Dave Asprey: The Art of Biohacking, Sleep Mastery, and Lasting Leadership

**Dave Asprey** (0:00)
Now you can hack it because you can track it. You cannot hack what you can't track. And that's one thing. And if you're saying, I don't want to do that, that's too much work. One of the cheapest biohacks of all that improves leadership and performance and longevity and aging is darkness.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:20)
Welcome to Mick Unplugged, the number one podcast for self-improvement, leadership and relentless growth. No fluff, no filters, just heart-hitting truths, unstoppable strategies, and the mindset shifts that separate the best from the rest. Ready to break limits? Let's go.

**Mick** (0:44)
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another exciting episode of Mick Unplugged. And today, I just told him offline, this is probably the highlight of my 2025 He didn't just spark a movement, he built a blueprint for human potential. He turned aging into a choice, coffee into a weapon, and biohacking into a global revolution. Best-selling author, relentless entrepreneur, the original mind behind the upgrade. I call him the OG of biohacking. Ladies and gentlemen, this is David Asprey. Dave, how are you doing today, brother?

**Dave Asprey** (1:20)
I'm doing really well. Wow, what an intro. I've never thought of weaponizing coffee, but I like your words.

**Mick** (1:25)
Hey, you did.
You did. I love it, man. Dave, you know, I have so many questions I want to ask you from my soul. I told you, you know, Gary Brekker, Damon John, all been telling me a lot about you towards the end of last year, and I really started diving deep into you and all the things that you're doing, man. And so I wanted to tell you face to face, even though we're virtual, but face to face, I just respect and appreciate the heck out of you, man. Like the lives you're changing, the insights you're giving. I know you don't get enough credit for it. I know you also don't seek credit for a lot, knowing the soul that you are, but I just wanted to tell you, bro, freaking appreciate you.

**Dave Asprey** (2:08)
Thank you, Mick.

**Mick** (2:11)
Just freaking appreciate you, dude. And I know this, you've spent a lot of your life building systems and protocols to upgrade the human body.
But I want to go a little bit deeper. I'm interested in the man, the person that needed it. Like who was Dave Asprey before the hacks, before the tools, before the protocols, and what broke Dave?

**Dave Asprey** (2:38)
Well, I had Asprey syndrome when I was younger. And this is on the autism spectrum. I learned to read when I was 18 months old. So when everyone else was figuring out how do you socialize, how do you crawl properly, I was just soaking up info. And the reason that I was so attracted that, by the way, it's not because I'm super smart because my dad read a book that said, how to teach your baby to read and he taught me to read. So any baby can do that. It's just not good for them.
So, what autism does to you is it means that your brain is running on low power. And it means that all the signals that are coming in, like sound and light and touch and vision, even smell, it's like they're static on the line. So you're constantly struggling and striving to make sense of things. And you don't have enough energy to do it if you had a normal nervous system. So that combination forces your brain to be really good at using small amounts of energy to find patterns. Of course, you miss things like social interactions and subtle cues and facial expressions and all this stuff that's well known. You also don't learn to pay attention to what's going on from the neck down. But fortunately for me, I have high functioning and I come from a long line of scientists and inventors and deep nerds. So that served me and I find myself when I'm 26 and I have weighed 300 pounds and I have struggled to lose the weight. I went to the gym 90 minutes a day, six days a week, religiously without fail for 18 months straight. I'm on a constantly hungry, low fat, low calorie diet. And I never lost a pound.
And I'm just like, I'm strong. I can max out all but two of the machines, but I'm still fat. And I'm sitting at a Carl's Jr. with my friends and I'm having the chicken salad with no dressing. Oh, and no chicken because calories. And they're all eating double Western bacon, cheeseburgers and fries. And I eat less than any of my thin friends and I work out more than all of them together. It must be because I'm not working out hard enough for eating enough lettuce. I just realized what I'm doing isn't working. I did what they said and it was not real. And I made a decision, well, okay, I'm a computer hacker. That was actually my career. So if I can hack the Internet, why can't I hack my own body? And I'm just going to do things that work. I'm going to measure it. And if it doesn't work, I'm going to quit doing it. And that led me pretty soon to meet a group of people three times my age, running one of the first longevity non-profit groups in the world in Palo Alto near Stanford University. And we'd meet every month with a leader in the field of longevity in the 90s, back when only crazy people do it except these were doctors. These were people who were already doing it. They were just underground. And so I learned what became biohacking from my elders. And it allowed me to lose the weight and to fix my brain, get rid of the chronic fatigue syndrome and the arthritis and the brain fog and the pre-diabetes and the obesity and all the other things going wrong with my biology. And that's what got me on the path. But eventually, if you start biohacking, and I built it this way, first you're going to say I came in because I wanted to fix the sore shoulder, I wanted to lose weight or I wanted to do something. Pretty soon, you're going to say, you know what, I got my energy back. I want to live longer. I have more to give, I have more to do, I have more to offer. So suddenly, now you're into longevity. But then you go, maybe that mean bitch in my head can just shut up. I'd like to be happy. And for me, I didn't know there was anything from the neck down that had any meaningfulness. So I went through and I learned each of the emotional states. I did a whole bunch of yoga. I've traveled around the world and I've studied in monasteries and with different leaders of lineages and the results have been profound because it's helped me to build at least a portion of the operating system for our consciousness. So there was no manual for this operating system. So now we at least have portions of the manual. All of my books are a part of it, depending on what your goal is. And heavily meditated is the most important. It contains all the stuff I couldn't talk about 15 or 20 years ago, back when I was starting the biohacking movement. If I'd have brought this stuff out then, people would have said there's no credibility. Putting butter in coffee and earthing and putting a laser on your brain to change your... That was edgy enough. But biohacking is now a global force. It's a $63 billion industry and I never trademarked the term. I could have, but I didn't because I wanted it to be a movement. And as a result, it's a new word in the English language in 2016 Webster's added it and my name is in the online dictionary.