Fireside Chat: Dave Asprey, Founder of Bulletproof

Roland Fraiser: What is it and why coffee? Because there was no coffee in the market and you saw a big gap? (laughter)

Dave Asprey: 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 gonna sell physical products, just because I want to hate myself because of inventory management, supply chain, freshness, 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 super cranky and jittery and just not feel good. And when I came back from a 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. And the market size for clean, lab-tested coffee was absolutely zero. 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 it down 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 put it out there, knowing the market for butter and coffee was zero, unless you’re a tribe in Ethiopia, which I didn’t know about at the time. And so this was literally complete experimentation.

But part of this was 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 opened 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 want to feel this way.   I think I’ll start exercising. I’ll do whatever it takes because that feeling is so precious.”

Roland Fraiser: What’s in it? And is it just yak butter, coffee?

Dave Asprey: There’s three things:

1. Coffee
2. Butter
3. Brain Octane Oil

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 five percent of what you find in there. So it’s basically the Everclear of coconut oil. And  you put that in there and it converts directly to energy in the body and it can’t be stored as fat. So 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 it 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’s the first time I ever shut up as a 300-pound guy who was ending meetings early because if I didn’t go have a chicken breast, I was gonna kill someone.

Roland Fraiser: What’s the best way to integrate that in your diet? Is it multi- times a day thing? Drink it in the morning? What is your optimal consumption strategy?

Dave Asprey: So I’m gonna share this with you guys. This isn’t a plug here. I’m just gonna tell you that you feel different. Your willpower is biologically derived. So if you want to have more willpower for your business, you want to be less of an asshole 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, 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 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 make 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.

And we make the collagen bars full of oil, too. So the deal is you get the oil multiple times a day and seriously, everything gets easier. That’s the whole plan.

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

Dave Asprey: Being contrarian is awesome. So I’ve had the fortune to speak on Tony Robbins’ stage a few times. And you go do the fire walk. And that first time you’re standing at the coals and you look down and that little voice in your head says, “If you step on those coals, you will die.” And then your conscious brain says, “But I want to step on the coals.” And you have this inner dialogue like, “Okay, I’m gonna do it.”

And then you take that first step and then you feel liberated because you actually 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.

How Important Are Credentials?

 

Roland Fraiser: So a lot of people might be afraid to take the stand that you do on health without being a doctor with all these degrees and 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?

Dave Asprey: 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 bio hacker, 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 were all afraid. So if you have a credential and license, especially in something like medicine, it’s hugely valuable. My wife is a doctor. Like they study way more, they know ten times more than I do about what they do. I’m not gonna fix a broken arm and all that stuff. They’re great at that. And they know physiology way more than I ever will. Do I understand mitochondria in biology to the point that big name doctors are on the back of the book and that doctors all over the country use my book in their practice for patients? I think I know something here.

And so my offering to you would be that you don’t need to know everything like 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 non-profit 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. So be conscious.

And if you don’t know, it’s okay to call an expert. Especially academics. They love this because, often times, no one values their work. Be like hey, I think I’m gonna do this. Can you tell me if it’s good? Can you improve it for me? People love to help.

This was something I didn’t understand as a young entrepreneur. Like when someone has a lifetime of experience and you wanna 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.

Overcoming Objections

 

Roland Fraiser: 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?

Dave Asprey: There’s sort of two classes of people like that. There’s the people who actually ask the question, and then you have a conversation. You talk about the story. You can talk about the science. Those people are curious. And one of the things that drives me nuts is when people say I’m gonna be   an “x” kind of diet activist. 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 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.

Roland Fraiser: It’s a self-liquidating problem. I like that.

Dave Asprey: Exactly.

Brain Fog

 

Roland Fraiser: Now you said brain fog was a challenge for you before and I know I have friends that say 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?

Dave Asprey: 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 tenants of the whole bulletproof lifestyle, the 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 here who just want to learn how to carry a 50 pound kettle bell. Maybe you should set down the one you’re already carrying before you get strong enough to try and carry the other one? Just 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 wouldn’t be foggy went to love handles, basically. Inflammation.

So your job is to tweak that system so that you have more energy.

The first place you feel energy is in the brain. 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 just tell the body stay young. 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, something that has MSG, you’re gonna have another one.

So you have control over your environment, over 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 gonna   be a great degree of overlap, but I can tell you – if you eat that, you’re going  to get brain fog.

Start paying attention! It’s all right there, the data’s right 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.

How to Hack Your Sleep

 

Roland Fraiser: So you mentioned as part of the fog thing, sleep. What does your research into sleep reveal and can we hack that?

Dave Asprey: As far as I know, I’m the first person to write a blog post called “How to Hack Your Sleep” and now that advice has been 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.

Roland Fraiser: My wife bought all the little dots.

Dave Asprey: Oh did she? The true dark dots? I love those.

Roland Fraiser: To block out all the LED lights. There’s so many frickin lights in hotel rooms and everything. It’s so hard.

Dave Asprey: I actually put a row of these dots on 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 gonna take to make you feel good and live a long time. So sleep efficiency is more important than length of sleep. So ten hours of crappy sleep isn’t as good as six 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 ot 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.

I started a company called TrueDark. It’s one of my portfolio companies, and I’ve been able to double the deep sleep that I get every night if I wear the sleep version of these glasses for an hour before bed. And I’ve gotten rid of jet lag.

Roland Fraiser: Really? TrueDark?

Dave Asprey: TrueDark. And the same as the dots that you’re using. And this is one of those little companies. And for you as entrepreneurs, you should 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 gonna 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 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 and said, “You guys go do this, talk to me once every couple weeks. I’m not gonna manage this. I’m a full-time CEO.”

Be pure about your mission. And if you’re doing 10 different things unrelated, 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. We spot those opportunities, we know what’s gonna 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.

Holotropic Breathwork

 

Roland Fraiser: What is holotropic breathwork and how is it good for us?

Dave Asprey: 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 like anxious and chaotic inside all the time, you kinda need to work on that.

Because if you don’t, your company is gonna be the same way.

Literally, it’s so true. That statement. But it’s also very airy, fairy, mushy, you know, let’s all shave our heads and sit lotus and whatever else. And what’s going on there is you’ve gotta 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.

Roland Fraiser: I’ve seen that in some journals. Yeah.

Dave Asprey: 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 in 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 breathwork, you can meditate, you can do what I did 20 years ago, have I-oh-ah-ska 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.

Increasing Lifetime Value of Customers

 

Roland Fraiser: How do you increase lifetime value of customers in your business? So you’ve got a readily re-consumable product, several of them. What do you do to track that and kind of maximize or optimize that?

Dave Asprey: That’s a big question. So increasing LTVC – the biggest thing is have a really big mission and be really open about it, and have a brand that has integrity and authenticity built in, and be public about your mission. And when you do that, people are like okay, I wanna be a part of this mission. And have a functioning product.

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 saw me talk and because you probably believe what I’m saying, you’re 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 gotta 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 gonna spend roughly 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 something that you might not even like me saying on stage, but I gotta say this – you know how to build a really big, highly engaged social media following? Get on a damn airplane, fly somewhere, show up on stage, and let people see what you’re made of. That’s actually how you build integrity.

I spent 170 days traveling last year. The other 170 days, I was at home with my kids and I drove them to school everyday, so I maintained balance just barely. That’s too many days, to be honest.

Roland Fraiser: I do like that answer. I agree with it completely.

Dave Asprey: But like you gotta show up and you gotta shake hands and just be real. And that is it. You need to do the digital marketing stuff, as well. It’s terribly important.

But so many people hide behind their monitors. And if you do that, you   just won’t get the LTVC that happens when you come out. You are the best ambassador for your brand because you believe what you’re saying.

If you don’t know how to travel, it’ll cost you personally. If you don’t manage your biology and you fly all the time, you’ll feel like crap and you’ll get sick and your life will be hell. So you better be kind of a master of this before you go out and do that.

And also, learn how to be a good public speaker. 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 gonna help you. So up your own game.

Mitochondria & What You Can Do

 

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

Dave Asprey: Absolutely. About two billion years ago, if you remember seventh grade biology, by the way, I don’t, but if you do, we harnessed 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 two 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, and now we’re in charge.” And they never stopped being in charge. 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 as a threat, you determine as a threat. Alright? 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 think triggered that? The bacteria think you’re 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 you know what they’re gonna say? They’re gonna say, “Dave Asprey’s a jerk.” And they’re gonna say, “You’re gonna die, get out of the water.” And you’re gonna last about ten seconds before you believe them. But the next day, you’re gonna last 20 seconds. And the next day, 40.

And then the fourth day, something magic’s gonna happen. You’re like you know what? I feel damned amazing. This is a really good day. And maybe I lost a little bit of weight. And what you did there was you told them, “I’m not gonna listen to your little whining. Shut up you dumb bacteria.”

And by the way, those of you who think you’re gonna die from 10 seconds of cold water, go ahead and die, and be replaced by young, strong mitochondria who can make heat on demand, because that’s your job already.

And 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 ,and they found that people who start doing this practice generally keep doing it and it works. 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.

How to Nail It at Being Successful

 

Roland Fraiser: Alright. When you think of the word successful, who’s the first

person who comes to mind and why?

Dave Asprey: When I was 16, I had this thing on my mirror that said that I’m gonna be a millionaire by the time I’m 23. It didn’t work. It took until I was 26, but there was an extra $5 million in there so maybe it kinda 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) is that people who’ve changed the field of medicine, or people who have made a new discovery, or people who are just doing something different that is meaningful change 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.