Dave Asprey | Biohacking Your Way to Entrepreneurial Resilience - Radical Responsibility Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The thing that causes the most pain, the most trauma,
the most bitterness and regret and anger and frankly, cancer
and divorce and all the bad stuff and entrepreneurs. It's
two traumas that are not the typical traumas that we
talk about, and I actually write about these in detail
and heavily meditated. One of them is betrayal and the

(00:20):
other one is injustice. And betrayal is when you trust
someone and you do the right thing for them and
then they do something that harms you and they do
it intentionally. And I've had a family member try to
steal one of my companies common red handed, went to court,
had the whole bulletproof situation. I got removed from the

(00:41):
border my own company, And if you don't learn how
to let that go, it will eat you up.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
Welcome to the Radical Responsibility Podcast. I'm doctor Fleet Mall
and I'm excited to guide you on a journey of
authentic transformation. In each episode, I'll bring you inside from
leading experts to explore trauma recovery, mindfulness practices, positive psychology,
and innovative breakthroughs in health, wellness and life optimization. This

(01:08):
is a space for real conversations that inspire meaningful change,
helping you find alignment with the person you are always
meant to be. Let's get started. What if transformation isn't
just about thinking differently, but feeling differently. Science shows us

(01:28):
that true change happens when we align not just our minds,
but also the neural networks in our hearts and guts.
This heart mind connection is the key to deeper healing, resilience,
and expanded awareness. That's why I created the Heart Mind
all access, membership and community, a space designed to help
you rewire your nervous system, cultivate heart intelligence, and live

(01:51):
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of transformational teachings specifically curated to meet you. You'll learn
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all sharing powerful tools to help you shift your mindset
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(02:17):
You'll also gain unlimited access to every summit and course
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global community to support your journey. If you're ready to
step into a more heart centered, connected and conscious life,
I invite you to join us. Clip the link to

(02:37):
learn more and start your journey. Today.

Speaker 3 (02:41):
We're at the key to unlocking your greatest entrepreneurial potential
was already inside your body. In this powerful conversation, I'm
joined by biohacking pioneer Dave Asbury, the founder of Bulletproof
and one of the most influential voices in human performance,
from battling chronic health issues to building a global wellness movement.
Dave shares how he has self experimentation, ancient wisdom, and

(03:04):
cutting edge tech to reclaim his vitality and how you
can too. We explore what it really means to lead
with energy, intuition, and resilience, even in the face of betrayal,
legal pitfalls, and the high stakes worlds adventure capital. Dave
doesn't hold back, offering hard won lessons and bounder control,
storytelling and self regulation that every mission driven entrepreneur needs

(03:26):
to hear. If you're ready to align your body, mind,
and business with purpose and power, this episode for you.
I am a doctor fleet Mall, your co host for
this session, and I'm really thrilled to be here today
with none other than Dave Asprey.

Speaker 1 (03:39):
Welcome, Dave. I am so happy to get to be
your love, your work great.

Speaker 2 (03:45):
Thank you so much so. I have this book of
yours here that I'm working my way through, but I've
already listened to Headstrong, the audiobook version, and I have
two of your bulletproof diet books upstairs on my breakfast tables.

Speaker 1 (03:58):
That's incredible. And the new book that comes out April
fifteenth to twenty twenty five is called Heavily Meditated, and
I think after Headstrong for you, that might be your
next favorite and Strong. The techniques in that book are
about how to make your mind work better, and whether
you're a spiritual guru or an entrepreneur, you get more
energy in the system and allocate better. You can meditate,

(04:20):
you can focus, you can execute whatever you're jammed. It
seems like this is that missing component that's been a
part of a lot of spiritual practice, but not a
part of CEO practice until very recently.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
Well, I'm definitely looking forward that book here. It was
funny I saw that name and I was wondering where
I've been working with a friend on a film I
having to do with prison work that you'd been working
on for I probably a different points fifteen years now,
but it never has completely gotten completed. But that was
our last working title, was heavily Meditated. Really Yeah, it
was a play on heavily medicated, right, which I'm sure

(04:55):
yours tims too.

Speaker 1 (04:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:56):
So you know, I'm reluctant to ask you to encaps
some of your origin story in just a couple of minutes,
and we got a lot to cover here. We did
reference some of it in the bio that I read
that you had some real challenges in your twenty some
really significant health challenges, and through self experimentation and dedication,
you managed to turn your own health around, and in
the process that ended up launching this biohacking movement. So

(05:19):
I wonder if you could maybe just highlight some pivotal
moments in those challenges that allowed you to turn your
health around, and then maybe a pivotal moment that took
you into the world of becoming an entrepreneur and getting
this message out at scale the people.

Speaker 1 (05:33):
Well, I was unhealthyusy kid, It turns out I figured
out later I lived in a basement with toxing mold,
and I've got some weird genes that make me more
susceptible to inflammation. By the time I was fourteen, I
started getting obese, had high blood sugar, but I had
arthritis diagnosed. I ended up having three knee surgeries. By

(05:55):
the time I was twenty three, I was on antibiotics
for fifteen years every month month because I'd have a
chronic strep throat in sinucidis. I had all the digestive
issues that you expect childhood asthma adhd Asperger syndrome, something
called odd oppositional defiant disorder, which I think a lot
of entrepreneurs have a little bit of that, which makes

(06:15):
us want to go run our own businesses. And by
the time I was twenty six, I had made six
million dollars by being a co founder of a part
of the first company that held Google servers when it
was two people and two computers and Hotmail and Salesforce
and all the big names today. We built the first

(06:35):
data centers, and I found myself attending board meetings for
a thirty six billion dollar publicly traded company under the
condition that I not speak, because they just wanted me
to learn. Because I was the guy who understod our
technology because I was a deep nerd. The problem is
I lost the six million dollars when I was twenty eight,
made out when I was twenty six, and this was

(06:56):
worth a lot of money back then compared to what
that is now, which is still a lot of money.
And I went through this phase of Okay, I've hit
three hundred pounds, I've been a vegan, I have tried
every day on the planet. I've gained and lost ten
twenty thirty pounds. So many times I went to the
gym six days a week, ninety minutes a day, without

(07:19):
fail for eighteen months. I did it just I skipped sundays.
I still had a forty six inch waist and still
weigh the same amount when I was done, and I
felt like a failure. And in entrepreneurship, if you're saying, well,
I'm convinced that billboard ads are now going to make
all my money, and you buy a bunch of billboard
ads and sales don't increase, well, you wouldn't say, well,

(07:42):
that means I'm going to buy even more billboard ads.
I'm going to billboard ad even harder to become successful.
But when it comes to things like dieting and exercise,
we just blame ourselves and say, so we didn't try enough,
and we just keep doing it, and we double down
on stuff that doesn't objectively work. And frankly, that can
happen with meditation too, So we can't have a double standard.

(08:04):
With the business, we measure it and if we invest
something and it doesn't work, we change our investment, we
change our strategy. With health, especially the unusual chronic things
that are maybe more performance tuning, it just feels like
there's nothing you can do, so you just keep doing
what you're doing. You believe something works, so you just
blindly set about it, or even worse, if you're in

(08:26):
business and you say, you know, I started the business,
and I know that newspaper want ads are the thing,
and they work really well. Therefore I know they work.
Therefore I will keep doing this even if they stop working.
It's another problem we have with our health. When I
went vegan for the first six weeks, I'm like, I

(08:47):
feel so good, I'm getting leaner and all this. So
I call this the vegan trap. By the way, it's
exactly the same as the keto trap, which is you
or the cardboard trap. You do something that makes you
feel great for the first six weeks, your brain says
that is a pattern, it is real. Therefore, if I
do more of it and I keep doing it, it's

(09:08):
always going to work, and we become blind to the
fact that it stopped working. And this can happen with
say AdWords. You know, if you're buying AdWords and these
keywords work great, you're not monitoring your campaign. Your return
on ad spend goes down. If you're not monitoring that,
you're gonna start spending money on ads that don't work. Nutrition,
cognitive function, it's all the same thing. So after all

(09:29):
of this stuff, I realized I'm a total jerk. I
get HYPOGLABITCHI I'm anxious all the time. I've been in
an entrepreneur magazine when I was twenty three for being
the first guy to sell anything over the Internet before
there was a web browser. So I tried kind of
be famous in my own little circle. I tried being
married briefly in my twenties so I would be lonely.

(09:49):
And I tried being rich, and I was miserable after
all those things. So that's what set me on the biohacking,
path of studying longevity, so I could get my brain
and my energy back, get my emotions working. And it's
what why I can't say, it's what set me on
the path of entrepreneurship. That's in a When I was
twelve years old, I could read Entrepreneur magazine and fantasize

(10:11):
about being an entrepreneur, and so I did it early on.
But that's my background. There's a lot of other career
success in the tech world, and maybe just to fill
in the story, after I'd exhausted the Western medicine things
that were supposed to make me well and happy, I
started doing the stuff that as a computer scientist doesn't
make any sense, you know, going to the Himalayas, going

(10:34):
to the Andes, studying with masters of different money. It
just when I started this something this is absurd, but
I got nothing else to do, and I feel like
I'm in the car. I'm personally celebrator all the time,
and it's slowing down and you can't press the accelerator
further than to the floor, and it's a feeling of helplessness.
And so many entrepreneurs I've coached are in that state.
We just don't show it to our employees or to

(10:55):
anyone else, because what are you going to do about it?
So it's this kind of silent thing. So from that perspective,
I was desperate. I did the things that I didn't
believe would work, because I realized the things I believed
were going to work, like cutting calories and semi vegetarian
diet and over exercising, they dinner work. So I got
nothing else.

Speaker 2 (11:14):
What am I going to do?

Speaker 1 (11:16):
So I found myself in a very remote part of
western Tibet that you know, well, I'm Mount Kylash, and
I had yak butter tea and very high altitude, and
all of a sudden, my brain turned on in a
way that made no sense. It was like the heavens
opened up, like a light bulb went on it. So
I remember when my brain used to work like this.
And because I'm trained at high altitude mountaineering, you're not

(11:37):
supposed to feel good at altitude. You're supposed to feel
kind of like you're dying because you sort of are.
And I just remembered that and came back and eventually
discovered through the process of just testing if I put
butter in MCT oil and coffee without mold, magic happens.
And if I use the wrong butter, or I use
the wrong coffee or just the wrong liquid, it doesn't work.

(12:01):
And so through the course of trial and error, I
came up with this, and now we understand all the
biochemistry about why. But the blog post I was writing
used to be called the bulletproof Executive. No one ever
talked to entrepreneurs, and no one ever talked to CEOs
and innovators in the language that was for us. And
you can hack yourself, you can upgrade your biology. These

(12:23):
mean doctors really mad when I talked about, like, how
dare you even someone the personal development, it's sort of
the that you are enough kind of a vibe. I'm like, no,
I'm sorry, that's not what I'm here for. I want
to be way more than enough, and like I want
to do something that really matters, and I want to
feel really good and energize and I want to know
I can handle anything life brings my way without breaking.

(12:46):
And it was just a different vibe, and it shifted
our language around how we talk about health and wellness
and personal development, where there's an aspirational component to it
versus just a healing component. I'm someone who had to
heal from deep pts, from the way I was born,
and from bullying and having a non neurotypical brain until
I reverse that, and I have a brain that would

(13:06):
measures mostly neurotypical now just faster. And when I look
at the path I've been on and all the suffering
and all the wasted time and wasted energy, both entrepreneurially
and on learning how to operate my emotional and spiritual
and physical body, that's what I do. I teach people.
I teach entrepreneurs and everyone else. Here's what you don't know,

(13:30):
and here are the things they gave the results the fastest,
and it's I feel like it's my calling because I
feel like I suffered more than you, and not you
personally just listening. I've probably had the medical condition. I've
probably made the mistake at this point.

Speaker 2 (13:44):
So Dave, I want to get into your career. There's
a lot of different levels and dimensions too. As an entrepreneur,
and I later won't talk about your books and publishing
it as a way to expand your voice and your reach.
But initially with bulletproof copy, what you described your discovery
with the yacht butter tea and tibets, and then you
came back and doing the testing to develop what became
bulletproof coffee. You really created a new category altogether. And

(14:09):
I don't know whether how much of that was strategy,
how much of it was serendipity. But I wonder if
you could talk about how we can sometimes in a
world you hear a lot about really niching down, so
you're not trying to compete with everybody in a huge space.
So the more you niche down, you know, the more
you can dominate a niche, creating your own niche a
brand new category.

Speaker 1 (14:28):
If something is very powerful, of course a lot of
competition will come in eventually.

Speaker 2 (14:32):
But I wonder if you could just talk about that,
those dynamics of the scan of a marketplace, the markets
you choose to compete in the possibilities of creating a
new category, niching down within a category, just in terms
of your experience, if you could talk about that a
little bit.

Speaker 1 (14:47):
To understand that fully, there's about four categories that it
created it. The biggest and brought est one is the
biohacking category itself and industry, and let's say sixty three
billion dollar valuation in the next couple of years of
the total size of the biohacking market from the first
conference we're still doing in Biohackingconference dot com and four

(15:11):
thousand people show up and it's a vibrant community, that
whole thing. So that's a category in and of itself.
Then within the subcategories, I created the functional coffee category.
It's probably half a billion dollars today. And of course
people copying like, oh, you mean coffee is a performance
and answer, I'm like, you don't think it's Mother Nature's
original smart drug, Like coffee is Mother Nature's pre workout

(15:32):
and smart drug. And nicotine is our other smart drug.
That's why people have been craving as forever because we
like it when we have energy in our brains work
smoking is bad for you, just to be really clear,
just nicotine might have some neurological benefits. So from that perspective,
that's one category. And then there's MCT oil. It was
only used in pharma or and like topical solutions and all,

(15:54):
and I turned it into a billion dollar category with
lots of companies competing. And then collagen was just a
not paid attention to supplement at all. And today there's
hundreds of college and companies and I single handedly made
collegen a billion dollar industry category. And if you look
back through our media, I mean there's hundreds of articles

(16:14):
in all of the magazines, Men's magazines, Women's magazine is
going to virus? What is this new protein? What is
it that comes from thought leadership? And what I hear
from the entrepreneurs that I work with. And I do
run something called the Business of Biolacing conference where we
coach entrepreneurs like a couple hundred at a time. So
I've gone very deep on this. Most entrepreneurs are saying,

(16:35):
I want to create a category and your niche that
is really expensive. I raised eighty actually almost ninety million
dollars in venture capital in order to do this, and
it's relatively risky. The reason I was able to do
that is number One, I started the business as a
blog without a business plan because it wasn't going to

(16:57):
be a business. I made a quarter million a year
plus stock options as a VP at trend Micro, a
large FOJOKEE trading beeer screw to company. I am a
computer acker. I started the blog so five people would
not suffer as much as I had with all these illnesses,
like I'm going to find five people were just so
trashed and are struggling and still succeeding, and I'm going
to give them the keys. That's my win. And if

(17:19):
more than five people care, great. And it was only
when I said I got to buy coffee that doesn't
give me the jitters, Maybe other people want to buy it.
It was almost an accidental business. With two very young
kids in my career, I probably didn't need to start
a company, but I was called. So the content was
a form of giving and sharing and teaching and not
a form of manipulation. As I was walking around Mount

(17:42):
ky Lash, I was just pondering, no one will come
to the longevity nonprofit meetings that I'm actually the president of.
The Screwer was at the time president of a group
that would bring the luminaries in the field of longevity
before everyone thought it was real, and they would teach
every month to the community. No one from Google would
show up in our meetings four minutes from Google's headquarters.

(18:05):
So my problem was only old people care about being out,
So I have to rebrand longevity. So I did, and
I called it biohacking. And the idea is that the
things that make old people young make young people powerful
and wow. So I need to name for these techniques
because no young person is going to pay attention to longevity.

(18:27):
They're going to pay attention to building their tribe, building
their career, building their power, finding a life partner, and
all of the things that we're supposed to do as
young men and women when we're not broken by our
nutrition and by trauma. So reframing biohacking as it is
the act of controlling your biology to give what you want.
Maybe it's abs, maybe it's peacefulness, maybe it's energy. You

(18:51):
get to choose and no one gets to choose for you,
and there's no judgment about it. You're just going to
do what works. And if you think something works, measure it,
but doesn't do something else. And I did not trademark
the term. And this is the biggest mistake that people make.
You have to understand if you want to make a
global movement, you're probably not going to own the word.
If you want it to be in Webster's dictionary, if

(19:13):
you want there to be millions of bioacors in Japan
and South Korea, and in South America and there are
in all of these markets, and I've sold books in them,
not that selling books makes any money. But the idea
here is it is now a global movement. I fly
to Dubai and people recognize me on the street, go oh, bioaking.
This is great. I'm like, how is this even possible?
It's possible because I did not do that. And now

(19:36):
there's probably five people who tried to copy my bioacing conference.
All of them fail because they don't attract the right
people because I have a strong community. It's almost like,
if you look at what happened when Linux and the
first open source companies came around, who's going to go
up against Microsoft? Are you stupid?

Speaker 2 (19:53):
Well?

Speaker 1 (19:53):
Microsoft has a huge amount of open source code today
and a lot of the Internet is based on open
source things. It wins over time. So my idea here,
as a computer hacker who's the board's open source and
has since the first open source thing came around and
what nineteen ninety six or something. I believe we should
have the source code to our own bodies, to our consciousness,

(20:15):
to our biology, and that we have the right to
manipulate that by any means necessary, with no intervention, and
so it attracted me to say, well, bioacing is a
movement about us. It's not my movement. I am called
the spiritual leader or you know, the men who created
it and still sets the standard for it. But many
others have said, well, I'm trying to do a conference

(20:36):
that computes, or I'll do something, you know, a copy
Day's blog or whatever. This is what happens when you
start a movement, and if you sit in anger or
envy or bitterness about that, it actually eats at you.
So you always want to be aware of that. The
other thing that you could do as a strategy, you
could say, well, I'm going to trademarket and you can
do pretty well with that. There's a movement. Mo Gaudat

(20:59):
is a part of that. He's been on my podcast
as well. He has the one billion Happy movement. This
is the former head of Google's advanced R and D
development and a very conscious human and he basically said, okay,
I'm going to create this movement as a nonprofit. So
you could do that just when you own the name,
people are lining up underneath you, and there are business

(21:21):
reasons to do that. But if you really want to
do what I did, which is multiple billion dollar categories,
not that I sold billions in each one. My lifetime
revenues at Bulletproof when I was running it before they
fired me was a seven hundred and fifty million in
lifetime revenue and one hundred and forty million annual revenue.
Pretty solid. And you can do that by consistently sitting

(21:43):
in a place of gratitude and in place of service.
And to do this you've got to break some rules.
At Wharton, where I got my MBA, they actually taught
us if you spend a dollar telling people your product
is high quality, you'll make more money than spending a
dollar making a high quality product. And the reason for

(22:06):
that is even if you make a high quality product,
you have the crap product and the good product, well,
you sell us money telling people it's good, So you'll
always make less money that way. And that might be true,
except I have this weird belief that people aren't stupid,
by the way, given the last five years, maybe I'm wrong,
But what I believe is that people will spend a

(22:28):
little bit more for something that is objectively higher quality.
So I just make stuff that's so good I can't
buy it any WLD and the coltun protein that I made,
the coffee beans that at the time when I was
at Bulletproof said mold free on the labels. Today they
just say clean. Those are things that people were willing
to pay more for because they could feel the difference.

(22:50):
The MCT oil that I made, well, I told people
work better than the street grade MCT oil. And five
years after I launched it, a study came out of
UC San Diego showing that the eight MCT that I
used that was more expensive was the one that reversed
so Alzheimer's disease and pased to clinical trials. So, oh,
that's so weird. People will pay more for good stuff?

(23:12):
Did we forget that is the whole world's supposed to
be a swap meet. I feel like Amazon did that
to us because I'm a contrarian. The other thing I
did when I launched as an entrepreneur is around twenty
eleven was my first blog post for the biohacking movement,
and maybe twenty twelve was the first biohacking conference. So

(23:33):
everyone was saying, you're gonna make all your money and
information products. It's so easy to sell information and newsletters, courses,
and I'm like, I don't actually ever complete any course
that I buy, and neither there's anyone else, And I
just feel like it's kind of scammy to just use
high pressure video sales letters. And I'm probably crapping on
half my friends who've been on this. You're good marketing

(23:55):
friends who've taught me so much. But if I use
a high pressure sales tactic to get want to spend
nine hundred ninety nine dollars on a series of video
courses to teach them something that they probably could have
read in a few business books. It's not unethical because
the person has free will, right, and there are lots
of ways to influence them. But it's not what I
wanted to spend my life doing. Because I did this

(24:16):
in filmod so I gave my most precious information away.
I still do in my books and on the blog
and podcast and the deals. If you like it, why
to buy some coffee? It's like a reverse thing. There
are a few places where if you like a blog
coast or something on Reddit or on substack, you know,
click here to buy me a cup of coffee. Kind
of a thing like we'll just want to buy the

(24:36):
whole back of coffee, like I will deliver so much
value to you regardless of what you ever spend a
dollar with me. Then if you're going to spend a dollar,
you're going to Number one, you're gonna trust me, and
number two, you might spend it with me, and I'm
at peace with that. And if you spend it with
some knockoff competitor and you know it gives you what
we used to call disaster pants, which is what low
grade MCT oil does to you, that's okay too. But

(24:59):
to not sit in like entitlement or anger, envy, your greed,
and just say, if this changes people's lives for the better,
that's my win, and I have faith and trust that
I'm going to make money along the way. Now there
are ways to probably make more money than that. Just
to be super clear, if I had just talked about
the keto diet, Bulletproof Diet was the first big book

(25:21):
on modern keto with clean fats. It was the first
big book on intermittent fasting. I could have picked any
one of those and built my brand around it or
around collagen protein only. And one of my competitors when
I was at Bulletproof, we were probably doing twenty thirty
million a year in Collagen, and we're in five other categories.
One of our competitors who kind of came in saw

(25:43):
the success we're having. They went to the same venture
capital firm I worked with, and those vcs are on
my board. Called me up one day and said, we're
putting thirty million dollars in your nearest competitor and category
and we're taking our board observer and putting them on
their board of directors. And I mean, I call them
my company attorney, like, is this legal? So a few

(26:06):
months after, you know, my product roadmap magically appears on
the shelves with someone else's names on that. I'm not
saying anyone did anything you know, unnatural there, because that
would be wrong, But what the f right? That company
exited for eight hundred million and I bulletproof well, they
took some actions to remove me from the board and
then recently sold the company for a tiny fraction. But

(26:28):
it was worth when I was running it against my ball,
So that was not the ultimate win. If we had
executed the way I would have liked, and I if
I had been able to stay in control and drive it, it
would have been an incredibly powerful exit. So maybe I
should have just picked one category and gone for it,
but I did. It's called the bioacking category, and that

(26:51):
means yes, Bulletproof was in ready to drink, it was
in supplements, it was in protein powders, it was in oils,
and it was in a cop five categories. And I
also had four or five other things like events and
coffee shops. And I've spun that stuff out and they
are all turning into businesses that are very valuable today.
And also I now have a portfolio of bioacting companies.

(27:15):
I just maybe suffer from something that a lot of
entrepreneurs do, is it feels good to create. It feels
good to create products. It feels good to create companies
until you have to run them. So that's something I've
learned over time. But if you really want to go big,
you make the category and you don't own the name,
and you don't fight against becoming a cleanex. If someone

(27:36):
wanted to say, you know, bullet group is an next cleenex.
When I was around bullet if fight have just gone.
You know, I sent warning letters all the time. But
if you want to say bioacting, yes we're all in
this together. Like today, my new coffee company. It's called
Danger Coffee, and it's Danger because who knows what you
might do. You might ask that girl uck, you might
start a company, and I can't say my goal, but

(27:57):
the inevitable outcome for that company is that it will
sell more coffee by revenue than Bulletproof did when I
ran it. And it'll do it because I'm following the
game plan. If I have a better product than anyone else,
and I have people's trust because they've seen me consistently
show up. That's who I am saying the things showing
talking about when I'm wrong, and so there's trust, and

(28:20):
it's trust for millions of people. And I'm incredibly profoundly
grateful for that, and I treasure it and I protect it.
So that's really hard to compete with. But man, it
takes time and it takes a lot of personal development
work to get there. If that's the past, one wants to.

Speaker 2 (28:33):
Go on, Wow, what a fascinating journey, and thank you
for unfolding that for us, and really interesting youth caken
kind of this, If I understood correctly, you focused on
really becoming a thought leader, A the thought leader in
a sense, in these categories, and you decided to take
more of an open source method than trying to control

(28:54):
the category with trademarking and so forth. Along the way,
as you said, there might have been ways you could
have kept lives more and made more money. This so
that I mean you could say the current longevity craze
a longevity It has been around for a long time,
but the current longevity movement is really a reflection of
the biohacking movement. So you could really talk about five categories.

Speaker 1 (29:14):
Thank you Fleet, just in a arty verse. Second. There
the whole, not the only goal, but a major goal
of biomacking was to make longevity real in our minds.
And over the last fourteen years of doing bioacking, now
we have vcs investing in it, and I've met with
all those guys in twenty fourteen pitching Bulletproof and talking
about longevity, and Andrew Drumerman came on my podcast before

(29:38):
he started his podcast, and we're talking about it, and
you know, all of the leaders in longevity. The whole
category is exploding and it's worth about six hundred billion
dollars today according to industry analysts. Because of all the
medtack and things that fall into it now, and I
don't think that would have happened did we not have
a bunch of tech people and visionaries going I'm going

(29:58):
to do this. And you know that's led to Brian
Johnson's latest stuff very similar. I spent two and a
half million dollars over twenty years extending my heage. She's
spending two million dollars a year on it. Either one
should be necessary, but I'm happy there's people doing it
because discovery happens constantly. So thank you for noticing that
that was a big goal.

Speaker 2 (30:18):
Yeah, yeah, And I think that you know the tech
world and so for getting involved in that way gave
a lot of credibility to it. In fact, long Jever
used to be associated a lot with kind of snake oil.
Now it's really associated with a lot of credibility, and
that's really been sourced a lot and from your work.
And it sounds like you know, along the way you've
created these categories, you took more of this open source thought. Leader.

(30:41):
It doesn't sound like you have a lot of regrets
about not having capitalized more on it than you have
With the size of these industries currently, Is that completely true,
or do you are there things that you would have
done maybe differently if you had them to do over again.
Not necessarily maybe in terms of taking our control approach,
but even in a way you navigate what ended.

Speaker 1 (31:01):
Up playing out with bulletproof copy and the rest of it. Question.

Speaker 2 (31:05):
I'm looking for lessons here per entrepreneurs, here in the audience.

Speaker 1 (31:09):
The number one lesson is this is something that a
couple of people told me who knew better, and I
was too stubborn to listen, especially when I was just
getting going. You need to have a badass attorney who
represents you, and you need a bad ass attorney represents
your company when you're fundraising, and your attorney should advise you,

(31:31):
and then the company attorney should advise the company. I
made the mistake of hiring one of the high end
law firms when I was doing my fundraising and said,
whether because I'm hiring them, they're kind of I know
they don't represent me, but they're kind of watching out
for my interests in the paperwork, and you know, we're
talking about the pros and cons, and you know, I
walked out of the meeting with the VCS not expecting

(31:54):
to ever do a venture raised for Bulletproof, expecting that
I was going to go in and talk to some
guys i'd worked with before and say, I need a
couple million bucks just personally. I'll do a convertible note,
I just need inventory, and you'll never fund my company
because I'm in too many categories. They and I walked
out the door with eight million dollars and sub made
my company's worth forty million dollars or something, and like, wow,

(32:17):
my not worth just kind of got really big here,
like my head is spending. But I took the venture
capital money because it would be so much dry powder
to reach millions of people versus just growing organically. So
it wasn't about just I'm gonna have a giant coffee company.
It was I'm going to be able to support the
movement which will grow the coffee and it was the

(32:38):
right long term strategy. Problem was I didn't have someone
watching my back, and there were a few times when
I got advice when I was on my first round
and on my third round there was actually not good advice,
not for me, and nay, it was good for the company.
And what vcs will do is the same thing that
governments do is they get the potato peeler out and

(33:00):
then just peel away a little bit of your rights.
And then when you notice and hey there like oh yeah,
sorry about that, we'll stop. They don't put the potato
peels back on over right, and then they do it again,
and then you say, hey, that's not okay, and then
they stop, and eventually they'll say, well, we're only taking

(33:20):
this peel of the potato because it's good for both
of us, right, because it's a win win.

Speaker 3 (33:23):
Right.

Speaker 1 (33:24):
Venture capitalists are not win win, They are take all.
And there are great human beings or vcs. I have
some very good friends who are them. As a information
field living organism, the venture capital underlying life force is
maximize control and maximize profits at the cost of founders

(33:46):
and employees. That's their job and you can never forget that.
So every time they tell you to screw yourself, even
a tiny bit for the group benefit, you say no,
thank you, and you have your attorney review anything they
want you to sign, and the company attorney, and if
you have a good attorney, it can save you. In

(34:07):
my case, I would have had another zero, like I
should have one hundred million dollars now if I had
played my cards right. I did not play them right,
and I came up against some very what I would
call some very dirty Shenangans, and it saw me. You know,
there's a time I should have said, oh no, you
don't get that board seat. There was a time I
just said, now, I'm not going to sign that agreement.

(34:28):
And I did it because I was naive and I
thought we were playing a win win game, because I
play win win games in my life, and I assumed
other people did the thing that causes the most pain,
the most trauma, the most bitterness and regret and anger
and frankly cancer and divorce and all the bad stuff
and entrepreneurs. It's two traumas that are not the typical

(34:51):
traumas that we talk about, and I actould write about
these in detail and heavily meditated. One of them is
betrayal and the other one is injustice. And the betrayal
is when you trust someone and you do the right
thing for them and then they do something that harms

(35:13):
you right and they do it intentionally. And I've had
a family member try to steal one of my companies
common Bred handed went to court, had the whole bulletproof situation.
I got removed from the board of my own company.
And if you don't learn how to run I called

(35:34):
the reset process in heavily meditative. If you don't learn
how to let that go, it will eat you up.
And I have seen so many entrepreneurs driven to alcohol
and drugs and sex addiction and just destroy their lives
because they were so terribly harmed by someone they trusted.
It hurts way more. But I did everything right. I

(35:55):
trusted this person, and they just turn around and they
did this for their own gain. And sometimes even worse,
they do it because there's malevolence and they want you
to fail because they're jealous. So I had to go
through this ten year journey of learning discernment, the very
subtle skills to understand when is someone feeling envy, when

(36:18):
is someone saying one thing and feeling another. And my
standards have gotten incredibly high, and when I sense contempt
in my company, I fire them right away. And I'm
dating a top relationship coach and expert named Chrisina Weber,
and she's brought all of the different relationships algorithms and

(36:42):
techniques that you could think of together in the group
that she runs and that I support her with called
we deepen. But one of them is you look at
the four horsemen of the apocalypse and relationships, the most
predictable way to see if two people will get divorced
is contempt. And if one partner feels content for the other,

(37:03):
it is very hard to recover that relationship. If someone
on your executive team feels contempt for you, they will
feel entitled to destroy your reputation and steal all of
your cookies. So for my entire executive team, and we
have a good culture now, if that comes up anywhere
in the company, we have a cultural red flag alert

(37:24):
for that and we address it right away. And it's
almost always by firing. Maybe it's just a misunderstanding we're
going to be forgiving, but that doesn't work. And it's
not just contempt for me, it's content for our mission,
contempt for the business. Like we don't sit with that.
But how do you know if someone's feeling contemp for you?
How do you have someone's feeling envy? Those are the
things that eat us up. And if you're sitting there
with injustice, I did the right thing and I still

(37:46):
got punished, or I did the right thing, and someone
intentionally harmed me. Those are emotional like soul wounds. And
if you don't address those spiritually or with your therapist,
or with your partner, your spe house, whatever, man, you're
not going to like your life. And so I went
through that multiple times, right on top of each other,

(38:07):
and I'm grateful that I have come through as a
peaceful person. But I'll tell you it's not easy. So
anyone listening, ninety percent entrepreneurs I coach have had people
steal from them. It's common, and it's because we're focused
on our thing. We're not. We don't expect people to
screw us, but they will.

Speaker 2 (38:23):
That's been my experience as a business consultant as well
as I've had at least one really difficult partnership issue.
And so you shared so much really valuable information. They're
valuable with them.

Speaker 3 (38:35):
Really.

Speaker 2 (38:35):
I think we probably have a lot of bootstrapping entrepreneurs
in our audience. But if you are going to go
get outside capital, I think you gave us some really
powerful advice there.

Speaker 1 (38:43):
Make sure you have two separate legal.

Speaker 2 (38:45):
Teams, one not looking after the companies and just in
the other after looking at your own interest as a founder.
And then you know, I think I make the assumption
to everybody in our audience here, because if they're attracted
into what we're doing, I make the assumption everybody here
is some who believes in win win and that's where
the real sustainable business and wealth and prosperity is is
in the win win space. But not everybody shares that,

(39:08):
and that's something we don't want to be naive about.
That's why we need to or trying to find those
win win people to work with. But we don't want
to be naive either. And then also what you said
about if we do suffer one of those kind of wounds,
we really need to do our healing work because that'll
really kind of pollute the space on our own mind
and all our possibilities and could really get in a
way of a lot of potentially very positive relationships. So

(39:31):
doing our healing work around that is so critically important.
So thank you Paul that there's so much wisdom in
there and so many ways entrepreneurs audience go aboard some real,
real not just pitfall, but you know, falling into a
quarry or something. So I wonder if you could talk
you know, the various categories you're in now and the

(39:52):
ones you've been in the path now, you chose to
go to the venture capital route with Bulletproof Coffee, and
you said you wouldn't have been able to establish it
category and the way you did without that level of capital.
Or have there been other things in which you've taken
more of a bootstrapping approach, or what kind of recommendations
you have, or what's your sense of that choice point

(40:12):
and whether it could be you know you're not going
to grow as fast bootstrapping it, but obviously you have
a lot more control over your destiny. So I'm curious
about your thoughts around that whole issue where one might
be more applicable and the other might be more preferable.

Speaker 1 (40:28):
You should always bootstrap at the beginning as much as
you can. So I talked about when I raised my
first round, I didn't talk about what happened first. So
I had just moved from Silicon Valley to a remote
island on Canada, to Mancouver Island. I have two young kids,
and I've spent a lot of my free cash on
move and things like that, and I'm looking to start

(40:50):
a business. I didn't quit my day job so I'm
supporting the business with my meaningful salary. And then I
took some control work on the side, where an investment
bank flew me around the world to teach hedge fund
managers how to raise their iques. They gave me fifty
thousand dollars to do this, and that was my startup
capital for Boll Group was fifty grand. It was all took.

(41:14):
I hired a young guy twenty three years old for
six hundred doucks a month who lived in his grandmother's
basement to do all this stuff that I needed done
that I knew how to do, that I have time
to do, and I knew he would screwed up because
he had done it before. But he was the unusual
kind of person who could solve a problem on his
own by doing research. Most new employees just tell me

(41:34):
what to do, and he was the guy I could say.
He said, I don't know how to code, So I decided
to learn how to code over the evening enough that
I could solve this problem. And so that decision cost
me millions of dollars in mistakes he made. It just
made me a lot more millions of dollars and stuff
he got done so very very lean. I grew the
business to twenty seven million dollars in revenue before I

(41:56):
took on venture capital money. And that means that by
the time we raised our Series C financing since nineteen
eighty six, when our lead VC was founded, they were
the first investment in Starbucks, I had more founders that
could be than any founder ever because I waited on
the venture capital and I raised when I didn't need it.

(42:18):
I was skyrocketing, and that's the time you want to raise.
A lot of founders like I just need to go
raise this money, and then they raised by a time
where they don't have the revenue or they raised too
much and things like that. So that would be the
way to do it. And I would just say boostrap
as long as you can. But if you decide I'm
not going to grow as fast as I could or
should grow, or that the market demands if I don't

(42:39):
raise capital. Number one raised from high net worth individuals
and family offices, And the reason for this is that
they have a longer time frame, especially family offices vcs.
If you're not in and out in seven years, they're
going to put all sorts of weird treasure. I like
to describe venture capitalists as hitchhikers. So you pick up

(43:01):
a hitchhiker, they're happy to pay for gas with their
credit card as long as you're going where they want.
But the second you want to go a different direction,
they're going to stab you and kick you out of
your car, Like that's not the kind of hitchhiker you want.
Family office guys are going to say, no, I don't.
I'm cool going where you want to go as long
as it's a good place. I'm just going to take
a lot longer. Just communicate with me. So you end

(43:22):
up working like working together on things, and some of
them are very hands off, so it's always bootstrap family
office if you can do it, or I know worth individuals,
people who are true believers in your mission and they're
going to be more flexible, and then if you need it, vcs,
but you need to just be very grounded and have

(43:44):
good support so when the vcs asked for something stupid,
you can literally look them in the eye and say
that's not going to work. And they're actually testing you
subconsciously to see if you're a sucker or not, and Franklin,
I probably was. I've worked for vcs. I have been
in venture capital partner meetings after the vcs walk out
at least seventy five times. I know kind of how

(44:06):
they think. But the secret algorithm of peeling off layers
of rights until suddenly you know the leg of your
stool was weak, it's pretty hard to see. So I
own that one.

Speaker 2 (44:16):
Again, great advice, and I've seen some founder entrepreneurs go
down some pretty heartbreaking routes with venture capital not having
the right advice and right proach. And I've also seen
I had a client that was a very successful company
in a very value added, honorable space, really trying to
clean up the toxicity out of schools and universities and

(44:38):
sports stadiums and so forth. And they came in with
a innovative technology basically created a category, but decided to
boostrap all the way and never did go pro outside
capital and really lost control of the category and it
really kind of ended up in the public domain and
taken over by much bigger players. So I'm sure there
is a sweet spot when you want to make the
right decision, and that advice to consider the possibility family

(45:00):
offices and high networks individuals as opposed to BC is
also a sage advice. I wonder if you could talk about,
let's circle back to you talked about, you know, being
a thought leader, and so that has to do with communication,
and obviously it can have to do with you know,
providing really credible information, but also storytelling and so in

(45:20):
the creation of a brand and the creation of a category.
And then you know, as a fundamental marketing strategy, as
a founder, whichever route you're taking to grow your business,
grow your market, grow your niche, or grow your own brand,
the role of storytelling. And you've mastered that, you have
a number of best selling books, and you're coming out
with more all the time. So I wonder if you
could talk to us about the power of storytelling as

(45:42):
it relates to the entrepreneurial journey.

Speaker 1 (45:45):
Storytelling is a learned skill. And I mentioned earlier I
had Aspergers syndrome. I did not have strong social skills,
but I had strong systems understanding and pattern recognition skills,
as is common with that kind of neurological dysfunction. And
I know, I just pissed off half the Asperger of

(46:05):
people by calling a dysfunction, But guys, you can have
an Asperger's brain that works much better than it does.
So anyway from that, I didn't understand how to connect
energetically or empathetically with the people I was talking to,
and I would just assume they were like me. All
humans are wired to assume others are like you. They
are not. We all have different brains, different patterns, different understandings,

(46:28):
different traumas, different friction points. So two things happen. I
learned early on in my tech career that the stupid
solution often wins because it has good marketing. So if
you're an inventor and you have the best widget and
it's so good that you protect it so much, or
you do such a shitty job or selling it that

(46:50):
no one ever uses your invention, there's a word for that.
It's called a failed inventor. So if you have something
that is precious and is worth the world's attention, you
have to learn how to tell people. So I decided
I'm going to have to learn how to do public speaking,
which was really unnerving for me. Not only was iobese,

(47:14):
I did not have the right social skills. And I
gave my first talk in front of fifteen hundred people
at something called the Web guildt this is for we did.
The word webmaster hadn't been made up yet, so this
was the first probably thousand webmasters in Silicon Valley. I
don't remember anything I said because I was terrified the
whole time. But they laughed and now it was successful.
Asked me to speak some more, and I'm like, I

(47:34):
have no skills here. So I ended up running the
web in Internet Engineering program at the univers California, Santa
Cruz in Silicon Valley for five years, three nights a week,
I would teach a room full of fifty engineers how
to build the Internet. If you spend enough time in
front of an audience, you learn how to do it.
After my first class, a mentor Sammy Damison day, you're

(47:57):
the worst teacher I've ever seen. My God like or
have to fire you. Then it taught me how to
do it, and I practiced, And then I went through
coaching programs, multiple coaching programs that took three days, five
days a week to learn how to do this. And
then I did the Heart Math Institute stuff that I
discovered through longevity practices. Then I did the energetic things
I have done, all the esoteric practices in caves, all

(48:21):
that stuff to learn how to connect with the signals
below the neck so that when I walk on stage,
even what I'm doing right now, I have aligned my well,
there's multiple levels here, but I'm aligning the r rave
variability on what people call the heart chakra from that
kind of thing, or you call it my vagual response

(48:42):
and my autonomic nervous system. I've aligned those for full presence.
And there's some other things that I do when I
go on stage that makes my energy feel very large.
I've spent six months of my life with electrodes on
my head doing advanced meditation. It's a subject of heavily
meditated from forty years of theen my neuroscience thing for entrepreneurs.
That means that the amplitude, the height of the waves

(49:06):
of my brain power, even from the things that are
coming off from other magnetic fields in my body, they
are very strong and very orderly. And that means with
focus intention, I can stand backstage or on stage and
I can literally radiate power and I can let people
feel what I am doing. And the biggest problem that

(49:28):
no one teaches is called congruents. And when someone is congruent,
their outer state matches their inner state, and you don't
think about congruence in another person. You feel congruence in
another person. And I learned through trial error and lots
of failure, that when I'm delivering a story, when I'm

(49:50):
teaching about a technology, when I'm explaining how mitochondria are
the foundations for consciousness or whatever I'm teaching, I am
simultaneously using wor words and I'm simultaneously using all of
my energetic biology to do that. And that means that
when people are sitting there, their nervous systems will relax,
and if I choose exactly the right words, you can

(50:14):
choose language that will enter the consciousness without a splash,
the way you see an Olympic diver they dive in.
How do they do that? The water just parted for them.
When you are conscious in your use of language, I
mean absurdly conscious, the words go in and then they
don't trigger any alert system in the person's biology. They

(50:36):
don't trigger any traumas or any friction or any But
I don't understand. I remember when you know, miss Johnson
in third grade yelled at me none of that. So
they go, oh, that feels like he really believes it,
and it looks like he's pretty trustworthy because he's pretty
smart and all that kind of stuff or whatever their
story is, then they can really focus and be present.

(50:57):
And if people have worked on stage with work on
their interstate instead of just going, we'll walk with your
hips out and you know, strut like a you know whatever,
and you know, own the stage and shout and use
the strong voice and be an alpha male. Okay, if
you're want to be in alpha male and that's your thing,
you better be in alpha male all the way down
to your root chakra and you better radiate that. From

(51:19):
every report. Frankly, alpha males aren't even real. You can't
do that. The guy who did all the research on
alpha male's and wolf packs, he made a mistake. It
turns out the real leader of the pack is the
one who's in the back watching out for all the
other ones. And it's the young, dom aggressive ones that
are in the front. And you spend his entire career

(51:40):
trying to fix the alpha male myth that he created,
So like you can try to radiate I'm the alpha
male leader. Even if you hold that energy, it won't
land around with people because they know you're not the
one in charge. You just think you are right, So
you got to really do the personal development work so
that you're internal and extra meta. After you do that,

(52:01):
the reason you can tell a story is because the
story is real, and it is authentically real, from the
lowest level of the vibration of the atoms in your
body all the way up to all the different biophotons
and magnetic fields that come off of you, and it
is entirely congruate. And if you can do that, people
are going to pay attention and they're going to know

(52:22):
that it is real, and they're going to know that
you are real, and they are going to trust. And
the question that makes me so frustrated when I'm coaching
these entrepreneurs at my business conference, like, well, how do
I signal authenticity? Like you're hold up a sign says
I'm authentic. You can't. We don't think about authenticity. You

(52:42):
can con people, but authenticity people feel it in their bones, right,
And so you know, I hope I'm not falling into
my own ego when I talk about this. It was
hard to learn these techniques and hard to learn how
to even know what's going on inside my body because
I don't think I grew up without the way most
people do. I did a careful study of this with
thousands of hours and a lot of tech because I

(53:04):
had to fix the way my eyes moved, I had
to fix the way I hear sounds. I had to
fix all my tongue moved. I'm still learning how to
crawl properly the way most people do when they're eighteen
months old, because my HeartWare didn't come with those settings.
And it's been a blessing. It's also been a huge
amount of costs and you know, pain and all the
other stuff. But if you just understand your interstate is

(53:25):
what tells your story. The outer stage is just the frosting,
and you better be good at frosting gigs. But that's easy.

Speaker 2 (53:30):
Awhere, Well, I love that. So you made it clear
that soytelling and public speaking are learnable skills. It sounds
like you did the conventional things of what you could
learn about how to do those things correctly, but you've
also integrated it with biohacking and with the meditative work
and really learning how to navigate your own body and
mind thoroughly, and you've integrated all that into being able

(53:52):
to not only put the words together in the right way,
but have the powerful presence that's deeply authentic in your
bult and connected genuinely with the story, and that's going
to have an impact on people.

Speaker 1 (54:03):
There's another aspect to this that I think entrepreneurs would
really benefit from, and it has to do with making
business decisions and with public speaking and with storytelling. And
it's that when a little, tiny intuitive thought enters your mind,
it enters very quickly, and if you're like most humans,

(54:25):
immediately you'll have an emotional response that says, don't pay
attention to that. Instead, pay attention to your brain. And
then you think about it a bunch and then you
just throw away that first little thought because it was
smaller than the emotion and smaller than the thought. If
you learn to calm the ego, which is that emotional

(54:46):
voice that tells you not to listen to your intuition,
you already know the answer to so many things you
don't think you know the answer to. So when you're
on stage and your mind goes blank because you're afraid,
the first thing you're going to do is start talking,
unless you're trained, and you realize the longer you wait,

(55:06):
the more people lean in to hear what you're going
to say, and then you can wait as long as
you want in order to find the next word, and
it just makes you look smart. So that's like step one.
But step two is most people will start ruminating right
there and says want to go, say I gotta make
up some stuff, Okay, wondering if I got to fill
in the spots. Okay, wondering I say next, and all

(55:26):
that inner dialogue is going. And if you can learn
to shut up the inner dialogue when you're quiet, the
right thing to say next will just appear. But it's
that first intuition, and you're not allowed to take the
ego and then the brain and then to ruin that.
So you could tell me, Dave, you're giving a talk
on X topic twenty minutes from now in front of

(55:47):
ten thousand people, and I would show up, and you
could measure my highway variability and I would be on
it and I would know what to say, and it
would be a eight out of ten talk without any
preparation other than going to chat GPT making sure that
line agreed with what I thought of. That's because I
am going to in real time channel the stuff from
my unconscious or from the collective conscious, or from God,

(56:10):
whatever you think people channel from. I don't know, I
have my thoughts, but we're all capable of that. You
just have to have a state of peace, which means
a state of not being afraid. And this is why
fro entrepreneurs, you work on your fear reaction. You work
on fear reaction over and over. And when that happens
in the boardroom, intuitional cut and then in the products
creation type you're oh wow, I never thow of that,

(56:31):
and they just flow. But the more energy goes into fear,
more energy goes into hunger and thinking about tacos, and
the more energy goes into distractions, the less energy goes
into creation. And if you're going to be a solid leader,
a solid storyteller, solid entrepreneur who holds the line when
the business is at risk when an employee misbehaves, if

(56:53):
you're going to do that, and you better learn how
to biohack, and you better learn the techniques of self regulation.
And then number one technique of self regulation isn't meditation.
I'll just make it happy. But the number one technique
is have more energy. Because you use energy to self
regulate so step one, add a lot more energy, make

(57:14):
your mitochondria bigger and stronger. This is why so many
execs use my techniques because if I have more energy,
I can handle more. And then the second step is
going and learn how to regulate the system. And if
you do that, like, oh my god, I double the
amount of energy I have, so I perform it. Now
I don't have energy to go in and reprogram myself.
So I put less of this abundant energy into fear,

(57:37):
and less into hunger, and less into things like less
and I put them into things that charge me and
build my company, build my mission, build my family. And
that's why in the arc of my books, my first
book was a fertility book, because having a really healthy
mom is a great advantage in life. So let's get
down off the way. Then how do I etop my
energy back it's a bulletproof diet. Then how do I

(57:57):
make my brain work strong? Right? And then how do
I make myself live much longer? Because anyone who starts
biohacking wants longevity, and I've been in longevity for twenty
five years. But then how do I become happy? How
does that work? And that's what heavily meditates about how
do you build those skills are the hardest ones, the

(58:18):
ones I've spent the most time on, and all the
time I'm learning hardcore biohacking and neuroscience and measuring heart
rate and looking at all the variables and measuring myself
in absurd ways. At the same time, I was spending
time with spiritual gurus learning the other side of things.
And that's what heavily meditated is what are the steps

(58:40):
in order you can do to not be triggered by anything?
And if you do that, you'll tell the world's best story.
You'll build a company. And when something comes along that
feels like a threat, you do not lose sleep, and
you do not lose your mission, and you do not
lose your mind. And you know, I like to think
I'm there. Maybe something can unsee me. But even if
it does, I have people around me who know this

(59:02):
about me, who are part of my spiritual team as
well as my work team, and they will call me
if I'm acting out of integrity from what I just said.
And if you build that in your culture, in your
family and your spouse and your religious support or your
spiritual support and your best friends in your community. It
makes it a lot easier to hold the line. And

(59:22):
that's why I build my life the way I do today.

Speaker 2 (59:25):
You just reminded me earlier when you were sharing your
story and the different pieces of wisdom that came out
around that adventure capital and agreements and lawyers and all
the rest of it. One that I did name was culture.
And you mentioned culture back then and the importance and
you quickly remove people from the culture that had that
contempt with the culture, the contempt with the company or
leadership for yourself, and so you just reinforce the importance

(59:48):
of culture again. And you also answered what my next
question was already, because my next question was, you know,
four founders, the relevance and the importance of embracing biohacking
at some level. So I think your successful founder CEO
today is going to embrace biohacking at some level to
optimize their own energy. They're going to optimize They're going

(01:00:08):
to embrace some form of meditation and self regulation and
body mind work to be able to self regulate it at
an optimal level. And we have a lot of research
going way back, really, even Daniel Goldman's work around emotional
intelligence that what really separates great leaders from ordinary leaders
is emotional intelligence. Well, how do you develop more emotional intelligence?
You developed more emotional intelligent by having the energy to

(01:00:30):
do so by being embodied. By self regulating, we's reach
our capacity for empathic connection and co effective coregulation and
all the rest of it.

Speaker 1 (01:00:38):
No, you've got a question for me. But you said
a word that entrepreneurs don't use. It's coregulation. This is
a word that child development experts will use if they're
teaching and parenting, and it's a word that a few
therapists might use if they're really on the ball. And
having interviewed Stan Groff, who was the founder of that

(01:00:59):
transpersonal side ecology movement and done work with heart math
and all, the idea of coregulation is that if your
nervous system is so regulated and so powerful, you have
to have both. You have to power and order. When
someone is losing their mind or they're losing their emotions,
they're being reactive. Just by holding that energy, you can

(01:01:22):
cause their body to line up with yours and they
will come out of that state. And the unspoken truth
is that if you are the top woman in your
company and you're a female entrepreneur, everyone with mommy issues
will map them onto you. And if you're the top
male in your company, everyone with daddy issues will map
them onto you. And to make it even more complex,

(01:01:45):
people who are really good employees and are normally totally fine,
something will happen in their personal life or they get
a flu or whatever, and they're at a state of
low energy, so their regulatory systems fail and they start
acting like children the way they acted with their dad.
And what happened to this person? Are they crazy? Now?
They lost their regulation state. And if you have that

(01:02:06):
strong thing and you can just do it, even though
they said might have pissed you off, you go to
work through that. If you can just do that, there's
a great chance that they will coregulate and the culture
will support that and it will bring them back in
instead of them spinning off and going nuts. And if
someone does spin off and just at gout of integrity,
it's the culture's job to catch them and expel them.

(01:02:27):
It's like a group of fish. They're all swimming in
a direction, and if one fish kind of goes a
little bit sideways fail them, one's help it back in
right And if one fish just darts off sidewright's, well,
guess that one's not in the school anymore, right, And
so that's a healthy culture when it brings gently, it
brings people back into all moving towards the goal, and
it allows people who are just tangential to get the

(01:02:49):
heck out and to do it quickly. And if a
shark eats those ones, that's okay.

Speaker 2 (01:02:54):
You can really just define really healthy culture as kind
of a self sustaining collective regulation and it's a very
powerful force. Is really what we teach at Hard Mind
and what we're hoping to bring into the entrepreneur world
is you know, experiences that develop our own confidence in
our own innate goodness and the unate goodness of others,
which doesn't mean they're always behaving in that way, but

(01:03:15):
on some ultimate level. And then neuroscience mindfulnance trauma informed
approaches to self regulation and coregulation. And that's what we
hope to bring to the world to make it a
better place. And also I think it's really important to
get this into the world of entrepreneurship and business. It's
really how we can take the journey you've taken and
that all are aspiring and AlterNet existing entrepreneurs are taking

(01:03:38):
and end up also succeeding in life and as well
as in business.

Speaker 1 (01:03:41):
So I'll say you've attained great wisdom in your life.
You know, we've talked on my show. We've talked multiple times,
and you do very high level meditated and energetic practice
that comes from decades of experience in it. And the
fact you're bringing this into business. I think this is
the time that the world needs it. And there's been

(01:04:03):
so much locked up knowledge in our different lineages. You
do shamanic training with one try and they teach you
this technique, and you go to a part of China
and they'll teach you this technique, and you go a
different part of China, like, oh no, this is five elements.
It's totally different. And you go to and when you
put enough this together, you realize there's all these capabilities
that humans have, and most of them we don't even

(01:04:27):
know about because we haven't shared because they didn't have
the ability to trademark that or even the ability to
file a patent on your meditation technique, so we would
just hide them. And now they're coming out. And the
reason they're coming out is if you're going to run
a business in today's world, you need those techniques. And
for humans to get the next level as a culture,

(01:04:48):
as a society, as a species, it's time for an upgrade.
And the upgrade is energetic, it's cultural, and it's biological,
and that we have to have well functioning bodies, which
means we're going to clean up the environ We're going
to learn how to eat, and if we do all
those things, I think we can make this an incredible
golden age of just like happy people doing things that

(01:05:09):
they're meant to do. And if we don't understand that
that's how it works, our businesses will fail. So kudos
to you for all the deep work you've done on
understanding all of the different unusual knowledge and taking the
risk to brain into business, which is not always easy.

Speaker 2 (01:05:25):
Thank you very much for that, and you Shedley been
an exemplar in that area. We're kind of near the
end of our time, unfortunately, because there's so many different
rabbit holes. I'd love to go down with you and further.
And this has been incredibly illuminating, Dave. Where can people
find out more about your work? And I also think
there was a specific gift you wanted to offer to audience.

Speaker 1 (01:05:43):
Yeah, my new book is called Heavily Meditated, and this
is the book for entrepreneurs who want to learn the
things we just talked about, because there's a very specific
set of steps you do to turn off triggers that
free up so much energy. And this is something that
has cost me more than ten million dollars to develop
with computers and electrics on the AD and I want

(01:06:07):
to teach that to you, so I will give you
a free of mini course. It is written down in
the book and I teach all the background stuff you need,
so you should get Heavily Meditated. But in the meantime,
if you go to Daveasprey dot com slash heavily Meditated.

Speaker 2 (01:06:23):
All gap wonderful, anywhere else people should be going to
find out more about your work. I know, you know,
I meant to talk about the whole world of content
marketing before, which you've been an exemplar of. You learn
how to tell stories, and of course you have a
podcast and you have a blog, you have bestsellers books,
so you're getting out there as a thought leader through that.
And where is there one website where people can kind

(01:06:44):
of then find out all about your work.

Speaker 1 (01:06:46):
If you go to Dave Asprey dot com, there's three
thousand blog posts, there's twelve hundred and fifty interviews with masters,
all free, eight or nine books, and a whole bunch
of other stuff that's there for you. All the different
brands I work with that are there, that make things
you can't bindy else because they're worth it, and that's
what I do.

Speaker 2 (01:07:04):
Wonderful.

Speaker 1 (01:07:05):
Thank you so.

Speaker 2 (01:07:06):
Much, Dave Aspy, renowned as the creator and father of
the biohacking movement and functioning Coffee and so forth. So
thank you so much for my pleasure. Thank you for
joining me on the Radical Responsibility Podcast. Remember, real change
happens when we commit to our growth, face our challenges
with compassion, and stay open to transformation. If you found

(01:07:26):
this episode helpful, I encourage you to subscribe and help
us spread the message of healing and personal empowerment. Stay grounded,
stay present, and stay true to you.

Speaker 1 (01:07:35):
Take care

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Dave Asprey | Biohacking Your Way to Entrepreneurial Resilience

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Dave Asprey | Biohacking Your Way to Entrepreneurial Resilience