Change Your State of Mind, No Drugs Required – Hapbee with Dave Asprey : 762

Bulletproof Radio, a state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today we're going to talk about some wearable tech. But guys, you've probably heard me talk about it since the days of Quantified self. I have the poster from when I spoke in 2011, and the idea of measuring and monitoring the body, it's actually not that. Not that cool. It's cool when it doesn't take any work to monitor it. In fact, it'll change your life. But if you have to spend a lot of time managing a whole bunch of wearables, it's not that useful because what you really wanted to do wasn't to get some data. What you wanted to do was actually change your biology. And you can use data to do that, but now you can use wearables that directly put signals into your body. And I've talked about many different ways of doing that over time. There's a new way though, that's pretty interesting. A company that just went public has the technology. Something I've been using since the very first prototypes came out that I was very skeptical of. But after I chatted with the scientists and dug in on it, I was like, wait a minute, there's something serious going on here. So that's what we're going to chat about today. We're also going to chat about executive burnout because in addition to this piece of tech that I use most nights now when I'm going to sleep and sometimes during the day, you're going to hear some kind of raw audience, entrepreneurial from the front lines stuff. I think you're going to love the episode today. And today's guest is named Scott Donnell. He's a CEO and founder of a company called Hapbe H A P B E E. Not just happy. And I'm, I'm really stoked. I think this is one of the next frontiers of biohacking. So I want to go in with you guys and show you just from the founder's perspective what he went through to create the company and also what this thing does. And if you ever see me looking around, walking around like I have some sort of an iron man complex with a little glowing light on my chest or an interesting looking headband. Now you know why. With no further ado, Scott, welcome to the show.

Great to be here, Dave. Yeah, thanks for having me.

For background, I mean, Scott, you created Apex Leadership, which does fitness for kids in schools. You've raised like $75 million for schools and 3 million customers. But that's one of the things you're doing. You taught my daughter to start her first company with one. One of your other companies called My First Sale. But the, the big swing for the fences is you just went public like, within the last month, right?

That's right. Yeah.

Okay.

Happy Happy Technologies, Inc. We just listed in the TSX Venture Exchange in Toronto just a couple weeks ago. It's been a ride.

Okay. Like, it's big time. Publicly traded. Like, what. What happened to you? You know, with the amount of stress, I've. I haven't taken a company public. I've had portfolio companies go public, but it seems like kind of a painful process.

Well, okay, for starters, getting into something, I just do stuff I really am interested in, something that personally changes my life, something I care about. So, like the school, fundraising. My wife's a teacher. I literally started to help her out. So now we've got 3 million kids that have done that for Apex. My first sale, that Anna did and all the other kids. I wish I had that when I was a kid, when I wanted to do business in third grade. Right? Like, and then when this happened, you know, I want. I was. I'm desperate to find ways to feel good and hack my. My mental wellness without drugs and toxins and drinking stuff. And I invested in this company over 10 years ago that invented the tech up in Seattle, emulate therapeutics, and I've just been fascinated by it. So, I mean, I guess you and I are brothers in this idea. If something fascinates you and it really changes your life and can help a lot of other people, you just jump on it. That's what entrepreneurs should do. Find something that you love and you're good at and then, you know, make a dent in the universe.

Okay, so you're definitely mission driven. And it's funny, you know, like, find an entrepreneur who doesn't say they're mission driven, but when the cameras are off, a lot of them are like, I just wanted to make money. And I saw this idea and I borrowed it and I made a cheaper, crappier version. I'm like, well, that's why you actually don't get to come on the show. So I like to think I'm good at curating. People are doing something different and better, which is the definition of an entrepreneur. So you, you know, you've put your feet in a lot of fires, which has earned you the right to go out and do more businesses and kind of expand. But happy to take it public is really cool because It's a kind of technology that most people don't think is real. Can you tell me about the history of the Happy device and what it does?

I'm wearing it right now. For those who are watching, if they are watching, I've got around my neck this thing is kind of the version 1.0. If the oldest ipod block that Steve used to show everybody, if you will. So 18 years ago, 15 scientists in a lab had this crazy idea that, what if you could get a signal from a drug molecule? And Richard Feynman and Einstein have said this forever, but they said, let's try to do it. And the only way they could do it was to get this technology that was a naval technology called magnetometers. They did a bunch of stuff, basically Faraday cages and liquid helium, and they got their first signal, and they tried it on the mice from a drug molecule. And without any molecule there, it had the impact on the mice. And then they thought, oh, my gosh, we just uncovered a gold mine. Let's try brain cancer. And that's where we started.

So mice are not generally susceptible to a placebo effect. Right?

Right.

Okay. So they had a hypothesis. They found some tech for, like, submarine detection and said, all right, if we can just use the most advanced sensors to pick up something that's always been there that no one's really been able to see because they didn't look hard enough. Kind of like the first time you had a microscope, you'd be able to look and say, oh, my God, there's this whole world in here. But they did it with magnetic fields instead of with other things, like looking at it. And the thing that kind of raised an eyebrow for me is I know magnetic fields have an effect on life because I do it at one of my companies, but I'm just changing electrical flow. What these guys were doing was causing biological changes that worked on animals. Right. And by the way, playing a magnetic field under a mouse isn't really something that causes great discomfort. So this is the kind of animal testing that most people can get behind.

Pretty clean. Yeah. And by the way, we blinded the lab techs, too. When we did our tests for Happy, we wanted to make sure that our first six signals didn't have any. You know, we wanted to blind the lab techs as well, so they didn't know which signals were on which cage, and they were 100% accurate in telling what was happening with the mice.

What I like about Happy is you're saying, all right, we don't have to do chemotherapy Drugs leave that to emulate. You said, all right, this tech can actually be used for wellness. What are the things that people want so that they can choose how they feel? And you were able to take normal compounds that humans use, things like coffee, and get the magnetic signal. And now there's a lot of science people rolling their eyes around going, but coffee beans aren't magnetic. When you say magnetic signal, what are you talking about?

Okay, what I'm saying is we have the ability to imitate a non covalent bond. Now we're going to get a little sciency for just a minute. There are covalent bonds and non covalent bonds. When you take a molecule into your body. Okay, we can't do covalent. There's no way. That's like food and amino builders and vitamins and things like that. That's a chemical bond to the protein receptors of your cells. A non covalent bond, however, is like a remote control trigger from a distance. Okay, that's. There's by definition not a chemical bond. That's what we're going at.

It's basically fluctuating because it's unbonded. It has an open binding site, which means that it moves enough that you can pick it up with extreme. Basically blocking out all the noise and getting a bunch of samples and averaging them out and things like that.

Precision. Yeah.

So you can get this. All right, we know what a covalent or a non covalent molecule looks like magnetically. And you said, all right, let's just amplify that and play it through a carefully calibrated pulsed electromagnet like on the head or on the chest. And so you've done six signals so far. And some of the stuff, this is really the realm of science fiction. And before I invested, I did a bunch of diligence. I met with your scientist from Emulate. And I'm like a little bit skeptical, but it's very hard when you say, all right, we can take these signals and we can see how they change the behavior of mice. And the mice don't know, the lab techs don't know. And you can see. So what are the six signals that you've done?

Okay, so what? We people want better sleep. Okay, so we have a sleepy signal. You throw this under your pillow at night and then just track your oura ring stats or whatever you want to use.

Why do you think I use it at night?

There you go. More energy and productivity is a huge one throughout the day, whether you're working, doing errands, holding laundry, whatever. It is hiking, working out. That's what our alert and our focus signals are for. Alert is straight up energy from, like, a cup of coffee, energy drink. And then focus is much more of a Nicotinian receptor kind of thing.

I know what molecules you use because I invested in the company and I did a lot of diligence before I would even come close to talking about this. Like, I, I, I really diligence the crap out of things, especially really cutting edge, because there's just too many people who think they have something and don't. How much research. How many research dollars went into the emulate stuff?

About $80 million to date.

Okay, so, all right, the six things you got sleep. That one definitely works. You've got the energy one. I feel that one within about 20 seconds of putting it on. Right. And. And I've walked around at a conference at Joe Polish's Genius Network event. Joe's been on the show, so listeners know him. And, like, see, people are going, wait a minute. And they put on, like, what? Like, I am feeling way different than I was, you know, five minutes before. So, I mean, I've seen it in people and I've seen the research that you guys have in house. So sleep and energy. What are the other ones?

We got a focus signal.

Okay.

Okay. Mimics that spray you just put under your tongue. There you go.

I'm only using this spray. I don't want to chew Lucy gum while I'm on the show because, you know, chewing on a microphone sounds great. Unless you're into asmr. Can you do an ASMR signal for those weird people? Just kidding.

We'll talk offline. We've got a happy signal. We didn't know what else to call it. It mimics a couple happy hour drinks, shots, if you will. Nice little bit of euphoria, feeling a little bit of flushed cheeks, GABA receptor.

Activation kind of thing.

And then we have two more. A muscle relaxant, the relax signal, and then the calm signal. So relax his shoulders down, calm his neck up. It's more. We don't cure anxiety, but it's sort of like take the edge off, definitely. Like, mellow out, microdose chill feeling. That's kind of the calm. Right. So let me tell you this real quick because I think this is important. The reason I'm doing this is because a month before we met, my grandma Joyce tried the first relax signal. And she's my. Why? She's the reason I'm doing this. She has had arthritis for 20 years. Terrible sleeping we don't cure arthritis, we don't do any medical things. But she really aches and sore and tension everywhere, and I just wanted to see how this could help her. So I gave her the relaxed signal. I didn't tell her anything about it. Said, grandma, try this on, it might help. I'm serious. That 15 minutes later, she was bouncing around, she was hugging everybody. She was so happy and feeling great. That night she slept 11 hours, and she hasn't slept more than five since, like, the 90s. And my grandpa the next morning walked up with the device and he gave me a hundred grand. Oh, wow. He said, whatever you did with Grandma, we're old, we're going to die sometime soon. We don't need the money. Whatever you did with Grandma, you need to do with as many other people as you can possibly help, because it's insane. And she used it. She just passed. She was on her last. We thought she was. Only had a month left. This was a year and a half ago, almost two years ago. She just passed a couple months ago, but she used it all the way until the day she died.

Wow. Well, I'm sorry she passed, and I'm glad you made a difference for her with it. I mean, that. That's the kind of stuff that. That lets you know you're doing the right work.

That's. That's my why, man. I mean, obviously it's helped me a ton too, but my grandma was the first time I was like, all right, I'm gonna help people like her and people like us. So here we are.

What's your. If you could talk about it, like, what's your usage rate when people use it? Because you get to see it, people log into the app and all that stuff. Like, do people stop using it after a couple weeks?

We're in the 40s% daily active users, okay? So people get it. And 40% of them is 31. Okay. Netflix is 31%. So let's just get some comps here. Yes, this thing is people are using it to help them throughout the day. And what I like about it, I mean, I don't want to change too much of the subject, but you're not scrolling. You're not just staring at something, getting a dopamine hit, and having life go by. You, you, you click go. And for an hour, two hours, we're about to launch the sleep. For four hours, you can do your life right? And you can enjoy and engage and do all the things that you were supposed to do to enjoy your life in the first place and not be addicted to a screen. And that's why we love what we do. And it's our goal is first do no harm and then prove the hell out of it. That's all we're trying to do. So we just finished our blinded sham studies a few months back. We proved, you know, almost. It was almost 100% accurate for onboard users. They could tell if it was on or off, when it was on or they didn't know. And they could tell between alert and sleepy or off. Everyone was accurate. The only one, there's two people that missed sleepy and relax. They could tell if it was on or off. They knew it was working. They just couldn't tell if it was sleepy or relaxed after 30 minutes. Kind of saying it like Malbec or Merlot, I guess. But once you do it 50, 60 times, you can tell, but not a couple.

So that matches what I've heard from people as well, in my own experience. And you put it on people who are uninterested in any biohacking tech and there's still like something happened and that's what made me invest in the company. And now that you've gone public and you're really talking about it more than you were at first. It was kind of like the best kept secret. You just started shipping these things. What about people who are already on like a medication, say they're on antidepressants or something like that. Is it safe to use this?

Yeah. So we got to talk about two things. Safety. Yeah. We don't, we don't see any issues. We've got 380,000 hours of play just on humans now over the last decade. Okay. And most of that is play of like a toxic chemo signal. Okay. So our signals are proven safe. We've done all the workups on the animals and now we've got tons of hours on humans.

Okay.

But we always, we always are very clear by saying this is not a medical, you know, product. We don't make medical claims.

You don't go off your medications. This is basically you're getting a signal that changes how you feel. Yeah, but what about stuff like inflammation? I mean, do people, I guess you sleep better, you get less inflammation. But I mean, have you done any work on. Oh, it happens to reduce inflammation or anything like that, or nothing you can.

Talk about or not yet. Now that we're public, we got to talk one on one behind the scenes. But we can say there's a lot going on in terms of looking at these Signals and what they're actually doing to the body. And we're really excited about kind of some of the things we have put in our public prospectus. We're looking at diet, we're looking at memory, we're looking at performance, we're looking at all the ways that this could potentially influence your body and your mind. Right. And so if that can all be in an app for a few bucks a month, to us, that kind of feels like a great way to solve a lot of problems for people.

What have like functional medicine doctors or naturopaths or medical doctors. And what have they said about it? Have any of them tried it?

Oh, yeah. So Consumer Health Summit was really fun.

By the way, this is Michael Fishman's group. Michael's been on the show as well.

Okay. Well, we had a dozen folks there in that exact space that were wearing it the whole weekend. Now we're looking at collaborations and distribution deals and a lot of exciting things coming down the pipe. But if you know a lot, I think about Jeremy Delk and those guys, you know, that work with Peptides and Helen Chen with stem cells and people that work in psychology. One of our biggest customer sets is counselors and psychologists because they love what this can do to help someone feel great throughout the day without turning to a potentially a bad thing. Right. I don't think a cup of coffee is bad bad or even a drink, but if you have too much of anything, it can be bad for you. And so they love that. It's sort of the, the substance free way to help yourself.

I have, using the energy setting, which is the coffee, like one. I've gotten to the point where I'm like, I've had enough. I don't need any more energy right now. Is that kind of what you're talking about there?

Yeah, yeah. We had actually. It's crazy. The more people biohack, the more they meditate, the more they're in functional medicine, even holistic medicine. They feel it right away. It's like this crazy. And there's another half. Right. We're working with some of these counselors. If someone has got a lot of trauma or blockage, they. It's. It's hard for them to feel it. They have to go six, seven, sometimes 10 sessions before they start to get the sensations to build their pathways. So I mean, people don't know their body. And I think this is one of the biggest problems with the mental health is people shut off their body. They shut off their feeling to their body. I mean, my One of my best friends is a dentist here in Scottsdale. He said that a percentage, not a small percentage of his patients come in and get novocaine shots, and they feel it doesn't work. They'll do a half a dozen novocaine shots and nothing happens. Like, they still feel everything that he does. And he's saying that some of that is a mental block, and some of that can be trauma. And so people are not in touch with how they're feeling. And one of our biggest hopes and missions is to get people to check in with how they're feeling throughout the day day, and then use a healthy alternative.

Back when I was, oh, 30, I would have said, you're so full of crap. What do you imagine how I feel? Like, I feel pissed off. But I did some. At the beginning of my personal development work, I spent 10 days at this thing called the Star foundation, and I walked out of there going, holy crap. It turns out everything from the neck down, there's a signal in all that noise. And as an engineering guy, I literally had turned it off. And plus, I was in pain all the time from arthritis and stuff like that and chronic fatigue syndrome. So it was like too much noise. Just ignore it. And I've gone from there to where I am now with all the biofeedback and neurofeedback and heart rate variability and all that stuff where I'm really tuned in on the body. I can tell you this food did that, this. This toxin did that. And I really can feel it, and I can manipulate it and control it, which is awesome. And that's kind of the basis of feeling into biohacking, because oftentimes you can tell something's better before you know the why. Even brain octane, there were no studies showing that C8MCT was better than the C10 or C12. But I could feel it. So I put the more expensive rare stuff on the market, and five years later, the research comes out, says, oh, that one MCT raises ketones way more than normal MCT or than coconut oil. So you're like, I could feel it. And so that cultivation of the ability to sense is important. What I think is happening with that set of people is that they're saying, there's just too much noise, there's too much going on, and it's just not plugged in. But then you get a stronger signal than they normally would have had. And all of a sudden, like, oh, wait, there's something. And all of a sudden you get, like, this little thread of Awareness. And once it has your attention and you're looking for it, you actually myelinate those nerves, you grow new synapses, you grow new interconnections. Feedback is strong for that, but in this case the feedback is, I felt different, how did I feel different? And you start becoming aware and you can do it at any age, which is pretty neat.

So I think one of the biggest lessons I learned in entrepreneurial school by the great Jeff Sandifer down in Austin, Texas. His first thing he told us was, you care about what you count and the things that you measure in your life. That's where your attention's gonna go. That's where the resources are gonna go. That's where your mind will spend its time. And so make sure you're tracking the right stuff. Right? That way you're. That's why people love biotrackers. You know, it helps them check in, you know, whoop and oura ring and that kind of stuff. And we want people to do that with their mental health.

It's one of those rules. In Game changers, I interviewed 500 people to figure out what they had in common to become people who've had a meaningful impact. And one of the rules, there's 40 something of them, is track what you hack. And the idea of I'm just going to track a whole bunch of stuff that I don't do anything about, it's like collecting pennies. If it makes you happy, you can do it, but it's probably not going to change your life, right? But when you say I am paying attention to the things I want to modify, magic happens. But there isn't any feedback signal in this thing. You don't tell me how I'm feeling. You don't say, oh, we're playing birds or getting a nice calming sound. You sit there and a little light comes on and it's doing something. So this is not feedback, this is a signal that modifies something. Do you know what it really modifies? I know, I can feel it. But what's it doing?

So you want me to give you the scientific explanation or I'm curious basically back to these non covalent bonds. Okay. If you can affect a protein receptor on a cell to change its shape, which is what we believe is going the IRC model, if a protein receptor can change its shape, it can trigger a whole world of metabolic effects and hormones and my RNA and things like that. And that's what we're doing. We do not put bells and whistles on this tech. Everyone's like hey, let's make this, like, the Calm app. Let's try to put, you know, Ron Swanson's sexy voice to help people go to sleep. And some really cool music. We might add that later on. But we wanted to go straight to the vein here. Like, let's have a help people with no bells and whistles to start and just see where it lands. That was really the idea.

It's the digital equivalent. About as close as you can get to saying, I'm going to take a sleeping pill. You don't want to do the work. To darken your room and learn how to sleep and don't have a late dinner. All the stuff that makes you sleep better. You're like, I just wanted to do something. Now, unfortunately, sleeping pills have all sorts of side effects, but from a digital perspective, I'm just going to do this. It's going to do the work, not me.

Yep, that's the idea.

Right? And then also, your cup of coffee does the work, too. Of course. It changes your cells when you do it. Like, it's modifying all kinds of stuff in the body. You're just saying we can make some modifications to receptors in cells. And that goes back to Candace Peart's work where she's talking about how cell receptors work, and they do change shape. That's why you need fluid cell membranes. So you can change a receptor and you can actually. It's called a ligand. You can. You can latch on to something. And so if you can influence a cell with a subtle magnetic field. So it's like, oh, I need to do more of this. It's doing that, and it changes how you feel. No drugs or anything, ingestible required. Which is kind of groundbreaking.

This is absolutely. I mean, please help me get Mike Butters a Nobel Prize here in the next five years. Dear God. I mean, our chief scientist led the team to invent Cialis. Okay, we've got a rock star team. It's just been all under NDA, and now in the last little bit, we.

Can tell the world, when do I get to buy the boner signal? Oh, my gosh.

How do they let you on the radio? I don't understand.

You know, everyone listening is asking that. At least all the guys are. And half the women who have guys who need it.

I am so glad we're public, because now all I have to say is, I can't disclose when all I can say is, we're researching.

Is that why you smile?

Trust me, Dave, you'll be the first. I'm going to Call you first. I'll tell the world that when we get it, you get the first test and we have to live stream it. It's going to be a vlog of Dave's 30 days of boner signal.

I have live streamed needles going into parts of my anatomy that would cause this to be marketed explicit. Of course, you couldn't actually see the juicy bits, but yeah, what the heck? The reason I'm asking is, look, where do people take a lot of pharmaceuticals? Where do people put their attention? It turns out having a healthy sex life makes you live longer, makes you better. And there's a lot of people. I did a couple podcasts about it, so I hear a lot of feedback now for people going, oh my God, like, you know, I'm okay, but I want to be better. So I had to ask. I don't even know if you guys will ever launch that, but if you do.

If we do. If we do, you get to be the first.

What would the name be? I mean, happy is already taken. Come on, Scott, what's it going to be?

You don't get to name it. That's the rule. No, you can't. Maybe it'll be passion. You know, actually that's.

That's so weaselly. Okay, one of my all time fantasies here is that I want to be responsible for product naming for a brand of condoms, because that would be the most fun marketing naming exercise of my life. And me and whoever I was working with, we would laugh like seventh graders for like two weeks trying to come up with the best name for it. So this is going to be the most fun episode when you name that signal. You have to run it past me and I'm going to make it better.

I will put a Slack channel together for 50 of US people who think.

I'm a bad person. I'm not. I just have a seventh grader sense of humor.

But, you know. Okay, so if you want to be honest for a minute, I can't make any claims, but we have had a lot of conversation about if this happens, do we talk about it, do we market it? I mean, when we were talking with our, one of our chief scientists, Dr. Kenneth Ferguson, who led the team for Cialis, they said that Viagra and Cialis made a massive mistake. They no longer really sell to women. And it was built for women. It's a vasodilator. It helps women more than men. The problem was when they started to market it, women bought it but for their man. And so women had a stigma against using it. Still do to this day. And so Viagra and Cialis though were home runs. Cut off half their market when they launched. Wow. Because of the way they launched, they could have been twice as successful. So that is something we're being very interested in. I don't want this to be a one off. This is a platform technology here.

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You're the guy that's chirping in my ear on what to do. Okay, fine.

That's how I would do it. So, ladies, it's okay to want things to work well. And I'm married and I can talk about this stuff. And we've had episodes about health for men and women. We've talked about stem cells there and all that stuff. All right, I know you don't do that yet, Scott. I'm just telling you that that is one of those things that is if you can pull that off with this device, it's going to be crazy awesome and people would love it as it is. Okay, well, getting a good night's sleep. I'll sign up for that. That's the 90% of my use is around sleep on this thing and I, I get really good sleep. I did before. I get better sleep with it.

But the cool thing is our goal is the Netflix of feelings, right? I mean, we want to just be pumping signals into this, into the app that you can use for the same membership. Right. That's our goal, is to kind of create a tribe of people who love what we're doing for the long haul.

All right, so Scott, we've been talking about this. I didn't set this up ahead of time, so I wasn't really thinking about it. A lot of people give a code to bulletproof radio listeners because we're such awesome people. Do you want to give a code? I don't even know what, like we didn't plan this. Do you want to do that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's just go to Happy Dot Com Dave and get their 50 bucks off.

You'll make that 50 bucks. All right. There you go. So. Well, thank you for offering that. I always like to make sure people get more than their value worth for the hour.

I hope we have. I mean we're definitely finally figured out our manufacturing just a couple weeks ago. So we caught up on the back orders and now we finally have inventory. So I think you're probably your audience is the first one that really gets.

This was one of the. This is one of the first ones that you made. And I just got my second one for my wife to use because I of course ordered one like a good investor would. And okay, so. So 50 bucks off for everyone. Thank you for offering that. And that's, that's nice of you. And what does it cost? I don't remember the price.

379.

Okay. So 50 bucks is a meaningful discount. And compared to the world of, you know, tracker rings and stuff like that, that's within the realm of reasonableness. You know, it's not a few thousand dollars and the difference there in how you feel it's noticeable. Is there a money back guarantee for people?

30 day money back guarantee.

All right.

Also a couple. Everyone gets a couple months free use as well. And then there's a membership of between 15, 19 bucks a month.

Okay. So you basically have access to the signals.

Yep. And then you get all future signals unlimited and the current ones for the members.

Okay, very cool. Yeah, well, I'm. Well, there's your name for the product for the new signal member. Is that not.

Oh my gosh, you're still on that?

I told you, man. My seventh grader was strong today. Like I tried to channel him, but it's there today.

Okay, fine. You can name it. We'll give you the rights. If it works, it works. I don't care what we name it. If it works. It's going to be amazing.

You guys have to test that one out.

That's right.

Along the way, there's something I wanted to talk with you about just for a couple minutes. It could be a little bit of stress. High growth companies, not to mention going public, is a huge amount of just bankers and lawyers and attorneys. And it's something that most people wouldn't know about unless they've been involved in that part of the industry. But it's incredibly high stakes. It's incredibly stressful. And I know you're also running multiple companies like I do, so just knowing you personally, I'm hoping you're up for talking about this on the show. You kind of hit the wall right in the middle of your ipo. What happened to you personally?

Yeah, I mean, this was a couple weeks ago, so it's still fresh. I basically had a breakdown. I mean, I could not see straight. I couldn't read. I was getting hundreds of emails a day, 15 hours a day of work for. I mean, there's really this whole year and a half since this has been super fast. And I think. I don't know, it was just. I felt like the world was on my shoulders and I got into a really dark spot and I just hit a wall. Like, I wasn't able to sleep. It was weird. I usually sleep well and Happy kind of kept me alive, to be honest with you. I.

So you couldn't sleep with what you. But if that means you couldn't sleep even with the happy.

I was using the happy to get some deep rem, but no more than like a couple hours. Like, I was.

Oh, wow.

I was breaking down. Yeah. And I was just, my. I went to go see. Get. Get some help. Went to the doctor, went to a counselor, and they said, your adrenal glands are shot. You. You overdid it, Scott. And I basically just shut everything. This was actually the day of the ipo. I didn't want to look at anything. I shut everything off. I was just passed out. I mean, I. I've never hit a wall like that in my entire life. And I've been an entrepreneur for 15 years. 500 employees, 3 million customers. I know how to handle, I thought. And then two weeks ago, I just hit the wall. And I knew in the last few months, Happy really did help me get through, like, not going to the bottle or not smoking. You know, I usually cigars are a big release for me and pills and certain things, and it did help me so many times, but I think I just. I way overdid it. And so now talking to, like some of my closest family and friends about it, my wife and we got three little kids. Obviously a newborn that's four months old, that's not sleeping at all.

No stress there.

Yeah. I mean, and I mean, it's the year of the pandemic, right? I mean, one of my businesses lost $20 million. Right. And this, this business exploded. But both of those things can be stressful. You know, we had a brand new house, we sold a house. My grandma passed away. My dog died, Dave. Like my six and a half year old Griffey dog, Goldendoodle, died of cancer. And I'm just sitting Here, like all this happened literally within a couple of months.

And those are all on the list of who stressors, like every one of those things, including sudden wealth or sudden loss of wealth, deaths of families, pets. Wow. So you really had like the perfect storm.

Yeah, I hit the wall, like literally hit the wall. And three days not really able to function. And I said, okay, I need a reset. And so I've been talking with some really close friends and doctors and my family, and I'm going to do a hundred day sort of challenge. I know myself. I mean, I think you and I are alike in a lot of this. I, I wanted to make this sort of a decision that I can't back out of.

This is a self challenge though, right?

This is a self challenge. Yeah. I'm going to do a hundred day challenge for my mind and my body and my environment. Right. Like BJ Fogg coming in and helping me with my habits. Whitney Jones, Ms. Olympia is going to help coach me through my exercise and eating. You. Thank you. Before we talked on this call, I mean, you're going to give me 40 years of Zen and a ton of other hacking help and just the list goes on. Jim Kwik and everybody's going to help. And I'm going to do 100 days and really for educational purposes, because I want to learn this stuff. I'm an infant when it comes to the biohacking world. And so I have a lot to learn and I want to dive in and I'm going to blog it all and happy.com 100days is what we're going to create to set it all up.

This is more about personal accountability where if you don't show up one day with your vlog, people are going to make fun of you.

That's right. Personal accountability.

You're basically motivated by shame and humiliation publicly. Am I getting that right?

Social pressure. That's right. I want to do it.

It actually takes courage to even talk about it. A lot of people in the entrepreneur space, you and I know a lot of successful entrepreneurs and there's a surprising number of them with, you know, it looks good on, on the surface, but marriages are broken. Incredible stress, substance abuse. I mean, it's, it's a problem partly because it's lonely when you're the guy at the top. How much of what happened to you was loneliness?

So lonely. I mean, it's, you can't really go talk to your siblings about this or a small group or like just your normal friends. It's, it's, it's A different air. I mean, you deal with problems that.

The people who work for you cannot see because they're not the CEO. It's a weird space, right?

Yeah. If I'm on the hook personally guaranteeing a $5 million deal or something like this, when I talk to my sister about it, she goes, oh, it must be nice. Okay. Yeah. I'm very blessed and thankful for what I get to do every day. I take a great pride and joy in being able to help so many people, but it's also stressful. Like, it's also a lot of risk, you know, And I do it because I love. I don't. I love helping like a massive dent in the universe. I really just love helping a ton of people. That's really fun to me. I don't have Rolexes or really nice cars or anything. I don't really care about money as much. I just really like to do something that no one's done to help a ton of people and make a massive change. And that stuff really excites me. Although it is scary and risky and I hit my wall, like actually hit it. So here we are. And I'm going to use happy the 100 days, right? I'm going to use happy instead of a bunch of drinks and a bunch of smokes and a bunch of pills. So it'll be a happy thing.

But there you go. I like that. You got to hear the interview that I just did with Hal Elrod. He's doing his miracle morning movie. Same thing he was going to do. 250 theater release and he almost died twice. And in the interview, he talks about how he realized that service to his family was most important. And he's affecting millions of people's lives globally and all that stuff. But it goes from serving everyone to serving your most important people first and using what's left. And he talks about his shift as an entrepreneur there in the interview, which isn't part of the movie, even though the movie is really inspirational and very functionally useful. But it's, it's that mindset where a lot of people who, whether they're working in charity, like, you know, Scott from Charity Water has been on the show and all that stuff. You know, if you give everything you've got and you didn't, you know, put the gas in the tank first, use the world's. Or put the oxygen mask on first, use the world's oldest analogies, you can get a little bit run down and it sounds like that's what you did. And then I Guess the world threw some other stuff at you that was higher than your resilience capacity at the time.

Yeah, well. And look, I, I tend to be a pretty transparent. I mean, my grandpa is, is a stud. Like, he, he's my hero. You know, he was Ronald Reagan's bank chair. Guy started Interwest Bank.

Oh, wow.

He was, he was the inventor of the two hours paid off every week to go do something for charity. Like he did that in the 50s and 60s with his people. Like, I got heroes in my family and nobody pass anything down. We don't pass on money. We teach you to fish in our family. But, you know, I've. I've realized so much about my family and how hard it can be to be an entrepreneur and how dark things can get and lonely things can get. And, you know, we have our close friend Joe Polish has genius recovery for this very reason. I mean, I, I almost saw the dark side of being two steps from suicide. Right. If you see the dark side, man, you know why people get addicted to stuff when people are in deep pain or deep hurt. Like, it's, they, they stare into the beast and that's. I mean, I want to be there when my grandkids are getting married. You know what I mean? Like, that's something that is like a vision in my mind how beautiful that would be. And to be healthy, not just like in a wheelchair or you like, you know, almost on my deathbed. I want to be healthy and dancing with them. Right?

There you go. That's what aging is supposed to look like. And I, I honestly think biohacking is gonna bring a lot of that out. So many different aspects of this. You know, the guys at Viome understanding our gut bacteria. We've got, you know, the Functional Genomics, the DNA company, now we've got the ability to place signals into the body that are noticeable. I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, 10 years from now you're talking about anti aging signals. In fact, I want to do some work with you guys on that, but I just feel like this is another arm of biohacking where we're talking about interventions and you can do things with light. And I do. One of my companies does that. You can do things with sound. And we've had some guys talking about sound healing on the show. And you can do things with magnets, but I've had heavy duty pulsed electromagnets to drive bone density and cellular changes and cellular growth. And that's like high intensity interval training for cell membranes. And it works. But the ability to get a signal with information in is another realm of biohacking. And I think you guys have really done it. And the fact that you got an $80 million head start from a cancer therapeutics company is kind of convenient. But I'm, I'm very hopeful that this branch of the biohacking world is going to bear a lot of fruit over the next 10 years. And I'm happy you did it. I'm happy you did it fast too, which is cool.

Yeah, thanks, Dave. And when I said earlier that I'm standing on the shoulders of giants, I'm talking about you. I'm talking about the industry that you sort of sparked. Because look, man, when people do crazy shit. When people do crazy shit, Dave, they get a lot of flack and you gotta help it. And Peter Diamantis, what's his quote? Everything's crazy the day before it happens, you know?

Well, it. He's exactly right. In fact, I just was writing a foreword for a book, a friend's book on biohacking and I actually mentioned that it's like human powered flight's impossible until it's not. And the stuff you're doing, we've had all these little data points, mostly moving needles around electroacupuncture, we know there's signals, but no one could measure the signal to get in here. And I think because of what we've got with machine learning, because what we've got with these incredibly precise things oftentimes that are around national defense or space programs that's percolating into our world. No one knows Teflon on pans, even though it's bad for you. It came from the space program. Like we gotta coat the space shuttle with something slippery. And then someone found a way to repurpose it.

How much is Kevlar in these days? I mean, it's crazy, right?

Yep. And so we're just taking those things and turning them around to do good in the world is something cool. And I just think it's a real deal. And I don't write checks and I don't become an advisor unless there's something new and different. And so I'm happy I was an investor and you guys will still am, that you've gone public, which is epic. And I'm happy that even though you've kind of burned yourself out like that, that you did a couple things. One, you were smart enough to ask for help, which some people don't do, and that takes a certain amount of courage, and that you're also holding yourself publicly accountable and saying you're going to talk about how you're going to turn on all the other biohacks in conjunction with the one that you're responsible for to see what you can do. I think you'll, you'll add at least 20, 30 years to your life if you do this 100 days and you keep doing it afterwards.

Yeah, yeah, that's the thing. That's, this is a tool. So happy is a tool in the tool belt. That's all we see it as. You know, we don't have this aggrandized self image. We, we want to be a very powerful tool for mental health. But I think everyone gets attracted to biohacking because they hit, they hit a pain point in their life where they need something, something better, they need something different that the world isn't giving them, or maybe the current way of doing it with their doctor who prescribes them one thing that causes five other problems. Right. People come to biohacking because they need an answer and they need something new. And so that's why we're excited about the industry.

Well, so am I for obvious reasons. And let's wind down the interview just with listening one more time. What those, what those six signals are that you've started with.

Sure. So we've got, here's the playlist, if people can see it. You're looking. We've got alert, calm, focus, happy, relaxed and sleepy. And those are the first six. We've got more coming every couple of months, about a dozen now that we're researching in the labs. We're very excited about them. But those are the first six and they help with sleep, energy, productivity, de stressing those kinds of things.

Well, I'm excited for the new ones to come out and I'm excited to do a collaboration around one that has some compounds that I'm looking at for longevity and mitochondrial performance. And we're going to just completely, we're going to get it to the point, I believe that you can put it on, you can run the signals that I'll collaborate with you on. And people are going to be like, what just happened? But I really like my life because I just have more energy all day long. And for me, that's always been the holy grail and I think it's happening. All right, Scott, thanks for your work in the world. And I know we mentioned at the beginning, thanks for teaching my daughter to be an entrepreneur with my For Sale. That's just an epic other business that we didn't even talk about, but it was a really meaningful thing for her. And she's still selling her little greeting cards. If you guys are interested in a greeting card, myfirstsale.com Dave will take you to her little store and you can see her handmade greeting cards. It's actually really cool and cute and they're actually nice. But there's you have thousands of other kids who've started their own little businesses, making cool stuff and just learning how to make their own little mark in the world. And that's also of great value. And we're not going to go deep on that, but just that deserves mentioning because it's awesome. So thanks man.

It's fun. It's my like passion. It's weird. It's like an outlet. I feel like happy is my focus and then everyone needs a creative outlet. And that was it. We created it in the pandemic to help kids learn entrepreneurship and there you go.

Awesome. Have a beautiful day.

Thanks.

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