Dave Asprey - Bulletproof

Full transcript: Dave Asprey on London Real

4:28 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Dave Asprey, founder of the Bulletproof Executive, creator of Bulletproof Coffee, host of the number one health podcast Bulletproof Radio, author of the New York Times bestselling book The Bulletproof Diet. Dave, you provide information and techniques for taking control of your biochemistry, your body, and your mind so you can perform better without burning out, getting sick, or allowing stress to control your decisions.

5:09 You’ve recently opened the first Bulletproof coffee shop in Santa Monica, California, and Bulletproof Films released the company’s first documentary film, Moldy, in June. You’ve also just raised nine million dollars in funding from Trinity Ventures. Welcome back to London Real. You know, that was the most amazing introduction, and it’s all because of my first appearance on London Real, and that was two and a half years ago. You know, I was looking at that footage.

5:34 Um, so much has changed. You know, I think we were still splitting the screen back then. Um, I just think about what you’ve done with Bulletproof since then, and I was just wondering if you could fill us in on the last, you know, two and a quarter years of what’s been happening with you, because like so many things have changed. You know, the first retail store. Every, every time I look on TV, there’s a new Hollywood actor talking about drinking your coffee.

5:56 I mentioned Bulletproof because I serve it here to everybody, and people have heard of it before, like, oh yeah, I know that. And so you know, and I know this stuff doesn’t happen by accident. And so, uh, I was wondering if you could fill this in, the last couple years. I can, and I will. First, I got to say, you put me up with this ghetto conference table when I was here last time.

6:15 Like, over there, look at this set. Like, this is legit. I, I walked in the door, I was like, I’m in the wrong place. So this is, congratulations, that this is an amazing upgrade that you’ve done as well. Thank you, thank you.

6:26 It’s, it’s a great for me to see as a marker when I have someone back on after a while, and I guess things have changed a lot, and yeah, you’ve upped your game immeasurably. Yeah, we try to get a little bit better every week, you know, and that’s probably kind of what you, what you do as well. And so, um, thanks. No, I appreciate, I appreciate noticing that. You got it.

6:44 The bulldog, I love it. Yeah, Winston’s a nice touch. So what’s happened in the last two and a half years? I, I had a chance to be out here, just kind of worked out. I was in town, and I was just getting to know your show, and I thought, this is great, and I’ve been doing the same things that I was doing back then, which is putting out the things that I’ve learned in the course of hacking my own biology.

7:08 You know, losing 100 pounds and turning my brain back on, and 10 years of running an anti-aging research group, the Silicon Valley Health Institute, and there’s so many nuggets in there that I realize the really difficult thing for people is that the knowledge is overwhelming, and it increases every day almost exponentially, because we have more researchers coming online, more research coming online, and I have a pretty good idea of what works. We have a pretty good idea of why it works, but there’s a lot more coming that may change or modify or change direction slightly, but directionally I’m pretty sure we’ve got a good understanding here. What is missing, though, is how do you communicate that level of complexity effectively?

7:49 And fortunately for me, my long time in Silicon Valley, where you’re taking these weird, esoteric network stack diagrams and turning them into something you can explain to a business person, it was just relentless training how to take ephemeral, ephemeral, complex, weird things and make them digestible. So I applied that same logic to all these different nuggets of wisdom that people can use right now, whether or not they’re old or they’re sick or whatever. Like, this is about everyone performing better.

8:18 It’s not just for getting well. And I put all of my attention and effort into communicating them briefly and effectively, so that it enters people’s consciousness and it becomes actionable. And the last 25 years has been that. So the Bulletproof Diet is around 100,000 words. It sold about 100,000 copies.

8:40 There’s a quarter million words on the website where you could pick up most of this information, but the amount of effort that goes into organizing and quantifying and referencing and just making it so you can digest everything, it’s the old Mark Twain quote: if I’d have had more time, I’d have written less. So this is an attempt to boil it down. The road map for the Bulletproof Diet, which is eating for cognitive function and resilience, not to mention your pants will probably fit better.

9:05 That’s a one-page infographic that’s free on the website, and a lot of what I do is driven by a sense of responsibility. No one did this for me when I was 20 years old, and I had arthritis in my knees and I weighed 300 pounds, and my brain was foggy. I had emotional irregularity and Lyme disease and chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia and toxic mold exposure. I had all these things, and it sucked, and I was like using all of my willpower to put one foot in front of the other, and I was still succeeding as an entrepreneur, but it was not.

9:38 It was not pleasant. It was a slog. And I’ve since learned that there’s a way to have a sense of effortlessness where it feels easy, and it’s joyful, and it’s fun. And I never had that when I was younger. It was always going to be unpleasant work, but I was going to do it anyway.

9:55 I just put my head down and pushed through it, and I realized that I hadn’t optimized the environment for me, and I hadn’t optimized myself for my environment. So the entire story of Bulletproof has been, if someone had given me this knowledge in a way I could absorb it when I was 15 or 20 or 25, it would have absolutely changed the trajectory and quality of my life. So when I started this blog, the point was, like, if I can help five people avoid what I went through, and I’m fortunate I had three hundred thousand dollars to spend on hacking myself.

10:26 A lot of people just, they get sick and they lead mediocre lives and they’re never what they could be, and I was very much at risk of that happening. I bought disability insurance when I was 26 years old, because I could feel that I just didn’t know if I was gonna have enough to bring it the next day, much less to keep bringing it for year after year. And it’s very hard for me to picture you at 300 pounds, and you know, with knee surgeries, and just it’s very hard for me to picture you performing sub-optimally.

10:50 I, I was always smart. It is, I’m, I have a smart family. My grandparents met on the Manhattan Project. So it’s not that I was, I was, you know, cognitively unable to do things. I probably did lose at least 15 IQ points from all the toxic exposures and all of that, and gain them back from getting rid of the toxins.

11:10 So it’s shocking what you can do. You’re still above average if your IQ is 118, and you lose 59q points, you’re still above average, but you’re not what you could have been. And that kind of perspective for me was scary, and I just figured if I could intervene in five people’s lives that Bulletproof would have been a smashing success. Because I was a vice president at a big internet security company. I was VP of basically evangelism at the company.

11:37 I was responsible for getting this large company’s message out around internet security and cloud security. So I didn’t need to start Bulletproof. In fact, it was one of the riskiest things I did, was quitting my very successful career. I could have been a CEO of a venture-backed cloud computing startup without a lot of work, and instead I basically, my family’s future, you know, I started to start a coffee company, and it was just, though, out of a desire to take something that is so profoundly important.

12:07 Like, there are things that are kryptonite for everyone that are around us. We don’t need to fear them. We need to know what they are, and we need to take reasonable steps to minimize these in our environment. And yeah, mold toxins in the environment are such a big unknown source of kryptonite, that I did a documentary about that, and that’s because water-damaged buildings, for a quarter of us, 28 of us, they make, they make you weak, and one of the first things they do is they take away your ability to regulate your emotions.

12:35 Well, they make you tired and cranky and [expletive] and nasty, and they make it mean to your kids and to your co-workers. And I’ve experienced that. And well, if one in four of us is really messed up by this, the rest of us don’t feel it that way, but it increases our risk of cancer and heart disease and a bunch of other things, and it’s virtually invisible. It’s just unknown by the medical profession. So I said, all right, that’s worthy of having attention.

12:58 So I spent a couple years and a lot of out-of-pocket money making a documentary, but now there is no physician out there who can say this is not real, and there is no family member of someone who has these mold talks and sensitivities who can sit down and say, you know, you’re crazy. No, this isn’t about crazy. This is about different people experiencing the world in different ways. And so many of us don’t even know this is happening, or a lot of us haven’t even experienced kind of optimal performance.

13:26 I never had. I, until I was 23, I thought it was supposed to hurt when you walked. It always hurt my feet are flat. They’re less flat now because I’ve been fixing that, but when I got orthotics when I was in my early 20s, I was like, oh my god, I walked across campus and it didn’t hurt. It was such a revelation.

13:43 I was just looking around like, how could I not have known this? But it turns out most people believe that they’re supposed to be struggling. In fact, you’re a good person if you struggle, and that is not the case. You can work really hard and you can succeed or you can fail, but you don’t have to struggle. And if there are things in your world that make you work harder than you should, or then you need to, to get something done, you could address those with the sense of struggle, or you could say, I’m going to do it anyway, but you’re actually wasting the gift of your life.

14:15 You’re here to do something. So if you spend that energy that you could have spent playing with your kids, to help them just learn what it’s like to play with their parents, or just trying really hard and being too tired to do something, you owe it to yourself. You owe it to the people around you to fully live. And I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let something in the environment around me affect me that way, and I’m not gonna let what I put in my mouth affect me that way.

14:38 I’m gonna choose foods that make me feel stable and focused and good all the time, and I’m not going to walk around being 300 pounds. And the thing is, what works matters, because when I weighed this much, this is a great secret, Brian. Fat people, we know we’re fat, and it’s not that we’re not trying. I actually think obese people are some of the highest willpower people out there. They are willpower athletes, because they run a marathon every single day, and the marathon is something like this.

15:11 Their body is deranged. Their metabolism is broken, and someone puts a muffin in front of them, and then they sit there and they say, I’m not going to eat the muffin, because I don’t want to be fat, and the muffin yells at them, and there’s an internal dialogue, all willpower, every day, until the willpower is gone. It runs out. We’ve proven it runs out. Like, no one is Superman like that.

15:29 Eventually you can be worn down, no matter how resilient you are. No matter how tough you are, you can be worn down, and the muffin will do that to you, and then you eat half the muffin, and then you think you’re a bad person, and you’re weak, and you failed. I lived this. I believe those things. God, I ate the ice cream.

15:45 I told myself I wouldn’t. You know, this week I was going to be really good. I was going to lose five pounds. You know what? It wasn’t about me.

15:52 It wasn’t about the willpower. It was about understanding how to do it right, and to go from there to where I am now, where I just don’t really care about food. If I’m not gonna eat a meal that makes me strong, I’ll just skip the meal, and I’m perfectly resilient and good to go, and I can do that several times in a row before I’m like, alright, no, I’m actually really hungry. I’m not gonna crash. I’m not hangry.

16:11 I’m not hypoglycemic, but I’m, I’m hungry. Genuinely hungry. I’m not starving. I’m not craving. I never knew there was a difference between craving and hunger.

16:21 There is one. And so to teach these things, that’s what Bulletproof has been about. And to show them. People say, oh, I don’t like Bulletproof coffee. I talked to a reporter the other day here in London, she said, no one in the office liked it, and I said, wait, that’s not possible.

16:34 That no one in an office would like Bulletproof coffee? I’ve had hundreds of thousands of people try this, and I said, did you blend it? She was no. Okay, so there was an oil and butter scum on top of some black coffee, and they were drinking that going, it’s gross. So if you do it right, generally people like that, and they experience the change in their mental state that comes from having glucose and ketones in the brain at the same time.

16:57 So it’s, it’s a noticeable effect, and for a few people it’s not, but for the vast majority it works. So, yeah, I, I do that. And the coffee shop in Santa Monica is there because for every person who hears this and downloads the Bulletproof coffee recipe and picks up some blueberry coffee beans, all of those people, there’s probably nine more. For every one of those, there’s nine more who are saying, I’m probably not going to do that. It sounds weird, but they’ll stop by the Bulletproof coffee shop, and then they’ll give it a try, and it’ll change the quality of their day, and they’ll feel what it’s like to be at this level where they haven’t been in a while, and that inspires them to do other things in their life that have nothing to do with me, so they can stay at that level.

17:33 This is a way of up-leveling what all of us are doing, like, all over the world. And when people do the things that I talk about on the Bulletproof website, like order grass-fed beef and grass-fed butter, they’re actually participating in ecosystem restoration. You can have rangeland with grass-fed cattle that does not need irrigation, that has a healthy soil biology, that has species diversity, or you could eat your, you know, endless rows of vegan kale that are a monocrop that may or may not be damaging the soil, depending on whether it’s organic and how well the soil is maintained, but certainly don’t support lots of bunnies living there and all the other things that happen in a healthy ecosystem.

18:12 So when you look at it from, you know, rangeland versus farmland, and you look at how important cattle are for our ecosystem, you realize, okay, those decisions you make aren’t just about being nice to animals. They’re about being nice to the whole earth, and that the earth requires big animals and little animals and vegetables, and it requires lots of variety there. Not just rows and rows of tofu or soy or corn or any of the other healthy fad vegetables, right?

18:40 So you’re introducing, yeah, some other concepts of what that world looks like. One thing I’ve always noticed about you was the information you talk about, the information that you condensed into The Bulletproof Diet book, but your company has always been about information. I mean, your blogs, like you said, 250,000 words. I often say to people Bulletproof is really a media company, and then you happen to also sell coffee, but you’re constantly cranking out information to people, whether it’s your podcast, multi-documentary, countless articles.

19:08 I mean, it’s really more about education. Yeah, I, I fully expect to change the world. That’s what I’m working to do. And there’s two sides to changing the world. One of them is changing supply, and this is what farmers do, what big industrial companies do, food producers.

19:29 And the other one is changing demand. And one thing you could do is you could yell a lot and protest and make laws to try and change supply, and we know what happens there. The suppliers basically just buy the governments and then change the rules for whatever they want, and that’s what large companies do. Well, you could also change demand. And when you raise awareness that, you know, there’s crap in that can of soup, and you just shouldn’t eat that, and that fast food isn’t useful, when you can do that, and I’ve helped.

19:55 There’s countless other health influencers online who are doing the same thing, but it reaches a level of consciousness and awareness where the big companies have to listen. And at the same time, I work with CEOs, very rarely, but I do this, and I bring them through my 40 years of Zen neurofeedback coaching and provide very targeted stuff where they can see, oh, you know, that chemical that might be in something I make actually makes me weak, so I want to take it out. Now they have a personal interest there.

20:22 It’s a way of tweaking this, the very top of the supply, the investors who are putting money in companies, so that they see the value for them and their families. But more importantly, in the U.S., we’ve succeeded in the last 18 months, the number of people who just refuse to buy processed food with lots of chemicals in it has just about tanked a lot of the processed food manufacturers. They’re panicking. So even stalwart companies like Campbell’s soup, which have all sorts of chemicals in their soup, they’ve realized, well, we’re going to have to reformulate this.

20:54 I thought this would take 20 years. McDonald’s had a double-digit drop, and people just stopped going, because they realized it’s not food. One of the big fast food chains in the US now has grass-fed beef. Granite is probably genetically modified grass, but it’s a step in the right direction, right? So this is about, Bulletproof is about raising awareness for these things so that people have a self-interest.

21:16 This is what you can do right now for you, and the byproduct of doing that is, it makes the world around you support you better. It’s different than a full environmental message. You do it for Mother Earth, and I’m, I’m fine with that too. I support that, but people throughout history have done things for themselves first. And when your basic needs are met, when you feel good, when you’re fed and clothed and housed and you feel safe, then you do things for the world.

21:40 And if you’re an enlightened soul, you might start doing things for other people before your own needs are met, which helps you meet your needs, and service to others is a core human need that I believe in that Maslow doesn’t have in his hierarchy. It’s that sense of community. But however you want to graph all that stuff out, what it comes down to is people want to help themselves. So let’s find a way to help you, to let you help yourself, that also achieves these other goals that provide dividends to you as well.

22:08 So when you eat the grass-fed beef, maybe you’re participating in less animal cruelty, if you care about that, which I believe is a good idea. I certainly care about that, but maybe you’re also making the soil healthier, right? And 20 years from now, is your one action going to have changed much? Probably not. But when people see you doing that, and you start becoming an influencer, because everyone says, why are you only eating grass-fed meat?

22:30 Well, okay, that creates a movement. It creates a sea change, and that does change global warming. It changes the quality of our food. It changes the quality of our kids, and that’s a big thing for me. If there were three things to someone listening who doesn’t know anything about Bulletproof, doesn’t even know what biohacking means, never heard of the three letters MCT, what are, like, the three things that right away you would just introduce them to make them start thinking about things?

22:53 One of them probably is molds, but, like, it, are there a few others that just would be good for them just to start thinking about? Let’s talk about what biohacking is. And this is a term that I helped to popularize. I have one of the biohack, biohack something or another. Do you like that word now, or have you moved past that one?

23:10 I like that word, and I didn’t trademark the word. I could have. Um, in the early days of that, and I didn’t do it on purpose, because I wanted a name for what it is that I do, that I don’t own, because it’s a community name. And then there’s now hundreds and hundreds of self-identified blog biohacker bloggers, and there’s tens of thousands of people who identify as biohackers. There’s physicians who call themselves biohackers.

23:32 The Bulletproof Conference in, in Pasadena, it’s in its third year, coming up, and we’re expecting about a thousand people to come to a conference on biohacking. And biohacking is the art and the science of changing the environment around you so that you have more control of your own biology, and the environment outside you and inside you is entirely hackable. You can change genetic expression. You can change hormonal expression. And it’s not about health, it’s about control.

24:03 And if you understand that you have control, you can apply the control to say, you know what, I want to be a bodybuilder. I don’t care if I die at 50. I’m going to be the biggest, most bulbous balloon-animal-looking guy I possibly can be. I just had that guy here last week, Dorian Yates, and I respect the hell out of that, like the whole bodybuilding profession. Like, these guys said, this is what I want, and this is what I’m gonna do, and I own my biology, and I am in control.

24:25 You know, I actually want to live to like 180, or thereabouts, maybe a little bit longer, and I, I’m not a bodybuilder, but I want to have enough muscle mass to be healthy and and optimal, right? And I don’t want to spend a lot of time doing it. So I exercise, but I don’t exercise at that level, even though I have great respect for, for that. Likewise, I’m not an endurance athlete, but I have great respect for those who say, you know, I’m going to control my biology.

24:47 I’m going to be able to run 100 miles straight. Like, wow, badass, that’s amazing. So what do I want to do? I want to lead a company that’s growing rapidly, helping a lot of people, and I want to be a kick-ass father and a good friend to my friends and a member of the community. Like, that’s what does it for me.

25:04 I want to create, and I, I want to share the things that I learned, and I have some big missions. There are some medical conditions I think we can measurably change just by changing people’s lifestyle practices. So in fact, most of the chronic illnesses that we have today in the world, the chronic Western diseases, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, autism, all of those are lifestyle diseases. And there’s no greater active service that I know of than to help people know, well, these are the things that are likely to reduce your incidence of these.

25:37 Some of them we can prove without a doubt, some of them we just were pretty sure, but directionally it’s a lot better than, you know, pizza, beer and cigarettes. And, and so let’s, let’s put the information out there and let people decide. Do you want to move a little bit in the right direction? Don’t move a lot in the right direction, or do you want to be blind to what direction is even useful? And the blindness thing didn’t work for me.

25:57 And, and, and some of the use of control in your environment, some of that is knowing when, where molds are. Some of that is if you’re consuming the wrong, the wrong pieces, if you’re consuming the sugars or the gluten pieces. Or is it not that simple? Well, that’s part of it, and here’s a prime example. When I was creating Bulletproof coffee, I went to Tibet, and I drank yak butter tea at very high altitude, 18,000 feet, and I noticed in this awareness, this constant why, like, just the question why all the time.

26:27 I noticed I feel amazing. I should feel like I’m dying at 18,000 feet, because you basically are. Like, it’s not pleasant to be at high altitude like that, and this stuff rejuvenated me, and it stuck with me so much that when I came back to the States, I said, I’m going to try and make this at home, and I made horrible butter thing. It was gross, and I went through all the butter variables. I tried 25 different kinds of butter, and realized a couple of these have something special, and that was using my sense.

26:52 Like, I felt different when I tried them, and I looked at different teas, all kinds of 100-year-old, 850-year-old bunch of expensive aged teas that were like hundreds of dollars an ounce. You didn’t know what it was. It could have been the tea, or it could have been the, yeah, yeah, was it that poor tea that’s actually the traditionally used in Tibet. And so I tried all sorts of variables, and I tried coffee, and I had given up on coffee for almost five years.

27:17 Because when I drank it, it made me cranky and angry, and I realized I had one cup of coffee and I felt great, and then next, I had a cup of coffee and I felt like a zombie. Like, wait, it wasn’t the coffee, it was something else, because how is it one day it was okay? And I really dug in on the research on mold and coffee, and I realized that the US doesn’t have legal standards for the amount of mold that’s allowed in coffee, but the rest of the world mostly does.

27:40 Even China has standards. The EU has standards. Japan has standards, so the coffee that’s illegal to sell in those countries gets shipped to the U.S., and when I drink that coffee, I don’t feel good, and I thought, I’m so tired of buying coffee that makes me feel crappy, and every now and then I get good coffee and I treasure it. So my first product was, I thought maybe 100 people would want this ultra-pure coffee that doesn’t cause the crash and jitters and crankiness that I experience from most coffee, because I’m more sensitive, right?

28:07 And you, that’s the thing. You are highly sensitive. You’re kind of the canary in the coal mine. I grew up in a basement that had been flooded. There was toxic mold, most likely stachybotrys, based on symptoms, one of the very worst of the worst.

28:18 And I have all the symptoms of this, as a kid, and I have documented cases as an adult where I lived in houses that had mold toxins, and every time I started to gain weight, that’s probably why I weighed 300 pounds. That’s why I couldn’t lose weight when I exercised six days a week for an hour and a half a day and cut my calories, cut my fat. And I have some of the world’s top experts in mold saying, yeah, that’s normal. You cannot lose weight no matter what you do if you have toxins like that in your environment.

28:41 Dr. Daniel Amen, like the most popular psychologist in America, uses quantitative brain scans. He looked at my brain when I was living in a moldy house with 3D radioactive imaging, and he said, Dave, you have the same brain structure as someone like a street drug addict, like someone living under a bridge. Like your brain is completely messed up by these. So these have a profound effect on me, because I grew up literally sleeping in poisonous air. I didn’t know, my parents didn’t know, and I dealt with this cognitively, I dealt with this physically, and a lot of the reasons my body isn’t as strong as I’d like it to be, well, it’s actually kind of strong now, but it wasn’t growing up.

29:17 It is, is because of that, and it does make you more sensitive. When I film this documentary, there’s a hundred thousand plus people who’ve responded to the documentary now, saying, oh my god, finally, someone I can show those people, and they’ll believe me. However, there’s twelve hundred studies on the Bulletproof website around just that one toxin that’s in coffee, that also grows in your walls if there’s a leak in your ceiling or there’s water behind the wall from condensation.

29:43 When we’re exposed to these, they trigger cancer. They trigger mitochondrial dysfunction. Your mitochondria are the basis for you. They’re the power plants, the spark of life. When you have no mitochondrial action, you are dead, and these things reduce mitochondrial respiration, which means basically your batteries are low, your light is dim, and it feels like that.

30:05 So I am a canary in a coal mine. 28 of us are canaries in a coal mine, a nice statistical bell curve distribution there. But if you’re not sensitive, and there’s tons of people who are sensitive and don’t know it, they just know some days I’m better than others. But if you’re not sensitive, and I am, and we are in the same place, I’m gonna feel it before you. But if you keep doing that, then okay, are you gonna have an autoimmune condition in five years or ten years?

30:29 Are you gonna get cancer? Is your risk of calcification from heart disease gonna go up? Yeah, that’s what these do to us, right? Or I’m also just cranky, giving out bad vibrations. Yeah, my self-esteem might be dropping because this is happening, that is happening, and I don’t know why.

30:42 I just think that maybe I’m not good enough. That’s what pains me the most, is that maybe I’m not good enough. Like the guilt that comes when, when you yell at someone, all right, and you’re like, god, they really didn’t deserve that. Like, I’m, I’m just a [expletive]. Like, who would ever treat someone like that?

30:57 But if you’re like, oh wait, someone injected me with an anger-inducing serum, and then I did that, you’re like, you know what, I regret that that happened, and I’m still responsible for my activities, but I know what happened, and I can watch out for that next time. It would be painfully obvious for us there, and you wouldn’t hold the guilt. And what I found was that all of the cases of worse behavior were always when I wasn’t feeling very good, and it was usually, not always, because of mold.

31:23 I mean, you give me gluten or MSG, you get less energy in the brain. The part of the brain with the most energy is the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex controls your rational mind versus your emotional mind, and if you turn off your prefrontal cortex, or if you just don’t have enough energy to fuel that, then what’s left is mammalian, chimpanzee behaviors, and those are the ones we regret and we feel guilty about. What if you could turn on the front of your brain a little bit more, just by eating the right way?

31:51 And that’s amazing. Do you ever share a meal with someone and you’re like, I’m watching the way they’re behaving and what they’re eating, and you’re like, I can see a lot of potential issues? You know, I don’t judge other people’s food. I used to a lot, and in a relationship I had years ago, before I, I met my current wife, I, I was with a woman, and we were in a mold-damaged house. It turns out there was a huge water leak behind the bedroom wall, and both of us had gained weight, and it made us really, really unwell, as well as the emotional volatility.

32:24 It was pretty bad, and we both developed food sensitivities. People don’t know this, but if you want to get gluten and casein, that’s milk dairy, sensitive really quickly, live in a house with toxic mold, because the proteins in those substances match the proteins in toxic molds. Your body gets food allergies it didn’t have before. It wasn’t from eating the food, it was from breathing something that looked like the food. That’s a really big unknown.

32:46 So this happened to us, and I remember I would make this, uh, this Waldorf salad, which I loved, you know, chopped up green apples, not too much sugar, and sour cream, which was a trigger. And I realized every time I made this, 50 minutes after dinner, I was the devil, right? Because the person I was with, like it would affect her brain, right? And that was a case where I was like, okay, I’m not making that anymore, because, like, this is clearly a trigger food.

33:13 And okay, I sound like a crazy person when I say that, right? Like, the food made you do it? Well, it’s more complex than that, but I’ll just say that if you are allergic to a food and you eat it, it will cause a, or fight-or-flight response in you, and we can measure that. In fact, there’s a free app called Food Detective that I make, that I give away without charge that will tell you if your food is doing that to you, because it’s such an important thing and no one knows about it, right?

33:36 So is it possible that the way you feel and the way you act 10 minutes, a half hour, an hour, two hours after you eat isn’t really, in large part, based on whether or not there was a little bit of something that’s kryptonite for you and your food. It’s not that hard to figure out. The whole roadmap on the Bulletproof diet is meant to be simple. There’s foods that don’t generally piss anyone off, that are full of energy and full of good nutrients without a lot of these anti-nutrients.

34:02 There’s a list of suspect foods, and these are foods that cause major problems for large swaths of people, but they may be okay for you. But until you eliminate a suspect, you assume they’re guilty, and you eliminate all of the potentially guilty. You see how you feel for a week or two and go, whoa, all right, I like how I feel. And then you add them back in, and you realize, okay, something in this short list of foods made me feel bad, or you use the app, and the app will actually tell you, oh, something in there made my heart rate change predictably.

34:31 So your body will not lie. If it’s reacting to these foods, whether or not you’re aware of this, you can see it in the data, and that’s what biohacking is about. Use this data. Use these real-time kinds of feedback so that you have more knowledge and consciousness and awareness of what your body does in response to food, in response to sleep, in response to temperature, and in response to meditation or mindfulness. And it’s remarkable what you can learn when you realize that your body has innate knowledge, but it’s hard for us in our scientific Western minds to tune in to know when our body’s telling us that.

35:06 So you can use data from your body, because your body will tell you when you’re stressed even if you don’t feel it, and from there you can say, all right, what do I do about that stress? And you can own that, and you say, I’m fine with that stress. It’s good stress, or it’s useless stress. And then you’re gonna turn it off, but without the knowledge, what are you gonna do? You’re just like a blind man groping around in a room.

35:23 Yeah, and I’m guessing it’s single digit percentages of people in the world, or in America, that are in tuned with the way they react to food, the way they react to Everything. I mean, was it the Twinkie defense was what that famous case where some guy did something after eating it? Yeah, tried to kill Reagan, I think, or was it, uh, the, the guy in San Francisco, the milk guy? Or maybe, no, no, it was some other politician. But yeah, yeah, it was the Twinkie defense.

35:44 And that sounds ridiculous to us, but certain foods, you know, what I believe in the Twinkie defense, because it’s got some of the big, oh, it’s processed gluten, hydrogenated fat, uh, stuff that tweaks your blood sugar. If you gave me, especially a diet soda, which is really neurotoxic, you give me diet soda in a Twinkie right now, I would not be able to have this conversation with you. In 10 minutes after having it, I would do my best. I would probably slur my speech.

36:10 My ability to, to remember words would not be there, and my emotional regulation, my, my intensity, the way I’m expressing right now would not be the same, and it would literally, for a little while, until I processed that stuff, it would make me biologically less than I’m capable of being. I’m still the same soul, the same spirit, the same person in there, but the amount of effort it takes to, to be present and to express goes up dramatically. It’s like someone just put three more plates on each side of what I’m bench pressing.

36:38 Like, man, I might be able to do another press here, but it’s going to take all my effort, and life is not supposed to be hard like that. So you can put foods in your body that do that, and they can make you act crazy, and they can make you really pissed off and make you make really poor decisions. And I’m certain that some of the worst decisions I’ve made before were a result of eating stuff that’s incompatible with my biology. Like, you don’t take your laptop and plug it into the wrong power supply.

37:03 Well, you shouldn’t do that with your body either. Right? Let’s talk about the coffee. Coffee is made, not you famous, but the brand famous. I mean, people talk about Bulletproof coffee now.

37:12 You know, I do. I drink it every day, and so it’s, it’s a great way for people to kind of be introduced to the whole concept of biohacking, or the whole idea that, you know, you can actually change what you consume, and it might change your mind frame. It also makes you a lightning rod for people that say, okay, Dave, what’s up with these mycotoxins? Some people say they’re there. Some people say they don’t.

37:32 And I’m always, I ask a lot of people in this chair, quite honestly, how they deal with sometimes the hate they get from the fame they get. And you know you’re no stranger to that. You know, whether it’s the, the Rogan people or the other people, and they’re all like this or that, and people are posting these studies, and these studies, I always just want to kind of give you a chance to, to answer that. When people ask, are we, don’t think the mycotoxins are there, you say they’re there.

37:57 What, what do you say? I, I am profoundly grateful for that level of criticism. I was inspired to spend almost two years of my life and hundreds of thousands of dollars out of pocket to make Moldy, the documentary, to document what mold toxins do to people. I interviewed a dozen people whose lives were completely wrecked by this, and about a dozen physicians, including two really influential physicians, as well as some less known ones who are total experts in mycotoxins, and anyone who says mycotoxins don’t matter who watches Moldy is not someone that I’m that interested in talking about.

38:35 They could say I have questions, and we can do that, but if you can look at that body of evidence, or the 1,200 studies about one, about one toxin that’s present in coffee, the most dangerous one, called ochratoxin A, or sorry, not the most dangerous, but the most common one in coffee, or you can look at the 34 studies on my website about the presence of this in coffee, or you can look at the evidence that most world governments have standards for this because it’s so dangerous, and the EU in the last 10 years tightened their standards because it’s worth doing for their population, but the U.S. has no standards. Or you could look at the video of one of the advisors to Bulletproof, Mark Inman, former head of the Specialty Coffee Association, saying I was in the room in 2008 when the Japanese trade minister rejected a thousand containers of coffee that was too moldy for Japanese people to drink, and I said, Mark, what happened to the coffee?

39:23 He said they sent it to America. So you can face all of that and still cross your arm to say there’s no mold in coffee. There isn’t a conversation to be had there. Do you think in 20 years from now we’re going to look back on mold the same way we look back on doctors who are smoking Lucky Strikes, and the same way we looked at pregnant mothers having martinis, and we’re going to hit ourselves in the heads and say, what the hell were we thinking? Absolutely, we’re going to do that, and there are major connections between mold and, and fertility.

39:54 And I see this all the time, and because people who, who are looking for solutions come to Bulletproof, and like, could this really be? And then they watch the documentary, and they go, wait, there’s a problem here, and environmental mold is more dangerous. It’s more imminently dangerous than mold in your food. However, if you’ve been exposed to environmental mold, mold in your food makes you just feel crappy, and if you eat low levels of these toxins in your food all the time, it actually causes damage to your body, and the toxin that’s present in coffee is also present in a lot of grain, as well as some other toxins.

40:32 This is that ochratoxin A. It’s present in, in chocolate, and the quality of your chocolate, quality of your coffee, really do matter. And one thing that almost everyone who drinks coffee has experienced: sometimes you drink coffee, and a half hour later you have to run to the restroom, and you have to pee, right? And there’s not that much pee, but you just had to pee, right? Your bladder wasn’t full.

40:54 Other times you drink coffee and you don’t have to pee. Well, here’s why: ochratoxin A, this thing that critics say doesn’t exist, magically in coffee, it is a strong toxin for your kidneys and your bladder. So what your body does in response to drinking this stuff, and it’s effective at parts per billion, you drink it, and then the body says, oh my god, this is an emergency. There is something here that is damaging the system. So it pulls water out of your blood plasma.

41:25 It dehydrates you. It puts as much water as it can get into the kidneys, into the bladder to dilute the toxin, and then it sends the signal, you got to pee right now, right now, and you go in there, you’re like, I really didn’t have to pee. What’s going on here? That is our natural body’s response to drinking something that is bad for our bladder and our kidneys. You may also feel tired and cranky, and the reason for that is that it takes extra glucose in order to help metabolize these toxins and move them along, because this is a life-threatening emergency to the, meat in your body, even though you don’t have any idea it’s happening.

41:57 Cognitively, your body then calls on blood sugar. Well, where’s it gonna get it out of your blood? What part of your brain consumes 60? Sorry, what part of your body consumes 60% of the glucose? Oh, your brain does.

42:08 So now you got a little bit of hypoglycemia. You got a little bit cranky, a little bit irritated, and you crashed two hours after you drank your coffee. So then you want another cup of coffee. In fact, you want to put sugar in it for some reason. Well, people don’t put sugar in their Bulletproof coffee.

42:20 It doesn’t need it, and they drink only one cup instead of the coffee yo-yo. Right? This is one of the reasons that Bulletproof coffee does what it does, and the brain-octane oil that’s in it is another thing, and the butter is another thing. And there’s some things where I’m pretty darn sure, and some things where it’s a hypothesis based on a study, but we haven’t studied it specifically, and this is written up in the Bulletproof diet. So when a critic wants to come up and say, Dave, I actually don’t think that it’s this thing in coffee and the mechanism is probably different, that’s not a critic.

42:48 That is an amazing scientific conversation, and I am totally willing to be wrong. When someone stands up and says there is no such thing as mold in coffee, this is clearly a scam, at that point this is like a dogmatic religious discussion. It has nothing to do with scientific discourse, so there isn’t really much to be said there other than, well, I think I’ve published enough data on this, and I, I can see it in, in the lab tests that I run, and so I’m just not worried about that.

43:17 Everyone doesn’t have to like what I’m doing, but the number of people who’ve emailed me and said, Dave, I couldn’t drink coffee for x number of years, some people for 18 years, and then I tried your coffee, and it doesn’t cause the jitter and the crankiness that, that, that I used to experience. I, I feel different on this. We also ran a study in the, uh, in the right of the work up for the Bulletproof diet, and I published the results of the study there.

43:41 There was a statistically significant difference in cognitive performance and executive function of people drinking black mold tested Bulletproof coffee beans versus black beans from the corner coffee shop. So we had the people, there were 54 people entered the study, and they went out to different, uh, basically local coffee houses and bought coffee, and we for six weeks ran a comparative analysis twice a day. They ran cognitive batteries of how they’re doing, and you know what?

44:11 There was a difference. Black coffee versus black coffee and butter, Bulletproof coffee versus butter, other coffee. So it turns out that there’s some evidence that this works. Is there a hundred percent guarantee that it works for everyone? No.

44:25 Is there a reasonable mechanism for action? Yes, and mold toxins are one of the major ones. So at that point, I’m happy to have a detailed conversation, but when the conversation starts with F*** Asprey, that’s not a conversation. That’s actually an opportunity to hit ban, and I do that frequently to people who want to troll. Sounds like you’ve moved on.

44:48 It sounds like that’s a conversation you were having more even a year or two ago. Sounds like it actually really rattled me, from like, how could people have this level of, like, of, um, what’s the word for it? Just, I don’t want to call it distrust, because it’s not about being trustful, just the level of anger over something that, okay, there’s 34 studies on the website, and I, I don’t get it, and some of it appeared to be financially motivated, some of it was just kind of bullying behavior.

45:12 Like, you know, something symptom of you becoming more popular. I don’t know what it is, but I’m, I’m over it, and I’m, I’m happy to have these conversations with people. I’m funding more research right now. Um, and you know, I’m going to keep saying how important this problem is, because mold contributes to autism. Mold contributes to cognitive decline as you get older.

45:33 It contributes to rheumatoid arthritis. There’s seven kinds of autoimmunity that’s triggered sometimes over the course of 10 or 20 years in people by breathing or eating toxic mold. There is pretty good evidence that toxic mold contributed to my father’s heart attack. And these things matter. So yeah, I’ll keep doing what I do.

45:54 Good, good. Let’s talk about fats. I love that. I grew up with non-fat milk, my mom served me in the late ’70s. Um, and that was the time of the non-fat did you get squeezed margin with it too?

46:04 Oh, I think we had that on camping trips. Yeah, maybe so. Um, and the, and, and uh, but you know, one thing about the coffee is it’s got the butter, and it’s got the MCT oil. You are a big proponent of consuming fats. You know, I was speaking with you a few days ago, and you know, the diet of your children in the morning, is it, it’s, it’s very, it’s fat heavy.

46:22 It’s eggs, it’s bacon, it’s avocados, and if there’s another message I always get from you at Bulletproof, it’s, let’s recognize the power of foods with good fats, and let’s really pay attention to consuming those. And I was just wondering if you could give us a quick crash course on your thoughts on fats. If you’re a Ferrari, you would require high-octane fuel. High-octane fuel is literally fuel that has more power per ounce. That’s what happens.

46:52 That’s what causes high performance. So in, in the U.S., the fuel is 108 for Ferraris or higher, and normal cars get 93. Okay. If you look at calories per gram, fat has more calories per gram. Calories are not bad for you.

47:10 Calories are actually what keep you alive. When you have no calories, it’s called starving, right? So delivering more calories per gram, assuming you can metabolize those, and you can, especially when you train your body to to digest fat, it enables you to get more energy for more time, and you fill in the gaps and, and the dips in your day. Fat turns off cravings. It satisfies hunger.

47:35 It provides energy. It is what every cell in your body is made out of. Few people recognize this, but your cell membrane is made of droplets of fat. That’s all it is. There’s a whole bunch of tiny droplets of fat lined up in a circle or in a globe around each cell in your body.

47:51 Your hormones are made out of cholesterol and fat. Your brain is fat and water and little bits of protein, but very little. So why do we say this thing is a fundamental building block for who and what we are, that is an efficient source of fuel? Why is it suddenly bad for us? Because of bad science in the ’70s.

48:08 Like, a guy who had never treated obese people came up with the theory that fat made you fat, because people starving get thin, therefore starvation is the way to be thin. That is not how it works. It’s funny, because I would, I saw you posted on your website this kind of, the less fat or non-fat movement in America, and it almost just seems like a reason to spend money on a government program. It almost looks like a reason a politician wants to get reelected.

48:31 It was just creating this campaign. That’s what happens. And also, fat has a branding problem, doesn’t it? Even the word fat has a branding problem. Well, but it’s associated with, I’m fat, and like, this is fat.

48:42 I mean, not anymore because of you guys. I launched last week. I launched a product called Fat Water. It’s a big Fat Water, and I should have brought a bottle, but I’ve had to check my luggage, because it’s in the US, and I haven’t launched it in Europe yet. But it’s small amounts of fat permanently dissolved into water.

48:59 It doesn’t float up, and it’s the XCT oil that we manufacture. This is a subset of coconut oil, and it’s not even MCT oil. It’s a subset of MCT oil, the most effective ones, and you don’t taste the fat, but it activates the fat receptors in your mouth. You’re like, this tastes different, and fat has different biological effects. It changes the osmolarity of the water, so you can absorb the water better.

49:23 So the idea that fat’s bad, I think we’re over that now, and there’s a few laggards who don’t know that. But some fat’s bad, and that’s okay. Margarine bad. Soy, canola, corn oil, vegetable oil, those are bad fats. They’re manufactured fats.

49:39 Well, what about protein? Right, some proteins are good, some are bad. The worst animal protein spider venom. That’s an animal protein. I don’t think we should be eating that, right?

49:48 So you can’t say protein is good or bad. It doesn’t mean anything. How about plant-based protein? Those must be good, right? Ricin, the nerve gas that killed all those people in Japanese subway, that’s actually a vegetable protein.

49:59 So protein is not protein, because animals and plants both make deadly proteins, therefore proteins deadly. So protein’s not good or bad. Different proteins do different things. Different fats do different things. So having that level of awareness, that it’s not about how many carbs and how much fat, those are almost meaningless.

50:16 It’s got to be the right fat, the right carbs, the right protein, and then the ratios start to matter. One thing I noticed about you is that, um, with Bulletproof, this isn’t your first rodeo, and one thing I’ve just watched the last two years is the way that you have scaled, and the way that you’ve hired and gotten ambassadors. And it’s, there’s a lot of people out there that try to sell coffee and butter, but you hear about them and then they go away.

50:41 But when it comes to everything you’re doing, and the products you’re doing, and the Fat Water, and the, and the, uh, the retail store, and the funding, it’s like, you know, Dave’s done this before. And I was just wondering, first of all, if you agree with what I said, or second of all, did that come from your background in the Valley? Did that come from you watching startups and how to scale them? Because you know it takes risks to scale. I’m learning that, and you’re scaling at a very high degree, and you know, and I know a lot of your staff, very impressed with them.

51:10 I know you’ve hired some former Starbucks people that are strategists, and I was just wanting to know about that as a bus, as a business. Is that an accurate representation of what I’m watching you guys do? Um, I think it’s pretty accurate, and we’re scaling rapidly, and that’s, I have a big mission, and if, if you want to change the world, you need to have a big microphone. And I have no personal desire for fame. That is not something that motivates me in the slightest, and I find it incredibly odd when people stop me in airports like, oh my god, you’re Dave Asprey.

51:39 I’m like, yeah, I’m Dave Asprey, like, and then I get to talk about something that I dearly love, and that is, is my mission. Like, I love having the conversation, but I always think it’s weird when someone I don’t know stops and goes, oh my god, you’re Dave Asprey. I’m like, yeah, sure, I’ll sign your book, but like, I appreciate the fan support. Like that, I’m grateful for it, but it also just feels weird, because I’m really a computer hacker, you know?

51:59 Silicon Valley, how do I scale cloud computing guy? But for five years I ran a program for the University of California about how to make things scale. How do we make the internet scale? So my very thought process around building complex systems, which is what my degree is in, is how do you build things that that are reliable and repeatable and don’t break? And so I, everything I do, I, I just naturally think about it that way, because it was such a part of, of how I see the world around me.

52:26 Like, that’s gonna break. This is what all hackers do, by the way. Oh, there’s a flaw in the system. We can’t help but see it. So when it comes to, to building and scaling Bulletproof, the biggest thing that I’ve done, actually, is two months, eight full weeks of this 40 years of Zen training that I do with the CEO clients.

52:47 I have sat there with a lie detector on my head, teaching myself to have the brain waves of an advanced Zen master. And that sounds a little bit kitschy, whatever. It raises your IQ, but what it does is it gives you amazing radar for what’s going on in your head, so you can see when you’re deceiving yourself. And it also lets you get a grasp on your fear, and lets you get a grasp on your intuition, so you can tell whether it’s fear that comes from somewhere not useful, the the programming of the meat in your body that makes you shy away from an opportunity, or whether it’s intuition that says that’s not the right opportunity for the company right now.

53:20 And so I am guided by intuition, and I am aware of the sources of fear, and if there’s some strange thing that comes up and I’m like, wow, I’m feeling really uncomfortable about this situation, I don’t know why, I’m going to meditate, I’m going to figure it out, and I’m going to apply introspection. So the biggest thing I can do, and the reason Bulletproof grows like this, is that I, um, I hold the culture. I hold the space. I spend most of my time either creating content or working with the senior leadership team and empowering them and teaching them that they don’t have to come to me, because I hire people who know more than I do about their specific function.

54:01 Like, there’s no way you can run a company, even with 10 people, that where the CEO can micromanage 10 people. The CEO will go insane, lose sleep, and probably jump off a bridge. And that actually happens to entrepreneurs a lot. So I don’t have that level of fear, and I’m willing to take risks and to, to have opportunities. But the reason I’m willing to do all this is not because I want to make another dollar.

54:24 The reason I’m doing this is because I want to help millions of people, so I’m motivated by this very big vision. And that means, all right, I have an opportunity. I could raise venture money, like I just did. I raised investment, or I could play it safe, and playing it safe, I’m gonna keep all the equity for me, right? And then I’m, it’s a very natural way to feel about something you spent your life creating.

54:49 Yeah, it is a natural thing, right? Like, it’s my baby, and Bulletproof is like, this is a lot of my life’s knowledge, my most precious knowledge. I give it away for free. And it’s your passion. Yeah, it’s what I, it’s what I do, and so to make that into something that scales and take a risk like that.

55:05 Yeah, it is a measurable risk, but okay, I raised nine million dollars. I’m going to open a Bulletproof coffee shop in multiple cities, and every time someone comes in who’s never tried this, they’re going to try it, and they’re going to say, that just changed the quality of my day, and I’d like to have another day like this. Maybe I’ll buy a Bulletproof product, maybe I won’t, but I’m going to do what it takes to feel that way, because now I just got a smack in the head saying, hey, this is how you’re supposed to feel.

55:28 Right? That creates change, and I think it’s going to, along the way, cause enough people to pay attention to the quality of their food that they’re gonna want Bulletproof quality of food. Sometimes they’re gonna want other quality food from other companies, and it’s gonna spur those companies to get the crap out of their food, to start putting quality in the food, and they’ll stop buying genetically modified stuff. They’ll stop buying things that are sprayed with glyphosate, which is one of the major problems with genetically modified foods, by the way.

55:55 It’s just chemical contamination. They’re going to stop allowing the pillaging of our soil by chemical companies. Things like that will just happen naturally. So of course I’m going to take that risk, because it’s not really a risk. It’s an opportunity.

56:09 And when we’ve spent this 9 million dollars and we’ve proven that this is a great investment, I’ll probably raise more money, because I want Bulletproof to be as big as it needs to be to help the maximum number of people. That’s my goal, and I’m doing it from, from here, from my heart, not from some, like, you know, Wharton MBA Excel spreadsheet. I did, by the way, go to Wharton, uh, the only business school without a built-in ethics program, I might add, and that Mr. Trump went there.

56:38 There were two case studies at Wharton that I still have nightmares about. I just have to mention these. One of them was a company that made contact lenses for chickens, because it turns out it was supposed to be cheaper to put these horrible plastic lenses inside the eye of a chicken, so they wouldn’t peck each other to death because they were too blind. Now, of course, only 10 of chickens got eye infections and fell over twitching, or something like that, and I’m like, I don’t want to do this case study about, like, the cost effectiveness of doing this, because it’s an unethical activity.

57:07 You don’t treat animals that way. And of course they just kind of looked at me funny. Um, and that, that sort of thing. Another one was, uh, so let’s figure out, uh, the, the market, uh, the right price for, for NutraSweet, for aspartame. I’m like, you don’t sell neurotoxins to people.

57:22 Like, this is unethical. You, no, and, and that’s always been my perspective, where you have to do the right thing first, and it’s entirely possible to run a profitable company that takes care of its employees and takes care of its community and the world around it without having to do things that cause harm. And so that’s built into the ethos of the system of the Bulletproof company, and that’s part of what makes it scale, because everyone at Bulletproof knows these values.

57:48 All of my senior leadership team goes to the 40 years of Zen, the neurofeedback thing, so they can have a higher level of self-awareness and a higher level of performance, which is the main reason that I started doing this kind of training. And so we can have really clear communications, where it’s not about my ego versus your ego. It’s about, this is the problem. We’re gonna both acknowledge the problem. We’ll accept responsibility wherever it lies, without judgment and without grudges, then we’re going to work on the problem, and we’re going to make it better.

58:14 And that’s what’s enabled me to scale. I hire people who kick ass, people who are cultural fit, people who believe in the mission, and then I give them the tools and everything I know how to help them perform better, including a sizeable monthly stipend. Pretty much, if you’re in the company, you get all the Bulletproof stuff you can handle per month, so that you get unfair advantage for your mitochondrial function. You get the collagen. You get as much coffee as you need.

58:39 You get the brain octane oil. It’s the best investment I could ever make, because my people are well fed. And yeah, we pay for their health insurance too, but I think that’s more valuable than health insurance. It’s probably more expensive than health insurance too, but it doesn’t matter. It’s worth it, and it makes, it makes the people work for Bulletproof.

58:54 It makes them feel better. It makes them perform better, makes them happier, and it makes them happier when they’re not working for Bulletproof. So that’s what makes us go. Yeah. I spoke to Zach Garcia after he went to 40 years of Zen like a year ago, and he was explaining what it was like.

59:07 And I know you’ve been many, many times. You’ve also had experiences with psychedelics and ayahuasca, and you can kind of compare the two. And I, I think I remember maybe even last time you were talking about how, you know, the 40 years of Zen, you get more out of that. I think you kind of recognize that plant medicines have certain benefits, but you get more out of this real feedback system, right? They’re very different.

59:30 I’ve done shamanic ceremonies in South America. I’ve trained with Alberto Villoldo. I have a spiritual side, and I’ve had great value from medicinal or ceremonial use of hallucinogens. I would not take them and go to Disneyland. I think that’s disrespectful, so that’s not the vibe here, and this isn’t about a party kind of situation.

59:52 But you can use them for profound, deep self-awareness and self-introspection, um, in a controlled setting with people who are going to help take care of you, because you may be unable to care for yourself a little while if you’re doing that right. So you might know the difference between um, uh, intuition and, and fear, so you might know yourself better. Yeah. And, and depending on your spiritual bent, you know, that the shamans that I’ve trained with, like, they talk to the ios, because they tell it what they want before they drink it, and they do some things that are entirely not rational.

1:00:20 But one of the things I’ve learned, one of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned, is that I am both irrational and rational at the same time. I have a meat operating system in my body. Like, the flesh of my body, it’s irrational. It’s an animal, and I have a rational side of me, which is my, my prefrontal cortex, is my, my brain, so I can simultaneously feel and think. It’s also possible for me to take my thinking and turn off my feeling, which is something I did for much of my life.

1:00:48 And when you do that, you tend to be one of those people who sits in a chat room and argues a point beyond what makes any sense, and believe anyone who disagrees with you is the devil, and that’s because you’ve literally turned off your thinking and feeling, and you’re, you’re emoting. And um, there’s actually a study out there that shows how people can do that. So I’m kind of working on being the opposite of that, of, be having both, having that confidence.

1:01:12 Yeah, recognizing that. So if you want to talk to the animal operating system, the irrational parts, hallucinogens are a great way to do it, and neurofeedback is a great way to do it, and so are deep breathing exercises. I’ve actually had some of the strongest visions I’ve ever had doing holotropic breathing, which is a hallucinogenic breathing exercise with no drugs involved that was designed to help people treat PTSD, and it’s been used by tens of thousands of people over the last 50 years.

1:01:39 And so having that to help me unpack all the weird trauma. I was an angry, pissed-off guy, very fearful and completely unaware of my fear, to be perfectly honest. A lot of my early career success was entirely driven by, by fear and anger, and frankly, hate. right and you had early career success, yeah, right? Yeah, right?

1:01:59 Yeah, you were like living the Silicon Valley dream in your mid-20s, right? Now, as miserable as all hell, but I was doing it. Yeah, right? And so you’ve you know, you’ve felt that before. You know that you have those emotions that need to be dealt with, and that’s what I mean when I say it’s not your first rodeo, as in, like, because you could easily have been the Bulletproof exec at 27, and this company would look very different, and you would be very different.

1:02:21 I’m guessing it wouldn’t have happened. Um, I actually started writing the very first blog in ’98. Actually, it was on my, my own, my old website, and I wrote, here’s smart drugs, like, in ’98. No one was doing this except smart drugs. Brought my brain back online in 1996, and I thought it’d be good to share this, and I talked about nutritional supplements, and I talked about diet and exercise and the ratios of these things, and the Bulletproof diet.

1:02:45 It is an evolution of the thinking from back then. You know, this was quite a while ago, but I didn’t publicize the page. I, the reason I didn’t, I was at the company that created what has now become modern cloud computing. Google’s first servers were in our buildings running our network. I was building giant e-commerce sites.

1:03:01 Like, this was changing the world. This was, in fact, I’m the first guy to sell anything over the internet. Like, the first e-commerce ever was me selling a caffeine t-shirt out of my dorm room. Right? So like, this was so important, but now we’ve got all that, and now the cloud has completely changed how we can do research, how we communicate, and it’s made it possible to take an idea like this, idea behind Bulletproof, like, do less of what makes you weak, do more of what makes you strong, and get lots of vitamins while you’re at it.

1:03:27 Like that kind of thing, making that and bringing it to people in a way that’s digestible. You couldn’t do that 10 years ago. You couldn’t do it 20 years ago. It would have taken generations, and now it takes a few years. Bulletproof’s, what, three, four years old, really, from a blogging perspective, about four years old, and that’s awesome, but we have to have the infrastructure to do it, and it’s there now.

1:03:46 Also, you’re a different person now, and so yeah, you’re more mature, you understand more, you understand yourself better, to, to build it, scale it, get the right vibrations, get the right people. It sounds weird, the whole vibe thing, but yeah, there’s a lot of heart that goes in. Any entrepreneur will tell you this. It is an act of creation, almost like parenting, and I say that as the father of two kids, but, but it is, it is an energetic thing you do when you create a company.

1:04:09 It’s not just a spreadsheet. It’s not just rational. It is rational, and if it’s not rational, you’re probably going to have a hard time with your business, but it can be both irrational and rational, and there are times when I do things that on a spreadsheet probably aren’t the right thing to do, but you know, you go with your gut. And when you ask the most prominent venture capitalist in Silicon Valley whether they go with spreadsheets or their gut, the majority of them go with their gut.

1:04:33 They use spreadsheets as a tool, but if you ignore your gut, you do so at great peril. It’s there for a reason. Yeah, let’s talk about your early biohacking days and your relationship with modafinil. People ask you about that all the time. You recently posted a great tweet about it where you just asked a bunch of blog questions.

1:04:48 I, I just love to hear your evolution with it, and now the way you talk to people about it, and the way you explain, I sometimes, I use it, sometimes I don’t, and these are the choices we have. Can you talk to us a little bit about what it is, your relationship with, with us? I know on your LinkedIn profile you used to stick Provigil on there. It was almost an inside joke to the people who knew about it. Well, in Silicon Valley, people have known about this for a while.

1:05:11 Modafinil is the smart drug, the one, if you’ve seen Limitless, the movie with Bradley Cooper, it was sort of patterned roughly off modafinil, and clearly that was a much bigger drug, but this is something where you take it and you’re like, I feel more like myself than I have in a long time, and my ability to focus, you feel limitless, and when I started taking this stuff, I was working at a startup that sold for about 600 million dollars in value, um, and I was getting my MBA at Wharton, and doing that in an executive program that was the same number of hours as a full-time MBA program. So I was full-on balls to the wall. I wasn’t succeeding in the classes, and there was something weird going on, because I’m quantitative and I pay attention.

1:05:54 I’m like, I sit down to take a test, and the first question on the test I get 100. Second question, I get 70, second question 70, third question 30, after that zero, and like, something’s happening here, and it’s predictable linear decline in performance, and I feel helpless, and I’m, I’m actually scared. I’m like, am I gonna graduate? Because something is trashing my brain. I don’t know what the deal is here.

1:06:20 So I started, the fact that was when I got my first brain scan with Daniel Amen. And it wasn’t with Amen. It was with one of the people who trained with him for 15 years, and this guy was a psychiatrist, and he took one look at me. Oh, getting your MBA, working full-time? Yeah, I know your type.

1:06:36 You want Adderall. Like, there are people who want Adderall for performance enhancement. Adderall’s prescription methamphetamine. Yeah, so it kind of dismissively looks at me, and he said, well, we’ll order the brain scan for you, but you know, I think you know that’s probably not right for you. So he, I come back, and he looks at the report, and there’s two pages of bad results and all these red splotches on my brain, and he goes, direct quote, inside your brain is total chaos.

1:07:03 I don’t know how you’re standing here in front of me. You have the best camouflage of anyone I’ve ever seen. Okay, so my brain was not functioning very well. I was succeeding enough to graduate at Wharton, and I was at a startup that we sold for a lot of money. Okay, it’s not like I wasn’t performing.

1:07:19 I was struggling greatly, and this is a really important point. Everyone listening to this, if we injected you with radioactive sugar and scanned your brains, there are areas for improvement. Everyone has them, almost without, without a doubt. There’s probably a few people with perfect blood flow and perfect metabolic activity everywhere, and they’re probably the happiest, most successful people you know, but they’re very, very rare. So we can all improve that way.

1:07:42 I had a lot of room for improvement. So one of the things, when he saw that, was like, good God, what you know, what drugs do you want? And we started out on Adderall. I took it for about a month and hated it. What was it like?

1:07:55 I want to make you feel like Adderall made it, made me focus a little bit better. It made me angry, and it made it so I didn’t want anyone to touch me. Like, I just, I would take it, and I just want to go sit in a room in the dark and just chill. It was really unpleasant for me. And you call it prescription methamphetamine.

1:08:10 Do people hate it when you say that? Do they disagree when you say that? I don’t think you can disagree on the label. It said d-methamphetamine salts. Like, it actually says it on the label.

1:08:19 It is prescription methamphetamine. I wasn’t saying that as a slam. That’s just a generic name for what they prescribe. Little blue pills that are also sold as Adderall. And um, there’s Ritalin, which is not prescription meth.

1:08:30 But what I had was actually prescription meth. Okay, right? And this is, yeah, okay. It wasn’t the Heisenberg level, though, so. So you started with that, and then, and I said, you know, there is research on this new drug called modafinil.

1:08:45 I really want to try modafinil. And he said, all right, it’s off-label, um, but we’ll give it a try, and I tried it. I’m like, holy crap, things are effortless. Like, I, I can pay attention again. Like, I got my brain back.

1:09:01 This is amazing, and I was already taking a handful of other smart drugs that are less effective but still very valuable stuff. I still take today. This had brought my brain back online from where I had been before, where I probably wouldn’t even be able to get into Wharton. Like, I was zombified for a while. So I’m like, all right, this stuff rocks, and I took it just about every day.

1:09:20 Maybe I skipped weekends here and there, but the vast majority of the time for eight years, and it helped my career. It helped me graduate from business school. I actually felt a little bit guilty about it, and there’s probably people in my class who would remember before a few of the tests I would actually put the smart drugs I was taking on the desk in front of me. I’m like, I’m not doping if you know what I’m doing, and you have the ability to do it too.

1:09:44 Then it’s not doping. It’s not cheating, and I still don’t believe it’s cheating any more than wearing a sweater on a cold day is cheating. It’s just technology that helps you do what you’re doing. So I took the stuff, and I, it really, really helped my performance. It was amazing.

1:09:59 Then I came out with a Bulletproof coffee and Bulletproof diet principles. I put them online for a couple years before I wrote the Bulletproof Diet book, and there were a few critics who were saying everything you do comes from adoptional, because there’s a study that says it helps You lose weight. I’m like, you know, this is highly unlikely, and there are a few people who said I was hiding it from them, even though I’d been on national news talking about it, which I always thought was one of the more bizarre criticisms of Bulletproof.

1:10:25 Um, but it was in your profile for a long time. Exactly. I was like, everyone else in the Nightline piece was wearing paper bags over their heads because they wouldn’t show their face, and I’m like, yes, yes, I actually take modafinil. I’m okay with it. Like, it might help you too.

1:10:37 So I consider it to be a profoundly effective drug for occasional use, or for regular use if you need it, and it’s changed many people’s lives, and it’s much safer than Adderall, and much safer than Tylenol, but it does have some potential risks. They’re small, though, compared to many of the drugs we take. So I looked at the criticism. I’m like, okay, maybe this is valid criticism. Let’s do the experiment.

1:11:00 So I went off of modafinil, and I did it while I was drinking Bulletproof coffee, while I was eating the Bulletproof diet, while I was avoiding the things that make me weak. And when I did that, I measured using a university-grade cognitive executive function kind of testing, and what I found was that when I was off of modafinil, my decision-making time was more variable. It was, you couldn’t predict how long it would take me. Sometimes I was very fast, sometimes I was longer, but my average decision-making time was, was somewhere.

1:11:31 When I was on modafinil, my average decision-making window was smaller. It was more predictable, but my average speed was the same. Other than that, I felt good all the time, which I didn’t have before. When I started taking modafinil, I had the energy to make it through the day, to feel good, to play with my kids at the end of the day. This energy was not something that I naturally had before.

1:11:52 Like, all right, but ethanol isn’t doing very much for me. Is there modafinil in my bag right now? Yeah, there is. I just flew to London, or to Scotland, and then London. It’s been a relatively intense trip.

1:12:03 I actually just used Bulletproof coffee and the normal stack of relatively lightweight smart drugs that I do every day, and the things I know about hacking light and temperature, and all for, for jet lag. And you know what? I didn’t need the modafinil, right? But it was there if I wanted it, or if I was gonna crash. I was like, man, I’m just too tired.

1:12:23 My brain isn’t focusing. I really want to be present for the audience. For this interview, I would have happily taken the modafinil, but I didn’t need to. So that’s where I am in my relationship with it today. I’m grateful that people said, hey, everything you do, you scammer, it’s because of modafinil.

1:12:37 It caused me to experiment with something that I knew very well worked great, but when you’re, when your brain is dialed in, when your nutrition is where it should be, when you’re doing other things right, and probably some of the meditation and neurofeedback and things I’ve done, I I’m better performing now than I was, and so I use modafinil no less. Talk to me about how people can get really sensitive about what they call a drug and not a drug, like you said, this is technology. We use, uh, we use farms to make our food.

1:13:05 You put a sweater on if it gets cold, and yet if you take a pill, some people say, oh, that’s a drug, but then they’ll obviously, you know, drink alcohol. How do you get across just the communication barrier when it comes to people? If drugs are bad, then we need to immediately ban coffee, alcohol, and cigarettes flat out, and the problem is a lot of amino acids in protein have drug-like effects on the body, so we should stop eating protein from vegetables.

1:13:31 Oh, okay. That’s not going to work. I, I look back at the stereotypical cavemen who are our ancestors, and you go back 100,000 years or something. Don’t quote me on that. I’m not a paleontologist, and one of the, the cavemen comes up and says, in whatever caveman language, hey, look, I just found this, like, burning stick out there from the lightning strike.

1:13:54 I’m gonna use it to keep my cave warm this winter, and the other one said, you can’t. It’s a drug, or it’s cheating, right? And one of those two cavemen is our ancestor. Drugs are technology. You can use technology to kill people, like dynamite.

1:14:10 Supposed to end World War One. The Nobel Peace Prize was from the guy who invented dynamite, and he thought it would make war so horrible that no one would do war anymore, and he was wrong. So technology can kill people, right? Technology can also save people. It can be used for good or can be used for bad.

1:14:25 Drugs are that way. Drugs are not good. Drugs are not bad. All drugs and all foods have a downside and an upside, and that upside and downside is different for you than it is for me, based on environmental and genetic variables. So given that, it is entirely ignorant to say a drug is good or bad.

1:14:47 The question is, is the benefit from this drug or nutritional supplement or food or exercise technique or meditation technique does the benefit outweigh the risk? And that is how educated, aware, scientific people think. And to put a value judgment based on drugs versus natural supplements versus foods is a religious behavior that is not driven by science, and it is not in people’s best interests. As a general principle, do drugs have more downside than natural substances?

1:15:20 As a general principle, yes, but keep in mind, ricin, the nerve gas, and spider venom are both natural substances, and they can kill you. So natural doesn’t mean safe, and drug doesn’t mean dangerous. However, if you were to close your eyes and you were going to take a natural substance or a drug, you’d probably pick the natural substance. But awareness of risk and benefit is so critical, and we’ve lost a lot of our intelligent discourse because of this rabid dogma that says, you know, drugs are good, drugs are bad.

1:15:50 They’re just tools. Shovels are not good or bad. You can farm and make food with a shovel, or you can kill someone with a shovel. It’s just a shovel, and you should treat it as such. Very good answer.

1:16:01 Uh, talk to me about the, the value of human relationships and what you do. You know, a lot of people from the outside see the incredible things you’re doing, the fundraise, the retail outfit, Fat Water, that kind of thing, but like, some people know that behind the scenes, or a lot of people know because it’s obvious that you, you have great social relationships. You know, you, you, you’re a phone call away from Arianna Huffington, or Rick Rubin’s a big fan of your coffee, or you probably know lots of CEOs of billion-dollar companies that use your techniques.

1:16:27 How much of that is part of the success you have, or part of any CEO’s job? I, I am completely awed at the, the level of relationships that have developed from Bulletproof, and I’m like, I, I just fell out of my chair when, um, did you used to be that guy? The 26-year-old Dave, I’m guessing, was he not as much? I used to have Asperger’s, right? I wouldn’t make eye contact with people.

1:16:51 I still have a hell of a hard time with names. Um, but I like my whole personality. My demeanor is different. The structure of my facial bones is different, because my jaw is a half inch forward from where I was. Like, I have hacked the crap out of myself.

1:17:04 Here’s a story. I realized I might want to be a CEO one day, and I realized that I didn’t know this as a young man, in my probably early 20s, around 24. I realized, you know what, there’s some kind of value to this, like networking thing. I always made fun of it. I was a programmer.

1:17:21 Like you know, the fat guy in a T-shirt that says, fu coders don’t network, they produce. Yeah, like, real men write code, kind of thing, or build network algorithms, or whatever it was I was doing. And I worked with this guy at 3Com. 3Com was one of the big networking companies. Was Cisco versus 3Com, and Cisco kicked our ass, and someone or another bought 3Com.

1:17:41 I think it was Dell, but um, this IT guy, um, whose name was Klaus, um, who’s probably listening to this, um, he was like, not an ID guy. He was doing all this weird networking stuff. He was German, so he, like, wore a suit and had a Mercedes, and I just followed him around, and he figured I was good at presenting stuff, highly technical stuff, because I understood this stuff really well, and he showed me networking, and I was like, I can’t believe that people get paid for this, and I don’t have any idea how it works, and I would do the dumbest things in front of executives and be like, Dave, you can’t do that.

1:18:13 So I decided I should learn. So every Thursday night for years, they had this meeting at the Stanford barn. This is in Silicon Valley, and it’s actually a barn that Leland Stanford made. They would have a networking cocktail mixer for, like, early web entrepreneurs. A lot of people went on to start really big companies, and I would show up to this thing, and I was the total geek, and I had no idea what to do.

1:18:38 So I would watch these people, like, like an anthropologist, just kind of stand in the corner and be like, okay, and then I would go try what I was watching. It was the most robotic, stupid learning you’ve ever, like, a hacker. To me, it was very much a hacker, and it was what I was doing. Is I, I didn’t have these things innately. I didn’t have the, the skills to do that, so I just kind of embarrassed myself and just made friends in a way that wasn’t natural for me.

1:19:01 It didn’t come easily, and learned how to do this, and how to swap business cards, and how to actually look at what I could do for someone else before I looked at what they could do for me. That’s huge, which they don’t teach you. And Klaus helped me to see that, and some of the other mentors I’ve had helped me to see that. But it was just practice that let me do that, and as I matured in my career, I had responsibility for corporate development. You’re going to buy other companies, or they’re going to buy you, and I’m the person to do that.

1:19:30 Or I’m the head of evangelism, or it’s my job to take the story of the company, including all the detailed technology, and and to tell it to people in a way that they can connect with. These are so far from my innate skill sets as a 23-year-old who wouldn’t make eye contact and basically, you know, chewed gum a lot and weighed 300 pounds. So that evolution came from an act of will and constant practice. But for me, in Bulletproof, my desire is, look, I want to help people.

1:20:01 And then when suddenly people pick up on that, and then when Rick Rubin dropped an email, I’m like, I’m pretty sure he’s famous. Okay, I’m not a celebrity guy, and I Google him, and I’m like, oh my god, every song I ever cared about, this guy played a hand in it. And I got to have lunch with Rick, and I drank my coffee, and I’m like, you know, just, like, both kind of a little bit starstruck, but also just touched at the level of authenticity and service that Rick has for what he does.

1:20:28 Like, he’s a guy who helps other people. And the same thing with Ariana. I was, uh, you know, we’d met. I’d, uh, she was gracious enough to host me in her studios to interview her. Radio, yeah.

1:20:42 And she’s a dynamo. Or, Thrive. If people haven’t read it, it’s a really powerful book about an executive who’s made mistakes and how she acknowledged them and fixed them. So I have a lot of respect for her. But she called one day and said, Dave, I, I want to serve Bulletproof coffee at Davos, like, like, the World Economic Forum, really.

1:20:59 Which is, yeah, I’m running a coffee shop there. Like, how can I help? Right? I’ll be there tomorrow with bells on. And it turns out I couldn’t get a security clearance in time to go to Davos.

1:21:08 Okay, I, I’m a computer software guy. I used to weigh 300 pounds. From Silicon Valley, like, even having the thought of going to Davos is like, holy crap. And Ariana, in just her generosity, is like, well, that’s okay. If you can get it there, we’ll make it for people.

1:21:21 And she did. They served Bulletproof coffee at Davos. Ariana Huffington did that, and she didn’t ask for anything in return. It wasn’t a transactional thing. It was just a relationship thing, because she likes it.

1:21:32 It works for her. She knows other people like it, and she was sharing something that was valuable to her. And I’m, I’m grateful for that, but executives like that, people who are working for the greater good, do help each other all the time. And I spend a lot of my time, um, as CEO of Bulletproof, interacting with guys like you, with guys like Peter Sage and Dan Peña and dozens and dozens of other people who are influencing and helping others. And I help them, and they help me.

1:22:02 And there’s, it’s not transactional at all. It’s not financial. It’s, it’s mission-driven, and it’s also driven by the desire to spend quality time with people who are doing things that matter. And I don’t know how to stay motivated if I don’t do that, so I spend a lot of money. I don’t want to know how much money I spend each year to make sure that I’m at the right conferences, so I can sit down and have meaningful conversations with people who inspire me.

1:22:25 I go hang out with Peter Diamandis, right? I do the Abundance 360 thing. I go hang out with Joe Polish at the Genius Network. I go hang out with JJ Virgin at her Mindshare Summit, and each of those opportunities gives me a chance to hang out with the person who’s running it, as well as the other people they attract into their communities. I would not be where I am today if I didn’t go out and form those relationships.

1:22:46 And I didn’t form those relationships to be where I am today. I formed them to inspire me and to allow me to inspire others, and that’s what it comes down to. And that’s the ultimate feedback mechanism when someone like Rick or Ariana recognizes your passion. I mean, that must tell you, okay, I’m doing something right here. I, I, I’m not sure that the validation comes from them.

1:23:07 I mean, it always feels good when someone, whether whether they’re famous or someone just walks up and, and probably the most authentic things are I got a card once. Um, next wasn’t the card. They handed me the card, but it was an in-person thing, and it was a guy with, with his family, his whole family. He had three kids, and he said, Dave, here’s a picture of us 90 days ago, and here’s a picture of us now, and they’d all sign the back of it. It said thanks, and they brought me a grasp at stake.

1:23:32 And the most touching part of this is there was a picture of an obese 14-year-old girl. She was fat, right? And then there was a picture of her 90 days later, and she was a slim, attractive, happy girl. You couldn’t recognize the difference, and she was there in the room, and like, that’s why I do what I do. So the kind of validation that comes from, you know, a celebrity doing it, it’s like, wow, you know, look at me, kind of thing.

1:23:55 But the stuff that really like gets you in the gut is when you realize, like, that teenager, they would have sucked. Like, their life would have sucked, and like, that’s why I started doing this. Can I ask you a couple questions about, sure, how you recognize your own success? I mean, say a year from now, what is one of your metrics, you know, for success? I know you probably don’t believe in that, but also you’re a quantitative guy, you’re a guy who likes to hack, and probably run how we’re doing versus the previous piece, but like, what’s the first thing that comes to mind that you’ll be able to evaluate kind of where you are?

1:24:51 Can you explain to that what worry is an ego behavior? Well, worry is a fear of dying. It’s a fear of survival. Right, and you can keep peeling away layers.

1:25:07 I’m worried that, you know, something bad might happen. Okay, what might really happen? Well, it might be this. It always eventually comes down to, I might not have enough. I might.

1:25:15 And what does not having enough do? Well, when you’re a child, when you have enough, it means, or you’re not good enough. It means mom and daddy won’t love me. If mommy, daddy won’t love me, they won’t feed me. If they won’t feed me, I’ll starve.

1:25:25 Okay, this is not rational. This is the irrational part, and if anyone listening to this thinks they don’t have that in them, then either they’re mistaken or they’re a robot. And this is not rational, but it’s how our meat works. So acknowledging that, and saying, oh, what’s, what’s, where’s that warrior really coming from? It’s always that.

1:25:47 And if you can keep that in mind and realize you’re probably not going to starve to death, like, there’s food stamps, there’s, you know, there’s trash in the gutter. I’m pretty sure I could eat in the city with no money for a week. It just wouldn’t taste very good, and I’d probably feel crappy because I’d be eating a lot of MSG. Okay, like, I will survive, and so will everyone listening to this. Or you’ll die.

1:26:07 Yep, we’re all gonna die anyway, so I’ve come to grips with that. So what worries me isn’t so much what I do. I feel a sense of responsibility for is the people who work for Bulletproof, for my family, and for the people who count on me. I have a deep sense of responsibility for people who consume Bulletproof content, people who listen to Bulletproof Radio, people who read what I write. I, I truly think this way.

1:26:36 There’s 16 million downloads of Bulletproof Radio, and that’s more than a hundred lifetimes of contribution. Line up all those hours. Okay, if I’m putting out crap content, full of dick jokes, I’m telling people things that aren’t true, and I’m not bringing everything I have to bear in those interviews, I’m killing a hundred people. Like, literally, I’m wasting a hundred lives. And that’s an enormous responsibility.

1:27:02 When I make a bag of coffee, I can make it to the very best degree I know how to do it, and I can provide it for someone, or I could do a half-assed job. And so the sense of responsibility that I feel is I feel responsible for the people who have entrusted me with the trust that says, I’m going to trust this guy to make my food, make my coffee, or to, to provide me with knowledge, and I’m going to trust him that the knowledge is accurate and fair and well represented, and I’m going to do my best on those things. I might not be perfect, but I’m going to do my damnedest.

1:27:34 And that’s the sense of responsibility I have. I don’t fear, or I don’t worry, that I didn’t meet the bar, but I’m executing towards that bar, and that’s what I pay attention to. So what I don’t like and what I pay a lot of attention to is, as Bulletproof scales, what if someone at a partner company does something stupid and I don’t know it? Right? people blame CEOs for all these bad things.

1:27:58 I know a lot of CEOs, billion-dollar company CEOs, and the vast majority of them are really good people, and all of them are trying to do good things, but companies, as they get big, do bad things. They act like psychopaths. If they were human beings, we’d throw all companies in jail. And the reason for that is not because there’s bad people at the top wearing dark robes and pulling puppet strings. I know, I’ve sat in the board meetings.

1:28:22 That’s not what happens in those things. What’s happening is emergent behaviors from complex systems, which is something I studied, and that’s the internet. So when you make a rule that says do this thousands of times, optimize for this, and you make millions of small micro-decisions spread throughout a company with a thousand or five thousand or a hundred employees, behaviors emerge that are not in alignment with your intent or your values. And that comes down to setting the mission.

1:28:52 At Bulletproof, at one of our all-hands, a new finance guy came in and basically said, well, something along the lines of, raised his hand and said, you know, at the end of the day it’s all about margin, all about the dollars. And I said, stop. Like, no. This is about helping the most people. Yes, we also will make enough profit to pay our employees, to grow the company, and to have fiduciary responsibility to our investors.

1:29:14 But our mission is not to make the most. Our mission is to help the most, and by so doing we’ll probably make more money anyway, but that’s not the goal. The goal is to make enough to do the most, and setting that as the core mission changes the micro decisions in Bulletproof. But that still doesn’t mean that, you know, one of the contract manufacturers we use to help encapsulate one of the supplements that we manufacture, because it’s too expensive to buy the machines that would sit idle a lot of the time anyway.

1:29:44 So almost everyone in the vitamin industry relies on big companies that have these machines. So what if they do something wrong? They put the wrong ingredients in, and I don’t know it, and our quality assurance team, yeah, there’s three people who do quality assurance at Bulletproof, because it’s that important, and we do more testing than any laws require. And what if we miss something? Right?

1:30:05 Like, I’m not worried about harming people, because that’s not going to happen here, but what if it’s just not what we think it is? And that’s something that would really, really just irritate me, and I would feel like I let down my community and my stakeholders, that I have a responsibility to. And so I do what I can, systems-wise, to prevent that from happening. Right? I just want to finish off and ask you about family.

1:30:26 Uh, family’s very important to you. You know, you wrote the Better Baby book with your wife. I bought a copy of that. Um, I know you know you have two sons, and you, you take their, their schooling very seriously. I think when you previously had another job, you made sure you could work at home and spend a certain amount of time at home with them.

1:30:41 And you know, and I was just wondering how you balance the family with what you do for Bulletproof and all the media you create. I mean, I don’t know if people realize you’re, you’re producing two podcasts a week, and that’s a lot of work there. And what you’ve learned over the years as far as how the best way is to balance family? Well, a small thing: I have a son, a son and a daughter, and a daughter. That’s okay, it’s two.

1:31:05 You got the number one, two. Okay, and when I worked in, in Silicon Valley, first had, first had kids there. It, it turns out you spend an hour commuting in the morning, even if you’re going five miles. You spend an hour commuting. That’s just what happens, and there’s a set start time for work, and then you’re not gonna be home for lunch, because you have to drive there.

1:31:27 It just doesn’t make sense, and then you get home at six, if you manage to leave work at five, but there’s that meeting, so you leave work at six, you get home at seven, so you get almost no time with your kids. They go to bed. They’re kids, right? And then you’re tired, and then maybe there’s a business dinner a couple nights a week. So I decided that I wanted a way to spend more time with my kids, and I wanted to keep doing the work that I do, and the obvious thing to do is end the commute.

1:31:52 And to this day, the majority of people in Bulletproof work from home, which is an enormous boon to their productivity. So they probably give half that time to Bulletproof, and they use the other half to go do yoga, or to exercise, or to date, or whatever it is they like to do. And that’s pretty powerful stuff. We have a headquarters in, uh, in Bellevue, Washington, and we have our coffee shop, where you kind of have to show up to make coffee for people.

1:32:15 That’s, that’s how it works, but making it so that, that, my own life, in my own life, I’m able to spend time with my kids. I travel 30, 40 percent, but when I’m home, I wake up in the morning, the kids make Bulletproof coffee with me, and yeah, they drink a little bit of it. And in fact, they can both pull great shots on the espresso machine. They know how to use the French press. They know all the good coffee technologies, and they like doing it, and then sometimes I drive them to school.

1:32:44 A lot of dads never get to do that. And then I go home and I work, and then I have lunch. If it’s summer, the kids are home, then they play. I worked. They know I’m working.

1:32:52 I have a separate office, the whole Bulletproof labs there, um, on, on my properties, 100 yards from the house. I just walk to work, and then I have lunch with my kids, and I play with them a little bit, and then I go back to work, and then I finish work, and I go play with the kids, and I have dinner with them, and I put them down. So I get more quality time with my kids than most dads do, even though I travel substantially, and they know when I travel I’m gone.

1:33:15 I leave them videos, and I talk to them on the phone every now and then, but when you’re five, you don’t care, really. You talk on the phone for like one minute. “I had a good day, I saw a turtle, I love you, bye.” And you know that that’s good. But, um, the net amount of time that I get in that amount of quality time is higher with that kind of a lifestyle than it was living in a big city, because I don’t do the commute.

1:33:36 And I concentrate all of my commute when I’m on a trip. Like this, I work 12 hours, 14 hours a day. When I do this, I’ll go home tonight after we’re done with our webinar later, and I’ll probably be on one-on-one calls with my staff between ten and two in the morning, and then I’ll wake up, get on a plane tomorrow morning and fly home, and that’s okay. Like, I’m moving the work so that I can have the life that I want, and that allows me to be present for, for my kids and present for my wife.

1:34:04 It’s also kind of boring sometimes if I don’t travel. Like, I live on an island, and, you know, I, I like to hang out with guys like you and Peter and all these amazing people. So that said, I live a half hour from an international airport for a reason, and I have bald eagles that live in my backyard, and the cows that I eat eat the grass that grows on my property, and my family grows all the food, all the vegetables that we eat in a year, right outside my office.

1:34:32 So I’m living sustainably, maybe not counting the jet travel. I get time with my kids. We have lots of time in nature, because there’s forest all around us. There’s an ocean 10 minutes away from us. It’s pretty idyllic, and I chose that on purpose, and it was completely backwards.

1:34:48 I was still working in Silicon Valley, and so, guys, I’m moving to Canada. And in fact, I was working for a small startup, this was a basis, the wristband company. Okay, I was a co-founder of the US entity and CTO. This is the heart rate monitoring company that was bought by Intel for 100 million dollars, and I was only there for a few months, because it turns out that their product wasn’t going to ship for three years, and when I joined, I’d somehow got the impression that it was going to ship within 30 days.

1:35:13 So there’s a few product delays that I didn’t really know about, and I just moved to a new country under NAFTA, and I needed to get a job, because I needed to stay in Canada. So because of the value of networking, I picked up the phone, and here’s, I live in a small town in the middle of nowhere, and I, I called some of the people I knew in the business, and it took me six days to get a VP-level job offer from a company who didn’t care where I lived, and that was the most amazing thing. It’s not that I’m particularly special.

1:35:45 It’s that companies want talent, and they don’t care where the talent lives, so they said, sure, we’ll hire you, and we don’t care where you live. So I ended up making Silicon Valley wages and living in a town where cost of living was much lower. That was really, really nice, and yeah, I got on airplanes quite a lot, but I got to be home the rest of the time. So I, I, really, I went from there to running Bulletproof, but the idea that you can put your energy and your focus into your job or into your your company, or all of that, and you can do it for many jobs from different places.

1:36:17 It, it’s very, very meaningful, especially when you have kids. And as an employer now, whether or not my people have kids, if they can effectively work from home, I wanted to do that, but there is no replacement for looking someone in the eye. Yeah. So I fly the company to places. We have the Bulletproof Conference.

1:36:35 The next one’s coming up October 23rd in LA. Most of the company is going to be there. It’s a chance for them to work together and see each other, and it’s also a chance for them to see a thousand people in our community, and to interact, and to be inspired by seeing the changes in those people. So you’ve got to get the eye to eye, and if you want to, you know, go live in, say, Thailand, which is kind of the young entrepreneur sort of fantasy, you’re going to be a little bit socially isolated, and you can deal with it, but there are connections you can make with people that only happen in real life, and after they’re made in real life, you can get on the phone, or you can send a very occasional email, but you still already have a connection.

1:37:12 But you’re going to have to spend some serious international airfare if you want to, really, you know, do what you can do. What about that old Google ad that says you should be able to touch the people around you? Do you ever think that in the future there will be an essential workplace, or is that just completely antithetical to the values that you just talked about? You know what, Bulletproof, you know, touching the people around me sounds like my idea of hell.

1:37:35 I just posted this, the open workspace. It destroys performance in people, and there’s good science to support this. It was a blog post on the Bulletproof website, but here’s what to do if you’re in an open office so that you can actually produce, and it involves noise-canceling headphones, like blocking out as much of the stuff that sucks your energy that doesn’t add any value. So structured time to come together, terribly important. Structured time to be a part, terribly important.

1:38:01 And this nasty Silicon Valley idea of, well, we used to have cubicles, which were bad enough, but now we tore down the cubicles, so we all just sit in desks like, like workmen, and stare at each other and try and focus at the same time. Come on. Like, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do that to people. Even people like each other. That’s refreshing.

1:38:19 Neither did I. I used to work on the trading floor. No, that’s horrible. Oh my gosh. And we each, we literally each had a meter of room, and you could smell what the guy was eating.

1:38:27 You could smell if you had a shower. Not to mention, you heard everything that people were talking about. They would overhear all of your conversations, and you’re with these people in a highly stressful environment that’s very selfish and ego-based for 10 hours a day, maybe 12 hours a day, and sometimes you’re entertaining with these guys at night. Again, you’re entertaining the high-performance traders, which are, again, on their own ego missions. Oh yeah, and uh, it does get to you after a while, not to mention all the molds and toxins that I’m sure were there.

1:38:52 Yeah, just formaldehyde from the furniture is a big issue for people in office buildings. Yeah, but it was just not the healthiest environment. It was just stressful to be around. Uh, and it’s just very refreshing to hear you say that, because you know in tech people say the opposite, but knowing you, let’s look at the science, right? And also, you know, the number of coders who have, you know, big, and it’s not just coders.

1:39:14 But if you want to create a really good marketing campaign, you want to be able to say, hey guys, let’s get in here, let’s, let’s whiteboard this thing out, let’s create, let’s mock it up, like, let’s do the team thing. But then you want to sit down and, you know, use your graphics software and really come into Illustrator and just make something pop. There’s a need for quiet, creative focus space, and it’s, it’s stressful to not have that when you want it.

1:39:36 And I think we’re turning up workplace stress, but we’re increasing the number of employees per square foot, and that, that’s a rough thing to do. And there are some companies now where CEOs are mandating everyone will come into the office, and you might need to do that if your culture has lost its edge and if people are milking the system. I’ve had to let people go. I had an employee who took another job while being a full-time employee at Bulletproof. And look, that’s not okay.

1:40:04 Like, like, you know, if you’re gonna do that, and you’re a full-time employee with benefits and all that kind of stuff, and your work contract says you need to talk about that before you do it, and you’re unavailable for your job some of the time because you’re working another job, like, that’s not what working at home is about. And if you want to start a company that competes with your employer while you’re working from home, that’s also kind of slimy, right? And you shouldn’t do that.

1:40:26 And I did start a company while I was working at my previous employer. I was doing cloud security, and my new company was a coffee company. Okay, there was no conflict there. Well said, Dave. I always ask everyone a few questions at the end.

1:40:40 I might have asked you these before. I’m going to hit you with them again. All right. If you can make a phone call to the 20-year-old Dave Asprey and give that young man a bit of advice, maybe one piece of advice, what would you tell them? I would tell myself something that I didn’t know until I was 30, and I would say, feelings don’t have a reason.

1:41:03 I had this rational loop that I was caught in, that’s very harmful, and I see a lot in people, especially when we’re young. And it was that: you think there’s no reason for me to feel afraid, therefore I do not feel afraid, therefore that feeling that I have right now is not fear, therefore I am invincible. And this is a nasty trap that we fall in, because then you just cut yourself off from knowing when you’re feeling a sense of fear. And I, I remember this very well.

1:41:37 I was doing this personal growth thing with uh, Barbara Findison, who’s this amazing innovator, who’s a founder of the American Pre and Perinatal Psychology Association, and she spent many years studying what early life experiences do to shape adult personalities. And there’s incontrovertible science about this. I didn’t know any of this stuff existed. So friend said, you just need to go and learn from this lady. You ignore all this, you won’t even want to go if you pay attention to it.

1:42:05 So on my friend’s advice, I just went, and I was kind of blown away, because she she knew things about my personality that she shouldn’t have known. And I started feeling really uncomfortable at some point during, during the experience there, and I was like, I can’t stay in this room. It’s I’m just like, I’m really uncomfortable, and she goes, well, you have to be feeling something. I said, yeah, I’m feeling angry. I’m pretty pissed off right now.

1:42:28 She goes, no, there’s something else. I’m like, no, I’m pretty sure I’m just angry, like there’s nothing else. And in fact, she looks at me, she goes, Dave, do you feel anything in your stomach? I said, yeah, my stomach feels a little bit different. She goes, that’s called fear.

1:42:41 And I look like, I go, there’s no reason for me to be afraid. It cannot be fear, because there’s no reason for it. And she just looked at me with these, like, giant glowing blue eyes, and she goes, fear doesn’t have to have a reason. It’s an emotion. Emotions don’t have reason.

1:42:54 And I was like, blown away by that. What, you mean my body can have emotions without my permission, without a reason, or without a reason that I know? If I hadn’t known that when I was 20, I would have listened instead of ignored all the things that my body was telling me, about my intuition, about my sense of the environment around me. Instead, I had taught myself to consciously ignore all of that, very valuable input signal, because there was no reason to listen to it.

1:43:18 I let my intellect and my reason override my emotions and my feelings, my intuition. Neither sense is more valuable than the other. A properly functioning human has both, and uses both, and allows the rational to govern the irrational, but listens to the irrational because it has value. If I could have told myself that in a way that I could have absorbed it, it would have completely changed how I treated other people, how I treated myself, and it would have revolutionized my entire life.

1:43:46 Instead, I struggled for a long time to learn that. Do you think that’s a symptom of tech CEOs and entrepreneurs and these types of individuals that just live in their brains and don’t acknowledge the intuition they have? Or is that just a stereotype? Let’s see. My grandmother, the PhD nuclear engineer who had met my grandfather on the Manhattan Project in Chicago, they moved to Los Alamos and helped to build the bomb.

1:44:10 Um, she’s still a subscriber to the Skeptical Inquirer, which is a magazine for basically people who don’t believe in anything. Like, it’s basically the ultimate debunkers magazine. Right, so our family discussions, all my aunts and uncles, master’s degree, scientists, and all that. So this is a hyper-rational family. Right?

1:44:29 So this is endemic in Silicon Valley, and certainly like the values of my family, where it’s most important to be right, and to be scientific when you’re right, even if you’re dogmatically holding on to a point that isn’t very scientifically valid. You just pretend like it is. So, you know, having seen that kind of behavior, I said, you know, I’m actually going to take a deep breath, and rather than holding on to something like that. I’m going to actually just do the science, and I’m going to be open to other ideas, and this is what led me to go learn meditation, which is something that I don’t think most people in my family would pay any attention to.

1:45:01 And most, 15 years ago, most Silicon Valley CEOs wouldn’t have done either. A few of the outliers, in Steve Jobs, who was using psychedelics on occasion for spiritual growth, and a few of the cutting-edge guys were very unusual. And I said, I’m going to do the irrational things, mostly because I’ve tried all the rational things and I’m still not happy, and I’m still fat, and I’m still tired. So I’m going to explore the things that obviously probably shouldn’t work.

1:45:27 So I do think, though, that my upbringing in a, in a, you know, national laboratory science-based family that had consciously rejected the irrational and the emotional and the spiritual, that did lead me to that mindset. And I do meet some CEOs who have that, especially young CEOs. And then there’s another class of CEOs who realizes, like, it’s really painful and difficult to be a CEO and to be in a leadership role and to be in the spotlight and to hold a purely rational point of view, because your body will scream at you when you’re doing something that is not in alignment with what you should be doing.

1:46:06 But if you teach yourself to ignore the screams and to do it anyway, you will never be happy. Your emotions and your actions have to be in alignment, and when you do that, your company will succeed more. You will personally succeed more. You’ll make healthier relationships, and you’ll serve people better. Right?

1:46:23 And if not, you get this disconnect in the future where things re-equalize, also known as midlife crises or blah blah blah. Where, yeah, because you weren’t listening to your emotions, you weren’t listening to your intuition, and you were just making those brain decisions. I came from a similar family. Dad, you know, a Caltech engineer, brother, computer scientist, Stanford. It was all, I was the science fair kid.

1:46:42 So it was always, never, never about embracing our emotions. There was no, you know, there was no even embracing of the humanities, of the arts, or anything. And so I’ve kind of had to try, to late, even lately recognize that my intuition is one of my greatest assets, and to try to shut it off is, you know, it’s the wrong way of thinking. But, you know, to trust that the meat bag knows some things that you need to listen to sometimes. And, uh, yeah, and it’s fascinating.

1:47:05 Um, the second part of that question is the best advice you’ve ever received, business or personal. You know, you, I didn’t ask you if you had mentors over the years, but obviously you mentioned, you know, the German guy, and it sounds like you do learn from a lot of different people. But what comes to mind? This is always the hardest question, but, you know, I’ve had some really successful, big, relatively well-known mentors who help me out on a regular basis, and it’s hard to call out one one versus the other.

1:47:36 People who step up, a couple of people come to mind. One that I’ve probably never mentioned, I have no idea if she’s a fan, I haven’t talked to her in a while. Her name is Carla Lindsey, and she was the chairman of 3Com’s personal assistant. And I was this young, fat, aspergery kid, my first real job in Silicon Valley. Very hard for me to picture that guy.

1:48:00 There’s a photo of me from Entrepreneur magazine that went out to, like, a million people, all fat. So, like, like, there’s good evidence on that one. It’s somewhere on the website, because people like it. Couldn’t possibly be, I’m like, no, really. Like, this was printed.

1:48:10 Like, it’s a matter of public record. But so Carla and I met in, like, big companies. They have these, like, employee HR training things that are usually completely lame. Um, and yeah, I remember this really well. Um, I’m sitting in there, and they say, tell us something unusual about yourself, and the first person, like, I have two kids, I have a dog, and I’m like, okay, I’m a truth-table engineer.

1:48:34 So I’m like, okay, unusual means I want to make sure that I align two highly unusual things, and then it’ll be completely unique on the planet. And I said, uh, let’s see, I have size 16 feet, and I’ve been bitten by a vampire bat. And everyone in the room goes, what the hell? What? Okay, that was maybe overkill, right?

1:48:55 But I’m like, there, that’s something no one knows. Of course now everyone knows it. But at that point Carla, like, it’s the next break. She gets up and she walks over to me, and she goes, I want to get to know you. You’re interesting.

1:49:07 Executive assistants to CEOs are some of the most knowledgeable, powerful people that are behind the scenes. Like, you want to know who’s behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz? It’s actually the Wizard of Oz’s executive assistant. And Carla was promoted to be Eric Benoit’s assistant, um, from being someone else’s assistant, because she stood out as a really good EA. So he basically poached her from one of the other vice presidents, and she understood the interworkings of power and politics and sociology in a company, and so we’d have coffee sometimes.

1:49:38 We got to be friends, but she would tell me why people were doing things in corporate environments that made no sense to me whatsoever. And during the time I worked there, I actually learned a lot, because from the perspective, especially from a socially awkward engineering perspective, but also just from a young person’s perspective, what happens in big companies looks stupid and chaotic, and you don’t understand, because you haven’t taken on a bigger role. What’s going on with a bigger role?

1:50:08 I used to describe my job running strategic planning was taking ideas that were crayon simple and redoing them in finger paint for senior executives. Okay, the ideas weren’t that hard to do. It was just re-explaining them because I didn’t, I thought the executives were dumb, and they just got there because they were power mongers. And what I didn’t realize is, now that I’m an executive, they have so much going on. The bandwidth they’re consuming is ginormous, and they need those things because that’s how they understand things, and they’re relying on me or others like me to make good recommendations and to tell them why, succinctly, those recommendations make sense, so they can apply all this other knowledge that I have no access to, so that they can make sure that the decision is in alignment with the company mission, and they can move forward, and they do it at a pace that is ungodly and unimaginable to me as a 20-year-old or 25-year-old.

1:50:59 And I’m doing that now, and I’m constantly training the young people in my company. No, don’t ask me to solve the problem for you, because I don’t have what the knowledge you do. I want you to solve the problem for you and tell me how you solved it, so we can work on this together. And I think Carla helped me understand that that’s what was going on, and that what looked to me like either backstabbing or careless behavior from executives was anything but, and that it all had a reason, and the reason is invisible to you.

1:51:28 And the EAs, they always know the reasons, and they, the goodies, don’t talk about non-public things. Like, they hold their confidences, and she never disclosed anything that was inappropriate, but she helped me understand an invisible landscape that applies at every company I’ve ever worked at, and I would not be where I am in my career today had we not had those coffee meetings. That’s a fascinating insight. I’ve never heard that before. Ever.

1:51:54 Hi Carla. Last part of that question, you know, to the 20-year-old that’s watching us from somewhere around the world that you know wants to grow up and, and, you know, do the kind of things you’ve done, you know, to create a company or create an idea or a movement, or just get that information out there in a way that people can consume it and understand it. You know, what, what advice do you give to them, of actions they should take or, or not take? Well, you said to someone who’s 20.

1:52:22 Yeah, okay. If you’re 20, you got to understand something: your prefrontal cortex will finish baking in four years. Okay, you are going to see the world from the perspective of someone whose brain isn’t cooked yet, and that’s awesome, because you will see things that people who have cooked brains, like mine, probably miss. So you also have almost nothing to lose, because you can actually eat probably crappy food and live on beer for about another five years before it catches up to you.

1:52:54 So you have the ability to start a company, and your risk is, oh no, I might fail, but I don’t have substantial assets to lose anyway. So now is a great time to start a company. And I started, uh, you know, my first company, doing, you know, e-commerce, that the e-commerce pioneer thing, when I was about 22, 23, or maybe even 21, when I started, before we did e-commerce. So I was an early entrepreneur, and I paid for my college tuition selling t-shirts to Halloween partiers.

1:53:21 Right? I encourage you to do that, but at the same time I got jobs, and I worked for people who had way more knowledge than I did, and I learned from Carla, and I learned from Klaus, and I learned from countless other people. Another guy who really made a difference for me was a guy named Peter who ran as a McKenzie consultant, who ran strategy at Exodus Communications, and I was one of the best leaders I’d ever worked with, and I learned so much from him.

1:53:52 Had I gone off, said, I’m going to be a startup entrepreneur, I never would have learned, like, how he led with kindness in an environment that was relatively toxic. I, I never would have learned all these things, and every day when I sit down at Bulletproof and sometimes there’s big decisions you know, big things coming. I wouldn’t have the context and the nuances to do those as well as I would have if I had not put in my time working and learning a function.

1:54:18 So my advice, if you want to start something like that, is to find your passion, know what it is, and invest in becoming an expert in that passion. At the same time, invest in the skills that are the things you think are the most fun. Get those skills and get good at them. If you like marketing, get damned good at marketing, and get damned good at whatever your passion is. You don’t have to market your passion right now.

1:54:40 You don’t have to start a company right now, but you can start the seeds of the company. And what you do is you say, these are the three functions in a company that I like the most that I want to do, and then hold your nose and learn about 20 minutes about all the functions you don’t have any interest in, and recognize that you will always have someone else who loves those on your team. And if you do what I did, which is, oh no, I’m weak, I have to fill in my weaknesses, you will waste years.

1:55:07 I suck at project management. My personality test shows I suck at project management, so what does a 22-year-old Dave do? Tries to get a certificate in project management certification, because I suck at it, and I don’t want to suck at anything. Dude, recognize this. If you’re 20 or 25, you’re going to suck at some things, and that’s totally good.

1:55:24 That’s why there are people who don’t suck at those things. Those are the people you need on your team. So start understanding where you suck and what you love. Learn the functions you love. Learn the ones that are easy and instinctive.

1:55:34 Learn the topics and the areas and industries that you have passion for, and learn how to do the things that you’re really good at, and that’s what’s going to make you a good CEO. And you have a far better chance of succeeding if you build a base, and you start doing that networking thing that I had to go to Stanford barn and stand there and copy people to do. Start learning how to communicate. Start learning how to forge those relationships, and start building relationships with people who are more knowledgeable than you in your space.

1:56:04 I ran a non-profit. I still run it, the Silicon Valley Health Institute, for 10 years to learn anti-aging. I’ve interviewed more than 100 people, or experts in that space, to become an expert in this field, where I don’t have a degree. I’m an unlicensed biohacker, but I know my [expletive]. You too can know your [expletive], but that means you have to put in your time, and you have to work at that, and when you do that, you’re going to be in a position to be an expert, to be able to communicate your expertise, and to be able to provide specific business value for your company, and to lead all the other functions into higher-end of those functions.

1:56:35 That’s what makes a company scale. You knowing everything, you having no weaknesses, does not make your company scale. It just makes you stressed. That was awesome. That was amazing.

1:56:46 Where’d that come from, Dave? I think we just captured something pretty special here. Uh, I’m not, not to toot our own horn here, but I think this is probably the best interview you, uh, that you’ve ever done, just because we saw so many different aspects of yourself. Great fun, man. Great job interviewing me.

1:57:00 You, you rock. This wasn’t that hard. It’s all about the interviewer. Seriously, interviewing is a very difficult skill, and most people suck at it, that’s why a lot of podcasts fail, because the interviewers are not conscious. And you’re doing a great job.

1:57:11 Thanks for opening up and talking about everything. You know, we’ve always had a really special relationship since, I think, right after your first episode, uh, I pitched you on Bulletproof coffee being our official drink, and uh, you know, you, I think you saw what we did in that first show, and you were, you were all in on London Real. I like what you’re doing, man. I’ve always liked it. It’s awesome, and I appreciate that.

1:57:32 But just, you know, making that investment in us early on, uh, meant a lot to me, and uh, so I really appreciate that. And uh, also, um, I have a statistical anomaly of a 100 success rate and serving your coffee to every single guest on this show, so I always joke with everyone here, I’m like, it’s a statistical anomaly, but um, everyone loves it, and so, uh, that’s always, it always surprises me, but then doesn’t surprise me, you know, when we do it. And so uh, it’s been amazing to have a relationship with you and your, and your company the last two and a half years.

1:58:02 I um, have been fortunate enough to even have, like, bi-weekly phone calls with, you know, uh, your marketing people, and, and I think we just both learn so much from each other. So it’s, it’s, I don’t even feel like it’s a sponsored relationship. I just feel like we’ve been growing with you, and we’re helping each other, and that’s what it’s about, and it’s been amazing to watch, and I’m a huge fan of everything you guys do and the way you do it. And I got to spend some time with you last few days.

1:58:24 We went up to see Dan Peña and to the castle party, and um, you know, I meet a lot of people, and I try to figure out why they do what they do, and you know, I had a question in here, like, you know, what do you want to do? Do you want to make the billion dollar company? And I really believe you are doing what you’re doing for those reasons that you say. You know, you want to get this information out there, and you don’t want that young Dave to go through the same, you know, that guy shouldn’t exist.

1:58:49 You know, he should go through those problems and be frustrated, and it’s hard enough when you’re 26 or 22, dealing with everything else you’re dealing with, let alone dealing with all these invisible factors that are affecting your life, and it’s just unnecessary. It’s not like you have to suffer to have success. Yeah, you have to put in the work, but there’s no point in, you know, these invisible forces that are holding you back, uh, through really a lack of education.

1:59:12 So, um, so thanks for providing that information to us, and uh, it’s been a, it’s been a great relationship, so I appreciate that very much. Uh, you’re, you’re welcome, and thanks for all your support. It’s been phenomenal to watch episodes where, like I said, 100 hit rate on Bulletproof coffee, and you’ve, you’ve scaled London Real quite nicely yourself. I mean, I didn’t get to interview you about that, but you’ve, you’ve really, um, you’ve really upped your game, and you, I mean, you’ve chosen your set, and it shows in, and you have four times as many cameras as I do.

1:59:44 Now, I mean, you’re, no, seriously, you’re, you’re stepping up, and, uh, you’re interviewing amazing people, and your interviewing skills have gone to the roof. So I’m, I’m happy to be a small contributor here, and I mean, I send you some coffee, and we have a sponsorship, but you’re doing the work, and, and I’m, I’m amazed at what you’ve done. So, likewise, mutual respect. Okay, thanks. I appreciate that.

2:00:05 We’re trying to scale a bit here, you know, uh, but I’m really inspired by how you scale, so it’s it’s always good to see it kind of firsthand. But thanks for that. You know, we’re on a journey here, but you know, it’s important, and again, if we believe in our message, which I do, and everyone here believes in it so much, that, uh, it’s kind of like your responsibility, really, to scale and get it out there. And so, so yeah, so as we say on London Real, it’s about the journey.

2:00:28 Uh, I can’t wait to do this again in another year or two when you’re back in London. But I wish you guys all the best of luck, not that you’ll need it, and it’s just fun watching you make these moves. I love it when I hear about these new products like Fat Water, and you know, we were on the trip with Dan Peña. Mariana brings the induction mat with us, and it’s just like, all these things are just exciting, uh, to watch. And so, uh, so thanks for everything you do, and uh, I wish you all the best.

2:00:51 Likewise. Thank you.