Dave Asprey: Biohacking Secrets to Eliminate the Energy Drains Sabotaging Your Success | Mental Health | E412

12:35Dave Asprey:And I was like, thank God someone finally believes me. Like I have the accelerator all the way to the floor all the time. And the car is slowing down. And I can't will it to go faster. And I have nothing left. And that was when I realized, okay, I have actually brain damage. It was probably from old toxins. But I was like, thank God this is so relaxing. I have a hardware problem. I can fix a hardware problem. If it's a, I'm a bad person or I'm just dumb problem. So I went all in on nootropics before they were called nootropics. I ordered$1 ,200 of them from Europe and started really self-medicating my brain.

13:12Dave Asprey:Because entrepreneurs, we make money with our brains. And I was feeling dumb at the time. Like, I'm desperate. So I did everything. I ended up spending$2.5 million, some of that to recover. and a lot of it to reverse my age, enhance my intelligence. I built a neuroscience company that makes people smarter and replaces decades of meditation in a few days. And I have written nine books and four New York Times bestsellers about cognitive enhancement and longevity and fertility. And my most recent book called Heavily Meditated is about altered states. And it became the bestselling philosophy book in the country.

13:50Dave Asprey:Which was crazy. It's not a philosophy book, but it explains how our bodies make decisions. And I probably should have written it as a business book because it's so important. I've had about 1 ,400 entrepreneur types come through my neuroscience company. So I'm writing this after 10 years of looking inside the brains of entrepreneurs.

14:08Hala Taha:Yeah. And we all make decisions with our bodies

14:11Dave Asprey:before we can think about it, and it's invisible to us, but I know the code for that. And once you understand what your body's doing versus what you're doing, a lot of the things that are hard for entrepreneurs, especially under 35. Like up to about 35, like I'm still finding my tribe. I'm still making my mark in the world. And you're trying to prove something. And so you have different body decision-making. Those are the emotions, but they come from your tissues, not from your brain. And then after sometime 35, 40, most people are like, oh, maybe I should have a mission. And sometimes you think you have a mission when you're young, but it's usually performative.

14:49Hala Taha:Young Improfiters, a few weeks ago, my main video editor put in his notice due to health concerns. Now, because it was an emergency and I wish him well, I was in a pickle. He was gone and there was nothing I could do about it. And so I was in full panic mode. The podcast still goes on. I still need promotional clips. I still have sponsors. I can't do this without a video editor. And so I was stressed, but I did what I always do. And we found an amazing replacement who's just as good as my previous editor, if not more talented. And I do what I always do. I went to Indeed Sponsor Jobs to find my candidate.

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16:16Hala Taha:Hey, Yap Bam. This commercial is for my ladies. I don't know about you, but I hate wearing a bra. But sometimes you have to wear a bra, like under a t-shirt. And when I have to wear a bra, I choose Honey Love. Honey Love does not make you choose between feeling supported and feeling comfortable. Their bras are wire-free, but still give you that lifted, flattering, secure feeling. You still get cleavage. And I've especially been loving their new crossover contour bra. It has light foam pads that create a smooth contoured shape under your clothes. And I'm also obsessed with their shapewear. Now, shapewear is so hit or miss.

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17:34Hala Taha:Yeah, fam, I genuinely feel ahead of the curve with AI for the first time. because last year I felt like I couldn't see the value from it. I would use AI and it would give me back dumb responses. And I was using ChatGPT like a search engine to draft an email here or there, but I wasn't using it effectively. So I went to Mindstone's AI Breakthrough Weekend with my business partner, Kate. I learned so many foundational skills that I use every day at Yap Media. Everything that I touch now involves AI. And Mindstone gave me the tools to actually make AI effective rather than just feeling like it was a bunch of hype.

18:08Hala Taha:And in fact, I built an app in 15 minutes at this retreat. And when I came back, me and Kate were like, we've got to put our team through this training. And so Mindstone has this AI competency program. It's a four-week totally online training that's super affordable. And we put the entire team, 60 people through this program. The productivity and the efficiency increase at YAP Media has been absolutely incredible. They've got their own proprietary tool called Rebel. It connects our email, our Slack. It attends all of our meetings and takes notes. And then it basically acts as like a second brain.

18:40Hala Taha:You can use any tool that you want, Claude, ChatGPT, whatever. It's the actual foundational principles of how to use AI correctly. That's what it teaches you. And if you guys want to experience MindStone and take their four-week AI competency program, Yap listeners get 10 % off at experience.mindstone.com slash Yap. That's experience.mindstone.com slash Yap. We talked about$2.5 million of testing on yourself, which ended up being like the best seed investment ever, right? Oh, yeah. You built this, you're the father of biohacking. You built billion-dollar products. Like, you've absolutely crushed it.

19:14Hala Taha:But what was one of the first experiments where you were like, oh, my God, I can actually, like, this is true. I can actually change my hardware.

19:22Dave Asprey:Oh, man. So many things pop into my head. One of the ones that just comes to mind, I was just becoming aware of this, and I had exhausted all the stuff that you can do with Western medicine. Like, I have constant pain in my body. My knees always hurt. My brain, I have this massive brain fog. I have fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, or today it's like the same thing as long COVID. I just didn't understand why some days I was kind of lucid. Some days I was a zombie. And when I was a zombie, I had to pretend like I wasn't a zombie, but I was pretty good at pretending. But I'm like, I can't remember anything from my meetings today.

19:58Dave Asprey:What am I going to do? So I decided I was going to do all the stuff that I thought was stupid. So I did acupuncture. I come from a family of scientists and I was raised to be very skeptical. And like meditation, that's for dumb people, right? Or even worse, like going to any spiritual thing of all. So I ended up saying, I'm going to go to Nepal and Tibet. I'm going to learn meditation from the masters. I give up, but like maybe I'm wrong about some of my fundamental assumptions. and so I spent three months doing that and I was in a monastery and and someone said oh you know let's go to the most holy mountain in the world which is five days on a four-wheel drive

20:45Hala Taha:across Tibet called Mount Kailash anyone who's Buddhist or Hindu knows this it's it's very

20:50Dave Asprey:famous and it's also very remote so I ended up going there and that was where I'm just feeling like death. Like my whole body hurts. It's 18 ,000 feet elevation. And this little Tibetan woman gives me a bowl of yak butter tea. And I drank it. And about five minutes later, it was like sparkles went off in my brain. I'm like, wow, I haven't felt this good in so long. What was in that? And it's just green tea. It's Pu-erh tea, but, and some yak butter. And I didn't understand why, but the lady, she would walk like a quarter mile, crack ice on the river, get water, boil the water over yak dung as the fire, because there's no wood, just you burn poop, right?

21:35Dave Asprey:And then they'd heat up the tea and make the tea. I'm like, okay, drink it. No, no, no. She'd pour it into a butter churn with the yak butter and then churn it for like 10 minutes. She wouldn't just turn it a little bit. I'm like, what is wrong with this person? Like, I just want to drink my tea, right? But what made it work was the fact that she churned it for that amount of time. And I couldn't understanding of this, but that was where the idea for Bulletproof Coffee came from. So it was, why do I feel radically different after I do this little dumb thing in a cup? Right? Well, it was the curiosity about what made it go that generated 500 plus million dollars of sales.

22:08Dave Asprey:Right? It's remarkable.

22:10Hala Taha:Yeah. So cool.

22:11Dave Asprey:Other things, when I bought my first batch of nootropics a little before that, when I was just trying to make my brain go so I wouldn't get fired. I remember getting them and I took something called paracetam, which is relatively well known today, although I recommend aniracetam even more. And I tried it and I took it for a week and thought, this is dumb. I wasted all this money and it didn't even do anything. So I quit taking it. And the next day I said, wait, I'm looking for a word. I can't remember a word. So you don't notice when your performance smooths out and gets better because it just feels natural.

22:45Dave Asprey:But you'll notice a decline in performance more than you'll notice an improvement. So the improvement was invisible, but the lack of it, like, oh, I'm searching for words that I can't find again. So I've been on aniracetam now for 25 years, which is a cognitive enhancer that increases memory IO. I've also been on the limitless drug, also known as modafinil, which I popularized with entrepreneurs years ago when my first posts was, why you are suffering from a modafinil deficiency, which just pissed everybody off, which is one of my love languages. So I wrote this and said, here's what happened when a little birdie gave modafinil to four ordinary people.

23:25Dave Asprey:And it told their stories. A guy was writing a proposal for the Dalai Lama Foundation. He's like, I took one pill. I rewrote the entire proposal that I've worked on for six weeks in one night. And I submitted it and they accepted it. And just everyone had these incredible experiences. And it really is the limitless drug. And so there's probably 50 ,000 entrepreneurs who are on modafinil. A lot of politicians are on it now. And this is a drug that was designed for narcolepsy when people fall asleep uncontrollably. But it also happens to be the most studied drug for raising IQ with very few side effects.

24:04Dave Asprey:So I'm actually on it right now.

24:06Hala Taha:How do you get prescribed for it?

24:08Dave Asprey:Well, there's two ways to do it. One is you go to chat GPT and say, what are the things I would have to tell my doctor to get him to write me a script for it? And then you tell your doctor that. The easiest one is to say you have shift sleep worker disorder because you have to work different shifts. The other thing you could do is you could just order it online from another country. So I have a prescription.

24:29Hala Taha:Yeah, similar to how people, I guess, get peptides now.

24:32Dave Asprey:Very similar, yeah. It's funny, though, because if you look at what makes someone an entrepreneur, there's a code or a name for it that's in the doctor's books. It's called ADHD. Yeah. All right. So it's weird because an off-label use of modafinil is for ADHD. So when I first went through all of this stuff, when my brain wasn't working in business school, and I went on the stuff, they tried giving me Adderall. And I hated how I felt on it.

25:05Hala Taha:Like, I can focus, but I want to curl up under my bed.

25:07Dave Asprey:And modafinil just made everyone around me slower.

25:11Hala Taha:I love that. I want to try it.

25:13Dave Asprey:It is one of the most profound substances. It doesn't work for 20 % of people that feel nothing. And five in a million people can have a reaction to it, the same reaction that ibuprofen causes. Oh, okay. It's very rare, but it's an autoimmune skin condition that's life-threatening. So you can do your genes if you're worried about it, but the odds are very, very low.

25:36Hala Taha:Yeah, fam, I am a perfectionist. I always want to make sure that I'm putting out the best offer possible to the world. So when I launched my LinkedIn masterclass and mastermind, I poured my heart and soul into the content and I knew that this was going to be transformative for all of my students. But I didn't know how to launch a website. I didn't know how to handle payments. I didn't know how to launch a payment plan, a subscription. I didn't know how to answer their questions in the middle of the night when they're trying to check out. But I left it all to Shopify. Shopify makes it so easy for us entrepreneurs to launch our e-commerce storefront.

26:09Hala Taha:They've got all these templates and AI tools. They make payment as easy as just one click. Shopify has been the best business partner for me over the past five years because they're so innovative. They're always thinking of new features from how to make sure that your cart doesn't go abandoned to having things like chatbots and helping you implement chatbots on your store. So please stop reorganizing your business plan for the 17th time. Build a storefront. Put the offer out there. All you need is the idea and Shopify can handle the rest. If you're serious about hearing your first... Start your free trial at shopify.com slash profiting today.

26:43Hala Taha:You heard that right. Start your free trial at shopify.com slash profiting. That's shopify.com slash profiting.

26:52Hala Taha:Hey, Yap Bam. This commercial is for my ladies. I don't know about you, but I hate wearing a bra. But sometimes you have to wear a bra, like under a t-shirt. And when I have to wear a bra, I choose Honey Love. Honey Love does not make you choose between feeling supported and feeling comfortable. Their bras are wire-free, but still give you that lifted, flattering, secure feeling. You still get cleavage. And I've especially been loving their new crossover contour bra. It has light foam pads that create a smooth, contoured shape under your clothes. And I'm also obsessed with their shapewear. Now, shapewear is so hit or miss.

27:24Hala Taha:I've got a whole drawer full of shapewear that I don't use. I'm sure you can relate, but I always grab their superpower short. Honeylove has great sculptwear. It's breathable. It smooths you under your clothes. It doesn't feel like I'm squeezing into something that doesn't fit me and I can't wait to take it off at the end of the day. Plus, Honeylove is female founded and designed by women. And you can tell because every detail feels thoughtful. Treat yourself to the most advanced bras and shapewear on the market. Use our exclusive link to save 20 % off at honeylove.com slash profiting. That's honeylove.com slash profiting.

27:54Hala Taha:And after you check out, they'll ask you where you heard about them and please support our show by telling them that Young and Profiting sent you. Experience the new standard and comfort and support with Honeylove. Go to honeylove.com slash profiting for 20 % off.

28:10Hala Taha:Hey, Young and Profiters. When I think back to the early days of Yap Media, I was way too scrappy. I'm talking about working out of coffee shops, bouncing between public Wi-Fi networks and hotspotting from my phone just to get through on a client call without the connection dropping. But looking back, it was actually adding a lot of unnecessary stress because you realize pretty quickly your business is only as strong as your connection. It's how you run meetings, serve clients, and keep everything moving. And that's exactly why I wish I had AT &T Business back then. They're built for small business owners who need their internet to work without second guessing it.

28:44Hala Taha:And once you've had that kind of reliability, you get real peace of mind. You can show it fully, close deals, serve your clients, and focus on growing your business without any of the stress. You need a provider that is as serious about your success as you are, like AT &T Business. Built to work. Get AT &T Business at business.att.com. That's business.att.com. Let's talk about energy leaks. You can have energy leaking from your brain. We just talked about some of those energy leaks. We can have energy leaking from our body. You've got this framework of five F's in which our body basically has to allocate where our energy goes, our mitochondria.

29:26Hala Taha:Talk to us about the five F's and what the mitochondria have to do with that.

29:31Dave Asprey:I'm going to take you through a set of steps that have to be true for this to make sense, because it's okay to be, I'm a little skeptical about this because I was skeptical too. And I I have exhausted this from philosophical, spiritual, biochemical, and just a systems biology perspective. And this is how life works. And I don't say that lightly.

29:51Hala Taha:Listen up, yeah, fam.

29:52Dave Asprey:You're not going to see this, but it's going to make sense. So let's pretend that you're a single cell microbe or something without all of intelligence, like a tree or a skunk or a politician or whatever. Okay. So anyway, something not very intelligent and you've got to be able to live. What are, if you strip away all the things, what are the things that you must do in order to be alive?

30:15Hala Taha:Eat.

30:15Dave Asprey:Well, that's almost there. Not get eaten is the first one. So it's fear. That's why these are F words. So don't let something eat me. And if you're a microbe, you secrete some toxins. You have little cilia to move away. If you're a tree, you grow thick bark or spines. If you're a politician, you tell more lies. Like all the things, right? Okay, so that's fear. Run away from killer hide. The second one you called it, it's food. is eat everything, right? This is why life will tend to do that. You put a bunch of rats in a box, they're happy for three generations and they eat everything, including each other.

30:47Dave Asprey:It's gross. So fear, food, third F word, all things have to do it to stay alive for multiple generations.

30:54Hala Taha:Fertility?

30:55Dave Asprey:You read my book, you cheated. I was trying to trick you into dropping an F bomb on your own show. So I'm gonna ask you this and you're listening to this, so ask yourself, is there anything you've ever done you're ashamed of that isn't one of those three things?

31:08Hala Taha:Fear, food, or fertility? No, not really.

31:12Dave Asprey:All the seven deadly sins, all the egoic behaviors are driven by mitochondria trying to keep your body alive. And they can do that because they're much faster than you can think. And here's the proof of this. If I clap my hands, you're sitting in your car somewhere probably, or the gym, and you're saying, okay, I knew it took some amount of time for this sound to reach my ears, and then I heard it because that's what you perceived. But if I had electrodes glued to your head, we can measure one third of a second after the sound hits your ear, your mitochondria and your nervous system allows it into the brain.

31:47Dave Asprey:Because your body is deciding what it's going to make you do and feel before you get a chance to think.

31:54Hala Taha:Wow. And if you don't believe me, you ever lean on a hot stove and go, you know, that's really hot.

31:59Dave Asprey:I guess I should move my hand. Yeah. No. You jerk your hand away, right, and go, good thing I moved my hand. You didn't move your hand. Someone else with their fingers on the control system who's hiding from you moved your hand and just made you take credit for it. Right? Because you didn't make the conscious decision. It was built in.

32:17Hala Taha:Yeah. Yeah.

32:17Dave Asprey:So the thing to know if you're an entrepreneur is that there is another intelligence inside your body running the things you're not paying attention to, and it doesn't have the goals you do. Its goals are fear, food, and fucking. But the good news is there's two more F words that mitochondria care about. And that's why we have hope for humans. The next one is friend. And all life will support its own ecosystem, the life around it, and its own species. This is why trees become an ecosystem. This is why we help other people's children if they're lost, why we help our elderly across the street. This is why we're kind to each other, even if we don't know.

32:57Dave Asprey:Because our mitochondria made us feel kindness. They are the puppet masters because they get to tell you what you're allowed to see, how you're going to feel about it, and then you take action on it. They are puppet mastering you all the time. But there's a hack for that. And the final F word that's the most important in the way you get control of the system is forgiveness. Now, that's usually a trigger word for a lot of people. It's like, I'm not going to forgive that person. They were mean to me. My anger keeps me safe. Dude, your anger is the biggest energy leak ever. So you don't do that. Forgiveness is not saying that you forgive someone.

33:32Dave Asprey:Forgiveness is making it so that you have zero reactivity to them, whether you ever speak to them again. And the idea is just letting it go, but being aware. And that is why I can still sit here today after literally losing$100 million because I didn't get the lesson on discernment until that was the cost of that lesson, which is what I would have walked away from Bulletproof with had people done what I thought was logical. You make$100 million, I make$100 million. I didn't understand that there are humans out there where for them to win, I have to lose. And it doesn't matter how much money or any other thing is involved.

34:10Dave Asprey:If I make any, they think that they lost. So when you understand you're playing a game with win-lose humans, the game is very different than if you're playing with win-win. I thought everyone was a win-win. So I'm like, you make$100 million, I make$100 million. Maybe you make$90 and I make$80. Who the heck cares? Like, it's a lot of money. But no, so my mistake and a really big lesson that makes me a great advisor for entrepreneurs is, yeah, understanding the human condition. That's all in my latest book, the different types of people there are.

34:37Hala Taha:Let's double tap on that. What are the different types of people out there? What do we need to watch out for?

34:44Dave Asprey:This is something that comes up with entrepreneurs when they're at 40 years' end. This is my neuroscience place here in Austin. It's a five-day retreat with electrodes glued to your head. The guy, the head neuroscientist from the telepathy tapes is my neuroscientist. So we're teaching people to have advanced powers, we'll put it that way. When people attend that, I teach them these categories of humans. So type one people are win-win. That's about 5 % people. So they're always win-win. You interact with them, like if they do something that made you lose, you can't even conceive of it. They just don't do that.

35:16Dave Asprey:The most common type of person after that is type two. These are people who are win-win usually, but they screw up. They don't see things because their ego takes action. Their mitochondria made them feel this way because their mom yelled at them or whatever. And then if you tell them, hey, buddy, that wasn't okay. They apologize. Go, oh, my gosh, how do I make that right? And then they pay you back or they do whatever. Normal humans on the path of being better humans.

35:43Hala Taha:So they'll make good.

35:44Dave Asprey:They'll make good. And they'll hear the criticism. Type three are win-lose, but they don't know it. And these are so dangerous for entrepreneurs. And the word for this is narcissist. And these are people who believe whatever their internal dialogue is, regardless of the facts. So you can have someone who you have a video of them in a room killing someone with a knife. They're covered in blood, holding the knife, and the room is locked. And you open the room, and they go, oh, it wasn't me. It couldn't have been me. I'm a good person. And you show them the video, you go, no, I'm a good person. It couldn't have been me.

36:19Dave Asprey:And they believe it. So you can't tell that they're lying because they're not lying. They just believe bullshit. So most entrepreneurs listening to this, you have someone in your company like that. You know who they are right now when I said that.

36:31Hala Taha:Or somebody who formerly was in your company potentially.

36:34Dave Asprey:Hopefully. Well, if you still have a company, they were probably formerly in your company. So one of the experiences that I just cherish is probably eight, nine years ago, I was at a business conference. and a guy named Ken, who was running a$500 million company, very experienced entrepreneur. I was telling him what was going on at Bulletproof and he looks at me and he recognized this pattern, didn't call it the same thing. And he said, so we're going to fire her with my phone or your phone. He hands me his phone. And I'm like, what are you talking about? I need this person. I understand the problem you're talking about.

37:13Dave Asprey:I'll work on it. He goes, you don't understand. And like, these are the people who break companies. I said, how do you know? He said, well, I run a$500 million company. I was mentored by Jack Welch, the CEO of GE. I'm like, holy crap, this guy's a badass and a good human. And I didn't take his advice. And about a year later, that same executive, who the entire year had told me and the board, we're going to be losing$4 million this year, but we have$30 million in venture capital. We're going to grow 40%. Every week, we're on track, we're on track, we're on track. And then December 1st, she goes, we might lose$5 million instead of$4 million.

37:48Dave Asprey:I said, okay, as long as our growth rates are there. And December 31st, she goes, oopsie, I lost$28 million. And I'm like, what? The entire year, you said something different. And you just burned three years of venture capital in one year without telling me you're the board. Like, what the? Okay, and if you're an entrepreneur running a big company, yes, I probably should have looked at the bank accounts. It's hard being the influencer and the CEO. It's really hard. It is. But I had trusted the wrong people. And this is a person with fantastic credentials, top of her class at Harvard kind of thing.

38:29So when I fired her, she looked me in the eye and she said, you should give me more stock options. I'm like, why?

38:40Dave Asprey:And she's made up a story in her head that made no sense. And I said, well, I would have to take stock options from the other employees who actually are doing work and didn't burn through all of our venture funding. And she started crying and ghosted me. And we have never spoken since. Wow. Because I penetrated her reality bubble. And the reality is I don't fail. So if you ever have someone come in the door during a job interview says they don't fail, run. Run screaming. It is really important. hire people who at least acknowledge failure. When you look at the fourth category of person, category four people, these are win-lose and they know it.

39:18Dave Asprey:They get off on manipulating you. They're very hard to spot because they're master manipulators. They're sociopaths and psychopaths. And it turns out there's 5 % of those and 5 % of win-win, the category ones. It's a bell curve. So your job as an entrepreneur is to ruthlessly eliminate type three people from your organization. These are the people who lie. These are the people who undermine you when you're not looking. They're the ones who organize coups. And if you allow a category three to stick around for more than about 90 days, what will happen is they will infiltrate some people in your organization, share their mindset, tell little white lies, but they're not white, to separate your team from you and create chaos in the org.

40:03Dave Asprey:And when you fire them, you'll lose two people. who are good people as well. So they're like a cancer in the arc. And if you let them go long enough the way I did, you might even lose your company. They're relatively hard to spot, but you spot them in the job interview. In my set of seven or eight companies right now, we have a goal, 60 days. If we hire one, well, you know in 60 days, we just fire them right then. And I tell people that during the interview and we do exhaustive profiling on people before we hire them to make sure we do that.

40:35Hala Taha:questions that you ask to kind of just get a sense of what type of person they are.

40:39Dave Asprey:At this point, I use two different frameworks. One is the Colby. And Colby tells you, are they a natural fit for this job in their instinctive way of thinking about the world and solving problems? And the other one is from a woman named Busy Gold. And she does psychology-level questions that I couldn't ask in a job interview. It would be illegal. But they go to a psychiatrist or psychologist who then assesses that, takes out anything personal and just says, here's the person's personality reaction profile. It's very dry numbers, but it tells with relative certainty whether someone is likely to go dark.

41:20Dave Asprey:And so my biggest mistake, building a$100 million company from scratch, was I didn't fire the people who were Category 3 fast enough. If I had just known that lesson, I would probably be a multibillionaire right now.

41:36Hala Taha:And so when you were talking about that example of the executive, she basically got triggered from an old wound when she couldn't accept that she failed, whatever that wound was.

41:48Dave Asprey:It was a daddy wound. A daddy. It always is. I just have to say this. Yeah. If you're a female entrepreneur, everyone in your company with mommy issues will see you as mommy because you're the woman authority figure. And if you're a male entrepreneur, everyone with daddy issues will see you as their daddy because that's how human brains work. That's how mitochondrial networks work. And that's what happens when emotions are generated before thoughts. So you're sitting in a room and you say something to someone and maybe it feels like you're criticizing him the way his dad did or the way his teacher did or whatever.

42:20Dave Asprey:he's going to get the emotions he had at that time unless he's done his forgiveness work and he's done a lot of personal development work.

42:25Hala Taha:Yeah.

42:25Dave Asprey:Right? And then he's going to see you as a bad person because that's what happened when he was five years old or whatever the hell. So you could spend your time managing emotions of other people, which is the most horrifying part of being an entrepreneur. Or you could do a better job of hiring people who've done enough work that it's okay. All of my senior executives, when they start in my companies, they go to 40 years of zen the first week. because that's where you go to turn off all of your triggers. Like literally that's what we're doing with computers. It's like the system notifications on your phone.

42:56Dave Asprey:I can't use my phone because Twitter and TikTok and everything is just popping up alerts everywhere. Your nervous system is doing that right now. So what if you just turned off all the useless alerts? That's what I've done. That's why I can run a big handful of companies. And that's why like no one died when a group of business people stole my company at the same time I was getting divorced and had a family member try to steal one of my other companies.

43:19Hala Taha:Oh my God.

43:20Dave Asprey:And I wrote about all that and heavily meditated, but I can sit here. I'm like, thank you for the lessons. Like I learned what I needed to learn. So you probably shouldn't try to steal one of my companies now because I will see it.

43:29Hala Taha:Can you give us an example of a trigger that showed up in your leadership that then you reset?

43:37Dave Asprey:This is so funny. One of the things that your mitochondria can do is they can decide which things in the environment you're allowed to hear or see. So one of my favorite board members when I was at Bulletproof, his name was Dan, Dan Skolnick. He's at Green River Ventures now. And he was just the kind of board member that every entrepreneur wishes they would have, who just really understood both sides of the seed. Dan sat down one time and he said, Dave, you have 200 SKUs. and an eschew is basically a separate product that you're selling and he's like it's breaking your team you're gonna you're gonna sink your company with this i'm like wow 200 is a lot like why didn't you say something and he looked at me like i'm like i'm an idiot and he goes dave i've been yelling this at you for the last six months and i was kind of humbled like i swear to

44:33Hala Taha:god this is the first time i've ever heard that and it was the first time i heard that because

44:37Dave Asprey:my ego didn't want to hear it because I think creating cool stuff that people want to use and that helps people's health, I think it's really kind of an obligation for an entrepreneur. Like, let's make the world a better place. We can make money doing it too. And the fact that I was that blind that I couldn't hear, I couldn't see this, even though people I trusted were telling me, everyone has that capability in them to just not see it. And it doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. It means that you have a human body because human bodies will do that because they're running the F words, right?

45:10Dave Asprey:In this case, it was probably fear of not doing my mission. I don't know.

45:15Hala Taha:People pleasing maybe a little bit.

45:16Dave Asprey:Definitely had some people pleasing in there. And I think I'm done with that. I like people triggering these days. It's more fun.

45:23Hala Taha:You had this trigger. How did you determine, you know, what wound was actually triggering you and how did you reset it or make sure that it doesn't happen as often.

45:34Dave Asprey:Okay. That is an amazing question. No one's ever actually asked it that way. So in Heavily Meditated, and guys, you can buy the book or not. It doesn't change my life in the slightest. Like it's my wisdom, but I think I make a dollar per book and it was already prepaid in advance. So truly, I'm not selling you the book. It's there for you. But the reset process that I use is based on neuroscience and it's based on a study of forgiveness practices around the world and then seeing what works in high performance people. So we glue electrodes to your head. This is what I did. And you sit down and you imagine the other person.

46:12Dave Asprey:There's eight steps. I won't go through all of them. But it turns out that the feeling of turning off one of these alerts, one of these triggers is very similar to what Buddhists would call a loving kindness thing. And it's a, what you basically do is you re-experience the pain in your body How did it feel when you were triggered? And then the altered opposite state is like this heart opening, warm, golden feeling where you're sending something to the other person. And there are similar practices in Buddhism, but they're not exactly the same. And I haven't seen other spiritual practices that have anything close to this, but it's not a Buddhist practice.

46:55Dave Asprey:It's a different thing. Desmond Tutu talks about like the feeling of this forgiveness, like a divine thing. But it's an embodied felt sense. Because when you were triggered, it wasn't your mind. It was a feeling. Like you know it's in your heart. It's in your gut. It's in your groin. Like the hairs on the back of your neck. And like you're ready to fight. So first you, how'd that feel? And then you learn this other state. Problem is it takes 20 to 40 years to learn the other state if you meditate for an hour a day. I can do it in five days for people. reliably after more than 10 years of doing this.

47:28Dave Asprey:So now, like, oh, anytime my body does this, eh, you have a tool to play whack-a-mole. And so you say, all right, turn that one off, turn that one off. It's like going through, and just anytime an alert popped up on your phone, you can click a little button and say, I don't want that one anymore. And then you do this process. But sometimes you don't know, like, the root of it, what the real cause is. So can I tell you a little story?

47:51Hala Taha:Of course.

47:52Dave Asprey:All right. around 2014. This is first three years of starting Bulletproof. I was doing maybe 800 grand a month. Not bad for a three-year-old company. Started and self-funded with$50 ,000 of teaching hedge fund managers how to make their brains work better. So this guy calls me up and says, hey, I'm your biggest fan. I'm a Hollywood stuntman. And you should be on this guy Joe Rogan show. Now, I have a confession. I have listened to five podcast episodes in my entire life. I've made 1 ,400 of my own episodes. And I've probably been on several thousand interviews like this one, right? So I create content, but I have time to listen to it because I run companies and make content.

48:40Dave Asprey:So I didn't know who Joe Rogan was. It was only maybe episode 400, 450 or something. So I show up in LA and Joe's like high as a kite.

48:49Hala Taha:He's like exhaling before the first question.

48:53Dave Asprey:And I'm like, man, I can't smoke that. I will be an idiot on your show if I do,

48:56Hala Taha:but I think it should be legal. And it became legal right after that.

48:59Dave Asprey:So I taught Joe about grass-fed meat, butter, coffee, getting ADHD going. And he still talks about that stuff today. And this is cool. Well, the stuntman then said, hey, Dave, let's do a coffee truck together. I'm like, I will do a Bulletproof coffee truck. Then he basically was playing me. I was trusting the wrong people. And calls me up one day when I'm still expecting our coffee truck's about done. He goes, I've decided I'm launching my own brand. And I'm going to say it's mold-free, but I'm not going to lab test it. So to me, mold-free coffee is really important because we have a problem in the U.S.

49:35Dave Asprey:where the world sends its moldy coffee here, and then we drink it and we get angry and want sugar. So that's why Danger Coffee, because who knows what you might do. There, I give my plug. But if you're an entrepreneur, you should drink Danger because it actually works. But anyway, so this guy, it was a betrayal thing. I'm like, okay, I can handle that, whatever, some guy. But then after being on Rogan two more times and just having been nothing but giving and helping, Joe goes on and says, Dave Asprey is a liar. He's a bad guy. Now, he hired a fact checker. Oh, by the way, he said that on the day that a company that he owned a portion of launched their competitor to Bulletproof.

50:13Dave Asprey:So this was commercially motivated behavior. And just today, I did my whole reset process. I've forgiven Joe Rogan. I've been to his comedy shows, and he was a hero during the pandemic. I don't have any issues with him. We both live in Austin. Haven't been to a party with him, but did I give him a hug? He'd probably run away. He'd probably kick my ass, but he's a lot shorter, so I'm kind of intimidating.

50:31Hala Taha:But I don't care.

50:32Dave Asprey:Like, I just don't care. So, Joe, if you hear this, I love you, brother. It's fine. But at the time, oh, my God, I freaked out. I hired a crisis PR firm. I'm like, what do I do? This podcaster's saying mean things about me. Really? Really? A podcaster saying mean things about me? But in my mind, it was a catastrophe. I'm like.

50:52Hala Taha:What's your credibility?

50:53Dave Asprey:What's my credibility? But I already had a show. I already had a brand doing like 800 grand a month. Like, who the fuck cares? He's a podcaster. Yeah.

51:01Hala Taha:You probably sold more coffee from it.

51:02Dave Asprey:Well. Ultimately. Ultimately, you nailed it. I couldn't see the fact that every time Joe Rogan says Dave Astor is a bad man, I sell more coffee. I couldn't see it for that same thing we're talking about. So I finally, after like six months of this, a guy who was a convoy commander in the Iraq war, who worked for me, he's like, Dave, he's just a podcaster. Why are you so freaked out? Like the whole team is feeling it. I'm like, gosh. So I put the electrodes on my head. I took my own medicine, did my 40 years of Zen thing. And the first thing that popped into my mind wasn't Joe Rogan. It was an experience in first grade that I'd forgotten.

51:37Dave Asprey:and it was a time when I tattled on another kid, which isn't cool, but hey, in first grade, you learn. And the teacher goes, little Johnny, did you do it? And he goes, oh, I didn't do it. Dave did it. And I got sent to the principal's office for doing the right thing. And I was so angry in first grade and I felt helpless in first grade, right? So what happens when I'm an adult? It's an unresolved trauma with little T. I'm an adult. I did the right thing. I helped Joe. I helped his audience. I was consistent and I got punished for it. And it brought up the feelings of anger and helplessness first fucking grade from something that had left my consciousness 30 years ago.

52:12Dave Asprey:So I did the reset process on that. And as I did the reset process, it was like the whole situation with Joe and all the stuff, it just like shrunk to this little thing and just went away. And then it became really clear, just what you said. Every time Joe Rogan says, Dave's a bad man, I just make more money. So what I should have done was gone right back on X now on Twitter at the time and just been like, Joe, your mom doesn't say I'm a bad man. That would have been the right response. Literally made fun of Joe Rogan's mom. Because it's like, let's pick a fight, dude. Let's be as public as we can.

52:43Dave Asprey:Bulletproof at the time. Now Danger Coffee. But because it's childish. This is, he's a comedian, right? He's not dumb. He just plays like he's dumb, but he's a comedian. And I'm actually, well, I'm pretty smart. I know my shit. And I don't lie. I never lie.

53:00Hala Taha:So you forgave him. Sometimes we think that we forgive people, but we're actually haven't really done the work.

53:08Dave Asprey:What do you mean sometimes? Very few people have ever forgiven someone. It's an advanced spiritual skill to forgive someone. This is why Jesus practiced it for all that time. Forgive them they know not what they do. Most people, I would say 99 % of the time, forgiveness is I decided to forgive them. It's a cognitive process that happens in the mind. In reality, no forgiveness happens in the mind. It is all in the body. Forgiveness is an altered state, like a psychedelic state or like an orgasmic state. You don't live in a state of forgiveness unless you're very, very special. You can live in a state of compassion, which is what Buddhism teaches.

53:47Dave Asprey:And compassion is, I automatically wish other people well before I can judge them. And that's also an advanced skill. Forgiveness is harder, but you don't always live in forgiveness. because once you've developed compassion, very few people can trigger you anymore.

54:01Hala Taha:So you've truly forgave somebody if you don't get the triggers resulting of whatever that trauma was.

54:07Dave Asprey:If a person that you think you've forgiven walks into a room and you have no reaction internally, your heart doesn't change even a little bit, you don't clench your jaw, you don't change your breath, and if we were measuring stress response, which we can now, on your skin, you wouldn't see any change. and you'd be like, oh, it's good to see you, right?

54:28Hala Taha:How do you think about gratitude with forgiveness? And is there anything with the Joe Rogan situation that you actually feel grateful for?

54:35Dave Asprey:Oh, I'm so happy you asked. In the reset process, you cannot enter the state of forgiveness without finding gratitude first. And I've worked with people who've been tortured in war, like the most horrific things doing the 40 Years Zen program. and entrepreneurs, a lot of them actually, who've been through childhood trauma, like pretty complex and just abhorrent things. And I've looked them in the eye and said, if you want to let that go permanently and forever, you have to find one good thing that happened. And the cool thing about gratitude is your body's dumb. It doesn't understand time or magnitude or space.

55:15Dave Asprey:It doesn't understand there's refrigerators or police officers or whatever. It's just like reactive, real-time, emotional flopping all over the place until you train it. So you can tell your nervous system whatever you want when you do this. And for gratitude, it just has to find one good thing. Doesn't matter what it is. You can literally be in a car accident and lose a leg. And I'm so grateful I have my other one. Boom, you found gratitude. It's not hard. But seeing the gratitude is actually very difficult. And you know what it takes to find gratitude? Curiosity. curiosity. And we all know what curiosity did.

55:50Dave Asprey:They say it killed the cat because curiosity takes you out of fear. So the reason that you're feeling triggered is ultimately fear. When you peel away all the labels, there's some kind of fear that your mitochondria network is signaling. And so once you start going, huh, I wonder, then you're not afraid anymore. And then you say, oh, it turns out there was this tiny little sliver of goodness amongst all the crap.

56:12Hala Taha:Yeah.

56:13Dave Asprey:Okay, now you're primed to do the reset process and actually forgive the person. And the forgiveness is you change the state of your body, not the state of your mind. So most people, I forgave, no. What you did is you told someone you forgave them and you decided that you forgave them and you're holding into all the crap in your heart and in your body and in your gut. And that crap is the biggest energy leak for all humans all the time.

56:35Hala Taha:Sometimes our triggers aren't from something that happened personally. So, for example, I'm Palestinian. So I feel like with the last three years, I probably have so much like trauma and things that I need to forgive the world for and release so that it doesn't show up in my leadership and my entrepreneurship.

56:53Dave Asprey:All right. Can I be really triggering for you?

56:55Hala Taha:Yeah.

56:55Dave Asprey:You have toxic empathy.

56:57Hala Taha:Hmm.

56:58Dave Asprey:Okay.

56:58Hala Taha:I'm sure I do.

56:59Dave Asprey:So do you know what toxic empathy is?

57:01Hala Taha:When you just feel like you, I do have toxic empathy. Like I know for a fact, like I'm so, you can, you can explain it.

57:08Dave Asprey:Okay.

57:08Hala Taha:I would like to learn more, too.

57:10Dave Asprey:So there's two paths that humans go down. When we're very, very young, okay, you're in a meat body that can't feed itself and poops on itself, right? And your networks in charge are like, how do I make sense of this weird world? Like there's air and light and mom. And if you look at the brainwaves of a baby, it's all like the deepest brain, like sleepy states and then dreamy states. And you don't even really come out of the dreamy state until you're seven or eight. so And during that time, you're not perceiving the world like normal. And you learn, what do I have to do to be safe? And one group of people learns, I have to think to be safe.

57:50Dave Asprey:Thinking is the way. And the other group of people says, I have to feel to be safe. Feeling is the way. So if you have an unsafe environment, then you learn, okay, I can earn love with my brain and I can think about whether someone's going to hit me and then I can avoid it. And someone else will say, if I can just feel everyone's feelings around me, then I can feel when something bad is going to happen and I can avoid it and I can be safe. Right? Now, they're both trauma responses. Right? So when people come in to 40 years' end, these are all people who, despite this, which is the human condition, are very successful.

58:23Dave Asprey:It's about$20 ,000 to work with my whole team for a week. I think it's underpriced, but whatever. Like, it's very expensive to run, but very valuable. So these people have some degree of economic success regardless of this. And the people are like, oh my gosh, I'm feeling everyone's pain, all that stuff. They learn, I don't have to feel pain. And when you study spiritual stuff like Buddhism, they'll tell you empathy is better than no empathy, but it's a low-level state. Because you want to walk into Walmart and feel everyone's feelings? I don't think so, right? Because it's just a random wash of humanity.

58:53Dave Asprey:It's normal. And you're trying to be better than normal. So the step above empathy is compassion, which is, oh, I automatically wish all these people at Walmart well. I'm not gonna judge them, even if they're on the people of Walmart webpage, which is the funniest thing ever, if you've ever seen it. But the idea here is, okay, I just like, I have compassion, right? That's healthy. And empathy is not so healthy because you're whipped around by other people's emotions all the time. And then on the other hand, the people who are meat robots, which is where I was, I will refuse to acknowledge my emotions because I don't comprehend them.

59:31Dave Asprey:And because dealing with my emotions is unsafe, I can just think my way out of them and therefore I will earn love. But for them to crack through into their emotions is, ah, I did that when I was about 30 at a personal development retreat. It took like seven days before I would go, I guess I have an emotion besides anger. Fine. So what's going on with you is partially that toxic empathy. And when people do a lot of their own work on their adult experiences, on their childhood experiences, they'll go in three different directions. One of them is pre - and perinatal trauma. The experience of birth and what happened in the womb has effects that you can remember that are changing your personality today.

1:00:14Dave Asprey:I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, and I had no idea the effects it had on me from a PTSD perspective until I did the work and was like, oh my God, I'm so glad I figured that out and let it go. Okay. So there's that. Then there's the generational trauma and that could easily be a part of what you're dealing with. And I see this in any part of the world where there's been conflict, including like Central Europe is full of this because every 60 years an army rides through and messes things up and then it lasts for several generations. You see in the Middle East very, very clearly.

1:00:47Dave Asprey:You see it in the Muslim world. You see it in Jewish people. Lots of bad stuff has happened over the last hundred years. I mean, you've got Lawrence of Arabia, all the things. Yeah. Right. Some people will just automatically like, okay, I cleaned out my own closet. Like, oh my gosh. And they'll start doing work on their great, great grandmother they never do. And then they feel these weird shifts in their body. This is more shamanism, but people do it themselves. Like I'm trained in shamanic practice and a bunch of other stuff, but they're doing this with electrodes on their head. And the coolest thing is sometimes someone will like, you know, forgive a family member they haven't talked to in 20 years.

1:01:23Dave Asprey:And then that night, they get a text from their long lost whatever going, I don't know why I'm just thinking about you. Not just once or twice, like hundreds of times to the point that we're all connected more than we think we are. And so your ability as a leader of a company to just hold your space, it comes down to dealing with your generational trauma, with birth trauma. And what happened in the womb? Was your mom safe? And all that sort of stuff. And then the freakiest thing that comes up, and I've had to deal with it myself, is past lives, which is not generational trauma. It's not this life.

1:01:54Dave Asprey:But you're like, why am I so angry at 14th century French people? It doesn't matter why. The why is the reason, the meaning engine of your conscious thinking. If it pops up in your mind, just run a reset process on it. Just let it go. Right? So I'll see people like, oh my gosh, I spent two hours today forgiving things from another lifetime, and I feel so much better. Now, is that real? I tend to think so. It doesn't matter. Did the person's state change, and did the beneficial change stick? And if so, then it worked. And I don't care if there's a belief system about it or not. What I do know is that 90 % of people who go through 40 years of Zen report relationship improvements in a survey.

1:02:34Dave Asprey:Actually, it's approximately 89 point something. There's, and all the other markers of psychological health and performance go up more than 50 % for all of the markers people go through. So, wow, forgiveness is a performance enhancing process, but only if it actually works. On the contrary, if you cognitively forgive someone, now you're creating a schism in reality for yourself. You say that you forgive the person, but you don't feel that way. And if you want to be a terrible leader, show up with a lack of authenticity and congruence. I've never seen a leadership book about congruence, but this is what happens.

1:03:14Dave Asprey:And my therapist of 10 plus years has actually said, Dave, you're the most congruent client I've ever worked with, which to me is a really good compliment. What that means is that my inner state and my outer state are aligned, right? And when you're a leader, if you're losing your mind and you get in front of the troops and you're like, all right, everything's fine. But everyone knows it's not fine because it's not the tells. It's not what you're doing. It's that you're sending out magnetic vibes we can measure and you're sending out quantum vibes that you kind of can measure, but are harder to sense.

1:03:51Dave Asprey:And probably some bio photons, like there's like, and pheromones and God knows what else. So we have a sense that we're lying. You know what I'm talking about? Can you tell when someone's bullshitting you?

1:03:59Hala Taha:Yeah.

1:04:00Dave Asprey:Well, you're a woman. and you guys have an unfair advantage. Seriously, women are more intuitive than men on average because you have to rely on intuition for safety. And guys are like, we have muscle.

1:04:09Hala Taha:We are safe. We have rocks.

1:04:11Dave Asprey:Your team can feel this too. It doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman in leadership. If you can walk up and you can say something that is internally true and externally true, you have their attention. And over the years of advising and coaching entrepreneurs, one of my favorite questions is people come up and say, Dave, how can I be more authentic? You can't act authentic. It's like you have to make your inside and your outside line up. And that's what meditation and breath work and all the spiritual side, the consciousness side of biohacking is about. And it's why not only do I run the biohacking conference here in Austin, which is called Beyond Biohacking, the largest and oldest biohacking conference of 5 ,000 people.

1:04:53Dave Asprey:Joe Dispenza has spoken there twice. And leaders were, some of our speakers are about that. But I also bought the Wonderland Conference, which we're bringing to Austin in October. And the Wonderland Conference is the second largest psychedelic conference in the world. Rick Doblin from Maps, who's a hero and a friend, is speaking. And it's a consciousness conference where we do psychedelic speakers as well as other technologies for consciousness. Because if you're an entrepreneur, you better learn how to hack your internal state. Otherwise, you will literally tear yourself apart. in the process of succeeding.

1:05:29Hala Taha:I was literally just about to ask you about psychedelics, so I'm glad that you brought it up. Because I feel like one of the hardest things to do is actually to remember your trauma and try to understand where these triggers are coming from. And it seems like certain drugs can kind of unlock that for people. Can you explain why?

1:05:50Dave Asprey:Your brain has something called the default mode network. And heavily meditative, if you're interested, has a whole chapter on psychedelics and how and why this works. Again, it's okay if you don't buy the book. I just want you to know where to go for more info. So the default mode network in neuroscience is pretty much what allows the ego to express itself. So when you take something like ketamine, which is what we use at 40 Years of Zen as an option for neuroplasticity, not classically a psychedelic, but similar neighborhood, or psilocybin or LSD or even something like DMT. By the way, I'm about to go do like a four-hour DMT session.

1:06:28Dave Asprey:That's going to be kind of cool. Right after this? It's not even the next couple months. We're going to do a whole, like an episode of a TV series on it because normally it's an eight-minute journey, but I'll do it for a few hours and see what happens. Anyway, all these disrupt default mode network signaling so that your ego shuts the hell up, and then you get to see the world the way your mitochondria see the world. It's pretty interesting. Like all the patterns, all the colors, all the memories, all the connection, it can come back. However, a great number of people end up reliving past traumas when the ego turns off.

1:07:05Dave Asprey:And they say, oh, I had a bad trip. No, you didn't have a bad trip. You relived a trauma. So you can let it go. If you have the right set and the right setting and the right facilitation support, you have the opportunity now that you become aware of it to actually work on letting it go. I've seen very few people permanently let things go with psychedelics. It's not impossible. And I've done everything but combo at this point. You can lighten the load, but without like a deep forgiveness that's embodied, it's very hard to do. And the difficult thing with psychedelics is that 90 % of what happens you don't remember.

1:07:44Dave Asprey:So even if you forgive in an altered state, if you don't have full recollection of it, you don't necessarily get the full benefits of it. So I am actually a fan of mindful psychedelic use, and I've been to Burning Man a dozen times, so I might use them for fun on occasion. But if you're using them recreationally, you're probably not getting the benefits. And if you don't have a facilitation process, it doesn't work. And the way we use ketamine at 40 Years of Zen is we do one journey a day. And before and after, there's training. And afterwards, there's facilitation. And the role of a facilitator at 40 Years of Zen is to make sure that you remember everything.

1:08:25Dave Asprey:And when you go in and you're doing neurofeedback sessions, which feel like you're on psychedelics, but it's just you and your brainwaves, you come out and you talk about it. Imagine, like if you had a dream last night. Did you have dreams last night?

1:08:37Hala Taha:Dreaming about this interview and making sure I do good.

1:08:40Dave Asprey:And you remember it? Yeah. Okay, cool. Most people, though, don't remember their dreams unless someone asked them to remember it.

1:08:46Hala Taha:I was like maybe not fully sleeping well. Okay, cool.

1:08:49Dave Asprey:But you know what I'm talking about. Yeah. Right? So people will forget their dreams. Like, I had the best dream. And you just don't know. So it's the same with psychedelic journeys, and it's the same with meditation. And that's why I have a team of trained facilitators, a team of neurotechnicians and scientists. So you come out, like, keep wearing the True Dark glasses that keep your brain in published medical studies that keep your brain in a meditation state. And then let's talk. And let's get it out there. Let's take notes. Let's structure the tools so you can do it better. And that's why we have a wait list for a$20 ,000 program because it saves you 40 years of meditating every day.

1:09:24Dave Asprey:And if you're an entrepreneur.

1:09:25Hala Taha:I'm going to do your program.

1:09:27Dave Asprey:Oh, you have to.

1:09:28Hala Taha:I want to do it ASAP.

1:09:28Dave Asprey:You're running a big enough couple companies. Oh, yeah, yeah. All you have to think about is one time that you made a really bad decision because you're emotional. Right?

1:09:38Hala Taha:Especially as a woman, we get very emotional.

1:09:41Dave Asprey:You know, you'd be surprised. Men and women both get emotional. Just you show it more. We get emotional. We just sit on it and grit our teeth and just chew it up and digest it and then like feel it in our bodies and we get old and fat and angry. You ever see that movie Grumpy Old Men?

1:09:58Hala Taha:Yeah.

1:09:58Dave Asprey:That's like a documentary on testosterone deficiency and lack of forgiveness. But we all do feel it. And women express it more. And some of the hardest clients at 40 Years of Zen are men. Like, I do not know how to feel my feelings. And this is to me like sacred work. Because when I was 30, I was at a personal development retreat doing holotropic breathwork, which is a replacement for LSD. It was hardcore breath work. And I was like, okay, I'm not understanding. There's all these people that are making all these sounds. There's people also with like whiffle ball bats, like hitting pillows and yelling.

1:10:39Dave Asprey:I'm like, this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. But I couldn't stand to be in the room. Like the sound of it just drove me nuts. So I went outside and the facilitators, bless them, they came out like, why are you outside? I'm like, I can't stand the sound of all these people yelling and wailing and whatever. This is my first personal development thing in my life. I was like way in the deep end. And so they brought me in. I took three facilitators and pillows, actually like weighted blankets on me so I could just lay there, right? And I'm like, I am a rational computer science human being.

1:11:09Dave Asprey:I'm, you know, successful, like what is up? And this wise woman looks at me and she goes, are you feeling anything? I said, yeah, I'm feeling pissed off because this is dumb. And she said, anything else? I said, well, there's a weird feeling in my stomach. She goes, that's fear. And I looked her right in the eye and I said, there's nothing in here for me to be afraid of. Therefore, it's not fear. And she looked at me and she kind of giggled and she goes, fear is an emotion. Emotions don't have to have reason. And I was like, oh my God, why did I not think of that? My body has emotions that make no freaking sense.

1:11:45Dave Asprey:But before that, my whole model of reality was that it can't be that emotion because why would it be there? Just understanding that. So we guys have it, but I was completely ignoring everything below my neck. And I don't anymore. And so women, you typically have to pay attention to things below your neck because they change all the damn time, right? You have a monthly cycle, you have a daily cycle, and like, it's a lot. So women's intuition, though, is very important for entrepreneurs. And I'm going to talk about that if we have time for it. If you believe what I'm saying about mitochondria being basically antennas on reality, they sense reality first, they make a group decision with each other about what they're going to pass on to the nervous system and ultimately to your brain, then the areas with the most mitochondria would be the most sensitive to the environment.

1:12:29Dave Asprey:So in men and women, we have 15 ,000 mitochondria in our brain cells and our heart cells, okay? And that's where it tops out. Oh, except in women, you have about 600 ,000 mitochondria in your ovarian tissue.

1:12:42Hala Taha:Wow.

1:12:43Dave Asprey:So the seed of intuition in women is the reproductive system. You also have a lot of nerve endings in other parts of your reproductive tract, right? So, and I've interviewed top OBGYNs and top female spiritual leaders about this, and more than one of the spiritual leader types has literally looked at me and said, intuition is in my pussy. I'm like, I'm not going to just, okay, yes, I believe you. I'm not going to disagree with that, right? So, when you're dealing with advanced Taoism and things that are in my wheelhouse. When you first start working with a spiritual teacher, you'll see them do this.

1:13:21Okay.

1:13:22Dave Asprey:They're activating chi in their hands. We have a lot of nerve density in our hands. And then as they start learning, they start feeling in their feet because you have the second most nerve endings in your feet, right? And then the true masters, when they're walking into a room, they feel hands, feet, and groin because it's a very sensitive area. And this has nothing with sex at all. It has to do with I'm aiming all the antennas in my body to get an intuitive sense. But guys are much worse at getting intuitive sense in our reproductive tract than women are. I think it has to do with reproductive safety.

1:13:55Dave Asprey:I don't know. But if you're a male entrepreneur, you had better know the two women on your team who are most intuitive and hopefully your spouse or partner is also intuitive. And you listen to what they say because they will tell you that guy's a douchebag. You're like, but I like that guy. It doesn't matter if a woman who has shown that she's intuitively trustworthy tells you someone's a douchebag, then just don't work with them. It's not worth it. These are your team. And the reason I'm still here as an entrepreneur today, I have two women on my team, Rebecca and Miranda. They just moved to Austin.

1:14:29Dave Asprey:Welcome, ladies. 14 years of supporting me, and they're both intuitive. And the number of times in the last especially 10 years after I learned this, when I just don't like that guy or that woman. They're not good. My assistant, Christine, same thing. I don't like that one. Every time I've hired someone she didn't like, I regretted it immensely. So listen to intuitive women. And if you're a guy, you have a different kind of intuition. You have it. It's just very, very different. And your intuition, it'll be in the same place. It'll be in your hands, in your feet, and in your reproductive tract.

1:15:04Dave Asprey:So if you walk into a room or someone else walks into a room and your balls climb up inside you, it probably should tell you something. That's a protective thing that your body is doing to tell you. Just you have to listen to the body. The body knows.

1:15:17Hala Taha:It's so interesting. And then when we think about those five Fs that you're mentioning and fertility, it's no wonder that women are making so many decisions around fertility. And even if you're not realizing it, that this decision you're making of who you're dating or what job you're taking or whatever might be like a fertility decision that you're not even realizing.

1:15:37Dave Asprey:It is so crazy the way things work. like the way a guy smells, not smells because, you know, you're smelling his armpit or something, but just in the room, your body will pick up the fact that he has DNA that's compatible with yours, a haplotype, and he'll smell good to you, but it won't be a conscious smell. And then you'll start talking to him and then you'll flip your hair and do all the things that you do. And you won't even know why you're doing it. This is how mitochondria manipulate us all the time, right? Problem is if you're on the birth control pill, that system gets hacked and broken, so it doesn't work.

1:16:12Dave Asprey:And then you might be attracted to the wrong guy. You go off the pill, and all of a sudden, your husband was not attractive anymore.

1:16:16Hala Taha:Oh, wow.

1:16:16Dave Asprey:That's why for—

1:16:17Hala Taha:I'm anti-birth control pills.

1:16:20Dave Asprey:In 2011, I wrote my first book, which was on fertility, because the mother of my children, former wife, she was infertile when I met her, and she's a doctor. So did some biohacking, restored her fertility. My first book was about that. And I went really deep on this. And birth control pills harm women so much, and access to birth control is a necessary right for women. Just the pill is harmful to women. It's okay to say both at the same time. If you care about women, you should say that. So yeah, it breaks relationships.

1:16:47Hala Taha:I just want to kind of close the loop on the fact that when you forgive, you get more energy because then your mitochondria can allocate energy to different things other than your emotions, right? So can you help people understand that better?

1:17:00Dave Asprey:Every day you take about 30 pounds of air and some amount of food. You combine them and you make electricity and heat and some other proteins and stuff like that. And that's what runs your body. Right now, the average person's thoughts, about one-third of their thoughts per day, are about tacos. Okay. Or at least about food. So each of those thoughts took electricity. So imagine if, like, one of the times your phone just slows down. Like, what is going on here? And you, like, close a bunch of open apps and then it speeds back up. Well, everything that you haven't forgiven is an open app running in your brain.

1:17:34Dave Asprey:and all of these unprogrammed thoughts, they just take up energy. And that means you're not thinking about the business. You're not acting with clarity. You're less conscious. It also means that the immune cells whose job is to kill cancer cells, they don't have enough energy. And the body is beautifully set up to run the most important on the to-do list to the least important in order. And it says, I'm going to prioritize not dying at the very top here and not dying now, right? and I'm going to make sure that we have some kids and that we eat and all this stuff. Folding proteins properly is pretty low on the list.

1:18:09Dave Asprey:So it's only going to do that if you give it two things, enough energy and a safe environment for it to regenerate. So if you're stressed all the time and out of energy, you have neither ingredient. And this is why so many entrepreneurs are like, I will use my willpower and my biological energy to become successful. I'm in my late 20s, early 30s. God, this was me. I can burn the candle in the middle and at both ends, and I'm just going to do it. So stress all the time, working out all the time, right? Because more is better. That's not how it works. But so at the end of the day, they're completely blown out.

1:18:46Dave Asprey:They might be successful. They're constantly wired or tired. They're reactive. They don't know they're reactive. And they're grinding all the time. And it creates misery. It also creates broken teams because then your team tries to do that. And then everyone in your company is all broken and like it's toxic. And I know because I've done it. So what you'd want to do instead is recognize that your body responds to stimulus followed by recovery. And this is why I exercise for about 20 minutes a week. And like I am like I'm on the cover of my book with my shirt off. I am. Well, if you believe the calendar, which I don't anymore.

1:19:26I'm actually 28 % old because I'm going to live to 180.

1:19:31Dave Asprey:But if you do the math, I'm 53 on the calendar. I am leaner and in better shape than any time in my life with less work than ever. And in business, it's the same way. Working more means you're a bad entrepreneur. So people probably got pissed at that. But it's true. Okay, you could have a high return on ad spend or a low return on ad spend. What would you rather do?

1:19:54Hala Taha:High return on ad spend.

1:19:55Dave Asprey:You want to spend as little as you can to get the highest return. That makes you a good answer. So why do you want to work hard? No, you want to delegate. You want to work as little as possible so that the only thing that ever crosses your desk is something that no one else in your company can do. And when you have too many of those, you want to hire someone who can do those things. That's the path. And why do you think I have, I think it's eight companies in the portfolio right now? Because I have hired good leaders, right? And I'm engaged with the companies, right? I'm spending a lot of time on Upgrade Labs now.

1:20:24Dave Asprey:We've got one here in Austin. And have you been?

1:20:26Hala Taha:No, I haven't yet.

1:20:26Dave Asprey:Oh, my gosh. I'm sure I can get you a free pass there.

1:20:29Hala Taha:Yeah, I'd love to.

1:20:29Dave Asprey:Yeah, and this is our AI longevity place where I can go for my 20 minutes a week of working out.

1:20:36Hala Taha:Only 20 minutes a week you're working out?

1:20:38Dave Asprey:I'm not joking. Most people hear me say 20 minutes a day. No, it's 20 minutes a week.

1:20:41Hala Taha:I thought you were saying 20 minutes.

1:20:43Dave Asprey:Look at my abs. Jeez.

1:20:45Hala Taha:How is that possible?

1:20:47Dave Asprey:AI. We've used AI to figure out what is the minimum signal to put into the body to cause it to grow muscles and get VO2 max. And, okay, get this. five hours a week. So an hour a day of spin class.

1:20:59Hala Taha:Yeah.

1:20:59Dave Asprey:Which is brutal. Like you've got.

1:21:01Hala Taha:Yeah, I work out literally six times a week in like heated classes and all this kind of stuff. And I love it. How? But there has to be a better way.

1:21:09Dave Asprey:So you're like a masochist.

1:21:10Hala Taha:Well, I don't think so. I mean, the only thing I don't like about it is how often I have to wash my hair. But other than that, I love it.

1:21:16Dave Asprey:I'm totally teasing you. You love it because you're getting the stress hormones that feel good, right?

1:21:20Hala Taha:Yeah, and the community and all that. Yeah, the community is a big one.

1:21:25Dave Asprey:So if you were to do five minutes three times a week of our tech for cardio, you're going to improve by 12%. What you're doing gets you a 2 % improvement over two months. So two months of consistent practice five hours a week, 2%. 15 minutes a week, 12%. So six times better in 15 minutes. And you brush your teeth for 15 minutes a week. So your cardio should take as much time as brushing your teeth. And if you're an entrepreneur, you want five hours a week back? I did.

1:21:49Hala Taha:Yeah, I was just going to say, like, no wonder you're running eight companies. You don't have to exercise every day.

1:21:54Dave Asprey:And here's something else that happens when people start biohacking. They need an hour less sleep. And then you wake up fully refreshed and you're like, oh my God, what just happened? Is everything okay? I thought I needed more sleep. No. If you need more sleep, it means you suck at sleep or you're sick. The people who live the longest get six and a half hours of sleep a night in three studies of more than a million people each over multiple years. So eight hours a night is for normal people. You want to be someone who's so healthy, you're like, you know what? Unless I worked out heavy or drank or something, I don't really need eight hours.

1:22:29Dave Asprey:I just wake up and I'm good to go and I don't need my coffee to get going. Interesting. I run Danger Coffee. I have a tattoo of caffeine on my arm. I love my coffee and I used to need it to function. Now I just love my coffee. I literally wake up before my alarm clock. This morning I woke up 15 minutes before my alarm, ready to go. I couldn't do this until I was over 40 years old because I didn't understand that I was stimulating too much and recovering not enough. It's called being kind to yourself.

1:22:56Hala Taha:So we've talked about internal triggers that can cause energy leaks. Now we're moving into external environmental triggers. Oh, big one. One thing that we did not talk about yet is light. And I see you've got these, for those of you watching on YouTube, he's got these yellow glasses that block junk light. is what you call it.

1:23:17Dave Asprey:These are the coolest glasses on the planet. I started TrueDark 10 plus years ago, and we block only the bad spectrum of blue and let the good stuff through. If you wear blue blockers, the ones you buy online, from anyone other than TrueDark, what you're getting is something that blocks all of the blue light. You need blue light to wake up and function during the day. If you block blue light, you will break your circadian biology. So I'm blocking underneath a specific wavelength of light with these. And these are the first all titanium custom made from scratch frames. I worked for like six months on these and they have little side shields.

1:23:50Hala Taha:They look cool.

1:23:51Dave Asprey:They're so cool. And the ones for jet lag, we have actually published a study in a medical journal showing that 15 minutes of wearing the TrueDark glasses puts your brain in the same state as advanced meditation. So you wear it for 15 minutes and you want to go to sleep. Oh, cool. I don't get jet lag anywhere on the planet. I can fly to Dubai and I'm completely good as long as I have my True Darks. So it's been life-changing for me. I just start companies that make things I can't buy, things that should exist but don't. So this is one.

1:24:24Hala Taha:It's a good plan. Man, next time you come on, we're going to have to talk about category creation and just like biohacking and entrepreneurship. That will be the next episode. But today, we're running out of time, and I do want to play a fun game that I think is going to work really well on social, okay? It's called Biohacking Confessions.

1:24:42Dave Asprey:Ooh.

1:24:42Hala Taha:And I want you to just answer the questions in terms of like what comes up for you in your gut. You can be like kind of quick. I'll ask any follow-ups if I want more information. But are you ready for biohacking confessions? I'm ready. Okay. What is your current age?

1:24:58Dave Asprey:Well, I identify as being about 35, 28 percent, or if the government is asking in their outdated ways, I'm 53.

1:25:06Hala Taha:How old do you hope to live?

1:25:08Dave Asprey:I'd like to die at a time and by a method of my choice. And that would be at least 180.

1:25:14Hala Taha:Has that changed with AI at all?

1:25:17Dave Asprey:I actually made up that number because of AI. And that number just comes from our current best is 120. And I just want 50 % better than our current best. I have 100 years to do it. Did you hear last month they announced they cured type 1 diabetes?

1:25:31Hala Taha:No.

1:25:32Dave Asprey:Kind of a big deal.

1:25:33Hala Taha:Yeah.

1:25:33Dave Asprey:Yeah. So we're like all of the diseases of aging are dropping like flies right now. I've done gene therapy. I run something called Unlimited Life, which is for high-level entrepreneurs who are all in on extending their lifespan. And we've got about 100 members in this where I go through their lab work. A doctor who's worked on two heads of state is my business partner in it. The guy who runs the Dalai Lama Foundation and Mr. Beast Foundation is the other partner. So high-level stuff. We take him to the jungle to learn from a shaman and do longevity work. We take him to Kenya. And we do about$50 ,000 worth of lab work on all of them.

1:26:12Dave Asprey:So when I say that, I don't say it lightly. Like I'm actively engaged in longevity. I've written a New York Times about selling a longevity book. We are cracking the code right now. I've done gene therapy. I just reprogrammed my stem cells in New Jersey last week. And I've probably had more stem cells than anyone on the planet. So yeah, we can do this. I'm just an early example of it. But if you're under 35 right now, you have such an unfair advantage because you haven't aged as much as I have while we were inventing all this shit.

1:26:39Hala Taha:Do you believe you're aging backwards?

1:26:42Dave Asprey:Some of the systems in my body are aging backwards quantitatively. Others, no.

1:26:49Hala Taha:What is not aging backwards?

1:26:52Dave Asprey:I don't have good data on my brain. I like to think, I mean, it's functioning very well, but I like to think that it's aging backwards, but I just don't know how to measure that. And some parts of my skin are aging backwards right now and others aren't. So I'm working on that one.

1:27:06Hala Taha:What's proving that you're aging backwards?

1:27:08Dave Asprey:It depends on which system you're measuring, but there's something called DNA methylation. And this is a measurement of about 600 ,000 different DNA methylation points. It's called an aging clock, and we can now do organ-specific aging clocks.

1:27:24Hala Taha:What was your most extreme self-experiment?

1:27:28Dave Asprey:This is a toss-up. Years ago, when my gut was just wrecked, I didn't know what was going on before I invented the term biohacking. I ordered a pill from Russia. It was an electrical stimulator pill. It was about this big. And you swallowed it, and it'll batter in it. And it would stimulate every five seconds your entire GI tract to increase the strength of your intestines. I really had a lot of health problems when I was young. 15 years of antibiotics, you can imagine. I'm like, I just don't want to have a wrecked gut. So, like, bzzz, bzzz, bzzz. and then it gets stuck somewhere, probably descending colon, and I'm sitting there, like in meetings, and I'm like, kicking, kicking, and it doesn't move.

1:28:12Dave Asprey:And so I'm jumping up and down, trying to get to it, laying on my side. Eventually, it did come out, and the instructions are like, you could wash it and take it again. I'm like, fuck that. So I threw it away. But yeah, I swallowed an electrical stimulating pill 20 years ago.

1:28:25Hala Taha:What was the most expensive experiment that you've ever done?

1:28:28Dave Asprey:I spent about$7 million building a neuroscience lab so that I could I could improve my own brain.

1:28:36Hala Taha:And get better brain data like you're wishing.

1:28:38Dave Asprey:Better brain data and just to have my brain work better. And fortunately, I turned it into 40 Years of Zen, where we've written millions of dollars worth of our own software. We've developed hardware, just not about diagnosing what's wrong. It's about how do we increase people's ability to access altered states that are part of the human birthright that we just don't know how to get to anymore.

1:29:02Hala Taha:Who is your biohacking bestie? Who's your best friend in this space?

1:29:06Dave Asprey:You know, this is an interesting one. I have so many just amazing friends. But one of my favorites is actually here in town, Dr. Ann Shippey. She just wrote a book about preconception. It was just on my show. We've been dear friends for about 15 years. And she's, I would say, the top environmental doctor in the country. And we get together a couple times a month and have brunch. And just go through all the biohacking stuff, the psychedelic stuff, the meditation stuff. And so she's like soul family. And because she's an IBM chemical engineer turned medical doctor, we can just nerd out at the deepest levels.

1:29:48Dave Asprey:She's just so freaking smart. So we hang out a lot. I think, yeah, just from a – there's nothing I can say that she won't be like, okay, I see that in my patients. And, you know, plus she's just a dear friend.

1:30:01Hala Taha:Who's your biohacking frenemy? Somebody that you respect them, but they're kind of your competitor too.

1:30:08Dave Asprey:Biohacking started with 100 people in a bar in San Francisco in, how was that, 2012? The first event. So it's on track to be a$200 billion industry by 2030, according to the latest analyst. It started a$200 billion industry. how can you have enemies in an industry that's going from zero in 2012 to 200 billion dollars over the course of what is that 20 something years it's nuts so the there's no reason to have uh frenemies and if i'm feeling that way towards someone i need to do more reset because if i'm feeling frenemy energy it means that i'm wasting my electrons so i'm just going to serve the people who are interested in what I have to say and I'm going to do to the best of my ability.

1:30:57Dave Asprey:And if someone else is doing a better job, then, you know, blessings on them. And like an example, Andrew Huberman, I had him on my show before he was a known entity. Because I find people before they blow up, and I've been, after 1 ,400 episodes, I have a pretty good track record of that. Had him on, and he talked about, you know, the Stanford Human Performance Lab. I'm like, that is so cool. I didn't know when I had him on that the Stanford Performance Lab was an empty room at Stanford that they weren't doing anything in. But he has gone on to, well, very largely support things like nicotine and the red true dark glasses and the other things that I've pioneered.

1:31:37Dave Asprey:So having a Stanford professor say, this is good stuff, is awesome. But what Andrew does that I very much respect, he's a teacher. I ran a program at the University of California for five years for web and internet engineering. So I understand what a good teacher is and isn't. He teaches very well, and he does that one thing. And sometimes I think, you know, if I just did more teaching, but then I'd have to quit all my other eight companies and focus on that. So I think he's done a great job of introducing people. Some of his guests are not so good, I would say. And there are a couple, a couple, so I'm not going to call them friend-me's.

1:32:14Dave Asprey:I'm just going to call them bullies, right? And I have no problem with bullies in general, like emotionally. I just think they're fun toys. So there's guys like BioLane. Have you heard of this guy? So apparently has like a million followers. And he's like, I have a PhD in, I don't know what he has a PhD in. But I did ask his mom. So anyway, BioLane did this video recently. And this is, the reason I'm telling you guys this, as entrepreneurs, you need to know.

1:32:42Hala Taha:It's like, Dave Asprey's here in his piss-stained glasses, and he said something I don't like.

1:32:47Dave Asprey:Now, BioLane's one of these dying breed of calorie trolls where he's like, if you just work out more and eat less, you'll lose weight. This advice has been so disproven by many people, including me, to the point that it's just laughable. You can't cancel out a Snickers bar with a diet soda. But this arguing way of just picking on the person instead of the idea, it's so fifth grade bullying. So I'm like, oh, I have a bully to play with. So here's what I did. I reposted his troll video on my Instagram. And then I did a stitch on top of it. And I said, hey, Violaine, thanks for being such a big fan.

1:33:30Dave Asprey:And I'd like you to know that in addition to apparently being piss stained, my TrueDark glasses block blue light under 490 nanometers, which is the wavelength that causes a bunch of biological effects that you probably wouldn't understand because you don't have a PhD in it. But to celebrate your fandom, people can get a discount code at TrueDark.com by using code Biolane. I used his, I sold$10 ,000 that day. And if he posts again, and by Elaine, please post again. What I'm going to do is I will donate a portion of the proceeds to a nonprofit for victims of childhood bullying. Because that's what he is.

1:34:10Dave Asprey:So, am I angry about this? No. Do I think this is the funniest marketing I've done in so long? And maybe this is some shout-out in front. It's just like, it's fun. And if you look at my social things, people like, Dave, you look old. What do you think I'm going to say? That's not what your mom said. I don't care. Like, then leave or don't leave. I just don't care because it doesn't trigger me at all. But it's so fun because what people usually say, oh, my God, how dare you? You made a mom joke. I'm like, hold on. I thought we were doing fifth grade bullying stuff. Like, it's your turn. Like, how about I'm rubber, you're glue?

1:34:44Dave Asprey:Because what you're doing is juvenile. If you think what I'm saying is wrong, tell me what's wrong. I'm like, let's talk. I love it. If you can tell me the hole in my theory and provide evidence, I'm going to go down that rat hole because I want to know. Like, I am looking for the perfection of understanding of biology in humans and of psychology and the spiritual thing and the connection in the quantum realms, all of it. So show me what I'm missing, please. And I will thank you and I'll send you some coffee. Right? So I learned from my followers. But if you're going to come in and just like make fun of me, dude, let's play.

1:35:15Hala Taha:Yeah, you're going to fight back. Okay, what is your biggest biohacking industry ick?

1:35:21Dave Asprey:The biohacking industry ick that I get is from people who really are new to the field. And they kind of, some of them get religion. A lot of them just get, I smell profits. You know, it's a growing industry, so it attracts entrepreneurs. But when people say, I want to be an influencer, but you're not an expert, that creates ick. because I see people taking relatively good biohacking ideas and dumbing them down to the point they're harmful. And I'm like, don't act like an expert if you're not an expert. Like how many peptide influencers who have one year of peptide experience are there? Oh, you read the same stuff that everyone read?

1:35:59Dave Asprey:I've been on peptides for 15 years, right? And I wrote a chapter about them in my book, about the most common ones to have the most evidence. And there's all kinds of experimentation. And I love experimentation. But, like, some people are better experts than others. So the idea of acting like an expert before you've really had a chance to learn, the only reason I can do what I do is that for five years in my 20s, I was mentored by people in their 70s and 80s, the leaders in the longevity field, because I worked at a nonprofit in the space. They taught me all this stuff so I could refine it throughout my 30s, and I launched the biohacking movement when I was 39.

1:36:38Hala Taha:Nicotine or nah?

1:36:40Dave Asprey:For sure nicotine. As far as I can tell, my book, which one was it? Probably Superhuman, my longevity book. It was the first book to talk about nicotine as a longevity molecule. And this was based on, I think his name is Dr. Paul Newhouse at Vanderbilt. I call him Dr. Nicotine. And I found his paper from 1986 showing that nicotine reversed Alzheimer's. So I asked him to be on the show. And we talked about the effects of this. I flew out to Switzerland. I met with the chief of R &D at PMI, also known as Philip Morris. This was many years ago. And he's a mitochondrial biologist, not looking to push tobacco at all.

1:37:19Dave Asprey:We talked about mitochondrial uncoupling and nicotine. So nicotine without smoking is a very notable longevity compound. It mimics exercise. It increases cognitive function. It stops narrow inflammation, and it's been used medicinally for 400 years. I'm not saying you should pop massive Zins all the time.

1:37:39Hala Taha:I was going to say, do you like Zins?

1:37:40Dave Asprey:I like Alp better because they're pre-moistened and all that. And you can use a patch, you can use a lozenge, just don't smoke and don't vape, but stuff is bad for you. And even the leadership team at the big tobacco companies, and I have met with them because I'm an innovator in lots of fields. And they've succeeded now in removing smoking largely from Italy and Japan. They found a better way to do it that doesn't cause lung cancer. Yeah. It's called a heated tobacco product. So they actually recognize smoking is bad, but nicotine isn't bad. And I'm in that camp.

1:38:14Hala Taha:These are some what-ifs.

1:38:16Dave Asprey:Okay.

1:38:17Hala Taha:Would you rather be guaranteed to live to 180, but you can't drink any coffee? Would you take that deal?

1:38:25Dave Asprey:Actually, probably not.

1:38:27Hala Taha:Coffee means that much to you?

1:38:29Dave Asprey:No, it's like I don't want to be guaranteed to live to 180. I want to die at a time and by a method of my choice. I am a freedom-oriented person, and most entrepreneurs are. Like, I am free to leave tomorrow if I'm done here, and I will do it without regrets.

1:38:42Hala Taha:Okay, well then I'm going to change this next question. So would you rather have the freedom to die when you want to or get to go back to change the way you lived before you were 30?

1:38:54Dave Asprey:Oh, I want the freedom to die at a time and by a method of my choice. I, you know, I suffered incredible amounts as a kid. I mean, I was bullied a lot. I had autism and I don't meet the clinical criteria for autism anymore. You can heal it. I'm autism adjacent maybe, but that just means I have a brain that does things, good things. But all the physical stuff and all, I just figured out pretty recently that I actually have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which is more common than people think. It's a hypermobility thing that's why I've had a leaky gut my whole life because my freaking collagen doesn't form right.

1:39:29Dave Asprey:It's also why I made collagen a billion dollar industry. So that helps.

1:39:33Hala Taha:Yeah, I mean, some of the things you suffered from, you ended up creating a whole category. Like you became a biohacker because you were unhealthy. So I guess everything just happens for a reason.

1:39:42Dave Asprey:If I didn't have toxic mold and my weird genetics, there would be no biohacking. And so all that stuff, I don't regret it. I wouldn't change a thing. Although I sure as hell suffered a lot.

1:39:50Hala Taha:Dave, this has been so awesome. I end my show with two questions I ask all of my guests. The first one is, what is one actionable thing our young and profiters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow? Think about your team right now and think of the most annoying person on your team. Whatever came to mind, call them up and say you're fired. I love that advice. And what is your secret to profiting in life?

1:40:15Dave Asprey:You better understand what currency you're dealing with, and it's not money. It's energy. So if you end every day and you minimize the amount that you suffered, you maximize the amount of energy that you have, you'll really like your life and you'll make a bunch of money. But if you focus just on money, you will sell your health and you'll sell your energy and you probably won't like the person you become.

1:40:40Hala Taha:And where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do?

1:40:44Dave Asprey:Among all the social media things, I run the Human Upgrade podcast. And you can find me at DaveAsprey.com, along with 3 ,000 articles telling you how to hack everything you'd want to hack.

1:40:54Hala Taha:Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining us on Young and Profiting Podcast.

1:40:58Dave Asprey:My pleasure.

1:40:59Hala Taha:Yeah, fam, I loved having Dave back on the show. Every time he joins us, he challenges the way we think about performance, success, and what it actually takes to operate at our highest level. And in this conversation, he reminded us that entrepreneurship isn't just a game of time management. It's a game of energy management. Dave said every electron matters. And that idea really ties this entire episode together. As entrepreneurs, leaders, and high performers, we spend so much time trying to optimize our schedules, our teams, and our business. But how often do we stop and look at the hidden places where our energy is leaking?

1:41:35Hala Taha:Whether it's old resentment, unresolved triggers, unhealthy relationships, or the constant pressure to do more, those invisible drains can quietly cost us far more than we realize. I also loved how Dave reframed forgiveness. He said, anger is the biggest energy leak ever. That's a powerful reminder because so many of us think that holding on to anger gives us strength or protection or a chip on our shoulder that makes us work harder. But in reality, that anger keeps us stuck. The moment we release that emotional charge, we free up energy that can be redirected towards growth, creativity, leadership, and the things that truly matter.

1:42:12Hala Taha:Dave also challenged us to be more intentional about the people we allow into our business and our lives. The right people multiply your energy and the wrong people consume it. And sometimes protecting your future means having the courage to make difficult decisions sooner rather than later. Most importantly, this conversation reminded us that more effort isn't always the answer. Sometimes the next level comes from better recovery, stronger boundaries, deeper self-awareness, and learning how to respond instead of react. Yeah, fam, if this episode made you rethink the way you work, lead, or show up in your life, share it with another entrepreneur, leader, or high performer who needs to hear it.

1:42:50Hala Taha:You can also watch this full episode on YouTube or Spotify video. And if you listened, learned, and profited, make sure you follow the show, drop us a five-star written review on Apple. That's my favorite platform for you to drop reviews. And let me know your biggest takeaway, especially on YouTube. Drop your comments. You can find me on Instagram at YapWithHala or LinkedIn at Hala Taha. This is your host, Hala Taha, aka the Podcast Princess, signing off.