Dave Asprey

I’m always ready to launch.

Dave Asprey

One of the most important things that I learned in this whole path and I’ve spent North of half a million dollars over the past 20 years hacking my system and this year I’ve really double downed on that. One of the most important things is willpower and understanding what willpower is and how you can improve ti using effective time management. Willpower is a biological resource. It comes from somewhere and it is exhaustible.

In the course of my career, I’ve had a very successful time in Silicon Valley and I had effective time management skills. I was a co-founder of a part of a company that held Google’s very first servers when Google was launched and in fact, most of the big internet companies got started in my company’s data centers. To have had this time in Silicon Valley where I would just push with everything I had using my willpower that came through my effective time management skills and then, when I would run out and just feel like I don’t have anything else to give, then I’m like, “It’s because I’m weak,” and I need to do something about that. That’s actually a recipe for a disaster.

There are many ways every single day where your willpower weakens away. Willpower is a finite resource so you only have so much of it. It’s precious and you can get a little bit more of it but most importantly, you just stop wasting it. Improve your effective time management skills that boosts your willpower.

Dave Asprey

Willpower is measured in psychology now. Willpower can be strengthened by effective time management skills. It’s really cool. They have hard-core quantified studies of willpower and one of the best ways of measuring willpower in animals is kind of mean.

You take a rat, you put them in water, you let them swim until they can’t swim anymore, which is really mean, and you don’t let them drown. You fish them out right when they go under but that is a very quantified measure.

They also measure something called Decision Fatigue. That’s part of willpower. This is something that really affects us as humans and specifically as humans who run businesses.

The number of decisions you make in a day is finite and it’s dependent on the amount of energy and willpower you have. Most people are unaware of the number of decisions they make every day because unfortunately, the parts of your body that get worn out from making decisions don’t really differentiate between deciding what to have for lunch and deciding whether you should buy another company. It’s just a decision. Improve your effective time management skills to improve your willpower. Each decision has a certain amount of risk associated with it however effective time management can help you minimize that.

The risk management parts of your body are mostly concerned about whether you’re going to starve to death, whether a tiger’s going to eat you, and whether you’re going to get to have sex to reproduce the species. That’s our hard-core wiring and all of those things get tide into willpower in a way that’s mostly invisible to us.

Dave Asprey

Absolutely means that. Some emerging science is really interesting here. There’s a cool study coming out of Israel. Some of my favorite ones about willpower is they look in a prison and they’re saying “Well, what happens if you go in on your parole hearing day? Are you going to get out?”

The biggest determinant of whether or not you spend another year in jail is what time you’re appointment is. If you come in at 8:30 or 9:00 in the morning, you have an 80% chance of getting out of jail. If you come in at 4:00 in the afternoon, you have an 80% chance of staying in jail. This is how timings affect your willpower and effective time management plays almost the same role.

What’s going on there is the parole board has made too many decisions. They ran out of decision so they just stopped making them.

Dave Asprey

That’s really cool.

Instead of just running out of energy to make those decisions, what if you could actually upgrade the energy so that you had more. Focus on energy that comes from effective time management.

My next book I’m working on is about mitochondria. Mitochondria are the power plants in our cells and I’ve been working on increasing my mitochondrial functions since the late 90’s when we really first started understanding mitochondria. By now I understand what happened that I’ve some mitochondrial damage. So my energy production systems are more sensitive than yours. I manage them more closely but it’s given me so much knowledge and the ability to turn them up. Again effective time management really helped me.

What happens if you are having decision fatigue or you’re running out of willpower, I can teach you how to use less willpower, which basically means like you’re getting better mileage in your car. It’s time to focus more on effective time management. You can go further because you didn’t waste gas with every mile but there’s also ways to sort of refill the tank along the way. And that is a game changer.

I used supplements, sometimes breathing exercise. Other things like that in order to increase the number of electrons that you can make in your body.

There’s a scene from The Matrix, an old movie but a very famous one. I’m guessing most of the listeners have seen it at least once. In the movie, when Neo gets in the car, one of the characters looks at him and calls him Coppertop. It’s like you’re just a battery. And in the movie, people really were batteries for these crazy computer things. But, really what you are, you really are a battery. At least inside every cell in your body, you have these power plants that act like little tiny batteries and every thought you have, every decision you make, and every action you take from birth until death is driven by electrons.

If you can do better at using electrons, you will be a better person with effective time management skills.

When you’re better at using electrons, the parts of your brain that use so many of them are in a position to regulate your emotions better and you do fewer things that you’re ashamed of later. You become a better person.

Dave Asprey

All decisions you make are going to drain the battery but what if you just made less decisions. Better decisions come from effective time management. I talked about those 3 components that your body is most interested in.

1. Making sure you don’t starve.
2. Making sure you don’t get eaten or killed.
3. Making sure that the species reproduces.

Most of your willpower goes towards those things and that’s a sad fact.

Your business gets basically the drags that are left over after you spent most your energy every single day worrying about those things, making decisions about those things that you don’t even know you’re making. I call that The Labrador Brain in the Bulletproof Diet. The book that I wrote that hit the New York Times list. It’s a book about food but I’m introducing these concepts that are a restatement of a model called The Triune Brain Theory” that says there’s a reptilian brain, a mammalian brain, and a human brain.

The Labrador brain is this mammal brain which is associated with your effective time management skills. All it cares about is those three things. It will redirect your behaviour. If you think about every bad decision you’ve ever made, everything you’ve ever done that you regret came from one of those three things. If something’s a threat, that’s fear. You procrastinate because of fear, which can be avoid by your effective time management skills only. You don’t make good decisions because you’re worried and afraid.

Every time you put down an empty pint of Ben & Jerry’s and think “God, I’m really a bad person because I just did that,” even though you’re not but people have weird guilt around food. You told yourself you aren’t going to eat the cookie or eat all the ice cream or it wasn’t then you did it anyway or some part of you made you do it. It’s your Labrador brain.

Dave Asprey

The very simple principles behind the Bulletproof Diet are if you just assume that roughly a third of your unconscious willpower drain comes from food, one-third comes from fear of random things, and one-third comes from fear that the species won’t reproduce, therefore, you better go get some.

What if we could just turn off a third of your willpower drained coming from food? That is what the Bulletproof Diet is all about.

When you use Bulletproof Coffee, which is what I’m known for. By the way, it’s really funny that I’m better known for that. I’m also the first person to ever sell anything over the internet and my effective time management skills helped me with that. Like the first example of e-commerce was out of my dorm room before the browser was created.

Dave Asprey

And it wasn’t blended if there’s fats and on top of it.

Dave Asprey

Luis, I was thinking you sounded kind of weak. Now we know why.

Dave Asprey

I was a raw vegan for a while too, actually really good raw vegan chef. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s biologically compatible with people who are over 25 very often.

But on the coffee fronts, what happens with that is it’s a special kind of coffee bean that doesn’t contain toxins that make you weak. Most coffee that you can buy especially in North America today, it contains toxin from the fermenting process and it’s not commonly talked about but most governments around the world have strict legal limits.

So coffee that’s too contaminated with this toxin to legally sell in Japan or even in China or Europe. They send it to The U.S and Canada and we drink it. And, it actually lowers what’s called mitochondrial respiration in studies. It’s not going to kill you. It’s just going to make you a little bit weaker. That’s a problem.

The bulletproof coffee beans are made with a different fermentation free process and they’re lab tested for 27 toxins that don’t have any business in your body at least not if you want to perform at your best and that’s one of the ingredients of bulletproof coffee. So you brew hot coffee with beans that don’t have things that don’t make you weak, then, you blend in grass-fed butter instead of milk.

The reason you do that is coffee is full of all kinds of beneficial compounds. In fact, it’s the number source of anti-oxidants in the American diet but if you add milk to it, the anti-oxidants stick to milk protein and then you can’t use them. So, you take anti-oxidants and you don’t get the benefit when you’re making a latte out of it. If you use butter, which is basically just milk fat, there’s very little protein in it so then, you get the benefits of all the plant compounds that are in coffee and it turns coffee into more of a super food. The final secret ingredient that’s really about willpower is an oil called Brain octane oil.

Now, brain octane comes from coconut but if you envision coconut oil like a weak beer, brain octane is vodka or Everclear. So we take about the top 5% of the oil in coconut oil and this has special biological properties. It doesn’t get stored as fat very easily in the body at all and it converts to fat burning energy called ketones very quickly. It turns out that some cells in your brain preferentially consume ketones instead of sugar or glucose of the body. A greater biological composition of your body helps you in effective time management.

So, every spiritual tradition or religious tradition that I’ve ever seen in some part of it has a fasting practice where to connect with whatever you’re trying to connect with, you fast for some set period of time. Fasting puts this fat burning molecule at higher levels in your body. Usually it takes about 3 or 4 days and suddenly you receive a state of clarity, a similar clarity comes from effective time management. It’s kind of weird though because you don’t have much sugar in your body at all. With brain octane, you get the molecules that power your brain, power your mitochondria. Those things that power your decisions, they can come from fat or they can come from sugar but when you use brain octane in your bulletproof coffee, you’re kind of cheating. You’re getting that brain state that comes from fasting but you don’t have to fast and as hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs will tell you bulletproof coffee is very popular among business owners and Silicon Valley.

When you have two sources of energy for your brain, those are fat and glucose that’s already in your body, you can do more than when you’re just running on glucose like most of us do most of the time. It’s a complete game changer.

Dave Asprey

That is exactly what happens.

Here’s where a huge portion of your willpower goes when you’re an entrepreneur, however you can save it using effective time management. You’re sitting in a meeting. Let’s say it’s 10:30 in the morning, you probably had a bowl of cereal or some kind of fruit smoothie for breakfast and now, your brain is starting to get a little bit worried because it knows it’s running out of fuel because sugar doesn’t stick with you very much. Carbs don’t stick in the morning. So, someone brings in the plate of cookies or this morning, some bagels, donuts, muffins, whatever. You didn’t really want to have a snack but the Labrador in your head says, “Eat the bagel,” and then you say, “No”.

Guess what that was. That was a decision. Then, about 3 seconds later, the voice in your head said, “Eat the bagel”. You say “No”.

Dave Asprey

Exactly! For a lot of people, there’s a little bit of like beating yourself up because you thought you were in charge. Well, you were in charge until you ran out of willpower. You can save your willpower using effective time management. Okay, literally that happen and then lunch time happens when you eat MSG, bad fats and other things that trigger sugar cravings.

In restaurants, when they add MSG without labelling it, it increases the average spend by 30% because it makes people crave dessert and extra drinks. So, you do that, at the end of lunch like, “Oh, I didn’t want to have dessert today because I’m trying to limit my sugar. Oh, but I guess I’ll just do it today”. You have that same conversation with the Labrador in your head. The same thing happens when you get the tool clocks lump and by that time, you’re not going to be making the decisions anymore. Effective time management is not hard but you just need to get used to it.

Dave Asprey

Well, the problem is that every time you make a choice, a choice is another word for decision, effective time management eases your decision making power. If you have to practice this, you’re using willpower on practice and on making choices and by the way, you’re right. Knowing the right choices to make is critically important because otherwise you’ll use willpower to make choices that consume more willpower. That’s what happened to me when I was on a low fat diet with exercise 6 days a week for an hour and half a day. I didn’t lose weight. I got strong and I got tired. Amazing how that worked.

But, I didn’t make choices that actually gave me more willpower or more energy and the whole bulletproof diet philosophy is around here’s one page road map. In fact, it’s downloadable without buying the book and you print that out and like here are the foods that give you more energy and more willpower. These are the ones that may or may not sap your energy and will power and these are the ones that always sap your energy. If you just kind of have that framework in your head, when you sit down at a restaurant or any other time, you can make a choice but you make choice that pays dividends in the form of more energy and more willpower and less weakness so that you have that energy. Good decision making is a skill similar to the effective time management that few of the people have.

When you get home at the end of the day, if you burned yourself out on decisions, you wasted your electrons because you ate food that actually cause your mitochondria to perform worse, you didn’t use brain octane or intermittent fasting or a ketogenic diet at least some of the time. You need to use some effective time management skills to avoid that.  You’re actually neurologically weaker and you come home and then, your wife or husband or your kids come rushing to you and they want this, they want that and all that and then, you snap at them and then you think you’re a bad person.

Well, the reason you snap at them is that the prefrontal cortex, the front part of your brain that consumes the most energy in your brain, it didn’t have enough electrons to properly regulate your emotions. This stuff is all documented. This is science. So then, you go, “Man, I’m a bad person” you beat yourself up and you say “Next time I’ll try harder”. What the hell?! Trying harder isn’t what it’s about. It’s supposed to be easy. It’s not supposed to take trying and pushing. The reason that’s hard is because you didn’t have the energy to do it.

Dave Asprey

So you owe it to yourself and you owe it to the people around you and by the way, if you’re an entrepreneur, all of the people who work for you and all of the partners and customers you’re responsible for. That’s one of the reasons I’m absolutely religious about taking care of my biology, self-awareness is an important factor in effective time management. There are hundreds of thousands of people. Like, there’s 35 million downloads on bulletproof radio, I’ve consumed a 127 full human lifetime with content upgraded. I’m either a mass murderer or I’m not.

That level of responsibility means my biology better be working and I better have enough energy at the end of the day to be nice to my kids and nice to my wife and to be nice to the people who work for me.

I’ll tell you. You give me coffee with mold in it. You give me food additives, chemicals, gluten, and bad fats, you know what? I’m kind of a jerk like I don’t like myself that way and I do not treat people as well as I’m capable of. So I owe it to the people around me and to myself.

Dave Asprey

You’re controlling people’s lives. Like when you make a decision if you’re going to hire or fire this person. If you make that decision when you have not enough energy in your brain because you ate crappy, it would have a big impact. These people who work for you have families and all that.

You have a sacred obligation to put yourself in the driver seat for your own biology all the time because so many people rely on you to create powerful things for them.

Dave Asprey

I’ve fought out caught every decision possible and will put on more of my entrepreneur hat. I’ve been an adviser to lots of start-ups over the last 20 years advising particularly about effective time management. I was even on IBM adviser’s board. In fact, quite a lot about how this works.

In my own life, I have trained all of my employees to not come to me to solve problems regarding effective time management. I’m the CEO and my job is to lead and its strategy and it’s to be the voice and face of bulletproof and to create new content, to talk about things and to synthesize new knowledge.

It is incredibly easy for employees to come to the CEO, who they assume at effective time management skills, and tell me what to do. In fact, as an employee, this is the safest thing you can do because if the CEO told you to do it and you fail, it’s the CEO’s fault. It’s not your fault. However, most CEO’s I worked with, they all are just used to this. They’re like, “Okay, it’s my job to make decisions.” There’s a canned answer that anywhere in the companies ever come to me. Well here, if they say, “Dave, what should I do?” and it’s this, “What do you think? What do you recommend?” The people who work for me, I have hired them to think. So they have gone out and spent 3 months studying the problem, understanding the market, and looking at what to do.

Now, they’re invited to come and say, “Hey Dave, based on all this analysis and research, this is the conclusion. This is what I want to do. Are you cool with it? Is there something else that we should talk about? Does this jive?” That’s a very good use of an analysis but it is an abuse of my decision making capacity to come to me and ask me to solve the problem for you when I don’t have all the information that you had. You have to do your own problem solving if you work for me and you can talk through your process with me but I will not solve your problems for you because my willpower is too expensive.

Dave Asprey

We have very unusual culture at Bulletproof. I actually hack everyone’s brain in the company. I provide neurofeedback. Like, we have neuroscientist who works with us. We have tens of thousands of dollars on neural feedback so my employees can learn how to get out of their own ways and it sounds kind of hard but it’s really terrifying for a lot of people.

You grow up where there’s someone in charge and they’re the one who makes the decisions and then you execute and when you turn on again, like, you make a decision and if it doesn’t work, like it didn’t worked. So, one of the things we do also is we embrace failure which may happen due to lack of effective time management skills. If you’re going to give people responsibility to push boundaries, sometimes, it’s not going to work and instead of punishing failure, we embrace failure and say, “All right. Good job. We learned something here. Let’s not do that again” and there are times when failure happened because         you procrastinated or you didn’t do what you said you were going to do. That’s very different than you did what you said and it didn’t come out the way we thought.

Holding people accountable is a challenge but I would save my willpower for the most important and impactful decisions that serve the greatest good and the largest number of people. I won’t waste it by making small decisions in the company or in my life.

This is a couple of years ago. There’s an emergency room physician who now runs a fertility coaching practice based on our first book. She’s my wife, and she used to text me, “Do you want lunch at 12 or 12:15?” I’m like, “I’m in a middle of a podcast interview here. You just asked me to waste a decision didn’t you?” What she was really telling me was, “Hey Dave, I care about you and I’m taking care of you” but what I would respond to that message was I would just say “Yes” and it would drive her nuts. Now, we got it worked out and it’s on account. Any time you can avoid a thing like that, your Mark Zuckerberg has a right. He wears the same clothes every day. So does Obama. He has two colors of suits and he has someone else pick out his tie. Those are decisions, you don’t waste those.

Dave Asprey

I don’t want to sound like a bit of a cop out but I have half a million words of content, 300 episodes of Bulletproof Radio and I ask every guest in the show a pretty similar question.

So I would say, start with reading the Bulletproof Diet. You might consider the Bulletproof Conference every year. We have thousands of people who will show up in a community to play with the toys and to talk about biology but finding friends is the biggest thing to do.