How to Define Success in 2025 | Dave Asprey

0:00This is the GaryVee Audio Experience. Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Gary Vee Audio Experience. I'm Mike from Team Gary Vee and on today's episode of the podcast we're sharing an interview that Gary did with Dave Asprey. They talk about a bunch of important topics like the significance of social media, the importance of redefining success, and focusing on joy. I hope you all enjoy. Thank you for having me on and honestly I love your audience so the answer to this question is going to be pretty fun. I've been spending a lot, you know it's funny you said not a scientist. because I think of myself that way.

0:33I'm not kidding. I was just about to say I've been in the lab. And what that means is I've been in my head. You know, people see me, especially people that don't know me as well here may see me super loud, super New Jersey, maybe a couple curse words. And I'm very empathetic to the first glance being like, is this guy for real? Is he a blowhard? Other people love it and it clicks. Just how the world works. But what's ironic is when people see me on social media or on stages, I'm talking the whole time, right? even in this format. I'm gonna speak a lot. I even get excited at times and interrupt you, so I apologize in advance to everyone who's listening.

1:09But the reality is I spend most of my time actually thinking. My favorite thing in the world is the shower, is the walk to work, is the long flight. And so I've been in the lab a lot, in my own head for the last year especially, on the concept of redefining success. I think about root cause, right? You know, I think about like, when I think about health and wellness, I think about like, the food system is very entrepreneurial. You know, America's a capital, listen, I'm an entrepreneur. I love capitalism. But when capitalism, like anything in life, goes too far, it does things like what's going on with our food situation, right?

1:46Things like that. I think about these things. You know, it's funny. I wouldn't have pegged you as someone who would call that out on the show. Maybe I'm just being, you know, like you're such a broad spectrum entrepreneur, but more media. Yeah, so you're worried about the food supply too, huh? I think about clean eating a lot. Yeah. I think about laws. I think about the fact that grass-fed can be worked around, but grass-finished can't. So when did this come online for you? Because I don't know that 10 years ago this was in your conscious field. What changed for you? In general, I would argue that most of the good that's happened in my life is curiosity.

2:24And I'm also a kid that was born in the Soviet Union. So for example, my great grandma Anya, when we moved to New Jersey out of Queens, the first day she visited, in the morning when I woke up, she made me go walk outside barefoot on the grass. No kidding. So grandmothers are always biohackers if they were trained by their grandmothers, right? Right, especially from the old country. My grandma spent her first 75 years in the Soviet Union, which is 50 years behind America. Or fasting. Because I grew up in my dad's liquor store, I didn't eat breakfast or lunch my entire life. I still don't, predominantly.

3:04So anyway, obviously I'm very aware of your audience. And it's funny because the reason I'm bringing these things up is it's how I see entrepreneurship. So I love entrepreneurship because I think it is one of the arenas in the world that allow people to maximize their joy. I love building businesses the way I see my friends who are poets how I see my friends you know I see entrepreneurship today unlike when you and I played with it in the mid 90s even that short ago now it's cool so now kids are forcing themselves to be entrepreneurs and that scares me I want people to be entrepreneurs if they are entrepreneurs but I'm petrified if somebody does it because they think it's the cool thing to do thanks for saying that well because you know this Dave like it's really lonely and hard and it hurts your self esteem because unlike school you can't hide when you fail in entrepreneurship yeah do you hear that interview with the founder of NVIDIA I did not well they asked him what would you tell yourself back when you and a friend were in college dorms starting Nvidia, what advice would you have?

4:27And his advice was don't do it. It was you have no idea how much suffering this is going to cause you. This is one of the most successful entrepreneurs on the planet, right? Well, it's funny. I don't know him and I've heard many people say that through the years and I don't think they actually mean it. I think it's a soundbite. For example, I think when you're a purebred entrepreneur, this is going to be a left field one. I actually think the adversity is the most delicious side dish. Yeah, because if you're used to fighting. Correct. It changes though. I've heard your stuff has changed as well.

5:05So for me at the beginning it was even before Bulletproof just in tech entrepreneurship it was like I'm going to prove something to the world or to myself and probably more to the world. Like I'm going to fight, I'm going to push. This is very common. I think there's two fuels. I think there's chip on shoulder. Right, I certainly had that. And I think a lot of people had that. You know, I'm very fortunate. I don't love using the word luck, but this is as black and white like luck to me as possible. Between my DNA, the mother who was a suffocating force of positivity and optimism. Suffocating optimism.

5:49Suffocating optimism, but practicality, not modern parenting where you also add delusion, which eliminates merit. Incredibly optimistic and positive and sunshine, but held me accountable, a word that has completely disappeared from modern parenting. And circumstance. I believe if I was born in America as a third generation DNA of my family entrepreneur, my life would have looked very different but I was born in the Soviet Union and came here and grew up with the struggles that gave me outrageous perspective to gratitude. When you are, I believe Dave, that the greatest gift is when you are born, if in the first 10 years of your life, you are not in incredible means, you're lower middle class and below, this is the greatest way to be born.

6:39That money is not a thing in your family yet or maybe ever but you have unlimited happiness. you've been taught you've been built you've been affected by money is not the variable of happiness that is kind of true in the science but a lot of the studies I found and this is before they inflated the crap out of the currency in the last three years all the money we printed it said about$74 ,000 right I've seen that I think you're struggling all the time and you only have ramen oh by the way I know people who have$200 ,000 but are always in debt, are making$200 ,000 a year. I mean, it's so funny because I talk to many of my employees.

7:24I can't say all because they don't all take me up on my open door policy and I don't get to everyone. But it's crazy because I'm so well-known as an entrepreneur, but I'm the CEO of this company and I speak to kids all the time that work for me. They will often bring up that their parents were entrepreneurs, if they were, or anti-entrepreneur, right? Like one of the two. like a union man right like whatever it might be and it's really interesting this is so cliche i'm sure this will land for everyone it's interesting to watch them then react to that right they either go all in on it or they go all out on it and the ones that go all out on it tend to be the ones that lived in families regardless of how well they were doing always stressing about money because you know there's also the other part in society that we've lost which is there's making money, but there's also saving money.

8:13And you know, Dave, you and I grew up when people talked about saving money. There are people that I know, and especially in this new world, with inflated dollars like you just talked about, who make a million dollars a year and don't have a dollar to their name because they're buying dumb shit. Yeah. It's a real problem. I kind of cringe when I see guys with 25, with a Ferrari and all that. Even if you have the money when you're 25, you probably don't need to buy. I cringe less about the savings and money. I always ask myself, does he need that to patch up an insecurity? Are we using things to make ourselves happier?

8:52Which gets me all the way back. I'm sorry, audience, but I'm coming all the way back to the answer to your question. What would I say to 25 or 45 year old, depending on start or transition? Please pick something you actually like. it hasn't changed that much because of AI or anything like that no because I think I think it's incredibly hard and if you're gonna build something for yourself you don't know if you're destined to have a 10 million dollar business or a 300 ,000 dollar business but if you love it if you love Star Trek more than anything in the world and you wanna build a business around that passion you start a podcast you make content for social media that then leads to Creative Commons product like t-shirts or you create like anything.

9:40Literally, that's what's so amazing about the world now. You create anything. Anything from a beanie to a protein powder that maybe is a slang term that Spock said in episode four of season three. I don't know Star Trek very well, but I'll use Star Wars. Greedo was my favorite Star Wars character. tier seven character in the Star Wars ecosystem. But like when you know something deeply or you love something deeply, we live in an unprecedented time in the world where the internet, the blockchain, AI, the mobile device, you and I, when we started our stuff back in the day, we didn't live in this lucky time where we could have just done organic content and got free distribution.

10:26Dave, social media is free distribution. Do you know how insane that is? It's so crazy. You know that caffeine t-shirt I talked about a long time ago? I sold it to 16 countries in alt.drugs.caffeine on Usenet, which is basically Reddit from 1990. I remember it. Right? And it was the first time someone had done that. And it wasn't that much money, but I was just trying to pay my rent and tuition. So I was happy about it. And it was very scrappy. It's one of those things, though. All I had to do was talk about it to my people because I finally found my people. But now you can find new people anywhere.

11:01Well, even better, in the same way that I was on Prodigy and then the internet, on the E. Robert Parker Mark Squires bulletin board talking about wine to find my community and then make them aware of Wine Library, you and I had to spend hours, countless hours of building community to have a community. Today, Wine Library TV started on February 21st, 2006. YouTube itself was created, launched on December 15th, 2005. Within two months or roughly a little more than two months after YouTube existed, I started a long form wine show about wine on YouTube. I made a 20 minute video, I posted it. 19 people watched it, maybe.

11:51today 2006 Gary with his which I was born with my charisma and capability to communicate and my wine knowledge at that point was more than half my life because I started learning about it at 14 that first video Dave might be watched by 800 ,000 people the first one wow I mean it could also have gotten 80 but anybody who's listening right now let me just give you the universal truth. If you do not take social media seriously in 2024, it doesn't mean you're going to go out of business. It doesn't mean that you're bad. It doesn't mean that you're like, but you are absolutely missing out on opportunity to create your thing.

12:32That is incredible. And the speed and time, if you produce content on the internet of building awareness and opportunity, because the algorithm now is letting the creative to find its audience. When I started doing social back in the mid-2000s, and you and everybody else, all of us, when we started doing 2005, 6, 7, 8, 9, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, it was more like email marketing. You have to make content and slowly but surely build a following, aka a list. And then you would post, and 30 % to 40%, just like email newsletters, of your audience would see it. Today, what we have is the interest graph, not the social graph.

13:11The social graph was build the following post. The interest graph is make something and let the algorithm, the AI, find the audience of the billions of people it has on the platform. That is remarkable. It's crazy remarkable because you don't have to do all the sleuthing. Are you worried though? And this is something that I'm really thinking about. When podcasts first started, you had an early podcast, I had an early podcast, right? You could make, you can have these conversations and now there's a, there's one guy, every single guest I've had on my show for 10 years, he'll call them the next day and try and schedule the same interview.

13:56Yep. Right. And there's a lot of kind of people who will go to a website. In fact, you probably even as the people in your group, here's how to ethically steal this business model. No, it's not ethical stealing, but they're going and they're just mirroring a competitor's website right over. It feels like the amount of new information and signal to noise is going down and we're just getting an echo chamber of a bunch of people saying the same thing but moving their hands differently and now with AI avatars. Is it going to be impossible to find the good stuff versus all the copies of good stuff that are lower quality copies?

14:32I've never had the audacity to judge what people decide is good. Well, no, hold on. That's bullshit. You sell wine. Yes, but if you, you know what? There's ratings for wine. There is. And if you go watch the thousand episodes of Wine Library TV, I would always say, trust your palate. I would say, the reason I'm doing this show is I'm tired of people only buying what Wine Spectator and Parker buy and give good ratings. And then I would say, vehemently, almost every episode, hey, by the way, I just rated this wine 94 points, but I love Big League Chew. I love beef jerky I love uni I love oysters I love sweetbreads I love Jolly Ranchers and Lemonheads unless you like every single thing I like you have to and this was the thing I said 40 ,000 times you have to trust your own palate so I value craft I think when the story you just told me my brain went to yeah but he or she may not be as good at interviewing as you are so they can have the same exact guests but you might ask different questions.

15:39Even if they decided to ask the same questions, I believe in energy. I believe that the intent, I believe in the moment, I believe in all these other variables. So, you know, to me, listen, I've had a career where people have done slight variations and tweaks and very slight and have built things but I always say, but what about me? I was affected by Randy the Macho Man Savage wrestling interviews. And I loved Chris Rock and Eddie Murphy. And like when I watch my keynotes, like meaning I don't watch them, like when I'm on stage and I do keynotes, somewhere about a year or two in, I'm like, wait a minute, this feels a lot like Macho Man and Eddie Murphy mixed up with a little bit of like, you know, I think that's how the world has always worked to your point.

16:24The size and scale we're playing at now. Yeah. Right? The size and scale we're playing at now. And there's a lot and AI's coming. But I don't know, you know, it's funny. maybe this goes back to being suffocated by practical optimism. I'm optimistic. I believe that the cream does rise to the top. I believe that you don't get to choose how much competition you have, right? I doubt. You really don't. And I like to figure out the merit of it. And I also have enjoyed, and this is also fun being with you because we've been through this journey and have seen each other from afar or up close at times.

17:01We have moments, right? You and I both have had moments in our career. Yeah, sometimes we're hotter and winning more than we are. You think about all the personalities that have come up in the internet age that you and I can think of now. Early podcasters, early Twitter personalities. Some come and go. They have a good year. Other people have been consistently around. Some people have family events or their own personal. This is why I want people to choose things they love. Many of the personalities that have fallen off have fallen out because of burnout. It's so common, right? You haven't burned out and you run, man.

17:36I feel like I've seen your energy. It's consistently high. It's because you like what you do and because of your optimism, but there's probably something else in there. Gratitude. It's gratitude. It's perspective. It's brother, when I tell you, man, God, this is like so fucking even emotional. I just don't know how to value anything other than the health of the people around me. I don't know how to do it. Of course I am proud of my career. Of course I'd like to do well. I'd like everything I do to do well. Of course I'm grateful for the accolades. I'm empathetic to the people that want to tear down my building because they don't know me and I don't mind when they leave a negative comment.

18:19Like I'm empathetic. I just, the reason I will never run out of energy is I don't value this stuff enough. I will tell you something. I know we don't know each other that well but I know that we, it's one of those things we have a good sense of each other even though we haven't had the luxury of that kind of time yet. And I say yeah because I hope we get those dinners and times. Me too.

18:42I don't value myself based on my professional career even though it's my passion. I don't get self-validation from Gary V or the successes or the followers or the money or the headlines. I just don't. I get validation from the people that actually know me, how they speak about me behind my back. That is something that if I could have internalized that when I was in my early 20s, that would have been life changing for me. And I write all my stuff and I feel like you do too, just like this is what you need to know. And if you learn it early on, it profoundly changes what you do. The amount of time you're trying to prove stuff to other people or you're responding to trolls and all that kind of stuff, it sucks the life out of you.

19:28And if you just say it doesn't matter. And then if you say the level above, which is don't feel bad for you, feel bad for them. Could you, Dave, could you, for everybody who's listening, really if I could accomplish anything in this podcast, it would be to encourage you to go try the thing you've been debating. And I know for all of you, literally the fundamental reason that you haven't yet started posting on social media to do the thing. Because that's what you would do. We live in 2023, 2024. is because you're genuinely concerned about the judgment. And that judgment - That's totally true, right?

20:04And the judgment can come from your mother, right? Like the judgment can come from your spouse. The judgment can come from your children. These are important people. They can come from your coworkers, your boss, your best friend. And then unfortunately it can come from JohnnyPants47 because you once posted something and he said you were ugly or stupid or you're wrong. Right, wrong. And so, for me, the level even above, like it doesn't matter, which is absolutely true, is what about having empathy for your mom who's always been negative and has always put you down? Because I promise you, her mom or dad or both did the same to her.

20:48The reason I've been able to continue to go, Dave, because again, this is a fun interview because we don't get to catch up often and I'm sure you, but we're both watching always, is I'm able to go because I have empathy and compassion for the people that are trying to tear me down, not anger. So you're always welcome if you find you need a job at any point to be a facilitator at 40 years of Zen. This is my neuroscience company where I teach entrepreneurs with neuroscience how to do gratitude and empathy and forgiveness so they can fit that state. I spent six months rewiring my brain to do exactly that.

21:22Good for you. But you, how did you pick this up? Is this from your mom? 100%. And the DNA. And it was, look, I was such a poor student. I'm not a reader. I'm not a consumer. I'm like this very interesting consumer. I'm consuming everything, thus almost rendering me consuming nothing. Deeply curious, always gravitated towards humans. Here's a good one. My mom, if she was, you know, she's very behind the scenes. My dad would do a podcast. He likes to live light. My mom's very behind the scenes. my mom would tell you that the weirdest thing the most interesting intriguing thing about my childhood was starting at about three to six predominantly in Queens in the early 80s late 70s we would go outside to get some fresh air or whatever we were doing and I would pull her arm I would gravitate to go sit on a bench with a stranger who's over 80 holy crap that my great grandfather that my great grandfather who passed away, unfortunately, pretty quickly after we got here was my best friend in my youth.

22:26My great-grandfather, Shia. Now, and I don't remember three to five, but I remember six to 10 when grandparents would visit my friends. And again, I'm an 80s baby, so we were outside all the time. And when a grandparent would come for the holidays or a birthday, and they'd come to the park where we were playing basketball or baseball or wiffle ball or football, I would always go out of my way to go talk to them. And now in my, you know, especially, you know, don't forget I was 34 years old before even I started any level of a public life. So I know myself because I lived it. Like I spent my 20s and my early 30s building a business for my father.

23:10I owned none of Wine Library. I never got paid much. I wanted to give back to my parents. I was very unique. I'm a first generation immigrant. I was born in the old country. I was in a cocoon. I wasn't a good student. I didn't go to a university that expanded my world. I was family business, immigrant life, cocoon, didn't go out. I was closed in this beautiful closed environment that made it unique, which is why now in my 40s, I'm like, ah, I loved wisdom. I'll give you one. Right now, we champion youth. Yeah. We want to look younger. We love, the kids have more say, you know, Gen Z, even young millennials had more say with their parents and in the workplace than our generations.

23:56We clap for the youth. 70 years ago, we clapped for the elderly. Wow. And I believe we're in the pre-dawn of going back. I believe in the next 20 to 30 years after this chapter of our over-obsession of youth, we will counter it, because that's what we do over 50 and 100 year windows. and I believe that you will start to see signals. Right now, no, because we're in generational warfare. I've never seen the level of judgment of boomers versus Gen Z and Gen Z versus millennials. It's really unfortunate. Humans have found another thing to tribalize to be bad at each other and it breaks my heart. But I do believe you will see more, back to social media and branding, I believe you will see more breakout stars who are in their 70s, 80s, and 90s who start pot.

24:45if you're listening right now and you're 70 and older, please start a podcast called The Wisdom Week or What I've Learned. And don't be insecure. Everybody who's 80 has something massive to put deposit to the world. Tell us about your life. Tell us about what you learned because that's what I've always been drawn to. So I think to answer your question, where did this come from? I think I came out a 90-year-old man. Wow. You know, this is also just an enormous drop of knowledge. The reason I started the biohacking movement is because when I was 26 and my health was failing and I had brain fog and arthritis and just all the bad stuff, I hung out with a room like 60 to 100 people in their 70s, 80s and 90s who taught me longevity before it was supposed to be done.

25:41And that led to me becoming an expert in the field. I didn't know how to do it so I asked the old people. And old people know a lot and the crazy thing is they want to share it because they have a lifetime of wisdom and they got nothing else to do with it but just share it. And especially now because families unfortunately are not respecting their elderly especially in America more than ever and they're just sitting around with so much to give which is why I'm telling all of them that are listening don't wait for your grandchildren to ask start a podcast. Go make TikToks. tell us because my great I'll tell you exactly when in August I'll tell you the exact month in August of 1982 my babushka Anya when I woke up instead of making me breakfast took me outside in my bare feet and made me walk on the grass for 15 minutes and now it's cool to do grounding in 20 you know they know and when we used to drive on the highway my grandma Esther and my babushka Anya they would go crazy when they would see something in the grass on the side of the highway and we would pull over and we would pick it and we would bring it home and they would dry it and make it tea.

26:52Now I've learned all these years later that's that it's a St. John Wart or Wart yeah so right it's called Zvita Boy in Russian. We would literally be driving to like the beach or to the store and out of nowhere I mean we'd be listening to like Michael Jackson or Cindy Lauper on the radio if we you know out of nowhere, my grandma or uncle or my great grandma would be, Zvita boy, Zvita boy, which would mean my mom would have to pull over on the highway. We had bags, plastic bags in our trunk and we would go outside and I'd have to go out there as a seven-year-old and pull the Zvita boy and we would fill the bags.

27:32And then 30, 40 years later, I hear people on social or podcasts or wherever I see it or over dinner talk about like, hey, there's this thing, it's good for depression or things of that nature. And I'm like, wait a minute. I Googled it and I looked at it. I'm like, motherfucker, that's a bit of a boy. You know, and so there's a, I mean, especially people that are from outside the US because the US has always been a modern society. You get some real old world shit from the immigrant grandparents. And you don't even have to do it with your own grandparents. I just mentioned two of my grandparents.

28:07I really only grew up with a grandma a great grandma who had dementia pretty early a great great grandfather who I told you died very early other than that my mom lost her mom at five my dad lost his dad at 16 so when you ask me about me I grew up fearing my parents dying so much of course so much that once they didn't by the time I got to 18 I kind of went into I won and now I'm just going to like live on pure gratitude and yes, and it's really wild. Like I would actually argue that in my essence, I'm the most opposite of what people think an entrepreneur is. I would say that it's weird that I became an entrepreneur.

28:53Like I'm so simplistic. Like I love the idea of living in an incredibly remote town and making my own food and going to sleep at set. Like I would have crushed 1643. But there was one other thing. One of my DNA traits is I'm an entrepreneur and I did want to sell flowers when I was five and I did want to sell lemonade and when it snowed and everybody sled and played snowball fights, I did ring doorbells and shovels like driveways. So I had this weird mix, but all this movement today, I think parallels into entrepreneurship importantly, so I'm going to recall it all the way back. I believe in the same way that the biohacking and food and mental health, if we can reframe entrepreneurship and tell people, don't follow the next trend.