Dave Asprey - The Father of Biohacking | How to Reverse Aging

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Dave Asprey isn't just an entrepreneur. He's a disruptor, a pioneer and the man who put biohacking on the mat from revolutionizing how we think about nutrition with bulletproof coffee to spending over $2 million on hacking his own biology. I've had my picture in an entrepreneur magazine and I was 23. I've got a job that most MBAs would kill for having even yet got my MBA. I helped actually sales force with her architecture when they were aid employees. And like all this cool stuff I'm teaching engineers but I was exhausted. My brain wasn't working on chronic fatigue syndrome. I've done the world's most advanced gene therapies. I just reset my central aging clock in my brain with focused ultrasound. It doesn't cost you $9. And most people don't need to do it. If I would have had that when I was 20, I would not have weighed your inner pounds. Dave has pushed the boundaries of health, performance, and human potential, an innovator, best selling author, and the host of one of the world's most downloaded podcasts. There are now three studies of more than a million people for multiple years, the people who live the longest sleep six and a half hours a night. Not because they're restricting their sleep is because healthy people need less sleep. You need to know if you feel great right now, what are your hormone levels? Because you need to pin them there when you're twice-stage or now. If you just get health and relationships down, everything else works. Dave's journey is a testament to challenging the status quo. He's not afraid to stir controversy, pursue unconventional methods, or face critics all in his quest to redefine what it means to live an optimized life. This is Dave Asprey. Welcome to success story. I'm your host, Scott Claire. The success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. 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Tell me a moment, like an inflection point in your career, that really stands as a turning point in your life. The first one I'm in my early mid 20s, I'm in Silicon Valley and I decided, yeah, I've done a lot of stuff. I know a lot about the internet and the first guy to sell anything over the internet before the browser existed. And I wanted to be like a CIO because I was done. CIO is a terrible job if you want to be tortured, take that job. So I got advice from a friend who worked in Nescape and he said, Dave, you can do all sorts of stuff. It tick off everything stuff what you want to do. And what that meant was I got two job offers. One was to build the first web interface for people soft, which got bought by salesforce.com. And the other one was to go to the first web hosting company and co-found a professional services group. So by taking out the things that I could do that I didn't want to do, I got the two offers that were amazing. That offer led to me being a co-founder of $100 million a quarter a part of a business that grew to $36 billion. And I was worth $6 million and I was 26. All right, I lost it when I was 28, oops. That's not a bad start. So $6 million at 26. I mean, most people would say, yes, I've achieved success. But is that around the time in your life when you were like overweight, you were pushing 300 pounds? I think you were in entrepreneur mag. And all traditional markers of success people would say he's got it. I made the money, I've had my picture in entrepreneur magazine. And I was 23. You know, I've got a job that most MBAs would kill for having even yet got my MBA. And I was actually really excited by the tech. Like we were building something that mattered. We built 42 data centers around the world. And when Google was two guys and two computers and the Facebook came, I helped actually sales force with our architecture and there were eight employees. And like all this cool stuff, I'm teaching engineers. But I was exhausted. And my brain wasn't working. I had chronic fatigue syndrome. But like, I'm just going to show anyone this. So this whole, I want to be happy. And I tried money. And I looked at a friend at the same company. And I said, I'll be happy. And when I have $10 million. And I just want to be clear, this was pre-bidened dollars. So that was back when $6 million was like real. That's not real. It was real money. And there's like this endless game of chasing. Yeah. And I think you're actually fortunate that you had the opportunity to see that game early on. Because some people, they play this game. I mean, a lot of entrepreneurs come on this podcast. A lot of people that have exited. But it's not a 26. It's at 40, 50, 60, 70. And not only have they lost relationships, they've lost two of their wives, kids hate them. The health is a huge thing too, that they've lost over their career. Because they focused on making money and not. What kind of thinking about it? I've also gone through two marriages. Oh no. That was actually not a purpose. Yeah. Thanks, man. Now, man, the mother of my kids. And I accomplished it on a couple and we're good friends. And we co-parent. My kids are just fantastically happy. I did learn from that first experience. I think I've had dinner with my kids more than any other CEO I know. Anytime I was at home, I did that. And if I was on the road, well, there's nothing you could do. So you learn that your health really matters. But you're never going to learn that unless you don't have it. And you're going to learn at some point that happiness and inner peace. That's exceptionally valuable. But your tube is either really pay attention to it. So for me, because my brain just quit working, I had all the diseases of aging before I was 30. That's pre-diabetic, high risk of stroke and heart attack. The chronic fatigue, arthritis, GI issues, hostage mode is like the list goes on and on. And this isn't working. I'd went to the gym 90 minutes a day, six days a week, for 18 months. And you think that would make you lose some weight. I'm on a low fat, low calorie diet. I still weight through inner pounds. I still have a 46-inch waist when I was done. And I'm sitting here now. I'm a 4.8% body fat. How old are you now? I'm 51 on the calendar and about 35 on my lab tests. Congratulations. So yeah. But I'm in better shape now. Cognitively, spiritually, physically, than I was at 20 or 30. So I kind of came from behind, you could say. And if I can do this, it's going to be easier for any other CEO, because it's unlikely you're as messed up as I was. I don't think a lot of people know what health is. Like you mentioned before, until you actually lose it. But even at even pre-30, I mean, you did not know that you did not know what good felt like, because this is how you operated every single day. So what was the thing? It sort of woke you up. Well, I would have told you that I was healthy. And I said, yeah, I have some extra fat, but I'm healthy. My energy works. And you just have no idea, because you've never felt this, certainly. So I decided I'm going to go to Wharton Business School while I work full-time. Because why not? There's an executive program. But they fly the professors out. It's the same classes as a full-time program. So it's really demanding. And I started failing out of my classes. I'm sitting there trying to concentrate. I think I'm smart. And something's deeply wrong. So I went in to see psychiatrists trained by Dr. Daniel Aiman. He's a very famous brain doctor. And he took one look at me. I was like, oh, tech bro wants Adderall. Like, I know this game. Kind of rolls his eyes. But he ordered a brain scan. And I did the brain scan. And when I walked back in his office, he just had a very different look on his face. And he said, Dave, 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. And then I was like, thank God. Number one, someone believes me. It's not that I'm dumb or lazy. It's not a moral failing lack of trying. Number two, I just have a hardware problem. I can fix a hardware problem. So nothing is wrong with me. Parts of my brain aren't turning on. So let's figure out how to turn those on. And years later, actually for the last decade, I've run a neuroscience company that upgrades people's brains. I kind of had to do that work for myself. I'm also on Dr. Daniel Amon's Board of Directors, who's one of the luminaries in the field of knowing what's going on in there. So that path of saying, I got to fix something that isn't working right. That's one of the things that led to the birth of the biohacking movement. The other big thing was along this path of just figuring out how to make things work. I went to this group as a longevity group in Palo Alto, started by one of the guys who invented Ethernet. This super early days, like super longevity is not a thing biohacking. Not a thing. No, biohacking hasn't been invented yet. And if you said you're into anti-aging, which is what they called it before longevity, became the name of the last couple of years, well, people thought you were crazy. Like tinfoil hat, alien crazy. And I went there, though, because I'm under 30. The members are all over 60. And pretty soon they're like, hey, can you join the board? I said, okay. And then can you be president? Okay. And one of my board members, Mike, is 88 years old. He has way more energy than I do. And he's calling me at 11.30 at night. Just like, I got this new idea. And I just realized these older people are becoming younger, but the same techniques that work for them make younger people more powerful. But I never got anyone under 60 to come to those meetings, even though we were two minutes from Google's headquarters. In Palo Alto. So, I'm walking around in remote Western to bad learning meditation for masters and just pondering. And I think we have to rebrand this thing. So you're on this whole, like, self-discovery. You're like, listen, like, people are sick. There is no healthcare. There's sick care. It's all, it's all lagging indicators. Not leading indicators. We're not going as a species in the right direction. And we're going in the wrong direction. So I said, all right, what can I do? I'm going to rebrand this as something that all humans want. And the definition of biohacking that I came up with was the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you, so you have full control of your own biology. And what that means is that if you're like me and you want to be a CEO who's full of energy, whose brain works just effortlessly and you can hold your energy no matter what's happening and not ever be triggered, and look pretty good. Okay, maybe that's what you want. Maybe you want to be the world's biggest bodybuilder that world's fastest person in the world's best test champion or you just want enough energy at the end of the day. Different people have different goals at different stages of life. So what would happen if we said the real thing we want is control over our hardware. And that's what people really want. Is I want to look and feel the way I want all the time. And that means I have enough energy to handle anything that comes my way. And that creates a deep feeling of safety. And it's kind of funny because that's become a new word in the English language industry analysts who I don't believe say biohacking is a $63 billion industry now. And I started it and started with a blog post in 2011. But along the way, people say, how did you do it? I raised $90 million in venture capital for my company Bulletproof when I was at Bulletproof. And I've been, I've had no association with the company for three years. So what, what happened, though, is a lot of that venture capital investment, it didn't just build a large consumer brand, it built the movement of biohacking. Can I ask like when you started with with Bulletproof and I know that you're not associated with them anymore, but why was that sort of the entry point into biohacking? What was, what was, why was that the point of leverage? All right, this is going to be really funny. When I started Bulletproof, it was just a block and it was called the Bulletproof Executive. And no one had ever written for people like you or me for people who are developers, network engineers, people building companies and also wanted health. Well, and performer, frankly, or even against none of us really want health. It's number 17 on the Honey Do list. We want performance. It just so happens that health drives performance. But if I try to sell your health, I feel like yeah, it's on my To Do list. I also got to polish my shoes. It's just not that big of a deal unless you're really sick. So re-characterizing some health activities into this is what you do to be a world-class performer. It was revolutionary and it pissed people off. But you can hack your biology, you can upgrade your health and you get doctors going, how dare you? And I'm be like, well, you're fat and you'll white lab coat there. You don't look very healthy. You should work on that. And of course, trolling back, right? And it's like, how dare I? How dare everyone not do whatever it takes to feel the way they want? You sort of have an obligation to do that. So it was started as a blog. It was going to be a nonprofit part of the nonprofit I worked with. But my board of directors couldn't agree on a URL after three months. Because while I'm an internet guy, they're not. So, okay, fine, I'll just handle this on a private blog. My goal, five people don't go through all the shit I went through. And when more than five people are interested, I couldn't buy a mold free coffee. And I was buying really expensive coffee. And I'd throw out half of it because it would make me cranky. And the other half was clean. So, all right, I'm just going to do the lab work and figure this out. Market size is zero. So, I launched something. I created a new market. MCT oil, you could buy an industrial rate of it that just gave you disaster pants. And I taught people how to use it. But there was a lot of problems. I said, final solve the problem and came up with a new way of doing it called C8 MCT. And we didn't have the university research showing that it reverses Alzheimer's like we have now. But you could tell it worked better. So, my final do this. College and protein, not a billion dollar industry it is today. I watched that because it was missing. And so, these are things where if you understand the system's biology, I go, okay, all of these need to exist in the world. So, I started the company because I couldn't buy the stuff. And I went to my friends on Santo Road, a VC where I'd worked. And I said, guys, you're never going to invest in Bulletproof. It's not a venture capital company. It's in five different industry categories. We have a coffee shop in LA. We have this upgrade labs thing, which is now a franchise with 32 locations around AI and longevity. It's one of eight portfolio companies. And I'm sitting there going, but you should give me two million dollars personally as a convertible note because I knew coffee inventory and like I'll make you a lot of money on that. And they came back and said, well, here's $8 million. And we think it is a venture company, a venture capital company. And I didn't do that until I was at 27 million in revenue. I raised capital. So I bootstrapped it until then, which is amazing. That is amazing. I would even ask, I want to talk more about peak performance because that's really the interesting thing that I'm going to pull out of you. But just from an entrepreneurial lens, why would you even take on a million that $27 million in revenue? Well, there's a little bit more to it. When I started the company, I was VP of cloud security at Trent at Trent Micro. Oh, so this was some side hustle that was doing well. Well, okay. I got a peak performance, right? Yeah. So finally, I'm to the point where I can replace my quarter million dollar year salary with my entrepreneur side hustle. I was about to call and quit my job when my SVP or whoever it was called me and was with the HR person to let me go because he wanted to do the cloud computing influencing. I was doing I'm like, thank you. I just got a severance package. So it was fantastic. So now I'm sitting there going, I have this company that's skyrocketing, but it takes a lot of capital to do a physical product, CPG company. Everyone at the time was saying, I'm going to do an information company. It's all digital and I'm a contrarian just by nature. So like, why didn't I create real value and because maybe I'm stubborn? Like, why didn't I differentiate in the single hardest to differentiate commodity on the planet? Like coffee is where all of the food marketing you see today, crafting all that. They all started out in the early 1900s, late 1800s as coffee marketing. That was where we got all of our big food marketing. So this is an old category. My god, I'll just do something different and usually it raced at the bottom with coffee. And it totally worked. Yeah, right? Just because the values were different. I think people, they will pay more to feel good. And it costs more because it costs more to make a product that works. And I've spoken to the senior leadership teams at Coke and at Pepsi and at General Mills and all these other places that they've had you innovate. And Bulletproof was named as one of the 20 most innovative companies by Forbes magazine. Like, we're a small company compared to the big guys. But the way you innovate is like, what's in it for the customer? If you're sitting in their shoes, what's most precious? What's most precious is feeling amazing. Not spending 20 cents less on your cup of coffee. A huge shout out to federated computer for supporting today's episode. Let me explain why I love federated computer, why they are friends of success story. They are changing the way businesses buy software because we all need software to run our businesses. I don't care what kind of business you're building. But the best business software doesn't have to cost thousands of dollars each month. So federated computer replaces a lot of the software that you're using right now. Let me explain the average typical federated computer customers save 75% or more on their software built and gets great software, top notch customer service and support, and a software solution that is uniquely installed for your business without any sort of surveillance or breaches of privacy. For example, if you use Google for email, sales force for CRM, slack for team chat, list monkey for customer acquisitions, and air table for data management. With a team of 10, you'd save $9,000 per year on software costs by switching the federated computer. They replace all of those. And what's wild is that the cost of federated computer doesn't grow as your team grows. You can use federated computer savings to grow your business rather than feed the woke Silicon Valley software companies. The federated computer team literally invented cloud software. They actually have the patents to prove it. And they are taking a hammer to the ridiculously high prices of business software that all entrepreneurs are suffering from. Federated computer, they've been a long time supportive success story. They're offering 30% off. They're already low prices when you use a coupon code freelance. So go to www.federated.computer to begin saving 75% or more on your monthly software costs. That's www.federated.computer. These folks are going to do you a big favor. Check them out. I think that when you even look at where you started with bullet proof and now I know you have danger coffee which is and I'm going to I want to understand the difference and then what this is trying to accomplish. And we'll get there. But if you look at if you look at peak performance, I think for most people coffee is the gateway into peak performance. That's but I didn't even realize that he said 50% of coffee that you can just go buy at the grocery stores full of mold anyways. It's between 80 and 94%. That's more buying. So the point is that when people try and perform better, they're already putting toxins or they're already putting garbage into their body. So even at a most rudimentary level, the performance that people are chasing is hurting them more than helping them. I don't know that you can say more than helping them. So there are studies that even if you drink moldy coffee, which gives you jitter, cranky, makes you want sugar, all the reasons I quit coffee for five years, because I just felt shitty. You feel good and then bad and you need more. But no, my point is that is how most performance products feel. Jim, coffee, new tropics, it's all like high as low. So this is almost like the, because I've tried everything under the sun. And this is almost like the necessary evil with performance products. It's not a performance. It's a totally new thing. It's because it's what they've experienced. Yes. What you look at, it is there's a slope of the curve up. Like how good do you feel? I mean, how sustained is it and why? And a lot of times when I first got into smart drugs in my mid-20s, just so I could do my job, yeah, some of those were really ampy. And others, you wouldn't know you were taking it until you stopped. And it turns out the best neutropics are subtle. I feel more like myself today. And in fact, I'm not sure it's even working. And you quit it in the next day. Like, why did I put my car keys in the fridge? Oh, I didn't do it all last week when I was taking it. So it took a lot of unpacking both from doing neuroscience and from formulating neutropics and 25 years of taking them to understand that most of the stuff you can buy out there, stuff like alpha brain or whatever, they're saying, well, let's just stimulate a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine. This is something we've known how to do since the 80s. I was mentored by the guy who wrote smart drug news throughout the 80s and 90s, Steve folks, who's a dear friend who's been on my show. So it turns out when you're young and you take a product like that, it's probably just going to give you muscle tension and make you clench your jaw because you need more than as you age. But when you're younger, you need something different. So understanding how this works took a long time to unpack, but as a system of engineering guy, for your brain, as important for entrepreneurs and just for people who want to perform, it's number one is how much energy can you make? Right. And number two is how flexible is your brain? And there's ways to manipulate both of those. And then the third thing is how much do you waste on useless thoughts that you can't control? And if you make a ton of energy, you have a brain that can transform itself easily. And you don't waste any energy on thinking about tacos or thinking about that mean thing someone said last week. Well, there's an awful lot left over for you to run a business and be a parent and have great intimate relationships and serve your community and involve yourself. But if you're where I was and where so many entrepreneurs are, you're stuck because there's a sense of doom and only problems come your way when you're CEO a lot of the time and you don't have enough energy and it's allocated all wrong. And there's nothing left at the end of the day, especially if you're a parent. So whatever little bit you have, you're going to book out your toddler who's going to say, no, no, no, you're like, okay, I'm burning my last bit of willpower on patients. And then your life sucks and it happens so often it's because you didn't have enough energy and you allocated it wrong and because your brain was stuck because it was rigid. All of those are eminently hackable with substances and behaviors. If you look at sort of your journey and if people look at even biohacking as a whole, there was a point when you invested roughly two million in understanding human biology. Big number for a lot of people that more my own biology. Exactly. But then people look at Brian Johnson and they'll say like, I don't have whatever X million dollars to spend on my body per year. So that scares people off. What are the simple things that people can do? Let's talk about this. So I spend about two, maybe 2.5 at this point over 25 years. Okay, that's a little bit more doable. And I'm friends with Brian, right? There is not a need to spend two million dollars even on the most aggressive longevity therapies. You could easily spend a half a million dollars. I've done the world's most advanced gene therapies. I just reset my central aging clock and my brain with focused ultrasound and stem cells and all the stuff you can do. I've done it. It doesn't cost you a million dollars. And most people don't need to do it. So when I write books like Superhuman is my longevity book. And if you look at Brian's doing and you look at what's in Superhuman, like there's a common agreement there about what are the things you do to reduce aging. I age at 73% the age of normal. And I don't spend two million dollars a year. You don't need to do that. But if you want to hire a bunch of texts to measure things, you can spend that much. So what can you do? Number one, like these are boring. Then we'll learn how to get good sleep. By the way, boring is useful though. Oh, yes. Yeah, boring, but useful. I want to talk about all the missed advanced things. Usually when I write a book, I go do what the crazy billionaires are doing. And that that just demonstrates what's possible. And it demonstrates a principle. And then I say, well, now that we know this pathway matters for aging or performance, what can you do that's cheap and what can you do that's free? And so anyone is sitting or going, well, you have to be rich to live a long time. You don't. In fact, I know a friend, she's aging at slightly less quickly than Brian Johnson. And her total spend is under 20 grand a year. Right, she's not a public person at all. So like, what's going on here? Well, sleep is number one. And as an entrepreneur who started a big company while working for another big company, I intentionally restricted my sleep to under five hours a night for two years. And it was a conscious choice. It's probably not good for you. It's probably not good for aging. Can you do it with biohacking? Yeah. And when people start doing the things that I teach, they usually need an hour or less sleep. And you could say, well, that's bad because don't we all need eight hours of sleep? That is not what the evidence shows. There are now three studies of more than a million people for multiple years. The people who live the longest sleep six and a half hours a night. Not because they're restricting their sleep. It's because healthy people need less sleep. And they're probably getting the right kind of sleep. Of course, yeah, right? So for me, I was a five minutes of deep sleep and five minutes of REM sleep per night. Okay. That's the worst sleep you can get. So about 17 years ago, I started tracking my sleep. And I bought this headband that was not Victoria's secret approved. And I wore it every night and I realized, oh my god, I suck at this. And I learned all the different things that impact the quality of your sleep. And as an example, I just flew here yesterday to Miami from Austin. And I spoke in an event until about 10, 30 last night. And I got an hour of deep sleep and 90 minutes of REM sleep in six and a half hours last night. That's more than most college students get and younger people get higher quality sleep than older people unless you know how to sleep. So it's something you can learn. It's a skill just like swimming or walking or playing pool, whatever you're into. You can learn to do it. And how? Oh, well. Okay. You don't have to do the whole thing that I first thing you do is just get something that accurately tracks your sleep. There's the aura ring that my favorite comes called sleep space. They're doing really, really advanced work. You can get a whoop, your apple watch will do it. And when you wake up in the morning, yeah, looking at your sleep is pretty good, but looking at your recovery score, which is a marker of how much recovery did your body actually do last night in the higher than number, the better. So if you look at that, you go, huh, it sucked last night. Oh, I had two glasses of wine with dinner. Anyone who tracks their sleep will know alcohol is bad for you because it ruins your sleep. Even if you think you fell asleep better, you don't feel good. You don't get good quality sleep. So it's quality over quantity and the summary of all this that is a gift. And the funniest URL of my entire marketing career, sleepwithdave.com. That's good. That's just like the free masterclass. An excellent thing you can do to sleep better. I love it. And a quick call out. One of the things that's most impactful, especially for jet lag, or if you're up at night in a studio or something, one of my companies does circadian biology. It's called true dark, true dark.com. I'm wearing the true dark daytime glasses right now. These block toxic blue, but allow healthy blue in. The nighttime glasses are a different color. They block all of the different things that control your timing system. There's a part of your brain called the SCN, and it's desperate to know what time of day it is, and it uses light and food timing. So if you want to get a good night's sleep, dim everything in your house or have red night lights or get the true dark glasses and have dinner earlier. If you just do those two things, you'll be shocked at how your quality of sleep changes. And there's a bunch of other stuff, temperature and timing and breathing exercises. Blacking out your room is another thing. There's a lot. There's a lot. Yeah, but that's, if you just do that, you're going to age less quickly, and you're going to perform better. And you're going to be in bed anyway. So you just got more benefits in less time. So that would be my top free hack. I just want to take a second to thank the Housebot podcast network for supporting today's episode. Now if you like success story, you're going to love other shows in the network. One of my favorites is the Hossel Daily Show, hosted by Juliet Bennett Ryla, Rob Literist, Ben Berkeley, and Mark Dent. It's brought to you by the Housebot podcast network, which is really the audio destination for business professionals. Now the Hossel Daily Show brings you a healthy dose of this a reverent, offbeat informative takes on business and tech. I was just listening to an episode to give you an example of what they talk about. So they broke down how this 100-year-old organization has created one of the most successful business models in the world. Not only does this organization teach young entrepreneurship, they generate over a billion dollars in annual cookie sales. And what I really love about the show is they take these stories and these businesses that we think we know. And then they reveal these surprising angles that we never considered. So I really think that you should go listen to the Hossel Daily Show wherever you get your podcasts. It's one of my favorites. You're not going to regret it. I love it. What is an upgrade labs? What are you focusing on an upgrade labs? What's, because I know that's sort of bringing biohacking tech to the mainstream. Ten years ago, underneath Arnold Schwarzenegger's office in Santa Monica, I got to open a biohacking facility. I don't know what all's going to be in there yet, but I have all the gear that universities have and pro athletes and Navy Seals and astronauts. And I use it on myself to improve my brain, to improve my biology. And these are things no one's ever heard of. You test everything. Oh, I test 50 plus devices. And I opened it. And today at upgrade labs, we have 32 locations and it's a franchise. So people can open a biohacking lab in their city. And what's different about it, all along the way, 900 small mom and pop companies have come in, said, we could do the same thing. No, you can't. It's taken more than $10 million to learn how to make money in that business. And what we have now is you come in. And oh, everyone wants something different. So we use AI and data to figure out what you really want first. Because we all have a to-do list. But it's ranked in order of importance. So did you want to get your energy back? Or did you want to live longer? Pick one. What do you find most entrepreneurs care about? I'm just curious. What's the, I know it changes. It depends on their age and life and their health. But it's usually cognitive function and energy. But some of them are like, I just, I want to be ripped. Like, I got to lose the weight. So you can have weight loss. Well, it's just got divorced. Yeah, exactly right. There's sleep, there's libido. And so it's very unique. And okay, based on that knowledge, now we have a goal. We use medical grade tech to figure out where are you now. And you can order lab tests at your house. So we'll do the work for you even without needles, just using electrical stuff. Now we know where you are and where you want to go. And then we use our algorithms on our large data set to be able to tell you, you're going to do this thing, then this thing, then this thing to get results. And what I've learned, which is really counterintuitive, especially for entrepreneurs like you and me, we like to push and we like to think, if I do more work, I'll get more results. That is just simple thinking and it's not accurate. That's probably not healthy. Imagine you have a big farm. If I do more work, I'll get more results. So I'm going to hire 500 people with shovels or you could buy a tractor. So I want to buy the tractor. So to me doing more work is dishonorable. And doing the least possible work to get results is what frees you the most. So when people come into upgrade labs, if you want cardio, to raise VO2 max, you can add about two years to your expected lifespan by increasing VO2 max by 12%. So this is a good measure. Well, you'd say I'm going to get on a spin bike and I'm going to just go for it five days a week. And if I do that for a couple of months, I should be really in good shape. Well, instead of these, you'll improve by two percent from sweating for an hour a day, Monday through Friday. This is kind of the same. This is the same issue you were dealing with when you first started to lose weight. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you come into upgrade labs in 15 minutes a week. There's three, five minute sessions. No sweating necessary or even allowed. That's the amount of time you spend brushing your teeth, by the way. You can improve by 12%. So 15 minutes for 12% or five hours for 2%. And what's the secret? The secret is that the body doesn't care how much work you do. In fact, the more work you do, the less your body will transform. It cares about how quickly the stimulus was turned on and how quickly you return to baseline. So 80% of what you do at upgrade labs is unusual technologies that cause the body to recover faster than it ever would have before. So brief stimulus, intense recovery, rapid changes. And people lose dozens of pounds. People get their brain back. And people have these miraculous transformations in a month or two. And it's because we actually are measuring where they are. We measure where they want to go. And every time you come in, we're measuring thousands of data points. There's no mirrors in an upgrade labs. The mirror is your data. Right, it's about how you feel. And it's about am I changing the amount of fat around my organs? I can see a change. If you drop all your liver fat, you'll just live longer and feel better. But we'll show you the number go down. Well, how does that play into other? So I mean, if you're trying to increase your view to a master trying to live longer, great reason as to why you want to work. I don't think many people want to become long distance runners. I don't think many people care that much about that. Yes, but outside of that, most people just want to be healthier. They want to they want to be around on this earth. What about things like lifting weights? Or because I mean, I know some people do marathon gym sessions. Some people try and do 45 minutes. Is there an optimal type of workout and time? My last book, I went really deep on the details of this. And most people work out for too long. Like to look at an hour and a half hour. Oh my god, that would be way too long. I like to do about 15 minutes. 15 minutes for weights. Okay, how do we do that? When you come and do an upgrade labs, we have an AI powered weight machine that changes the resistance in a way that gravity can't. So all of exercise in human history is run away from tigers or pick up rocks. And you can run away from a tiger on a treadmill or you can concentrate the rock into a kettlebell and pick it up. It's still a rock. Well, your body is an expert at learning how to deal with gravity and doing the least possible change. In order to deal with gravity because we have two billion years of gravity. So when you're fighting an AI machine trying to lift something and it's changing the resistance in a way the body doesn't expect, the body will allow you to push harder and to recruit more muscle than you otherwise would. And you can grow muscle three to five times faster when you change the stimulus. Like a dynamic stimulus increase or decrease based on your effort. Yeah. And this is all based on a large data set as well. So all of a sudden you're saying, oh, in 15 minutes I could get my weights out of the way and five minutes I get my cardio out of the way. What do I do with all this extra time? And that's when we're going to want to apply a recovery tech. And there's a bunch of different technologies we use for that. And what you end up with is, wow, I'm changing, but I'm not blown out. And you know, I have a lot of friends who are crossfitters. And there's a lot of injuries. There's a lot of stress and burnout because we believe because it's easy to believe more work gets more results. And it's not true. Like the very best businesses have the highest return on ad spend. Not the lowest return on ad most, most leverage. The most so like one one unit in equals 10 units at whatever that is. Yeah. And why in exercise do we think the more units we put in, the more results we'll get instead of measuring the results we get? It drives me insane. It's interesting. I actually, so there's this this company. And I think it's similar but different to what you do. And I've only ever done it once because I used to be I used to play a lot of sports. And then I'm like very traditional gym. Like, you know, you go and you do like a push pull split, whatever doesn't matter. But I did this machine where I was it was doing bench press and and and some sort of row. And it would dynamically increase or decrease the resistance as you're going through these motions. And you only did, I think 15 reps, 15 reps of back, 15 reps of chest. And it took all of maybe five or 10 minutes. And I've never felt those muscle groups, like like the delayed onset muscle soreness of dawns. I felt it for like six or seven days after. So I think it's a similar style of of workup. But I'm not sure which machine that was. We might have even used that in the very early days. And since then the AI system we call the AI chain machine that we're using now. But it was it was a wild feeling. It was insane. And this is somebody who's worked out since I was like 15. It's because that kind of machine. It's moving no matter what you do. It's like an isometric thing. And the new one that we're working with is called Oxfet, which is a part of our tax stack. I'm an advisor and investor in the company. It's it's transformational because it's watching with the camera and it's measuring how your feet are positioned and how much force. And so all we're doing is the same thing we do in every industry out there. Let's get the data and do continuous process improvement. And this is one of the last frontiers where we measure everything to see what gets us a greater return. But we go to the stupid spin class and they play whatever Taylor Swift there and you stand up to pedal because of shame because you know if you're the only one not pedaling and there's someone yelling at you in the front glass. That's my idea of hell. But I'll do it if I'm actually going to change. But the data shows you don't change. So at upgrade labs I just hired the former COO of equinox and soul cycle and orange theory to be our president and we're growing rapidly. People can go to own and upgrade labs.com and you can open a franchise in your city. And the idea there is it would take you a thousand dollars an old day to drive around town to try and find access to each of these little pieces of tech and it's a few hundred dollars a month for a membership and you can come in every day. So you get access to all this stuff and it saves you a ton of time. And to me if I would have had that when I was 20 I would not have weighed 300 pounds and it would have taken me way less time and suffering than 90 minutes a day in the gym with no results. It's interesting how when it comes to health and wellness. We'll talk I want to talk about like cognitive and brain performance in a second but when it comes to health and wellness losing weight putting on muscle the advancements have been steroids they've been peptides they've been sarms they've been ozemic. So it's all these like chemical compounds and yeah maybe like the art of lifting or the art of athleticism aerobic anaerobic has changed slightly in the past 50 but not like not significant amount. I mean like the lifts that Arnold did are the same lifts that people do now. So it hasn't like evolved that much the machines haven't of trust me. I've been to gyms where the machines look like they were around when Arnold was just getting started. So nothing's really changed it just seems to be layer on all these chemical compounds to try and improve the body. And chemical compounds are terribly important if you want to live a long time and you want to perform well. Everyone on the planet has low testosterone at this point and it's because of fragrances and chemicals and plastics and in the US in particular atrazine is a compound that's a terrible disruptor of testosterone. So you see young men with free testosterone lower than their grandfathers would have had 30 years ago. So if you're not getting results from your exercise and you're I used to say over 40 but really over 30 it's all over the place. You can try and improve your sleep eat some more saturated fat you know lift heavy a couple of times a week but not too much and all the things you might get your testosterone up to low normal for where it should be. And you could also just start taking testosterone when your levels are low and all the normal stuff doesn't get you to the right level. And the reason you do this as an entrepreneur isn't because it makes your exercise work better it's not because it makes you lean or helps you build muscle or and it's not even for libido. It's that when testosterone levels go up dopamine goes up and dopamine is the neurotransmitter that rewards you for effort. It doesn't reward you for getting something. It rewards you for pursuing the thing. And if you've ever seen that that movie Grumpy Old Men you ever see that? I don't think so. No. What is it? It's like an 80s movie about these three old guys are sitting rocking chairs and just piss each other on. I mean I've liked the two Grumpy Old Men from them up. It's exactly these are documentaries on testosterone deficiency. Yeah. And if you are staying up late working on starting your company you're not getting enough sleep. You're probably getting jet lag dream fly over the place. You're probably eating a bunch of restaurant oils. Your testosterone is ruined. And that means when you wake up I'm so blown out say what am I going to do? You're probably need some testosterone. And there's nothing wrong with working with a functional medicine doctrine doing that. And but I was going to say the issue is that there's so many different chemical compounds and people do. So what the issue is somebody will put testosterone in the same conversation is any of the other anabolic. That's the issue. So it becomes demonized. That's the concern. Like so then you have like I was like like you have everything from like debal to trend in the same conversation as testosterone. So then guys you're laughing because you know that if you're uneducated and you don't understand this world those things are just as foreign to you as testosterone is. It's true. And it's funny if you say testosterone people think of all these 1970s testosterone analogs. So all this it comes down to well why do we just guess why don't we measure and you can go to axo.health axo.health and you can get the advanced longevity panel for like 800 bucks and it includes discounts on a lot of things but you get your testosterone levels, the other sex hormone levels, your thyroid levels which control energy and a bunch of other longevity and inflammatory compounds. So you need to know if you feel great right now what are your hormone levels because you need to pin them there when you're twice the age you are now. So you've got to get the data and if you just measure it you're going to go oh my god my cortisol isn't working right. My testosterone is low my thyroid is low. Oh your low energy you exercise and you don't lose any weight. Can't put on muscle and you just don't feel motivated. It's not you. It's that your hardware doesn't have the right things. So you could say I'll use all these weird chemicals or I'll use bio identical replacement the way my body is supposed to be doing it if I lived in nature and since we live in a nature with 10,000 chemicals in it just get the data and see what's going on and it's axo.health. You have to by the way you have to give me all these links so I can put them in the show and also people can start to go down this rabbit hole but the the reason I built that man I used to go to the doctor and beg to get my lab tests right to the point that in my I think late 20s I just fired my doctor was like I'm so tired of I'm just going to learn everything myself because I'm so tired of they came to interpret this. So why do you need a permission slip to know what's going on your body? So most people go in you waste a half a day waiting in the waiting room and then the doctor says I don't know what this lab is I'm like order you don't need it in your insurance company after eight hours on the fence is I'm not going to pay for it. So direct pay get it done never talk to a doctor get your results get an interpretation of the results and then you can call your doctor and say I got my numbers they need help so this is the new way of doing it I never want to talk to insurance company again and that's why axle health is one of my it's a part of upgrade labs so members can get access that but anyone anywhere can order well anyone in the US anyway can order an axle health test before we go on to cognitive performance any other thoughts on all the emerging health trends I mentioned those them big I mentioned peptides navigating again very very difficult to navigate what helps and what doesn't is there anything those two or otherwise that you recommend people stay away from or go into that could actually have a net positive I would say measure what's going on first measure with that's the end okay and some peptides are relatively easy like BPC 157 if you have gastric issues or you have an injury that's not healing BPC 157 is safe it's effective it's been around forever and I have used pretty much every peptide out there at this point and some of them are profoundly effective my other favorite that no one talks about is called Milano 10 to and Milano 10 is a compound that causes you to get a tan with very minimal sun exposure and okay that's cool but having a tan and that means you have sunscreen built in but you didn't have to get a whole bunch of sun damage to get it it also has a bunch of effects on mood and even on sexual function so that's one of my favorites and if you just want the sexual function side and a lot of guys over 40 your testosterone blow you need this PT141 is a peptide that makes you feel like you're in about 18 again it's ridiculous so that's those are useful um cognitive performance okay this podcast is brought to you in part by stash are you still putting off saving and investing because you'll get to it someday stash turns someday into today stash isn't just an investing app 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offer a subject to tease and seize does that does cognitive reform aside danger coffee at all okay let's talk about that so what is first of all what is danger coffee so I got I got I actually have not tried this yet my because I wanted this bag to be on the set I mean a second you go then I'm gonna try it out yeah so what is this what is this outside of being just very healthy no mold good coffee um what are you trying to accomplish with this well some of the brands I've worked with in the past no longer say mold free on the label so I don't worry y'all should I'd encourage people to look at whatever coffee that you'd like to buy just say mold free and damn straight at danger coffee says that it also is it's remineralized oh and in mineralized mold free and he odd tested so the remineralized means that we put a therapeutic dose of trace and ultra trace minerals in the coffee you won't taste it it's super high in coffee it tastes amazing but you don't taste the minerals the act as electrolytes and these are minerals that can increase the electroactivity in your cells so you drink the coffee act I feel really good and what you'll find is that inside your body there's a set of sensors that tells you whether food is good for you or not and they don't have a taste but there's a just I want more of that feeling when you drink danger coffee because of the minerals the parts of your body that are hungry for minerals well they're like drink more of that it feels good and the reason I say you need more minerals that's if you want to live a long time and you want cognitive performance you got to have enough zinc and magnesium and a bunch of other minerals you've never heard of problem is most super foods including spinach and kale and even sweet potatoes and beets think you're all men's even raspberries these guys will suck minerals out of your body this is the plants way of making sure you don't eat too many of them so if you've been eating those and you eat normal wheat and other things that are sprayed with glyphosate that also steals minerals you don't have the minerals your body needs to make neurotransmitters and your body's doing its best you want to really change your brain or change your muscles or your cardiovascular some sort of stimulus followed by recovery and the presence of minerals and proteins and some fats so your body can build what it needs but if you do the first two and you don't have minerals you don't get results so danger coffee's built this way because it's replenishing the minerals that none of us has anymore now what happens when you have enough minerals well about three years ago I had an old yoga injury repaired on my foot and they had to saw through the bone all the way through the main bone in the foot and I did it when I was awake because well you can't feel it and it's interesting so I'm there with the the doctor in Beverly Hills um doctor Ellie's hydrate he's been on my show and in the saws like it and he looks at the nurse and goes I'm having a hard time getting through the bone and I'm feeling I'm like uh doctorate the bones getting hot here and he looks at the nurse got this guy human and then afterwards he said Dave I operated on someone half your age and their bone cut like butter and I could barely get through your bone what are you doing and well what I'm doing is biohacking and I have enough minerals that's why I do it because literally bone density is one of the greatest predictors of longevity so get enough minerals already and then meditations better brains are better muscles are better bones are better metabolism is better that's why I made danger coffee and it's called danger because who knows what you might do I love it you might start a company while you're working full-time who knows you might break your foot or and the yoga injury no so I've also heard um when it comes to coffee I don't know the signs behind this so I'm gonna I'm probably gonna miss quote or or or or screw up the jargon but um I've heard that it's actually smarter to take electrolytes in the morning before coffee for uh I think that I've been told this because uh your body is not receptive to caffeine with like the first 30 minutes of waking up but it's receptive to electrolyte I don't know if you know anything about this I do I've heard this paraded a few times and I don't really understand it because I mean I take uh electrolytes and BCAs before I work out but I've always just drank coffee in the morning if you're one of those annoying people who wakes up at 5 a.m. all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed it's not me um mom either but if you're one of those good for you then you should wait to drink your coffee if you're someone who would rather stay up late and sleep in then you should have your coffee as soon as you can because in the morning your body should raise cortisol cortisol is a really important hormone for life low cortisol is four times more deadly than high cortisol so I think actually now that you're saying this I think it was a uh huberman podcast and he said drinking coffee increases cortisol more than it should in the morning and then I I'm remembering now as you see I had huberman on my show before you had a podcast okay I'm telling me explain to me about cortisol and why this is not the best advice so cortisol has a circadian rhythm which means it should go up in the morning and the reason cortisol goes up in the morning is that for you to get out of bed your blood pressure needs to go up if it didn't go up you'd stand up there wouldn't be enough blood in head you'd fall down hit your head and tiger to you so life wants higher cortisol in the morning and this is a good thing and then it should be moderate during the day and then it should go down at nights you can go to sleep but a lot of entrepreneurs don't have that kind of a curve and your low cortisol in the morning so what should you do absolutely have electrolytes but you can have electrolytes in water and I do that every morning recommended it with you see salt or mind salt for a very long time so do that in the morning these are a different kind of electrolytes in nature coffee and you can have it right after you wake up you can have it 15 minutes or half hour two hours after whenever you would drink your coffee but getting electrolytes in the morning including a meaningful amount of sodium is part of raising blood pressure in the way you want it raised and high blood pressure is bad low blood pressure is worse so though there really is no issue with drinking a coffee in the morning not a cup of coffee and people always will try to say you should wait this amount of time the only time that you should delay your coffee is if you're a super morning person because you want to actually be able to move your circadian window and if you're a super late night person have coffee as early as you can so the your body will get the memo oh I should probably wake up early and go to bed on a reasonable time tonight let's talk about cognitive performance so again people usually default to drugs in the tropics and things just to but I mean you spoken about physical health you spoken about diet I'm sure not eating mold has something to do with cognitive performance as well this is also what 40 years of zen taps into so talk to me about just sort you can talk about 40 years of zen what it does but also not just what it does some best practices just for anybody to improve the cognitive performance so I mentioned Ed Krunner free to you syndrome yeah in my 20s and this is when you range just won't work you can't remember things you're so tired and it doesn't matter how hard you're pushing there's nothing left to push so that give me a kind of a sacred need to get my brain working I also worked in Silicon Valley where my brain is how I pay my rent so it's kind of terrible as is a lot of people living to this and if they feel like they're not sharp one day like it's super scary for them I bought disability insurance when I was 25 because like something is wrong with my brain no doctor says it's real but I know something's not right and so I've learned a lot here and part of it is you can train your brain in lots of different ways just like you would go to the gym and 40 years of zen I started it about 10 years ago now I've had 2000 entrepreneurs come through five days a very intense work and what we're doing there is we are teaching you how to redirect allocation of energy inside your body so that you don't automatically default into fear and this is not conscious fear this is stuff that happens before you can think and so that you have a lot more energy left at the end of the day to do things you want to do we also then go in and performance tune your brain and what I wanted was like a formula one mechanic for my own brain that's why I started this and the performance tuning will do a clinically based assessment of your brain called a QEG and then we'll look at that and say all right here's a SWAT analysis strength we can us opportunity threat so let's show you what's going on in there and these are areas that are dysregulated you're high performing you're here but what would happen if we reconnected these two parts that don't talk and these two ones that are too hot we'll just calm those down and these over here that are not talking enough we'll turn that up a little bit and you get to decide what performance characteristics your brain has from doing that it's like you take your current or mechanic and they're gonna say do you want it to be faster do you want it to break better do you want it to handle better like what are the aspect you want it to seems like for the personal it seems like science fiction like that you can do that so how do you how do you actually what's the the strategy or the the framework even a few things that you do it it's well there's there's kind of two big parts to four years then the first three days is a combination of things I've learned in remote mountains and in Tibet and Nepal and the Andes and a lot of work it's a meditation and you have electrodes glued to your head and recently we added this is now the world's first psychedelic assisted neurofeedback program you can have medically prescribed ketamine to create more neuroplasticity and have a deeper experience it works with a fatiguing increases neuroplasticity oh my god yeah one of the most neuroplastic agents we know of one small dose for 72 hours makes the brain more plastic and that's why for treatment resistant depression and things the brain can can become like play dough like you're 17 again so people come in with their without that and I run them through this meditation process with a thousand samples per second coming off the brain and we teachers go back every single thing that's ever triggered you you go in and you remove the trigger because if you can be triggered and you're running a company it means you're not in charge this is like like you're talking about like childhood trauma hell yeah absolutely wild so instead of spending 10 years with a therapist you're hacking that rock I mean this is a performance thing we don't do anything that might be medical like therapy and you're allowed to go in without it being medical and edit out your reaction to to traumatic events and one of my friends who went through the program Craig runs a 1200 person company and he said I just realized that all of my success comes from being bullied in seventh grade and how many entrepreneurs now are going oh god yeah and how I was bullied too so there's that there's other parts of it but you get to pick whatever whatever gets under your skin yeah it sucks especially if you're in a board meeting or you're sitting with your employees and something you didn't like happened if you lose your mind your company doesn't do well of course yeah if you lose your mind and act appropriately everyone still feels that you lost your mind so the only way to really lead is to show up where your inside interstate matches your outer state and if you can do that you've achieved a stakeholder equanimity and that's what we're doing at 40 years then you get to choose your state you get to stain it no matter what happens the world around you so that you can do more good in the world that's the first three days and it is really transformative because every single day your body affect every single second your body is scanning the world there's something that might be a threat based on everything that happened from the moment of conception forward and your body is very fast and it's very dumb and it has a third of a second to make you feel whatever it wants before you can see reality there's like a little censorship window it's called p300 for neuroscientist people and what that means is if you can reprogram your threat networks it's the same thing is picking up your phone saying I think I'll turn off all the alerts from tiktok and every other damn app on there you can't use your phone if it's a learning all the time how are you supposed to use your brain your brain if it's a learning all the time so I turned off all the alerts I could find in my body if anything triggers me let go but let me go back and just do the reset process more so I have a book coming out where I teach people the best I can the reset process will come out in that 2025 and the idea here is any human that can be triggered can be programmed and if you can be triggered it means you're carrying a load of gun that's what triggered means you should unload that right and that way you're actually powerful because he knows you might do you're gonna do the right thing even if it's hard but if things are hard and that triggers you because your automated threat systems go you know when I was five years old it felt hard like this and at that time I was triggered so I'm just gonna send a little trigger up there and you're big at all brand of like there's a reason it's because that guy's an asshole this is our it actually works in there and it sabotages yeah yeah the amount of stupid things I've done because of my nervous system oh my god so why not just going to work on that that's what 40 years as in as it is the top place on earth for letting your brain get the upgrade that's possible from decades of meditation I just didn't have decades to do it I want to take a second and thank Range Rover Sport for supporting today's episode now let's talk about tools that match your ambition that match the ambition of everybody who's listening today who has taken risks who is upleveled their personal professional development who's tried to build their own thing everybody listening gets it there is a moment when the thing you're trying to build the challenge that you're taking on it finally starts to take off there is like this rush of excitement and possibility and that feeling that feeling that you get when you get behind of the 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elevate your driving experience visit Land Rover USA.com and configure your Range Rover Sport today when you go through this process and you program your brain you remove the triggers you deal with trauma I mean I know you don't you're not doing therapy but ultimately there's a lot of head-up trauma that leads to these reactions right yeah um what what's the end result like for example like I'll give you an example just some days I feel like I can pull facts quicker I feel like my words come to me quicker what's happening there versus some days when same diet same rest I feel slow I feel brain fog I feel lethargic what what's the so if I go through this process I'm sure it helps oh it helps the norm is how with annoying and really it can even raise like you but what's what's happening in that situation you can't remember things yeah the primary cause of brain fog is toxins if it's changing on a day-to-day basis not just mold mold is a major class of toxin it's in environments you walk into that place that smells like a mop and you had lunch there and you have brain fog that afternoon there's a correlation you're breathing neurotoxins in the air if you're sleeping in a house that has water damage you're probably gonna have brain fog but it's gonna happen most days and there are people say every day I have brain fog Monday through Friday and I go home and I don't have it and it gets better by Monday I go on vacation like dude you're working or living in mold but let's say that it's highly variable what did you have for lunch MSG is a major major cause of brain fog after lunch and you're gonna go to the restaurant say to use MSG and they're gonna look you right in the eye and they're gonna say I do not use MSG that's because in the US if an ingredient is 74% MSG it does not have to be labeled as MSG when restaurants use MSG or hidden MSG they sell 30% more food because it gives you food cravings and then you get sugar cravings the body takes all available blood sugar and it uses it to try and suck glutamate out of your synapses so they'll stop firing which is what causes migraines from MSG well of course you have a sugar craving course you have an energy crash so if you don't have artificial colorings you don't have fried seed oils these bad fats and you don't have MSG and flavor enhancers like that you're much less likely at brain fog in fact those are the primary cause the other cause that people don't really talk about is lighting this really bright bright blue LED lights the ones mounted right above you at work these really bright environments that causes brain fog I'm wearing the true dark glasses right now they block the part of light that's most stressful on the eyes and one of our customers reached out and said you know what I was trying to figure this out Monday through Sunday I eat the same exact meals and every day at work I'm exhausted by the end of the day and I come home and I just don't do anything on weekends I feel great I used to think it was job stress it's not is that I put the true dark glasses on now at the end of the day I feel the same as I do on the weekends it's because the lighting is junk light the same as junk food so one thing you could do that's cheap and effective go outside in the morning for 20 minutes and at lunch time go outside even for five or ten minutes and just let some light into your eyes don't stare at the sun just be in touch really toxic environment yeah it and it makes a huge difference so I get massive brain fog if you put me without the glasses in an LED lit room for eight hours I'm going to be an idiot by the end of the day I just know it so I block it so we've learned through a lot so we spoken about peak performance through sleep through diet through sort of rewiring your brain through health of wellness you kind of got wait let's talk about neutropics for a minute okay let's do it okay so neutropic is a word it just means cognitive enhancing and there are neutropic drugs and their neutropic supplements and the best drug on the planet for this by far is called Modaphanil I was on ABC nightline about 14 15 years ago because I took this to get through business school it's from the movie limitless this is the drug but in limitless I think that drug made you kill people Modaphanil when you first take it everyone around you is so slow that you can get angry at them so if you're dick you'll be a bigger dick on Modaphanil so you got to work on the inner piece thing but it makes it much easier to focus and there's great studies I wrote about these in my cognitive enhancement book it's called headstrong but I mentioned my books the gears and buy my book are not it is one not she's in my life at all it just that's the concentrated knowledge that I put out there so I went through all this studies on Modaphanil for cognitive enhancement it's profound so maybe on the days when you wake up and you're like today's the zombie day you take 100 milligrams of Modaphanil it's a prescription drug some people choose to buy it online without needing a permission slip that's up to you but it's interesting you do that and then that day everything is easy so I've been taking this stuff almost every day for 20 years now since 2001 and you don't feel like it has decreased the fact over a period of time I went up to 400 milligrams a day to test it out years ago I've been taking 100 milligrams a day every day if I'm flying more than 10 time zones in one night I might take an extra 50 milligrams but it works and for some people it doesn't work at all and for five out of a million people there's an autoimmune reaction similar to what ibuprofen does so it's not without risk but it's very low risk compared to many of the drugs that they prescribe I mean in college everyone takes that at all I would not touch that stuff it's not a good cognitive enhancer it's terrible and if you took a nice shot of espresso I made with the angel coffee to get the mineral effect that's in there and you were to take a metaphenol versus an adderol you're not gonna tweak in fact the military switched from adderol for pilots because adderol makes one kill people and if you're flying a 50 million dollar airplane with a machine gun this is not right they switched to my daffinol because it just makes you more focused and it's originally a drug that was designed for narcolepsy people fall asleep uncontrollably for the rest of us it just makes us more focused and on the the cognitive enhancing side I make a formula called um called brain 101 that has the basic cognitive enhancer is yours yes in my father yeah and there are a variety of metropics out there that work at the very high end there's something called quality in mind which is a good one and before you take all the fancy neutropics the most important thing you can take is boring it's vitamin dac go to vitamin dac.com DAKE these are fat soluble vitamins like vitamin D and A they direct minerals in your cells then you take minerals 101 same website vitamin dac.com minerals 101 gives you the minerals your body needs to make neurotransmitters and all the other mitochondrial things you need if you do those two things every workout every meditation everything you do is easier because you have minerals that your body needed to do them those are baseline for everyone after that you do something like a brain 101 and that's going to contain herbs that increase your neurotransmitter levels and it's going to contain things that increase power levels via enhancing mitochondria and you can say that sounds like a lot of science well it is but I'm saying you're going to take well no but there's so much I think that people all they want is they want like the the the the bare minimum playbook because they get overwhelmed with information and they don't then they'll do anything so this this is it it's only three bottles yeah it's vitamin Dac then it cost you about 22 bucks a month it's one one bottles good for two months pretty pretty cheap yeah you're going to take minerals 101 as it's like 25 bucks a month don't quote me exactly on that and then you're going to take brain 101 which is probably 35 to 50 I don't remember what we're charged for it you later that on to a medicinal I do yeah do right don't feel overstimulated no okay in fact when I wake up in the morning most mornings I feel really good and sometimes I wake up I stayed up to late last night at a restaurant I can just tell things weren't right and so I might tweak what I take the other thing that is at the high end that you can order online is called an aracetam and an aracetam is the only cognitive enhancer that increases memory IO and IO is input output so you know the difference between having a slow internet connection and a faster internet connection an aracetam gives you the fast connection I've been on that for 25 years so what would happen if you go back for 25 years and every day you were smarter and more focused in your memory had better IO that's what I did and then I train the crap out of my brain at 40 years of zen and I have 10 companies in my portfolio and I built a $100 million plus company from scratch and I I have great relationships at compounds that compounds like if you're just like even like 1% better over the past 25 years what you can do and maybe because I had so much to overcome I think it's more than 1% for me and for most people I think you have 10 to 50% better performance that's just sitting in their untapped we wake up your mitochondria go do an upgrade labs or do any of the biohacking stuff that you can read about online and then do some cognitive enhancement but make sure your hormones work and for that one get a lab test in axle health your hormones are working great they're probably not get that fixed go to a functional medicine doctor and then all of a sudden like I'm a great golden god everything that happened today I can handle and it didn't stress me out and it's like this will sound kind of dumb but there's a scene in the matrix like nia looks at all the bullets since it goes no and then they all strap it's not quite like that but it's a sense that things that would have dysregulated you as an entrepreneur as a father or mother they just don't you're like I've got this and it's that deep knowing that you've got this that creates a sense of safety and peace in yourself if you have that all the people in your organization and in your family they will feel that you have that too and it's your job to not just act that way to actually be that way and I did not always have this I had to build it but it is buildable and it is the best thing I've ever done do you think do you think there will ever be a point in any future where any of the recommendations you just made make their way into mainstream health and medicine it's inevitable I find it so like we're on the same page we're very much kindred spirits with literally everything you spoke about but I can't in any lifetime ever see a GP talking to me about any of this shit oh you think you're gonna be seeing a GP in five years so cute but you know what I mean like they don't talk about this like like even even having a conversation about about food and nutrition that makes sense with a family doctor I've walked out of that conversation no my issue is not I once asked my mechanic about how to fix my plumbing and he was totally useless why would you go to a doctor for food my only was that they should my issue is that they should they are the they are the the avatar of health for a lot of people not everybody looks at my mom doesn't know a biohacking is my mom my mom goes to a GP right it's it's just so weird to say everyone should when your model of reality doesn't work you should change your model of reality to one that works and so if you go to your doctor and your doctor isn't looking way younger than their current age and way healthier than everyone else you have a right to politely and kindly say doctor do you follow your own advice because it looks like you have an extra 20 pounds and I'd like to understand if you know what's going on there because if you can't fix that and you know what's going on I it's I'm not feeling confident here this isn't about being rude it's not about being unkind it's about hiring the best service provider for you your doctor is your service right they were a consultant and they're not your daddy they're not your mommy so I went through a phase in my 20s where I was pissed at the medicine field I was really angry because no doctor would believe me and I fired him as I'm going to learn all this stuff and I finally went to a doctor with seven different lab tests and all this crap and I was wrong some of my best friends in the world are doctors about most of them are I married a doctor for 17 years were together doctors the good ones they're healers they didn't get this training and if you go to a healer asking about food and they're not trained in food they're going to do their best because they want to help but they're not trained and that's okay so you want to go to a functional medicine doctor or nutritionist not a registered dietitian they're the ones who put McDonald's in hospitals that whole field and actually I didn't know that oh god yeah if they're a functional dietitian there's a few of those they'll work but registered dietitians are the ones who tell you you can cancel out a Snickers bar with a diet coke like this is like a crazy if it fits your macros or even worse to see even worse than that like they're the ones who put McNuggets at hospitals and say it's okay I just was hoping that there'd be some brighter future there is here's how to do it go to chat GBT right now say I want you to act like a functional medicine doctor and expert in nutrition right I want you to ignore mainstream stuff if it isn't going to work in my case I want you to consider alternative medicine and say and also consider literature on the vegan diet and on the carnivore diet and on saturated fats whatever else is interesting to you right say based on this give me some good advice it'll give you better advice than most doctors unless they're functional medicine or longevity doctors that already will and you could say you know I'm really interested in unusual cognitive enhancers that may or may not be legal in my country can you tell me some that would help me with this specific symptom it will just tell you it is free okay most doctors can't spell an aracetam last question I have for you what is that tattoo on your arm this one yeah that is caffeine that's caffeine I believe there's a story behind it the first product ever sold over the internet before the browser was invented is a t-shirt that said caffeine my drug of choice and add the molecule on it and I did start bolt roof which is kind of a big coffee I started danger which is becoming a big coffee company because people love it like the amount of reorders is higher than ever we just got our shop of 500,000 customer little trophy and caffeine is mother nature's original cognitive enhancer it is so good for you not in high doses but coffee is better than kale and spinach and tofu or almost any other compound that we put in our bodies and it has been for a long time if you wanted to leave the audience actually no so first of all before we go before we before we finish this um you dropped a lot of different links is there like one source of truth what's the website I don't know if it's truth but it's my best it's it's dayvastgrade.com that's got the podcast the books 3000 articles this is all free stuff and you'll find a link to axle health and upgrade labs in 40 years as in and the true dark glasses and all that kind of stuff it's all there you've had a great career great life you built multiple businesses if you could go back and tell your 20 year old self one thing after all of this could be health advice could be life advice what would it be I would have told myself to study relationships the same way study technology or business because this is an area where you don't get any training in school whatsoever whatever training you think you got from your family it wasn't training they're just copying what their parents did and I'm dating a relationship expert named Christina Weber who runs a group called we deep in and she's brought all of the best relationship professionals together and does like mastermind hot seats but four relationships with couples and singles in the room and the amount of transformation that I see there and because I've been separated twice or divorce twice I've made it a practice to study relationships part of that is 40 years as in just the deep personal development work but it's not that hard relationships are pretty simple if you understand how to structure them how to think about them and how to communicate and I've been mentored by guys like drawn gray from the Mars and Venus guy who's become a good friend and it's not as hard as it feels so you might as well study that as as hard as you would study your application and it takes less than a year to become an expert and then the things that would have created a big blow up just don't and so I under invested on relationships and now the with the we deep and stuff that I'm doing I'm now an advisor to our company and you want to come on do I love talking about an ocean come on she'd probably love that all right I'll see if I can get her in but having like the world's best relationship experts talk to another couple and tell them what they're doing wrong while you're watching is like oh my god I was doing that and then you sit there and then they tell you what you're doing wrong and what you're doing right I've never experienced something like that but the amount of rapid learning is great so I'm I have a really healthy happy relationship because of knowledge that that's what I should have done and if you just get health and relationships down everything else works.