Lessons - Simple, Free Ways to Boost Your Health | Dave Asprey - Biohacking Pioneer

In this lessons episode, uncover how true peak performance begins with simple, foundational habits. Learn how most coffee contains hidden toxins that hurt more than help, learn why sleep quality matters more than quantity for longevity, and learn how light exposure and meal timing can boost your brain's energy and focus. I think that when you even look at where you started with bullet proof, and now I know you have danger coffee, which is, and I'm going to, I want to understand the difference and what this is trying to accomplish. And we'll get there. But if you look at, if you look at peak performance, I think for most people, coffee is the gateway into peak performance. That's, but I didn't even realize that he said 50% of coffee that you can just go buy at the grocery store's full mold anyways. It's between 80 and 94%. That's more buying. So the point is that when people try and perform better, they're already putting toxins or they're already putting garbage into their body. So even at a most rudimentary level, the performance that people are chasing is hurting them more than helping them. I don't know that you can say more than helping them. So there are studies that even if you drink moldy coffee, which gives you jitter, cranky, makes you want sugar, all the reasons I quit coffee for five years, because I just felt shitty. You feel good and then bad and you need more. And it's like a, but no, my point is that is how most performance products feel. Jim, coffee, new tropics, it's all like high as low. So this is almost like the, because I've tried everything under the sun. And this is almost like the, the necessary evil with performance products. It's not good performance. It's a totally nank. It's because it's what they've experienced. Yes. And what you look at it is there's a slope of the curve up. Like how good do you feel? And then how sustained is it? And why? And a lot of times when I first got into smart drugs in my mid 20s, just so I could do my job. Yeah, some of those were really ampy. And others, you wouldn't know you were taking it until you stopped. And it turns out the best neutral picks are subtle. Like, well, I feel more like myself today. And in fact, I'm not sure it's even working. And you quit it in the next day. Like, why did I put my car keys in the fridge? Oh, I didn't do it all last week when I was taking it. So it took a lot of unpacking both from doing neuroscience and from formulating neutral picks and 25 years of taking them to understand that most of the stuff you can buy out there, stuff like alpha brain or whatever, they're saying, well, let's just stimulate a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine. This is something we've known how to do since the 80s. I was mentored by the guy who wrote smart drug news throughout the 80s and 90s. Steve folks, who's a dear friend who's been on my show. So it turns out when you're young and you take a product like that, it's probably just going to give you muscle tension and make you clench your jaw because you need more than as you age, but when you're younger, you need something different. So understanding how this works took a long time to unpack, but as a system of engineering guy, for your brain, as is important for entrepreneurs and just for people one and perform, it's number one is how much energy can you make? Right. Number two is how flexible is your brain? And there's ways to manipulate both of those. And then the third thing is how much do you waste on useless thoughts that you can't control? And if you make a ton of energy, you have a brain that can transform itself easily, and you don't waste any energy on thinking about tacos or thinking about that mean things someone said last week, well, there's an awful lot left over for you to run a business and be a parent and have great intimate relationships and serve your community and evolve yourself. But if you're where I was and where so many entrepreneurs are, you're stuck because like there's a sense of doom and only problems come your way when you're CEO a lot of the time and you don't have enough energy and it's allocated all wrong. And there's nothing left at the end of the day, especially if you're a parent. So whatever little bit you have, you're going to book out your toddler who's going to say, no, no, no, you're like, okay, I'm burning my last bit of willpower on patients. And then your life sucks. And it happens so often, it's because you didn't have enough energy and you allocated it wrong. And because your brain was stuck because it was rigid, all of those are eminently hackable with substances and behaviors. If you look at sort of your journey and if people look at even biohacking as a whole, there was a point when you invested roughly two million in understanding human biology, big number for a lot of people that weren't my own biology yet. Exactly. But then and then people look at Brian Johnson and they'll say, like, I don't have whatever X million dollars to spend on my body per year. So that scares people off. What are the simple things that people can do? Let's talk about this. So I spend about two, maybe 2.5 at this point over 25 years. Okay, that's a little bit more doable. And I'm friends with Brian, right? There is not a need to spend two million dollars, even on the most aggressive longevity therapies. You could easily spend a half a million dollars. I've done the world's most advanced gene therapies. I just reset my central aging clock in my brain with focused ultrasound and stem cells and all the stuff you can do. I've done it. It doesn't cost you a million dollars. And most people don't need to do it. So when I write books like, my superhuman is my longevity book. And if you look at Brian's doing and you look at what's in superhuman, there's a common agreement there about what are the things you do to reduce aging. I age at 73% the age of normal. And I don't spend two million dollars a year. You don't need to do that. But if you want to hire a bunch of texts to measure things, you can spend that much. So what can you do? Number one, like, these are boring. And there was learn how to get good sleep by the way, boring is useful though. Oh, yes. Yeah, boring, but useful. I wanted to talk about, you know, all the missed advanced things. Usually when I write a book, I go do what the crazy billionaires are doing. And that, that just demonstrates what's possible. And it demonstrates a principle. And then I say, well, now that we know this pathway matters for aging or performance, what can you do that's cheap and what can you do that's free? And so anyone is sitting or going, well, you have to be rich to live a long time. You don't. In fact, I know a friend, she's aging at slightly less quickly than Brian Johnson. And her total spend is under 20 grand a year, right? She's not a public person at all. So like, what's going on here? Well, sleep is number one. And as an entrepreneur who started a big company while working for another big company, I intentionally restricted my sleep to under five hours a night for two years. And it was a conscious choice. It's probably not good for you. It's probably not good for aging. Can you do it with biohacking? Yeah. And when people start doing the things that I teach, they usually need an hour or less sleep. And you could say, well, that's bad because don't we all need eight hours of sleep? That's not what the evidence shows. There are now three studies of more than a million people for multiple years. The people who live the longest sleep six and a half hours a night, not because they're restricting their sleep. It's because healthy people need less sleep. And they're probably getting the right kind of sleep, of course. Yeah. Right? So for me, I was a five minutes of deep sleep and five minutes of REM sleep per night. Okay. That's the worst sleep you can get. So about 17 years ago, I started tracking my sleep. And I bought this headband that was not Victoria's secret approved. And I wore it every night and I realized, oh my God, I suck at this. And I learned all the different things that impact the quality of your sleep. And as an example, I just flew here yesterday to Miami from Austin. And I spoke in an event until about 10 30 last night. And I got an hour of deep sleep and 90 minutes of REM sleep in six and a half hours last night. That's more than most college students get. And younger people get higher quality sleep than older people unless you know how to sleep. So it's something you can learn. It's a skill just like swimming or walking or playing pool, whatever you're into. You can learn to do it. And how? Oh, well. Okay. You don't have to do the whole play. The first thing you do is, yes, get something that accurately tracks your sleep. There's the aura ring that my favorite comes called sleep space. They're doing really, really advanced work. You can get a whoop. Your apple watch will do it. And when you wake up in the morning, yeah, looking at your sleep is pretty good, but looking at your recovery score, which is a marker of how much recovery did your body actually do last night in the higher the number, the better. So if you look at that, you go, huh, it sucked last night. Oh, I had two glasses of wine with dinner. Anyone who tracks their sleep will know how call is bad for you because it ruins your sleep. Even if you think you fell asleep better, you don't feel good. You don't get good quality sleep. So it's quality over quantity. And the summary of all this that is a gift and the funniest URL of my entire marketing career. Sleep with Dave.com. That's good. That's that's just like the free master class and excellent thing you can do to sleep better. I love it. And a quick call out. One of the things that's most impactful, especially for jet lag, or if you're a bit night in a studio or something, one of my companies does circadian biology. It's called true dark true dark.com. I'm wearing the true dark daytime glasses right now. These block toxic blue, but allow healthy blue in. The nighttime glasses are a different color. They block all of the different things that control your timing system. There's a part of your brain called the SCN. And it's desperate to know what time of day it is. And it uses light and food timing. So if you want to get a good night's sleep, dim everything in your house or have red night lights or get the true dark glasses and have dinner early. If you just do those two things, you'll be shocked at how your quality sleep changes. And there's a bunch of other stuff, temperature and timing and breathing exercises, blocking out your room is another thing. There's a lot. There's a lot. Yeah. But if you just do that, you're going to age less quickly and you're going to perform better. And you're going to be in bed anyway. So you just got more benefits in less time. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.