Daymond John: How Overcoming a Health Scare and Embracing Biohacking Led to New Purpose and Vitality

Your wiring is up. We're gonna get ready to mic you up, please. All right, there you go. We're ready to take the stage. All the people I learned from in one room. Only in this room. I'll give credit to these guys. I heard it started about 12 years ago with 10 people in a bar. What kind of bar was that? A juice bar.

Please join me in welcoming my friend Damon John.

Come on, room.

Have a seat.

Wow.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.

How many people do you have in this room?

Got about 3,000 people.

Imagine all the spinach these people are eating. What's happening, man?

Didn't eat any spinach. Damon, you offended? They don't eat spinach. It's bad for your kidneys.

You don't know. Yeah, got it, Got it.

I'm feeling triggered right now. I'm just messing with you.

Thank you for having me. I really, really appreciate it. This is my first time here, and it's absolutely an honor to be around so many people, so many. So many great people that I actually know and have been mentoring me, especially you, from afar. So thank you.

You're so welcome.

What.

What brought you here? I mean, you can go anywhere you want.

So what brought me here and I brought up one or two slides is, you know, that defining moment, I think, in everybody's life. You know, it happens in one second. It actually literally, to me, is a culmination of action, words or thoughts. That may have taken an hour, two days, 10 years, but that one second, I just wanted to throw up the slide. If they have it, let's throw up the slide really quick. I sat with someone. He was the manager of Muhammad Ali, and he said, with all the money you have, if you ever really went and got an executive physical, I said, what the hell is that? I. I get physicals. I mean, the doctor puts his thumb in my ass, tells me to cough, and then tell me, go about my way. You ever.

You ever shop for doctors by the size of their thumb? The small thumb dog?

Yeah. Well, he usually says, this is not going to hurt. And then I go out and he says, I mean, it wasn't going to hurt me, but. So I go get the executive physical. They say to me, hey, you got a little nodule on your thyroid. Go get it checked out. They do the biopsy, of course, 90% of the chance they could tell what it is, I'm the 10% chance they can't. They say, go get it removed. You're 47 years old. You're a healthy guy, go. The one hour surgery becomes five and a half hours of removing a stage two piece of cancer that was the size of a golf ball that was in my body for many years. And I didn't realize that it was in there. And I decided at that point that I was going to just give up. I said, you know what? I've lived. I lived 10 lives. I never want to see my mother. I don't want to bury my mother. My two oldest girls are great girls. My wife is super smoking fucking hot. So before I'm in the dirt, she's gonna be married again. And I got a little 3 year old who will never know who I am. And then I realized, I said, I'm a selfish bastard. No mother should ever bury their child. I should see my grandkids. My wife is fucking hot as shit and I get to sleep with this hot ass woman every night. And I want to see my 3 year old grow up. I decided to start checking into people who could help me with my health. And I realized one person was. I decided to look at the mentors when one is my buddy Brandon here who really started helping me with my hearing. Not realizing you, of course, knowing brain health, that hearing is something we neglect all the time. It takes 10 years for somebody to know that, admit they can even they have hearing loss, right? Their brain is not active. They're the person now turning the TV up to 10. When, you know, everybody's at 2. They're always getting into arguments and misunderstandings with people. So I start working on my hearing and I start realizing that the technology is so great in these things that now we can tell with AI. We can tell 15 minutes prior to your parents falling. You can understand what's going on with Sarki and hearing. I started doing that. My wife tells me to start looking at your stuff. You're on a board with me, an advisory board. I'm up there talking to you. My wife is like, you on the phone with Dave Asprey? I was like, yeah, it's cool. She's like, you know what he can do? I said, yeah, he can send us a shit full a truckload of coffee. She's like, no, this is Dave Asprey. I said, I understand. What the fuck are you talking about? And then I start looking at you and sometimes I don't want to look. You're naked in the desert. And I go, but then I start to get mentored by you from afar. I call you. I said, what's this hyperbaric Chamber. You put me with a guy named Samir. Unfortunately, you tell me later something had happened. And now his beautiful son is running the company. You. You, Joe Polish, and you start advising me. I start talking to Brandon. I start talking to Dr. T, Dr. Rewire over here. And now I'm living Gary Brecker, Dr. Ong, Ebol Machine, RMI. I become somebody who. My life has changed. So. And everybody in this room understands it. When you start going down this biohacking longevity path, it's like Christmas every day. You find out something new every single day. And I know my weakness. Listen, I'm still trying to find one of you guys or girls who will lie to me and tell me I could still eat as much sugar as I would like. I'm sorry. I just can't get over that. I love a snack.

I think I know a vegan or two who will tell you that. Yeah, but they're fat, too, though.

I gave up alcohol.

Wow.

Yeah, that's.

Congrats.

I watched somebody very dear to me who was 55 years old, drink herself to death. And it took her and not only brought down the whole family for the last six months, we watched her shrivel, literally on the deathbed. And I realized the pain of drinking. You know, as entrepreneurs, I used to go to three different dinners. I would drink the first two to get numb because of the assholes that I was with. I couldn't stand. And then I was so happy to see somebody, at the end of the night, I would drink again. And it's something that if you take. Let's follow the money, if you take it out of the environment, well, what would happen to bars, restaurants, clubs, and various other things? And if you actually tell people you're not drinking anymore, they actually go, come on. You're bullshitting. Come on. Are you kidding me? And it's everywhere, right? So it's so hard to give it up. And then when I started giving up, I dropped 15 pounds immediately. And my life started to change. I gained back more time in my life. I didn't wake up in the morning going, oh, my God, did I really say that? And so that's what got me here. A series of mentors. And then after that, I decided to live life on the edge. I decided I never went scuba diving ever in my entire life. So for this, the first time, I'm going to go scuba diving. Fill up the slide right before I got into the water, because I had this new reinvigoration of life, right? God, this is so beautiful. There it Goes, that's before I got into the water. I was like, let me go. I mean, look, they were so happy. Look, they were wagging their tails. They were like little dogs. And then after that, I decided to go in. Let's see if we have the next slide. Oh, there I go, right there. That's me in the open ocean, no cage. And around a 14 foot live tiger shark. In the wild, there are about three or four tiger sharks in there and barriers, other things. But the bottom line, the bottom line of why I would do that, because a lot of people ask me what the hell's wrong with me, is that I've had this reinvigoration of life. As everybody knows in this room, when you can think better, when you can appreciate life more, when you can have these conscious decisions that you're making and keep unraveling the way that science is moving so fast. Thanks to advocates like David sharing this and everybody in this room who has amazing technology like Opti Health and Biome and Aveam and all the. And rmi. I have this thirst for life. Like I feel like I can live forever fucking ever. And it's absolutely amazing. So thank you. So that's why I'm here. And the only thing now I have to do is find a way to get Kevin o' Leary to move three seats over on Shark Tank.

It's going to happen. One thing is just live longer.

Yeah, there you go. Well, Kevin's a vampire. He's going to outlive us all.

It's tough to beat the vampires. Yeah, man, it's so inspiring. One of the taglines I use is who knows what you might do? Because you don't know until you start doing things that give you more energy. You gave up, give up alcohol. And I've done the same thing. I have maybe once a quarter, I'll have a shot of sake with sushi. Like, it's just not a part of my life.

It's not. You kind of look at and go, well, why? You know. Yeah.

You wake up the next morning, you're reminded why you just don't really do that.

Yeah, right.

What percentage of the people you work with have made that move?

It is odd though, that, because I guess when you do get older, you see two very extremes. You see somebody who was on this quest to understand life. They know they need balance. They knew they need to. They knew. They know they need nutrition, they know they need to constantly exercise. And then you see this other aspect of somehow magically it will get better and it doesn't and they put their head in the sand or they say let's let me let, I hope that thing, that bus doesn't hit me. When they don't, they don't, they're not listening. They can stop the bus from hitting them. And you try to talk to these people. What I found is I don't talk to people like that. I, I talk to the people who want to learn.

There you go.

And I share my story about how it's not one answer. What works for your body doesn't work for somebody else, you know. And I just try to show people the vulnerability of how I'm still learning every single day.

So it, it's that sense of curiosity that cancels out fear and it keeps you younger. And you're one of the more curious guys I know. I want to know though, were you always curious or did this come later in life?

No, I was always curious because I remember I was driving down the street one day with my mother. We lived next to jfk and if you anybody, I don't want to show my age, but there was the Concorde, used to land two times at a day in our neighborhood. And I said to her one day we were driving our street ma, how do men and women build such massive machines like that? Shook the whole neighborhood. She said every single thing that has been solved, built or created in this world started with one person that had one idea, that took one action and why can't it be you? And I didn't have an answer for her. So my curiosity at the end of the day, for the rest of my life has always been, well, somebody else did it. Why can't I make it bigger? Why can't I make it better? What you think they all had money? Well, 65% of the world's, the Ford's top wealthiest people in the world are self made men and women. That means they started with zero. And if it was about money, well then I do know the Ford and the Carnegie's and you know the Roosevelts and Rockefellers and all these people that have helped do such great things for this country. Well why don't they own the Teslas and the Instagrams, the Facebooks in this world? Why? Because the first generation makes it, the second enjoys it and third destroys it. So it's not about money. Because if it was about money, then BlackBerry and Blockbuster and Kodak would still be here. So it's all about. Every single person in this room has an opportunity to be bigger than the next person, than the Elon Musk of the world and everybody, every single person in this room. I looked at this conference that started with what it was a hundred people in a bar.

Yep.

12 years ago. Look at it now. It's saving and changing people's lives. You didn't have that. You, maybe you had that vision, but you just wanted, like every entrepreneur in here, you want to solve a problem.

My vision was a little smaller. I, I wanted five people not to go through the hell that I went through. And that was why I started blogging. I'm like, the right people will read this stuff and they'll. If someone had just told me this when I was 19, they would have set me free. And more than five people cared. Thanks, guys.

Yeah, there you go.

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You know, my ex wife, I have two girls. I'm a girl dad. I have a 30 year old, a 25 year old. Great, great women. One of them is a championship ballroom dance. The other just graduated toward her master's from Parsons for architectural design. I have my current wife who is my biggest mentor in regards to health and my little 3 year old. So both of my wives call me a Disney dad. I come home, I said, what did you do? She said, I did this. And then mommy's mad at me, I go and I give her a toy and then I leave. So that's the kind of dad I am, I have great, great partners. My ex wife and my current wife are great partners. So I wish I could tell you that. But what I do is I try to lead by example like anybody else. You know, I tried to tell my daughters that you never arrive. You know, so, you know, I'll give you example. A lot of people in general think that you arrive. I re, I take inventory of my schedule every month because something has to give and something has to change. And the same as you're doing in this conference or people with the, with all this life saving equipment, they go, this works for you now, but this is not working for you. Here and move over here and try this. So what I've tried to tell my daughters is the concept of problem solving and you never arrive. I'll give you an example. During the pandemic, a woman was stalking my wife myself and she was calling. I don't know how she got my wife's parents phone number. Wow. My wife says to me, what's wrong with you? You're a celebrity. You should have somebody who knows how to get all of this out of the way and nobody ever gets your contact. I said, okay, well, I don't like the name drop, but I'm a name drop for the purpose of this. I said, let me call a couple of people. I called Mark Cuban, Catherine Zeta Jones and Pitbull. I called Mark and I said, Mark, you have a technique to get your information off the Internet. He said, DJ, you only got one stalker. You suck. I got 12 this year. I called Catherine Zeta Jones. She goes, oh, darling. She says some shit like that. And I call pit bull. And he said, what's the lady's name who was talking to you? I said, what? I told her name. He said, pap. Oh, she's on the other line right now. My phone too. I realized that you don't never arrive. You don't say. Now that you're on ABC and you're a star, by the way, here's what you get. You'll always be famous. You'll be protected, you'll be this, you'll be that. You never arrive. By the way, when you get married, happily ever after, you never arrive, right? You can eat the things that you were eating at 19, you can't eat them at 25. Just because you get a piece of paper from a college doesn't mean that you're going to have a job. You never arrive. And when I teach my daughters that you never arrive, I think that that is the best thing that you Always have to reinforce your moral. You always have to work on your network because money will come and go, people will come and go. But as we've seen lately, people's. People's ethics and people's network, you can't lose that. Your reputation. Yeah, right. And I tell them that's the one thing you have to work on. Two things you have to work well, three things, obviously faith, constantly educating yourself and your moral standard and your compass for who you are. Because it will either come back to reward you or it will haunt you. Wow. Absolutely. Thank you.

It would be helpful for a lot more kids to hear that. So maybe someone will listen to this episode when we put it out on the air because. Yeah, your reputation. Being truthful. One of the things that I learned about, I don't know the exact date, but I read a study on the metabolic impact of lying. Even little lies. Lying, just not telling the truth. And there are people who practice only telling the truth. And even in the smallest way, an example, someone says, hey, can you pick me up at the airport? He goes, sorry, I can't make it. Well, the reality is you can make it. You could blow up your day. The truth is, I'm not going to make it. And just those little things. And so I started doing this a while ago. And the amount of free energy in your brain when you never have to have that little voice that goes, that isn't quite true. So you just work on always being truthful. It doesn't mean you have to tell everyone everything. But what it means is that the words you say are true to the very best of your knowledge. And for me, that's been a profound thing and just allowing more space for creativity. And I've been working on sharing that with kids.

You know, I realized, thank you. And you know, to build off of that, is everybody here who does the show, what's it called when you die, when you eat once a day?

Omad.

Okay, And. And the ones who fast realize how much time you spend thinking about food, right? We gotta get ready, we gotta do this. Where we gonna go? I mean, while I'm eating lunch, half the time my wife is like, so what are we having for dinner? What are you talking about? Waiting lunch. Now she works out two times a day and I get why she's doing that. So I realized that. But then you know what else? I realized the same about the line I said, I started doing this about eight years ago, same time of trying to have wellness in my life. I started writing at the beginning of the Year, the end of the year, I wrote everybody that I was going to cut out of my life forever. Wow. And the criterias were this. If you weren't a good friend to yourself, you were never going to be a good friend to me. If I wasn't a good friend to you, there is a reason I may be at fault. If I call you and I feel that you're jealous, or if I say things or if I cannot say something to you because of the drama, even if you're a family member. It started off I cut off 10 people. Next year, I cut off six. Next year, two. You can't imagine the amount of stress you go through. Even though you don't talk to that person about once every month, two months, four months, the amount of stress and time that you have spent on that one or two or five people, that affects the rest of your entire life. And now, once I started doing that, guess what happened? I could sleep easier. And I had time to offer my love to people who deserved it and to accept other people's love. And that was the most important thing. And then God came back into my life. Wow. These small things are huge. In the end result, we are. We die by what they call paper cuts due to these small things, like lying, having false relationships, doing things because others need to approve of that, you know, and obviously eating the wrong and taking in the wrong things, that is a shortcut, but it's not really. It then takes more of your life to fix to get back to where you want to be.

That's some profound wisdom. Thank you. One of the things that I work on teaching younger people when I'm talking about relationships, I've even had this conversation with my kids. If you spend time with someone, you go on a date or just time with a new friend, it's how you feel afterwards that tells you whether they're trustworthy. So if you went on that date or you met this person, you had a really good time, but afterwards you get that icky feeling. Those are the kind of people. You got to listen to that signal. And it's intuition. What I used to do is I would just kind of quash that signal and say, well, I'm just gonna be logical about it. But then you end up surrounding yourself with people who don't have your best interests at heart and will lie to your face and smile while they're doing it. So it's hard to notice. One of the things you do on Shark Tank is you're making a rapid assessment of entrepreneurs and of Course, they have their business model, but I don't think you're looking at that. You're looking at the people, right? What do you look for? Like, do you, like, feel it in your gut? Do you feel it in your heart?

You're spot on. I think it's your gut, you know, I'm looking at, you know, when I'm on Shark Tank. So. By the way, we don't know those people. We don't even get a piece of paper on those people. That guy Maury, Stand up Mori, he was on Shark Tank. There you go. Say hello to Maury. He had Hanukkah treetopping on Shark Tank. Average pitch is one hour long. Sixteen cameras shooting that pitch. So you have 16 hours of footage for you to see. Eight minutes takes us six to nine months to close the deals. We close about 60, 70% of the deals. But you're right, I'm looking at the company because I want to hear the entrepreneurial story. When an entrepreneur tells you the story, they almost tell you the story, such as, the train's leaving the station. Whether you like it or not, I want you on the train, but this train's leaving the station and they're excited about how they're solving a person's problem or they're bringing them joy. I look at the numbers, and if I like the product, I'll just buy one of your sponges. But I want to like you. It is my gut in you. Because if this business works out or not, then we'll start another business together. You see, if I want to make money, I send my money over to the market. Well, they don't dust off Steve Jobs from the dead, and he asked me to fix computers. I either make money or I lose money. So if I'm going to do business with you, I have to like you. I have to want to talk to you every single day for the next five or ten years. And I want to learn from you and with you. And it's my gut about the person.

Our mutual friend Joe Polish has introduced me to a guy named Robert Cialdini, who wrote the book Influence you might have come across it. This is a professor who's been on the show a couple times, and he went through and said, well, how do I know how people manipulate others? All signed up to a used car salesman, a real estate thing, and went to all these kind of slimy professions to learn how they were manipulating people, and then did academic work on that and wrote a great book. In fact, it's a book I'VE gifted to my kids. I'm like, if you want to know if someone's running an operation on you, this is it. But one of his biggest signals to say that someone's working you is if you like them right away faster than you should before you really get to know them. You just feel this unnatural, wow, this is the best person ever. How do you sort out that manipulative signal from someone who's genuine, authentic. Everyone here is questioning, is this a real supplement? Is this a real entrepreneur? How do I know I can trust this person? Where's your trust come from?

It comes from experience. And that's why, hence six to nine months to close the deal. Because I'm checking on them. I'm seeing how they're responding to things. I'm seeing how they're talking about other people when those other people aren't in the room. Those are clear. Tell tales. But that's. You're right. I mean, the, the, the, the aspect of influencing people. Con men and con women have nothing technically to sell besides to like them, to trust them. And for you to tell them a problem or give them an opportunity that you didn't really know existed, but they have nothing else to sell besides that. Real entrepreneurs, they usually are horrible business people, especially scientists like, you know, they really are because they're creating something so great and they're trying to, like, I don't give a how my iPhone is built. Does it have cool apps? Do I. Can I get my music right? And that's where the entrepreneurial spirit comes from. Because. But the problem solvers in this room, when you walk up to somebody say, listen, let me tell you what's wrong with you. And all the, no, no, no. Can I run quicker? Can I have, can I hear my daughter's little whisper in my ear? Can I live longer, you know, to take away the aches in my body, you know, so, so that's what happens where I find the difference. Entrepreneurs who are great storytellers are unstoppable. You know, Steve Jobs, we all know, he said, I'm not going to geek you out on computers. I'm going to tell you where technology is going, right? And I'm going to not just tell you about how, all right, you want to be a geek on a computer. I'm going to put all, you know, all Those tapes and CDs you have, I'm going to put them all on this thing called mp3 player that existed for a long time. I'm going to put them all right there and Then you're going to be able to hear your Rolling Stones. Oh, by the way, I saw James Taylor last night. Absolutely still amazing. Wow. And he started there and then he turned you into computers and various other things. So that's really what the difference is. Con men and con women have nothing to sell. Besides that. Immediate trust, but your gut is usually something you should really, really trust. I made my biggest mistakes in my 30s when I had massive amount of money coming in every single year through fubu. And when people said that I should invest or purchase something because the way the person looked or on paper or the segment of the market, am I invested in it? And out of the 10 times I didn't trust my gut, eight time I lost. And the two times I won, I went, thank God I. I at least made my money back. Wow.

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Sure.

So when someone walks in the room or you look at something, whatever it is, there's like an immediate gut feeling. It's really, really the first thing, but it's very short. And then you have an emotional response after that, and then you justify it with your brain afterwards. So I've just been paying attention to that very first thing that's really in the body before the brain even can think. Does that jive with like, what you, what you sense?

You know, I would normally say that because I grew up in the hood and it used to be like, why is that guy looking around so much when he just came up to me. But shark tank over 15 years has changed only because it's crafted to change that. Again, we don't know these people. So the producers have gotten to the point where it's very like, wonky. Hey, Shark, by the way, you're like, oh, cool. Oh, this sucks. Oh, whatever the case is. And they go, and then they go, and we've done $3 million in four months. Huh. It doesn't change the gut feeling on the person, but it's my, my intuition there is not as sharp because I have seen, I think something like 1800 pitches and I've been trained to kind of just wait for it, wait for it, wait for it. I wish I had that, but I would say that. Do you think sometimes I know we're all in this room, sometimes we say, well, we don't want to be the know it all. We don't want to be judgmental because we never wanted to be judged like that ourselves. Where is that balance you have in that gut?

To me, it feels like the judging happens in the brain long after the gut's already made a decision. Either you listened or you didn't listen.

Yeah.

And it, for me, it's been a practice over, especially the last 10 years of just carefully recognizing that little twinge before I get the like or don't like and before I then go, well, I should like them because of this and all that. Like, there's almost like three tiers. So I've been honing in on that, just that little first thing. And I think that's where intuition lives.

How many people will be able to be that in tune with it? Because I see entrepreneurs or regular everyday people that, you know, it's kind of like the old joke, a guy get pushed out of the 12th story of a building and he's falling on his way down. And on the eighth story, somebody says, how you doing? So far so good. On the fifth floor, so far so good. How do you have time to do that when so many people sit there and they go, I'm working this dead end job. I'm not thinking about any level of financial intelligence. I'm 55 years old. I'm not studying AI or technology. I'm going to be okay. They're doing that. They're not even using sensibility about their. Either their toxic relationship, their businesses that they just may need to rehack, or their life. You think how many people can do that within every person they meet within seconds?

I think it's automatic in everyone and it's like a hearing thing. If you don't know you're not listening to it until you hear it the first time, you're not going to pick it up. And the reason that this comes to mind for me is I had Asperger's syndrome when I was young, on the autism spectrum. And I say had, and so people get triggered by that. Sorry. And I didn't think there was anything useful below the neck in terms of emotional stuff. I was just hyper rational.

You said you had. Yeah, I'm still dyslexic.

We can talk about that. You know about Irlen lenses?

Yeah, well, you know, eight of the 12 Sharks are dyslexic.

Yeah, it's really common in entrepreneurs. I was supposed to be dyslexic.

Oh, sorry to make the club, man.

No, no, I'm serious. I have all the. I have all the fluffy stuff around the things. Like when they analyze my eyes, they're like, how are you not dyslexic? What's going on?

I was talking to Dr. Ned ADHD, you know, doctor, yeah. And I said to him, hey, dad, you're really dyslexic. You're supposed to be a doctor on this shit, you know? But he's fascinating. But go ahead. Sorry.

No, it's funny, those all run in that same thing. And so I'm fortunate that I wasn't dyslexic. But there's a reason I like my true darks. Aside from the fact that blue light isn't good for your circadian, it's that certain frequencies of light piss off my brain. And if you want me to read under the wrong color light, it's harder for me. And there's different colors of light for different people. So I learned that. But once I learned that there was a signal underneath this, I didn't just pick it up as a kid because I just ignored all this because it was too much work. I didn't have enough energy in my brain. So then after 30, I started going, God, I gotta unpack all this stuff, right? So it's been a huge amount of work. I had to learn how to move my eyes, right, how to hear right, all kinds of things that people wouldn't really imagine. But that made me maybe more conscious of this stuff. But what I learned is when you hear about things like people who meditate, they can do this. Dr. Joe Dispenta is coming on stage later and he's going to talk about some of the science of this. And what you find is that people, even if they're in dead end jobs, if they learned breath work, they learned meditation, or they just tweak their diet so they have just to spark more energy, if they put the energy back into themselves, then they can, they can do it.

Let me ask you something, Dave, and this is why I said it's a rabbit hole. It's a fun, fun rabbit hole to go down. Because just in this little bit of time that I've talked to you, and I haven't had the honor or the privilege, like many of these people, to hear so many thought leaders in this business, in this world, in this little time, from hearing how the light can trigger different aspects of what you have or had in your life to how you've learned to tap into your gut from this standpoint, all the things we're talking about, what do you suggest? And you may probably have this. What are the first steps for people to take? Because this is like trying to eat an elephant at lunch. I'm sorry if I'm eating right now.

This was grass fed elephant. You guys loved it.

But it's a lot, it's a lot of information. And we can get stuck on analysis paralysis as we go back out into our world and we have to deal with our family, our kids, our significant other, you know, inflation, housing, a lot of stress issues. What would you suggest is that kind of 1% a day or 1% a week somebody should do? And how do they prioritize that?

The first thing, let's say you're just getting into this, you don't know what to do. You might say, I gotta go out and spend $500 a month on longevity supplements. Actually, you don't. What you do is you learn how to sleep. And this is something that doesn't cost any money. It's just knowing what to do. It's dimming the lights at night, having an earlier dinner, paying attention to it, possibly getting a sleep tracker, if that's in your budget. But the idea here is having a consistent bedtime, having darkness the way mother Nature designed things. Shockingly, depression goes down dramatically when your bedroom is just blacked out. Like a 69% reduction in depression from darkness. Like, we can have light during the day, we turn darkness at night. So it's not even about being perfect about that. It's just saying, huh, how do I feel when I woke up this morning? What caused that? And that one change could be timing of things, it could be brightness of things. In fact, clinically, people with bipolar disorder, right? Or even people with BPD can improve when they have darkness at night. And so this is cheap, it's free.

And then I've seen you do other things. Like, listen, like I was telling one of my buddies, you know, you know, I know you want to get back to the gym, just start doing 10 push ups in the morning and then move it up to 10 in the morning, in the evening and the whatever. But I like something else. You said go in the shower, turn it from hot to cold four days straight. That's it. Right. I would say the first thing to do was read the book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon.

Amen. Yes. If you read that book, raise your.

Hand and set goals. Seriously, my bottom line and my, you know, my key to success, I believe is I read the same exact 10 goals every single night before I go to bed and every single morning when I wake up. Six of them expire in six months. The other four expire in two years, five years, 10 years and 20 years. I never hit my six month goals because the end of the day, if I'm going to make this amount of money, if I make this amount, when I reset it, it's this amount, lose this amount of weight, various other things. The reason I read them before I go to bed at night, I want it to be the last thing I think about. Because when those shades are dark, I want it to be the only thing I think about when I go to sleep. That's why I don't watch Yellowstone before I go to bed. The reason I read them in the morning, I want it to be the first action I take. I'm human. Sometimes I don't read them in the morning. I skip a day or two. You know what I do? I allow everybody else in the world to take the two most valuable things in my life. It's my time and my thought. Because I wake up in the morning, if I don't read them and I pick up this and everybody that I know that I see on social media, they're skinnier than me, they're richer than me, and they're all in Greece for Christ's sake. I have no idea when these people work. And then I open up my emails and my email is always allowing somebody else's goddamn problems into your, into your head. So before you kiss your significant other or your dog, and it might be the same person, Dave, you have social media, depression and somebody else's problems on your mind. But the point about reading goals is also you have to envision yourself in the goal. Like I said about the drinking. We all know what we need to do. So I wouldn't wanted to lose £20 for about three years. That will be six. Six blocks of goals. And I kept reading my goal. Wake up in the morning, I'm gonna substitute one meal with a green drink, 10 bottles of water, 10,000 steps on my Fitbit. Whatever the case is, not any. Eat any fried foods and or meats. Earn my workout at the end of the night. And in regards to that, lose three quarters of a pound a week. And by this time, I would get down to my ideal weight. I never hit that goal. I'd get down to the 175 and I'd bounce back up because I said I want to envision myself in my Shark tank season one outfit. I kept envisioning myself there. We didn't do anything. All of a sudden, I changed that last goal to I wanted to live longer, to see myself walking my three little girls down the aisle. I dropped the weight in four months. No chef, no trainer. It was the end goal that was the most important thing. So as the book says, or any other book you'll see from Brian Tracy or any of our men and women, if you don't set goals for yourself, you will let other people set goals for you. You become what you think about most of the time. I will never get a girl or a guy. I'll stay in an abusive relationship. I'm never gonna be able to build this company. You're gonna embarrass yourself, you're gonna embarrass us. And we allow other people to set goals for us. And that's what I think is the most powerful thing we can do. So the goal is, I'm gonna start off with sleeping in the room like that. Month number two, I'm gonna start taking the shower. Month number three, if I see this, I. I'm going to do this. I think that's the most important part.

Little bites.

And we have to read it every single day. I started reading these. I put them on my mirror, but I didn't have a phone that I can look at as my screensaver. Because I'm going to pick this up 220 times a day.

And that's on your screensaver.

I do it really well because I know how to do it. But when I started, I used to put it like Napoleon Hill. I used to put it on my bathroom mirror. And that was 40 years ago.

You know, it's funny, when I was 16, I read think and Grow Rich, and I wrote my goal on my Bedroom mirror. It was my bathroom mirror. And it was. I'm going to have a million dollars in liquid assets by the time I'm 23. And I did that because I thought money would make me happy. And it turns out there's not a great correlation there. And I kind of think it didn't work. I only made $6 million when I was 26.

Right.

And I didn't say make and keep. So I lost it when I was 28 and kind of had to start over. So when you're writing your goals, but. And keep on there.

Same exact, same exact thing I read at 16. I said I'm gonna have a million dollars by the age of 20. And I said a million dollars, but I didn't have a goal for the million dollars.

Yes.

What I was gonna do, buy a Bugatti. I'm Sorry, I was 2 million short. Was I going to buy income producing houses or was it going to. Whatever the case is. And I made a, I made zero. And I was only. I was almost homeless up until 29. I changed my goals right around 28. And I had 30 million liquid by the age of 30.

Yeah, good guys, for, for your health goals, your longevity goals, your biohacking goals, your intelligence goals. This is what it's about. You've got to set a goal. You don't have to be a failure if you don't meet your goal right now. You can change your goals, you can take bite sized goals, but you gotta have a why. So what do you want to live forever? You'll be bored if you don't have a why. And you probably won't want to live forever. So find the reason behind it, which is why you had your 30 million like that, because you had a reason for it.

Absolutely.

What was the reason that you wrote in your goal?

The reason I want, I wrote in the goal is because I said to myself, I want to empower an entire community that I felt was being neglected. And I came up with fubu. A lot of people thought that FUBU was about a color. But I got to be very honest. My father, who happened to be my stepdad, who came in my life at 16, happens to be of the Jewish faith. His step, his brother was the lead attorney for Mandela in the United States. And my Jewish stepdad told me, son, be pro black but never anti anything else and never become the thing you're fighting against. Absolutely. So I created something called fubu. It's about a, a culture. And you know, in closing, I want to hopefully give a CTA to give people discounts and everything else. But, you know, one thing about our health and about the things we think about is I think we in this country have more in common than we have apart. Don't let these 5% of these assholes rip us apart and think about, yeah, what's the difference? Why is country music and hip hop gonna be the most dominating music always? Because it's the voices that have nots. And what is the difference? One is country music. Oh, my dog died. I can't find my dog. What is hip hop? Where my dog's at? Snoop Doggy Dog. It's the same shit, right? At the end of the day, I want to thank everybody here for what you're doing and changing life. I want to really thank Dave Asprey, who has been such an amazing mentor. He did not even know it until it became full circle. I want to thank two of my other mentors or of course, Naveen. You're going to see Naveen up here. I want to thank Brandon from Starkey hearings. Brandon, please stand up. And Dr. T, Dr. Rewire, right there. Dave has allowed me to do a call to action for who's in this room, but of course for the people gonna be on on the podcast. I'm gonna put up the call to action right now. So if anybody out there would love to take advantage of these discounts, all you have to do is go to the sharkhealth.com I'm telling you right now, I'm walking Brandon around, who is the president CEO of Starkey. Hearing this is like if I were to walk Steve Jobs around the room when he decided that he was not only going to show about computers, he was going to show about where technology is going. This man and Dr. Rewire are important. They're going to. I'm going to make sure they're going to give everybody in this room the power and understanding of where we're going with the most vital, important thing that Dave Asprey brought attention to our brain. Because everything we do here, from a health perspective, if you can't get the nourishment to your brain, it won't power anything else. So hit my. My QR code, and there's a couple of things here you can go on there. And we're going to, of course, populate it with various different opportunities with rmi, Oxy, Health, Balancer Pro, and all the stuff that Dave and I have that we can give discounts and aspects to. Well, if you go to any of the Balancer Pro, Oxy Health and RMI today while I'm at the booth, you want to meet me and you sign up, there's up there and of course you can if you ever want to work with me or any of my guys or join my CEO access group that I'm going to try to convince you, Dave to be one of the advisors. All right. I'm in by CEOs who want to become world renowned sharks if they're actually changing lives. Just go on there and there's a lot of stuff there put in the title whether you want to work with us, whether you're a podcast, whether you're changing lives as a company, a CEO or you just want to get some discounts from us. But again, thank you for having me in this room and thank you all for what you're doing. I thank you, Chairman.

Give me that.

Thank you.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.