Superhuman Contact Lenses, Motivation Supplement Stack, Cat Scratches Cause Brain Fog, Amino Acid Shortening Lifespan, and more... : 1448

Summary

---

The Human Upgrade: Biohacking for Longevity & Performance

Episode 1448 — April 10, 2026

Host: Dave Asprey

---

Main Theme & Purpose

This episode is a rapid-fire “10-minute weekly upgrade” with Dave Asprey, focused on the latest breakthroughs and practical insights in biohacking, longevity, and health optimization. Dave highlights five surprising ways everyday inputs—from cat scratches to amino acids, superhuman contact lenses, supplement stacks, and even the power of a simple flower inhale—can dramatically affect your cognitive function, motivation, lifespan, and stress levels. The theme: paying closer attention to the subtle but powerful inputs we often overlook can lead to the biggest human upgrades.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Cat Scratches and Brain Fog: Bartonella Underdiagnosis

[02:02 - 05:04]

• Bartonella is a bacterial infection from cat scratches or bites; emerging research links it with chronic symptoms like brain fog, mood issues, and fatigue.
• “Someone gets scratched by their cat ... then slowly develops brain fog, mood instability, fatigue, and they spend the next decade getting handed diagnoses that don’t quite fit.” (Dave Asprey, 02:28)
• Bartonella evades detection by hiding in red blood cells; standard antibody tests often miss it. A PCR test is required for accurate detection, which many doctors don’t order by default.
• Advice: If you’ve had a cat scratch and ongoing cognitive/mood issues, push your doctor for a specific Bartonella PCR.

2. Tyrosine: The Lifespan-Shortening Amino Acid (for Men)

[05:05 - 07:13]

• A Mendelian randomization study (n=270,000) found higher tyrosine levels correlated with nearly a year less lifespan in men, but not women.
• Tyrosine is abundant in high-protein diets and many supplements.
• “The higher your testosterone, the more you might be paying a price for excess tyrosine.” (Dave Asprey, 06:22)
• Mechanism: In men, excess tyrosine is more likely oxidized (via testosterone-driven enzyme myeloperoxidase) into meta-tyrosine, causing inflammation and aging acceleration.
• Actionable tip: If on a high-protein or carnivore diet, get your plasma tyrosine and phenylalanine ratios tested (aim for <10:1).

3. Superhuman Contact Lenses: Altius’s Game-Changer for Cognitive & Visual Efficiency

[07:14 - 08:37]

• Altius developed tinted contact lenses that reduce chromatic aberration by 53% and enhance visual contrast by 20–30%. Means your eyes/brain spend less effort correcting ‘noisy’ light.
• “Your brain is burning resources just to make sense of noisy visual input.” (Dave Asprey, 07:30)
• Dave parallels with his own TrueDark glasses, emphasizing most ‘blue light blockers’ are inadequate.
• These new lenses filter light at the cornea, directly preventing processing overload—reportedly aiding e-sports performance and post-injury (TBI) recovery.
• Practical advice: If not ready for contacts, use high-coverage blue-light glasses like TrueDark, and supplement with apps like f.lux or Iris.

4. Motivation in a Supplement Stack: Taurine + B6/B9/B12

[08:38 - 09:04]

• Recent placebo-controlled study: four weeks of a stack (Taurine, methylated B6, folate, B12) measurably increased motivation (effort for reward) and reduced attention lapses.
• “A lot of people ... who describe themselves as unmotivated or stuck are probably just running depleted B vitamins, low taurine, and they’re blaming themselves for a nutrient problem.” (Dave Asprey, 09:00)
• Mechanism: Combo boosts glutathione in astrocytes (brain support cells), freeing brainpower for what most call ‘willpower’.
• Protocol:
  • Taurine: 2g
  • Methylfolate: 800mcg
  • P5P (active B6): 50mg
  • Methylcobalamin (active B12): 1mg
  • Take all in the morning, before food, for four weeks before evaluating effect.

5. The Power of Inhaling Flowers: Fast Stress Reset

[11:43 - 13:51]

• New research (Monell Chemical Senses Center): a 30-second deep inhale of a floral scent directly calms the nervous system—reducing heart rate by 5–10 bpm and shifting towards parasympathetic (“rest & digest”).
• “It’s the oldest sensory pathway we have ... what matters is that you stop, go outside, find something blooming, and breathe slowly and deeply through your nose for 30 seconds.” (Dave Asprey, 12:38 & 13:06)
• Even the act of nasal breathing works; scent compounds add a further calming signal straight to the limbic system.
• Lavender is most backed by research, but any floral will do.
• Big-picture: Many biohacks are complicated—but powerful tools are often free and right outside your door.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Bartonella is dramatically underdiagnosed ... Standard antibody tests miss a significant portion of cases. You need PCR and most conventional doctors won’t order it unless you push.”
  — Dave Asprey, 03:23

• “This should give everyone pause who’s loading up on tyrosine, whether in your pre-workout or your carnivore diet.”
  — Dave Asprey, 06:50

• “The difference between TrueDark and what most people think of as blue light glasses is the same difference between actually fixing the input, and slapping a band-aid on it.”
  — Dave Asprey, 07:46

• “A lot of the people I talk to who describe themselves as unmotivated or stuck are probably just running depleted B vitamins, low taurine, and they’re blaming themselves for a nutrient problem.”
  — Dave Asprey, 09:00

• “I think we’ve built out elaborate recovery protocols ... and walked right past one of the fastest autonomic resets that exists, which is growing in every park and front yard in America right now.”
  — Dave Asprey, 12:13

---

Key Timestamps

| Timestamp | Topic | |-----------|--------------------------| | 02:02 | Cat scratches, Bartonella & chronic brain fog | | 05:05 | Tyrosine intake and male lifespan | | 07:14 | Altius contact lenses, visual input, brain resources | | 08:38 | Motivation stack: taurine + vitamins | | 11:43 | Smelling flowers for nervous system reset |

---

Closing Thoughts

Dave ties the episode together by emphasizing attention to subtle, everyday inputs over exotic technologies or expensive interventions:

“All five of these stories are really about inputs you’ve been ignoring... None of these require a prescription or a biohacking budget. What they require is paying attention at a level most people never bother with. That’s the actual edge.” (Dave Asprey, 13:20)

---

Summary by The Human Upgrade Podcast Summarizer — for listeners, biohackers, and anyone interested in the intersection of cutting-edge science and real-world wellness.

Transcript

[A]

I'm Dave Asprey. That's Dave spelled D A I V

[B]

E. And this is your 10 minute weekly upgrade on the biggest stories in biohacking, longevity and the world of health.

[A]

Let's go.

[B]

Is the air you're breathing making you sick? Just because you don't see mold doesn't mean it isn't there. My friend Jason Earle has been on a mission for over two decades to help people understand the history of hidden role of indoor air in their health. He's one of the world's leading experts on mold and indoor air quality. And he created the Got Mold Test kit to make professional grade air testing simple and accessible. It uses cutting edge air sampling tech that top inspectors trust. And it's engineered for you at a fraction of the cost. It takes just minutes to get samples using the patented Biovac air sampling pump. Then you send them prepaid to one of the most prestigious microbiology labs in the world. No guesswork, no paperwork and no hidden fees. You get fast results, intuitive reports and great support. And since you keep the pump, you can retest anytime for less. It even comes with a lifetime warranty. Mold may be invisible, but its impact isn't. This kit helps you understand your environment so you can take action for your health. Go to gotmold.com and use code DAVE10 to save 10% and see what's in your air. Because the best biohackers don't guess. They test.

[C]

And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.

[A]

Hey, everyone.

[B]

Check out this guy and his bird.

[A]

What is this, your first date?

[C]

Oh, no. We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.

[A]

Yeah, the bird looks out of your league. Anyways.

[C]

Only pay for what you need. @liberty mutual.com.

[B]

There's a good chance your cat is

[A]

making you stupid, your protein shake is taking years off your life, and the best stress tool on the planet is blooming outside your front door right now. This week got weird fast, and here's why. So bartonella is a bacterial infection that gets transmitted through cat scratches and bites. And it's been showing up in research on chronic illness a lot more these days. What's changing is the diagnostics. We now have PCR testing that can actually find this thing in the body where older antibody tests kept missing it because the bacteria hides inside red blood cells and vascular tissue. It doesn't behave like a normal infection. It kind of digs in and just stays. I've been talking about stealth pathogens on this show for a long time and this is the classic playbook. Someone gets scratched by their cat or one roaming their neighborhood maybe years ago, and then slowly develops brain fog, mood instability, fatigue, and they spend the next decade getting handed diagnoses that don't quite fit. Depression, anxiety, chronic fatigue. The doctor is pattern matching symptoms and completely missing what's actually driving them. I think Bartonella is dramatically underdiagnosed and the reason is that the standard antibody test misses a significant portion of cases. You need PCR and most conventional doctors won't order it unless you push. If you have a cat, you've been scratched and something in your cognitive or mood picture has never fully resolved, go find a Lyme literate MD and ask specifically for a Bartonella pcr, not a standard tick panel pcr. This is the one that I keep coming back to this week. A Mendelian randomization study which is one of the stronger research designs we have for establishing causation in nutrition short of locking people in a lab for a decade, looked at nearly 270,000 people and found that higher circulating tyrosine is associated with almost a full year of lost lifespan in men, not in women, men specifically. Here's why this matters beyond the headline number, tyrosine is present in a ton of things right now. It's in pre workouts, it's in fat burning formulas and it's loaded into high protein keto diets because meat is full of it. And the reason men get hit and women don't comes down to an enzyme called myeloperoxidase. In men, excess tyrosine gets oxidized into a compound called meta tyrosine which is inflammatory, which drives up the exact markers IL6, CRP, TNF alpha that accelerate aging. Testosterone appears to upregulate that pathway. So the higher your testosterone, the more you might be paying a price for excess tyrosine. If you've been a listener to the show, you now know why. This is such an interesting study. That has certainly got me thinking. For those that may be supplementing with tyrosine or eating a full carnivore diet, it might be wise to go run a panel. Quest and LabCorp both run Plasma tyrosine and phenylalanine. Based on this study you Want your ratio under 10:1. Know your number before you decide. Alright, this one I find pretty remarkable and I want to explain why. Because on the surface tinted contact sounds like a marginal upgrade, and it's not. A company called Altius has developed a tinted contact lens that cuts chromatic aberration by 53% and improves visual contrast by 20 to 30%. Chromatic aberration is the fact that your eye can't focus every wavelength of light to the same point at the same time. Blue light focuses slightly in front of your retina, red light slightly behind it, and your brain is constantly running a background correction process to compensate. That process costs energy. Every hour you're in front of a screen, your brain is burning resources just to make sense of noisy visual input. This is actually something I've been working on for a long time. I created TrueDark glasses specifically because I saw this problem and wanted to solve it. Filtering the light spectrum before it hits your eye so your brain isn't constantly doing damage control. The difference between TrueDark and what most people think of as blue light glasses is the same difference between actually fixing the input and slapping a band aid on it. Most blue light glasses block maybe 15% of the blue spectrum. TrueDark was built to go much further than that because I knew from my own experience that the brain cost of bad light was real and most people had no idea they were paying it. What Altius is doing takes that same logic and moves it to the cornea itself, which is a meaningful step forward. Instead of glasses sitting in front of your eye, the lens is filtering the spectrum at the source. Your retina gets quick information, and your brain does less work. I spent years after my mold exposure dealing with visual processing issues. And I know from personal experience how much cognitive bandwidth gets consumed by corrupted sensory input. When the signal gets cleaner, you get sharper. Not because you got smarter, but because your brain stopped wasting processing power. Esports players are reporting real performance improvements. TBI patients are reporting less overstimulation. This is first principle stuff, and it's the same first principle I was working from when I built TrueDark. If you're not ready for contacts, TrueDark glasses are still a strong starting point. And stack either one with flux or iris on your screens. So this study came out of the University of the Philippines. Real randomized crossover trial, real placebo control. And what they were measuring wasn't energy in the stimulant sense. They were measuring effort, motivation. Specifically whether people would choose harder tasks when the reward was worth it, or whether they just default to the easy path. After four weeks on a combination of Taurine, B6 folate, and B12, people were more willing to exert effort for a reward and showed measurably fewer attention lapses on a validated test. The mechanism is what I want you to pay attention to here. Taurine combined with folate upregulates glutathione in astrocytes, the support cells that keep your neurons running. Better astrocyte function means your prefrontal cortex has more resources to do the thing that most people call willpower. A lot of the people I talk to who describe themselves as unmotivated or stuck are probably just running depleted depleted B vitamins, low taurine, and they're blaming themselves for a nutrient problem. This combination has been kicking around energy drinks for years, but nobody was looking at it mechanistically until now. The data is worth acting on. 2 grams of taurine methylfolate 800 micrograms P5P 50 milligrams methylcobalamin 1 milligram activated forms only in the morning before you eat. Give it four weeks before you judge it.

[B]

Every time you reach for a healthy snack, you could be sabotaging your energy, focus and long term health. That's because even if you think think it's healthy, it probably contains seed oils which make up 20% of the average person's daily calories. And recent studies show seed oils can cause metabolic issues and inflammation in your body. Masa decided to do something about it. They created a delicious tortilla chip with just three organic nixtamalized corn, sea salt and 100% grass fed beef tallow and no seed oils. This is one of the few times I'll eat corn because this corn is nixtamalized with which is a process that removes mycotoxins and anti nutrients. Masa chips don't only avoid all the bad stuff, they taste incredible too. Snacking on Masa chips is nothing like eating regular chips. They're crunchier, tastier and sturdier than other chips so they won't break in your guac. With Masa, you feel satisfied, light and energetic with no crash, bloat or gross sluggishness afterwards. And an added bonus is that the beef tallow makes makes the chips much more satiating so you won't find yourself uncontrollably binging and still feeling hungry afterwards. Ready to give Masa a try? Go to masacips.com daveasprey and use code daveasprey for 25% off your first order. That's M A S A chips.com daveasprey use code daveasprey. You're gonna love these chips.

[D]

Your hair is a sign of how healthy you are. So what actually works if you want to grow new hair? There are tons of products that sound good on paper, but they really don't do much in practice. Irestore is different because it is powerful and it's targeted and it's light therapy. Your hair follicles directly absorb the light energy, which means blood flow increases and that means dormant hair follicles can wake back up. The Elite delivers that through 300 lasers and 200 LEDs directly to your scalp. And it takes an easy 12 minutes a day. And you can wear it while you're working, while you're doing chores around the house. And the clinical results from it are amazing. Double blind study, 100% of participants grew more hair. In four months, their hair count increased an average of 43.2%. And this thing really works. Plus you get a 12 month money back guarantee.

[A]

Try it for a year and see

[D]

what happens and you'll like it. Spring savings is happening right now, so go to irestore.com, use code Dave and get an exclusive discount on the elite. That's irestore.com code Dave.

[B]

I'm going to end with something that

[A]

I know sounds almost too simple, and that's exactly why I want to talk about it. Researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses center, serious respected smell scientists looked at data from olfactory woks across 70 cities and confirmed that a 30 second deep inhale of a floral scent measurably lowers heart rate and shifts your nervous system toward parasympathetic five to ten beats per minute. And the reason this works the way it does is that smell is the only sense that bypasses the thalamus and goes straight to the limbic system. Every other sense gets routed through a relay station. First, your nose talks directly to your amygdala before your conscious brain has processed anything. It's the oldest sensory pathway we have and, and most people have basically stopped using it. I think we've built out elaborate recovery protocols, cold exposure, red light, breathwork devices, and walked right past one of the fastest autonomic resets that exists, which is growing in every park and front yard in America right now. Florals score highest for universal pleasantness. Lavender has the most RCT backing. But I don't think it matters much which flower. What matters is that you stop, go outside, find something blooming, and breathe slowly and deeply through your nose for 30 seconds. The nasal breathing alone is doing work. The scent compounds are adding signal on top of that it's two mechanisms for free. What tied this week together for me is that all five of these stories are really about inputs you've been ignoring. A scratch from your cat, an amino acid in your supplement bottle, the wavelengths hitting your retina and your B vitamin status, the air right outside your door. None of these are exotic. None of them require a prescription or a biohacking budget. What they require is paying attention at a level most people never bother with. That's the actual edge. Not the next device or the next drug, but understanding what your body is already responding to, whether you're aware of it or not. I'll see you next week.

[B]

All right, guys, that is your weekly biohacking roundup. Join me again next Friday for another rundown of the biggest health stories in the news.

[A]

Enjoy your weekend.

[E]

A Human Upgrade Formerly Bulletproof Radio was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider carefully, read all labels and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.