleep, with your food or with your environment. And where energy comes from in the body, the brain uses the most energy so you feel energetic problems in the brain. First it comes from mitochondria. Their job is to bring light, air and food together and then to make energy for the body and then to cause the body to react to the environment around you so that you'll live the longest, at least long enough to reproduce. So if you can triangulate on that thought, 48% of people under age 40 have early onset mitochondrial dysfunction. And all of us over age 40 have it. It's called aging. And what that means is you suck at taking food and air and making energy. Some of the energy that was supposed to go to your brain so it would be foggy, went to the love handles, basically inflammation. So your job is to tweak that system so that you have more energy. And the first place you feel energy is in the brain. And, and there's short term hacks, things like that brain octane oil or things like cold showers in the morning and things that you can do. They're in the book. Almost all of what I write about isn't about the food stuff. That was my first book. It's about these other lifestyle things to tell the weak parts of your body to die. Only the strong survive. And that's what sprinting does versus going for a long jog. That's what a cold shower does. All those other things are just tell the body, stay on. And when you do that, your brain fog declines. And if your blood sugar level crashes and you're not a fat burner, then for God's sake, eat something. But if you eat the wrong thing, somebody has msg, you're going to have another one. So you have control of your environment, of your biology, more than any generation in all of history. You want it warmer, you want it colder, you want it brighter, you want it darker, you want to eat any substance on Earth. If you can afford to come to this event, you can afford almost any food on the planet. It's up to you to pick the ones that give you energy. And here's the trick. What makes you really strong may not be the same thing that makes the person sitting right next to you really strong. There's going to be a great degree of overlap. But I can tell you for some people you eat that, you're going to get brain fog. Start paying attention. It's all right there. The data is there on your plate. If I feel crappy right now, what did I do a half hour ago? That's probably what caused it. Start there.

So you mentioned as part of the fog thing, sleep. What is your research into sleep revealed and can we hack that?

As far as I know, I'm the first person to write a blog post called How To Hack youk Sleep. And now that advice has been just echoed across the Internet in like thousands of blogs. But one of the biggest things you can do is sleep in a room that's absolutely pitch dark. And what's.

My wife bought all the little dots.

Oh, did she? The true dark dots. I love those.

Block out all the LED lights. There's so many freaking lights in hotel rooms and everything. It's so hard.

I actually put a row of these dots on the. The smoke detector in my room. So here's the deal. Blue light, green light. In fact, almost any kind of light except pure red light. Small amounts of it disrupts your sleep. So you still go to sleep, but your sleep quality goes down. And the deal is you want to sleep less hours because you have stuff to do that's fun, but you want to get as much sleep as it's going to take to make you feel good and live a long time. So sleep efficiency is more important than length of sleep. So 10 hours of crappy sleep isn't as good as 6 hours of really good sleep. So one of the things you do is you make sure it's dark. Whatever it takes. Lowering the temperature of your room. Not eating after dark. But for some of us who wake up at three or four in the morning, you actually want to have a specific kind of small snack before bed to prop up your blood sugar so you don't wake up with adrenaline cortisol. So I wrote all this stuff down on the Bulletproof blog, and one of the biggest things that's made a difference for me, as you see my cool glasses here, I started a company called TrueDark. It's one of my portfolio companies. And I've been able to double the amount of deep sleep that I get every night if I wear the sleep version of these glasses for an hour before bed, really? And I've gotten rid of jet lag. True dark, true dark. And the same as the dots that you're using. And this is one of those little companies that I'm like, guys, go do this. I don't operate the company. And for you, as entrepreneurs, you think about this. If you put everything you do that doesn't fit together in one company, that works to a certain point. But when you're going to scale a company, I literally took the glasses to my management team and I said, hey, guys, these are so legit for sleep. We need to do this. And they're like, for God's sake, Dave, don't you think that like four or five product categories is enough. Please don't make us. I'm like, really? So then I took the patent and took it to another team, said, you guys go do this, talk to me once every couple weeks. I'm not going to manage this. I'm a full time CEO. But that kind of perspective, be pure about your mission and if you're doing 10 different things unrelated to, you better have a big ass team. Otherwise you have an unfocused team. And that unfocused team is really a problem. And all of us as entrepreneurs, our job is just about to be unfocused, right? We spot those opportunities, we know what's going to happen next. And we're always looking at this and looking at that, and this is an example there of where I had the discipline at least to not do this myself.

Nice. Well done. You listened to that, Bork?

I did.

What is holotropic breath work and how.

Is it good for us when you get your hardware working? In other words, your cells can make enough energy again, it frees up enough energy and that energy becomes willpower. You can use that for personal development. And if you're running a company, it's your job to be a good human being because your company is an energetic reflection of your energy. So if you're anxious and chaotic inside all the time, you kind of need to work on that because if you don't, your company is going to be the same way. Literally. It's so true, that statement, but it's also very airy, fairy mushy. Let's all shave our heads and sit lotus and whatever else. And what's going on there is you got to do something to gain awareness of what's happening inside. And I had the guy who invented holotropic breathwork, stan Grof, he's 90 something now and still really strong and focused. He treated 3,000 patients with LSD as a licensed therapist in Czechoslovakia before it became the Czech Republic. And when LSD was banned, he went to an old breathing technique that causes you to. I think the technical term is to trip balls.

I've seen that in some journals.

Yeah, it's a medical term. And when you do this, you pretty much go outside your body. You have all sorts of weird visions, but it shows you your crap. It's a mirror and it lets you go into an altered state where you can work on that. And we've done this at bulletproof coaching institute events where we actually have Stan and his team come in and lead 150 people through this. And the Deal is, you can do breath work, you can meditate, you can do what I did 20 years ago, have ayahuasca with a shaman in Peru, you can see a therapist, you can do any of these things. But if you're not doing any of that personal development stuff, you're hiding from yourself and you won't grow yourself. And if you don't grow yourself, you won't grow your company.

How do you increase lifetime value of customers in your business? So you've got a readily reconsumable product, several of them. What do you do to track that and kind of maximize or optimize that?

That's a big question. Increasing ltvc. The biggest thing is have a really big mission and be really open about it and have a brand that has just integrity and authenticity built in. And be public about your mission. And when you do that, people are like, okay, I want to be a part of this mission and have a functioning product because then, okay, and it works for me. That would be really important. But after that you can look at overall ltvc. But it's not really meaningful anymore because for instance, if one of you gave me your email address out there and you heard me talk today and you've never heard of bulletproof before, the odds are because you probably believe what I'm saying. Like, I like that guy's energy, or maybe you don't. But whatever it is, your LTVC will be very different than someone who basically clicked on our sign up form on the website. So you got to track LTVC based on where lead came from because that's going to tell you more than almost anything else. One thing that works really well for us, if someone reads one of the books they're going to spend, roughly, we're still arguing about the numbers based on what data set you want to use. Probably twice as much as someone who doesn't. And it's because, like, oh, there really is science behind this. I think I'll do this. So product efficacy matters. And then explaining to people how and why this thing works for them and just being available all the social media stuff. And also, for God's sake, learn how to be a good public speaker. If you don't know how to do it, it's a skill, it can be taught, it can be learned. Get a coach. That sort of thing matters so much. Not just a speaking coach, but just any kind of coach is going to help you so up your own game.

One thing that I see over and over and over in all of your things, and I definitely agree is that it's kind of pretty much all about the mitochondria. Right. Can you tell us kind of briefly what they are and maybe what are three to five action steps people could take relatively immediately to have a positive impact on them?

Absolutely. About 2 billion years ago, if you remember seventh grade biology, by the way. I don't. But if you do, we harness these ancient bacteria to become our power plants. And we don't really know what the we was. We think it was some sort of parasite. There's argument over what the cells that we think of as us are. But the alternate reality, the one I believe, is that 2 billion years ago, these bacteria were floating around and they found another cell and they said, hey, what if we infect that cell? We take over now, we're in charge. And they never stop being in charge. So what they did is say, what if we stick some more of these little petri dishes together? Now it's our job to drive the petri dish to make sure it stays alive. And to this very day, they're calling the shots. What they determine is a threat, you determine is a threat. So if someone yells at you in a board meeting or you get some criticism online or whatever, and you feel that thing right here, what do you think triggered that? They think you're gonna die. And they send a signal to you that, I think I'm gonna die. And your job is to tell those guys, I'm sorry, you have it backwards here. You're my pet and you have to do what I tell you. And just to make sure you know who's in charge, every morning after I take a nice warm shower, I'm gonna turn that water on cold and let it hit me right here. And you know what they're going to say? They're going to say, dave Asprey's a jerk. And they're going to say, you're going to die, get out of the water, and you're going to last about 10 seconds before you believe them. But the next day, you're going to last 20 seconds. And the next day, 40. And on the fourth day, something magic is going to happen. Like, you know what I feel damned amazing. Like, this is a really good day and maybe I lost a little bit of weight. And what you did there is you told him, I'm not going to listen to your little whining. Shut up, you dumb bacteria. And. And by the way, those of you who think you're going to die from 10 seconds of cold water, go ahead and die and be replaced. By young, strong mitochondria can make heat on demand. Because that's your job already. Guess what else they make on demand? They make willpower on demand. It's kind of important, right? So a cold shower in the morning, it's so cheap. It's so simple. A new study just came out, literally last week I posted on the Facebook page, and they found that people who start doing this practice generally keep doing it. And it works. It doesn't even have to be a long, cold shower. Not this masochistic 20 minutes of shivering. I'm talking like one minute. It's not that hard. Except the first couple days. Then it's hard. All right, when you think of the.

Word successful, who's the first person that comes to mind and why?

Oh, that's a tough one. I thought I had four more hacks here that I was going to go.

You want some hacks?

Second hack, read Headstrong. These are all laid out in there. There we go. There's more we can talk about there. When I think of successful people, I used to. In fact, when I was 16, I had this thing from Think and grow Rich on my mirror. I was like, I'm going to be a millionaire by the time I'm 23. It didn't work because I was 26, but there was an extra 5 million in there, so maybe it kind of worked. But it was all about the money, and I was such a jerk, to be perfectly honest. And what I found from interviewing about 500 successful people on bulletproof radio, not all financially successful, but people who've changed a field of medicine, or people who've made a new discovery, or people who are just doing something different that's meaningful and just changes the game for large numbers of people. By that definition of success, looking at your impact is really important. And what I found is, by and large, those people tend to be the ones who have practices that make them happy which drive their success. So when I look at what a successful person looks like now, it's someone who is stupidly happy and having a big impact that makes them even more happy. And when I look at who embodies that, there's a guy, Naveen Jain, who runs Biome. You know Naveen, he's been on the radio show a couple times. He runs one of the companies that's mining the moon this year for minerals. For the first time ever, he runs viome, a company doing this gut thing. And he's a multibillionaire.

He's just so cool and down to earth.

And happy. He came to the US with nothing like holes in his shoes, never had seen snow, barely spoke English kind of a story, and has started seven very successful companies. Many of them have gone public. But he just walks around all the time, completely supercharged, happy. And literally, he told his kids, and he said this on the air so I can talk about this. He said, look, until you do something to make an impact, you're still a piece of. I wouldn't say that to my kids. This was an older teenager who was kind of giving him some lip, maybe. But the point here is he was telling his kids, you don't have an intrinsic. Like, you haven't earned it yet. You got to go out and earn it. If you want to stay really, you want to feel really good, go out and earn it. And he believes that he does that himself. And he just shares this with all lot of people. So that level of energy and happiness and vibrancy and impact combined, that's an example of someone who I think has really nailed it. I do.

He's super, super cool guy. What's the book or books other than your own that you've given the most to other people?

I gotta say, Think and Grow Rich. Like, it's a very, very old book, but it's got so much wisdom and knowledge in there. And the other one is Robert Greene's 48 laws of power.

That is a great one.

I never understood Silicon Valley boardroom politics when I was 25, 26, whatever that was. They let me attend board meetings even though I was not an executive. But the rule is you're not allowed to speak. And I saw these alien creatures 20 years older than me acting in ways that were stupid. It made no sense. And then I read this book and I'm like, oh, my God, now it makes sense. It was like the engineering eyeballs fell off and you could see they're playing a different set of rules. And if you don't know those rules, you don't know when they're being used against you. And you're not going to succeed as much as you could. Like, that book just deserves a place on all of your bookshelves. It's 20 years old, but it'll still be relevant 100 years from now.

What have you changed your mind about in the last few years? Obviously, you made some big changes several years ago, but in the last few.

What have I changed my mind about? One of the big things was raising funding for my company was a really big change because I started Bulletproof to have an Impact. And one of the big things was I said, you know, E Commerce is a great place to be. You get the highest margins on E Commerce, at least if your cost of customer acquisition is reasonable. And then I said, well, what's my real mission? Right? And I want to touch as many lives as I can. And that means that I want to make it more convenient for my customers, which means going and being national at Whole Foods and a thousand other grocery stores. Now, that's a lower margin business because you pay distributors. You gotta have Salespeople field marketing 5,000 demos in stores. That is a massive, massive logistical operation. And it costs a lot of money to do it. But at the end of the day, if I measure the number of people who will try this and just be inspired to do something so that they can have more of this energy every day, that that felt like the right thing to do. So I changed my mind around this idea of I want to be an E Commerce only company to be. I want to be a larger brand that is able to reach people wherever they want to get it. And that's driven product strategy and it's driven the level of investment in the company. And frankly, it's a bigger risk, but it's also a bigger opportunity. So if you want to change millions, millions of lives, it has to be easy. And so I just changed my mind around, am I going to run what makes me the most money per unit, or am I going to run what makes the most units with enough money to keep the company going? And I'm pushing the units because that's what pushes the change I'm looking to make in the world?

That's really cool. If you could get everyone to make one decision about their health and make one change before they leave, what would you wish for for them?

Man, there's two answers. Can I have two answers? You can have two. All right. The first one is, this is gonna be really, really easy to say and probably hard to do. Stop eating fried crap. I don't care if it's fried in coconut oil or butter or if it tastes really good, just stop eating fried stuff. I'll tell you, eating a couple french fries has the same effect on your arteries that a cigarette has, except the cigarette only lasts for four hours and the fried stuff lasts for 24 hours. So seriously, quit eating fried stuff and take up smoking or don't do either one, which would be really good advice. But if you're willing to eat that fried stuff because it tastes good, just take a drag. Seriously, it's the same damn thing. But you'll get the nicotine, which at least feels good. Like, seriously, it's not worth it for the French fries. So that would be on the biological side.

Okay.

All right. And all that science is in the book anyway, but I'm not even kidding. Like fried stuff, even if it's gourmet, just don't do it. All right, second one. And you can do this one right now. This is something I do with my kids every night. I sit down and I say, all right, tell me three things you're grateful for.

For.

And this is something that's baked into 40 years of Zen. If you can tell yourself to not just think of something you're grateful for, but actually feel gratitude, you can do that right now. Even if it's like the worst day you've had in a long time, be grateful you still have both your legs. That one's always there. Unless you don't, in which case, well, you have both your arms, hopefully. So whatever the deal is, it could always be much worse. But if you can find that sensation of gratitude, just grateful to be sitting here in this room at this event, that turns off the fight or flight response. So those mitochondrial messages that tell you I'm not safe, tell you I'm not good enough. Company could go out of business, or they don't like me or whatever the heck voices in your head are lying to you. Gratitude shuts that off. So if you build that, practice that every morning or every night or both, or anytime you're feeling really stressed, just feel gratitude for anything that pops into your mind. That is one of the easiest ways to increase energy production in the body, reduce inflammation, make yourself happy, and. And make yourself act with kindness towards others. And it doesn't cost you a nickel. And it takes less than 30 seconds. It's a huge biohack.

That's awesome. Before we go, what is the best way for folks to find out more about you? Bulletproof. 40 years of Zen and all the good stuff that you are putting out there.

Well, if you head over to bulletproof.com, there's a big blog, things like that I interview twice a week still on Bulletproof Radio. It's worth listening to. You can play it on twice as fast if you want to save time, which is something I would definitely do at 3x. I sound like a chipmunk. Don't do that. And I've been interviewing a few more entrepreneurs. People are changing the world there. So check out Bulletproof Radio. And on Instagram, I'm Dave Asprey. If you follow me there, you'll see all the weird pictures of stuff I do. Totally. Kind of a fun thing to do. But overall I would just say whether you're following my stuff or not. Forty years is the brain thing. But just decide today that every day you're just going to do one thing to make yourself better. I ask all the members of my team to do that. It's a very simple goal and, and it lets you off the hook. I didn't say one big thing, just one thing. And if you hold yourself accountable, just identifying to noticing when you do it and if you're at the end of the day like I didn't do anything, go floss already. Right? Like find one thing and commit to that and you'll kick ass.

Awesome.

You've been listening to Business Lunch with Roland Fraser. If you're enjoying the show, let us know by subscribing, leaving a review and for more information go to businesslunchpodcast.com thank you for listening.

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