 So our next speaker is Dave Asprey. He's a new speaker to the 21 convention. He's a Silicon Valley investor, entrepreneur, blogger, computer security expert, and notorious biohacker. Cool stuff. He's got, on average, 150,000 unique visitors coming to his site every month. He's also featured on CNN Nightline. So he's got some amazing stuff to share, I'm sure. And you can find out more about him at his site, which is bulletproofexec.com. Help me welcome Dave to the stage. Thanks. Thanks for having me here, everyone. I'm going to tell you a quick story. This is me. When I was about 22, I was featured in Entrepreneur Magazine because, well, it was the first guy to sell anything over the internet, literally the first guy. I don't look that old, do I? I paid for my computer science undergrad education, selling t-shirts that said caffeine, my drug of choice. You can see one back there. To 12 countries over Usenet, because we hadn't invented the web browser yet. I ate 1,500 low-fat calories a day, not all the time when I was in college, but when I got serious about trying to lose some of the fat you see here, I got to the point I'd work out an hour and a half a day, six days a week. I couldn't lose the weight. I had 297 pounds when I was in my fourth year at University of California, Santa Barbara. And because this is a conference where we talk about things like dating and whatnot, I'll tell you about my first internet date. Working on the computer lab. Yes, I did hacker terminal. I was trying to find a picture of what that looked like. And I think I got it down because when I'm hacking, I hold my laptop like this. I type like this and I wear a mask. I still do that. You and me both. About 13 years ago, I ran the program for the University of California. These are all public photos you can prove. This one was published in a bunch of course catalogs. It's hard to see with this light, but I was puffy and I was pretty fat. My career's on fire, though. I made actually $6 million when I was 26. Not bad. Little bit less exercise, though. Fewer carbs, I've only lost about 50 pounds. Not a bad deal, really. Problems with my stress levels were going up. And stress goes up as you start working more and you start dating more. Oh, wait. It actually happens. And for me, my brain started misfiring. I literally was at work and I would think about this and say, I can't remember what happened to me today. Something's really not working very well here. I took a computer game called FreeCell. We have way better tools today, but FreeCell's a solitaire game. Some days I could perform well, some days I couldn't. And I got a verifiable quantitative metric and said my brain is doing this every day. Otherwise, our ability to know how well we're doing it any one time is pretty fuzzy, using data helped. So now I'm fat, but I'm getting stupid. All the seventh graders were right. Decided I was gonna make money fast and live forever. What the heck? There we go. I was featured in Monster Careers, one of the first books about how to do online networking to have an amazing job. Accompaniment bankrupt. My brain got really broken. If you think that you've had stress in your life, try being set for life with $6 million when you're 26, when you're 28 realizing you're gonna have to work for 20 more years, it sucks. I put my anti-aging research online for the first time and I was actually about Jolly's age when I was 28. So I've been doing this for a long time. When I was 29, I took some measurements. It's hard to read any doctor's handwriting. Sorry, they're Dr. McGuff. This says increased risk for stroke myocardial infarction. So I'm 29, they're telling me you're gonna die like you're 50 or 60 or 70. That was bad. This is a picture of my brain. Colors are a bit hard to make out with these lights. The red parts are the parts where there's no metabolic activity when there should be. This is not a good thing when you're trying to have a successful career, things like that. And worst of all, interesting referral. What this means is you're a guinea pig because we don't know what the heck to do with you. So the good curious doctors are like that, but the patients don't. A decade later, I spent a quarter million dollars on my own money biohacking myself, working on upgrading every system I could find. My career is pretty darn good. I got my MBA from Wharton while working full time. I have an angel investor. I have two young kids, a happy, healthy family. My book comes out in January published by Wiley and Sons. Gary Tobs introduced me to my agent. So like this is all top tier stuff. At the same time, I'm a vice president at a large internet security company. I'm about 210 pounds, give or take muscle mass. 45 minutes a month is the amount I exercise now. I can do five hours of sleep for two years in a row and maintain my cognitive function and my autonomic nervous system stress. I have highly optimized biohacker nutrition, which you're gonna hear about in a little bit. I've raised my IQ by more than 20 points between 20 and 40 actually, depending on what day it is. You don't know this, but your IQ varies pretty dramatically day by day based on your sleep and your food and a bunch of other things. My vision, my hearing, and the way my brain works are all very different than they were when I was younger. I'm quoting a world class antigen doctor who does metrics on my blood with me. He says, my risk is as low as it gets for diabetes, for heart disease, for stroke, and for cancer. All the markers that we monitor, they're very low, yet I eat a stick of butter every day. Hmm, so how'd I do this? Systems thinking, which is basically the way hackers think. What that means is it's not just my body. My body is a system and the system interacts with the systems around it, all of the things that are here. When you look at things that way, rather than this is a knee or this is a joint, you can actually do things with your body and with your life that you wouldn't expect. You correlate things over time. You can't just notice something once. You need to look for patterns all the time. And real-time feedback has been transformative for me. You can reprogram the way your nervous system works by getting feedback on what it's doing. You suck at knowing what your body is doing at any one time unless you've specifically developed a skill to do that. The people who are really good at that spend all day, every day meditating. They're called Buddhist monks and they can, you know, basically dry a sheet in an ice storm with body temperature that they raise consciously. I don't really have a lot of time to sit into bed and meditate. So how do I get that ability to have really good wiring to really understand what my body's doing? Well, I use technology. I've also learned a ton from a ton of really smart people because I run an anti-aging nonprofit group and I've been involved with them for more than 10 years. So more than a hundred experts I've had personal time with as well as all the ones I've paid to be with me. I threw money at the problem. I'm here today to show you all the stuff that works best so you don't have to throw money and spend a decade doing things to yourself. I've hacked my sleep. I mentioned five hours and I was just fine. That's a conscious change that I made to improve my sleep efficiency. If you only remember one thing from this presentation, this is what you need to do with everything in your life, including dating, including weight loss, including putting on muscle, including getting a raise at work. It's, you try what's supposed to work. When it doesn't work, you ignore it instead of trying it over and over and over and over. And then you try what shouldn't work. So if you try the normal things, it's all right to go out on the deep end and see what's going to be there. Who do you think taught me to eat a stick of butter every day? No one. I did an experiment. I said, hmm, I know that butter and other healthy fats are the cleanest burning things in the body that cause the least inflammation. What if I try just increasing the amount of this? And then I looked at what happened. So it's, you're just creating a feedback loop for yourself. You can discover amazing things about what works in an online company, what works in dating, what works anywhere just by following this iterative process.