EP128: Work Smarter Not Harder with Dave Asprey

Hey Sachin and welcome to the Perfect Practice Podcast. It's my mission to use this podcast as a platform to help holistic heart centered practitioners transform the world. I think we can all agree that the world needs more of what we have to offer now than ever before. And I want to take all the information and all the knowledge and experience that I've gained over the years and leverage the community and the contacts and the mentors that I've had over the years and share some of the most valuable nuggets that I've picked up over those years. I also want to bring special guests on so that they can share their valuable wisdom and knowledge with you as well. Each episode is going to be packed with valuable nuggets of information to help you grow both personally and professionally, all while moving you towards more impact and more freedom. I'm excited that you're here. I'm excited that you want to grow and learn. So let's jump right in. Well, welcome everyone and our next speaker, as you probably very well know him, is Dave Asprey. Dave is coming to the stage and you know, he's really going to shine some light on various aspects of being an entrepreneur. Not only is he one himself, he's been in the game for many, many years. He's also a published author, has written many best selling books, including his newest one, Smarter Not Harder, which I've had the honor and privilege to read and I hope that you do as well. If you don't have your copy, go grab it. It's a total game changer and we're going to dive into that a little bit and we're also going to dive into Dave and where he's been and what he's done and how it can help you as a functional medicine practitioner, a holistic health coach, or somebody who's really looking to make the world a better place by helping people achieve better health. Dave, thanks for joining me today.

You are welcome. Sat.

Well, you're tuning in from Costa Rica, which is one of my favorite places on Earth. So thank you kindly for taking time out of your busy schedule and joining us. I know you're really passionate about helping people feel and do their absolute best and I've been following your work for many, many years and greatly appreciate all you've done to help us and support us. What I'd love to know is if you have a updated and working definition that you're working with now for what is a biohacker, because you're known as the father of biohacking And I'm curious if you've got your own updated version of it for 2023.

Well, when I first came up with the definition, biohacking was the, the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so you have full control of your own biology. It's still there. But the definition of what are the domains of the environment around you that you can change, it's constantly expanding. Because some of the lowest hanging biohacks that have the broadest impact on you, they're at the cellular level, they're deep down in your operating system, in your body. These are areas that are invisible to you by design. You're not supposed to know about that because it's automatic and it just works. Except it doesn't just work because we broke the environment around us. That includes things like it always has included. But I haven't gone as deep. At the biohacking conference that I put on every year in some of these domains, I've always talked about mindfulness and consciousness. And I know that you, you and I had private conversations about that stuff too, which is amazing. So when your cells start to work better, when your hardware starts to work better, your capacity for consciousness improves. You just have more bandwidth to access hidden parts of reality that are actually there. And there are things that we've written about for thousands of years, things that include tantric sex, things that include non ordinary states of consciousness. There's ways to get there with neurofeedback, which has been my primary path. Breath work, which you and I both talked about on interviews before, and other ways of accessing this, whether it doesn't have to be my medicines at all, it may be, but just having science based, but also consciousness based conversations about what are the techniques that allow us to access these altered states of high performance and high performance at what? Well, at healing, at relationships, at feeling a sense of inner peace or feeling compassion. These are things you can measure with EEG machines. I say the definition of biohacking hasn't changed, but the set of tools is ever expanding.

Yeah, you know, in smarter, not harder, you talk about so many different things. And one of the things that I'm impressed with is how you write. So you've taken something that can be very complicated, very convoluted, and you've really broken it down into simple things that we can do, intermediate things that we can do, and advanced things that we can do, which I love, because this information then becomes accessible to every single person. As a fellow author, not quite as prolific as you what I'd love to know is what does that writing process look like? Do you enjoy writing? Is that something that you had to hack yourself or is that something that just comes naturally to you?

I would say it didn't come naturally, but I am a computer hacker by training. I know how to write code, I know how to logically group things. But something I don't talk about that much is that when I was working in tech, not only was I at the company that held Google's first servers, when Google was two guys and two computers, and I ended up co founding the professional services group there. So we built Salesforce's architecture when there were eight employees at Salesforce. That early stage stuff, it required both structured thinking, but it required the ability to teach new knowledge. So for five years I ran a program at the University of California where every day I'd work in a tech startup land and then I would teach for about two and a half hours. I teach working engineers in Silicon Valley. How do we build the Internet? How do we build what we now call cloud computing? So I would have a one hour time between my last meeting and I would have dinner and I would study the latest trade journals and create a class to teach for two and a half hours to people who knew what they were doing. It was so stressful when I started doing this, but I learned how to rapidly assimilate information, translate it and make it teachable. And what that did is that made me one of the most powerful guys at this company where I worked because I had this amazing picture of the landscape, what was going on. So that rapid acquisition and structuring it led me to understand if you can teach something, you really know it. And that is still the best way to learn something. But if you're not going to teach it, you write a book as if you were teaching it. So when I write a book, I have an idea, I have a hypothesis, I have something that's new that I want to transmit and translate so people can absorb it. And so the way I go about writing is, all right, how would I teach this? And then it forces me to structure my thoughts. And so I love that part of writing which is the building the skeleton, understanding what's the path to bring a reader through. What I don't really love is putting the muscles on the bones. I'm good at the skeleton and I'm good at the, we'll call the skin the outer layer, so it can be perceived and it'll enter your brain the right way. So I'm grateful that I've learned how to have a structured process where I work with a writing partner who can help me on the deep parts of. Okay, here's what we want to communicate in this chapter. Here's all the science. Point. Can you help me get into a rough shape and then let me finish it? So that's helps, but that's the part I don't like because that can just be a huge amount of time, and it's not the highest value time. So what I most appreciate is structuring and then like the aha. And how do I draw a graph? How do I tell the story that gives me energy and I stay up late and I go into this altered state. There's an old talk I gave, I think, after the Bulletproof Diet came out, and it's very hard to break onto the New York Times list. It's a very, very high bar. And I managed to do it with my first big book. And so I gave a talk about all the tech I used to alter my states of consciousness so I could write.

I could just see you plugged in, dialed in, doing your thing.

And there was electrodes on my brain. There was specific chemicals involved, you know, like coffee, you know, stuff like that. And just different rituals and understanding my own. Like, how do I get into writing mode? It used to be about 45 to 90 minutes of just like, you know, screwing around before I could finally shift into this weird, focused kind of writing flow state. And I've managed to be able to do that much more quickly just through the course of practice.

I love that. So for all of you that are tuned in, one of the things that you want to pay attention to, what they've said is that teaching others is the best way to master a subject. So what I love about learning and acquiring new knowledge is sharing it. So a lot of times what I do on social media is I'll just do a brain dump. I'll learn something new and I'll share it with somebody, and I'll try to share it in a way that's simple and easy for them to understand and at least grabs their attention, gets the light bulbs turning on in their head about a particular topic. And certainly we all have permission to do that. So pick up something. Pick up some new knowledge. I mean, this book is loaded with quotables like you could flip to any page. And it's written in such a way that it's easy for the consumer to understand. Of course you want to give Dave credit. However, there's literally an entire year's worth of content in there. If you want to teach that to your audiences, there's tons of great information in there.

There's something else I wanted, not to interrupt you, something else I wanted to call out for people who are seeing this. There are many books out there that say the same thing. So someone will find something and say, this is really good. I want to write it in my words. For instance, books on fasting, There are more than a few of those. And my goal as an author, and I would encourage you, if you're listening to this, your goal is to say something that hasn't been said. And then to do that, you want a launching point. And I write my books to be launching points. And my goal is I'm not writing a book unless I'm saying something you haven't ever seen somewhere else. And if you're going to teach something, take something from the book. Thank you. If you want to give credit or don't, that's okay too. But then add a new nuance, like evolve the work. Don't just borrow the work.

Right.

And that's, that's an area where great concern right now because with all the AI stuff that's available right now, anyone out there can take my book and probably copy and paste it somehow into a chat GPT and say, look, I just wrote a new version of it. Except there's Nothing new in ChatGPT. So your job is to just to add the new, like add just a couple sprinkles of your own on it. And that's how human consciousness and knowledge evolves.

I love that. Thanks for adding that. And if I may add to that even further for somebody, nuance it to your audience. So you might take something like, something that you talk about, like breathwork, for example, and how does that information apply to your avatar? So how does it make it relevant to perimenopausal women or somebody with thyroid health? So connect their, you know, health issue that they've identified with and the tool that you're providing them with. And that could be a way to nuance the information. So speak to your audience as well.

There's four letters that are there. I encourage my team when I'm working on social media stuff and especially in the books and in my podcast. And the four letters are wify and it's what's in it for you. And if you're creating content for yourself, that's not how to make content that sticks. You have to put yourself in your audience's mindset and if you're dealing with an autoimmune group, people, they have had a certain life experience. They've probably been gaslit by doctors. Not by evil doctors, just by doctors who didn't know any better. Or maybe you're dealing with professional athletes. Your spin on the same content is gonna be very different. But what is the goal of my audience and how do I make, I believe is important to share, how to make it relevant and useful for them. Right. So that's. That's the thing. Wifi. Remember that? And by the way, I want to give credit for wifi, and I don't know if that's a Joe Polish or Dan Sullivan thing they both got on my show, but I got that actually from writing copy. So it's probably more of a Joe Polish thing. WiFi's important.

Yeah. Joe's going to be speaking as well, talking about his book, what's in it for them? So very much in alignment with that messaging is we always want to really figure out, okay, what is in it for the person who's reading that. That's what's going to make it, you know, really land. And a lot of times, like, one of the things that we. We try to encourage people to do is be their own avatar. So, you know, work with people who you can truly understand the path that they've gone down because you perhaps have gone down that path. And the content you're sharing a lot of times is the stuff you wish you had known that would have probably accelerated your journey moving forward. With that being said, one of the things you talk about is using laziness as a superpower and as an advantage. I'd love for you to unpack that for those of us that haven't read the book yet.

Okay. By now, we've all heard of cloud computing at this point, but someone had to make it. Back in my early 20s, I had a job at a hospital, and I was running a portion of the IT for the hospital, and it was taking me a lot of time to manage these eight servers that did most of the work. And I realized if I can automate my job, I don't have to necessarily tell my management that I did that. And then that frees up a bunch of time so I can do what I want, which at the time was learn more about tech, right? Like make something new. And that was the thinking that led to the very early days of cloud computing. And I can say with a great degree of confidence that the first shipping modern cloud computing was a product that was my Product I shipped one day before Marc Andreessen shipped the company that I guess his last big tech company before he became a vc, it was called Loud Cloud. But we shipped, hey, instead of buying all this computers and all this crap, why don't you just pay us and we'll turn on as many computers as you need and we'll turn them off when you don't need them. And it was groundbreaking. We didn't have the name cloud computing. That came because I'm lazy, because I didn't want to manage computers, so I automated it. And I'm not trying to say I invented cloud computing. There was probably 1,000 people in Silicon Valley all working on this at the same time because we were all lazy. The fact that I was at a company that had a $36 billion market cap and I ran tech strategy for it, that's why I could get this product out. It was driven by laziness. This is very offensive. In fact, it probably hurts sales of, of this book because laziness is so repellent. Like, what else can we talk about? Like death, you know, so we all have a deep shame over being lazy because we've been shamed for it by teachers and coaches. But it turns out laziness is built in biologically in your body. Your body is terrified that you might run out of energy and die. Which means that the couch and laying down and being lazy, it's always going to look more attractive than it is, that it's going to feel better. And also so is eating everything. Because if you eat everything and don't do anything, you know, you won't die of starvation or lack of energy. Now none of this is in our conscious brain. It's in our operating system, which is invisible to our brain. So as an entrepreneur or a business owner, you could say, well, I'm not going to allow myself to be lazy because only bad people are lazy. And then no one would love me. And if no one loves me, I don't have any friends. And then I'll die. Like that's what the way your body feels, even though you're saying, well, what's going on? So find a way to do something with less work. That's why we have cars. Cause someone didn't like shoveling horse poop. And that guy was better off than the guy who just walked everywhere, right? So evolution of society comes and freeing up energy, having low cost energy available for all of us. It's fundamental to human freedom and human consciousness. Because if you spend all your time not Being lazy, you're just another brick in the wall.

Great advice. So, like, a less triggering word might be efficiency, right? How to. How to be more efficient.

The problem is efficiency is boring. Do you ever wake up in the morning, God, today I want to be efficient. Today I want to be optimized. No, like efficiency and optimization. They imply you're willing to give up something to get something else. I am not. I want to have my cake and eat it too. And that's normal and healthy, and there's nothing wrong with that. Let me just find a way to do it, and that will motivate you way more than today. I'm going to be efficient. Efficiency is boring. It's not at all motivating. And even worse, you know what efficiency usually gets you? It gets you that hotel room where the lights feel crappy, the water doesn't flow very well, and it feels cold and impersonal and cheap and plastic. But it was efficient. No, I want epic.

Mm.

It's different than efficiency. And so I would encourage your listeners go, you know what? My body is lazy. It will change my view of reality to make pizza and Ben and Jerry's and Netflix and the sofa look really sexy and the gym look really, really, like, unattractive. And it turns out gyms aren't very efficient compared to what you'll read about in this book. But the notion that you can have the ability to motivate yourself with laziness if you go, okay, my brain's not lazy, but my body is. And so the way you can overcome something is with willpower and say, I don't care if my body doesn't do it, I'm just going to go do it. And this certainly has been my approach, and I will overcome myself. You can do that, but it costs you energy. The easier way to do this is to tell your body, all right, instead of going to the gym for an hour, I'm going to do an eight minute thing that's from smarter, not harder, and it's going to save me 52 minutes. The savings of time is way more motivating to your hardware than the effort. So your brain can be like, yeah, I'm going to go work out. What we've done, though, is because we suppress this desire to do things more efficiently because we might be lazy. It means we go to the gym and we say, if more is better, that's one of the shortcuts we make. So I'm just going to go pound it out and sweat all over the place. And in fact, I'm such a good person today I'm going to do 10 minutes. But you're actually getting less results in terms of what you wanted to do. So biohacking in general is a very goal driven. Okay, what's my goal? Satin, your goal in mind might be very different. Someone listening to this right now, their goal is, I really want to have kids. So they're focusing on fertility and someone else saying, I want to be a balloon animal. Like, I want to be the most ripped person on earth or whatever. And someone else is like, I want to live forever someone else. I want to be the smartest and someone else just want to be able to handle my stress because I'm so anxious all the time. And that's my goal. All of those, you could say, are health, but they're almost unrelated. So smarter, not harder, is about. Well, let me help you pick the goal based on thousands of people who've come through the first biohacking facility on earth. It's underneath Arnold Schwarzenegger's office is called Upgrade Labs in Santa Monica. We're franchising that across the country. There's dozens of them opening right now. And people can go to ownandupgradelabs.com and I'll set you up to be an entrepreneur. You have a franchise in your town where you're opening biohacking centers that both are profitable on the entrepreneurial side, but make a huge difference for the people who go there. I didn't feel comfortable in creating this as a franchise until I knew how to make money doing it. It turns out it's one of the hardest businesses that I've done, probably second only to 40 years of Zen, which is my Brain Upgrade for entrepreneurs program. The reason that I could write this book, though, is because after thousands of people have come through, I have enough data to say, you know what? These are the five big domains people are asking for when they say, I want to be healthy. And I don't even like the word healthy. What does that even mean? Most people listening to you, like, tell me the metrics for your health, you don't have hard goals for it. You don't have real goals that are measurable and attainable and actionable and all the stuff we learn in business school, if you don't do that for your health, it's not going to work. So health itself is not a goal. It's just the domain. It's like saying, I want to have finance. What results did you want? Finance that might be more important, if that makes sense.

I love that. Thank you for the clarification. If you were to work with somebody privately, because you've worked with many, many entrepreneurs, where would you say people waste a lot of their time? Where are some of the, for lack of a better term, where can we trim the fat, so to speak?

So I'm on about 25 or 30 advisory boards and I have a portfolio of companies I've invested in in the biohacking space. I'm not an active investor right now until I get some liquidity for Bulletproof, but I do a lot of advisory work for equity. So I do have this conversation a lot. And many entrepreneurs, especially if it's your first time out doing this, you're trying to prove something to someone else other than you, and you're sort of looking to prove you're good enough and you're running away from failure. And so there's a great amount of, surprisingly, if you dig deep, there's a great amount of shame based behavior. One of the guys who went through 40 years of Zen, who runs a 1200 person call center, and I can say this because he posted on Facebook, it's Craig Handley, who you may or may not know, he's like, I just finished 40 years of Zen. I realized that all of my entrepreneurial success is because I was bullied in seventh grade. And if, by the way, if you talk to entrepreneurs, many, many of us, including me, had a lot of bullying happening. And what if instead of running away from that, which was the first half of my career, by the way, I was very successful? I made $6 million when I was 26, lost it when I was 28, but you can do it that way, it just creates pain and anxiety and suffering and it's wasted effort. And if instead you're saying, what am I moving towards that's worthy, that is so much more motivating. And it makes what would have been a really bad day, maybe if not a good day, but at least a bearable day, that didn't leave you just depleted at the end of it. And in my mind, that's working smarter, not harder, because you can work so hard that you grind yourself, you bring yourself down, you're like, great, I'm finally a success. And then you retire, you quit working, and then you don't have any friends anymore, and then you're done in two years. This happens all the time. This is why working hard is not a good idea. Being able to work hard and doing it on occasion, when you have epic tool sets, that's what Creates success. There's no correlation between hard work and success.

Yeah, I know there's. That can be very true. Even that statement can be very triggering for people.

You mean I've worked hard all this time and I'm not a good person yet You're a good person whether or not you work hard, that's what. Or maybe you're not a good person. You should do something about that. Either way, like that's what it's about. The people who program society to tell us we have to work hard. It was like Rockefeller trying to create assembly line workers. Even our schooling system with the bells and the regimentation that was to make people better workers. You're not here to be a better worker. And I will tell you straight up, if I could automate all of my work in the world as an entrepreneur so I could do it in one minute a year, I would absolutely do that. And if I could do all of the exercise that I needed for the rest of my life in one minute, I would do that and so would you. If you're listening to this going, God, I never thought of that. Well, there's a reason you think about that. You are programmed to work really hard instead of to think about how to get it done. And what I'm encouraging you to do when you read Smarter Harder is figure out what the it is. Like, what do you want to do? What matters to you, right? What's the problem you're going to solve? And this isn't like the, the, you know, I'm going to feed a billion people or the moonshot idea from my close friend to be in Jane from Viome. I support those. I have my own moonshots. Right, but what do you want to do? It's not even that. It's like, how do you want to be? And to do that it requires freedom of energy and freedom of time. And if you're working hard, you have neither one. This is a book that says, let's give you five to ten hours a week of time back and let's double your energy and then see what's possible.

Yeah. So huge. Because especially in the beginning of any entrepreneurial journey, the lift can seem so heavy. And it certainly takes effort to get things off the ground. But if we're kind of self sabotaging unintentionally and unconsciously by not applying what you've shared with us in this book, it could create even further inefficiencies. It can create us not getting our message out there could unfortunately create some situations. People Just throw in the towel. They just give up because they feel like it's too hard, but they're not really focusing on the smarter part and maximizing their opportunity. Dave, what would you, you know, I know you've interviewed thousands of people. I'm curious as to who your mentors were. Who, who kind of set you up? Like, who did you reach out to when you needed help and guidance and maybe you could share who those were if you feel comfortable. But also the value of mentorship and getting that guid people I loved. I'd love to know how that's impacted you.

If I had one piece of advice for people, especially under about 35, but at all, at all times, spend time with old people. The other word for old people is your elders. And the idea of the elders of a lineage or a discipline or the elders, the village elders. These are people who've already had to solve all the problems you're trying to solve. And because working hard is such a big thing, you're going to do it all by yourself. Or you could get help. The reason I could create the biohacking movement is that when I was in my early 20s and I had all these health challenges, health challenges, my health struggles, and everyone has these stories, but I'll just say I was diagnosed like, Dave, you have a very high risk of stroke and heart attack, and you're 27 years old, your testosterone is lower than your mother, and you weigh 300 pounds. I also knew that if I was fat, it was because I was probably lazy. And that's not true, but that's what I knew because that's what I'd heard. And I knew that if I just went to the gym and I ate less, I would lose weight because, well, you know, Newton's law, all of that is garbage. It's not at all reality based, but it was what I believed. So then I changed my behaviors to match a false reality, expecting results. So I worked out for 702 hours. I did 90 minutes a day, six days a week, half weights, half cardio, and I did this religiously. If I only got two hours of sleep, I still went to the gym, it didn't matter. And I got to the point where I could max out all but two machines at the gym. There was a couple of shoulder presses that I just never could quite get to all of the plates. And I still had a 46 inch waist. I was still fat. I still weighed 300 pounds, 297 pounds actually, if you want to be fully accurate. But Close enough. What I determined at the end of all that when I saw my thin friends eating double western bacon cheeseburgers and I'm having the chicken salad with no chicken because calories and no dressing and it's obvious I'm eating too much lettuce. I'm not trying hard enough. I really believe that. And at a certain point I got, okay, wait a minute, what I'm doing just isn't working. I actually did everything I was supposed to do. But before then, the feeling I'd had was that I was failing because I wasn't trying hard enough. So that's a treadmill. That can happen as an entrepreneur in your business, can happen in your relationships. Maybe it's that you're trying really hard, you're just doing the wrong stuff. So smarter, not harder, is kind of my revenge for that lost 702 hours. And if you think about how much time that is over the course of 18 months, a full time job is 2000 hours. So I basically had, whatever, a little bit more than a third of a full time job just in the gym. Like, what the heck? I wasn't getting results for that. It was an investment of my energy and my effort that didn't pay off. And that's why I thought this was a book worth writing, because there's that laziness principle and there's new knowledge we have about how to get into the body. But if I'd have just asked someone older, I would have learned instead of having to do it myself. So from a business perspective, I have answers for you. But from a biohacking perspective, I hung out with people in their 80s working on anti aging when I was in my mid-20s because they knew the secrets that no doctor could tell me. And I was mentored by the generation of orthomolecular physicians, which is what we now call functional medicine. And I interviewed someone on panels once every. It was once a month in Palo Alto, right near Stanford University. We would have like the greats come in kind of people I would put on my podcast, the kind of people that you would talk about with the latest cutting edge theories that didn't match what everyone said would work, because what everyone said would work, didn't work. And I went through a period of being like, angry about this and a period of like, I have to tell everyone. You know, kind of like, like, you see when someone goes vegan or someone goes keto, it's almost identical. Behavior wise, you just have to tell everyone what to do. And over time, I'm Like, I'm just going to do what works. And when people are saying, dave, how can you have 8% body fat? And how can you be 39 years old biologically? You know, the calendar says you're 50. Well, okay, since you asked, I'm happy to share. But it's not that I'm forcing it on people. I'm making it available to people. And that all of that came about because I got to work with something called the Silicon Valley Health Institute. I became chairman and president before I was 30, and I was the only guy under 50 in the room. I was so excited. These guys were just telling me the secrets of life. Same thing goes for business. I remember when I was at this tech company, I was a nerd, like a deep engineer, network engineering, computer security, that kind of stuff. But I was so interested in how is this big multibillion dollar business? How are we making decisions? So one day I walked into our VP of Strategies office and I said.

Hey, I know I'm out in the.

Field making stuff, but I want to do what you do. How do I do it? And he goes, I love to have you work for me. And all of a sudden, this guy's name is Peter Fortenbaugh. Today he's the executive director of the Boys and Girls Club in Palo Alto. He sat me down and taught me how to do strategy, how to think strategically, how to navigate the halls of power. I still remember sitting in my first executive team meeting. This is a dozen executives. One of them was the former CTO of Apple and people with great first VP of sales for Oracle. They're in the room. They're part of the team that built this company, that built the web hosting data center business, that we're still using that stuff today. Like, they're all crazy. I didn't understand any of what they were doing because they weren't nerds, they weren't writing code. But I read 48 laws of power by Robert Greene. It's like, oh, my God. They're following a different set of rules. They have a different reality than I have. Then all of a sudden, I could understand it, and I'm so honored. I've been able to interview Robert Greene twice, and I would, in fact, highly recommend his book. Sure. Read smarter, not harder. And if you want craziness, read a Zopus, which is the laws of human. I think it's the laws of human nature or human consciousness. And what you find is we have a layer of conscious stuff. We do, and a layer of unconscious stuff. Go to the elders, ask them how they dealt with their marriages. Ask them what they learned. And they all know. And not only do they know, they want to tell you. So another guy, Ken Crittenden. One time, I was really struggling with an executive situation when I was running Bulletproof, and I was starting to think that I was crazy. And it turns out I had a narcissist in the company. Narcissists have a very specific way of breaking companies. And he looked at me. This is a guy who's built a $500 million real estate business and is very successful. And he picked up his cell phone and he goes, dave, are we going to fire her using my phone or your phone? And I'm like, why? It blew my mind. And I looked at him, I said, how did you learn how to do this kind of stuff? And he goes, I said, who mentored you? And he said, jack Welch. So I can call Ken, and he's available and he wants to help. And Joe Polish, you just mentioned, Joe's helped me enormously. And when people are successful, all they want to do is share their success with you. They're not transactional. I grew up believing that if I help someone or if I received help from someone, it would put me in debt. And then I had to do it all on my own, like the rugged individuals. That's bullshit. Entrepreneurs want to help each other. So I can mention Peter. He taught me how to operate in a corporate environment. And I can mention a couple ones. There was a woman named Carla who was the assistant to the CEO of a company called 3Com, one of the biggest networking companies at the time in my career. And she met me in a corporate HR thing. It was like, we need to have lunch once a week or coffee once a week. And she mentored me, especially if you're a younger entrepreneur through the people who've been there before. They just don't want you to make all the stupid mistakes they did. And what's frustrating is if I mentor someone, I'm going to share some advice with them. If they take the advice and they work on it, it's very satisfying. If they just hear it and then just go off and run their company off a cliff despite being warned, that's frustrating. So one of the things you can do, if you find someone who's willing to share some advice with you, let them know that it helped. Let them know that you did it, and then they're more inclined to help you even further. And if it's a coaching situation or a mentorship or Board of directors thing, which is what I do now, or advisory board. It's important that you have some skin in the game. It's one of the reasons I'm like, yeah, actually, I do want equity in your company if I'm going to help you on a consistent basis, because I want to have skin in the game. And because you have paid something, even if it's not cash, you've paid something, which means now you will unconsciously value the advice and you're more likely to use it. Because free advice, even if it's the best advice in the world, most people don't have the maturity and the wisdom to make use of it. But if all you had to do is buy someone lunch for the advice, then you'll use the advice. It's a hidden thing inside our operating system.

Yeah. If you pay, you pay attention. It's kind of funny how it works. Even at times when I want to give. I mean, I know you do too, and I like to give lots of information away for free. And we feel like we're doing our community and our clients and our readers a huge service. But how many people actually action it? And if they were to pay even just a little bit, or have to buy lunch or dinner or coffee or something to that effect, or there was some exchange of energy, then I feel like that makes a huge difference for people. It's almost like a disservice not to. Not to have that energy exchange because they're. You just don't know how much they value it. Right. Or. And having that feedback loop is important. I think the, the thing that excites me the most, and it sounds like you're saying this as well, is when I get feedback from somebody that says, hey, I really appreciate what you shared with me. I applied it and it helped. Like, to me, that just lights me up. It just, you know, puts me over the moon when I get feedback like that. Whether even if that person paid me or not is irrelevant to me because my heart gets a little deposit of. Of me making an impact on somebody's life. I'm sure you get tons of people reaching out to you, telling you how much you've benefited their health and their wellness and even their businesses as well.

I do, and it always feels good. I don't do it to feel good. And I appreciate it. Be if you share advice or knowledge or wisdom with people and they don't take action on it. It's actually your fault, not their fault, if they didn't take action on it. It's because you didn't have the wifi right for them or you didn't have discernment with who you shared it with. So there's been times when I've shared advice with a narcissist or even a sociopath here and there where they're not looking for that exchange. They're not looking for the greater good. They're looking for, what can I steal? And there are people in the entrepreneurial field, I'll call them wantrepreneurs. They've never come up with an original idea, but they'll see something new and amazing, and then they'll make it as cheap and crappy, and they'll say that whatever it is is the same, and they'll sell something that doesn't even work, claiming that it's the new thing in the world. There was an example when I was starting Bulletproof. I was very specific about the effects of C8MCT oil because it works better. Five years after I told everyone that, a study actually came out at University of California, San Diego that showed, oh, that does raise ketones more than the other MCTs. But during that time, another company decided that they were going to jump on the bandwagon. They did an orchestrated character attack on me, and then they started selling an MCT oil that was primarily C12. This is a type of MCT oil that doesn't have any magic powers. So if you didn't know any of this because you're a normal person and you're not into biohacking and health and all that, you say, well, I heard somewhere that I should put MCT oil in my coffee. And you heard that coffee. So I bought some from this knockoff brand, and it didn't work. Therefore, MCT in coffee doesn't work, despite the fact that millions of people have gotten results from doing it the right way. Now, I'm not saying you had to buy my brand of C8MCT, the bulletproof grain octane. I'm just saying that if you did it with something labeled MCT, that wasn't the good stuff, but was much cheaper because of a knockoff company, well, that's actually a major cause of stress for entrepreneurs. It's also a cause of why there's a lot of crappy stuff in the world. The race to cheat instead of the race to results.

There's so many products out there. There's so many new things coming to the market, and it can be hard for the average consumer to really know what's good and what isn't. So it's important, you know, for us to find a trusted resource, somebody who has integrity, somebody who's not willing to compromise, somebody who's always, you know, creating and developing and recommending products that they themselves use. And that's what I always loved about you and admired about you, is that, you know, you walk the walk, you talk the talk like you're living proof, as we would say. And I've seen you in various different settings at different masterminds we belong to. You know, you're. You're very, very disciplined in the things that you say and recommend. Like, I can personally vouch that when we were at Genius Network, you brought your own lunch, right? There was a beautiful lunch being served, and you brought your own lunch because you wanted to stay in your. A highest level of integrity, but also feel your absolute best because we're paying $10,000 to be at that event, right? You don't want to have brain fog or have the food kind of drag you down, lower your energy. You want to maximize the opportunity while you're there. So I can. I can genuinely say that you are in the highest integrity of your message, which I deeply, deeply value and appreciate. And that's, like, I think you and I both know we can't say that about everybody. And, you know, it's not about calling out names, but it's. It's rare to find someone like that. So I want everyone to really know that Dave is the real deal.

And.

And his recommendations are things that he's actually doing himself or has done himself that have benefited him. So that, to me, is a very powerful thing that I look for in somebody. I always, always. One of my mentors told me, never, never take advice from someone who you wouldn't trade places with. And, you know, it's not about trading places, but it's really about, like, I admire you for that, right? The integrity that you have, and it's, you know, if a little bit of it rubs off on me, so be it. But it's wonderful to see that that actually exists. It's not just a character, right? Like, you know, there's people that play characters online, and you're certainly not that.

Likewise, Satchin, I picked that up on you. You're one of the genuine helpers. And if you spend time in an entrepreneurial community and especially in the world of health and all, you realize there are some people who are playing it straight. They're playing for the greater good, for humanity, and they're willing to help. And just off the top of my Head like Daniel. Amen. David Perlmutter. I mean, these are just helpful souls, right? And they're always willing to help. And one of the things that happens when you're always helping is there will be the people who will take advantage of it. And then the trick as an entrepreneur who's doing that is to not get bitter and angry over that. Because sometimes it can be really hurtful stuff. Someone who's a business partner suddenly just decides they're going to steal. I've had that happen. I've had people embezzle billions of dollars from me. But I trusted you and I treated you right. And I'll probably write a book about this. But the way it works is good people like you and me, we're going to play a game where the rules are I do something that makes you win, you do something that makes me win, right? So what if someone in front of you is pretending to play by those rules, but instead they're playing by rules where you lose so they can win? What they're gonna do is they're gonna do something that screws you over, that benefits them, and then you're gonna call them out on it and say, hey, that wasn't cool. And they're gonna lie to you. And they might not even know they're lying if they're a narcissist. These are people who are just caught in trauma. But then because you play by win win, you'll do something else to make them win, to demonstrate that that's the game you're playing. And a skilled narcissist, or worse off sociopath, they will continuously try to get you to do things to show that you're playing win win that benefits them. And they're stacking up benefits and you're starting to feel like you're crazy. And this has taken down huge numbers of good hearted entrepreneurs. And it takes you down either because it breaks your business, it breaks the culture in your business, or it actually, like, it harms your spirit.

Right?

And what that really is is a problem of discernment where like, yes, I help broad numbers of people, but now that I'm maybe more experienced as an entrepreneur, there are certain people where it's like, oh, if that person's in the room, I know their pattern and I know it because I've talked to them about it. They said they'd fix it and they did the opposite of what they said they were going to do. Like, I'm not going to that event. It's just, it's not worth my Time I'm not sharing what I know with people who are actively targeting. And the more successful you are financially, the more powerful you are or the more famous you are, the more those people are attracted to you like moths to a flame. So as you become more successful as an entrepreneur, you become more discerning at which people you will hire, which people you will partner with. And you might say, this is a great deal, except I don't trust them. So then you just don't do it. And it turns out that signal is not a cognitive signal, it's a visceral signal. So your body knows. You just have to learn how to trust the body versus trust. These fake signals coming from your operating system telling you to eat ice cream and pizza and sit on the couch, right? So this is where the spiritual and like the last couple chapters of Smarter, Not Harder, that's where they come into play. Because if you have all the energy in the world and you just throw it at people who are not worthy of it, it doesn't work. So that's probably the most knowledge I have to share there is. The more successful of an entrepreneur you are, the harder it is to filter the people that you want to let into your executive team or to your inner circle and all that, because you will attract a higher percentage of people who are very good at hiding their bad intentions.

I love that. I still remember reading that chapter on spirituality waiting in line at customs in Costa Rica. And I'm reading it and my wife's standing next to me. I'm like, I think this is my favorite chapter in the book. So thank you for adding that context. One of the things that I really love about you, and this kind of leads into my next question, is you always seem to maintain a state of equanimity. And I know that takes a lot of work to do that. Right? So I want to discount the effort that you've put in. I know you've done the 40 years of Zen. I'm sure there's a lot of meditation and, and breath work and things like that that you've done and experiences that you've had and mentors that you've had to help you get to that state. But I feel like that's such an important thing for us to talk about. Especially many of the people that are watching this are online entrepreneurs. And their message is going to go against the grain. It's going to be a little bit disruptive. And what I hear over and over again is people are afraid of what others are going to think. And I know that you've encountered these people that you're describing. You know, I follow you on social media, I see what comes up and I notice how you don't let that impact you. So I'd love if you could share some, some tools that we could probably adopt or things that we can do so that we're not so afraid to put our message out there and that message doesn't die inside of us.

I had the, the biggest masterclass ever on dealing with, with trolls and, and personal attacks and all that. A while ago I was on the Joe Rogan Show. I've been on three times and the first time he's like, oh my God, this coffee stuff changed my life. Joe's pretty ADD and Bulletproof Coffee works pretty well on making your brain more focused. There's hundreds of times, like, there's so much good stuff written here, it's blowing my mind. I love all this stuff. Meanwhile, a company where he's an owner was deciding they were going to undermine this and another friend of his, where he had a relationship was trying to steal the name Bulletproof. Right? So this was like financially motivated, dirty politics. So then it went from, you know, you changed my life to Dave's a con artist and a liar. There was no evidence of this, but it was just, it was about an 18 month long attack. The way Joe Rogan works is there's a group, they call themselves the Death squad. There's about 25,000 people who are bullied in high school, most likely, and now they're adult bullies and they can do it behind the safety of their keyboards. So overnight my social media went from, Dave, thanks, you just changed my life. I lost 50 pounds, I'm not in the hospital. Really meaningful stuff in my motivation. I just don't want people to go through what I went through. That's why I started the blog. And to overnight go from thank you for making my life better to you're a piece of shit and a con artist and snake oil and all that kind of stuff. It really, really messed with my head, to be perfectly honest. And I finally ended up doing what's in the last part of Smart Now Harder, the reset mode. So I had to go back and like, why is this a trigger for me? And the reality is that if someone comes to your social media and they say something mean, right? The reality is that it has nothing to do with you at all. It has to do with them. So when all this happened, I ended up sitting down and going back like, well, why is This a trigger for me. And I did a lot of spiritual and personal development stuff around it. And it turns out there was a. There's a trigger that most people have, probably even more so now than in the past, and it's around injustice, because when you're a kid, there will be unjust things. In my case, it had to do with bullying. So sometime in, like, first grade, I got. I told a teacher that someone did something bad, and then they said that I did it and I got punished, even though I did the right thing. In this case, I didn't know any of that. I'd forgotten that. That thing that was, I don't know, 30 years ago. But what was coming up for me emotionally when I was being attacked, like, that was, it's not fair. And that's usually a childhood that. Because, like, that's when things really aren't fair. And when things aren't fair and you're 6 or 10 years old, you're like. That sense of. It creates a rage and a sense of helplessness and all that. So I was dealing with that. And when I cleared that, using the reset process in the book, the reality is that every time Joe Rogan would say, dave's a bad man, I would sell more coffee. It didn't matter. He was talking to me. And he finally figured that out, apparently, because when he went over to Spotify, he deleted all of the episodes with me. So kind of sweep that under the rug. So bottom line, though, is they're all archived, so they're available online, and the Internet never forgets. And I just. I'm like, thanks, Joe. Like, genuinely, because the attacks that I endured on my social in a very concentrated way from Joe highlighted some important things. One of them is it takes a bully or a troll to, oh, a minute or two to come up with their attack on you. And it takes you a half a second to click delete lock. And you have a moral obligation to keep your environment for your people, who you can serve to keep it clean. So if someone came into your house and took a dump on your couch, which is basically what those. Those. The Joe Rogan people were doing to me, well, you would tell them to leave. And most people have no problem with that. As a matter of fact, if someone did that, you'd probably physically remove them from your living room. It's no different. And every now and then, maybe every couple months, I'll do a post and say, guys, here's the rules. If you want to be here with me on Instagram or wherever it is.

This.

Is this behavior. We are kind. We're not always nice. Those are different. You can be kind, which is being truthful, even if it's not nice. And if you're attacking people instead of ideas, I will kick you out. And some of you, ah, you know, you're. You're deleting critics. No, I'm not deleting critics. People who are saying, I'm not convinced that butter is good for everyone. What about apo? Let's talk. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there's something to learn here.

Right?

Like, let's do that. And there's lots of vegans who follow me, even though I tease them and I make fun of all that stuff. I was a devout raw vegan, and it harmed me greatly, and it's harming people to this day. So I'm willing to talk about it, and I will use humor and I'll tease. But we're united in our goal. We want to be healthy, we want a better planet, and we want less animal cruelty. It's just the path to get there might not be what you think it is. So it's that sense of duty and sense of kindness that's there. And I think you should tell your followers this is the standard. And, yes, I absolutely block people who don't want to be helped. They're here to get attention. They're here to get conflict. And those are actually the narcissists. Those are the ones. They're feeding off of your pain. They're feeding off of your energy. They will not get any energy from me other than playful energy, which they can't stand because humor diffuses tyranny all the time. So usually I'll respond flippantly to a troll. And like, one of my favorite ones recently, they're like, dave, you look like you're 60, and obviously I have so much estrogen, you're probably a lesbian. And I'm like, guys, the reality is I'm in better shape than I've ever been. I take my shirt off, and people 20 years younger than me are giving me the side eye. And I'm like, I can kind of own that, given that I saw stretch marks. I weighed 300 pounds. I'm in such good shape. I love how I am now. And my brain works better than ever before. So I could take that personally and be like, oh, my God, maybe I am getting old. Maybe. I don't know. I have no idea. I guess they don't like how I cross my legs because I'm sitting on A chair that's like 2 inches off the floor. I don't know what the heck they were talking about, but it makes me laugh. I'm like, maybe I am a lesbian. I never thought about that. But whatever, it doesn't matter. It doesn't stick. So your job, if someone comes, like, if it does stick, you'd be like, okay, that's. That's not a cognitive thing. You know this. It's an emotional. It's a feeling. It's an in the body thing. And the stuff, the reset mode, which is actually just a scientifically validated process for forgiveness, works really well. So someone comes in like that, it actually doesn't hit me in the goal. I don't have the emotions about that. It's more amusement. And it's also compassion. Like, I wonder what their mom did to them so that they're spending their valuable time out there attacking anyone. And if they want to attack me, there's millions of people who will come out and say, dave changed my life. What are you talking about? This is great. This guy in the uk. I was in the UK on tv on big national thing. I'm wearing my two dark. The red glasses for sleep because it's three in the morning for me to do the interview. And I'm talking about how calories don't make you fat. So one calorie troll. This Snickers bar and a diet. So it will counsel each other out. Did this huge hit piece on me, got the million followers and I'm like, this is awesome. So I just took a screenshot of it and I put it on my page and say, guys, if you want to talk to him. So he has thousands of people's lives have been changed. You go to his page and they're all just telling him, you don't know what you're talking about. So my followers will back me up because I've helped him and what I did there. And this is the kind of ninja move that I would encourage. If you listen to this, what I did is I said, hey, hey, guys. You know, to honor this poor person who still believes colors matter, I'm going to use his Instagram handle as a discount code for my products. His name is Fitness Chef. Hi, Fitness Chef.

Oh, that's great. What a. What a great. What a great way to respond. I love that.

And the deal is when. When your followers know it's not hurting you, not that you pretend like it's not hurting you. Newsflash. We can tell. We can all feel that, right? If you get defensive.

No, you're not.

You're not going to get defensive. You can be playful, right? And there are other times where it's like this person is looking for a fight, right? And I will tell you just straight up, I've been in more than 100 fist fights because I was bullied as a kid. I never lost. I was always the one on top at the end because of physics, because I was the fat kid and I could sit on you and I had more reach. It's still true to this day. So, yeah, I know how to take you down, but I don't need to. So if you're coming to me to pick a fight, if you actually get a fight from me, you're not going to walk away from it. But I'm not combative anymore. But I walk around. I am dangerous. That's why it's called Danger Coffee. My newest brand, Dangerous, means that who knows what I might do? Do whatever I want, but I'm not programmable. And you can't make me do things by trying to pick a fight with me. I can choose to engage in a fight with you, but why would I do that? I have stuff to do in the world. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to play, and then I'll walk away from the fight because it's not worth my time. And if you can do that from a place of love instead of from a place of defensiveness, the trolls lose their power. They have no ability at all. All they're doing is driving up your metrics for. For viewership.

I love that I'll give everyone a hack that I use, and it just drives people, like, it just confuses a crap out of people and gives you a good laugh. So if you're ever experiencing somebody's road rage, the moment you make eye contact with them, pretend like they're a friend you haven't seen in years. And you're, like, super excited to see them. And they just get so confused because they think that, because they feel that, oh, my God, do I know this person? Like, why is this person so excited and happy to see me? They're supposed to be mad and all pissed off, and you could just see. It just diffuses the whole situation in the car that you're in. God knows what happens to them, but it just makes me crack up. And my son gets such a howl out of it, and we're just laughing our butts off. So we take a situation where perhaps a different version of me would have Flipped out would have ruined my day and I'd just be repeating curse words to that person that of course they wouldn't hear. So I'm just lowering my own vibration to now doing the exact opposite and leaving them kind of curious and wondering, like, oh my God, like, what did I just do? Like, is that someone I know? Is it a coworker? Is it a friend? Is it somebody I haven't seen in a while?

You can do this. And it does throw people for a loop. I love that. And like, I got pulled over a while ago. I just finished a week of shamanic training, so I was in a pretty altered state anyway. And I'm like, I'm just going to give this cop so much love. Now in some parts of the world still, cops have the ability to say, I'm just going to let you off. And a lot of the time they have a quota. They have to do it. So this is one of those things. It was somewhere near the Palm Desert, so I just was in the real grounded, calm, open hearted, loving state that comes in and I asked all these questions and it was just really cool. And at the end he's like, can.

I shake your hand?

He's like, you're a really nice man. And you can tell. He was like, am I in the right career? It was totally different, right? And it turns out there's a huge number of law enforcement who use the things I've been teaching about biohacking because they're in a really stressful environment with very little gratitude for what they do. And I'm not saying they always do good things. I mean, we've all seen misbehavior from police and government and all that stuff. However, on an individual level, they're all just people trying to do their best. So when you do that, it's like maybe that's going to carry forward. And with road rage, man, I used to have a very powerful middle finger, finger muscle. It was bigger than my biceps. And I haven't had road rage in many years. But the way I do it now is the story of road rage. And you get pissed off is that other person. They think they're better than you, they think they're more deserving and they're an asshole and all this kind of stuff. None of that's real. It could be that they're on the way to the hospital to see the birth of their child or to see the last dying breath from someone you just don't know. So what I like to do now is I like to tell myself a story that they're about to shit their pants and they're just trying to find a bathroom. And that's less enlightened than the last breath, but it's funnier. So. Man, that guy really is about to fill his pants. You go, brother. You go.

That's what my wife does. You guys must have been speaking to each other. That's exactly what she says. He's like, this guy's got explosive diarrhea. He's got to get home.

Totally, right?

Okay.

Whatever story made me feel better is what it is, right? And the reality is we're all capable of driving our car into another car and causing a big accident and harming ourselves and others because we let our operating system and our ancient impulses do that. The more energy you have, the more power you have, the more dangerous you are in that. Who knows what you might do? You're not programmable by that person's behavior. What you're going to do is what you choose to do. What we will choose to do when we have our full power and we've done our personal development work is we'll choose to support other humans and the planet. You can't create peace on Earth by making sure everyone is so tired and weak and efficient that we live in little cubicles with our half.

A.

Half a cup of cricket powder every day. That's not the world that I will allow to form. We can't do that to each other because that's not a world worth living in.

Totally agree, Dave. If you have a few minutes, what I'd love to do is we had some questions come in from our attendees, and what I'd love to do is maybe we could do a rapid fire round. And I've got about five questions for you. You can direct people to the book if that's where the answer is, or if it's something that you want to answer. We'll keep it quick and brief and in. In honor of your time as well. Is that cool with you?

Works.

Okay. Awesome. So if you could choose one Biohack. If you're just starting, let's say somebody's absolutely new to your work and they could choose one biohack to incorporate for the next 30 days. What would it be?

All right, you must read smarter, not harder. Because to answer that question, you need to know your goal. And there's five big goals from. From upgrade labs or from talking with thousands of people. Here's what people really want. They might want to put on muscle. A very different biob they might want to lose fat, which is a different thing. And they might want to get their energy back, which is a major thing that we don't necessarily talk about. But it's behind a lot of this. And it turns out losing fat and getting your energy back are the same thing. I'm here for the energy. That's a different. Or I want my brain to work better or I want to manage stress better. Those are incredibly different goals. For the first time ever in surveys, people are asking for stress management more than weight loss. Even though we're fatter than we've ever been, that's how stressed people are. When you read smarter, not harder. I go through each of those five domains, figure out which one's your top goal and which one's your second goal. And I tell you all the tools that work better than picking up rocks and running away from tigers, which is the pretty much that's all of exercise and all meditations. Sit quiet and be aware. Well, okay, there's faster ways to do all these things that just free up more time and more energy for you. So to answer the question, I have to go very, very foundational. So what's one thing that's going to affect everyone? And I am going to recommend that you go to vitamin D, B, just vitamin d a k, e.com and there's two supplements that are cheap that make a difference and such. And you make a bunch of cool supplements and also insert the ones you make that do similar things assuming you have them. But vitamin date, these are fat soluble vitamins, they're important. But you need not just have vitamin D but you need D, A, K and E all in the right ratios. And the reason you need those amongst others is that they drive minerals in because the other part of that is called Minerals 101. It's a broad spectrum mineral. And when you have the combination of fat soluble vitamins and minerals now, your body can respond to anything you do in a better way. Because right now you might work out or you might get sleep or you might meditate, you might do any of these things to be better and then you don't get results. It's because your body said, well, I needed manganese to do that. I didn't have manganese, sorry. And no amount of effort is going to magically make manganese appear so that you can make an enzyme that you needed to create that ATP or to create what, whatever change you were trying to get. So mineral sufficiency and vitamin D together is one of the most Important biohacks you can do. And I explain why in the book why we're so deficient in minerals. I know you know this because you're very knowledgeable. Now. Do you have similar products that you can talk about like, you don't have to buy my stuff to change my life. I want to change your life. That's the deal.

Yeah, no, absolutely. Like one of the things. So we're actually creating a supplement pack. We don't have any other supplements at the moment which does include a mineral complex because they are super important, as we all know. One thing I can say is that when you came and spoke to our mentorship group and you were kind enough to share this website, a bunch of people went and bought it, started using this combination and said, oh my God, I had no idea that the lights weren't. The lights were not fully on. They were in a dim state in my head and in my body. So definitely we have testimonials of people who can vouch for experiencing benefits using those products. So I would definitely encourage. We'll drop a link so people can go there. Vitamindake.com and yeah, minerals very overlooked. I mean the thing is, is that we kind of know these things, right? But you know, in the evolution of supplements, things just have to get sexier and sexier and more and more exotic and we forget to go back to the basics. We do.

And I felt kind of dumb. Like minerals, like these are the oldest things ever. They're just so not sexy. They're not a nootropic and I formulate new sexy things. But this is the thing with the highest return on investment because everything you do requires minerals. So everything you do, you get more results from relatively cheap and just well formulated stuff. That website is Vitamin D. And if people take your vitamin pack that has a multi mineral, those minerals are more important than the nootropics you're taking. But I do both love that.

So Einstein said. There's a question from Jasmine. Einstein said that the future of medicine is frequencies and I would love your thoughts on that. What are your thoughts on vibrational frequencies as modalities for healing? There's devices, I won't name names, but there's devices out there that promote healthy frequencies. I'd love your perspective.

Well, I would say if you're looking to Einstein for health advice, you might want to reconsider your because he's a physicist and probably doesn't know that much about health. The guys who I would pay more attention to are Tesla and Royal Rife where Tesla actually got a lot of his ideas from rife. And these are people who were using frequencies almost 100 years ago for healing Russian biohackers. Going back to the space program, I figured this out much more so than in the West. When you go to 40 years of Zen, you can go to 40 years of Zen.com, that's my brain upgrade program for entrepreneurs. And I've spent six months of my life with electrodes on my head, which is why I can do a lot of things I can do because I managed to reprogram my operating system that way. Yes, your body talks in frequencies. You can use sound frequencies, you can use light frequencies, you can use electromagnetic frequencies. And when you go to an Upgrade Labs, we use all of those instead of picking up rocks in order to get your results in far, far less time and frequencies. Even for light, there's a color of the light. I love that you've got red behind you. I've got my red light. When I'm in a hotel, I travel. This is just some Amazon thing. I just love nothing I sell and I'm sure there's lots of friends. This is my red light thing. I can get it to turn on there. So this is what I use for light in a hotel room. And it's a red light because that's actually better than the hotel lighting. So that is a frequency thing. But if you pulse lights in certain ways, there's all kinds of stuff you could do. I use both pulsing light and certain frequencies of light at Upgrade labs in order to create results in less time. I don't know. Like I said, it's the only future. But yeah, we can train your brain to go to consciously go into different frequencies. The difficulty though is that there's a large number of, I'm going to call them quantum woo. People like, well, it's quantum, right?

Okay.

There is such a thing as quantum biology, right? And a lot of people say, well, it's frequency. It's. Well, frequencies are measured in cycles per second and Right. So like, what's the frequency of this? How many times per second am I clapping? That frequency probably isn't that impactful. I want to know what is it that has the frequency and then what frequency to get what result for which person. That's why I use AI at Upgrade labs in order to be able to predict what signals we can put into your body and your mind to get you the results that you want, because you don't want the same results as me.

Speaking of light and Sound, which are obviously frequencies. I know you talk about Braintap and Practicorter is going to be speaking at the event as well.

I love the event is biohackingconference.com, by the way. That's just so people know what we're talking about. Yep.

Okay, awesome. So I love if you have a 30 second plug for BrainTap.

Yeah. Braintap is a partner. They sponsor the conference. I'm always grateful for that. And there's a rich history going back to about the 50s where we started looking at blinking lights and sounds and how you can change the state of the brain with it. The sound stuff goes back to Tibetan bells where they ring a different bell in each ear and it creates this weird feeling where your body changes. Frequencies are how our bodies interacts with the world. What Braintap does, it's really cool is they have a set of headphones that even uses lights over the acupuncture points in your ears, lights over your eyes and specific sounds. There's even a couple of programs on there that I've recorded to help you use that to put your brain into an advanced meditative state. And I mentioned Brain Tap in smarter, not harder, because, well, if you could just meditate and there's value in meditating, but I promise you that meditation plus breath work will get you there faster. But if you did it with a Brain Tap, you can get there even faster. So it's a tool to let you make your body do what you want. What are you doing? You're changing the frequencies of light and sound in the environment around you to get control of your own biology. That's biohacking.

Yeah. It's made such a huge difference for me and there's some of my clients that it's completely transformed their life. So thank you for shedding some light on that. Have you ever heard of a medbed? Has that come across any of the research that you've done?

Yeah, there's a variety. There's probably about 30 companies doing things in the same domain as Red Bed and we've got a proprietary version of. Of that, of that idea that's a part of an Upgrade Labs franchise. Bottom line is red and infrared and.

Oh, sorry, Dave. I said med bed. Med.

Yeah. Is that not a light bed that also uses. I thought it used both.

I think it might. These are like. These are beds. My knowledge of this is very preliminary. This is a question that came in. But my understanding is these are beds that can help us regenerate, like new organs and new Butt new aspects of our body. It's like very futuristic, but I wasn't sure if you.

So they're. What these are doing is they're using very specific frequencies of light and sometimes EMF to send a signal into the body. When you read smart and hard, right. I talk about this kind of thing. Well, what tells your body to regenerate itself? Is it chemicals? Well, yeah. Is it light? Yeah. Is it sunshine? Yeah. Is it water? Yeah. Is it information fields? Yes. When you get really deep into things, there's a pretty good argument that there's a holographic structure to the world around us, which means that in a hologram you can break it in half and each half contains the whole hologram. So the way you access holograms is with lasers. And I have used lasers medically on myself, including ones not for humans for 25 years. So, yeah, lasers and LEDs are profoundly effective for causing tissue regeneration. And it's part of my anti aging strategy, so I fully support it. I can't talk about that specific product. I haven't tested that one. But I do know there's about 30 or 40 vendors coming out with different aspects of that and there is efficacy to it. We don't know. And I feel pretty good about this. We don't know yet exactly what frequencies, whether it's magnetic frequencies or light frequencies or sound frequencies are going to get exactly what results yet. That's where AI is helping us accelerate the world of biohacking very dramatically. That's why the large data set from upgrade labs where we have this stuff, I can feed frequencies into a person and see what happened because we're measuring results and then feed that into a learning system over time.

Wow, I love that last question. And this one comes from Nancy, and Nancy says, what are the top longevity hacks? So maybe there's two parts to this. One is free. What are the best free longevity hacks, and the second one are the ones that are perhaps ones that we have to invest in.

All right, the short answer to this is Reid Superhuman. This is my major book on anti aging and I go through dozens of things that are shown in studies to extend lifespan of mammals or mammals. So there's lots of things you could do, but the number one thing is learn how to get better sleep. Not more sleep, just better sleep. And if you would like kind of the short free version of that, go to sleepwithdave.com which is the best URL of my entire life because it's so funny, but that's kind of Everything I know about sleep, sleep and it's a gift. I'm not trying to make money off that. That's just here's what I've done. I went from five minutes of deep sleep per night to 90 minutes of deep and 90 minutes of REM in six and a half hours in my average night's sleep. So I'm getting profoundly good sleep. If you just do that, you'll live longer. The second thing would be skip breakfast. Unless you're in a specific state where you need a high protein and probably a higher fat breakfast. There's times for that. But generally having a substantial period of time when you don't eat is going to be important. Don't eat after the sun goes down is another thing. Those are easy. And from there I'm just going to say it. Eat some animal protein. Plant based protein does not do the same thing as animal based protein. This is coming from a guy who was a devout vegan. That works.

Okay. And then if you had maybe one or two low cost or medium cost interventions, any, any thoughts there?

Well, I mean I, I, I've done huge numbers of stem cells. I, I have to be in like the top 10 most stem cell treated people on the planet at this point. So like that's a very expensive thing you can do. I've done, you know, I've done work with them all over the world. I've written about them and it's superhuman when you read it. I go through a couple different types of that. There would be, I'm going to talk about the TrueDark glasses. The sleep glasses, these are not blue blockers. The ones I'm just putting on right now are. But next to my bed because I'm in a hotel in Costa Rica. What do you know? This is@truedark.com these are sleep glasses that also in a study we're about to release, put your brain in a meditative state. Just wearing these does the same thing as meditating for some forms of meditation. I wear these at night before I go to bed. This is cheap. I don't get jet lag anywhere on the planet. When I control the color of light coming into my eyes. I wear these for an hour before bed and then I go to sleep and I get better sleep last time. This is a low cost thing to do at one time and it's a meaningful intervention.

Love it. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Dave, this has been wonderful. Thank you for taking time out of your day in Costa Rica. Go enjoy the sun, enjoy the beach. Enjoy the beauty of what the land has to offer. Another shout out for your amazing book. You mentioned Superhuman as well. Smarter, not harder. I love this book. I love the formatting of it. I love how simple it is to read. And you can literally pick it up, open up any chapter, and learn something profoundly helpful to your health and your happiness. Dave, you also helped us in, you know, hacking our business in many ways by hacking ourselves and really addressing some of the emotional baggage that we might carry that might be preventing us from, you know, reaching that next level in our business. You talked about finding the right mentors, your elders, people who've done what you want to do. In a way, you want to do it. And you've given us lots of things to chew on and think about. I deeply value our friendship and I'm so grateful for our time together. Is there any last message you'd like to offer our listeners today?

Well, number one, thanks. I genuinely appreciate that, Sachin.

You're.

You're one of the good guys working for the betterment of the world, and I genuinely appreciate that.

Thank you.

I think that the final thing we talked about, but because you're talking particularly about entrepreneurship here, people genuinely want to help you succeed, right? And yeah, there are some people who probably are going to put a stick in your wheels or whatever, but the vast majority of people, they want you to win. If you ask for help, you'll get it. If I would have been wise enough early on in my career, I would have probably been a very different place. There's another contemporary, a guy named Marc Andreessen I mentioned earlier, who's a very famous VC today. He and I are about the same age. He wrote the first web browser and I sold the first thing ever sold over the Internet before the web browser was created. So we didn't have the name E Commerce, but it was a caffeine T shirt out of my dorm room, and funny enough, it had this caffeine symbol on it. He was smart because he went to Silicon Valley and He found someone 25 years older in the world of tech and said, show me how to do this. And he's a multibillionaire. I said, I'm going to do this all by myself. I don't need any help. And I'm not a multibillionaire. I'm quite successful. I have no issues with that. But it was the willingness early on to ask for and receive help that made all the difference there. So I would just encourage you, find mentors, ask for advice, listen and take action. On it. You don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Love that. Thank you, my friend. Have an amazing rest of your day. And thanks for enlightening us with your knowledge and wisdom and beautiful energy today. Appreciate you.

You're welcome.

Sa.