Biohacker Dave Asprey | Why Your Emotional Triggers Are Killing Your Business

Dave, what's the weirdest health hack you've ever tried?

I can think of two of them, and they both had to do with digestion. I used to have such problems with my gut. I used to weigh 300 pounds, which is a whole lot of stone, 50% more than I weigh now. I think it's like 20 stone, but don't. Don't quote me on that. And I was just con. I'd been on antibiotics a lot, so I had just the worst gut, and it stressed me out all the time. So I bought, 25 years ago a pill from Russia that was an electrical stimulating pill, and it was pretty big. And you swallow it, and it shocks your gut every five seconds to strengthen the muscles. Wow. And I'm sitting there going, you know, my body's kind of jerking, and then it got stuck somewhere on the left side, and my left leg would just kick every five seconds. And I was kind of a little jumping up and down, laying on my side, and finally it came out, and the instructions said you could wash it and use it again. And I just drew the line there. So that was one. I've also tried taking pig whipworm eggs because one of the ways of modulating your immune system is with parasites, and pig whip worms cannot reproduce in humans. So you take them, they're there for a little while. It's called Hellman therapy, and it's. People with things like IBS and Crohn's disease have had full remissions from one brief interaction with a parasite. They can't reproduce, but it's pretty weird to be, you know, swallowing eggs from parasites, but I did it.

And how did that go for you?

I don't think it really did anything, but it was kind of intimidating to do it. I. I've gone to the ends of the earth both on, like, the energetic, esoteric, meditative kinds of things and on hard science, just because my body was so screwed up. And it's a lot better now.

So how quickly did you lose half your body weight?

That's half my current body weight. It was only a third of my fat body weight, just for listeners. And the first half of all that weight I lost. It only took three months. And for me, I stopped eating gluten, and it made such a difference, but it took 10 years to lose the other half of the weight. And this happens repeatedly. People say, I'm going to go on a low carb diet, which was called the Atkins Diet, or even banting way back 200 years ago or something. So problem is you can lose it and then you get stuck with half your fat gone. And then you say, oh, it's because I had 12 grams of carbs. If only I could do 11. And what gets you partway there won't get you the rest of the way there. That was why I wrote my big book is the first book on intermittent fasting and cyclical keto. It was called the Bulletproof diet. And in fact, a major member of parliament there in the UK lost 80 pounds in American. I don't know how many stone there's, but a lot of stone. And like completely talked about it in the media because it was so easy to lose when you're eating the right types of fat and the right types of protein. So we just, we kind of have a lot of beliefs that don't work. And I don't care what your beliefs are about nutrition. If they're working, you should have a ton of energy and you shouldn't have a hard time losing weight. Where I am now As a former 300 pound computer hacker, this is the COVID of my new book. And I don't know if the camera's gonna get that. There you go.

Perfect.

That's not airbrushed. I'm 5% body fat. I'm even trying to be that lean. It's just a matter of learning what's compatible, learning how to run your body. So the work of biohacking is how do we write the instruction manual for the human body and mind and even spirit so that you can have tons of energy, have a body that works and a mind that does what you want it to do. And that's my life's work, at least the second half of my life's work.

So, Dave, I want to get into a lot of that that you've mentioned in a moment, but I'd love to know what you believe is the biggest health scam out in the world that many people have bought into or believe.

The vegan diet. Wow. Straight up health scam. And I, I can say that because I was a devout vegan, I became a raw vegan. I could blend, I could sprout, I could tofu, all that stuff. And you know what? I did lose some weight on it. I lost bone density, I lost muscle, and I finally shattered three teeth because the kinds of plants that are at the core of a vegan diet will steal minerals from your cells and your bones. And it's not just a stereotype that vegans are emotionally volatile. And if you don't believe me, if you're vegan. And I said that. You got mad, didn't you? Okay, people eat an omnivorous diet. We don't get mad when someone says, don't eat that. And if we do, we just get therapy. But as a vegan, I was emotionally dysregulated because it broke my biology and it has proven to make lower IQ unhealthier children. So if you're a parent, feed your kids at least some eggs and some butter. You can be vegetarian, but if you're vegan, it is a crime against your children, it is a crime against your own intelligence, and it makes it hard for you to modulate yourself. Go vegetarian if you're vegan and the world will be a better place, your health will be better, we'll have better soil and we'll have a better environment and focus on grass fed stuff because we need that.

Okay, thanks, Dave. And what about the weirdest health hack you tried that actually really did work, as opposed to electrocuting yourself from the inside or putting worms in your body?

Well, this also has to do with the electricity. But I started 25 years ago gluing electrodes to my head to see what was going on in there, to read the electricity coming off my brain and to learn how to control it. And it's called neurofeedback. And over the last 25 years, well, I ended up developing a way to replace between 20 and 40 years of meditation with five days of training your brain with a computer. So today I have nine companies in my portfolio. I write a major book about every two years, podcast with 550 million downloads and 1300 episodes and just a lot of work in the world. The the largest biohacking conference in the world for 4,000 people. And the list just goes on and on. And I can do all that because I went through my brain with a computer and I did lifetimes of meditation because. And I've traveled to remote monasteries in Nepal and Tibet and in the Andes and learned from shamans and done all the stuff that I didn't even believe was had any reason or chance of working. And what I found was that there's all these things, but you have to go sit in a cave and then you're meditating for four hours and then the teacher's like, ah, you got it. Good job, grasshopper. Or like whatever the thing is from that lineage. But the feedback loop was very, very short. When you have a computer hooked up, if the sounds get louder, you're doing better. If the sounds get quieter, you're not doing as well. So I learned how to regulate my nervous system and my brain in a way that to me was entirely alien. And it's led to enormous peace. And I just wrote Heavily Meditated my newest book, because Now I have 10 years of working with more than a thousand CEOs and high performers in order to teach them how to control their brains and their nervous system. And the difference is profound. So I have the data, like, we know what works and what doesn't work from all this stuff that we've been talking about for thousands of years.

So is this accessible to normal people, this computer that you put on your brain?

Well, if you wanted to come to Seattle, to my facility, it runs about 20,000American dollars and there's a team of neuroscientists and facilitators and an executive chef. So no. But the technique that we developed over all this time is called the reset process. And I put it in heavily meditated, so at the cost of a book. And you can do this at home, you don't need the computer. It's faster and more detailed and dialed in with the technology, the neurofeedback technology that we created. But the steps work. And I've done this in large audiences. And you can do it at home, you can do it with a friend. So the technique is in heavily meditated. You read the book, there's eight steps to it. And it lets you find something that triggers you, something that really, like pushes your buttons. I don't know what the UK equivalent is. Like flips your bit or crushes your biscuit. I don't know. You guys have all these weird ways of.

Pisses you off.

Pisses you off, pisses you off. It probably has bollocks in there somewhere too, but I can never use that one, right? So anyway, the thing that gets you what adults do is, okay, that guy really pissed me off, but I'm going to smile anyway. And like, everybody knows that you're pissed off that they got to you, but you fake it. And that's how society becomes polite, even if we're angry all the time. Problem is, being angry all the time is bad for you. It makes you old and it makes you act like a jerk and it makes you rough on yourself and it's the source of the mean voice in your head. So what the meditating people would have taught me somewhere, you know, some guru would say, notice the feelings. The feelings are washing over you. Gently set them aside. You are not your feelings. All of this is true. Yes, do that. And then the Hacker part of me is like, why do I have to do that? Can't I find out why my system keeps doing that and heal it and turn it off? So the model that I'm teaching in heavily meditated is the same as if you take your phone and you know all the alerts are going off because you haven't disabled any of them. Like TikTok and emails and calls, ding, ding, ding. You can't use your phone, you can't even think your nervous system is like your phone. So your goal is to go into the control panel, the system settings for your, your operating system, for your body, and turn off triggers that aren't serving you. And that way you don't have to gently take a deep breath and set them aside and all that stuff, because you're not mad anymore. And now that same situation happens, see if that same guy walks in, who would have pissed you off and now you just go, oh, that guy's up to no good. But you're not mad and you're not angry and that means you're in control and you can behave the way you want to behave and it doesn't cost you anything. And there's a model for why your body behaves this way, for why you get so mad at times when you shouldn't get mad logically, but you do. And now we have control of it. Like, this is my most important work and my books are in 20 languages and about a million copies. And like, I've done a lot of good stuff. This is a next level. I couldn't have written heavily meditated at the beginning of the biohacking movement because frankly, some of the stuff in there, it's a little bit out there, but it's what works and it's what I've measured works over 10 years.

Okay, so I've probably got about five or six questions that have come out of this, but I want to grab one word you said and that was peace. And probably for 20 years of being an entrepreneur, I've been trying to figure out how the universe works and what is the purpose of life. Not just my life, but life. Oh yeah, of course, most people come to the conclusion that happiness is the purpose of life, which I don't agree with. And then to use your word, peace. Peace is the purpose of life. Perhaps the problem is, is there's always war. So what is the purpose of life and is it happiness and is it peace? And if it is peace, then are you just going to get murdered and raped by someone who's Better at war. And actually, is anger a good emotion? Because you can use it to start a movement or overthrow labor in the UK or whatever.

Anger is an incredibly useful spark. But if you use anger as your fuel source, it will burn you, you will hate your life, and you'll probably cause great harm to people around you. So recognizing anger for what it is, okay, it's some energy there. If I can make you angry, who's in charge? You. If I can trigger you, it means you're carrying a loaded gun. And, dude, you can't even have a pocket knife in your country.

Oh, no. We can have a machete, though, in London.

That was good. But you. You see the point here. If you can be triggered, you're not in charge. The person who wrote the marketing campaign, the politician, people are manipulating you, and we have really good AI to manipulate you now, you know, you think ad campaigns are just information. No. Every little thing is scripted to talk to the unconscious parts of your mind. You can be the one who configures them so that that stuff does not land. And my goal is to install an upgrade for all humans who want it, so that no one can control your system except for you. So the deepest, darkest manipulators, the narcissists, the sociopaths, politicians, ad executives, whatever, they're going to try their games and you're just going to look at them and go, I see what you're doing, but it's not even going to make you mad, because it's laughable. That is true peace, and that is also freedom. And some people think that peace means nonviolence. And that is absolutely something that powerful people have been pushing since the 1960s to make people believe that nonviolent protest actually works. There's a great article in the Atlantic that goes through the history of nonviolent protests. Every single time it's worked, there was a small, very violent fringe element present. And the reason the nonviolence worked is because the people in power who were doing wrong maybe were concerned that the violence would spread. But if you have purely nonviolent protest, it doesn't work. Now, I am not advocating violence whatsoever. What I am advocating is that no one can make you so mad that you get violent. And one of my favorite stories that I'm pretty sure I included in the final edit and heavily meditated comes from the Bushido code in Japan. And there's a legend about a samurai and his master gets killed by another bad samurai who is sneaky, right? So dishonorable. So samurai says, I swear Vengeance, because that's my duty. So he cuts a swath through the country and he kills all of the bad guys clan. And he's going up against the final samurai. And they're fighting and he's coming in with his, his sword to strike the final killing blow. And the bad guy spits in his face. And all of a sudden he stops and he puts his sword away. And the bad guy says, but you had me. I was on the ground, why didn't you kill me? And the samurai says, well, when you spit in my face, you made me mad and I don't want to kill you in anger. I'm going to go calm down and then I'm going to come back and kill you, okay? That is peace, that is powerful. Right? You're always in control of your state. And people who are peaceful are the most dangerous people on earth. And I fundamentally believe in danger. In fact, my new coffee company is called Danger Coffee. It's danger because who knows what you might do. The most dangerous people on the planet, they will do the right thing no matter what. And the reason I advocate for this is, and we can go through the nature of consciousness, I know that humans are wired inside our cells, inside our bones, to be kind to one another. And there's reasons we don't do it. Some of them are justified, but most of them aren't. And it's all within your control. You just have to know how it works.

So when you say in our cells is, do you mean that we get a, an emotional reward to be kind and it's good for evolution and survival is.

No. Well, it's good for survival, but probably not for evolution. You want to go through how it works?

Sure, yeah.

So if I clap my hands right now, you know that it takes some time for the sound to get to your body and then you hear it, because that's what we perceive. But if I hooked electrodes from 40 years of Zen to your brain, and we were measuring your auditory processing system, your body received the sound and it allowed your brain to hear it one third of a second later. But you don't perceive that. And then it took you another three quarters of a second in order to think about the sound and know what it was. And what this means is that you have a censorship window where the hardware of your body, where your meat, it's deciding what it's going to allow you to see and how you're going to feel about it. And then when you get that, you're going to make up a logical Story about why you did what you did. Well, that can't be real. But of course it's real. Everyone listening. There's one time you leaned on a hot stove accidentally, and you jerked your hand away and said, good thing I pulled my hand away before I got burned. You didn't blow your hand away. You didn't go, you know, I noticed it was hot. I noticed I was going to get burned, so I moved my hand. Because if that's what we did, your hand would be halfway cooked because we're too slow. So that means there's another consciousness inside your body that is filtering reality for you. And this is true. And we can measure it. That's why I know that it's real. And then it follows. What does that part of the body do? Well, your little human brain, my little human brain, we could not process reality if it was our job to think about how every joint moved and to squeeze a diaphragm here. Remember to beat the heart, remember to breathe, remember to blink. And, oh, let's pay attention to infrared and X ray and. And all the things around us that we just don't even. We know they're there. We don't pay any attention. Our body's handling all that for us. It has its own intelligence. And all life starts at a single cell. For humans, that single cell is called the mitochondria. These are ancient bacteria that are embedded inside our cells. There's more of these ancient mitochondrial bacteria in your body than there are cells, because the cells in your brain and your heart have 15,000 of these little guys making decisions about reality and in real time. And you don't get to even know about it for a third of a second. So it's a network, an intelligent network that tells you how you're going to feel about things. And it gets programmed to keep the meat alive. It doesn't even like it that your brain's in there because it's running the same operating system that's in a mouse or in a jellyfish or like a slime mold, like a politician, any of those things. All life, even trees, they all have the same steps in the same order. And this is a. It's a beautiful model. And it's taken me a long time to figure this out, and it's because I'm a computer science guy. And here's how all humans and everything else on Earth processes reality. Before we get a chance to think. And it's going to be really relaxing to learn this. The first thing that your body does is it is. These are all F words, which makes it easy. It's fear. If something is scary, run away from, kill, or hide from it, and do it before you can think. That's why if someone jumps out and startles you, you will jump. It's why the body protects itself without us having to do anything. And unfortunately, how do you recognize fear? Fear is a very complex phenomenon, and since you were in the womb, that network of mitochondria that isn't very smart but is very fast, it's been saying, well, what's scary? And the time your mom almost dropped you, the time the coach yelled at you, the time the bullies came after you. Everything that ever felt scary gets stored in your tissues as a potential threat. And the next time it happens, your tissues will say, hey, potential threat. And you'll get a surge of emotion. And then you perceive it with the emotion and go, that guy's a jerk. Because you felt it. And you felt it because of a program running in your body, not because you decided he was a jerk. That's called discernment. That's a beautiful thing. Maybe he is a jerk, but it's not because you felt like he was a jerk. It's because you saw him be a jerk and you. You thought about it. Because otherwise, your feelings run everything. Well, if fear is the first thing, it gets about 10 times more energy than anything else. I hate it when Zoom puts those bubbles in. I don't know. Stop it. So after fear comes food. One third of the average person's thoughts are about time Tacos. It's literally. It's about, what am I going to have for lunch? And it's absurd, but it's true. And it makes sense if you're a bacteria floating in the ocean or whatever. If there's not enough food, you die. So first thing is, is something trying to kill me and do I have enough food? This makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? Okay, the third F word. All life has to do it to stay around forever. Can you guess what that one is? I was thinking fertility, but all right, we'll go with fucking. If that's your. If that's your vibe, Rob, I'm not going to judge you. Yes, it's bugging. So there are two more F words that all life does, but let me just pause there for a minute. Have you ever done anything you're ashamed of? That isn't one of those three.

If I've ever really judged someone and got them wrong, I've felt shame around that.

Yeah.

But I have to think about it.

Yeah. Yeah, that's. That's actually a profoundly good answer. The reason you're judging other people is. Is fear. Instead of thinking about them, you're judging them. And the body saying that might not be safe. Judge that person. Judge that person. And when you learn how to turn off the judgment and to turn on the thoughtful discernment, then it is an automatic thing because it's when you judge someone and you're wrong. Yeah. So it's.

Most of the shame in my life has definitely come from rejection. Maybe women. When I was younger people definitely I was very overweight as well, so I had a. Still have a lot of food shame. So.

Yeah. Wow. All of, all of shame is 100% about that first F. F word, fear. Right. And when there's the issues around food, it's around fear of not having enough energy. So I put the second F word when it's around women. Well, that's the third F word. And this if the reason it feels so strong, especially around sex, your body believes that if you don't have sex, the species will end. That is a deep, deep fear. That's a. Yeah. And, and it. It's not true. But your body doesn't understand that there are even other people around. It just knows. It's a primordial urge and it manipulates your feelings. And this is why so many people get hooked on. On porn. And this is why so many people get hooked on emotional eating. And I did have some emotional eating. I would eat when I was lonely. And in fact, I wrote a book about this. I. I hired a shaman to drop me off in a cave for four days with no food and no people because I knew that I would get hypoglybitschy if I didn't eat too. So I figured I was going to lose my mind, but at least I can do it alone in a cave. And it turns out I did not lose my mind. I. I had the most energy I've ever felt. It was incredible. So your body tells you eat six times a day or go into starvation mode. Eat, eat, eat. It's not real. You can go 60 days at least without eating, without starving to death. But it feels like you're going to die if you skip a meal. Right. The feeling is not reality. So we have fear. We have food. We have fucking in order. All life on Earth is like. Is like, do we need to kill it? Can I eat it? And can I hump it? Before your brain gets a signal of what's going on. And this creates a lot of freedom. It's not you, it's. It's part of your body that's doing this. And then the next F word to answer long answer your question, it's friend. All life on Earth is wired to support its own species and to make an ecosystem around it so you don't have to think, because your body already wants you to support your community and it desperately wants to be in a community. This is why loneliness is so painful. And the way the model in heavily meditated just in the world of biohacking works is you have some amount of energy that your body makes and you can actually change that amount of energy. And then you pour it into the fear bucket. And if there's not very much fear, it goes into the food bucket. And if you're not worried about food and you're nourished, it goes into the intimacy bucket. And if you turn lust into intimacy and it's a sacred altered state when you do it in certain ways, it can be profoundly healing and it can be as strong as taking psychedelics. 20% of people report meeting God during orgasm at least once in their life. But you can't tell because they're just laying there flopping and they're saying, oh, God, which they always say. But it's, it's, it's a very profound experience. And in heavily meditated, I go through all the techniques, all the technologies, all the methods of entering altered states so you can go in and do something different, whether it's to reprogram yourself and change your control panel, or whether it's to enter a flow state or a highly intuitive or highly creative state. It's not like you just go meditate. That's like saying, just go eat. What are you eating? And it turns out meditation is very slow. And there are things that amplify the effects or accelerate the effects and knowing which technique to use to get what result is worth writing a book about. Because I've never found a book that does that in all of the thousands and thousands of books I've read or the teachers I've trained with. So you end up going, fear, food, fucking friend. And then forgiveness. And that's the final F word. And if you didn't. Well, let's, let's put it this way. If you turned fear into peace, you turned hunger into nourishment. You turned lust into a sacred form of connection. And then you turn your community into a source of nourishment. Because every time you put something into your Community, your community puts it back in you. You have so much left over for the final F word, forgiveness. And forgiveness is the act of going in, changing your state, and turning off inappropriate fear, hunger, and lust. It's how you reprogram yourself as forgiveness. And I have worked with some of the most powerful, wealthiest people in the world, CEOs, celebrities, pro athletes, and we all face these F words. They're the source of all human suffering. And it is not you. It is your body. So let's go in and reprogram it. You can imagine your body's like a big, bouncy Labrador retriever, and it comes in the living room, it pees on the couch, it eats your shoes, it barks, and then it gets up on the table and eats everything, right? And you're going, God. And then it slobbers on you when you're done, it tries to hump your leg. Perfect dog, right? Or you put it through obedience training, school, and that same dog will sit there, and you can put a piece of popcorn on its nose, and it'll sit there until you tell it it's allowed to eat. Which nervous system do you want? Because you can do that. And it used to take a lifetime. This is why most societies would take some percentage of people, usually the weird ones, and say, you go sit in the cave or the monastery or the church and just spend all your time there. And after 40 years, write down what you notice and give it to the next guy. And in a thousand years, we'll know something. And then the nerds like me are like, I'm kind of lazy, so maybe we could just measure the data and we could do it faster, because we have this amazing amount of technology in the world that never existed the way it does now. And what this means is I could go from being a fat computer hacker with Asperger's syndrome into a person who is connected to my emotions and the world around me. And I can do all this. That would have literally taken lifetimes if I did it the old way. And it's repeatable. And you don't have to have the tech. I do write about some of the tech, especially the affordable stuff. You can do all this just knowing what works, because a lot of people think something works, but it doesn't. And I was that way about the vegan diet. It is harmful, but I believed it, so I did it. I believed that working out all the time would make me lose weight. So I did it for 18 months, six days a week. I never lost any weight. But I got strong and I never had to buy smaller pants. It didn't work. I just believed it would work. So most of us believe, well, just deciding to calm down is going to work. It doesn't work because the lack of calm happened before you could think. That's why it doesn't work.

Okay, wow. Thank you for that, Dave.

Hope it was helpful.

So I want to talk about some of these, I suppose, trends because as an entrepreneur, I'm always trying to be more productive and efficient. I'm nearer to 50 than I am 40, so I'm trying to now make sure that I extend my life. And so, you know, I'm trying to put on some muscle, ice bathing, intermittent fasting, you name it. And then it seems that as more science comes out, what once apparently was a miracle seems to have downsides. So intermittent fasting might not be good for retaining muscle mass or ice bathing can actually reduce muscle mass or veganism is terrible. So if anything comes out, that is the new amazing thing. Are we just only seeing upsides and we haven't had long enough to research the downsides? This recent budget should warn you that your pension is not safe and secure and they're coming for your inheritance. Do you even know how much is in your pension or where your pension is invested? Add to this the recent inheritance tax grab on your pensions and the risk of a market crash. You probably didn't know this and I didn't until recently, but physical gold can be added to your pension pot. Gold is inheritance tax free and has grown 700% in the last 20 years. You probably know from my content I'm investing heavily in silver and gold and that's why I've partnered with direct Bullion. Myself and Nigel Farage are brand ambassadors and direct bullion can help you with gold to protect and grow your pension. I buy my gold and silver from direct bullion and I don't earn any money on any purchases of gold or silver if you buy direct from direct Bullion. So if you go to robmore.directbullion.com you can get a great price on your silver and gold and you can get the Pension Gold Investing Guide completely for free. As you know, I don't do many strategic partnerships and when I do, I do them with people who are credible, who've been doing it a long time, who invest in things that I invest into and gold and silver's going wild. I'm investing heavily in gold and silver. I and I recommend you check out robmore.directbullion.com.

Well, this intermittent fasting thing is. It's really new. We've only been doing it for 10,000 years. So, yeah, one of these days they're going to know something about it. So it's laughable. Anytime you introduce something new, the existing people get so angry. Right. Why would you get angry if someone disagrees with you? Because you were bullied as a child. And there's two kinds of science. There's science with a capital S, and it is just another form of dogmatic religion. And then there's science with a small S, which is where you have a hypothesis and you constantly search for things that disprove your hypothesis so you can make a better one. And it's really painful if you're someone who says, you know, I am a physicist and I believe in string theory, and some young punk comes along after you spent 40 years in your field and does a new equation that proves that everything you believed was wrong, except that's not really what it proved. All science is about creating a lens on how to see something. And that lens is not real, because the reality around us, it's all a bunch of quantum foam, most likely. And we're never going to perceive that with our human bodies, but that actually is out there. It's real. So we're just looking at more effective ways to see reality, to get the things we want to happen. It's. It's a quest for understanding and it's curiosity. So anytime someone says, well, you can't put butter in coffee, like, people have lost 10 million pounds or something by putting butter in coffee. And it was the amount of anger from people, despite radical, consistent results, it was amazing. Intermittent fasting. There's a voice in many people's heads, programmed by society and usually by our mothers. So you're in the uk, most people in London, your grandparents, or maybe great grandparents, depending on your age, they survived World War II, where there was a famine and there was bombing, and in the us, the Great Depression. Well, that's why your mom or your grandmother always tries to put food on your plate, wants you to eat more than you did before. And why anytime you're hungry, oh, no, it's an emergency. What are we going to do? It's fear, right? So we get these patterns stuck in us. So it's no wonder that someone goes, well, that Dave Asprey guy, he told me to skip breakfast. And I felt a feeling like, oh, my God, I'm going to die. It's a famine. And I believe the feeling, right? The data around Intermittent fasting is very clear. Just like exercise or water, you can do it too much. And I wrote very specific instructions in my first big book. The first book on intermittent fasting was called the Bulletproof Diet. And four books later, I had to write fast this way, because when men or women over fast or over keto, the same thing will happen in women. Hit the wall before men. And what happens is first you start realizing that you didn't get good sleep because your stress hormones go up because you're not eating often enough, or you're not eating enough calories, or you're not eating carbs on occasion, the way your body really wants you to. So, okay, you ignore that, or more likely, you go, I already know intermittent fasting is good for me. Now that I'm not sleeping, let me do it even longer because that must be the problem. Okay. Or let me go to the gym one more time. It's just over. Training is basically what it is. So after that, for guys, we wake up without a kickstand. And for women, disruptions in your monthly hormone cycle. And if you still keep doing it, you get your cortisol levels high enough that your hair starts to thin, and that's how you know you're doing it too much. But does it work profoundly well? Yes, at the right dose.

So I think. I mean, that's a life lesson there. Does it work profoundly well? Yes, at the right dose. I mean, that. Isn't that like. Everything in life works well at the right dose?

Yeah. One of the things that pisses me off is you see these influencers out there drink a whole bunch of water every day. And that's supposed to have magic powers. People die from that in marathons. It's an excess of water without enough salt. So there's. How about this? Drink when you're thirsty and make sure there's electrolytes in your water. And you've heard eight glasses of water a day, Right? Are those English glasses or metric glasses? No one ever, like, no one even knows how big a glass is. It's just made up nonsense from someone who probably, you know, lived in a desert a long time ago and ran out of water. So it's easy to tell. It's called thirst. And what. What all of this comes down to, though, Rob, that's the most important thing, is that if you pay attention to the signals that are in your body, it's not about pushing harder. It's about generating more energy and reducing friction. So it just takes a little push to get all the results. You want. And if you are capable of pushing hard and you've doubled the amount of power your body makes and you've removed all the friction, you've got a rocket ship. Wow.

Okay, so I have entrepreneurs mostly who listen to this show, and I personally feel that there must be some connection between health and wealth. Do you think there's any connection between health and wealth? And if so, can you talk about that?

100%? And entrepreneurs are my favorite people in the world because I'm one of you two. I'm one of the few entrepreneurs to start a business from scratch that reached more than a hundred million dollars a year in revenue. So when I was running Bulletproof, before they removed me from the company, I was. I was doing 140 million a year. So I'm with you from zero to 140 at least. And the one. It's not the one thing. I've learned a lot of important things I like to share. But one of the most fundamental things that I did not learn at Wharton Business School, that I don't think they teach us anywhere, it's that your body has an energy field. And you could say, Dave just went, woo on me, guys. You can measure it. You can see it with different technologies. In the east, we would call it chi, right? And you see, like, the qigong masters rubbing their hands and lighting things on fire. And all this is actually measurable mitochondrial energy that your body can manipulate. And if you're a parent, you know what I'm talking about. Because your energy field extends to your kids, and you can feel your family, well, to your ego, to this operating system in your body. That part we were talking about before, that runs off the F words. Your identity extends to your company. Your energy field extends to your company. And this means that if your energy is small because you're not healthy or your energy is chaotic because you didn't learn how to manage your energy, if you're in a state of fear, your company will be in a state of reactivity. And your job as an entrepreneur, especially at a rapidly growing company, you must be the most regulated, stable, peaceful person in the room all the time. If you really want a big company, and a big company where you want to show up every day. And this means when someone tries to sue you, when some tariff comes in or whatever, some external thing happens, instead of going into the first F word, which all entrepreneurs are going to want to do, because a threat to your company, your company's your bank, maybe it's like a threat to you. You've got to learn the skills to sit there where all of your execs or all of your companies are going. I can tell he's not afraid and that we've got this. And the way they tell is not what you say. It's called congruence. And it's a big part of heavily meditated congruence is when your inner state matches, your outer state matches the way you behave. And all leaders have sat there and said, I'm about to shit my pants, but I'm going to smile and say, everything's fine. And everybody knows that everything isn't fine, because you wouldn't know this unless you're studying it, but the spacing of your heartbeats changed when you were afraid. And their bodies can feel that. And we don't consciously sense it, but we can measure changes in each other based on our presence. So be present, be grounded and be in charge. Not because your brain was in charge, but because your body and your brain were aligned and in charge. That is that kind of peaceful power I'm talking about. That's what makes companies grow. And every time you lose your mind, you will be reactive. And if you're running a company with a million pounds, or with 10 million pounds, maybe you have 100 employees, if you get triggered, if you get angry, all the people and all their families may not eat because you did something stupid, because I could push your buttons or because you could push their buttons. So you've got to do the deep personal work. And that starts with, can my body make electricity? Well, from air and food. And if you can't do that, that's an easy one. The hard one is the next one. Now that I have enough energy, how do I not waste it on being hungry, on being angry, being lonely and all that stuff? You grow, your company grows. If you're growing and say you get divorced or you have a bad breakup, sometimes death in the family, some other big trauma. How many entrepreneurs have you seen just take their companies off a cliff because their personal life went down? You have to manage that stuff. And that has been the biggest work for me. And now I. I run an entrepreneur relationship mastermind with my girlfriend, who's a top relationship coach. And we bring entrepreneurs in and they do a hot seat. And the most successful people are now focusing as much energy on maintaining their relationship, both with their community and with their partner, as they are on their business. And they're managing their relationship with metrics like a business, because it's just as important. It's a source of Energy. So if fear becomes peace, eating and hunger become nourishment. Nourishment equals electricity. And that's the electricity that makes your field, that makes your business thrive. But if you're lonely and your body is always going, only fans, only fans, only fans, dude, do something about it. You can't let your body do that, right? And you invest there. And you're saying, what do you mean? You're telling me to, like, find a girlfriend or two, clean up my marriage in order to make another million pounds? Hell, yes, I'm telling you to do that, right? Anywhere there's friction in your life, that's what you do. You hired an EA a long time ago to remove stupid friction on your calendar. Well, do it everywhere. Hire a chef if you need to, right? And at that point, hire a relationship coach or a therapist. And if you really want to grow, hire a therapist for yourself and hire a relationship coach for your relationship. And watch the friction in your life go away. And it'll seem magical, because when there's no friction there, dude, everything's easy in the business right now. And then just go in there and add some junk food, add some relationship stuff, and add some triggers that push your fear buttons. You're like, wow, everything sucks in my business today. Isn't that weird? You are the common element, and you're not managing yourself very well. And this whole, like, I'm going to just push, dude, I made $6 million when I was 26 years old doing that, you burn the candle at both ends. And in the middle, I'm the first guy to sell anything over the Internet. The first E Commerce on the planet was out of my dorm room, right? And I did this because I had been bullied, because I'm going to prove I'm good enough. And you can push, but at a certain point, when you get rid of all this friction, you're like, why am I pushing? I could be pulled. And then you're like, oh, maybe I could have a mission for my company and a purpose for why I'm here, whether it's my company or not. And at that point, you stop pushing and you start being pulled. And your job is just remove things that are in the way. And it's a totally different energy than that, like, domination energy, the fighting energy. It's like, no, no, you can't fight with me because I am everything, and that's how you want to be. And those are the businesses that change the world.

Wow. So that lesson that you've just shared there about essentially managing Your emotions and not dumping on your teams, probably my.

Managing your state, not your emotions, your emotions. If they've already happened, then you're hiding them by managing them. I'm talking about editing the system that makes inappropriate emotions that are a waste of energy and time.

Okay, is there also a logical way to do this? Because something that I learned from a couple of people, which seems to be a useful tool, is anything that happens that gets that trigger. Ask yourself, why is this good? Or what is the upside? Because it feels like the fear response is perceiving more downside, more threat. Basically, we've had big lawsuits and looking back, it's given us way better knowledge than before we had the lawsuit. So is that a helpful thing to ask yourself? Why is this good? What's the upside? Or is it too logical?

Well, it's impossible to manage emotions logically. And this is one of my other big learnings. When I was 30, I sat down with a true master of this stuff, and I was actually feeling fear, but I didn't know what it was. And I was like, I'm uncomfortable and I'm angry because fear will always look like anger. Anger just hides fear. It's like a wrapper for fear. And I looked at this woman, she was 84, and I said, there's nothing here for me to be afraid of, therefore it's not fear. And she just laughed and she said, fear is an emotion. It doesn't have to be rational. Like, oh, crap. That means that my system is simultaneously irrational and rational. So I'm going to try to use my irrational side to manage the irrational side. It's not going to work. What you can do, though, is you can do something beautiful that you recommended. It's called meta awareness. You just observe your state and go, oh, look, something did piss me off, Something did trigger me, or something happened that feels like a threat. So for me, if something pushes any negative emotion feeling like, oh, look, I found another one. And I'm going to run the reset process on it, which is. Which is in heavily meditated. But the center point of the reset process is what you just described, and it's gratitude. So in when I'm teaching entrepreneurs how to edit triggers out, the first step is replay the feeling, the negative feeling. And you don't replay it in your head, you replay it in your body. So, and I don't want people to do that now if they're driving, people break down crying sometimes. If you do this authentically. And I'm skipping steps, but I'm just kind of describing the basic part of it. So you're like, oh man, that sucks. Like I feel the discomfort, I feel the in my gut, I feel the hairs on the back of my neck. And then exactly what you said. Find the gratitude. And I've worked with people who've been physically tortured and what do you mean you want me to find something I'm grateful for for being tortured? It's like, well, yeah. Do you still have all your fingers there? There's something you're grateful for. So there's something that happens with gratitude. It's curiosity first. The curiosity takes you out of fear. That's why they say curiosity kill the fat. Kill the fat, kill the cat. Probably kills fat too. So when your curiosity turns on, you step out of fear a little bit. And then when gratitude turns on, it's a key that can unlock the door to permanently removing the trigger. And that final F word of forgiveness, that's how to do it. So I've also faced really big lawsuits. I mentioned, you know, I built a hundred million dollar a year company, got kicked off the board and out of the company and it got sold off for much less than it was worth when I was there. So that's the thing that will destroy a lot of people. I mean, it was hard. And so I did okay, acknowledge the pain and then I look for something to be grateful for. And there's actually a ton of. Right. I just couldn't see it because my operating system puts 10 times more energy on the negative than the positive. Because I'm human. Oh, by the way, if you meditate, you can go from 10 to 6 times more energy. But still, it's a lot. But then the final step is seeing things from the other side's perspective and realizing that everything they're doing that feels like they're doing it to you, they're not. They're doing it and it's not about you. And they're doing it because their parents are mean to them. They're doing it because all sorts of reasons because they're a flawed human being like you, like everyone else. And I have had some serious narcissist, sociopathic interactions and I write about them in heavily meditated. There's ways to actually categorize people by what's motivating them to cause harm to you. It's not you who's motivating them. When you look at what I'm going to call it, a business trauma, the, the, the pain that we feel as entrepreneurs is different than the pain that a lot of people feel as adults, the big ones are betrayal and injustice. And it happens over and over. I run something called the Business of Biohacking Conference, where I teach about 200 entrepreneurs how to build businesses the way I built Bulletproof and the way I'm building my other nine companies. And we do this every October in Austin. And. And when I say, hey, guys, raise your hand if you've had employees steal from you, 90% of people, and that. That hurts. You trusted them, you're paying them, and they looked you in the eye every day and they stole your money. Right? And it is a deep wounding because, like, how can I ever trust anyone? And if you allow that to stick in your nervous system, you'll be a bitter, paranoid human being. You have to learn how to do the reset process where like, oh, they did it because they're. They're flawed, right? And when you make this little shift, only after you feel the pain, only after you experience gratitude and you make that shift, then you look at them and you can say, I have no anger. I'm not mad. I'm not sad. I. I'm not happy either. But I feel a sense of connection because they're just a human, and they're a human that I'm not going to talk to anymore because they're actually a narcissist and a predator. But I'm not mad at them. I just have boundaries. Does that make sense?

It makes total sense, Dave. Yeah, because I think probably the most liberating thing is disconnecting yourself from them. They're not doing it to you. They're doing it because of them. Also, is there an argument that there's nothing to forgive? Because if you have to forgive, you're coming from a place of having to let something go. They are just being them.

At the end of the day, forgiveness is not telling them that you forgive them, and it's not saying that what they did was okay. Forgiveness is just a change in your emotional and energetic state, and it's a change that we can measure with a computer. Your brainwaves change.

So it's for you, not them.

Oh, yeah. All it is is everything that you're angry about, everything that you've not forgiven that you perceived, or I'll say that your system perceived as a harm or a threat. Those are rocks and friction on the road to happiness and success and evolution and growth. So you could just leave them there. And then you got to drive slow and weave around all these things just to get where you're going. Or every time you do this process, you're paving the road, you're removing all the friction, and pretty soon the road is straight and it's paved well, and you can just coast on it. And forgiveness is only about you, has nothing to do with the other person. And I've seen people forgive the most profound things. One of the things that, that it. It brings tears to my eyes sometimes. We had a woman Come through 40 years of Zen, where you spend five days with a computer helping you not escape from doing this process. Like, it. It is very intense. And she's in her 80s, and she was conceived from parents who were just getting out of a concentration camp in Europe. And she. She said at the end of this, she said, I have been seeking peace my entire life, and I never found it, but I just felt it. Like I. I finally know what peace feels like. And she had deep multigenerational trauma in her family, right? She was conceived in an unsafe environment and raised by people who were heavily traumatized and just had no. It was all about forgiveness, right? And that's why I put it in the F word. The model for reality, for humans to reduce all these things. Look, being not hungry all the time is pretty easy, right? I've written big books about that. Like, it's a. Fixing your diet's easy. And if you try to do something that doesn't work, you'll know it because you're hungry all the time. There you go. And then looking at intimacy as a source of nourishment, it's also possible to have a reasonably good relationship without too much work. Like, there's known things, there's lots of relationship experts. Read two books on it and do what they say, and you'll probably improve that meaningfully. But then dealing with your reactivity to things that might be threats, that is the thing that makes you a better parent, a better entrepreneur, a better member of your community. And the only way to deal with that, that I've ever found that is sustainable and effective and efficient is forgiveness. Otherwise, I'm going to take half my energy to worry about being hungry and half my energy to worry about threats that aren't even real. And there's so little left for me to take care of myself. No wonder I'm exhausted all the time. No wonder I make shitty decisions. You wouldn't know this because it's designed to be invisible, but your brain has about 20 different ways of solving a problem, and your brain is lazy. It doesn't want to use any more energy than necessary. And, you know, rob that if you had a business problem and you sat down for a day with a spreadsheet and a notepad, you really ponder it and you think about it, you're going to make a pretty good decision, right? Well, that decision is going to feel like it's a good decision. If you only had 10 seconds to make a decision, your brain would use a different, much more energy efficient, but much less accurate way of making the decision. And that decision is going to feel exactly as good as the one you pondered is going to feel. True. And the brand's like, haha, I used a low power algorithm to save time, right? Unfortunately our ability to know which one of those is good isn't great because they both feel like we did the work because your body doesn't want you to do more work. So knowing that your powers of self deception are very strong because you're in a meat body, it's important to know, don't waste energy and make sure you have enough energy because then your brain will automatically use a better way of thinking for you to solve problems. You won't miss things that you should have seen but you didn't see because you, you had pasta for lunch.

Dave, why did you get kicked out of your own company?

Venture capitalists operate on the same principle as governments. They take a potato peeler and they start peeling away your rights or your equity. And they're always doing it for your own safety, for the good of us all, maybe for the safety of the children. They're peeling, peeling and pretty like hey, you just peeled away a third of my potato. And they go, oh, sorry. And then they stop, they don't put the potato back and then they start peeling again. You go, hey. And pretty soon you're like, I got one, one French fry left here. Like this isn't cool. So that's part of it. Another way of looking at venture capitalists is they're hitchhikers and they're happy to fill up with petrol on their credit card until you want to go somewhere they don't want to go. Then they stab you and kick you out of the car. So I write about some of this in heavily meditated the parts I could write about. But the basic answer is investors always seek control. There was a time when I was, we're talking about, I was dysregulated, I was tired, just gotten off an airplane and I made a fast decision about a board seat and I didn't put a time limit on it, I put a position limit on it and I didn't I think I was, I was under the impression and has been the greatest gift from all this. I used to believe that if I was in a deal with someone, if we had aligned incentives, like, okay, I'm going to make a lot of money, you're going to make a lot of money. That means it. That means that we're lined up. They have no reason to do this. Well, the reality is people and I talk about the categories in heavily meditated, category three and four people, narcissists or sociopaths, for them to win, you have to lose. And they will take a deal that makes them only 1 million instead of $100 million, as long as it makes sure that the other side doesn't make anything. And it is, it's part of this whole ego thing we talk about. So you want to be able to find those types of people. And I'm not saying which of the people I was dealing with did that. There were actually three of them who had that mindset, and that was a big part of it. And I'm not saying I'm a victim here. Like, I chose to work with these people. I did not sue them when I could have earlier on. And, you know, I take, you know, in hindsight, I. I can, I could see what I could have done. And it's made me a great advisor to companies. So that's a part of it. And then there are other people where, when we talk about winning and losing, they. They're unaware of what they're doing. So in heavily meditated, I talk about, they're called the category three people. They will look you in the eye and they'll say, I am a good person, therefore, all the bad things I did, I didn't do them. It had to be you, right? So they're not trying to make you lose. They don't even know that they're making you lose. Right? So that's narcissism. And in business, every entrepreneur listening to the show has one or two employees who create all the drama, all the chaos. And as I say these words, you know who they are, they popped into your head. And if you fired that person right now, pick up your phone and fire them, your life will change. And all of the good people working for you, their lives will change for the better. But you're unlikely to fire that category three narcissist person because they have convinced you with unconscious things, subconscious things, that you will die or the company will die without them. And this is psychological manipulation, but it's not intentional. They. They just do it. And I've studied this very, very deeply, and it turns out it's a hallmark of you having one of these people in your company, or maybe in your family, maybe, maybe in your community. And if you feel like you can't do it without them, ask yourself, is that true? And if it is, you'd better hire a replacement to work alongside them, because your company's at risk if a bus hits them, which can happen to anyone, and your company will die the next day. Dude, you're at risk, okay? The reality is, if that person got hit by a bus, you. It would be uncomfortable and you'd hire another one, right? So why are you allowing the person who's always blaming other people, creating all the drama, all the chaos, to be there? Because your subconscious fear has been programmed that you need them. And I have witnessed this so many times before. I got the lesson, wow, Dave, you know what?

I could do this forever. I'm really enjoying this. I can't keep you here forever because you've got all these companies to run.

No feeling.

So we came to move into more of a quick fire round.

Anything you want to ask me, I'm here for you.

Okay? Excellent. How do you spot that narcissist or psychopath in your company quickly?

Oh, my God. Okay, you. You have to read heavily meditated for all of this, but the number one thing is, if you liked them really, really quickly, that's a big sign. Healthy relationships take time to build unhealthy relationships like, wow, this is the coolest person I've ever met. They're probably running an operation on you. And if you're an entrepreneur, you already know who they are. The first person who pops into mind that they're like, oh, that person always causes drama. That's them. Like they're covered in blinking lights. You just have to believe the blinking lights.

Okay, great. Is supplementation kind of bullshit? Is it a big pharma thing? We've got to take A to Z. Vitamins and minerals.

If you still believe that you're going to get all of your vitamins and minerals from nutrition, you should also believe that you only get your toxins from mother nature. Our bodies need support to be able to thrive in the artificial world that we've created. If you are not taking supplements, you're missing out on a major opportunity to improve your consciousness, your energy, your physical composition, your focus. Only little problem there. There are some BS supplements out there, but there are less BS supplements than there are BS pharmaceuticals.

As someone who made 6 million age 27 and hundreds of millions in your companies. How do you sell anything to anyone?

Number one, congruence. If I believe what I'm saying all the way through, they can feel it. And number two, I run everything I say to the best of my ability through something called withy. What's in it for you? Talk less about me, listen more, and talk more about them. And I'm always yelling at my team in a beneficial, nice CEO way of yelling. Guys, when you're writing a post, don't say, let me tell you about my. That's gross. That's all ego. You've got to check this out. This could change your life. It's the same thing. They already know I'm talking, so you say the word you way more than I. And I finally ask my team. Every copy that we create has a ratio of the word I and my to the total number of words. And my goal is to have the lowest ratio. And what that lands to for people is. Oh, that's authenticity. Authenticity comes through your words and it comes through whether your inner and outer state match. If you're authentic, you can sell anything if it's the right thing for them.

What are your three top kind of buyer hacking tips? First, for busy entrepreneurs.

Okay, you probably suck at sleep. I know that you measure roas. Cause I do too. Return on ad spend. You ever measure Ross return on sleep spend? Well, get a piece of technology that measures the effectiveness and efficiency of your sleep and start using it. If you do that, there's whoop, there's aura, there's ultra human, there's eight sleep. There's all kinds of cool technologies like this. Well, pick one. And this will change your life because now you have a performance metric for your sleep. And sleep is where entrepreneurs usually break themselves. Number two, this is a strange biohack, but I'm gonna call it a biohack. So number one, track your sleep so you can fix it. And the number one thing for that is blacked out room and darkness at night. Those are very, very important for you. Just your body needs darkness as a nutrient as much as you need sunshine as a nutrient. And you're lacking sunshine in the UK a lot of the year. So darkness is more important at night. The second one is don't have a to do list. Like, what do you mean? Is that a biohack? Yes, it's a cognitive biohack. If you're an entrepreneur or a CEO, a to do list will destroy your life because it creates constant pressure and you can never recover. Use A calendar, Put it on the calendar or you just put it on the I'm not doing it list and be incredibly religious about that. This prevents you from taking on more than you can fit in the allocated time for work. And the third thing I'm going to recommend specifically for entrepreneurs is also a biohack that's based on calendaring. And is that every morning before you start work, set aside at least 45 minutes, ideally an hour, for you to do something to improve yourself that morning. Do not do the same thing every morning. Ideally you can have some coffee, you can go outside and get some sunshine every morning. But basically following the same morning routine is addictive. Unfortunately, working out every morning will overtrain you. This morning you might need to meditate and do some breath work. Tomorrow you might need to lift something heavy. It's not about doing the same thing every day. It's about setting aside the time and making it sacred with your assistant and promising yourself that you are going to do something to improve yourself and it will change based on day to day. And then have the appropriate knowledge in the appropriate tools or the appropriate technologies present for you. So have an infrared sauna if that's one of the things that's appealing. Have a cold plunge if you want to do that right. Learn how to do the breath work or any of the other consciousness enhancing things. And my books contain all kinds of stuff like that. Heavily meditated. The new book has the breath work, the Altered States reprogramming stuff in it. So if that's your jam, then get that book and say, all right, this week, 45 minutes every morning, I'm going to pick something and I'm going to try it. And you wanted three of them.

Yeah.

The other, the other one. Put some butter in your black coffee and blend it up tomorrow morning with nothing else and have that for breakfast and see what your brain does. That hack has changed tens of millions of people's lives. It really does change cognitive focus. It does not work with cream and it doesn't work if you put sugar in there. Just black coffee with some butter. You must blend it. Old school, but it works.

What are your top three tips for maximizing energy?

Understand that all energy comes from your mitochondria. So if you want to maximize your energy, how you slept the night before is most important. The second thing is there is nothing like this molecule, that's caffeine that I have tattooed on my bicep. So have some coffee. And now I'm going to really trigger many listeners. Coffee's Better than tea. Can I just say it? All right. Tea doesn't have enough, enough of it. And tea has some other things in it that you don't want 10 cups of tea to get there unless you want kidney stones. So it's okay to have tea. Also have coffee in the morning. It. It works. And to maximize energy, I'm going to suggest learning breath work. Most people don't breathe through all of their lungs. And there's three big buckets of breath work in heavily meditated. And one of them is about calming the nervous system. One of them is about becoming focused, and the other one is about leaving your body and having a psychedelic experience just from breathing. And each of those buckets has multiple ways to do it in them. But just practicing this, even for five, ten minutes a day, different ones, you learn to put the breath in different parts of the body and that will profoundly change how your energy flows. So it's basically, you know, you learn how to eat and use some stimulants, learn how to breathe, because that's the other side of eating. And then learn how to sleep and you might like your life.

Are people like David Goggins, you know, these insane fitness people, Are they kind of good to copy for health and strength?

I love David Goggins because he demonstrates what is possible. Does he look happy?

He looks very angry and hurt to me. I mean, he wrote a book called Can't Hurt Me and the first thing I thought is, you're. I mean, I've met him, he's been on my show. I'm not judging him. But if you write a book called Can't Hurt Me, does that not mean you're hurt?

You know, I, I think there's a case for that. And you know, I, I'm trying to remember, like, pretty sure I've interviewed him out of the 1300 people. Sometimes, like, I know them, but I haven't interviewed them. So I have great respect for, for him and his ability to show the edges of human performance. I don't know anyone who does chronic marathons who's happy. Like, what are you running from? Right? So if you want the energy of David Goggins, you should copy his mechanisms over. Training like that generally makes you age more quickly and it doesn't make you happy. And I'm. It's worth gonna argue that I was a grind it out kind of guy. I would work until I fell asleep at my desk in my 20s. It just, you pay for it later. And doing that physiologically and emotionally to yourself, I'm a minimum effective dose guy. So what I would suggest is instead of just going out there and grinding, grinding, grinding. Look, the ability to push hard and to grind, that's what makes us win. The belief we always have to push hard and grind, that's what makes us suffer. Be the guy who finds a better system, a better process, and the guy who removes all the friction in your system so you're capable of pushing. But I want to push my sled when it has wheels and it's on ice. You just take one push and it goes for half a mile. I don't want to be the guy who's pushing uphill over gravel and grunting the whole time, because I'd rather have a sled that weighs a thousand times more and apply that grunting energy and it'll still slide because I greased the skids. That's what we need. We need effectiveness and efficiency and power. And what David Goggins is exhibiting, this whole grind, the hustle, that is your ability to make power. That's beautiful. And I know how to make power, too. I just want to apply my power where it's going to do the most. And that means you have to do deep inner work.

What are the biggest lies about calories and weight loss?

The biggest lie is that calories count. Now, there are people who are going to become extremely angry in this, and they're going to say, but Newton's law. And I got two things for you about calories. Number one, there is a drug. It's an extract of toxic mold that's xenoestrogen. They give it to cows, and the cows get fat on 30% less calories. The fact that that drug exists just punched every calories in, calories out, guy in the throat. Number two, if they're still standing there and they're not already very, very angry and starting to, like, froth the way they do eat a gram of uranium. It has a million calories. You should get fat. But strangely, they don't get fat. And they go, but, but, but you can't absorb uranium. I'm like, oh, now we're not talking about calories anymore, are we? So I believed calories in, calories out so profoundly, and that's what made me stay fat. Calories are energy. You want to be high energy, have enough calories. I see women especially, who don't eat enough calories. They're constantly tired and stressed because they need to eat more. And they can't lose weight because they need more. It's what you eat. And Your hormonal system and your environment that is going to control this. And my final point there, I know this is supposed to be fast, but I got to share this. I ate 4,500 calories a day, stopped exercising, and slept less than five hours a night. When I started my company Bulletproof, I was also a vice president at a publicly traded company. I had a high pressure executive job And I started $100 million startup at the same time. Without exercising on 4,500 calories a day. Did I get fat? I actually grew abs for the first time in my life on a calorie surplus. It's not good to eat more calories than you need. Calories don't make you fat.

How would you define biohacking in one sentence?

Biohacking is the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so you have full control of your own biology.

Is it possible to age backwards?

Yeah, I've already done it.

How?

Well, that book is called Superhuman. There are many things, but one of them is even just. There's studies showing meditation can lengthen your telomeres. But I've had gene therapy where a single injection reprograms some of my genes. It's a temporary reprogramming for about two years. That makes you on average nine years younger when you measure your age. So there are many, many ways to do it. But yeah, we can age backwards.

Wow.

I'm only 28% old.

I like that better than years.

Yeah, absolutely right.

If you had 30 seconds to teach someone to upgrade their life, what would you say?

All of the things that you're ashamed of come from the hardware in your body, not from you. And the angry, mean voice in your head also comes from the same place. You can train all of that to go away. Wow.

What would be your top three tips to make more money?

Run the reset process and practice forgiveness. Work with a therapist or maybe with plant medicine and find where you are unconsciously resisting wealth. There's huge amounts of money trauma that that hold people back. And the third thing, Have a mission. Have a why. Being pulled towards something that matters will create more wealth than you fighting your way to get there. Your why cannot be the money. The money is a side effect of the why.

Is alcohol really as poisonous as now?

We're being led to believe alcohol is profoundly poisonous. It is just not good for you. There are things you can do to mitigate it. And I publish big infographics. The hard stuff is better than drinking a pint, sadly. And at least Where I live in Austin now, most of the parties I go to, there's no alcohol. There might be other things like low dose mushrooms, which are actually better for you than alcohol. So if you're gonna drink, do it infrequently. And my rule is I only drink things that are older than I am. And that means it's rate limited because it's really expensive and rare.

Dave, this show is called Disruptors. Like you were on about 1300 episodes and interviews. I've thoroughly enjoyed this, so thank you very much. Really appreciate it. Very grateful. What would you say the word disruptive means to you?

Disruptive to me is a religion. It's been in my job description for every job. I've hired Clayton Christensen's organization, who's the guy who wrote the book on disruptive technologies. Disruption means that you find something stupid and you break it so that you can make something better.

That's right up there of one of the best quotes I would say we've had on Disruption. So, Dave, maybe share your favorite book and your favorite product and your favorite place for us to follow you. And if you could share that.

You're talking about favorite book by another author?

No, by you. By you. Your favorite book.

Yeah, the most important book that I have ever, ever written and the hardest is heavily meditated. This, this is after. This is my ninth book. And after running all this neuroscience, heavily meditated will unlock things. And. And I only write books that. That about things that aren't somewhere else. This is entirely new thinking and it's tested. So I. I wish every entrepreneur on earth had this. Um, that was the first question. And then the second one. There was three in there.

Yeah. Your kind of product or supplement or one of your health products.

My. My favorite product is Danger Coffee when I started the mold free thing at Bulletproof. But Bulletproof doesn't say mold free on the label anymore. And I know Danger Coffee is mold free, but it has a therapeutic dose of trace minerals in it. And those trace minerals would cost you 22 bucks all by themselves. And trace minerals increase your cell's ability to make electricity. So I drink that. I'm like, wow, it's more energy and it's really good coffee. So we'll be shipping it out there soon enough. And the third one was where to find me. If you go to daveasprey.com There's $750 worth of giveaways. If you end up ordering the audible version of the book or just the regular version of my book, and you can find all my social media. Dave Ashley, I'm 3,000 articles, all the different stuff I'm working on, it's all there.

Dave, once again, very grateful. Thank you very much for this, Rob.

You're a great interviewer. I can tell you've done it more than once and appreciate you.

Thank you very much. This episode was brought to you by Disruptive Media, helping bold entrepreneurs stand out through podcasting, video and social content. Visit Disruptive to learn more. This episode was brought to you by Disruptive Media, helping bold entrepreneurs stand out through podcasting, video and social content. Visit disruptivemedia.co uk to learn more.