 This is mine pump today's episode. This one was a fun one. So when you hear the term bio hacker, you're probably like, yeah, I've heard that a million times. Well, at one point that term didn't even exist. Well today we interviewed the person that started it all Dave Asprey. This guy was a bio hacker before anybody knew what the term meant. In fact, he's the reason why that term even exists. He is the pioneer of that entire space and he's never stopped. Now I'm going to be quite honest getting into this episode. I thought I knew who he was. But as this episode and this interview progressed, I quickly learned he is not the person I thought. In fact, this is the most uncensored, real interview of Dave Asprey. You're ever going to hear he won all of us over. We love the guy. It was a great episode, no holds barred uncensored. It was incredible. He went into when he started his business, how we built it, his relationship with money, bio hacking, the whole deal, his relationship with his former company. It's pretty amazing. The guy pulls no punches. We think you're going to love him as much as we did at the end of this episode. It was pretty amazing. By the way, he has an incredible podcast called the human upgrade. And he always is searching for the newest ways, the cutting edge tech ways to improve longevity and health. This guy is brilliant, very smart guy, one of the best entrepreneurs in the health and fitness space. Again, listen to this episode. You're going to hear some uncensored talk. By the way, check out his new company, dangercoffee.com. The name alone is just incredible. Today's YouTube giveaway is Maps Power Lift. Here's how you can enter to win. Leave a comment below this video in the first 24 hours that we drop it. Subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications. We'll let you know in the comment section if you want. Also, we got a sale going on this month. Maps performance is half off and the extreme fitness bundle of programs is also half off. If you're interested, just click on the link at the top of the description below. All right, here comes the show. Dave, thanks for coming on the show. It's going to be fun. Awesome. So you have one of the most recognizable brands in the kind of health space. And it seemed to have exploded at a no where. I remember when I first heard about some of the stuff you're doing and it just continued to grow, I want to go all the way back. I want to go all the way back to how it all started and then kind of go along the journey of what this has been like for you entering into the health space and then just kind of crush it. Yeah, what did entrepreneurship really start for you? It started when I was 12. Okay. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. So I read this, I guess it was an entrepreneur magazine back then and it was talking about what venture capitalists do. I'm like, that sounds like fun. I can help people start companies. I want to start a company. And when you're 12, you know what you're talking about. Right. But then when I was in college, I started college when I was 16. By the time I was 19 thinking, all right, I got to figure out a pay for this because college is getting more and more expensive. And today it's insane. So I said, I got to start a business here. So I started making t-shirts and I sold them at the Halloween parties, you know, it was a big special event at that school. But I went online and we didn't have the web browser yet. This was like old text interface stuff like internet 1.0. And I put this thing up like, here's this t-shirt I made. And I sold t-shirts to 16 countries out of my dorm room. Wow. And they had this, the caffeine molecule on them. And it said caffeine, my drug of choice. So a little while later, this professor from Rutgers University, which is a big sign, went to a state school and he, you know, kind of Ivy League. He's like, no one's ever going to make money on the internet. And I was like, oh yeah, Mr. Ivy League, you know, angry college student kid. Like I'm already making money on the internet. So you don't know what you're talking about. And the next day, the Miami Herald calls and then there's an article about me in entrepreneur magazine. And a lot of people say, Dave, you never weighed 300 pounds. You're a liar. And I'm like, so is your mom. And let's let you go too. I like it. Was that how, did I say that out loud? And then I pull out my picture from entrepreneur magazine when I'm in a double X to large t-shirt. What year was it? Is it, you're only 17 or 16, 17 right now? I might have been 19. About 19 there. Yeah. Um, maybe even 21 by the time the article came out somewhere around there. And I'm in a double X to large t-shirt in entrepreneur magazine. And this is the first product ever sold over the internet before we had spam and before we had e-commerce. It wasn't called e-commerce because then you could do it. And two weeks after that, the first spam hit the internet because of what I said in that article, which was don't, we didn't have the word spam. I'm like, don't send people emails that they didn't ask for. So of course, attorneys started spam. Now, how did you, how did you sell things back then? Would people just email you? I want this. And then it was horrible. You want to know the, the real way. So yeah, it was by email, but then how they pay you. So you could actually fax a check. No. Oh, really? Really? That's what I said. I did not know that. So I figured that stuff out. And then I was one of the first guys to sign up with this company called First Virtual, the first online payment. Crazy thing. Like 25 years later, I met Bernie, man. And I meet the founder of First Virtual. Oh, wow. Full circle, huh? Yeah. It was the coolest thing. This is really amazing guy who's actually working on mitochondrial biology now. So you just, I was the right place, right time. But that was the entrepreneur thing. I, it was, I need to pay my bills. And then I started in Silicon Valley. I came here and I just desperately wanted to start something. And there's a picture right there. Look at that. Yeah, you found me. That's you right there. Wow. That's me. Wow. That's actually the photo from Entrepreneur Magazine. Wow. Was that you at 300? The, what, what do you think you waited there? I might have been like 282. Yeah. Yeah. That's not peak form. My, my, my peak was actually 297. Naked, so I just rounded to 300. So guys like, actually, I'm a liar. I mean, just in case you can't find out. Wow. Wow, that's very interesting. Yeah. Cool. That was me. I guess I was 23 there. I, there's, there's your, your current dates. Very cool. All right. All right. By the time all this stuff came out, but I was doing the teacher stuff when I was 19 and 20. Yeah. So that's how it all started there. And so I wanted to do it, but I came to Silicon Valley, ended up co-founding. I was one of three guys who started, it was called intrapreneurship inside the first company that held servers for Google. And Google was two guys and two computers, right down the street, actually, from here, uh, we built 42 data centers, companies called Exodus communications. I co-founded the consulting group there. We did $100 million a quarter in revenue, just for that part of the company. And grew the company to $36 billion. Well, you leap from t-shirts to that. Fuck. I do something, but here's the thing. I joined a 300 person company and my business unit was me and two other guys and we had no money and the, no one even knew what we were doing. We just started making shitloads of money and got everyone's attention. And that's a great way to learn for entrepreneurs is find a way to start something inside a big business where you have accounting and HR and payroll and all the crap that drags most entrepreneurs down. And I learned, cause we grew from 300 people to 5,000 people in three years. So I saw every phase, including chapter 11 of a business. And so people say, oh, you know, every, someone told me this interview and it actually pissed me off. Dave, everything you touch turns to gold. Like, do you know how much I have suffered in, in Silicon Valley learning, marketing, operations, how to behave in business groups. So it's not like you just wake up to be an entrepreneur. You can wake up with the spirit of entrepreneurialism. The skill comes from apprenticeship and it comes from mentorship and it comes from working with people and it comes from a lot of training. Eventually I was head of business development, corporate development and head of technology for, for different companies, including major computer security companies, like Trend and Micro, that was my job. When I started Bulletproof, I was a VP at a publicly traded company, quarter million dollars a year in stock options. So I didn't need to start a business if I got two young kids. It was the worst idea ever, but when you're an entrepreneur, at least if you're wired like I am, you can feel when it's time to do something and it hurts to not do it. So like the whole world of health back then, no one talked about upgrading yourself, about hacking your health. That was language that was, you're not allowed to use and people got angry when I talk. Wait, hold on. So this makes a lot of sense now. So you're coming from the tech space, you're moving into the health space, now all the language that we take for granted makes perfect sense. That's all tech language. Yeah, I'm hacking your body. I'm a computer hacker. Wow. Literally, computer security. That's what we do. Wow, I did not know that, Dave. I didn't connect that to you. Wow. So, you know, some of the, I promise you that some of the things that people are hearing are running through infrastructure that one of the companies that I worked with built. Wow. In fact, probably more than one. I also ran the program three blocks from here for the University of California to teach web and internet engineering to all the engineers who built web 1.0. Like, so this is like my place. I have so much of my energies here in Silicon Valley. And so you want to go from telling people antivirus software is cool to telling them that having abs and a brain that's better and that you can be smart and feel good and have a great sex life. One of those is easier than the other. But the skills to do it came from really difficult entrepreneurship. And I have an MBA from Wharton, which doesn't help at all as an entrepreneur, it turns out. Sorry. When you look back, we actually have a very similar story. You brought up the point of like the, the luxury of working for a company that you watch scale and grow. So we were a part of the largest fitness company back in the day. So back in the day, there was nobody in the billions of dollars. 24 fitness was the first to move to $2 billion. He sold a Fortsman a little shortly after that. We were there in the early days and watched it and learned a lot of those lessons that has now applied to our own, our own journey. What are some of the big takeaways like that you like that was like, man, I'm so glad I went through that. And I applied that knowledge to, to current businesses and stuff. And can you, can you think back or draw back to some of the stuff? Most of the hardest parts of growing a business has to do with the human element. And if you're a mission driven, generally positive person and you approach the world the way game theory says you should, which is win-win. So when we can prove this with math now, there's a Nobel Prize over this. So if you approach someone and they do something nice to you, you do something nice to them. And that's the only move that makes sense. And if both people keep doing that, we get awesomeness. Problem is that if you want to make the most outcome for you, then you do something bad to take the stuff for you. Right? So if we were rational and not emotional, if you do something good, the other guy does something bad, you're like, fuck you. And then you cancel that person from your business, you fire them, whatever, right? And it's done. But what good hearted people will do is we'll assume it must be a mistake because we think they're like us. So we'll do something nice again. To prove that it must have been a mistake. And then they'll go, oh, they'll do something nice for you because they know that you're an easy sucker. Right? And they don't even know they're doing it. That's what narcissists do. So what you learn over time in any kind of business like that is how do you spot the people who are the takers, but don't even know they're takers. They will tell you with tears in their eyes that they have your back. They'll tell you that, oh, you remind me of my grandfather. Meanwhile, they're takers and they can't even face the fact to themselves. So I've had to work on that a lot because what happens when you become either more wealthy or more famous is people like that are attracted to you like moths to a flame. And that's why Hollywood celebrities are so insular and weird. Because unless you're another celebrity, that means at least you're both famous, you can hang. Or if you knew them before they were famous, anyone else is suspect and they've all been screwed so much because they're targeted by people. And I've certainly had that happen. So I've learned how to be way more selective in hiring executives because I've made some very terrible mistakes. What are some tail signs? Like when you when you look at somebody and like, how do you read? Yeah, like, are you, I imagine, okay, if you've experienced this a lot, you've got the ability to kind of feel it in a room pretty quick. Like if someone's authentic or not. You know, you can feel a lack of authenticity. That's pretty easy. If someone's faking it, everyone has that hardware, right? It's the fact that there's two weird categories of people. You're not going to see it. And those are the dangerous ones. And this comes from Lao Tzu's lineage. A friend of mine, Dr. Barry, taught this to me and there's there's four kinds of people. And there's category one people. They are win-win. So every deal they do, every interaction, some good happens for them. Some good happens for you. And that's just how they are. Very rare, right? There's category two people. They're usually win-win, but they make mistakes. And the thing is when you say, hey, man, you screwed up. You're like, oh, man, I'm really sorry. How do I make it right? And then you, you correct it and we move on. Okay. These are normal, healthy human beings, right? Cause we have blind spots. We screw up. We didn't mean to do it. We made a mistake. You know, we were drunk, whatever. Right. You clean up your puke. Like it's okay. Category three is though, their win-lose and they don't know it. So for them to win, someone has to lose. But they're completely blind to that fact. So these are the kind of people where you'll find them in a locked room and there's bodies everywhere. They have knives and they're covered in blood and you'll say, why'd you kill all the people? And they'll go, I didn't call the people. I couldn't call the people because I'm a nice person. And they'll believe it and they'll tell themselves they didn't do it. So they're so convincing because they believe their own bullshit, hook, line and sinker. I once had an executive. She told me, I don't fail. By the way, you should never hire someone who has never failed or so. That doesn't make you a failure, that's a flag. Yeah, so I just don't fail. I always win. I always find a way. And it turns out the way was to tell yourself that you won, even if there's bodies everywhere. And in that situation, more than $20 million in one year got spent that couldn't have got spent because I always win, right? And like, what the hell, how is this possible? It's on me if I'm, you know, if I'm CEO and all that stuff. But the bottom line is someone looks you right in the eye and they believe they're not lying, but they're just wrong. You're not going to pick up in authenticity. That's why they're so dangerous. And because they create a false reality, they always poison the minds of at least two other good people in your organization and take them out. And then the category fours are the worst. These are the sociopaths. They win, lose and they know it. They're like snakes. They're born that way. They, you're not going to detect them because they're the master manipulators. And if you have a sociopath, there's really not that much you can do other than kind of like the Johnny Depp, Amber Heard kind of situation. I don't know if that was sociopath, your narcissism or whatever, but clearly we might have been dealing with two of them on that one. Who knows, right? But whatever's going on there, you're like, you just have to go to court and it's like, if someone's going to walk away broke, right? So fortunately, I haven't run across many sociopaths. But the narcissists, they, they've destroyed culture regularly. Yeah. Do you think that you, so you're saying becoming successful or wealthy or somewhat known, you start to attract more of those threes and fours, especially the fours, actually threes, especially threes, 100% you do that. Okay. Right. And so what do you do about that? Well, it, some people are really good at spotting those. So you need to know who on your team is good at that. Oh, and that's something you learn, not as a small entrepreneur. It's something you learn in a larger environment. Build a team. Like not everyone needs to be the quarterback, right? You need every position full. So on my teams now, I have executives who are really good at intuition. And if we're going to hire someone in one or two of my detector people are like, something to feel right next, there's, you don't have to take a risk on anyone. So I wish I'd have been better at that. And I've hired tons of good people. And I've made some mistakes when hiring as well. And all entrepreneurs do that. But what we all do when we're young, and certainly what I did early in my career is you try to fix them, right? No, if you have a high performance team, like, hey, let's put all of our resources into the person who's fucking up the most. Yeah. What does it tell everyone else that you don't care about them? So the kindest thing you can ever do. Someone who's not a good fit, who's not performing. As you say, Hey, thank you for, for all your help. It's not working. So I'd like to help you find a job somewhere where your skills are going to be a good fit. And this is knit. And they can be really pissed off and, you know, do whatever they're going to do, but inside they're relaxed because they know it's not a good fit. So they're stressed all the time. They're dragging everyone else around them down. So when you let them go with kindness and truth, they're actually more relaxed. The rest of the team says, thanks God, thank God. And you actually make more money because you removed friction from your business. So funny you're talking about this right now because off air before you got here, we just had this conversation. I was with some friends this weekend and one of them's a big VC guy and I was telling them that one of the things that I have a challenge with right now is that my partners lean heavily on me to go out and look and find these investments for us that we do because on the side we invest in real estate and other companies. And, you know, we get these pitches all the time. And it's just, that's not my wheelhouse. It's none of our wheelhouse. And we got a ton of other things that are on our plate. And I'm like, and then you get these people that need money from you. And so they put their best foot forward and they sell the shit out of their company. And you can get all of us excited. Like, oh, yeah, that sounds great. And it's like, and I don't have the time to go and analyze that data. And he looked at me goes, well, why don't you have a financial analyst do that and work, have them work for you. And then they are the one talking to you, not the company who is looking out for their best interests. Have someone who's on your team go do it. It was like this light bulb moment for all of us. Like, why have we been doing this? Oh, yeah, it's ego. That's why we're doing it. Yeah, probably. I mean, it is. It's the same reason that most entrepreneurs end up investing a lot of the money they make in other small startups, because you think, well, I did it once or twice. Therefore, I must be good at figuring out whether someone's going to do this. Newsflash doing it and seeing whether someone else could do our different skill sets, but we convince ourselves we're going to suffer. Not good. Did you go through that? Did you ever? I've lost so much money in angel investments. Um, and I've also made some, but you have to have enough money to be able to make 20 investments. Yeah. And you know, I've had, I've had a couple that are probably going to be amazing at 160x. Um, and another one, what is that? That probably 30 or 40, right? Not huge investments, right? And for every one of those, though, I've had a couple, like five to tens and a bunch of just zero, zero, zero, zero, zero. Right. So the trick is to always invest way less than you want to invest. Uh, and probably did not invest. I, I, if I could go back when I was 26, I told you when I, you know, was part of that, that business, I made $6 million and I was 26 years old. Wow. That's about $18 million in Biden dollars. That math, maybe 20. Hold on one time. Is it? Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. That's going to occur in the post. Give it a couple more months. So, uh, it was a lot and I lost it when I was 28. So it's all, all of it. Yeah, all of it. No, you didn't. Most of the dot com people lost. Oh, yeah. There was so was tied up in the, in the stocks for your stock value order. Yeah. In my case, because I was doing, uh, I was doing M&A for diligence. Like I was the guy who would decide whether we were going to buy a billion dollar company or not, whether their tech worked. So what that meant was I knew all the deals were going to do. So I was always blacked out because I had inside information. Uh, and then there was another thing that happened with the IRS where people would sell their stock options and then lose all their money and still owe money to the IRS. So I had a lot of friends who went bankrupt. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was, it was like one year, BMWs and Mercedes and the next year just like tumbleweeds. As a 26 or 28 year old, I mean, cause you're still a kid. I was still a kid. Yeah, and you said you had young kids at the time or no? I didn't have those till a little bit later. Okay. So you're a young kid. How did you deal with, because that's got to be a, I mean, that's, that's a tough thing to go through for anybody. I used to say that's on the WHO list of like the top 10 most stressful things humans go through, but I don't believe anything the WHO says. So fuck those guys. So it's not on that list. And no, I'm not a part of their treaty in case someone was wondering. Now it is a really stressful event. So losing your life's fortune is, is shockingly stressful. I literally said I'm going to go get a degree in psychopharmacology when I'm done with this. Like I'm done. Like I can retire and study crazy, cool, cognitive-enhancing stuff and longevity and all the stuff that I'm doing anyway today. But realizing I was going to have to, you know, go back to work, it was, it was humbling. We built two eight-story buildings on their admission college in Highway 101 there. You drive past them every day. It used to be Yahoo back in the day before that. It was S3. I don't know who's there now. And we built them and had an office at the top of one of them. And I spent one day in the office before we declared bankruptcy. Oh, wow. And I stuck around through Chapter 11 and the company bought us one Chapter 11 again. So I've experienced Chapter 22. Now, during that period of time, did you, did you go through a lot of personal growth? Because typically that happens when you just, everything sucks all of a sudden. Yeah. I mean, I, I went through, you know, break up at the time as well. Well, at the same time. Yeah. It's pretty common. There's big financial. I was just going to say, yeah. And then I ended up going down around that time in 1999, actually, I went down to Peru and did ayahuasca with the shaman. That was your first time? It was my first time. But you couldn't, like no one could spell ayahuasca. It wasn't. How did you hear about it? In 99, that was not a thing. How did you hear about that? It was funny. I, I've been into cognitive enhancement and longevity, all the esoteric stuff since I was my early 20s. Remember, I used to be fat and tired and sick all the time. And like, I want to know everything there is to know. So I, I went down and, and I asked at the guest house. I'm like, hey, I want to meet a shaman that's called an ayahuasquero. And, and they look at me, they go, you're white. I go, yeah, I know. And I said, but you'll throw up, it's for locals. I said, no, so they introduced me to the guy and I did it. And I talked about it in the very, very early days of biohacking, you know, back in 2011, I was, I was talking about it in the blog. And I think I helped to popularize it, which probably wasn't a good thing. You go to Peru now. It's at the airport. Like this is a sacred thing. And if you have an unqualified shaman, it'll install malware. I don't think ayahuasca, like I worry about Aubrey Marcus, I think it's so glad you're going this direction. We've been talking about how much it's got bastardized in the last decade. He's going to need like a lot of antivirus software. Because it's powerful as it is to fix. I mean, I see this with all the, with the data on, on psychedelics in general, if used properly with therapists, they can be brilliant. They can also induce PTSD in some cases. Probably not most of them. So you can't, you can't clump all psychedelics together. They each just do such different things. But ayahuasca in particular, I think, is, is the second riskiest. Oh, I see. What would you say the first one? The very most risk is something called Datura, which just don't do that unless you're crazy. Okay. Ibogaine, I think is, is more intense, but less risky than ayahuasca just from, and I say risk, there's risk of psychosis and all that. There's risk of, well, it's called spiritual damage. And this is, I've done some shamanic training and I've trained in different lineages of things. And I run a neuroscience mystery school called 40 Years of Zen. We've had 1500 entrepreneurs come through over the last eight years without drugs, reach those same states just with feedback from what their brain is doing and showing. This is what my mother-in-law preaches. She says that you should be able to train yourself to be able to do those things. You absolutely can. Yeah. And I also have tried the vast majority of the psychedelics and I have no issues with them at appropriate set and setting and timing, you know, doing any of them all the time isn't a good thing. I'm actually considering adding ketamine as a potential offering at 40 Years of Zen with all the neurofeedback because. I went through ketamine therapy. It was groundbreaking for me. When they opened the first ketamine clinics for my show, I did it in San Diego. I found one of the first guys to do it and said, all right, you know, I'll do it and we'll just do a podcast about it. Yeah, it's a real powerful drug for forgiveness. Like it helped you, right? Absolutely. So I can't say it's a psychedelic and I've had great benefits from all of them and I know many people who don't know what they're doing or who are harmed. So I can't say they're good or bad. I just worry that when someone says, I've done ayahuasca 57 times and now, you know, I have a God penis or whatever the fuck his latest story is. I'm sorry, man. Like maybe it's not working. You're slowly winning salad right now. So what was your first experience like when you did it? You must have a good experience, obviously. I grew a God penis. That's the social media clip with no context. Thanks guys. No problem for sure. That was a different. So you're saying what was what was your experience with them? You must have had a good experience for your first time. You know, it was it was. I think it was helpful. I'm I go to weird places spiritually. It helped put some stuff together. It was probably too much for me at that age. Oh, I see. Right. In fact, later, one of the advanced shamas I work with actually said, oh, I see. I can see what happened at that point. Like, let's undo that because they shouldn't have done that because what you're doing is when you're with someone who's real, they're realigning your energetics in a way that you don't see unless you're very well trained and you're not to do that. So I didn't think any of this was possible. I thought it was all BS. I'm a computer science guy, like in plus one horizontal scaling of architecture and zeros and ones is kind of how I think about the world. I mean, I work engineer. I just realized that there's signaling protocols that exist that we don't see very often, but that are repeatable and measurable by science. And the guy doing the most there is Joe Dispenza. Joe's actually speaking at the 10th annual biohacking conference. So the end of May in Dallas biohackingconference.com. And it's really interesting because he's putting electrodes on people and measuring what happens with this stuff that we've all kind of known. Like, you know that if you're lifting and you visualize it works better. Frank Zane came on my show and talked about how much visualization versus how much he lifted. Like, oh my God, like this guy's like a monk. Oh, they've measured it. They've done the research too on like basketball players, that the ones that actually visualize themselves doing the free throws and shot actually 100 free throws every single day actually had the same increase in your percentage. That's crazy. Yeah. So there's all sorts of stuff that we just don't like to think is true. But if you measure it, it's true. So when it comes to all the psychedelics and all the other things like that, I believe a qualified shaman. This means eight years with the people, people taking the medicine every day and a sacred thing connected to the jungle. And I know guys like that, like my buddy Christian here and they they have a way of being and they see you the way Nio sees zeros and ones in the matrix and they can edit it. And so if you're with someone like that and you take a drug and you know, you're working together and they're doing stuff. It's very different than, you know, you did it with that, you know, cute 20 something year old you met who does ceremonies on the weekends for extra money. I don't think that seems it seems to have turned into like almost like a pyramid scheme to me. I hear these stories of somebody going and their mind is blown. And then six months later, they're they're a coach. No, it's crazy what it's turned into. Yeah, it it is. And there's great value in it and there's great healing. And I've seen so much good stuff and I've seen so much healing of especially like the masculine, the feminine, a lot of forgiveness. You can do all that with breath work, with whole tropic breath work. And I do my deepest, biggest work with neurofeedback because those states are available to all of us without the drugs, but sometimes the drugs help. They can open a door so you can know what it looks like. But if you take them every day, you got a problem. Now, did you have like this big like epiphany sort of take away from your experience with that? Or was it kind of similar to what you've already been sort of working on? At that time, it was the first, I guess I had tried mushrooms before that in Amsterdam where they were legal because it was harder to get good mushrooms back then because you just didn't know what you're getting. So it was a it's really hard to put words to it. There's this word ineffable, which means there isn't a word for it. And it's one of those experiences, I would say it wasn't that transformative, but it was relaxing. And one of the things that it does is it increases neuroplasticity dramatically. So BDNF goes through the roof and you actually probably get neural growth factor as well. So it probably is helping me with toxins in the brain that works really well. I also have a high tolerance for it. So I took a double dose then. Don't I ask it twice in my life other times when I turned 50. And I actually thought I wouldn't do it again. Just I wasn't feeling called to it, but that time it worked out and I did a three and a half times dose. And so you didn't immediately start a business right after that. I did not. Most people. So after that point, did you go back to tech or when the second chapter 11 or is this when you second chapter 11? I stayed at I stayed in, let's see, 2000. Actually, that was right when I went to I said, I think three months off. So back then, what we would do is you just work your ass off because like you're going to make a lot of money. Yes. The hustle culture sort of thing. It's really not good for you. No, you don't say it. So sorry, Gary V. I was afraid. You know, then I think you would say the same thing. I've been on my show a couple times. I like them. But you know that that, you know, working really hard is good. Always working hard without a break is bad. Right. Same with lifting. Like if you never get a recovery day, you don't put muscle on us. We know that, but we didn't maybe know that in our careers back then. So I finally said, but the first time in my life, I'm going to take three months off and I'm going to go just bum around in Southeast Asia and I want to learn meditation from the masters because I've tried everything to fix my health. You know, the 300 pounds I've lost some of the way. I've been a vegan. I've been a raw vegan, which makes you really sick, both of us and weak. And I've, I've tried the zone diet. I've tried actions. I tried everything and I was kind of desperate. It's always been paying my brain just wouldn't work. So I said, I'll just go learn the stuff that isn't supposed to work. And I ended up going to Nepal and being in a monastery for a while, learning some meditation techniques there and ended up going to remote parts of Tibet where I ended up at Mount Kailash, which is pretty much the Mount Olympus of the East. And it's the holiest mountain in the world. No one's ever climbed it. And that's literally where the the Hindu and Buddhist gods live at the top of this mountain in the Lord. And you're allowed to walk in a circle around it. And it's it's like going to Mecca or something. You're going to do it one time in your life. And so I went, I just happened to be late. So all the tourists were gone. It's 30 mile an hour wind is 10 degrees below zero. Most of the little mud huts that the heat with burning yak dung are closed. And it's kind of mountaineering conditions at 18 thousand feet. You can die. But what the heck? So there's maybe eight people walking around the mountain, but we did it anyway. And I'm just feeling like I'm dying because of the altitude and cold and just miserable. Drink a bowl of yak butter tea. That's little Tibetan woman gives me. And all of a sudden I'm like, my brain works. My body works. You know, the angels were singing. And that was where I had the inspiration for for Bulletproof Coffee. Because why did that work? And I came back here to Silicon Valley and I would mix just regular butter and regular coffee. And it just tasted bad. It didn't work. And so actually I didn't regular tea before I did coffee. What kind of tea were they using in Tibet? Is this regular black tea? They used aged puer tea. OK. But I didn't know that. Is there caffeine content in it? So is there some stimulated effects? And not more than any. Puer has a little bit of longevity effects. It's not the tea, though. OK. So I thought it was a tea. So I spent a thousand dollars on Mountain View Avenue with the little Chinese. Yeah, I was going to wonder like how you made the leap from that to coffee. I tried every kind of tea and it didn't matter. So it must be the butter. So I tried 25 kinds of butter and two kinds worked. The grass-fed butter. Because it has compounds in it that are not present in regular butter from industrial cows. So all right. I got, you know, any kind of tea seems to work. And then I tried a cup of coffee and I felt great. I'm like, this is fantastic. I'm not allergic to coffee. I'd quit coffee for five years because I would drink it and I would get jittery and cranky. Oh, yeah. And then the next day I had another cup of coffee and I felt crappy and I'm like, wait a minute. I couldn't have gone from coffee's fine to coffee's bad in one day. It's the coffee. So I realized I was dealing with impurities and coffee. So I finally found clean coffee and I made that industry category for mold-free coffee. And I started putting grass-fed butter in it and I had MCT oil from the longevity non-profit stuff I was doing. And I ended up with this recipe that worked. But it was like hundreds of experiments and I started giving it to people and they're saying the same thing as me like, what is happening? Why does my brain work better? And... Were you eating with it at the time or was this the first time you said, no, I'm going to take this and not eat as well? When I first started figuring this stuff out, it was just a performance enhancer. You drink it. Like, God, I got my brain back. Like, this is like modafinil. It's so good. And what I was doing in retrospect, especially because I've been a vegan which harms the fat in your body, I was replacing missing fatty acids in my cells. So most people put butter in, for about two years, you just can't get enough butter. It's like your religion. And then all of a sudden after two years, like, okay, I can chill. That's because it takes about 700 days to replace half the fat in your body. And then another two years later, like, you know, put a teaspoon in, put a couple teaspoons. I don't care. But the first year, like, give me the tablespoons I need to, you're trying to fix yourself. Right? But the reason that Tibetans were making yak butter tea the way they did, they put butter and tea into a butter churn. And then usually that's the older lady. She sits there and churns it for 10 minutes. She's like, to chunk, to chunk, to chunk. You know, I remember sitting there going, like these primitive people, don't they know you could just eat the butter and drink the tea and you wouldn't have to do all this extra work? Right? And I was totally arrogant because the reason they were doing that is when you mix butter fat, but not cream, with a warm liquid, especially one that has colored compounds in it like tea or coffee, you change the structure of the water into something called exclusions on water. And now some people say, I guarantee you there's like 5% of listeners who are now triggered, right? And guys, get a therapist. Because if I can trigger you, that means you're carrying a loaded gun and if you're in California, they'll arrest you for that. If you're in Texas, they'll just, you know, high five you. But regardless, seriously, chill. So what is structured water? Exclusions on water? Well, Dr. Gerald Pollock is about 80 at the University of Washington. There's written a couple of textbooks on this. You can see it in a microscope. It's not made up. When water is near a little bit of a fatty membrane, the water changes its viscosity, how thick it is. So it's a little bit more like gelatin or a little bit less like gelatin. And that phase of water is required for life. So when you're drinking vegetable juice, you're doing the same thing as when you blend a little bit of butter or MCT oil into a liquid. It's the blending is moving the water against the lipids that are in it to change the structure of the water so your body can immediately use it to make energy. So the viscosity is not because the fat is mixed with the water. It's the water itself. The water itself. Okay. And does this change? So I don't know, like surface tension does it have to do with any of that or? I don't believe it affects the surface tension on the top of the water. But you know, water has that like when it goes up against the edge of a test tube or something, it kind of has a little curve in the membrane. It's the force that makes the water stick to the side. It changes something in the water. And does it make it more viscous? I believe it makes it more viscous. Wow. And when I say I believe, it's because I'm looking at the pictures on my head of it and it probably would have to be more viscous. The reason I found out about this is because it pissed me off that I had to blend bulletproof coffee. And now what I, my new coffee company I should say is called Danger Coffee. It's got minerals and electrolytes in it. And it's called Danger because who knows what you might do? Sold. My hidden movie. That's the way I like my coffee. Could be a new PR, you could ask a lot to start a company or you could tell a douchebag in a mask to go away. I don't know, whatever you want to do. So good deal. So structure, I would love to see a picture of this Doug if he could pull this up. I wanna see what structure world looks like. So look at that Gerald Pollock, P-O-L-L-A-C-K. So I ended up donating $50,000 to his research lab in order for him to come and speak at the biohacking conference. And then we collaborated because he couldn't figure out how to measure MCT oil excess liquid. So I came up with this idea that you get a drop of MCT at the end of a needle and then you put it underneath the microscope then you put water there and then you look at the thickness of the exclusion zone. And what he found in a paper that's published somewhere is that the thickness of the exclusion zone from butter oil and MCT oil are the thickest exclusion zones he's seen. What that means is that these fats are particularly good at changing water so our cells can use water because all the water in your cells and all the water in plant cells is exclusions on water. Otherwise cells can't do that. Oh, interesting. The way we make it is 1200 nanometer light plus water that's body heat by the way. So body heat plus water and our cell membranes are made of lipids. So inside your cells is all this water. So it acts like a carrier almost. So is there an evolutionary theories to why this would be the case? Why would water be better for us in this way? How would we find this in nature? Or how do we create the opposite, I guess? You generally don't find it in nature unless you're drinking an animal's blood or blood plasma or you're doing basically fruit juice from fresh fruit, not pasteurized and all that stuff or drinking tree sap or something or vegetable juice. Maybe milk or something raw milk or something like that? Actually raw milk probably would be exclusions on water. I'd be shocked if it wasn't. In fact, that's a really interesting observation. There's other benefits for raw milk aside from that but I would guess mother's milk and raw milk would have to be easy. Right, cause you got fat and I'm good. So search for easy water. It's not the sum of edict stuff. The fourth phase of water is gel polycs. Do easy water, like yeah, the letter easy. Yeah, like that. And do like microscope lab studies. Yeah, cause I've heard it's the four states like a gel state, right? Yeah, that's the viscosity. It's the thicker one. And so that's part of why blending it made a difference versus just eating it. I didn't know, I just knew. If I blended it at high speed for 20 seconds, I could get results. And so... Now, how did you introduce it? You just brought it to work and say, hey guys, try this out. Yeah, okay. I remember, in fact, I would sit at... I don't know if it was still open after the pandemic. Red Rock Coffee down in Mountain View, you guys over there? Yeah, I've been there. Is it still there? Yeah, we used to have met for our app when we were building our app. Yeah, we would have done that. I used to hang out there. And I would like bring my... That's right, all the nerds are upstairs. All the nerds are upstairs with their laptops. All the plug-in building companies, dude. That's what that spot is. It was a hot spot. It would be funny if we crossed paths around that time. We probably did, man. Totally. So I would actually bring like butter and a little mixer and I'd put it in coffee there. And I was testing out like which coffees were less likely to be moldy and stuff like that. So, good times. And I wouldn't have believed any of this stuff, but bottom line is this is hard science around biology and water. And it's how things work. So it turns out water plays all sorts of roles and there's many different theories or maybe lenses to look at how human bodies work. There's people who think we're meat robots. People who think we're chemical. And there was a fight about 1920s between people who thought we were chemical and people who thought we were electrical. We're both. We're also light, magnetic and quantum. And we can prove each of those are signaling mechanisms in the body. Your body does all those. It does the right one when it needs to at the right time. So they're all variables in your environment. You can change the definition of biohacking. The one I wrote, changed the environment around you and inside of you to have full control of your biology. You're just hacking the signaling networks inside your body. Now, what's fascinating to me is, because I've been in the fitness and health space for a quarter, I mean two and a half decades, right? So 25 years at least as a professional and longer just as a consumer. And every once in a while, something will come along and kind of change the landscape. So I remember when Atkins Diet came out and it was like, it just changed everything. All of a sudden, everybody was talking about, you know, eating in that particular way. I remember CrossFit did it for strength training to a certain extent. But Bulletproof Coffee, which is, you know, it's like a, it's like roller blades or Kleenex, right? People talk about putting butter in their coffee. That's what they call it. I didn't ever heard of it before. I'm interested in how it went from that to all of a sudden becoming this phenomenon. Because great product, sure. But there's got to be other something else behind it to get it out to really. What was the machine behind it? Exactly. This is gonna sound so trite. It actually worked. It wasn't marketing, right? People are smart enough, if something feels really good, they'll do it again. That's why we have babies, right? It's a proven fact, right? So when people drink butter and MCT oil in coffee, they feel better than when they put milk in the coffee. And so they do it more. Yeah, but how did they hear about it? How did you start to get it out? How did they hear about it? So one of the easiest things to do if you really want people to hear something is raise $90 million in venture capital. That's the answer I was looking for. Hold on, write that down, coach. I recommend everyone not to try it. It was actually a really challenging day for me because I knew I was onto something, the way of thinking about yourself, with thinking about health, the level of agency that I believe people have over their biology, it wasn't there in our fitness language. It was all about diet and exercise. I was still a little bit angry back then because when I weighed 300 pounds, I said, I'm gonna lose this weight. It's the most important thing on earth. I've already had two knee surgeries. I'm 22 years old. I don't want to go through this again. Nothing else matters. So I went to 24-hour fitness. I went in Manteca, California. Oh shit, my neck, the woods, 209 area coach. Nice. I had a 209 number. And I used to cruise McHenry. I used to cruise McHenry. It's hilarious. Why am I telling you? You got distracted. I was thinking about what car I was driving on McHenry. So I'm at 24-hour fitness and I tracked it. I went 90 minutes a day, six days a week. Cardio. Half cardio, half weights. Maxed out all but two of the machines. I still have a couple of the overhead press things. My shoulders are just not right for that. But other than that, max every single machine out. And the cardio, because my knees already had two surgeries, weighted backpack 15 degree in clown. Okay, so I was not going easy on myself. If I was sick or I didn't get enough sleep, I went anyway. Final exams, finishing up college, I went anyway. It was the most important thing. So 702 hours, 18 months later, I think I had to lose some weight, right? 46 inch waist, still weigh 300 pounds. But I could max the machines out. I was stronger, right? Oh, and I went on a low fat, as low calories I could manage diet, which of course means low protein, right? And- The body can become remarkably efficient with caloric intake. It sure can, especially when you have toxic molds that are 10,000 times more estrogenic than human estrogen that cause cows to get fat on 30% less calories. They make humans do the same thing. Did you have mold toxicity at this time? I did. Oh, wow. I grew up with that. Wow. Did a big documentary on toxic mold, moldymovie.com. It's free. It's just a gift out there for people. And in fact, my hormones measure when I was 26, because I finally made a little bit of money. How bad was it? Well, I sent my parents to this longevity guy in Los Gatos, Dr. Miller is his name. And so my parents have their numbers and I said, well, I'm going to go see him. He doesn't see young people, but I'm just going to get my numbers. So I feel like I'm old. And I go and he goes, Dave, your testosterone is lower than your mom. Oh, no. No young man wants to hear that. No. Well, all young men today hear it, right? Because we have an epidemic of that. Is that wild? I know. We talk about this all the time that, you know, 25 years ago when we first started the space, I'd never in my life heard a 20-something-year-old boy complain about testosterone. When I started sharing about my testosterone journey and so I thought it has become the number one DM that I get from young men is their low levels. It's crazy. I'm a little bit militant that you have control of your own biology. Yeah, eat some egg yolks, eat some steak, don't eat a bunch of processed foods, stop spraying Axe Body Spray and all the synthetic fragrances on it, licking receipts and get some sleep and put on your True Dark glasses and all the stuff that I've taught and you guys teach and that are kind of core bio hacks that... And you know, it's still not gonna work because we spray Atrazine and all this other crap around that you can't stop. So get some testosterone from your doctor and start putting it in whatever way you like. And if you do that, you will maintain the characteristics of masculinity that come with testosterone. They are good for you. Having enough testosterone lowers your risk of heart attacks and cancer and diabetes and it raises dopamine, which makes you happy, which makes you give a shit about making something out of your life. So it's important. It's a motivational hormone. Fix it. Yeah, and there's no moral failing saying, oh, you know, there's something wrong that's affecting my life, but because I'm all natural, despite the fact I'm under non-natural lights and you're not natural at all, it's a fantasy. In fact, that's narcissism right there. Believe in your story, you're not natural. No one listening to this is natural because the EMFs that got this to you weren't natural. So you might as well just realize, okay, in an ideal world, you wouldn't have a need to do it, but in this world, you do. There's ways you can take enclomaphene, which can boost testosterone. The guy's like Maximus Tribe are doing that. I inject, I use cream when I was a younger guy, but if you have kids, you don't want to use testosterone cream because if you get a little bit of that on your kids, they'll fuck them up. Timmy grows a mustache. Yeah. Or pets. I've had people tell stories of messing their pets up because they're rubbing their pets with it. No. Oh yeah, yeah, no. Yeah, I had a client that was like, their dog was like losing patches of hair or like crazy. That couldn't figure it out forever. And that client was putting their testosterone like on their forearm and didn't even realize they were petting their dog afterwards. I've seen some young kids really change their testosterone with lifestyle, but that's another conversation. The lifestyle some of these kids live now is just so different from how we did. I mean, they literally are indoors all day. They're always on electronics. They don't move. They don't have a, they don't give their body a reason to have testosterone. They're even socializing less. And we know, especially for men, competition with other men and socializing and pursuing the opposite sex has positive effects on testosterone. Guess what makes exclusion zone water besides body heat, sunlight? Go ahead and sit in the sun and all the water in your body is charged and could be used to make ATP in your cells to form proteins. Don't get any sunlight. Doesn't work. Wow. There's something else that's happening. And I like this idea of studying everything in the environment around you. 85% of women are on chemical birth control or hormonal birth control. Is it 85? That's some time in their life. So we should know better. If you look at what happens in urban architecture, urban landscapes, landscaper is about 30, 40 years ago realized if you plant male trees, they don't drop seed pods. You don't have to pay landscapers. So almost every tree around here is a male tree. What do you think happens to male trees when there's no girl trees around? They put out 10 times more pollen. So we all have way worse allergies because of that. That is super interesting. I have never heard that before. Probably because it makes total sense. Yeah, it's annoying, like really bad. And that would, that's okay. So this, okay, wow, that's really interesting. Now here's the corollary to that, okay? So now you're a guy, a young guy who should have high testosterone and you walk around and you never smell a woman who's fertile. Yeah. Because, ovulation, when women ovulate, guys are testosterone, it doesn't matter if it's your woman, if there's a woman in the bar, in the room who's ovulating, your invisible hormone systems are like, I don't know what's going on right now, but I want to go either start a company or start a war. Seriously, that's how guys are like, and that raises our testosterone. We're supposed to be around fertile women. What do you think happens if you have a whole bunch of guys and there's no fertile women around who all have high testosterone? We kill each other like rats in a cage. You think Mother Nature didn't account for that in tribes of 150 people on the savannah? Of course. So what's going on here is, we ought to be treating our women with more respect, which means access to birth control, but not convincing them that chemical birth control that harms their health via dozens of mechanisms is somehow good for them, right? And valuing them for what only women can do as women. The conversation is very one-sided. In fact, there's a lot of women that are on birth control, not for birth control reasons, but for like acne or to regulate their period and stuff like that. And they're just not told. You know, it's not, it's presented as it's innocuous. Like, oh, it's not a big deal. That's the problem. It's so bad, the risks are so high. So for the women in my life, I'll have the conversation and it's like, look, I wrote a book on fertility called The Better Baby Book. And I'm probably responsible for hundreds of babies as a result of that. But like, it's not helping you, right? And, you know, I support your right to control your biology, your right to have access to birth control, but doing it in a way that is gonna make you old more quickly and change your personality and change, it's bad. But what we aren't talking about is the fact that, that also affects everyone around you as well, right? So I feel like that's a part of the problem. And I'm not in no way blaming women for this. I'm blaming industrial chemicals and manipulation of humans with marketing for a societal thing. But I think that's a part of it. And I think atrazine is a much bigger part of it. And also, I just have to say this because you guys, you know, have a platform here. Anytime someone talks to me about carbon reduction, I do not hear them because it means they're an idiot. And the reason for that is carbon is a 60 to 100 year problem. Glyphosate, atrazine, and the other endocrine disruptors are a 20 to 30 year problem. And so they're using carbon to distract us from the stuff they're doing right in our faces. So I'm not dealing with the long-term problems until we address this right now. So I will not change my behaviors in any way until you stop spraying me and my kids with poison. Now, you say it's a 20, 30 years. That mean if we stop now, that's how long it takes for it to get out of the... It'll take even longer than that. But right now in 25 years at our current birth rate, we're gonna have empty cities all over the US. Yeah, we'll be infertile. Yeah, that's why I stopped worrying about the population problem after I wrote a book on fertility. That was what 14 years ago. And I said, we're screwed. And this is one of the reasons I'm interested in longevity. Our only answer is for all of us and everyone listening, we gotta live to 150 and be exceptionally young and strong. And maybe even able to have kids and we're 100 just because we want to. Otherwise, the whole planet's fucked. Dave, let me ask you a question. So when you stepped into the health space, it's been how long has it been? 15 years? 10 years? That's been longer than that. Back when I was in Silicon Valley starting at about 26. In Palo Alto, we had a group called Smart Life Forum. Now it's Silicon Valley Health Institute. It's one of the first longevity anti-aging nonprofits in the country. Started in 1993. Okay, so you've been doing this for a while? I was president of that by the time I was 28, I think. Okay, so that's a long time. Okay, so you've been doing this for a long time. Like 25 years. In this whole period of time of doing it, did you ever think it would get to the point where right now you sound like an extremist? Well, right now the mainstream is like, you know, here's what's good for you and you're way over here saying, no. Like, because I, you know, it seems like it's getting crazier and crazier to me personally, I can't believe it. I'm 50. Yeah. If they look like this, and by the way, I work out 20 minutes a week, guys. Otherwise, guys, prove it. Like I don't care what the mainstream says. They have consistently been misled and the list goes on and on. Fluoride is not good for your teeth or your thyroid gland and we know it and most of the world knows it in the US, we're blind to it. Mold toxins are a thing and they're regulated in most of the world, but not here, not in our coffee. And the list goes on and on where if you just read, I don't care what the mainstream in the US thinks because it's not even reality-based for the rest of the world, like travel a little bit. And you realize everyone in Europe is like, why do Americans keep poisoning themselves? It's so weird. So you just have to look at, are you living in the world? Are you living in a bubble? So I don't think I'm that extreme as compared to some people, but when- I don't think so. I mean, everything you're saying, I mean, we've talked about, it's just strange to me because I've been doing this for so long and mainstream advice, I should say, has always been off, but it's been so wrong. But it seems like it's getting more wrong and more off. At this point, you have to conclude that whoever's doing it is doing it on purpose. That's what I mean. You have to conclude that because there's too much evidence, there's too many really big people getting canceled. Like Joe Mercola, he's written books that have been by far the number one New York Times bestseller and they're not listed anywhere, right? So many copies sold because it's blacklisted, right? Stuff like that's happening. And I don't think it's reasonable or fair that any government agency in any country says that they have anything to do with what I eat. Bottom line is, I don't see it written anywhere in my agreement with the government, which is a relative small amount of words. Sorry, it's not your job. Well, let's be honest, if you had followed official government guidelines for the last 30 years, I wouldn't be laughing. You would all be sick and unhealthy. And that's a fact. I was so sick in my 20s doing, following that stuff, I don't think I would have been alive past 40. I bought disability insurance when I was 26. Wow, did you, in this, you went in the other direction because you were constantly looking for information and how do I fix this? I tried everything that was supposed to work. I did the low fat thing. I did the gym thing all the time without a break. Like I starved myself. I did all that and it did not work. And it was only after I went through this process of thinking, God, it's a moral failing. I just, I'm not trying hard enough. Oh, that makes me sad. Yeah. This is what happens. We hear that all the time. Everyone is fat. It's you. And one of the things that changed it for me, because I was feeling that at business school too. And I went and I got a brain scan here in Palo Alto with one of Dr. Amon's guys. And they said, oh look, you have a hardware problem in your brain. You have big holes of metabolic activity. It's damage from toxic mold. I was like, thank God. That means that it's something I can fix. Cause otherwise it's just an intrinsic failure. It's just a failure to try. And every fat person today thinks, oh, I've tried so hard. And the fact that they're eating all the cheesecake or something, it's because their body's making me the cheesecake cause they're literally starving. Right? And yes, sometimes there's emotional eating. I had some of that too, but that's not it for the people who are really dialed in. They're trying, trying, trying, trying. There's a limit to trying and that's okay. Yeah. How did you start to get rid of the mold out of your body? How did you get through that process? I was really lucky that I figured out what it was relatively early on. I was still really sick. So I did all the detox stuff you're supposed to do. I did binders, but the thing that's really most effective is ozone therapy. And I've been really blessed. I've helped thousands of people over the years. You are living in toxic mold houses. You can tell when you talk to when I was mold exactly what it is. And then you say, oh, so when did your house get damaged by water? And they go, how did you know? Because it's written all over you. And then usually you bind some toxins and if you take sporinox, which is an antifungal drug for months and you move out of the molding environment, most people get better. And you see a functional medicine doctor, probably fix your thyroid, probably fix your leaky gut. There's an order of operations there. But it's very fixable now. Back then it was almost impossible to fix, but ozone therapy to fix mitochondria was the number one thing. Into the day, that's what mold does is a poison to the mitochondria. Do you have that gene? Is it the MTH? I do, MTHFR. There you go. So you also have that. So that also reduces your ability to detoxify. It does. Yeah, I have the same thing. It's common, about a third of people have some of them. And it turns out there's dozens and dozens of them you could have where I might need more B6, you might not. And then there's other ones like COMT and Sulfur. So genetic analysis is worth doing to figure out if you have pathways that are weird. I need more biotin than the average person. If I don't know that and I don't get enough biotin, I'm just always gonna feel like crap. Yeah, yeah. And that also means you have issues with methylation. Is that true? Yeah, MTHFR and methylation kind of go hand in hand. Got it, got it. Yeah, so people with MTHFR issues either over or under methylate. Got it. So I was, we interviewed Dr. Seeds and he told, he's mentioned. Oh, he's great. Yeah, and he mentioned that creatine was a great supplement to help people with methylation, which lucky me, I've been taking it since I was 16 nonstop. That's a good move. What kind of creatine do you like? Creatine pier. Yeah, just regular creatine pier. I've been playing around with the double A creatine. Oh, really? What's it called? I'm forgetting the name of it. I don't know. Is it an organic salt that they connected to? I believe it is. Yeah. Okay, what's the rationale? They had a bunch of studies, more than one that said it absorbed better. But I mean, we've all seen all the creatine micronized. Like for, I told you guys, I was at your 24 hour fitness. So I've been reading all the bodybuilding stuff. In fact, way back in the day, when I lost my first 50 pounds, I must have been 23, 24. I gained it back, of course. But it was cause, you would know this cause you're a Central Valley guy from back then. So where I went to high school, if you read a bodybuilding magazine, they would beat you up because you're gay. Cause you're looking at guys in bikinis. Like literally that was, it was, you know, 4-H is what they do in the school. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm sitting at a coffee shop and there's one of these magazines and they're like, you know, carbs could be making you fat. I'm like, seriously, I'll try that. And you know, I went home and started eating cottage cheese. And I cut out gluten. Not, it turns out I have a really bad gluten sensitivity. And so just by doing that and doing a half-assed job of cutting carbs, I lost like 50 pounds when I personally got better. And then I changed when I ate and it came back, right? But that was like a really interesting thing that it was my first awareness that people who are either power lifters or bodybuilders, they're some of the best bio-hackers on the planet. Yeah. Oh, are you kidding me? They're cosmonauts with themselves. Yeah, yeah. You have the longevity. They're the original bio-hackers. Yeah, they have longevity people, the Neutropics people and the bodybuilders. I wanted to bring those together. That's what bio-hacking is. And then take their techniques, cross-pollinate it with neuroscience and some Navy SEAL stuff and then spoon feed it to the population. You must be a fan of Dan Jukain. Absolutely. Yeah. Wow, good deal. Am I the only one that's still tripping out about all the mantries or what? I'm still... Yeah. I'm still fucking stuck there. That's because you get so bad out of it. I have so much truth in it. I've always wanted to cut it. It feels like it's gotten so bad. Go into a forest that hasn't been messed with by people and it's not new. No problem. Well, you might have some problem, but it's a lot less because there's 10% of the pollen. Yeah, that's like just... If everything we've talked about so far, I'm like mind-blowing right now. Because I've never heard that. I've never heard anyone say that before and that makes so much sense that they would put out... Of course the trees would put out 10 times more pollen than they would before because there's no female trees anymore. Dave, when did you first start to see this company start to take... Like when did you just look at it and go, oh, this is a company. This is like taking off. You know, like I mentioned earlier, I had a good job in tech. I had two young kids. They were one year old and two year old. And I've just moved up to Vancouver Island. I wanna build a farm up there. And so I started the blog because I wanted five people to read it. I suffered more than anyone should. I spent a million plus dollars getting better. I spent a couple of million dollars reversing my age now. If five people read my blog and didn't go through all the stuff I went through with mold and obesity and brain fog and just the abject suffering and failure and pain, that was my goal. So I didn't build a list. I just blocked. I just wrote down the stuff that I've studied for 20 years. The stuff from the nonprofit group. I just wanted to share. And after a little while, I'm like, you know, I went to Denver. I was working for, I think, Bluecoat Systems. This is like a computer tech networking security thing. I'm supposed to give a tech talk in Denver. And I just need coffee. I'm such a zombie. I didn't realize it was mold from a hotel or something. But there's a reason if you have brain fog. So I drive like a half hour in a taxi to the one good coffee shop in Denver at the time. And I get the coffee that's most likely to mold free and I drink it and I'm on the way. Okay, my brain's gonna work. I'm gonna give a good keynote. And then the coffee was moldy. And I get there and I'm even worse than I was before. I didn't know about my daffodil. I didn't have all my biohack styled in. This was, you know, for 2005-ish or something. And sure enough, I don't remember what I said on all on stage, but I just remember going, I just wanted to drink coffee and I feel so bad. So I wrote a blog post. Hey, I'm gonna lab test coffee. Do you want to go in? The market size for mold-free coffee is zero. It doesn't exist, right? Today, I guess it's probably about a $500 million industry and Danger Coffee is rapidly growing in that industry because it's mold-free and has trace minerals and who knows what you might do. That's why it's called Danger Coffee. You've got me already. I love that. That made me happy. Right in the middle of the pandemic, I came up with the name. Tell me I'm gonna be safe one more time. One more time, buddy. I fucking love safety. I fucking want to make a Danger Coffee. I choose danger. I choose danger. I should hold up a mug if I had time. What rich people do when they're bored. Safe and effective. And effective. Yeah, so yeah, I was bored. But that business, there was no market size. So a few people wanted the coffee. It turns out it was more than five. It was a lot. So I called up some of my venture capital friends I'd worked for and I said, look, I've got this crazy business. It makes these glasses called True Dark that block a certain spectrum of light. We're doing cafes. We're opening these biohacking facilities today. Upgrade labs. It's a franchise. You can open a biohacking facility anywhere. Right, so there's all this stuff I'm doing. You're never gonna fund this guys. You're venture capitalists. I know what you do, right? And, but you're my friend. So why don't you give me like 50 grand on a loan? Cause I need to buy coffee beans and I'll give you a hundred grand back later. You know, just a short-term business loan. And they called me up a week later and said, how about $8 million? I go, we think it is venture fundable. I was like, oh my God, really? Okay. And I really thought about it. And we were getting there earlier. I got distracted because if you take venture capital money, you are promising to sell your company at some point. And I thought like really hard because, you know, on one hand I can keep the message pure and the product's pure if I own it. But if I have millions of dollars, I can spread the message to make a societal change. So I took the money. And I knew that it meant that, you know, Bulletproof someday would probably get sold and that I wouldn't have control over, you know, whether they met my standards or didn't. I wouldn't have a say anymore. But I also knew that I'd be able to reach a hell of a lot of people and create the awareness of how in charge of ourselves we really are. And the other thing you do as an entrepreneur when you decide to take money from VCs versus other types of investors, VCs are like governments. And what governments do is their job is to take away your rights. They just do it over time. Like with the potato peel, it's like just one little thing, right? And every time they'll say, oh, don't worry. This is for all of our mutual good. Let's take one little slice. And if they take too many and you're like, hey, then they go, oh, we're sorry. And then stop. And then the next year they start up again. They start again. So they're just whittling it down. They're not gonna take a bite. They're gonna take a tiny little sliver. So that's why today, governments are doing all sorts of stuff that they do not have rights to do because, oh, we just need this temporary right from September 11th. Dude, it's like a lot, 20 years later, you still have that temporary right. Wouldn't it get that back again? Never. Like there's no such thing as temporary. VCs have the same strategy with entrepreneurs. VCs job is to be able to control the companies so they can make sure that they can sell it whether you want to or not. That's their job. That's what they get paid to do. That's what LPs pay them to do. You have to know that when you get in bed with them and you have to be able to create the right contracts and agreements with them and then hold them to a standard, which is not win-win because the venture capital entrepreneur game is not win-win. On the surface it's win-win. Underneath the surface, there's opposing forces there and you just need to hold your boundaries. VCs can be friendly. They can be great business partners. I love working with VCs on a board who know what they're doing and roll up their sleeves and give you good advice. And I've had company-saving advice from them at the end of the day that they just need one more board seat. They just need one more right, one more here, one more there. And there's a lot of reasons that entrepreneurs at the end of the day, they build something big and they don't walk away with very much. And it happens more often than it doesn't because of that game. So for people who are listening who want to start a business, nothing wrong with VCs, but know the game you're playing and have good advisors who are on your side and have basically played the game before. Do you feel like you structured your cap table right with bulletproof or no, then? Do you feel good about it? Or are you saying this because hindsight looking back, it was not. You know. So how about those Dodgers? Come on dude, you gotta give it to me. You're gonna do that, don't leave me hanging. You said we could ask you anything. You didn't know I was gonna go there or what? I answer all the questions I can answer. Don't give me that, come on. So I mean, going back, you would do it differently? Every one with the benefit of hindsight would do most things in their life differently. Even the good things, you would do better, right? And yeah, I can say that of course I would like to have more control over things than I do now, right? And I didn't foresee there being a need to start another coffee company, the Danger Coffee thing. But it turns out that was bulletproof choice to have that happen, okay. And I'm actually really having fun because putting the trace minerals and the electrolytes in the coffee without changing its flavor and being able to go back to a really high grade coffee with Danger Coffee, it just, I don't know, it's bringing me joy. I'm surprised they'd let you. Was there no computer? No, apparently VCs are supposed to get to sign a non-compete agreement. They never did. Oopsie. You know, I don't want to leave here right now. I feel like this is where I wanted to go with you and hear some of this juicy stuff that nobody gets to talk to you about. Yeah, there's some stuff I'm probably... Come on, you can dance around it but give me a little more. I'm not at liberty to discuss. Yeah, that's fair, I'll take that. Okay, so. You know what's interesting is that when you talk to coffee aficionados, people like really into coffee or espresso, they often talk about the water that they make the coffee with because, and so it's got to be the minerals in the water that affect the taste. I'm talking about from a flavor standpoint. You know, it's interesting. The reason that they're looking at that first and foremost is bad minerals in your water eat espresso machines. Oh, okay. So the boiler in your espresso machine will be screwed. So one thing Starbucks does right is they have some of the best water filtration standards of any coffee chain out there. So even in their drip coffee, it's filtered. So I feel really good. I'll go into Starbucks and just say, can I get a vent a hot water? And then I add my danger coffee to that right there. I stir it up right in front of them. What a prick. No, I can't make my coffee in your coffee shop. All the time. You always tip the barista for the water, right? Yeah, I do it. I travel around with my danger coffee mug right there. Like, oh, look at them as much as I do tip them here. Yeah, yeah, hot please. So minerals, in fact, this is a tip for people listening. If you fill up your coffee maker with tap water, you're making bad coffee. Like use filtered water to make your coffee. It tastes so much better. Huge difference. It took me a long time to figure that out actually. Couldn't figure out, I moved from one house much to have worse water or tap water. My coffee got so shitty out here. And then also one day someone used a water bottle. They poured like a crystal geyser or something in there. And I was like, oh, why is the coffee so good? I had no idea at that point. Yeah. Wow. And then the minerals we're adding are ionic minerals that can actually enter your cells. So your body loves that. They're basically plant minerals without any of the plant stuff that blocks you from using plant minerals. Humic and full big kind of stuff. So when you have those in the coffee, it doesn't change the flavor at all, but the parts of your body that sense minerals are like, what was that? Like I need more minerals, drink more. And so it just, it feels good in a way that's not a flavor kind of thing. A lot like if you drink butter and MCT blended into coffee, most people, they'll take a sip of it and then they'll pause for a second and go, huh. And then like there's a wanting of more. That's the invisible systems in the body saying, that is water that I can use right now. Get me more, that's a resource. And when you drink danger coffee, the resource is 50 plus trace minerals and electrolytes. Even if you're drinking it black, there's a strange like, ah, it feels good and it tastes like amazing coffee. Now, when you created this company, did you take on any partners or is this all self-funded and you went a different sort of blueprint with this? This is all self-funded. Yeah. See, one of the things that happens when you're growing the e-commerce company, if you're selling stuff online, once you decide you're going to sell on Amazon, Amazon will probably destroy your business. Yeah. They're really good at that. If you want to know why everything in the world is crappy, just look at Amazon. I'm not kidding. Oh, here's a high quality product. I'm playing about it. I know, am I wrong? Shot cutting it out, yeah. I mean like, here's a high quality product. Here's a shitty knockoff product that will fall apart in five days that's $6 cheaper. Let me put this one up here. And so it incents you to always buy crap, right? And it punishes the expensive nice stuff. And it's expensive because it lasts 10 times longer and it's well-made, right? And it punishes it so much those companies either make a crappy product with the same sticker or they go out of business. Yeah. So with Danger Coffee right now, you go to dangercoffee.com. And I'm not selling it in grocery stores because same thing, you go to a grocery store, they take 90% of all the profits and you make one penny on something sold in a grocery store if you're the creator and it oftentimes doesn't pay to do it. But if you want to reach 100 million in sales and at Bulletproof we sold more than half a billion dollars in lifetime revenue. Wow. And it's helped a huge number of people. I think Alzheimer's is lower because MCT oil reverses Alzheimer's. I couldn't say that when I sold MCT oil, could I? Phase II clinical trial studies, C8 MCTs do that. And... I did not know that. Is that recent? Actually no, that's been out for a long time. Really? Yeah. Reverses, I knew it helped with the symptoms but I didn't know what it was. It'll reverse mild. Yeah. Interesting. Coffee itself helps to prevent. Yeah. Right, at least in some studies. Yeah. And so like there's all these benefits that came about from this and I turned college into a billion dollar industry and college is a really interesting protein. I think you single-handedly exploded Keri Gold butter. Oh, God, yeah. I didn't even hear about them until people were making Bulletproof. This is the butter you got to use. There was a global shortage in 2014. Someone got arrested smuggling grass-fed Keri Gold butter from Norway to Sweden. Seriously, like a whole truck full and there was this whole thing in Europe. There's articles in Ireland going, you'll never guess what the Yanks are putting in their coffee and all this stuff. And yeah. Did they ever write you a letter to the CEO of like, I would have been like, bro, thanks. Are you serious? They're a bunch of Redneck farmers from Ireland. No shit. It's never acknowledgement at all. I reached out like, guys, you should like send me butter for the conference or something like that. Yeah, you should have had Lifetime Supply of Butter. It's a barrel. I would love to see the growth of Bulletproof coffee in Keri Gold sales and just match them up. I bet they'd be like, they'd be right up through. And Keri Gold is supplied by some guys, I think they're called Fonterra. And I was really close to a deal at one point to be controlling about 1% of the U.S. butter supply with Bulletproof, but I couldn't make money doing it. Like, because I feel like the Irish business stuff, no, my Irish friends, I was just in Belfast. My Irish friends will be pissed at me, but the Irish butter mafia, whatever they're called, they, yeah, maybe there's just no money in it. And right now it's just a shout out to farmers in Ireland and throughout Europe. Keep putting, we'll say keep putting farm materials on your government until they back off. Cause right now they're trying to get them to kill their cows because of carbon. Yeah, crazy. Which is insane. And the people who are trying to do that are sociopaths who have lost their leadership positions in your government. They just don't know it yet. So continue blocking roads in Germany, go all that stuff. France, I love what they do. I'm just blasting them with fertilizer. That's protesters ever. It's something to pay attention to, yeah. And most people listening to this, it's not on the news. You'll see it on some social media sites, but it doesn't get covered pretty much at all. And there's a lot of outrage over this forced veganism nonsense that's out there. I feel like, what did they used to call marijuana? What kind of, it was what you call it drug? Like your first one you used, what they call it? A gateway drug. Okay, I feel like health and fitness is a gateway drug to seeing the insanity. Because when you get in health and fitness, it's very black and white. You start to see like, wait a minute, they say do this. That doesn't work. This works. And then you go down this like rabbit hole and then you start to see everything and it starts to look wild. And to me it's crazy what they're trying to do by, and they're doing it under the guise of carbon, save the earth or whatever. Why aren't they promoting nuclear power or anything like that? It doesn't make any sense to me. You know, these are people who literally hate human beings. There's no other way you could do this. Wasn't there an article where literally that the title of it was it would be better off there were no humans at all? Yeah, because we use carbon. Yeah. Like newsflags guys. Carbon, oxygen, carbon, oxygen. They're the same thing. You have to use carbon. Our breathing was contributing to global warming. The one thing that I think it gives me great hope is that there are many people like me who will never be vegans and politicians are made out of meat. Oh, God. Can we cut that out too? I hope you're writing these down, Anthony. These are great. Oh, hold on. You were thinking that? Oh. We always joke about it. We'll just eat twice as much meat going forward anyway so they're gonna help anybody anyways going that route. Oh, boy. Okay, I have some selfish questions. I promise I won't pick anymore on the cap table stuff but I do wanna hear. One of my favorite things to ask somebody who's had as much success as you have had is your personal journey with finances and money. Like coming from being a kid, not really having much money to all of a sudden making thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands than millions. Tell me about your journey and at what age were you making what kind of money and what kind of person you were and how it's changed you? This is such a cool topic. I'm happy we're talking about it. Cool. I like to talk about that stuff. It turns out this is something that comes up a lot when people go through 40 years as in. This is a five day neurofeedback program in Seattle because you go really deep on invisible patterns and we all have invisible patterns around money. I would say that I grew up in a family, my dad had the equivalent of a government job for a national laboratory which meant okay, pay good vacations but we weren't poor, we weren't rich but I thought we were poor. I don't think as my parents are great at managing money. And so I kind of grew up that way. I remember I started college and I had friends who had a car that their parents bought them. I bought my own car. It was $2,000 and not very nice. And I was actually paying my own way through college and I worked at Baskin Robbins, a scooped ice cream. I shared a one bedroom apartment in a slum with a guy and you started what turned out to be the first e-commerce company just goes, that begins me. Like I was scrappy, didn't mean I was a very good student. You think at this time, sorry, I interrupt you and I want to know what's going through your head. Like is it out of desperation? Is it drive? Cause you want to be rich? Like what's motivating? I wanted to be rich. It turns out I'm freedom motivated and I believed that money would make me happy and money would make me free. And it doesn't do either one of those, although it helps, right? It certainly does, I'm not going to argue about that. And it's disrespectful when people say money doesn't matter. The studies show that money matters until household income of $75,000, but that's in the old money. So that's about $120,000 in today's money. And that's real, like inflation, they stole half your money in the last two years. You're not paying attention. So I'm a little upset about that if you guys can't. Yeah, we all are, we all are. Yeah, just, but you know, there's people listening who maybe haven't done the math and just pay attention. So I look at the feelings around money, there's like fear of not having enough because then it's fear of safety. And so there's times when, you know, you'll say I can't afford that and it's usually around health and fitness and things like that, like taking care of yourself. And then there's times when you can't afford that and it's going out for drinks, right? Which is a huge amount of money compared to other things. People say, I can't afford to eat well. I'm like, what is wrong with you? You're getting a 10 pounds of grass-fed ground beef sent to you in the mail is not very expensive. And there are people that's, you know, a month's food and they're just eating, you know, ramen and in which case, I'm sorry. You're probably fucked, right? And by the way, we can all do better as a society but we're not doing better right now. And that, in fact, are facts. So there's prioritization to spend and that's usually broken because we process our money through the F word filters that I teach in biohacking and that inside your cells they process reality long before your brain gets even a signal, something's going on. You can measure this. So the first thing that your body looks for is from the mitochondria, their environmental sensors and their computers that decide what to do. And then they can manufacture heat, electricity or chemicals and hormones and stuff like that. Mitochondria will process fear first. If something is scary, run away from kill or hide from it. Take all the energy, all the focus and do that. Thank you. So that's fear, first of the F words. Next in order, eat everything, right? And your body will do that because famines have killed everything alive lots and lots of times. So you don't have to think about it. All these are happening before you can think. So we have fear, we have food, something else your body has to do to keep the species alive forever. It's also an F word. Yeah, yeah, we know what that is. Fuck. I'll say it. Fornicate. I was going for fertility. You guys set up on that trap right there. I never get tired of that. Fell for that one. Chop enough bugs. So, yeah, it's fucking. So fear, food, fucking and friend. We do this in order and friends with others in our tribe and just even others on the other life forms on the planet. So all life does this. I don't care if you're a tree. You run the algorithm. Oh, if it's scary, make more toxic compounds in your bark, right? If it's food, get all of the soil nutrients and sunshine you can out compete the other trees. If it's reproduction, put out some pollen, right? And then form a tribe with trees, whatever they call that, a glade, right? Everything does it. So you do it too. And that means when there's money that you process it through that same framework because all of reality comes through that. So with money, if money means safety and you feel like you're losing money, you feel fear, which takes all of your energy, right? And so you run it through them. What else does money get you? Money gets you all the food you can eat. You need that. What else does it get you? All the sex you want and all the friends you want to, even though they're not real friends, they still feel real until they take all your money, right? That's why money is so weird. It's a really interesting lens to see it through. That's why it's such an emotional topic for us. So did you go through all those when you started making money? Absolutely. And for me, though, it was like when I make money, I'm gonna be happy. I wrote down when I was 16, I am gonna have a million dollars in liquid net assets. By the time I'm 23. And I put it on my mirror, think and grow rich style. And I read the book and I was like, I'm all in. And I really truly thought it would make me happy. And like I said, I made $6 million when I was 26. Didn't quite make it when I was 23, but close enough. And I looked at a guy, he's got us right down the street here and the parking lot's full of all these exotic cars. And I looked at him and I said, yeah, I got $6 million, but I'll be happy when I have 10. Yeah. And I talked with J. Abraham on my show about this. He was one of the most storied marketing guys in the world. Same thing. It's like you buy a new car, you're happy for two days. So money doesn't make you happy as nothing to do with happiness as long as your basic needs are met. And understanding that's really important because what happens when you lose a bunch of money is you feel like you're gonna die. It literally feels like you lost a family member or something. It's not real, it's just emotion, it's your body. So you just have to realize that you're in financial net worth and your safety are not that connected, right? Even though there's all sorts of weird stuff in the world today, you can still eat even if you've lost everything you had right now. Probably not gonna die, at least not for a while. It would just be uncomfortable. So it was a cold plunge. Like that's the reality we live in. It just doesn't feel like that's the reality. How long did it take you to start developing a better relationship? Like when did you realize, okay, like this is not it? You know, it was a big lesson when I made and lost all that money. I'd already been on magazine covers of being famous didn't seem to make you happy. Being rich didn't seem to make me happy. And so even when I started Bulletproof, I was a computer hacker. I had entirely anonymized my existence. You couldn't even tell it in my car. Like I was happy to be invisible. I gave up my anonymity in order to make biohacking a thing because that was the only thing I could see to do it. But I don't have a desire to be famous. But given that I have the opportunity to do that, I will use it for good. But money is kind of the same way. What are you gonna do with a bunch of money? You can use it. So one of my friends who's named Ken Honda writes really effectively about this. He's Japan's equivalent of Tony Robbins, the largest author, like 25 million books or something sold. His first book in the US, I introduced him to his agent, Celeste. And it's called Happy Money. And every time he spends money, he expresses gratitude for the money flowing through his hands and gratitude for what the money is going to do for the person who receives it. Even if it's to pay a ticket, it doesn't matter. Every time you spend money, gratitude for the money. And he's like, you do that, more money comes in. And what I didn't understand about money is that money is, it's called current C because it flows like a current and you even store it in banks. So money is a flow and it doesn't actually exist. It's made up. Unless you're trading gold bars, it is entirely made up. In fact, it's not even printed anymore. They just change a number in a computer. So we're all worried about a fanciful notion that says other people owe us something that they will steal from you if you're not looking. Whether it's through inflation or through investment schemes or through when you're not looking, breaking your car window in San Francisco and stealing a gum wrapper, I have no idea. San Francisco's crazy. But you know what I'm saying? So the impermanence of it all is important to understand. So your feeling of safety, what you want to do is just be able to say, I'm okay whether I have money or not. And that make that sense of peace around money is one of the most important things you can have. And there's people are saying, well, Dave, you can say that because you have enough. Guys, I had $10,000 in liquid net assets when I started Bulletproof. I'd spent all my money moving to Vancouver Island. I'd gone to a startup. And after 90 days, it didn't work out. So there's been lots of times I'd put auto parts in boxes for five years. I mentioned I worked at Baskin Robbins. Yeah, you can, there's times when you work hard and times you don't have enough. And there's times when you do. And most of the time there's also in your normal career, there's sine waves. Sometimes it's high, sometimes it's low. Sometimes it's high, sometimes it's low. And being afraid about it and being worried about it usually is very counterproductive. Doing something about it is something that matters. So where am I now about money? Sure, I'd like to have more of it, wouldn't we all? I'm probably nowhere near as wealthy as people think I am, but I'm also comfortable. There was a time when it looked pretty likely I was gonna be a billionaire. And that time, at least for that opportunity has passed, not that there aren't, if I'm gonna live to 180, I should have three or four more of those at least. And given that in another five years, a billion dollars might be enough to buy a cup of coffee the way things are going, there's that. How do you communicate it to your kids? Like what you just said, it's pretty high level. You have teenagers right now. I'm not sure if you teach that to them quite yet or is there things that you do in your household around money, do you talk to them, like this is dad's money and then you don't, this is not your money? Like, yeah, I'm like, hey, if you wanna have money, you should probably go earn some, right? And if you wanna earn money and be happy, do something that helps other people like improve the world. That's what entrepreneurship is for. Do something better. And the thing that pisses me off the most and I tell my kids this too is, you saw these things on Instagram or TikTok, here's how to steal this company's, how about you guys just stop that shit? Like every time a company comes out with a new innovation, something that's cool, right away, three or four unethical internet marketing scumbags will come along and be like, I can make the same thing even cheaper and immediately they're taking the wind out of the sales, they didn't do any innovation, all they did was cheapen the world and it's happening so fast so quickly that when companies make good stuff, by the time it can get out there, they're already starting to not be able to continue doing it. So the level of IP theft and copycatting out there instead of actually doing something new, it's different. And what are the results of doing something new? Well, biohacking, upgrade our biology, you can hack your health, it's been on the cover of men's health, women's health, Vogue, Mademoiselle, all the magazines I would never be in as a fat computer hacker, our language has changed around health and fitness because of doing something different and better instead of doing it the same as everyone else, right? So what I tell my kids is do something better. It doesn't have to be a thousand times better, but if you're gonna iterate, iterate, but don't iterate on lower cost and shittier quality, iterate on new features, on something better, something more interesting, and that that's how you add value in the world. I really like that because when, we get to talk to a lot of entrepreneurs and especially in the training coaching space, there's a lot of trainers that want to figure out or want to do what we did. I said, one of the things you have to understand is that, and I tell them this all the time, that 10 years ago, we saw an opportunity to do something better. We looked at the fitness space, we saw the number one digital program online was Beachbody, they're doing $4 billion a year, and when you unpacked their actual programming, it was dog shit. And we looked at, we could go out there and provide. You ever put Tony Horton in here? Actually, he's tried to be on the show a few times. I like Tony, he was actually, you should interview him. Yeah. Have you talked to him lately? He's like a totally, he's like a monk. I know, I've heard. Yeah, we haven't met him. I was blown away, like really cool. Yeah. And what I do, I give him his kudos though, I haven't met him yet, but they were brilliant at marketing. Absolutely brilliant. I mean, that's what they did better than anybody else, but the actual training program, he's dog shit. And just, it is what it is. And then the thought for us was that we can provide something better. And then the podcast was, let's go give it all the information for free before we ask for any money. And then the podcast proved that. And then we could turn around and monetize. And so, it's not simple, it's simply, oh, how do you hack the algorithm or how do you create, it's like, go make something better that you believe you could provide and add more value to someone's life, the business and the money will follow. You have, I mean, Arthur Brooks, good friend of ours, is a Harvard professor expert on happiness. And a big part of happiness is doing something that you feel has purpose and meaning. So you make money without that feeling and you may be, it's like drinking sea water to quench your thirst. Yeah, it doesn't feel good to make money and know that you hurt someone to do it. It doesn't feel good to lie, cheat and steal. And I feel like the people who do that, unless they're the ones who are just telling themselves they're not doing it, they're actually in pain. Sure. And they're looking over their shoulder and all that. And what I'm working with my kids to help them understand is that they're responsible for their own stuff and for their own path in life. And there's some stuff, even as teenagers, you know, kids think their parents are invincible. There's some things my kids could do that could get them a lot of trouble that I can't get them out of. Right? And God knows if they did half the stuff I did when I was 16, they'd probably been a lot of trouble because the world has become a lot more authoritarian. Yeah. And you know, financially, they need to make good decisions. And I just tell them, I'm gonna give you advice and you can take it or not. And same with food. You know, this is what this food does, this is what that food does, you pick. Because I know what I would do when I was 16, I'm gonna do what I'm gonna do and you are too. So, you know, Godspeed. And it's the same with finances. And if my kids are desperately broke when they're 19, I hope they learn something. What's been the hardest thing of fatherhood? One of the hardest things in fatherhood was actually getting separated. So, I separated a couple of years ago, consciously uncoupled. And it was the decision between, do I model a relationship that's run its course to my kids or do I model something else? And balancing that decision over, you know, what's best for the kids, what's best for me, what's best for the mother of my kids and making the decision at the right time and communicating it in the right way that allowed the kids to continue thriving. And I think we did that, you know, I'll tell you in 10 more years. But that was a really difficult thing because I think one of the worst things that people do is they say, well, you know, if a marriage is dysfunctional and isn't going to get functional and there's no harm in saying, you know what? We both did our best. And doing something that isn't working and isn't going to work over and over and over actually just creates more suffering. So if you've gotten to that point, then the worst thing you do is show your kids that that's what they should do when they're in a relationship, right? So just realizing I could wait longer and longer and longer and I know so many friends also wait till they're in college and then they get divorced, right? And then the kids are mad at them and then everyone feels like it was a sham. So it's being authentic. It's talking about feelings with the kids. Those are all really difficult things. And, you know, for me, maybe the hardest part is when they're really young and you just have to say the same thing like a thousand times before they can hear it. That's just boring, right? Like I had soft people who of course we all do it and we all do it with as much love as we can but it's hard just because like, dude, I already said that like 500 times like why are you asking me this, right? I find that insane making but I'm happy to do it because it's my kids. How did you break the news to the kids about you guys separating? Just thinking about this. We sat them down and just matter of factly. Together? Yep. Yeah. And that depends on family dynamics and things like that. And there's, you know, there's details that just aren't mine to tell in the details of that but sat them down together. And it actually went better than I would expect and there's all sorts of pain in a situation like that. What was really helpful for me was that my former wife and I, we were aligned on the decision to do that and it wasn't like anyone cheated. It wasn't like there was, you know, built up volcanic resentment and all that. It was more of a peaceful co-parenting. You know, everybody wants everyone else to win. Yeah. And to be in that state, I'm really grateful for that. And also I think it's because we'd all done a huge amount of forgiveness and gratitude and neurofeedback and meditation and you know, that kind of household. So that means even if there's a feeling maybe you don't have to act on it right away. Yeah. When I got divorced, I became more involved post-divorced than I was when I was married because I think I got, I realized, oh, I'm only gonna see them half the time and I became very aware of the fact that I wasn't gonna be with them all the time. Did you find anything like that? Cause you, I mean, I worked a lot at the time when I was in my first marriage. I'm, I mean, I'm assuming you worked a lot as well. Did you find that for yourself as well? Like, okay, I need to be more present when I do have them or was the arrangement different? Probably different. I had dinner with my kids every single night when I was home because we lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere. So there's nowhere to go. There's one of the reasons I didn't wanna live up there full time anymore because I actually liked being able to see people. And so I spent a lot of time with the kids when they were younger. And now when they had a certain time as teenagers, they just wanna know you're around. They don't wanna see. They don't wanna hang out with you. No. So what's cool though for me is that when they come to see me when they're on breaks and all, I get really good quality time, much better than I had before, right? Because it's like we're both in on that time and we do fun stuff and it's very good quality time. Are they still on the farm? Yep, they're still on the farm. Good deal. So what's, what would you like to happen with your new company? What's the big goal with it? Is it to crush all the other coffee companies? There's a couple of new companies, right? One of them is Danger Coffee. And I don't wanna crush anyone. I just wanna make coffee that is actually mold-free. It says run and label mold. Doesn't say clean. A lot of people make up clean. I don't know what that means. Clean can mean anything, right? Yeah, right? Yeah, Mr. Clean, when it's in there. So Danger Coffee is very clean, very high cup scores. We're doing even like premium ceremonial grade coffee and the minerals and electrolytes just change the smoothness of it. So you're getting a real dose of trace minerals that almost everyone's deficient in when you drink it. So it's just doing more good than normal coffee and it feels better. So I just feel like every time I drink it, someone drinks it, it improves them. So that's gonna keep growing. And then upgrade labs. How many franchises are there now? There's 27 of these sold and there's... So explain it, you go in, I'm assuming it's all biohacking. So what is the experience like in one of these? So the first one opened underneath Arnold Schwarzenegger's office in Santa Monica. That's why I heard, okay, so now I'm like, I know this, okay, this is what I remember. I created this business category too. People have come in, there's about 900 locations that have tried to knock it off, but here's the deal. Anyone can open a location in a strip mall with a cold plunge and a $200 red lamp and say it's a biohacking facility. That's mostly what's going on. What we're doing is you come in, we're using medical, there you go. We're using medical grade tech, but not doing medicine. So we come in, we get thousands of data points off your body. We use algorithms and AI to figure out, based on your goal, which of all the biohacks do you do in what order to get your girl the fastest? Got it. So we're gonna put muscle on faster than you're gonna get from picking up things under gravity because we have an AI control system that provides resistance that puts muscle on more quickly. You can use even resistance bands. There's all kinds of different ways of changing speed of muscle growing. The kind of people who are coming in for that, the 92% of people don't go to the gym because the ROI on the gym isn't that good. They don't have six hours a week to go, work out or four hours to go, work out. And so they don't. So like guys, give me 20 minutes twice a week and you're gonna get enough muscle mass in your chest, in your legs, that it's gonna affect you metabolically, in a very small amount of time. We're gonna raise their VO2 max by about 12%, we do it in very, very small amounts of time, all with AI and digital controls because it turns out those really fine inputs and outputs, you can change things. And then we're doing a bunch of recovery technologies like a custom built red light bed that has embedded frequencies, cryotherapy, which helped to popularize. Is it like a monthly fee or do people buy a package? It's a monthly fee. Oh, I see. You guys don't buy a package, but most people just buy a monthly fee. I see. And it, you would pay for the monthly fee, you'd get, it's the cost of like two massages in the average place. It's not a crazy thing, but you get access to a lot of very advanced tech. Interesting. But the most important thing is we have the technology to tell you what to do, to get results really quickly, including neurofeedback. So we will train your brain in the time, you know, that you didn't spend on a spin bike somewhere because five minutes gets you more results than the spin bike. In the other 20 minutes, why don't we hook you up to neurofeedback and train your brain so that you have the ability to control your state better? It's just different goals. So some person may say, I want to be younger. So AI and longevity are at the center of this thing. Another person, I want more muscle. I want to lose weight. I want to get my energy back. I want to manage just better. I want to be smarter. So these are primary goals. So it's, you come in, who are you, where are you biologically and quantitatively? And then we help you get to your goal in the tiniest amount of time possible. My assumption is we're all lazy and that's okay. Mother nature wants you to save energy and eat everything in case there's a famine. So the part of you that wants to be lazy, you're going to come to labs and say, this was less work than everyone else and I got really good results. Save time, save energy, same or better results, I'm in. So you said how many locations now? We have 27 signs. When did you start the first one? Well, the first one started eight years ago. Eight years ago. And the reason it's taken this long to franchise is it took more than $10 million to figure out how to make money in this business. It turns out it's hard to do. Yeah, you're telling me. It's capital intensive. Did you take money on for this business also or did you do this one yourself on it? I own this one entirely now, but it's been a long path to get here. Oh wow, good deal. Yeah, I can imagine that being a difficult way to make money because the cost of all the things that you're talking about, the equipment is pretty expensive per square foot and then a monthly fee, unlike a gym, you probably want people to show up or as a gym industry like, hey, pay us and don't show up. You know, that's their model. You would have been a good person actually to reach out to you to what we started. So we've got a place out in Park City. It's the first, we do real estate, I told you. But we have one short term rental. It's our first ones right outside of Park City and we used all our relationships with the cold plunge, the sauna, the steam, the infrared. Yeah, we should have talked. And so the whole house is outfitted. Very fun. Yeah, yeah. So if you ever want to go out there and stay, but my goal was to first prove the model that we could keep it loaded and charge a little bit of our premium for the type of people that would appreciate all those things. It's like an Airbnb kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah, I've seen a couple of biohacking Airbnbs out there. You might be able to do it, but watch out man, some of those technologies are going to get you mold. Which one do we, what do we, like what? The steam room? The steam room. Yeah. The whole place is, especially in Park City, because you have really cold air and you have a sealed envelope and you get the steam inside. It goes into the wall, sticks to the envelope and then inside of the wall is covered in black mold. So steam is really dangerous. Even though it's really good for it, you gotta have insane ventilation and the people who are there have to remember to turn the fans on or they have to be automatic. Oh, it's automatic. It's a risk. Yeah, yeah, it's good to know though. It's really good to know. Well, Dave, we're almost two hours in and I tell you what, this has been a very entertaining. Yeah, great, great conversation. I really appreciate you coming on the show. This has been a lot of fun. It's my pleasure. And for listeners, you can start a business, just start a business that does something better than exist today. And if you do that, you're making the world a better place. And if you knock off someone else's idea and do it cheaper, you're making the world a worse place. So it's unethical to use entrepreneurship to make the world a worse place. So don't do that. And if you do it the right way, who knows, you might actually make a lot of money and also make a difference. Yeah, markets plus good people. That's a good idea. There it is. Thanks Dave, I like it.