Dave Asprey | Founder of Bulletproof and Father of Biohacking

This episode explores Dave Asprey's journey as the founder of Bulletproof and his contributions to the concept of biohacking.

1. Dave Asprey’s personal health challenges played a significant role in his pursuit of biohacking.
2. Asprey’s innovative creation of Bulletproof Coffee marked a turning point in popular health culture.
3. The episode delves into the concept of biohacking and its potential to enhance human health and longevity.
4. Asprey discusses the science behind his products and the importance of quality control in food production.
5. He shares his futuristic vision for health optimization through the integration of technology and wellness practices.

1: Introduction

Hosts introduce Dave Asprey, discussing his background and the day’s topic. Dave Asprey: "I've used personal challenges as a catalyst to develop a deeper understanding of human health."

2: Origins of Bulletproof

Asprey recounts the origins of Bulletproof Coffee and his motivations for starting his company. Dave Asprey: "My own health transformation inspired me to help others achieve the same."

3: Principles of Biohacking

Exploration of the principles behind biohacking and how Asprey applied them to his life. Dave Asprey: "Biohacking is about making changes to your lifestyle that have a measurable impact on your biological age and health."

4: Future of Health and Technology

Discussion on the future of health technologies and their integration into daily life. Dave Asprey: "We're at the cusp of a revolution in how we understand and manage our health."

1. Experiment with Diet: Start integrating biohacking principles by experimenting with your diet, focusing on reducing inflammations, such as eliminating processed sugars.
2. Quality Sleep: Prioritize quality sleep by adjusting your environment—dark, cool, and quiet are ideal conditions.
3. Mindful Movement: Incorporate regular, moderate exercise into your routine, tailored to your body’s needs.
4. Stress Management: Adopt stress reduction techniques like meditation or yoga to enhance mental and physical health.
5. Continuous Learning: Stay informed about the latest health technologies and nutritional sciences to keep your approach updated.

Dave Asprey, founder of Bulletproof Coffee and a pioneer in the Biohacking movement, is a four-time New York Times bestselling author, CEO of Upgrade Labs and Danger Coffee, and host of the Webby award-winning podcast, The Human Upgrade.

As a maverick in health science and biotechnology entrepreneurship, Dave made history by selling the first product online—a caffeine-related item—from his dorm room, earning recognition in Entrepreneur Magazine. Battling health challenges at 28, including cognitive fog and pre-diabetes, Dave embarked on a transformative journey, losing over 100 pounds, rejuvenating his health, and even boosting his IQ.

He coined the term "biohacking," now in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, and founded The Bulletproof Diet. Named "Father of Biohacking," Dave invested millions to advance human potential, hosting the world's premier biohacking conference. His work has been featured in major publications and Forbes recognized his company as one of the world's most innovative brands.

Dave's mission is to elevate human well-being, "one cell at a time," through groundbreaking initiatives like 40 Years of Zen, a neuroscience-based transformation program attracting global elite participants.



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Patrick J. McGinnis
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Wrote down a few notes just to. I do show notes too. In fact, I have my team do them for me to help. That's nice. That's always nice.

Dave Asprey
Or have chat. GPT do it, man. Try that. Seriously. I use it.

Patrick J. McGinnis
I use it. I just to get the juices flowing. But then it doesn't tell you everything, right? You have to do your own research. I upload a whole bunch of my old episodes.

Oh, that's interesting. Like the transcripts. And I'm like, google this guy I'm interviewing for the show. Write me show notes in like the style of your yeah. And I show them the show notes that I already have, and then they get like 90% of the way there.

Wow, I gotta do it like that. It'll save you time. I've been super basic about it. Just like I'm interviewing Dave Asprey. Give me some.

Dave Asprey
You gotta be like, here's who I am. This is my show. This is how I like my show notes. And just pretend like you're a doctor Oz producer or the Joe Rogan producer and write, you know, whatever you like. And I want you to write really intelligent questions that no one's heard before that they would want to hear.

That would do well on SEO. That will make first viral content, and it'll do all that. It's pretty cool. That's interesting. I'll start doing that from now on.

Patrick J. McGinnis
But Dave Asprey, appreciate you being on the show. Thanks for coming. Thanks for coming by. You know, I like, to always start from the beginning just to get a sense of you as a person and the human behind all these, like, incredible brands. So I saw you're born in Albuquerque.

Dave Asprey
I was. Did you also grow up there? I did. How was that? Yeah, Albuquerque at the time was a pretty poor city.

It was one of the poorest states in the country. So there was a lot of, like, call it violence. So I think I was in maybe 75 fights before I was done with high school. Never started one, at least, never threw the first punch. I might have said a few triggering things, and I always threw the last punch because physics, when you're the fat kid who's taller than everyone else, I'm just like, dude, I'm gonna sit on you.

You shouldn't fight me. So overall, it wasn't. It's a beautiful place. I love New Mexico. I still feel at home there, but I can't say it was the most magical experience I've ever had.

Patrick J. McGinnis
Yeah, well, I mean, was it just like, people would pick on everybody? Like, you know, it's like the traditional sort of bully. Bullying. There was a lot of bullying. And this goes back just to the time it was a normal thing, I think, in schools.

Dave Asprey
Yeah. But also, I was overweight. I was also the tallest person. And there's something called Napoleon's complex, which is when the shortest guys feel like they have to prove something by beating up the biggest guys. It's like some primate behavior.

And I just remember this one time in, I don't know, 8th grade or something, this. This kid was trying to do that, and I just looked at him. I was like, dude, if I put my hand on your chest, you can't touch me and I can still kick you. Yeah. Could we just not fight?

Patrick J. McGinnis
Yeah. And he punched me anyway. Yeah. So, um, I mean, in terms of, like, in terms of what you enjoyed doing, like, what were some of your. Interests as a kid?

Dave Asprey
Yeah, I was really into gold mining because my parents with a few other families, this is something new Mexicans used to do. We actually owned a small gold mine, so I would go up there on weekends with my dad and my gun, my 22, and, you know, shoot at trees and go hiking and work on our little gold claim. In fact, a lot of people dont know this. I was the new Mexico gold panning state champion. Well, so there's like a tournament, there's.

A competition to see who can get three gold nuggets out of sand the fastest. And I won it. And I was like, yeah, I beat the adults. I'm such a big deal. I probably won a gold pan or something, if I pronounce.

But I was very proud of myself at the time. Dig up gold to win gold. Yeah. I was also a computer nerd. This was in the very early days of it.

It helped that when my mother was pregnant with me, she worked for Bill Gates and Paul Allen and Ed Roberts, the founders of Microsoft. Because Microsoft started in Albuquerque as a company called mips. That's right. She was our first employee and one of the Microsoft founders bought my crib. Oh, wow.

Patrick J. McGinnis
For their kid. Yeah. Just like, because like, oh, you're working for us. We should buy you something. So.

Dave Asprey
Oh, bought, you bought my crib. Yeah, bought my mom a crib for me, I guess. So. She didn't get stock options and isn't a kabillionaire. What was that experience like for her being so early there?

You know, it was not impactful. She worked there for what, you know, a few, whatever, six months or something when she was pregnant. And this was the early seventies, right? Yeah. So she's like, I work for these three guys doing this tech stuff, but my dad has been in it for his whole life.

So I always had a computer. Even when I was eight years old, I had my own computer. Before Windows existed, I had my own computer and I didn't know how to type and I was writing software. So I was one of those people who should be in Silicon Valley. Like, that's just how it works.

Patrick J. McGinnis
Well, you did end up there. I think I read a great career, so we'll talk about that. But you mentioned being overweight as a kid. Did that run in the family or. Were you just that way?

Dave Asprey
Yeah, it ran in the family. All of my, on my dad's side of the family, especially all of my aunts and uncles are substantially overweight, except for one who's, I think he might be vegan. So he might just be malnourished. Yeah, yeah, I know. Your thoughts on veganism?

Patrick J. McGinnis
You were vegan at some point. I was vegan trying to lose that weight. It just didn't work or what happened. No, it routinely makes people sick. 80% of people quit being vegan in the first year because they get sick from it.

Dave Asprey
I'm like, what if we just didn't get arthritis autoimmune disease in kidney stones because we never tried malnourishment as a strategy for losing weight. Yeah, but I mean, I've written extensive science books on this. People have lost millions of pounds following my recommendations that include butter and beef so I'm not a carnivore guy. I'm not a keto guy, although I'm happy to use both of those strategies. Yeah, I'm a how do you feel and how do you look today guy.

And what's the fastest way to get there? And that's what biohacking is all about. Yep. So when did. So I know you end up, um.

Patrick J. McGinnis
I think you went to wharton, got your MBA, and then worked in silicon Valley. It was the other way around. Oh, worked and then went and got your MBA? Yeah. What I did is I went straight from my, my early career in tech.

Dave Asprey
I studied computer science. I got bored, and I'm like, all we're doing is theoretical problems. I want to go out and build a business. In fact, I had already started what's, as far as any evidence I can find in my understanding of the world? I started the first e commerce company on the planet.

I saw that. I saw that. It was like a global e commerce business. I guess you could call it global. I did.

Here's what it was. We didn't have a web browser yet, so the Internet was all text, and you could wait a while on your modem and download an image just like you would have on a webpage today. So we had the equivalent of Reddit, but it was called Usenet. And on that, there were places where we would talk about caffeine and coffee and all this. And I was really into coffee.

So I made a t shirt that says caffeine, my drug of choice. And I had a picture of the molecule. In fact, I have that tattooed on my bicep. And I said, I'm just going to sell this to the people online. It's like my online friends.

And I posted it because I was a member of the community. And pretty soon I had orders from 16 countries, and the word ecommerce hadn't been invented yet, and I didn't even know how to take payments, so they were faxing me checks, and I was going to the bank and driving to the post office with a car full of t shirts and bags. So you're selling that. You're not selling coffee. You're selling the.

I'm selling t shirts. Caffeine is my drug of choice. Interesting. And I still have one of those t shirts framed on the wall in my house, and it's kind of funny. That really is the first e commerce product on the planet.

And that was a couple days before the first wine was sold over the Internet. The guys who today run wine.com did that. And people now are saying, well, that sounds like a bunch of bullshit. I don't care. Like, I have the articles written about it.

And so I became famous when I was about 22 because the Miami Herald wrote about me. And then all these other journalists called me. Pretty soon, I've got a color picture in Entrepreneur magazine wearing the t shirt. I'm pretty sure that's real. And then another group of trolls.

I love trolls, by the way. Another group of trolls, like, you never weighed 300 pounds. And I'm like, well, how about a picture from fucking Entrepreneur magazine of, you got the receipts? I'm in a double extra large shirt here, and I made the shirt. Right?

Patrick J. McGinnis
Where can someone find that these days? It's on my website. In fact, there's a picture on Instagram pegged up there of the photo from Entrepreneur magazine. Awesome. I kind of look like I'm a lesbian.

Dave Asprey
I mean, my face was really puffy, but my estrogen levels were higher than my mom's, and my testosterone was lower than my mom's because of metabolic dysfunction and environmental estrogens that are caused by toxic modes. I was literally being poisoned, and I'm, like, just puffy. And I fixed all that. And today I'm 6% body fat, and I feel so much better than I did back then. When did that hit you?

Patrick J. McGinnis
When did that hit you? That, like, I need to do something about this. Somewhere around. Somewhere around. Right after that, that picture, uh, in entrepreneur magazine, I'd also had three knee surgeries.

Dave Asprey
They said I had arthritis when I was 14. Wow. In my knees, and I was just in pain all the time. After the second surgery, I was like, I'm done. I'm going to the gym.

So I went to the gym 90 minutes, six days a week without fail for 18 months. What were you doing? What was, like, the regimen? 45 minutes of cardio on a treadmill with a weighted backpack. The rest of it weights.

I could max out all but two of the shoulder exercises on the machines. When I was done, I went in with a 46 inch waist weighing 300 pounds. I went out with a 46 inch waist to weighing 300 pounds and stronger. I was stronger. No doubt about it.

Yeah. I'm sure my bone density went up right. And I might have swapped out some fat for some muscle, but I didn't need smaller pants. That helps. And today I'm grateful, because there's a lot of evidence that if you lift heavy before you're 25, you get muscle memory, so that when you lift heavy when you're 55, that your body will still put on muscle like it did when you were young.

But if you never lift heavy when you're young, when you're older, you won't be as responsive to exercise. Makes sense. Yeah. So it was like, it was a rough time, but I said, I've got to do this. And at the end of all that 702 hours, I did the math, working out and not getting results.

At first I thought it must just be, I'm not trying hard enough. I'm eating so little, and I'm not eating the chicken or the dressing. Just give me more lettuce and this burning hunger all the time. And you just grit your teeth and be like, all right, I'm just going to enjoy that because that's a feeling of weight loss. That's a feeling of metabolic dysfunction and malnourishment.

Patrick J. McGinnis
So were you just, were you following any, like, advice from anybody or at the time, or just. You were just doing whatever you felt like was the. I mean, I read all the stuff you could read, you know, all the. The fitness magazines and whatever, you know, all the stuff everyone knows. It's calories in, calories out.

Dave Asprey
Just exercise more and just. It doesn't work. And I had to kind of break myself to realize it didn't work because I can be stubborn that way. And then I finally just said, I'm going to do what works. And I read this magazine.

So where I went to high school, by then, I'd moved to the Central Valley in California. It was like farming community, four h pickup truck country. At the time, in the late eighties, if you read a bodybuilding magazine, at least in that town, it meant you were gay. It was like dudes in bikinis, right? So literally, like, they would still beat up gay people there.

And I'm not a gay person. Yeah, but, like, you just wouldn't do that. So I'm at a coffee shop, and there's one there. I'm like, I'm looking through it and I'm like, oh, my God, this guy says that, like, carbs make you fat. I thought carbs were for energy, so I ended up cutting wheat out of my diet because wheat was a carb.

I'm sensitive to wheat. And over the course of three months, my personality changed. I became nicer, and I lost 50 of the hundred pounds. Now, the other 50 pounds took me seven or eight years to figure out why those wouldnt go away. And I tried the keto thing before it had the branding of keto.

It used to be called Atkins. And I tried the zone diet and I tried the vegetarian thing and I went through all these different things just saying what can I do? Because my mindset is, im only going to do what works. Im not going to do what is supposed to work. Because what most people do today, whether its to succeed in business or to succeed in relationships or to succeed with their health, I heard somewhere that this works.

Im going to follow a very simple rule like exercise more, eat less, and it has to work because, and they insert some bullshit story that's too simple and it doesn't work. And then when it doesn't work, you blame yourself because shame and guilt are such powerful motivators and what. So yeah, if your marketing doesn't work, maybe you should try a different marketing strategy and we don't have much of a problem with that. Right, right. But if your vegan diet doesn't work and you're getting all these weird health problems, maybe you should change that.

Right. But I think people assume that, oh, throughout history, people have tried things and failed try things, failed try things. Oh, and they succeeded here. So they assumed that that might, that must work. And so they've written extensively about it, talked extensively about it.

Patrick J. McGinnis
And so, like, it's almost like looking at history as opposed to being, having this a contrarian point of view of like, maybe, maybe there's a better way, maybe there's a different way. Maybe it's not a one size fits all thing. And have you found that, have you found that people's, at least when it comes to your body and, and sort of the, the way that the different things affect it, is it pretty common across the board or do you find that everyone's different? Well, there are basic rules that work for all people. And the number one rule is stop eating the toxins that make you weak.

Dave Asprey
But the toxins that make you weak or make me weak are not the same. And then the second thing is focus on food that has enough energy. That means calories are not bad for you and has the right nutrients. If you do that and then you personalize, it always works. What I find a lot of people make mistakes on is they say, well, hmm, I'm going to focus on the aggregate nutrient density index.

And there's a mindset that says calories are bad. And if you believe that you're supposed to eat foods that are mostly water and fiber and have some nutrients and you're starving all the time because your body doesn't get enough energy. And I see this more in women than men, but you're just not getting enough animal protein because you stuffed your body with a bunch of water and fiber and green stuff that actually has onboard toxins in it. So number one, toxin avoidance, man made or nature, I don't care. Number two, enough energy to power your brain and your willpower to be an entrepreneur and just to show up in the world.

And number three, adequate animal protein because it's three times more absorbable than highly processed vegan protein, which is the only way you can get vegan protein without a ton of carbs. Number four, dont eat bad fats. And this is true for everyone. Bad fats are soybean and canola and corn oil and the cheap liquid oils that are everywhere now and then. Number five, have the amount and type of carbohydrate that makes your metabolism work right.

And that varies by person. Thats a lot to memorize. And that was as simple as I can make it. So instead of publishing a blueprint or the one thing that everyone should do, people have offered me $10,000 actually to tell them the list of what I take every day in supplements. I won't do it.

I will never post my exact list. Number one, because I'm always running experiments. Number two, unless you are a six foot four guy who used to weigh 300 pounds with a history of autoimmunity and a lot of other weird biological stuff, with an unlimited budget, on a mission to live to at least 180, you shouldn't take what I do because if you're 120 pound woman from India, you have an entirely different microbiome, an entirely different mitochondrial biome, probably different genetics. And if you took what I did, you would just get disaster pants. Yeah.

Patrick J. McGinnis
So do you recommend doing that? People do, testing their microbiome and figuring. Out, yeah, Viome is a company I've worked with as an advisor. Even when they were first getting started, Viome and I actually run $100,000 mastermind for entrepreneurs with the founder of Viome, Navin Jain and Vishan Lakhiani from Mindvalley. So if you guys want to do that, go to contact me on daveasprey.com and I'll hook you up with the Apollo group.

Dave Asprey
So I really believe in the microbiome stuff, but you also need your own. Just testing it. How's my body doing? So what I do now is I have a company. It's a franchise company called Upgrade Labs.

We've been around for nine or so years. We started under Arnold Schwarzenegger's office in Santa Monica. You walk in the door and we put you on a medical grade machine that measures your cell functions and tells you, do you have fat around your organs? Do you have fat under your skin? Are you inflamed?

Are you dehydrated? Where's your muscle? Where's your bone? And from there, what are your goals? And then we use AI and surveys to figure out exactly what you care about most.

There's about seven or eight things that people care about for their health. If you are 25 and I say, do you care about your health? You're going to say, yeah. And I go, all right, you can date that man or woman, or you can care about your health and not date that man or woman. What are you going to do, dude?

Everyone who's not dying is going to say, you know, the health can wait. I'm going to go on the date. And then you say, okay, you can have your health, or you can have that $200,000 a year dream job like my health can wait. This is normal. Our bodies are wired to do that.

It turns out we care about sex and power and community before we care about health, unless we're really sick. And that's why we always make short term decisions. Our bodies do that to us. So by reframing the longevity movement into this is what you do to be powerful and successful today, to have a better brain, to have a better libido, to have better energy, to be calmer, to be more peaceful, to be more powerful. This is so weird.

The stuff that makes 80 year olds back into 60 year olds will take a 25 year old and give him or her superpowers. So these are techniques of power and energy. That's what biohacking is based on. And what I'm doing now to make it just easier, is at my biohacking conference that comes out end of May in Dallas, more than 3000 people. This is a conference that launched the biohacking movement.

So it's a new word in the English language in 2018. My name's in Webster's. Yay. But people who come to this thing are going to have the chance to feel and experience all the biohacking technologies. But I'm also going to be launching an AI tool.

And you can get to the front of the line. Go to I willteachyoutobeyoung.com. And this is based on everything I've ever spoken, everything I've ever taught, and a bunch of other research that's not even published. So that instead of saying, I'm going to do what Dave does, even though I'm not. Dave, what if, given all your wearable data, what if we just helped you get the right lab tests?

Or you just gave us your lab tests and we ran that through our algorithms, and we tell you, here's what to do for your goals. Because you are biologically different than me. Your goals are different than mine. Your budget is different than mine. And when I say budget, I'm not saying I'm richer than you.

That's not at all that what the budget's based on. Theres three things you invest, whether its your health or your business or anything. One of them is money, of course. The next one is time. And after that, the one we dont talk about is suffering.

So if I told you and had really good evidence, all you have to do is stab yourself 74 times with a knife all over your body every morning, and youll live forever. You'll do it for a week and be like, it's not worth the suffering, it's just too much. Right? So we don't think about that. But doing something every day that is brief and intentional pain works really well.

This is why cold plunges help with dopamine. That's why monks used to flog themselves on their back. And there's all these practices around the world. God, that looks like it really hurts. Yeah, it's because brief, intentional pain, you control changes structures in your brain, changes dopamine receptors, makes you happy.

I'm not talking about that kind of pain. I'm talking about going to a peloton class and having some screechy instructor, or, I don't have a spin class, some screechy instructor wearing spandex sweating for an hour. And you do it, you know, three, four, or five days a week, and you might get a high from endorphins when you're done, but it wasn't really fun, and there's a lot of internal resistance to doing it. That kind of pain, most people won't invest that much time and that much effort. Yeah.

Even though it's not that expensive to do it, in my world, you come into an upgrade labs, you give me 15 minutes a week of cardio with no sweating, and I'll give you six times better results than 5 hours of spin class. Because we're using AI like we're cheating. And that's okay. And so my mindset there is, for everything in your life, you actually want to invest the minimum amount of suffering you need. Because suffering could be used as energy to make something great or to experience a suffering.

Right. So I get in a cold plunge most mornings and I suffer for a couple minutes, but I dont fetishize struggling as a way to get a result. In fact, its the opposite of getting a result. And then how much time? I allocate about 45 minutes a day to biohacking and I dont really have much more time than that.

And all the other things that I do throughout the day might support my energy and my environment and my lifestyle, but they're not intentional biohacking because I'm working. I have six companies. Right, but you've, you've, you've built that into your day. It's not like you're the other. Outside of that 45 minutes you're just eating anything you want, doing anything you want.

Patrick J. McGinnis
Like it's part of your routine. Pizza, beer, junk lighting, and you know, cocaine or whatever. I live a healthy life. But what I did is anytime there's a decision to be made between something I'm going to do anyway, like coffee. I could drink crappy coffee from the local Starbucks with 50 grams of sugar in it.

Dave Asprey
Or my new coffee brand is called danger coffee. And I have nothing to do with bulletproof anymore. And that means I. I don't know that they are following my current standards. I don't even think they know my current standards because they're new.

Yeah, but danger coffee is mold free. And it says it right on the label. Uh, which some coffees don't. Actually, most of them don't. It also has a large therapeutic dose of trace minerals and electrolytes in it.

So I was going to drink coffee. I could have had the coffee with mold that causes, like, jitters and for me, brain fog and sugar. Or I could have had clean coffee, like danger coffee. Dude, every decision you make every day, there's one moves the needle more towards energy and one moves it away from energy. And if there equivalent amount of work to do both take the path that gives you more energy.

And if it's a ton of work to get more energy, maybe don't take that path because you didn't want to do the work. That's okay, too. Yeah. So I think a lot of entrepreneurs have perfectionism disease, where they think every decision has to be optimal. No, just the decisions that are worth it have to be optimal.

Right? So I want to unpack this. Let's just talk about coffee for a second. Right? You mentioned being into coffee.

Patrick J. McGinnis
You launched the e commerce business shirts about coffee. And then you go on to start bulletproof coffee. I know you're not involved anymore, but I want to talk about that period in your life because it was such a big part of your life. Um, what did you kind of come across? You're into coffee.

I'm sure you're trying a lot of things. What did you learn about coffee early on? And why? Why did you start bulletproof? Or even like, what prompted you to go in that direction?

Dave Asprey
Oh, yeah, this is so unlikely. So I literally am a computer hacker. Uh, maybe I'm rusty these days, but I was vp of cloud security at Trend Micro, one of the top three biggest computer security companies. And I said, you know, I want to start a blog to teach people all the stuff I know about cognitive function and longevity, because there's just so little info out there. I had already run a longevity nonprofit group in Palo Alto for just almost a decade at that time, and it's still running today.

I learned all these techniques from people three times my age who are making themselves younger. That's why I know a lot of the stuff that I know. I just got early coaching from my elders. Who were these people? How did you connect with them?

I mentioned I was pretty sick when I was young. So a couple of friends said, you should go hang out at this weird group that meets by Stanford University. Okay. And it turns out that the guy who invented wireless Ethernet started a longevity group in 1993. And in the late nineties, I joined the group and they asked me if I'd be president and chairman.

So I became one. And our members were in their sixties, seventies, eighties, reversing their ages, and we would bring the luminaries in the field of longevity, which was considered to be crazy space, but these are doctors with lots of experience and all, and id interview them on stage for our members every single month. And this just brought me so much joy. I finally realized ive mastered my biology. Like, Im healthy, Im lean.

My brain works better than it ever has. If I can get five people, just five people, to not suffer as much as I did, to not have to spend a couple million dollars recovering their health and then accelerating it, that would just be worth it. It would be the best ROI of anything I could do because it's hard to put words to it. I was really, really screwed up in my twenties. When your testosterone is in the tank and your thyroid's in the tank, had such bad brain fog, the chronic fatigue.

Patrick J. McGinnis
Stuff, and mostly from food or was there like alcohol or other things too? There was no alcohol. There was toxic molds, which is a major trigger for chronic fatigue. And today, so many people have long COVID which is just chronic fatigue syndrome anyway. And I could, you know, we could have a five hour podcast about the biology of why that happens and what to do about it, which isn't our goal.

Dave Asprey
But I was so miserable on so many different fronts and my body was constantly in pain and my brain felt like I was always struggling, like I just don't want a few people to go through that. And that was my motivation for starting my blog. And then I figured out this thing about coffee because part of my path has been learning the biochemistry. But I decided I would try all the things that weren't supposed to work because there was so much B's because I just worked so hard with bad advice. So I decided I would try all the esoteric stuff.

So I've been to the Andes to learn meditation and shamanic practice. I'm not a shaman, but I've done shamanic initiation stuff. I've traveled to the Himalayas to learn meditation from the masters there. And I found myself on Mount Kailash, which is the holiest mountain in the world. It's kind of the Mount Olympus, but for the east it's a five day drive and a three day hike at very high elevation, like 18,000ft.

And I just happened to go there at the wrong time of year, like a dumb tourist. So its ten degrees below 00:30 miles an hour winds just miserable. And I havent felt that bad in a while. And this little tibetan woman, I still have a picture of her, gives me a bowl of yak butter tea and I drank it and my brain turned on and im like, what just happened? Like you felt the immediate within five.

Minutes im like a surge of energy. Im like I havent felt this energy in three years. What the heck? That's all natural tea. It was just tea with yak butter and they didn't have a blender.

She would hand blend it in like a butter churn. It was like, and I'm like, this makes no sense. But it was such a powerful feeling that I wrote it down and I came back to Silicon Valley and I blended some butter and some tea and it tasted like crap and it didn't work. So I tried $1,000 worth of different expensive tea and didn't change anything. So I tried 25 different butters.

And the two grass fed butters worked like there's something in the butter. When you say worked, was it to give me energy? The feeling like you had to drink it and be like, so it was mostly the butter. That was the thing, it turns out, was the type of butter. I'd also given up coffee for five years because I noticed I would drink coffee and I'd feel good.

And then an hour or two later, I would get this feeling of anxiety in my chest and kind of jitters, and I'd want sugar or I'd want more coffee. And it was really addictive, and it was just like this kind of tension feeling. So I came back from Tibet and I had a cup of coffee, really good coffee, and it was like the lights came back on, and I was like, five years of no coffee. I feel so much better. I believed I was allergic to coffee.

Well, the next day I had high end coffee from a different source, and I had anxiety and tension. And I thought, wait a minute. I didn't just become allergic to coffee overnight. This is B's. It's different coffee.

So I figured out, went into all the research on coffee agriculture production toxins, and that I just did good biohacker detective work. I figured out where the mold is, where it comes in, and how to test for it. Why is it there? It's there because insects bite coffee beans. When they do that, they introduce mold spores.

The mold spores sit in the coffee bean, then during the transport of the coffee that's harvested. By the way, good coffee pickers who are well trained and paid more, won't pick bad beans, but usually they just use migrant workers who don't know how to pick coffee. And they'll also pick unripe beans. But that's a different thing. That's one of the steps.

The coffee can spoil in the truck, but then they ferment the coffee either in piles on tarps or in river water. And during that fermentation, this toxin, that is something that interrupts your cell membranes and is associated with bladder and kidney cancer. It grows and it survives roasting, and it survives brewing. And this is so well known that most world governments have standards in place to protect their population from more than ten parts per million of this toxin. It's not that the mold is present, it's that a toxin made by mold is present.

Just like when you take penicillin, you're not eating mold, you're taking an extract of penicillin. Well, if China, Japan and Europe will protect their population from mold and coffee, the US doesn't. So they will send coffee to the US. You can't sell legally in Europe. And then we'll drink it.

And then, of course, we get jittery and cranky and all those things. And I was very sensitive to that because I lived in a house with toxic mold. Well hasn't anything since then been done about it? Or has it, like, do you find, is it just because at the level of scale that a lot of these coffee brands are at, they don't. It's a lot easier to say that there's not an issue that it is to fix the issue.

I mean look at our political system, right? All you have to do is repeat a lie often enough. So what coffee snobs will say from the industry, and I guess I am ten years in the coffee industry, but they'll say at first they're like, Dave's a computer hacker, there's no way he could have done this. And I'm like, guys, the reason I could do this is because I'm not from your world, I'm from another world. And I looked at the data instead of beliefs, right?

And the data is we're drinking coffee with mold toxins. There's 36 studies that back this up and why don't we just address the problem? We could, maybe the government in the US could put in a regulation saying, oh, we're going to have the same standards as Europe. Ten parts per million or less in coffee. And then the coffee industry would have to go back and they'd have to go to the coffee growers and coffee processors and they'd have to increase the quality which would increase the cost which would then make, you know, McDonalds and Starbucks and Dunkin donuts and Tim Hortons and all those people all pissed off because now their coffee costs went up.

Yeah. When im selling danger coffee, its premium coffee, it tastes really good and its got a therapeutic dose that would cost you probably more than the coffee of trace minerals that are in it when you drink it. And I dont worry about it. Yeah, so early on, yeah so early on, you discover this, you have this blog, and how do you go from being this like guy who people might look at me like this guy, I don't know, who knows this guy knows what he's talking about. He's just like writing a blog and I'm here drinking my coffee and to having this like world like phenomenon when it comes to bulletproof coffee.

Patrick J. McGinnis
And people are like, you know what I mean? There's a secret. Yeah, it's a really, really dark secret. People aren't as dumb as you think. I learned at Wharton, it's cheaper to run an ad that says you have high quality products than it is to make high quality products.

Dave Asprey
This is the state of marketing today. Wharton's also at the time, the only business school without a built in ethics course. But that's actually not how the world works. If you sell a product that actually works, people will talk about it and they'll buy more. The idea of putting butter and MCT oil in coffee without mold, it's a new idea.

It's a synergy of an ancient ayurvedic practice or an ancient tibetan practice and MCT oil, which comes from my longevity research world. And this didn't exist before. And when you blend all that stuff together, it actually does what I said. And now I think I know why it works. But it was so shocking because people would say, this is bullshit and then they would try their first cup.

And one of my favorite stories ever, I used to have something called the fatmobile. And this was a Toyota Prius turned into a giant stick of grass fed butter with a coffee cup from Disneyland that would twirl around as my art cart burning man. And I remember this one night, I'm sitting there outside one of the many different dj's, and this really drunk guy rolls up with his girlfriend on his bike and he goes, is this that bullshit paleo coffee thing? You know, I heard that guy was on Joe Rogan and he was just drunk off his mind. And his girlfriend's like, well, why don't you try it?

So. And I'd hand out 5000 cups of coffee every night. No cost, no branding, none of that stuff. So I give it to the guy and he stumbles off and whatever. And then as we're pulling the car out to go to the next place, he's chasing us on his bike.

Stop, stop. Hey, wait, hold on. That coffee. I feel so much better. I'm like, can I just have some more?

I'm sorry, but instant coffee doesn't do that. Starbucks doesn't do that. And what's going on here is people want to feel energy. And if you make a really good product that's noticeably different, you can grow a brand. If you do the same thing as the other guy and you just make a cheaper thing or you just copy someone, you're actually out of integrity, right?

And there's all these douchebags on Instagram saying, here's how to legally steal someone's webpage an idea. You're like, you know what you're doing there? You're stopping R and D. So my advice for entrepreneurs, and I mentor a lot of entrepreneurs these days, and I'm an investor advisor to a lot of companies. Do your own thing, make it better.

And what people do is they go, well, I could just do what the other guy did that was successful. So Im just going to copy. That means youre fearful, right? Have some balls. Look at what that guy did and make it 10% better, not 10% cheaper and crappier because that leads to a world where everythings a flea Mart and a swap meet and everything breaks.

By the way, Im talking about Amazon today. Yeah. So, but you know, theres a lot of things when it comes to health in the health and wellness space, you dont see the immediate effects. You just assume that it's good for you. And so like, and hopefully you live long enough and healthy enough that it was the right moves.

Oh, you see it, man. So you think so like most things. But like, you know, like a lot of supplements you're just taking because you think they're good for you, but you. Can see all of it if you want to. And if you're taking the right ones, you ought to feel it.

Some of them are subtle, some are powerful. Right. So what I'm doing now with the I will teach you to be young.com thing, thats not its final name, but thats where it is for now. Its to tell you what labs you need to track to get the results you want. So if your result is I want to be smarter, heres what you do.

If you want to be younger, heres what you do if you want to be thinner, you want to have more muscle, you want to have more stress response, you want to be smarter. All those things, different lab tests. And that means you want to take different supplements and you can see whether theyre working. But the easiest way to do this is something thats built into your apple Watch or a WHOOP or an oura ring, its heart rate variability. Take all the stuff youre going to do and all the supplements and whatever, wake up the next morning.

And what was your heart rate variability the night before? If the sum total of what you did worked, itll be higher. Its called a readiness score on an oura rank. And theres a new company called irrible like earable that now it's a headband you wear that makes you sleep deeper, faster and gives you much better data than you can get from an aura ring. So the idea there is you get a hospital grade sleep study and the better your supplements and diet, the better your quality of sleep and the more your data shows it.

Yep. So that's our easiest way to do it. But if you do the I will teach you to be young thing I'll tell you exactly which labs and help you get them. And if your budget is $100 a month and your goal is this, don't spend money on the data. Spend money on the supplements that are going to move the needle the most for you, and I'll tell you exactly what those are.

And if your budget is, well, like, okay, I've had some success in my career. I would like to get younger. My budget's $500 a month, okay? Different lab tests, different supplements, different pharmaceuticals. You still don't have to see a doctor.

Right. And if you have something wrong with you, you go see a doctor. But this is about managing your health and your longevity. This isn't about managing sickness. Yeah.

And then it gets more interesting. You say, well, what if I want to spend $10,000 a year? Okay, what's the next tier? And at a certain point, you say, well, you should take this $500 test. It measures 800,000 DNA methylation sites in your body that tells you how fast you are aging and how old you are biologically.

And this is a very scientifically valid test. And it's funny. After $2 million over 20 years, about $100,000 a year. Um, my rate of aging is 72%, the rate of normal people. And I've had it as low as 69%, depending on which variables I'm tweaking.

Patrick J. McGinnis
How much. How much younger are you based on that test? There's different ways of looking at the test. There's something called extrinsic age, which is basically the. The age of your body based on all the environmental factors, like your lifestyle and diet, the things that are easy to.

Dave Asprey
To vary and control. 19 point. I'm gonna say about 19 and a half. It's either 19.35 or 19.6. Let's say 19 and a half years younger than my current age.

Wow. That's your choices for what you did in the morning and what you did when you went to sleep, your stress levels, your meditation, all that. You can move the needle by almost 20 years. Yep. Right.

And then there are other ways of measuring age. In fact, I'm about to release some info at the biohacking conference. And that's biohackingconference.com for people who want to be there. Joe dispenzel will be there. Doctor Daniel.

Amen. But I'll be talking about maybe a dozen different ways of looking your age. And how young am I? It could be anywhere from 39 to 46, depending on which numbers you like. And some of the other ones are weird.

Have you ever heard of grip strength? Grip strength? Yeah. Like, your actual grip strength? Yeah.

Yeah. Well, that is one of the biggest markers of age. If you. I have. Over time, it just.

You just get weak, weaker. Right. So my grip strength is that of an 18 year old. Do you actually train that? No, it's just based on all the healthy.

Yeah, yeah, right. That's just how it works. And I felt it when you. When I. When I shook your hand when you got here.

Oh, did you guys. This guy has a strong handshake. Yeah. It wasn't an intentional thing. It's just like, I had one guy years ago, my friend Alex.

He publicly accused me of working out and lying, that I wasn't working out because I truly wasn't working out at the time at all, and I'd lost some weight. And. And finally, like, we had a. Like a personal conversation, I'm like, dude, why are you doing this? Like, I'm not lying.

I actually practice a non lying thing as part of my spiritual work. And he's like, your handshake is too strong for someone who doesn't exercise. So I know you're exercising. And I'm like, oh, let's talk about mitochondria. We're buddies now, but it was pretty weird.

But healthy people, when you're young, you're just stronger, and it's built into your tissues. And I'm not trying to brag here. I'm saying everyone can do this. Another marker of aging, the amount of visceral fat packed around your organs as you age, it goes up in almost everyone. I have low visceral.

This is the dangerous fat. Low visceral fat for an 18 year old. Is that a marker of aging? Well, given that it always goes up as you age, unless you do something about it, I'm completely not normal. There's also response time of the brain.

When you're 18, it's about a quarter second, and as you get into your thirties, it's 350 milliseconds. I have an 18 year old brain response time. So how quickly does my brain respond to the environment? I get a signal in it. It's much faster than it normally would be.

And is that because I've been taking cognitive enhancers for 25 years? Maybe. Is it because I've spent six months of my life with electrodes glued to my head at my 40 years of Zen brain clinic figuring out how to upgrade your brain. This is, like a thing entrepreneurs do, and I don't know why I can't tell you everything. I did that worked?

Maybe it's the recipe that works. And it wasn't one thing. And every drug company, and just a lot of people, they just assume, well, there's one thing that causes aging. Why do you believe that to be true? One thing that causes autism, one thing that causes obesity.

No, there's not one thing that causes bread. Like, it's. It's. It's a recipe. Yeah.

And you've got to have that whether you're running a business, whether you're running your biology. So I would just tell people, if you're willing to spend some percentage of your income and some percentage of your time and some percentage of your energy, you can have a better brain, you can have a better body, you can have a better heart, better relationships, and you can live longer. Yeah. And anyone out there who says, well, oh, you're just going to extend your health span. I know, because I'm a surgeon and I was fat and stressed and traumatized, and now I charge a quarter million dollars a year in order to sell you a longevity practice that tells you you can't live longer.

And there are people out there taking advantage of others doing this right now. And if your doctor in the world of longevity doesn't look you straight in the eye and say, I think we can extend your lifespan, let's do our best. That is not a longevity doctor. That's a Luddite pretending to be a longevity doctor. So is this where.

Patrick J. McGinnis
So you've mentioned publicly that you believe you're going to live till 180, is that right? Is that based on that? Almost right. I'm planning to live to at least 180, at least 100? Yeah.

Dave Asprey
I don't want to sell myself short. So you really believe longer than that? 100% so and so. But based on that, are you living your life in accordance to that or. Part of my morning meditation is, I'm telling the cells in my body that they're about 28% of their duty cycle.

You're one of the things that needs to happen biologically. For your body to do that, is your body has to believe it's going to do that. And your body has its own consciousness that's different from you. And that also pisses some people off. It's called your ego, and it comes from your tissues.

It is not you. It's a different thing that works for different goals. It's the part of you that wants you to eat all the cakes, have sex with all the people who shouldn't have sex with, and run away from anything remotely scary. So that's just not you. It's something you manage that's always trying to manage you.

So you got to be on top of that in order to make these kind of decisions. But if you do that, you can. Yeah, but I mean, more so, like, you know, the sort of the shortness of life. Right? Like, let's say the, they say the average age is like, what, 72, maybe younger.

Oh, for dying. 74. Yeah. No, it's higher now. 86.

Patrick J. McGinnis
Oh, it's higher now. Okay, so based on that, people, like, live their life assuming that maybe they might live to that age, right? Yeah. That's a terrible strategy. Yeah.

Dave Asprey
Right. You should live your life in two different ways. One, like, you could die today and it would be okay because you're not afraid of that anymore and because you're living in integrity and at the same time, like, you are going to live for an extremely long period of time because all the evidence that I have says that there's a great likelihood of this and we're solving problems every day to make this happen more. And if you are wrong and you think you have a long period of time where you can build up wisdom and build up energy and you can do all these amazing things, and then you get hit by a truck, you had a life with less fear and with more joy and more curiosity and more creativity and more love. But if you're saying my life is short, the last 25 years of my life are going to be suffering arthritis, not knowing my name and tubes in all of my holes, thats a miserly little life with a foregone conclusion.

I already tried that in my twenties. It sucks to have the diseases of aging, to not remember anything from a meeting, to not be able to bend over without being dizzy, having sore joints and having the doctor look at you and say, youre at very high risk of stroke and heart attack, you should do something about that. And youre obese. Oh, and youre pre diabetic. And geez, youre only 26.

Everyone is expecting this when they're in their fifties. It wasn't even normal in our fifties until very recently. And it doesn't have to happen to anyone. So take that out of your consciousness. You know, it could happen to you.

It's not going to happen to you. You are going to be very, very old, and you're going to look and feel as good as you do now or better. And you're going to have the benefit of wisdom, which comes from experience. If you have youthful energy and wisdom, that's what's going to fix the world.

Patrick J. McGinnis
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What do you say to people that, let's say, like, right now, we live in a world where it's just go, go, go, right? Like, it's just, you know, like, work all the time. I know the hustle culture has, you know, there's been a lot of talk around that, but it just seems like the way the state of the world right now or, like, the economy, right? Like, you have to, you just have to, like, work hard. I don't know how to explain, like, if you want to be successful and you don't come from a lot of money or whatever, you need to work hard and, and that takes up a lot of time, right?

Obviously, this is, this is your life. This is, like, your daily life. And you've, you've, you've made it your kind of core mission around this. But how do people that you mentioned, people put health on the back burner over behind other things? But how does it become something that, like, do you think it's possible to, like, weave it into that, that daily life of people working?

Like, most of their day, they're at work, they're not, I don't know, eating. Like, yeah, it's possible I'll just share some personal stuff. When I started bulletproof, I was working full time. I had a side gig for an investment bank, teaching hedge fund managers how to raise their iq. So they paid me $50,000, flying all over the world in my spare time to teach them.

Dave Asprey
That was my startup capital. I had two very young children, and I just moved to Canada, and I had about $10,000 of liquid assets by the time all this was happening. Because when you move with two young kids internationally, you just burn all your cash. And I was like, man, this sucks. But at least I had a good job and regular paycheck, so I wasnt rolling in it, lets say.

And I ended up growing bulletproof to 27 million in revenue before I quit my job. And I replaced my salary directly from my entrepreneurial venture. So father of two young kids, international move, launched a company, grew it, and managed it while working as an exec at a large company. I cut my sleep to 4 hours a night and I did this for 18 months straight and I lost weight. It wasn't good for my brain, but with biohacking, you can do that.

In retrospect, I wish I would have done that a little different. But since that time, when I quit that job, I grew bulletproof to $140 million a year in revenue. And I started 40 years of Zen, which has helped thousands of entrepreneurs reprogram their brains and their reality, including me. I started upgrade labs, which now has 28 locations and is running. I have a successful podcast with more than 400 million downloads and a webview award.

I have eight published books and four New York Times bestsellers. I have two fucking amazing teenagers who aren't out doing drugs and all sorts of weird stuff. They're turning into remarkable human beings. I am consciously uncoupled in a non contentious separation where I'm still friends with the mother of my children. We just wanted different things, but to go through all that.

Oh, and along the way, bulletproof kicked me off the board of directors about three years ago and they were bought by an investment bank for a small amount recently. Anyone whos an entrepreneur and sees the company they built go down a path like that, that just doesnt feel good. Its traumatic. Preston, what went wrong there? Just for people listening to maybe avoid if theres certain things that you maybe.

Differently when youre working with venture capitalists. Actually, let me finish the point. Ill tell you about the book. So all that stuff. I still today run a media company, the podcast, the biohacking conference.

3000 plus people every year for ten years. Hundreds of vendors to play with toys. I'm writing a new New York Times bestselling book right now, and I have time. Are you still sleeping 4 hours a night? No, I sleep six and a half hours a night.

Patrick J. McGinnis
Six and a half. And that's what actually, people who live the longest sleep that much, really much longer than people who live eight who sleep 8 hours a night. Yeah. So it turns out healthy people need less sleep. I wear this WHOOP and it tells that's like the get by, uh, option, which is it's not the performer, the peak option is the get by option.

But I. But I. Why is it that, is it because of these other things that I don't feel as energized when I sleep? Six and a half versus seven seven five. If you're lifting heavy all the time or you have extra stress, you need more sleep.

Dave Asprey
Yeah. If you're nutrient deprived, you need more sleep. But the evidence, it's from more than now, 4 million people over multiple years. The lowest all cause mortality is at six and a half hours. And I don't, I would never tell people to cut sleep in order to be healthier, but I would tell you when you are healthier, you will naturally cut your sleep just because you need less.

And by the way, for that no cost. Sleepwithdave.com dot it's just every URL's that. You have, they're great. It's how to remember stuff, right? Yeah.

So. Sleepwiththave.com, which I laugh every time I say, that's my, my marketing achievement of my career. It's everything I know about how to go to sleep faster, better, deeper. Just people ask me the question all the time and I'm like, the answer is complex, but it's not that hard. I just don't want to give you 20 URL's.

Patrick J. McGinnis
Well, that's like the ultimate biohacking thing, right? It's like, how do I get the least amount of sleep but I can still function, peak, you know, tip top shape. Uh, and. Yeah. So six and a half.

Dave Asprey
I've tracked my sleep for 15 years. My current gold standard is the irritable, which is this out of Oxford University. It's true. Hospital grade, but that's the little thing that whispers in your ear to cause you to get more deep sleep. So people can't go to sleep or can't stay asleep.

It fixes that and it gives you this hospital grade signal so you can really tune your sleep. You might be surprised that your WHOOP or your aura is not that accurate when you compare it to an irritable. So that's, that's a newer tech that I'm, I'm really enjoying. So we're talking about bulletproof in your tongue. Yeah.

So ive worked in Silicon Valley with a lot of venture funds. I actually worked at a venture fund and ended up raising $90 million in venture capital for bulletproof. And venture funds play an important role in the economy because for me, I needed money for coffee. I actually went to the VC's, some of whom were my friends, and I said, this isnt really a fundable company because im in all these different things and who's going to buy it? And I said, but you should give me 50 grand for just a personal loan for coffee.

I'm just dialing for dollars here because I have too many orders and not enough inventory. So they came back and said, here's $8 million. And I was like, whoa. And I remember I had this kind of spiritual discussion with myself because I know what VC's do. Their job is just like governments to slowly, like a potato peeler, slowly peel away rights from founders or citizens until you notice and say something.

Then they stop for five minutes, then they do it again. But they never put the potato peel back on, right. But I also knew that if I had that much money that I could reach millions of people and I could change the world. Biohacking is a global industry worth $63 billion now. I started the biohacking movement and I feel so good about it because I go to places all over the world and people stop me and tell me this work has changed their life.

This is more than five people. I just wanted to help. It's helped millions of people. Like, had you not taken the 8 million it would have been, I wouldn't. Have had the media budget in order to really make this grow.

Right? So I'm always grateful to the venture capitalists because growth capital and things like that happen. And did the bulletproof diet come before the actual coffee, the product, like, because I know people were making their own bulletproof coffees, right? My very first blog post about biohacking was about the recipe for bulletproof coffee. And I trademarked it, but I didn't.

I see you need mold free beans. And after a while I'm like, guys, I can't tell you where to get mold free beans because there's no way to test them. That's not $10,000. So would you want to go in with me? And that was my first product.

And then I looked at most of the MCT oil you could get back then was not pure and it would give you like massive diarrhea. And so I found one that was much more effective and how to make it. And then five years later, a study came out and says that one form of MCT oil is much better than all the others at raising ketones in the body and helping the brain so you can feel what works. So those were some of the early products, but it was just born out of I can't buy it, so I'm going to make it and I just shared the secrets that I knew. I published the bulletproof diet roadmap online and I had hundreds of thousands of people doing it for free before I wrote the book.

Patrick J. McGinnis
Yeah, and then you raised the 8 million to go out and create the product. Well, I already had created the product. I just couldn't make enough of it to sell. I needed inventory mostly. And that helped me with hiring a marketing team and all.

Dave Asprey
So on the venture capital side, that's the good thing. The bad thing is, well, they want this board seat. They want that board seat. And you know, sometimes you, you might come in with one board member and then they leave. And in this case, one of the VC's called me one day and said that they put $30 million into our biggest competitor.

Patrick J. McGinnis
So the VC that was on your cap table, invest, why was that? They just wanted to hedge their bets. Or like, did they not believe in bulletproof anymore? I couldn't tell you why. I mean, I.

No rhyme or reason. Well, it's whatever's going on inside their heads, right. I can tell you that as a founder, that did not feel like it was high integrity. Right. That's a conflict of interest.

Dave Asprey
It felt like that to me. But they did promise that they wouldn't share my numbers with the other company and that the other company wouldn't see mine. Oh. But their board observer went to the other company, which is an interesting thing as well. So now someone who knows all of our inside secrets is now at a competitor.

But don't worry, he's not going to talk about it. Yeah. And so that was one of the things where like, wow, I wouldn't have expected that, right? And so for founders who are just worried about this stuff, or for people who are just alive, your board of directors or your government or your investors will continuously come to you and say, you need to give me this right, but it's for your own good, okay, 100,000 million percent of the time, that is always bullshit. When the government said, oh, here's their patriot act, it's just for whatever, a year, just to keep you safe.

Dude, it's whatever, 2000, 123 years later. No, they don't give rights back. So anytime your board or your investors want to write, you always ask for more back than you give them. And then suddenly they didn't want the right. Or you put very strong controls, you can have that right for three months.

And if the numbers go down, I get the right back. One of the big mistakes I did, I added a certain right that the investors had asked for. Right. And I put a limit on a certain employee being there instead of a time limit. And so, I mean, these are very small chess moves on a very big chessboard.

And if I look back on things, I'm like, I wish I would have had better advisors advising me instead of the company. But people who are all in and mission driven, like me, the company feels kind of like it's you and, you know, it's not, but it feels like that. So I shouldn't have listened to my corporate attorneys from my own interests and my employees interests. I should have listened to a separate attorney that only advised me, because then there were probably some decisions that if I could go back with what I know now, of course I would do it different. So what happened there?

End of the day, someone else is running the company. I have no visibility to the numbers. I have no visibility to what they're doing. And then they called up one day and said, we're selling the company, and, sorry, out of cash, and we're going to sell. So they had all those rights to do that you didn't really have to have.

That's debatable. But they did it. Yeah. There's some stuff that I'm not really in a position to talk about. Let's just say that there wasn't agreement over who was allowed to do what.

And so I have had to call up a lot of friends and people who believe in me and said, this investment that we all thought was going to return things. Since I have been removed from the company, the valuation has plummeted, and I didn't even know it had plummeted because I wasn't getting numbers. It's one of the things this can happen. In fact, when I share this, always without blaming people, but when I share this with other really successful entrepreneurs, the number of people who open up and go, oh, my God, it happened to me. And it's just like when someone embezzles money.

By the way, I had an employee embezzle $3 million from me personally. Right. And sometimes you feel like, well, you're a victim of a crime or whatever. It can really piss you off. Thinking of yourself as a victim will always be toxic.

Right. So why didn't I have better controls in place? Well. Cause I trusted the wrong person. Why did I trust the wrong person?

That's on me. Right. So most big entrepreneurs have had embezzlement, they've had theft, they've had people lie about them, and a lot of them have had their board of directors. Absolutely screw them. And whether it's because there's someone evil or that because we have mixed incentives, I don't really know.

But I do know that it didn't feel good. But now I love being an advisor for entrepreneurs because anytime an investor is trying to fuck an entrepreneur and I'm advising that entrepreneur, I'm like, I know this game, I know this game really well. Like I've got a PhD in it. Do you think the dynamics have changed a little bit? Like in terms of who has more leverage now?

Patrick J. McGinnis
Just seems like there are more investors than there are really good entrepreneurs or. People that are building really, really good entrepreneurs. Do. Do you have an advantage if you have a track record? But it's always been that way.

Yeah. The difficulty though, it's also what sector. So in the nineties, Silicon Valley VC's were kind of dicks because they could. Be, they could be right, they had all the money. Yeah.

Dave Asprey
And now the tech VC's are mostly relatively chill because they know that if they mess with the top founders and all that stuff, they're dead. So I feel like in that side of things, which is kind of my old stomping grounds, it's a little bit more balanced and it's more mature. But on the CPG side of things like it's gangster for consumer packaged goods there I see a lot of entrepreneurs kind of abused and frankly theres a lot of entrepreneurs saying look, I made this mix of cheap mushroom sawdust from China and instant coffee and I have a new brand but they got nothing new. So their job is to convince VC's to give them money when they have no ip and they have nothing new to offer and they dont have the ability to communicate it. So there's tons of million dollar companies that are never going anywhere.

And the VC's are inundated. So they kind of feel like they're in a powerful seat. But in terms of powerful well educated people who can build a team and build a brand, there aren't a lot of us out there like that. So I'll probably end up raising for danger coffee at some point. And I'm in the very beginning stages for upgrade labs, my human longevity AI franchise.

So I will and do work with investors. But I look at my investors as partners, and as partners it means we need to have very clearly explained and mutually understood agreements. The difficulty that most entrepreneurs have and that I had in the past any contract, it doesn't matter what the contract says you're going to do, it matters what happens if you don't do what you said you were going to do. So I am all about what happens if you don't do that for any reason. Whether it's because a bus hit you or because it turns out you're a sociopath and I don't know it yet.

Or maybe I'm a sociopath and you don't know it yet. Either way, we need to know. And if there's enough penalty and it's enforceable, it turns out even if they are a sociopath, you can use the courts to force them to do what they said only if there's enough teeth in the contract. So I really focus on that. And so when I look to raise this time, I want to raise from good human beings who believe we can extend human lifespan, and we will.

And we can help a lot of people and we can disrupt some industries. And I want it to be win win. So there is no possible way that I win and they don't win. And no possible way that they win and I don't win. And VC's have been trained for a very long time to make it, so they always win and you dont.

Patrick J. McGinnis
Yeah. So investors who are working or thinking about saying I should work with Dave, im happy to talk with you, but if you open the conversation saying you want participating prep, you are probably not the right guys. You want preference? Well talk. You want participating prep.

Dave Asprey
No. And this is something most first time entrepreneurs dont even know what I just said. But you better learn how venture capital works. And your attorneys better be very experienced at deals or you're not paying them enough because you're going to need help negotiating. It's like your first time buying a car.

Patrick J. McGinnis
Yeah. You don't know where they're going to screw you, but it's an industry. Yeah. So you mentioned Danger coffee, which is your newest brand. Besides the investor thing, are you doing anything else differently in your approach when it comes to building danger coffee compared to what you were doing with bulletproof?

Because bulletproof, like you said, was this like new novel concept that people didn't know about. So it's like the sort of the concept it feels like sold the brand, you didn't have to do much marketing in the way of, you know, it was just like, no. And I spent $400,000 a year giving away bulletproof coffee at festivals and events all over the place. There was a lot of marketing that went to that. Yeah.

Dave Asprey
And so I know how to do that with danger coffee. It's also a new concept. It's a specific form of trace minerals, and we're also deficient. People feel different when they drink danger coffee, even if there's no butter. And MCT, and that's the difference, is I make a better product than anything that's existed before.

And then I market it. Most people, they buy a cheap product and then they market it like it's something special. And I remember once Forbes named Bulletproof when I was running it as one of the top 20 most innovative brands in the country. For a small startup to be on the list with these huge things, that was a huge honor, right? So then Coca Cola asked me to come in.

In fact, they wanted to buy 5% of the company, and I said no. And it was because if a large company like that buys 5% of you and then you don't sell it to them, then you're kind of marked as, like, something must be wrong with you. So it was strategically the wrong choice, but it was an honor to get a request like that. But I met the entire senior team at Coke to talk about innovation and brands, and I shared the same thing, guys, people will pay for quality and like, yeah, but the mass market, if we raise our costs by half a cent, then they'll buy Pepsi instead of coke, right? And I met with the CEO of Pepsi, had the same conversation.

So it's like this race. Yeah, price competition, right? And so your job as a consumer is to say, I'm not gonna buy the cheapest thing. I'll buy the thing. It's slightly better than, that's almost the same price because I get more benefits from it.

And then that breaks their whole model. And when no one will buy the Twinkie, they stop making twinkies, right? But when I was at coke, I showed them my fat picture from Entrepreneur magazine and said, and I told them my story about being fat, and they're kind of chuckling. I said, well, guys, when that picture was taken, I was drinking 17 cans of diet Coke a day. I'm pretty sure it doesn't work.

And, like, half the room, the younger half chuckled and the other half kind of like, crossed their arms, right? But it was like, hey, I'm just going to be me, right? And does it work, guys, diet sodas make you fat. If you've been drinking diet sodas for ten years and you're still fat, stop. It doesn't work.

But if you drink something like danger coffee and you go, my God, I didn't have to pee right away. Afterwards, I feel more energized. I didn't need sugar in it like, you know, this is amazing coffee. I don't have heartburn. You're going to buy more danger coffee.

Oh, and you're getting a therapeutic dose of trace minerals that, you know, your body's lacking because you read my free content. Well, then you're going to go to dangercoffee.com and you're going to say, by now I realize I should do this. And you were going to drink coffee every morning. You could have gone and spent $6 at Starbucks, or you could have spent way less on coffee. That does something for you at home.

And so you do that, and now danger coffee is part of your life. And why is it called danger? Because who knows what you might do something good because now you feel better and it's not that hard. It's not marketing trickery, it's not, you know, SEO ninjas. It's just making stuff that's better.

Patrick J. McGinnis
Yeah. So when you envision, like, your life, let's say, when you're like 170 years old. Yeah. What do you imagine life is going to be like for you? Well, I'm pretty good at predicting the future.

Dave Asprey
The first e commerce thing and the first company to run data centers. When Google was two guys into computers, I was there.

It's getting harder and harder to project the future because of two things that I don't talk about a lot on my own show. One is AI, and I have a degree in AI. I've worked in that industry, although recently not as much, except that I'm building tools with the latest generation of this. So AI is making our rate of change very, very high. And the other one that really only nerds talk about is quantum computing.

And both of these are changing the world far more rapidly than you would ever know. Last night I was at an event and the deputy secretary of defense was talking about it, and all these things are going on. So what is my life going to look like? That there's one of two scenarios going to happen. One of them is we use all of our technology, knowledge and power, and we restore the environment to a healthy state.

We actually acknowledge what we already know is a healthy diet for humans, and we make it happen. And we stop the sociopaths spreading chemicals in our soil, in our water, in our skies. That is limiting human lifespan. So if we do that, we're going to have an amazing time. And when I'm 170, we're going to have a lot of healthy people, we have connected societies, and we're going to have amazing technology that lets us do things.

You wouldn't imagine. Or we have the other reality, which is more everything is tracked and monitored and controlled by a central authority. And since every society that's ever gone down the central authority route always fails with mass starvation, that's probably not the way we want to go. Right. So what I envision is a world that's better, where people are younger, and we have people who have wisdom.

If you know you're going to live for 150 or 200 or 300 years, are you really going to throw the trash in the ocean? Because you know that that plastic is coming back into your body. Yeah, but do you think, like, the world functions well when there are people living that long? Like, because you hear a lot about, you know, like, people in the workforce and, you know, the baby boomers and, you know, Gen X and Gen Y. Like, you know, like, there's this turnover, right?

Patrick J. McGinnis
There's this sort of. I don't even want to call it healthy, but a healthy turnover where there's opportunity for younger people, because older people get old and they get out of the workforce. Do you think that just things change from that perspective? Things will change, yeah. And they already are changing.

Dave Asprey
One of the biggest problems is that we used to have generational wealth in the US where your parents might buy two houses and you get one. If we keep going the way we're going right now, two companies, Blackrock and Vanguard, maybe three, and State street, they will own 60% of the homes in the US instead of our kids. And this is so unacceptable. And look, I don't care which politician you support, whichever one you support needs to say straight up that they will change taxes on those companies to make that unprofitable, so that we can buy homes for ourselves and our kids can, too. This isn't a problem of older people.

This is a problem of sociopaths designing policy. And the only. The only candidate I've seen or heard talk about this is Robert F. Kennedy, junior, who straight up stood up and said exactly that. I will change tax law on day one so that our children can buy homes again.

Patrick J. McGinnis
Yeah. Right. So what will happen over the course of 100 years? I want you to go back 100 years. Its 1921 world War one was just fought with horses for a lot of it.

Dave Asprey
They had cavalry in it, and our first biplanes have just happened. Kitty Hawk, I think, was 1917, if I remember right, were about to have a big economic boom. The telegraph is going on, the railroads. I mean, crazy times. It's so different.

That's when they were born. Let's see, they couldn't spell DNA because they know what it was. They had no antibiotics washing hands before you went to the hospital. And that person's alive today. And they drank and smoked and did all sorts of stuff.

They lived through the seventies of free love and pot and the eighties of cocaine and heroin and the nineties of, I don't know what we do in the nineties, bad music, but everyone's too afraid to, I guess ecstasy was the nineties drug. Yeah. And raves and. But anyway, they, they did all this crazy stuff and they're still alive right now. They're pretty old, though.

Patrick J. McGinnis
Yeah, but, but they lived through it all. Yeah. All the things that you're not supposed to do, right. The next hundred years, there was World War two, there was the Korean War. There's all this nasty stuff that happened.

Dave Asprey
There's also a lot of amazing progress that happened. So my view is fundamentally the population is shrinking in every developed nation dramatically. We're not having babies because we can't, because we polluted the environment over the last 30 years. When I was 30, it was, God, I hope we don't get pregnant accidentally. My 30 year old friends, I have a lot of them, like, I'm freezing my eggs because my fertility is already almost gone.

I hope I can get pregnant. No 30 year old in all of recorded history has said that unless they're married and wants a family. Right. So we have massive problems. And our replacement rate is around 2.1 kids per couple.

And our current rate, depending on the country, is around one to 1.4 kids per couple. That means we have a population crash coming. It means there will be empty cities 25 years from now unless we take our people, no matter what age they are, and we make them younger, stronger and healthier. Do you, do you have faith that the public sector, through policy, will be able to help that? Or is it just going to be up to entrepreneurs and the private sector to just figure out innovative ways to help?

Patrick J. McGinnis
When it comes to that, I would. Love to find one example throughout history where the public sector has actually done that. Can you think of one? I personally can't. Honestly, I've looked into this.

Dave Asprey
It doesn't look like public policy is the way to do it. And I am not a libertarian. I do not identify as any party. The party system is for people who can't think because I'm about policies, not parties. But the primary role of a government is to protect you from violence.

That's it. That means that the violent taking of your life, your health, your home, your goods, right. And for that you pay a price. It's called taxes. And I'm happy to pay some amount of taxes.

Guys, quit stealing my shit. And if you're my government stealing my shit, you're stealing my health, you're stealing my wealth, you're stealing my rights. And you keep raising taxes because you have terrible economic policies. Oh, and you deflated my currency so much under Biden that you've already taken half of my money. That wasn't the taxes you took, that was the other half.

So throughout all of history, when democracies fail, and they always do, it's usually after about 200 plus years, and they usually fail in some kind of revolutionary thing, just like dictatorships do. Right. All governments have sine waves and things. So I'm concerned about the state of the US and I really appreciate having been born here and that there's so much good stuff here. So I'm hoping that we do something about inflation and about printing more currency and about just out of control spending and the fact that we owe something like a quarter million dollars per person in the country to other countries.

So I would say precious metals and bitcoin seem a lot more stable over the next 20 years than the US currency. But our government does all sorts of dirty stuff to other governments and we're good at it. So maybe we'll win and do some other, like, I'm not betting any of it, but diversification. Yeah. Is a good thing.

Yeah. And entrepreneurs, we fix stuff. Right. Governments, they take stuff. Yeah.

Hopefully. Hopefully in 100 years, you can listen back to this and be like, I was right, and we're in a much better place now. You know, 100 years from now, we'll have gone through three more cycles of. Yeah, and there'll be times when people are really stressed, there'll be times when people leave a country because of its policies. I see a lot of people fleeing Canada right now because it's gotten really weird up there.

Right. And fleeing Canada, like, that's where you go because people are nice. Like, I was the I was citizen, like, I like Canada, but it's gotten a little weird up there. And I see people saying, I want to leave California or I want to leave the US. And look, we've had migrants for thousands of years because you don't like the conditions you're in, you go somewhere else and there's some good stuff and some bad stuff.

So, like, this is life, but when you're going to live for hundreds of years, there's some good times, there's some bad times, right? And you see things are good over there and like, you develop a sense of peace, right? Where you don't have to be reliant on what's happening around you or on rights that you're granted to have the rights that are innate to you. And part of developing wisdom is learning the sense of resilience so that you can choose your state no matter what's happening. And in the stuff that I teach at 40 years of Zen and the stuff at the advanced biohacking levels, it's like, look, you can have empathy for another person.

That's better than no empathy, but it's toxic because then you feel everyone else's pain and they can manipulate you. That's actually how narcissists and sociopaths get in, is because you have too much empathy and you can't control it. So then you evolve and you develop compassion where, you know, I really wish you well, but I don't have to feel your pain to wish you well. You just do it automatically instead of being pissed off and judgy. Okay.

The state beyond that that's more evolved is called equanimity or resilience. And this is the monk who meditates in the middle of a storm. And you cannot take the monk out of their chosen state. They can take themselves, themselves out of their state. And that's what I think most entrepreneurs need.

So today, revenues are great, things are going good. Tomorrow, some employees lying and tried to steal some stuff or something bad happened. But you're like, I am calm, I am peaceful. I'm going to be non reactive, and I'm going to do the things that matter and act with integrity. Well, if everyone's like that, you're unprogrammable.

And that means that marketing companies can't lie to you and it means your government can't lie to you and it means your investors can't lie to you. So more equanimity is the goal. Yeah, I was pulling up this quote that I really like, that Ryan Holiday had posted something about, like, it's not skill or something that sets you apart. It's like, I found the quote. It's be quiet, work hard, and stay healthy.

Patrick J. McGinnis
It's not ambition or skill that is going to set you apart, but sanity. There you go. But just, you know, there's a lot to unpack there on the healthy side. But, yeah, like, just, well, health drives. Sanity and resilience in a major way.

Dave Asprey
And that's what they don't teach entrepreneurs. We burn up our health when we're young because we think there's some sort of morality in burning the candle at both ends and in the middle. The problem is you'll do that, you'll never have enough. I remember when I was 26, I made $6 million at the, that company, the data center company, and I lost them when I was 28. And how do you lose that much money?

But when I had $6 million, I looked at another friend at the company and said, I'll be happy when I have ten. Right. It's an elusive goal. Right. And it's the hungry ghost syndrome from Buddhism, where no matter what you eat, you're always hungry.

They have a whole realm of hell named after that problem. So how do you lose $6 million when you're 26, by the way? I just want to say this was pre Biden dollars, so that's about $18 million in today's money. Yeah, yeah. I'm not joking.

Yeah, no, yeah. Minimum wage was $4 an hour in the late nineties. Right. And now it's 20. That's five x.

Patrick J. McGinnis
Crazy. So anyhow, I, the way I lost money was by being too successful too fast. So I got promoted until I could actually attend board meetings in my, when I was 27 years old and I wasn't on the board. But this is a $36 billion publicly traded company, and I was allowed to watch but not speak because I was like, very high level strategy for the company, for M and A. So that meant I had inside information.

Dave Asprey
I was not allowed to trade my stock. And I watched the stock go from $80 a share to dollar five a share when I was blacked out from trading. Oh, my God. All I had to do was quit and sell everything, and I didn't because I knew it was going to come back. Newsflash, guys, for every entrepreneur out there, everyone who's got a windfall like that, take half your winnings and put it with an investment advisor who's trustworthy if you can find one, they're hard to find and tell them that you want it.

Money that you're not going to touch, that will never go away. And you want it to grow a little bit, but not aggressively, because you have lots of risk capital in your career and you dont need it in your money. There were multiple times I couldve taken money off the table at that company, and I just didnt. And one thing that I advise entrepreneurs do, if youre going to raise a round of venture capital, always negotiate for the company first because you have a fiduciary responsibility. And then you look at the VC's and you say, hey, I want to sell you some of my shares as well, even if youre taking a half a million dollars or a million dollars off the table.

Right. And if they say why? You say, because I want to have enough money that I don't have friction in my life. And they're happy to do that. They want you to not worry about who's going to wash your car because they want you focused on the business.

Right. So you do that and you save some of it. That means if it doesn't work out, even though you know it will, because you have faith in your company that at least you have a savings account. I know some people just are broken if something doesn't go the right way. And I know, as in my case, I was expecting bulletproof to be worth as much as $800,000,000.05 years ago.

And I don't know if I can talk about the exact amount that it went for, but it was 10% of what the company was worth when I left. And things like that, they're surprising and unpredictable. So your job along the way is to do your best to have something thats not just small company stuff. Thats what you know. And this is the voice of wisdom.

And I had someone tell me this years ago. I didnt believe them. And this is actually one of the things that makes you a badass, is listening to wisdom at a younger age. Theres a story, if we have time, ill share it. Sure.

Patrick J. McGinnis
Yeah. So back I talk about how I sold that first product over the Internet. This was when Marc Andreessen was building the first web browser. It was at a university. It was called Mosaic.

Dave Asprey
Yeah. It was an open source thing. And Mark and I were the same age. In fact, you might be a little bit younger than me, just slightly, you know? Yeah, no, Mark is exactly the same age as me.

He flew to Silicon Valley and he walked into sun Microsystems, which was a $20 billion company. Just had Scott McNeely on the show. Oh, did you? Nice. Scott's a stud.

And he goes in and goes, look, I need help. Tell me what to do. And so he allied himself with people who really knew what to do. And he built Netscape, and then he built loud cloud. And I competed with loud cloud.

I launched a similar product one day before the lab cloud big launch. But he sold that. He fought really hard. He almost failed that company. And to his credit, he did it and became a venture investor, multibillionaire, and just tons of respect there.

The difference between him and me is that I hadn't done some personal development work when I was younger. And I'm like, I'll do it all by myself. So I'm living 80 miles from Silicon Valley. I have the first frickin e commerce company. I could have driven there and raised money with my eyes closed.

All I had to do was take advice from someone else and ask for help, and I was unwilling to do it. And it took me another five or six years to learn how to take advice from people who've been down the path before. And this is why I spend so much of my energy now mentoring people, whether it's on biohacking or with the Apollo group, this, you know, very in depth mentoring people, because if you're starting your first business, you're willing to be curious and listen and pay attention and take action. You can avoid all the mistakes that you are going to make by working with someone who's already made the mistakes. So I wish I would have done that.

And the other guy who did this even more elegantly is Mark Zuckerberg. He was like a lot of these guys, dropped out of Harvard, same thing Bill Gates did years ago. But Bill, I think he had family connections. His dad was the top attorney for one of the industrial titans behind monopolies, the Rockefellers. Mark Zuckerberg, he did the same thing.

Charles Hanberg, he went and he connected himself with people who knew a lot so he could do his superpowers. So the sooner you realize if you're really working on it, you better find people who have already taken the arrows, taken the hits, so that you don't have to. So those are two entrepreneurs, kind of from my generation a little bit. After talking about my generation, I'm only 30, what the heck? And I respect that they did that.

And I also know why I didn't do it. So if you're listening to this and you feel like I have to do it all on my own, it's a hostile world, blah, blah, blah, you have a lot of stories about reality that are bullshit. That's why I've spent six months of my life with electrodes on my head. I developed a neuroscience company and hired a team so I could upgrade my brain. And I've had 1500 entrepreneurs come through there to go through.

How good are you at sensing reality without judgment? Because the better you are at that, the better of a CEO you can be, and the more you'll be able to say, I don't know that. Who knows it? I'll ask for help versus I'll just handle it on my own because you don't want to tell people that you actually don't know anything and that you have fear and you have a negative voice in your head and all that crap. All that's hackable.

Patrick J. McGinnis
Yeah, love that. Thanks for sharing that. Well, Dave, this has been a wonderful conversation. Yeah, thanks for coming by and just sharing your story and wisdom and all that with me. I learned a lot and the listeners, I'm sure they did too.

So thanks for coming by. You are very welcome. And listeners, if you want to know what's going on with just all that, just tell me what to do stuff, I will teach you to be young.com dot and if you sleep with dave.com dot. Sleepwithdave.com dot. And the final one, if you want to be an entrepreneur in the biohacking space, go to ownandupgradelabs.com.

Dave Asprey
It's a franchise and we'll teach you how to build and run a biohacking lab in your city. Sweet. Thanks, Dave. Don't.

Patrick J. McGinnis
Don't.