The Mello Millionaire with Tommy Mello - Health Is Wealth: Dave Asprey’s Blueprint for Longevity and High Performance

Episode Date: September 5, 2025

Dave Asprey is the father of biohacking, a four-time New York Times bestselling author, and a global thought leader on human performance and longevity. Once a chronically overweight Silicon Valley entrepreneur battling brain fog and burnout, Dave turned his own health crash into a relentless quest: to upgrade the human body and mind. That journey sparked the Bulletproof movement, popularized butter coffee, and helped millions rethink what’s possible for their energy, focus, and lifespan.Today, he’s the host of the top-ranked Human Upgrade podcast, a keynote speaker, and the founder of multiple health and wellness companies. He’s trained Navy SEALs, Olympic athletes, CEOs, and everyday people seeking to feel and perform at their best. Known for making science practical — and sometimes provocative — Dave isn’t just chasing more years of life; he’s engineering a quality of life that maximizes every single year he has on Earth. His mission is bold: to live to at least 180, and to help others defy the limits of aging along the way.For Dave, health is wealth — and he’s showing the world how to make the right investments. Meet me at Home Service Freedom 2025 ⟶ https://homeservicefreedom.com/Check Out My Social Media:Tiktok  ⟶ https://www.tiktok.com/@officialtommymelloInstagram ⟶ https://www.instagram.com/officialtommymello/Facebook ⟶https://www.facebook.com/thomasmello/My other podcast:Home Service Expert ⟶ https://open.spotify.com/show/4WHQ3ldGThHsP1cfzNF33GLive Q&A submission form:https://homeserviceexpert.com/questions00:00 The Power of Energy in Business02:03 Dave Asprey: The Godfather of Biohacking03:41 The Journey to Health Optimization09:42 Longevity and the Future of Aging19:41 Overcoming Business Obstacles and Setbacks23:47 The Importance of Community and SupportTMM Director / Series Creator - Elaina SlaytonExecutive Producer - Jim Leslie Producer - Bianca Zhou Editor - Paul McAleavey Camera - Cullen Fleming

You can't accumulate power. Your mitochondria can hold six seconds worth of power. All you can do is spend it. How you radiate that power changes your company. So your energy changes reality because you have such a big impact on it because you're a business owner. So the more you own yourself, the better your business does and the more you change the world. Innovative, tenacious, radical. Our guest today is the godfather of biohazard.

a relentless human optimizer who spent decades pushing the boundaries of performance, energy and health. I will argue very passionately that there's only one thing you ever invest in its energy. Dave Asprey is a best-selling author and Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur who has been forging a path to extend life, sharpen the mind, and upgrade the human operating system. If you know the type of environment to put around you, that might be an important ingredient for biohacking, right? He spent over $2 million on self-experimentation.

With a background in computer science and cybersecurity, Dave applied a hacker's mindset to biology. This is technology that should be and can be and now will be available for everyone. He's the founder of 40 years of Zen Upgrade Labs and the Biohacking Conference, and he's helped millions rethink what it means to feel and function at their best. We can turn the biological clock in ourselves backwards because now we know why we age and what to do about it. Dave's work has redefined peak performance for a new generation of high performers. Get ready.

This conversation will challenge what you believe about aging, energy, and what's truly possible for the human body and mind. Welcome back to the Melo Millionaire. Today I got an awesome guest that I'm really excited to interview because this is important stuff. Dave Asprey, he's a biohacker advocate of low carb high fat diet. He's the founder of Upgrade Labs and Bulletproof Nutrition. He's the author of the Bulletproof Diet Superhuman. meditated, smarter or not harder, headstrong, fast this way, and game changers. He's an entrepreneur in New York Times bestseller, and he is widely considered the father of

biohacking. As a former Silicon Valley tech executives, Dave pivoted to health optimization after personal experiments helped him lose over 100 pounds and reverse chronic health issues. Asprey's mission is to live to at least 180 years old and help others upgrade their bodies and minds along the way. Dave, it's an honor to be on this with you. I'm so happy to be here. Hey, and by the way, thanks for sending me the coffee.

I'm excited. My new post-bulletproof danger coffee. Yeah. Do you want to start out by just giving us your background a little bit about where you've been, where you're at today, and where you're going? Sure. I have built a large company. Bulletproof was my last company. And I've been, we'll see, we've parted.

ways and I started a new company called Danger. Danger coffee because who knows what you might do, like that kind of good danger is in there. And it's full of minerals. I've also created the biohacking movement, which is now industry analysts say it's a $36 billion industry that didn't exist until I put on the first biohacking conference and created the word. And it's actually now a new word in the English language. So there's all this incredible movement around how do we have control of our biology. And I've had many, many highly successful people come through my 40 years as in neuroscience program, which is a brain upgrade for, mostly for entrepreneurs and celebrities and athletes. My most recent book just came out. It hit the number one bestselling

meditation and the number one bestselling philosophy book, surprisingly, for a guy who was a 300-pound computer hacker. But it did that because after 10 years of measuring people's brainwaves, now we know what works for meditation in altered states versus what we think works, but maybe doesn't. And this is the recipe. People spend $20,000 a week to be with me and my team doing deep neuroscience. And I give away the eight-step recipe that you can use to turn off these notifications that keep popping up in your nervous system instead of on your phone. But what is it that happened with your life that you just decided something needed to change. You, you're the fog and just rock bottom. Man, when I was 23,

I weighed 300 pounds. And I'd been diagnosed with arthritis to my knees since I was 14, been on antibiotics for 15 years every month because I just kept getting strep throat and sinus infections. And then I started having brain fog, chronic fatigue syndrome. We didn't know that. That's what it was back then. And I ended up spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on figuring out what was going out with my health. And my doctor was not useful. So I fired him and got angry and said,

I'm just gonna do this myself. I'm working in Silicon Valley. I'm helping to build the internet as we know it. How hard could it be to hack the human body? And it turns out it's pretty hard, but it's doable. But the way a hacker solves a problem is very different than the way a doctor solves a problem.

When I was 26 along that journey, I made $6 million. And these were pre-Biden dollars, so they were worth a lot back then. I like that. And that still gave me a lot of dry powder so that I could really work on my health. And I could just say, I don't care what it costs. I'm going to try this. So for several years there, every night, I would study for four hours, fall asleep at my desk, and I would just order all the stuff, and I would try it.

And at this point, I've spent $2.5 million. on reversing my age. I'm at least 20 years younger than my biological age. I guess it depends on how you want to measure it. And as a former 300-pounder, this is my abs. Yeah, fantastic. That's not, I'm supposed, like, I'm supposed to be 52 years old. This shouldn't be.

And I exercise 20 minutes a week, not per day, per week, using AI. What you really have to do is look at the numbers and when they're not working, do something about the ones that don't work. And instead for health, like, well, I don't need to look at the numbers. I'll just look at the scale, which is a kind of useless number. And I know that if running is good, I'll just run more. And here's what science will show you. If you come in and you use the AI thing at Upgrade Labs, five minutes, three times a week, zero sweating involved. you'll improve your VO2 max by 12%.

If you do an hour a day, five days a week, sweating all over each other in some spin class, you'll improve by 2%. I'm getting six times better results in 15 minutes. So the amount of time you've been brushing your teeth can be the amount of time you've been on cardio. I'm willing to invest that. I'm really not that interested in doing an hour a day of spin class.

And so, like, make every minute count because we have stuff that matters. And it's that mindset for longevity, for all the things that I do across the nine different companies in my portfolio. It's why I keep writing books. It's why I've 1,300 and something episodes on my show. And I've interviewed some of the leading experts in longevity and consciousness. It's because there's so much work we can do on ourselves.

And I was just the worst possible case for that. And I would just say, if you're listening to this right now, you're probably interested in the millionaire side of things. And I got bad news for you. When I was in my mid-20s there, I was absolutely convinced, first, if I get famous, that it's going to make me happy. So my prove-you-or-fat, Dave picture, when I was 23, I was an entrepreneur magazine. I was the first guy to sell anything over the internet before e-commerce had a name the first product. ever sold was a t-shirt that said caffeine, my drug of choice, and it had this caffeine molecule from my bicep now on a t-shirt. And I didn't know that was a big deal. I was just trying to

pay my tuition, but being famous made me happy for 15 minutes. And then, oh, when I get rich, I'll be happy. And, dude, I tried that. I was still miserable when I was a multimillionaire. And then I tried getting married in my 20s for a couple brief miserable years. That doesn't make you happy either. So it's something else. So money above a certain amount, which is not that high, doesn't make it happier. And so you're like, oh my God, I got to have purpose. Because everything else follows purpose. I love it. So is 180 years, is that just get the PR going? Or is that like in your mind. With the technology coming out and everything now, I do feel like the age number is going to go up massively. I've been active in the longevity movement for 25 years. I started

when I was sick and fat in my 20s. I would hang out at one of the first longevity nonprofit groups probably in the country in Palo Alto. So I'm the only guy under 60 in the room and I'm under 30. elders, the luminaries in the field are teaching me about longevity and the things that make old people young, make young people powerful. And that's what was missing. That's why I started the whole biohacking movement because I wouldn't care about anti-aging when I'm 20. I'm going to care about something else. I'm going to care about mastery over my life and building relationships, building my tribe, making my mark in the world, creating my career, all the things that we're all working on. Biohacking is accessible and interesting. So everything I write,

what I care when I was 19. And along the way, I've discovered that anyone who starts on that path of wanting to be a biohacker, to get your energy back, to look away, whatever, you're eventually going to become a longevity person and a consciousness person because that's what really matters. So having spent that much time in longevity, I wrote a mega book on longevity, New York Times science bestseller kind of book called Superhuman. And in it I make the case for why 180 is conservative. And between you and me, I just chose 180 because any bigger number when I came out with this book wouldn't have been credible.

So it was a conservative number for me. So listen, I did a little bit of digging on this lifespan stuff and here's what I found. A 2021 study found that it will be possible for humans to live to be 130 years old. However, it will be rare. We won't all be living to 130. And it won't happen soon. The study found that though it has a probability of less than one in a million and is highly unlikely to occur in the near future, it is possible that the maximum reported age at

death will rise to 130 years during the present century. Keep in mind though, guys, that the CDC reported the average life expectancy in the U.S. to be only about 77 years old. I mean, 77 to 130 is a pretty massive range. But get this, some research suggests that a max maximum life expectancy age doesn't actually exist, that humans could live longer than we could even predict, meaning that Dave isn't necessarily wrong in his statement that he could live to 180 years old. But that such an incredible lifespan would be super dependent on an individual's behavior.

Those people who beat the odds and become the first to live to 130 or 180, they're going to have to live extremely clean. Their health would need to be near perfect. And it seems modern science doesn't know how to support the kind of lifestyle that can give you that. But hey, if Anyone's going to do it. It's probably going to be Dave. 180s conservative because here's why. Our current best is 120 years old. Actually, 122.

That person, you go back 122 years. World War I was fought with horses and biplanes. They didn't have antibiotics. They couldn't spell DNA. They didn't have PubMed. They didn't have AI. Like the amount of tools available to us is stupid. And I'm an investor or advisor to many of these world-changing longevity technologies out there.

I have had gene therapy that for the average person makes you nine years younger on lab tests of your age. Just one shot. It doesn't even hurt. I've had stem cells in every joint in my body twice. So crazy billionaires always fund stuff that no one else will do because they have nothing better to do with all their minds. money, right? And they're willing to spend millions of dollars on something that you can't do. And that proves we can do it. And then it becomes accessible to all of us. And longevity is on a rapid, rapid path. So here's my, my bet. Can we do just 50% better than our current best for longevity?

And I have a hundred years. And I have chat GPT to help me. Like, of course we're going to get there. I want to play a little game that I just made up while we were talking. I want you to rate these one out of five. Okay. And five being the best. And I don't care. There's no limit on the fives you could give. 17 minutes in the sauna day.

17 minutes per day in the sauna. That's a five. And this is for me, by the way. This is like my game to make me smarter and what I'm going to do. Cold plunge. And if it is a cold plunge, how long and what temperature? and how often? Okay.

Cold plunge is of five, but you want to be at 37 degrees. That's the one that hurts. And you want it to be for less than three minutes, and two minutes is fine. And you want to do it three or four, maybe five times a week, but not every day.

Walks in nature, and I'm not talking about a sprint, but a pretty brisk walk. I'm going to give that a 4.5. The only reason it's not a 5 is that usually it takes enough time to get to nature that the cost of doing it is pretty high. What about weight training? If you're doing it once or twice a week with the right methods, it's a 5.

If you're doing it every day, it's probably a 2. Sleep. I've always heard 8 hours. And by the way, I focus. I'm a minimum of 7. I'm shooting for 8. Based on the data, I would put eight hours a night at only a three, and I would put six and a half hours a night at a five. But the big butt is six and a half hours a night, if that's all you need, because studies of millions of people show the people who live the longest only need six and a half hours of sleep.

That means you must do everything in your life to be so healthy and lower in toxins that you're fully recovered in six. and half hours. If you need eight hours a night, truly need it, then your odds of dying from all cause mortality are meaningfully higher than people who only need six and a half. I get six hours and 32 minutes naturally now. And that also goes into the quality of sleep, but like I got a sleep number. I've invested, I have more pillows than anybody on the planet because I'm always testing pillows. I got one more, well, two, a two-partner, then I got another important question because you brought up the parents. So alcohol. You know, alcohol's just bad for you. Everybody knows this. And the alcohol industry spent billions of dollars at the National Institutes of Health

and National Institutes of aging, trying to prove some benefits for it, much like big tobacco, used to spend a bunch of money to get people in white lab cuts to tell you, I smoke Marlboro's and I'm a doctor. Yes, they did. Yeah. Alcohol's bad for you. But so is high speed downhill skiing. It's bad for you. You're probably going to blow an e or hit a tree. But damn, it might be worth it. So what do you do for alcohol?

Number one, only drink alcohol older than you. Why? Because it's rate limiting. You know how expensive alcohol that's 40 years old is? So you can afford beer when you're 21. You can't really, you know what I'm saying? Only drink the really good stuff. Don't drink very often.

Limit the amount you drink. Recognize that there is no justification for doing it other than pleasure. And avoid the hits from alcohol. There's a couple of bad things that happen when you drink. Number one, alcohol is full of toxins unless it's distilled. So take some activated charcoal, which will bind to the toxins in your gut. So that you don't have to use your liver to get rid of all that stuff in the wine or the beer, which are not distilled. When you drink, if you plan ahead, you can.

supercharge your liver so your liver won't get damaged and become fatty. And you do that by taking glutathione, which is a standard biohacking supplement. Glutothion is what gets depleted in your liver from drinking. And there is now a genetically engineered probiotic you can take before you drink that reduces the aging effects of alcohol probably by 80%. It's called zbiotic. All right, let's go to Danger Coffee. I can say Danger Coffee is a 5. Danger is lab tested mold-free with a therapeutic dose of trace and ultra-trace minerals, and you can put butter and MCT in there and blend it up.

I'm going to give that one a five. What's one piece of game-changing a device you wish you knew in your early 20s? Man, there's kind of two, but the biggest one of all is if you can be trick, it means you're a loaded gun and someone else has their finger on the trigger and that it's your fault entirely. The second one, it's that people really want to help. When I was young, I had this mindset that I had to make my mark, I had to do it all by myself. And anytime I accepted help from someone, it kind of created a debt. and that's not how it works.

People who have suffered, they are so happy to tell you how to not suffer also. And when I was in my early 20s, so many successful entrepreneurs saw something in me and offered to help me. And I would just kind of like, oh, no, thanks. I got this.

I got this. So I stubbornly was like, I'll just make all the mistakes and feel all the pain myself until I kind of couldn't take any more pain. So I wish I would have just said, When you allow someone to help you, you are giving them a gift because it feels really good to help other people. So now someone offers me something like, wow, thank you.

Yes. And I offer to help people as well whenever I can because it's good for me, right? Everybody wins. I just didn't know that when I was young. So a question here, what keeps you going when you're confronted with business obstacles and setbacks? I just see a lot of people. Life's hitting them in the face. time. I don't know what burnout is. I guess what do you say to most people? This is mostly business

owners listening to this and that feels like the whole roof's caving in all the time. The economy, this, that, the other. Number one, you live a blessed life if you've never hit rock bottom. When I coach entrepreneurs, I'll ask them, usually about 200 in the room for my business of biohacking event, how many people have had someone you trust steal money from you? And you ask them to raise their 90% of entrepreneurs. You too, right? Everybody. So, in fact, after studying more than a thousand entrepreneur brains and writing that heavily

meditated book, man, the thing that stops us most is two specific traumas. I didn't like the word trauma, but these are like emotional, spiritual injuries. One of them is betrayal. This is when someone intentionally harms you for their own benefit. And man, that, that, it, it, the sense of, of just pain from that is a big deal. I had a family member try to steal one of my companies once. And I write about that in my most, in my recent book, like, how do you recover from that? And man, it, it punches you in the gut so hard that it creates changes in your mitochondria and it creates

changes in your hormone levels and change your neurotransmitters and you wake up and you just, you don't have the fire they had before, right? And how do you get out of that? Well, number one, you support your biology, right? So you can take someone like that. You know what? You need some rhodiola. You need some adaptogenic herbs.

You can bounce back from the stress so you'll make dopamine and you'll make norophenephrine again so that you won't be in a funk. And this is maybe the most important thing. You need community. And entrepreneurs, we get lonely. Because if you're the top dog, you can just adore your employees, but you could also fire them. And they know it.

And you know it. There's always a little space. there no matter what you do. And if you talk about your life with people who aren't entrepreneurs, immediate jealousy or overwhelm and fear. So I remember the first time I raised a million dollars of venture capital, I got my car and I thought, oh my God, I'm worth like 30 something million dollars. Who do I call? I'd call my friends from college because that's, there's too many zeros. I'm not going to call my parents like they they're they would on the surface be happy, but they'd be actually very scared and a little bit conflicted because they have a story about money. I couldn't call my wife at the time because she had anxiety about money too. And I'm like, shit. I guess I'll get a taco.

Right. So it's it is not it is very lonely when you're an entrepreneur and dealing with that stuff where there's usually some shame involved. Like how could I have let that person do that? Why didn't I see it? And that's why I wrote heavily meditated. There's a forgiveness process. Forgiveness is letting go of a grudge, letting go of pain that your body is holding on to. That's the most important thing followed by community. So you might want to hire a relationship coach as well. And for that kind of stuff, I work with a company called We Deepen, where I sit. We do entrepreneurial masterminds for relationship management, not to manage your business,

but to manage your husband or wife and you both go and we do hot seats with the top relationship experts in the world. Because let's face it, if your company's on fire and your marriage is a garbage fire, your company will fail. How many entrepreneurs do you know because relationships go down and then their company goes down? It happens all the time. So you got to have support from other entrepreneurs who know the game.

You got to have support for your relationship from people who are experts in the world. A relationship therapist or coach, even if your relationship is 10 out of 10, keep it that way. you hire consultants all the time for marketing, do it there, and then relentlessly work on any trigger you have because if no one on earth can trigger you, no one can take you off your game. That's just a very, very big goal. That's been my path.

That's what I do with neuroscience. And it just, this is the question I always ask, is there any books that just completely changed your life? I mean, obviously, we talk about E-Mith and the richest debt, rich dad poor dad, and, you know, Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie. Is there any book, though, that just like, man, this completely changed the direction of my life. I'm going to answer with kind of two books that are stuck together. In my early 20s, 48 laws of power really helped me understand boardroom dynamics.

And that's Robert Green's book, a very, very famous book. But the book you really want to read is his opus. And it's the basic laws, or maybe it's just the laws of human nature. If you're an entrepreneur, that book is a masterclass on all the bad things and the good things that people will do that are invisible to you. That book will change your life. Dave, this is, I knew I was going to have a good time on this podcast, but it was not only educational, but, you know, my feeling is I work very hard, but the problem is I love my work. I'd actually love to be here more than I'd like to watch a football game at the game.

So it's like, for me, this is my fun, this is my passion, but my deal is, is, like, like, what good is it if you don't have energy? What good is everything in the world? Great relationships, all these things. If you don't love your life, if you don't have energy, if you don't have passion, if you don't have alertness, if you're foggy all the time. So this has been very powerful. Dave, what's the best way to get a hold of you for the audience out there?

Go to Dave Asprey.com. And all this stuff is there. 40 years of Zen. If this resonated, read heavily meditated. It's not going to change my life if you do or don't buy my book. That's not why I'm saying it. This is 10 years of looking at a. thousand CEOs brains and figuring out what actually works to change the state.

So read the book, right? And that's going to give you the recipe to go in. And if anything that you heard resonated, go do that one thing and ignore the rest of this interview because that's the one thing you need. And finally, look, I want you to give us your best close out. I don't know. Maybe we talked about a lot of stuff. I've got more insights in this podcast than if.

think and I've been on over a thousand podcasts but uh wow thanks man you know this is this is a quote it is the goal of life is not to accumulate power but to radiate it and because you have business owners and CEOs and entrepreneurs in the audience you you can't accumulate power your mitochondria can hold six seconds worth of power all you can do is spend it right so how you radiate that power changes your company. And if you're doing entrepreneurship the way I think you ought to, your company should be doing something to make the world better just by making something that people need. So your presence, your energy changes reality because you have such a big impact on it because you're a business owner. So your job is to be the one person in

the room who can hold calm and peaceful space. No matter. matter what is happening in the world and your team will line up behind you even if things are hard. And if you are losing your mind internally but acting strong, they'll all know it and it won't work. So the more you own yourself, the better your business does and the more you change the world. I love it. Dave, this is a masterclass. I really appreciate you doing this. We'll have a part two. Beautiful anytime. Thank you, Tommy. Thank you. Thanks so much for listening to this episode. Like always, we're going to close it out with the Tommy truth, which is a little slice of wisdom from me to you that can help guide you in whatever you're

striving towards right now. My secret formula is I pay to play. I spend a lot of money on self-development. I will get the best coaches at everything. I call them my connectors. I call and they get me access. I bypass a decade of learning by just taking everything. And the more I spend with coaches, the faster I grow, the faster everything around me. It's like water and sun for a plant and the right soil. And it's even got some of that powder you put in the flowers to make it last long. You get the right. teacher that understands how someone like me retains and gathers the information look out and that's it guys we'll talk to you next week