Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 672: Dave Asprey

Episode Date: December 28, 2017

In this episode, Sal, Adam and Justin speak with Dave Asprey, creator of Bulletproof Coffee and the rapidly growing Bulletproof brand. At one point Dave was a 300 pound Silicon Valley executive and in this episode the boys dig into what drove Dave to be Dave, starting as far back as his birth (for real!). You can learn more about Dave at www.bulletproof.com Poster boy for biohacking (2:01) Where does the passion come from? (4:49) Was 300lbs Bullied Wanted to be "bulletproof" How does he deal with critics now? (11:01) Say my name Science trolls How does he respond to individual variance? (13:38) Blood tests – inflammation low Do what works and measure what works Junk lighting – Headstrong (23:38) Does he have an order of operations? (25:45) What does his exercise regimen look like? (27:33) Does he consider himself obsessed with hacking his body? Body image issues? (38:30) How does his business brain tick when it comes to new technology? (40:05) Disruption What is he disrupting right now and what does he foresee disrupting in the future? (44:36) Mycotoxins in your coffee and Joe Rogan (46:40) Coffee companies taking the same precautions as Bulletproof? (48:48) What are some major toxins is he looking at? (50:31) Where does he attribute his success to? (53:26) Almost died at birth Has he done any work with psychedelics? Opinion on them? (58:10) What has been the biggest challenge that he has faced? (1:04:14) The stages of growth, what challenges has he seen at each new stage? (1:07:20) Cargo ship or motor boat (1:10:10) Core tenants Related Links/Products Mentioned: Quackwatch Eating To Break 100: Longevity Diet Tips From The Blue Zones Artificial sweeteners: sugar-free, but at what cost? Head Strong: The Bulletproof Plan to Activate Untapped Brain Energy to Work Smarter and Think Faster-in Just Two Weeks – Dave Asprey (book) Blue light has a dark side - Harvard Health TrueDark™ Twilight & Daywalker Set | Biohacked Bulletproof Labs - Bulletproof Labs High-Intensity Intermittent Exercise and Fat Loss The effect of body posture on cognitive performance: a question of sleep quality KAATSU Occlusion Training Guide - Mind Pump Media The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google - Scott Galloway (book) Joe Rogan Exposes Dave Asprey and Bulletproof Coffee for False Claims on Mycotoxins (YouTube) The Science Behind Just One Mold Toxin in your Coffee Glyphosate, pathways to modern diseases II: Celiac sprue and gluten intolerance Climb Everest in a T-shirt & Shorts. Survive Submersion In Freezing Water For Hours. Wim Hof Tells You How He Did It! – #403 What is EMDR? The reptilian brain Thrive Causemetics | Luxury High-Performance Cosmetics Featured Guest/People Mentioned: The Bulletproof Blog Dave Asprey (@bulletproofexec)  Twitter Dave Asprey (@dave.asprey)  Instagram Bulletproof | Power Mind and Body Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey Professor Steven Barrett Dr. J. Craig Venter (@JCVenter) Twitter Peter Diamandis (@PeterDiamandis) Twitter Naveen Jain (@Naveen_Jain_CEO) Twitter Joe Rogan (@joerogan) Twitter Wim Hof (@Iceman_Hof) Twitter Marc Andreessen Would you like to be coached by Sal, Adam & Justin? You can get 30 days of virtual coaching from them for FREE at www.mindpumpmedia.com. Get our newest program, MAPS Prime Pro, which shows you how to self assess and correct muscle recruitment patterns that cause pain and impede performance and gains. Get it at www.mindpumpmedia.com! Get MAPS Prime, MAPS Anywhere, MAPS Anabolic, MAPS Performance, MAPS Aesthetic, the Butt Builder Blueprint, the Sexy Athlete Mod AND KB4A (The MAPS Super Bundle) packaged together at a substantial DISCOUNT at www.mindpumpmedia.com. Make EVERY workout better with MAPS Prime, the only pre-workout you need… it is now available at mindpumpmedia.com Also check out Thrive Market! Thrive Market makes purchasing organic, non-GMO affordable. With prices up to 50% off retail, Thrive Market blows away most conventional, non-organic foods. PLUS, they offer a NO RISK way to get started which includes: 1. One FREE month’s membership 2. $20 Off your first three purchases of $49 or more (That’s $60 off total!) 3. Free shipping on orders of $49 or more Have Sal, Adam & Justin personally train you via video instruction on our YouTube channel, Mind Pump TV. Be sure to Subscribe for updates. Get your Kimera Koffee at www.kimerakoffee.com, code "mindpump" for 10% off! 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If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mite, op, mite, op with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. This guy's pretty much like the godfather of this coffee movement. It's weird, I've never heard of it. That exploded. I don't know, I think Starbucks is responsible for that, but I think the guy putting fat in his coffee. He's definitely right.

Well, we went to Paleo FX. It was like Blu-Proof Land. Right. I'm really, you know, I'm really curious to see what people think about this interview. So, because this is one of those interviews we did over the phone, not my favorite when we do them over the phone, because I feel like I can't look into your fucking soul, you know what I'm saying? I ask some body language, sir.

I ask him some deep questions here, so I brought it for you guys, but I feel like sometimes he pulled a little matrix on me. So be kind of interesting to hear what you guys think of this. He's a cool, look, Dave asks me, he's a cool guy, super smart guy. I would love to meet him in person. I love him in the studio. Yeah, because you can have better conversations in person,

you could do more more content, you get to know the person. We don't normally agree to do podcasts through Skype for the very reason we're talking about. We like to get a little bit more deep with people. It's Dave Asperger though, right? He wants to get on your podcast, we should do it, he's been around for a while. He's got a very popular podcast, he's quite influential.

Yeah, I know a lot of people are really excited about this, I mean, he got a lot of traction on our Instagram when Taylor posted up what we're gonna be doing. So that's right. Pretty excited to have him on. He is a smart guy. It is a good interview. And I think we committed, I think after the end of the interview,

we committed to a January, February Doug. He's I think he's supposed to come on. Maybe I think sometime in February, but yeah, so yeah, look forward to doing some more stuff with this guy. Excellent. So here we are talking to Dave Asperg. You can find his website is bulletprooflabs.com

or bulletproof.com and his podcast is bulletproof radio without any further ado. Here we are talking to Dave Asperg. You're kind of like the poster person for biohacking. How did that start? Was that a big thing even before you got into or are you the one that made it popular? I wrote the first definition of biohacking

and I'm the first person to talk about it in a scale. I actually decided not to trademark the term because I wanted a name for this community that was a little different. Like I spent 20 years running anti-aging nonprofit group in the Bay Area and I looked at like there's Navy SEALs and there's astronauts and there's power lifters and bodybuilders and endurance athletes and

Medical professionals and anti-aging people all these different people were all seeking the same thing Which is control over our biology and there was very little cross-pollination between those groups It's we're working towards the same goal, which is control So how do we bring it together in a community and that's's why I trademarked Bulletproof Coffee and all that stuff. And you made that in my business, but I made by hacking a community name that we can all use to identify as people who are breaking the frontiers about figuring out how to have control of your biology. Like you may want to get swole and the guy next to you may want to live to 200 years old.

We're going to use the same tool set. Yeah, because I for some reason thought that, you know bulletproof your business was around much longer than it has been It's only been around for what how many years like four like four years five years I started my first blog post at the end of 2011 and that was after many years of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and Running all this anti-aging stuff and I just one day said, you know If someone had told me all the stuff I know now when I was 20, it would have saved me so much struggle and money and effort.

And so I'm just gonna write this blog. I'm an executive at a big tech company. I make a quarter million dollars a year and with stock options. I'm not looking to start a company. I just want five people to read this blog and have it change your life. I didn't build a list and do any of the marketing stuff

you're supposed to do. I'm just gonna give away the good info and it grew from there very organically. It's amazing when that happens. I feel like most people that have a lot of success, like the level of both proof success, have to start off with like intentions like that. I feel like when you're totally driven monetarily, it doesn't seem to work out the same way. And the most successful people that I've interviewed or talked to, it's always when you just have this passion that you want to do something or you want to help people,

and that's what really makes it grow organically. People can feel it. If you're just out there to sell something, anyone out there can knock off some content from someone else's site or copy a product and go out there and cut some corners and make some money. But you got to live with yourself when you do that. and go out there and cut some corners and make some money. But you gotta live with yourself when you do that. And people just, we can sense it, we're not dumb.

And when it comes at, I wanna help people, if it's real and it really comes from your heart, I think there's just an energetic difference. And you could say there's no science behind that. Okay fine, there's no science behind that. It still works. Where does your passion for this come from? Like what made you so interested in biohacking or changing your physiology or just improving?

Like what was it that drove that? I used to weigh 300 pounds in my fourth year of college. And I'd struggle with weight even as a young, you know, in high school and things like that. I'd gain 20 pounds or so I lose 20 pounds, gain 30 pounds and just yo-yo all over the place. I tried all sorts of different diets at our brightest in my knees since I was 14. I was on antibiotics every month for a strep throat and sinus infections for years and my biology was wrecked. In my mid-20s, I went to Silicon

Valley. I was a co-founder of a part of the company that held Google's first servers when Google was one server and two guys. And I made $6 million and I was 26 years old. I lost when I was 28, but it was a good couple of years there. But during that time, I started to get brain problems. So here I am. I'm a reasonably smart guy. I'm at the most interesting thing in the world at the time, which is like the growth of the internet. And when I was losing

my brain, not just my bad knees and my fat ass, I'm like, I got to do something. And I got kind of desperate. So I just said, this is the most important thing I can do. And I put hundreds of thousands of dollars. And I saw the world's best people and within a year i was uh... president of this anti-aging nonprofit group where i was learning from guys three times my age about how they were controlling their biology when i did it for myself and i go look i'm losing weight my knees don't hurt anymore my brain works again i can turn this back on

through willpower and eventually i just became an expert from absorbing from these people i'd study every night for two to four hours until I literally fall asleep at my desk, just learning about biology and I'm like, wow. Now I have the energy to bring it. I never had my whole life and like I'm not angry anymore and it all changed.

And so it was literally, I was worried about my career, my ability to pay for my family and just to feel good ever. So that's where it came from. So this was your first time being fit in your whole life? It was. I rode a road bike and a mountain bike as a teenager in New Mexico. Sometimes 20 miles a day. I played soccer for 13 years and I've had three knee surgeries before I was 23. They told me I'd be lucky if I could walk.

Much less go trek in the Andes in Himalayas, which I've done since then. And so yeah, I was never healthy and it wasn't for lack of trying. After my second knee surgery, I'm like, all right, I got this. I worked out six days a week and an hour and a half a day at the local, I think they called it 24 hour not unless before it was 24 hour fitness. And half weights, half cardio, 15% incline on the treadmill, 1800 calories a day, low fat. And a year and a half of that, I'm still 300 pounds and I could bench press all my friends.

Like I could max every machine and I was still a fat ass. And I was just so disheartened and I thought it was because it was a moral thing. Like if only I'd tried harder, you know, if only eight, even less beans, you know, or whatever that get was, it wasn't working and it was just a sense of frustration where like when my doctor told me,

maybe you should try to lose weight. I'm like, how? He goes, you should try to eat healthy. I'm like, this jerk thinks I'm eating Snickers bars all the time and I'm like, pushing every lever that anyone's ever told me to push and I still feel like crap and I'm tired all the time. And it was only when I saw an anti-aging doctor look to my hormones like,

oh look, your testosterone is lower than your mom. And your thyroid's broken. You're over-trained. Like, oh, maybe that's the problem. It's amazing how common that is. And on the show, we actually talk a lot about the insecurities that drove us into fitness. Do you share much about what that was like being 300 pounds and the insecurities driving you into working out and how that probably was the motivating factor to the way how you

ate and how you train? It's certainly a part of it. I was bullied a lot. I'm six four. And I'm probably pushing right now. I haven't weighed myself recently. I put on some muscle recently. I'm probably really around 230 to 35 right now,

and I've got a nice V-shape, I'm 45 years old. This is unprecedented in my life, I have abs, and I'm like, I'm blowing away, but for years after I lost all the fat, I turned sideways in the hallway to make space for people to go around me, because I was so used to weighing 300 pounds. And when you're the tall guy and the fat guy, you're going to get bullied because all the short guys, like Napoleon's complex, they always want to start fights because they don't understand physics. I'm like, so the number of times I just sit on a small guy who punched me once, I lost track

of that. But it leaves emotional scars. Like, I want to literally be people, people are people like, I want to be invincible from this stuff. A lot of my entrepreneurial success, a lot of that motivation in the gym, it literally came from fear of failure and fear of looking like a failure or not being good enough. I have a reprogrammed all that stuff. It's gone. I don't operate from there anymore. It helps me. I'm married, I have two kids. I don't even have to look good.

But I'm glad I do. So you feel like you're at peace now with it? Yeah, I'm very much at peace with it. It helps. I spent four months with electrodes glued to my head doing hours of neurofeedback to do the equivalent of 40 years of zen meditation. That's helped me a lot because all the voices in my head, all the critical ones, they always come from

your childhood traumas and bullying and and just you know bad stuff that happens your body Your body actually is trying to keep you alive is trying to keep you safe from things it perceives to be threats and So I just had really bad threat recognition and as I went through and very systematically turned off all those crappy voices in my head To the point that, now, I can have critics or things not go my way, and I don't lose sleep over it. I don't worry. I just, I can see it from the other person's point of view,

and it's probably because they were bullied. I don't know, but it's not about me. I just can do the right thing and move on. And God, it's refreshing to be able to leave other people's baggage with them. But that was a cultivated skill because I'll tell you, I was a very successful, very fearful guy in my 20s. Yeah, it's really changing those thought patterns are no different. I mean, we've worked in fitness for a long time. It's no different than changing muscle recruitment patterns.

If somebody's been moving a particular way for a long time, it takes a while to change those patterns to create a new default pattern with their movement. If somebody's always sitting down or somebody walks with high heels all the time, it will take sometimes a year or two years of concentrated effort to change that pattern so that their new default is something

that's more desirable. How do you deal now with critics now? Like who are your number one critics? Who are people that you would say are probably You know the ones are kind of coming after you all the time or do you have the best way to deal with critics is Just gratitude. I have a daily gratitude practice and there there's just three words, and it's say my name. Like, you're talking about me, and of course you're saying bad things, it just makes people Google me. And you're like, yeah, there's an abundance of evidence

behind what I do. There's tons of science. And when people hear what I have to say, it's credible, and because it actually works, and there's 100 million cups of bull of proof coffee last last year so you can say whatever you want about my mom or about me and it in my mind I'm at peace with that and there's two different kinds of critics the the sort of the the science trolls it's a a term that I coined and science told us someone who looks up something on pub med and then pairs it

with a personal insult and post in your social media those guys I love because they only get to do it once. And after that, you click ban, delete. It took them 10 minutes to say what they're gonna say and they'll never see a word I say again and I'll never see a word they say and I'm at peace with that. Like those are not my customers.

And then there's like the broader ones. One of my life goals was actually to be listed on QuackWatch. Every single physician who's ever made a difference in my life is listed on QuackWatch. Every single physician who's ever made a difference in my life is listed on QuackWatch, which is a site for essentially big pharmaceutical companies or something like that. I have no idea what motivates the guy who runs that thing, but he's been sued countless times. So I got this thing in the USA today about the Bulletproof

Diet, and any good reporter is going to have the pro, and then they have to find a competing point of view. So they interviewed Stephen Barrett, the guy behind Quackwatch. And I was, I shared it on Facebook, I'm like, guys, this is the best day ever. Everyone I respect has been attacked by this critic, and I finally made the list. Even though I'm not a doctor, he called me a Quack.

Like, what an honor. And of course, there's thousands of likes later, and people just laughing. That's how I deal with it. And so I'm just, how can you not be grateful when someone's talking about your work? Yeah, it's a, it's, especially when it comes to nutrition,

that's a very difficult one because there's so much misinformation, there's a lot of special interests and then, and a ton of variables. And then on top of it, when you eliminate, you eliminate the special interests, when you eliminate the misinformation or people trying to sell you bullshit, then you have individual variants, which seems to be pretty dramatic from person to person.

I mean, what do you say to that? Like somebody who comes in and says, hey, you know, I know you recommend a high fat diet, but we have individuals who seem to just thrive on, you know, a vegan diet or people who seem to thrive on more carbohydrates in their diet. How do you deal with that? It's built into the bulk of your diet. And this book is sold a half a million copies in 14 languages. And there's basic algorithms, things like Eat Less Talksons, Eat A ton of Vegetables. Those are universal rules. And to say everyone should eat this amount of fat, no. Can I tell you, no one should eat high amounts of hydrogen and fat and corn, oil and soybean

oil if they want to thrive? That's a hard and fast rule. There are other things. Look, you can choose the amount of protein you want based on your goals. I'm fine with that. And some people do handle carbs better than others. It has to do with their genetic history. It has to do with their gut biome. And what I'll tell people is what's been at the core of my antation knowledge. There's three

numbers that really matter that tells you whether what you're doing works or not. And it's blood tests. C-reactive protein, homosistine, and LPPLA2. Those are three markers of inflammation. And if those are low, what you're doing is working. When inflammation is low, you make energy effectively in yourselves, and you won't have muffin top, and you want muffin top in your brain. And if those are high, then you're doing something wrong.

Maybe it's a toxin. Maybe you're eating a food that's not compatible with your biology. Maybe you're eating too much fat. I don't really know, but now you've got numbers to move towards. And at this point, enough people have gone bulletproof that I can tell you, if those numbers don't move and you'll see triglycerides drop dramatically and HDL goes up as well. But if those numbers don't move in the right direction, okay, it's time to look at your genetics. MTHFR, the problem

is account for homocysteine and most people. People can't handle certain forms of evidements like me. And when you go through and then you account for that and you do appropriate supplementation, then boom, you get another round. And you may see people with familiar hypercholesteremia. People who just have huge amounts of cholesterol, if they have no inflammation, it seems like it doesn't really matter too much but they usually have too much inflammation so they may have to tweak their diet dramatically have more

monosaturates and maybe they only want a teaspoon of butter instead of a tablespoon but sure that's all good that's how we're wired number would rule do what works and measure if it works and when people do that it just makes me happy because I was doing what didn't work and I was doing it really hard just to make sure that I was a good person. And oh my God, the amount of suffering that comes from that, it's not okay. It's extremely frustrating.

But you know, it's almost like you have to be careful when you tell people to look at blood markers because you make that popular enough and the next step will be a pharmaceutical company that's gonna give you a drug that will lower those markers but not necessarily change what was causing those markers. So you're talking about inflammatory markers, I could foresee a pharmaceutical company saying,

hey, here's a new drug, it lowers your C-reactive protein, now you're okay. And it seems like that's the approach when it's a signal more than anything, right? Well, like, stand levels, or stand drugs, and to lower your cholesterol levels, which aren't that useful anyway. But yeah, it's exactly what they do.

I can't tell you, though, if they come out with a drug that lowers C-reactive protein because it increases mitochondrial function, I'm going to be all over that drug. I'm going to want to understand how it works. But we are reaching that point where we can go in and say, you know, let's turn on this one factor in a cell, maybe pharmacologically or more likely using a plant compound these days or using fasting and understand, you know, it's conceivable that you're going to live longer and you can dramatically lower the incidence of type 2 diabetes and things like that. And then I'm not religious about that. I was going to use pharmaceuticals as a last resort,

but I've been using a smart drug pharmaceutical for 20 plus years. That's really been beneficial for me. That makes my neurons live longer. Doesn't have side effects like that. You're talking about Modaphanil? Yeah, okay, that. No, I did Modaphanil for eight years, but I've been off Modaphanil for about four years. I acquitted when I was testing the bulletproof diet to see if it was an important variable. And it turns out my brain works so well when I eat right with all the neurofeedback I've done.

I can't even measure a meaningful difference on and off that stuff anymore. Like I'm on it all the time without taking it. But I'm talking about the RASATAM family. My favorite is an Arasatam. And even in that family of smart drugs, which are pretty well known, Parasatams, the most famous,

there's individual variability for which racetam works for you. So I say these companies come out with you know, stack of all these different racetams, probably it doesn't work the same way for everyone. So you need to find out which racetam's work well for your neurochemistry, and when you dial that in, like go wait, my brain is now protected from hypoxia

when you don't have enough oxygen and my neurons live longer, and my cross-connectivity in the brain works better. I can remember stuff better. I kind of like how I feel on this, but it's not ampy. It's just a supportive thing. I'm on that stuff right now. I took 800 milligrams of that stuff this morning and I take a bunch of other plant-based

neutrobics as well and some of the bulletproof stuff and some of the mitochondrion hand-sisters. And I do it every day, get some my ketone levels up a little bit with brain octane, and I'm like, I've already turned to you at 45 and then at 25, and I just, I love my life, but I'm not opposed to pharmaceuticals, is a big point there.

You just have to use them as a last resort and be really aware of, you know, if they've been around for 50 years, do we really understand it? Well, the race of thames are, they are synthetic, and they are pharmaceuticals in some countries in some countries i believe rush uh... prescribes uh... pericetam and

uh... i don't think they were ever prescribed here in the u.s. were they no in fact it's weird they're not in the physician's desk reference so you go to the doctor and say i'm taking peracetam and they go perasa what and they try to look it up and they can't even find it unless they just go to google yet there's all this research. My very first batch of para satam in the 90s sometime was actually made by sandows pharmaceuticals, but they had to ship it from Europe because it wasn't available in the US. Now you can buy it in powder and capsules all over the place. Yeah, I have a little bit of a different approach with supplements like that.

I do think they can be a lot of fun. I do think that they can enhance certain experiences, but I'm always very wary of taking something for long-term health only because when we look at places like the world's blue zones where people do live the longest, most of them don't take anything. And it only feels like we evolved for so long with our environment that, and they're so little that we know about the human metabolism

and so little that we know about things like the gut microbiome. Like in the microbiome, that's something that's, we're just, we're really starting to tap into now. We really, I mean, 15, 20 years ago, nobody was talking about it. Now we're starting to get some science to come out the show that it's extremely impactful in the body. And so it's, I'm always wary of saying, this is, you know, take this synthetic drug or synthetic product for longevity because we don't know what we don't know, you know what

I mean? Like, if you look at the studies on artificial sweeteners, you know, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, there were studying, you know, I mean, I mean, I mean, like, if you look at the studies on artificial sweeteners, you know, 20 years't know. I mean, like, if you look at the studies on artificial sweeteners 20 years ago, 30 years ago, there were studying things that we knew to study toxicity and those types of things, and they said, okay, it was safe.

They didn't know to test for really forgot microbiome, and now we know that it has a real bad detrimental effect for that kind of stuff. And we also just started to learn about epigenetics and how these things may change the way your genes express themselves and it may take decades. Do you ever worry about that taking some of these synthetic products?

You know, I don't take a lot of synthetic products. The ones I do take typically have enormous numbers of years like prostems been around for 60 years. And another one of my favorites is some called L deprenppronil, which is an antidepressant. But you take it like 50 milligrams for antidepressant, you take it at 0.1 milligrams. These very low doses that are incredibly well studied for longevity. And so when you look at things that have 30, 40 years of track record and you're using low doses, I think there's things that have 30, 40 years of track record and you're using low doses. I think there's pretty good evidence for those,

but there's no way I want to go out there and say, I'm going to take this brand new drug every day for the rest of my life because there isn't enough known about it. But on the flip side, I had a chance to ask Craig Venter. He was the first guy to sequence the human genome. It's been $100 million to get a picture of a zone DNA. And I'm like, Craig, so you have all this data

for 20 years and all these human genomes. What recommendations could you make based on what you know so far that I could use today, or should we just talk about it over pizza, or should we just keep eating pizza and beer until we have more data? And he looks at me and says, let's talk about it over pizza and beer.

And I'm like, dude, we can choose directional rightness and we can course correct, whereas even without taking any of these either natural or pharmaceutical kinds of things, we know that we're exposed to toxins, things like glyphosate, things like mercury, even things like junk lighting that huge amount of evidence is coming in for. It works both these all the time and we didn't evolve for that. And so we're already putting stuff into a system that is untested, and I'm like, maybe I could counteract some of that. At least I'm going to cultivate awareness and try and balance the system out, given that I'm not living in the forest with my shirt off the way I was built to be. I've never heard anyone reference junk lighting before. That's cool.

Could you explain that for the listeners that probably don't know what that means? Sure. This was in my last book, Headstrong, which, and I got to plug this for a second because this book hit the New York Times Science bestseller list. I write like advice on how to hack yourself books. When it hit the science list, that was like one of the biggest honors of my entire life. And it's because I went so deep

in a mitochondrial biology, like how does your body make power? And it turns out these little angtion bacteria that are in your cells, they are light sensitive, especially the ones in your eyes, but in the rest of your body as well. They even use light to communicate with each other. So what we're doing when we sit under LED lights,

we look at these bright screens, if you do it right before bed, it completely jacks up your body's ability to go into rest and reset mode. So when you go to sleep at night, even if you still go to sleep, your sleep quality doesn't work. And some parts of your cells think it's daytime,

they're trying to make energy. Some parts of your cells think it's nighttime, they're trying to make energy, some parts of your cells think it's nighttime, they're trying to rest and recover, so you don't get like a synchronized effort, either kick ass or recover like crazy. And LED lights have this huge uneven lighting spectrum with a ton of blue light, which is the hardest part on your biology.

So I actually started one of my portfolio companies, it's called TrueDark, and their deal is, they're gonna solve the world's junk light problem, because bad light in your eyes causes sugar cravings. Bad light in your eyes destroys sleep quality, and we keep putting the equivalent of corn syrup that we've never put on our plate. We put it in the light above our desk, and it affects our brain in the same way that corn syrup was.

I think this is one of those emerging areas for anyone who's into fitness. You've got to recover if you're not sleeping well and you're not turning all your energy under in the day, you're not doing it right. And the light you work out under, the light you see when you first wake up in the morning, the light you see before you go to bed, it's a powerful epigenetic signal. And it's one that we've tweaked enormously in the last five years. And when we change our light bulbs, just no one ever thought about it. I think I think you could even make the argument that that's probably up on the top of the totem pole too, right? As far as priorities, because that's what I always try and explain to people that are looking for the next biohacking supplement or thing that's out there is

addressing some of the big rocks first. Do you have like an order of operation for you Dave or that you tell people like, you know, address sleep, address this, address that, and then we can talk about the latest greatest supplement that's gonna help assist this or does it not matter to you? I would say most important is food. Second most important is light. And after that, and light controls sleep to a large extent.

And after that, you're starting to get into toxins and then temperature of all things. And these are all external environmental variables that your mitochondria are sensing in real time to try and figure out what can it do to make your body survive the longest. And it's doing all of this in a distributed calculating manner entirely separate from your conscious mind. So when they get a segment, it's like, oh, I'm in a world with tons of energy. Oh, and I know it's morning, so I should turn on all my energy right now. Then all of a sudden, I go, wow, I feel really good. And then you have more

willpower because willpower comes from the same electrons that come when you eat food and combine them with oxygen. So for me, I mean, I'm talking to you guys right now in front of a screen that's running software that cuts out most of the blue light. I'm wearing my chewed art glasses that cut out half the blue light and I'll switch to the sleeping glasses an hour before bed. And I've got a reptile lamp above my desk that stimulates sunlight, because I'm in Canada where it's dark right now. And so I'm just telling about,

hey, it's daytime right now, act like it's daytime already. And at nighttime, there is no bright white light in my house. I have red lights outdoors, so I don't disrupt the wildlife with junk light. And in my own place where I stay up late at night writing and

Recording stuff. It's all illuminated like a submarine. It's all red and when I do that I sleep like a baby and I lose weight and I feel good and if I travel I use glasses and it matters as much as food And you know you don't have to be paranoid about your food You don't have to be paranoid about your light But if you think it doesn't matter at all you're kind of missing a big variable there So you're you're very much into longevity and thinking about that through all these hacks. What does your exercise regimen look like?

Like what does that look like on a daily basis, a weekly basis, like what are you doing? Well, I just opened bulletproof labs in Santa Monica based on what I'm doing. And I look at exercise as just another environmental signal that tells the body what to do. And I do things like cryotherapy, whole body vibration, where the body vibrates 30 times a second,

which is a little more effective than rebounding. So when I wake up in the morning, after I drop my kids off at school, I spend about 10 to 15 minutes on the bullet-proof vibes, a whole wide vibration thing, 30 times a second, usually in front of a tanning lamp that's optimized for my vitamin D levels, not for making me have a dark tan.

And what I'm doing there, I'm getting my good light, and I'm stimulating my lymphatic system, and this is the effectiveness of going for a walk. If it's sunny outside, I'll just go for a walk, but it's rainy. I'm in Canada right now. So I do that. I'll stretch while I'm doing vibrating like that. And then for muscle stimulation, what matters, at least in the research I'm familiar with, is the speed at which you can exhaust a muscle. The faster you can do it, the more the muscle grows. So I will do instead of lifting iron the way I did for a long time, I'll use things like the ARX, which is a computer-driven winch system.

So I'm fighting something that will always win, and I can fight it the maximum output my body's capable of all along the strength curve. And when I do that, I can see how I'm doing on a computer, which always motivates me to push even harder so I can beat myself last time. And then result is it completely kicks my ass. And if I do that once a week, my muscles are bigger and stronger than they need to be, given my goals. And if I do that twice a week, I have to buy new shirts. I don't like that. I have a huge fan of yoga, believe it or not. And the recommendations from headstrong are, you need to go for a walk for 20 minutes today. There's a whole body of research on just movement to stimulate mitochondrial biogenesis. And

then there's a whole body of research around high intensity and interval training. So either you lift the heavy things once a week or you sprint for 90 seconds. One of the hacks from the book that I'm a huge fan of you sprint like a tiger is gonna kill you. And instead of walking, you lay on your back, the way animals do. You literally lay down, which just allows your heart rate to recover faster than you get up and you sprint again.

And it's shocking what laying on your back does. And CrossFiters all know this. They're always on their back when they don't have to work out for a reason. They got great programming. But that's what I do. And then when I'm doing my cardio, I usually have iced compression bands around my arms and legs. This is all the stuff that's at labs where people to go and play with.

A lot of this is $100,000 gear for pro sports. How far? I'm recording this above a million dollar biohacking lab at my house where I test all the stuff out. Because I think it matters. The deal is how much energy and time do I have to put into this to generate a signal that caused my body to do what I wanted to do? And it turns out I can do a signal equivalent

to about two and a half hours of cardio in 21 minutes of cardio. But it's uncomfortable. How do they measure that? What of cardio in 21 minutes of cardio, but it's uncomfortable. How do they measure that? What do you mean 21 minutes equals an hour? Like, what do you mean by that? 21 minutes of interval training on a machine when I'm sitting on an ice pack, and I've got compression on my arms and legs with ice water running through it.

What's happening there is I'm building up lactic acid in my extremities and because I'm sitting on chilled ice while I do this all the blood that would have gone to cool my skin stays in the brain in the organs. So I'm exercising. But at the end of 21 minutes, when you take off the compression bands, all the lactic acid that builds up goes into the brain all at once at levels equivalent to what happens after a really long cardio workout. Lactic acid is a signal of the brain that says,

you need to get stronger. It basically believes I just went for a long workout, even though I didn't. Oh yeah. Very professional with that. So they're measuring lactic acid, and that's what they're saying, same lactic acid as someone an hour.

Okay, so 21 minutes with this, you get the same lactic acid measurements, but they're not measuring other things in terms of like adaptation, progress, that kind of stuff. You're just talking about the lactic acid? Well, in that case, I'm talking about lactic acid for the 21 minute thing, but there's actually a whole body of evidence around what happens when you do compression. The katsu guys have a style of compression.

It turns out, restricting blood flow can change the signal to the body pretty dramatically. And I stack that. In fact, that system is called the VASPER, the one I'm using at a little proof labs. And there's a bunch of research about that. In fact, the space program astronauts are using that. A bunch of pro athletes are using it now. And you actually see changes in VO2 max, changes in cardio, respiratory fitness, they've looked at heat shock protein and things like that that are actually lower when you want to be lower during exercise, so you get less stress on the heart, even though you're still getting a high heart rate.

Right. Yeah, we're very familiar with Katsu is the blood flow restrictive training, which we've actually written a guide on, and we've talked about quite a bit. It's very fascinating research on it, and us being experienced using it, it's a tool that can be added to a normal routine, although it doesn't seem to replace a normal team. It seems like, and we tend to do this, it's something cyclical that humans tend to do is that we'll take something and we'll find

or try to find a way to make it shorter or faster or do it indoors rather than outdoors and try to create or mimic the same adaptation. But we tend to fall short with a lot of these things. So it's a very interesting field of research and the way you short with a lot of these things. So it's a very interesting field of research and the way you're applying a lot of these things, but to try and replace, you know, for example. It'd be interesting to compare the two.

Dave, you had the opportunity, how have you been doing this long enough to where you can actually switch up your modalities and say, okay, I've been running this, sitting on my ice with myself, I'm trying to envision you right now. So you've got to tell me you have a picture somewhere so I can look at this picture. So I'm trying to picture you all wrapped up with compression, sitting on an ice block, doing exercises.

Like have you compared that like to a traditional program where you're working out for an hour and then you're doing strength training and then compare that to like a high-perture feature. Have you actually compared it compared them with them with other modalities of training? Well, in terms of being a human guinea pig, I've certainly spent a lot of time doing other modalities. I haven't, I'll say a flat out, I haven't had the discipline to say, all right, I'm going to go do another modality that takes a long time.

And partly, I've got two young kids. I'm CEO of Adventure Back Company. I keep writing these books and I've got a bulletproof radio. So my assumption is that everyone who has a young family is not working out as much as they like to. Before I had kids, it was like, look, I'm gonna do a yoga class every day, you know, hit the gym a couple times a week, you know, go for long hikes with a backpack, outdoors,

and those are still luxuries for a lot of people. But we've got 7 billion people and something like 5 billion are living in cities now. And look, I live in an organic farm. I can go for a walk in the forest. And I do that on purpose. I built my life to support that. Unfortunately, I picked a rainy dark part of the world at least in midwinter. But I literally believe that that is better.

I just know that there are some days where there simply isn't time because I'm not going to get family time if I could do that. So if I can do 20-1 minutes and so 2.5 hours, I'm going to take the benefits of that. And the benefits per minute were higher. Yeah, the benefits are going for a 2.5 hour walk and sunlight with my shirt off, probably barefoot, probably would have been even better. That's just going to happen today. And I think we're all stuck in that world where, all right, let's get the return on investment

based on what we have to invest, even if it's only three minutes a day. What's going to give you the most you can get there, acknowledging that if I want to be a fitness competitor, I'm going to have to take a very different track than what I do now. But man, I'm pretty stoked being 45 and I'm at 9.9% body fat based on my last scan. And I don't, I'm not hungry ever. And I don't have to spend, you know, 12 hours a week exercising. Yeah. Stuff like that. No, no, no, totally. I mean, you're, that's exactly the approach people should take, you know, trying to maximize their time because modern life doesn't allow for, you know,

devotion to everything for hours and hours a day. And you know, the other side of it too, is when you're looking at optimizing performance, you're not, it looks like in my experience, you know, for example, optimal performance protein intake, studies will show is around 0.6 to 0.8 grams per pound of body weight and lean individuals. Well, that's too much protein for longevity. But for optimum strength and muscle,

you know, that's ideal. You look at athletes, look at like the highest performing athletes and pretty much any sport, and they are not optimal health, and they won't be just, they won't display signs of optimal longevity. It doesn't matter if it't display signs of optimal longevity it doesn't matter if it's a bodybuilder doesn't matter if it's a marathon runner a football player basketball player extra pushing your body to any extreme uh... will take you out of optimal longevity so it's almost like you know it's you got to kind of trade one for the other

uh... and i think the same is true for you know trying to you know push and the same is true for, you know, trying to, you know, push and hack our biology. It's, you know, you're maximizing performance or you're maximizing longevity or you're trying to find kind of a happy meeting in between. It was funny.

Well, back to New York Times called me almost muscular and I'm like, yes, that's exactly what I want to be. Because my goal is to lift to at least 180. And that is not like a joke or anything like that I truly think 120 is achieved with what we know today and based on what's happened in the last 60 years I think in the next 60 years we're gonna learn more about the causes of aging and I you know I do stem cells my own stem cells and some other ones and

Any sort of anti-aging therapy that I can find that looks like it's a longevity therapy, I will go play with it and experiment with it because I'm deadly serious about that. I want to feel amazing when I'm 150. And I know because when I was 26, I had an 88 year old board member at the nonprofit, I run dating a 35 year old. And not like a Hugh Hefner thing.

Like a boy. Actually like in shape and happy. And like his brain worked and I'm like, I don't even be like that. And that's my goal and everything seemed to work. That guy, that's a true longevity right there. I had a client like that once and years ago and he was 75 and his girlfriend was a young 40. And it was pretty cool a lot. But besides wanting to be like that,

would you say that you're maybe in the past, you had your body image issues got fit, became obsessed with that, that maybe now you're obsessed with all of these methods of hacking. Do you think that it may be a poor relationship with body image or wanting to search for the next thing? Because there's a lot of things that you're doing to yourself. And I'm sure critics have said this to you before, does it feel like an obsession? Does it feel like it's unhealthy?

You know, I've dealt with unhealthy things. I've had emotional eating and tons of cravings and stuff like that. I have a passion for this. And you could say, all right, the guy who's obsessively upgraded his 1969 Mustang 40 years ago, was he obsessed with it? Yeah, he was making a hot rod, right? And I'm a computer hacker by training. Was I obsessed with upgrading the cooling unit so I could overclock my processor in the early 90s, you picture, as I was. I could tell you how much rambles on my video card before anyone else, right? hit your ass so I was. I could tell you how much rambles on my video card

before anyone else, right? And we have this long history of hacking things. And I'm a hacker, I've always been a hacker. And this is my current passion. It's like how do I make it so my brain works all the time? So I can remember everything I want to remember. So I can learn faster and I can live longer with a super high quality of life.

I just don't know anything more interesting than that. But if I find it, that'll be my new passion, but at least have, you know, built up, the things I've built up now. No, I think that's great. I think that's really great. And if I left it up to Sal, he'd sit here and talk to you about science

and fucking fitness all day long, but I've been excited to talk to you about your business brain, because for someone to make $6 million by the age of 26 and then pivot into bullet proof and take it to where you've taken at this level. The vision behind that, I'm fascinated with that. I wanna dive into, did you see this all the way through?

And what are you currently interested in right now? Like I'm very, I don't know if you've read the book, The Forks, an incredible read. Talks about the big four companies Forts, an incredible read. Talks about the big four companies with Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple. I always miss Apple. I don't know why I miss Apple, because they don't seem like they fit there. But the four of them and what they're doing and what the future looks like in the next

10 years with Lexa and right away up sales to everything, how does your brain tick with that and your company and your vision Well, I I spent a lot of time with Peter de Mendes and Navine Jane And Peter's the guy who created the X prize the the $10 million prize for private exploration of space and Every year I get together with him and a bunch of other entrepreneurs and and we talk about the future, and we talk to the CTOs of big companies about the future of robotics and AI. And we're using machine learning now at Bulletproof Labs. We're feeding the exercise data

and the physiological data from all the people who come through into machine learning to figure out, okay, which of these systems do you use to get what goals for what person at what stage are they? And any data we can get goes into the system. At 40 years of the end, the neurofeedback company that I created with the mission of racing the global IQ by 15 points. Yeah, that might take a little while, but I'm up for that.

Well, okay, we're the same thing. It goes into machine learning. So all the stuff that you and I would miss is human beings. Well, this pattern matching, we can do that better now. So I'm all over this deep technology stuff because it's driving the pace of innovation. My whole career has been around disruption. It was actually in my job description most of the time. But like that company that held Google's first server, it also held the Facebook's first servers. And basically all of the big, old web brands that you know

now, well, we were there and we built the buildings and put in the network. And, you know, I did a lot of that work. I even ran the program at the University of California to teach engineers how to build that stuff. So being there at the beginning, you see how rapid change happens, but until you've been through a cycle or two of disruption, what the internet did to phone companies is it completely just kick their ass. And my job is to do that to big food right now with bullet proof. What are you doing wrong? Your algorithm is how good can I make it taste and how cheap is it and how

pretty is the sticker on the front. And that's been the whole algorithm for food since the very beginning of marketing. Right. And my algorithm for food is how does it make you feel, how good does it taste, how convenient is it, and then how much does it cost. And my theory, based on my own experience, people are willing to pay a little bit more for food that makes them feel really good and not have cravings and your brain fog and all the other stuff that comes from eating crap. And until that gets baked into our food culture where the very largest food companies on the planet wouldn't think of launching something that doesn't make people feel amazing, then the disruption is still just an open opportunity, but you can disrupt from just a place of absolute

joy because it's fun to watch stupid stuff break. And well, you know, when you're doing it stupidly because that's the way you've always done it, someone's going to come through and do it better and they're going to do it faster and faster. And the stuff that I helped to build on the internet, it's so cheap and easy to go out and start something and find a problem and then solve it. And you can become successful in a very small period of time. What I spend on web hosting in a month at Bulletproof

is, I don't even know how much it is, but it's a tiny percentage of what I would have quoted my own company 20 years ago to get on the internet. It would have been a million dollars a month to pay for e-commerce and servers and internet and all that stuff, and now it's part of the budget, but it's not part of the budget that breaks the bank. And that has happened in the last 20 years.

And so that means a young entrepreneur right now says, you know, I see a problem. I don't like how companies do this. I can do better. You can do better with a million dollars in funding instead of in 50 million dollars in funding. And you can do it in two years instead of 20 years. And it's only getting faster. And that just, I wake up every morning, happy about that.

That's a really exciting, so what do you think bulletproof is disrupting right now and what do you see at disrupting in the future? Well, we're disrupting the coffee business right now. This whole conversation about how does your coffee make you feel and this whole, is it okay to put bad fat and high fructose corn syrup into your coffee? And the answer is no, it's not okay,

but we do it because it tastes good and it satisfies a sugar craving. But what if you put the brain octane oil in the coffee and the coffee itself doesn't have toxins in it that come from cutting corners and coffee production? You're like, oh, I drink that and suddenly my brain turns on in a different way and I like that feeling.

And I'm going to do it at text to get that feeling, even if it means I would change what I put on my plate, even if it means I'd change how I sleep, because once you feel how you're supposed to feel, you're going to change all the other variables because that feeling is the most precious part of being alive. And like I was missing that. I don't even know what the difference

between cravings and hunger, because I only had cravings. I just thought they were the same as hunger. And until I sorted out my biology, it just wasn't clear. So, bulletproof, yeah, we're going to disrupt coffee and make people talk about what is this coffee doing for me instead of, where was it grown? Is it one of Juan Valdes's relative who picked it and all that stuff? That's the window dressing, man. Where's the science? That's part of it. When it comes, where's the science? And so that's part of it.

And then when it comes to food, things like the Bulbjurb College in bars, I mean, we've been eating junk protein in bars. You talked earlier about what too much protein does for you. Well, the wrong kind of protein also limits your ability to get old and be healthy. So you can pump yourself full of soy protein or excessive amounts of way protein and all these other things, but they come at a cost of inflammation. We're missing collagen proteins. So I'm like, what's the highest quality protein that's missing from a diet I can put in the bars? How do I add some of these ketones into the bar with brain octane? And what we came up with is something where

people say, do I want to spend a little bit more for a bar that makes me not even want to think about food for a few hours? And data says that people love that. I certainly do. Yeah, go back to the minor toxins and coffee, because I remember, I don't know, was it maybe like a year ago, I remember there was a bunch of beef between Joe Rogan

and something that you stated about the minor toxins. I would love to hear your point of view with all this. Oh, sure. So, bulletproof coffee, by his own admission, it seems like it changed Joe Rogan's life. you stated about the might of the i would love to hear your point of view with all this oh sure so uh... book of coffee by his own admission seems like it changed uh... joe rogan's life and he he talked about it quite a lot uh... and uh... when one of his friends uh... lunched a coffee company that was not lab testing their coffee and tried to steal the idea i just told my followers on

my own page hey uh... guys that coffee isn't tested it it says on the webpage. So I'm not going to endorse a coffee, it doesn't know what's in it. And I got some angry emails, which I have saved. And the next day I was a bad man. So same thing, to this day, I don't think Joe, I don't listen to a show, but I don't

really know if he's still says bad stuff about me or not. But every time he says my name, my sales keep going up. So, you know, it's okay to, you know, say I'm a bad person. I'll tell you I got 36 studies. You can Google one ugly mug bulletproof and that that blog post will come up. Most countries on the planet have legal limits on Moltoxans and coffee because it's a known industry problem. The US doesn't. Really? I got got oh heck yeah so it's a conspiracy right because all these countries are supporting my ideas oh wait and then on top of that uh it's even better because of former president of the specialty coffee association i'm videotaping him at our plantation in Guatemala and he's telling the story about oh

yeah i was in j Japan when the Japanese trade minister rejected 1,000 containers of coffee because they were too moldy for Japanese consumers. And I'm like, and what did you do with the coffee? He goes, we send it to the US. He's not lost against it. Wow. I can't make this stuff up.

Like how do you do that? So I can tell you that the stuff with Joe appears to be economically motivated. And you know, you can say bad things about me all day long. It's all fine. Like, there's so much data behind this and between the science and that blog post, the preponderance of global governments agreeing with my position. Man, sometimes, sometimes people disagree with you no matter what you say.

So how many coffee companies would you say in the US are actually taking the steps that you're taking? I don't think any of them are taking the steps I'm taking because I have the system's view of biology and the system's view of coffee. So it starts in the soil, it ends in your cup, and there's thousands of micro decisions you make along the way that influence the likelihood of this happening. So we went through the system of coffee and made the decisions that lower the creation of toxins and came up with a test for 27 toxins

that we track in our coffee to make sure that our process is working. So the green coffee that goes into the roaster is really important. Our green coffee is super clean because we changed the process for that. No other coffee company's doing that. I won't tell you every coffee on the planet is moldy,

that would be ridiculous. I'll say it's a big known industry and that the industry targets government standards for whatever country they're selling into and those government standards are too high for living a very long time. And there's a whole bunch of reasons for that, but the main reason is called multi-micotoxin synergy. And this is documented in a bunch of pub you know, pub-ed studies and things. But the bottom line is a government level of safe toxin for toxin number one, when you combine it with a safe level for toxin number two, becomes dramatically unsafe. That's where we're testing for 27 of them. And, you know, am I obsessive about that? Yes. I want the cleanest coffee on the planet. I'm okay with that. That sounds like a big part of your business having to provide quality control and manage that.

How do you even cover that? It's been hundreds of thousands of dollars on it and have multiple people in my quality assurance and R&D and scientific affairs offices. We raised $30 million in venture funding in order to do this right. Wow. Well, what you were saying earlier about how you,

you're making a bet that people are gonna be willing to pay more for better quality for food. I couldn't agree with more. I think we have solved, we solved some of the early issues that we had with food, which was not getting enough food, starvation, maybe lacking particular important nutrients. And now we've kind of traded that.

And now we're dealing with, seems like chronic disease. So although we don't get infectious disease and we don't necessarily get things like scurvy and stuff like that anymore, chronic disease seems to be exploding and on the rise. What are some of the major toxins that you're, that you look at? You talked about glyphosate. Like, what's your view on glyphosates?

And how many of those should people avoid or should it just all be organic for everyone? It should be organic for everyone. Glyphosate is a terribly evil substance because they sold it on this this false Statement that oh it won't harm humans because it only harms bacteria Guys, we have back to know what's inside our gut bacteria Do you know what's inside our cells that makes all of our energy bacteria? They're called mitochondria there's ancient rod shaped bacteria that we incorporate it into our cells and

The horrible thing about glyphosate is that it glyin, it stands for glycine, the amino acid. Your collagen in your body has primarily made out of glycine. So you will take up this toxin that's in food that's not organic and oftentimes it's even in organic food because they're just pumping it everywhere. And your body will try and make collagen out of roundup. and your body will try and make collagen out of roundup. And what's up, what abs is dysfunctional collagen. Now collagen handles hydration in the body. It's your facial planes. If you're gonna be working out,

you need fascia that works, obviously. And your ligaments, your cartilage, all that stuff is based on collagen. So now you're doping your collagen with something that causes inflammation if it accidentally gets incorporated in there. Collagen also carries an electrical signal throughout the body. All the acupuncture meridians run through collagen. And so, wait a minute, this stuff is not okay. Not to mention it destroys soil integrity.

And the bacterial biome and the fungal biome and the soil is the foundation for your organic vegan food or whatever you're eating. You ruin the soil with this chemical. It takes hundreds of years to grow good soil back. I'm more worried about that than I am about mercury, although I'll tell you I don't want either one of those in my body. Those are two big toxins I pay attention to. I swear every time I talk about the subject, I get messages from people that are like, well, I guess I'm just screwed.

There's like all the stuff everywhere. Like, what do I do? You know, what do I do now? Everything seems to be screwed up, but unfortunately that's the reality. Is that everywhere you turn, you gotta kind of self-regulate because no one's doing it for us. You know, we gotta keep an eye on all these different things

and it's really unfortunate. You've been successful most of your life, even before you got into the health and wellness space, where did that come from? Were you a driven kid? Was it from your parents? You know, I was driven as a kid. I don't think it's from my parents.

It's because I was afraid of failing. You can be successful because you're running from something. And that's how you, that is not a path to happiness. And it's not really even a good path to success. I've worked with enough entrepreneurs as a coach, where a good number of entrepreneurs get successful and profoundly unhappy and divorced or depressed or even like suicidal

because of that. No matter what you do, it's never gonna be good enough if that's your motivation. So I made $6 million and it was 26, but I lost it when I was 28. And the reason I lost it is straight up is because I wasn't willing to ask anyone for help. What 26 year old kid do you know

who knows how to manage $6 million and keep it? What did you do, good of Vegas? Yeah, yeah, yeah, hookers and blow. Yeah, exactly, every time. What happened was the company where I worked, my career advanced so much that I was allowed to attend board meetings. I was the only non-executive at the company there.

I was in charge of Mergers and Acquisition due diligence on the technology front. I knew all of our deals and it was illegal for me to trade my stock. A good advisor had I trusted anyone enough to have a good advisor. Would it tell me, Dave, quit your damn job, take your $6 million, put it in your pocket, and go leave your life and do the most amazing things you can think of because you're set for life. And you know what I told myself, I literally said this over lunch show friend,

and I said, you know, wanna have $10 million, I'll be happy. Like, what kind of a jerk says that? Like, we got a broken person. And what was going on there was, like, fear of failure, never being good enough no matter what you do. And I had to learn that lesson.

And you compare that with like like a guy from my generation, Mark Andrewsson from Andrewsson, Horowitz, very successful multi billionaire. I wrote a review of his web browser when he wrote mosaic 1.0. I wrote it for PC Magazine. I sold the first product ever sold over the internet. It was a t-shirt that said caffeine, my drug of choice, sold out in my dorm room.

And I was an entrepreneur magazine, and I was 23 years old for doing that. And you know what, Andrew said that he went to Silicon Valley and asked Jim Clark, the CEO of a major billion dollar company for help. And you know what I did, I said, I got this. I'm not going to take help from anyone. That's the difference in mindset between someone who's got an abundance mindset, someone who understands that you don't get there alone, I didn't understand any of that.

So a lot of my success came from, because I was terrified of starving, terrified of not being good enough, not having enough, and just never being happy. And where does that come from? Where does that come from though? Was it as a kid, did you grow up real poor? Would you have a tough childhood? Like why that fear?

You really want to know, all right, I'll tell you. Yeah. I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck. And I didn't lose oxygen, I was born, but I came into the world full on at a deep like cellular nervous system level believing something was trying to kill me. I'd always be alone, I'd never be safe. Because that was the best programming to keep me alive. Because if someone tries to kill you on your way into the world, even though you don't

understand any of this, but that's what your body's going to do. So I literally had this wired in and I became aware of this when I was about 30 and I spent a lot of time like reprogramming early birth trauma and I see this over and over and super successful people. They were bullied, they were abused, they had a rough birth and they're still dealing with that and the way they deal with the world. And when you realize you can just reprogram that stuff so that the visceral response is gone.

Like, wow, I was spending a lot of energy on that and it wasn't providing any return. And when I dropped all that stuff and I got rid of the trauma instead of just becoming aware of it, but I stopped the signal from mattering like that. That's when you both really started to grow. And that's when I realized, look, I have enough. It doesn't take that much money to be comfortable, but what's the impact of what I'm doing? It doesn't matter.

And that's what wakes me up every morning. And the most successful people I know aren't keeping score with their bank accounts at all. That's not even how you think about it. It's such a tough. Make sure there's enough there to fuel your vision. But after that, it's like, how important is what you're doing? It's so tough, right?

Because it's like, what makes you successful is also something you have to shed. So many people, they succeed because they're so afraid or they're driven by their insecurities and it gets them where they're at and then they're at a point where they're like, I need to change that person who got me all the success, I need to change who that is because now it's just, it's making me feel terrible. Shout out to Lewis Howes and Mask of Masculinity right there. Talks about that. Totally. Very, very difficult.

What kind of therapies you talked about doing the neural feedback? Have you done any work with psychedelics or any other therapies where you kind of die? Because I know there's so many layers to that, you know what I mean? Oh, yeah, so many layers. I first became aware of that specific trauma for me, not to count all the bullying and all that stuff. But I became aware of that doing whole tropic breathing, which was invented by Stan Groff, who's been on my show.

And this guy is now about 90 something, but he invented psychedelic therapy and treated 3,000 patients with LSD on a therapist's couch in the 60s in Czechoslovakia. And he ended up realizing that you could do special breathing exercises to make people trip the same way. And I went and I did that kind of work and just became aware of, wow,

this is what's really going on in my head. About 20 years ago, I did ayahuasca in Peru before it was cool. They actually were like, they're like, you're white. Why would you ever do that? You know, you're gonna throw up, right? That's only for the village people, and I attracted a guy down and did it,

and I'd read about it and said, this might be helpful and it was. And so I definitely have explored the psychedelic side, but the reason I started 40 years as in to do neurofeedback is that neurofeedback is something I'd done at home for 20 years, but when you do it in a focused, intense setting for five days where you actually have someone holding you accountable and really looking at how to go in and edit the programming and the brain,

that's what let me really go deep and like turn off the buttons. The other technique that is really effective, something I recommend for a lot of people I work with and that I've used myself. It's called EMDR. And if you know you were bullied or you know what's going on, you can sit down with a therapist and there's like a reset mode for the brain that you can go into by moving your eyes in a certain way. And when you do that, a good therapist in one or two sessions sometimes can take a really deep trauma and just like turn it off. Wow. So, so change the way you physically react to the to the meant to the thought of the

trauma. But it's not really the thought of the trauma. The time the thought happens is way too late. Too late. You talked earlier about how like the body is a pattern matching machine and I loved when you said that because what happens is the body is constantly scanning the world around you on a microsecond by microsecond basis to detect threats and make sure that you react in time. So by the time you have a chance to form a thought, you've already had the change of physiology that comes from anxiety. So the anxiety stress happened because you walked into a room and the guy there in the board room looks a lot like that guy that punched you in fifth grade.

And you didn't think about that. You didn't even remember that, but the body's like, get ready to kill. And so you just, you get a little twins, your heart rate changes, your eyes dilated a little bit, your galvanic skin response, like the amount of microswetting your skin changes, and your endgymatabasum just shifted from repair and restore to get ready to run or kill.

And if you do that, like hundreds of times a day for no reason at all, it's gonna work you down over the course of 20 years, and that's what I was doing. It's like 20% I believe, what that we consciously are aware of that our brain is like downloading for at every moment. Isn't it something like that? I can't remember.

I read it in some book one time. Have you heard of that before, Dave? I've definitely heard of that. And it's kind of hard to really put a pin on it because what's going on is there's this distributed system throughout the body that's picking up environmental signals and they keep getting filtered at each layer. So by the time you become aware of it in your brain, it's gone through the body and you kind of stripped off layers of meaning all the way through until only the most important

stuff bubbles up. The problem is something that's two layers down from a conscious awareness just change your hormone levels and cause you get a little shot of adrenaline which raises your blood, sugar levels and all these things. You don't know that's going on. You're not supposed to know what's going on. It's an automatic system to keep tigers from eating you. The problem is I thought almost everything was a tiger.

I didn't think this consciously, but I was wired that way. When I learned to do things like heart rate variability and all these awareness things, all that's turned off now. I mean, I've had times where I really felt, wow, is Bultriff going to, is it going to go down here? You know, like, like, huge critics coming on or, you know, stuff that I didn't plan and just being able to, you know what, I'm going to handle this. I'm going to do the right thing.

And I'm going to be able to sleep at night. I'm going to wake up the next morning. I'm going to keep doing the right thing until we fix whatever the problem is or until it blows over whatever it is. And to be able to do that without the visceral fear of death that grips most entrepreneurs, oh my god, it's a better way to live. But it also allows me to make decisions as a human being instead of as a reactive animal, which is what a lot of people do when they're back to into a corner. Yeah, I was just looking at research recently about, you know, it's like these patterns get stored in the most primitive

parts of your brain, you know, the cerebellum or the brainstem. And those are like the subconscious, just where you react. By the time you, by the time you're conscious of it, it's too late, it's already taken hold. Body's already responded. Yeah, and the conscious part of the brain, the frontal lobe, for example, it can change those patterns, but it has to be a practice. You have to consciously stop it, change it, reverse it, and you've got to make this pattern over and over and over again to hardwire it into that, what they call the reptilian part of your brain.

If you don't do that, then it'll never stop, even if you're trying to be conscious of it, when it happens, it's just one of those things. That's why they think things like psychedelics or some of these therapies are so effective is because they create the sense of profoundness. That feeling of profoundness, that emotion tends to wire things more permanently

in that reptilian part of our brain, that more primitive part of our brain, we have to have that sense of, whoa, and that's why they think some of these substances or some of these techniques are effective versus just me sitting here talking to you, which would take session after session after session of practice to cause that particular change. Dave, what would you say during this whole process of building bulletproof, what would you say has been the biggest challenge that you faced? One of the challenges that I faced is when I started this, everyone was all about, hey,

I'm going to sell information products. I'm a contrarian and a little stubborn. I'm like, all right, I'm going to sell physical products. And I'm a contrarian and a little stubborn. And I'm like, all right, I'm in a sell physical products. So when you decide to sell physical products and you're self-funded out of your paycheck, it becomes a bit of a challenge. OK, how do I make enough coffee? Like, how do I not run out?

So there were times when demand grew. And like, wow, I'm out of product. What am I going to do? I got to make more. The decision to seek venture investing. And that means you're selling a portion of the company to investment companies. And if you pick the wrong one, you don't want to let people

have a piece of your baby, right? Unless you trust them. And you know that they're good people with a shared goal. And I've been very fortunate on that front too, but those are giant challenges where your thing is gonna happen or your website goes down for two days and I don't even know who to call to fix it.

And I know I probably could fix it, but I have to quit my day job if I fix that because I'm a technologist, but I'm working full time while I started in the company. The other big challenge for me has been, I really like to help people. And knowing when someone has, has been of service to the company or not, but also knowing when they've hit their capacity and then finding the right place within the company versus either just continuing to promote someone beyond

where they have experience has been a real learning challenge for me. There aren't a lot of schools that teach you to grow a company from zero to a hundred plus million dollars in a few years. I've lived through that in my career a couple times, but I wasn't the guy running the show and making the hard calls. Instead of being able to take care of the people who care so much about the vision and people I work with every day and make sure that I've got the right people,

the right levels with the right skill sets and I bring in new DNA, but new DNA that has the experience to help the people who've been here for so long and the right culture to not break it. Cause it's easy to hire someone from Philip Morris. And maybe they have some good marketing skills. But you're probably not the right thing. Do you do something every day to make yourself better?

Stuff like that. It's really a challenge. And a lot of it is a personal development challenge. And I find that the bigger the company grows, and the more people we reach, the more important it is that I keep my head on straight, that I have core integrity. It's not enough to act a certain way. If inside your feeling fear or stress or anxiety or uncertainty, people know it. It's my job

to be rock solid at my core and then to share that with the company. That's really the biggest challenge I've had as an entrepreneur, but it's also the most fun. Would you say there's unique challenges with every phase of growing to a 100 million dollar company? For example, I always talk about scaling a business. One thing to build a business that is sustainable enough to support an income for yourself and maybe your family.

But then that next level to make a million dollar company and then to make a ten million dollar company, then a hundred million dollar, the each one is its own monster. Do you do recognize or remember like specific challenges that you went through at each stage of that of growing bulletproof? Yeah, I think the numbers you just mentioned are pretty good ones. What gets you to a million dollars and a lot of companies don't even get there. And what gets you to a million dollars, I mean, I still remember the first day, I'm like, wow.

We just did a million dollars in revenue, and you're like, your head's spinning, like this is so incredible, especially when I haven't put my day job yet. And that doesn't mean I put a million dollars in my pocket. It means I took every penny the company made, and I used it to hire new people, or buy more product

or to put it back into the company. So it was bootstrapped. But just that at a certain point in the cloud, I've got to now create an organization. Now when you're doing a million dollars, you can have three, four or five people working for you and you can manage them all. And at a certain point in the cloud,

I actually can't talk every day to everyone who works in the company because I don't have enough hours in the day and then I don't do any work. So all of a sudden, I have to have trusted lieutenants. Who do I trust? Do they have the skills? And then that's what gets you to that five million or 10 million. And then the challenges about 10 million are very different. They're financial.

I'm going to run out of cash. Do I have appropriate controls in place? What's my HR policy look like? Who should run that? And then just finding the executive team who can support you and then having the personal ability to trust and empower your executives to make decisions that you're never gonna know about.

And this is something that drives me nuts. You see these people getting really mad, something happens, well, the CEO should know. I'm like, guys, if you have 100 or 1000 people working for you, you cannot have a map of everyone's brain inside your head, because you're just one human. So what you did, you set a culture, you set operating tenants, operating principles,

values for the company, a culture, in a strategic direction, and you hired the best people you could find, and you weed out the bad actors if any of them make it in. And still, sometimes a company will do something like, wow, we didn't plan that. And it's a tough thing to do. And I hope my people have very, very high standards. And they meet them because we have a shared mission like that.

But it is a different mindset to just one day sit down and be like no matter how hard I work, no matter how much I email. There is no way that you can know everything going on in a person in a company of 20 employees. It will not happen if you're CEO and if you try to make it happen, you will completely break your company. And that's where most entrepreneurs, that is where they never go beyond $5 million because they don't trust. Well, I think that's the most common thing I hear with, because it's when you build something by yourself that you can completely control all by yourself.

It's one thing, but then once like you said, you have to trust these others. Did you have, can you recall like conversations or a guy you had to fire or scenarios that was a major learning lesson for you? Like of learning to either one, let go, and let somebody else run that position. Or like you said earlier about creating that culture, can you remember specific times where you learned that or went through that growth spurt?

It happens to any company that grows where someone who you're incredibly grateful for for getting into a million dollars. They probably don't have their career experience to get you to $10 million. They've never done it before. And you could say, all right, do it anyway. The only problem is it's going to cost a lot for them to do it because they're going to go down a lot of blind alleys because they haven't done it. Whereas the right thing to do is go ahead and say, all right, have you done this $10 million

thing two or three times in your career? Even better, yeah, have you done a $40 million thing? Great. Come on in and run that division or run that process and you're gonna be in charge. And at that point, if I've done a good job, I've already queued up the people who grew it and composited them very well and said, all right,

I'm gonna bring in someone who can teach you a thing about how to grow this to 10 or 20 or $30 million dollars, whatever the number is, right? But you have to have hired someone and also set it up so their expectation is that, look, you're probably not going to be running this business when it's giant, but there's always a place here for you, right? So there will always be learning, there will always be the ability to serve and to push your limits, but you're not gonna get to drive the cargo ship if all you've ever done

is drive a motorboat. Like if we grew from motorboat to cargo ship faster than your career has grown, we're gonna hire a captain, but you can sit right next to the captain and he's gonna show you how to do it. And then when it's time for you to have your own cargo ship, you can do that.

And one of the things that I remember, my head of product who was really, really strong, Kharissa, she called me one day and said, Dave, this is the best job I've ever had, but I have to quit. I'm like, are you kidding me? Like, why? And she said, well, I've been doing this, you know, this nonprofit cosmetic company called Thrive and I just got a good morning America. So, and she said, this is my shot. Like, I'm helping women with cancer. I have to go do this and so I said all right and I funded her My pocket that's first every small amount more like a token But she's got out an absolutely just kicked ass to the point She you know her valuation is probably as high as bullet proofs if I was to estimate.

That's fantastic. How do you fault something like that? But it could have easily been, maybe, Karissa would have had a collar two years after that and say, we just hired the guy who ran lunchables as $700 million business, and he's coming in. And you're going to report to him, right? And by the way way that guy did join Bill of truth and he's like I got to pay for my sins here. Lunchables didn't Maybe it helps a lot of moms maybe didn't help a lot of kids like I think I could do better and

You know having that kind of someone who's who's been at a $700 million a year product line like like that's how you grow your company to be big You hire the people who know a hundred times more than you as a founder and are good people at their core. And you trust them and you set goals and you set targets and you look at the numbers. And you give them as much space as they need, as much dry powder as they need on a plan that you all support. And that's what matters. Just long way, you got to care. and you got to be sensitive when someone is going

off the rails, you're going to know it. The first time you get that sensation that's like, you know, this person isn't working out and you're the guy in charge, you really got to listen to that and start paying attention and asking her questions. So they're not working out. You got to talk to them and work with them so that they can work out. And if you hide, which is what most entrepreneurs do, including me when I was younger, say, I don't want to deal with that.

I'm just not going to pay attention to it. It'll actually suck the wind out of all the people around a poor performer. And just understanding that and then holding myself accountable to those same standards. And that's a big challenge. But I like to think I've done, and at least the reason we'll job on that. And now I've spent most of my time on, you know, culture, and just culture, and what we call core tenants.

But these are things like, thou shalt not cross. We want that, but you know, genetically modified, you know, gluten containing stuff. Yeah, I don't care about cheaper. Like that's not what we do, right? And we've written those down we spent days going through and now that we've got that stuff written down my product team which is like more than ten people can go out they can innovate with my inputs but i don't have to be there in every innovation session holding him to the rules because the rules are well understood

and and that's another big scale point and just having that that just in your core where everyone in the company understands that, that I think is the biggest, the hardest and the biggest thing you can do. Excellent, that's an excellent play. What you're saying sounds amazing. We want to thank you for coming on the show. I think you're part of that first big wave

of what's happening in the industry with food, with quality, where consumers are now paying attention. You're starting to see big food companies start to try to attract consumers with words that look like they mean quality, but it's not yet quality, but it's showing that the market is starting to shift and we appreciate. Oh, great time to be disrupting, man. And it's fun watching you. Yeah, definitely.

Guys, thanks for having me on. And one of the things I've done that's part of the strategy is make it easy to get both your stuff and going into Whole Foods nationally with the ready to drink cold brew coffee. Like, man, I'd rather sell that by your commerce. See, commerce is a tighter business for anyone who runs a business, they'll tell you,

but to make it go out to hundreds of millions of people, you got to go out there. So like, to be able to do that, it's easy at least give it a shot. And the stuff I'm saying about why it works biochemically and all that, it's real. And you should be able to feel a difference the first time you try it. And so my ask for people out there is just try it one time and just see how you feel, because it's pretty obvious Awesome. Well, thanks. Thanks again. Yeah, thank you. Appreciate your time, man Thank you guys. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump if your goal is to build and shape your body

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