Transcript of Dave Asprey: Biohacking Secrets to Eliminate the Energy Drains Sabotaging Your Success | Mental Health | E412

If you're a female entrepreneur, everyone in your company with mommy issues will see you as mommy, 'cause you're the woman authority figure. And if you're a male entrepreneur, everyone with daddy issues will see you as their daddy, because that's how human brains work. That's how mitochondrial networks work. And that's what happens when emotions are generated before thoughts.

Today I'm sitting down once again with the father of biohacking, Dave Asprey, for his third appearance on YAP. In this conversation, Dave challenges what's really holding us back and shows us how letting go of the things draining our energy can change the way we lead, work, and live.

Thing to know if you're an entrepreneur is that there is another intelligence inside your body running the things you're not paying attention to, and it doesn't have the goals you do. Its goals are fear, food, and fucking. But the good news is there's two more F words that mitochondria care about. The next one is—

what are the different types of people out there? What do we need to watch out for?

My biggest mistake, um, building a $100 million company from scratch, was was I didn't fire the people who were category 3 fast enough. If I had have just known that lesson, I would probably be a multibillionaire right now.

What was your most extreme self-experiment?

I ordered a pill from Russia. It was—

Dave, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.

I'm so happy to be here. I love entrepreneurship.

I am very happy that you're here. This is the third time you've been on. Yep. First time in person though, so I feel super honored. That we get to be in the same space, and I just can't wait to pick your brain. I've looked up to you, especially in this biohacking space for such a long time.

Thank you. And it's, it's all because you moved to the best city, Austin.

Yeah. Austin is amazing. So I wanted to kind of open this up with a frame of, is the normal that we see today a problem? Because when people are walking around, they're anxious, they're inflamed, they're tired. They're overcaffeinated. And when people look at you and folks like Bryan Johnson, we're thinking these people are extreme, these people are weird, these people are overdoing it. But really, is the new normal a problem?

Normal is always a problem because 50% of people are dumber than average. So normal literally means average. So if you're happy with normal, you're probably not an entrepreneur because we want to be better than normal, and that's okay. And not better than everyone else, just better than average, right? And some people are like that, some aren't. In fact, half of people want to be better than normal because they are, and they typically are going to say, how much better than normal can I be? And the cool thing is one person may say, well, I'm, you know, a CrossFitter, right? Another, I'm a finance entrepreneur. Another one's like, I don't care about that, I want to be a personal trainer. It doesn't really matter. It's like you pick your passion, say, how can I be the best in the world at that? And you might not be the best in the world. We all know that there aren't that many people who can be the best in the world at something, but be as close as you can. And as long as it's the best you can be at that and anything else that interests you, you'll probably enjoy your life a lot more and probably make more money too.

Yeah. When you look at normal life of Americans, I was just, you know, I gave you a plastic bottle just now and you went, ugh, plastic.

Yeah, I had to touch it with a rubber glove.

Yeah.

I borrowed it from Brian Johnson.

And you poured the water and I asked you, You know, I can't believe you're actually going to still drink, drink that. I forgot that, you know, you would probably not want to drink water from a plastic bottle. So what are some of the normal things that we do that to you just seem like really unhealthy and you think people should stop doing?

Well, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to take a drink of this plastic water out of a plastic cup because I've been working my man boobs lately. No. It's because perfectionism can be toxic. And I see this in— in eating, it's called bulimia or orthorexia. And we see it in biohacking. We see it in the gym, in exercise, in all kinds of cultural contexts. And it's just, oh no, what I'm doing isn't perfect. It's just perfectionism under another label. If you have that about your health, you're probably going to die because you're going to die of stress. So you should stress about your stress. Like, it is a terrible suck. It's such a terrible suck that the Buddhists have a name for that kind of hell. They have like hundreds of different types of hells, but perfectionism is one of them. So I know very well that I should have my water that ideally would be out of a glass bottle drawn from a spring and lab tested, and we might as well add some hydrogen or oxygen and treat it with lasers and bless it with monks. 'Cause I'm sure some of that makes a difference, and I could stack rank which of those probably makes a difference depending on the monk.

But for God's sake, I just needed some water, right? So I don't worry about being perfect. I say, how perfect or how close to perfect can this thing be given the constraints of the system?

Mm-hmm.

It helps that I'm a former computer hacker. I studied computer science and worked in Silicon Valley as a tech entrepreneur for a long time. So How good can you make it? Elon has a similar mindset. He has something, um, it's a ratio. I think he calls it like the idiot ratio or something. Okay. And it's basically, okay, what is the cost of the raw material in this mug? And he'll say, okay, there's metal and plastic. Okay. That's worth 2.5 cents if you were to buy the raw materials. And so why are you paying $5 for a mug? That costs 2.5 cents in materials. So that ratio is basically how dumb are you because you can't make it yourself. So I kind of see the world through a similar lens where is it worth it to do it myself, right? And how excellently can I do that? So on the water, I could carry around a water filter. It just doesn't return energy to me.

Yeah.

And what I found about entrepreneurship, and I think I've earned the right to say this, I've done more than $1 billion in revenue from companies that I've founded. I built Bulletproof to $140 million in revenues. Before the board fired me and then sold it to themselves for peanuts. Thanks, guys. There was a lawsuit. Danger Coffee is my new coffee brand. I've also been a tech entrepreneur, very successful. And after all of that, I have 8 companies in my portfolio right now that I'm operationally involved with. And I'm able to do this because I monitor and manage my energy the way they do in data centers, which was my first big win back in the late '90s. In the dot-com boom. It was a data center company. So how do we do that? We say, okay, every electron matters. Well, it turns out our bodies are wired the same way. So your cells have distributed power generation called mitochondria. They do other things too. And then if they make a lot of power, okay, where is it going to go? Well, it's going to go to folding proteins, making neurotransmitters, thinking about your mother-in-law, worrying about your business, feeling like you're going to die because someone's criticizing you.

All the things that every entrepreneur struggles with, especially when they're young. There's only a finite number of electrons. Now, with biohacking, the origins of this came out of the longevity movement way, way back in Silicon Valley. The first longevity nonprofit I ran this in my 20s, I became president and chairman of it, and I started learning about how biology works and said, oh my God, it's the same thing. It's just energy.

Yeah.

So what I'm doing every day is I'm saying, how can I not waste a single electron so that I have enough left for my body to do the things it needs to do to stay healthy, and for me to allocate my energy so I don't waste a single drop. So if I spend all my energy worrying about what's in my freaking water, then I wouldn't spend that energy being present or killing cancer cells or any of the other things that my system wants to do. So the game of life for everything alive, not just humans but especially entrepreneurs, is How do I allocate my energy most effectively?

I have so many questions about allocating energy effectively.

Cool.

But first I want to talk about your origin story. So you mentioned that you started in Silicon Valley. Yeah. And you actually were pretty unhealthy in your 20s.

You could say it.

And late 20s, or, or, you know, you were maybe average.

I will say below average for health perspective.

You were below average. Talk to us about what it was like working in Silicon Valley. Like what did your body feel like? What did your brain feel like every day when you were unhealthy?

It actually started even during college. So I was studying computer science and I'd hit £300. I weigh about 198 today. And I was also trying to pay for my college, which had gotten very expensive. So I started selling a t-shirt with a caffeine molecule on it that looks like that.

Cool.

I don't know if the camera can see that. That's my caffeine molecule. That became the first product ever sold over the internet before e-commerce had, uh, had the name e-commerce. People were faxing me checks to cash. It was the weirdest thing. And then I was in Entrepreneur magazine at 23, you know, full-color picture and all that. Years later, when I was telling the story of biohacking on the Joe Rogan Show, people like, you weren't really fat. I'm like, here's my proof of fat photo from Entrepreneur magazine, motherfucker. So Um, but when I got to Silicon Valley, I'd had arthritis since I was 14 in my knees. Um, I started dislocating where my knees would just pop out and I would just fall over walking through college. It was very painful. Uh, I'd been on antibiotics for 15 years every month, give or take, because I had chronic strep throat and sinus infections. I didn't know because I lived in toxic mold and I have the genetics that makes it really poisonous. I had brain damage from toxic mold to the point that when I was going to Wharton's Business School when I was about 30, I was failing.

Like, I was literally failing out of the classes and thinking to myself, maybe I'm not trying hard enough. Maybe I'm dumber than all my classmates. Maybe I'm— oh my God, maybe I'm normal. I went to one of Dr. Daniel Amen's clinics and they did a brain scan. And I saw the psychiatrist who looked at me— it wasn't Dr. Amen. Um, he looks at me like, oh, tech bro wants Adderall. Okay, you can see this look of like, whatever. But he ordered the brain scan that I wanted. And then when he got the results, I walked back into his office. It was in Palo Alto. And he just looks at me, he goes, "Inside your brain is total chaos. I don't know how you're standing here in front of me. You have the best camouflage I've ever seen." Wow. And I was like, thank God someone finally believes me. Like, I have the accelerator all the way to the floor all the time. And the car is slowing down and I can't will it to go faster and I have nothing left. And that was when I realized, okay, I have actually brain damage. It was probably from mold toxins, but I was like, thank God this is so relaxing.

I have a hardware problem. I can fix a hardware problem if it's a, I'm a bad person or I'm just dumb problem. So I went all in on nootropics before they were called nootropics. I ordered $1,200 of them from Europe and started really self-medicating my brain because entrepreneurs, we make money with our brains. And I was feeling dumb at the time, like I'm desperate. So I did everything. I ended up spending $2.5 million, some of that to recover and a lot of it to reverse my age, enhance my intelligence. I built a neuroscience company that makes people smarter and replaces decades of meditation in a few days. And I have written 9 books and 4 New York Times bestsellers about cognitive enhancement and longevity and fertility. And my most recent book, called Heavily Meditated, is about altered states. And it became the best-selling philosophy book in the country.

Yeah.

Which was crazy. It's not a philosophy book, but it explains how our bodies make decisions. And I probably should have written it as a business book because it's so important. I've had about 1,400 entrepreneur types come through my neuroscience company. So I'm writing this after 10 years of looking inside the brains of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs.

Yeah.

And we all make decisions with our bodies before we can think about it, and it's invisible to us. But I know the code for that. And once you understand what your body's doing versus what you're doing, a lot of the things that are hard for entrepreneurs, especially under 35— like, up to about 35, you're like, I'm still finding my tribe, I'm still making my mark in the world— and you're trying to prove something. And so you have different body decision-making. Those are the emotions, but they come from your tissues, not from your brain. And then after some time, 35, 40, most people are like, oh, maybe I should have a mission. And sometimes you think you have a mission when you're young, but it's usually performative.

You talked about $2.5 million of testing on yourself, which ended up being like the best seed investment ever, right?

Oh yeah.

You built this, you, you're the father of biohacking. You built billion-dollar products, like you've absolutely crushed it.

Mm-hmm.

But what was one of the first experiments where you were like, oh my God, I can actually, like, this is true. I can, I can actually change my hardware.

Oh man, so many things pop into my head. One of the ones that just comes to mind, I was just becoming aware of this and I had exhausted all the stuff that, that you can do with Western medicine. Uh, like I have constant pain in my body, my knees always hurt, my brain, I have this massive brain fog, fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, or today was like same thing as Long COVID. Um, I just didn't understand why some days I was kind of lucid, some days I was a zombie, and when I was a zombie, I had to pretend like I wasn't a zombie, but I was pretty good at pretending. But I'm like, I can't remember anything from my meetings today. What am I gonna do? So I decided I was gonna do all the stuff that I thought was stupid. So I did acupuncture. I come from a family of scientists, and I was raised to be very skeptical. And like, meditation, that's for dumb people, right? Or even worse, like, going to any spiritual thing of all So I ended up saying, I'm gonna go to Nepal and Tibet. I'm gonna learn meditation from the masters.

Like, I give up. Like, maybe I'm wrong about some of my fundamental assumptions. And so I spent 3 months doing that. And I was in a monastery and someone said, oh, you know, let's go to the most holy mountain in the world, which is 5 days on a 4-wheel drive across Tibet called Mount Kailash. Anyone who's Buddhist or Hindu knows this. It's, it's very famous, and it's also very remote. So I ended up going there, and that was where I'm just feeling like death, like my whole body hurts. It's 18,000 feet elevation, and this little Tibetan woman gives me a bowl of yak butter tea, and I drank it, and about 5 minutes later, it was like sparkles went off in my brain. I'm like, wow, I haven't felt this good in so long. What was in that? And it's just green tea. It's pu'er tea, but— and some yak butter. And I didn't understand why, but the lady, she would walk like a quarter mile, crack ice on the river, get water, boil the water over yak dung as the fire, because there's no wood, just you burn poop, right? And then they'd heat up the tea and make the tea.

I'm like, okay, drink it. No, no, no. She'd pour it into a butter churn with the yak butter and then churn it for like 10 minutes. She wouldn't just turn it a little bit. I'm like, what is wrong with this person? Like, I just want to drink my tea. Right. But what made it work was the fact that she churned it for that amount of time. And I couldn't understand any of this, but that was where the idea for Bulletproof Coffee came from.

Yeah.

So it was, why do I feel radically different after I do this little dumb thing in a cup? Right. Well, it was the curiosity about what made it go that generated $500+ million of sales.

Right.

It's, it's remarkable.

Yes. So cool.

Other things. When I bought my first batch of nootropics, A little before that, when I was just trying to make my brain go so I wouldn't get fired, I remember getting them and I took something called piracetam, which is relatively well known today, although I recommend aniracetam even more. And I tried it and I took it for a week and thought, this is dumb. I wasted all this money and it didn't even do anything. So I quit taking it. And the next day I said, wait, I'm looking for a word. I can't remember a word. So you don't notice when your performance smooths out and gets better because it just feels natural. but you'll notice a decline in performance more than you'll notice an improvement. So the improvement was invisible, but the lack of it, like, I'm searching for words that I can't find again. So I've been on aniracetam now for 25 years, which is a cognitive enhancer that increases memory. I/O. I've also been on the limitless drug, also known as modafinil, which I popularized with entrepreneurs years ago. One of my first posts was, why you are suffering from a modafinil deficiency, which just pissed everybody off, which is one of my love languages.

So I wrote this and said, here's what happened when a little birdie gave modafinil to 4 ordinary people, and it told their stories. A guy was writing a proposal for the Dalai Lama Foundation. He's like, I took one pill, I rewrote the entire proposal that I've worked on for 6 weeks in one night, and I, I submitted it and they accepted it. And just everyone had these incredible experiences, and like, it really is the limitless drug. And so there's probably 50,000 entrepreneurs who are on modafinil. A lot of politicians are on it now. And this is a drug that was designed for narcolepsy when people fall asleep uncontrollably. But it also happens to be the most studied drug for raising IQ with very few side effects. So I'm actually on it right now.

How do you get prescribed for it?

Well, there's two ways to do it. One is you go to ChatGPT and say, what are the things I would have to tell my doctor to get him to write me a script for it? And then you tell your doctor that the easiest one is to say you have shift sleep worker disorder because you have to work different shifts. The other thing you could do is you just order it online from another country. So I have a prescription.

Yeah. Similar to how people, I guess, get peptides now.

Very similar.

Yeah.

It's funny though, because if you look at what makes someone an entrepreneur, Um, there's a code or a name for it that's in the doctor's books. It's called ADHD.

Yeah.

All right. So it's weird because an off-label use of modafinil is for ADHD. So when I first went through all of this stuff, when my brain wasn't working in business school and I went on the stuff, they tried giving me Adderall and I hated how I felt on it. Like, I can focus, but I want to curl up under my bed. And modafinil just made everyone around me slower.

I love that. I want to try it.

It is one of the most profound substances. It doesn't work for 20% of people. They feel nothing. And 5 in a million people can have a reaction to it, the same reaction that ibuprofen causes.

Oh, okay.

So very rare, but it's an autoimmune skin condition that's life-threatening. So you can do your genes if you're worried about it, but the odds are very, very low.

Let's talk about energy leaks. Mm. You can have energy leaking from your brain. We just talked about some of those energy leaks. We can have energy leaking from our body. You've got this framework of 5 Fs—

Oh, yeah.

—in which our body basically has to allocate where our energy goes, our mitochondria. Talk to us about the 5 Fs and what the mitochondria have to do with that.

I'm gonna take you through a set of steps that have to be true for this to make sense. Because it's okay to be— I'm a little skeptical about this because I was skeptical too. And I have exhausted this from philosophical, spiritual, biochemical, and just a systems biology perspective, and this is how life works. And I don't say that lightly.

Listen up, Jap fam.

You're not gonna see this, but it's gonna make sense. So let's pretend that you're a single-cell microbe or something without a lot of intelligence, like a tree or a skunk or a politician or whatever. Okay, so anyway, something not very intelligent, and you've gotta be able to live. What are— if you strip away all the things, what are the things that you must do in order to be alive? Eat. Well, that's almost there. Not get eaten is the first one. So it's fear. That's why these are F words. So don't let something eat me. And if you're a microbe, you secrete some toxins. You have little, little cilia to move away. If you're a tree, you grow thick bark or spines. Uh, if you're a politician, you tell more lies, like all the things, right? Okay. So that's fear. Run away from killer hide. The second one, you called it, it's food. Just eat everything. Right? This is why life will tend to do that. You put a bunch of rats in a box, they're happy for 3 generations, and they eat everything, including each other. It's gross. So, fear, food, third F-word. All things have to do it to stay alive for multiple generations.

Fertility? You read my book. You cheated. I was trying to trick you into dropping an F-bomb on your own show. So, I'm gonna ask you this, and you're listening to this, so ask yourself, is there anything you've ever done you're ashamed of that isn't one of those 3 things?

Fear, food, or fertility? No, not really.

All the Seven Deadly Sins, all the egoic behaviors, are driven by mitochondria trying to keep your body alive. And they can do that because they're much faster than you can think. And here's the proof of this: if I clap my hands, you're sitting in your car somewhere, probably, or the gym, and you're saying, "Okay, I knew it took some amount of time for the sound to reach my ears, and then I heard it," because that's what you perceived. But if I had electrodes glued to your head, we can measure 1/3 of a second after the sound hits your ear, your mitochondria and your nervous system allows it into the brain because your body is deciding what it's gonna make you do and feel before you get a chance to think. Wow. And if you don't believe me, you ever lean on a hot stove and go, "You know, that's really hot. I guess I should move my hand." Yeah. No, you jerk your hand away. Right? And go, "Good thing I moved my hand." You didn't move your hand. Someone else with their fingers on the control system who's hiding from you moved your hand and just made you take credit for it, right?

Because you didn't make the conscious decision. It was built in. Yeah. So the thing to know if you're an entrepreneur is that there is another intelligence inside your body running the things you're not paying attention to, and it doesn't have the goals you do. Its goals are Fear, food, and fucking. Hmm. But the good news is there's two more F-words that mitochondria care about, and that's why we have hope for humans. The next one is friend. Hmm. And all life will support its own ecosystem, the life around it, and its own species. This is why trees become an ecosystem. This is why we help other people's children if they're lost, why we help our elderly across the street. This is why we're kind to each other, even if we don't know, because our mitochondria made us feel kindness. They are the puppet masters because they get to tell you what you're allowed to see, how you're going to feel about it, and then you take action on it. They are puppet mastering you all the time. But there's a hack for that. And the final F word that's the most important in the way you get control of the system is forgiveness.

Now, that's usually a trigger word for a lot of people. It's like, I'm not going to forgive that person. They were mean to me. My anger keeps me safe. Dude, your anger is the biggest energy leak ever. So you don't do that. Forgiveness is not saying that you forgive someone. Forgiveness is making it so that you have zero reactivity to them, whether you ever speak to them again. And the idea is just letting it go, but being aware. And that is why I can still sit here today after literally losing $100 million, because I didn't get the, the lesson on discernment until, like, that was the cost of that lesson. Which is what I would have walked away from Bulletproof with had people done what I thought was, was logical. You make $100 million, I make $100 million. I didn't understand that there are humans out there where for them to win, I have to lose. And it doesn't matter how much money or any other thing is involved. If I make any, they think that they lost. So when you understand you're playing a game with win-lose humans, the game is very different than if you're playing with win-win.

I thought everyone was a win-win. So I'm like, you make $100 million, I make $100 million. Maybe you make $90 and I make $80. Who the heck cares? Like, it's a lot of money. But no. So my mistake and a really big lesson that makes me a great advisor for entrepreneurs is, yeah, understanding the human condition. That's all in my latest book, the different types of people there are.

Let's double tap on that. What are the different types of people out there? What do we need to watch out for?

This is something that comes up with entrepreneurs when they're at 40 years of Zen. This is my neuroscience place here in Austin. It's a 5-day retreat with electrodes glued to your head. The guy, the head neuroscientist from the telepathy tapes, is my neuroscientist. So we're teaching people to have advanced powers, we'll put it that way. When people attend that, I teach them these categories of humans. So Type 1 people are win-win. It's about 5% people. So they're always win-win. You interact with them, like, if they do something that made you lose, you can't even conceive of it. They just don't do that. The most common type of person after that is Type 2. These are people who are win-win usually, but they screw up. They don't see things because their ego takes action. Their mitochondria made them feel this way because their mom yelled at them or whatever. And then if you tell them, hey buddy, that wasn't okay, they apologize, go, oh my gosh, how do I make that right? And then they pay you back or they do whatever. Normal humans on the path of being better humans. So they'll make good. They'll make good, and they'll hear the criticism.

Type 3 are win-lose, but they don't know it. And these are so dangerous for entrepreneurs. And the word for this is narcissist. And these are people who believe whatever their internal dialogue is, regardless of the facts. So you can have someone who have a video of them in a room killing someone with a knife. They're covered in blood, holding the knife, and the room is locked. And you open the room and they go, oh, it wasn't me. It couldn't have been me. I'm a good person. And you show them the video. No, I'm a good person. Couldn't have been me. And they believe it. So you can't tell that they're lying because they're not lying. They just believe bullshit. So most entrepreneurs listening to this, you have someone in your company like that. You know who they are right now when I said that.

Or somebody who formally was in your company, potentially. Hopefully someone—

well, if you still have a company, they were probably formally in your company. So one of the experiences that I, I just cherish is, uh, probably 8, 9 years ago, I was at a business conference and, um, a guy named Ken who was running a $500 million company, very experienced entrepreneur, um, I was telling him what was going on at Bulletproof. And he looks at me and he recognized this pattern, didn't call it the same thing. And he said, so we're going to fire her with my phone or your phone, like hands me his phone. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, I need this person. Uh, you know, I understand the problem you're talking about. Like, I'll work on it because you don't understand, like, these are the people who break companies. I said, how do you know? He said, well, you know, I run a $500 million company. I was mentored by Jack Welch, you know, the CEO of GE, like, I'm like, holy crap, this guy's a badass and a good human. And I didn't take his advice. And about a year later, that same executive who the entire year had told me and the board, I'm going to— we're going to be losing $4 million this year, but we have $30 million in venture capital.

We're going to grow 40% every week. We're on track. We're on track. We're on track. And then December 1st, she goes, we might lose $5 million instead of $4 million. Okay, as long as our growth rates are there. And December 31st, she goes, oopsie, I lost $28 million. And I'm like, what? The entire year you said something different and you just burned 3 years of venture capital in 1 year without telling me or the board. Like, what the fuck? Okay. And if you're an entrepreneur running a big company, yes, I probably should have looked at the bank accounts. Uh, it's hard being the influencer and the CEO. It's really hard. I had trusted the wrong people. And this is a person with fantastic credentials, top of her class at Harvard kind of thing. So when I, when I fired her, she looked me in the eye and she said, you should give me more stock options. I'm like, why? And she's made up a story in her head that made no sense. And I said, well, I would have to take stock options from the other employees. Who actually are doing work and didn't burn through all of our venture funding.

And she started crying and ghosted me, and we have never spoken since. Wow. Because I penetrated her reality bubble, and the reality is I don't fail. So if you ever have someone come in the door during a job interview, says they don't fail, run, run screaming. It is really important. Hire people who at least acknowledge failure. Yeah. When you look at the fourth category of person, Category 4 people, these are win-lose and they know it. They get off on manipulating you. They're very hard to spot because they're master manipulators. They're sociopaths and psychopaths. And it turns out there's 5% of those and 5% of win-win, the category ones. It's an— it's a bell curve. So your job as an entrepreneur is to ruthlessly eliminate type 3 people from your organization. These are the people who lie. These are the people who undermine you when you're not looking. They're the ones who organize coups. And if you allow a category 3 to stick around for more than about 90 days, what will happen is they will infiltrate some people in your organization, share their mindset, tell little white lies, but they're not white, to separate your team from you and create chaos in the org.

And when you fire them, you'll lose 2 people who are good people as well. So they're like a cancer in the org. And if you let them go long enough the way I did, you might even lose your company. They're relatively hard to spot, but you spot them in the job interview. In my set of 7 or 8 companies right now, we have a goal: 60 days. If we hire one, yep, well, you know, in 60 days we just fire them right then. And I tell people that during the interview, and we do exhaustive profiling on people before before we hire them.

What are some of the questions that you ask to kind of just get a sense of what type of person they are?

At this point, I use two different frameworks. One is the Kolbe, and Kolbe tells you, are they a natural fit for this job in, like, their instinctive way of thinking about the world and solving problems? And the other one is from a woman named Bizzy Gold, and she does psychology-level questions that I couldn't ask in a job interview. It would be illegal, but they go to a psychiatrist or psychologist who then assesses that, takes out anything personal and just says, here's the person's personality reaction profile. It's very dry numbers, but it tells with relative certainty whether someone is likely to go dark. And so my, my biggest mistake building a $100 million company from scratch was I didn't fire the people who were category 3 fast enough. If I had just known that lesson, I would probably be a multi-billionaire right now.

And so when you were talking about that example of the executive, she basically got triggered from an old wound when she couldn't accept that, that she failed, whatever that wound was.

And it was a daddy wound. A daddy wound. I just have to say this. Yeah. If you're a female entrepreneur, everyone in your company with mommy issues will see you as mommy because you're the woman authority figure. And if you're a male entrepreneur, everyone Someone with daddy issues will see you as their daddy because that's how human brains work. That's how mitochondrial networks work. And that's what happens when emotions are generated before thoughts. So you're sitting in a room and you say something to someone, and maybe he feels like you're criticizing him the way his dad did, or the way his teacher did, or whatever. He's gonna get the emotions he had at that time unless he's done his forgiveness work and he's done a lot of personal development work. Yeah, right. And then he's going to see you as a bad person because that's what happened when he was 5 years old, or whatever the hell. So you could spend your time managing emotions of other people, which is the most horrifying part of being an entrepreneur. Or you could do a better job of hiring people who've done enough work that it's okay.

All of my senior executives, when they start in my companies, they go to 40 Years of Zen the first week because that's where you go to turn off all of your triggers. Like, literally, that's what we're doing with computers. It's like the system notifications on your phone. I can't use my phone because Twitter. And TikTok and everything's just popping up alerts everywhere. Your nervous system is doing that right now. So what if you just turned off all the useless alerts? That's what I've done. That's why I can run a big handful of companies, and that's why, like, no one died when a group of business people stole my company at the same time I was getting divorced and had a family member try to steal one of my other companies. Oh my God. Um, and I wrote about all that and heavily meditated, but I can sit here, I'm Thank you for the lessons. Like, I, I learned what I needed to learn. So you probably shouldn't try to steal one of my companies now because I will see it.

Can you give us an example of a trigger that showed up in your leadership that then you reset? This is so funny.

One of the things that your mitochondria can do is they can decide which things in the environment you're allowed to hear or see. So one of my favorite board members when I was at Bulletproof, His name was Dan, Dan Skolnick. He's at Green River Ventures now. And he was just the kind of board member that every entrepreneur wishes they would have, who just really understood both sides of the seat. Dan sat down one time and he said, Dave, you have 200 SKUs. And a SKU is basically a separate product that you're selling. And he's like, it's breaking your team. You're going to, You're going to sink your company with this. I'm like, wow, $200 million is a lot. Like, why didn't you say something? And he looked at me like I'm like, I'm an idiot. And he goes, Dave, I've been yelling this at you for the last 6 months. And I was kind of humbled. Like, I swear to God, this is the first time I've ever heard that. And it was the first time I heard that because my ego didn't want to hear it. Because I think creating cool stuff that people want to use and that helps people's health, I think it's really kind of an obligation for an entrepreneur.

Like, let's make the world a better place. We can make money doing it too. And the fact that I was that blind, that I couldn't hear, I couldn't see this even though people I trusted were telling me, everyone has that capability in them to just not see it. And it doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. It means that you have a human body, because human bodies will do that because they're running the F-words, right? In this case, it was probably fear of not doing my mission. I don't know. People pleasing, maybe, a little bit. Yeah, definitely had some people pleasing in there. I don't— I think I'm done with that. I, I like people triggering these days.

It's more fun. You had this trigger. How did you determine, you know, what wound was actually triggering you, and how did you reset it or make sure that it doesn't happen as often?

Okay, that is an amazing question. No one's ever actually asked it that way. So in Heavily Meditated— and guys, you can buy the book or not, it doesn't change my life in the slightest. Like, it's, it's my wisdom, but I, I think I make a dollar per book, and it was already prepaid in advance, so it Truly, I'm not selling you the book. It's there for you. But the reset process that I use is based on neuroscience, and it's based on a study of forgiveness practices around the world, and then seeing what works in high-performance people. So you— we glue electrodes to your head. This is what I did. And you sit down and you imagine the other person. There's 8 steps. I won't go through all of them, but it turns out that The feeling of turning off one of these alerts, one of these triggers, is very similar to what Buddhists would call a loving-kindness thing. And it's a— what you basically do is you re-experience the pain in your body. How did it feel when you were triggered? And then the, the altered opposite state is like this heart-opening, warm, golden feeling where you're sending something to the other person.

And There are similar practices in Buddhism, but they're not exactly the same. And I haven't seen other spiritual practices that have anything close to this, but it's not a Buddhist practice. It's a different thing. Okay. Desmond Tutu talks about, like, the feeling of this forgiveness, like a divine thing, but it's an embodied, felt sense. Because when you were triggered, it wasn't your mind. It was a feeling. Like, you know what it is. It's in your heart. It's in your gut. It's in your groin. Yeah. Like, the hairs on the back of your neck. Like, like you're ready to fight. Okay, so first you— how'd that feel? And then you learn this other state. Problem is it takes 20 to 40 years to learn the other state if you meditate for an hour a day. I can do it in 5 days for people reliably after more than 10 years of doing this. So now, like, oh, anytime my body does this, eh, you have a tool to play whack-a-mole. And so you say, all right, turn that one off, turn that one off. It's like going through And just anytime an alert popped up on your phone, you can click a little button and say, I don't want that one anymore.

And then you do this process. But sometimes you don't know, like, the root of it, what the real cause is. So can I tell you a little story? Of course. All right. Around 2014, this is first 3 years of starting Bulletproof, uh, I was doing maybe $800 grand a month. Uh, not bad for a 3-year-old company started and self-funded with $50,000 of, of, uh, teaching hedge fund managers how to make their brains work better. So, um, this guy calls me up and says, hey, I'm your biggest fan, I'm a Hollywood stuntman, uh, and you should be on this guy Joe Rogan's show. Now I have a confession. I've listened to 5 podcast episodes in my entire life. I've made 1,400 of my own episodes, and I've probably been on several thousand interviews like this one, right? So I create content, but I have time to listen to it because I run companies and make content. So I didn't know who Joe Rogan was. It was only maybe episode 400, 450 or something. So I show up in LA and Joe's like high as a kite. He's like exhaling before, before the first question. And I'm like, man, I can't smoke that.

I will be an idiot on your show if I do, but I think it should be legal. And it became legal right after that. So I taught Joe about grass-fed meat, um, butter, coffee. Getting ADHD going, and he still talks about that stuff today. And this is cool. Well, the stuntman then said, hey Dave, you know, let's do a coffee truck together. I'm like, I will do a Bulletproof coffee truck. And then he basically was playing me. I was trusting the wrong people. And calls me up one day when I'm still expecting our coffee truck's about done and goes, I've decided I'm launching my own brand and I'm going to say it's mold-free, but I'm not going to lab test it. So to me, mold-free coffee is really important because we have a problem in the US where the world sends its moldy coffee here and then we drink it and we get angry and want sugar. So that's why Danger Coffee, because who knows what you might do. There, I get my plug. But if you're an entrepreneur, you should drink Danger because it actually works. But anyway, so this guy, it was a betrayal thing.

I'm like, okay, I can handle that, whatever, some guy. But then after being on Rogan 2 more times and just having been nothing but giving. Yeah. And, and helping. Um, Joe goes on and says, Dave Asprey is a liar, he's a bad guy. Now, he hired a fact-checker. Oh, by the way, he said that on the day that a company that he owned a portion of launched their competitor to Bulletproof. So this was commercially motivated behavior. And just today, I did my whole reset process. I've forgiven Joe Rogan. I've been to his comedy shows, and he was a hero during the pandemic. I don't have any issues with him. We both live in Austin. Haven't been to a party with him yet. Did I give him a hug? He'd probably run away. He'd probably kick my ass, but he's a lot shorter, so I'm kind of intimidating, but I don't care. Like, I just don't care. So Joe, if you hear this, I love you, brother. It's fine. But at the time, oh my God, I freaked out. I hired a crisis PR firm. Like, what do I do? This podcaster's saying mean things about me.

Really? Really? A podcaster saying mean things about me? But in my mind, it was a catastrophe. I'm like, Well, it's your credibility. What was my credibility? But I already had a show. I already had a brand doing like $800 grand a month. Like, who the fuck cares?

He's a podcaster. Yeah, you probably sold more coffee from it.

Well, ultimately, ultimately you nailed it. I couldn't see the fact that every time Joe Rogan says Dave Astor is a bad man, I sell more coffee. I couldn't see it for that same thing we're talking about. So I finally, after like 6 months of this, a guy who was a convoy commander in the Iraq War I was like, who works for me? He's like, uh, Dave, he's just a podcaster. Why are you so freaked out? Like, the whole team is feeling it. Oh my gosh. So I put the electrodes on my head, I took my own medicine, did my 40 Years of Zen thing, and, and the first thing that popped into my mind wasn't Joe Rogan. It was an experience in first grade that I'd forgotten. And it was a time when I tattled on another kid, which isn't cool, but hey, in first grade you learn. And the teacher goes, little Johnny, did you do it? And he goes, oh, I didn't do it. Dave did it. And I got sent to the principal's office for doing the right thing. And I was so angry in first grade. And I felt helpless in first grade.

Right? So what happens when I'm an adult? It's an unresolved trauma with a little t. I'm an adult. I did the right thing. I helped Joe. I helped his audience. I was consistent. And I got punished for it. And it brought up the feelings of anger and helplessness in first fucking grade. From something that had left my consciousness 30 years ago. So I did the reset process on that, and as I did the reset process, it was like the whole situation with Joe and all the stuff, it just like shrunk to this little thing, just went away. And then it became really clear, just what you said, every time Joe Rogan says Dave's a bad man, I just make more money. So what I should have done was gone right back on X, now on Twitter at the time, and just been like, Joe, your mom doesn't say I'm a bad man. That would have been the right response. Literally made fun of Joe Rogan's mom because it's like, let's pick a fight, dude. Let's be as public as we can. Bulletproof at the time, now Danger Coffee. But because it's childish. This is— he's, he's a comedian, right?

He's not dumb. He just plays like he's dumb, but he's a comedian. And I'm actually— well, I'm pretty smart. I know my shit, and I don't lie. I never lie.

So you forgave him. What— sometimes we think that we forgive people, but we're actually haven't really done the work.

What do you mean sometimes? Very few people have ever forgiven someone. I mean, it's an advanced spiritual skill to forgive someone. This is why Jesus practiced it for all that time. Forgive them, they know not what they do. Um, most people, I would say 99% of the time, forgiveness is, I decided to forgive them. It's a cognitive process that happens in the mind. In reality, no forgiveness happens in the mind. It is all in the body. Forgiveness is an altered state, like a psychedelic state or like an orgasmic state. You don't live in a state of forgiveness unless you're very, very special. Um, you could live in a state of compassion, which is what Buddhism teaches. And compassion is, I automatically wish other people well before I can judge them. And that's also an advanced skill. Forgiveness is harder, but you don't always live in forgiveness because once you've developed compassion, very few people can trigger you anymore.

So you've truly forgave somebody if you don't get the triggers resulting of whatever that trauma was.

If a person that you think you've forgiven walks into a room and you have no reaction internally, your heart doesn't change even a little bit, you don't clench your jaw, you don't change your breath, and if we were measuring stress response, which we can now, on your skin, you wouldn't see any changing. You'd be like, "Oh, it's, you know, it's good to see you." Right.

How do you think about gratitude with forgiveness? And is there anything with the Joe Rogan situation that you actually feel grateful for? Oh, I'm so happy you asked.

In the reset process, you cannot enter the state of forgiveness without finding gratitude first. And I've worked with, with people who've been tortured in war, like the most horrific things, doing the 40 Years of Zen program. And entrepreneurs, a lot of them actually, who've been through childhood trauma, like pretty complex and, and just abhorrent things. And I've looked them in the eye and said, if you want to let that go permanently and forever, you have to find one good thing that happened. And the cool thing about gratitude is your body is dumb. It doesn't understand time or magnitude or space. It doesn't understand there's refrigerators or police officers or whatever. It's just like reactive, real-time, emotional flopping all over the place until you train it. So you can tell your nervous system whatever you want when you do this. And for gratitude, it just has to find one good thing. Doesn't matter what it is. You can literally be in a car accident and lose a leg, and I'm so grateful I have my other one. Boom, you found gratitude. It's not hard. Yeah, but seeing the gratitude is actually very difficult. And you know what it takes to find gratitude?

Curiosity. And we all know what curiosity did. They say it killed the cat. It's because curiosity takes you out of fear. So the reason that you're feeling triggered is ultimately fear. When you peel away all the labels, there's some kind of fear that your mitochondrial network is signaling. And so once you start going, huh, I wonder, then you're not afraid anymore. And then you say, oh, it turns out there was this tiny little sliver of goodness amongst all the crap. Yeah, okay. Now you're primed to do the reset process and actually forgive the person. And the forgiveness is you change the state of your body, not the state of your mind. So most people— I forgave? No. What you did is you told someone you forgave them, and you decided that you forgave them, and you're holding into all the crap in your heart and in your body and in your gut. And that crap is the biggest energy leak for all humans all the time.

Sometimes our triggers aren't from something that happened personally. So for example, I'm Palestinian, so I feel like with the last 3 years, I probably have so much like trauma and things that I need to forgive the world for and release so that it doesn't show up in my leadership, in my entrepreneurship.

All right, can I be really triggering for you? Yeah. You have toxic empathy. Hmm. Okay.

I'm sure I do.

So do you know what toxic empathy is?

When you just feel like you— I do have toxic empathy. Like, I know for a fact, like, I'm so— you can, you can explain it. Okay. I would like to learn more too.

So there's two paths that humans go down when we're very, very young. Okay, you're in a meat body that can't feed itself and poops on itself, right? And your networks in charge are like, "How do I make sense of this weird world? Like, there's air and light and Mom." And if you look at the brainwaves of a baby, it's all, like, the deepest brain— like, sleepy states and then dreamy states. And you don't even really come out of the dreamy state until you're 7 or 8. So during that time, you're not perceiving the world like normal. And you learn, what do I have to do to be safe? And one group of people learns, I have to think to be safe. Thinking is the way. And the other group of people says, I have to feel to be safe. Feeling is the way. So if you have an unsafe environment, then you learn, okay, I can earn love with my brain, and I can, I can think about whether someone's going to hit me, and then I can avoid it. And someone else will say, if I could just feel everyone's feelings around me, Then I can feel when something bad's gonna happen and I can avoid it and I can be safe.

Right now, they're both trauma responses, right? So when people come in to 40 Years of Zen, these are all people who, despite this, which is the human condition, are very successful. It's about $20,000 to work with my whole team for a week. I think it's underpriced, but whatever. Like, it's very, it's very expensive to run, but very valuable. So these people have some degree of economic success regardless of this. And the people like, oh my gosh, I'm feeling everyone's pain, all that stuff. They learn, I don't have to feel pain. And when you study spiritual stuff like Buddhism, they'll tell you empathy is better than no empathy, but it's a low-level state. Because you want to walk into Walmart and feel everyone's feelings? I don't think so, right? Because it's just a random wash of humanity. It's not— it's normal. And you're trying to be better than normal. So the step above empathy is compassion, which is Oh, I automatically wish all these people at Walmart well. I'm not gonna judge them even if they're on the People of Walmart webpage, which is the funniest thing ever if you've ever seen it. But the idea here is, okay, I just, like, have compassion, right?

That's healthy. And empathy is not so healthy because you're whipped around by other people's emotions all the time. And then, on the other hand, the people who are meat robots, which is where I was, I will refuse to acknowledge my emotions. Because I don't comprehend them and because dealing with my emotions is unsafe, I can just think my way out of them and therefore I will earn love. But for them to crack through into their emotions is— ah, I did that when I was about 30 at a personal development retreat. It took like 7 days before I would go, I guess I have an emotion besides anger. Fine. So what's going on with you is partially that toxic empathy. And when people do a lot of their own their own work on, on their adult experiences, on their childhood experiences, they'll go in 3 different directions. One of them is pre- and perinatal trauma. The experience of birth and what happened in the womb has effects that you can remember that are changing your personality today. I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, and I had no idea the effects it had on me from a PTSD perspective until I did the work and was like, oh my God, I'm so glad I figured that out and let it go.

Um, okay, so there's that. Then there's the generational trauma, and that could easily be a part of what you're dealing with. And I see this, um, in any part of the world where there's been conflict, including like Central Europe is full of this because every 60 years an army rides through and messes things up, and then it lasts for several generations. You see in the Middle East very, very clearly. You see it, um, in the Muslim world. You see it in Jewish people. Lots of bad stuff has happened over the last 100 years. Um, I mean, Lawrence of Arabia, all the things. Yeah. Right. Some people will just automatically like, okay, I cleaned out my own closet. Like, oh my gosh. And they'll start doing work on their great-great-grandmother they never do. And then they feel these weird shifts in their body. This is more shamanism, but people do it themselves. Like, I'm trained in shamanic practice and a bunch of other stuff, but they're doing this with electrodes on their head. And the coolest thing is Sometimes someone will, like, you know, forgive a family member they haven't talked to in 20 years. And then that night they get a text from their long-lost whatever going, I don't know why I'm just thinking about you.

Oh my God. Not just once or twice, like hundreds of times, to the point that we're all connected more than we think we are. And so your ability as the leader of a company to just hold your space, it comes down to dealing with your generational trauma, with birth trauma and what happened in the womb. Was your mom safe and all that sort of stuff? And then the freakiest thing that comes up, and I've had to deal with it myself, is past lives, which is not generational trauma, it's not this life, but you're like, why am I so angry at 14th century French people? It doesn't matter why. The why is the reason, the meaning engine of your conscious thinking. It's— if it pops up in your mind, just run a reset process on it, just let it go, right? So I'll see people like, oh my gosh, I spent 2 hours today forgiving things from another lifetime, and I feel so much better. Now, is that real? I tend to think so. It doesn't matter. Did the person's state change, and did the beneficial change stick? And if so, then it worked. And I don't care if there's a belief system about it or not.

What I do know is that 90% of people who go through 40 Years of Zen report relationship improvements. Yeah, in a survey. Actually, it's approximately like 89 point something. There's, uh, and all the other markers of psychological health and performance go up more than 50% for all of the markers for people go through. So wow, cool. Forgiveness is a performance-enhancing process, but only if it actually works. On the contrary, if you cognitively forgive someone, now you're creating a schism in reality for yourself. You say that you forgave the person, but you don't feel that way. And if you want to be a terrible leader, show up with a lack of authenticity and congruence. I've never seen a leadership book about congruence, but this is what happens. And my, my therapist of 10+ years has actually said, Dave, you're the most congruent client I've ever worked with, which to me is a really good compliment. What that means is that my inner state and my outer state are aligned. Right? And when you're a leader, if you're losing your mind and you get in front of the troops and you're like, all right, everything's fine, but everyone knows it's not fine because it's not the tells, it's not what you're doing, it's that you're sending out magnetic vibes we can measure and you're sending out quantum vibes that you kind of can measure but are harder to sense, and probably some biophotons, like there's all— and pheromones and God knows what else.

So we have a sense that we're lying. You know what I'm talking about? Can you tell when someone's bullshitting you? Yeah. Well, you're a woman. You guys have an unfair advantage. Seriously, women are more intuitive than men on average because you have to rely on intuition for safety. And guys are like, we have muscle, we are safe, we have rocks. You know, your team can feel this too. It doesn't matter if you're a man or woman in leadership. If you can walk up and you can say something that is internally true and externally true, you have their attention. And over the years of advising and coaching entrepreneurs, One of my favorite questions is people come and say, Dave, how can I be more authentic? You can't act authentic. It's like you have to make your inside and your outside line up. And that's what meditation and breathwork and all the spiritual side, the consciousness side of biohacking is about. And it's why not only do I run the biohacking conference here in Austin, which is called Beyond Biohacking, the largest and oldest biohacking conference of 5,000 people. Joe Dispenza has spoken there twice. Leaders, or some of our speakers about that.

But I also bought the Wonderland Conference, which we're bringing to Austin in October. And the Wonderland Conference is the second largest psychedelic conference in the world. Um, Rick Doblin from MAPS, uh, who's a hero and a friend, is speaking. And it's a consciousness conference where we do psychedelic, uh, speakers as well as other technologies for consciousness. Because if you're an entrepreneur, You better learn how to hack your internal state, otherwise you will literally tear yourself apart in the process of succeeding.

I was literally just about to ask you about psychedelics, so I'm glad that you brought it up, because I feel like one of the hardest things to do is actually to, like, remember your trauma and try to understand, like, where these triggers are coming from. And it seems like certain drugs can kind of unlock that for people. Can you explain why?

Your brain has something called the default mode network. And Heavily Meditated, if you're interested, has a whole chapter on psychedelics and how and why this works. Again, it's okay if you don't buy the book. I just want you to know where to go for more info. So the default mode network in neuroscience is pretty much what, what allows the ego to express itself. So when you take something like ketamine, which is what we use at 40 Years of Zen as an option for neuroplasticity, not classically a psychedelic but similar, similar neighborhood, or psilocybin or LSD, um, or even something like DMT. By the way, I'm about to go do like a 4-hour DMT session. That's gonna be kind of cool. Right after this? Uh, it's sometime in the next couple months. We're gonna do a whole, like, an episode of a TV series on it because normally it's an 8-minute journey, but I'll do it for a few hours and see what happens. Anyway, all these disrupt default mode network signaling so that your ego shuts the hell up, and then you get to see the world the way your mitochondria see the world. It's pretty interesting, like all the patterns, all the, the colors, all the memories, all the connection.

It can come back. However, a great number of people end up reliving past traumas when the ego turns off, and they say, oh, I had a bad trip. No, you didn't have a bad trip. You relived a trauma. So you can let it go. If you have the right set and the right setting and the right facilitation support, you have the opportunity now that you're aware of it to actually work on letting it go. I've seen very few people permanently let things go with psychedelics. It's not impossible, and I've done everything but combo at this point. You can lighten the load, but without like a deep forgiveness that's embodied, it's it's very hard to do. And the difficult thing with psychedelics is that 90% of what happens you don't remember. So even if you forgive in a— in an altered state, if you don't have full recollection of it, you don't necessarily get the full benefits of it. So I am actually a fan of, of mindful psychedelic use, and I've been to Burning Man a dozen times, so I might use them for fun on occasion. But if you're using them recreationally, you're probably not getting the benefits.

And if you don't have a facilitation process, it doesn't work. And the way we use ketamine at 40 Years of Zen is we do one journey day, and before and after there's training, and afterwards there's facilitation. And the role of a facilitator at 40 Years of Zen is to make sure that you remember everything. And then when you go in and you're doing neurofeedback sessions, which feel like you're on psychedelics but it's just you and your brainwaves, You come out and you talk about it. Imagine, like, if you had a dream last night. Did you have dreams last night?

Dreaming about this interview and making sure I do good.

And you remember it? Yeah. Okay, cool. Most people, though, don't remember their dreams unless someone asks them to remember it.

I was, like, maybe not fully sleeping well.

Okay, cool. But you know what I'm talking about, right? Yeah. So people will forget their dreams. Like, "God, I had the best dream!" And you just don't know. So it's the same with psychedelic journeys, and it's the same with meditation. And that's why I have a team of trained facilitators, a team of neurotechnicians and scientists. So you come out, like, keep wearing the TrueDark glasses that keep your brain in— published medical studies— they keep your brain in a meditation state. And then let's talk and let's get it out there. Let's take notes. Let's structure the tools so you can do it better. And that's why we have a waitlist for a $20,000 program, because it saves you 40 years of meditating every day.

And if you're an entrepreneur, I'm going to do your program. Oh, you have to do it ASAP. You're a—

you're running a big enough couple companies. Yeah, yeah. All you have to think about is one time that you made a really bad decision because you're emotional, right?

Especially as a woman, we get very emotional.

You know, you'd be surprised. Um, men and women both get emotional, just you show it more. We get emotional, we just sit on it and just chew it up and digest it, and then like feel in our bodies and we get old old and fat and angry. You ever see that movie Grumpy Old Men? Yeah, that's like a documentary on testosterone deficiency and lack of forgiveness. But, um, we all do feel it, um, and women express it more. And some of the hardest clients at 40 Years of Zen are men who are like, I do not know how to feel my feelings. And this is to me like, like sacred work, because when I was 30 I was at a personal development retreat doing holotropic breathwork, which is a replacement for LSD. It is hardcore breathwork. And I was like, okay, I'm not— I'm not understanding. There's all these people, they're making all these sounds. There's people also with like wiffle ball bats hitting pillows and yelling. I'm like, this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. But I couldn't stand to be in the room. Like, the sound of it just drove me nuts.

So I went outside and the facilitators Bless them. Uh, they came out like, why are you outside? I'm like, I can't stand the sound of all these people yelling and wailing and whatever. This is my first personal development thing in my life. I was like way, way in the deep end. And so they brought me in. I took 3 facilitators and pillows acting like weighted blankets on me so I could just lay there. Right. And I'm like, I am a rational computer science human being. I'm, you know, successful. Like, what is up? And this wise woman looks at me and she goes, Are you feeling anything? I said, yeah, I'm feeling pissed off because this is dumb. And she said, anything else? I said, well, there's a weird feeling in my stomach. She goes, that's fear. And I looked her right in the eye and I said, there's nothing in here for me to be afraid of, therefore it's not fear. And she looked at me and she kind of giggled and she goes, fear is an emotion. Emotions don't have to have reason. And I was like, oh my God. Why did I not think of that?

My body has emotions that make no freaking sense. But before that, my whole model of reality was that it can't be that emotion because why would it be there? Just understanding that. So we guys have it, but I was completely ignoring everything below my neck and I don't anymore. And so women, you typically have to pay attention to things below your neck because they change all the damn time, right? You have a monthly cycle, you have a daily cycle, and like, it's a lot. So women's intuition though is very important for entrepreneurs. And I want to talk about that if we have time for it. If you believe what I'm saying about mitochondria being basically antennas on reality, that they sense reality first, they make a group decision with each other about what they're going to pass on to the nervous system and ultimately to your brain, then the areas with the most mitochondria would be the most sensitive to the environment. So in men and women, we have 15,000 mitochondria in our brain cells and our heart cells. Okay, and that's where it tops out. Oh, except in women, you have about 600,000 mitochondria in your ovarian tissue.

Wow. So the seat of intuition in women is the reproductive system. You also have a lot of nerve endings in other parts of your reproductive tract, right? So, and I've interviewed top OB-GYNs and top female spiritual leaders about this, and more than one of the spiritual leader types has literally looked at me and said Intuition is in my pussy. I'm like, I'm not gonna just— I— okay, I— okay, yes, I believe you. I'm not going to disagree with that, right? So when you're dealing with advanced Taoism and things that are in my, my wheelhouse, when you first start working with a spiritual teacher, you'll see them do this, okay? They're activating chi in their hands. We have a lot of nerve density in our hands. And then as we start learning, they start feeling their feet because you have the second most nerve endings in your feet, right? And then the true masters, when they're walking into a room, they feel hands, feet, and groin because it's a very sensitive area. And this is not— has nothing with sex at all. Has to do with I'm aiming all the antennas in my body to get an intuitive sense.

But guys are much worse at getting intuitive sense in our reproductive tract than women are. I think it has to do with reproductive safety. I don't know. But if you're a male entrepreneur, you had better know the two women on your team who are most intuitive. And hopefully your spouse or partner is also intuitive and you listen to what they say because they will tell you that guy's a douchebag. You're like, but I like that guy. It doesn't matter if a woman who has shown that she's intuitively trustworthy tells you someone's a douchebag, then just don't work with them. It's not worth it. Like, these are your team. And the reason I'm still here as an entrepreneur today, I have two women on my team, Rebecca and Miranda. They just moved to Austin. Welcome, ladies. Um, 14 years of supporting me and they're both intuitive. And the number of times in the last, especially 10 years after I learned this, when like, I just don't like that guy or that woman, like they're not good. My assistant, uh, Christine, same thing. I don't like that one. Every time I've hired someone she didn't like, I regretted it immensely.

Mm-hmm. So listen to intuitive women. And if you're a guy, you have a different kind of intuition. You have it. It's, it's just very, very different. And your intuition, it'll be in the same place. It'll be in your hands and your feet and in your reproductive tract. So if you walk into a room or someone else walks into a room and your balls climb up inside you, it probably should tell you something. That's a protective thing that your body is doing to tell you. Just, you have to listen to the body. The body knows. It's so interesting.

And then when we think about those 5 Fs that you're mentioning and fertility, it's no wonder that women are making so many decisions around fertility. And even if you're not realizing it, that this decision you're making of who you're dating or what job you're taking or whatever might be like a fertility decision that you're not even realizing.

It is so crazy the way things work. Um, like the way a guy smells not smells because, you know, you're smelling his armpit or something, but just in the room, your body will pick up the fact that he has, uh, DNA that's compatible with yours, a haplotype, and he'll smell good to you, but it won't be a conscious smell. And then you'll start talking to him, and then you'll flip your hair and do all the things that you do, and you won't even know why you're doing it. This is how mitochondria manipulate us all the time, right? Problem is, if you're on the birth control pill, that system gets hacked and broken, so it doesn't work. And then you might be attracted to the wrong guy. You go off the pill and all of a sudden your husband's not attractive anymore. Oh wow. That's why for— I'm anti-birth control pills. In 2011, I wrote my first book, which is on fertility, because, uh, the mother of my children, former wife, um, she was infertile when I met her, and she's a doctor. So did some biohacking, restored her fertility. My first book was about that, and I went really deep on this.

And birth control pills harm women so much And access to birth control is a necessary right for women. Just the pill is harmful to women. It's okay to say both at the same time. If you care about women, you should, you should say that. So yeah, I'm— it breaks relationships.

I just want to kind of close the loop on the fact that when you forgive, you get more energy because then your mitochondria can allocate energy to different things other than your emotions, right? So can you help people understand that better?

Every day you take about £30 of air and some amount of food, you combine them and you make electricity and heat and some other proteins and stuff like that. And that's what runs your body. Mm-hmm. Right now, the average person's thoughts, about one-third of their thoughts per day, are about tacos. Okay. Or at least about food. So each of those thoughts took electricity. So imagine if, like, one of those times your phone just slows down, like, what is going on here? And you, like, close a bunch of open apps and then it speeds back up. Mm-hmm. Well, everything that you haven't forgiven is an open app running in your brain, and all of these unprogrammed thoughts, they just take up energy. And that means you're not thinking about the business, you're not acting with clarity, you're less conscious. It also means that the immune cells whose job is to kill cancer cells, they didn't have enough energy. And the body is beautifully set up to run the most important on the to-do list to the least important in order. And it says, I'm going to prioritize not dying at the very top here and not dying now, right?

And I'm going to make sure that we have some kids and, you know, that we eat and all this stuff. Folding proteins properly is pretty low on the list. So it's only going to do that if you give it two things: enough energy and a safe environment for it to regenerate. So if you're stressed all the time and out of energy, you have neither ingredient. And this is why so many entrepreneurs are like, I will use my willpower and my biological energy to become successful. I'm in my late 20s, early 30s. God, this was me. I can burn the candle in the middle and at both ends, and I'm, I'm just going to do it. So stress all the time, working out all the time, right? Because more, more is better. That's not how it works. But so at the end of the day, they're completely blown out. They might be successful. They're, they're constantly wired or tired. They're reactive. They don't know they're reactive, and they're grinding all the time, and it creates misery. It also creates broken teams because then your team tries to do that, and then everyone in your company is all broken, and like, it's, it's toxic.

And I know because I've done it. So what you'd want to do instead is recognize that your body responds to stimulus followed by recovery. And this is why I exercise for about 20 minutes a week and like I am like I'm on the COVID of my book with my shirt off. I am. Yeah. Well, if you believe the calendar, which I don't anymore, I'm actually 28% old because I'm going to live to 180. But if you do the math, I'm 53 on the calendar. I am leaner and in better shape than any time in my life with less work than ever. And in business, it's the same way. Working more means you're a bad entrepreneur. So, yeah, people probably got pissed at that, but it's true. Like, okay, you could have a high return on ad spend or a low return on ad spend. What'd you rather do?

High return on ad spend.

You want to spend as little as you can to get the highest return. Yeah, that makes you good on performance. So why do you want to work hard? No, you want to delegate. You want to work as little as possible so that the only thing that ever crosses your desk is something that no one else in your company can do. And when you have too many of those, you want to hire someone who can do those things. That's the path. And why do you think I have— I think it's 8 companies in the portfolio right now. Because I have hired good leaders, right? And I'm engaged with the companies, right? I'm spending a lot of time on, on Upgrade Labs now. We've got one here in Austin. Have you been? No, I haven't yet.

Oh my gosh.

Um, I'm sure I can get you a free pass there. Yeah, I'd love to. Yeah. And this is our, our AI longevity place where I can go for my 20 minutes a week of working out.

Only 20 minutes a week you're working out?

I'm not joking. Most people hear me say 20 minutes a day. No, it's 20 minutes a week.

I was— I thought you were saying 20 minutes. Look at my house. Jeez. Like, how is that possible?

AI. We've used AI to figure out what is the minimum signal to put into the body to cause it to grow muscles and get VO2 max. And okay, get this, 5 hours a week. So an hour a day of spin class. Yeah. Which is brutal. Like, you've got—

Yeah, I work out literally 6 times a week in, like, heated classes and all this kind of stuff. And I love it. How? But there has to be a better way. So you're like a masochist? Well, I don't, I don't think so. I mean, the only thing I don't like about it is how often I have to wash my hair. But other than that, I love it. I'm totally teasing you.

You love it because you're getting the stress hormones that feel good.

Yeah. And the community, you know.

Yeah, the community is a big one. So if you were to do 5 minutes, 3 times a week of our tech for cardio, you're going to improve by 12%. What you're doing gets you a 2% improvement. Over 2 months. So 2 months of consistent practice, 5 hours a week, 2%. 15 minutes a week, 12%. So 6 times better in 15 minutes. And you brush your teeth for 15 minutes a week. So your cardio should take as much time as brushing your teeth. And if you're an entrepreneur, you want 5 hours a week back. I did.

Yeah, I was just gonna say, like, that no wonder you're running 8 companies. You don't have to exercise every day.

And here's something else that happens when people start biohacking: they need an hour less sleep. And then you wake up fully refreshed and you're like, oh my God, what just happened? Is, is everything okay? I thought I needed more sleep. No, if you need more sleep, it means you suck at sleep or you're sick. The people who live the longest get 6.5 hours of sleep a night in 3 studies of more than a million people each over multiple years. So 8 hours a night is for normal people. You want to be someone who's so healthy, like You know what? Unless I worked out heavy or drank or something, I don't really need 8 hours. I just wake up and I'm good to go and I don't need my coffee to get going. Okay. Interesting. I run Danger Coffee. I have a tattoo of caffeine on my arm. I love my coffee and I used to need it to function. Now I just love my coffee. I literally wake up before my alarm clock. This morning I woke up 15 minutes before my alarm, ready to go. I couldn't do this until I was over 40 years old because I didn't understand that I was stimulating too much and recovering not enough.

It's called being kind to yourself. So we've talked about internal triggers that can cause energy leaks. Now we're moving into external environmental triggers. Oh, big one. One thing that we did not talk about yet is light. And I see you've got these— for those of you watching on YouTube, he's got these yellow glasses that, that block junk light, is what you call it, are the coolest glasses on the planet.

I started TrueDark 10+ years ago, and we block only the bad spectrum of blue and let the good stuff through. If you wear blue blockers, the ones you buy online from anyone other than TrueDark, what you're getting is something that blocks all of the blue light. You need blue light to wake up and function during the day. If you block blue light, you will— you will break your circadian biology. So I'm blocking underneath a specific wavelength of light with these. And these are the first all-titanium, custom-made from scratch frames. I worked for like 6 months on these, and they have little side shields.

They look cool.

They're so cool. And the ones for jet lag, we have actually published a study in a medical journal showing that 15 minutes of wearing the TrueDark glasses puts your brain in the same state as advanced meditation. So you wear it for 15 minutes and you want to go to sleep. Oh, cool. I don't get jet lag anywhere on the planet. I can fly to Dubai and I'm completely good as long as I have my TrueDarks. So it's it's been life-changing for me. I, I just start companies that make things I can't buy, things that should exist but don't. So this is one.

It's a good plan. Uh, man, next time you come on, we're gonna have to talk about category creation and how to— yeah, and just like biohacking and entrepreneurship. That will be the next episode. But today we're running out of time, and I do want to play a fun game that I think is going to work really well on social. Okay, it's called Biohacking Confessions. And I want you to just answer the questions in terms of like what comes up for you in your gut. Okay. You can be like kind of quick. I'll ask any follow-ups if I, if I want more information. Uh, but are you ready for biohacking confessions? Ready. Okay. What is your current age?

Well, I identify as being about 35, 28%, or if the government is asking in their outdated ways, I'm 53.

How old do you hope to live?

I'd like to die at a time and by a method of my choice, and that would be at least 180.

Has that changed with AI at all?

I actually made up that number because of AI, and that number just comes from our current best is 120, and I just want 50% better than our current best. I have 100 years to do it. Um, did you hear last month they announced they cured type 1 diabetes? No. Kind of a big deal. Yeah. Yeah. So we're like like all of the diseases of aging are dropping like flies right now. I've done gene therapy. I run something called Unlimited Life, which is for high-level entrepreneurs who are all in on extending their lifespan. And we've got about 100 members in this, uh, where I go through the lab work. A doctor who's worked on two heads of state is my business partner in it. The guy who runs the Dalai Lama Foundation, um, and MrBeast Foundation is the other partner. So high-level stuff. We take them to the jungle to learn from a shaman to do longevity work. We take them to Kenya. Um, and we do about $50,000 worth of lab work on all of them. So when, when I say that, I don't say it lightly. Like, I'm actively engaged in longevity. I've written a New York Times bestselling longevity book.

We are cracking the code right now. I've done gene therapy. I just reprogrammed my stem cells in New Jersey last week. Uh, and I've probably had more stem cells than anyone on the planet. So yeah, we can do this. I'm just an early example of it. But if you're under 35 right now, you have such an unfair advantage because you haven't aged as much as I have while we were inventing all this shit.

Do you believe you're aging backwards?

Some of the systems in my body are aging backwards quantitatively.

Um, others, no. What is not aging backwards?

I don't have good data on my brain. I like to think— I mean, it's functioning very well, but I'd like to think that it's aging backwards, but I just don't know how to measure that. And some parts of my skin are aging backwards right now and others aren't. Hmm. So I'm working on that one.

What's proving that you're aging backwards?

It depends on which system you're measuring, but there's something called DNA methylation, and this is a measurement of about 600,000 different DNA methylation points. It's called an aging clock, and we can now do organ-specific aging clocks.

What was your most extreme self-experiment?

This is a toss-up. Years ago, when my gut was just wrecked, I didn't know what was going on before I invented the term biohacking. I ordered a pill from Russia. It was an electrical stimulator pill, so this big, and you swallowed it and a little battery in it, and it would stimulate every 5 seconds your entire GI tract to increase the strength of your intestines. I really had a lot of health problems when I was young. 15 years of antibiotics, you can imagine. I'm like, I just don't want to have a wrecked gut. So, like, bzzt, bzzt, bzzt. And then it gets stuck somewhere, probably descending colon. And I'm sitting there, like, in meetings, and I'm like, kicking, kicking. And it doesn't move. And so I get up and I'm jumping up and down trying to get through it, laying on my side. Eventually it did come out. And the instructions are like, you could wash it and put it— and take it again. I'm like, fuck that. So I threw it away. But yeah, I swallowed an electrical stimulating pill 20 years ago.

What was the most expensive experiment that you've ever done?

I spent about $7 million building a neuroscience lab so that I could improve my own brain and get better brain data, like you're wishing. Better brain data and just have my brain work better. And fortunately, I turned it into 40 Years of Zen, where we've written millions of dollars worth of our own hardware and software. We've developed hardware. Just not about diagnosing what's wrong. It's about how do we increase people's ability to access altered states that are part of the— part of the human birthright that we just don't know how to get to anymore.

Who is your biohacking bestie? Who's your best friend in this space?

You know, this is an interesting one. I have so many just, just amazing friends, um, but one of my favorites is actually here in town, Dr. Anne Shippey. Um, she just wrote a book about preconception, was just on my show. We've been dear friends for about 15 years, and she's, I would say, the top environmental doctor in the country. And, uh, we get together a couple times a month and have brunch and just go through all the biohacking stuff, the psychedelic stuff, the meditation stuff. And so she's like soul family, uh, and because she's an IBM chemical engineer turned medical doctor, we can just nerd out at the deepest levels. She's just so freaking smart. So we hang out a lot. I think, yeah, just from a— there's nothing I can say that she won't be like, "Okay, I see that in my patients." Like, and, you know, plus she's just a dear friend. Who's your biohacking frenemy?

Somebody that you respect them, but they're kind of your competitor too.

Biohacking started with 100 people in a bar in San Francisco in Uh, was that 2012? The first event. So it's on track to be a $200 billion industry by 2030, according to the latest analysts. It started a $200 billion industry. How can you have enemies in an industry that's going from zero in 2012 to $200 billion over the course of, what is that, 20-something years? It's nuts. So. The— there's no reason to have, uh, frenemies. And if I'm feeling that way towards someone, I need to do more reset, because if I'm feeling frenemy energy, it means that I'm wasting my electrons. So I'm just going to serve the people who are interested in what I have to say, and I'm going to do to the best of my ability. And if someone else is doing a better job, then, you know, blessings on them. And like, an example, um, Andrew Huberman— I had him on my show before he was a known entity because I find people before they blow up. And I've been— after 1,400 episodes, I have a pretty good track record of that. Um, had him on and he talked about, you know, the Stanford Human Performance Lab.

I'm like, that is so cool. I didn't know when I had him on that the Stanford Performance Lab was an empty room at Stanford that they weren't doing anything in. Um, but he has gone on to, well, very largely support things like nicotine and the red TrueDark glasses and the other things that I've pioneered. So having a Stanford professor say this is good stuff is awesome. But what Andrew does that I very much respect, he's a teacher. I ran a program at the University of California for 5 years, um, for web and internet engineering. So I understand what a good teacher is and isn't. He teaches very well and he does that one thing. And sometimes I think, you know, if I just did more teaching, but then I'd have to quit all my other 8 companies and focus on that. So I think he's, he's done a great job of introducing people. Some of his guests are are not so good, I would say. And there are a couple— a couple— so I'm not going to call them frenemies, I'm just going to call them bullies, right? And I have no problem with bullies in general, like, emotionally.

I just think they're fun toys. So there's guys like Biolane. Have you heard of this guy? No. So apparently has like a million followers, and he's like, I have a PhD in— I don't know what he has a PhD in, But I did ask his mom. So anyway, um, BioLane did this, this video recently, and this is the reason I'm telling you guys this. As entrepreneurs, you need to know. It's like, Dave Asprey's here in his piss-stained glasses and he said something I don't like. Now, BioLane is one of these, like, dying breed of, uh, like, calorie trolls where he's like, if you just work out more and eat less, you'll lose weight. This advice has been so disproven by many people, including me, to the point that it's just laughable. You can't cancel out a Snickers bar with a diet soda. But, you know, but this arguing way of just picking on the person instead of the idea, it's so fifth-grade bullying. Yeah. So I'm like, oh, I have a bully to play with. So here's what I did. I reposted his troll video on my Instagram, and then I did a stitch on top of it, and I said, hey, Biolane, thanks for being such a big fan.

And I'd like you to know that in addition to apparently being piss-stained, my TrueDark glasses block blue light under 490 nanometers, which is the wavelength that causes a bunch of biological effects that you probably wouldn't understand because you don't have a PhD in it. Um, but to celebrate your fandom, people can get a discount code at truedark.com by using code Biolane. I used his I sold $10,000 that day. And if he posts again, and by the way, please post again. Um, what I'm going to do is I will donate a portion of the proceeds to a nonprofit for victims of childhood bullying because that's what he is. So am I angry about this? No. Do I think this is the funniest marketing I've done in so long? And maybe there's some shoutout, but it's just like, it's fun. And if you look at my social things. Um, people like, "Gabe, you look old." What do you think I'm gonna say? "That's not what your mom said." Right? I don't care. Like, then leave. Or don't leave. I just don't care because it doesn't trigger me at all. But it's so fun because what people usually say, "Oh my God, how dare you?

You made a mom joke." I'm like, "Hold on. I thought we were doing 5th grade bullying stuff. Like, it's your turn. Like, how about I'm rubber, you're glue?" Because what you're doing is juvenile. If you think what I'm saying is wrong, tell me what's wrong. I'm like, "Let's talk." I love it. But if you can tell me the hole in my theory and provide evidence, I'm gonna go down that rat hole because I want to know. Like, I am looking for the perfection of understanding of biology in humans and of psychology and the spiritual thing and the connection in the quantum realms. All of it. Hmm. So show me what I'm missing, please. And I will thank you, and I'll send you some coffee, right? So I learn from my followers. But if you're gonna come in and just, like, and make fun of me, dude, let's play. Yeah.

You're gonna fight back. Okay, what is your biggest biohacking industry ick?

The biohacking industry ick that I get is from people who really are new to the field, and they, they kind of— some of them get religion, a lot of them just get, "I smell profits." You know, it's a growing industry, so it attracts entrepreneurs. But when people say, "I want to be an influencer," but you're not an expert, that creates ick. Because I see people taking relatively good biohacking ideas and dumbing them down to the point they're harmful. And I'm like, don't act like an expert if you're not an expert. Yeah. Like, how many peptide influencers who have one year of peptide experience are there? Oh, you read the same stuff that everyone read? I've been on peptides for 15 years, right? And I wrote a chapter about them in my book about the most common ones that have the most evidence. And there's all kinds of experimentation, and I love experimentation. But like, some people are better experts than others. So the, the idea of acting like an expert before you've really had a chance to learn. Mm-hmm. The only reason I can do what I do is that for 5 years in my 20s, I was mentored by people in their 70s and 80s, the leaders in the longevity field.

Because I worked at a nonprofit in the space, they taught me all this stuff so I could, I could refine it throughout my 30s. And I launched the biohacking movement when I was 39.

Nicotine or nah? Uh, for sure nicotine.

Um, as far as I can tell, uh, my book— which one was it? Probably Superhuman, my longevity book— it was the first book to talk about nicotine as a longevity molecule. And this was based on, I think his name is Dr. Paul Newhouse at Vanderbilt. I call him Dr. Nicotine. And I found his paper from 1986 showing that nicotine reversed Alzheimer's. So I asked him to be on the show and we talked about the effects of this. I flew out to Switzerland. I met with the chief of R&D at PMI, also known as Philip Morris. This is many years ago, and he's a mitochondrial biologist, not looking to push tobacco at all. We talked about mitochondrial uncoupling and nicotine. So nicotine without smoking is a, a very notable longevity compound. It mimics exercise. It increases cognitive function. It stops neuroinflammation. And it's been used medicinally for 400 years. I'm not saying you should pop massive Zens all the time.

I was gonna say, do you like Zens?

I like Alp better because they're pre-moistened and all that. And you can use a patch, you can use a lozenge. Just don't smoke and don't vape. That stuff is bad for you. And even the leadership team at the big tobacco companies, and I have met with them because I'm an innovator in lots of fields, And they've succeeded now in removing smoking largely from Italy and Japan. They found a better way to do it that doesn't cause lung cancer. Yeah. It's called a heated tobacco product. So they actually recognize smoking's bad, but nicotine isn't bad.

And I'm in that camp. These are some what-ifs. Okay. Would you rather be guaranteed to live to 180, but you can't drink any coffee? Would you— would you take that deal?

Actually, probably not. Coffee means that much to you? No, it's that I don't want to be guaranteed to live to 180. I want to die at a time and by a method of my choice. I am a freedom-oriented person, and most entrepreneurs are. Like, I am free to leave tomorrow if I'm done here, and I will do it without regrets.

Okay, well then I'm going to change this next question. So would you rather have the freedom to die when you want to or get to go back to change the way you lived before you were 30?

Um, oh, I want the freedom to die, uh, at a time and by a method of my choice. I, you know, I suffered incredible amounts as a kid. I mean, I was bullied a lot. I had autism, and I don't meet the clinical criteria for autism anymore. You can heal it. I'm autism adjacent, maybe, but that just means I have a brain that does things, um, good things. Um, but all the physical stuff and all, um, I just figured out pretty recently that I actually have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which is more common than people think. It's a hypermobility thing. That's why I've had a leaky gut my whole life, because my freaking collagen doesn't form right. It's also why I made collagen a billion-dollar industry, so that helps.

Yeah, I mean, some of the things you suffered from, you ended up creating a whole category. Like, you became a biohacker because you were unhealthy. So I guess everything just happens for a reason.

If I didn't have toxic mold and my weird genetics, there would be no biohacking. And so all that stuff, I don't regret it. I wouldn't change a thing, although I sure as hell suffered a lot.

Dave, this has been so awesome. I end my show with two questions I ask all of my guests. The first one is, what is one actionable thing our young improfitters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

Think about your team right now and think of the most annoying person on your team. Whatever came to mind, call them up and say you're fired. I love that advice.

And what is your secret to profiting in life?

You better understand what currency you're dealing with, and it's not money, it's energy. So if you end every day and you minimize the amount that you suffered, you maximize the amount of energy that you have, you'll really like your life and you'll make a bunch of money. But if you focus just on money, you will sell your health and you'll sell your energy, and you probably won't like the person you And where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do? I'm on all the social media things. I run the Human Upgrade podcast and you can find me at daveasprey.com along with 3,000 articles telling you how to hack everything you'd wanna hack.

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining us on Young and Profiting Podcast. My pleasure. Yeah, fam, I loved having Dave back on the show. Every time he joins us, he challenges the way we think about performance, success, and what it actually takes to operate at our highest level. And in this conversation, he reminded us that entrepreneurship isn't just a game of time management. It's a game of energy management. Dave said every electron matters, and that idea really ties this entire episode together. As entrepreneurs, leaders, and high performers, we spend so much time trying to optimize our schedules, our teams, and our business. But how often do we stop and look at the hidden places where our energy is leaking, whether it's old resentment, unresolved triggers, unhealthy relationships, or the constant pressure to do more. Those invisible drains can quietly cost us far more than we realize. I also loved how Dave reframed forgiveness. He said, "Anger is the biggest energy leak ever." That's a powerful reminder because so many of us think that holding on to anger gives us strength or protection or a chip on our shoulder that makes us work harder. But in reality, that anger keeps keeps us stuck.

The moment we release that emotional charge, we free up energy that can be redirected towards growth, creativity, leadership, and the things that truly matter. Dave also challenged us to be more intentional about the people we allow into our business and our lives. The right people multiply your energy and the wrong people consume it. And sometimes protecting your future means having the courage to make difficult decisions sooner rather than later. Most importantly, this conversation reminded us that more effort isn't always the answer. Sometimes the next level comes from better recovery, stronger boundaries, deeper self-awareness, and learning how to respond instead of react. Yap fam, if this episode made you rethink the way you work, lead, or show up in your life, share it with another entrepreneur, leader, or high performer who needs to hear it. You can also watch this full episode on YouTube or Spotify Video, and if you listened, learned, and profited, make sure you follow the show. Drop us a 5-star written review on Apple. That's my favorite platform for you to drop reviews. And let me know your biggest takeaway, especially on YouTube. Drop your comments. You can find me on Instagram @yapwithhala or LinkedIn @halataha.

This is your host, Hala Taha, AKA the Podcast Princess, signing off.