Why You Should Listen –
This special episode of Bulletproof Radio is a recording of a speech Dave gave at the World Entrepreneur Forum in Bear Mountain, Canada. Dave speaks to a group of over 100 of the world’s hungriest entrepreneurs about the value of marketing, innovation, anxiety and the voice in your head, decision fatigue, starting Bulletproof and more. Enjoy the show!
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You’re listening to bulletproof radio with Dave Asprey. Today’s cool fact of the day is that according to a group called Board of Innovation that studies innovation in industry and society Google searches for the phrase “how to reward innovation” gets six and a half times more results than the phrase “how to encourage innovation.”
That’s kind of a cool thing because encouraging people to innovate is less interesting than basically saying when you do innovate, good things happen to you. Small nuances in language equals a big difference in results. I believe that rewarding innovation is useful. However, innovation is something that is a biological process. It’s something that is a part of who we are. It’s something that you can actually encourage.
I gave a talk at Bear Mountain here in Victoria, BC for the world entrepreneur forum to a room of about a hundred people, mostly senior executives, talking about innovation as a biological process and talking about business innovation but also where it comes from. Where does it come from in your mind and in your heart? We’ve taken this talk and I’ve turned it into one of those unusual Bulletproof Radio podcasts for you where you’ll get to hear my take on something that I’ve never really talked about on the air.
I think you’ll enjoy this. There is a lot of bio-hacking, a lot of biology. It’s not super deep on the geeky stuff but it is a different mindset on the difference of an engineer and a non-engineer and on what happens in business. It’s pretty cool stuff.
Before we get into the show itself, which I know you’re going to like. I wanted to talk about Unfair Advantage. Unfair Advantage is a Bulletproof supplement. After brain octane, probably the most important supplement I’ve ever made and it’s more complex than Brain Octane. Unfair Advantage helps your mitochondria work better, which turns it into a broad spectrum nootropic. It’s there for a cognitive function because your brain has a ton of mitochondria.
If you want to do innovation, you want to be innovative or you just want to feel good when you are driving your kids home at the end of a long day, it doesn’t really matter. You have to have enough energy in your head. Unfair Advantage is designed to help your mitochondria make more energy right now and then make more mitochondria over time, which is a huge upgrade to your ability to innovate and just your ability to feel good all the time.
This is something I take on a daily basis and it’s one of the top sellers at Bulletproof because people feel a profound difference. My experience is that when someone tries it for the first time, the majority people report “Oh, I felt it right here in my forehead” which is interesting because your brain has the highest mitochondrial density. The other people who don’t feel it in forehead are most likely to feel it in their chest area around the heart, which is funny because the heart has an equal number of mitochondria to what’s in the brain. Eyes, the brain and the heart all have the most energy usage and the most energy production int he body and it’s funny that you could take a supplement that encourages your mitochondria to work well and it’s possible that you could feel it in the areas where you have the most mitochondria.
If you meditate or have a lot of body awareness practices, it’s easier to feel it and you may feel nothing at all. There is obviously no guarantees there but Unfair Advantage has really changed my ability to bring it. I can tell you before I went on stage to deliver the talk you’re about to hear, I had five ampules of Unfair Advantage and some decaf Bulletproof coffee made with Brain Octane. As you can tell, I was in pretty good form.
Enjoy this show. It’s fun. It’s an easy listen.
Steven asked me to come tonight and talk about innovation. I live about forty minutes north of here on a small organic farm with a million dollar human hacking laboratory where the barn used to be, which is my office and where I shoot my internet show and where I innovate. It’s a space that’s designed for innovation in terms of making me have an environment that’s up for that.
I moved to Canada about six years ago from Palo Alto and I played a substantial role in the early innovation of the internet as we know it today … The first thing ever sold over the internet was sold out of my dorm room. It was a t-shirt that said caffeine, my drug of choice. It still is.
Bulletproof coffee is pretty well known these days, twenty something years later. At the time it didn’t seem very innovative. In fact, they raised my tuition by nine hundred percent and I was hungry. I was tired of eating burritos that cost a dollar that were frozen. I said I better do something about that. They say necessity is the mother of invention so I went on to something called Usenet which doesn’t really exist anymore and that was before we had [inaudible 00:06:31] and I said I like coffee, let me see what I can do. I’m going to make a product.
Being a young egotistical nineteen-year-old or something, when the professor for Rutgers went online and said no one is ever going to make money on this internet thing, I said well I’m just going to the University of California, I’m not an Ivy League guy. By the way, I’m a millionaire now but I’m like I know I’m not an Ivy league guy but I’m already making a million on the internet so who do you think you are? Within about twenty days, I’ve been eighty publications starting with a man named Harold who is like this guy is making money on the inner something or nother.
… In the article I said you shouldn’t ever advertise in the community unless you’re a part of the community. The first spam on the internet happened. It was predictably attorneys. They spamed every single news group with an ad for free green card services or something like that. They would canter in a seagull and yes they are going to help.
I might have accidentally contributed to that, too, but these are the very, very early days of the internet. The very first online payment processing? I’ll tell you how we did it. People faxed me their checks. That’s how we did Paypal before Paypal. This was ridiculous. What was holding us back at the time was laws. It wasn’t legal to do what we do today for payment processing. They would block you from doing something that was called factoring back then, which was using your payment account to allow someone else to do it, where as today it’s commonly known.
All this time, you don’t really know you’re doing something that changes the world until it’s gone along pretty far. I was like, this great, I’m actually working at Baskin Robbins to pay for some of my bill. You know, thirty one flavors, scooping ice cream. You get a really big scooping muscle right here. Internet sounds easier though this inner something or nother, to sixteen countries the first month, I’m really excited it feels big but not as big as [inaudible 00:08:36] it didn’t even have a name.
You can spot innovation in retrospect a lot more easily than you’re likely to see it when it happens because for every person doing something like that, there are probably about five thousand people who are tilting at windmills. There’s nothing wrong with tilting at windmills. That’s also how innovation happens. The best innovators are tilting at their own windmills because they are convinced it’s the right one. To look at it as an investor, it’s very hard to tell.
If you’ve looked at a hundred companies, you still can’t tell. I used to sit next to Travis Kalanick, the guy who is CEO of Uber because we both worked in the content distribution business. Part of technology we still use today in order to get videos and things over the internet. He hadn’t become the CEO of Uber yet but same sort of thing. I know people who sat down and said, are you kidding? An app to call a taxi, you’re an idiot. Obviously we know who the idiot was, probably not Travis. (laughs)
Your radar that says I’m dealing with [inaudible 00:09:51], genius is tough. It gets even worse. What if they’re both? Guess what, in fact, if you’re playing the odds the very best genius also are crack pods, aren’t they? Thomas Edison was really known. That other guy, what was his name? Tesla something or other? He’s also a little known. The other guy who was probably the biggest crack pod at the same time and also my favorite inventor was a guy named Royal Rife? Who ever heard of this guy? One person, two people. Edison had a lot going on, to the point where Edison stole some of his stuff from Rife. He stole some from Tesla too, but Tesla stole some of his from Edison, and that’s a whole different story about innovation.
What Rife was doing though, was, arguing with his guys over how we should distribute power, he was also hacking the human body more than Tesla was. To this day, a very small part of what I do at Bulletproof, I make a whole line in my racial platform. You stand on it, it vibrates thirty times a second. Did I say crack pod? Stand on a thing that does this? I can tell you the thing works, otherwise I wouldn’t mess around with it, but the guy who originated that was hanging out with Edison and Tesla and they didn’t know why it worked. They thought it was probably electrical.
It turns out it probably is the electrical and the effect that it has on the body. NASA figured out in the eighties that they could regenerate astronauts when they came back to Earth using this kind of vibration, which is what got my attention and why I decided I could manufacture something like that. I kind of fit the mold for a crack pot right? I do quasi-medical things, hacking the human body. I run a neuro-feedback center that upgrades human performance in a very unusual way, with signal processing coming off the head. This is the realm of crazy. Seriously, the realm of crazy. To [inaudible 00:11:49] like a school for the gifted in Scalem. Right?
I passed the sniff test, which is what investors all do. The sniff test is something that you get from experience that says there is definitely some crazy in there but there is probably enough genius that it might be with an investment and enough ability to execute. You can have the crazy genius who is more genius than crazy who will never actually make the idea happen because they can’t let it go. They are stuck to it. They have what we call founder-itis, which is, I built it, it is my baby, I’m never going to let it go. It is the same thing as the parents who have the child who is now twenty-four and can’t leave home because you’re not willing to let it go and do its thing.
As an angel investor in Silicone Valley, almost everyone when they make a little bit of money in Silicone Valley becomes an investor until they become poor again. I made six million dollars when I was twenty-six at the company that held Google’s first servers. We had forty-two data centers, we invented the co-location business. I was the found of the consulting group at that company and some of the biggest names of the internet today got their start in our data centers. I either helped to build their infrastructure or I run a program for the University of California teaching engineers how to build this.
I made six million dollars and I lost it when I was twenty-eight. For two years, I had a lot of money. I didn’t lose it all through angel investing. A lot of that was the dot com crash and things like that. Having invested in a lot of companies, I always invest in the best technology because I’m a technologist at all. You know how many times the best technology wins? Almost never. It’s the best marketing. It wins.
I decided twenty years ago when I saw this and I was horribly offended in Silicone Valley. I said that one was better, the injustice of it all. It doesn’t really matter. If you can innovate your ass off and you cannot explain to the world what it does. You cannot explain to the world that you are trustworthy and you are worthy of stewardship of the idea that you have cultivate, it doesn’t matter if you innovate it because you’re not going anywhere.
As an investor, or in potential businesses partnerships today, what I look for is crazy. I look for genius. I look for either a lack of ego or I look for the ability to step back and to let go and say all right what I’m doing is so important and so impactful that it’s going to disturb a lot of people then I would be willing to do things that are imperfect.
Perfection is the enemy of innovation, as well. You can spend twenty-five years perfecting something or you can spend six days to build it good enough to start sharing it. Both of those are extremes of the spectrum. If you do the six day thing, you’re probably not going to like what happens but if you’re on the other spectrum it doesn’t work. How do you end up in the middle there? I think that comes from mentorship and it comes from experience.
My own path in Silicone Valley taught me a lot. I didn’t have any of these clothes. I’m a hardcore geek. My grandparents met in the University of Chicago, working on the Manhattan Project. My grandmother has an advanced degree in nuclear engineering. My grandfather is a PhD Chemist. I come from this crazy, geeky, scientific family. There’s really no need to make eye contact.
To go from there to, how do you choose this crazy thing like that? It comes down to avoiding extremes but being able to identify them and look at it as an investment. Now that I’ve hopefully convinced you that I know a thing or two about innovation and about investing innovation, I want to talk about where innovation really, really comes from. It’s probably not what you think.
When I was going to business school, they talk about innovation as a business process. That irritates the hell out of me because we’re not actually meek robots, as convenient as it would be if we were. What we are is the electrical, and chemical, and magnetic and many other things. We have a software layer and we have an operating system layer and what I do is I hack you in performance.
What you didn’t hear about is that when I was succeeding on the internet and doing all this stuff in Silicone Valley, I weighed three hundred pounds. We’re in Canada, we can talk pounds, I don’t have to convert to stone when I go to Europe, it drives me nuts. I also started to get really severe brain fog when I made all this money.
I end up beating technology strategy. I didn’t need to do diligence on a six billion dollar when I was twenty-seven years old and I was competent to do that and I was so excited except when I couldn’t remember where I was because my brain was completely fried. That scared the crap out of me.
I bought disability insurance before I was thirty because I didn’t know if my brain was going to do this. Here I am more than a million dollars spent on upgrading this and fifteen years of experience and have become friends with many of the leaders in functional medicine, having run anti-aging research group for years, I did all that stuff because I was kind of afraid. I turned the hacking of the internet to the hacking of what’s going on in the human body.
Now, I can run circles around the twenty-five year olds who work for me. They can drink me under the table and I’m okay with that. I can stay up later and wake up earlier, if I have to. I have the energy to bring it now at forty-three that I never had at twenty-five. It is absolutely achievable to do this.
I sat down about five years ago as the VP of college security, head of Global [inaudible 00:18:48] for half a billion dollar internet security company, stock options and all that. I said I’m going to write a blog for myself when I was eighteen because I want to know this stuff that has taken me hundreds of thousands and years of suffering and wasted effort and maybe fine people will read it and maybe they will take the advice and maybe it will change their life and I’ll have done a really good service.
If someone had done that for me, it would have absolutely changed things for the better. It turns out, more than five people cared about it. I reach ten million people a month on my combined platforms right now. That is shocking and amazing. It also means that I killed at least a hundred people if my content is no good because I’ve consumed a hundred full lifetimes with the things I’ve written and the words that I’ve recorded and distributed. That is a ginormous set of responsibility and one that I actually hold as a sacred obligation.
It is very easy to broadcast stuff on the internet. It’s actually very hard to broadcast quality stuff on the internet that there is actually worth listening to and gave something back to the person who sees it.
The rest of our talk today is about that, the giving back thing. When I look at what causes innovation in companies and business processing, you can stop innovation with the business process. That’s very, very straight forward, we call that finance and accounting and regulatory and legal and all those kinds of human resources, whatever they do on that side of the house. You do want to trust that but really innovation is a biological process that happens in your brain.
It starts with electrons because every single you do as a human being starts with energy. About, don’t quote me on the length of time because it’s more than five hundred million years ago so in other words, many, many moons ago [inaudible 00:20:55] got together and they said we’re going to invade this cell and take it over. They’re called mitochondria today. Most of the cells in your body have a thousand bacteria in them that in our traditional story of evolution we talk about these mitochondria as the power plants of the cells. What is actually happening and what we’ve unveiled just in the last five years mostly of research about these things. These things are driving the cells. These little bacteria in the cell decides if they cell lives or dies, splits or doesn’t split, goes this way, goes that way, how much energy it has and whether they should go to another cells and give energy over there. It sounds to me like they’re in charge, I don’t know.
These are the things that sense the environment around you and decide how much energy you have. They also sense the environment inside you. You’re stressed and afraid all the time? They know it. They’re like okay, let’s set this guy up to run away when something scares you. Let me tell you, if you want to innovate and your biology’s set up to run away from something scary, do you think you’re going to innovate pretty well? No. You’re going to run really well is what you’re going to do. In fact, just run faster than the slowest fat guy next to you. It’s all you have to do to survive, okay?
Let’s put on our hats and go back and reverse the generic problem. Let’s design an organism that can live forever, assuming there is aging. There is only three rules you need to have. These rules are running all of us, including me.
Rule number one, eat everything so you don’t starve to death. Great rule, right? By the way, are there any bagels left? Rule number two, run away and kill scary stuff. That’s pretty good, you can survive. Rule number three, have sex with everything.
I’m sorry, we’re all doing that. But imagine a big labrador retriever? That’s pretty much how they live. Oh look spoiled dinner food? I’ll eat that. Look, a lady! I’ll hump that. Somebody’s carrying a [inaudible 00:23:08] oh I’m going to go bark at it, right? This is what we all do at our operating system level. This is what your meat does and it’s designed that way because is what makes sure that you live long enough to reproduce. That’s really what it comes down to.
That ensures the survival of our species. These mitochondria in your cells have carefully set up the petri-dish family bin, called your body, so that you will support them and these are the rules you have. You think that those rules are you. You probably feel guilty when you indulge in something, like I can’t believe I ate all the cake or even worse, I can’t believe I did that [inaudible 00:23:44] all of the cake. Whatever it is, there are a lot of behaviors that are fully automated that we assume we decided to do.
What you can measure, and what I do measure, at the four years in Neuroscience Institute in Seattle is what happens is something happens running around you, your body picks that up, picks up electrically and your nervous system senses this thing and then you think about it and about two three hundred milliseconds later you tell yourself what happened and why.
No one here in this room has accidentally leaned on a hot stove and thought [inaudible 00:24:34] my hand. No, you leaned on the stove. Something moved your hand and you said, that was hot good thing I moved my hand. But you did not think about moving that hand. What moved it? Well, what moved it is these three rules that we all have.
The sad thing about visuals is that all of these rules are incredibly energy intensive. It takes you energy to be afraid of things. It takes you energy to go into [inaudible 00:25:06] fight or flight mode where you will not be an innovator and just zap into this other mode which is called parasympathetic. This is the rest, reset and reflect mode that is a requirement for innovating.
A little bit of fear may be helpful for innovating but learning to put your nervous system in this state is actually hard to do. You can go to a monastery. I spent time in Tibet learning meditation from the masters and things like that. That’s the old way. It takes twenty years or something. Steve Jobs went and did that. The guy that hung out in [inaudible 00:25:44] and ate only carrots for months on end. That’s actually a true story. He did that kind of stuff.
With technology now you can’t change that response very quickly. When I work with executives which I still do on occasion because it keeps me smart although I’m pretty busy these days with Bulletproof, I always use a $99 sensor that plugs into an iPhone and in about six weeks, ten minutes a day, you can learn to take that voice in your head that says [inaudible 00:26:19] that feeling of anxiety where I’m like okay I don’t know why I got stressed. I don’t know why I reacted that way at a board meeting. I don’t know why my middle finger keeps going up when I drive, but it’s obviously the other guy’s fault.
Whatever those things are, you will learn, if you’re an average person, twenty four hours a day, six weeks, there is actually something that happens inside your chest. Your heartbeat changes. It doesn’t get faster or slower. The spacing changes. An animal getting ready to run around, it’s heartbeat shifts from relatively randomly spaced to very, very even. A person who is getting ready to have a heart attack that goes “da don, da don, da don, da don, da don.” It’s perfectly regular. An animal relaxing on a couch goes “Da don, da don, da don, da don, da don.” Same number of beats per minute but a very different pattern of beats. Well, you can very quickly learn what it feels like when your heart shifts from, okay I’m thinking, I’m innovating, I’m creating to I’m getting ready to kill or run.
It is a very subtle feeling. It is hard to do. With sensor feedback it’s not that hard to learn whatso ever. It’s called heart rate variability training. I don’t make it. I’m an advisor to the company. I’m an uncompensated no stock holding advisor so I have no skin in the game in this. It’s called a hard math inner balance sensor. I used this when I’m teaching someone to be a better innovator or a better leader because hundreds of times a day, the average human slips into I’m going to kill mode. You don’t actually kill. It can be done remote. It depends if you feel [inaudible 00:28:14] or not. This [inaudible 00:28:17] comes from about the first seven years of your life because those first seven years of your life are all about pattern recognition and my undergraduate degree is in decisions core systems. It’s a subset of our efficient intelligence, in pattern recognitions. It’s how we run the whole internet these days. It’s the same thing for our bodies.
So, if when you were six you fell off the swing and you were falling backwards and you felt like you didn’t have control and then there was a panic from your parents, there is a very good chance that when you lean back and when you get on an airplane you’re going to have a panic response. It’s entirely programmed, it has nothing to do with how good of a person you are.
You go into the board room. That triggered that same feeling. You didn’t think about it. It was the same feeling that happened during that time when you were bullied in second grade. We see this behavior in board rooms all the time and if you go to engineering where they’re doing some innovation stuff you probably see even more of this because engineers spend most of their time living in their heads. That’s because they don’t want to deal with all of this other crap. You get a lot of cerebral stuff whereas the most effective engineers spend an equal amount of time. Just like the most effective CEOs, they’re half in their head, half in their heart. They recognize that there is environmental input information from the world around them that comes into the nervous system that is processed more quickly than you can think about it.
In other words, rooms happening as the information comes in, the body does what it’s going to do and we decide why we did it. That’s totally a lie. It’s a lie that’s teachable. When you learn that there is value in this, your intuition gets a lot. I spent ten weeks of my life with electrodes glued to my head doing the four years of training where I carefully learned to line up the peaks and troughs of different brainwaves as well as to raise the height of my brainwaves. The amplitude of my brainwaves is four times higher than it was when I first started training my brain twenty years ago. I do that because it allows me to know when my intuition and my nervous system is detecting something interesting and novel and new here and to be able to actually act on that.
Before I learned to do that, I was a classic engineer and the whole point of it was to think about that you shut all this crap off because it’s a very nervous system. There’s lots of weird environmental input and just fear, loathe and anger and God knows what else is out there so just ignore this stuff and think. You can’t think through innovation. It doesn’t work like that. You feel to innovation and then you apply thought and logic and science on top of it but you don’t break new ground. You go over existing ground to do. All you do is think.
I mentioned those three things that you do. One of them we just kind of conquered. I taught you a way, there’s the hundred dollar sensor that you could do. You could also just learn some reading exercises that will lower your sympathetic nervous system response and increase your parasympathetic. I’ll teach you guys one of those, do you want to learn? [crosstalk 01:05:20]
It’s pretty straight forward. Here’s why I wish someone taught me this when I was sixteen. By the way my 9-year-old knows how to do it now. I was born with the cord wrapped around my neck. I came into the world with the conscious programming, or unconscious programming, that said there’s probably something here that’s trying to kill you because I was [inaudible 00:31:49] you have no context. You’re a baby. You don’t even have a coral context. Your brain doesn’t work very well. So, I actually had a lot of … sympathetic flight or fight response that was always on for no reason that I could see or remember or sense or fear.
I’ve reprogrammed all this stuff. Here’s one of the fastest ways to do it. It’s what we teach the special forces. It’s also what they teach in yoga studios. It’s called a box trap. Walk through in a second but I’m going to describe it to you. I’m going to tell to breathe in for five seconds, hold your breath for about 5 seconds, you’re going to breathe out for about five seconds and then if you can do it you’re going to hold your breath empty for about five seconds. Most of the time we [inaudible 00:32:31] breathing exercises, holding your breath empty for about five seconds will trigger an I’m going to die response. It’s a total lie by the way but your body is telling you, oh my god. Unless you’re going to die you should explore that and keep pushing the front until it isn’t labeled anymore. You here are a nicer person for doing it.
So you ready to do it? So you’re going to empty your lungs and breathe in through your nose to the count of five. One, two, three, four five and hold. One, two, three, four, five. You’re going to slowly exhale. One, two, three, four, five. Now you’re going to hold it empty. One, two, three, four, five. [inaudible 00:33:24]
If you do that three or four times at bedtime, especially for if you’re one of those people who has a hard time going to sleep, you actually can go to sleep faster. This is a neat hack that someone figured out probably a thousand years ago in India. It literally can take you from I really want to kill that guy, I can’t believe I did that, I can’t believe the deal’s going this way, what’s going on here. It can take you to, I’m going to do the right thing here. I’ve seen such atrocious behavior in martyrs where people get triggered in stuff that they’re not aware of that if they just have that one technique, not to mention all the other cool tech stuff you could do, then it actually changes outcomes for the better.
This is just basic self-awareness. It’s awareness not of what I’m thinking, but awareness of what I’m feeling. No one hacked our I want to run away or I want to kill things response recently enough. If you were to spend twenty percent less of … the precious mitochondria energy, those electrons your cells are making all the time. Seriously, twenty percent less of getting ready to run away or kill things, what would you do with that extra energy? Make something [inaudible 00:34:41] just a thought. That’s why I say innovation is an energetic, biological process. If you’re using all of your energy on other stuff, it doesn’t work.
Let’s talk about food. It is a biological emergency if your brain doesn’t have enough energy. Your blood sugar is going up, down, up, down. By the way if you eat like most people eat thanks to some mistakes we made in public policy forty years ago, lots of lots of sugar and bad fats and really not much else, you’re going to have fluctuations in blood sugar.
Every time your blood sugar starts to drop, when we talked about mitochondria and I said a thousand per cell, there’s an astrics going there. Your eyes, your brain and your heart have ten thousand power plants per cell. They’re the big energy consumers in the body. If your heart can’t beat you die. If you can’t think you die. If you can’t see, well you might not die for a little while but something will probably eat you.
Those are kind of [inaudible 00:35:49] power intensive systems and they are excessively engineered and if there is a disruption of energy supply with those, the coultrons stop blowing, it is a biological emergency and your body will kick right over into Oh my God, I’m dying mode. It will trigger a cortisol spike, which is the death hormone that’s also a useful one if you’re sick, and it will trigger an adrenal spike which is good. Cortisol and adrenaline deliver food. It’s the cell picking up the phone and calling the premiere and saying can you send in helicopters with extra oil because I don’t want to shut down production right now. You’re calling in the big guns.
Your body will do this every afternoon at 2:00 if your nutrition isn’t where it needs to be. It is going to do that, and takes you out of I’m here to innovate mode and puts you back in emergency mode and even worse, you don’t have energy, because it’s an actual energetic problem that caused the emergency. We do this weird other bit of [inaudible 00:36:53] as the energy starts to dwindle just a little bit, something interesting happens in your head. A little voice pops up, I like to go with a Labrador in my head because we’ve all seen a Labrador beg for any kind of food on the planet. It seemed like this, energy isn’t the coin of sufficient, or it’s usually not sufficient to siting down at a conference table and someone goes down and says a nice [inaudible 00:37:22] is down and it’s 2:00 or 2:30 in the afternoon and a voice goes in your head going eat the cookie and you’re like no. About three seconds later, the voice says, eat the cookie. No.
And [inaudible 00:37:35] goes on in the last fifteen minutes and it sounds like this, eat the cookie, no, eat the cookie, no, eat the cookie, no, until you go maybe I’ll just have half. Then you do it and then you’re a bad person. You gave in. Except you’re not bad person because that desire for the cookie and because the things that call the shots, the little mitochondria that run you, they run on energy. They needed energy and it’s actually okay that you had that. The fact that you want that is a good phrase because they’re bad to you, they’re stupid. They wanted energy and energy likes from your system to all that energy.
There’s an amazing study about that ability to say no and it had to do with decision fatigue. How many of you have heard of decision fatigue. Interesting, there’s only about ten percent of you know. Decision fatigue is a measurable thing. I didn’t know this until about ten years ago but you have a finite amount of willpower. You have X number of decisions you can make per day before you are unable to biologically make more good decisions. It’s not a matter of wanting to do it. It’s not a matter of willpower. It’s not a matter of how good of person you are. It is a matter of how good you are with energy and the energy of your biology.
What proved this most amazingly was a group in Israel and they run tight prisons and we said I wonder if we can be on some interesting data, like who goes below. What they found was, if you were to go to jail, get the 8:30am time slot at the parole board, first decision of the day. You have a ninety percent chance of getting parole. Want to stay in jail and get the free meals everyday kind of thing, get the 4:30pm parole board. You have a ninety percent chance of them saying you’re staying in jail. Ninety percent on either side, this is decision making fatigue. This is willpower in action. You have the same thing in you.
This isn’t to say your weak if you’re an 8:30. Some of us are stronger if we’re at 8:30. Some of us are stronger at 4:30 than we are at 8:30, don’t ask me to do anything at 8:30. I’m a terrible [inaudible 00:39:54] I’m a night person. There are other people who, if I ask them to work with me at 11pm, they would completely be zombified. Neither one of those settings is better, it’s just a circulum rhythm thing. What is true, is if you ask either one of us to take any other thing, make decisions constantly while they’re out of energy, guess what you’re doing every time you tell the voice in your head no about cookies, you’re making a decision. Oh my God, you want to change the wallpaper in there? It’s something amazing. Finding something amazing and now you’re just a bunch of [inaudible 00:40:26]. Should I run away from that? Is that dangerous? Do we kill it?
Then you start going no, bad cookie, no cookie for you. Then, a tragic number of the opposite sex walks in and you might think about that for awhile to. No wonder it’s willing to innovate, right?
So what I want for you today is on top of the start very early thing, or just that single box frame that can take you out of I will kill mode, which wastes energy, and then you waste decisions but mostly just wastes electrons and puts you back in charge in the parasympathetic, dominant, the rest and reflect and reset mode. I will tell you something about food. It’s also amazing. It’s also creamy and delicious.
A molecule of sugar has thirty six electrons for you to use in it. A molecule of fat has 147 electrons for you to use in it. You want to kick ass and change the world on Popsicles and fruit juice and for God’s sake, kale? THat’s not how it works. Innovation runs on bacon and butter. It actually does. You cannot house a high functioning brain in an environment that is dwindling of high quality, undamaged fats. It is necessary.
Everyone comes best selling book with a lot of references about this. There are other … I’m not alone here. I was one of the first to talk about this. There are guys like Mark Hyman, the director of functional medicine at the Cleveland clinic who just wrote a book with an awesome title called Eat Fat, Get Thin. Yes, it actually works like that as long as the fat isn’t highly processed, industrial [seata 00:42:21]oils because if you eat that fat, you get stupid and then you get fat.
The brain is made out of butter and after that it’s made out of fats. It’s got almost no sugar in it at all. It has zero kale in the brain. The biggest innovation that I’m known for is Bulletproof Coffee. It is my great pleasure to offer this to the world because I noticed something that I didn’t make any sense to me. I am a curious engineering, systems, thinker guy. Everything I do is a system and I went to Tibet in 2004. I wanted to learn meditation from the masters. I wanted to understand all that crazy stuff that honestly didn’t make that much sense to me but I had a few months and thought this would be neat.
I went there without a lot of plans and did the thing that everyone does now. I went to a very remote part of Tibet. It’s called Mount Kailash. It takes five days in a four-wheel drive on dirty roads to get there. You’re driving over these eighteen thousand foot passes and one of the most amazing things I’ve ever done. Mount Kailash is headwaters for the Ganges and Hindus Rivers. It’s where a lot of people at the height of summer from either the Buddhist religions or the Hindu religions go because their gods live at the top of this mountain. They want to go to the top. You walk in a circle around it to sort of pay your respects. A lot of people go there to die, which is why the ravens there are this big. The Tibetan sky burial is what you think it is.
This is a place on Earth unlike many other places. The problem is it was early November and it was maybe ten degrees below zero and there were maybe ten people on the whole mountain, but I wanted to do it. It seemed like a cool idea. I’ve also had arthritis in my knee since I was fourteen. I have a screw in my right knee after three surgeries. My knees were not as strong as they are today because I hadn’t figured out the biological underpinnings that I know today. So I was struggling. I was really cold. I went into this guesthouse which is a euphemism for mud hut. With that said, it was at least two feet shorter than I am.
I went into this place and this little [inaudible 00:44:52] I saw her picture, and she’s like this tall. She gives me this bowl of yak butter tea, which is exactly as disgusting as it sounds. It is yak butter, mixed with tea and a little salt. The typical nomadic family carries everything on the back of a yak and they have this two pound butter churner. Every morning they take their part of tea and churn this butter and then it is going cha, chunk, cha, chunk, cha, chunk before they’ll drink it. An intelligent Tibetan would clearly be like okay, your breakfast is going to be yak butter tea and barley flour. Why don’t you just get a glop of butter, stick in flour and pour the tea over top like a sane person and save yourself all the churning for God’s sake, right? That was my thinking.
They always did that. I drank this glass of tea and within five minutes I’m like I feel amazing. I had twenty five cups at their house. It wasn’t like a big gulp cup. My brain turned on. I’ve done analysis in the Andes and Himalayas. You always feel like death at 18,000 feet. Here I am, I felt so good. I’ve never felt that good at altitude. I remember thinking this is weird and why. I came back to California. On the way back, I smothered Tibetan [inaudible 00:46:21] and got new ones, they gnomes had two packs and they had a car battery and a blender. Does that make any sense? No. Of all the things were having a land of big sky. You can see everything. There’s no infrastructure. In a big city, there’s like ten families in it and there’s blenders. Not necessarily TVs.
I came back and started experimenting and eventually came up with the recipe for Bulletproof Coffee which are coffee beans that are free of a toxin that specifically damages mitochondria. You wouldn’t know this but the US and Canada have no laws about this toxin in coffee but all of Europe, all of China, all of Japan, most of the world have laws that say if this toxin is present in meaningful amounts don’t drink the coffee.
The world’s most moldy coffee comes from Canada and US and we drink it and then two hours later when our mitochondria take a hit we get sugar cravings and jittery and flip people off except here we say we’re sobbery or something like that. I almost got it right.
This actually happens. There is a special kind of coffee without that and you blend it with butter. For almost ten years now, twelve now, it’s tormented me that I couldn’t tell you why blending mattered and why I cannot eat a butter like a Snickers bar and drink some coffee and feel the same. I have a book coming out next year that actually tells why there is biochemical reason for this and it’s all about your mitochondria. It’s about what fat does to the body.
Another ingredient that’s in Bulletproof Coffee is called Brain Octane oil. Brain Octane oil is an extract from coconut oil that raises fat burning molecule in your body five times higher than you get them from eating coconut or butter or anything else. When you shift into fat burning, every time you turn the crank on your little power production plants in your cells, you get 147 electrons instead of 36. If you have ever done a three day fast or you’ve tried a very high fat, low carb, extremest diet, after three days you reach a state of clarity that is really unusually. You go I feel really good, I can’t believe I’m not hungry.
Every religious tradition known to man that’s been going on for awhile has fasting at least some time of year. Fasting triggers the same. I have a little problem though. I am an entrepreneur. I don’t have time to feel cold and crappy and yell at people because I’m having an energy crash. You can use that oil either in your food or in your coffee to short circuit this problem in the brain of not having enough energy to suddenly have enough energy. This stuff has changed my life. I took some of the most powerful smart drugs known to man called the daffodil. It’s Limitless, the movie was based on this drug loosely.
It got me through business school. It made me a better mediator. I quit taking the drug four years ago because I managed to get enough electrons generated in my brain and the scary thing here is that innovators, the people and you know who they are in the company if you have a company big enough like this. That person just knows stuff. Those are unusual brains and those brains … they require more energy than the normal brain. They are more sensitive to these swings.
Take a bunch of coders … There’s a reason Microsoft has eight Bulletproof Coffee stands on campus for their software development people because the people who are creating knowledge, they are sucking energy in and are using it to create, they have to have a steady supply of that. That is one of the haves there. If you were to not do that at all and you were to simply at your next meal say I’m not going to have a sugar because sugar does inhibit mitochondria function, especially over time. You were to say instead, I’m going to choose an undamaged fat of butter from grass fed cows, avocados, coconut oils, nuts that haven’t been roasted in cottonseed and soybean oil and covered in MSG and sugar might be a good choice. If you do a lot of that …
I recommend the diet by the way for free we have the one [inaudible 00:50:41] in the fridge. It’s an info-graphic straight out of Silicone Valley style. It is everything written in my book in an image. You can just have it or you can download it for free from the webpage that tells you if you want your brain to work, eat more of these called Bulletproof foods. There’s a list of suspect foods there. For some people, they will actually [inaudible 00:51:02] for other people, you’ll be fine. There’s something I called kryptonite foods. Just don’t eat that stuff. Everyone who can afford to be in this food today, you never have to eat hydrogenated fats or tofu again. In fact, [inaudible 00:51:16] they’re bad for you. There’s no excuse for that.
I basically sort this out on a really good, maybe good, really bad so you don’t have to do a lot of thinking. You don’t have to know why all those decisions were made but you have a framework or a road map, which is what it’s called. Pick one up on your way out. You can feel the difference on the first day. Where we get a little bit mixed up in the middle here is you wouldn’t know it but about twenty percent of people have a genetic sensitivity to something called the nightshade family.
The nightshade family includes potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants, bell peppers, cayenne, jalapenos, things like that. There’s people in this room. How many of you know if you have a nightshade sensitivity? One, two, three, four. Okay. Where are the other people? If we’re playing the odds, there’s people that don’t know if it’s going on. I’m one by the way. If you’re one of those people, that’s why nightshades are on the suspect list, you probably consume nightshades everyday in one of those food groups. You probably also have musculoskeletal pain that’s becoming a part of your life.
You’re probably like my father. He had his first hip replaced. Finally at 74, I convinced him to stop eating nightshades. He called me up a week later and said I don’t think I’m going to need to replace my other hip. That’s awesome. If you don’t know that food might cause something for you … we aren’t all the same, we’re genetically different. We actually have different mitochondrial DNA that came from our mothers and our mother’s mothers. There are only seven strings of it but there’s lots of mutations. That’s something that matters. If you want to create innovation in your company, the simplest thing you can do is do what Google does and provide me free lunch. Don’t skimp on the budget for lunch. Buy them the nicest food you can get. I don’t mean the nicest tasty food you can get besides Pizza Hut. I mean the nicest food that is biologically compatible with human beings. When you do that, you will see the innovation in your company goes up.
Get them the good coffee. Coffee that causes a crash and anxiety two hours after you give to people isn’t appropriate. You’re paying an engineer a hundred grand a year and you’re going to serve bad coffee? Are you kidding me? That is the crime against your shareholders if nothing else. It’s just not okay. I say that as a former engineering and still kind of a geek. I know I run a coffee company so I’m biased. This matters. If you increase the quality of food in your environment and you increase the novelty in your environment and you give people the opportunity to go outside every now and then, to get some air and some light, you will see the fruits in your innovation.
Of course you get bad business processes out of the way, but if people are free to have enough energy, spare energy in their system, we will automatically use that to solve problems. If we don’t have enough we will automatically use whatever spare energy we have to hoard more energy and do things in our own best interests and basically be in the fight or flight mode. The weak mode versus the good mode. It all comes down to the little bacteria that run you and whether or not they are well fed and well cared for. If you care for them, you get innovation. You don’t care for them, you [inaudible 00:54:48]. That’s what it comes down to.
Can I answer some questions for you? About Silicone Valley? About innovation? About introducing me to Canada? Just be destroying my lack of e-commerce contributing right now. Or anything else?
Joe: I follow your website and your blog a bit. It amazes me that either you either have enough energy to do that or is there a team of minions behind you that are doing research, look at video production, everything. How do you manage all of that?
Dave Asprey: The question is Joe follows the Bulletproof websites and how do you possibly do all of that? Do you have minions? Brock has a video. He’s our only video editor. He’s a very powerful minion. He goes to Vancouver. Vancouver minions are strong.
I do have a team at Bulletproof. We have a coffee shop in Santa Monica that does triple the revenue per square foot than the Starbucks team do and I hired three of the first ten Starbucks people to help me put the store together and one of the temps is my head of commercial operations. I have a content team but the research, I actually do research.
I do it because this is the most important thing I know how to do. Before did this, I would have been standing in front of the classroom of fifty engineers in Silicone Valley in San Jose teaching them about how a bit of traffic to gets from your browser to the back end going back and eVery step and every level of it because I’m inherently curious and because everything in the system for the way my brain is wired, I just wanted to hack the system because my feet hurt all the time. I was old when I was young. My knees hurt. My brain wasn’t working. I had gas all the time. I weighed 300 pounds and I smelled bad. It was pretty bad.
The research though it’s all in here, and the way I represent information in my brain for reasons that may be genetic or maybe because I learned to read at 18 months is that I store everything away in a three d picture. I’m very visual that way so I can recall things there that are really useful. I can connect ideas in an unusual way that helps me be an innovator. It also means that I’m probably not going to match your name to your face ever again even if we’re close friends. [inaudible 00:57:16] There is a team at Bulletproof but the research is swayed.
Joe: That’s good. Can you just explain how much you like e-commerce?
Dave Asprey: E-commerce, maybe you should have led with. When I go to the States, I can have any item I want within 24 hours. Maybe within an hour if you’re in a big city. I just go to a webpage, click a button and it arrives. I can innovate with that. I can get five different things that are [inaudible 00:57:44]. I can recombine them and make something and test an idea and discard it or take it and run. In Canada, if you want to order something, you might get it two weeks later. You’ll pay three times as much as shipping, but I don’t care how much I pay for shipping. I will give someone fifty dollars to send me a pair of socks from the US if that’s the only place the socks are there. They still will not send the socks. If they do arrive, they will have been carefully opened by Canada customs to smell them before I get them and it’s unacceptable and I believe the Canadian economy is in trouble because with a postal service like ours and an incredibly ineffective border agency that’s gotten worse since I’ve moved here, I cannot get the tools of innovation to my home often times within 30 days.
I have a team of 3 administrative assistance who do it. It’s to the point where I’m looking at partnering with another web PO member at buying out a helicopter because it’s paying sixty dollars an hour to run the God damned helicopter to Bellium to pick up my Amazon Prime shipments to get them back to Canada so I can do the things I need to do. [inaudible 00:59:03] That’s what my comments about. You cannot get the tools of innovation because they have the blocks by bureaucracy. It is embarrassing that a first world nation full of amazing people like Canada has an e-commerce system like this. I also spend ten times more to create a license for one of my products to get it approved to be sold in Canada than I do in US. News flash, the market is ten percent as big here. The only reason I have a warehouse in Canada because I live here. If I was a hard entrepreneur, I would never sell anything in Canada because I make less money, a lot less money, selling in Canada because of huge regulatory hurdles here.
I sound too much like Donald Trump, that would make me sad, [inaudible 00:59:53] but that’s what I mean there. We have an issue in this country in being legally and systematically allowed to buy stuff and get it quickly. That is one of the major things of what’s [inaudible 01:00:06].
Question?
Female: My question is, on talk with money, are you looking for money because you have some new products on the horizon to play with or is it more [inaudible 01:00:18].
Dave Asprey: I’m expanding the product hopefully in advance of a book launch in April. The book before last [inaudible 01:00:24] and then before it gets really big sales on this one and I want to have the product in line. I also found out that I accidentally sold about 100,000 copies of my book in Japan with no marketing. I got an email and went holy crap. It took me a year to do that in Canada and plus the US. In Japan I did that in four months without even knowing. I’m flying there in October to do our launch in Japan.
Male2: October when?
Dave Asprey: 17th, 20th or somewhere around there.
Male2: I’m going to be there.
Dave Asprey: Are you going to be there?
Male2: No, just before that.
Dave Asprey: Before that, yeah, I think it’s around there. I want to say the 17th but … drop a note if you’re going to be there. We might overlap. I’m doing a three or four day book signing in Japan. We’ve got inventory for the launch and I’m also approved nationally in both eats so there’s some inventory requirements and I’ve grown the team quite a bit in order to support the guy who launched Lunchables. The seven hundred million dollar line of junk food for kids is paying for his sins right now. He’s saying I can never do that right now. I made life better for moms and I made a lot of children not very well. I can’t inside my soul to do that anymore.
We are taking the dark art of of consumer packaged goods and using it to disrupt big food by serving food that actually makes people full instead of having cravings. Hiring people like that. I have the lady who launched and ran the Via, Starbucks instant coffee line, who is running my product team.
A guy with a four hundred million dollar line on his head from [inaudible 01:02:05] bakery is running my grocery sales team. We are a real company to answer your question about minions.
If you want to innovate, higher the A players and you pay them more than you make. Everyone of a team like that is going to move the needle very quickly. Bulletproof has grown very, very quickly. I’ve got to tell you, as a former head of evangelism where my job was to get an audience excited about anti-virus software, this is shooting fish in a barrel.
I’m talking about stuff we’re made of. I’m talking about human performance, things people care about. Bringing a team like this together, it’s more fun that way but that’s why it’s team grown and product expansion and geomathic expansion and channel expansion all at the same time.
Male2: Talk about timing though, I was co-founder of a company twelve years ago that was genetic stands of people’s metabolic genes and hearing specific vitamin supplements can equal those genes and we just ran out of funding. It was ahead of the curve.
Dave Asprey: So twelve years ago, he had a company that was doing a genetic analysis
Male2: And mass customizing of vitamins.
Dave Asprey: And mass customizing of vitamins. It’s hard to really know that I registered with the name vitamin tests dot com and looked at the same business model and I didn’t do it partly just because I’d like to think my sense of timing is getting better. Back when I did that first e-commerce play entrepreneur [inaudible 01:03:35] evening. It’s very hard like this. I couldn’t believe at a young kid I was like [inaudible 01:03:39] as they asked me how long a wait from we stop sending out paper catalogs and I’m like oh, within five years. That was in 1995, you still get a stack of paper catalogs in the mail. Overtime your ability to see trans-changes and I’m lucky that I cut my teeth in Silicone Valley where disruptive change happens every about every 18 to 24 months and … I’ve worked with Clayton Christensen, the guy who coined the term “disruptive innovation.” I’ve worked with his consulting firm. I’ve disrupted and all that. I think the time is right now. The time is right now because the e-commerce infrastructure is in the place where what would have cost twelve years ago fifty million dollars in infrastructure you can get for five thousand dollars now. The amount of computer cost to your network is unimaginable right now. I spend right now, on a monthly basis, I do twelve hundred dollars on spacing and bandwidth and all that stuff.
I may have called you as sales engineer in the early days of axis communications. I recorded a company like Bulletproof half a million dollars a month. That would been a deal bale in.
Male2: We would have become our own merchant bank or e-commerce [inaudible 01:04:54]
Dave Asprey: Yeah so it’s easier than it’s ever been. The problem with it being easy is assume those of ours reaching for product is looking at social media. There are a lot of people, well I have seventy four dollars I think I’ll make product and I’m not going to think about it. I’m not going to do my research. I’m not going to follow regulatory and then you get some people selling some weird stuff out there. Then you have a wave of people today who are just wiped away. You see like fifty different companies selling the exactly the same pills or exactly the same [inaudible 01:05:22] of names and that creates arc confusion. That’s why I believe the era of trustworthy brands is on its way up right now.
My timing was very fortunate with Bulletproof on that … Also, ones that copy you. I’d no idea if anyone would ever want to drink a coffee without mold toxins. I can tell you that it works. I feel much different. I’m actually afraid to drink coffee from the normal coffee companies because I feel like crap when I do it. I know there’s a difference. I sense it. That’s all the science that I needed and now I understand why and I did that. I can replicate it because I like coffee. Maybe someone will buy it and apparently it works.
Male2: I think your social media marketing is brilliant.
Dave Asprey: Thank you.
Male2: It works.
Dave Asprey: I appreciate that.
Male2: Thank you for the presentation on Thomas from Adventures. What’s your thoughts on blue bottle costs?
Dave Asprey: Thomas from Adventures, right now is on the bottom copy. Blue level is one of the early, what we call the third wave of coffee. The first wave of coffee was make it cheap, the Hills Brothers and things like that. The second wave of coffee was the Starbucks, make it about community. Make it better than the really bad stuff, but let’s not really focus on coffee. It is just better than it was but we focus on consistency and feel. Then the blue bottles and the other companies like Intelligence came out and said let’s focus on the experience of coffee and let’s focus on the [inaudible 01:06:55] of the coffee. I’m sorry I think I’ve said the blue bottle industry of San Francisco is a work of art. I just want to go there and I just want to look at all the glass piping and the incredibly scientific [inaudible 01:07:06] and they’ve done good marketing that way. The problem is that for all the sets of third wave coffee, they all go to the same dirty warehouses and they all buy coffee in big burlap bags that were all processed by the same thing. They are all graded.
They are all graded on two things, cost and flavor. The innovation that Bulletproof has is … about the human performance of purity. I’d rather make a cup of coffee that was only a seven out of ten that makes me feel like a great golden god than a cup of coffee that tastes like a ten out of ten that gives me a headache and makes me jittery three hours later. That’s the difference between these third wave of coffee people and whatever you want to call Bulletproof. But, Blue Bottle, beautiful stuff and I believe it just raised 45 million dollars today just to expand in Boston. It’s expensive. I’ve got my two stores in LA, the eight on Microsoft’s campus, we’re doing a couple in Seattle. If I want to go that route, I’m looking at hedge fund dollars. I’m not sure though I need to have coffee stores on every corner. I just need a few meccas: New York, LA, San Francisco and things like that. That’s part of the on-going strategies that I’m working on right now.
Male2: Any other questions?
Male3: How are you farming or responding to people that are promoting that they are selling Bulletproof coffee but they’re not a representative? Are you just promoting Bulletproof coffee, but it’s not necessarily important?
Dave Asprey: How do I respond to people who sit there, selling Bulletproof coffee when they are just taking coffee and putting butter in it. I won’t, actually. Their imitation is.
Male2: The sincerest form of flattery.
Dave Asprey: There you go, sincerest form of flattery. Thanks. I must have housed in other companies, I can remember that. I almost never lose words. I also have any [inaudible 01:08:58] counsel. I usually respond with hey guys, I appreciate the support. I love this idea, would you like to be a wholesale partner.
You’d be amazed at how many small coffee shops are like you know I can actually sell the real beans and I can put Brain octane and people will feel it, let’s do it. Then you say, I’m really sorry and say can you just call it butter coffee. That’s the generic coffee but Coca Cola isn’t going to allow you to sell Coca Cola when you put sugar in water and it’s not the same thing.
You have to be selling the same thing and all. I do it respectfully. There is some egregious knockoffs who are doing it on purpose with malicious intent and those guys I’m happy to take down.
The cool thing is they have to pay an hourly fee for their attorneys. I don’t. (laughs) It’s in house. I have [D Light 5 01:09:44] who represents me, I have big guns when I need them. It’s a lot cheaper for me to pester someone then it is for them to pester me. The economics will be okay. Maybe two other questions, then I’ll be respectful of your evening. I have no idea, just use your cane and pull me off stage.
Male2: I think there was another question.
Dave Asprey: Another question, all right one more and then that’d be it for your evening.
Male4: I notice that you don’t indicate organic anywhere in your advertising and yet that’s also a factor in coffee.
Dave Asprey: Alright good question. The question is that I don’t indicate organic on my packaging yet I’m charging premium price actually above organic.
Male4: Yeah I know.
Dave Asprey: Which is kind of cool and that covers the cost of my lab testing. The reason for that is that I am going direct to source. The plantations that I work with in Columbia and in Guatemala, we install infrastructure to process the coffee differently than coffee is normally processed. It is not economically feasible for our small plantation, the sites we work with, to get organic certified because the organic certification is like the Canadian postal service.
Male2: Or worse.
Dave Asprey: Or worse, maybe. So they’ll spend one or two years income in order to become organic certified in order to get a buck a pound more for their grain coffee and they lose money. The main plantation in Guatemala has been in the same family for like four generations and its never been in spring so we have passive organic. Use that word and the FDA gets all up in your stuff so we’re rain forest alliance certified and I make organic because … the coffee reach that I have now is many, many container loads.
I can and probably will get organic certification but it will not change the product one iota. It is simply a marketing thing. I can tell you that I take better care of the soil in my plantation and the ones that are owned by my partners than most organic places. I really care about that. I live on an organic farm and I grow all my own food. I take it seriously. I am the system that starts in the soil and [inaudible 01:11:58]
Male4: Do you ever use any of Rudolph Steiner’s material on biodynamic organic gardening?
Dave Asprey: Oh, question about do I use Rudolph Steiner’s stuff. My kids are in a Waldorf school, which is Steiner inspired.
Male4: Yeah.
Dave Asprey: I don’t bury boars heads full of poop in my garden, if that’s what you’re asking, which is a Rudolph Steiner practice but the core centered fine dynamic practices are used by the very best vineyards and the very best pot growers and the very best coffee growers because it works. Planting according to the moon cycle really matters because your mitochondria follow the moon. They were born floating in the ocean and follow the solar cycle and follow the lunar cycle. That’s why you do too. That’s why every emergency room is full on a full moon because we’re still a little bacteria doing what the moon and the sun said and our plants are the same way. You plant them at the wrong time, they don’t grow the same. Steiner was a very interesting and crazy innovator kind of guy.
On that note, I think that was all of our questions. Thank you for all of your time and attention tonight.
