Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Tue, 20 May 2025
How did a 300-pound tech executive become the founder of a $20 billion biohacking industry? In this Habits and Hustle episode, Dave Asprey reveals his unconventional journey, sharing his marketing philosophy: "I do not sell. I teach." We discuss how he bootstrapped Bulletproof to $27 million before raising capital, the venture capital challenges that led to losing control of his company, and why he believes making products that genuinely work is his true marketing secret. We also dive into his experience creating the Bulletproof Coffee phenomenon and how his desperate search to heal his own chronic health issues led to revolutionary discoveries. Dave Asprey is the founder of nine companies, including Bulletproof, Danger Coffee, TrueDark, and Upgrade Labs. He's authored bestselling books including "The Bulletproof Diet," "Head Strong," and his newest release, "Heavily Meditated." Dave is credited with creating three unique billion-dollar markets: MCT Oil, Collagen Protein, and Functional Coffee. What We Discuss: (01:00) Biohacking and Marketing Secrets (10:10) Uncovering the Quiet Desperation (13:19) Entrepreneur's Journey to Success (19:32) Venture Capital, Biohacking, and Longevity (30:37) Sexual Health and Biohacking Insights (42:18) Exercise, Recovery, and Hormone Optimization (49:50) Optimizing Testosterone and Peptide Use …and more! Thank you to our sponsors: Therasage: Head over to therasage.com and use code Be Bold for 15% off TruNiagen: Head over to truniagen.com and use code HUSTLE20 to get $20 off any purchase over $100. Magic Mind: Head over to www.magicmind.com/jen and use code Jen at checkout. Air Doctor: Go to airdoctorpro.com and use promo code HUSTLE for up to $300 off and a 3-year warranty on air purifiers. Bio.me: Link to daily prebiotic fiber here, code Jennifer20 for 20% off. Momentous: Shop this link and use code Jen for 20% off David: Buy 4, get the 5th free at davidprotein.com/habitsandhustle. Find more from Jen: Website: https://www.jennifercohen.com/ Instagram: @therealjencohen Books: https://www.jennifercohen.com/books Speaking: https://www.jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagement Find more from Dave Aspry: Website: https://daveasprey.com/ X: https://www.instagram.com/dave.asprey/?hl=en YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/DaveAspreyBPR
Chapter 1: What is biohacking and its marketing secrets?
Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle.
Crush it.
On today's episode of Habits and Hustle, I'm joined by the one and only Dave Asprey. He is the founder of Bulletproof and a pioneer in biohacking. He's a New York Times bestselling author who spent decades optimizing human performance and longevity. And he's helped millions upgrade their lives through science-backed strategies.
Dave and I talk all about his strategies, his marketing approach, how he built nine businesses, and how he even bootstrapped Bulletproof to $27 million before taking on venture capital. We also talk about how he got removed off his own board and so much more.
So guys, if you're interested in biohacking, longevity, business and marketing strategies by one of the best that's done it, I would stick around and listen up. Before we dive into today's episode, I first want to thank our sponsor, Therasage. Their TriLight panel has become my favorite biohacking thing for healing my body. It's a portable red light panel that I simply cannot live without.
I literally bring it with me everywhere I go. And I personally use their red light therapy to help reduce inflammations in places in my body where, honestly, I have pain. You can use it on a sore back, stomach cramps, shoulder pain. ankle, red light therapy is my go-to.
Plus, it also has amazing anti-aging benefits, including reducing signs of fine lines and wrinkles on your face, which I also use it for. I personally use Therasage Trilight everywhere and all the time. It's small, it's affordable, it's portable, and it's really effective. Head over to therasage.com right now and use code BEBOLD. for 15% off. This code will work site-wide.
Again, head over to therasage, T-H-E-R-A-S-A-G-E.com and use code BEBOLD for 15% off any of their products. Guys, we have basically like the father of biohacking. It feels like you created it. I did.
I came up with the word in Tibet, walking around the holiest mountain in the world and came back and wrote blog posts, started the first conference, got it added to the dictionary eventually. Yeah, I invented it. I really did.
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Chapter 2: What drove Dave Asprey's early success?
It's really funny. I got my MBA at Wharton a while ago.
Did you really?
Oh, yeah. And... I did not even know that. I was a Silicon Valley tech dude. That I knew. Yeah, so I got my MBA there, but I was kind of failing out of my classes because my brain was cooked and I had toxic mold, brain damage, and all this stuff. So for me to pass my test, I would literally line up the smart drugs I was taking on the desk. I'm like, I'm not cheating. Like, if you dope...
Like, you know, people, Lance Armstrong couldn't talk about what he was doing because they didn't let him, but it would have been great if he was like, I won the Tour de France and I did A, B, and C so we could all learn. And I'm like, I would fail out of this. So here's my cognitive enhancers.
I'm not cheating because there's no rule against doping in business school, but it was the only way I graduated. And I've been on cognitive enhancers for 25 years and oh my God, why doesn't everyone do this?
Well, Will, I want to talk to you about that. But what I find so interesting about you, I think beyond everything else, you are a master marketer, a master business person. It's one thing to have the knowledge or experience. to educate yourself, right?
It's another thing to be able to execute it in a way that people actually, it resonates with, and you've been able to develop such a hardcore community, but over and over again. With all these businesses, like Bulletproof is just one of the things you do. The biohacking conference, 40 years of Zen, Danger Coffee, and the list is like, it's on and on.
So like, I think beyond just like knowing all these biohacking secrets, what I really want to get into today is your marketing secrets. Sure. What actually, like, how did you know what to do, how to get people like in? Is it just polarizing? Is it just being unique? Is it just being like outlandish? Like, what is your secret and what is your strategies? That's what I want to know.
We can go there. Okay, good.
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Chapter 3: How did venture capital affect Bulletproof?
Because, you know, you look at your Instagram and yes, everything is kind of like, things are super outlandish to the average Joe, but it actually tracks and works and it becomes a thing later on.
Yeah.
Okay, so tell me.
Okay. When I was in business school, we had a whole class for a semester where the basic idea was to teach us that it was cheaper to spend a dollar telling people your product was high quality than it was to make a high quality product. And this is one of the problems in the world. Like, look at what's going on on Amazon and all this cheap stuff.
So if I made the world's best of something and there was a knockoff next to me, it's still gonna cost me a dollar to market the world's best and it's gonna cost them a dollar to market the world's crappiest with nice paint on it.
Right, right, right.
So therefore we have this race to the bottom where everything's like something you would buy at a flea market. And I just have this belief from my own experience having all the diseases of aging before I was 30. chronic fatigue syndrome, brain fog, arthritis since I was 14. I weighed 300 pounds. The GI issues, high risk of stroke and heart attack on lab tests, prediabetes.
So I have all this going on and I realized I don't give a crap if something is supposed to work. I only care if it does work. And in business, it's kind of the same thing, but it's more obvious.
So if you have this religious belief that billboard ads are going to change the world for you, so you put a million dollars into billboard ads and you don't sell anything, you go, well, it's maybe because I didn't do it enough. So you put $10 million in and it still doesn't do anything, and then you're out of money.
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Chapter 4: What are the insights on sexual health and biohacking?
I was the only guy under 60 in the room because I was learning how to heal myself from people three times my age. Like my elders, the masters of longevity taught me all this stuff that became biohacking.
Like who? Who were you looking up to?
A guy named Julian Whitaker was an example. Bruce Ames, who's still around. So I got to hang out with like the who's who from the 90s. People were writing the big books on nutrition. Barry Sears from The Zone, the Atkins family. So I'm getting mentored by all these people. So we have these longevity nuts, you could call them. Like everyone thought we were crazy. Like it's not possible to do that.
And then on the other side of the road, my brain was failing, and I'm at a company that split three times on the NASDAQ in 1998, was worth $36 billion, and I co-founded a part of that company. And my career is going nuts. My brain is totally cooked. I can't remember things, and I'm hiding it from people, and I keep getting promotions, and it was just kind of this hellish but exciting experience.
uh exciting time in my career where there's this deep fear that i have the accelerator pegged all the way to the floor and i'm slowing down every day and i don't know what to do so i got into this cognitive enhancers i talked about before and the guy who ran the world's only newsletter in the 80s on that became a mentor so all of a sudden i have the elixir of brain juice that works and i know how it works and i've studied intensely
And I've worked with the longevity people. And Mike on my board of directors, who's 88 years old, has more energy than I do, calls me at 1130 at night, all excited and ready to do stuff. And I'm like, how does he do that? I want that. And I know it's possible. And I saw older people get younger. I just didn't wait till I was old to see it.
I got to see it when I was young because my body was failing. So, okay, now I got old people wanna become young. I've got cognitive enhancement, right? These guys don't talk to each other. And then you've got, I went to the gym 90 minutes a day, six days a week for 18 months straight. Just beat myself up. I will lose this weight no matter what. I never lost a pound. I still had a 46 inch waist.
I was just stronger at the end of that. So now I got my bodybuilders who are some of the best biohackers in the world. And then you talk with the professional athletes and like astronauts and then all the nutrition people. And I've been a vegan, I've been a raw vegan. I've tested all the limits of the diets and understand how all that stuff works because I had to, because no one could tell me.
And I wrote a major, major book, almost a million copies of it sold. What was the first book?
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Chapter 5: How to optimize exercise, recovery, and hormones?
It sold even like 600,000 copies in Japan of all places.
That was a massive movement.
It actually introduced in the first chapter, here's lectins, which became a big thing. Here's clean keto and here's intermittent fasting. Like those are massive trends. Totally. That have taken off and it made collagen into a billion dollar industry category. Collagen. And it made MCT into a billion dollar industry category and functional coffee into a half a billion dollar category from one book.
and from one movement. And the reason for that isn't because I'm good at marketing. It's because I know how to make things that work.
How? So tell me, so like, how did you figure, like the butter and the coffee, right? Like that was like such a trend. People are still- Oh, people still do it. People are still doing it. But that took over the health and fitness industry. Isn't it crazy? It's beyond. Like there was like, obviously, you know, there's like, you can go get that at the cafes and everywhere you went.
It was like the Air One of today.
Air One actually was the first company that carried Bulletproof coffee when I was at Bulletproof.
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Chapter 6: What are the benefits of optimizing testosterone and peptide use?
Oh, really?
And they used to make Bulletproof coffee ice cream at their original location. I love Air One.
I mean, so how did you figure that? So were you basically a human guinea pig for all of these things?
People who are older will understand this. Well, if you wake up- Like me or older than me? Older than you, unless you had a really good longevity program. Yeah. There comes a time for most people, if they're not doing the longevity stuff that I teach now, where you wake up and you're like, my body hurts. I feel like crap. My brain doesn't work.
I have a wet blanket on my head and I wake up and I don't like how I look in the mirror and I don't have any vibe, any drive. I'm just tired and I'm gonna slog through the day and I'm gonna do it again and again. I experienced that. at a very young age. And like, I'm just gonna use willpower, but willpower is a function of how much energy your body can make.
So having to go through and repair all that stuff really taught me how to talk with people about what they don't share with other people. And one of the things that really touched me during the process of learning how to reverse all that is I raised my first venture capital round for Bulletproof. It was something like $8 million. And it's from Sand Hill Road, BC.
And one of the guys who ended up on the board, who I'd gotten to know because I worked for that firm, He wrote a Medium article and I was shocked when I read it. This guy came to me when I was working at the firm and just, why are you putting butter in your coffee? Like you're an idiot. And it explained why he tried it.
And when he wrote that post after they funded the company, he said, 60 days after I met Dave, I sat down in my BMW in the parking lot in Sand Hill Road and I cried. I'm like, what? Venture capitalists don't cry. They don't have souls. Like, I don't understand this. And I'm just joking. My friend does have a soul. And he said, here's why.
He said, my entire adult life, I've had crippling fatigue and brain fog, and I've never told a soul anything. And 60 days after I started doing what Dave said, I went through the entire day without losing my energy even one time. And it felt so hopeless and so impossible that I was crying because I've never experienced a day of full energy in my adult life and no one ever knew. And you look around
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Chapter 7: How did Bulletproof Coffee become a phenomenon?
Chapter 8: Why is quality more important than perceived quality in business?
That was a massive movement.
It actually introduced in the first chapter, here's lectins, which became a big thing. Here's clean keto and here's intermittent fasting. Like those are massive trends. Totally. That have taken off and it made collagen into a billion dollar industry category. Collagen. And it made MCT into a billion dollar industry category and functional coffee into a half a billion dollar category from one book.
and from one movement. And the reason for that isn't because I'm good at marketing. It's because I know how to make things that work.
How? So tell me, so like, how did you figure, like the butter and the coffee, right? Like that was like such a trend. People are still- Oh, people still do it. People are still doing it. But that took over the health and fitness industry. Isn't it crazy? It's beyond. Like there was like, obviously, you know, there's like, you can go get that at the cafes and everywhere you went.
It was like the Air One of today.
Air One actually was the first company that carried Bulletproof coffee when I was at Bulletproof.
Oh, really?
And they used to make Bulletproof coffee ice cream at their original location. I love Air One.
I mean, so how did you figure that? So were you basically a human guinea pig for all of these things?
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