Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Dave Asprey: Biohacking Secrets to Eliminate the Energy Drains Sabotaging Your Success | Mental Health | E412

Episode Date: August 17, 2026

Dave Asprey's health was collapsing by the time he reached Silicon Valley. After hitting 300 pounds in college, he battled chronic fatigue, brain fog, arthritis, and pain, often forcing himself through work when he could barely think. He has since spent around $2.5 million to restore his wellness and upgrade his biology, learning along the way that long-term success depends on protecting energy, not pushing through with willpower. Today, having generated more than $1 billion in revenue across his ventures, he applies those principles to run a portfolio of eight companies. In this episode, Dave shares how entrepreneurs can eliminate triggers to think more clearly, perform at a higher level, and build lasting success without sacrificing their health. In this episode, Hala and Dave will discuss:  (00:00) Introduction (00:00) Is the New Normal Unhealthy? (07:08) Dave’s Health Crisis and Biohacking Breakthrough (19:12) The Five Fs That Drive Your Energy (25:17) The Four Types of People in Business (34:29) Emotional Triggers That Distort Leadership (45:43) The Link Between Gratitude and Forgiveness (48:18) Toxic Empathy and Generational Trauma (56:57) Psychedelics, Trauma, and Emotional Healing (01:08:38) How Forgiveness Frees Up Your Energy (01:15:48) How Junk Light Drains Your Energy (01:17:17) Dave’s Biggest Biohacking Confessions  Dave Asprey is an entrepreneur and four-time New York Times bestselling author widely known as the “father of biohacking.” He is the CEO of Upgrade Labs and the founder of Bulletproof Coffee, Danger Coffee, TrueDark, and 40 Years of Zen. Dave also hosts The Human Upgrade, a Webby Award-winning podcast focused on biohacking, human performance, and longevity. His latest book, Heavily Meditated, is a guide to removing your triggers, dissolving stress, and activating inner peace.  Sponsored By: Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/profiting Shopify - Start your $1/month trial at Shopify.com/profiting. Northwest Registered Agent - Get a complete business identity with Northwest. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/YAPFree and start using free resources to build something amazing.  Mindstone - Master practical AI skills without the complexity with Mindstone’s AI Competency Programme. Head to experience.mindstone.com/yap and get 10% off.  AT&T Business - Stay connected with reliable, secure internet built for entrepreneurs. Switch to AT&T Business at business.att.com.  HoneyLove - Treat yourself to the most advanced bras and shapewear on the market. Save 20% off Honeylove by going to honeylove.com/PROFITING! #honeylovepod ElevenLabs - ElevenAgents by ElevenLabs helps businesses deliver better customer experiences. Start with a demo at ElevenLabs.io/profiting Quo - Bring your calls, texts, and contacts together in one place. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to quo.com/profiting.  Resources Mentioned: Dave’s Book, Heavily Meditated: bit.ly/Heavily_Meditated Dave’s Book, Super Human: bit.ly/Super_Human  Dave’s Podcast, The Human Upgrade: bit.ly/THU-apple  Dave’s Website: daveasprey.com Dave’s Instagram: instagram.com/dave.asprey/  Dave’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/asprey  Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals  Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap YouTube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Newsletter - youngandprofiting.co/newsletter  LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new  Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Startup, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, Motivation, Manifestation, Brain Health, Life Balance, Self-Healing, Positivity, Happiness, Sleep, Diet

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all of our incredible deals in the show notes or at young and profiting.com slash deals. If you're a female entrepreneur, everyone in your company with mommy issues will see you as mommy because you're the woman authority figure. And if you're a male,

entrepreneur, everyone with daddy issues, we'll see you as their daddy because that's how human brains work. That's how mitochondrial networks work. And that's what happens when emotions are generated before thoughts. Today I'm sitting down once again with the father of biohacking Dave Asprey for his third appearance on Yap. In this conversation, Dave challenges what's really holding us back and shows us how letting go of the things draining our energy can change the way we lead, work, and live. The thing to know if you're an entrepreneur is that there is another intelligence, inside your body, running the things you're not paying attention to, and it doesn't have the goals you do.

Its goals are fear, food, and fucking. But the good news is there's two more F-words that mitochondria care about. The next one is... What are the different types of people out there? What do we need to watch out for? My biggest mistake, I'm building a $100 million company from scratch, was I didn't fire the people who were category three fast enough. If I had just known that lesson, I would probably be a multibillionaire right now.

What was your most extreme self-experiment? I ordered a pill from Russia. It was... Dave, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. I'm so happy to be here. I love entrepreneurship. I am very happy that you're here. This is the third time you've been on, yeah.

First time in person, though. So I feel super honored that we get to be in the same space. And I just can't wait to pick your brain. I've looked up to you, especially in this biohacking space for such a long time. Thank you. And it's all because you move to the best city, Austin. Yeah, Austin is amazing. So I wanted to kind of open this up with a frame of, is the normal that we see today a problem?

Because when people are walking around, they're anxious, they're inflamed, they're tired, they're over-caffeinated. And when people look at you and folks like Brian Johnson, we're thinking these people are extremes, people are weird, these people are overdoing it. But really, is the new normal a problem? Normal is always a problem because 50% of people are dumber than average. So normal literally means average. So if you're happy with normal, you're probably not an entrepreneur because we want to be better than normal. And that's okay, and not better than everyone else, just better than average, right? And some people are like that, some aren't.

In fact, half of people want to be better than normal because they are. and they typically are going to say, how much better than normal can I be? And the cool thing is one person may say, well, I'm a crossfitter, right? I'm a finance entrepreneur or another one. I don't care about that. I don't be a personal trainer.

It doesn't really matter. It's like you pick your passion, say, how can I be the best in the world at that? And you might not be the best in the world. We all know that. There aren't that many people who can be the best in the world at something, but be as close as you can.

And as long as it's the best you can be at that and anything else that interests you, you'll probably enjoy your life a lot more and probably make more money, too. Yeah. When you look at normal life of Americans, I was just, you know, I gave you a plastic bottle just now. And you went, ugh, plastic. Yeah, I had to touch it with a rubber glove. I borrowed it from Brian Johnson.

And you poured the water. And I asked you, you know, I can't believe we're actually going to still drink that. I forgot that, you know, you would probably not want to drink water from a plastic bottle. So what are some of the normal things that we do that to you, that to you, just seem like really unhealthy and you think people should stop doing? Well, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to take a drink of this plastic water out of a plastic cup because I've been working my man boobs lately. Now, it's because perfectionism can be toxic.

And I see this in an eating. It's called bulimia or orthorexia. And we see it in biohacking. We see it in the gym and exercise. in all kinds of cultural contexts. And it's just, oh, no, what I'm doing isn't perfect. It's just perfectionism under another label. If you have that about your health,

you're probably going to die because you're going to die of stress. So you should stress about your stress. Like, it is a terrible suck. It's such a terrible suck that the Buddhists have a name for that kind of hell. They have, like, hundreds of different types of hells, but perfectionism is one of them.

So I know very well that I should have my water that ideally would be out of a glass bottle drawn from a spring and lab tested, and we might as well add some hydrogen or oxygen and treat it with lasers and bless it with monks. Because I'm sure some of that makes a difference, and I could stack rank, which of those probably makes a difference depending on the monk. But for God's sake, I just needed some water, right? So I don't worry about being perfect. I say how perfect or how close to perfect can this thing be given the constraints of the system?

It helps that I'm a former computer hacker, I studied computer science, and worked in Silicon Valley as a tech entrepreneur for a long time. So how good can you make it? Elon has a similar mindset. He has something, it's a ratio. I think he calls it like the idiot ratio or something. And it's basically, okay,

what is the cost of the raw material in this mug? And they'll say, okay, there's metal and plastic. Okay, that's worth two and a half cents if you were to buy the raw materials. And so why are you paying $5 for a mug that costs $2.5.5 in materials? So that ratio is basically how dumb are you because you can't make it yourself?

So I kind of see the world through a similar lens where is it worth it to do it myself? Right? And how excellently can I do that? So on the water, I could carry around a water filter. It just doesn't return energy to me. Yeah. And what I found about entrepreneurship,

and I think I've earned the right to say this, I've done more than a billion dollars in revenue from companies that I've founded. I built Bulletproof to 140 million in revenues before the board fired me and then sold it to themselves for peanuts. Thanks, guys. There was a lawsuit. Danger Coffee is my new coffee brand. I've also been a tech entrepreneur very successful. And after all of that, I have eight companies in my portfolio right now that I'm operationally involved with.

and I'm able to do this because I monitor and manage my energy the way they do in data centers, which was my first big win back in the late 90s in the dot-com boom. It was a data center company. So how do we do that? We say, okay, every electron matters. Well, it turns out our bodies are wired the same way. So your cells have distributed power generation called mitochondria. They do other things too.

And then if they make a lot of power, okay, where is it going to go? It's going to go to folding proteins, making neurotransmitters, thinking about your mother-in-law, worrying about your business, feeling like you're going to die because someone's criticizing you, all the things that every entrepreneur struggles with, especially when they're young, there's only a finite number of electrons. Now, with biohacking, the origins of this came out of the longevity movement. Way back in Silicon Valley, the first longevity nonprofit, I ran this in my 20s. I became president and chairman of it.

and I started learning about how biology works and said, oh my God, it's the same thing. It's just energy. Yeah. So what I'm doing every day is I'm saying, how can I not waste a single electron? So I have enough left for my body to do the things it needs to do to stay healthy and for me to allocate my energy so I don't waste a single drop.

So if I spend all my energy worrying about what's in my freaking water, then I wouldn't spend that energy being present or killing cancer cells or any of the other things that my system wants to do. So the game of life for everything alive, not just humans, but especially entrepreneurs, is how do I allocate my energy most effectively? I have so many questions about allocating energy effectively. But first, I want to talk about your origin story. So you mentioned that you started in Silicon Valley.

And you actually were pretty unhealthy in your 20s and late 20s or, you know, you're maybe average. I will say below average from a health perspective. Talk to us about what it was like working in Silicon Valley. Like what did your body feel like? What did your brain feel like every day when you were unhealthy? It actually started even during college. So I was studying computer science and I'd hit 300 pounds. I weigh about 198 today.

And I was also trying to pay for my college, which had gotten very expensive. So I started selling a t-shirt with a caffeine molecule on it that looks like that. Cool. I don't know if the camera can see that. That's my caffeine molecule. That became the first product ever sold over the internet before e-commerce had the name e-commerce. People were faxing me checks to cash. It was the weirdest thing.

And then I was an entrepreneur magazine at 23, you know, full-color picture and all that. Years later, when I was telling the story of biohacking on the Joe Rogan show, people like, you weren't really fat. I'm like, here's my proof of fat photo from Entrepreneur Magazine, motherfirm. So, but when I got to Silicon Valley, I'd had arthritis since I was 14 in my knees. I started dislocating when I knees would just pop out and I would just fall over walking through college. It was very painful. I'd been on antibiotics for 15 years every month, give or take, because I had chronic strep throat and sinus infections. I didn't know because I lived in toxic mold and I have the genetics that makes it really poisonous.

I had brain damage from toxic mold to the point that when I was going to Wharton's business school when I was about 30, I was failing. Like, I was literally failing out of the classes and thinking to myself, maybe I'm not trying hard enough. Maybe I'm dumber than all my classmates. Maybe I'm, oh my God, maybe I'm normal. And I went to one of Dr. Daniel Amon's clinics, and they did a brain scan. And I saw the psychiatrist who looked at me. It wasn't Dr. Ayman. He looks to me like, oh, TechBrow wants Adderall.

You see this look of like, whatever. But he ordered the brain scan that I wanted. And then when he got the results, I walked back into his office. It was in Palo Alto. And he just looks at me and goes, inside your brain is total chaos. I don't know how you're standing here in front of me. You have the best camouflage I've ever seen. Wow.

And I was like, thank God. Someone finally believes me. Like, I have the accelerator all the way to the floor all the time. And the car is slowing down, and I can't will it to go faster, and I have nothing left. And that was when I realized, okay, I have actually brain damage. It was probably from old toxins. But I was like, thank God, this is so relaxing. I have a hardware problem.

I can fix a hardware problem. If it's a, I'm a bad person or I'm just dumb problem. So I went all in on neutropics before they were called neutropics. I ordered $1,200 of them from Europe and started. really self-medicated my brain because entrepreneurs, we make money with our brains. And I was feeling dumb at the time. Like, I'm desperate. So I did everything. I ended up spending two and a half million dollars. Some of that to recover and a lot of it to reverse my age, enhance my intelligence. I built a neuroscience company that makes people smarter and replaces decades of meditation

in a few days. And I have written nine books and four New York Times bestsellers about cognitive enhancement and longevity and fertility. And my most recent book, called Heavily Meditated, is about altered states. And it became the best-selling philosophy book in the country. Yeah. Which was crazy. It's not a philosophy book. But it explains how our bodies make decisions.

And I probably should have written it as a business book because it's so important. I've had about 1,400 entrepreneur types come through my neuroscience company. So I'm writing this after 10 years of looking inside the brains of entrepreneurs. Yeah. And we all make decisions with our bodies before we can think about it, and it's invisible to us. But I know the code for that. And once you understand what your body is doing versus what you're doing, a lot of the things that are hard for entrepreneurs, especially under 35. Like up to about 35, like, I'm still finding my tribe.

I'm still making my mark in the world. And you're trying to prove something. And so you have different body decision making, this is the emotions, but they come from your tissues, not from your brain. and then after sometime 35, 40, most people are like, oh, maybe I should have a mission. And sometimes you think you have a mission when you're young, but it's usually performative. Young Improfitors, a few weeks ago, my main video editor put in his notice due to health concerns. Now, because it was an emergency and I wish him well, I was in a pickle. He was gone, and there was nothing I could do about it.

And so I was in full panic mode. The podcast still goes on. I still need promotional clips. I still have sponsors. I can't do this without a video editor. And so I was stressed, but I did what I always do. And we found an amazing replacement who's just as good as my previous editor, if not more talented. And I do what I always do.

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We talked about $2.5 million of testing on yourself, which ended up being like the best seed investment ever, right? You built this. You're the father of biohacking. You built billion dollar products. Like you've absolutely crushed it. But what was one of the first experiments where you were like,

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

I give up. Maybe I'm wrong about some of my fundamental assumptions. And so I spent three months doing that. And I was in a monastery and someone said, oh, you know, let's go to the most holy mountain in the world, which is five days on a four-wheel drive across Tibet called Mount Kailash. Anyone who's Buddhist or Hindu knows this, it's very famous. And it's also very remote.

So I ended up going there, and that was where I'm just feeling like death. Like my whole body hurts. It's 18,000 feet elevation. And this little Tibetan woman gives me a bowl of yak butter tea. And I drank it. And about five minutes later, it was like sparkles went off in my brain. I'm like, wow, I haven't felt this good in so long. What was in that?

And it's just green tea, it's puer tea, but, and some yak butter. And I didn't understand why, but the lady, she would walk like a quarter mile, crack ice on the river, get water, boil the water over yak dung as the fire, because there's no wood, just you burn poop, right? And then they'd heat up the tea and make the tea. I'm like, okay, drink it. No, no, no. She'd poured into a butter churn with the yak butter and then churn it for like 10 minutes. She wouldn't just turn it a little bit. I'm like, what is wrong with this person?

Like, I just want to drink my tea. Right? But what made it work was the fact that she churned it for that amount of time. And I couldn't understand any of this. But that was where the idea for Bulletproof Coffee came from. So it was, why do I feel radically different after I do this little dumb thing in a cup, right? Well, it was the curiosity about what made it go that generated $500 plus million of sales. Right?

It's remarkable. Yes, so cool. Other things, when I bought my first batch of neutropics, a little before that, when I was just trying to make my brain go so I wouldn't get fired, I remember getting them, and I took something called Parasatam, which is relatively well known today, although I recommend Anerastatam even more. And I tried it, and I took it for a week and thought, this is dumb. I wasted all this money, and it didn't even do anything, so I quit taking it. And the next day, I said, wait, I'm looking for a word. I can't remember a word. So you don't notice when your performance smooths out and gets better because it just feels natural.

But you'll notice a decline in performance more than you'll notice an improvement. So the improvement was invisible, but the lack of it, like, oh, I'm searching for words that I can't find again. So I've been on anoracetam now for 25 years, which is a cognitive enhancer that increases memory I.O. I've also been on the limitless drug,

also known as modafinil, which I popularized with entrepreneurs years ago, one of my first posts was, why you are suffering from a modafinil deficiency, which just pissed everybody off, which is one of my love languages. So I wrote this and said, here's what happened when a little birdie

gave modafinil to four ordinary people, and it told their stories. A guy was writing a proposal for the Dalai Lama Foundation. He's like, I took one pill. I rewrote the entire proposal that I've worked on for six weeks and one night, and I, submitted it and they accepted it. And just everyone had these incredible experiences. And it really

is the limitless drug. And so there's probably 50,000 entrepreneurs who are on modafinil. A lot of politicians are on it now. And this is a drug that was designed for narcolepsy when people fall asleep uncontrollably. But it also happens to be the most studied drug for raising IQ with very few side effects. So I'm actually on it right now. Is that cheating? Do you get prescribed? for it? Well, there's two ways to do it. One is you go to chat GPT and say, what are the things I would have to tell my doctor to get him to write me a script for it? And then you tell your doctor that. The easiest one is to say you have shift sleep worker disorder because you have to work different shifts. The other thing you could do is you could just order it online from another country. So I have a

prescription. Yeah, similar to how people, I guess, get peptides now. Very similar. Yeah. It's funny, though, because if you look at what makes someone an entrepreneur. There's a code or a name for it that's in the doctor's books. It's called ADHD. Yeah. Right. So it's weird because an off-label use of modafinol is for ADHD. So when I first went through all of this stuff when my brain wasn't working in business school, and I went on the stuff, they tried giving me Adderall. And I hated how I felt on it. Like, I can focused, but I want to curl up under my bed. And modafinil just made everyone around me slower. I love that. I want to try it. It is one of the most profound substances. It doesn't work for 20%

of people that feel nothing. And five and a million people can have a reaction to it, the same reaction that ibuprofen causes. Oh, okay. So very rare, but it's an autoimmune skin condition that's life-threatening. So you can do your genes if you're worried about it, but the odds are very, very low. Yeah, fam, I know we've all called customer support before, where we're on hold forever, we're getting passed from person to person, we're repeating ourselves over and over, and then somehow, after all that time, we get nothing done. That is not a way to run a business. 11 agents by 11 Labs is a voice AI agent that can actually listen, understand what your customer

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And after you check out, they'll ask you where you heard about them and please support our show by telling them that young and profiting sent you. Experience the new standard in comfort and support with Honeylove. Go to honeylove.com slash profiting for 20% off. Let's talk about energy leaks. You can have energy leaking from your brain. We just talked about some of those energy leaks. We can have energy leaking from our body. You've got this framework of five Fs in which our body basically has to allocate where our energy goes, our mitochondria.

Talk to us about the five Fs and what the mitochondria have to do with that. I'm going to take you through a set of steps that have to be true for this to make sense because it's okay to be – I'm a little skeptical about this because I was skeptical too. And I have exhausted this from philosophical, spiritual, biochemical, and just systems biology perspective. And this is how life works. And I don't say that lightly. Listen up, yeah, bam. You're not going to see this, but it's going to make sense.

So let's pretend that you're a single cell microbe or something without all of intelligence, like a tree or a skunk or a politician or whatever. Okay. So anyway, something not very intelligent and you've got to be able to live. What are, if you strip away all the things, what are the things that you must do in order to be alive? Eat. Well, that's almost there. Not get eaten is the first one. So it's fear.

That's why these are F words. So don't let something eat me. And if you're a microbe, you secrete some toxins. You have little cilia to move away. If you're a tree, you grow thick bark or spines. If you're a politician, you tell more lies. Like all the things, right? Okay, so that's fear.

Run away from killer hide. The second one, you called it, it's food. It's eat everything, right? This is why life will tend to do that. You put a bunch of rats in a box. They're happy for three generations, and they eat everything, including each other. It's gross.

So, fear, food, third F word, all things have to do it to stay alive for multiple generations. Fertility? You read my book. You cheated. I was trying to trick into dropping an F-bomb on your own show. So I'm going to ask you this,

and you're listening to this. So ask yourself, is there anything you've ever done you're ashamed of that isn't one of those three things? Fear, food, or fertility? No, not really. All the seven deadly sins, all the egoic behaviors are driven by mitochondria trying to keep your body alive. And they can do that because they're much faster than you can think.

And here's the proof of this. If I clap my hands, you're sitting in your car somewhere probably or the gym, and I'm saying, okay, I knew it took some amount of time for the sound to reach my ears and then I heard it because that's what you perceived. But if I had electrodes glued to your head, we can measure one third of a second after the sound hits your ear, your mitochondria, and your nervous system allows it into the brain. Because your body is deciding what it's going to make you do and feel before you get a chance to think. Wow. And if you don't believe me, you ever lean on a hot stove and go, you know, that's really hot. I guess I should move my hand. Yeah.

No. You jerk your hand away, right? And go, good thing, I move my hand. you didn't move your hand. Someone else with their fingers on the control system who's hiding from you moved your hand and just made you take credit for it. Right?

Because you didn't make the conscious decision. It was built in. Yeah. Yeah. So the thing to know if you're an entrepreneur is that there is another intelligence inside your body running the things you're not paying attention to and it doesn't have the goals you do.

Its goals are fear, food, and fucking. But the good news is there's two more F words that mitochondria care about. And that's why we have. have hope for humans. The next one is friend. And all life will support its own ecosystem, the life around it, and its own species. This is why trees become an ecosystem. This is why we help other people's children if they're lost, why we help our elderly across the street. This is why we're kind to each other even if we don't know. Because our mitochondria made us feel

kindness. They are the puppet masters because they get to tell you what you're allowed to see, how you're going to feel about it, and then you take action on it. They are puppet mastering you all the time, but there's a hack for that. And the final F word, that's the most important and the way you get control of the system

is forgiveness. Now, that's usually a trigger word for a lot of people. It's like, I'm not going to forgive that person that would mean to me. My anger keeps me safe. Dude, your anger is the biggest energy leak ever.

So you don't do that. Forgiveness is not saying that you forgive someone. Forgiveness is making it so that you have zero reactivity. to them, whether you ever speak to them again. And the idea is just letting it go, but being aware. And that is why I can still sit here today after literally losing $100 million

because I didn't get the lesson on discernments until, like, that was the cost of that lesson, which is what I would have walked away from Bulletproof with, had people done what I thought was logical. You make $100 million? I make $100 million. I didn't understand that there are humans out there where for them to win,

I have to lose. And it doesn't matter how much money or any other thing is involved. If I make any, they think that they lost. So when you understand you're playing a game with win-lose humans, the game is very different

than if you're playing with win-win. I thought everyone was a win-win. So I'm like, you make $100 million? I make $100 million. Maybe you make $90 and I make $80. Who that cares? Like, it's a lot of money. But no.

So my mistake and a really big lesson that makes me a great advisor for entrepreneurs is, Yeah, understanding the human condition. That's all in my latest book, the different types of people there are. Let's double tap on that. What are the different types of people out there? What do we need to watch out for?

This is something that comes up with entrepreneurs when they're at 40 years of Zen. This is my neuroscience place here in Austin. It's a five-day retreat with electrodes glued to your head. The guy, they had neuroscientist from the telepathy tapes is my neuroscientist. So we're teaching people to have advanced powers, and put it that way. When people attend that, I teach. them these categories of humans. So type 1 people are win-win. It's about 5% people. So they're always win-win. You interact with them? Like if they do something that made you lose, you can't even

conceive of it. They just don't do that. The most common type of person after that is type 2. These are people who are win-win, usually, but they screw up. They don't see things because their ego takes action. Their mitochondria made them feel this way because their mom yelled at them or whatever. And then if you tell them, hey, buddy, that wasn't okay. They apologize, go, oh, my gosh, how do I make that right? And then they pay you back or they do whatever. Normal humans on the path of being better humans. So they'll make good.

They'll make good. And they'll hear the criticism. Type three are win, lose, but they don't know it. And these are so dangerous for entrepreneurs. And the word for this is narcissist. And these are people who believe whatever their internal dialogue is, regardless of the facts. So you can have someone who you have a video of them in a room, killing someone with a knife. They're covered in blood, holding the knife, and the room is locked.

And you open the room, and they go, oh, it wasn't me. It couldn't have been me. I'm a good person. And you show in the video, go, no, I'm a good person, couldn't have been me. And they believe it. So you can't tell that they're lying because they're not lying. They just believe bullshit. it. So most entrepreneurs listening to this, you have someone in your company like that. You know who

they are right now when I said that. Or somebody who formerly was in your company potentially. Hopefully. Well, if you still have a company, they were probably formerly in your company. So one of the experiences that I just cherish is probably eight, nine years ago. I was at a business conference. And a guy named Ken, who was running a 500 million dollar company, very, very experienced entrepreneur. I was telling what was going on at Bulletproof. And he looks at me, and he recognized this pattern, didn't call it the same thing. And he said, so we're going to fire her with my phone or your phone, like hands me his phone. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, I need this person. You know, I understand the problem you're talking about. Like,

I'll work on it. Because you don't understand, like, these are the people who break companies. I said, how do you know? He said, well, you know, I run a $500 million company. I was mentored by Jack Welch, you know, the CEO of GE. I'm like, holy crap, this guy's a badass and a good human. And I didn't take his advice. And about a year later, that same executive, who the entire year had told me in the board, I'm going to, we're going to be losing $4 million this year, but we have $30 million in venture capital.

We're going to grow 40%. Every week, we're on track, we're on track, we're on track. And then December 1st, he goes, we might lose $5 million instead of four. I said, okay, as long as our growth rates are there. and December 31st, she goes, oopsie, I lost $28 million. And I'm like, what? The entire year, you said something different,

and you just burned three years of venture capital in one year without telling me of the board. Like, if you're an entrepreneur running a big company, yes, I probably should have looked at the bank accounts. It's hard being the influencer and the CEO. It's really hard. But I had trusted the wrong people. And this is a person with fantastic credentials,

top over class of Harvard kind of thing. So when I fired her, she looked me in the eye and she said, you should give me more stock options. I'm like, why? And she's made up a story on her head that made no sense. And I said, well, I would have to take stock options from the other employees who actually are doing work

and didn't burn through all of our, our venture funding. And she started crying and ghosted me, and we have never spoken since. Wow. Because I penetrated her reality bubble, and the reality is, I don't fail. So if you ever have someone come in the door during a job interview says they don't fail, run, run screaming. It is really important. Hire people who at least acknowledge failure. Yeah. When you look at the fourth category of person, category of four people, these are win-lose,

and they know it. They get off on men. manipulating you. They're very hard to spot because they're master manipulators. They're sociopaths and psychopaths. And it turns out there's 5% of those and 5% of win-win, the category ones. It's a bell curve. So your job as an entrepreneur is to ruthlessly eliminate type 3 people from your organization. These are the people who lie. These are the people who undermine you when you're not looking. They're the ones who organize coups. And if you allow a category 3 to stick around for more than about 90 days, What will happen is they will infiltrate some people in your organization, share their mindset, tell little white lies, but they're not white, to separate your team from you and create chaos in the org. And when you fire them, you'll lose two people who are good people as well.

So they're like a cancer in the arc. And if you let them go long enough, the way I did, you might even lose your company. They're relatively hard to spot, but you spot them in the job interview. in my set of seven or eight companies right now. We have a goal. 60 days, if we hire one. Well, you know in 60 days, we just fire them right then. And I tell people that during the interview,

and we do exhaustive profiling on people before we hire them to make sure with that. What are some of the questions that you ask to kind of just get a sense of what type of person they are? At this point, I use two different frameworks. One is the Colby. And Colby tells you, are they a natural fit for this job in their instinctive way of thinking about the world and solving problems? And the other one is from a woman named Busy Gold. And she does psychology-level questions that I couldn't ask in a job interview. It would be illegal.

But they go to a psychiatrist or psychologist who then assesses that takes out anything personal and just says, here's the person's personality reaction profile. it's very dry numbers, but it tells with relative certainty whether someone is likely to go dark. And so my biggest mistake, I'm building a $100 million company from scratch, was I didn't fire the people who were category three fast enough. If I had just known that lesson, I would probably be a multibillionaire right now. And so when you were talking about that example of the executive, she basically got triggered. from an old wound when she couldn't accept that she failed, whatever that wound was.

It was a daddy wound. A daddy wound. It always is. Can I just have to say this? Yeah. If you're a female entrepreneur, everyone in your company with mommy issues will see you as mommy because you're the woman authority figure. And if you're a male entrepreneur, everyone with daddy issues will see you as their daddy because

that's how human brains work. That's how mitochondrial networks work. And that's what happens when emotions are generated before thoughts. So you're sitting in a room and you say something to someone, and maybe he feels like you're criticizing him the way his dad did or the way his teacher did or whatever. He's going to get the emotions he had at that time unless he's done his forgiveness work and he's done a lot of personal development work.

Yeah. Right? And then he's going to see you as a bad person because that's what happened when he was five years old or whatever the hell. So you could spend your time managing emotions of other people, which is the most horrifying part of being an entrepreneur. Or you could do a better job of hiring people. who've done enough work that it's okay.

All of my senior executives, when they start in my companies, they go to 40 years in the first week because that's where you go to turn off all of your triggers. Like literally, that's what we're doing with computers. It's like the system notifications on your phone. I can't use my phone because Twitter and TikTok and everything is just popping up alerts everywhere. Your nervous system is doing that right now. So what if you just turned off all the useless alerts?

That's what I've done. That's why I can run a big handful of companies. and that's why, like, no one died when a group of business people stole my company. At the same time, I was getting divorced and had a family member tried to steal one of my other companies. Oh, my God. And I wrote about all that and heavily meditated, but I can sit here. I'm like, thank you for the lessons. Like, I learned what I needed to learn.

So you probably shouldn't try to steal one of my companies now because I will see it. Can you give us an example of a trigger that showed up in your leadership that then you reset? This is so funny. one of the things that your mitochondria can do is they can decide which things in the environment you're allowed to hear or see. So one of my favorite board members when I was at Bulletproof, his name was Dan Skolnick. He's at a green river ventures now. And he was just the kind of board member that every entrepreneur wishes they would have, who just really

understood both sides of the seed. Dan sat down one time and he said, Dave. You have 200 skews. And a skew is basically a separate product that you're selling. And it's like, it's breaking your team. You're going to sink your company with this. I'm like, well, 200 is a lot. Like, why didn't you say something?

And he looked to me like I'm an idiot. And he goes, Dave, I've been yelling this at you for the last six months. And I was kind of humbled it. I'm like, I swear to God, this is the first time I've ever heard that. And it was the first time I heard that because my ego didn't want to hear it because I think creating cool stuff that people want to use and that helps people's health, I think it's really kind of an obligation for an entrepreneur. Like, let's make the world a better place.

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

these days. It's my thought. You had this trigger. How did you determine, you know, what wound was actually triggering you? And how did you reset it or make sure that it doesn't happen as often? Okay, that is an amazing question. No one's ever actually asked it that way. So in heavily meditated, and guys, you can buy the book or not. It doesn't change my life in the slightest. Like, it's my wisdom. But I think I make a dollar per book, and it was already prepaid it in advance. So truly, I'm not selling you the book.

It's there for you. But the reset process that I use is based on neuroscience, and it's based on a study of forgiveness practices around the world, and then seeing what works in high-performance people. So we glue electrodes to your head. This is what I did. and you sit down and you imagine the other person, there's eight steps and we'll go through all of them.

But it turns out that the feeling of turning off one of these alerts, one of these triggers is very similar to what Buddhists would call a loving kindness thing. And it's a, what you basically do is you re-experience the pain in your body. How did it feel when you were triggered? And then the altered opposite state is like this heart opening, warm golden feeling where you're sending something to the other person. And there are similar practices in Buddhism, but they're not exactly the same. And I haven't seen other spiritual practices that have anything close to this, but it's not a Buddhist practice.

It's a different thing. Desmond Tutu talks about like the feeling of this forgiveness, like a divine thing, but it's an embodied felt sense. Because when you were triggered, it wasn't your mind. It was a feeling. Like, you know it. It's in your heart. It's in your gut. It's in your groin.

Like the hair is on the back of your neck. And like, like you're ready to fight. So first you, how'd that feel? And then you learn this other state. Problem is it takes 20 to 40 years to learn the other state if you meditate for an hour or day. I can do it in five days for people. Reliably after more than 10 years of doing this. So now like, oh, anytime my body does this, eh, you have a tool to play whack a mole.

And so you say, right, two. Turn that one off. Turn that one off. It's like going through and just anytime an alert popped up on your phone, you can click a little button and say, I don't want that one anymore. And then you do this process. But sometimes you don't know, like, the root of it, what the real cause is. So can I tell you a little story? Of course. All right. Around 2014, this is the first three years of starting Bulletproof. What was doing maybe 800 grand a month? Not bad for a three-year-old company started. self-funded with $50,000 of teaching hedge fund managers how to make their brains work better. So this guy calls me up and says, hey, I'm your biggest fan. I'm a Hollywood stuntman. And you should be on this guy Joe Rogan show. No, I have a confession. I have listened to five podcast episodes in my entire life.

I've made 1,400 of my own episodes. And I've probably been on several thousand interviews like this one. right? So I create content, but I have time to listen to it because I run companies and make content. So I didn't know who Joe Ruggin was. It was only maybe episode 400, 450 or something. So I show up in L.A. And Joe's like high as a kite. He's like exhaling before the first question. And like, man, I can't smoke that. I will be an idiot on your show if I do. But I think it should be legal and it became legal right after that. So I taught Joe about grass-fed meat, butter, coffee, getting ADHD going, and he still talks about that stuff today.

And this is cool. Well, the stuntman then said, hey, Dave, you know, let's do a coffee truck together. I'm like, I'll do a bulletproof coffee truck. Then he basically was playing me. I was trusting the wrong people. And calls me up one day when I'm still expecting our coffee trucks about done. He goes, I've decided I'm launching my own brand. And I'm going to say it's mold-free, but I'm not going to lab test it.

So to me, mold-free coffee is. important because we have a problem in the U.S. where the world sends its moldy coffee here, and then we drink it, and we get angry and want sugar. So that's why Danger Coffee, because who knows what you might do? There, I give my plug. But if you're an entrepreneur, you should drink danger because it actually works. But anyway, so this guy, it was a betrayal thing. I'm like, okay, I can handle that, whatever, some guy.

But then, after being on Rogan two more times and just having been nothing but giving and helping, joke goes on and says, Dave Asprey's a liar. He's a bad guy. Now, he hired a fact checker. Oh, by the way, he said that on the day that a company that he owned a portion of launched their competitor to Bulletproof. So this was commercially motivated behavior. And just today, I did my whole reset process. I've forgiven Joe Rogan.

I've been to his comedy shows, and he was a hero during the pandemic. I don't have any issues with him. We both live in Austin. Haven't been to a party with him. He'd give him a hug. He'd probably run away. He could probably kick my ass, but he's a lot shorter, so I'm kind of intimidating. But I don't care.

Like, I just don't care. So, Joe, if you hear this, I love your brother. It's fine. But at the time, oh, my God, I freaked out. I hired a crisis PR firm. Like, what do I do? This podcaster saying mean things about me. Really?

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

Yeah. You probably sold more coffee. from it, ultimately. Ultimately, you nailed it. I couldn't see the fact that every time Joe Rogan says Dave Astor is a bad man, I sell more coffee. I couldn't see it for that same thing we're talking about. So I finally, after like six months of this, a guy who was a convoy commander in the Iraq war, who worked for me, he's like, Dave, he's just a podcaster. Why are you so freaked out? Like the whole team is feeling it. My gosh. So I put the electrodes on my head. I took my own medicine, did my 40 years as an thing. And and the first thing that popped into my mind

wasn't Joe Rogan, it was an experience in first grade that I'd forgotten. And it was a time when I tattled on another kid, which isn't cool, but hey, in first grade, do you learn? And the teacher goes, little Johnny, did you do it? And he goes, oh, I didn't do it, Dave did it. And I got sent to the principal's office

for doing the right thing. And I was so angry in first grade, and I felt helpless in first grade, right? So what happens when I'm an adult? It's an unresolved trauma with little tea. I'm an adult. I did the right thing. I helped Joe,

I helped his audience, I was consistent, and I got punished for it. And it brought up the feelings of anger and helplessness in first fucking grade from something

that had left my consciousness 30 years ago. So I did the reset process on that. And as I did the reset process, it was like, the whole situation with Joe and all the stuff,

it just shrunked this little thing, just went away. And then it became really clear, just what you said, every time Joe Rogan says, Dave's a bad man, I just make more money.

So what I, should have done was gone right back on X now on Twitter at the time and just been like, Joe, your mom doesn't say I'm a bad man. That would have been the right response. Literally made fun of Joe Ogan's mom. Because like let's pick a fight, dude. Let's be as public as we can, bulletproof at the time. Now danger coffee. But because it's childish. This is, he's a comedian, right? He's not dumb. He just plays like he's dumb, but he's a comedian. And I'm actually, well, I'm pretty smart. I know my shit. And I don't lie. I never lie. So you forgave him.

Sometimes we think that we forgive people, but we're actually haven't really done the work. What do you mean sometimes? Very few people have ever forgiven someone. It's an advanced spiritual skill to forgive someone. This is why Jesus practiced it for all that time. Forgive them they know not what they do. Most people, I would say 99% of the time, forgiveness is I decided to forgive them. It's a cognitive process that happens in the mind.

In reality, no forgiveness happens in the mind. It is all in the body. Forgiveness is an altered state, like a psychedelic state or like an orgasmic state. You don't live in a state of forgiveness unless you're very, very special. You can live in a state of compassion, which is what Buddhism teaches. And compassion is, I automatically wish other people well before I can judge them. And that's also an advanced skill. Forgiveness is harder, but you don't always live in forgiveness because we,

Once you've developed compassion, very few people can trigger you anymore. So you truly forgave somebody if you don't get the triggers resulting of whatever that trauma was. If a person that you think you've forgiven walks into a room and you have no reaction internally, your heart doesn't change even a little bit, you don't clench your jaw, you don't change your breath. And if we were measuring stress response, which we can now on your skin, you wouldn't see any change. you'd be like, oh, it's good to see you, right? How do you think about gratitude with forgiveness? And is there anything with the Joe Rogan situation that you actually feel grateful for?

Oh, I'm so happy you asked. In the reset process, you cannot enter the state of forgiveness without finding gratitude first. And I've worked with people who've been tortured in war, like the most horrific things doing the 40 Years' Zen program.

And entrepreneurs, a lot of them, actually, who've been through childhood trauma, like pretty complex and just abhorrent things. And I've looked him in the eye and said, if you want to let that go permanently and forever, you have to find one good thing that happened. And the cool thing about gratitude is your body's dumb. It doesn't understand time or magnitude or space.

It doesn't understand there's refrigerators or police officers or whatever. It's just like reactive, real-time, emotional flopping all over the place until you train it. So you can tell your nervous system whatever you want when you do this. And for gratitude, it just has to find one good thing. It doesn't matter what it is.

You can literally be in a car accident and lose a leg. And I'm so grateful I have my other one. Boom, you found gratitude. It's not hard. Yeah. But seeing the gratitude is actually very difficult. And you know what it takes to find gratitude? Curiosity.

And we all know what curiosity did. They say it killed the cat. Because curiosity takes you out of fear. So the reason that you're feeling triggered is ultimately fear. When you peel away all the labels, there's some kind of fear that your mitochondrial network is signaling. And so once you start going, huh, I wonder, then you're not afraid anymore. And then you say, oh, it turns out there was this tiny little sliver of goodness amongst all the crap. Yeah.

Okay, now you're primed to do the reset process and actually forgive the person. And the forgiveness is you change the state of your body, not the state of your mind. So most people, I forgave? No. What you did is you told someone you forgave them and you decided that you forgave them and you're holding into all the crap in your heart and in your body and in your gut. And that crap is the biggest energy leak for all humans all the time. Sometimes our triggers aren't from something that happened personally. So for example, I'm Palestinian. So I feel like with the last three years, I probably have so much like trauma and things that I need to forgive the world for and release so that it doesn't show up in my leadership and my honor. entrepreneurship. All right. Can I be really triggering for you? Yeah.

You have toxic empathy. Mm. Okay. I'm sure I do. So do you know what toxic empathy is? When you just feel like you, I do have toxic empathy. Like I know for a fact. Like I'm so, you can, you can explain it.

Okay. I would like to learn more too. So there's two paths that humans go down. When we're very, very young, okay, you're in a meat body that can't feed itself and poops on itself, right? And your networks in charge are like, how do I make sense of this weird world? Like there's air and light and mom.

And if you look at the brainwaves of a baby, it's all like the deepest brain, like sleepy states and then dreamy states. And you don't really come out of the dreamy state until you're seven or eight. So during that time, you're not perceiving the world like normal. And you learn, what do I have to do to be safe? And one group of people learns,

I have to think to be safe. Thinking is the way. And the other group of people says, I have to feel to be safe. Feeling is the way. So if you have an unsafe environment, then you learn, okay, I can earn love with my brain, and I can think about whether someone's going to hit me, and then I can avoid it. And someone else will say, if I can just feel everyone's feelings around me, then I can feel when something bad is going to happen, and I can avoid it, and I can be safe.

Right. Now, they're both trauma responses, right? So when people come in to 40 years of end, these are all people who, despite this, which is the human condition, are very successful. It's about $20,000 to work with my whole team for a week. I think it's underpriced, but whatever. Like, it's very expensive to run, but very valuable. So these people have some degree of economic success regardless of this.

And the people are like, oh, my gosh, I'm feeling everyone's pain, all that stuff. They learn, I don't have to feel pain. And when you study spiritual stuff like Buddhism, they'll tell you empathy is better than no empathy, but it's a low-level state. Because you want to walk into Walmart and feel everyone's feelings? I don't think so. Right? Because it's just a random wash of humanity. It's not, it's normal and you're trying to be better than normal. So the step above empathy is compassion, which is, oh, I automatically wish all these people at Walmart well. I'm not going to judge them, even if they're on the people of Walmart webpage, which is the funniest thing ever, if you ever seen it. But the idea here is, okay, I just like, I have compassion, right? That's healthy. And empathy is not so healthy because you're whipped around by other people's emotions all the time. And then on the other hand, the people who are meat robots, which is where I was, I will refuse to acknowledge my emotions because I don't comprehend them. And because dealing with my emotions is unsafe.

I can just think my way out of them and therefore I will earn love. But for them to crack through into their emotions, I did that when I was about 30 at a personal development retreat. It took like seven days before I would go, I guess I have an emotion besides anger. Fine. So what's going on with you is partially. that toxic empathy. And when people do a lot of their own work on their adult experiences,

on their childhood experiences, they'll go in three different directions. One of them is pre-in-perinatal trauma. The experience of birth and what happened in the womb has effects that you can remember that are changing your personality today. I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, and I had no idea the effects it had on me

from a PTSD perspective. until I did the work and was like, oh my God, I'm so glad I figured that out and let it go. Okay, so there's that. Then there's the generational trauma, and that could easily be a part of what you're dealing with. And I see this in any part of the world where there's been conflict, including like Central Europe, is full of this because every 60 years, an army rides through and messes things up, and then it lasts for several generations. You see in the Middle East, very, very clearly. You see it in the Muslim world. you see it in Jewish people.

Lots of bad stuff has happened over the last 100 years. I mean, Lawrence of Arabia, all the things. Yeah. Right. Some people will just automatically

like, okay, I cleaned out my own closet, like, oh my gosh, and they'll start doing work on their great, great grandmother they never do. And then they feel these weird shifts in their body.

This is more shamanism, but people do it themselves. Like, I'm trained in shamanic practice and a bunch of other stuff. But they're doing this with electrodes on their head. And the coolest thing is sometimes someone will like, you know, forgive a family member

they haven't talked to in 20 years. And then that night, they get a text from their long, lost, whatever, going, I don't know why I'm just thinking about you. Oh, my God. Not just once or twice, like hundreds of times to the point that we're all connected more than we think we are. And so your ability, as a leader of a company, to just hold your space, it comes down to dealing with your generational trauma,

with birth trauma, and what happened in the womb, was your mom safe and all that sort of stuff? And then the freakiest thing, that comes up and I've had to deal with it myself is past lives, which is not generational trauma, it's not this life, but you're like, why am I so angry at 14th century French people? It doesn't matter why. The why is the reason, the meaning engine of your conscious thinking, it's if it pops up in your, just run a reset process on, just let it go. Right. So I'll see people like, oh my gosh, I spent two hours today forgiving things from another lifetime and I feel so much better.

Now, is that real? I tend to do. I tend to be. I tend to be able to be. I tend to be able to be. I to think so. It doesn't matter. Did the person's state change and did the beneficial change stick? And if so, then it worked. And I don't care if there's a belief system about it or not. What I do know is that 90% of people who go through 40 years is in report relationship improvements in a survey. Actually, it's approximately like 89 point something. There's, and all the other markers of psychological health and performance go up more than 50% for all of the markers for people to go through. So, wow. Now, forgiveness is a performance-enhancing process, but only if it actually works. On the contrary, if you cognitively forgive someone, now you're creating a schism in reality

for yourself. You say that you forgive the person, but you don't feel that way. And if you want to be a terrible leader, show up with a lack of authenticity and congruence. I've never seen a leadership book about congruence, but this is what happens in my therapist of 10 plus years has actually said, Dave, you're the most congruent client I've ever worked with, which to me is a really good compliment.

What that means is that my inner state and my outer state are aligned, right? And when you're a leader, if you're losing your mind and you get in front of the troops and you're like, all right, everything's fine, but everyone knows it's not fine

because it's not the tells, it's not what you're doing, it's that you're sending out magnetic vibes we can measure, and you're sending out quantum vibes that you kind of can measure, but are harder to sense, and probably some biophotons, like there's all, and fernones, and God knows what else. So we have a sense that we're lying. You know what I'm talking about? Can you tell when someone's bullshitting you? Yeah. Well, you're a woman. You guys have to have an under advantage. Seriously, women are more intuitive than men on average, because you have to rely on

intuition for safety, and guys are like, we have muscle. We are safe. We have rocks. Your team can feel this, too. It doesn't matter if you're a man or woman in leadership. if you can walk up and you can say something that is internally true and externally true, you have their attention. And over the years of advising and coaching entrepreneurs, one of my favorite questions is, people come and say, Dave, how can I be more authentic? You can't act authentic. It's like you have to make your inside and your outside line up.

And that's what meditation and breathwork and all the spiritual side, the consciousness side of biohacking is about. And it's why not only do I run the biohacking conference here in Austin, which is called Beyond Biohacking, the largest and oldest biohacking conference in 5,000 people. Joe Dispenza has spoken there twice, and leaders where some of our speakers are about that, but he also bought the Wonderland Conference, which are bringing to Austin in October. And the Wonderland Conference is the second largest psychedelic conference in the world. Rick Doblin from MAPS, who's a hero and a friend is speaking. and it's a consciousness conference where we do psychedelic speakers

as well as other technologies for consciousness because if you're an entrepreneur, you better learn how to hack your internal state otherwise you will literally tear yourself apart in the process of succeeding. I was literally just about to ask you about psychedelics, so I'm glad that you brought it up because I feel like one of the hardest things to do

is actually to remember your trauma and try to understand like where these triggers are coming from, and it seems like certain drugs can kind of unlock that for people. Can you explain why? Your brain has something called the default mode network. And heavily meditated, if you're interested, has a whole chapter on psychedelics and how and why this works. Again, it's okay if you don't buy the book.

I just want you to know where to go for more info. So the default mode network in neuroscience is pretty much what allows the ego to express itself. So when you take something like ketamine, which is what we use at 40 years of Zen, as an option for neuroplasticity, not classically a psychedelic, but similar neighborhood, or psilocybin or LSD, or even something like DMT. By the other, I'm about to go do like a four-hour DMT session. That's going to be kind of cool. Right after this? It's sometimes in the next couple months. We're going to do a whole, like, an episode of a TV series on it because normally it's an eight-minute journey, but I'll do it for a few hours.

and see what happens. Anyway, all these disrupt default mode network signaling so that your ego shuts the hell up, and then you get to see the world the way your mitochondria see the world. It's pretty interesting, like all the patterns, all the colors, all the memories, all the connection. It can come back. However, a great number of people end up reliving past traumas when the ego turns off, and they say, oh, I had a bad trip. No, you didn't have a bad trip. you relived a trauma. So you can let it go. If you have the right set and the right setting and the right facilitation support,

you have the opportunity now that you've become aware of it to actually work on letting it go. I've seen very few people permanently let things go with psychedelics. It's not impossible, and I've done everything but combo at this point. You can lighten the load, but without like a deep forgiveness that's embodied, it's very hard to do. And the difficult thing with psychedelics is that 90% of what happens you don't remember. So even if you forgive in an altered state, if you don't have full recollection of it, you don't necessarily get the full benefits of it.

So I am actually a fan of mindful psychedelic use, and I've been to Burning Man a dozen times, so I might use them for fun on a good. But if you're using them recreationally, you're probably not getting the benefits. and if you don't have a facilitation process, it doesn't work. And the way we use ketamine at 40 years of Zen is we do one journey day, and before and after there's training, and afterwards there's facilitation. And the role of a facilitator at 40 years of Zen is to make sure that you remember everything. And then when you go in and you're doing neurofeedback sessions,

which feel like you're on psychedelics, but it's just you and your brainwaves, you come out and you talk about it. Imagine, like if you had a dream last night, did you have a dream? dreams last night? Dreaming about this interview and making sure I do good. And you remember it? Yeah. Okay, cool. Most people, though, don't remember their dreams unless someone asked them to remember it. I was like maybe not fully sleeping well. Okay, cool. But you know what I'm talking about. Yeah. Right? So people will forget their dreams. Like, God, I had the best dream. And you just don't know. So it's the same with psychedelic journeys and it's the same with

meditation. And that's why I have a team of trained facilitators, a team of neurotechnicians inside us. So you come out and like keep wearing the true dark glasses. They keep your brain. in published medical studies that keep your brain in a meditation state. And then let's talk. And let's get it out there. Let's take notes. Let's structure the tools so you can do it better. And that's why we have a wait list for a $20,000 program because it saves you 40 years of meditating every day.

And if you're an entrepreneur. I'm going to do your program. Oh, you want to do it ASAP. You're running a big enough couple companies. Oh, yeah, yeah. All you have to think about is one time that you made a really bad decision because you're emotional. Right?

Especially as a woman, we get very emotional. You know, you'd be surprised. Men and women both get emotional. Just you show it more. We get emotional. We just sit on it and grab our teeth and just chew it up and digest it and then like feel in our bodies and we get old and fat and angry. You ever see that movie Grumpy Old Men?

Yeah. That's like a documentary on testosterone deficiency and lack of forgiveness. But we all do feel it. And women express it more. And some of the hardest clients at 40 years of Zen are men. I do not know how to feel my feelings. And this is to me like sacred work because when I was 30, I was at a personal development retreat doing holotropic breathwork,

which is a replacement for LSD. It is a hardcore breathwork. And I was like, okay, I'm not understanding. There's all these people that make all these sounds. There's people also with like withle ball bats, are hitting pillows and yelling. I'm like, this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. But I couldn't stand to be in the room.

Like the sound of it just drove me nuts. So I went outside and the facilitators, bless them. They came out like, why are you outside? I'm like, I can't stand the sound of all these people yelling and wailing and whatever. This is my first personal development thing in my life. I was like way in the deep end. And so they brought me in. I took three facilitators and pillows, actually like weighted blankets on me

so I could just lay there. right and I'm like I am a rational computer science human being I'm you know successful like what is up and this wise woman looks at me and she goes are you feeling anything I said yeah I'm feeling pissed off because this is dumb she said anything else I said well there's a weird feeling in my stomach she goes hmm that's fear and I looked her right in the eye and I said there's nothing in here for me to be afraid of therefore it's not fear and she looked at me and she kind of giggled and she goes fear is an emotion emotions don't have to have reason. And I was like, oh my God.

Why did I not think of that? My body has emotions that make no freaking sense. But before that, my whole model of reality was that it can't be that emotion because why would it be there? Just understanding that. So we guys have it, but I was completely ignoring everything below my neck.

And I don't anymore. And so women, you typically have to pay attention to things below your neck because they change all the damn time, right? You have a monthly cycle. have a daily cycle, and like, it's a lot. So women's intuition, though, is very important for entrepreneurs. And I'm going to talk about that if we have time for it. If you believe what I'm saying about mitochondria being basically antennas on reality. They sense reality first. They make a group decision with each other about what they're going to pass onto the nervous system and ultimately to your brain.

Then the areas with the most mitochondria would be the most sensitive to the environment. So in men and women, we have 15,000 mitochondria in our brain cells and our heart cells. Okay, and that's where it tops out. Oh, except in women, you have about 600,000 mitochondria in your ovarian tissue. Wow. So the seed of intuition in women is the reproductive system. You also have a lot of nerve endings and other parts of your reproductive tract, right? So, and I've interviewed top OBGYNs and top female spiritual leaders about this,

and more than one of the spiritual leader types has literally looked at me and said, intuition is in my pussy. I'm like, I'm not going to just, okay, I, okay, yes, I believe you. I'm not going to disagree with that, right? So when you're dealing with advanced Taoism and things that are in my wheelhouse, when you first start working with a spiritual teacher, you'll see them do this. Okay, they're activating chi in their hands. We have a lot of nerve density in our hands.

And then, as I start learning, they start feeling their feet because you have, have the second most nerve endings in your feet, right? And then the true masters, when they're walking into a room, they feel hands, feet, and groin. Because it's a very sensitive area. And this has nothing with sex at all. It has to do with, I'm aiming all the antennas in my body to get an intuitive sense. But guys are much worse at getting an intuitive sense in our reproductive tract than women are. I think it has to do with reproductive safety. I don't know. But if you're a male entrepreneur, you had better know the two women on your team who are most intuitive. and hopefully your spouse or partner is also intuitive,

and you listen to what they say, because they will tell you, that guy's a douchebag. You're like, but I like that guy. It doesn't matter. If a woman who has shown that she's intuitively trustworthy tells you someone's a douchebag, then just don't work with them.

It's not worth it. These are your team. And the reason I'm still here as an entrepreneur today, I have two women on my team, Rebecca and Miranda, they just moved to Austin, welcome ladies, 14 years of supporting me, and they're both intuitive. And the number of times in the last especially 10 years after I learned this, when I just don't like that guy or that woman, like they're not good.

My assistant, Christine, same thing. I don't like that one. Every time I've hired someone she didn't like, I regretted it immensely. So listen to intuitive women, and if you're a guy, you have a different kind of intuition. You have it. It's just very, very different. and your intuition, it'll be in the same place. It'll be in your hands and your reproductive tract.

So if you walk into a room or someone else walks into a room and your balls climb up inside you, it probably should tell you something. That's a protective thing that your body is doing to tell you. You have to listen to the body. The body knows. It's so interesting. And then when we think about those five Fs that you're mentioning and fertility,

it's no wonder that women are making so many decisions around fertility. And even if you're not realizing it, that this decision you're making of who you're dating or what job you're taking or whatever might be like a fertility decision that you're not even realizing. It is so crazy the way things work. Like the way a guy smells,

not smells because you know, you're smelling his armpit or something, but just in the room, your body will pick up the fact that he has a DNA that's compatible with yours, a haplotype, and he'll smell good to you. but it won't be a conscious smell,

and then you'll start talking to him, and then you'll flip your hair and do all the things that you do, and you won't even know why you're doing it. This is how mitochondria manipulate us all the time, right? Problem is if you're on the birth control pill, that system gets hacked and broken, so it doesn't work, and then you might be attracted to the wrong guy.

You go off the pill, and all of a sudden your husband was not attractive anymore. Oh, wow. That's why for... I'm anti-birth control pills. In 2011, I wrote my first book, which is on fertility, because the mother of my children, former wife, she was infertile when I mean.

met her and she's a doctor. So did some biohacking, restored her fertility. My first book was about that. And I went really deep on this. And birth control pills harm women so much and access to birth control is a necessary right for women. Just the pill is harmful to women. It's okay to say both at the same time. If you care about women, you should say that. So yeah, it breaks relationships. I just want to kind of close the loop on the fact that when you forgive, you get more energy because then your mitochondria can allocate energy to different things other than your emotions, right? So can you help people understand that?

Every day you take about 30 pounds of air and some amount of food. You combine them and you make electricity and heat and some other proteins and stuff like that, and that's what runs your body. Right now, the average person's thoughts, about one-third of their thoughts per day, are about tacos. Okay, or at least about food.

So each of those thoughts took electricity. So imagine if like one of the times your phone just slows down, like, what is going on here? And you like close a bunch of open apps and then it speeds back up. Well, everything that you haven't forgiven is an open app running in your brain. And all of these unprogrammed thoughts, they just take up energy. And that means you're not thinking about the business. You're not acting with clarity. You're less conscious.

It also means that the immune cells, whose job is to kill cancer cells, they didn't have enough energy. And the body is beautifully set up to run the most important on the to-do list to the least important in order. And it says, I'm going to prioritize not dying at the very top here and not dying now. Right. And I'm going to make sure that we have some kids and that we eat and all this stuff. Folding proteins properly is pretty low on the list. So it's only going to do that if you give it two things, enough energy and a safe environment for it to regenerate. So if you're stressed all the time and out of energy, you have to be.

have neither ingredient. And this is why so many entrepreneurs are like, I will use my willpower and my biological energy to become successful. I'm in my late 20s, early 30s. God, this was me. I can burn the candle in the middle and at both ends. And I'm, I'm just going to do it. So stress all the time, working out all the time, right? Because more is better. That's not how it works. But so at the end of the day, they're completely blown out. They might be successful. They're They're constantly wired or tired. They're reactive. They don't know they're reactive.

And they're grinding all the time. And it creates misery. It also creates broken teams because then your team tries to do that. And then everyone in your company is all broken. And it's toxic. And I know because I've done it. So what you'd want to do instead is recognize that your body responds to stimulus followed by recovery. And this is why I exercise.

for about 20 minutes a week. And like I am like, I'm on the cover of my book with my shirt off. I am, well, if you believe the calendar, which I don't anymore, I'm actually 28% old. Because I'm going to live to 180. But if you do the math, I'm 53 on the calendar. I am leaner and in better shape than any time of my life with less work than ever. And in business, it's the same way. Working more means you're a bad entrepreneur.

So people probably got pissed at that. But it's true. Like, okay, you could have a high return on ad spend or a low return on ad spend, which you'd rather do. High return on ad spend. You want to spend as little as you can to get the highest return. Yeah. That makes you good on.

So why do you want to work hard? No, you want to delegate. You want to work as little as possible so that the only thing that ever crosses your desk is something that no one else in your company can do. And when you have too many of those, you want to hire someone who can do those things. That's the path. And why do you think I have, I think it's eight companies in the portfolio right now? because I have hired good leaders, right?

And I'm engaged with the companies, right? I'm spending a lot of time on upgrade labs now. We've got one here in Austin. Have you been? No, I haven't yet. Oh, my gosh, I'm sure I can get you a free pass there. Yeah, I'd love to. Yeah, and this is our AI longevity place where I can go for my 20 minutes a week of working out.

Only 20 minutes a week you're working out? I'm not joking. Most people hear me say 20 minutes a day. No, it's 20 minutes a week. I thought you were saying 20 minutes. Look at my house. Jeez. How is that possible?

AI. We've used AI to figure out what is the minimum signal to put into the body to cause it to grow muscles and get VO2 max. And, okay, get this. Five hours a week. So an hour a day of spin class, which is brutal. Like you've got- Yeah, I work out literally six times a week and like heated classes and all this kind of stuff. And I love it. But there has to be a better way. So you're like a masochist. Well, I don't think so. I mean, the only thing I don't like about it is how often I have to wash my hair. But other than that, I love it. it. I'm totally teasing you. You love it because you're getting the stress hormones that feel good. Yeah, in the community and all that. Yeah, the community is a big one. So, if you were to do five minutes three times a week of our tech for cardio, you're going to improve by 12%. What you're doing gets you a 2% improvement over two months. So two months of consistent practice five hours a week, 2%. 15 minutes a week, 12%. So six times better in 15 minutes, and you brush your

teeth for 15 minutes a week. So your cardio should take as much time as brushing your teeth. And if you're an entrepreneur, you want five hours a week back? I did. Yeah, I was just going to say, like, that no wonder you're running eight companies. You don't have to exercise every day. And here's something else that happens when people start biohacking. They need an hour or less sleep. And then you wake up fully refreshed and you're like, oh my God, what just happened? Is everything okay? I thought I needed more sleep. No. If you need more sleep, it means you suck at sleep or you're sick. The people who live the longest get six and a half hours of sleep a night in three studies of more than a million people each over multiple years. So eight hours a night is for normal people. You want to be someone who's so healthy,

you're like, you know what, unless I worked out heavy or drank or something, I don't really need eight hours. I just wake up and I'm good to go and I don't need my coffee to get going. Interesting. I run danger coffee. I have a tattoo of caffeine on my arm. I love my coffee and I used to need it to function, now I just love my coffee. I literally wake up before my alarm clock. This morning, I woke up 15 minutes before my alarm, ready to go. I couldn't do this until I was over 40 years old because I didn't understand that I was stimulating too much and recovering, not enough. It's called being kind to yourself. So we've talked about internal triggers that can cause energy leaks. Now we're moving into external environmental triggers.

Oh, big one. One thing that we did not talk about yet is light. And I I see you've got these, for those of you watching on YouTube, he's got these yellow glasses that block junk light is what you call it. These are the coolest glasses on the planet. I started True Dark 10 plus years ago, and we block only the bad spectrum of blue and let the good stuff through. If you wear blue blockers, the ones you buy online, from anyone other than True Dark,

what you're getting is somebody blocks all of the blue light. You need blue light to wake up and function during the day. If you block blue light, you will break your circadian biology. So I'm blocking underneath a specific wavelength of light with these. And these are the first all titanium custom made from scratch frames. I worked for like six months on these, and they have the little side shields. They look cool. They're so cool.

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

It's a good plan. Man, next time you come on, we're going to have to talk about category creation and how to, and just like biohacking and entrepreneurship. That will be the next episode. But today, we're running out of time. And I do want to play a fun game that I think is going to work really well on social. Okay. It's called biohacking confessions.

Ew. And I want you to just answer the questions in terms of like what comes up for you in your gut. Okay. You can be like kind of quick. I'll ask any follow-ups if I want more information. But are you ready for biohacking confessions? I'm ready. Okay.

What is your current age? Well, I identify as being about 35, 28 percent. Or if the government is asking in their outdated ways, I'm 53. How old do you hope to live? I'd like to die at a time and buy a method of my choice, and that would be at least 180. Has that changed with AI at all? I actually made up that number because of AI.

And that number just comes from our current best is 120. And I just want 50% better than our current best. And I have 100 years to do it. Did you hear last month they noticed they cured type 1 diabetes? No. Kind of a big deal. Yeah. Yeah.

So we're like all of the diseases of aging are dropping like flies right now. I've done gene therapy. I run something called unlimited life, which is for high level entrepreneurs who are all in on extending their lifespan. And we've got about 100 members in this where I go through their lab work. A doctor who's worked on two heads of state is my business partner in it. The guy who runs the Dalai Lama Foundation and Mr. Bees Foundation is the other partner. So high-level stuff, we take him to the jungle to learn from a shaman to do longevity work. We take him to Kenya.

And we do about $50,000 worth of lab work on all of them. So when I say that, I don't say it lightly. Like, I'm actively engaged in longevity and written in New York Times by selling longevity book. We are cracking the code right now. I've done gene therapy. I just reprogram my stem cells in New Jersey last week. And I've probably had more stem cells than anyone on the planet. So, yeah, we can do this.

I'm just an early example of it, but if you're under 35 right now, you have such an unfair advantage because you haven't aged as much as I have while we were inventing all this shit. Do you believe you're aging backwards? Some of the systems in my body are aging backwards quantitatively. Others, no. What is not aging backwards? I don't have good data on my brain. I like to think, I mean, it's functioning very well, but I'd like to think that it's aging backwards, but I just don't know how to measure that. And some parts of my skin are aging backwards right now and others aren't.

So I'm working on that one. What's proving that you're aging backwards? It depends on which system you're measuring, but there's something called DNA methylation. And this is a measurement of about 600,000 different DNA methylation points. It's called an aging clock. And we can now do organ-specific aging clocks. What was your most extreme self-experiment? This is a toss-up.

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

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

that we just don't know how to get to anymore? Who is your biohacking bestie? Who's your best friend in this space? You know, this is an interesting one. I have so many just amazing friends. But one of my favorites is actually here in town, Dr. Anne Shippey. She just wrote a book about preconception, was just on my show. We've been dear friends for about 15 years, and she's, I would say, the top environmental

doctor in the country. And we get together a couple times a month and have brunch. And just go through all the biohacking stuff, the psychedelic stuff, the meditation stuff. And so she's like sole family. And because she's an IBM chemical engineer turned medical doctor, we can just nerd out at the deepest levels. And she's just so freaking smart. So we hang out a lot. I think, yeah, just from a, there's nothing I can say that she won't be like,

okay, I see that at my patience. And, you know, plus she's just a just a dear friend. Who's your biohacking frenemy, somebody that you respect them, but they're kind of your competitor, too? Biohacking started with 100 people in a bar in San Francisco in, what was that, 2012, the first event? So it's on track to be a $200 billion industry by 2030, according to the latest analysts. I started a $200 billion industry. How can you have enemies in an industry that's going from zero in 2012 to $200 billion over the course of, what is that, 20-something years? It's nuts.

So there's no reason to have frenemies. And if I'm feeling that way towards someone, I need to do more reset. because if I'm feeling friend of me energy, it means that I'm wasting my electrons. So I'm just going to serve the people who are interested in what I have to say and I'm going to do to the best of my ability. And if someone else is doing a better job, then, you know, blessings on them. And like, an example, Andrew Huberman, I had him on my show before he was a known entity.

Because I find people before they blow up, and I've been, after 1,400 episodes, I have a pretty good track record of that. had him on, and he talked about, you know, the Stanford Human Performance Lab. I'm like, that is so cool. I didn't know when I had him on that the Stanford Performance Lab was an empty room at Stanford that they weren't doing anything in. But he has gone on to, well, very largely support things like nicotine and the red Trudeau glasses and the other things that I've pioneered.

So having a Stanford professor say, this is good stuff, is awesome. But what Andrew does, that I very much respect, he's a lot of. a teacher. I ran a program at the University of California for five years for web and internet engineering. So I understand what a good teacher is and isn't. He teaches very well. And he does that one thing. And sometimes I think, you know, if I just did more teaching, but then I'd have to quit all my other eight companies and focus on that. So I think he's done a great job of introducing people. Some of his guests are not so good, I would say. And there are a couple, a couples where I'm not going to call friend me is I'm just going to call them bullies, right? And I have no problem with bullies in general,

like emotionally. I just think they're fun toys. So there's guys like Biolane. Have you heard of this guy? No. So apparently I was like a million followers and he's like, I have a PhD in, I don't know what he has a PhD in, but I did ask his mom. So anyway, Bio Lane did this video recently. And this is, the reason I'm telling you guys this, as entrepreneurs, you need to know. It's like, Dave Asprey's, he's. here in his piss-stained glasses and he's had something I don't like. Now, Bialane is one of these, like, dying breed of, like, calorie trolls where he's like, if you just work out more and eat less, you'll lose weight. This advice has been so disproven by many people, including me, to the point that it's

just laughable. You can't cancel out a Snickers bar with a diet soda, but, you know, but this arguing way of just picking on the person instead of the idea, it's so fifth-grade bullying. Yeah. So I'm like, oh, I have a bully to play with. So here's what I did. I reposted his troll video on my Instagram. And then I did a stitch on top of it.

And I said, hey, by Elaine, thanks for being such a big fan. And I'd like you to know that in addition to apparently being pissedained, my true dark glasses block blue light under 490 nanometers, which is the wavelength that causes a bunch of biological effects that you probably wouldn't understand. because you don't have a PhD in it. But to celebrate your fandom, people can get a discount code at trudark.com by using code Biolane. I sold $10,000 that day. And if he posts again and Biolane, please post again.

That's so good. What I'm going to do is I will donate a portion of the proceeds to a nonprofit for victims of childhood bullying because that's what he is. So am I angry about this? No. Do I think this is the funniest marketing I've done in so long? And maybe there's some shout in front.

It's just like, it's fun. And if you look at my social things, people like, gave you look old. What do you think I'm going to say? That's not what your mom said. I don't care. Like, then leave or don't leave. I just don't care because it doesn't trigger me at all. But it's so fun because what people usually say, oh, my God, how dare you?

You made a mom joke. I'm like, hold on. I thought we were doing fifth grade bullying stuff. Like, it's your turn. Like, how about I'm rubber. your glue because what you're doing is juvenile. If you think what I'm saying is wrong, tell me what's wrong. I'm like, let's talk. I love it. If you can tell me the hole in my theory and provide evidence, I'm going to go down that rat hole because I want to know. Like,

I am looking for the perfection of understanding of biology in humans and of psychology and the spiritual thing and the connection in the quantum realms, all of it. So show me what I'm missing, please. And I will thank you. And I'll send you some coffee. Right. So I learn from my followers. But if you're going to come in and just like and make fun of me, dude, let's play. Yeah, you're going to fight back. Okay. What is your biggest biohacking industry ick? The biohacking industry ick that I get is from people who really are new to the field.

And they kind of, some of them get religion. A lot of them just get, I smell profits. You know, it's a growing industry. So it attracts entrepreneurs. But when people say, I want to be an influencer, but you're not an expert that creates, ick because I see people taking relatively good biohacking ideas and dumbing them down to the point they're harmful. And I'm like, don't act like an expert if you're not an expert. Like how many peptide influencers who have one year of peptide experience are there? Oh, you read the same stuff that

everyone read? I've been on peptides for 15 years, right? And I wrote a chapter about them in my book, about the most common ones to have the most evidence. And there's all kinds of experimentation. And I love experimentation, but like some people are better experts than others. So the idea of acting like an expert before you've really had a chance to learn, the only reason I can do what I do is that for five years in my 20s, I was mentored by people in their 70s and 80s, the leaders in the longevity field, because I worked at a nonprofit in the space. They taught me all this stuff so I could refine it throughout my 30s and I launched the biohockey movement when I was 39. Nicotine or nah?

For sure, nicotine. As far as I can tell my book, which one was it, probably superhuman, my longevity book, it was the first book to talk about nicotine as a longevity molecule. And this was based on, I think his name is Dr. Paul Newhouse at Vanderbilt. I call him Dr. Nicotine. And I found his paper from 1986 showing that nicotine reversed Alzheimer's. So I asked him to be on the show. And we talked about the effects of this.

I flew out to Switzerland. I met with the chief of R&D at PMI, also known as Philip Morris, this is many years ago. And he's a mitochondrial biologist, not looking to push tobacco at all. We talked about mitochondrial uncoupling and nicotine. So nicotine without smoking is a very notable longevity compound. It mimics exercise. It increases cognitive function. It stops narrow inflammation. And it's been used medicinally for 400 years. I'm not saying you should, pop massive zins all the time. I was going to say, do you like zins? I like Alp better because they're pre-moistened and all that.

And you can use a patch, you can use a lozenge. Just don't smoke and don't bait, but stuff is bad for you. And even the leadership team at the big tobacco companies, and I have met with them because I'm an innovator in lots of fields. And they've succeeded now in removing smoking largely from Italy and Japan. They found a better way to do it that doesn't come. cause lung cancer. Yeah.

It's called a heated tobacco product. So they actually recognize smoking's bad, but nicotine isn't bad, and I'm in that camp. These are some what-ifs. Okay. Would you rather be guaranteed to live to 180, but you can't drink any coffee? Would you take that deal? Actually, probably not. Coffee means that much to you?

No, it's so I don't want to be guaranteed to live to 180. I want to die at a time and buy a method of my choice. I am a freedom-oriented person. and most entrepreneurs are, like, I am free to leave tomorrow if I'm done here, and I will do it without regrets. Okay, well then I'm going to change this next question. So would you rather have the freedom to die when you want to

or get to go back to change the way you lived before you were 30? Oh, I want the freedom to die at a time and buy a method of my choice. You know, I suffered incredible amounts as a kid. I mean, I was bullied a lot. I had autism, and I don't meet the clinical criteria for autism anymore, you can heal it. I'm autism adjacent, maybe, but that just means I have a brain that does things, good things. But all the physical stuff and all, I just figured out pretty recently that I actually have Elders-Donlose syndrome, which is more common than people think.

It's a hyper-mobility thing that's why I've had a leaky gut in my whole life because my freaking collagen doesn't form right. It's also why I made collagen a billion-dollar industry, so that helps. Yeah, I mean, some of the things you suffer. from you ended up creating a whole category. Like you became a biohacker because you were unhealthy. So I guess everything just happens for a reason. If I didn't have toxic mold and my weird genetics, there would be no biohacking.

And so all that stuff, I don't regret it. I wouldn't change a thing. Although I sure yourself suffered a lot. Dave, this has been so awesome. I end my show with two questions. I ask all of my guests. The first one is, what is one actionable thing our young improfers can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

Think about your team right now and think of the most annoying person. on your team. Whatever came to mind, call them up and say you're fired. I love that advice. And what is your secret to profiting in life? You better understand what currency you're dealing with, and it's not money. It's energy. So if you end every day and you minimize the amount that you suffered, you maximize the amount of energy that you have, you'll really like your life and you'll make a bunch of money. But if you focus just on money, you will sell your health and you'll sell your energy and you probably won't like the person you become. And where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do? I'm on all the social media things. I run the Human Upgrade podcast,

and you can find me at Dave Asprey.com along with 3,000 articles telling you how to hack everything you'd want to hack. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining us on Young and Profiting Podcast. My pleasure. Yeah, fam, I loved having Dave back on the show. Every time he joined joins us, he challenges the way we think about performance, success, and what it actually takes to operate at our highest level. And in this conversation, he reminded us that entrepreneurship isn't just a game of time management. It's a game of energy management. Dave said every electron matters. And that idea really ties this entire episode together. As entrepreneurs, leaders, and high performers, we spend so much time trying to optimize our schedules,

our teams, and our business. But how often do we stop and look at the hidden places where our energy is leaking. Whether it's old resentment, unresolved triggers, unhealthy relationships, or the constant pressure to do more, those invisible drains can quietly cost us far more than we realize. I also loved how Dave reframed forgiveness. He said anger is the biggest energy leak ever. That's a powerful reminder because so many of us think that holding onto anger gives us strength or protection or a chip on our shoulder that makes us work harder. But in reality, that anger keeps us stuck. The moment we release that emotional charge, we free up energy that can be redirected towards growth, creativity, leadership, and the things that truly matter. Dave also challenged us to be

more intentional about the people we allow into our business and our lives. The right people, multiply your energy and the wrong people consume it. And sometimes protecting your future means having the courage to make difficult decisions sooner rather than later. Most importantly, this conversation reminded us that more effort isn't always the answer. Sometimes the next level comes from better recovery, stronger boundaries, deeper self-awareness, and learning how to respond instead of react. Yeah, bam, if this episode made you rethink the way you work, lead, or show up in your life, share it with another entrepreneur, leader, or high performer who needs to hear it. You can also watch this full episode on YouTube or Spotify video, and if you listen, learned,

and profited, make sure you follow the show, drop us a five-star written review on Apple. That's my favorite platform for you to drop reviews, and let me know your biggest takeaway, especially on YouTube. Drop your comments. You can find me on Instagram at Yap with Hala or LinkedIn at Hala Taha. This is your host, Hala Taha, aka the podcast Princess, signing off.