Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Mon, 19 May 2025
Dave Asprey’s journey into biohacking began with a quest to improve his health. In his twenties, he was overweight and low on energy, but through cutting-edge science, Dave optimized his brain health, reduced his biological age, and transformed his life. As the father of biohacking, he believes he can live to 180 years and achieve what many consider impossible. In this episode, Dave discusses how entrepreneurs can leverage biohacking to boost health, wellness, and productivity. He also shares insights from his book, Smarter Not Harder, revealing efficient strategies for peak performance and longevity. In this episode, Hala and Dave will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (01:53) How Mindset Affects Biological Aging (05:56) Benefits of Biohacking in Health and Business (11:05) Why Biohacking Works: The Science Behind It (16:40) The Power of Laziness in Boosting Productivity (21:25) Managing Stress and Triggers in Business (31:52) The Importance of Health and Wellness Scans (34:30) ADHD as a Superpower in Entrepreneurship (39:32) Workout Tips for Busy Entrepreneurs (47:09) The Truth About Diet and Meat Consumption (01:00:03) Foods to Boost Brain Health and Performance Dave Asprey is an entrepreneur, author, biohacking pioneer, and the founder of Bulletproof 360, Inc., known for popularizing Bulletproof Coffee. A four-time New York Times bestselling author, his books include The Bulletproof Diet and Smarter Not Harder. He is also the host of The Human Upgrade podcast and has invested over $2 million in biohacking experiments, revolutionizing the fields of health, aging, and longevity. Sponsored By: Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/profitingIndeed Shopify - Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at youngandprofiting.co/shopify Microsoft Teams - Stop paying for tools. Get everything you need, for free at aka.ms/profiting Mercury - Streamline your banking and finances in one place. Learn more at mercury.com/profiting LinkedIn Marketing Solutions - Get a $100 credit on your next campaign at linkedin.com/profiting Bilt - Start paying rent through Bilt and take advantage of your Neighborhood Benefits™ by going to joinbilt.com/PROFITING. Airbnb - Find yourself a co-host at airbnb.com/host Resources Mentioned: Dave Asprey: The Business of Biohacking | E149: youngandprofiting.co/BusinessofBiohacking Dave’s Website: daveasprey.com Dave’s Book, Super Human: bit.ly/Super_Human Dave’s Book, Smarter Not Harder: bit.ly/Smarter-Not-Harder Dave’s Book, Bulletproof Diet: bit.ly/Bulletproof_Diet Dave’s Book, Heavily Meditated: bit.ly/Heavily_Meditated Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap Youtube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, Mental Health, Psychology, Motivation, Manifestation, Life Balance, Self Healing, Positivity, Happiness, Sleep.
Chapter 1: How does mindset affect biological aging?
I have the average response time in my brain of an 18 year old.
Dave Asprey is an entrepreneur, the father of biohacking, and there's literally not a more qualified expert in the world on this topic.
It's silly to run a business and not manage your biology. Your body is lazy by design, and the flip side of laziness is efficiency. You're just wasting time in the gym. Being fit is important, but it does not follow that spending more time in the gym makes you more fit. If you can learn to recover faster than mother nature intended, you can do way more in your life.
And that's what biohacking really is about. Now I have the body I want without a lot of work because if you do that, you're captain of your own ship and it changes everything.
Chapter 2: What are the benefits of biohacking for health and business?
How would you approach going to the gym?
What you would do is you would, and then you make sure of animal protein right after you work out.
What should we know about meat?
Grass-fed red meat is the healthiest meat that most people can eat.
What's the most unconventional thing that you're doing right now to achieve your age goal?
Wow, I do everything.
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Chapter 3: Why does biohacking work? What is the science behind it?
Yeah, fam, are you struggling to find the willpower and the energy you need to get things done? How would you like to do less but get even better results? Well, my guest today is going to tell us how, and it all starts with using your own laziness to your advantage. Well, I'm so pumped to hear from the goat of biohacking himself, Dave Asprey.
Dave Asprey is an entrepreneur, the father of biohacking, and the author of books like Bulletproof Diet, Superhuman, and most recently, Smarter Not Harder. I first talked to Dave back in episode 149 about his biohacking journey and his advice on diet and fasting.
Today, he's going to share with us some of his latest and most innovative biohacking insights, including how to take control of your body's operating system and maximize your own performance using minimum effort. I can't wait to jump right in with the goat of biohacking himself, Dave Asprey. Dave, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.
I'm happy to be here.
I am so pumped to speak with you. You are the father of biohacking. You literally invented the term and there's literally not a more qualified expert in the world on this topic. So, so happy to have you here. So we last talked three years ago on the podcast, which feels like such a long time ago.
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Chapter 4: How can laziness boost productivity?
And I think the most memorable part of the interview is when I called you by your biological age and you told me that I was ageist. And you mentioned that you are a 48 year old who aligns with being 28 years old because you believe you will live to be at least 180 years old. And at the time you were 28% of your goal.
And so, like I mentioned three years ago, there was AI, but nobody was really talking about AI even like we didn't even mention it one time in the conversation. So I'm curious to know how old do you think you're going to live to now?
I am sticking to at least 180. And it's funny, there are a group of people in the longevity field who are kind of afraid of death. And it's like, I'm never going to die. And look, the universe is going to end at some point. I'm willing to wait around until that. And I don't think 180 is an upper limit. I just think it's 50% better than our current best. And this week, I celebrated my 29% birthday.
So I just look at my birthdays now as a percentage of my minimum acceptable duty life. And I think that has an effect on the cells themselves. There are interesting studies where they'll take really old people and they'll make a special like a hotel with all the TV shows and all the furniture from when they were young. And then their biological markers of aging go down.
So I just keep reminding myself, like, I'm somewhere in my mid-30s or less, and that's how I see the world. And I was only kidding when I said you were ageist. But the idea here is there are people out there who have the attitude, they have the brains of being 32 years old, and they might be substantially older than that.
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Chapter 5: What are effective strategies for managing stress in business?
And I learned most of biohacking from people in their 70s and 80s when I was 26 years old. So I want to find the people who have lots of calendar years who have young energy and like, what are you doing? Because that's where we learn.
That's so interesting. So you're saying that you basically are telling yourself that you're a certain age because you believe that your cells are acting differently because you're telling yourself that you are a younger age. Did I get that right?
The power of self-deception works on cells. We call it placebo, but it's totally real. In fact, a lot of pharmaceuticals get approved that are 10% better than just what your mind can do on its own. We've all read Think and Grow Rich. I read that when I was 16, and I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. And we know that having a positive mindset, visualization matters.
So why would it only matter in your business? It doesn't even make sense.
I love the concept of being able to identify with whatever age that you want. I myself look 10 years younger than I really am. And people often get really confused. They think I'm in my mid-20s and I'm in my 30s. And it's to my advantage in the business world for sure. But lately, I don't even want to tell people my age. I feel like it's not their business. And I feel like in the future...
people won't really identify with their biological age. Do you feel like that's true?
We're getting to that point. And it's funny, when I was 24 and I was building out my tech entrepreneur career, I went to the hairdresser. I'm like, can you give me some gray right here on the sides? And they're like, why would you ever want that? We don't have gray hair dye.
And I said, well, I know that I'm going to make $20,000 a year more when I go into a job because they're going to say, oh, he has experience. And so you want to look like you have enough experience for people to take you seriously, because if you look like you're 25 and you're 45, you're not going to be given the kind of respect you think.
And in entrepreneurship, it matters less, except if you're going in with a bunch of old, stodgy government bureaucrats and trying to sell them your new service. They want to see that you've got enough experience. So there's probably around 30 to 35 is where you want to be pinned in terms of how you look and how you think.
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Chapter 6: How can ADHD be seen as a superpower in entrepreneurship?
But if your brain thinks you're old and your brain actually is aging and your cells are less old, OK, you've got some of the longevity. But having a young brain, having done a ton of neurofeedback on my brain to train it to be more effective, to be more powerful and to be more efficient at the same time, that combination is pretty incredible.
And I do all the other stuff you'd expect, like tons of stem cells. and making sure my cognitive systems work epically well. The cool thing is as you age, your brain slows down a little bit unless you do something about it, then we can measure that. So I have the average response time in my brain of an 18 year old. So whatever I'm doing is working.
Wow, I love that. And I'm going to pick your brain later on about how we can improve our brain health. Let's talk about the boom of biohacking since we last talked. I've had Ben Greenfield on the show and Gary Brekka and all these guys. Do you feel like there's different schools of thoughts when it comes to biohacking?
Biohacking, the definition when I first came out with this, it's the art and science of changing the environment around you and then inside of you so you have control of your own biology. And the areas that we play in are longevity, which is a big focus for me, cognitive function, and then I'm going to call it the spiritual or the happiness side of things.
And I've been putting a lot of weighting of my effort behind those three areas. And you'll see a lot of people who maybe are newer to the biohacking scene. They read a bunch of stuff and decide they want to write a book or start a podcast. And the reason I didn't trademark the word biohacking is I wanted it to be a global movement. I don't own biohacking. I just started it.
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Chapter 7: What workout tips are there for busy entrepreneurs?
People call me the father of biohacking. So I do see people who are saying I'm just a longevity person and there's a longevity conference. And then I'll see people say, well, I'm a biohacker. I just have some red light and some cold plunges. I'm like, those are very old biohacks. That's great. And all of these are helping people.
What's maybe most refreshing is that biohacking has crushed the vegan diet. And having been a raw vegan at one time in my life, which is really bad for you, what inspires me the most is I write all of my posts, all my podcasts.
If someone had just told me this when I was 20, it would have saved me $2.5 million, and it would have saved me an enormous amount of suffering, both the spiritual, emotional suffering and physical suffering, having lost 100 pounds, having made my brain work better than it ever has. So I try to keep it balanced. It also comes down to what's your goal?
Because the things that make old people young are the things that make young people powerful. So let's say you're 30 and you say, oh my gosh, I'm going to do biohacking. Now I have the body I want without a lot of work. Because if you're an entrepreneur, you don't have time to spend 10 hours a day on longevity and going to the gym because you're actually building a company.
You probably have some sort of romantic interest and you're balancing all this. You could also meditate for four hours a day and... We just don't have time for that. So how do I make it really effective? And how do I make it take a small amount of time for my brain to work, for me to have epic levels of energy and just more resilience than anyone else? And if you can do that,
you will be really successful, not just in your entrepreneurial life, but in your personal life. And it depends on how many friends you have of different ages. Show me an entrepreneur who's killing it at work when their relationship is falling apart at home. It doesn't work. So your relationships are a part of your environment that affects you as a biohacker. So we want happiness.
We want the ability to be in whatever state we choose, whether it's focused or relaxed, so no one can trigger us. You can't do just one thing. You have to have brain, you have to have energy, you need to have your body, you need to have your longevity. It's just a lot easier and cheaper to do this if you start in your 20s or 30s than if you wait till you're 40 or 50.
And I know that you wrote a recent book called Smarter, Not Harder. And we're going to dive into a lot of those concepts today so that we can learn how we can do biohacking more efficiently, like you said, because we are busy entrepreneurs. We don't really have time to meditate for hours or work out for hours and do these diets that don't work.
So one last question before we jump into that kind of stuff. Biohacking has received a lot of criticism. A lot of people call it elitist. They call it unscientific. What are your thoughts around that?
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Chapter 8: What foods boost brain health and performance?
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