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Entrepreneur Disrupted Mini-Series – #17: Dave Interviews Jay (Pt.1)

by Jay Abraham | November 10, 2017

Dave Asprey did a probing, penetrating and highly unprecedented interview of Jay Abraham. Dave explores Jay’s disciplines, mindset, belief systems, and everything that he stands for. Dave also got into some of Jay’s eclectic and mad scientist side and some of the crazy, zany lifestyle patterns, and disciplines he does. This Jay Abraham interview presents Jay in a totally different light and a totally different presence, and gives you more insight in the humanity and the humility that he’s trying to bring to entrepreneurs and show how they can represent it also.

Listen to the podcast here: 


Entrepreneur Disrupted Mini-Series – #17: Dave Interviews Jay (Pt.1)

Long before Dave and I did the fifteen-part entrepreneur disrupted series, Dave did a probing, penetrating and highly unprecedented very lengthy interview of me for his podcast series, Bulletproof Radio. He explored my disciplines, my mindset, my belief systems, everything that I stand for. Then he got into some of my eclectic and mad scientist side and some of the crazy, zany lifestyle patterns, and disciplines I do. It’s really interesting and I really believe it presents me in a totally different light, a totally different presence, and I’d like to hope it gives you more insight in the humanity and the humility that I’m trying to bring to entrepreneurs, not just myself, but show how they can represent it, but also a you’ll see the crazy, zany, wild and joyous side of me that I don’t think everybody sees.

Our cool fact of the day is that the act of breathing is something that most of us take for granted, but the truth is that breathing is a unique biological function because it’s the only one you have unless you’re really well-trained. That’s both voluntary and involuntary. That means that you don’t have to think about breathing. It’ll always happen automatically, but you can take a deep breath, you can hold it, you can speed it up, you can slow it down. That’s one of the things that as someone who might want to control your own performance or just hack your own biology, so you have more control and you can do more of the things you want to do. Breathing is probably the easiest thing to do. It turns out you can control your temperature, you control your heartbeat, you control the electrical conductivity of your skin, all sorts of things, if you learn. Breathing, we all know, but we probably don’t know all the different things you can do with it. You’ll find things like this cool fact and a bunch of other ones, including some specific breaths you can do for your mitochondria in my book called Head Strong: The Bulletproof Plan to Activate Untapped Brain Energy to Work Smarter and Think Faster in Just Two Weeks.

There’s something else that’s world-class and amazing on multiple fronts but not as much as my buddy, Jay. That is these brand new Bulletproof Collagen Bites. These are cookies, vanilla shortbread, fudge brownie, lemon cookie. When you eat these, they’re made with grass fed, low-temperature processed collagen protein, not some crap milk protein isolate stuff that causes inflammation. They turn off hunger in a way that’s actually impossible to put words to. You eat one of these cookies and you just don’t care about food. It’s not that, “I’m a little satisfied, I could hold off my cravings, like my cravings went away.”That’s because they’re full of brain octane, which is the kind of oil that we make this different than MCT oil that doesn’t cause the disaster pants problem and gives you way more ketone energy in your brain. Give those things a try, you will be amazed if you put one of those in your purse, in your bag and you get hungry, it’ll get you through for hours.

Our guest is none other than Jay Abraham. If you’re interested in business, you might have heard of him. Forbes Calls Jay Abraham one of the top five executive coaches in the entire US. He’s been doing this for 25 plus years. He’s increased the bottom line of over 10,000 clients in 400 industries with 7,200 sub-industries. This guy has solved just about every kind of sales, marketing, competitive edge question that you could think of. He’s on stage regularly with Tony Robbins. He’s the only guy who spends an entire day every year with Tony Robbins Platinum group. Tony’s Platinum group spends $100,000, a very large amount of money every year to get quality time with Tony and his inner circle of advisors, and Jay is one of those advisors who really helps these people. If you’re into internet marketing or marketing in general, you’ve probably seen one of Jay’s books because he’s a prolific author.

You may be interested in business and some portion of Bulletproof. We have a lot of people who are physicians. We have a lot of people who have careers all over the place. We have police officers. People from all walks of life who may or may not give a rat’s ass about business, but Jay is a high performer on many levels. I know Jay really well because we’ve been friends years ago, I bought one of Jay’s $500 books and it was like, “I can’t believe I got scammed. I spent $500 on a book. I’m probably going to send it back.” I read it and I was like, “This guy has knowledge and it’s very distilled.” I figured there was no chance I’ll ever meet this business rock star guy. Years later, I got a chance to meet him and we got to be friends. Jay has spoken to every employee at Bulletproof and he came in and did a strategy session with us. He’s helped to advise me on how to grow Bulletproof and how to have a service company where our mindset is to have a fiduciary responsibility, where our job is to do the right thing for our viewers and our customers, even if it’s not the path that makes us the most money or even if it’s the path spouse that makes us no money.

Our responsibility ethically, morally and for the greater good of the business is to tell you, “Don’t drink Bulletproof coffee, it’s not right for you,” if that’s the case for you rather than just say, “Just drink it, anyway.” Jay’s thinking has helped to help me have a level of excellence that I’m working to spread throughout the company. Jay, thank you for being on the show. Thank you for all your advice.

Thank you for the invitation. It’s an honor.

What do you do to be a super high performer? You’ve been doing this crazy life. You travel around. You’re in Japan a lot. You’re all over the planet. You fly maybe more than I do in terms of miles. Certainly frequency, but you go overseas more than I do. You’re a little older than I am but you don’t look it too much. You’ve got more than twenty years on me and you look great. You’re strong and your mind is strong too, which is cool. How do you do these crazy overseas trips and still come back and look and feel good? Because it’s harder when you’re older. What’s your trick?

The trick is not a trick. It’s an attitude. I am hopelessly and infinitely interested in all humanity. It’s always fascinating to me to interact with people on a worldwide basis. We did Italy twice, we did London twice, we did Paris, Ireland, Vietnam, Bangkok, Tokyo and China. What you find is that everyone thinks everyone’s different and they’re not. There’s this core of people that want to be true value creators. There’s a core of people that want to have passion not just about what they do but who they do it for, and they just need clarity to guide them and connect the dots. Almost everybody worldwide has got the same problems, the same issues, surprisingly many of the same businesses.

They’re very fascinating human beings and I get a big kick out of learning, out of sharing, out of borrowing. If you asked how I do it, I love to learn. I love to see all the different ways different people see life, all the different values different people represent because that’s the totality of the marketplace we are dealing with, whether it’s the people we’re selling to or the people we’re hiring. I love humanity and I get tired from the trips because I do very intensive and expensive, very non-structured activities that are predicated on the real understanding of the situation. They are very mentally exhausted but they’re very intellectual, like your cerebral fitness grows, because you learn and it’s very wonderful.

You have a sense of curiosity. You’re curious about everything like a relentless curiosity. It sounds like variety is something that keeps your brain going and there are good studies about that. The fact that you see what you do is an act of service, like you’re helping the people you go to.

It’s probably worthy to share what accounts for my uniqueness, because it’s something that anybody can avail themselves of if they’re willing. It’s quite liberating, intoxicating, animating and a wonderful elevator to your performance capability. I spent a life traveling from one industry to another, and when you get a chance to travel outside of a singular industry, you see that each industry has a precept, like follow the herd. They all have a certain way of thinking. They all have a certain way of doing. They have a certain way of selling. They have certain attitudes, distribution models, and plus or minus 20%, they’re all about the better, a little better, a little worse.

When you see that there are thousands of different ways to strategically operate, of different distribution models, of different competitive advantages, of ways to add value, of ways to access markets, you realize that most people accept unintentionally, unnecessarily, unknowingly a fraction of the sales, the clients. They could be generating a fraction of the transactional size. They could be doing a fraction of the repeat business, referral business, ancillary business because they don’t know how much more is possible from a day, a moment, a time, an interaction, access, investment capital, human capital. I’ve been blessed I get to see all that. That’s really the quintessence of what drives me.

That’s how you’re driven in general. What’s cool is you’re all over the world but you’re always full of energy. I know that you do things to take care of yourself physically not just a sense of curiosity. How do you handle jet lag? What do you do when you take a red eye and you’re going to go on stage for Tony or someone? What’s your resilience strategy?

It’s probably not going to be as sophisticated as yours, but I’m very lucky because I get to fly on an airline I want and I like very indulgent ones that usually have very nice wines and spirits. I enjoy a little bit of that.

You actually drink in the air?

I do but not heavily anymore.

If I drink anything in the air, I get taken out by that. You are tough.

Not a lot but a little bit. When I land, I have a regimen. They stock my room with about three cases of all kinds of water. I basically don’t eat anything for the first day. I have a contractual provision that I get five hours a night with two concurrent massage therapists, so I get the equivalent of ten hours of massage every night.

The human touch and the massage is part of your recovery.

I am paid to be elevated in my understanding, my connection, my attention, my empathic perception and I relax on a table and I can think very clearly because there’s nowhere else to go. I believe in my delusionary belief that getting all the cells opened up, the blood vessels flowing in all the areas doing what they’re supposed to do is very healthy. Everywhere I’ve ever traveled when I’ve spoken, I’ve had every night. Sometimes I’m too tired and only take three hours, but it’s as part of my contract. I also get acupuncture. I have a lot of regimens that I do, and I don’t really eat except if it’s thrust upon me, anything fried or sweet. I don’t like anything fried and I like very little sweet unless I’m drinking red wine, and then chocolate’s good. I drink a lot of water. I drink a little alcohol when I’m working, and I honestly get lots of body work.

When I get a massage, I usually go into some altered state after a little while. I’m not asleep, but I’m in a deep theta state where I’m dreamy, groggy, and not present. Are you sleeping during these five hours of massage, in an altered state, or you’re just lying there getting all the body work done and fully awake the whole time and thinking?

It’s an integration of the first two. It’s very relaxing because my mind has never learned how to turn off in most endeavors, but what happens is all these thoughts you’ve commanded to the recesses of your subconscious converge and your mind works for you the way it’s supposed to. It collaborates, it combines, it integrates, it produces all these remarkable breakthrough concepts when you’re not trying to withhold or suppress them. I get the best breakthrough clarity when I’m lying. I get acupuncture, and I refuse to do an hour, it’s too little. I do at least two hours. I used to have a guy that would come for one full day a month, and I would just sit there and roll and roll and take notes of everything that came out of my reflection because you’re forced. I’m running so fast so often that some of the best things I want to remember and preserve don’t get acted upon or even dimensionalized because something else happens. When you’re in an environment where it’s forced, concentrated, creative reflection is very intoxicating, liberating and clarifying.

You’re doing a lot of self-care in order to operate at that level. You also did some work with Dr. Barry, a guy you introduced me to. Are you open to talk about that?

I do lots of things. Now you can get stem cells. I used to get frozen sheep embryo flown in from Switzerland and I would do eight injections a month. I get IVs all the time for the brain and other things. Dr. Barry is remarkable. Most people don’t understand that there are levels of energy that transcend anything you could get from a Red Bull. There’s nothing wrong if you like Red Bull using energy to propel the capacity in your brain, your cellular structure, intellect and perceptivity. He’s done some of the most famous people in the world. He does Tony Robbins, does very famous iconic families. He does very famous sports figures. Explaining what he does is hard. I used to go to Australia 30 years ago. Australia, for some reason, was a crucible of developmental of a lot of alternative issues before they made it here. I would get introduced to all kinds of things twenty years before they would come here. I was very open-minded because they had a positive impact.

You introduced me to Dr. Barry Morguelan, who’s a UCLA surgeon from Kentucky. He’s the last thing you’d imagine one of twelve living grandmasters of a very ancient Chinese lineage of energy medicine would look like. He went and trained with a group of people or a lineage that is the precursor to Shaolin and some of the shamanic practices, very ancient. These are the people who would protect the emperor of China. They’d protect him energetically and went through the training on how to melt a glacier by sitting on it, the sort of stuff that Wim Hof does but on a mountain in China; a day’s hike away from anything.

These incredible stories and this humble guy who doesn’t look at all like that can do things. He’s a very credible surgeon who trains doctors all over the world on how to do endoscopic GI surgery. I know that you get work done by him and I rolled my eyes when you introduced me to him. I said, “He doesn’t really look the part,” and then I experienced what he could do. It was like, “There are absolute noticeable differences that are not subtle in what he does.” He wrote the meditation for Head Strong because I didn’t know anyone with his breadth of power and knowledge on this stuff, because it’s medical and mystical.

If you look in history at people who one would say is a force of nature, I would argue that they were not as much that as they were people who learned how to harness and command forces within nature to their directives.

He’s the kind of guy that can walk into a park and all the dogs will walk up to him if he wants them. It’s powerful. You’re a very well-known business guru and someone who’s performed at a level that’s pretty unusual for decades. I’m doing okay and we both do stuff like that and we’re not alone, even though a lot of people won’t go out there and talk about that stuff. When you integrate the low level stuff where our bodies are integrated with the environment around us, this mitochondrial connection to the world, and this cognitive thing that you and I both also do that when you get everything working together, it seems like the system has a lot more power, and I’m blown away. It’s cool that you introduced me to him and that you wanted to talk publicly about the fact that you do things like acupuncture, massage and body work, and this trans energetic medicine because they help you. How do you know they help you though?

I didn’t get ill for eight years in a row when I did one regimen. I can tell you that I’ve had Barry work on me when I was exhausted and walked out of the room so radiant that I went for twelve hours nonstop. He works on Tony every night when Tony does his programs, and Tony’s pretty elevated in the methodologies he uses.

Tony glows when he walks. He’s so bouncing with energy. It’s amazing.

We try to be very precise. I am very aware of myself. I’ve been disciplined to try to understand what’s going on in a conversation, in an action interaction, so I’m very aware of my performance, my brain power. I’ve been very blessed because I have a very broad context of understanding, but I can tell when it’s been elevated to a much more stratospheric level. All these elements I’m telling you about, they have elevated my intellectual performance coupled with my energy, coupled with my concentration, coupled with my odds. They’ve even helped my authenticity, meaning the connection I’m able to make with others. I can’t tell other people to do it, but I can tell you that if you take my work, which is all about optimization, highest and best use of in the business arena, everything you do, everyone you do it with, everything you spend, everybody, every opportunity you have and you translate it to your work, why would you want to live a life sub-optimally if you have within your reach the way to make every day more vibrant, more vital, more mentally alive, more observant, more perceptive, more sensory impactful. It makes no sense to me.

It comes down to awareness. I was paying attention to how I felt and how I performed and I noticed the difference.

A sustaining difference and a compounding positive difference.

One of the problems that I had was learning to trust my own perceptions. The last thing we want to do is be fooled by some placebo effect or something like that. How do you know when you’re getting a placebo effect versus something that’s real?

The answer is twofold. If you do it once, you may not, but if you do it enough repetitive times, you can tell. It’s empirical. It’s not anecdotal. You can either see you’re going to feel like crap, you’re going to feel moot, or you’re going to feel great.

How do I feel? Either you know how you feel or you don’t, and if you feel good and you didn’t before, that’s a useful data point.

Most people don’t know.

They haven’t learned to cultivate the awareness of on a scale of one to a hundred, where am I right now? It’s a powerful thing to note when there’s a big fluctuation and figure out what might that have been. Could it have been the acupuncture? I went in, I felt like crap. I went out and either I felt weird or I felt much better, but to say it had no effect would be probably not matching the reality.

I get acupuncture three times a week for two hours when I’m home. If you’ll notice my ear, I didn’t cut myself. It looks like little Band Aids. They all have needles in them.

Go to Bulletproof.Com/YouTube to see this on the YouTube channel.

I get them when I leave. I have them put long lasting adhesive needles on all the major impact points, and it has a sustaining effect. I’ve gauged my performance with and without it. First of all, you talked about people not knowing how they feel. Most people are so out of touch with their lives and what’s going on. You’ll say to somebody how you feel great. Somebody will say it to me and I know they don’t listen. I’ll say, “My arm hurts.” I’ll say a bunch of negative things just to see if they even hear, and they say, “Oh great.”It is a tragedy not for them disrespecting me, but for them disrespecting themselves because they’re not in touch.

I noticed something when I moved to Canada that shocked me when I first came here. If you go to the convenience store here, the cashier says, “How are you doing?” At least half the time they’re going to hear your answer. If you said, “It’s been a crappy day,” they’d be like, “Tell me about it.” I feel like when I’m in New York or a big city, they’re probably not going to ask, and if they do, you could basically say, “There are aliens invading,” and they wouldn’t hear what you had to say. Maybe it’s because it’s dark and cold up here, so people are bored, but whatever it is, I noticed it and it freaked me out at first. The people are listening. I should be more aware of what I say.

Isn’t that connectivity wonderful? You feel so much closer and meaningful and it can transform. We have a regimen and it’s delightful. When I go to Asia, not as much Latin America, but a lot of people in Asia have very dour, non-evocative emotion. We have a protocol. First day, I hydrate. The next day, I go to the bar or the lobby and I sit for four hours and smile at people till they smile back. Then I ride the elevator for two hours and do the same in the elevator. Then I get off on every floor and I engage very briefly all the housekeepers and the service people because they don’t get acknowledged. Most of us don’t acknowledge one another. Very sad but it’s great fun and that inspires me. I get great joy out of it, like a recycling of energy.

When you fly to Japan or to China, you’ll do this?

Everywhere I go in Asia, I do it in China, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Singapore. When you see somebody smile, their body language change. Their eyes start going from tepid to sparkly. There’s a transformative little aura about them because they felt a little bit better about themselves if you engage them. It’s very fun to try to engage somebody that doesn’t speak English and still be interested and empathic. It’s a wonderful exercise. It’s very tragic that more people don’t allow themselves to do it because you are the beneficiary more the people that you give to.

It’s true that you’re very giving that way. I remember the first time we met, I came to the coffee shop opening or we had lunch somewhere, you and your wife and I. I spilled my Bulletproof coffee because my mug malfunctioned and we were just laughing and I was like, “I can’t believe I did that.” You’re very fun and open that way. Some business gurus aren’t that way. They’re a little bit wooden. I knew a bunch of good people in the field and I wouldn’t want to disparage them inadvertently.

We lose track in our lives of humility and humanity. If you can keep yourself focused on our relevancy and irrelevancy, it’s very wonderful because everybody has value and worth and everyone has a perspective, whether you like them or not. One of the things I learned early in my life was to very carefully try to examine, evaluate, understand, explore, respect, and appreciate how other people see life because that’s their reality. You can’t change the reality till you embrace someone’s value system.

Important Links:

• Head Strong: The Bulletproof Plan to Activate Untapped Brain Energy to Work Smarter and Think Faster in Just Two Weeks
• Bulletproof Collagen Bites
• Jay Abraham
• Tony Robbins
• Tony Robbins Platinum
• Dr. Barry Morguelan