 If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump, mind pump, with your hosts, Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. This guy's pretty much like the godfather of this coffee movement, it's weird, I've never heard of it. That exploded in a paleo world. I think Starbucks is responsible for that, but I think the guy putting fat in his coffee, he's definitely. Well that's what I mean. Right, right. When we went to Paleo FX, was like Bulletproof Land. Right, I'm really curious to see what people think about this interview, because this was one of those interviews we did over the phone, not my favorite when we do them over the phone, because I feel like I can't look into your fucking soul. You know what I'm saying? I want body language, sir. I asked him some deep questions here, so I brought it for you guys, but I feel like sometimes he pulled a little matrix on me, so it'd be kind of interesting to hear what you guys think of this. He's a cool, look, Dave Aspie's a cool guy, super smart guy. I would love to meet him in person, I'd love to have him up in the studio. Yeah, because you can have better conversations in person, you could do more content, you get to know the person. We don't normally agree to do podcasts through Skype for the very reason that we're talking about. We like to get a little bit more deep with people. It's Dave Aspie though, right? He wants to get on your podcast, we should do it, he's been around for a little while. He's got a very popular podcast, he's quite influential. Yeah, I know a lot of people are really excited about this. I mean, he got a lot of traction on our Instagram when Taylor posted up what we're gonna be doing. That's right. I'm excited to have him on, he is a smart guy, it is a good interview. And I think we committed, I think after the interview, we committed to what, January or February? Doug, I think he's supposed to come up. Maybe I think sometime in February, hopefully. Yeah, look forward to doing some more stuff with this guy. Excellent, so here we are talking to Dave Aspie. You can find his website is bulletprooflabs.com or bulletproof.com, and his podcast is Bulletproof Radio. Without any further ado, here we are talking to Dave Aspie. You're kind of like the poster person for biohacking. How did that start? Was that a big thing even before you got into or are you the one that made it popular? I wrote the first definition of biohacking and I'm the first person to talk about it at scale. I actually decided not to trademark the term because I wanted a name for this community that was a little different. I spent 20 years running an anti-aging nonprofit group in the Bay Area and I looked at, there's Navy SEALs and there's astronauts and there's power lifters and bodybuilders and endurance athletes and medical professionals and anti-aging people, all these different people. We're all seeking the same thing which is control over our biology and there was very little cross-pollination between those groups. We're all working towards the same goal which is control. So how do we bring it together in a community? And that's why I trademarked Bulletproof Coffee and all that stuff and made that in my business but I made biohacking a community name that we can all use to identify as people who are breaking the frontiers about figuring out how to have control over our biology. Like you may wanna get swole and the guy next to you may wanna live to 200 years old. We're gonna use the same tool set. Yeah, cause I for some reason thought that Bulletproof, your business was around much longer than it has been. It's only been around for what? How many years? Like four years, five years? I started my first blog post at the end of 2011 and that was after many years of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and running all this anti-aging stuff. And I just one day said, you know, if someone had told me all the stuff I know now when I was 20, it would have saved me so much struggle and money and effort. And so I'm just gonna write this blog. I'm an executive at a big tech company. I make a quarter million dollars a year with stock options. I'm not looking to start a company. I just want five people to read this blog and have it change your life. Didn't build a list and do any of the marketing stuff you're supposed to do. I'm just gonna give away the good info and it grew from there very organically. It's amazing when that happens though. I feel like most people that have a lot of success like the level of bulletproof success have to start off with like intentions like that. I feel like when you're totally driven monetarily it doesn't seem to work out the same way. And the most successful people that I've interviewed or talked to it's always when you just have this passion that you want to do something or you want to help people and that's what really makes it grow organically. People can feel it. If you're just out there to sell something anyone out there can knock off some content from someone else's site or copy a product and go out there and cut some corners and make some money. But you got to live with yourself when you do that. And people just, we can sense it. We're not dumb. And when it comes that like I want to help people if it's real and it really comes from your heart I think there's just an energetic difference. And you could say there's no science behind that. Okay, fine. There's no science behind that. It still works. Where does your passion for this come from? Like what made you so interested in biohacking or changing your physiology or just improving? Like what was it that drove that? I used to weigh 300 pounds in my fourth year of college. And I'd struggle with weight even as a young in high school and things like that. I'd gained 20 pounds or so I lose 20 pounds, gained 30 pounds and just yo-yo all over the place. I tried all sorts of different diets at arthritis in my knee since I was 14. I was on antibiotics every month for strep throat and sinus infections for years and my biology was wrecked. And in my mid-20s, I went to Silicon Valley. I was a co-founder of a part of the company that held Google's first servers when Google was one server and two guys. And I made $6 million when I was 26 years old. I lost when I was 28, but it was a good couple of years there. But during that time I started to get like brain problems. So here I am like I'm a reasonably smart guy. I'm at the most interesting thing in the world at the time which is like the growth of the internet. And when I realized I was losing my brain, not just my bad knees and my fat ass, I'm like I gotta do something and I got kind of desperate. So I just said this is the most important thing I can do. And I put hundreds of thousands of dollars and I saw the world's best people. And within a year I was president of this anti-aging nonprofit group where I was learning from guys three times my age about how they were controlling their biology. And when I did it for myself I'm like, oh look, I'm losing weight. My knees don't hurt anymore. My brain works again. I can turn this back on through willpower. And eventually I just became an expert from absorbing from these people. I'd study every night for two to four hours until I'd literally fall asleep at my desk just learning about biology. And I'm like, wow, now I have the energy to bring it. I never had my whole life. And like I'm not angry anymore and it all changed. And so it was literally, I was worried about my career, my ability to pay for my family and just to feel good ever. That's where it came from. So this was your first time being fit in your whole life? It was. I rode, let's say I rode a road bike and a mountain bike as a teenager in New Mexico, sometimes 20 miles a day. I played soccer for 13 years and I've had three knee surgeries before I was 23. They told me I'd be lucky if I could walk much less go trekking the Andes in Himalayas, which I've done since then. And so yeah, I was never healthy and it wasn't for lack of trying. After my second knee surgery, I'm like, all right, I got this. I worked out six days a week an hour and a half a day at the local, I think they called it 24 hour Nautilus before it was 24 hour fitness and half weights, half cardio, 15% incline on the treadmill, 1800 calories a day, low fat. And a year and a half of that, I'm still 300 pounds and I could bench press all my friends. Like I could max every machine and I was still a fat ass. And I was just so disheartened and I thought it was because it was a moral thing. Like if only I'd tried harder, you know, if only eight, even less beans, you know, or whatever the heck it was, it wasn't working and it was just a sense of frustration where like when my doctor told me, maybe you should try to lose weight. I'm like, how? He goes, you should try to eat healthy. I'm like, this jerk thinks I'm eating Snickers bars all the time. And I'm like pushing every lever that anyone's ever told me to push. And I still feel like crap and I'm tired all the time. And it was only when I saw an anti-aging doctor looked at my hormones like, oh look, your testosterone is lower than your mom. And your thyroid's broken. And like you're over-trained. Like, oh, maybe that's the problem. It's amazing how common that is. You know, and on the show, we actually talk a lot about the insecurities that drove us into fitness. Do you share much about what that was like being 300 pounds and the insecurities driving you into working out and how that probably was the motivating factor to the way how you ate and how you train? It's certainly a part of it. I mean, I was bullied a lot. I'm six, four. And I'm probably pushing right now. I haven't weighed myself recently with, I put on some muscle recently. I'm probably really around 230, 235 right now. And I've got a nice V shape. I'm 45 years old. This is unprecedented in my life. I have abs. And I'm like, I'm blown away. But for years after I lost all the fat, I turned sideways in the hallway to make space for people to go around me because I was so used to weighing 300 pounds. And when you're the tall guy and the fat guy, you're gonna get bullied because all the short guys, like Napoleon's complex, they always want to start fights because they don't understand physics. I'm like, so the number of times I just sit on a small guy who punched me once, I lost track of that. But it leaves emotional scars. Like, all right, you know, I want to literally be bullied people. Like I want to be invincible from this stuff. And a lot of my entrepreneurial success, a lot of that motivation in the gym, it literally came from fear of failure and, you know, fear of looking like a failure or, you know, not being good enough. And I've reprogrammed all that stuff. It's gone. And I don't operate from there anymore. It helps me, I'm married, I have two kids. I don't even have to look good. But I'm glad I do. So you feel like you're at peace now with it? Yeah, I'm very much at peace with it. It helps. I spent four months with electrodes glued to my head doing, you know, hours of neurofeedback to do the equivalent of 40 years of Zen meditation. That's helped me a lot because all the voices in my head, all the critical ones, they always come from childhood traumas and bullying and just, you know, bad stuff that happens. Your body actually is trying to keep you alive. It's trying to keep you safe from things it perceives to be threats. And so I just had really bad threat recognition. And as I went through and very systematically turned off of those crappy voices in my head to the point that now, I mean, I can have critics or, you know, things not go my way. And I don't lose sleep over it. I don't worry. I just, I, you know, I can see if any other person's point of view and it's probably because they were bullied. I don't know, but it's not about me. I'm just gonna do the right thing and move on. And God, it's refreshing to be able to, you know, leave other people's baggage with them. But that was a cultivated skill because I'll tell you, I was a very successful, very fearful guy in my 20s. Yeah, it's really changing those thought patterns are no different. I mean, we've worked in fitness for a long time. It's no different than changing, you know, muscle recruitment patterns. You know, if somebody's been moving a particular way for a long time, it takes a while to change those patterns to create a new default pattern with their movement. You know, if somebody's always sitting down or somebody, you know, walks with high heels all the time, it will take sometimes a year or two years of concentrated effort to change that pattern so that their new default is something that's more desirable. How do you deal now with critics now? Like, who are your number one critics? Who are people that you would say are probably, you know, the ones that are kind of coming after you all the time? Or do you have any? The best way to deal with critics is just gratitude. I have a daily gratitude practice and there's just three words and it's, say my name. Like, you're talking about me. And of course you're saying bad things. It just makes people Google me. And you're like, yeah, there's an abundance of evidence behind what I do. There's tons of science. And when people hear what I have to say, it's credible because it actually works. And there's a hundred million cups of Bulletproof Coffee last year. So you can say whatever you want about my mom or about me. And in my mind, I'm at peace with it. And there's two different kinds of critics. The sort of the science trolls, it's a term that I coined. And science troll is someone who looks up something on PubMed and then pairs it with a personal insult and posts it in your social media. Those guys I love because they only get to do it once. And after that, you click ban, delete. It took them 10 minutes to say what they're gonna say. And they'll never see a word I say again and I'll never see a word they say. And I'm at peace with that. Those are not my customers. And then there's the broader ones. One of my life goals was actually to be listed on QuackWatch. Every single physician who's ever made a difference in my life is listed on QuackWatch, which is a site for essentially big pharmaceutical companies or something like that. I have no idea what motivates the guy who runs that thing, but he's been sued countless times. So I got this thing in the USA Today about the Bulletproof Diet. And any good reporter is gonna have the pro and then they have to find a competing point of view. So they interviewed Steven Barrett, the guy behind QuackWatch. And I shared it on Facebook. I'm like, guys, this is the best day ever. Everyone I respect has been attacked by this critic and I finally made the list. Even though I'm not a doctor, he called me a quack. Like what an honor. And of course there's thousands of likes later and people just laughing. That's how I deal with it. And so I'm just, how can you not be grateful when someone's talking about your work? Yeah, especially when it comes to nutrition, that's a very difficult one because there's so much misinformation. There's a lot of special interests. And then- And a ton of variables too. And then on top of it, when you eliminate, you eliminate the special interests, when you eliminate the misinformation or people trying to sell you bullshit, then you have individual variants which seems to be pretty dramatic from person to person. I mean, what do you say to that? Like somebody who comes to you and says, hey, I know you recommend a high fat diet but we have individuals who seem to just thrive on a vegan diet or people who seem to thrive on more carbohydrates in their diet. Like how do you deal with that? It's built into the Bulletproof Diet. And this book has sold a half a million copies in 14 languages. And there's basic algorithms, things like eat less toxins, eat a ton of vegetables. Those are universal rules. And to say everyone should eat this amount of fat, no. Can I tell you, no one should eat high amounts of hydrogen and fat and corn oil and soybean oil if they want to thrive? That's a hard and fast rule. There are other things. Look, you can choose the amount of protein you want based on your goals. I'm fine with that. And so people do handle carbs better than others. It has to do with their genetic history. It has to do with their gut biome. And what I'll tell people is what's been at the core of my antigen knowledge. There's three numbers that really matter that tells you whether what you're doing works or not. And it's blood tests. C-reactive protein, homocysteine, and LPPLA2. Those are three markers of inflammation. And if those are low, what you're doing is working. When inflammation is low, you make energy effectively in yourselves and you won't have muffin top and you want muffin top in your brain. And if those are high, then you're doing something wrong. Maybe it's a toxin. Maybe you're eating a food that's not compatible with your biology. Maybe you're eating too much fat. I don't really know, but now you've got numbers to move towards. At this point, enough people have gone bulletproof that I can tell you. If those numbers don't move, and you'll see triglycerides drop dramatically and HDL goes up as well. But if those numbers don't move in the right direction, okay, it's time to look at your genetics. MTHFR problems account for homocysteine in most people. People who can't handle certain forms of B vitamins like me. And when you go through and then you account for that and you do appropriate supplementation, then boom, you get another round. And you may see people with familiar hypercholesteroemia. People who just have huge amounts of cholesterol. If they have no inflammation, it seems like it doesn't really matter too much, but they usually have too much inflammation. So they may have to tweak their diet dramatically and have more mono unsaturates. And maybe they only want a teaspoon of butter instead of a tablespoon. But sure, that's all good. Like that's how we're wired. Number one rule, do what works and measure if it works. And when people do that, it just makes me happy because I was doing what didn't work and I was doing it really hard just to make sure that I was a good person. Oh my God, the amount of suffering that comes from that. It's not okay. It's extremely frustrating. But it's almost like you have to be careful when you tell people to look at blood markers because you make that popular enough and the next step will be a pharmaceutical company that's gonna give you a drug that will lower those markers but not necessarily change what was causing those markers. So you're talking about inflammatory markers. I could foresee a pharmaceutical company saying, hey, here's a new drug that lowers your C-reactive protein. Now you're okay. And it seems like that's the approach when it's a signal more than anything, right? Well, like statin levels are statin drugs to lower your cholesterol levels which aren't that useful anyway. But yeah, it's exactly what they do. I can tell you though, if they come out with a drug that lowers C-reactive protein because it increases mitochondrial function, I'm gonna be all over that drug. I'm gonna wanna understand how it works. But we are reaching that point where we can go in and say, let's turn on this one factor in a cell, maybe pharmacologically or more likely using a plant compound these days or using fasting and understand, it's conceivable that you're going to live longer and you can dramatically lower the incidence of type two diabetes and things like that. And then I'm not religious about that. I'll say use pharmaceuticals as a last resort but I've been using a smart drug pharmaceutical for 20 plus years that's really been beneficial for me that makes my neurons live longer. Doesn't have side effects like that. You talking about modafinil? I don't care about that. No, I did modafinil for eight years but I've been off modafinil for about four years. I quit it when I was testing the Bulletproof Diet to see if it was an important variable. And it turns out my brain works so well when I eat right with all the neurofeedback I've done. I can't even measure a meaningful difference on and off that stuff anymore. Like I'm on it all the time without taking it. But I'm talking about the rassetam family, my favorite is anorassetam. And even in that family of smart drugs which are pretty well known, perassetam's the most famous, there's individual variability for which rassetam works for you. So I say these companies come out with a stack of all these different rassetams. Problem is it doesn't work the same way for everyone. So you need to find out which rassetams work well for your neurochemistry. And when you dial that in like, oh wait, my brain is now protected from hypoxia when you don't have enough oxygen and my neurons live longer and my cross connectivity in the brain works better. And I can remember stuff better. Like I kind of like how I feel on this, but it's not ampy. It's just a supportive thing. I'm on that stuff right now. I took 800 milligrams of that stuff this morning. And I take a bunch of other plant-based new tropics as well and some of the bulletproof stuff and some of the mitochondrial enhancers. And I do it every day, gets my ketone levels up a little bit with brain octane and I'm like, I have more energy at 45 than at 25. And I love my life, but I'm not opposed to pharmaceuticals as a big point there. You just have to use them as a last resort and be really aware of, they've been around for 50 years, do we really understand it? Well, the racetams, they are synthetic and they are pharmaceuticals in some countries. I believe Russia prescribes paracetam and I don't think they were ever prescribed here in the US, were they? No, in fact, it's weird. They're not in the physician's desk reference. So you go to the doctor and say, I'm taking paracetam and they go, paracetam what? And they try to look it up and they can't even find it unless they just go to Google. Yet there's all this research. My very first batch of paracetam in the 90s sometime was actually made by Sando's Pharmaceuticals but they had to ship it from Europe because it wasn't available in the US. Now you can buy it in powder and capsules all over the place. Yeah, I have a little bit of a different approach with supplements like that and that I do think they can be a lot of fun. I do think that they can enhance certain experiences but I'm always very wary of taking something for long-term health only because when we look at places like the world's blue zones where people do live the longest, most of them don't take anything. And it feels like we evolved for so long with our environment that, and there's so little that we know about the human metabolism and so little that we know about things like the gut microbiome. The microbiome, that's something that's, we're just, we're really starting to tap into now. We really, I mean, 15, 20 years ago nobody was talking about it. Now we're starting to get some science to come out the show that it's extremely impactful on the body and so it's, I'm always wary of saying this is, take this synthetic drug or synthetic product for longevity because we don't know what we don't know. You know what I mean? Like if you look at the studies on artificial sweeteners 20 years ago, 30 years ago there were studying things that we knew to study, toxicity and those types of things. And they said, okay, it was safe. They didn't know to test really for gut microbiome. And now we know that it has a real bad detrimental effect for that kind of stuff. And we also just started to learn about epigenetics and how these things may change the way your genes express themselves and it may take decades. Do you ever worry about that taking some of these synthetic products? You know, I don't take a lot of synthetic products. The ones I do take typically have enormous numbers of years like Prostam's been around for 60 years. And another one of my favorites is something called LDepronil, which is an antidepressant. But you take it like 50 milligrams for antidepressant. You take it at 0.1 milligrams. These very low doses that are incredibly well studied for longevity. And so when you look at things that have 30, 40 years of track record and you're using low doses, I think there's pretty good evidence for those, but there's no way I want to go out there and say I'm gonna take this brand new drug every day for the rest of my life because there isn't enough known about it. But on the flip side, I had a chance to ask Craig Venter, you're the first guy to sequence the human genome. It's been $100 million to get a picture of his own DNA. And I'm like, Craig, so you have all this data for 20 years and all these human genomes. What recommendations could you make based on what you know so far that I could use today or should we just talk about it over pizza or should we just keep eating pizza and beer until we have more data? And he looks at me and says, let's talk about it over pizza and beer. And I'm like, dude, we can choose directional rightness and we can course correct. Whereas, even without taking any of these either natural or pharmaceutical kinds of things, we know that we're exposed to toxins, things like glyphosate, things like mercury, even things like junk lighting that a huge amount of evidence is coming in for. It works both of these all the time and we didn't evolve for that. And so we're already putting stuff into our system that is untested. And I'm like, maybe I could counteract some of that. At least I'm gonna cultivate awareness and try and balance the system out given that I'm not living in the forest with my shirt off the way I was built to be. I've never heard anyone reference junk lighting before. That's cool. Could you explain that for the listeners? I probably don't know what that means. Sure. This was in my last book, Headstrong, which, and I gotta plug this for a second because this book hit the New York Times science bestseller list. I write advice on how to hack yourself books. When it hit the science list, that was one of the biggest honors of my entire life. And it's because I went so deep in a mitochondrial biology about how does your body make power? And it turns out these little ancient bacteria that are in your cells, they are light sensitive, especially the ones in your eyes but in the rest of your body as well. They even use light to communicate with each other. So what we're doing when we sit under LED lights who look at these bright screens, if you do it right before bed, it completely jacks up your body's ability to go into rest and reset mode. So when you go to sleep at night, even if you still go to sleep, your sleep quality doesn't work and some parts of your cells think it's daytime. They're trying to make energy. Some parts of your cells think it's nighttime. They're trying to rest and recover so you don't get like a synchronized effort either kick ass or recover light crazy. And LED lights have this huge uneven lighting spectrum with a ton of blue light, which is the hardest part on your biology. So I actually started one of my portfolio companies, it's called True Dark, and their deal is they're gonna solve the world's junk light problem because bad light in your eyes causes sugar cravings. Like bad light in your eyes destroys sleep quality and we keep putting the equivalent of corn syrup that we'd never put on our plate. We put it in the light above our desk and it affects our brain in the same way that corn syrup was. So I think this is one of those emerging areas for anyone who's into fitness. You gotta recover if you're not sleeping well and you're not turning all your energy on during the day, you're not doing it right. And the light you work out under, the light you see when you first wake up in the morning, the light you see before you go to bed, it's a powerful epigenetic signal. And it's one that we've tweaked enormously in the last five years and we've changed our light bulbs. Just no one ever thought about it. I think you could even make the argument that that's probably up on the top of the totem pole too, right? As far as priorities, cause that's what I always try and explain to people that are looking for the next biohacking supplement or thing that's out there is addressing some of the big rocks first. And do you have like an order of operation for you Dave or that you tell people like, you know, address sleep, address this, address that. And then we can talk about the latest, greatest supplement that's gonna help assist this or is it, does it not matter to you? I would say most important is food. Second most important is light and after that and light controls sleep to a large extent. And after that, you're starting to get into toxins and then temperature of all things. And these are all external environmental variables that your mitochondria are sensing in real time to try and figure out what can it do to make your body survive the longest. And it's doing all of this in a distributed calculating manner entirely separate from your conscious mind. So when they get a signal, it's like, oh, I'm in a world with tons of energy. Oh, and I know it's morning, so I should turn on all my energy right now. Then all of a sudden like, wow, I feel really good. And then you have more willpower because willpower comes from the same electrons that come when you eat food and combine them with oxygen. So for me, I mean, I'm talking to you guys right now in front of a screen that's running software that cuts out most of the blue light. I'm wearing my true dark glasses that cut out half the blue light and I'll switch to the sleeping glasses an hour before bed. And I've got a reptile lamp above my desk that stimulates sunlight because I'm in Canada where it's dark right now. And so I'm just telling about, hey, it's daytime right now, act like it's daytime already. And at nighttime, there is no bright white light in my house. I have red lights outdoors, so I don't disrupt the wildlife with junk light. And in my own place where I stay up late at night writing and recording stuff, it's all illuminated like a submarine. It's all red. And when I do that, I sleep like a baby and I lose weight and I feel good. And if I travel, I use glasses and it matters as much as food. And you don't have to be paranoid about your food. You don't have to be paranoid about your light. But if you think it doesn't matter at all, you're kind of missing a big variable there. So you're very much into longevity and thinking about that through all these hacks. What does your exercise regimen look like? Like what does that look like on a daily basis, a weekly basis? Like what are you doing? Well, I just opened Bulletproof Labs in Santa Monica based on what I'm doing. And I look at exercise as just another environmental signal that tells the body what to do. And I do things like cryotherapy, a whole body vibration where the body vibrates 30 times a second, which is a little more effective than rebounding. So when I wake up in the morning, after I drop my kids off at school, I spend about 10 to 15 minutes on the Bulletproof Vibes, a whole body vibration thing 30 times a second, usually in front of a tanning lamp that's optimized for my vitamin D levels, not for making me have a dark tan. And what I'm doing there, I'm getting my good light and I'm stimulating my lymphatic system. And this is the effectiveness of going for a walk. If it's sunny outside, I'll just go for a walk, but it's rainy. I'm in Canada right now. So I do that. I'll stretch while I'm doing vibrating like that. And then for muscle stimulation, what matters, at least in the research I'm familiar with is the speed at which you can exhaust a muscle. The faster you can do it, the more the muscle grows. So I will do instead of lifting iron the way I did for a long time, I'll use things like the ARX, which is a computer-driven winch system. So I'm fighting something that will always win and I can fight it the maximum output my body's capable of all along the strength curve. And when I do that, I can see how I'm doing on a computer which always motivates me to push even harder so I can beat myself last time. And then result is it completely kicks my ass. And if I do that once a week, my muscles are bigger and stronger than they need to be. I give in my goals. And if I do that twice a week, I have to buy new shirts. And I don't like that. I'm a huge fan of yoga, believe it or not. And the recommendations from Headstrong are you need to go for a walk for 20 minutes a day. Like there's a whole body of research on just movement to stimulate mitochondrial biogenesis. And then there's a whole body of research around high-intensity interval training. So either you lift the heavy things once a week or you sprint for 90 seconds. One of the hacks from the book that I'm a huge fan of, you sprint like a tiger's gonna kill you. And instead of walking, you lay on your back the way animals do. You literally lay down, which just allows your heart rate to recover faster than you get up and you sprint again. And it's shocking what laying on your back does. And crossfitters all know this because they're always on their back when they don't have to work out for a reason. They got great programming. But that's what I do. And then when I'm doing my cardio, I usually have iced compression bands around my arms and legs. This is all the stuff that's at labs for people to go and play with. A lot of this is $100,000 gear for pro sports. How fun. I'm recording this above a million dollar biohacking lab at my house where I test all this stuff out. Cause I think it matters. The deal is how much energy and time do I have to put into this to generate a signal that caused my body to do what I wanted to do? It turns out I can do a signal equivalent to about two and a half hours of cardio in 21 minutes of cardio, but it's uncomfortable. How do they measure that? What do you mean 21 minutes equals an hour? Like, what do you mean by that? Well, 21 minutes of interval training on a machine when I'm sitting on an ice pack and I've got compression on my arms and legs with ice water running through it. What's happening there is I'm building up lactic acid in my extremities. And because I'm sitting on chilled ice while I do this, all the blood that would have gone to cool my skin stays in the brain in the organ. So I'm exercising. But at the end of 21 minutes, when you take off the compression bands, all the lactic acid that builds up goes into the brain all at once at levels equivalent to what happens after a really long cardio workout. Lactic acid is a signal to the brain that says you need to get stronger. Like it basically believes I just went for a long workout even though I didn't. Oh yeah, very familiar with that. So are they measuring lactic acid? And that's what they're saying, same lactic acid as someone an hour. Okay, so 21 minutes with this, you get the same lactic acid measurements, but they're not measuring other things in terms of like adaptation, progress, that kind of stuff. This is, you're just talking about the lactic acid? Well, in that case, I'm talking about the lactic acid for the 21 minute thing. But there's actually a whole body of evidence around what happens when you do compression. There's the Katsu guys have a style of compression. It turns out restricting blood flow can change the signal to the body pretty dramatically. And I stacked that. In fact, that system is called the VASPR, the one I'm using at a little proof labs. And there's a bunch of research about that. In fact, the space program astronauts are using that, a bunch of pro athletes are using it now. And you actually see changes in VO2 max, changes in cardio respiratory fitness. They've looked at heat shock protein and things like that that are actually lower when you want to be lower during exercise. So you get less stress on the heart, even though you're still getting a high heart rate. Right. Yeah, we're very familiar with Katsu is the blood flow restrictive training, which we've actually written a guide on and we've talked about quite a bit. It's very fascinating research on it and us being experienced using it, it's a tool that can be added to a normal routine, although it doesn't seem to replace a normal routine. It seems like, and we tend to do this is just, it's something cyclical that humans tend to do is that we'll take something and we'll find or try to find a way to make it shorter or faster or do it indoors rather than outdoors and try to create or mimic the same adaptation. But we tend to fall short with a lot of these things. So it's a very interesting field of research and the way you're applying a lot of these things. But to try and replace, for example- It'd be interesting to compare the two. Dave, have you had the opportunity, have you been doing this long enough to where you can actually switch up your modalities and say, okay, I've been running this, sitting on my ice with myself all right. I'm trying to envision you right now too. You gotta tell me you have a picture somewhere so I can look at this picture. So I'm trying to picture you all wrapped up with compression, sitting on an ice block doing exercises. Like, have you compared that like to a traditional program where you're working out for an hour and then you're doing strength training and then compare that to like a hypertrophy training? Have you actually compared them with other modalities of training? In terms of being a human guinea pig, I've certainly spent a lot of time doing other modalities. I haven't, I'll tell you a flat out, I haven't had the discipline to say, all right, I'm gonna go do another modality that takes a long time. And partly I've got two young kids. I'm CEO of a venture-backed company. I keep writing these books and I've got a bulletproof radio. So my assumption is that everyone who has a young family is not working out as much as they'd like to. Before I had kids, it was like, look, I'm gonna do a yoga class every day, hit the gym a couple times a week, go for long hikes with a backpack at doors. And those are still luxuries for a lot of people, but we've got seven billion people and something like five billion are living in cities now. And look, I live on an organic farm. I can go for a walk in the forest. And I do that on purpose. Like I built my life to support that. Unfortunately, I picked a rainy, dark part of the world at least in midwinter. But I literally believe that that is better. I just know that there are some days where there simply isn't time because that means I'm not gonna get family time if I can do that. So if I can do 21 minutes instead of two and a half hours, I'm gonna take the benefits of that. And the benefits per minute were higher. Yet the benefits are going for a two and a half hour walk in sunlight with my shirt off, probably barefoot, probably would have been even better. That just isn't gonna happen today. And I think we're all stuck in that world where, all right, let's get the return on investment based on what we have to invest, even if it's only three minutes a day, what's gonna give you the most? You can get there acknowledging that if I wanna be a fitness competitor, I'm gonna have to take a very different track than what I do now. But man, I'm pretty stoked being 45. And I'm a 9.9% body fat based on my last scan. And I don't, I'm not hungry ever. And I don't have to spend 12 hours a week exercising and stuff like that. No, no, totally. I mean, that's exactly the approach people should take. Trying to maximize their time because modern life doesn't allow for devotion to everything for hours and hours a day. And the other side of it too is when you're looking at optimizing performance, it looks like, in my experience, for example, optimal performance protein intake. Studies will show is around 0.6 to 0.8 grams per pound of body weight in lean individuals. Well, that's too much protein for longevity. But for optimum strength and muscle, that's ideal. You look at athletes, look at the highest performing athletes in pretty much any sport and they are not optimal health and they won't display signs of optimal longevity. It doesn't matter if it's a bodybuilder, it doesn't matter if it's a marathon runner, a football player, basketball player, pushing your body to any extreme will take you out of optimal longevity. So it's almost like you've got to kind of trade one for the other. And I think the same is true for trying to push and hack our biology. It's you're maximizing performance or you're maximizing longevity or you're trying to find kind of a happy meeting in between. It was funny. A while back, the New York Times called me almost muscular and I'm like, yes, that's exactly what I want to be because my goal is to live to at least 180. And that is not like a joke or anything like that. I truly think 120 is achievable with what we know today. And based on what's happened in the last 60 years, I think in the next 60 years, we're going to learn more about the causes of aging. And I do stem cells, my own stem cells and some other ones. And any sort of anti-aging therapy that I can find that looks like it's a longevity therapy, I will go play with it and experiment with it because I'm deadly serious about that. I want to feel amazing when I'm 150. And I know because when I was 26, I had an 88-year-old board member at the nonprofit. I run dating a 35-year-old and not like a Hugh Hefner thing. He was actually like in shape and happy and like his brain worked and I'm like, I wouldn't be like that and that's my goal. Everything seemed to work to that guy. That's a true longevity right there. I had a client like that once in years ago and he was 75 and his girlfriend was a young 40 and it was pretty cool to watch. But besides wanting to be like that, would you say that you may be in the past, you had your body image issues got fit, became obsessed with that, that maybe now you're obsessed with all of these methods of hacking? Do you think that it may be a poor relationship with body image or wanting to search for the next thing? Cause there's a lot of things that you're doing to yourself and I'm sure critics have said this to you before, does it feel like an obsession? Does it feel like it's unhealthy? I've dealt with unhealthy things. I've had emotional eating and tons of cravings and stuff like that. I have a passion for this and you could say, all right, the guy who's obsessively upgraded his 1969 Mustang 40 years ago, was he obsessed with it? Yeah, he was making a hot rod, right? And I'm a computer hacker by training. Was I obsessed with upgrading the cooling unit so I could overclock my processor in the early nineties, you bet your ass I was. I could tell you how much rambles on my video card before anyone else, right? And we have this long history of hacking things and I'm a hacker, I've always been a hacker and this is my current passion is like, how do I make it so my brain works all the time so I can remember everything I want to remember so I can learn faster and I can live longer with a super high quality of life? I just don't know anything more interesting than that but if I find it, that'll be my new passion but I'll at least have, you know, built up the things I built up now. No, I think that's great. I think that's really great. And if I left it up to Sal, he'd sit here and talk to you about science and fucking fitness all day long but I've been excited to talk to you about your business brain because for someone to make $6 million by the age of 26 and then pivot into bulletproof and take it to where you've taken at this level, the vision behind that, I'm fascinated with that. I wanna dive into, did you see this all the way through? What are you, and what are you currently interested in right now? Like I'm very, I don't know if you've read the book, The Four, it's an incredible read. Talks about the big four companies with Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple. I always miss Apple. I don't know why I miss Apple like that because they don't seem like they fit there but the four of them and what they're doing and what the future looks like in the next 10 years with Lexa and our, you know, right away up sales to everything. Like how does your brain tick with that and your company and your vision? Well, I spend a lot of time with Peter Diamandis and Naveen Jain and Peter is the guy who created the X Prize, the $10 million prize for private exploration of space and every year I get together with him and a bunch of other entrepreneurs and we talk about the future and we talk to the CTOs of big companies about the future of robotics and AI and we're using machine learning now at Bulletproof Labs. We're feeding the exercise data and the physiological data from all the people who come through into machine learning to figure out, okay, which of these systems do you use to get what goals for what person at what stage are they and any data we can get goes into the system. At 40 years of Zen, the neurofeedback company that I created with the mission of raising the global IQ by 15 points. Yeah, that might take a little while but I'm up for that. Well, okay, we're the same thing. It goes into machine learning. So all the stuff that you and I would miss as human beings or this pattern matching, we can do that better now. So I'm all over this deep technology stuff because it's driving the pace of innovation. My whole career has been around disruption. It was actually in my job description most of the time but like that company that held Google's first server it also held the Facebook's first servers and basically all of the big old web brands that you know now, well, we were there and we built the buildings and put in the network and I did a lot of that work. I even ran the program at the University of California to teach engineers how to build that stuff. So being there at the beginning, you see how rapid change happens but until you've been through a cycle or two of disruption, what the internet did to phone companies is it completely just kicked their ass and my job is to do that to big food right now with Bulletproof. What do you see? You're doing it wrong. Your algorithm is how good can I make it taste and how cheap is it and how pretty is the sticker on the front and that's been the whole algorithm for food since the very beginning of marketing. And my algorithm for food is how does it make you feel? How good does it taste? How convenient is it and then how much does it cost? And my theory based on my own experience people are willing to pay a little bit more for food that makes them feel really good and not have cravings and brain fog and all the other stuff that comes from eating crap. And until that gets baked into our food culture where the very largest food companies on the planet wouldn't think of launching something that doesn't make people feel amazing then the disruption is still just an open opportunity but you can disrupt from just a place of absolute joy because it's fun to watch stupid stuff break. And well, you know, when you're doing it stupidly because that's the way you've always done it someone's gonna come through and do it better and they're gonna do it faster and faster and the stuff that I helped to build on the internet it's so cheap and easy to go out and start something and find a problem and then solve it and you can become successful in a very small period of time. What I spend on web hosting in a month at Bulletproof is I don't even know how much it is but it's a tiny percentage of what I would have quoted my own company 20 years ago to get on the internet. It would have been a million dollars a month to pay for e-commerce and servers and internet and all that stuff. And now it becomes, it's part of the budget but it's not a part of the budget that breaks the bank and that has happened in the last 20 years. And so that means a young entrepreneur right now says, you know, I see a problem I don't like how companies do this. I can do better. You can do better with a million dollars in funding instead of in 50 million dollars in funding and you can do it in two years instead of 20 years and it's only getting faster. And that just, I wake up every morning happy about that. That's a really exciting. So what do you think Bulletproof is disrupting right now and what do you see it disrupting in the future? Well, we're disrupting the coffee business right now. This whole conversation about how does your coffee make you feel? And this whole, well, is it okay to put bad fat and high fructose corn syrup into your coffee? And the answer is no, it's not okay. But we do it because it tastes good and it satisfies a sugar craving. But what if you put brain-octane oil in the coffee and the coffee itself doesn't have toxins in it that come from cutting corners in coffee production? You're like, oh, I drink that and suddenly my brain turns on in a different way and I like that feeling. And I'm going to do what it takes to get that feeling even if it means I've changed what I put on my plate even if it means I changed how I sleep because once you feel how you're supposed to feel you're going to change all the other variables because that feeling is the most precious part of being alive. And like, I was missing that. I don't even know what the difference between cravings and hunger because I only had cravings. I just thought they were the same as hunger. And until I sorted out my biology, it just wasn't clear. So Bulletproof, yeah, we're going to disrupt coffee and make people talk about what is this coffee doing for me instead of where was it grown? And is it one of Juan Valdez's relatives who picked it and all that stuff? That's the window dressing, man. Like, where's the science? And so that's part of it. And then when it comes to food, things like the Bulletproof College in bars. I mean, we've been eating junk protein in bars. You talked earlier about what too much protein does for you. Well, the wrong kind of protein also limits your ability to get old and be healthy. So you can pump yourself full of soy protein or excessive amounts of whey protein and all these other things, but they come at a cost of inflammation. We're missing collagen protein. So I'm like, what's the highest quality protein that's missing from our diet I can put in the bars? How do I add some of these ketones into the bar with brain octane? And what we came up with is something where people say, all right, do I want to spend a little bit more for a bar that makes me not even want to think about food for a few hours. And data says that people love that. I certainly do. Yeah, Dave, go back to the Minotoxins and coffee because I remember, I don't know, was it maybe like a year ago? I remember there was a bunch of beef between Joe Rogan and something that you stated about the Minotoxins. I would love to hear your point of view with all this. Oh, sure. So Bulletproof Coffee, by his own admission, seems like it changed Joe Rogan's life. And he talked about it quite a lot. And when one of his friends launched a coffee company that was not lab testing their coffee and tried to steal the idea, I just told my followers on my own page, hey, guys, that coffee isn't tested. It says on the webpage. So, you know, I'm not gonna endorse a coffee that doesn't know what's in it. And I got some anger emails, which I have saved. And the next day I was a bad man. So same thing to this day. I don't think Joe, I don't listen to a show, I don't really know if he still says bad stuff about me or not. But every time he says my name, my sales keep going up. So, you know, it's okay to say I'm a bad person. I'll tell you, I got 36 studies. You can Google one ugly mug Bulletproof and that blog post will come up. Most countries on the planet have legal limits on Molotoxins and coffee because it's a known industry problem the US doesn't. Really? I've got, oh, heck yeah. So it's a conspiracy, right? Cause all these countries are supporting my ideas. Oh, wait. And then on top of that, it's even better because the former president of the specialty coffee association, I'm videotaping him at our plantation in Guatemala. And he's telling the story about, oh yeah, I was in Japan when the Japanese trade minister rejected a thousand containers of coffee because they were too moldy for Japanese consumers. And I'm like, and what did you do with the coffee? He goes, we sent it to the US. Because there's no laws against it. I can't make this stuff up. Like how do you do that? So I can tell you that the stuff with Joe appears to be economically motivated. And you know, you can say bad things about me all day long. It's all, it's all fine. Like, like there's so much data behind this and between the science and that blog post, the preponderance of global governments agreeing with my position. Man, sometimes sometimes people will disagree with you no matter what you say. So how many coffee companies would you say in the US are actually taking the steps that you're taking? I don't think any of them are taking the steps I'm taking because I have the systems view of biology and the systems view of coffee. So it starts in the soil, it ends in your cup. And there's thousands of micro decisions you make along the way that influence the likelihood of this happening. So we went through the system of coffee and made the decisions that lower the creation of toxins and came up with a test for 27 toxins that we track in our coffee to make sure that our process is working. So the green coffee that goes into the roaster is really important. Our green coffee is super clean because we changed the process for that. No other coffee companies doing that. I won't tell you every coffee on the planet is moldy. That would be ridiculous. I'll say it's a big known industry and the industry targets government standards for whatever country they're selling into and those government standards are too high for living a very long time. And there's a whole bunch of reasons for that but the main reason is called multi-microtoxin synergy and this is documented in a bunch of pub edge studies and things, but the bottom line is a government level of safe toxin for toxin number one when you combine it with a safe level for toxin number two becomes dramatically unsafe. That's why we're testing for 27 of them. And, you know, am I obsessive about that? Yes, I want the cleanest coffee on the planet. I'm okay with that. That sounds like a big part of your business having to provide quality control and like manage that. How do you, how do you even cover that? It's been hundreds of thousands of dollars on it and have multiple people in my quality assurance and R&D and scientific affairs offices. Like we raised $30 million in venture funding in order to do this right. Wow. Well, what you were saying earlier about how you, you're making a bet that people are gonna be willing to pay more for better quality for food. I couldn't agree with more. I think we have solved, we solved some of the early issues that we had with food, which was not getting enough food, starvation, maybe, you know, lacking particular important nutrients. And now we've kind of traded that and now we're dealing with, seems like chronic disease. So although we don't get infectious disease and we don't necessarily get things like scurvy and stuff like that anymore, chronic disease seems to be exploding and on the rise. What are some of the major toxins that you're, that you look at? Like you talked about glyphosates. Like what's your view on glyphosates and how many of those should people, you know, avoid or should it just all be organic for everyone? It should be organic for everyone. Glyphosate is a terribly evil substance because they sold it on this false statement that, oh, it won't harm humans because it only harms bacteria. Yeah. Hey guys. Do you know what's inside our gut, bacteria? Do you know what's inside our cells that makes all of our energy? Bacteria, they're called mitochondria. They're this ancient rod shaped bacteria that we incorporated into our cells. And the horrible thing about glyphosate is that the gly in it stands for glycine, the amino acid. Your collagen in your body has primarily made out of glycine. So you will take up this toxin that's in food that's not organic. And oftentimes it's even in organic food because they're just pumping it everywhere. And your body will try and make collagen out of roundup. And what happens is dysfunctional collagen. Now collagen handles hydration in the body. It's your facial planes. If you're gonna be working out, you need fascia that works, obviously. And your ligaments, your cartilage, all that stuff is based on collagen. So now you're doping your collagen with something that causes inflammation if it accidentally gets incorporated in there. Collagen also carries an electrical signal throughout the body. All the acupuncture meridians run through collagen. So wait a minute. This stuff is not okay. Not to mention it destroys soil integrity. And the bacterial biome and the fungal biome in the soil is the foundation for your organic vegan food or whatever you're eating. You ruin the soil with this chemical. It takes hundreds of years to grow good soil back. Like I'm more worried about that than I am about mercury, although I'll tell you, I don't want either one of those in my body. Those are two big toxins I pay attention to. I swear, every time I talk about the subject, I get messages from people that are like, well, I guess I'm just screwed. There's like, all this stuff everywhere. Yeah, like what do I do now? Everything seems to be screwed up, but unfortunately that's the reality is that everywhere you turn, you got to kind of self-regulate because no one's doing it for us. We got to keep an eye on all these different things and it's really unfortunate. You've been successful most of your life even before you got into the health and wellness space. Where did that come from? Like were you a driven kid? Was it from your parents? You know, I was driven as a kid. I don't think it's from my parents. It's because I was afraid of failing, right? You can be successful because you're running from something. And I'll tell you, that is not a path to happiness and it's not really even a good path to success. Although I've worked with enough entrepreneurs as a coach where a good number of entrepreneurs get successful and profoundly unhappy and divorced or depressed or even like suicidal because of that. No matter what you do, it's never gonna be good enough if that's your motivation. So I made $6 million and I was 26, but I lost it when I was 28. And the reason I lost it straight up is because I wasn't willing to ask anyone for help. What 26 year old kid do you know who knows how to manage $6 million and keep it? Would you do Go To Vegas? Yeah, hookers and blow. Yeah, exactly. Every time. What happened was the company where I worked, my career advanced so much that I was allowed to attend board meetings. I was the only non executive at the company there. And I was in charge of mergers and acquisition due diligence on the technology front. So I knew all of our deals and it was illegal for me to trade my stock. And a good advisor, had I trusted anyone enough to have a good advisor, would have told me, Dave, quit your damn job, take your $6 million, put it in your pocket and go live your life and do the most amazing things you can think of because you're set for life. And you know what I told myself? I literally said this over lunch to a friend. I said, you know, wanna have $10 million, I'll be happy. Like what kind of a jerk says that? Like we kind of a broken person. And what was going on there was like fear of failure never being good enough no matter what you do. And I had to learn that lesson. And you compare that with like a guy from my generation, Mark Andreessen from Andreessen Horowitz, very successful multi-billionaire. I wrote a review of his web browser when he wrote Mosaic 1.0 and I wrote it for PC Magazine. I sold the first product ever sold over the internet. It was a t-shirt that said caffeine, my drug of choice sold out of my dorm room. And I was an entrepreneur magazine and I was 23 years old for doing that. And you know what Andreessen did? He went to Silicon Valley and asked Jim Clark, the CEO of a major billion dollar company for help. And you know what I did? I said, I got this. I'm not gonna take help from anyone. That's the difference in mindset between someone who's got an abundance mindset, someone who understands that you don't get there alone. I didn't understand any of that. So a lot of my success came from because I was terrified of starving, terrified of not being good enough, not having enough and just of never being happy. And I had to shift that. Where does that come from though? Was it as a kid, did you grow up real poor? Would you have a tough childhood? Like why that fear? You really want to know. All right, I'll tell you. I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck. And I didn't lose oxygen when I was born, but I came into the world full on at a deep like cellular nervous system level, believing something was trying to kill me. I'd always be alone and I'd never be safe because that was the best programming to keep me alive. Because if someone tries to kill you on your way into the world, even though you don't understand any of this, but that's what your body's gonna do. So I literally had this wired in and I became aware of this when I was about 30 and I spent a lot of time like reprogramming early birth trauma. And I see this over and over in super successful people. They were bullied, they were abused. They had a rough birth and they're still dealing with that in the way they deal with the world. And when you realize you can just reprogram that stuff so that the visceral response is gone. Like, wow, I was spending a lot of energy on that and it wasn't providing any return. And when I dropped all that stuff and I got rid of the trauma instead of just becoming aware of it, but I stopped the signal from mattering like that. That's when Bulletproof really started to grow. And that's when I realized, look, I have enough. It doesn't take that much money to be comfortable, but what's the impact of what I'm doing? Like, it doesn't matter. And that's what wakes me up every morning. And the most successful people I know aren't keeping score with their bank accounts at all. Like that's not even how you think about it. You gotta make sure there's enough narrative to fuel your vision. But after that, it's like, how important is what you're doing? It's so tough, right? Because it's like, what makes you successful is also something you have to, you know, you have to shed. Like so many people, they succeed because they're so afraid or they're driven by their insecurities and it gets them where they're at. And then they're at a point where they're like, I need to change that. That person who got me all the success, I need to change who that is because now it's just, it's making me feel terrible. Shout out to Lewis Howes and Masculinity right there. Yeah, it talks about that. Totally that. Very, very difficult. What kind of therapies, you talked about, you know, doing the neural feedback. Have you done any work with psychedelics or any other therapies where you kind of died? Because I know there's so many layers to that. You know what I mean? Oh yeah, so many layers. I first became aware of that specific trauma for me, not to count all the bullying and all that stuff. But I became aware of that doing holotropic breathing, which it was invented by Stan Groff, who's been on my show. And this guy is now about 90 something, but he invented psychedelic therapy and treated 3,000 patients with LSD on a therapist's couch in the 60s in Czechoslovakia. And he ended up realizing that you could do special breathing exercises to make people trip the same way. And I went and I did that kind of work and just became aware of like, wow, this is what's really going on in my head. About 20 years ago, I did ayahuasca in Peru before it was cool, they actually were like, they're like, you're white, why would you ever do that? You know, you're gonna throw up, right? That's only for the village people. And I tracked a guy down and did it and I'd read about it and said, this might be helpful. And it was. And so I definitely have explored the psychedelic side, but the reason I started 40 years as in to do neurofeedback is that neurofeedback is something I'd done at home for 20 years. But when you do it in a focused intense setting for five days where you actually have someone holding you accountable and really looking at how to go in and edit the programming in the brain, that's what let me really go deep and like turn off the buttons. The other technique that is really effective, something I recommend for a lot of people I work with and that I've used myself is called EMDR. And if you know you were bullied or you know what's going on, you can sit down with a therapist and there's like a reset mode for the brain that you can go into by moving your eyes in a certain way. And when you do that, a good therapist in one or two sessions sometimes can take a really deep trauma and just like turn it off. Wow. So change the way you physically react to the thought of the trauma? Well, it's not really the thought of the trauma. By the time the thought happens, it's way too late. You talked earlier about how like the body is a pattern matching machine. And I loved when you said that because what happens is the body is constantly scanning the world around you on a microsecond by microsecond basis to detect threats and make sure that you react in time. So by the time you have a chance to form a thought, you've already had the change of physiology that comes from anxiety. So the anxiety stress happened because you walked into a room and the guy there in the boardroom looks a lot like that guy that punched you in fifth grade. And you didn't think about that. You didn't even remember that, but the body's like get ready to kill. And so you just, you get a little twins, your heart rate changes, your eyes die a little bit, your galvanic skin response, like the amount of microswetting your skin changes. And your injury metabolism just shifted from repair and restore to get ready to run or kill. And if you do that like hundreds of times a day for no reason at all, it's gonna wear you down over the course of 20 years. And that's what I was doing. It's like 20%, I believe what that we consciously are aware of that our brain is like downloading for at every moment. Isn't it something like that? I can't remember I read it in some book long time. Have you heard of that before, Dave? I've definitely heard of that. And it's kind of hard to really put a pin on it. Cause what's going on is there's this distributed system throughout the body that's picking up environmental signals and they keep getting filtered at each layer. So by the time you become aware of it in your brain, it's gone through the body and you kind of stripped off layers of meaning all the way through until only the most important stuff bubbles up. The problem is something that's two layers down from unconscious awareness, just change your hormone levels and cause you to get a little shot of adrenaline, which raise your blood sugar levels and all these things. You don't know that's going on. You're not supposed to know what's going on. It's an automatic system to keep tigers from eating you. The problem is I thought almost everything was a tiger. I didn't think this consciously, but I was wired that way. And when I learned to do things like heart rate variability and all these awareness things, all that's turned off now. And I mean, I've had times where I really felt, wow, is Bulletproof gonna, is it gonna go down here? You know, like huge critics coming on or stuff that I didn't plan and just being able to, you know what? I'm gonna handle this, I'm gonna do the right thing and I'm gonna be able to sleep at night. I'm gonna wake up the next morning. I'm gonna keep doing the right thing until we fix whatever the problem is or until it blows over or whatever it is. And to be able to do that without the just visceral fear of death that grips most entrepreneurs. Oh my God, it's a better way to live, but it also allows me to make decisions as a human being instead of as a reactive animal, which is what a lot of people do when they're backed into a corner. Yeah, I was just looking at research recently about, it's like these patterns get stored in the most primitive parts of your brain, the cerebellum or the brainstem. And those are like the subconscious, just where you react. By the time you're conscious of it, it's too late, it's already taken hold. And bodies already responded to it. Yeah, and the conscious part of the brain or the frontal lobe, for example, it can change those patterns, but it has to be a practice. You have to consciously stop it, change it, reverse it. And you've got to make this pattern over and over and over again to hardwire it into that, what they call the reptilian part of your brain. If you don't do that, then it'll never stop, even if you're trying to be conscious of it when it happens, it's just one of those things. And that's why they think things like psychedelics or some of these therapies are so effective is because they create the sense of profoundness and that feeling of profoundness, that emotion, tends to wire things more permanently in that reptilian part of our brain, that more primitive part of our brain. We have to have that sense of, whoa! And that's why they think some of these substances or some of these techniques are effective versus just me sitting here talking to you, which would take session after session after session of practice to cause that particular change. Dave, what would you say during this whole process of building bulletproof, what would you say has been the biggest challenge that you faced? Well, one of the challenges that I faced is when I started this, everyone was all about, hey, I'm gonna sell information products. And I'm a contrarian and a little stubborn, and I'm like, all right, I'm gonna sell physical products, right? So when you decide to sell physical products and you're self-funded out of your paycheck, it becomes a bit of a challenge. Okay, how do I make enough coffee? Like how do I not run out? So there were times when demand grew and you're like, wow, I'm out of product. Like what am I gonna do? I gotta make more. The decision to seek venture investing, and that means you're selling a portion of the company to investment companies. And if you pick the wrong one, you don't wanna let people have a piece of your baby, right, unless you trust them and you know that they're good people with the shared goal. And I've been very fortunate on that front too, but like those are giant challenges where your thing is gonna happen or your website goes down for two days and I don't even know who to call to fix it. And like I know I probably could fix it but I have to quit my day job if I fix that because I'm a technologist but I'm working full-time while I started in the company. The other big challenge for me has been I really like to help people. And knowing when someone has been of service to the company or not, but also knowing when they've hit their capacity and then finding the right place for them in the company versus either just continuing to promote someone beyond where they have experience has been a real learning challenge for me. There aren't a lot of schools that teach you to grow a company from zero to 100 plus million dollars in a few years. I've lived through that in my career a couple of times but I wasn't the guy running the show and making the hard calls. And instead of being able to take care of the people who care so much about the vision and the people I work with every day and make sure that I've got the right people at the right levels with the right skill sets and I bring in new DNA, but new DNA that has the experience to help the people who've been here for so long and the right culture to not break it. Cause it's easy to hire someone from Philip Morris. You know, maybe they have some good marketing skills but you're probably not the right thing. Like do you do something every day to make yourself better? Stuff like that, it's really a challenge and a lot of it is a personal development challenge and I find that the bigger the company grows and the more people we reach, the more important it is that I keep my head on straight that I have core integrity. It's not enough to act a certain way if you're inside you're feeling fear or stress or anxiety or uncertainty. People know it, right? So like it's my job to be rock solid at my core and then to share that with the company. That's really the biggest challenge I've had as an entrepreneur, but it's also the most fun. Would you say there's unique challenges with like every phase of growing to a hundred million dollar company? For example, I always talk about scaling a business. One thing to build a business that is sustainable enough to support an income for yourself and maybe your family, but then that next level to make a million dollar company and then to make a 10 million dollar company and then a hundred million dollar company. Each one is its own monster. Do you recognize or remember like specific challenges that you went through at each stage of growing bulletproof? Yeah, I think the numbers you just mentioned are pretty good ones. What gets you to a million dollars and a lot of companies don't even get there and what gets you to a million dollars? I mean, I still remember the first day I'm like, wow. We just did a million dollars in revenue and like your head's spinning like this is so incredible, especially when I haven't quit my day job yet and that doesn't mean I put a million dollars in my pocket. It means I took every penny the company made and I used it to hire new people or buy more product or to put it back into the company. So it was bootstrapped, but just that at a certain point like, wow. I've got to now create an organization. Now, when you're doing a million dollars you can have three, four or five people working for you and you can manage them all. And at a certain point like, wow, I actually can't talk every day to everyone who works in the company because I don't have enough hours in the day and then I don't do any work, right? So all of a sudden I have to have trusted lieutenants. Who do I trust? Do they have the skills, right? And then that's what gets you to that five million or 10 million and then the challenges above 10 million are very different. They're financial. I'm gonna run out of cash. Do I have appropriate controls in place? What's my HR policy look like? Who should run that? And then just finding the executive team who can support you and then having the personal ability to trust and empower your executives to make decisions that you're never gonna know about. And this is something that drives me nuts. You see these people getting really mad and something happens, well, the CEO should know. I'm like, guys, if you have a hundred or a thousand people working for you you cannot have a map of everyone's brain inside your head because you're just one human. So what he did is you set a culture, you set operating tenants, operating principles, values for the company, a culture, and in a strategic direction and you hired the best people you could find and you weed out the bad actors if any of them make it in. And still sometimes a company will do something you're like, wow, we didn't plan that. And it's a tough thing to do. And I hope my people are very, very high standards and they meet them because we have a shared mission like that, but it is a different mindset to just one day sit down and be like, no matter how hard I work, no matter how much I email there is no way that you can know everything going on in a company with 20 employees. It will not happen if you're CEO. And if you try to make it happen you will completely break your company. And that's where most entrepreneurs, that's why they never go beyond $5 million because they don't trust. Well, I think that's the most common thing I hear with because it's when you build something by yourself that you can completely control all by yourself. It's one thing, but then once like you said you have to trust these others. Did you have, can you recall like conversations or a guy you had to fire or scenarios that was a major learning lesson for you? Like of learning to either one, let go and let somebody else run that position. Or like you said earlier about creating that culture. Can you remember specific times where you learned that or went through that growth spurt? And it happens to any company that grows where as someone who you're incredibly grateful for for getting you to a million dollars they probably don't have their career experience to get you to 10 million dollars. They've never done it before. And you could say, all right, do it anyway. The only problem is it's gonna cost a lot for them to do because they're gonna go down a lot of blind alleys because they haven't done it. Whereas the right thing to do is go ahead and say, all right, have you done this $10 million thing two or three times in your career? Even better, yeah, have you done a $40 million thing? Great, come on in and run that division or run that process and you're gonna be in charge. And at that point, if I've done a good job, I've already queued up the people who grew it and compensated them very well and said, all right, I'm gonna bring in someone who can teach you a thing about how to grow this to 10 or 20 or $30 million, whatever the number is. But you have to have hired someone and also set it up so their expectation is that, look, you're probably not going to be running this business when it's giant but there's always a place here for you. So there will always be learning, there'll always be the ability to serve and to push your limits, right? But you're not gonna get to drive the cargo ship if all you've ever done is drive a motorboat, right? Like, and if we grew from motorboat to cargo ship faster than your career has grown, we're gonna hire a captain but you can sit right next to the captain and he's gonna show you how to do it. And then when it's time for you to have your own cargo ship, you can do that. And one of the things that I remember, my head of product who was really, really strong, Carissa, she called me one day and said, Dave, this is the best job I've ever had but I have to quit. I'm like, are you kidding me? Like, why? And she said, well, I've been doing this, you know, this nonprofit cosmetic company called Thrive and I just got a Good Morning America. So, and she said, this is my shot. Like, I'm helping women with cancer. I have to go do this. And so I said, all right, and I funded her. So I broke a check out of my pocket. That's cool. A very small amount, more like a token. But she's gone out and absolutely just kicked ass to the point, you know, her valuation is probably as high as bulletproofs if I was to estimate. Wow, that's fantastic. Like, how do you fault someone something like that? But it could have easily been, you know, maybe Carissa would have, you know, I would have had a caller two years after that and say, you know, we just hired, you know, the guy who ran Lunchables, a 700 million dollar business and he's coming in. And you're gonna report to him, right? By the way, that guy did join Bulletproof. And he's like, I got to pay for my sins here. Lunchables didn't, maybe it helped a lot of moms, maybe it didn't help a lot of kids. Like I think I could do better. And you know, having that kind of, someone who's been at a 700 million dollar a year product line, like that's how you grow your company to be big. You hire the people who know a hundred times more than you as a founder and are good people at their core and you trust them and you set goals and you set targets and you look at the numbers. And you know, and you give them as much space as they need, as much dry powders as they need on a planet you all support. And that's what matters. And just along the way, you got to care and you got to be sensitive when someone is going off the rails, you're gonna know it. And the first time you get that sensation that's like, you know, this person isn't working out and you're the guy in charge, you really got to listen to that and start paying attention and asking your questions. Because if they're not working out, you got to talk to them and work with them so that they can work out. And if you hide, which is what most entrepreneurs do, including me when I was younger, say I don't want to deal with that, I'm just not gonna pay attention to it. It'll actually suck the wind out of all the people around a poor performer. And just understanding that and then holding myself accountable to those same standards, man, that's a big challenge. But I like to think I've done and at least a reasonable job on that. And now I spend most of my time on, you know, culture and just culture and what we call core tenants, where these are things like thou shalt not cross. We will not put, you know, genetically modified, you know, gluten containing stuff. Yeah, I don't care if it's cheaper. Like that's not what we do, right? And we've written those down. We spent days going through. And now that we've got that stuff written down, my product team, which is like more than 10 people can go out and they can innovate with my inputs, but I don't have to be there in every innovation session holding them to the rules because the rules are well understood. And that's another big scale point. And just having that just in your core where everyone in the company understands that, that I think is the biggest, the hardest and the biggest thing you can do. Excellent, that's an excellent play. What you're saying sounds amazing. We wanna thank you for coming on the show. I think you're part of that first big wave of what's happening in the industry with food, with quality, where consumers are now paying attention. You're starting to see big food companies start to try to attract consumers with words that look like they mean quality, but it's not yet quality, but it's showing that the market is starting to shift and we appreciate. Oh, great time to be disrupting that and it's fun watching you. Yeah, definitely. Guys, thanks for having me on. And one of the things I've done that's part of the strategy is make it easy to get both your stuff. And going into Whole Foods nationally with a ready to drink cold brew coffee. Like, man, I'd rather sell that by e-commerce. E-commerce is a tighter business for anyone who runs a business, I'll tell you, but to make it go out to hundreds of millions of people, you gotta go out there. So like to be able to do that, it's easy at least give it a shot. And the stuff I'm saying about why it works biochemically and all that, it's real. And you should be able to feel a difference the first time you try it. And so my ask for people out there is just try it one time and just see how you feel because it's pretty obvious. Awesome, cool. Well, thanks again, David. Thank you, appreciate your time, man. Thank you guys. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. 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