Dave Asprey | Biohacking Your Way to Entrepreneurial Resilience

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The thing that causes the most pain, the most trauma,
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the most bitterness and regret and anger and frankly, cancer
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and divorce and all the bad stuff and entrepreneurs. It's
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two traumas that are not the typical traumas that we
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talk about, and I actually write about these in detail
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and heavily meditated. One of them is betrayal and the
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other one is injustice. And betrayal is when you trust
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someone and you do the right thing for them and
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then they do something that harms you and they do
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it intentionally. And I've had a family member try to
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steal one of my companies common red handed, went to court,
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had the whole bulletproof situation. I got removed from the
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border my own company, And if you don't learn how
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to let that go, it will eat you up.
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Welcome to the Radical Responsibility Podcast. I'm doctor Fleet Mall
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and I'm excited to guide you on a journey of
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authentic transformation. In each episode, I'll bring you inside from
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leading experts to explore trauma recovery, mindfulness practices, positive psychology,
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and innovative breakthroughs in health, wellness and life optimization. This
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is a space for real conversations that inspire meaningful change,
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helping you find alignment with the person you are always
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meant to be. Let's get started. What if transformation isn't
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just about thinking differently, but feeling differently. Science shows us
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that true change happens when we align not just our minds,
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but also the neural networks in our hearts and guts.
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This heart mind connection is the key to deeper healing, resilience,
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and expanded awareness. That's why I created the Heart Mind
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all access, membership and community, a space designed to help
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you rewire your nervous system, cultivate heart intelligence, and live
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with greater clarity and purpose. With over one thousand hours
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of transformational teachings specifically curated to meet you. You'll learn
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from world renowned meditation teachers, neuroscientists, and experts in neuroplasticity,
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all sharing powerful tools to help you shift your mindset
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and heartset, regulate your emotions, and unlock your full potential.
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You'll also gain unlimited access to every summit and course
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we've ever produced, a treasure Trouble Wisdom worth over ten
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thousand dollars in growing plus live gatherings, and an inspiring
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global community to support your journey. If you're ready to
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step into a more heart centered, connected and conscious life,
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I invite you to join us. Clip the link to
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learn more and start your journey. Today.
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We're at the key to unlocking your greatest entrepreneurial potential
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was already inside your body. In this powerful conversation, I'm
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joined by biohacking pioneer Dave Asbury, the founder of Bulletproof
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and one of the most influential voices in human performance,
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from battling chronic health issues to building a global wellness movement.
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Dave shares how he has self experimentation, ancient wisdom, and
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cutting edge tech to reclaim his vitality and how you
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can too. We explore what it really means to lead
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with energy, intuition, and resilience, even in the face of betrayal,
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legal pitfalls, and the high stakes worlds adventure capital. Dave
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doesn't hold back, offering hard won lessons and bounder control,
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storytelling and self regulation that every mission driven entrepreneur needs
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to hear. If you're ready to align your body, mind,
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and business with purpose and power, this episode for you.
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I am a doctor fleet Mall, your co host for
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this session, and I'm really thrilled to be here today
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with none other than Dave Asprey.
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Welcome, Dave. I am so happy to get to be
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your love, your work great.
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Thank you so much so. I have this book of
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yours here that I'm working my way through, but I've
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already listened to Headstrong, the audiobook version, and I have
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two of your bulletproof diet books upstairs on my breakfast tables.
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That's incredible. And the new book that comes out April
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fifteenth to twenty twenty five is called Heavily Meditated, and
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I think after Headstrong for you, that might be your
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next favorite and Strong. The techniques in that book are
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about how to make your mind work better, and whether
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you're a spiritual guru or an entrepreneur, you get more
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energy in the system and allocate better. You can meditate,
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you can focus, you can execute whatever you're jammed. It
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seems like this is that missing component that's been a
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part of a lot of spiritual practice, but not a
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part of CEO practice until very recently.
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Well, I'm definitely looking forward that book here. It was
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funny I saw that name and I was wondering where
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I've been working with a friend on a film I
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having to do with prison work that you'd been working
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on for I probably a different points fifteen years now,
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but it never has completely gotten completed. But that was
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our last working title, was heavily Meditated. Really Yeah, it
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was a play on heavily medicated, right, which I'm sure
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yours tims too.
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Yeah.
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So you know, I'm reluctant to ask you to encaps
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some of your origin story in just a couple of minutes,
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and we got a lot to cover here. We did
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reference some of it in the bio that I read
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that you had some real challenges in your twenty some
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really significant health challenges, and through self experimentation and dedication,
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you managed to turn your own health around, and in
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the process that ended up launching this biohacking movement. So
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I wonder if you could maybe just highlight some pivotal
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moments in those challenges that allowed you to turn your
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health around, and then maybe a pivotal moment that took
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you into the world of becoming an entrepreneur and getting
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this message out at scale the people.
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Well, I was unhealthyusy kid, It turns out I figured
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out later I lived in a basement with toxing mold,
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and I've got some weird genes that make me more
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susceptible to inflammation. By the time I was fourteen, I
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started getting obese, had high blood sugar, but I had
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arthritis diagnosed. I ended up having three knee surgeries. By
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the time I was twenty three, I was on antibiotics
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for fifteen years every month month because I'd have a
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chronic strep throat in sinucidis. I had all the digestive
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issues that you expect childhood asthma adhd Asperger syndrome, something
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called odd oppositional defiant disorder, which I think a lot
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of entrepreneurs have a little bit of that, which makes
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us want to go run our own businesses. And by
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the time I was twenty six, I had made six
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million dollars by being a co founder of a part
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of the first company that held Google servers when it
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was two people and two computers and Hotmail and Salesforce
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and all the big names today. We built the first
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data centers, and I found myself attending board meetings for
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a thirty six billion dollar publicly traded company under the
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condition that I not speak, because they just wanted me
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to learn. Because I was the guy who understod our
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technology because I was a deep nerd. The problem is
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I lost the six million dollars when I was twenty eight,
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made out when I was twenty six, and this was
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worth a lot of money back then compared to what
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that is now, which is still a lot of money.
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And I went through this phase of Okay, I've hit
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three hundred pounds, I've been a vegan, I have tried
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every day on the planet. I've gained and lost ten
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twenty thirty pounds. So many times I went to the
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gym six days a week, ninety minutes a day, without
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fail for eighteen months. I did it just I skipped sundays.
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I still had a forty six inch waist and still
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weigh the same amount when I was done, and I
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felt like a failure. And in entrepreneurship, if you're saying, well,
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I'm convinced that billboard ads are now going to make
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all my money, and you buy a bunch of billboard
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ads and sales don't increase, well, you wouldn't say, well,
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that means I'm going to buy even more billboard ads.
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I'm going to billboard ad even harder to become successful.
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But when it comes to things like dieting and exercise,
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we just blame ourselves and say, so we didn't try enough,
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and we just keep doing it, and we double down
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on stuff that doesn't objectively work. And frankly, that can
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happen with meditation too, So we can't have a double standard.
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With the business, we measure it and if we invest
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something and it doesn't work, we change our investment, we
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change our strategy. With health, especially the unusual chronic things
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that are maybe more performance tuning, it just feels like
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there's nothing you can do, so you just keep doing
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what you're doing. You believe something works, so you just
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blindly set about it, or even worse, if you're in
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business and you say, you know, I started the business,
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and I know that newspaper want ads are the thing,
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and they work really well. Therefore I know they work.
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Therefore I will keep doing this even if they stop working.
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It's another problem we have with our health. When I
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went vegan for the first six weeks, I'm like, I
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feel so good, I'm getting leaner and all this. So
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I call this the vegan trap. By the way, it's
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exactly the same as the keto trap, which is you
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or the cardboard trap. You do something that makes you
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feel great for the first six weeks, your brain says
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that is a pattern, it is real. Therefore, if I
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do more of it and I keep doing it, it's
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always going to work, and we become blind to the
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fact that it stopped working. And this can happen with
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say AdWords. You know, if you're buying AdWords and these
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keywords work great, you're not monitoring your campaign. Your return
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on ad spend goes down. If you're not monitoring that,
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you're gonna start spending money on ads that don't work. Nutrition,
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cognitive function, it's all the same thing. So after all
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of this stuff, I realized I'm a total jerk. I
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get HYPOGLABITCHI I'm anxious all the time. I've been in
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an entrepreneur magazine when I was twenty three for being
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the first guy to sell anything over the Internet before
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there was a web browser. So I tried kind of
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be famous in my own little circle. I tried being
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married briefly in my twenties so I would be lonely.
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And I tried being rich, and I was miserable after
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all those things. So that's what set me on the biohacking,
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path of studying longevity, so I could get my brain
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and my energy back, get my emotions working. And it's
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what why I can't say, it's what set me on
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the path of entrepreneurship. That's in a When I was
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twelve years old, I could read Entrepreneur magazine and fantasize
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about being an entrepreneur, and so I did it early on.
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But that's my background. There's a lot of other career
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success in the tech world, and maybe just to fill
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in the story, after I'd exhausted the Western medicine things
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that were supposed to make me well and happy, I
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started doing the stuff that as a computer scientist doesn't
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make any sense, you know, going to the Himalayas, going
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to the Andes, studying with masters of different money. It
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just when I started this something this is absurd, but
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I got nothing else to do, and I feel like
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I'm in the car. I'm personally celebrator all the time,
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and it's slowing down and you can't press the accelerator
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further than to the floor, and it's a feeling of helplessness.
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And so many entrepreneurs I've coached are in that state.
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We just don't show it to our employees or to
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anyone else, because what are you going to do about it?
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So it's this kind of silent thing. So from that perspective,
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I was desperate. I did the things that I didn't
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believe would work, because I realized the things I believed
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were going to work, like cutting calories and semi vegetarian
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diet and over exercising, they dinner work. So I got
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nothing else.
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What am I going to do?
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So I found myself in a very remote part of
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western Tibet that you know, well, I'm Mount Kylash, and
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I had yak butter tea and very high altitude, and
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all of a sudden, my brain turned on in a
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way that made no sense. It was like the heavens
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opened up, like a light bulb went on it. So
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I remember when my brain used to work like this.
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And because I'm trained at high altitude mountaineering, you're not
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supposed to feel good at altitude. You're supposed to feel
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kind of like you're dying because you sort of are.
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And I just remembered that and came back and eventually
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discovered through the process of just testing if I put
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butter in MCT oil and coffee without mold, magic happens.
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And if I use the wrong butter, or I use
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the wrong coffee or just the wrong liquid, it doesn't work.
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And so through the course of trial and error, I
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came up with this, and now we understand all the
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biochemistry about why. But the blog post I was writing
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used to be called the bulletproof Executive. No one ever
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talked to entrepreneurs, and no one ever talked to CEOs
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and innovators in the language that was for us. And
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you can hack yourself, you can upgrade your biology. These
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mean doctors really mad when I talked about, like, how
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dare you even someone the personal development, it's sort of
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the that you are enough kind of a vibe. I'm like, no,
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I'm sorry, that's not what I'm here for. I want
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to be way more than enough, and like I want
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to do something that really matters, and I want to
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feel really good and energize and I want to know
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I can handle anything life brings my way without breaking.
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And it was just a different vibe, and it shifted
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our language around how we talk about health and wellness
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and personal development, where there's an aspirational component to it
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versus just a healing component. I'm someone who had to
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heal from deep pts, from the way I was born,
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and from bullying and having a non neurotypical brain until
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I reverse that, and I have a brain that would
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measures mostly neurotypical now just faster. And when I look
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at the path I've been on and all the suffering
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and all the wasted time and wasted energy, both entrepreneurially
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and on learning how to operate my emotional and spiritual
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and physical body, that's what I do. I teach people.
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I teach entrepreneurs and everyone else. Here's what you don't know,
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and here are the things they gave the results the fastest,
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and it's I feel like it's my calling because I
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feel like I suffered more than you, and not you
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personally just listening. I've probably had the medical condition. I've
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probably made the mistake at this point.
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So Dave, I want to get into your career. There's
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a lot of different levels and dimensions too. As an entrepreneur,
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and I later won't talk about your books and publishing
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it as a way to expand your voice and your reach.
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But initially with bulletproof copy, what you described your discovery
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with the yacht butter tea and tibets, and then you
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came back and doing the testing to develop what became
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bulletproof coffee. You really created a new category altogether. And
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I don't know whether how much of that was strategy,
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how much of it was serendipity. But I wonder if
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you could talk about how we can sometimes in a
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world you hear a lot about really niching down, so
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you're not trying to compete with everybody in a huge space.
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So the more you niche down, you know, the more
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you can dominate a niche, creating your own niche a
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brand new category.
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If something is very powerful, of course a lot of
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competition will come in eventually.
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But I wonder if you could just talk about that,
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those dynamics of the scan of a marketplace, the markets
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you choose to compete in the possibilities of creating a
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new category, niching down within a category, just in terms
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of your experience, if you could talk about that a
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little bit.
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To understand that fully, there's about four categories that it
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created it. The biggest and brought est one is the
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biohacking category itself and industry, and let's say sixty three
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billion dollar valuation in the next couple of years of
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the total size of the biohacking market from the first
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conference we're still doing in Biohackingconference dot com and four
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thousand people show up and it's a vibrant community, that
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whole thing. So that's a category in and of itself.
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Then within the subcategories, I created the functional coffee category.
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It's probably half a billion dollars today. And of course
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people copying like, oh, you mean coffee is a performance
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and answer, I'm like, you don't think it's Mother Nature's
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original smart drug, Like coffee is Mother Nature's pre workout
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and smart drug. And nicotine is our other smart drug.
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That's why people have been craving as forever because we
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like it when we have energy in our brains work
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smoking is bad for you, just to be really clear,
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just nicotine might have some neurological benefits. So from that perspective,
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that's one category. And then there's MCT oil. It was
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only used in pharma or and like topical solutions and all,
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and I turned it into a billion dollar category with
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lots of companies competing. And then collagen was just a
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not paid attention to supplement at all. And today there's
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hundreds of college and companies and I single handedly made
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collegen a billion dollar industry category. And if you look
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back through our media, I mean there's hundreds of articles
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in all of the magazines, Men's magazines, Women's magazine is
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going to virus? What is this new protein? What is
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it that comes from thought leadership? And what I hear
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from the entrepreneurs that I work with. And I do
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run something called the Business of Biolacing conference where we
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coach entrepreneurs like a couple hundred at a time. So
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I've gone very deep on this. Most entrepreneurs are saying,
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I want to create a category and your niche that
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is really expensive. I raised eighty actually almost ninety million
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dollars in venture capital in order to do this, and
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it's relatively risky. The reason I was able to do
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that is number One, I started the business as a
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blog without a business plan because it wasn't going to
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be a business. I made a quarter million a year
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plus stock options as a VP at trend Micro, a
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large FOJOKEE trading beeer screw to company. I am a
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computer acker. I started the blog so five people would
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not suffer as much as I had with all these illnesses,
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like I'm going to find five people were just so
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trashed and are struggling and still succeeding, and I'm going
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to give them the keys. That's my win. And if
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more than five people care, great. And it was only
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when I said I got to buy coffee that doesn't
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give me the jitters, Maybe other people want to buy it.
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It was almost an accidental business. With two very young
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kids in my career, I probably didn't need to start
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a company, but I was called. So the content was
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a form of giving and sharing and teaching and not
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a form of manipulation. As I was walking around Mount
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ky Lash, I was just pondering, no one will come
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to the longevity nonprofit meetings that I'm actually the president of.
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The Screwer was at the time president of a group
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that would bring the luminaries in the field of longevity
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before everyone thought it was real, and they would teach
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every month to the community. No one from Google would
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show up in our meetings four minutes from Google's headquarters.
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So my problem was only old people care about being out,
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So I have to rebrand longevity. So I did, and
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I called it biohacking. And the idea is that the
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things that make old people young make young people powerful
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and wow. So I need to name for these techniques
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because no young person is going to pay attention to longevity.
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They're going to pay attention to building their tribe, building
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their career, building their power, finding a life partner, and
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all of the things that we're supposed to do as
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young men and women when we're not broken by our
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nutrition and by trauma. So reframing biohacking as it is
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the act of controlling your biology to give what you want.
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Maybe it's abs, maybe it's peacefulness, maybe it's energy. You
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get to choose and no one gets to choose for you,
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and there's no judgment about it. You're just going to
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do what works. And if you think something works, measure it,
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but doesn't do something else. And I did not trademark
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the term. And this is the biggest mistake that people make.
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You have to understand if you want to make a
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global movement, you're probably not going to own the word.
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If you want it to be in Webster's dictionary, if
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you want there to be millions of bioacors in Japan
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and South Korea, and in South America and there are
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in all of these markets, and I've sold books in them,
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not that selling books makes any money. But the idea
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here is it is now a global movement. I fly
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to Dubai and people recognize me on the street, go oh, bioaking.
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This is great. I'm like, how is this even possible?
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It's possible because I did not do that. And now
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there's probably five people who tried to copy my bioacing conference.
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All of them fail because they don't attract the right
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people because I have a strong community. It's almost like,
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if you look at what happened when Linux and the
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first open source companies came around, who's going to go
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up against Microsoft? Are you stupid?
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Well?
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Microsoft has a huge amount of open source code today
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and a lot of the Internet is based on open
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source things. It wins over time. So my idea here,
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as a computer hacker who's the board's open source and
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has since the first open source thing came around and
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what nineteen ninety six or something. I believe we should
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have the source code to our own bodies, to our consciousness,
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to our biology, and that we have the right to
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manipulate that by any means necessary, with no intervention, and
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so it attracted me to say, well, bioacing is a
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movement about us. It's not my movement. I am called
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the spiritual leader or you know, the men who created
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it and still sets the standard for it. But many
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others have said, well, I'm trying to do a conference
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that computes, or I'll do something, you know, a copy
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Day's blog or whatever. This is what happens when you
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start a movement, and if you sit in anger or
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envy or bitterness about that, it actually eats at you.
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So you always want to be aware of that. The
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other thing that you could do as a strategy, you
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could say, well, I'm going to trademarket and you can
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do pretty well with that. There's a movement. Mo Gaudat
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is a part of that. He's been on my podcast
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as well. He has the one billion Happy movement. This
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is the former head of Google's advanced R and D
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development and a very conscious human and he basically said, okay,
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I'm going to create this movement as a nonprofit. So
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you could do that just when you own the name,
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people are lining up underneath you, and there are business
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reasons to do that. But if you really want to
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do what I did, which is multiple billion dollar categories,
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not that I sold billions in each one. My lifetime
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revenues at Bulletproof when I was running it before they
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fired me was a seven hundred and fifty million in
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lifetime revenue and one hundred and forty million annual revenue.
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Pretty solid. And you can do that by consistently sitting
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in a place of gratitude and in place of service.
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And to do this you've got to break some rules.
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At Wharton, where I got my MBA, they actually taught
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us if you spend a dollar telling people your product
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is high quality, you'll make more money than spending a
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dollar making a high quality product. And the reason for
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that is even if you make a high quality product,
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you have the crap product and the good product, well,
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you sell us money telling people it's good, So you'll
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always make less money that way. And that might be true,
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except I have this weird belief that people aren't stupid,
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by the way, given the last five years, maybe I'm wrong,
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But what I believe is that people will spend a
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little bit more for something that is objectively higher quality.
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So I just make stuff that's so good I can't
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buy it any WLD and the coltun protein that I made,
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the coffee beans that at the time when I was
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at Bulletproof said mold free on the labels. Today they
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just say clean. Those are things that people were willing
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to pay more for because they could feel the difference.
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The MCT oil that I made, well, I told people
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work better than the street grade MCT oil. And five
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years after I launched it, a study came out of
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UC San Diego showing that the eight MCT that I
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used that was more expensive was the one that reversed
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so Alzheimer's disease and pased to clinical trials. So, oh,
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that's so weird. People will pay more for good stuff?
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Did we forget that is the whole world's supposed to
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be a swap meet. I feel like Amazon did that
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to us because I'm a contrarian. The other thing I
445
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did when I launched as an entrepreneur is around twenty
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eleven was my first blog post for the biohacking movement,
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and maybe twenty twelve was the first biohacking conference. So
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everyone was saying, you're gonna make all your money and
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information products. It's so easy to sell information and newsletters, courses,
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and I'm like, I don't actually ever complete any course
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that I buy, and neither there's anyone else, And I
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just feel like it's kind of scammy to just use
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high pressure video sales letters. And I'm probably crapping on
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half my friends who've been on this. You're good marketing
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friends who've taught me so much. But if I use
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a high pressure sales tactic to get want to spend
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nine hundred ninety nine dollars on a series of video
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courses to teach them something that they probably could have
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read in a few business books. It's not unethical because
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the person has free will, right, and there are lots
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of ways to influence them. But it's not what I
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wanted to spend my life doing. Because I did this
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in filmod so I gave my most precious information away.
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I still do in my books and on the blog
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and podcast and the deals. If you like it, why
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to buy some coffee? It's like a reverse thing. There
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are a few places where if you like a blog
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coast or something on Reddit or on substack, you know,
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click here to buy me a cup of coffee. Kind
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of a thing like we'll just want to buy the
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whole back of coffee, like I will deliver so much
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value to you regardless of what you ever spend a
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dollar with me. Then if you're going to spend a dollar,
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you're going to Number one, you're gonna trust me, and
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number two, you might spend it with me, and I'm
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at peace with that. And if you spend it with
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some knockoff competitor and you know it gives you what
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we used to call disaster pants, which is what low
479
00:24:55.599 --> 00:24:58.599
grade MCT oil does to you, that's okay too. But
480
00:24:59.000 --> 00:25:02.519
to not sit in like entitlement or anger, envy, your greed,
481
00:25:03.240 --> 00:25:07.000
and just say, if this changes people's lives for the better,
482
00:25:07.559 --> 00:25:10.599
that's my win, and I have faith and trust that
483
00:25:10.599 --> 00:25:14.799
I'm going to make money along the way. Now there
484
00:25:14.799 --> 00:25:16.640
are ways to probably make more money than that. Just
485
00:25:16.680 --> 00:25:18.599
to be super clear, if I had just talked about
486
00:25:18.599 --> 00:25:21.880
the keto diet, Bulletproof Diet was the first big book
487
00:25:21.920 --> 00:25:24.759
on modern keto with clean fats. It was the first
488
00:25:24.759 --> 00:25:27.359
big book on intermittent fasting. I could have picked any
489
00:25:27.359 --> 00:25:29.160
one of those and built my brand around it or
490
00:25:29.200 --> 00:25:32.960
around collagen protein only. And one of my competitors when
491
00:25:32.960 --> 00:25:36.240
I was at Bulletproof, we were probably doing twenty thirty
492
00:25:36.240 --> 00:25:39.519
million a year in Collagen, and we're in five other categories.
493
00:25:40.559 --> 00:25:43.079
One of our competitors who kind of came in saw
494
00:25:43.119 --> 00:25:46.759
the success we're having. They went to the same venture
495
00:25:46.759 --> 00:25:50.279
capital firm I worked with, and those vcs are on
496
00:25:50.279 --> 00:25:51.960
my board. Called me up one day and said, we're
497
00:25:51.960 --> 00:25:54.759
putting thirty million dollars in your nearest competitor and category
498
00:25:56.559 --> 00:25:58.839
and we're taking our board observer and putting them on
499
00:25:58.880 --> 00:26:02.200
their board of directors. And I mean, I call them
500
00:26:02.279 --> 00:26:06.240
my company attorney, like, is this legal? So a few
501
00:26:06.279 --> 00:26:10.400
months after, you know, my product roadmap magically appears on
502
00:26:10.440 --> 00:26:12.839
the shelves with someone else's names on that. I'm not
503
00:26:12.880 --> 00:26:15.759
saying anyone did anything you know, unnatural there, because that
504
00:26:15.759 --> 00:26:20.599
would be wrong, But what the f right? That company
505
00:26:20.599 --> 00:26:23.759
exited for eight hundred million and I bulletproof well, they
506
00:26:23.759 --> 00:26:25.880
took some actions to remove me from the board and
507
00:26:25.920 --> 00:26:28.400
then recently sold the company for a tiny fraction. But
508
00:26:28.480 --> 00:26:31.039
it was worth when I was running it against my ball,
509
00:26:31.599 --> 00:26:36.119
So that was not the ultimate win. If we had
510
00:26:36.119 --> 00:26:38.960
executed the way I would have liked, and I if
511
00:26:39.000 --> 00:26:40.960
I had been able to stay in control and drive it, it
512
00:26:40.920 --> 00:26:45.359
would have been an incredibly powerful exit. So maybe I
513
00:26:45.400 --> 00:26:48.039
should have just picked one category and gone for it,
514
00:26:48.319 --> 00:26:51.839
but I did. It's called the bioacking category, and that
515
00:26:51.920 --> 00:26:55.680
means yes, Bulletproof was in ready to drink, it was
516
00:26:55.680 --> 00:26:58.559
in supplements, it was in protein powders, it was in oils,
517
00:26:59.000 --> 00:27:01.960
and it was in a cop five categories. And I
518
00:27:01.960 --> 00:27:04.599
also had four or five other things like events and
519
00:27:04.759 --> 00:27:07.519
coffee shops. And I've spun that stuff out and they
520
00:27:07.559 --> 00:27:10.599
are all turning into businesses that are very valuable today.
521
00:27:11.000 --> 00:27:14.519
And also I now have a portfolio of bioacting companies.
522
00:27:15.000 --> 00:27:17.240
I just maybe suffer from something that a lot of
523
00:27:17.319 --> 00:27:20.960
entrepreneurs do, is it feels good to create. It feels
524
00:27:20.960 --> 00:27:23.119
good to create products. It feels good to create companies
525
00:27:23.160 --> 00:27:26.039
until you have to run them. So that's something I've
526
00:27:26.079 --> 00:27:29.759
learned over time. But if you really want to go big,
527
00:27:30.160 --> 00:27:32.680
you make the category and you don't own the name,
528
00:27:33.440 --> 00:27:36.119
and you don't fight against becoming a cleanex. If someone
529
00:27:36.160 --> 00:27:38.279
wanted to say, you know, bullet group is an next cleenex.
530
00:27:38.319 --> 00:27:40.079
When I was around bullet if fight have just gone.
531
00:27:40.119 --> 00:27:42.319
You know, I sent warning letters all the time. But
532
00:27:42.799 --> 00:27:45.200
if you want to say bioacting, yes we're all in
533
00:27:45.240 --> 00:27:49.680
this together. Like today, my new coffee company. It's called
534
00:27:49.759 --> 00:27:52.319
Danger Coffee, and it's Danger because who knows what you
535
00:27:52.400 --> 00:27:54.160
might do. You might ask that girl uck, you might
536
00:27:54.240 --> 00:27:57.160
start a company, and I can't say my goal, but
537
00:27:57.920 --> 00:28:01.000
the inevitable outcome for that company is that it will
538
00:28:01.079 --> 00:28:04.359
sell more coffee by revenue than Bulletproof did when I
539
00:28:04.440 --> 00:28:06.720
ran it. And it'll do it because I'm following the
540
00:28:06.720 --> 00:28:10.000
game plan. If I have a better product than anyone else,
541
00:28:10.240 --> 00:28:13.200
and I have people's trust because they've seen me consistently
542
00:28:13.240 --> 00:28:17.559
show up. That's who I am saying the things showing
543
00:28:17.640 --> 00:28:20.599
talking about when I'm wrong, and so there's trust, and
544
00:28:20.640 --> 00:28:24.079
it's trust for millions of people. And I'm incredibly profoundly
545
00:28:24.079 --> 00:28:26.960
grateful for that, and I treasure it and I protect it.
546
00:28:27.440 --> 00:28:30.039
So that's really hard to compete with. But man, it
547
00:28:30.079 --> 00:28:31.920
takes time and it takes a lot of personal development
548
00:28:31.920 --> 00:28:33.759
work to get there. If that's the past, one wants to.
549
00:28:33.680 --> 00:28:38.079
Go on, Wow, what a fascinating journey, and thank you
550
00:28:38.160 --> 00:28:42.160
for unfolding that for us, and really interesting youth caken
551
00:28:42.240 --> 00:28:45.319
kind of this, If I understood correctly, you focused on
552
00:28:45.400 --> 00:28:48.319
really becoming a thought leader, A the thought leader in
553
00:28:48.359 --> 00:28:51.519
a sense, in these categories, and you decided to take
554
00:28:51.559 --> 00:28:54.680
more of an open source method than trying to control
555
00:28:54.720 --> 00:28:58.039
the category with trademarking and so forth. Along the way,
556
00:28:58.079 --> 00:28:59.680
as you said, there might have been ways you could
557
00:28:59.720 --> 00:29:02.039
have kept lives more and made more money. This so
558
00:29:02.160 --> 00:29:05.440
that I mean you could say the current longevity craze
559
00:29:05.440 --> 00:29:07.680
a longevity It has been around for a long time,
560
00:29:07.720 --> 00:29:10.839
but the current longevity movement is really a reflection of
561
00:29:10.839 --> 00:29:14.079
the biohacking movement. So you could really talk about five categories.
562
00:29:14.480 --> 00:29:17.200
Thank you Fleet, just in a arty verse. Second. There
563
00:29:17.799 --> 00:29:20.400
the whole, not the only goal, but a major goal
564
00:29:20.400 --> 00:29:23.359
of biomacking was to make longevity real in our minds.
565
00:29:23.680 --> 00:29:27.240
And over the last fourteen years of doing bioacking, now
566
00:29:27.279 --> 00:29:30.720
we have vcs investing in it, and I've met with
567
00:29:30.759 --> 00:29:33.480
all those guys in twenty fourteen pitching Bulletproof and talking
568
00:29:33.480 --> 00:29:38.000
about longevity, and Andrew Drumerman came on my podcast before
569
00:29:38.039 --> 00:29:40.359
he started his podcast, and we're talking about it, and
570
00:29:40.759 --> 00:29:43.319
you know, all of the leaders in longevity. The whole
571
00:29:43.359 --> 00:29:46.640
category is exploding and it's worth about six hundred billion
572
00:29:46.759 --> 00:29:49.960
dollars today according to industry analysts. Because of all the
573
00:29:50.079 --> 00:29:52.759
medtack and things that fall into it now, and I
574
00:29:52.759 --> 00:29:54.519
don't think that would have happened did we not have
575
00:29:54.599 --> 00:29:58.240
a bunch of tech people and visionaries going I'm going
576
00:29:58.319 --> 00:30:01.400
to do this. And you know that's led to Brian
577
00:30:01.519 --> 00:30:04.839
Johnson's latest stuff very similar. I spent two and a
578
00:30:04.880 --> 00:30:07.440
half million dollars over twenty years extending my heage. She's
579
00:30:07.480 --> 00:30:10.400
spending two million dollars a year on it. Either one
580
00:30:10.440 --> 00:30:13.119
should be necessary, but I'm happy there's people doing it
581
00:30:13.160 --> 00:30:17.039
because discovery happens constantly. So thank you for noticing that
582
00:30:17.039 --> 00:30:17.720
that was a big goal.
583
00:30:18.599 --> 00:30:21.079
Yeah, yeah, And I think that you know the tech
584
00:30:21.119 --> 00:30:23.279
world and so for getting involved in that way gave
585
00:30:23.319 --> 00:30:25.319
a lot of credibility to it. In fact, long Jever
586
00:30:25.519 --> 00:30:27.920
used to be associated a lot with kind of snake oil.
587
00:30:28.279 --> 00:30:30.640
Now it's really associated with a lot of credibility, and
588
00:30:31.400 --> 00:30:34.319
that's really been sourced a lot and from your work.
589
00:30:34.359 --> 00:30:36.759
And it sounds like you know, along the way you've
590
00:30:36.799 --> 00:30:40.880
created these categories, you took more of this open source thought. Leader.
591
00:30:41.240 --> 00:30:43.200
It doesn't sound like you have a lot of regrets
592
00:30:43.200 --> 00:30:46.480
about not having capitalized more on it than you have
593
00:30:46.759 --> 00:30:50.319
With the size of these industries currently, Is that completely true,
594
00:30:50.400 --> 00:30:52.519
or do you are there things that you would have
595
00:30:52.640 --> 00:30:55.519
done maybe differently if you had them to do over again.
596
00:30:55.599 --> 00:30:58.519
Not necessarily maybe in terms of taking our control approach,
597
00:30:58.839 --> 00:31:01.359
but even in a way you navigate what ended.
598
00:31:01.240 --> 00:31:04.680
Up playing out with bulletproof copy and the rest of it. Question.
599
00:31:05.519 --> 00:31:08.519
I'm looking for lessons here per entrepreneurs, here in the audience.
600
00:31:09.039 --> 00:31:13.240
The number one lesson is this is something that a
601
00:31:13.240 --> 00:31:15.519
couple of people told me who knew better, and I
602
00:31:15.640 --> 00:31:17.839
was too stubborn to listen, especially when I was just
603
00:31:17.880 --> 00:31:23.000
getting going. You need to have a badass attorney who
604
00:31:23.039 --> 00:31:26.640
represents you, and you need a bad ass attorney represents
605
00:31:26.640 --> 00:31:30.400
your company when you're fundraising, and your attorney should advise you,
606
00:31:31.160 --> 00:31:35.759
and then the company attorney should advise the company. I
607
00:31:35.839 --> 00:31:38.759
made the mistake of hiring one of the high end
608
00:31:38.880 --> 00:31:41.640
law firms when I was doing my fundraising and said,
609
00:31:41.640 --> 00:31:43.599
whether because I'm hiring them, they're kind of I know
610
00:31:43.599 --> 00:31:45.440
they don't represent me, but they're kind of watching out
611
00:31:45.440 --> 00:31:48.319
for my interests in the paperwork, and you know, we're
612
00:31:48.359 --> 00:31:51.000
talking about the pros and cons, and you know, I
613
00:31:51.039 --> 00:31:54.039
walked out of the meeting with the VCS not expecting
614
00:31:54.079 --> 00:31:56.559
to ever do a venture raised for Bulletproof, expecting that
615
00:31:56.599 --> 00:31:57.920
I was going to go in and talk to some
616
00:31:57.920 --> 00:32:00.160
guys i'd worked with before and say, I need a
617
00:32:00.160 --> 00:32:03.319
couple million bucks just personally. I'll do a convertible note,
618
00:32:03.319 --> 00:32:06.079
I just need inventory, and you'll never fund my company
619
00:32:06.119 --> 00:32:08.400
because I'm in too many categories. They and I walked
620
00:32:08.400 --> 00:32:11.119
out the door with eight million dollars and sub made
621
00:32:11.119 --> 00:32:16.839
my company's worth forty million dollars or something, and like, wow,
622
00:32:17.279 --> 00:32:19.359
my not worth just kind of got really big here,
623
00:32:20.559 --> 00:32:23.279
like my head is spending. But I took the venture
624
00:32:23.279 --> 00:32:26.200
capital money because it would be so much dry powder
625
00:32:26.319 --> 00:32:30.039
to reach millions of people versus just growing organically. So
626
00:32:30.079 --> 00:32:33.519
it wasn't about just I'm gonna have a giant coffee company.
627
00:32:33.799 --> 00:32:35.839
It was I'm going to be able to support the
628
00:32:35.880 --> 00:32:38.480
movement which will grow the coffee and it was the
629
00:32:38.519 --> 00:32:42.000
right long term strategy. Problem was I didn't have someone
630
00:32:42.000 --> 00:32:45.319
watching my back, and there were a few times when
631
00:32:45.599 --> 00:32:48.480
I got advice when I was on my first round
632
00:32:48.480 --> 00:32:51.519
and on my third round there was actually not good advice,
633
00:32:51.960 --> 00:32:54.079
not for me, and nay, it was good for the company.
634
00:32:54.119 --> 00:32:56.039
And what vcs will do is the same thing that
635
00:32:56.079 --> 00:33:00.400
governments do is they get the potato peeler out and
636
00:33:00.400 --> 00:33:02.400
then just peel away a little bit of your rights.
637
00:33:03.039 --> 00:33:06.119
And then when you notice and hey there like oh yeah,
638
00:33:06.160 --> 00:33:10.640
sorry about that, we'll stop. They don't put the potato
639
00:33:10.640 --> 00:33:13.960
peels back on over right, and then they do it again,
640
00:33:14.599 --> 00:33:17.000
and then you say, hey, that's not okay, and then
641
00:33:17.039 --> 00:33:20.480
they stop, and eventually they'll say, well, we're only taking
642
00:33:20.480 --> 00:33:22.200
this peel of the potato because it's good for both
643
00:33:22.200 --> 00:33:23.759
of us, right, because it's a win win.
644
00:33:23.920 --> 00:33:24.119
Right.
645
00:33:24.759 --> 00:33:29.079
Venture capitalists are not win win, They are take all.
646
00:33:29.400 --> 00:33:31.440
And there are great human beings or vcs. I have
647
00:33:31.480 --> 00:33:35.079
some very good friends who are them. As a information
648
00:33:35.240 --> 00:33:41.440
field living organism, the venture capital underlying life force is
649
00:33:41.720 --> 00:33:46.319
maximize control and maximize profits at the cost of founders
650
00:33:46.319 --> 00:33:49.920
and employees. That's their job and you can never forget that.
651
00:33:50.200 --> 00:33:52.599
So every time they tell you to screw yourself, even
652
00:33:52.640 --> 00:33:57.160
a tiny bit for the group benefit, you say no,
653
00:33:57.480 --> 00:34:01.519
thank you, and you have your attorney review anything they
654
00:34:01.599 --> 00:34:04.519
want you to sign, and the company attorney, and if
655
00:34:04.519 --> 00:34:07.319
you have a good attorney, it can save you. In
656
00:34:07.519 --> 00:34:11.280
my case, I would have had another zero, like I
657
00:34:11.280 --> 00:34:13.079
should have one hundred million dollars now if I had
658
00:34:13.119 --> 00:34:14.880
played my cards right. I did not play them right,
659
00:34:15.519 --> 00:34:17.960
and I came up against some very what I would
660
00:34:18.000 --> 00:34:21.239
call some very dirty Shenangans, and it saw me. You know,
661
00:34:21.440 --> 00:34:23.519
there's a time I should have said, oh no, you
662
00:34:23.519 --> 00:34:25.679
don't get that board seat. There was a time I
663
00:34:25.719 --> 00:34:27.679
just said, now, I'm not going to sign that agreement.
664
00:34:28.119 --> 00:34:30.639
And I did it because I was naive and I
665
00:34:30.679 --> 00:34:32.559
thought we were playing a win win game, because I
666
00:34:32.599 --> 00:34:34.880
play win win games in my life, and I assumed
667
00:34:34.920 --> 00:34:39.039
other people did the thing that causes the most pain,
668
00:34:39.239 --> 00:34:44.480
the most trauma, the most bitterness and regret and anger
669
00:34:44.639 --> 00:34:47.199
and frankly cancer and divorce and all the bad stuff
670
00:34:47.199 --> 00:34:51.440
and entrepreneurs. It's two traumas that are not the typical
671
00:34:51.480 --> 00:34:54.119
traumas that we talk about, and I actould write about
672
00:34:54.119 --> 00:34:57.679
these in detail and heavily meditated. One of them is
673
00:34:57.800 --> 00:35:04.639
betrayal and the other one is injustice. And the betrayal
674
00:35:04.760 --> 00:35:08.840
is when you trust someone and you do the right
675
00:35:08.880 --> 00:35:13.280
thing for them and then they do something that harms
676
00:35:13.320 --> 00:35:19.280
you right and they do it intentionally. And I've had
677
00:35:19.639 --> 00:35:22.000
a family member try to steal one of my companies
678
00:35:22.159 --> 00:35:26.079
common Bred handed went to court, had the whole bulletproof situation.
679
00:35:26.280 --> 00:35:28.039
I got removed from the board of my own company.
680
00:35:28.639 --> 00:35:33.960
And if you don't learn how to run I called
681
00:35:34.000 --> 00:35:36.400
the reset process in heavily meditative. If you don't learn
682
00:35:36.440 --> 00:35:38.800
how to let that go, it will eat you up.
683
00:35:39.599 --> 00:35:43.360
And I have seen so many entrepreneurs driven to alcohol
684
00:35:43.440 --> 00:35:48.039
and drugs and sex addiction and just destroy their lives
685
00:35:48.079 --> 00:35:51.559
because they were so terribly harmed by someone they trusted.
686
00:35:51.880 --> 00:35:55.719
It hurts way more. But I did everything right. I
687
00:35:55.760 --> 00:35:58.639
trusted this person, and they just turn around and they
688
00:35:58.679 --> 00:36:02.519
did this for their own gain. And sometimes even worse,
689
00:36:03.119 --> 00:36:07.159
they do it because there's malevolence and they want you
690
00:36:07.239 --> 00:36:10.119
to fail because they're jealous. So I had to go
691
00:36:10.199 --> 00:36:13.960
through this ten year journey of learning discernment, the very
692
00:36:14.000 --> 00:36:18.239
subtle skills to understand when is someone feeling envy, when
693
00:36:18.280 --> 00:36:22.000
is someone saying one thing and feeling another. And my
694
00:36:22.199 --> 00:36:27.159
standards have gotten incredibly high, and when I sense contempt
695
00:36:27.880 --> 00:36:32.280
in my company, I fire them right away. And I'm
696
00:36:32.400 --> 00:36:36.079
dating a top relationship coach and expert named Chrisina Weber,
697
00:36:36.679 --> 00:36:41.960
and she's brought all of the different relationships algorithms and
698
00:36:42.079 --> 00:36:45.800
techniques that you could think of together in the group
699
00:36:45.920 --> 00:36:48.199
that she runs and that I support her with called
700
00:36:48.239 --> 00:36:52.360
we deepen. But one of them is you look at
701
00:36:52.400 --> 00:36:56.760
the four horsemen of the apocalypse and relationships, the most
702
00:36:57.039 --> 00:36:59.920
predictable way to see if two people will get divorced
703
00:37:00.559 --> 00:37:03.599
is contempt. And if one partner feels content for the other,
704
00:37:03.719 --> 00:37:07.119
it is very hard to recover that relationship. If someone
705
00:37:07.159 --> 00:37:09.920
on your executive team feels contempt for you, they will
706
00:37:09.920 --> 00:37:14.119
feel entitled to destroy your reputation and steal all of
707
00:37:14.119 --> 00:37:17.840
your cookies. So for my entire executive team, and we
708
00:37:17.880 --> 00:37:21.599
have a good culture now, if that comes up anywhere
709
00:37:21.599 --> 00:37:24.480
in the company, we have a cultural red flag alert
710
00:37:24.519 --> 00:37:27.320
for that and we address it right away. And it's
711
00:37:27.360 --> 00:37:30.239
almost always by firing. Maybe it's just a misunderstanding we're
712
00:37:30.360 --> 00:37:32.639
going to be forgiving, but that doesn't work. And it's
713
00:37:32.639 --> 00:37:34.400
not just contempt for me, it's content for our mission,
714
00:37:34.440 --> 00:37:36.760
contempt for the business. Like we don't sit with that.
715
00:37:37.400 --> 00:37:39.440
But how do you know if someone's feeling contemp for you?
716
00:37:39.679 --> 00:37:42.199
How do you have someone's feeling envy? Those are the
717
00:37:42.239 --> 00:37:44.440
things that eat us up. And if you're sitting there
718
00:37:44.440 --> 00:37:46.239
with injustice, I did the right thing and I still
719
00:37:46.239 --> 00:37:49.599
got punished, or I did the right thing, and someone
720
00:37:49.679 --> 00:37:55.000
intentionally harmed me. Those are emotional like soul wounds. And
721
00:37:55.039 --> 00:37:58.519
if you don't address those spiritually or with your therapist,
722
00:37:58.639 --> 00:38:02.280
or with your partner, your spe house, whatever, man, you're
723
00:38:02.320 --> 00:38:04.239
not going to like your life. And so I went
724
00:38:04.320 --> 00:38:07.119
through that multiple times, right on top of each other,
725
00:38:07.679 --> 00:38:09.719
and I'm grateful that I have come through as a
726
00:38:09.760 --> 00:38:12.880
peaceful person. But I'll tell you it's not easy. So
727
00:38:13.039 --> 00:38:15.960
anyone listening, ninety percent entrepreneurs I coach have had people
728
00:38:16.000 --> 00:38:19.119
steal from them. It's common, and it's because we're focused
729
00:38:19.119 --> 00:38:20.960
on our thing. We're not. We don't expect people to
730
00:38:21.000 --> 00:38:21.840
screw us, but they will.
731
00:38:23.280 --> 00:38:25.880
That's been my experience as a business consultant as well
732
00:38:25.880 --> 00:38:30.400
as I've had at least one really difficult partnership issue.
733
00:38:30.719 --> 00:38:33.559
And so you shared so much really valuable information. They're
734
00:38:34.119 --> 00:38:34.960
valuable with them.
735
00:38:35.039 --> 00:38:35.320
Really.
736
00:38:35.639 --> 00:38:38.159
I think we probably have a lot of bootstrapping entrepreneurs
737
00:38:38.159 --> 00:38:40.000
in our audience. But if you are going to go
738
00:38:40.440 --> 00:38:42.840
get outside capital, I think you gave us some really
739
00:38:42.880 --> 00:38:43.760
powerful advice there.
740
00:38:43.920 --> 00:38:45.880
Make sure you have two separate legal.
741
00:38:45.599 --> 00:38:48.320
Teams, one not looking after the companies and just in
742
00:38:48.360 --> 00:38:50.840
the other after looking at your own interest as a founder.
743
00:38:51.480 --> 00:38:54.159
And then you know, I think I make the assumption
744
00:38:54.199 --> 00:38:56.920
to everybody in our audience here, because if they're attracted
745
00:38:56.920 --> 00:38:59.559
into what we're doing, I make the assumption everybody here
746
00:38:59.599 --> 00:39:01.679
is some who believes in win win and that's where
747
00:39:01.719 --> 00:39:05.239
the real sustainable business and wealth and prosperity is is
748
00:39:05.280 --> 00:39:08.039
in the win win space. But not everybody shares that,
749
00:39:08.519 --> 00:39:10.599
and that's something we don't want to be naive about.
750
00:39:10.639 --> 00:39:13.000
That's why we need to or trying to find those
751
00:39:13.039 --> 00:39:14.920
win win people to work with. But we don't want
752
00:39:14.960 --> 00:39:17.920
to be naive either. And then also what you said
753
00:39:17.920 --> 00:39:21.000
about if we do suffer one of those kind of wounds,
754
00:39:21.039 --> 00:39:23.400
we really need to do our healing work because that'll
755
00:39:23.440 --> 00:39:25.559
really kind of pollute the space on our own mind
756
00:39:25.639 --> 00:39:28.280
and all our possibilities and could really get in a
757
00:39:28.280 --> 00:39:31.079
way of a lot of potentially very positive relationships. So
758
00:39:31.360 --> 00:39:34.440
doing our healing work around that is so critically important.
759
00:39:34.800 --> 00:39:37.360
So thank you Paul that there's so much wisdom in
760
00:39:37.400 --> 00:39:41.559
there and so many ways entrepreneurs audience go aboard some real,
761
00:39:41.840 --> 00:39:44.840
real not just pitfall, but you know, falling into a
762
00:39:44.920 --> 00:39:48.079
quarry or something. So I wonder if you could talk
763
00:39:48.880 --> 00:39:52.679
you know, the various categories you're in now and the
764
00:39:52.719 --> 00:39:55.119
ones you've been in the path now, you chose to
765
00:39:55.159 --> 00:39:58.000
go to the venture capital route with Bulletproof Coffee, and
766
00:39:58.039 --> 00:40:00.000
you said you wouldn't have been able to establish it
767
00:40:00.159 --> 00:40:02.800
category and the way you did without that level of capital.
768
00:40:03.440 --> 00:40:05.440
Or have there been other things in which you've taken
769
00:40:05.480 --> 00:40:09.960
more of a bootstrapping approach, or what kind of recommendations
770
00:40:10.000 --> 00:40:12.719
you have, or what's your sense of that choice point
771
00:40:12.800 --> 00:40:15.320
and whether it could be you know you're not going
772
00:40:15.400 --> 00:40:18.880
to grow as fast bootstrapping it, but obviously you have
773
00:40:18.880 --> 00:40:21.480
a lot more control over your destiny. So I'm curious
774
00:40:21.519 --> 00:40:24.360
about your thoughts around that whole issue where one might
775
00:40:24.440 --> 00:40:27.599
be more applicable and the other might be more preferable.
776
00:40:28.280 --> 00:40:31.679
You should always bootstrap at the beginning as much as
777
00:40:31.760 --> 00:40:33.960
you can. So I talked about when I raised my
778
00:40:34.000 --> 00:40:36.920
first round, I didn't talk about what happened first. So
779
00:40:37.000 --> 00:40:41.199
I had just moved from Silicon Valley to a remote
780
00:40:41.199 --> 00:40:44.000
island on Canada, to Mancouver Island. I have two young kids,
781
00:40:44.119 --> 00:40:46.440
and I've spent a lot of my free cash on
782
00:40:46.639 --> 00:40:50.719
move and things like that, and I'm looking to start
783
00:40:50.760 --> 00:40:54.920
a business. I didn't quit my day job so I'm
784
00:40:54.960 --> 00:40:59.360
supporting the business with my meaningful salary. And then I
785
00:40:59.400 --> 00:41:02.039
took some control work on the side, where an investment
786
00:41:02.039 --> 00:41:03.880
bank flew me around the world to teach hedge fund
787
00:41:03.920 --> 00:41:06.840
managers how to raise their iques. They gave me fifty
788
00:41:06.880 --> 00:41:10.360
thousand dollars to do this, and that was my startup
789
00:41:10.360 --> 00:41:13.239
capital for Boll Group was fifty grand. It was all took.
790
00:41:14.159 --> 00:41:17.559
I hired a young guy twenty three years old for
791
00:41:17.639 --> 00:41:19.639
six hundred doucks a month who lived in his grandmother's
792
00:41:19.679 --> 00:41:22.760
basement to do all this stuff that I needed done
793
00:41:22.760 --> 00:41:23.960
that I knew how to do, that I have time
794
00:41:24.000 --> 00:41:25.400
to do, and I knew he would screwed up because
795
00:41:25.400 --> 00:41:27.599
he had done it before. But he was the unusual
796
00:41:27.719 --> 00:41:30.119
kind of person who could solve a problem on his
797
00:41:30.159 --> 00:41:34.400
own by doing research. Most new employees just tell me
798
00:41:34.480 --> 00:41:36.440
what to do, and he was the guy I could say.
799
00:41:36.719 --> 00:41:38.639
He said, I don't know how to code, So I decided
800
00:41:38.679 --> 00:41:41.039
to learn how to code over the evening enough that
801
00:41:41.079 --> 00:41:44.400
I could solve this problem. And so that decision cost
802
00:41:44.480 --> 00:41:46.199
me millions of dollars in mistakes he made. It just
803
00:41:46.239 --> 00:41:47.920
made me a lot more millions of dollars and stuff
804
00:41:47.920 --> 00:41:51.920
he got done so very very lean. I grew the
805
00:41:51.960 --> 00:41:56.400
business to twenty seven million dollars in revenue before I
806
00:41:56.400 --> 00:42:01.719
took on venture capital money. And that means that by
807
00:42:01.760 --> 00:42:06.800
the time we raised our Series C financing since nineteen
808
00:42:06.880 --> 00:42:10.719
eighty six, when our lead VC was founded, they were
809
00:42:10.760 --> 00:42:13.000
the first investment in Starbucks, I had more founders that
810
00:42:13.039 --> 00:42:16.079
could be than any founder ever because I waited on
811
00:42:16.079 --> 00:42:18.599
the venture capital and I raised when I didn't need it.
812
00:42:18.679 --> 00:42:21.840
I was skyrocketing, and that's the time you want to raise.
813
00:42:22.559 --> 00:42:24.039
A lot of founders like I just need to go
814
00:42:24.119 --> 00:42:26.519
raise this money, and then they raised by a time
815
00:42:26.519 --> 00:42:28.360
where they don't have the revenue or they raised too
816
00:42:28.440 --> 00:42:31.199
much and things like that. So that would be the
817
00:42:31.199 --> 00:42:32.880
way to do it. And I would just say boostrap
818
00:42:32.880 --> 00:42:35.360
as long as you can. But if you decide I'm
819
00:42:35.360 --> 00:42:37.320
not going to grow as fast as I could or
820
00:42:37.400 --> 00:42:39.800
should grow, or that the market demands if I don't
821
00:42:39.840 --> 00:42:44.719
raise capital. Number one raised from high net worth individuals
822
00:42:44.760 --> 00:42:48.519
and family offices, And the reason for this is that
823
00:42:48.840 --> 00:42:53.840
they have a longer time frame, especially family offices vcs.
824
00:42:53.880 --> 00:42:55.679
If you're not in and out in seven years, they're
825
00:42:55.679 --> 00:42:57.480
going to put all sorts of weird treasure. I like
826
00:42:57.519 --> 00:43:01.360
to describe venture capitalists as hitchhikers. So you pick up
827
00:43:01.360 --> 00:43:03.559
a hitchhiker, they're happy to pay for gas with their
828
00:43:03.599 --> 00:43:05.519
credit card as long as you're going where they want.
829
00:43:05.800 --> 00:43:07.559
But the second you want to go a different direction,
830
00:43:07.760 --> 00:43:10.400
they're going to stab you and kick you out of
831
00:43:10.480 --> 00:43:13.360
your car, Like that's not the kind of hitchhiker you want.
832
00:43:13.599 --> 00:43:15.599
Family office guys are going to say, no, I don't.
833
00:43:16.119 --> 00:43:17.519
I'm cool going where you want to go as long
834
00:43:17.519 --> 00:43:19.159
as it's a good place. I'm just going to take
835
00:43:19.159 --> 00:43:22.079
a lot longer. Just communicate with me. So you end
836
00:43:22.159 --> 00:43:26.000
up working like working together on things, and some of
837
00:43:26.039 --> 00:43:30.000
them are very hands off, so it's always bootstrap family
838
00:43:30.039 --> 00:43:33.079
office if you can do it, or I know worth individuals,
839
00:43:33.079 --> 00:43:37.079
people who are true believers in your mission and they're
840
00:43:37.119 --> 00:43:41.400
going to be more flexible, and then if you need it, vcs,
841
00:43:41.519 --> 00:43:44.480
but you need to just be very grounded and have
842
00:43:44.599 --> 00:43:47.159
good support so when the vcs asked for something stupid,
843
00:43:47.599 --> 00:43:49.559
you can literally look them in the eye and say
844
00:43:50.239 --> 00:43:53.239
that's not going to work. And they're actually testing you
845
00:43:53.280 --> 00:43:56.239
subconsciously to see if you're a sucker or not, and Franklin,
846
00:43:56.239 --> 00:43:59.639
I probably was. I've worked for vcs. I have been
847
00:43:59.679 --> 00:44:03.639
in venture capital partner meetings after the vcs walk out
848
00:44:03.639 --> 00:44:06.519
at least seventy five times. I know kind of how
849
00:44:06.559 --> 00:44:10.639
they think. But the secret algorithm of peeling off layers
850
00:44:10.679 --> 00:44:12.760
of rights until suddenly you know the leg of your
851
00:44:12.760 --> 00:44:15.960
stool was weak, it's pretty hard to see. So I
852
00:44:15.960 --> 00:44:16.960
own that one.
853
00:44:16.880 --> 00:44:21.199
Again, great advice, and I've seen some founder entrepreneurs go
854
00:44:21.239 --> 00:44:24.360
down some pretty heartbreaking routes with venture capital not having
855
00:44:24.360 --> 00:44:27.039
the right advice and right proach. And I've also seen
856
00:44:27.440 --> 00:44:30.039
I had a client that was a very successful company
857
00:44:30.039 --> 00:44:34.239
in a very value added, honorable space, really trying to
858
00:44:34.280 --> 00:44:38.280
clean up the toxicity out of schools and universities and
859
00:44:38.320 --> 00:44:41.199
sports stadiums and so forth. And they came in with
860
00:44:41.280 --> 00:44:45.119
a innovative technology basically created a category, but decided to
861
00:44:45.159 --> 00:44:47.400
boostrap all the way and never did go pro outside
862
00:44:47.440 --> 00:44:50.000
capital and really lost control of the category and it
863
00:44:50.039 --> 00:44:52.079
really kind of ended up in the public domain and
864
00:44:52.159 --> 00:44:54.960
taken over by much bigger players. So I'm sure there
865
00:44:55.000 --> 00:44:56.760
is a sweet spot when you want to make the
866
00:44:56.840 --> 00:45:00.480
right decision, and that advice to consider the possibility family
867
00:45:00.519 --> 00:45:04.119
offices and high networks individuals as opposed to BC is
868
00:45:04.199 --> 00:45:07.519
also a sage advice. I wonder if you could talk about,
869
00:45:07.679 --> 00:45:10.079
let's circle back to you talked about, you know, being
870
00:45:10.079 --> 00:45:13.480
a thought leader, and so that has to do with communication,
871
00:45:14.000 --> 00:45:16.119
and obviously it can have to do with you know,
872
00:45:16.199 --> 00:45:20.880
providing really credible information, but also storytelling and so in
873
00:45:20.920 --> 00:45:23.360
the creation of a brand and the creation of a category.
874
00:45:23.400 --> 00:45:26.719
And then you know, as a fundamental marketing strategy, as
875
00:45:26.760 --> 00:45:30.079
a founder, whichever route you're taking to grow your business,
876
00:45:30.079 --> 00:45:32.719
grow your market, grow your niche, or grow your own brand,
877
00:45:33.119 --> 00:45:36.360
the role of storytelling. And you've mastered that, you have
878
00:45:36.440 --> 00:45:38.440
a number of best selling books, and you're coming out
879
00:45:38.440 --> 00:45:40.079
with more all the time. So I wonder if you
880
00:45:40.119 --> 00:45:42.280
could talk to us about the power of storytelling as
881
00:45:42.320 --> 00:45:45.119
it relates to the entrepreneurial journey.
882
00:45:45.360 --> 00:45:51.159
Storytelling is a learned skill. And I mentioned earlier I
883
00:45:51.199 --> 00:45:55.480
had Aspergers syndrome. I did not have strong social skills,
884
00:45:55.559 --> 00:46:00.440
but I had strong systems understanding and pattern recognition skills,
885
00:46:00.480 --> 00:46:03.880
as is common with that kind of neurological dysfunction. And
886
00:46:03.920 --> 00:46:05.599
I know, I just pissed off half the Asperger of
887
00:46:05.639 --> 00:46:08.280
people by calling a dysfunction, But guys, you can have
888
00:46:08.320 --> 00:46:10.639
an Asperger's brain that works much better than it does.
889
00:46:10.840 --> 00:46:15.760
So anyway from that, I didn't understand how to connect
890
00:46:15.920 --> 00:46:20.000
energetically or empathetically with the people I was talking to,
891
00:46:20.440 --> 00:46:22.159
and I would just assume they were like me. All
892
00:46:22.239 --> 00:46:24.000
humans are wired to assume others are like you. They
893
00:46:24.000 --> 00:46:28.280
are not. We all have different brains, different patterns, different understandings,
894
00:46:28.280 --> 00:46:33.840
different traumas, different friction points. So two things happen. I
895
00:46:33.960 --> 00:46:36.960
learned early on in my tech career that the stupid
896
00:46:37.000 --> 00:46:41.239
solution often wins because it has good marketing. So if
897
00:46:41.239 --> 00:46:45.280
you're an inventor and you have the best widget and
898
00:46:45.360 --> 00:46:47.840
it's so good that you protect it so much, or
899
00:46:47.880 --> 00:46:50.519
you do such a shitty job or selling it that
900
00:46:50.679 --> 00:46:53.280
no one ever uses your invention, there's a word for that.
901
00:46:53.280 --> 00:46:57.559
It's called a failed inventor. So if you have something
902
00:46:57.599 --> 00:47:00.400
that is precious and is worth the world's attention, you
903
00:47:00.800 --> 00:47:06.039
have to learn how to tell people. So I decided
904
00:47:06.039 --> 00:47:08.119
I'm going to have to learn how to do public speaking,
905
00:47:08.159 --> 00:47:12.800
which was really unnerving for me. Not only was iobese,
906
00:47:14.159 --> 00:47:17.159
I did not have the right social skills. And I
907
00:47:17.199 --> 00:47:19.320
gave my first talk in front of fifteen hundred people
908
00:47:19.880 --> 00:47:22.599
at something called the Web guildt this is for we did.
909
00:47:22.599 --> 00:47:24.920
The word webmaster hadn't been made up yet, so this
910
00:47:25.079 --> 00:47:28.280
was the first probably thousand webmasters in Silicon Valley. I
911
00:47:28.280 --> 00:47:30.840
don't remember anything I said because I was terrified the
912
00:47:30.840 --> 00:47:33.079
whole time. But they laughed and now it was successful.
913
00:47:33.079 --> 00:47:34.559
Asked me to speak some more, and I'm like, I
914
00:47:34.599 --> 00:47:37.960
have no skills here. So I ended up running the
915
00:47:38.000 --> 00:47:40.960
web in Internet Engineering program at the univers California, Santa
916
00:47:40.960 --> 00:47:45.280
Cruz in Silicon Valley for five years, three nights a week,
917
00:47:45.320 --> 00:47:47.280
I would teach a room full of fifty engineers how
918
00:47:47.320 --> 00:47:51.000
to build the Internet. If you spend enough time in
919
00:47:51.000 --> 00:47:54.360
front of an audience, you learn how to do it.
920
00:47:54.599 --> 00:47:57.440
After my first class, a mentor Sammy Damison day, you're
921
00:47:57.440 --> 00:47:59.800
the worst teacher I've ever seen. My God like or
922
00:48:00.119 --> 00:48:01.559
have to fire you. Then it taught me how to
923
00:48:01.559 --> 00:48:04.480
do it, and I practiced, And then I went through
924
00:48:04.480 --> 00:48:07.880
coaching programs, multiple coaching programs that took three days, five
925
00:48:07.960 --> 00:48:11.719
days a week to learn how to do this. And
926
00:48:11.760 --> 00:48:13.920
then I did the Heart Math Institute stuff that I
927
00:48:14.000 --> 00:48:17.039
discovered through longevity practices. Then I did the energetic things
928
00:48:17.039 --> 00:48:21.000
I have done, all the esoteric practices in caves, all
929
00:48:21.039 --> 00:48:24.719
that stuff to learn how to connect with the signals
930
00:48:24.760 --> 00:48:27.840
below the neck so that when I walk on stage,
931
00:48:28.199 --> 00:48:32.440
even what I'm doing right now, I have aligned my well,
932
00:48:32.480 --> 00:48:36.079
there's multiple levels here, but I'm aligning the r rave
933
00:48:36.159 --> 00:48:39.519
variability on what people call the heart chakra from that
934
00:48:39.639 --> 00:48:42.280
kind of thing, or you call it my vagual response
935
00:48:42.320 --> 00:48:46.400
and my autonomic nervous system. I've aligned those for full presence.
936
00:48:47.119 --> 00:48:48.920
And there's some other things that I do when I
937
00:48:48.960 --> 00:48:51.679
go on stage that makes my energy feel very large.
938
00:48:52.159 --> 00:48:55.199
I've spent six months of my life with electrodes on
939
00:48:55.239 --> 00:48:57.920
my head doing advanced meditation. It's a subject of heavily
940
00:48:57.960 --> 00:49:01.480
meditated from forty years of theen my neuroscience thing for entrepreneurs.
941
00:49:02.280 --> 00:49:06.719
That means that the amplitude, the height of the waves
942
00:49:06.719 --> 00:49:09.400
of my brain power, even from the things that are
943
00:49:09.440 --> 00:49:11.719
coming off from other magnetic fields in my body, they
944
00:49:11.719 --> 00:49:14.639
are very strong and very orderly. And that means with
945
00:49:14.719 --> 00:49:19.840
focus intention, I can stand backstage or on stage and
946
00:49:19.920 --> 00:49:24.199
I can literally radiate power and I can let people
947
00:49:24.440 --> 00:49:28.159
feel what I am doing. And the biggest problem that
948
00:49:28.280 --> 00:49:33.960
no one teaches is called congruents. And when someone is congruent,
949
00:49:34.400 --> 00:49:38.559
their outer state matches their inner state, and you don't
950
00:49:38.880 --> 00:49:42.880
think about congruence in another person. You feel congruence in
951
00:49:42.920 --> 00:49:47.159
another person. And I learned through trial error and lots
952
00:49:47.199 --> 00:49:50.880
of failure, that when I'm delivering a story, when I'm
953
00:49:50.920 --> 00:49:54.320
teaching about a technology, when I'm explaining how mitochondria are
954
00:49:54.360 --> 00:49:58.840
the foundations for consciousness or whatever I'm teaching, I am
955
00:49:58.880 --> 00:50:02.400
simultaneously using wor words and I'm simultaneously using all of
956
00:50:02.440 --> 00:50:06.000
my energetic biology to do that. And that means that
957
00:50:06.039 --> 00:50:09.760
when people are sitting there, their nervous systems will relax,
958
00:50:10.320 --> 00:50:14.400
and if I choose exactly the right words, you can
959
00:50:14.480 --> 00:50:18.800
choose language that will enter the consciousness without a splash,
960
00:50:18.840 --> 00:50:21.239
the way you see an Olympic diver they dive in.
961
00:50:21.599 --> 00:50:24.880
How do they do that? The water just parted for them.
962
00:50:25.360 --> 00:50:27.960
When you are conscious in your use of language, I
963
00:50:28.039 --> 00:50:33.000
mean absurdly conscious, the words go in and then they
964
00:50:33.000 --> 00:50:36.800
don't trigger any alert system in the person's biology. They
965
00:50:36.800 --> 00:50:39.159
don't trigger any traumas or any friction or any But
966
00:50:39.239 --> 00:50:42.199
I don't understand. I remember when you know, miss Johnson
967
00:50:42.199 --> 00:50:44.119
in third grade yelled at me none of that. So
968
00:50:44.159 --> 00:50:49.079
they go, oh, that feels like he really believes it,
969
00:50:49.239 --> 00:50:51.679
and it looks like he's pretty trustworthy because he's pretty
970
00:50:51.679 --> 00:50:53.280
smart and all that kind of stuff or whatever their
971
00:50:53.280 --> 00:50:57.079
story is, then they can really focus and be present.
972
00:50:57.760 --> 00:51:00.320
And if people have worked on stage with work on
973
00:51:00.360 --> 00:51:02.920
their interstate instead of just going, we'll walk with your
974
00:51:03.000 --> 00:51:05.960
hips out and you know, strut like a you know whatever,
975
00:51:06.559 --> 00:51:08.960
and you know, own the stage and shout and use
976
00:51:09.000 --> 00:51:12.559
the strong voice and be an alpha male. Okay, if
977
00:51:12.599 --> 00:51:14.559
you're want to be in alpha male and that's your thing,
978
00:51:14.599 --> 00:51:16.960
you better be in alpha male all the way down
979
00:51:17.119 --> 00:51:19.480
to your root chakra and you better radiate that. From
980
00:51:19.480 --> 00:51:23.239
every report. Frankly, alpha males aren't even real. You can't
981
00:51:23.280 --> 00:51:25.400
do that. The guy who did all the research on
982
00:51:25.440 --> 00:51:29.519
alpha male's and wolf packs, he made a mistake. It
983
00:51:29.559 --> 00:51:31.920
turns out the real leader of the pack is the
984
00:51:31.920 --> 00:51:34.840
one who's in the back watching out for all the
985
00:51:34.880 --> 00:51:37.519
other ones. And it's the young, dom aggressive ones that
986
00:51:37.559 --> 00:51:39.960
are in the front. And you spend his entire career
987
00:51:40.039 --> 00:51:43.440
trying to fix the alpha male myth that he created,
988
00:51:44.440 --> 00:51:47.320
So like you can try to radiate I'm the alpha
989
00:51:47.360 --> 00:51:50.199
male leader. Even if you hold that energy, it won't
990
00:51:50.280 --> 00:51:51.920
land around with people because they know you're not the
991
00:51:51.960 --> 00:51:54.639
one in charge. You just think you are right, So
992
00:51:55.000 --> 00:51:57.679
you got to really do the personal development work so
993
00:51:57.719 --> 00:52:00.159
that you're internal and extra meta. After you do that,
994
00:52:01.039 --> 00:52:03.679
the reason you can tell a story is because the
995
00:52:03.800 --> 00:52:06.719
story is real, and it is authentically real, from the
996
00:52:06.800 --> 00:52:09.960
lowest level of the vibration of the atoms in your
997
00:52:09.960 --> 00:52:14.079
body all the way up to all the different biophotons
998
00:52:14.119 --> 00:52:16.159
and magnetic fields that come off of you, and it
999
00:52:16.239 --> 00:52:20.159
is entirely congruate. And if you can do that, people
1000
00:52:20.199 --> 00:52:22.280
are going to pay attention and they're going to know
1001
00:52:22.400 --> 00:52:23.840
that it is real, and they're going to know that
1002
00:52:23.880 --> 00:52:26.400
you are real, and they are going to trust. And
1003
00:52:26.800 --> 00:52:30.000
the question that makes me so frustrated when I'm coaching
1004
00:52:30.039 --> 00:52:33.519
these entrepreneurs at my business conference, like, well, how do
1005
00:52:33.559 --> 00:52:38.480
I signal authenticity? Like you're hold up a sign says
1006
00:52:38.519 --> 00:52:42.719
I'm authentic. You can't. We don't think about authenticity. You
1007
00:52:42.760 --> 00:52:48.440
can con people, but authenticity people feel it in their bones, right,
1008
00:52:48.480 --> 00:52:51.119
And so you know, I hope I'm not falling into
1009
00:52:51.119 --> 00:52:53.360
my own ego when I talk about this. It was
1010
00:52:53.639 --> 00:52:56.679
hard to learn these techniques and hard to learn how
1011
00:52:56.719 --> 00:52:58.800
to even know what's going on inside my body because
1012
00:52:58.800 --> 00:53:00.280
I don't think I grew up without the way most
1013
00:53:00.280 --> 00:53:02.599
people do. I did a careful study of this with
1014
00:53:02.760 --> 00:53:04.960
thousands of hours and a lot of tech because I
1015
00:53:04.960 --> 00:53:07.320
had to fix the way my eyes moved, I had
1016
00:53:07.320 --> 00:53:09.239
to fix the way I hear sounds. I had to
1017
00:53:09.239 --> 00:53:11.599
fix all my tongue moved. I'm still learning how to
1018
00:53:11.639 --> 00:53:13.840
crawl properly the way most people do when they're eighteen
1019
00:53:13.880 --> 00:53:16.559
months old, because my HeartWare didn't come with those settings.
1020
00:53:17.159 --> 00:53:19.159
And it's been a blessing. It's also been a huge
1021
00:53:19.159 --> 00:53:21.719
amount of costs and you know, pain and all the
1022
00:53:21.719 --> 00:53:25.639
other stuff. But if you just understand your interstate is
1023
00:53:25.639 --> 00:53:28.039
what tells your story. The outer stage is just the frosting,
1024
00:53:28.159 --> 00:53:30.039
and you better be good at frosting gigs. But that's easy.
1025
00:53:30.079 --> 00:53:33.440
Awhere, Well, I love that. So you made it clear
1026
00:53:33.519 --> 00:53:37.519
that soytelling and public speaking are learnable skills. It sounds
1027
00:53:37.559 --> 00:53:40.440
like you did the conventional things of what you could
1028
00:53:40.519 --> 00:53:42.480
learn about how to do those things correctly, but you've
1029
00:53:42.480 --> 00:53:46.039
also integrated it with biohacking and with the meditative work
1030
00:53:46.119 --> 00:53:48.559
and really learning how to navigate your own body and
1031
00:53:48.599 --> 00:53:52.239
mind thoroughly, and you've integrated all that into being able
1032
00:53:52.280 --> 00:53:55.039
to not only put the words together in the right way,
1033
00:53:55.119 --> 00:53:58.760
but have the powerful presence that's deeply authentic in your
1034
00:53:58.840 --> 00:54:01.960
bult and connected genuinely with the story, and that's going
1035
00:54:02.039 --> 00:54:03.400
to have an impact on people.
1036
00:54:03.679 --> 00:54:07.559
There's another aspect to this that I think entrepreneurs would
1037
00:54:07.599 --> 00:54:10.239
really benefit from, and it has to do with making
1038
00:54:10.280 --> 00:54:14.800
business decisions and with public speaking and with storytelling. And
1039
00:54:14.840 --> 00:54:19.719
it's that when a little, tiny intuitive thought enters your mind,
1040
00:54:20.440 --> 00:54:24.079
it enters very quickly, and if you're like most humans,
1041
00:54:25.079 --> 00:54:29.320
immediately you'll have an emotional response that says, don't pay
1042
00:54:29.360 --> 00:54:33.519
attention to that. Instead, pay attention to your brain. And
1043
00:54:33.519 --> 00:54:35.079
then you think about it a bunch and then you
1044
00:54:35.159 --> 00:54:37.079
just throw away that first little thought because it was
1045
00:54:37.119 --> 00:54:41.440
smaller than the emotion and smaller than the thought. If
1046
00:54:41.480 --> 00:54:46.039
you learn to calm the ego, which is that emotional
1047
00:54:46.079 --> 00:54:47.920
voice that tells you not to listen to your intuition,
1048
00:54:49.199 --> 00:54:51.639
you already know the answer to so many things you
1049
00:54:51.679 --> 00:54:53.920
don't think you know the answer to. So when you're
1050
00:54:53.960 --> 00:54:59.320
on stage and your mind goes blank because you're afraid,
1051
00:55:00.119 --> 00:55:02.119
the first thing you're going to do is start talking,
1052
00:55:02.599 --> 00:55:04.599
unless you're trained, and you realize the longer you wait,
1053
00:55:06.320 --> 00:55:08.159
the more people lean in to hear what you're going
1054
00:55:08.239 --> 00:55:10.239
to say, and then you can wait as long as
1055
00:55:10.280 --> 00:55:12.400
you want in order to find the next word, and
1056
00:55:12.440 --> 00:55:15.960
it just makes you look smart. So that's like step one.
1057
00:55:16.559 --> 00:55:21.519
But step two is most people will start ruminating right
1058
00:55:21.519 --> 00:55:22.880
there and says want to go, say I gotta make
1059
00:55:22.960 --> 00:55:24.480
up some stuff, Okay, wondering if I got to fill
1060
00:55:24.480 --> 00:55:26.840
in the spots. Okay, wondering I say next, and all
1061
00:55:26.880 --> 00:55:28.960
that inner dialogue is going. And if you can learn
1062
00:55:29.039 --> 00:55:32.440
to shut up the inner dialogue when you're quiet, the
1063
00:55:32.519 --> 00:55:35.119
right thing to say next will just appear. But it's
1064
00:55:35.119 --> 00:55:37.360
that first intuition, and you're not allowed to take the
1065
00:55:37.440 --> 00:55:40.360
ego and then the brain and then to ruin that.
1066
00:55:41.039 --> 00:55:44.119
So you could tell me, Dave, you're giving a talk
1067
00:55:44.159 --> 00:55:47.760
on X topic twenty minutes from now in front of
1068
00:55:47.960 --> 00:55:51.559
ten thousand people, and I would show up, and you
1069
00:55:51.559 --> 00:55:54.159
could measure my highway variability and I would be on
1070
00:55:54.239 --> 00:55:56.000
it and I would know what to say, and it
1071
00:55:56.000 --> 00:55:58.840
would be a eight out of ten talk without any
1072
00:55:58.880 --> 00:56:01.320
preparation other than going to chat GPT making sure that
1073
00:56:01.400 --> 00:56:04.239
line agreed with what I thought of. That's because I
1074
00:56:04.280 --> 00:56:07.239
am going to in real time channel the stuff from
1075
00:56:07.239 --> 00:56:10.239
my unconscious or from the collective conscious, or from God,
1076
00:56:10.320 --> 00:56:12.599
whatever you think people channel from. I don't know, I
1077
00:56:12.599 --> 00:56:15.840
have my thoughts, but we're all capable of that. You
1078
00:56:15.920 --> 00:56:17.880
just have to have a state of peace, which means
1079
00:56:17.920 --> 00:56:20.199
a state of not being afraid. And this is why
1080
00:56:20.199 --> 00:56:22.599
fro entrepreneurs, you work on your fear reaction. You work
1081
00:56:22.639 --> 00:56:25.320
on fear reaction over and over. And when that happens
1082
00:56:25.320 --> 00:56:29.519
in the boardroom, intuitional cut and then in the products
1083
00:56:29.519 --> 00:56:31.480
creation type you're oh wow, I never thow of that,
1084
00:56:31.760 --> 00:56:35.400
and they just flow. But the more energy goes into fear,
1085
00:56:35.800 --> 00:56:39.079
more energy goes into hunger and thinking about tacos, and
1086
00:56:39.119 --> 00:56:41.519
the more energy goes into distractions, the less energy goes
1087
00:56:41.519 --> 00:56:45.480
into creation. And if you're going to be a solid leader,
1088
00:56:45.519 --> 00:56:49.960
a solid storyteller, solid entrepreneur who holds the line when
1089
00:56:49.960 --> 00:56:53.000
the business is at risk when an employee misbehaves, if
1090
00:56:53.000 --> 00:56:55.960
you're going to do that, and you better learn how
1091
00:56:56.000 --> 00:56:59.280
to biohack, and you better learn the techniques of self regulation.
1092
00:56:59.599 --> 00:57:02.599
And then number one technique of self regulation isn't meditation.
1093
00:57:03.880 --> 00:57:07.440
I'll just make it happy. But the number one technique
1094
00:57:07.480 --> 00:57:11.199
is have more energy. Because you use energy to self
1095
00:57:11.239 --> 00:57:14.679
regulate so step one, add a lot more energy, make
1096
00:57:14.719 --> 00:57:17.360
your mitochondria bigger and stronger. This is why so many
1097
00:57:17.360 --> 00:57:20.800
execs use my techniques because if I have more energy,
1098
00:57:20.880 --> 00:57:24.639
I can handle more. And then the second step is
1099
00:57:24.719 --> 00:57:26.880
going and learn how to regulate the system. And if
1100
00:57:26.880 --> 00:57:29.039
you do that, like, oh my god, I double the
1101
00:57:29.039 --> 00:57:31.039
amount of energy I have, so I perform it. Now
1102
00:57:31.159 --> 00:57:33.400
I don't have energy to go in and reprogram myself.
1103
00:57:33.599 --> 00:57:36.760
So I put less of this abundant energy into fear,
1104
00:57:37.239 --> 00:57:39.559
and less into hunger, and less into things like less
1105
00:57:39.599 --> 00:57:41.760
and I put them into things that charge me and
1106
00:57:41.800 --> 00:57:46.159
build my company, build my mission, build my family. And
1107
00:57:46.239 --> 00:57:48.960
that's why in the arc of my books, my first
1108
00:57:49.000 --> 00:57:51.679
book was a fertility book, because having a really healthy
1109
00:57:51.719 --> 00:57:53.719
mom is a great advantage in life. So let's get
1110
00:57:53.719 --> 00:57:55.320
down off the way. Then how do I etop my
1111
00:57:55.400 --> 00:57:57.840
energy back it's a bulletproof diet. Then how do I
1112
00:57:57.880 --> 00:58:01.639
make my brain work strong? Right? And then how do
1113
00:58:01.719 --> 00:58:04.679
I make myself live much longer? Because anyone who starts
1114
00:58:04.679 --> 00:58:08.119
biohacking wants longevity, and I've been in longevity for twenty
1115
00:58:08.159 --> 00:58:12.199
five years. But then how do I become happy? How
1116
00:58:12.199 --> 00:58:16.159
does that work? And that's what heavily meditates about how
1117
00:58:16.159 --> 00:58:18.639
do you build those skills are the hardest ones, the
1118
00:58:18.639 --> 00:58:21.400
ones I've spent the most time on, and all the
1119
00:58:21.400 --> 00:58:26.480
time I'm learning hardcore biohacking and neuroscience and measuring heart
1120
00:58:26.559 --> 00:58:29.280
rate and looking at all the variables and measuring myself
1121
00:58:29.519 --> 00:58:33.880
in absurd ways. At the same time, I was spending
1122
00:58:34.000 --> 00:58:37.239
time with spiritual gurus learning the other side of things.
1123
00:58:37.280 --> 00:58:40.519
And that's what heavily meditated is what are the steps
1124
00:58:40.559 --> 00:58:42.960
in order you can do to not be triggered by anything?
1125
00:58:43.000 --> 00:58:45.039
And if you do that, you'll tell the world's best story.
1126
00:58:45.199 --> 00:58:47.719
You'll build a company. And when something comes along that
1127
00:58:48.199 --> 00:58:51.400
feels like a threat, you do not lose sleep, and
1128
00:58:51.440 --> 00:58:53.480
you do not lose your mission, and you do not
1129
00:58:53.480 --> 00:58:57.159
lose your mind. And you know, I like to think
1130
00:58:57.199 --> 00:58:59.599
I'm there. Maybe something can unsee me. But even if
1131
00:58:59.639 --> 00:59:02.199
it does, I have people around me who know this
1132
00:59:02.280 --> 00:59:04.760
about me, who are part of my spiritual team as
1133
00:59:04.800 --> 00:59:07.280
well as my work team, and they will call me
1134
00:59:07.800 --> 00:59:09.840
if I'm acting out of integrity from what I just said.
1135
00:59:10.159 --> 00:59:12.679
And if you build that in your culture, in your
1136
00:59:12.719 --> 00:59:16.920
family and your spouse and your religious support or your
1137
00:59:16.960 --> 00:59:21.360
spiritual support and your best friends in your community. It
1138
00:59:21.360 --> 00:59:22.960
makes it a lot easier to hold the line. And
1139
00:59:22.960 --> 00:59:25.199
that's why I build my life the way I do today.
1140
00:59:25.639 --> 00:59:28.320
You just reminded me earlier when you were sharing your
1141
00:59:28.360 --> 00:59:30.880
story and the different pieces of wisdom that came out
1142
00:59:31.199 --> 00:59:34.360
around that adventure capital and agreements and lawyers and all
1143
00:59:34.400 --> 00:59:37.119
the rest of it. One that I did name was culture.
1144
00:59:37.119 --> 00:59:39.360
And you mentioned culture back then and the importance and
1145
00:59:39.559 --> 00:59:42.320
you quickly remove people from the culture that had that
1146
00:59:42.360 --> 00:59:44.760
contempt with the culture, the contempt with the company or
1147
00:59:44.840 --> 00:59:48.119
leadership for yourself, and so you just reinforce the importance
1148
00:59:48.159 --> 00:59:51.519
of culture again. And you also answered what my next
1149
00:59:51.599 --> 00:59:54.239
question was already, because my next question was, you know,
1150
00:59:54.519 --> 00:59:59.280
four founders, the relevance and the importance of embracing biohacking
1151
00:59:59.320 --> 01:00:02.760
at some level. So I think your successful founder CEO
1152
01:00:02.880 --> 01:00:05.440
today is going to embrace biohacking at some level to
1153
01:00:05.480 --> 01:00:08.840
optimize their own energy. They're going to optimize They're going
1154
01:00:08.880 --> 01:00:12.320
to embrace some form of meditation and self regulation and
1155
01:00:12.360 --> 01:00:15.159
body mind work to be able to self regulate it at
1156
01:00:15.199 --> 01:00:17.280
an optimal level. And we have a lot of research
1157
01:00:17.320 --> 01:00:20.480
going way back, really, even Daniel Goldman's work around emotional
1158
01:00:20.480 --> 01:00:24.360
intelligence that what really separates great leaders from ordinary leaders
1159
01:00:24.480 --> 01:00:27.960
is emotional intelligence. Well, how do you develop more emotional intelligence?
1160
01:00:28.000 --> 01:00:30.400
You developed more emotional intelligent by having the energy to
1161
01:00:30.440 --> 01:00:33.440
do so by being embodied. By self regulating, we's reach
1162
01:00:33.519 --> 01:00:37.480
our capacity for empathic connection and co effective coregulation and
1163
01:00:37.519 --> 01:00:38.239
all the rest of it.
1164
01:00:38.559 --> 01:00:40.840
No, you've got a question for me. But you said
1165
01:00:40.880 --> 01:00:45.320
a word that entrepreneurs don't use. It's coregulation. This is
1166
01:00:45.360 --> 01:00:49.119
a word that child development experts will use if they're
1167
01:00:49.159 --> 01:00:52.400
teaching and parenting, and it's a word that a few
1168
01:00:52.440 --> 01:00:55.480
therapists might use if they're really on the ball. And
1169
01:00:55.519 --> 01:00:58.760
having interviewed Stan Groff, who was the founder of that
1170
01:00:59.239 --> 01:01:02.400
transpersonal side ecology movement and done work with heart math
1171
01:01:02.440 --> 01:01:06.360
and all, the idea of coregulation is that if your
1172
01:01:06.400 --> 01:01:10.199
nervous system is so regulated and so powerful, you have
1173
01:01:10.280 --> 01:01:14.440
to have both. You have to power and order. When
1174
01:01:14.480 --> 01:01:17.400
someone is losing their mind or they're losing their emotions,
1175
01:01:17.400 --> 01:01:22.199
they're being reactive. Just by holding that energy, you can
1176
01:01:22.320 --> 01:01:24.840
cause their body to line up with yours and they
1177
01:01:24.880 --> 01:01:28.440
will come out of that state. And the unspoken truth
1178
01:01:28.960 --> 01:01:31.960
is that if you are the top woman in your
1179
01:01:31.960 --> 01:01:35.719
company and you're a female entrepreneur, everyone with mommy issues
1180
01:01:35.719 --> 01:01:38.360
will map them onto you. And if you're the top
1181
01:01:38.360 --> 01:01:41.119
male in your company, everyone with daddy issues will map
1182
01:01:41.159 --> 01:01:44.320
them onto you. And to make it even more complex,
1183
01:01:45.079 --> 01:01:48.320
people who are really good employees and are normally totally fine,
1184
01:01:48.719 --> 01:01:51.079
something will happen in their personal life or they get
1185
01:01:51.119 --> 01:01:53.800
a flu or whatever, and they're at a state of
1186
01:01:53.800 --> 01:01:57.320
low energy, so their regulatory systems fail and they start
1187
01:01:57.360 --> 01:02:00.559
acting like children the way they acted with their dad.
1188
01:02:00.679 --> 01:02:03.320
And what happened to this person? Are they crazy? Now?
1189
01:02:03.360 --> 01:02:06.440
They lost their regulation state. And if you have that
1190
01:02:06.639 --> 01:02:08.679
strong thing and you can just do it, even though
1191
01:02:08.760 --> 01:02:10.639
they said might have pissed you off, you go to
1192
01:02:10.679 --> 01:02:12.760
work through that. If you can just do that, there's
1193
01:02:12.840 --> 01:02:15.400
a great chance that they will coregulate and the culture
1194
01:02:15.440 --> 01:02:17.239
will support that and it will bring them back in
1195
01:02:17.760 --> 01:02:20.800
instead of them spinning off and going nuts. And if
1196
01:02:20.800 --> 01:02:24.480
someone does spin off and just at gout of integrity,
1197
01:02:24.559 --> 01:02:27.239
it's the culture's job to catch them and expel them.
1198
01:02:27.719 --> 01:02:30.639
It's like a group of fish. They're all swimming in
1199
01:02:30.719 --> 01:02:32.639
a direction, and if one fish kind of goes a
1200
01:02:32.639 --> 01:02:34.480
little bit sideways fail them, one's help it back in
1201
01:02:35.280 --> 01:02:37.480
right And if one fish just darts off sidewright's, well,
1202
01:02:37.559 --> 01:02:40.679
guess that one's not in the school anymore, right, And
1203
01:02:40.760 --> 01:02:43.960
so that's a healthy culture when it brings gently, it
1204
01:02:43.960 --> 01:02:46.719
brings people back into all moving towards the goal, and
1205
01:02:46.760 --> 01:02:49.280
it allows people who are just tangential to get the
1206
01:02:49.280 --> 01:02:51.320
heck out and to do it quickly. And if a
1207
01:02:51.360 --> 01:02:53.239
shark eats those ones, that's okay.
1208
01:02:54.719 --> 01:02:57.519
You can really just define really healthy culture as kind
1209
01:02:57.519 --> 01:03:01.360
of a self sustaining collective regulation and it's a very
1210
01:03:01.360 --> 01:03:04.159
powerful force. Is really what we teach at Hard Mind
1211
01:03:04.199 --> 01:03:06.599
and what we're hoping to bring into the entrepreneur world
1212
01:03:07.079 --> 01:03:10.880
is you know, experiences that develop our own confidence in
1213
01:03:10.920 --> 01:03:13.320
our own innate goodness and the unate goodness of others,
1214
01:03:13.360 --> 01:03:15.519
which doesn't mean they're always behaving in that way, but
1215
01:03:15.639 --> 01:03:21.480
on some ultimate level. And then neuroscience mindfulnance trauma informed
1216
01:03:21.480 --> 01:03:25.239
approaches to self regulation and coregulation. And that's what we
1217
01:03:25.320 --> 01:03:26.719
hope to bring to the world to make it a
1218
01:03:26.760 --> 01:03:28.920
better place. And also I think it's really important to
1219
01:03:28.920 --> 01:03:31.800
get this into the world of entrepreneurship and business. It's
1220
01:03:31.840 --> 01:03:34.800
really how we can take the journey you've taken and
1221
01:03:34.840 --> 01:03:37.920
that all are aspiring and AlterNet existing entrepreneurs are taking
1222
01:03:38.320 --> 01:03:41.280
and end up also succeeding in life and as well
1223
01:03:41.280 --> 01:03:41.920
as in business.
1224
01:03:41.960 --> 01:03:45.400
So I'll say you've attained great wisdom in your life.
1225
01:03:45.440 --> 01:03:48.360
You know, we've talked on my show. We've talked multiple times,
1226
01:03:48.559 --> 01:03:54.320
and you do very high level meditated and energetic practice
1227
01:03:54.559 --> 01:03:57.239
that comes from decades of experience in it. And the
1228
01:03:57.280 --> 01:04:00.000
fact you're bringing this into business. I think this is
1229
01:04:00.119 --> 01:04:03.519
the time that the world needs it. And there's been
1230
01:04:03.760 --> 01:04:07.679
so much locked up knowledge in our different lineages. You
1231
01:04:07.760 --> 01:04:10.480
do shamanic training with one try and they teach you
1232
01:04:10.519 --> 01:04:12.840
this technique, and you go to a part of China
1233
01:04:12.920 --> 01:04:14.880
and they'll teach you this technique, and you go a
1234
01:04:14.880 --> 01:04:17.280
different part of China, like, oh no, this is five elements.
1235
01:04:17.320 --> 01:04:20.119
It's totally different. And you go to and when you
1236
01:04:20.119 --> 01:04:23.719
put enough this together, you realize there's all these capabilities
1237
01:04:23.760 --> 01:04:27.239
that humans have, and most of them we don't even
1238
01:04:27.280 --> 01:04:30.159
know about because we haven't shared because they didn't have
1239
01:04:31.280 --> 01:04:34.599
the ability to trademark that or even the ability to
1240
01:04:34.679 --> 01:04:36.920
file a patent on your meditation technique, so we would
1241
01:04:36.960 --> 01:04:39.199
just hide them. And now they're coming out. And the
1242
01:04:39.239 --> 01:04:41.280
reason they're coming out is if you're going to run
1243
01:04:41.320 --> 01:04:45.159
a business in today's world, you need those techniques. And
1244
01:04:45.280 --> 01:04:48.239
for humans to get the next level as a culture,
1245
01:04:48.280 --> 01:04:51.199
as a society, as a species, it's time for an upgrade.
1246
01:04:51.239 --> 01:04:56.079
And the upgrade is energetic, it's cultural, and it's biological,
1247
01:04:56.079 --> 01:04:58.760
and that we have to have well functioning bodies, which
1248
01:04:58.800 --> 01:05:00.400
means we're going to clean up the environ We're going
1249
01:05:00.440 --> 01:05:01.960
to learn how to eat, and if we do all
1250
01:05:02.079 --> 01:05:05.519
those things, I think we can make this an incredible
1251
01:05:05.760 --> 01:05:09.960
golden age of just like happy people doing things that
1252
01:05:09.960 --> 01:05:13.199
they're meant to do. And if we don't understand that
1253
01:05:13.199 --> 01:05:17.079
that's how it works, our businesses will fail. So kudos
1254
01:05:17.079 --> 01:05:18.719
to you for all the deep work you've done on
1255
01:05:18.880 --> 01:05:23.079
understanding all of the different unusual knowledge and taking the
1256
01:05:23.159 --> 01:05:25.119
risk to brain into business, which is not always easy.
1257
01:05:25.440 --> 01:05:27.599
Thank you very much for that, and you Shedley been
1258
01:05:27.639 --> 01:05:30.159
an exemplar in that area. We're kind of near the
1259
01:05:30.239 --> 01:05:32.440
end of our time, unfortunately, because there's so many different
1260
01:05:32.480 --> 01:05:34.559
rabbit holes. I'd love to go down with you and further.
1261
01:05:34.599 --> 01:05:37.880
And this has been incredibly illuminating, Dave. Where can people
1262
01:05:37.920 --> 01:05:39.960
find out more about your work? And I also think
1263
01:05:40.280 --> 01:05:43.079
there was a specific gift you wanted to offer to audience.
1264
01:05:43.880 --> 01:05:49.159
Yeah, my new book is called Heavily Meditated, and this
1265
01:05:49.239 --> 01:05:51.519
is the book for entrepreneurs who want to learn the
1266
01:05:51.559 --> 01:05:54.880
things we just talked about, because there's a very specific
1267
01:05:54.920 --> 01:05:57.639
set of steps you do to turn off triggers that
1268
01:05:57.719 --> 01:06:01.000
free up so much energy. And this is something that
1269
01:06:01.039 --> 01:06:03.320
has cost me more than ten million dollars to develop
1270
01:06:03.480 --> 01:06:07.079
with computers and electrics on the AD and I want
1271
01:06:07.079 --> 01:06:11.079
to teach that to you, so I will give you
1272
01:06:11.119 --> 01:06:12.960
a free of mini course. It is written down in
1273
01:06:12.960 --> 01:06:14.960
the book and I teach all the background stuff you need,
1274
01:06:15.039 --> 01:06:17.440
so you should get Heavily Meditated. But in the meantime,
1275
01:06:18.119 --> 01:06:23.360
if you go to Daveasprey dot com slash heavily Meditated.
1276
01:06:23.440 --> 01:06:27.719
All gap wonderful, anywhere else people should be going to
1277
01:06:27.719 --> 01:06:29.559
find out more about your work. I know, you know,
1278
01:06:29.719 --> 01:06:31.960
I meant to talk about the whole world of content
1279
01:06:32.039 --> 01:06:34.239
marketing before, which you've been an exemplar of. You learn
1280
01:06:34.280 --> 01:06:36.039
how to tell stories, and of course you have a
1281
01:06:36.079 --> 01:06:38.440
podcast and you have a blog, you have bestsellers books,
1282
01:06:38.440 --> 01:06:41.039
so you're getting out there as a thought leader through that.
1283
01:06:41.320 --> 01:06:44.039
And where is there one website where people can kind
1284
01:06:44.039 --> 01:06:45.719
of then find out all about your work.
1285
01:06:46.480 --> 01:06:48.840
If you go to Dave Asprey dot com, there's three
1286
01:06:48.880 --> 01:06:52.559
thousand blog posts, there's twelve hundred and fifty interviews with masters,
1287
01:06:53.159 --> 01:06:56.079
all free, eight or nine books, and a whole bunch
1288
01:06:56.119 --> 01:06:58.079
of other stuff that's there for you. All the different
1289
01:06:58.079 --> 01:07:00.880
brands I work with that are there, that make things
1290
01:07:00.920 --> 01:07:02.920
you can't bindy else because they're worth it, and that's
1291
01:07:02.920 --> 01:07:03.280
what I do.
1292
01:07:04.360 --> 01:07:04.840
Wonderful.
1293
01:07:05.400 --> 01:07:06.039
Thank you so.
1294
01:07:06.000 --> 01:07:09.960
Much, Dave Aspy, renowned as the creator and father of
1295
01:07:09.960 --> 01:07:13.400
the biohacking movement and functioning Coffee and so forth. So
1296
01:07:13.559 --> 01:07:16.239
thank you so much for my pleasure. Thank you for
1297
01:07:16.360 --> 01:07:20.400
joining me on the Radical Responsibility Podcast. Remember, real change
1298
01:07:20.440 --> 01:07:23.159
happens when we commit to our growth, face our challenges
1299
01:07:23.199 --> 01:07:26.480
with compassion, and stay open to transformation. If you found
1300
01:07:26.480 --> 01:07:29.679
this episode helpful, I encourage you to subscribe and help
1301
01:07:29.760 --> 01:07:33.480
us spread the message of healing and personal empowerment. Stay grounded,
1302
01:07:33.559 --> 01:07:35.519
stay present, and stay true to you.
1303
01:07:35.719 --> 01:07:36.239
Take care