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Dave Asprey
Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle.
Tony Robbins
Crush it. Welcome to part two of my conversation with Dave Asprey, the father of biohacking and the founder of Bulletproof Coffee. In this episode, we dive into the health hacks and daily routines that transformed his life. Dave reveals why exercise won't help you lose weight, why going vegan was his biggest mistake, and why he's been on testosterone since the age of 26. He also breaks down the surprising protocols he follows, including taking over 150 supplements a day. Whether you're deep into biohacking or just curious, this episode offers a rare look into the extreme practices of someone who spent $2 million optimizing his body to live to 180. Before we dive into today's episode, I first want to thank our sponsor, Thera Massage. Their tri light panel has become my favorite biohacking thing for healing my body. It's a portable red light panel that I simply cannot live without. I literally bring it with me everywhere I go and I personally use their red light therapy to help reduce inflammations in places in my body where honestly, I have pain. You can use it on a sore back, stomach, cramps, shoulder, ankle, red light therapy is my go to. Plus it also has amazing anti aging benefits, including reducing signs of fine lines and wrinkles on your face, which I also use it for. I personally use Therassage Trilite everywhere and all the time. It's small, it's affordable, it's portable and it's really effective. Head over to therassage.com right now and use code be bold for 15% off. This code will work site wide again. Head over to Therasog T H E R A s a g e.com and use code be bold for 15% off any of their products. Do you feel that they're still as effective as people thought? Like, do you feel, is there anything else on the market that's coming out that's even more potent that people are not aware of or we're learning more and more.
Dave Asprey
So I started one of the earliest red light therapy companies called True light. It's about 11 years old now.
Tony Robbins
Oh yeah, I remember you. I remember this. How many companies do you have? Let's just start with that now.
Dave Asprey
I think nine.
Tony Robbins
You have nine companies now. So you have a red light company, you have a light company.
Dave Asprey
Actually, I just sold that off to a friend who's running it now. So True Lights. I'm still a shareholder, but I'd, I'm just a shareholder. I don't operate that one. I have TrueDark, these circadian glasses. It's really cool. Andrew Huberman, who was on my show before, he had a show and has done incredibly well and is a great teacher. He just started talking about red light. I'm like, great. TrueDark. We actually filed patents on the specific types of tents to cause people to go to sleep faster. And we published a study in a medical journal on shifts in brain waves from our specific tent. So TrueDark is on my company. Then we've got Upgrade Labs, which is the franchise company that has the AI exercise and recovery.
Tony Robbins
Yeah.
Dave Asprey
30 locations signed. And people can go to ownandupgradelabs.com and you can work with me on it. Like open a biohacking franchise in your neighborhood.
Tony Robbins
So how many are actually open?
Dave Asprey
Nine are open.
Tony Robbins
Nine right now. Okay. Giga one. Upgrade.
Dave Asprey
Upgrade.
Tony Robbins
True Light.
Dave Asprey
We've got Danger Coffee, which is doing great. Wouldn't surprise me if someday we surpassed the coffee sales from Bulletproof.
Tony Robbins
Really?
Dave Asprey
Count on it.
Tony Robbins
Are you guys. Are you guys really doing that well right now?
Dave Asprey
Like, we're not doing that well right now, no.
Tony Robbins
But your trajectory.
Dave Asprey
Well, I know my entrepreneurship.
Tony Robbins
I. I know beyond.
Dave Asprey
Yeah.
Tony Robbins
And you know, you're really good. You're a great. You're the best salesperson I've ever met in my life.
Dave Asprey
Wow. Thank you. You are.
Tony Robbins
You know why? You're a great orator. You know, you can take information and you can really, like, explain it in such a way that people get so hooked in, like, even when. Because you, You. You speak with such a. Not just like, passion about it, but, like, detail. Like, you're so detail oriented. Like, you don't just glaze over it. So people really, like, you're explaining things where people are like, I want to try it.
Dave Asprey
You know where that comes from. I taught for five years.
Tony Robbins
Amazing.
Dave Asprey
@ University of California. Every night for. Or not every night, three nights a week for five years. I taught to learn how to teach and learn how to do public speaking.
Tony Robbins
And great at it.
Dave Asprey
Thank you. The other thing, though, is I do not sell. I teach.
Tony Robbins
And that's it.
Dave Asprey
I am only going to tell you about it if I think it might be helpful for you. And I don't want you to buy any of my stuff unless it's going to be more than worth it for you. And I genuinely mean that. And I have turned down huge amounts of money for doing things that were out of integrity. One investor once offered me a $75 million bribe and I said no.
Tony Robbins
Serious.
Dave Asprey
Would have screwed my existing investors. I don't do that. Literally $75 million in stock options for selling equity. You can guess which company. I'm not going to say it. For selling equity to him at a much lower valuation than it was actually worth.
Tony Robbins
Really.
Dave Asprey
It's one of the reasons that things went a little bit sideways is I.
Tony Robbins
I wouldn't take the money because it's interesting, because I can. If I can be honest with you for a second, I think a lot of people, because you're talking. You talk about a lot of products all the time on social media. People feel like you kind of, like, sell out a little bit, right? You're talking about this random thing and that random thing. And it's like, well, if he's getting paid, he'll talk about it.
Dave Asprey
I have a giant trash can in my house for things people send me that are not worthy.
Tony Robbins
Yeah.
Dave Asprey
So what I do is I only talk about things that work. The world of biohacking has gone from an idea while I'm walking around a mountain in Tibet to a new word in the English language in 2016 to a $20 billion industry. According to industry analysts. In 11 years, I run a conference with more than 100 vendors of the coolest stuff. And I've every single one of them myself. And people like, oh, Dave talks about stuff that works. I'm like, if you don't like it, then don't listen. But my job is to tell you this is possible. This is how it works. This is what it is. And if you have that problem, you probably should try this. Or if you have that goal, it's volume also, right?
Tony Robbins
Like, you get so much volume sent to you and you try so much more than the aver person that you just have more opinion on more things that are in front of your face, basically.
Dave Asprey
And I talk about the hard stuff. Like, I went public, guys, because I was fat. I had a huge amount of skin taken off my face. You can call it a facelift if you want. It was like four facelifts in one, if you're going to call it that. But I could have hidden that. And sometimes, like, I talk about one technology, it would be easier to not talk about it. This is some. With 36 studies behind it. But it relies on a quantum effect that I can't quite understand. But it works.
Tony Robbins
What is it?
Dave Asprey
It's called Leela. And they do things for EMF mitigation. And I've done shamanic training. I can do energy work like half of my work is on consciousness stuff, right? Like the 40 years of Zen things.
Tony Robbins
What is that, by the way? So you need to finish the company. So you have like, you got four more to go.
Dave Asprey
We'll finish that. Sorry, I'm jumping all over the place. But just. So the Lila Quantum thing, it works in study after study after study. But I don't like the idea that a little pendant or a service is going to change blood flow dynamics in the body. But it appears to work. It appears to work personally and in studies. So I'll talk about it. And people are like, dave isn't scientific. The role of science is to find things that work, even if we don't know why, and then to figure it out. So I will talk about it and I'm done. Joe Rogan tried to counsel me. I just don't care.
Tony Robbins
Yeah, you have to just do your own thing and stay in your lane. People like, who will. Like, not everyone's going to love you.
Dave Asprey
That's not what I'm here for.
Tony Robbins
That's not what you're here for. But I want to hear the other companies.
Dave Asprey
The other companies. So we got 40 years of Zen and for 10 years I have been teaching entrepreneurs and celebrities and people like that five day intensive program to have the same brain waves of someone who's meditated for decades like a Zen monk. And it's a quantitative state. People come to Seattle, where our facility is, and they glue electrodes to their head and we teach them a very specific technique that originated from my work all over the world with these lineages, and it lets you turn off triggers permanently. And one of my friends, Craig, went through. He runs a 1200 person company. He came out and he goes, oh my God. All my success as an entrepreneur is because I was bullied in 12th grade and I'm still getting. Or, sorry, in seventh grade, I'm still getting even. And so I've had very successful people come through and I've done six months of my own life on this. The reason I can do nine companies and write the things and just stay present is because I went through and I figured out that probably 75% of my mental capacity was on old alerts from childhood going off. And you can turn this off. So I'm like, how do I scale this? Heavily meditated. My new book, I teach the process that entrepreneurs spend $16,000 on for everyone. And it is a structured meditation. It works better with eeg, measuring your brain waves and when you do that, the things that push your buttons the most they go away. It's not that you just become aware of them. They stop pushing buttons. And I'll give you an example, and this is in the book too. When Bulletproof was coming up, I went on the Joe Rogan show. And he was. It really helped him, like, the coffee changes life is very complimentary and would talk about it quite a lot. I was complimented and grateful. Came back on same thing. But then one of his buddies, where he has equity in the company, decides to copy the Bulletproof products at. And then after that, it was all of a sudden like, dave's a bad man selling snake oil. And my social media went from like, thank you for helping me lose all the weight and just good stuff, to like, you're a bad person. And it really shook me. I'm like, what is going on? And I hired, like, a crisis PR firm and no one knew what to do. And I'm like. And finally, one of the guys on my team who was a convoy commander in Iraq, kind of understands fear response. He's like, dave, you're acting weird, man. You gotta get on this. So I sat down, I did the reset process, this idea of, like, internal inquiry. And it turns out I had an unresolved trauma from first grade that I'd completely forgotten about that I didn't know anything about that was driving my emotional state. So I. I told the teacher that one of the kids was doing something he shouldn't have done. So I was a tattletale. And then the teacher asked the kid, he goes, I didn't do it. Dave did it. And I got sent to the principal's office for doing the right thing. That is injustice. And it really pissed me off, apparently in first grade, and it stuck. So the two traumas that entrepreneurs face the most that ruins their businesses are injustice and betrayal. Most entrepreneurs, in fact, 90% of people. When I'm teaching a classroom full of entrepreneurs, I run the business of biohacking conference. So how many people have had people embezzle? 90% of people. This is betrayal. It hurts. I did the right thing by my employees, and they stole my money. And it. It. It hurts until you do the work and you realize that it doesn't have to hurt. Like, okay, it happened, right? And. And there's a different energetic behind it. And then the injustice thing. I did the right thing. I expected the other person to the right thing. They didn't. Those two things will take you off your game. They will waste your energy, they'll ruin your marriage, they'll ruin your company, and they'll ruin your leadership. So the higher up you go in power, in wealth or in fame, the more likely you are to attract narcissists and sociopaths like moths to a flame. And you better become a Jedi Master at both spotting them and not being triggered by this type of person.
Tony Robbins
Why is that though? You're right. The higher, more successful you become, you do, you do end up. That does happen. You end up like gravitating to those type of personalities more.
Dave Asprey
There's something in Buddhism called the Hungry Ghost Realm of Hell. And they draw it with a bunch of people with distended bellies. Like they're starving and they're surrounded by food, but no matter how much they eat, they're always hungry. And when people have the trauma that causes narcissism, by the way, this is all in heavily meditated, some of the most important things I've ever learned. They're stuck in this. I am not enough. I do not have enough. I have to get it from other people. And it expresses as jealousy and envy. And they want to take it from you because they deserve it. And anyone who points that out has to be destroyed. And this is why if you let someone like that into your organization or even worse into your bedroom, then like everything starts to break. Because they have a false reality, they believe their own. So I teach that there's four kinds of people in heavily meditated and you can categorize them based on are they, what are they? Well, this comes from Lao Tzu's work, who's like the Buddha of China. And my friend Barry Morgolon, who's one of nine living grandmasters, taught me this. And category one, these are win win people. They, when they win, the other party wins. Maybe not the same amount, but they help others, others help them. And like they're, they're very high integrity on that 5% of people. It's a standard curve. Then you have category two people. They're win win most of the time, but they screw up, they have blind spots. But when you tell them you screwed up, they go, oh man, I'm so sorry. How do I make it right? They evolve, they learn, they grow, they take feedback. Those are the only kind of people I will allow in my life.
Tony Robbins
How much percentage of people have that or that?
Dave Asprey
I'm going to guess today it's probably 50 or 60.
Tony Robbins
Okay.
Dave Asprey
But some of them are not very good at that. So you want people who make less mistakes, but you always want people who are willing to own their mistakes. So these are evolving People. Then you have category three people. They're win, lose, and they don't know it. So for them to win, someone else has to lose. And this is the kind of person you can have video of them murdering a room full of people. It's a locked door, they're holding the knife, covered in blood. And you walk in and go, you kill these people. And they go, I couldn't have killed all these people. I'm a good person. And they believe what they're saying. On a lie detector test, reality does not matter to them. And so if you threaten their false reality, they'll start spreading lies and rumors and undermining. And they destroy companies all the time. And when I coach entrepreneurs, every one of them, like, who creates the most drama in your company, they all know who it is, and they don't fire them right now. I made that mistake multiple times. And then category four people, they're win, lose, and they know it. They're sociopaths and psychopaths, and they're the most toxic of all. And you can't spot them because they're expert manipulators. 5%. Just 5%. Amazing 5%. Oh, my God. The problem is, I think with social media, we have more and more of the narcissist type. And so it's our job just to curate our community and our companies to become aware of that. And if you have some of those tendencies, not everyone with some narcissistic tendencies is a narcissist. In fact, to be an executive in business, entrepreneur, you have to have some narcissistic tendencies. It's not a bad thing. It's that you're conscious of them, is when you're unconscious of them, that it's an issue. So understanding this, it creates so much peace for people because, like, that's what happened. I became more successful. So the people who are like, I don't have enough, I need the, like, zombies drawn to you because you made a noise in the Walking Dead. So you've got to have good filters in place. And one of those is not having blind spots because you have triggers because you have old traumas. And that's why I've been able to do what I do. But I've taken a lot of hits along the way.
Tony Robbins
A lot.
Dave Asprey
I had one executive I hired, perfect pedigree, and my plan that year was to lose, I think it was $4 million, and to grow by 40%. And I just raised $30 million in capital so I could do that. And that's a great growth Rate. So every month, every week, yes, we're on track. Yes, we're on track. December 1st, we might lose 5 million, not 4 million. I'm like, that's kind of a miss, but okay. December 31st, oopsie. I lost 28 million.
Tony Robbins
Wow.
Dave Asprey
And I'm like, did you really burn through three years of venture capital and every single week look at me and the board and tell us that it wasn't happening? I don't know what happened. I don't fail. This is a little conversation. I don't fail. Do I know what could happen? I'm like, you were top of your class at Harvard. You had the spreadsheets.
Tony Robbins
You.
Dave Asprey
And this. When we let her go, she looked at me and she said, you should give me more stock options.
Tony Robbins
Really?
Dave Asprey
And I said, why? And she didn't have a reason, but because she. She's good. She'd served. And she ghosted me after that. Never spoke again. And when she interviews for jobs, she says, I wasn't at the company when she was there. And I think she believes that.
Tony Robbins
Are you serious?
Dave Asprey
100% serious. I know, because people she's interviewed who are friends will call me and go, did you know this? I'm like, it's okay. This is how people are when they're really, like, in their thing, right? This kind of thing happens. This is why you check references and you check them and you check them. Because if you're a good reader of people, if a person believes their own lives, you won't spot it. You can't. So these are some big lessons that I've learned. And I would not have been able to weather being fired from my own company. I consciously uncoupled, had a very copacetic divorce. I moved countries. I had another employee, embezzled some money, just one thing after another. And I handled all of that in a way that I don't think I could have done had I not done all this deep personal work. The spiritual journeys just alongside that, becoming physically. Well, rewriting my response to stress and threats. And 40 years is in is behind that. And it's helped so many entrepreneurs just be able to not lose their mind in a board meeting. Because one of the things that we recognize is congruency. So we've all been in a meeting with someone, and we know they're pissed off, and they're like, I'm not pissed off. Right? And, you know, and then they're acting, you know, their interstate's like, I want to kill you. And their outer state's like, thank you for your time. So at least we're behaving. We're not like going into savagery, which is what would happen if we didn't behave right. But it's very different.
Tony Robbins
But it's fake.
Dave Asprey
It's fake and we know it. But it's very different if in that same situation, if someone's acting out and you're the leader in the company and you notice the acting out and it doesn't move your nervous system even a little bit, and you're just aware of it, and you can look at them and you can say, are we done? You're not bad. And they're like, oh, shit. My acting out didn't do anything. I don't have any power from misbehaving. Right. And so it turns out the lower someone is on category two, the more narcissistic or the more sociopathic they are, the more they feed off triggering you. If you cannot be triggered, you are not narcissist food. That's why this book is so important.
Tony Robbins
I understand what you're mean. I see the full circle there. Okay, so. But like that 40. That 40 years of Zen, though, that sounds like a really good program for a lot of people. I'd like to try that myself.
Dave Asprey
Come on up. It takes five days. It's intense. And about a year ago, we partnered with a medical provider who comes in and can layer ketamine therapy on top of it. So it's the world's first psychedelic assisted neurofeedback program.
Tony Robbins
That sounds amazing.
Dave Asprey
Yeah. And it's. How do you rewire your brain so that you make better decisions? You're more conscious and more present. Oh, and get this. In April, I think, April 12, in Austin, we're doing a biohacking and consciousness day where I'm bringing in Victor Chan, who writes the Dalai Lama's books, and several other leaders in consciousness and meditation were doing a day of biohacking and consciousness.
Tony Robbins
Wait, I just was invited to a biohacking conference in April in Austin.
Dave Asprey
Oh, that's probably one of the ones who's trying to copy mine.
Tony Robbins
Yes. Not yours, mine's.
Dave Asprey
Let's see, mine is May 28th. This is the first.
Tony Robbins
Oh, yeah. Different. This is a guy from England.
Dave Asprey
Yeah, we'll see what happens there.
Tony Robbins
Do you know who I'm talking about? Oh, yeah, yeah.
Dave Asprey
I used. By the way, I used to own half that conference before he violated every line in the contract with me.
Tony Robbins
What do you mean you own that conference?
Dave Asprey
My team launched that conference for him and he violated Every line of the contract. So I sent him an Astogram legal letter and gave him his equity back. He moved it to Austin because I lived there. At least that's what he told people.
Tony Robbins
Because he was doing it in England.
Dave Asprey
Oh, yeah, no, they know I live in Austin.
Tony Robbins
So you mean you're. It's not your conference, but you owned a piece of that conference?
Dave Asprey
I did. I launched the conference for him. Yeah, we were. We were business partners. And then he violated, like, every line of this crazy email. And it's funny, in the email, he's like, yeah, I did all those things, but it's your fault. I'm like, yeah, I know this pattern, Category three. So I stepped away from that. But, yeah, it's in Austin because I live there. And I'm not saying that because I believe it. I'm saying that because he told three people who are friends that. And I'm okay with it. Like, all right. Because try it. We'll see what happens.
Tony Robbins
Wow. Oh, my gosh.
Dave Asprey
By the way, if you go to biohackingconference.com, we'll have 4,000 people, 100 plus vendors. Joe Dispenzos on stage.
Tony Robbins
When is that one? May20.
Dave Asprey
May 28th.
Tony Robbins
Oh, my gosh.
Dave Asprey
Bioackenconference.com. let's see, we've got Joe. We've got James Nestor from Breath.
Tony Robbins
Oh, yeah, I love him.
Dave Asprey
He's a great guy. So good.
Tony Robbins
That's a great one. Oh, I want to go to that one.
Dave Asprey
This is the thing that launched the biohacking movement. But yeah, there's actually like eight conferences around the world around the biohacking movement, and we need. It's a global thing, so I'm partnering with some conferences overseas to do that. Makes sense just to work with them. Like, I. It's not like I own biohacking. I started this, and I did not trademark it because I want it to be a societal movement. I'm just the founder and leader of it. So.
Tony Robbins
Because there's so many biohacking conferences. There's so many.
Dave Asprey
Yeah.
Tony Robbins
And so. But yours. When is. Because I know you have a big one in LA all the time, but that's.
Dave Asprey
We moved it from la.
Tony Robbins
Oh. So it's not here anymore. So now that's the one that's in. Like you're saying in Austin in May 20th, May 28th.
Dave Asprey
It's three days. And it. It's. It's a big deal. It feels like CES now. It's such high production.
Tony Robbins
It's big.
Dave Asprey
Yeah. 4,000 people. We're filling up the Fairmont and overflowing it.
Tony Robbins
I'm telling you, like the amount of stuff that. Okay, so how are. I didn't even. I feel like we didn't even get over your day in the life, your habits and hustle. Okay, what time do you wake up? Give me your whole situation.
Dave Asprey
The earlier you go to bed, the better off you are.
Tony Robbins
What time do you go to bed at night?
Dave Asprey
Well, I go to bed around 10, 10:30.
Tony Robbins
Okay. Not crazy.
Dave Asprey
Not crazy for all of my life until I was a about 40, I went to bed at 2am I've been a night owl and I couldn't go to bed earlier. And I fixed it by hacking my circadian biology. The reason I started Trudark, the red glasses. If you wear those, not just any red, this is for optical filter, but the truedark glasses for sleep. If you wear those every night for two hours before bed, you can shift your circadian window. I don't get jet lag anywhere on the planet when I use the color of light properly. So I fix my sleep. I go to bed like a normal person now for the first time in my entire life. So I go to 10, 10:30.
Tony Robbins
Wow. Okay.
Dave Asprey
If I do go to bed, then I'm going to wake up around seven hours later.
Tony Robbins
Okay.
Dave Asprey
I get six and a half hours of sleep on average per night. I just don't need more than that and I don't want more than that. And I'll wake up without an alarm. The people who live the longest get six and a half hours of sleep a night, not eight hours a night.
Tony Robbins
Really?
Dave Asprey
Study of three million people over three years. All cause mortality is lowest at six and a half hours a night.
Tony Robbins
Why?
Dave Asprey
Because healthy people need less sleep.
Tony Robbins
Is that right?
Dave Asprey
Yeah.
Tony Robbins
That's so interesting. Yeah.
Dave Asprey
Probably different for men and women. On average, women do need more than men and that's a real thing. But the data in that study wasn't broken out that way.
Tony Robbins
That is so interesting.
Dave Asprey
And there's two other studies, large scale studies besides the first one, that say the same thing. So the idea of eight hours a night, it's a myth.
Tony Robbins
Where did it come from?
Dave Asprey
That study? They collected data in the 80s. It was a very large amount of data. It was so much data that no one could process it. And someone dusted it off sometime in the early 2000s and ran it through proper computers and was like, oh my God, look at all this. And since then it's been confirmed twice.
Tony Robbins
Interesting.
Dave Asprey
If you wake up and you feel rested and good to go. And your heart rate variability is there. And you only got seven hours of sleep. Good for you. Regularly. Like, tens of thousands of people have reached out over the years saying, damn, I. I went on the bulletproof diet. I started biohacking. I need an hour less sleep. Is that normal? I'm like, yeah, welcome to being healthy.
Tony Robbins
That's amazing. Do you wear a mouth tape? Do you wear, like, a weighted eye mask? What is your.
Dave Asprey
I put a bite guard in. This is critically important if you're going to live a long time over. As you age, your molars wear down, and it changes the angle of your jaw, which screws up your whole nervous system. Those were my first 10 podcasts, like, 14 years ago.
Tony Robbins
Really?
Dave Asprey
Yeah.
Tony Robbins
It screws up your nervous system if you don't wear a mouth guard.
Dave Asprey
Yeah. Because if the angle of your jaw changes, it changes the pressure in your trigeminal nerve, which is right next to the vagus nerve. So the inflammatory cytokines from the trigeminal go to the vagal nerve, which controls rest and digest and fight or flight. And if you want to live a long time, maintain the height of your molars. And you do that by wearing a bite guard at night. I had to, like James Nestor did, who's speaking at the conference. I had to expand my upper palate, bring my lower jaw down forward, and raise the height of my molars for my nervous system to work right. Because we have malnutrition of mothers in large part from all these grains and all the other things. A lot of kids are born with a crowded palate and teeth that don't fit. So your nervous system will never work right until you fix it. That was a big shift for me.
Tony Robbins
So you were. You wear, like, a mouth guard.
Dave Asprey
I wear a mouth guard, and I tape my mouth. I've been doing that for six, seven years.
Tony Robbins
Okay.
Dave Asprey
Even my teenage daughter, she saw me, can I try it? And after three days, she goes, I'm doing this every night. I don't have bad breath in the morning. I don't have dry mouth. I sleep better. So it's really just a little piece of tape right here. I do that.
Tony Robbins
Oh, so you don't wear the one that goes this like, you wear it this way?
Dave Asprey
I usually wear it this way because then if you need to breathe through the side of your mouth, you can. You just want to make it so that when you're asleep, your mouth is held closed. And the difference in outcomes for sleep and brain health, it's. It's Profound.
Tony Robbins
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Dave Asprey
My bed is electrically grounded so I drop the static charge that builds up during the day. I wear the truedark glasses for sleep about an hour before bed or when I'm home. My entire house has dim red lighting that I turn on at night so it looks like a submarine or a house of ill repute. And really, this is the coolest thing. My my girlfriend didn't do any of this stuff and we walked through LAX two nights ago because we landed at 10 o' clock and she was wearing her true dark glasses too and I didn't make her do it. She. She's like, can I do that? Because you feel so much better when you have darkness at night. It's unbelievable. So yeah, I go to a hotel room, I travel a little red light and I turn off all the bright lights and I turn on my red light and then I have an environment where my body knows it's nighttime so I should go to sleep. So light's important. Electrical grounding is important. I do a handful of stuff like supplements before I go to sleep.
Tony Robbins
What supplements are you taking at night?
Dave Asprey
I take like 40 of them at night. Yeah.
Tony Robbins
Besides magnesium.
Dave Asprey
Yeah, take magnesium. I take a sleep formula with a bunch of herbs in it. I take Lately I've had some GABA I'm playing around with. I'm just going through. I have some stuff that increases activity in parts of the brain, some stuff that affects glial cell and neurons. I do lion's mane because it improves dreaming that I'd have to go like. I have a whole spreadsheet of all this stuff, but it's a handful every night.
Tony Robbins
Okay.
Dave Asprey
And there's also nighttime is a great time to absorb minerals. So one of the fundamental things for human performance and longevity is minerals. So I take minerals 101, which is one of the formulas I make. That's a nighttime thing. And then you have enough minerals in order to go through the entire night and just. You can't fold proteins if you don't have the ingredients to make the enzymes that do it.
Tony Robbins
Do you take NAD like True Niagen or.
Dave Asprey
I do. I have been using NAD or nad precursors for 15 years now, since the first studies came out. And I take a variety of them. I've used Truniagen, I've had them on the show. I have used the Qualia formula and several others. And as we learn more about NAD, it's becoming really clear when you take NAD, you have to block a cell called CD38. So I do that as well. And there's a variety of things like green tea extract that'll do that.
Tony Robbins
Why do you have to block that?
Dave Asprey
Your CD 38 cells consume between 20 and 26 times more NAD than actually it's an enzyme, not really a cell. So CD38 enzyme absorbs that. And what that means is for the first six weeks after you take an NAD precursor, you get a lot of energy because your mitochondria using it. But then CD38 starts to soak it up. You get more and more CD38, which is pro inflammatory. So you have to block CD38 from stealing your NAD. And you can do that with other supplements or with formulas that have it built in. I just did a whole podcast on this. It's probably up right now.
Tony Robbins
So the thing is on nad, or just. What's that? What's the podcast?
Dave Asprey
It was on nad.
Tony Robbins
How do you remember all of this stuff? That's the thing.
Dave Asprey
Like, this is going to be a fascinating. A fascinating thing about memory. And I will tell you. Give me two seconds and I'll tell you what this episode was, because I recorded it live last week. It was. Okay. I'm not going to spend the time to find it. I'll. I'll figure out what it was.
Tony Robbins
Just everyone look for the. I'll just say, check out the NAD episode. Okay?
Dave Asprey
It's on the. It's on the Human Upgrade.
Tony Robbins
Human Upgrade. Okay, good.
Dave Asprey
And I've done four or five with different scientists on it. It's. It's a fascinating topic. So here's how I remember things. I have studied memory and cognitive function, and I Take cognitive enhancers and all that kind of stuff. And there's two kinds of memory. There's memory about how things work, like semantic memory. And then there's episodic memory, which is when things happened in order. And you can train your brain to do different things. I do not know what day of the week it is right now. I don't care. I have almost no episodic memory because it's irrelevant. I have the before time. If I need to know, I can look it up. That's why I'm. I don't know earlier. And if you ask me what I'm doing tomorrow, I have very, very vague understanding. I just don't care. Because I have built my life. I've built my systems, I have my ea. My time is managed for me. All of my brain is about understanding systems and how things work. And that's partly because I trained it that way.
Tony Robbins
Yeah.
Dave Asprey
And partly because I used to have Asperger's syndrome when I was used to. Yeah.
Tony Robbins
Not anymore.
Dave Asprey
You can resolve Asperger's, you maintain the pattern matching abilities, but you lose the downside of it. I had to retrain how my eyes see, how my tongue moves, how my ears hear, and how my body moves. I'm still working on some functional movement. And I had to retrain my brain to recognize things like faces. It was a lot of work. Most of my 30s were that.
Tony Robbins
How. How did you train?
Dave Asprey
I feel. I guess it's like a whole hour episode.
Tony Robbins
I know. I mean, like, you don't have to tell me, but, I mean, can you say it in like three sentences?
Dave Asprey
Yeah. I'll explain the why. Which will, I think, be the answer to your question. If you have autism or Asperger's a part of the autism thing. Some people don't like the name Asperger's. I don't really care. I don't like whatever their name is either. Sorry, guys.
Tony Robbins
Hilarious.
Dave Asprey
I identify as being triggered right now.
Tony Robbins
Yeah. I love it.
Dave Asprey
Okay, when you have autism like that, there's two things going on. One, your mitochondria don't make enough energy. And two, your nerves, your sensory input, they have static on them. So when you're a little baby, you're trying to make sense of the world, like, is that light important or not important? Is that vibration and that sound important or not important? And you're like a little large language model, you know, trying to figure out what.
Tony Robbins
Yeah.
Dave Asprey
What's good, what's not. But when you don't have enough power for your Central processor, which is the mitochondrial problem. And there's static on everything. The brain becomes hyper efficient, but it ignores a huge amount of the data because it can't sort it out from the chaos, from all the static. So there's static in your eyes. I didn't have peripheral vision. I did not know how to see peripherally until I was in my 30s. And I worked with developmental ophthalmologist. And I just did an episode with Bryce Applebaum on vision training. And I learned how to see in my peripheral vision because my brain's like, I don't need that data to live. So I was seeing internal vision and I didn't know it right. And my left eye was turned off half the time because it was too much work for my brain to make him go. So the brain will make these incredible sacrifices on your perception of the world just to make sure it can function.
Tony Robbins
So you could turn your eye. You turned your eye back on?
Dave Asprey
Yeah.
Tony Robbins
I could sit with you for three weeks and have more questions. I'm so sorry.
Dave Asprey
It's okay. Here's the basis though. If you can turn the power back on, which is fixing your mitochondria, which is fundamental to the whole bioactive movement, all of a sudden, wow. Now I have a hyper efficient software code and my operating system is meant for low power, but I have tons of power. So now I can really do things that really would be hard to do otherwise. Problem is, I don't have a good signal. So then you have to teach the brain how to clean the visual signal, how to clean the auditory signal. And that had to do with figuring out where the little gaps in my hearing was where it didn't match, and then doing uncomfortable hearing exercises that trained my brain to fill in the gaps in my hearing. And then the tongue, My tongue was glued to the floor of my mouth. I had to have the surgery for that and do a bunch of tongue rehab, which affects your fascia and your whole movement. And I had to, like I said, spread out my palate and move my jaw forward so my nervous system would work. And then I had to learn how to crawl because I never learned how to crawl as a kid because I was reading in 18 months, like this stuff. Most people are never going to do this, but if you want to, you can take a brain that is not neurotypical and you can maintain the gift and you can, you can recover from the downsides. For me in seventh grade, I knew the names of two people in my class in the school year because I couldn't recognize their faces because.
Tony Robbins
Are you serious?
Dave Asprey
Because people are face blind.
Tony Robbins
Yeah. Can you now see faces perfectly?
Dave Asprey
Pretty. Well, I wouldn't say no one's perfect. I think everyone has a little bit of a thing about it, but I actually recognize people.
Tony Robbins
Did you recognize me?
Dave Asprey
I recognize you, yeah. When I came in. Yeah. But if you walked up to me, like on the street at Erewhon, you.
Tony Robbins
Would never recognize me.
Dave Asprey
I probably wouldn't, but here's why. There are hundreds of thousands of people who know me, and they know me because they've seen me and they've listened to me for a thousand hours, and they're going to approach me like their best friend. And even if I had not had Asperger's, it's hard for me to go, okay, I've met tens of thousands of people, and I am like, what database do I sort from for this person? Is it a fan or is it someone I've met a few times? That's hard. But I think that's hard for every celebrity I've talked to.
Tony Robbins
It's hard. But I'll tell you something, it's interesting because I went at that biohack thing that we were at. We were both doing the red carpet, literally right beside each other. You were here, I was here. I had someone talking to me. You had someone talking to you. We were right here. And I looked at you. You looked at me, and you didn't say a word. And I didn't say a word. So I was like, fuck that. And I just walked away. Not because I thought you were rude. Cause I thought to myself, it's also so many things happening. I'm like, I didn't. I recognized you. Because you're right. I see you all the time. Like, you come up on my feed. I've interviewed you for like 20 minutes before. Somewhere at your biohacking. Like, you're much more familiar. I know, for you to me, you know, like, maybe like, someone said my name a couple times or whatever.
Dave Asprey
I recognize your name. And when I know it's you, I'm like, oh, great, I've got it.
Tony Robbins
But it wasn't. The context wasn't there.
Dave Asprey
And also, to be fair, if you're at a gala, totally. Everybody's hair is done. You have wearing, like five pounds of makeup and glamorous dress. You don't look like yourself. I don't look like myself either. Leather jacket or whatever. So people are wearing.
Tony Robbins
You looked exactly the same. But I know that, like, when out of context, you don't know Somebody. It's really hard. But I think I want to ask you. I want to ask you something because I think if anybody, you might have a good answer. My mom was sadly diagnosed with Alzheimer's maybe a month ago. It's really horrible. And so someone like you, because you do all these things and talk to everybody and you can you retain everything. Have you heard of anything that helps people with Alzheimer's? Not necessarily reverse it, but help maintain or let it not progress as quickly. I wrote a whole book on it on Alzheimer's.
Dave Asprey
It's called Headstrong.
Tony Robbins
I didn't even know you had that book. When was that book written?
Dave Asprey
2016 or something? It is. It was on the New York Times bestseller list between Homo Deuce and Sapiens, the monthly science book list. Not the advice on how to book. I hit that one as well. And most of the research on cognitive enhancement comes from Parkinson's and Alzheimer's research. So it goes very deep in it. I was the largest donor to Maria Shriver's Women's Alzheimer's movement.
Tony Robbins
You were?
Dave Asprey
Yeah. And that's because women get it twice as much as men. And my grandmother, who was at Los Alamos National Labs as a nuclear engineer, Ph.D. for most of her career, got Alzheimer's at the end of her life. So, yeah, I care a lot about cognitive function. I'm also at high risk of it because I had toxic mold exposure and all those things like that. So here's the short version. There's an amazing supplement that is called C8MCT oil. You ever heard of it?
Tony Robbins
MCT Oil? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dave Asprey
Well, in phase 2 clinical trials, MCT oil reverses Alzheimer's disease. When I was selling MCT Oil, I wasn't allowed to say that because that would have been a medical claim. So I just got everyone to use it anyway and reduce the incidence of Alzheimer's across the country. Because guess what else does it? Coffee and MCT Oil. Both are anti Alzheimer's. I'm not joking. There's really good science for both of those. But you know what's an even better one? This is also making the rounds. Andrew Huberman just started talking about it about seven years ago or something. I had Dr. Nicotine from Vanderbilt University on the show. I call him that. His name is, I think, Andrew Newhall, if I remember right. So you guys can look it up. Dave Asprey, nicotine podcast, Vanderbilt. And in 1986, he wrote the first paper showing that pharmaceutical nicotine, not smoking, prevents or reverses Alzheimer's disease. Nicotine Is neuroprotective at low doses. In my longevity protocols, you use low dose nicotine to keep the neurons happy and healthy and strong. Did you see me open that little container?
Tony Robbins
Yeah, I did.
Dave Asprey
That was nicotine.3 milligrams of nicotine. A little chokey that doesn't have artificial sweetener in it. So should you take a low dose, like 7 milligram patch of nicotine and put it on your mom? Hell yeah. And then give her, I don't know, maybe some danger coffee with some MCT oil in it or pour it in her wheaties if that's what she'll eat and watch the conversation you have. A half hour later, she will come back. I would do this with my grandmother. I wouldn't do the nicotine. Actually, I should have, but I didn't see her that much. But just with the mcts, she would tell me about capturing. Was it capturing neutron. No, not neutrons. What were they capturing in wax? Protons? I don't know, some kind of subatomic particle under the bleachers in Chicago, on the Manhattan Project. When she would have her mct. And when she didn't have mct, she would watch infomercials. Totally different brain. Yeah. So those would be nicotine, MCT coffee. And then you've got to look at toxins, heavy metals and toxic mold. In my book, I actually said these are causes. Not the only causes, but some of the causes of Alzheimer's. And, oh, maybe two years later, Dr. Dale Bredesen comes on my show. Very well studied doctor credentials, all the above. And he has a book called the end of Alzheimer's. And he says, straight up, here's the evidence that toxic mold and toxic metals cause Alzheimer's. I'm like, hallelujah, Finally, a doctor's agreeing with this stuff because it's so important. So you get your mom a test for these things, and then you do the protocols that restore mitochondria. And unless she's pretty far gone, of course you can reverse it. Dr. Dale Bredesen has reversed people over and over and over with his protocols. And yes, they involve things like the ones I just talked about. So you have to know why it happened and what it was. But Alzheimer's, unless it's very, very far advanced, it is reversible. You're just not going to get that information from your insurance company. That's not their business.
Tony Robbins
Right. And so the nic. That's so the nicotine. Can she take what you just did?
Dave Asprey
The she could if she'll suck on A mint. You can get a spray, but you have to buy that outside the country and have it shipped in because the FDA hasn't approved the spray. That's approved in every other country for 20 years. But the patch usually works because it's less of a jolt. And you just put it, you know, ribs, arm, and then it just absorbs over 24 hours.
Tony Robbins
What type of patch would you recommend, though? Is there a particular one Nicorette usually make?
Dave Asprey
No, not. Sorry. Nicorette's the. The spray.
Tony Robbins
I don't know. Nicorette's the. I think it's the patch.
Dave Asprey
No, Nicorette is the little lozenges and stuff like that. And they always have bad sweetener. Nicorette's like the worst brand you can get. Lucy Chew. Lucy, I think it's called. But Lucy gum is. They have some of their flavors have no bad sweeteners. And I'm an investor and advisor in them. They were the first, like, clean nicotine company. And I'm like, this is a cognitive enhancing substance. Smoking's bad. Nicotine is different. So you could get some of that. They make like, mints or gum. And then there's a transdermal thing. I'm seeing the name of the label in my brain right now. It's like an orangish color that you stick on. Just go to the drugstore and say, patches. Don't buy the generic ones. They suck. Buy the name brand ones.
Tony Robbins
The name brand ones.
Dave Asprey
Yeah.
Tony Robbins
Okay. Finish your. I can. I know we're like, I don't know how long it's been, but I didn't even talk to you about Maha, rfk, fda.
Dave Asprey
Love all that stuff.
Tony Robbins
Like, that's like what I. That literally was what I was going to start this podcast with, and we haven't even gotten there. So that sucks, because I really wanted to talk to you about all that stuff.
Dave Asprey
Wow. I. I've. If we can just do a really brief thing there. I'm not a political person. I believe that if voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.
Tony Robbins
Yeah, they should.
Dave Asprey
Well, and I don't say that lightly. When I was 18, still being on the spectrum, I'm like, I studied all of the ballot measures. I met all the people I was going to vote for. I finally get to vote, and I made the mistake of tracking results. I'm like, oh, my God. Everyone who I voted for who won did the opposite of what they promised to do. And the ballots are all garbage. And like, this is dumb. Why am I spending a hundred hours on this like a good citizen. And then as a computer hacker, we know who hacked which elections how. And it's been happening probably since, I think, 1994.
Tony Robbins
Are you serious?
Dave Asprey
Yeah, absolutely. Like the election with Kerry.
Tony Robbins
Oh, yeah.
Dave Asprey
There's a Rutgers statistics professor, he's like, isn't it weird? Every county that has the unsecured vote tallying machines, you can access by dial in modem the way hackers like me do. In those counties, 90% of Democrats voted Republican. But in the county next door, strangely, most Democrats vote Democrat like the rest of the country. And the odds of it being, you know, statistically happening randomly are like one in a trillion or something. This is clear evidence of election hacking that swung a presidential election. And what they did, they called the professor and asked them to shut up. And they asked Kerry after six weeks to stop contesting it because it would destabilize his country. And he took one for the team, by the way. I'm not partisan. I don't think it matters who's in charge. The government wants more power, they're going to get it one way or the other. And I'm okay with that.
Tony Robbins
Yeah.
Dave Asprey
So. But I'm like, if that's happening, why am I spending all my time on voting? So this is my political thing. I sat down. I've never donated any money to any political candidate. I maxed out my donation for RFK because he's not a politician, he's an attorney, an environmental one, and he's consistently behaved the same way. But I still was suspicious and I had dinner sitting across from him for two hours. He's incredibly intelligent. His memory is better than mine because he remembers time better than I do and people place his time and he talks about mitochondria. And if anyone on earth is going to enter that role with integrity, I think it's him. I could be wrong, but one on one interaction like that, there's. I would say this is my most exciting time I've ever been about anything politically. And already seeing the shocks through the pharmaceutical industry, the regulatory garbage that's been happening at the FDA for a long time to stop longevity from happening in the us why do I have to go to Costa Rica to get stem cells that work?
Tony Robbins
Why?
Dave Asprey
I'd have to go to Dubai. I like Dubai. I'm actually. I have a green card there. I love Dubai. But why would I have to go there? Because American companies are fleeing. Like, he can fix all this stuff. And why would my kids have to eat food that they can't buy at the grocery store. And why do I have to protect their testosterone? All of this we can fix in a small period of time just by using science. So my God, please let RFK keep doing what he's doing. And I he's got my full support, whatever he needs.
Tony Robbins
Did you go to the to the Maha gala?
Dave Asprey
It would have been a good idea.
Tony Robbins
In Washington.
Dave Asprey
I wasn't available. I was double booked. So I didn't go.
Tony Robbins
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Dave Asprey
I'm very interested in it and I've had a few preliminary conversations. So if there's a good role for me, this is the only way I would ever consider entering government. And my, my goal here is I want our kids to be healthier and stronger. My first book was how do we have healthier pregnancies and babies who don't have autism? Because I didn't want my kids to get what I Had and they didn't get it. Even though the mother of my children was infertile when we met.
Tony Robbins
Really? Did you, by the way, vaccinate your children even with like all those years back?
Dave Asprey
Let's see here. That seems like a personal question.
Tony Robbins
It does. Why? You seem to talk about all sorts of vaccinations and it's.
Dave Asprey
We'll say their medical privacy is theirs, not mine. So they're teenagers and they get to decide what they disclose or don't disclose.
Tony Robbins
Okay. So are you a believer of vaccines now?
Dave Asprey
I have always been very concerned because this whole autism thing, and I've interviewed even back in the, in the 90s, I started an autism nonprofit and donated a substantial amount of money to it for my time in the tech world. We know very well that autism in some kids with some genetics is associated with certain injections. It just is. And the people who say it isn't. Well, you're going to bully people who have data you don't like. And I have sat down with guys like Andrew Wakefield, who's been thoroughly discredited, except he hasn't been. He's just been thoroughly canceled. So I would just say that the case for modern vaccine schedules in the US is bullshit. Most of the world doesn't follow that. And we have worse health outcomes. And the data is very clear. Doesn't mean that all vaccines are necessarily bad. The one vaccine that I think is probably worthwhile is tetanus. Not dpt, but just tetanus. I did step on a rusty nail and I did get actual tetanus that kills you. And I was within 12 hours of death. And thankfully I was married to an emergency room doctor who knew what was going on and sent me to the to get the antibodies I needed.
Tony Robbins
Your ex wife was a doctor?
Dave Asprey
She was an emergency room doctor from the Carolinsk Institute, yeah.
Tony Robbins
Oh, wow. Okay.
Dave Asprey
Very, very smart woman.
Tony Robbins
Wow.
Dave Asprey
Okay, so maybe that one. But would I give my kids hpv? I'm pretty sure my kids won't be sexually active by the time that thing wears off. If you give it to a baby, it's dumb.
Tony Robbins
Well, they're trying to give it to you before the age of 15. HPV, the Garden Cell.
Dave Asprey
They're giving it to babies.
Tony Robbins
See, I was at the doctor Yesterday with my 12 year old and the doctor offered it to my 12 year old and I said, no, thank you right now, but if you want it to be effective, you have to do it before the age 15. That's what they said.
Dave Asprey
Yeah, there's a lot of marketing. I. Given what happened with the whole pandemic, at this point, I am far more hesitant to do anything like that. And you got to look at risk. I don't believe in vaccinating for things that don't kill you. Chickenpox. Chickenpox is not a deadly disease.
Tony Robbins
No, I agree with that.
Dave Asprey
And we know how to turn off any lipid encapsulated virus, including chickenpox, herpes, smallpox, monkeypox, all of them.
Tony Robbins
How about polio?
Dave Asprey
Polio is a different animal, but just the pox things. You can take a synthetic oil antioxidant preservative called BHT, take 300 milligrams in a capsule twice a day. It'll dry up. Chickenpox in three days or any other pox, it'll stop shingles. It cost 10 cents. One of my mentors wrote the book on that. It's called something like Stop herpes with bhd. So I'm not worried about chickenpox. It is not a fatal disease. We do not vaccinate for non fatal things. It's dumb.
Tony Robbins
Right?
Dave Asprey
Right. So there's things like that. Polio, if you go deep. And at the beginning of the pandemic, I bought all of the print books on the history of vaccines and pandemics because the electronic ones would get changed. I've got a collection of it. What really happened with polio is they started spraying organophosphate pesticides that cause permeability in the spinal cord so viruses, different viruses, could get into the cerebral spinal fluid. And when that happened, you get polio, like symptoms from the vaccines and the spread of polio? Absolutely. Traces the spread of where they started doing the chemicals. This is a chemical problem, not a viral problem. So do we need polio vaccines? No. How about we spray less chemicals? Let's build highly resilient humans. Turns out measles. If you get measles or whooping cough when you're supposed to get it, it confers lifelong immune benefits where you're less likely to get sick from respiratory diseases and other things. And there is great evidence for this. And measles is not deadly. Yeah, it just isn't. There's all kinds of panic in there, but if you look at the hard data, very, very few kids die from measles. And kids who have basic nutrition, very, very hard for them to die from it. I'm not the only one saying this. There's just. There's entire reams of books written about this. People don't know about them.
Tony Robbins
Right. People are Also, you know, they're scared and they get, they get fear mongering, right? People get scared and so they do something to be preventative.
Dave Asprey
Do you know what is more scary than getting a disease that has a tiny percentage chance of killing you? Having a lifelong, lifelong life of chronic illness. And as a guy who had all the chronic illnesses in my 20s, I'm like, Fuck that, like you're going to try and force me to do something that's going to increase my risk of that, even though I know I already have an increased risk, like over my dead body. And in the world that I live in, if one group or person has a right to force things into your body, against your better judgment, they are granting you the right to do it to them. And I don't think we want a world where high speed lead vaccinations are flying back and forth. But bodily autonomy is, should have been in the Constitution is a fundamental God given right. No agency, no elected official, no insurance company, no doctor, no daddy, no employer. Nobody has that right but you for your body, right?
Tony Robbins
They all, well, they, the first step is of course they eliminated the red dye. What's next?
Dave Asprey
Glyphosate. It looks like he's going to go after glyphosate. And it's funny because the EPA may or may not go after glyphosate, but all the HHS has to do is say, here are the allowable levels of glyphosate contamination in food and when, if you spray glyphosate on wheat at the end of the crop right before humans are going to eat it, if you do that, it no longer becomes sellable, they'll stop doing it and that will change the health of the country so quickly. And if we say, huh, if there's atrazine in the water, it's not allowable. And the big question now is between what is FDA and what is EPA and what is usda. So there's going to be some balancing there. But I think the guy who has control over what's allowed in food, ultimately that's at the top of the food chain, right? Because other people can say, well it's allowed, like it's allowed, but if it's in the food, it's not allowed anymore. So go rfk. And I'm happy to build programs that help kids be healthier. There's so much we can do to, to have kids who don't need ADHD medications because we fed them well at school. Like how cheap is it to put butter, which Kids need. And I can tell you exactly why they need it. Instead of canola oil in their food. If we just did that, what would happen? Magic. So I'm, I'm all in on that. Like, this is a chance to rebuild society so people are more energized. And I know from all of the work I've done, all the books I've written, everything. When we are at our full power, we are wired to be kind to each other. And if we're malnourished and we're exhausted and tired and afraid, we're jerks. And we're programmable. And all my work, biohacking. If you're a biohacker, you program yourself, nobody else. So we're building highly resilient, unprogrammable humans who choose to do the right thing because they want to.
Tony Robbins
Wow, I love that answer. And then just wrap it up with your very quickly, your daily routine. We got the night routine. Kind of just go really quickly in one minute or less. What do you do every day? You wake up at what time? You said six and a half hours. You sleep?
Dave Asprey
I wake up around 6:37, go outside for 20 minutes, get some sunlight in my eyes. If I don't go into upgrade labs, I will do a cold plunge. I may also do either an infrared sauna or I have a hot tub. The government has decided you're not allowed to have a hot tub that's above 104 degrees. That's not hot enough to do anything. So I hacked my hot tub to go to 106 degrees. So it takes me 12 minutes to raise my body temperature to 104. So I get heat shock proteins and then I get in the cold plunge again. So I'll do hot, cold contrast sometimes.
Tony Robbins
But you like the infrared because now there's all this data saying that it's not hot enough that you need to have like a finish, you know, like, like a old school.
Dave Asprey
Well, we don't have data saying that infrared saunas don't work for the stuff from the Finnish studies. We just know the Finnish studies use those. What infrared saunas do is they cause about 95% more toxins to come out of your skin than just a hot saun sauna. So my preference is to have a really hot sauna or a really hot hot tub and an infrared sauna and to do each of them some of the time with some cold therapy. And I'll do that. I have all the biohacking toys from upgrade labs at my house. So I set aside, I Set aside about an hour, hour and a half, and I will do a combination of things to improve my biology that day. I do not do the same thing every day, except I will have my danger coffee in the morning, along with a glass of salt water with some creatine in it and some other electrolytes. And I don't drink water without salt in it ever. And it's absolutely changed my life. I do 8 grams of sodium or more per day, and it is life changing. The idea that lowering salt is good for humans is completely a lie. And I don't just say that lightly. I'm quoting Michael Alderman, the former president of the American Hypertension Society, a medical doctor who studied sodium output in urine of 3,000 people for several years. All the data we have on salt intake is from. How much salt did you think you had? Like, it's nonsense data. So you looked at the real data into the study. Direct quote from a medical professional who really did the work. If you want to live longer, eat more salt.
Tony Robbins
Wow. Okay, so I'm going to.
Dave Asprey
I do that in the morning.
Tony Robbins
Okay, so you just put regular Himalayan salt in there.
Dave Asprey
Himalayan salt. Or I'll use something like an elementi. I make my own blend of electrolytes, but magnesium, potassium, sodium. I'll do creatine. I'll also do 2 ounces of lemon juice.
Tony Robbins
I'm a big creatine person as well.
Dave Asprey
It's important.
Tony Robbins
Most studied.
Dave Asprey
It may hurt your sleep, though.
Tony Robbins
Really?
Dave Asprey
For some people, it just cranks your energy up enough. And if you don't have the ability to metabolize it, you need to take either collagen or glycine or certain types of folate in order to get the full benefits. When I cranked my creatine up to 10 grams a day, I'm like, why did I wake up at. At five in the morning and not want to go back to sleep? That's weird. And that's what it was. I had three grams of glycine.
Tony Robbins
Yeah, well, 10 grams. That's a lot. I take 2.5.
Dave Asprey
Oh, that's not enough. You need at least five. Unless you're eating a lot of red meat.
Tony Robbins
Well, I just. Because I. I'm scared of the bloating.
Dave Asprey
Well, if it happens and you bloat, then stop.
Tony Robbins
I know, I know. I mean, that's true, right? I mean, that's 100% true. Exactly. Okay, so then you do all these little. You change around all your little things.
Dave Asprey
Handful of smart drugs.
Tony Robbins
What are the. What are the supplements that you Swear by. Besides, what did you say? At night you take creatine.
Dave Asprey
I do 150 supplements. A. And I have for 20 years, like, handfuls of them a day.
Tony Robbins
Yeah, okay, so you take the creatine. You told me that. Magnesium. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Dave Asprey
A huge number of cognitive enhancers, adaptogenic herbs. I'm manipulating my cortisol, adrenaline and catecholamine levels. Tyrosine is important. I take recently, last couple times, like BPC157 to help my face recover a bunch of different minerals. It did. Huge number of mitochondrial enhancers. I'm taking C15. I just did a second podcast cast with the inventor of that stuff. It's amazing science. Have you talked to her? Stephanie Van Watson. I think she might get a Nobel Prize.
Tony Robbins
Really?
Dave Asprey
She discovered the first new essential fatty acid in 90 years that we didn't know about.
Tony Robbins
I should write her name down.
Dave Asprey
Yeah, it's very interesting. She runs fatty 15.
Tony Robbins
Oh, fatty 15. Yeah, I know who they are.
Dave Asprey
She's a really good guest. And you talk to her. She's like, some dolphins get old, some don't. I'm an epidemiologist for dolphins. Why? And this one, why? And 10 years later, and now there's a hundred studies backing up what you said. It's incredible.
Tony Robbins
Yeah, I know that.
Dave Asprey
I take that stuff.
Tony Robbins
Okay.
Dave Asprey
And a lot of the longevity supplements that are in the world that you've heard about, they. They launch or they come on my show really early because I'm into this stuff. So I take urolithin a the timeline stuff, help them get big. I take spermidine. I take calcium akg have for many, many years wrote about it. All my books, by the. All this is in Superhuman, my longevity book.
Tony Robbins
Yeah. By the way, I did read that book. It's over there. I read that book, like, a hundred years ago. I don't remember it, though. I don't retain information like you do. Apparently, I'm doing something wrong. That was a good book. That was one of. I think that was the book I really liked. Superhuman.
Dave Asprey
It cracked the code on longevity to say, there's a real case for it. Here's how you do it, and the framework for that book. If you read most of the modern longevity books, it's the same thing. Here's the four things that are going to kill you. And it's funny. Peter Attia came on my show before he had a podcast, and you read his book. He's like, oh, you can't extend human life. Which is a funny thing for A doctor to say. But he says that. And he's like, but here's the four killers. I'm like, I love your framework, Peter. Later. And so, yeah, that idea that stop the bad things and then, what are the seven to nine pillars of aging? And you just. You go through. And I have supplements for each one of those things that are. Okay, what do I do for my telomeres? What do I do for my mitochondria? What do I do for extracellular stiffening? What do I do for toxin removal? And I think toxin removal is underappreciated in longevity.
Tony Robbins
Okay. Why. How do we do that, though?
Dave Asprey
If you look at my most recent book, I have a chapter on that. But the supplement that's probably. Yeah, that's probably most underappreciated is calcium D glucarate. So glutathione. Since the beginning of the biohacking movement, I put that out there. The first liposomal glutathione on the planet was from my doctor in my twenties. I helped him. Helped him launch it. So glutathione, Hell, yeah. That's number one. Number two, it would be calcium D glucarate. And then you need toxin binders, like activated charcoal, away from supplements or away from medications. That works really well.
Tony Robbins
Wow. Wow. Okay, I. I have a million more questions, but we gotta wind it up because I got my next podcast. I understand. Trust me. Okay. Dave Asprey. You're like a plethora of knowledge. I. There was, like, 77 more things I can talk about. I'm gonna break this up into two parts because I don't even know how long this. How long was this podcast?
Dave Asprey
Two hours. Wow. It doesn't feel like that much time.
Tony Robbins
I don't think it was that. I don't feel. I. I really could have done another two hours with you.
Dave Asprey
Thank you for all the cool questions. I just love sharing this stuff. Stuff. I. I started all these companies. I think it's a sickness, but if I can't buy something that should exist in the world, I feel like I have to make it. And then I just tell people about it and just. Thanks for your curiosity and listening and asking questions. It's fun.
Tony Robbins
I love it. And I think that you were just. Like I said, you. You gave what I love. I love guests like you who give people actionable things that they can actually do in their life. I mean, some of this stuff is, like, things I didn't even ask you today about some of the.
Dave Asprey
The.
Tony Robbins
The other kooky stuff that, like, we like the plasma and all those things.
Dave Asprey
Done. Done that as well.
Tony Robbins
I know you've done everything, but you've got. You've kind of, like, gave people so much information and things that they can easily integrate. That doesn't take much. So thank you.
Dave Asprey
Here's the most important thing of all of the biohacking things I've done. If you can just remove triggers from your nervous system, everything in your life is so much easier, including taking your supplements or anything. So if you pre order heavily meditated, the reset process in that book is the most precious thing I've ever developed.
Tony Robbins
And I will say your books are always ahead of its time. Like, like, you keep on, like, referring to these things. Like, I wrote, like, when I ask you a question, you're like, oh, yeah, I wrote about that in 2016, like, 10 years ago.
Dave Asprey
I don't sound arrogant. I'm just, like, pointing people. It's like a hyperlink to know where to go to find all of the.
Tony Robbins
Concentrated stuff, because people are, like, in the moment. Right. And they don't remember that. Like. Like, even all these new biohacking conferences, you did it before anybody else did it. And, like, even.
Dave Asprey
It's a question of, am I doing it best? Now is all that matters. Coming first is not relevant. It's. Is it epic now? And I stand by my epicness at that conference.
Tony Robbins
I love the biohacking conference you have, but I will say I've been to a bazillion of them. You do have, like, the best one. You really actually do.
Dave Asprey
My team is so good. They care so much.
Tony Robbins
They do a great. You do a great job at that conference. And I want to. Oh, I.
Dave Asprey
What?
Tony Robbins
One more. The Dalai Lama. You didn't tell me about the Dalai Lama.
Dave Asprey
Yeah. I'm taking a small private group to Dharamsala, and we're spending a week doing consciousness and biohacking and longevity medicine with a doctor I've partnered with. So we're teaching people to live forever, doing the stuff that you don't really talk about and getting time with His Holiness. And just like, if. If you really are into this, you want to live a very long time. You're not afraid of dying, and you want to be highly conscious and you want to help as many people as you can. So small group of people. That's what that's for.
Tony Robbins
All right.
Dave Asprey
Like a dozen people.
Tony Robbins
Probably a dozen. How much does it cost?
Dave Asprey
If you have to ask, it's probably too much.
Tony Robbins
Fair enough. Fair enough. Okay. Thank you for being on the show. Bye, everybody.
Podcast Title: Habits and Hustle
Host: Jen Cohen and Habit Nest
Episode: 453
Guest: Dave Asprey, Father of Biohacking and Founder of Bulletproof Coffee
Release Date: May 27, 2025
In Episode 453 of Habits and Hustle, host Jen Cohen delves deep into the world of biohacking with special guest Dave Asprey. Asprey, renowned for pioneering Bulletproof Coffee and championing the biohacking movement, shares his extensive knowledge on optimizing human performance through unconventional health hacks, daily routines, and cutting-edge supplements.
Dave Asprey provides an overview of his entrepreneurial ventures in the biohacking industry, highlighting his diverse portfolio of companies geared towards enhancing human performance.
TrueDark and Circadian Technology:
Asprey discusses TrueDark, a company specializing in circadian glasses designed to improve sleep by manipulating light exposure. He mentions their patented tent technology that accelerates sleep onset and influences brain wave patterns:
"TrueDark is on my company. We actually filed patents on the specific types of tents to cause people to go to sleep faster... published a study in a medical journal on shifts in brain waves from our specific tent." ([02:30])
Upgrade Labs:
Asprey introduces Upgrade Labs, a franchise offering AI-driven exercise and recovery programs with 30 locations signed up. He emphasizes the opportunity for entrepreneurs to open local biohacking franchises:
"People can go to ownandupgradelabs.com and you can work with me on it. Like open a biohacking franchise in your neighborhood." ([03:26])
Danger Coffee:
Highlighting Danger Coffee, Asprey expresses confidence in its growth, aiming to surpass Bulletproof Coffee’s sales:
"Danger Coffee, which is doing great. Wouldn't surprise me if someday we surpassed the coffee sales from Bulletproof." ([03:48])
Asprey delves into the psychological aspects of entrepreneurship, emphasizing the impact of personal traumas on business success and leadership.
Handling Betrayal and Injustice:
He identifies injustice and betrayal as the two most detrimental traumas for entrepreneurs, sharing personal anecdotes about overcoming these challenges:
"The two traumas that entrepreneurs face the most that ruins their businesses are injustice and betrayal." ([06:33])
Categories of Workplace Personalities:
Asprey categorizes people into four types based on their interactions and intentions:
"If you cannot be triggered, you are not narcissist food. That's why this book is so important." ([15:53])
A significant portion of the discussion revolves around the importance of sleep and the methods Asprey employs to optimize his sleep quality.
Red Light Therapy and Circadian Biology:
Asprey explains how wearing TrueDark glasses two hours before bedtime helps shift his circadian window, allowing him to fall asleep earlier and avoid jet lag:
"If you wear those every night for two hours before bed, you can shift your circadian window. I don't get jet lag anywhere on the planet when I use the color of light properly." ([22:30])
Sleep Duration and Health:
Challenging conventional wisdom, Asprey cites studies suggesting that six and a half hours of sleep per night correlates with the lowest mortality rates:
"The people who live the longest get six and a half hours of sleep a night, not eight hours a night." ([23:29])
Night Routine Enhancements:
His evening routine includes electrical grounding, dim red lighting, a bite guard, and mouth taping to maintain jaw alignment and improve nervous system function:
"I wear a mouth guard, and I tape my mouth. I've been doing that for six, seven years." ([25:55])
Asprey discusses his extensive supplement regimen, aimed at enhancing cognitive function, longevity, and overall health.
NAD Precursors and CD38 Inhibition:
He emphasizes the importance of NAD for cellular energy and the need to inhibit the CD38 enzyme to prevent NAD depletion:
"I've been using NAD or NAD precursors for 15 years now... you have to block a cell called CD38. So I do that as well." ([29:37])
MCT Oil and Alzheimer's:
Asprey advocates for C8 MCT oil as a potent supplement for reversing Alzheimer's symptoms, supported by Phase 2 clinical trials:
"In phase 2 clinical trials, MCT oil reverses Alzheimer's disease. When I was selling MCT Oil, I wasn't allowed to say that because that would have been a medical claim." ([38:17])
Comprehensive Supplement List:
His nightly intake includes over 150 supplements targeting various aspects of health, including glutathione, calcium D-glucarate, urolithin A, spermidine, and more:
"I take like 150 supplements a day. And I have for 20 years, like, handfuls of them a day." ([60:05])
Asprey shares his skeptical perspectives on modern vaccination practices and regulatory policies, advocating for alternative health solutions.
Vaccine Skepticism:
He expresses concerns over current vaccine schedules, linking some vaccines to autism and criticizing their broad mandates:
"I believe that the case for modern vaccine schedules in the US is bullshit. Most of the world doesn't follow that. And we have worse health outcomes." ([49:37])
Natural Alternatives and Toxin Mitigation:
Asprey promotes natural alternatives like BHT for combating viral infections and emphasizes reducing exposure to toxins like glyphosate and heavy metals as preventive measures:
"It's more scary than getting a disease that has a tiny percentage chance of killing you? Having a lifelong, lifelong life of chronic illness." ([54:05])
Asprey outlines his meticulously crafted daily routine designed to maximize health, performance, and longevity.
Morning Ritual:
"I will do a combination of things to improve my biology that day. I do not do the same thing every day... and a lot of the longevity supplements that are in the world that you've heard about, they launch or they come on my show really early because I'm into this stuff." ([57:27])
Hydration and Nutrition:
Consumes Danger Coffee with salt water, creatine, electrolytes, and lemon juice, challenging the conventional low-salt diet:
"I do not drink water without salt in it ever... If you want to live longer, eat more salt." ([59:03])
Evening Routine:
Incorporates grounding, red light therapy, and a complex supplement regimen to support overnight recovery and cellular health:
"I take like 40 of them at night... I take a sleep formula with a bunch of herbs in it." ([28:44])
Beyond conventional practices, Asprey explores advanced biohacking methods aimed at rewiring the brain and enhancing consciousness.
Heavily Meditated Reset Process:
Introduces a program designed to eliminate triggers from the nervous system, enhancing emotional resilience and performance:
"Pre order heavily meditated, the reset process in that book is the most precious thing I've ever developed." ([64:28])
Psychedelic-Assisted Neurofeedback:
Discusses a pioneering program that combines meditation with ketamine therapy to rewire the brain for better decision-making and conscious living:
"We partnered with a medical provider who comes in and can layer ketamine therapy on top of it... the world's first psychedelic assisted neurofeedback program." ([19:31])
Asprey highlights upcoming events and initiatives aimed at expanding the biohacking movement globally.
Biohacking Conferences:
Announces an upcoming conference in Austin with over 4,000 attendees and 100+ vendors, featuring notable speakers like Joe Dispenza and James Nestor:
"Biohackingconference.com... We're filling up the Fairmont and overflowing it." ([21:26])
Consciousness and Longevity Retreats:
Mentions exclusive retreats in Dharamsala, partnering with leaders in consciousness and longevity to teach advanced biohacking techniques:
"We're spending a week doing consciousness and biohacking and longevity medicine with a doctor I've partnered with." ([65:36])
On Integrity in Business:
"I do not sell. I teach. I am only going to tell you about it if I think it might be helpful for you." ([04:48])
On Sleep Optimization:
"The idea of eight hours a night, it's a myth." ([23:55])
On Vaccination Stance:
"I don't believe in vaccinating for things that don't kill you." ([51:52])
On Personal Growth and Resilience:
"All of this work, biohacking... helps to program yourself, nobody else." ([55:46])
In this compelling episode, Dave Asprey offers a comprehensive look into the realm of biohacking, sharing personal experiences, scientific insights, and practical strategies for optimizing health and performance. From rigorous supplement routines and sleep optimization techniques to his controversial views on vaccines and health policies, Asprey provides listeners with actionable knowledge to enhance their lives. His dedication to pushing the boundaries of human potential is evident through his entrepreneurial ventures and relentless pursuit of knowledge, making this episode a valuable resource for anyone interested in living a fulfilled and high-performance life.