Blue Zones vs. Biohacking: Two Opposite Paths to Longevity with Dave Asprey

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Blue Zones vs. Biohacking: Two Opposite Paths to Longevity with Dave Asprey"

The Dan Buettner Podcast – January 15, 2026 Host: Dan Buettner
Guest: Dave Asprey

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Overview

This compelling episode brings together two influential figures with distinctly different philosophies on longevity and health: Dan Buettner, explorer and creator of the "Blue Zones" concept, and Dave Asprey, self-proclaimed godfather of biohacking. Through candid conversation, they compare, contest, and occasionally converge on the best paths to a long, vibrant life—spanning everything from engineered health hacks, supplements, and gene therapy to the unsexy but proven power of environment and social ties. Candid stories, research insights, and a bit of friendly ribbing create a vivid, accessible exploration of what it means to pursue the outer limits of health.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introducing the Spectrum: Blue Zones vs. Biohacking (02:15–03:17)

• Dan welcomes Dave, setting up their “opposite ends” approaches: Blue Zones’ natural, demographic-based longevity habits vs. Dave’s technology- and data-driven biohacking.
• Dave’s Origin Story: His early health struggles (severe autoimmunity, obesity, and chronic illness) led him to “hack” his biology using resources, experimental therapies, and advice from older mentors.

2. Longevity Mindset: Ceiling or Frontier? (12:12–16:57)

• Dan’s stance: “The maximum average life expectancy for humans...is mid 90. And that going beyond that, you have to have won the genetic lottery or it's going to require some intervention that we don't exactly know what it is yet.” (12:12)
• Dave’s aspirational vision: Cites rapid technology and knowledge progress—suggests 150, 180, even 200 years is possible with changes in environmental signaling, gene therapy, and continuous measurement.

3. The Power of Environment (13:16–15:24)

• Convergence on environment as destiny: Both agree unconscious environmental cues (light exposure, social setup, food environment) shape longevity more than conscious willpower.
• Example: Blue-blocking glasses, lighting, and indoor environmental design impact circadian rhythms and health—“Darkness is also a nutrient.” (15:24)

4. Biohacks, Environment, and the Accessible: Free Tools for All (25:05–28:27)

• Dave’s Top Free/Cheap Biohacks:
  • Darkness and light—mimic natural cycles.
  • “BICEP”: Brief, intentional, conscious exposure to pain for increasing dopamine sensitivity (e.g., cold showers, spicy foods).
  • Nature and discomfort—“Too much comfort and too much convenience” is a modern disease (28:58–29:36).

5. Exercise: Old School & High Tech (29:36–31:29)

• Dan: Blue Zones residents simply move more in everyday life, not “exercise.”
• Dave: AI-assisted, super-efficient workouts can trigger molecular youth signals in less time—“15 minutes, three times a week equals two extra years of life.” (30:23)

6. Supplements, Hormones, and Gene Therapy (32:22–40:46)

• Dave’s daily regimen: Up to 150 supplements, personalized based on extensive labs—not something he recommends blindly, though key basics are minerals and fat-soluble vitamins.
• Pharmaceuticals: 5mg Cialis nightly for vascular and neurological health. Testosterone replacement (for men and, insightfully, for many women post-menopause)—recent science supports hormone therapy’s benefits.
• Dan’s take: Skeptical of defaulting to replacement therapy—would rather see foundational changes but agrees access and environment make natural optimization difficult.

7. Food Philosophies: Protein, Carbs, and Blue Zone Traditions (42:12–47:14)

• Dave: High (animal) protein diet—1g per pound bodyweight, prioritizing bioavailability. Avoids grains, especially gluten, unless European wheat. Loves sheep’s milk products.
• Dan: Blue Zones data—a 65% carbohydrate diet (beans, whole grains, tubers, greens, nuts) is standard for the world’s longest-lived. Animal foods are celebratory and minimal (~2% of intake in Okinawa).
• Debate: Which “carbohydrates” matter—simple/refined vs complex—both vehemently anti-sugar excess.

8. Salt, Minerals, Modern Diet Myths (53:34–59:51)

• Dave: Disputes conventional wisdom—recommends 6–8g of salt for most, citing studies showing current recommendations are based on shaky evidence and may harm cell hydration and cardiovascular risk for many.
• Dan: Points out the sodium overload in the modern food supply but acknowledges individual variation and nuanced ratios with potassium.

9. Marketing, Vulnerability, and the Biohacking Movement (62:32–76:26)

• Biohacking is a movement: Dave coined the term, deliberately left it open source; Bulletproof and related products helped fuel a $36bn industry.
• The pitfalls: Dave shares battles with betrayal (family, board disputes, copycats, online trolling), and the emotional toll (“the hardest to deal with are injustice and betrayal” - 66:17); emphasizes the need for a forgiveness practice (“It’s not what someone did to me, it’s how I responded to it that was the problem.” – 66:24).
• Dan’s praise: “You have this genius for vectoring your ideas into people’s minds whether or not we want them.” (76:26)

10. Middle Ground: What Actually Matters Most (75:22–76:26)

• Both men ultimately agree the essence is having a product or practice that truly works and being congruent—genuine purpose, not just marketing hype.
• Dan: “I never started out to help people live longer. I started out to solve a mystery, and it turns out it works.” (75:42)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On blue zones vs. biohacking philosophy:

  • “The Dan Buettner formula for longevity would be...not trying too hard to change your behavior, but to shape your environment, to engineer your unconscious behavior.” (12:42 – Dan Buettner)
  • “The definition of biohacking...is the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so you have full control of your biology and your state.” (13:16 – Dave Asprey)

• On longevity potential:

  • “I am pretty sure, given the innovation happening in our space, that...we can, at least some of us may already be at that point of living 150, 180, 200 years.” (16:57 – Dave Asprey)

• On trolls & forgiveness:

  • “If you can be triggered, it means you’re carrying a loaded gun and someone else’s finger is on your trigger. And no one wants to be that way.” (07:49 – Dave Asprey)
  • “Reality is every time Joe Rogan says, Dave Asprey’s a bad man, I just sell more coffee.” (10:35 – Dave Asprey)

• On social connection and gender:

  • “Women need three friends where they can talk...Men need three friends where they can go do stuff and solve problems… to bring energy to the relationship.” (24:14 – Dave Asprey)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• Dave’s biohacking backstory – 03:17–05:46
• Opposing philosophies outlined – 12:12–13:16
• Defining “biohacking” – 13:16–13:44
• Practical biohacks anyone can use – 25:05–28:27
• Role of discomfort in longevity – 28:58–29:36
• High-efficiency exercise & Upgrade Labs tech – 30:23–31:29
• Supplements, minerals, and hormones – 32:22–40:46
• Debate on protein vs. carbs, Blue Zone eating – 42:12–47:14
• Salt and mineral discussion – 53:34–59:51
• Dave’s personal dietary routine – 51:12–54:53
• Marketing, biohacking movement origin, and betrayal – 62:32–72:25
• Discussion on forgiveness and handling injustice – 66:24–72:25
• Closing reflections and agreement – 75:22–77:23

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Final Thoughts

This episode doesn’t just pit two longevity titans against each other; it shows where deep research and lived experience intersect—and diverge. Whether you’re drawn to the blue zones’ effortless well-being or lean toward quantified, N=1 experimentation, you’ll finish the episode challenged, informed, and entertained. Both Dan and Dave ultimately champion curiosity, congruence, and a willingness to try, fail, adapt, and forgive—while reminding us that real transformation, whether environmental or technological, starts from within.

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Connect:

• daveasprey.com
• danbuettner.com

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“How do we become even more vibrant than we think is possible? Because we’ve never experienced it.”
—Dave Asprey (01:49)

Transcript

[A]

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[A]

Lemonada.

[B]

How do we become even more vibrant than we think is possible? Because we've never experienced it. And the only reason I knew I could do this was because my friend Mike, who was 88, was kicking my ass. Things like biohacking's rings and monitors and trackers and all this stuff. You don't have to do any of that. It's just that most of us don't have great bodily awareness.

[A]

How long do you think we can live?

[B]

150. 180. 200 years.

[A]

All right, you guys are in for a treat. Today. We're going to make podcast history. First of all, this is the first sort of co podcast that I'm aware of, so we're completely innovating in the podcast front. But also for those of you who follow Dave Asprey on Instagram and podcast and Dan Buettner on Instagram and podcast, you probably know we're kind of at opposite ends of the how to live to 100 spectrum. And we're friends.

[B]

Just 100. That's okay.

[A]

200, Dave. And so we're going to be interviewing each other. In some cases we want to find a middle, but in other cases we're going to give you two opposite things to think about when it comes to living to 100. And I will say you're much taller than I thought you were. Six, four. And you're in great shape. So whatever you're doing is obviously working and you're happy and successful. And for my audience, why don't you give a little background on how you got to be this longevity influencer?

[B]

Sure. Back in my teenage years, When I was 14, I was diagnosed with arthritis and I'd been on antibiotics for only 15 years by the time I was 20. First, sinus infections and strep throat, had three knee surgeries for the arthritis, got fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, toxic mold poisoning, metal poisoning, high risk of stroke and heart attack. Before I was 30 and I went to the doctors, I went to the gym, 90 minutes a day, six days a week. And I would eat this, like semi vegetarian. Wasn't fully vegetarian, but low calorie diet when I was exercising heavily every day and I never lost a pound. And I was just so frustrated, thinking maybe I can eat even less, maybe I can work out for 92 minutes. And I just said, I'm doing it and it's not working. So I'm going to be the computer hacker that I am, and I'm going to work on hacking this system. And I started doing things that were counterintuitive. So I followed all the things that were supposed to work and they just didn't. And my gut was wrecked all the time and I just felt like crap. So I started hanging out with people three times my age at the first Longevity nonprofit group in Palo Alto, California. And my friend Mike, who's on the board, would call me at 11:30 at night with more energy than I had just bounding with energy. And I saw these guys are making themselves younger. And so the techniques that make old people younger make young people more powerful and stronger. So I recovered my health with the help of my elders, and I carried that forward to start the biohacking movement. After a three month trip to Nepal and Tibet to learn meditation from the masters, and after a lot of work with neuroscience and reprogramming my biology as my hobby while I worked for an antivirus software company and I wrote a blog post and I started just talking about this body of knowledge that was not about longevity, it was about upgrading ourselves. So I fixed my health and it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. It shouldn't have cost. But then I said, all right, how do we become even more vibrant than we think is possible because we've never experienced it. And the only reason I knew I could do this was because my friend Mike, who was 88, was kicking my ass.

[A]

Dave, what's your superpower? What are you best at?

[B]

My superpower is probably having had autism in the past.

[A]

Is that right?

[B]

Yeah, I had Asperger's syndrome, which is what we called it then. And did it go away? Well, yeah, with a lot of work, it is reversible even as an adult for most people. So what that did. When you're on the spectrum, something happens. And there's lots of things that can cause neuroinflammation as a kid, but your brain doesn't have enough mitochondrial energy and all the signals coming in are staticky. So now your poor brain is trying to figure out what's a word, what facial expression matters, you know, what is this input from the tag in your shirt. But because it's spiky and you don't have enough energy anyway, the brain becomes hyper efficient. But it throws away a lot of useful information. So then as an adult, when I restored the power to my mitochondria and then I got the toxins out of my nervous system, I had to reprogram how my eyes move, how I hear, how my tongue moves, my physical movement. So what remains from that is that my operating system in the brain was set up for hyper efficiency and seeing connections between things. And I think that's really my superpower, is that sometimes I pull from very different fields and synthesize something. And my goal is I only write a book if I can say things that haven't been said before, because otherwise I can just have you on to talk about your research. Why would I need to write it again?

[A]

Remind our audiences your most current book and the book you're most proud of.

[B]

My most recent book is called Heavily Meditated. And this is a book about all the things that either accelerate or work better than meditation to enter specific altered states. And the most precious one is forgiveness. Oh, wow.

[A]

And it's easy to the biohacker talking about forgiveness.

[B]

It's the most important thing. And it's easy to say that because there's, you know, forgive them, they know not what they do. That's kind of been written before for the last 10 years.

[A]

Not mine. Yeah.

[B]

I've run a neuroscience company called 40 Years of Zen where we bring CEOs and executives and professional athletes and people through a five day intense neurofeedback program. We're measuring their brain waves and I'm teaching specific meditation techniques so I can prove that they work. And at the end of five days of 40 years of Zen, you have the same brainwaves of someone who's done daily meditation practice for 20, 30, 40 years. And I've spent six months of my life hooked up to a computer rewiring my brain. And what you learn is that no matter how successful someone is, everyone has that thing that gets under their skin. And I wrote heavily meditated because if you can be triggered, it means you're carrying a loaded gun and someone else's finger is on your trigger. And no one wants to be that way. I've yelled at my kids. I've yelled at people I love. Not intentionally. Well, what happened? Well, it was ultimately me. So how do I reset that instead of spending all my energy trying to manage it? That's what that book's about, but it's based on 10 years of data.

[A]

So Saturday Night Live just parodied you, and they kind of poke fun of you in a way, but. And how did you feel about that? Were you angry or happy?

[B]

No, I danced a jig. Are you kidding? What an honor, right? If Saturday Night Live thinks my work is worth being parodied. Thanks, guys. So I just.

[A]

Part of the Zeitgeist.

[B]

I sent it to all my friends.

[A]

Yeah. And how do you deal with trolls? People who disagree with you to the extent that they're mean?

[B]

I read about this in heavily meditated. I've helped a lot of people who were kind of stuck with weight loss the way I was. So my social media was full of just gratitude. And I was on the Joe Rogan show a couple times. One of the companies that he was an owner of decided to launch an identical product. And that day, suddenly, I was a snake oil salesman and a bad man. And it rocked me. I was like, what is going on here? And so I hired a crisis PR firm. Like, I don't know. I'm already got a successful business here. But one of the guys on my team who's a convoy commander in Iraq was like, dave, your way of reacting is just a podcaster. So I sat down and put the electrodes on.

[A]

So Joe went at you.

[B]

Joe Rogan went at. And it was entirely baseless. I helped him a lot with his ADHD stuff, and I helped his audience. I came in with good intentions.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

And when I put the electrodes on and it did the reset process that's in the book, what happens is you think, what's the first time I felt this Way like the feeling in your body. And this story from first grade that I'd completely forgotten about for 30 years popped in my head. I tattled on some other kid for something. And then the teacher says, little Johnny, did you do it? And he goes, I didn't do it. Dave did it. And I got sent to the principal's office.

[A]

Oh, that's.

[B]

And this is injustice. But the reason I was so reactive to Joe was that I had a trauma from first grade where I got punished for something I didn't do. And I didn't consciously think that, but my body replayed that. And once I became aware of that, reality is every time Joe Rogan says, Dave Asprey's a bad man, I just sell more coffee. It wasn't actually harming me.

[A]

I was friends with George Plimpton, and he once said about pr, he said, PR is a lot like breath. Bad breath is better than no breath at all.

[B]

That's a great quote.

[A]

So, I mean, I love it that these people are sort of mean to you. And it flips around to be a big positive, you know?

[B]

And with Joe, it was emotionally tough, I'm not gonna lie. But I did my forgiveness work, and I've been to his comedy show in Austin, and I think he was a hero during the Pand. And I don't have any issues with him. But what it did is it taught me really, what's going on with trolls. The vast majority of trolls were bullied in elementary school or in middle school. They're stuck at that level of emotional development, and they're just playing that game. So I'm like, wait a minute. I have a seventh grade sense of humor. It's part of my longevity strategy.

[A]

Mine do, too.

[B]

When people troll me, I literally. And you go to my social and see this, I just write, that's not what your mom said.

[A]

So great.

[B]

And that's for a troll. Now, if someone comes in and says, dave, you know, I really think canola oil might be healthy. And here's a study. What do you think? That's not a troll. That's like, yes, let's figure this out. But there's a very different energy between someone who's just there to spread their darkness. Right? So I want to make fun of darkness because darkness doesn't like humor.

[A]

I love it. And maybe you'll flip them and make them nicer people. So I think a lot of people come to you and come to me for advice on longevity. And I come from demography, which would suggest that this the ceiling. The maximum average life expectancy for humans, the human machine, is mid 90. And that going beyond that, you have to have won the genetic lottery or it's going to require some intervention that we don't exactly know what it is yet. So the Dan Buettner formula for longevity would be. I can help you get to your mid-90s, largely without chronic disease and with a lot more money in your bank account because you're not spending on healthcare by not trying too hard to change your behavior, but to shape your environment, to engineer your unconscious behavior, not your conscious behavior. So that would be my. My stump speech. How about what's yours?

[B]

We are so incredibly aligned on it. The definition of biohacking, which is a new word in the English language. It's the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so you have full control of your biology and your state. And we're changing our environment with unconscious things that affect you. And that's why you see people wearing true dark glasses or their. They're changing their light exposure because it's an environmental variable.

[A]

That's a great example, by the way.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So the light you're receiving is different than the light I'm receiving. What happens when you wear those yellow glasses?

[B]

These glasses, and not all yellow will do this. These block only half of the spectrum of blue light. So at 400.

[A]

Did you try them on?

[B]

Yeah. At 490 nanometers and below, it creates mitochondrial stress. Those look good on you.

[A]

Do I look like a biohacker now?

[B]

Yeah, you do.

[A]

Love it. And that somehow protects melatonin, or what are the.

[B]

It turns out blocking under 490 protects the cells in your eyes from excessive stress, which creates brain stress and creates brain fog.

[A]

Oh, really?

[B]

Yeah. So during the day you need blue light. This is why blue blockers are actually bad for you. Because during the day you get no wake up signal. But if you get a huge wake up signal, including unnatural spectrums of blue, you don't feel good. So I started TrueDark, this company about 12 years ago when I was trying to figure out why do these new LED lights make me feel awful at the end of the day. So I engineered this solution. And the problem is at nighttime, I used to wear blue blockers, but there's four other colors of light that also affect your sleep. So blue blocking isn't enough at night. And if you go to my house today at nighttime, it's all red lights, because dim red lights don't affect your sleep at all. They're invisible to your biology. But these white lights we have at night truly are a massive change even in the last 20 years, because there are different types of light. So I look at light and food as both nutrients and darkness is also a nutrient. So we're changing our environment so we have better circadian signaling so we can live longer.

[A]

And how long do you think we can live?

[B]

Well, we know that our current best is about 120, right? So that's proven. We have historical documents where people talk about living to 185 in India, 400 in the Bible, 969 for Methuselah. That was a long time ago. And who knows if they even measured time the same way? So we can ignore those. What that means is that I have a hundred additional years to do 50% better than our current best. I have AI, I have PubMed, I have the Human Genome Project. We know what mitochondria are and how they behave. And we have antibiotics. Oh, and we have every technology innovation because a hundred years ago we didn't have any of that. World War I was fought with biplanes and horses. I mean, we're living in a different world than our current record holder. So with all those innovations and the fact that I'm willing to go to the ends of the Earth, I've had gene therapy that increases follistatin levels and the average person gets nine years younger epigenetically. The other part of my bet is that we can measure whether what we're doing works because we've invented these aging clocks that say, well, compared to everyone else, how's your DNA methylation? So there's a chance I'll get hit by a truck. There's a chance one of my experiments will go wrong. But I am pretty sure, given the innovation happening in our space, that there are enough people working on enough of the different many variables of aging that we can, at least some of us may already be at that point of living 150, 180, 200 years.

[A]

I would agree with you that the pace of discovery is such that something will likely come along for sure in our lifetime and maybe even sooner than that. But we still have seemingly the limitation of the human machine. And most mammals live about two and a half times the age of procreation. So you get to the age where you can have offspring and then multiply by two and a half. And whether you're a mouse or an elephant or a human in between, that's sort of the set point for biology. We have about 37 trillion cells in our body, each one of which undergo about 2 million chemical processes per second. And the idea that we're going to somehow systematically intervene with all 37 trillion, it just seems mind boggling. And there's no, you know, we talk about metformin and rapamycin and NAD plus and stem cells, and they all maybe do some good in this tiny little piece of real estate on a map the size of the United States, which is the human aging processes. And I'm just not seeing a drug or intervention on the scientific horizon yet that will govern 37 trillion cells and all those chemical processes.

[B]

Because I have the computer hacker brain. I came into systems biology after learning network engineering. And all we know that there are signaling networks within the body and there are things that control timing. So there's a central aging clock in the hippocampus, and then there are peripheral aging clocks and cellular aging clocks. So we don't necessarily need to change every single cell. We need to tell the cells what to do, and then they'll all do it at the same time. So this is a signaling problem. It's kind of like in the old days of your computer. If you didn't want to pay for your software license, just change the date on the clock and then the software license keeps working. You could just make it another year. I don't know if you ever did that. I did in college. So we won't tell the software, sorry.

[A]

Microsoft, Dave owes you $8 million.

[B]

Exactly. So what we're looking at doing is saying, how do mitochondria talk to each other? And what we have learned, that goes back to circadian biology and to a certain extent, even back to the values of community that we both really share as an important variable, is that roughly 5% of the cells in the retina of your eye have melanopsin sensors. And these do not go into the visual cortex. They go into the timing clock in the brain. So now we know what are the keys that unlock those cells to tell your body that it's daytime or nighttime. So I could see, I'm just making this up, but I could see a drug that entirely blocks or modifies those. So your body thinks only a day passed when seven days passed. I don't know that that would work, but there's so many ways of telling the body that your duty cycle is much longer than two and a half years. And part of my meditation and part of the way I celebrate my birthday, which actually happened about four days ago.

[A]

Happy birthday.

[B]

Hey, Dave. It was my 28 and a half percent birthday.

[A]

So you're 112 now or.

[B]

I'm 35 or I'm dyslexic, which would make it 53. So on the calendar I'm 53. But I really, I celebrate my birthdays in percentage of duty cycle. So I do believe that your mind does communicate with the body. I also believe the body communicates much more with the mind than we give it credit for. So I do my best to have tons of mitochondria energy, to have appropriate but not excessive free radical formation and to keep my toxin level low and to keep my hormones like that of a young person. And I do neurofeedback. And I've even opened up my blood brain barrier with ultrasound and introduced stem cells into my brain to reset my central aging clock by about 20 years, which lowers immune function. I'm about to go get my third dose of gene therapy. The first two are follistatin. The other one that's coming up is something called vegf, which increases microcapillary growth throughout the body. And you want that for blood flow. And at this point I know I have the crappiest genetics ever. I have all sorts of different things that don't work normally, but they're all addressed because I measured it.

[A]

You know. I've spent my life exploring the world, not chasing adrenaline, but meaning. From the blue zones of Costa Rica to the highlands of Sardinia, I've learned that adventure isn't about going further, it's about going deeper. That's why the Defender caught my attention. It's not just built for the toughest roads. It's designed for people with a purpose. A vehicle capable of great things like the people who drive it. When I'm planning a new expedition or just heading up to my lake place, I want something that feels as durable and capable as the journeys themselves. The Defender, whether the 2 door 90, the the 110 or the 8 seat 130, gives you the confidence to explore wherever your path leads. Because adventure isn't just about conquering the landscape, it's about connecting with it. Explore the [e-mail] so believe it or not, audio is part of my daily life. For some reason, I wake up every night about three in the morning and I don't know what to do with myself. I don't want to get completely jolted awake. So I put on audible.com and listen to an audiobook. And it's actually many days my favorite part of the day. It helps lull me back to sleep in a way that I have great dreams. And that's just one reason why I love listening to Audible. Audible has an incredible collection of audiobooks, podcasts and original content and has become one of my favorite ways to stay curious and to keep learning, whether I'm traveling, walking, or just going about my day or night. In fact, several of my own audiobooks, including the Blue Zones and the Blue Zones of Happiness are available on Audible. And I love that people can listen to these ideas in a way that actually fits into their real life. Listening on Audible makes it easy to explore new perspectives, revisit ideas that matter, and build simple habits that support long term well being. Kickstart your well being journey with your first audiobook. Free. When you sign up for a free 30 day trial at audible.com livebetter membership is $14.95 a month. After 30 days, cancel anytime. That's audible.com livebetter because staying curious or might just be one of the best longevity practices we have. So just to illustrate how different our approach is, my solution for living longer is eat a cup of beans, live in a walkable neighborhood, make three friends who care about you on a bad day, and know your sense of purpose and live your sense of purpose. And I will say that yours is a lot sexier and a lot, you know, more lean in. Interesting.

[B]

You know, this is something that I, I do because I love it and I'm curious and I would absolutely endorse your perspective. Maybe not on the beans, but oh.

[A]

I almost got a bean endorsement out of Dave Asprey. I was just writing everything and go.

[B]

If I do that, my three friends don't want to hang out with me. So having one to three really good friends where you can be vulnerable, it's massively changes your vasopressin levels as a man, not just oxytocin. And this is important in your relationship. This is Adam Lane Granth's research and he's talking about attachment theory. So women need three friends where they can talk, oxytocin goes up and they have energy to bring back to their relationship. And men need three friends where they can go do stuff and solve problems and then they get their vasopressin to bring back energy to the relationship, which brings up relationships as another.

[A]

What was that word? Vasopressin?

[B]

Yeah, vasopressin. It's a neurotransmitter that's involved actually in blood flow, but it's also involved in the happiness and energy pathways.

[A]

And that's what the social connectivity does for us. But for people out there listening, who may not have your level of precision or access to resources or access to innovation, what would be the top three to five biohacks that you think are safest and deliver the most punch for the effort?

[B]

This actually makes you really happy because some people will say, oh, biohacking is just for rich dudes. Number one, 58% of biohackers are women. They always have been. Women are better biohackers.

[A]

That surprises me.

[B]

Women generally have more bodily awareness than men because for guys, if there's not a bone sticking out, we're probably fine until we're pretty far along, right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So there's that inherent intuitive sense of interoception that's called. And then you're asking about things. I know people say, oh, it's only for wealthy people, but every one of my books has here's the principle, here's the free version, here's the cheap version, and here's the crazy billionaire version that illustrates it works. So darkness is such an important nutrient. Everyone who's lived to a hundred years old grew up with stars in the sky. They didn't have lights on at night because it just wasn't very common. And if they did, it was a dim light. It wasn't like this incredibly bright that we have now to the point where you can see stars in most cities.

[A]

But I don't think of that as a biohack, but I guess it probably is.

[B]

It's changing the environment around you. So you have control your biology.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, I guess.

[B]

You know, think like biohacking's rings and monitors and trackers and all this stuff. You don't have to do any of that. It's just that most of us don't have great bodily awareness. And so if you're waking up in the middle of the night, you might want to know when and where and why and how and whether it's because of blood pressure or carbon dioxide. So you can fix the problem because getting good sleep makes you feel better and be nicer and live longer. So I don't mind using tools to become more self aware, but I don't want to be reliant on tools. So I would say darkness and sunlight are critically important and they're free. The next one is and heavily meditated. I wrote about it, it's called bicep, but it's not the bicep with caffeine on it.

[A]

Check out the biceps. Can we get a close up on that? I'M just seeing this massive bulging carbon chain.

[B]

I got the molecular diagram of caffeine tattooed. And by the way, tattoos are not good for health. I did that because when I was 22, I made a T shirt with that molecule on it. And it was the first product ever sold over the Internet, before E Commerce had a name.

[A]

And plus, in singles bars you could say, do you want to see my caffeine molecule? And coincidentally, they get to see your.

[B]

Giant bicep at singles bars. I actually tell them it's a Cialis molecule and it seems to work better. All right, back to darkness and light and things like that. Bicep is brief, intentional, conscious exposure to pain. And in the old days, monks would flog themselves. I'd ask my teachers in seventh grade, why do they do that? Because they're such sinners. No. And then, well, why do yogis lay on beds of nails? Because they're proving they're good yogis. No, it turns out those or taking a cold shower, which is the biohacker equivalent, or getting in an ice bath, doing something every day for one minute that hurts but doesn't cause harm changes dopamine receptor sensitivity by up to 250%. And since dopamine motivates us to do things that matter, it takes less motivation.

[A]

I love this, actually.

[B]

Yeah, Less willpower to be a good monk or to be a good dad or to be a good whatever you wanted to do. So this is, again, it's a free biohack. You could also eat a jalapeno or maybe get a good spanking if you're into that. It doesn't matter.

[A]

So it starts with the carbon chain, ends with a spanking. But what I suppose a cold shower, a cold plunge might fall into that category. You know, I think so many of the problems that we're suffering right now comes from too much comfort and too much convenience.

[B]

Amen.

[A]

We're never more than five steps away from some fatty, sweet, ultra processed food source we constantly live at. Either air conditioned, down to or heated up to 72 degrees. Instead of walking place, we spend about three times more time in our cars than we did in 1980s. In blue zones they're constantly exposed to a little bit of discomfort. They wake up, it's cold in the morning, they walk out to their garden, they spend a couple hours hoeing, they have to cook their own food and endure a bit of hunger and do their work by hand, et cetera. We don't have any of that anymore.

[B]

And you know what's Interesting. They didn't have a big exposure to natural EMFs or to artificial blue light, and they went outside for a couple hours a day, and they moved around because movement is really important for us. And in the west, we oftentimes think about exercise instead of just movement. And they're just different things. So structuring your life so you move regularly would be really good for you. And I can't say that I always do that because, well, sometimes I'm on podcasts for eight hours or airplanes for a long period of time. So even if I don't have time to do that, I like to at least do a few squats or. Because this is what I do. I, of course, have AI exercise equipment that will give me cardio exercise in 15 minutes. That works better than five hours of cardio.

[A]

Wow. What does that look like? So we're kind of moving on to number three here. Yeah, you need to have AI Assisted Physical Activity.

[B]

This comes from Upgrade Labs, which is my AI Longevity clinics out of centers. And what we have there is a piece of tech that monitors your heart rate, and an AI voice tells you, pedal slower. It's really boring. You pedal for one minute, like, and it goes. You're gonna die. And then you pedal really hard, and the pedals just won't move. You do that for 20 seconds two times, and that's all you do. And if you do that, it sends exactly the right signal into your body to tell yourself to improve metabolically. And people who do this three times a week experience a 12% VO2 max improvement, which is equal to two years of additional life in the correlation studies.

[A]

Amazing.

[B]

But if you did an hour a day of spin class with Felidian of Leotard yelling at you, you only get 2% improvement. So we're getting six times more results in 15 minutes than five hours. And all I want to do is get the right signal into my body to, say, be young and healthy and strong and focused and intelligent. Right. And give me the most freedom to do the things that matter in the world to me.

[A]

So the blue Zone shepherd equivalent of that is the. The shepherd is out pasturing his sheep, and the lamb runs away. And he said, I can't lose that lamb. And all of a sudden, he takes off running after it.

[B]

So it is 100% true. And we are so lying down. And I have great respect for. For your work and your facilities.

[A]

Likewise.

[B]

I actually built a regenerative farm on Vancouver island and raised my kids on it. So I recognize changing the environment around you well, having a farm and growing up in a forest is really a gift and it was really hard on me travel wise to get off that island. But for my children, it's the most powerful environment I could put them in. So we raised 25 sheep twice a year and 25 pigs and once three cows and a whole bunch of plants. And yeah, I've chased pigs and sheep and cows and you're right, it is a lot of work. But they're pig chaser diet. They're also delicious.

[A]

So what about pills? Are you a fan of supplements or superfoods or or pharmaceuticals?

[B]

I've been trying to cut back. I do about 150 supplements a day.

[A]

Just 150?

[B]

Yeah, just 150.

[A]

And I'm guessing they're not all black beans.

[B]

No, probably not. I don't even think I have a black bean extract in there.

[A]

Okay, tell us which ones you take and which ones you think other people listeners could take and not worry about it.

[B]

Yeah. The first disclosure here is okay, I had a lot of autoimmunity as a kid and OCD and odd and Asperger's and a wrecked gut from years of bacteria use. And I have a weird set of genetics that increases my risk of some things, my inflammatory profile and sticky blood and all sorts of crap. I'm someone who's willing to spend an unlimited amount of money and time to do this. And I've customized this stack with lab tests over years. So don't do what I do unless you personalize it for you because I need nine times more biotin than the average person and I know, take that. But here's the things that work for everyone as being most important and they're not complex sexy supplements. And I can talk about the sexy longevity stuff, but most of us are mineral deficient and it's because our soil is broken because we've been growing the same stuff in it or spraying glyphosate on it. So we don't get the minerals into the plants and then we eat the plants and we think there's iron in it, but there's not. So taking a broad spectrum multi mineral is important and I make one called minerals 101 and there are others on the market but a well formulated multi mineral so that all the longevity systems in your body have the raw materials they need. Whether it's vanadium or chromium or these other minerals we even think about. We also need vitamin D and vitamin D is D, A, K and E. And the studies on vitamin D, actually, all these independently. There are a lot of studies and the reason these are not sexy supplements. But if you look for the broadest effect across thousands of pathways in the body that your body needs support on, the fat soluble vitamins drive the minerals. They tell the minerals where to go. Does this go in your bone? Does this go in your mitochondria? Does this go to make testosterone? So I consider these to be very simple, very affordable and worthwhile baseline for longevity or just for feeling good. And because I do that and I do my other supplements and things, I had to do surgery about three and a half years ago on my foot. I had an old yoga injury and I didn't rehab it right. I was doing crow pose, kicking back to plank and my toe joint got stubbed and I have square joints, which is not good. They usually get arthritis as you get old. So it started to fuse and just nothing I did worked on that. I kept trying things so they had to cut the bone in my foot in half.

[A]

Ouch.

[B]

And I did it in Beverly Hills and I was awake for the surgery.

[A]

Oh, it looked good, I bet.

[B]

Oh, it was a beautiful operating theater. So I'm laying there and I can't feel my leg and hear the bone saw. It goes bzz. And the doctor looks, looks at his nurse and says, I'm having a hard time getting through the bone. Like, is this guy even human? And afterwards he said, dave, I operated on someone half your age and their bones cut like butter. What are you doing? Adequate minerals. If you don't want to break your hip, take your vitamin D and your minerals. And not breaking your hip is a really good way to live till at least 100 without dying because this is a major cause. You fall over. So those are low cost and relatively simple supplements. I take a handful of things that affect cognitive function. I take a handful of things that affect mitochondrial function. I take things that affect neurotransmitter creation. In my case, specifically dopamine and cortisol, because I know that genetically my body doesn't make enough cortisol no matter what I do. So I support that. And I do use pharmaceuticals for longevity. And I use very low doses of pharmaceuticals that can change in a way that we haven't found plant compounds that compete. As an example, I take a 5 milligram dose of Cialis every night. Cialis is one of the ED meds.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. Like Viagra.

[B]

Yeah, Viagra is a short acting and Cialis is long acting. But our goal is we want all of the blood vessels in the body to be more open and dilated. Yeah. And it works for 24 hours. So there's a very strong association of reduction of Alzheimer's disease when people are taking Cialis. And strangely it's even dose dependent. So you do 5 milligrams because it's going to lower your risk of getting Alzheimer's. And in my longevity work, there's kind of four things that are going to kill you. Diabetes, which is a precursor to cancer and heart disease and Alzheimer's. So let's not get those would be step one. What else do I take? What's the most controversial one? I take testosterone. I don't think that should be controversial. They just removed the black box warning for men and women for hormonal disease.

[A]

Oh, I didn't realize that for test. I just got out of a menopause panel and it was all the rage that now this, this hormone replacement therapy, mostly estrogen, but others for women in menopause, is. Now we know that it does not cause breast cancer as we erroneously thought before, and it's actually a very effective treatment. So you're saying testosterone for men, which men should be taking testosterone. If you're over 40, which, believe it or not, I am.

[B]

Yeah. I would have never imagined. You should get your levels tested and the odds are exceptionally high that you're going to be low. And just a quick word, for women We've known for 20 years in longevity circles that bioidentical hormone replacement really affects longevity and quality of life in women. It reduces risk of all these things in different studies, but it was always because of some bad data from 23 years ago. It was always sort of locked up in the fda. Well, four days before we were recording this, I got to interview the Commissioner of the FDA, Dr. Marty Mackere, and we talked about this and he just stood up and said, you know, the data is very strong. It's very convincing. Hormone replacement is going to improve the lives of at least 50 million women. So this is a longevity technique that we've been talking about really since the 80s.

[A]

50 million women. I think we should underscore that.

[B]

Yeah, it's so important and it just breaks my heart because perimenopause tears marriages apart. I mean, it is a really rough time for women. It doesn't have to happen like we know the levels or severe.

[A]

I think it has to happen. But.

[B]

Oh yeah, you might go through perimenopause, but you're right, the severe, painful and just disabling parts of it. It's easily treatable with hormones. But everyone thought those hormones cause cancer. They never did and they don't.

[A]

And I mean, you're ripped, you're in good shape. We saw your biceps. So is some of this muscular bulging because of testosterone? Are you, are you stronger now than you were?

[B]

Well, I don't know that I'm stronger. I'm probably as strong as I was when I was young. But when I was 26, my testosterone levels were lower than my mom's on low tests because I was obese and because of environmental toxins and from mold toxins. So I may not actually know what it feels like to have the ideal testosterone levels for my body because I might have never had them. But no young man today has ideal levels because these bright lights mess with your testosterone. Indoors, not getting enough protein, not getting enough saturated fat, not getting enough choline, not getting enough heavy exercise, all these things contribute, plus all the plastics and weird fragrances and all the stuff. So we have an epidemic where our 20 year old men who should be ripped and lean without much work and seeking women all the time, they're not because they have the testosterone levels that their grandfathers had 30 years ago. So this is a species wide at least.

[A]

And that's because the toxins in ultra.

[B]

Processed foods, toxins, lighting, lifestyle stress, it's a recipe for disaster. It's not just one ingredient. And so we need to treat this because testosterone drives dopamine and dopamine drives desire to make a difference in the world.

[A]

I mean, should we really be focusing on testosterone replacement when maybe we ought to be focusing on getting people to eat, eat healthier, get exercise, get the right light exposure?

[B]

It's a really great point. And what I've found, and I've worked with a lot of people now, is that if someone's willing to really commit to this and they're exercising heavily only twice a week, they're going for a walk, they're doing everything right, but they're still, they have plastic carpet, they go to work, they're breathing all this stuff. Very few guys can get their free testosterone above 20, which is the level according to Ben Beekman, who's a friend who's been on the show. That's where we want to be. And what happens to most men, they're working out, they know what works. And around 45, they go to the gym and they're working harder than ever, but they're growing a pot belly and the workouts don't work anymore. That's testosterone turning off so we just get their levels to that of a healthy 35 year old. And a very few people, maybe 1 in 20, can do this naturally if they're willing to put a lot of time and energy in. It's very hard to do.

[A]

95% of men Middle age ought to be on testosterone.

[B]

And when they do it, oh, my gosh, it's the brain effects. Like, they want to take care of their family again. They're reignited in their career now. Their workouts work again. And there's a level of vibrancy that comes. You know the movie Grumpy Old Men?

[A]

Yeah. It filmed in Minnesota, where I'm from. You know, it's.

[B]

Yeah. Great movie. And it's a documentary on testosterone deficiency. That's men on low testosterone.

[A]

Well, Ann, Margaret, I was quite a hit there.

[B]

I think.

[A]

Maybe a little bit of lingering testosterone.

[B]

There you go. Right.

[A]

So how about the diet of longevity? What's. According to Dave Asprey? What should we be eating if we want to hit this 150-year-old mark?

[B]

All right. Whatever it takes. And I am the first to say, I would love to be a gravel tarian. Actually, I wouldn't love it, but I would do it if I knew very locale. Yeah, if just eating gravel would do it, I would force myself to eat gravel. Like, I'm willing to do this stuff. I've been a vegan. I've been a raw vegan. I've been a vegetarian. I've done the zone diet, the Atkins diet, and all sorts of other combinations of this and that and meal timing. And just in my quest to lose that hundred pounds of fat, and I lost fifty pounds in three months when I added more protein and cut some carbs and cut out gluten, which for me was a big trigger. The other 50 pounds took me 10 years to figure out how to lose. And that led to me writing the first big book on intermittent fasting and cyclical clean keto. And when I focused in on the research for longevity, there were kind of two spikes in protein consumption that had good evidence. One of them is 0.6 grams per pound of body weight, which is probably in alignment with a good number of recent longevity books, because there's a lot of data for that. And the reason that we recommend that is that raising a compound called mtor, which you need to build muscles and to repair tissues, but if it's always elevated, can increase cancer risk. The theory is that raising MTOR too often would increase cancer risk. So therefore you don't want to do it. So if we minimize our animal protein and minimize our protein, then that would be protective. There's just one problem. Carbohydrates raise MTOR more than animal protein. So I did recommend that in my book. But I've tried the other spike, which is 1 gram per pound of body weight. And the reason that I look like I do is I have adequate but not high testosterone and I get enough animal protein in my diet. If I didn't do animal protein, the plant based protein research that I've seen, and I'm willing to be proven wrong, shows that these plant based proteins are usually about 30% as effective for amino acid availability in the body.

[A]

All of this sounds right to me. I draw almost all my insight from looking at the populations that live the longest around the world. And we did a meta analysis, 155 dietary surveys done in all five of these blue zones over time. And by the way, if you want to know what a hundred year old ate, to live to be 100, you have to know what she was eating as a little girl and middle aged.

[B]

And was she breastfed?

[A]

Yeah, even that. And when you look over the past hundred years to what these cultures were eating and average it out, it was about a 65% carbohydrate diet. So the vast majority of their intake came from carbs. But both jelly beans and garbanzo beans are carbohydrates. So we're talking the garbanzo bean end of things. But also whole grains and tubers and you know, greens and garden vegetables of all sorts and nuts and of course beans.

[B]

But where's the Japanese really eating whole grains or were they eating polished rice?

[A]

People confuse Okinawa with Japan. Okinawa was actually the rukus Kingdom until 1918, where they were involuntarily assimilated into the Japanese nation. And it's really a different culture. It's about as different as Minnesotans are to Mexicans.

[B]

Start with an M. I mean, but.

[A]

We'Re on the, we're on the same continent, but we're not all the same people. So about 70% of all calories that Okinawans consumed until about 1975 or so came from purple sweet potatoes.

[B]

Ah, sweet potatoes. Okay, yeah, got it with all the polyphenols polished.

[A]

Rice was for rich people. And you, if you had rice in Okinawa, most of the time you were trading that it was a commodity and you needed the money. They did eat pork, by the way, but pork was a celebratory food usually consumed around the lunar new year. They killed the family Pig. And then they'd pig out and they'd render the fat and make lard and versions of ham. So they had meat for a while, but only about 2% of their caloric intake came from animal products. And also, by the way, not a lot of fish. So it's, it's. I will admit it's probably overly simplistic, but I do have five disparate populations who are eating largely a high carbohydrate diet. And actually, I hate the word carbohydrate because I believe the healthiest carbs and healthiest calories in our diet are complex carbs. And the least healthy calories in our diet are white sugar carbohydrates. Horrible. I think we both agree that sugar is a toxin no matter what. Maybe not.

[B]

But it turns out if you get 4 or 5 grams of sugar as an electrolyte, it'll lower cortisol levels. So I want to be careful. If we say it's toxic, I don't think sugar is good for you. But small amounts of sugar can resuscitate mitochondria in distress. And there's a case for them sometimes post workout, long exercise, et cetera.

[A]

Right. Which we're going to get. And you put a little bit of cat ketchup on your.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

Whatever you're. You're getting that 4 grams of sugar pretty quickly. Average American eats about 22 teaspoons of sugars.

[B]

It's insane.

[A]

Yeah. And. And at that level, it's for sure a negative. You know, all this fine tuning. Well, in general, I salute it, because medical innovation comes from your mind, your type of mind. I'm going to try this, see if it works. If it doesn't, I triage it. I go on to the next thing. The most important single innovation to add years of life expectancy in the last hundred years was penicillin.

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

And nobody, nobody could foresee penicillin, but it was that investigative mind that discovered it all of a sudden, until penicillin was discovered. If you stepped on a nail and got it, you died. Or had an abscess tooth, you died. And now, boom, this comes along and it's your mind, it's your longevity hack sort of process that gives us these big leaps.

[B]

You know what's crazy? They used AI just within the last three months with some new molecular modeling capabilities, and they discovered 400,000 new unexplored antibiotics.

[A]

Wow. Let's try those one by one.

[B]

If they can do that, can we just add 10 years to the human life? There's so much good stuff happening, more than any human can even track right now, that I'm hopeful. And I'm also. I see life as this system. And you go back to Okinawa. All right, so someone's born. They're likely born vaginally, and they picked up the microbiome from their mom. Right. Which is a necessary part of building your gut bacteria. So there weren't a lot of C sections back then. Right. And we didn't overly clean our infants. So they started out with the right inoculation, and then they played in the soil. And then studies have shown that in other parts of Japan, there's a special species of gut bacteria that preferentially digest seaweed. So unless you're married to someone from that part of the world and you mix your microbiomes up and you inherit that and you eat a Japanese diet, it's almost like Mother Nature has conspired to set up all the microbes and all the plants and all the animals and the angle of the sunshine and the temperatures, and then to select these mitochondria that are going to thrive as part of this beautiful system that we're not really separate from. And what I'm recognizing is I'm 28% Basque, and I've got some Northern Europeans with random stuff. I think the Basque part of me likes ribeye, which is the native Basque food. I have no idea. But I don't have the right microbiome for my random genetics, and I don't live in the right environment for my genetics. And it feels like a lot of what I'm really doing with biohacking is I'm saying, how do we set the environment up so that it's most harmonious with our body, so that it's not about forcing the body to do something, it's about signaling the body. Hey, you're in the right place, which drops stress, and it causes systems to work better. But we're all so genetically different, and we've messed with our gut bacteria and our soil biome that it's really hard to know what to do. So I do my best to replace what we've already taken out of nature. And that by doing that, that is improving the markers of how you feel, how you're aging and how you look and just quality of life. I would prefer to just go outside my cave, you know, spear a bunny or something and, you know, eat it.

[A]

Vegans will love that one.

[B]

Sorry, vegans.

[A]

What does Dave Asprey eat in a day?

[B]

Bunnies and salamanders. No. I make sure that I get 1 gram per pound of body weight of animal protein, so about 200 grams.

[A]

So what's breakfast? Nuts and bolts?

[B]

I usually don't eat breakfast. Okay. But if I did, it would be some sort of protein, probably sheep's milk, yogurt. I prefer sheep's milk because it's a two. It's got more protein, it's got more of the types of fats that you want. And I'm not allergic to it like I am cow's milk.

[A]

Easier to digest.

[B]

Yeah. It's much more compatible with humans.

[A]

By the way, that's big in sardinium.

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And fermented sheep's milk, like manchego cheese. I eat a lot of that because it's a good source of saturated fats I target. And this may drive you nuts. 50% of my fat calories, at a minimum, coming from saturated fats and the rest from monounsaturated. So I like some olive oil, but not too much because studies show that about 2 ounces of olive oil is good for longevity, good for cognitive function. I minimize my seed oils, but I do eat things like avocados and some nuts. But if you eat really large amounts of olive oil, it increases an enzyme called D5D and D6D, and those cause a lot of oxidation of the omega 6 in your cell membranes about five times more. So just goes all the way up.

[A]

There's also a ton of calories that people don't realize.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

Yeah. A tablespoon of olive oil has about 120 calories in it. So you're loading up on calories you don't need. What's for lunch? That sounds like maybe your bigger meal.

[B]

Ideally, your biggest meal would be between 12 to match when the sun is at the.

[A]

Yeah. That tracks with blue zones, too, by the way.

[B]

Oh, yeah. I actually am a huge admirer of you and your work. Just there are people listening. I can't believe they're talking.

[A]

Yeah. Which is why people are gonna watch.

[B]

And, you know, it's so fun to have friends who believe something different than you.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And we have this weird stuff where, you know, if that person says something I don't like, I have to hate them, and I don't do that. I think you have a fantastic heart, and you've been researching in longevity, I think, for a little longer than I have. And you're a true believer. Like, how do we do this? Right. So, yeah, likewise. You're an intellectual mind I greatly respect. So, yeah, we reach that. That middle of the curve, it makes sense. For me, it's a signaling thing. And for you, that's what they've always done, and it seems to work best. And, like, great. We align.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So what did I have for lunch today? I had 16 ounces of ribeye, and I put extra sea salt on it for the minerals. I do think we have an epidemic of salt deficiency right now.

[A]

Boy, that goes flies right in the face of what health experts been telling us, doesn't it?

[B]

Then again, those same health experts for the last 23 years told us that hormone replacement was bad for women.

[A]

Good Patouche.

[B]

Here's why I say this. Way back when I was running that longevity nonprofit, the first time I ever gave my own talk, instead of moderating experts, it was on salt. And I went really deep. I still have the PowerPoint somewhere. And after that, Gary Taubes wrote a book about salt that was very well researched as well. And there's a guy named Michael Haynes who was the president of the American Hypertension Society. So, you know, guy who studies high blood pressure.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And he said all the data for salt consumption is just based on people like, how much salt did you have yesterday? There's. It's not measured. So he measured urinary output of sodium in 3,000 people for three years. So he actually got the data and a direct summary, in his words, of his work. If you want to live longer, eat more salt, there's gotta be a limit to that. Of course, the limit's usually about 6 or 8 grams, which is what I do, and it's changed my life.

[A]

I always thought winter is the most revealing season. Things slow down, the noise fades, and you're given space to think about what really matters. For me, that reset usually starts at my lake house in Wisconsin. Snow on the ground, coffee on the stove. Long walks where the only sound is the ice shifting along the shore. It's where I go to begin again. When I travel later in the season, though, it's comforting to know my home isn't sitting empty. By hosting it on Airbnb, I get to offer someone else that same pause, that same feeling of a fresh beginning. Hosting fits easily into my life. It's simple, meaningful, and it helps carry that spirit of renewal and connection forward. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how [e-mail] host to people listening. You have to be careful because, I mean, there's the Dietary Guidelines will warn us against too much salt and its association with hypertension. We're here in the opposite from you, but sure.

[B]

So the current recommendations are around 2.1 grams. And it's weird.

[A]

So how much is that? That's like a tablespoon or.

[B]

I, I think it's less than that.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

But it turns out sea salt isn't actually sodium, so there's NaCl. So you basically, there's an adjust, there's an adjustment. If you go to chat gp, they'll tell you this much salt has this much sodium in it. But they never told you per pound of body weight, did they? So it would make no sense that a guy as tall as you or me should have the exact same amount of salt as someone who's five feet tall. True. So what does salt deficiency do? It lowers the body's ability to get water inside of cells because of something called an osmolarity gradient. So that's a problem. But even worse, there's an enzyme called renin. And when sodium is low, renin goes up. And a very slight rise in renin increases cardiovascular risk, even by about 25%. So the current 2.1 gram recommendation from the government raises cardiovascular risk. And people say, what about high blood pressure? Sodium affects your blood pressure within the error margin of a blood pressure cuff. It is nominal for all but a very small percentage of people who are salt sensitive hypertensives. Those people usually need more potassium. So what we have is the government shouldn't be telling us how to be healthy. Have you ever seen a healthy politician? It's not their job.

[A]

But you know, you think of like Cheerios has more salt than potato chips and soups are chock full. They have nearly a thousand milligrams of sodium. Our diet is so laced with sodium already, it just seems surprising that we would think about adding more sodium or more salt.

[B]

The data is incredibly strong on this. And I mean, you look at Cheerios. Cheerios are labeled as a heart healthy food. But we know that raising insulin is really bad for heart health. And Cheerios spike and something like no one's business because they're ultra processed carbs. I was very surprised by this. And I actually was focusing on making sure I had more potassium than sodium. And I've limited my sodium. And when I got my sodium levels up to be appropriate for someone of my size and my height and for my stress level. Stressed animals need more sodium. And as a farmer, we put salt licks out for our animals. Because it's so bad for them? No, it's because they die without it. Elephants travel thousands of miles to the salt caves. To get their sodium. So it's a necessary nutrient that we don't want to demonize. You don't want to overdo it. And I teach people, look at your ratio of sodium to potassium. If you're getting enough potassium, you can have more sodium, and you'll actually have better cell hydration. And at upgrade labs, whenever someone comes in, we use a $26,000 machine that measures cell hydration, among many other things. And what we find universally is that half our people come in and they say, I drink huge amounts of water every day, but their cells are dehydrated. And we say, put some salt in the water, and then they drink the water, and their cells become hydrated again. So it's weird that you can drink water and it won't go into your cells. It's because cells are made out of, like, seawater. There's salt water inside them. And if there's water outside and the body doesn't have any salt out here, the new water can't get into the cells. So they just hold onto it.

[A]

How about dinner? Huge ribeye for lunch. What's dinner?

[B]

Dinner is likely to be another huge ribeye or maybe a piece of lamb or a piece of fish.

[A]

So you don't need any vegetables at all?

[B]

Vegetables. There's going to be some kind of vegetable. Arugula is my favorite. I eat a lot of arugula. I'll eat some broccoli. I'm not anti vegetable, but I choose vegetables that are lower in oxalate. So I don't do spinach. I do arugula instead. It has more polyphenols. It's just nutritionally superior. And then I'll usually put some pili nuts or macadamia nuts on it. I put some olive oil. I might put manchiko cheese. I might have some fruit, and I might have some white rice.

[A]

And how about what does Dave Asprey do if he wants to blow it out? If he wants to. Like, I love eating this food. I'm going to eat it, darn it.

[B]

Well, I'm about to go to Dubai actually, tonight. And American wheat is hard red wheat. It's a certain species that's harder on the gut, and it's polluted with glyphosate and bromine and a bunch of other stuff. So if I get even a little bit of wheat here, it wrecks my gut. I get pimples, my brain gets foggy. I can eat European wheat reasonably well, unless they smuggled American wheat into Italy like they're doing so when I'm in Dubai, my goal is to treat my baklava deficiency.

[A]

Oh, yum.

[B]

I'm going to have a pound of baklava every day for five days. I'm going to take some pharmaceuticals to keep my blood sugar under control, and I'm going to enjoy the hell out of it, and I'm not going to regret it even a little bit.

[A]

Yeah, you got to enjoy life. That's another big lesson, these restrictive diets. You're also a master marketer.

[B]

Thank you.

[A]

What was your first product that really put you on the map?

[B]

Well, I had a long career in Silicon Valley. I taught at the University of California. I taught engineers how to build the first version of the Web. I ran the Web and Internet engineering program, and I got really frustrated because I was a deep nerd, and the best technology would never win. These guys made this stupid technology that's inefficient, and they just had all this success. But this other one that was clearly superior always failed. And it's because if you're going to invent something that's new and no one uses it, you're a failed inventor. So I realized, oh, my gosh, I'm going to have to learn the dark art of marketing so that I can make the things that are worthy be seen by people. And doing this in the world of cloud computing, security, that's hard. It's not exciting. So meanwhile, what I've been doing as my love in the longevity field, in the nonprofit world, I just sat down one day and I said, I've failed at getting even one person under 60 to come to our meetings every month. And we're four minutes from Google's headquarters, and I just beat myself up about it. And on this walkabout in Tibet, I just had time to think, and I realized we have a branding problem for longevity. We also have one for consciousness. No one wakes up when they're 19 years old and says, today, I'd like to become enlightened, and I would like to live forever. We wake up, and automatically our mitochondria make us do it. We wake up and go, where's my tribe? How do I make my mark in the world? And where's my basically intimate partner or partners when you're 20? So this is our motivation. So I started the biohacking movement, which I would say is probably the most.

[A]

Are you the godfather of biohacking?

[B]

I coined the term. Yeah.

[A]

Oh, my God.

[B]

My name's in Webster's Dictionary.

[A]

Yeah. Look at the sea here. We just Thought he was a normal guy. The godfather of biohacking right here.

[B]

Yeah. And I did it as a Trojan horse to get young people to pay attention to longevity, because the things that make old people young make young people powerful.

[A]

So there'd be no Brian Johnson without Dave Asprey.

[B]

Probably not. I think I inspired him. His marketing campaign, like Beat for Beat, matched the one for my longevity book, which is great. Like, I want all the voices in longevity. Like, I think my body temperature above 94 degrees is healthy. But Brian and I are friends. I knew Brian before he got into the longevity because I'm also a neuroscience guy. So I called him about his colonel thing, and we talked about science fiction books. I love him because he's a deep nerd like me. We have all of this need for our young people to actually know how to drive their bodies and their minds. I didn't have that when I was 19. If someone had just written all the stuff that I wrote and the things I've shared when I was a young man, it would have saved me a half a million dollars just to feel good again and another 2 million to reverse my age. So I would say biohacking, which is today a $36 billion industry that I started.

[A]

That's huge.

[B]

Yeah. That might be my biggest success. Yeah. This is important. I did not trademark the term biohacking on purpose because I wanted it to be a movement in society. I created a company called Bulletproof. I have nothing to do with them. My new coffee is called Danger Coffee because who knows what you might do?

[A]

So you coined Bulletproof. So you're the Bulletproof coffee?

[B]

Yeah, I was the founder of Bulletproof.

[A]

And how come you have nothing to do with it anymore?

[B]

Well, they kind of removed me from the board of directors and then sold it to themselves. I write about some of that in heavily meditated. It was not one of the happier times. Good thing I have a forgiveness practice.

[A]

I mean, Bulletproof Coffee was in the zeitgeist for a long time. People were talking about it was like one of these eyebrow risers. Oh, my God. I can put butter in coffee and it's healthy for me, which I don't know if I'd agree with, but I recognize it was a huge. So you invented it. How did you get it out there? And how was it eventually taken away from you?

[B]

Well, so I invented this. I came back from Tibet going. I remember how sharp I felt. Something happened when I had that yak butter tea. So I bought some tea and some butter, and it tasted bad. It didn't work. So I spent $1200 on expensive tea and it still didn't work. So I bought 25 kinds of butter and two kinds worked the grass fed butter. Oh, that's weird. It was the closest to yak butter. And years later, I funded research at the University of Washington in their cell biology department, Dr. Gerald Pollock's work. And he said, you know, Dave, I'm measuring changes in the viscosity of water when it's next to a fat. So when I see water held next to droplets of butter oil or MCT oil, I see very large changes in the viscosity of the water. So it only works. If you want to put butter in your coffee, you have to blend it for 20 seconds. And I'd like to say I invented that. I'm in Tibet and this was before we had little rechargeable things. The wealthy Tibetans had two yaks and one of them had a car battery and a blender to make it easier to make their tea. Why do you need a blender at 18,000ft elevation? Because you have to blend it. If you don't have that, you have a butter churn and you turn cha chung, cha Chung for 10 minutes before you can drink it. So there's wisdom in ancient ways. You can't just put butter, no, you can't eat a stick of butter and drink coffee. It just doesn't work. And so it's the blending. And it's funny, we drink our green juices fresh squeezed and all that. It's something called exclusion zone water inside your cells is water that's ideal for folding proteins and making ATP. And we can replicate that water with a fresh squeezed vegetable juice or by blending little droplets of fat. It doesn't take much butter to do that. It doesn't work as well with olive oil, but it kind of works. And it tastes bad.

[A]

And then you sold it for a.

[B]

While and they I didn't really sell it. We'll say it was sold, but say I lost control of the company.

[A]

Oh, I'm sorry.

[B]

That's all right. You take a lot of venture capital money. I knew I'd sell the company one day. It was a relatively traumatic experience. And we talked earlier about the thing with Joe Rogan. And for adults, two things that reduce life expectancy and are the hardest to deal with are injustice and betrayal. And those create like an emotional scar or even a spiritual scar, you might say. And there are practices in the east and the west to actually let go of that. So people Go through bad breakups. You know, they maybe get in a car accident or someone they really love and trust stabs them in the back. I had a family member, an envious one, tried to steal one of my companies. And it's straight up white collar crime. And I mean, wow, your own family. Of all the people you think you could trust. So I wrote, heavily meditated, my most recent book, because for 10 years I've worked with executives on letting go of the biggest things that were causing them pain every single day. And it's not what someone did to me, it's how I responded to it that was the problem. So I learned how to do this deep forgiveness process that instead of letting me deal with it, where you just go in and it's like turning off the alerts. If TikTok is bothering you all day on your phone, you should probably turn off those alerts. But if your nervous system is bothering all day because someone was mean to you, you could turn off those alerts too.

[A]

Well, for context, let's unpack this a little bit. We give extra credit for vulnerability. As you know, vulnerability is endearing, but can you just describe when you were at your lowest with these injustices and what the injustice was and how you were feeling that triggered this change?

[B]

I went through the experience with Joe kind of early on. It's like 2014, 2015 with Joe Rogan. That was a wake up call.

[A]

So he sort of stole one of your ideas or.

[B]

No, Joe didn't. It was another company Joe was a major investor in. And so the day they launched their new products, suddenly Dave's a bad man. And it was. I believe it was commercially motivated. I mean, you can't really ever know someone else's motivations. So I'd already kind of gone through that, and that was an injustice.

[A]

What was the product?

[B]

It was the MCT oil and then actually the bulletproof coffee itself. Oh, wow. Yeah. And it was a good innovation. I can see why people wanted to copy it. There's just. There's cleaner ways to do business.

[A]

You hadn't trademarked bulletproof, of course.

[B]

Of course.

[A]

Yeah. Okay.

[B]

And so I'd gone through that and I'd done my forgiveness work on it, but it kind of rocked me for a year or two.

[A]

But, I mean, does this keep you up at night? Do you call friends? Do you cry?

[B]

I didn't cry at the time. It did keep me up at night. And very few things keep me up at night. I'm a big boy, and I would just ruminate on it. And it wasn't really that Joe said it. It was that there were thousands of people who I could have helped who were just coming to my website, just convinced I was a con artist when what I have to offer is free information that is actually life changing. And so many people, even here at this event, people stop me with tears in their eyes and they're saying, do you know what you did? Like, I've lost 50 pounds. You know, these profound stories. And I share this stuff because it's important.

[A]

Because of Bulletproof.

[B]

Yeah, because of biohacking, because of all this knowledge. So someone's savaging my reputation. It means a bunch of people who probably could have benefited from this are now going to become blind to it.

[A]

And don't believe you.

[B]

Then it was like it was the harm to the mission more than my ego, I think. But I got through that. And then I found out a family member was working on stealing one of my companies. And that was really shocking. And I couldn't believe it. But when I filed the lawsuit and did the discovery, yep, premeditated white collar crime.

[A]

How does one steal a company?

[B]

They worked on moving all of the IP out of the company, the stuff that I paid for and developed. So the crown jewels of the company that let it do what it did, they worked on claiming ownership of it and signed some documents and it was.

[A]

Oh, how fiendish.

[B]

It was very fiendish. And when I found out, like, wow, like I've treated this person, you know, helpfully for years, and I just found out, wow, like it wasn't reciprocated. That was on me. I mean, there were warning signs I didn't see. So it's all just lessons. But that creates a feeling of kind of loneliness. And then I find out one day the board of directors pulled some shenanigans and removed me against my will from my own board of directors. I'm like, what is going on here? But at least the company was for sale. It was worth half a billion dollars, set for life. And then they stopped communicating. I'm like, I don't want to sue my own company.

[A]

Well, what was a half a billion dollar company that was bulletproof?

[B]

Yeah, that was what all the. I mean, we hired an investment bank. That's what it was worth. And it was supposed to be for sale. So I'm like, all right, I'm not going to say anything. I'm just going to sit back, I'm going to sell the company. Everyone's okay. But in the next two years, instead of selling it Some things that management did, I'm careful with my words here, caused the company to be worth less than 10% of what it was worth when I was there. And then they orchestrated a sale to themselves. It was interesting.

[A]

That's painful. That's all right.

[B]

It was brutal. I mean, the amount of stress. People who've built put all their energy into something like that. It feels like it's your baby and it's not. Your company isn't your baby, but you put your life force energy into a mission company like that. And it was just one of the things like, what a waste. Just what a terrible, terrible waste of something. And so the sale went ahead and it was all of a sudden, okay, My economic situation has shifted very dramatically. But the worst of all is I had to call up, had friends who trusted me, who invested in my company, who by all rights should have become wealthy from their investment, and I should have become super wealthy from the work that I put in for 10 years. And I had to say, you know what? I'm sorry it didn't happen. Like, I lost all of my shares too. And that was hard. And you find out sometimes who your real friends are. Some of my friends like, God damn, I'm really sorry. That sucks, man. Are you okay? And others like, where's my money?

[A]

Well, you know, you said at the top of our conversation about realizing that misbehavior is on them. What you get to choose is how you react to it and training your mind to not react as negatively and with more acceptance and to a certain amount of kindness. But, you know, to flip the positive, Dave, I mean, you're on Saturday Night Live and Jimmy Fallon, and you have this genius for vectoring your ideas and your. Your products into the zeitgeist, into people's homes. And we're at Eudaimonia right now. There's 4,000 different vendors there, and they all have their version of Bulletproof coffee, whether it's a supplement or a superfood. But what general advice, if you have a product or an idea that you think is worthy for other people to get healthier, what's sort of the strategy for getting into people's hands?

[B]

As the leader of a $36 billion industry, I've spent a lot of time thinking about that. And I actually teach entrepreneurs how to build the next version of what I did. The most important thing isn't marketing. It turns out it's having a product that actually works. And the reason, imagine that reason Bulletproof was so successful was because people felt radically different after they did it. It was a highly efficacious product that was better than what was out there. And so many people today, they're just copying something out there, but they don't have the expertise to even make a better copy. They make a lower quality copy and they put a pretty sticker on it, and then they start marketing it. So look at your product. Make it so that it is fantastic. And I support a lot of companies as an advisor, and there's companies. We have 10 years of research on this new molecule derived from fermentation of pomegranates, and we have all this clinical research for longevity and mitochondrial function. I'm like, come on my show. Let's talk. So my job is to shine a light on the people doing the real work versus the people making pretty stickers. And so my first advice for every company would be, make a awesome product. And if you don't do that, you haven't earned a right to go out there and market to people. You're just wasting their time. Right. And the second one would be, show them who you are. I've been on stage more times than I can count 1400 episodes of my show. And the thing people always say is, wow, you're actually like this because I'm not acting. Congruence is one of the hardest things to do. I couldn't do congruence where your inner state and your outer state match until I did all this neurofeedback work on myself. So I don't have to act. I'm present. And I believe people can feel a slimy founder. Not all people can, but enough can. And you have a guy who's up there going, yeah, I'm here to save the world. And meanwhile, he's like, suckers.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. Anybody who tells me that they're here because they care about the healthy humanity, I'm pretty sure they probably got their hand in your pocket and interested in profit.

[B]

But. But you're one of those who cares? And I could tell because I can read people. And you deeply care about your work.

[A]

Yeah, my work. You know, I didn't. I mean, blue zones. I never started out to help people live longer. I started out to solve a mystery, and it turns out it works.

[B]

There you go. It's funny we didn't mention this in the start. I didn't start Bulletproof to become a brand. I was going to do all of my blog underneath the nonprofit, but when my board of directors argued for three months over the URL, I just, I was like, okay, I'm just gonna go do this. So I started the blog that became Bulletproof. It was gonna be a nonprofit. I just wanted people to have the information. And then the coffee came out. I couldn't buy mold free coffee, so I made some. It was completely not meant to be a company. It just became one. So it's. You were curious. You're driven by curiosity. You found something precious, and you shared it with the world. And I think you did it because you care, right? Yeah.

[A]

Yeah, I care. 25 years later, I'm kind of still doing the same thing, different permutation. You have this sort of genius, I don't even think you know, you have at vectoring your ideas into people's minds whether or not we want them. Again, your approach and my approach could not be more different, but yet somehow we meet in the middle and we agree on most things, and it's just a joy to talk to you. How do we keep in touch with you?

[B]

I'[e-mail], dave Asprey on Instagram, and I just. I appreciate your work in the world. You have such good energy, and we're working on the same goal, and it's okay to have different approaches.

[A]

And I'm from Dan Buettner.com Dan Buettner on Instagram and Dan Buettner podcast, which you're watching now or you're watching the Dave Asprey. Either way, come back to both of our podcasts and see more. I'll see you when you're 100. Dave will see you when you're 150.

[B]

Thank you.