Dave Asprey┃From Survival to Human Upgrade: How Personalized Biohacking Can Transform Longevity

You don't need to spend $2.5 million over 20 years like I did, and you definitely don't need to spend $2 million a year obsessively tracking everything. It doesn't, it doesn't do much because what works for you is not what works for the person next to you. It is so highly personalized. And having done a lot of clients through Unlimited Life, every recommendation is different and it has to be personalized or it doesn't work. We're all unique.

What if aging, energy, focus, and even the way you experience your own mind are far more changeable than you've been led to believe. Today, I sit down with pioneering entrepreneur, 4-time New York Times bestselling author, and the father of biohacking, Dave Asprey, to explore how our ability to influence human biology may actually go. Dave shares how his own health crisis, reaching nearly 300 pounds, struggling with arthritis and chronic fatigue, and buying disability insurance at just 26, set him on a decades-long path of experimentation that helped launch the biohacking movement. We'll get into why he now sees biohacking as less about controlling the body and more about learning to intentionally change your state, how mitochondria may be one of the keys to energy and longevity, why the future of health has to become deeply personalized, and how emerging technologies could radically shape the the way we think about aging, performance, and human potential.

I'm really excited to be here today with none other than the father of biohacking himself, Dave Asprey.

Welcome, Dave.

I'm really happy to be here.

I'm gonna share your bio and then we'll jump right in. Sound good?

Sounds like a plan.

Okay. Dave Asprey is a pioneering entrepreneur, 4-time New York Times bestselling author, biohacker, founder of Bulletproof, founder and CEO of Upgrade Labs, Founder of 40 Years of Zen and host of the Human Upgrade podcast. Widely recognized as the father of biohacking, he has spent more than 2 decades researching human performance, neuroscience, nutrition, and longevity. After overcoming obesity, prediabetes, and chronic health challenges through extensive self-experimentation, Dave coined the term biohacking, now recognized by Merriam-Webster. He founded Bulletproof and helped popularize functional coffee, MCT oil, and collagen protein, While also creating Upgrade Labs, the world's first human upgrade center, and 40 Years of Zen, an advanced neuroscience program focused on peak cognitive performance and personal transformation. Dave's work has been featured on CNN, Good Morning America, The New York Times, Wired, and other major media outlets. He's the author of bestselling books including The Bulletproof Diet, Headstrong, Superhuman, Fast This Way, and Smarter Not Harder. And I really want to mention, I think, what I think is a fabulous book, Heavily Meditated.

Hmm.

So we'd like to start off on a little bit of a personal note. And you are widely recognized as the person who introduced the term biohacking to the world. So looking back, what convinced you? I'm familiar with your background, and many people probably are, of what you suffered as a child growing up in a home with a lot of mold and all that resulted from that. But what convinced you that aging, energy, and performance were much more programmable than most people believed? And then also, how has your definition of what biohacking is evolved since that point?

I was starting to get a little desperate in my, my mid-20s. I'd hit as much as 300 pounds. I had arthritis since I was 14, and I didn't know what to do. I felt like I was in a, in a car and I'm pressing the accelerator. It's all the way to the floor and the car is slowing down and I can press harder, but there's no more room for it to move. And I bought disability insurance when I was 26 years old. You don't do that because the doctor said there's nothing wrong with you, but I just, I don't have any gas left in the tank. So I started kind of out of desperation hanging out with a group of people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s in Palo Alto, California, and they were running the first longevity nonprofit group in the Bay Area. And it was actually started by one of the guys who invented Ethernet, the networking standard that we all use today, even now during this interview. And so this was an early tech guy saying, maybe we can live a lot longer. He started it in 1993. And if you look at what happened in the early aughts, that's when all the, the multi-billionaires started investing in longevity, and the fruits are just happening now. So just very, very early days. Think Homebrew Computer Club, but for longevity. When I met people in their, uh, 70s and 80s who had more energy than I did, thought, well, they've reversed their age, they can do it, why can't I? And I started attending all the meetings. And I learned from my elders, and then eventually they asked me to run the organization. So I ran the first longevity nonprofit in the Bay Area for more than 5 years. And every month I interviewed the top experts in the field before most people thought it was really even a field. And people say, Dave, how do you know all this stuff? How can you do this? How can you have, you know, these, these clients spending, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year? With the VIP longevity practice Unlimited Life. And I'm like, well, it's not just me. We have full doctors and all that, but it's because I have been immersed in longevity for 25 years because I needed it for my own biology. And, um, I just, my brain wasn't working. My body wasn't working. My gut wasn't working. Like nothing was working right. So I had to rebuild it. So call it enlightened self-interest. But the gift of that is that when my friend Mike, who was 88, would call me at 11:30 at night and say, I have this great new idea. Like, how's he calling me at 11:30 at night? Because I'm tired and he's not. And like, I want that. And I got that and so much more just by the practice of biohacking. And what's changed over the years? There's been one change in the definition of biohacking since I started it. The original idea for biohacking came to me on the side of Mount Kailash, the holiest mountain in the world. In a remote part of Western Tibet. I was learning meditation from the masters and doing some exploration, and I thought, why will no one under age even 50 come to this longevity nonprofit group? And I realized it's because, well, if you're worried about longevity and you're 20 years old, you're doing it wrong. You should be worried about finding a mate and making your mark in the world. So I just pondered and I recharacterized this idea. I said, oh, we have a branding problem for longevity or anti-aging. The reality is the things that make old people young make young people powerful. So maybe I could talk to everyone about control over your biology. And so the definition when I launched this was the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so you have control of your biology, about controlling your meat body.

Mm-hmm.

And I started out with that because I think that's where the consciousness of the, the world was, and it was most accessible to people. And over the years, I've changed it to the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so you have control over your state. And your state encompasses your body and your mind and your spirit. And people don't know this, but your biology is the antenna for your spirit anyway. So broken biology means it's harder to Harder but not impossible to do some of the more exalted spiritual things. It's hard to be peaceful when your cells are falling apart. And I actually know that because I have a great genetic mutation in something called CCL2. When I get gut bacterial toxins or mold toxins or a lot of other things, I have about 10 times more tissue destruction as an immune response. So I feel the things that are affecting your biology that you may not feel, but they're making you old or giving you cancer. Me, they punch me in the brain and the gut at the same time. So how do I know these things work or don't work? Because I can sense it, right? And then I can do the science and I can look at it. And this gift, even though it kind of sucks, has been something that's let me in multiple books write about things that weren't proven yet. To the standards of big pharma, not that their standards are actually that useful for proving things. But one of the examples years ago, I said there's a specific kind of MCT oil called C8 MCT that you can put in coffee. At the time I used to, I used to call it Bulletproof Coffee. I have nothing to do with that company. My new coffee company, by the way, I'm drinking it right now, is called Danger Coffee. Danger, because who knows what you might do. But I said, put a specific kind of this coconut extract in because it works better. And here's the mechanistic science about why I think it works better. I cannot prove to you that it works better. And 5 years after the book comes out, University of California San Diego says, oh, that kind that Dave talked about? Yeah, it works better than everything else. How do you know it? Because you can feel it. So one of the most important things in the history of biohacking for thousands of years, we didn't call it that, but it's the same thing, was observation. So what we used to do is we'd take all of our weird people like me. Oh, by the way, I was on the autism spectrum. Now I'm just adjacent to it. And yes, you can actually change where you are on the spectrum. But they would take our weird people and they'd put them in monasteries or caves or teepees on the edge of town, and they'd say, Study this, pay attention to paying attention, and write down what you see and read all the scrolls from the last guys, right? And then write everything down and hand it off to the next guy. Pretty soon we're going to learn something about the world, but we might all be dead by then, and that's okay. So the original biohackers, they were shamans, they were meditators, they were keeping the keys of how do you run these dumb meat bodies. And all of them end up at the same thing, that the world that we see in our normal state is not a very— it's a useful representation of the world, but it's not a very accurate one. So change your state, become more aware of the world and, uh, more aware of yourself, and maybe you'll be a better person.

So your kind of biological hypersensitivity was both a blessing and a curse, but made you in many ways the ideal guinea pig for this kind of self-experimentation that helped you develop this movement and, and provide the leadership you've provided. So if you look at our current society, even here in the US or in the Western or in the modern world, it's pretty much the global world these days. But so you have people that are, you know, really not focused on health or concerned about health much at all. They're just a lack of education or interest. And then you have people that are aware of their health and probably would like to be healthier, live longer, but are probably not tuned into the biohacking movement or things like that. And then you have people that are involved in biohacking, supplementation, you know, more conscious around health or have more information. So maybe the middle one, people with a more conventional perspective, but also even the world— in the world of biohacking, to what, to what degree are, are we still misunderstanding what aging is all about? And, and misunderstanding What really can contribute to both longevity and healthspan? And I mean, I still think there's this, a really strong cultural force that sees longevity as just this inevitable aging decline process, a process of entropy. So where are we with that? And what do you see that were the key things that we're getting wrong, the key things in terms of our mind shift and understanding that need to shift?

There's a, like, a mechanistic biological answer and there's a metaphysical answer. Which one do you want?

Uh, probably both. Let's start with the, with the physical one.

Well, we know there's about 12 hallmarks of aging, and I wrote about these in Superhuman, which is my, my New York Times longevity book that's kind of set the template for a lot of the books that have come out afterwards. And so what can we do for each of those 12 things in order to reduce the effect of it so that the net result is longer life? Well, it turns out there's a lot, and it's been 7, 8 years or something since I wrote that book, and we've got about 100 clients in Unlimited.Life. These are people, wealthy people, some billionaires pulling out the stops, and we do $50,000 or thereabouts of lab work on them to start them in the program. So we know everything. And then we do everything, and they're willing to do everything, including stem cell reprogramming and gene therapy, things that I've done. And what we're finding is using validated statistical tables from our lead physician, who has been an actuarial working with heads of state on their longevity, as well as with insurance companies on predicting lifespan. We are making the predicted lifespan go up for these people. They're actually showing in their data that they're going to live longer within 1 year of starting. So the return on investment for that, they spend a year with some energy and some time and some money, and they're getting a year or more back. That's kind of interesting. So this works mechanistically. Now, our current best for humans is 122 years old. At least that's in recent time. If you look at anything in India, there's lots of people 185 years old that are written about, some even in relatively recent times. And if you look in China, they talk about it. And even the Bible— Methuselah, 969 years old. Noah, 400 years old. So our current best, who the heck knows? So I'll just say that it is possible to, at a minimum, be super healthy, and to hit the longest possible lifespan for humans, which is 122. We already know that, it's been done. But the average lifespan in the US is 79.5, 80 years old. That's a big 40 years. That's a big gap. So that's a lot of room for expansion. And I want to go up to 180. I want 50% better than our current best. It doesn't seem that hard to do.

So staying in the mechanistic model, how much of that is genetics and how much of it is what we can impact through biohacking on various forms?

There are about 100 genes that supercentenarians have that are different. And my friends, my friend James Clements flew around the world, gathered the genes from these people who are healthy over 100, and then gave 'em all to George Church who did The research on this. So there's a genetic component, but it's not the only one by far. And there's some other interesting things. People who live over 100 have higher cholesterol, not lower cholesterol, because cholesterol is actually protective for a lot of toxins and things like that. A lot of these people smoked and, and drank, which are usually not a good thing, although I think there is actually for For cognitive function, there's a case for low-dose tobacco. Well, ideally low-dose nicotine. But, um, what's happening there is some people are doing it. Sometimes it's luck, sometimes it's genetic, uh, and sometimes it's the fact that a truck didn't hit you at some point in your life, you know? Uh, and also infectious disease is a really big contributor that's under— underrepresented. We're finding more and more COVID or Epstein-Barr, or in my case, the toxic mold stuff and Lyme disease coinfections. These have long-lasting effects. In fact, if I looked at what are the things that make me less likely to hit my goal, it's a childhood full of illnesses and terrible genetics. But in the world of biohacking, we get to do gene therapy. So I've done 2 injections, and we offer these to clients at Unlimited Life, where a protein called klotho that improves cognitive function and longevity— I've injected some signals for my cells to cause them to make more klotho.

Wow.

For the next year or two. So I've bumped my levels up and I've done the same thing with follistatin, which helps you have muscles and lower fat, um, even if you don't change your exercise or diet. These are things that young people have that old people lose. So we can now instruct your cells to make more of the young people juice. And those are types of gene therapy that are not inherited. If I was to have more children, which I'm not going to do, I would, uh, I wouldn't want to be in a position to hand those down. So I'm only changing my cells temporarily and not permanently. But would I go in, and will I be able to in the next 10 years, with or without any government's permission, to be able to go in and turn off the crappy genes that have caused so much of this suffering? You bet your ass I'm gonna do that. I will edit my own genome.

Before moving on, really talking about some of the, the key levers, and of course that's pretty high-tech stuff and, and probably available to some kind of elite-level biohacking.

That's only today, Fleet. Hold on, we got to pause for a second there. Yes, this is what the crazy billionaires do, but someone has to do it first. The first mobile phone in LA was like $40,000, and now they're a dollar a month in Africa. If no one does this, it will never be available for everyone.

Oh, I, I, I hear you, and I, I'm not in any way being pejorative about it. I think it's fantastic that people are doing it. So, so I wanna talk about that and some of the other levers that are available to more people. But before that, you mentioned a metaphysical response. So what would be your metaphysical response to that question?

Well, it's very clear when you look at the math and the philosophy that our bodies are trying to translate the lowest level reality, which is a quantum reality, for us to be able to operate in it. And in a quantum space, well, time is completely made up and so is space. They're not real. They're just useful. I mean, I can feel the matter of my body. I can tap on this and we know what time we were meeting for this. Even though I might have been a minute late.

Right.

But provably, those don't exist. And if they don't, the future and the past become highly malleable. So instead of— instead of saying, well, I'm going to live this amount of time, is that time even real? And what about history? It turns out there's a bunch of possible futures for us. Well, there's also a bunch of possible pasts. And you can prove this 6 ways from Sunday if you have a PhD in in quantum physics. And the book that convinced me of this is the only thing that explains all of the shamanic, all of the Buddhist, and all of the Western approaches at the same time is, is this knowledge set. It's called biocentrism. And what that implies is that when you do the math around the quantum physics and you look at it from a philosophical perspective and you want to be able to explain all the observed phenomena, both the spiritual life, death, all that kind of stuff, and the other, the other physical things that we're aware of, this is the only solution I've been able to find. Beyond Biocentrism by Robert Lanza is a good place to get started. But what that does, it provides an actual explanation for things like magic, things like altered states phenomena, things like these intense feelings of, of presence that you might sense at the top of a mountain or in a beautiful brook. You can't throw away the observed reality. And when you look at the history of science, the history of science was studying consciousness. And where I've ended up is that consciousness makes the universe. So the universe sits inside consciousness. Consciousness does not reside inside the universe. So we just have it backwards. And when you arrange things in that order, all of the weird stuff that is provable, like mind reading I had, or reading something blindfolded at the Beyond Conference, I had kids who could read with blindfolds on, provably in front of an audience, who learned intuition. If intuition exists, and I could— we talk about for 2 hours, you and I both, about how it exists, there has to be a mechanism. There has to be a reality in which that's real. And the idea is that our consciousness makes everything around us, is the only thing that explains all of the things. And that means, fortunately, I could probably edit my own genes with my mind. Give me time.

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Exactly. So before we return to the more mechanistic realm, you know, this could explain— it's speculative, obviously, but, you know, you mentioned in some other societies historically, people have perhaps lived much longer even than 122 years. China would be one place. The great Taoist masters of antiquity might be one place where that happened. They clearly weren't doing gene therapy. But perhaps through their contemplative practices, they were accessing the quantum field in such a way that that was shifting what was possible for them.

Yeah, the Taoists are particularly powerful, and that lineage is tied in with ancient shamanic practice, ancient Buddhist practice. It's old and it's very, very rich. The old tantric stuff, which was ultimately about longevity. In fact, Tantra was a longevity practice. Taoism's longevity practice. Most of the ancient practices all had, we want to live longer, right? Or even better yet, live forever, at least forever, as long as we want. So I think there's great value in what you're saying there. And some of the things that are possible in those states, I have learned having grandparents who worked for a national laboratory in the US, hardcore scientists, that's not possible. Therefore it isn't. But the reality is it is possible, and I have witnessed things and I have done things that I was raised as a child to believe are impossible. So I don't know what it is, but I do think that way back in the day, there are some people with some rituals and some knowledge and just some unique abilities who did live way longer than we think. And that's why it's written about in thousands of ancient books. It's not like one science fiction book from 1,000 years ago. There's a lot of people who live longer than 100 years. The only biohacking explanation for why we may have a lower lifespan is that it looks like every 100 or so years our lifespan is dropping by a certain percentage as a species. And the explanation for that would be 11,000 years ago when a comet hit the North Pole, as Graham Hancock talks about. It probably contained a lot of heavy isotopes like deuterium. And deuterium is a heavy hydrogen that causes excess oxidation and mitochondrial dysfunction. And some of the crazy fringes of biohacking will say, oh, you know, this, this changes everything, but it's in everything, so you can't really get away from it. We also have radioactive potassium. That's in all the potassium we eat. So it could be that there's radiation on the planet, the potassium and the deuterium, and that those are causing errors in genetics. I'm not worried about those unless you're a billionaire with cancer. You can't afford to lower deuterium in your body. It's almost impossible. But what we're learning right now, the tech is coming online to just go in and repair your genes. Okay, so you have some gene drift over time as you age. Who cares? Go in and fix them. We just did the first mitochondrial transplant. Literally, we're taking mitochondria from young people, putting them in an old person to heal a disease. The guy's 90 who just received them, and the company is raising more funding. And I'm working on putting together a potential venture fund in order to invest more in these technologies that are going to change the world. Right. And do I want a mitochondrial transplant? Yeah, absolutely. Right. Younger mitochondria. We all want younger. Like, you want to take the battery out of your phone and get one that keeps the charge in it? So it'll stay charged longer? Of course you do. Let's do that for your brain. It's like just the— we're living in science fiction right now. It's the coolest thing ever.

Let's talk about that level of mitochondrial function in our cells, uh, for a moment. So, um, you know, we have a medical system that's been more about sick care than healthcare and been focused on symptomology and so forth. We're all very familiar with that paradigm, and you've talked about not just treating disease or not just preventing disease, but really upgrading the human condition, upgrading our biology is what you've kind of been referencing now. And so the regen— the basic regenerative capacity within our biology goes down to the level of mitochondria where our sort of life force energy is regenerated and created. So what are some of the basic things that any of us can be doing? to, to repair, you know, cuz a lot of aging, I, I assume from what I've learned, has to do with mitochondria becoming less robust. And so what can we do to begin to reverse that? And short of mitochondrial transplants, when they come online, great. But short of that, what can we do to have healthier mitochondria?

There's tons and tons of, of things you can do here. And for people really interested, Headstrong is my book that goes deepest in mitochondrial biology. Uh, it ended up sandwiched on the New York Times Science Monthly list, which is amazing to be able to do as an author, but it was between Homo Deus and Sapiens. I was like, I'm the meat in the sandwich between some very well-known books. And mitochondria, first thing is understand their nature. Mitochondria are a separate organism from what you think of as you. They're ancient bacteria. There's more of them than there are cells in your body, because some cells in your body, there's tens of thousands of mitochondria embedded in the cell. And in 7th grade biology, you learn, oh, mitochondria, they're the power plants of the cell, which is actually sort of kind of true. You could also, though, say mitochondria are the puppet master of the cell and they control everything you do. And they have their own consciousness that is not your consciousness. Mitochondria are very fast. They sense reality long before you do. They vote with each other. They have a robust and active community where they talk to each other via different mechanisms. They share energy, they move parts of themselves around, and they do all this kind of like the repair crew of your body that's making sure your body is alive even if you're not paying attention. So ultimately it's mitochondrial networks that are collaborating to figure out the local What's going on here? And then they're sharing that information up that eventually makes it to your nervous system and into your brain. Your brain has some control over big systems, but the mitochondria always sense everything first and decide what they're gonna pass on to the nervous system and the brain. They're not you. And they do make power. They make heat. They make electricity. They make some, um, a few proteins and, and chemicals and things like that. But what's interesting is they also have a, a stress response because they're bacteria. Bacteria understand if they're in a stressful or safe environment. So they're tied to immune function, inflammation, aging. And if your body, because of the mitochondria, believes that it's in a safe place and the nutrient sensing in the mitochondria go, oh, we have all the building blocks including selenium and zinc and all the things. And we have enough energy, then we are going to do a good job of maintaining the system. But if they're rushed, they're in a hurry, and they're missing things, they're going to be like you when you go to the, the gas station. You know, one of my tires is a little bit low but not that low, like I'll fill it up later. And my windshield washer fluid, yeah, it's empty, but I don't have time to go in and buy the thing because I'm in a rush, so I'll get to it later. And so your body will elegantly Stop doing all of the things that it doesn't need to do if it doesn't have enough energy. But if you have enough energy and enough peace, your body will regenerate in a beautiful way. It's just most of us have broken that cycle. So how do you fix it without doing mitochondrial transplants or gene therapy? Well, the first thing is stop eating things and breathing things that directly poison your mitochondria. Now this is gonna make some people mad. In the human food system for thousands of years, we have this thing we do to remove toxins from our food. It's called processing our food. Now, ultra-processed food is really bad for you, but whole wheat, the outer part of the grain, is toxic to mitochondria, even though it has some calories you can use long-term. It's bad. But white flour, which isn't particularly good for you either, it's just calories. It has very, very low toxin loads compared to whole wheat. So we can survive on all kinds of plants that are not very good for us, but they're better than starving to death. So we've made this kind of vegan death cult around eating foods that have almost no energy and have a very high toxin load that directly poison mitochondria. Examples of these would be oxalates and things like black beans or even sweet potatoes, which I used to recommend more, or almonds are Very high raspberries, very high in oxalates that cause 70% of kidney stones and in multiple studies directly poison your mitochondria. So, so eat less toxic plants and eat high-quality animal foods that aren't poisoned with glyphosate, which is toxic for your mitochondria as well. So eat the right plants, eat a low inflammation diet. This is gonna help your mitochondria a lot. Things like coenzyme Q10. Then there's this weird trick. When I was on the side of Mount Kailash, returning earlier to the story in our interview, it's about 18,000 feet elevation, very miserable. At that elevation, you should feel like you're dying because you kind of are. There is no air to breathe. You kind of have a headache. You sort of feel stunned all the time, weird swelling. Sometimes you take a drug called Diamox so you don't get— Fluid in the lungs. This is not highly human compatible, and I've trained in high-altitude mountaineering. So I'm walking around and a little Tibetan woman, half my height, brings me this little bowl of yak butter tea. And what I don't really normally tell in this story, it wasn't just yak butter tea. She woke up before us. There was maybe 6 or 7 of us staying in a guest house. It was 10 degrees below zero and the wind is blowing at 30 miles an hour. And she wakes up early, she walks a quarter mile, breaks through the ice on the river, gets a kettle, fills it with water, and walks back. Then she heats it up over burning yak dung because that's the only fuel available. Okay, then she brews tea. Okay, great, let's have some tea. No, no, no. Then she takes the tea and she pours it into a butter churn, adds some scoops of yak butter, And then this is the thing that drove me crazy. For 10 minutes, she went cha-chunka, cha-chunka, cha-chunka in the butter churn until it wasn't even that hot anymore and it was all blended together. And then she served it to us and I drank it and my brain turned on in a way that it hadn't turned on in 2 years before that because of the mold toxins. Something magic happened. Like, what is this? And that was where the idea for Bulletproof Coffee came from. Like, I noticed the shift and I came back to Silicon Valley and I started putting different kinds of butter in different kinds of tea and eventually realized mold-free coffee was really important because coffee would knock me out or not knock me out. And different cups did different things and different butters did different things. So today, if you get Danger Coffee, which is my new coffee brand, you put in a little bit of grass-fed butter. It has to be grass-fed or it doesn't work. Danger Coffee contains trace minerals, high amounts of trace minerals that your mitochondria directly need. And the butter, when you put it in the coffee and maybe some MCT oil, you blend it up. It has to be blended. What happens is kind of magic because we didn't know this at the time when I started doing it. There's research from the University of Washington, Dr. Gerald Pollack, who has spoken at the Beyond Conference. He's in his 80s now. He's a water biologist, and he figured out that butter oil or MCT oil changes the structure of water when it touches the water so that there's a thin band of water that has a different viscosity, different thickness. And that is the type of water that is present inside your cells to make energy, to fold proteins, to make ATP. So when that little Tibetan woman was using her butter churn for 10 minutes in warm tea with yak butter, she was charging charging the water so it's the kind of water that your body uses to make energy. But if you and I were to drink a glass of water out of that same river without doing what she did, we would have had to use our precious body heat to transform the water by holding it up against our cell membranes. So you want your mitochondria to work? Put a little bit of butter in your Danger Coffee, put a little bit of MCT in there and blend the crap out of it. And take some MCT oil.

Oh, yeah.

Take some PQQ, take some spermidine, take some Timeline. There's a whole bunch of things, but minerals come first and vitamin Dake comes first. So dangercoffee.com, vitamindake.com would be places to start. D-A-K-E.

So I have a quick question about coffee. You know, you're well known for creating the Bulletproof Coffee, and now you have your brand Danger Coffee. And I had my cup of Danger Coffee this morning. Something just came across the 1440 News Service today. And it was about research around coffee, and it was pointing out some Swedish studies and others pointing to all the health benefits of coffee. But it did point out that the, the brewing method makes a difference. And they pointed to some risk in unfiltered coffee of there being too much— Maybe this is old research, but they were suggesting use filters as opposed to espresso or Or French press, or at least limit yourself to 1 cup of espresso or French press a day and filter the rest, because otherwise you're gonna have too much. I got it written down here. You probably know the answer to this.

Apoesterol and Kawahara.

That's it. Exactly. Yeah.

Okay.

So I have addressed—

or lightness on this.

I've addressed this probably 100 times since I started writing about longevity and coffee and biohacking and all that. So if you believe, if you're a member of the cholesterol cult, you believe that this life-giving compound causes heart disease. By the way, it does not. And I mean, God, we have so much evidence for that now. But if you believe that, then drinking unfiltered coffee— oh no, it might raise your cholesterol. Of course, it doesn't raise oxidized cholesterol. It actually raises beneficial cholesterol. And those 2 compounds, cafestrol and kahwehol, are coffee oils, like coffee essential oils. And when you have espresso or French press coffee, They help the liver. They don't harm the liver, but it depends on what the definition of helping is. If you think cholesterol's bad, you're trying to suppress the way the body is, is shuttling energy and nutrients around, as well as making hormones. And 25% of your brain is cholesterol. It's kind of important. But the reason that I recommend coffee made with a metal filter, either French press, or for me, I do 2 espressos every day as Americanos, and I have for more than 20 years. I always use a metal filter because those coffee oils in studies cross the blood-brain barrier and turn off inflammation in the brain. So the only way you can say that this metal-filtered coffee is bad for you is if you also believe that cholesterol is bad for you. And the evidence is that inflammation is bad for you, but coffee oils are anti-inflammation. So I'd rather have high cholesterol and low inflammation than low cholesterol and high inflammation. And if we could just get that into Western medicine, a lot of the problems we have with heart disease is because we keep going after the wrong targets. And even Lp is more important than cholesterol. So we just— we've been making some fundamental errors based on assumptions about reality that aren't true.

So when you get lab work done and your cholesterol panel of the various types of cholesterol, and, you know, they have the— that range within what's considered acceptable. So in the biohacking world, do you have a different range? Has that been defined of what you think Is an acceptable range for cholesterol levels, you know, or ideal range?

It's just not that relevant, right?

So you don't think there— you don't think there are upper limits we should be concerned about, especially if we're drinking, uh, French press coffee and buttered coffee and etc., etc.?

If you have APOE4, which is a gene that makes you have much higher risk of cardiovascular disease and dementia and Alzheimer's, Mm-hmm. The traditional advice has been, oh, eat less saturated fat and more monounsaturated fat, uh, because you're in a certain risk area. There's also familiar high— or familial hypercholesterolemia, which is when people have genetically very, very high cholesterol. Problem is the people who live longer have more cholesterol too. So what I recommend we do is we look at the, the factors that are more closely correlated with heart attacks. And we track soft plaque. So in my case, for almost 20 years now, I've had zero seed oils intentionally. I only eat tallow and butter and coconut oil and olive oil and steak, you know, animal fat. And I'll eat some avocados and occasional walnuts and stuff like that. But I do that and my olive oil limit to 2 ounces a day. So What would happen if you did that and you're at high risk like I am? Well, what would happen is you'd have zero diffuse soft plaque anywhere in your body, which is what I have, even though I have high risk for that. I have 2 spots of soft plaque that are small in, in my heart, and those are as a result of spike protein injury from getting COVID that are healing and actually reducing based on my practice. I have the lowest level of fat in my muscles they've ever seen. According to a recent episode on my show, very little fat anywhere around my organs. Like I'm an 18-year-old, super healthy person from that perspective. And I follow this advice. So what I do look at in clients when I'm working with our medical team, and again, I'm not a doctor, I just get to help the doctors with how do we think systems biology and help our clients. And what you'll find is That looking at things like triglycerides, which is important, the ratio of triglycerides to total cholesterol is really important. It's always about metabolic function. If they have insulin resistance, they're gonna be in trouble. If they don't have insulin resistance, it's amazing. They don't seem to have cardiovascular disease. And we also look at Lp, which is something that new drugs are coming out that may be helpful. But the most important thing is something called homocysteine.

Mm-hmm.

You have a problem processing B vitamins. Let's give you the right ones for your genetics. 80% of our clients are taking the wrong B vitamins, and you can see it cuz homocysteine raises your heart attack risk more than cholesterol. And you can treat that with a supplement, which is why big pharma doesn't like to talk about it cuz they can't patent the supplement. And then we look at something called C-reactive protein or hs-CRP on your labs. That's also an independent risk factor. So homocysteine means genetic problem, B vitamins. C-reactive protein means you have a bacterial infection or some other physical stressor somewhere in the body. And when we track those 2 things and something called HOMA, which is a history of their blood sugar levels, HbA1c, you get a good picture of your cardiovascular risk, way better than this dumb cholesterol stuff. Problem is statins are a multi-billion dollar market. They're not going to tell you the truth. They just aren't. Statins are generally bad for most people, but about 10% of the time, with certain genetics, certain circumstances, they're lifesaving. And I just have to say this final thing about that, Fleet, because I know I'm on a bit of a rant here.

In—

when we're examining medicines to see if they're worth taking, you look at like the, the benefit versus risk ratio. And for statins, for every 100 people that take statins, 1 person Gets a risk reduction. Everyone else gets side effects, which can be 30, even 50% of people. We know that they're harmful to mitochondria. They're a terrible solution for prevention, and they work post-heart attack in certain circumstances. But it's the most egregious case of marketing malfeasance I've seen in a long time. So not a fan, put it that way. But what do you do? for all these things for your mitochondria, well, you should probably put some butter in your coffee. At least that's what my evidence says.

Is there a place, uh, and this is kind of a personal interest of mine, uh, my C-reactive protein is very low, uh, but I do the Lp, which is genetic. Uh, I have that and there's nothing you can do about that. I have, uh, a lot of, I think if I'm correct, a fair amount of free, free-floating lipids in my blood. So I'm getting a CAC, an arterial scan in the next few weeks just to check whether there's plaque there or not. But, you know, I finally got to a cardiologist and that's how I was able to get the scan done. And they were bringing up, well, you could go on statins. I said, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not going. Some of you have to really convince me that statins will be helpful for me before I'd ever go anywhere near statins. But is there a place where one can kind of get the body of knowledge you just discussed to really look into that, or do you have to really kind of look everywhere and be into the research and the studies yourself, or has someone kind of put that together?

Um, if you read, uh, Superhuman, my longevity book, I go into a lot of detail about, about this stuff. And I, I do want to say we think that lowering, uh, Lp is probably, uh, going to be good for you, but we don't know if— if you have something that's on fire, I lowered the smoke, it doesn't mean the fire went out, it just means you have less smoke.

Right.

And we're not sure about that with Lp, but we think it's very likely. And there's actually a new drug that just got approved in the last couple days that should lower Lp, but it also lowers cholesterol at a crazy level. So there are ways, something called PCSK9 drugs, that lower this. And there's even supplements, uh, like something called L-carnitine, which is common for mitochondrial function and for, um, uh, and for mitochondrial ability to eat fatty acids. Um, you can probably get about 10%, um, of, uh, of reduction in Lp just from that. But there's, there's big, big drugs on the market or about to come that lower it, something called bempedoic acid. But I went on bempedoic acid to see if I could lower, uh, lower my Lp, which which is mostly genetic, and it did drop dramatically. So did my ability to remember things because my cholesterol dropped. Cholesterol is necessary for your brain. It's like, it's the funniest thing. So, uh, I'm like, I think I'll quit taking that. Like, I don't care, I am healthy. Track your risk, get a Cleerly scan of your arteries. If you don't have a problem, you don't have a problem. And if someone says, oh no, scary, like, I don't know how much money do they make when you're afraid.

Mhm. So we're getting towards the end of our time together today, and I'd like to ask you about kind of the future of biohacking, maybe in this context. So, you know, we're hearing more and more about personalized approaches to medicine. Part of that is the kind of concierge level of medicine, which is quite expensive and available to those with resources. And there's the higher end of a program like your program that you're doing. which for people with a lot of resources, but it's great that somebody's doing that so we can learn. And then there's the idea of regenerative medicine. There's all these ideas about shifting our medical landscape and our whole mindset around that, and then biohacking within that. So where do you see the future of all this moving?

You know, biohacking is about changing your state. So Some people want to be a balloon animal, like you want big muscles and like, I want to— okay, that's your thing, right? That probably isn't as correlated with longevity as people think because strength and neuromuscular coupling, it seems to be more important than muscle mass, but you should have some of both. There's people who say, I want to be peaceful. Like, I just don't want to feel stressed all the time. I don't want to feel fear all the time. And people say, I want to be young. Like, I would like to not age. I've spent $2.5 million reversing my age and fixing all the weird genetics and stuff that I have.

So I'm one of those too.

And some people say, I just want an amazing relationship. I want to feel intimacy that I haven't had before, or I just want to sleep really well. So the state you choose is the state you choose. And ultimately what you'll find is you want to develop the ability to switch between states effortlessly so that you can be in a connected to the universe state of divine union with your partner or with the tree in front of you, whatever your thing is. And then you can immediately, without fear or stress, switch into focus mode and go mode and turn your brain on and be completely dialed in and focused and get all this stuff done. And then to be able to say, you know what, I'm going to just pause for a second. I'm going to come up with the perfect idea that no one's ever thought of before. And you're pulling your energy from somewhere else. It's that ability to switch. And maybe you want a brain that doesn't fade. And Fleet, something I haven't shared with you even though we're friends because it just came out, I just added some more technology to 40 Years of Zen, my neuroscience company, and we can measure cognitive fatigue. And it's an annoying test. For 14 minutes, you stare at a screen and every 1 second a word comes up. It's no or go. And if it's go, you press the mouse button as fast as you can.

Yeah.

So you had to stay focused for 14 minutes, every second on a boring task. I used to have ADHD. Well, it turns out my response time was in the 80th percentile for my age, so my brain is very fast. But what was unprecedented is I'm in the 0.001% of people who had no variance in my response time at all, had no fatigue at all over the 14 minutes. Where my final answer was just as fast and just as accurate as the first answer, and I missed 2 answers. So many, many, many standard deviations, um, less cognitive fatigue from a guy who had chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia and crippling brain fog, from a guy whose psychiatrist looked at a brain scan when I was 30 and said, inside your brain is total chaos. I don't know how you're standing here in front of me. You have the best camouflage I've ever seen. So I went from totally broken to the best in the world at having cognitive resilience. And if I can do this as a former 300-pound fat computer hacker who's been on book covers with my shirt off— I have the worst genes, I have the worst background, and I did this. So you can do this, Fleet. Anyone listening to this, it will be much less work and much less money for you. You don't need to spend $2.5 million over 20 years like I did, and you definitely don't need to spend $2 million a year. obsessively tracking everything. It doesn't, it doesn't do much because what works for you is not what works for the person next to you. It is so highly personalized. And having done a lot of clients through Unlimited Life, every recommendation is different and it has to be personalized or it doesn't work. We're all unique.

So, how does— maybe the final question. So, you know, even just all the information you've covered, uh, and, and we could have gone so much more deeply into so many different areas, uh, is Probably fairly daunting to the average person. And then we need to, not only there's all this information out there, now I need to actually learn enough to have my personalized pathway in this. How do I handle the daunting nature of that so you can get started and have a pathway you can feel, okay, I'm doing enough of the right things, I'm gonna keep learning, I'm on a good path here, instead of just going, oh my God, this is too complicated, it's too much. And, you know, Sure.

Uh, you can go to axo.health, A-X-O dot health, and we've got a platform where you can order lab tests. And I'm not trying to sell you on this. You can get lab tests all over the internet now, right? We've put together the panel of things that are most important according to my 20-plus years in the field and made it as affordable as possible. But once you get the results, it runs through an algorithm that's trained on everything I've ever said, and it makes recommendations— not medical recommendations, lifestyle recommendations— to support whatever your goal is. Because it turns out, Fleet, Making recommendations for someone without knowing what they want is a problem. So if you want longevity but we make recommendation goals for physical performance, you'd be pissed off, and vice versa. So we actually have a part of the system that talks to you. What do you really want? And the reality is we want performance and longevity, but unconsciously you want one more than the other, and we'll tease that out of you in a way that doesn't take very long, so that, that way we can tailor the goals so that based on this lab work and this lifestyle stuff, This is what to do to move the needle fastest. And then the other thing is, don't worry about perfectionism, right? It just has to work. If you get 80% of it, you're going to completely shift your life. And I've seen people in 6 months, they lose 40 pounds, their brain turns on, they become more loving, they become more focused, they relax. Like life just becomes better. So it doesn't take as long as you think.

Well, I want to express just a lot of gratitude for your leadership in this movement, Dave, and your support for our future of biohacking. And, and really personally, I've read most of your books.

Absolutely.

I'm, I'm a customer on Axle Health, and, and I found all of the resources you've been providing. I'm not quite ready to get to Unlimited Life yet. Maybe if HeartMind does better in the next few years, I can do that. But, but yeah, you've been an extraordinary help to me personally in terms of having more confidence that I'm doing enough of the right things about my health in my, in my own enlightened self-interest and in terms of what my lifestyle goals are. So, so thank you very much for that.

You're welcome. And you're looking well, my friend.

Feel good. Feel good. So Dave Asprey, father of the biohacking movement, thank you very much.

Thank you for joining me on the Radical Responsibility Podcast. Remember, real change happens when we commit to our growth, face our challenges with compassion, and stay open to transformation. If you found this episode helpful, I encourage you to subscribe and help us spread the message of healing and personal empowerment. Until next time, stay grounded, stay present, and stay true to yourself. Take care.