Can Biohacking Make You More Successful? With Casper Co-Founder Neil Parikh

I'm Nicole Lappin, the only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand.

It's time for some money rehab.

Have you ever noticed that there is this very bizarre trend happening in the entrepreneurship space?

There is this very specific broy entrepreneur that's super into biohacking.

And I have a lot of questions.

Like, why is this one particular type of person so obsessed with these health hacks?

And an even bigger question, are these entrepreneurs onto something?

In other words, should we all be biohacking?

In order to answer these questions, I'm talking to Neil Parik, one of the co-founders of Casper, the game-changing mattress company, and a total sleep and health research nerd.

We are talking about biohacking.

We also define it.

If you've never heard of it, we've got you.

And of course, we talk about sleep because we had to.

Here's our conversation.

Neil Parik, welcome to Money Rehab.

Thanks for having me.

Appreciate it.

So let's start with the obvious.

Sleep.

Be honest, you co-founded Casper.

Was the goal to actually make the world sleep better or did you just see a white space avoid in the market?

Or a little bit of both?

I think some things happen by accident and, you know, they only make sense in reverse.

So with my story, I was in medical school and I hated it and I really wanted to leave.

And so I took a year off.

and moved to New York and ended up in a co-working space with somebody who I met next to me talking about how he used to sell mattresses online from his dorm room.

And I was like, that's a dumb idea.

Nobody's ever going to buy a mattress on the internet.

But we started talking and we realized it was actually a big opportunity.

Now, I hate admitting this, but my dad's a sleep doctor.

And so I'd kind of been thinking about this for a while.

And so when we put two and two together, we realized the starting opportunity was in mattresses because it was a terrible buying experience.

You know, back then you'd have to like negotiate with somebody at a store, like it's a used car or something with these sleazy people with big suits on and other weird things.

But the bigger opportunity we saw was like, there could be a Nike of sleep, right?

There's no brand that really helps you think about when you want to sleep better, both from products, content, services, experiences, and other things.

And it makes it cool.

And I think we were in an era where we were thinking about, you know, now we're finally in rest and relaxation mode where like people prioritize that, right?

We sauna and cold plunge and exercise and other things, but that era was just starting back then.

So I'd say it was a bit of both.

What does your dad think about the company he loves it now although when i told him i was dropping out of med school to start it he thought i was insane obviously well thankfully some of this sleep research since then has become more mainstream i mean i think we've all heard don't eat right before bed don't use your screen right in your eyeball before bed you know get eight hours all that stuff first of all are any of those insights correct?

Yeah, so I'd say most of them are correct.

So here's the thing.

The biggest impact to sleep is actually not really what you do at night.

There are impact factors like cold temperature, your room should be cold, heat and humidity, you want, you know, breathable sheets, that kind of stuff.

But a lot of the impact is what you do during the day.

For me, the biggest impact has almost always been caffeine.

I never realized it that like that three o'clock cup of coffee that I would have to keep me going, I was going to feel it, you know.

all the way until three o'clock in the morning because I'm a slow caffeine metabolizer.

And I didn't realize that until I got the genetic testing done.

So, I'd say it's a lot of impact is actually what happens during the day.

And most people don't really think about that because during the day, you're thinking about whatever it takes.

But the problem is, if you don't make the investment during the day, then you get into this like doom spiral of sleep, which is that you're tired all day, which means used.

And then you watch TV at night or you have a few drinks, you stay up late, you don't sleep well, which means the next day you need more caffeine and you eat like crap, and then you stay up late.

And so, you kind of never break out of the cycle.

This is as I'm zipping my coffee.

I mean, it's 1:22 in in the afternoon.

It's not yet three, but still.

Okay.

Maybe two o'clock.

We're done.

That's my cutoff.

There's been a lot of weird stuff, though, come out lately, like the mouth tape thing, you know, people literally taping their mouths shut to encourage breathing through their nose, I guess, sleeping better.

When you were doing research for the book that you co-wrote on sleep, were there any tips like that, like weird tips that surprised you?

One of the weirdest things is actually sleeping in separate beds from your partner.

So it's something that we learned is very common in Germany, for example, where people often will sleep in two twin-size beds with different comforters, different beds that are essentially together but separate, which is weird because I would never do that.

But apparently, people love it and it has been shown to improve sleep pretty dramatically because you're not like kicking the other person at night.

You can kind of have your own temperature control and whatnot.

What it does for your relationship, I don't know, but it definitely honey.

Did you hear that?

Did you sleep well the night before Casper IPO'd?

No, terribly.

terribly.

I mean, it's a, it's a huge thing.

Did you sleep?

I think it was, you know,

my best analogy was it was like sleeping, like how much I slept the night before I took the SATs, which is going to sound so nerdy, but I was so nervous.

How often did you check the stock price, be honest?

The day of

every, you know, 10 minutes, because you think about it a lot.

And then at some point, you just have to turn it off because the problem is it can become this like obsessive thing where

like the hard part is like you work on something for such a long time and then you do it for the mission.

But I think most people would be lying if they didn't think about the financial, you know, success of it at all.

And then all of a sudden it's like all of your life's work has been reduced down into one number, you know, and that number is actually not reflective of it.

of all the amazing things that are going on within a company.

And so it is a little bit of like a mental twist, you know, and I've talked to many friends who have run public companies and it's, it's definitely stressful to see that because

also when you run a public company, you can't really talk about all the stuff that's going on in your company because it's, you know, not, it's non-public information.

And so for all of your friends and everybody that you know, the only thing that people see on the outside world is often your stock price, but all day long, you're living something totally different.

And so that was, that was really the adjustment that I had to make.

What do you think the most important number is if it's not the stock price?

I think the most important number is probably NPS, or like, are your customers happy?

NPS, just because we're in a jargon zone.

Oh, yeah.

Net promoter score.

So it's basically, you know, the number that we use to figure out, are your customers happy?

The key question is just like, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?

And it's an imperfect measure, but it helps you get a sense of, are you doing a good job or not, right?

That's generally a scale of one to 10.

And if you report a low number on that, it's a good proxy for like, I don't like this company.

They suck, right?

They don't treat me well.

The product's not great.

But it kind of captures a lot of things into one metric that you can,

I would say, softly look at over time.

Like, are you trending in the right direction or not?

What's the stock price right now?

We went private.

So that's $0.

How nice is that?

It's a great day.

Yeah.

What are the emotions around that?

Because it feels like when you're a bibbi entrepreneur, going public is like the end all be all.

And then you get there and you're like, holy shit, this is like a financial colonoscopy every day.

I mean, this is what I've heard from other entrepreneurs who have taken their companies public and regretted it and then have, you know, potentially gone through similar processes of taking it back public, which can be heavenly in some ways because you don't need to, you know, go through

said colonoscopy.

It's way less fun.

than people think it is.

I think that it's definitely glorified in terms of this is the thing that everybody should be doing and that you should aspire to.

And, you know, we see photos of the New York Stock exchange everywhere and that like you want to go ring the bell and like don't get me wrong all those things are really cool right taking a photo up there really cool having a stock price pretty cool i would say the level of accountability and responsibility that comes to having public shareholders is insane right and the what it does to change your business how much you can talk about what you're doing externally changes

your relationships with other people change your employees start looking at the stock price and i think also like the cool cool thing about being private is that like, like we talked about with the stock price, when you're private, your entire existence doesn't often get reduced into one number, right?

And there's a much richer story that you can tell about who you are and what you're doing, what your story is and whatnot.

And so, yeah, it's not all it's cracked up to be.

So entrepreneurs who take sleep really seriously tend to also be interested in biohacking.

I've seen some of your musings as of late.

First, before we double click on it, can you just define what biohacking means for anyone who might not know?

Yeah, so biohacking

can mean a lot of things, first of all, but to me, it means making changes in your life using either things that you're doing externally or internally to impact your health.

So, tactical example could range from I'm using red light therapy to either improve the quality of my skin or change something about my circadian rhythm.

To some people, it means eating a very specific diet, like Brian Johnson, eating a very very specific blueprint yeah mush diet to some people sauna and cold plunge has become very popular and so i would say it's basically any intervention you take that's trying to impact your body somehow so entrepreneurs are specifically obsessed with this now you mentioned brian johnson who famously spent two million bucks on medical interventions and all sorts of weird stuff like electromagnetic pulses on his penis to make it younger and all weird weird stuff

um You know, why do you think entrepreneurs specifically are so obsessed with biohacking?

I have a couple of ideas, but I'd love to hear yours.

Oh, I think it's control.

What I mean by the control thing is that when so much of the world is out of your own control, I think biohacking feels like, wow, I can do something and then I see a direct input into what's happening into me, or at least what I believe, right?

And when you're often running a company, it feels like things are out of your control all the time right the market could be changing you have employees you have other things.

I might be projecting a little bit here, but my hypothesis would be that it's like a very direct thing that people can do and see some output on the other side.

And I think the other thing is, you know, people who start companies are often experimenters.

And so we're down to try crazy things on ourselves.

And so there's a range of that, obviously, from, you know, sauna to some people injecting themselves with crazy things that come from animals that are probably not FDA approved and whatnot.

But we're probably like a little bit more on the radical side than most people.

I mean, there there's a lot of money going into this with a handful of dudes for the most part.

Oracle's Larry Ellison reportedly spent $330 million

on aging and age-related diseases.

Bulletproof's David Asprey wants to live beyond 180 years old and is spending all sorts of money to do that.

What companies do you think are doing interesting things that you would try?

Or has any of this stuff been democratized to a place that regular folks can try it?

Yeah, it's a good question.

I mean, my go-to ones are often just around sleep.

So, you know, the aura ring is wonderful.

Like, one of the key problems with sleep is how can, and it's the same problem in business.

How can you impact something that you don't measure?

Right.

What we used to do is just like wake up and get a sense of like,

I feel kind of tired or I feel kind of stressed.

And I think what's amazing is that now you can look.

and see, oh, it's because even though you were in bed for eight hours, you only slept five hours and 32 minutes, or maybe you only got 42 minutes of deep sleep.

And so you can think about, okay, what does that mean and what should I do about it?

The second to that is either getting a gym membership where you can go sauna or getting one of those sauna blankets or doing something.

I've seen remarkable results from people using the sauna more frequently.

I mean, the studies on all-cause mortality are incredible in terms of the expansion in.

in lifespan for people who sauna multiple times a week.

The other benefit to it is that even if all the science doesn't work about the long term, most people just feel amazing afterwards.

And so I think there's some real value to that too.

And like, you know, what's the cost of heat?

There's plenty of ways to get it that's not that expensive.

True.

You don't need a fancy infrared sauna to do that.

You can just go to the desert, go outside on a hot day, take a hot bath, whatever.

I am no health expert, but I do want to get your thoughts like bullish or bearish on a couple of things that have gotten some pause lately.

Ambrosia is a company that offers young blood transfusions for $8,000.

Are you bullish or bearish?

Bearish.

All right, pass.

That's, I think, where they take blood from a teenager or something and then put it in your body.

Here's the thing.

It might work.

The reality is I'm sure people feel better, right?

The question is, what level of risk do you want to take and how much money do you have, right?

Like we also know IVs, for example, when you get them, are they really doing anything that's different than drinking four Gatorades in a row?

Not really, but it seems like it's like expensive pee.

Yeah, but you know, the placebo effect is really powerful.

Like if you're really hungover or you're, you know, not feeling great, that big yellow bag makes people feel somehow better than drinking four Gatorades.

And so like, does getting the blood of a

young, you know,

healthy person who hits the gym 18 times a week feel good to some people?

I'm sure, right?

They probably feel superhuman afterwards, just like when you put on a pair of Nike sneakers that the marathoners use to run a two-hour marathon, you suddenly feel like you can run faster.

Yeah, we're sleeping a casper mattress.

All right.

What about data mining your own DNA?

There's a company, Health Nucleus, that will do this for $25,000.

They'll map your whole genome for early detection of diseases, bullish or bearish?

Would you do that?

I have done a lot of data mining of my genome.

I have not done the health nucleus one, but I would say bullish on this idea of using your genetics to impact your life.

There's a few other tests that are way cheaper, starting with 23andMe, which most people have done at this point.

You can actually export that data and put it into a bunch of other services.

There's a one called 3x4 genetics that I don't have an affiliation with, but is really cool, where

now you can actually start to see based on your genetics, how should you eat?

Now, I think that's super interesting because you can actually make tactical changes.

So for me, for example, I've always had high cholesterol.

It's run in my family for a long time.

And I was always thinking and told by doctors, well, maybe you should try the keto diet.

And so I tried the keto diet for a while.

And often the keto diet is like, oh, we'll have lots of coconut oil and ghee and other things and cheeses.

But it turned out that from my nutrogenomics panel, for me, saturated fats are deathly.

My body cannot process them.

And so actually.

The reason my cholesterol was so high for such a long time was because I was having all these saturated fats, which is what I was told to eat by other people.

Yeah, there's some cheaper ones that will do like food sensitivity things.

I was really surprised by some of my results.

Like, I can't have sugar and fruit together or something.

And I was like, whatever, I'm not going to have sugar and fruit together.

Who does that?

But then I was like, I love cobbler and pies.

And like, of course, I put sugar and fruit together.

You know, a fruit tart.

Yeah.

All right.

Anti-aging super pills.

This is interesting because there's a company that will do this for 50 bucks a month.

Basically, instead of taking a big handful of a bunch of different supplements, they'll consolidate it into

one or two pills.

Bullish or bearish?

I'd say bullish if it has the key things that help you actually take it.

So the number one thing that makes a difference is adherence, right?

Like if you don't take your vitamin D, it's going to have no impact on you.

If you don't take your fish oil, it's going to have no impact on you.

And so if it gets you to do it, great.

If those pills are just sitting there on the counter because they're still like in these beautifully wrapped one-off packages, but you don't take them, makes no impact.

For sure.

brain drugs like nootropics very bullish yeah why so i take these supplements from thesis all the time which i love i'd say that it's one of the few areas where i really do believe you can get impacts to cognition to focus to memory i mean the nootropics really got popular in the last five or ten years i've personally taken them i have seen huge benefits and i also think that like right now there's this craze where a lot of people are getting diagnoses for things like ADHD or other, you know, disorders where the first call to action is often to take stimulants or other prescription medications.

And I actually think that nootropics could be for some people, right, a much easier kind of glide path on the way in to see how you feel versus just jumping onto the more aggressive stuff.

How about fasting meal plans like Prolon or just sort of fasting, bullish or bearish?

Very bullish.

So every year I do a five-day water fast, which is going to sound insane because it is kind of insane.

Where for the first two days, you feel terrible and you're grumpy and you want to, you know, it's awful.

And then come days like three and a half to five, it's like you're inside of the matrix.

Yeah.

I feel fucking invincible.

I've done it and I wanted to kill myself.

And then I was like, wait a minute, why do I ever eat food?

It's so stupid.

Exactly.

You're like, what?

I can suddenly speak Portuguese or something, you know,

you know, should you do it for that long?

How frequently should you do it?

I think those are all things that we have to figure out.

I'm probably more bullish on doing extended fasting rather than doing intermittent fasting.

Like there was this whole IF craze for a while where everybody was doing like, you know, I only eat in the eight hour window or a four hour window every day.

And most recently, a lot of the functional medicine doctors have switched away from recommending that to everyone because of fears of muscle loss.

But look, I mean, there's some ancient science here, right?

Like, why do most of the world's religions recommend fasting in one way or another, right?

I think it's because we've known for a long time it's probably good for us.

Hold on to your wallets.

Money rehab will be right back.

And now for some more money rehab.

Well, okay, so you said the main explanation potentially for why

entrepreneurs are really, really obsessed with biohacking is control.

What was yours?

Why do you think we need to ego?

Okay.

Yeah.

Similar.

I mean, Brian Johnson isn't spending millions of dollars to give access to medical interventions to like President Biden or Malala Yousafzai, right?

I mean, these medical interventions are so expensive, but they're out of reach for so many people.

And I think there's a little bit of narcissism involved if an entrepreneur is thinking that they can just be one of the few that gets access to this superstellar medical care right now.

Okay, I get it.

Can I offer another perspective, though, as well?

So.

I think that's probably true, but I also think that they're the people willing to run the experiments on themselves.

And those things end up sometimes trickling down into pop culture a bit more, right?

Because the thing is, like a lot of biohacking, some of it's very expensive, don't get me wrong, right?

But like some of these interventions are not that expensive, right?

There are some supplements that can help you that are not that expensive.

Going to a sauna, like that's been a common part of our culture for a long time.

But like the pharma companies have basically and the NIH and like our entire system have oriented basically all of medical care to be either fee for service, I pay for a doctor's visit, or

I'm taking a drug and there's no other interventions, right?

And so I think what's going to happen is that like, maybe these people are running experiments on themselves because the NIH is not doing tons of studies on like the impact of sauna on, you know,

public health.

And maybe we'll get more downstream impacts from those people talking about it more publicly.

Like, yeah, the stuff Brian does is crazy, but like, if people eat slightly less meat, for example, like is the blueprint health diet the perfect diet?

I don't know, but do you think if most people ate less fried chicken and slightly more food like that, would they be healthier?

I think the most people would say probably, yeah, it's probably good for people.

So you're saying right now it'd be altruism, but there's like some good that comes from being a guinea pig for the rest

of society.

Another explanation potentially is that entrepreneurs are so committed.

to the optimization of everything, their lives, their businesses.

And so they want optimization with their bodies as well.

I mean, this, the Tim Varris kind of started this fire with four hour body and four hour work week before that.

What do you think about that idea?

I think that's right.

Yeah.

I mean, especially this whole generation of people, right?

So for example, like e-commerce entrepreneurs, what are they really good at?

It's like AdWords buying and like optimizing your click-through rates and user flows.

And so like, it's a very natural extension that we go from optimizing every part of our business into optimizing ourselves.

That makes sense.

Sure.

I mean, I know a lot of entrepreneurs, you probably do too, who bring optimization to their personal lives.

They use Monday.com project management software to track their mental health trends or OKRs for their relationships.

Have you bought into any of those business tools or behaviors and brought them over to your personal life?

I'd say the biggest impact to me, though, was on my finances starting to use this app called Copilot.

I don't know if you've ever heard of it.

So people used to use Mint and everybody was like, okay, this is cool.

I think the biggest change for me was having a source of truth on what the heck is happening in my life because it's so easy to groundhog and be like, no, I didn't spend $800 on food last week.

Like that's, you know, you could just like forget or like say, you know, crazy things.

And then you look at these things and you're like, what?

Oh my God.

So I would say that's.

probably driven the biggest change because I used to groundhog on these things a lot.

I would just say like, no, I don't want to look at it.

Like, I'll just pretend like it doesn't exist.

And like seeing it and getting in front of it and planning for it has been a big, a big impact for me so you've used business tools to get your personal finances in order like your own spending saving have you automated it have you taken control like when you first made real money did you just think like i've got money like i'm never gonna run out of money we're cool and then not pay attention no i did the opposite personally i went and did two things, one of which I'd recommend and the other I would not recommend.

So I aggressively angel invested.

I've made like 200 investments into other companies, which is cool.

And part of it's like you get to learn a lot and you get to support other entrepreneurs and it's awesome.

But the liquidity on angel investing is really, really long.

And I think you kind of, you don't really think about that.

That way, like when you write a check to invest into a company, first of all, most likely that money's never back, right?

You don't really think about that.

And then secondly, if it ever does, the first companies that I backed like 10 years ago are starting to exit, right?

And so, like, that's a long time to wait to get access to your money again.

So, that's the one where, like, if you're really into it, that's great.

But I think the fact that like everybody wants to, you know, do angel investing, I'd probably think about it.

The one I do recommend is just investing into yourself.

Like, I spend a lot of money on coaches and like therapists and learning of all different sorts.

Like, I'll hire people to teach me, I don't know, anything I can think of.

And I think for

me, that has had the the biggest impact and that's usually what i recommend to most people because it's like if your life is like an exponential curve small changes at every point can dramatically impact you like you know slightly further and further out and so like if there's anything you're going to invest in it's probably much better to invest in yourself and go long on yourself versus going long on just the s p 500 you know yeah you've been listening to money rehab investing in yourself pays most dividends later on duh neil uh you then went back into the entrepreneur game.

After that, you then predicted that a bunch of startups and VCs are going to go out of business.

Why did you say that?

And what do you see for the year moving forward?

Okay, so we're in a liquidity crunch.

And

the problem is that

we had a historic amount of venture capital that entered the ecosystem over the last five years.

Like everybody's cousin has a venture fund.

You know what I mean?

Like a $10 to $50 million fund where they're investing investing in something or other.

So what's amazing about that is that every, you know, a lot of people were able to start companies because you could raise 500K to two and a half million dollars from people.

But the problem is that like, if you hadn't figured out your business model and we've gotten to today, the thresholds for Series A's and Series Bs are way higher than they used to be.

And so what ends up happening is that there's just like not a lot of money left for those companies that are doing okay, but not amazing, unless you're an AI.

If you're an AI, all bets are off, right?

But for a lot of of these companies, the second thing is that we were sold a bill of goods by investors that ended up often not being true, right?

Like, oh, I'm always going to be there for you.

I've got your back.

I've got more money, et cetera.

But I think the reality is like, most of the time, investors aren't your friends, right?

Like, it's your job to manage your business.

It's your job to think about liquidity.

And it was like a little bit of a series of unfortunate events.

Like when the SVB collapse happened, right?

Now all the people that took venture debt from them are struggling because there's no more money to come.

You know, how do you, one, how do you repay that venture debt?

And two, who's inheriting and collecting that money?

Yeah, I think it's going to be a bit of a painful year.

That said, I've shut down companies before and it was really hard.

And the reality is, I think this is just like part of the ecosystem, right?

Like a lot of companies just should shut down.

And I think we should think about them like projects, not like forever entities, where like, if it's not a thing to be ashamed of that you shut something down, right?

It's, it's more of a sign of like, if you see the writing on the wall, you have to decide, am I going to pound the pavement for the next 10 years to make this happen because I'm willing to do anything?

Or do I want to go work on something else?

And I don't think there's anything wrong with either way.

I don't either.

I shut down a company.

It was a financial smartwatch.

I thought it was a brilliant idea and it was so stupid.

And it was painful, but you have to shut it down.

And that is the financial circle of life.

Weander episodes Neil by asking all of our guests for one money tip listeners can take straight to the bank.

What's just one thing that you would leave listeners with about saving, investing, budgeting, running a business, shopping a business now, anything?

The biggest tip I have is set aside money to invest in yourself, you know, and think about, okay, 10% every month I'm going to spend on myself, whether that means going to the gym, hiring a trainer, going to therapy, saving up for school or something.

The compounding gains for that in your life are going to be enormous.

And most people never think about it, right?

They just think, I can't afford it.

But like, if you save for vacations, you should save to invest in yourself.

Money Rehab is a production of Money News Network.

I'm your host, Nicole Lapin.

Money Rehab's executive producer is Morgan Lavoy.

Our researcher is Emily Holmes.

Do you need some money rehab?

And let's be honest, we all do.

So email us your money questions, moneyrehab at moneynewsnetwork.com, to potentially have your questions answered on the show or even have a one-on-one intervention with me.

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And lastly, thank you.

No, seriously, thank you.

Thank you for listening and for investing in yourself, which is the most important investment you can make.