Dave Explains His Work & Impact

Megan: Dave Asprey, welcome to the show.

Dave: Thanks, Megan. I’m happy to be here.

Megan: We’re so happy to have you. I think most people listening probably know who you are, but for those who don’t, how would you explain who you are and what you do?

Dave: People know me mostly from starting Bulletproof. I’m a nine-time author, half of them New York Times bestsellers. I’m a leader in the field of extending human lifespan and longevity. I’ve spent $2.5 million increasing my lifespan, and I created the biohacking movement. My name is in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, so there are many millions of people on a path of expanded consciousness or longevity because they became biohackers.

Dave: I run the largest and original biohacking conference for about 4,500 people every year here in Austin, Texas — biohackingconference.com. And I run a deep neuroscience personal development retreat program called 40 Years of Zen, where more than a thousand executives have spent five days with me, electrodes glued to their heads, learning the brain states that normally take 40 years of daily practice to achieve.

Dave: I’ve spent six months of my life with brain tech glued to my head. I’m also a former computer hacker — a former 300-pound nerd who got tired of being sick and hacked myself so I could teach other people how to do it. Now it’s a movement, and I teach people this stuff. It’s fun.

Megan: It sounds like you’re not busy at all.

Dave: I’m also a dad… and, you know, other stuff.

Upgrade Labs & Entrepreneurial Identity

Megan: Not to mention you’re working on Upgrade Labs.

Dave: I forgot that one! Yeah, it’s a franchise with around 30 locations opening. Join me — this is for entrepreneurs. Own an Upgrade Labs. We can partner on hacking humans to live longer in your neighborhood. I make companies and I build things I can’t buy.

Why He Builds What Doesn’t Exist

Megan: “Build things you can’t buy” — say more about that.

Dave: I wanted a coffee that didn’t make me tweak. So years ago, I started Bulletproof. When I ran it, it did $750 million in lifetime revenue and $140 million a year. Then the board kicked me off the board and let me go. The company ended up selling at a fire-sale price — that sucked.

Dave: But I learned a lot. My new coffee company is called Danger Coffee. Within 18 months, I should be outselling Bulletproof on dollar volume of coffee. Bulletproof sold me the coffee shop and then told me I couldn’t sell my own coffee at the coffee shop… so I had to make a new one. It’s called Danger Coffee because who knows what you might do.

Turning Toward the Past

Megan: I love that. What a comeback story — especially after being kicked off the board, which I want to hear more about. But before that, take us back to who you were before you were the father of biohacking. When did you realize, “Hey, maybe I want to make some changes with my life”?

Dave: I was a tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley for many years.

Megan: What were you working on when you were there?

Dave: I was a co-founder of the first company to build data centers for the internet. When Google had two guys and two computers, they were on our networks and in our buildings. I ran the web engineering program for the University of California for five years — teaching while working full time.

Dave: The business unit I co-founded grew to $100 million a quarter in revenue, and I made $6 million when I was 26 years old. That was a lot back then.

Megan: No kidding.

Dave: Like, you could actually buy a house with it.

Reality Behind Early Success

Megan: What was your life like at that time? Were you on top of the world — super wealthy, flying high, partying, dating? What did life look like?

Dave: It was miserable. I was working 90 hours a week — high stress, high anxiety. I didn’t even know it was anxiety because it was constant. I wanted to be happy. I got married around that time in a poorly conceived marriage that lasted a couple years.

Dave: I thought I’d try being rich… and by the way, I lost the six million two years later. That sucked. So I tried being rich — didn’t create happiness. Tried being married — didn’t create happiness. Still felt lonely, anxious, unhappy. That’s what led to a lot of this.

Declining Health & Hitting a Wall

Dave: My health was bad. I had arthritis at 14. I was on antibiotics every month for 15 years for chronic strep throat — so my gut was wrecked. By 30, I’d seen a bunch of doctors. My testosterone was lower than my mom’s — same doctor. They said I was at high risk of stroke and heart attack. I was pre-diabetic, had crippling brain fog later diagnosed as fibromyalgia… and realized I’d grown up with Asperger’s.

Dave: You can hack that — it’s just a lot of work. Since then, I’ve spent $2.5 million on longevity, understanding my nervous system, and learning how to create the body you want.

Dave: The definition of biohacking, when I wrote the first blog post on it, was: “The art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so you have full control of your biology.”

Exploring Emotional Roots

Megan: Those emotions you experienced — loneliness, anxiety, burnout — were those present in childhood? Or were you surprised by them when they showed up later? Tell me about your relationship to those feelings.

Dave: I was born into a family of scientific and engineering nerds. My grandmother was a PhD nuclear engineer at Los Alamos National Labs. My grandfather wrote the chemistry section for Encyclopedia Britannica. Deep nerds. All of them except one on that side of the family have Asperger’s.

Dave: So I grew up emotionally less aware, but very rational. I’ve done all the transpersonal psychology stuff you can think of. The thing that probably made the biggest difference happened when I was about 30 — around 22 or 23 years ago. I had just gotten divorced from my first wife. We were married for like two years. I had no idea how to choose a partner or what I was supposed to do.

The Breaking Point

Dave: I was desperate. I felt like I was going to break. A friend said, “Go to this weird retreat.” I asked what they were going to do. She said, “I’m not going to tell you because then you won’t go.” She was right — and I didn’t trust her. Honestly, she was probably trying to get into my pants. But I didn’t know what else to do, so I signed up for a ten-day retreat with no idea what it was.

Arriving at the Retreat

Dave: I walk into this small place in Northern California — a little hotel — and there’s this older lady with glowing blue eyes like something out of a movie. She says, “Tell me about your birth.” I’m thinking: hospitals…vaginas… I don’t know. This is weird.

Dave: Turns out she was the founder of the American Pre- and Perinatal Psychology Association. When I walked in the door, she knew — just by looking — that I’d been born with the cord wrapped around my neck. So I came into the world with my nervous system primed to think something was trying to kill me. Straight sympathetic activation. Birth PTSD.

Dave: She asked, “Do you know anything about your birth?” I said, “Yeah, the cord.” She showed me a SWOT analysis — strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats — about me. I felt like a moth pinned to a board. I asked, “How did you know this?” She said, “Science. We’ve been studying this for 30 years. There’s a huge correlation between personality traits and birth experiences. We know where, we know why, we know how.”

Dave: I started crying. Software engineers and network engineers don’t cry — we’re nerds — but I did. I thought: why didn’t anyone tell me this? I had struggled and suffered for so long. And so many entrepreneurs are doing the same thing — dealing with unaddressed trauma from birth or bullying.

Bullshit Detector: Understanding Fear for the First Time

Megan: Sounds like that was a watershed moment — realizing your birth trauma was part of your story.

Dave: It was part of it. Later that week we did holotropic breathing and all the stuff I later helped popularize with biohacking. Breathwork wasn’t a thing back then — totally foreign to Silicon Valley.

Dave: At one point, they put pillows on the floor with wiffle ball bats. The instruction was to bang on the pillows and yell. I thought it was the stupidest shit I’d ever seen. I was sitting there all judgy and rational, but the sound of everyone hitting the pillows overwhelmed me. I had to leave the room. I went to my car, turned on the radio — and couldn’t hear it. That’s a clear trauma response. I had no idea.

Dave: Three women facilitators came out and convinced me to go back in. They had to hold a pillow on my chest for vagal nerve calming. They asked, “What do you feel in your body?” I said, “Anger — because this is dumb.”

Dave: Then Barbara — the woman with the blue eyes — said, “Do you feel anything else?” I said, “Yeah… my stomach feels weird.” She said, “There’s a name for that. It’s fear.”

Megan: Wow. I got shivers.

Dave: I told her, “There’s nothing here to be afraid of. Therefore it’s not fear.” She laughed: “Fear is an emotion. It doesn’t have to make sense.” Why didn’t anyone tell me that?

Dave: Fast forward to my book Heavily Meditated — it’s about how the nervous system and the body process reality before the brain even gets the signal, and how we can use that to accelerate meditation and altered states.

Thoughts vs. Nervous System Reality

Megan: And that’s sometimes my problem with CBT — especially the pure form of it — which is basically, “Just change your thoughts.” But it’s not about our thoughts. It’s about our nervous system.

Dave: Can I be judgy for a minute?

Megan: You can always be judgy.

Dave: CBT is bullshit.

Megan: Great, preach.

Why CBT Often Fails

Dave: The idea that you’re going to catch all of your inner thoughts, think about them, and choose the “right” thought — that’s what functioning adults do so we don’t kill each other in meetings. But as a therapeutic system, it’s stupid. Here’s why.

Dave: There’s a concept called congruency. Imagine I’m in a board meeting and an investor says — this really happened — “We just put $30 million into your closest competitor, and our board observer is going to sit on their board and give them your strategy.”

Dave: I could smile and say, “That’s great, congratulations.” Everyone knows it’s bullshit. Anyone with emotional awareness knows I’m pissed. But I learned to smile. That’s CBT.

Dave: I’ve studied with monks, shamans, people all over the world. Whether it’s ancient lineages or modern psychology, the instruction is the same: notice the thought, notice the emotion, gently set it aside. Same as CBT. But the real fix isn’t setting it aside — it’s turning off the alert in the first place.

Turning Off the Alerts

Dave: Imagine your phone keeps giving you alerts. CBT says: “Just swipe them away and gently refocus.” A hacker says: “Turn off the alerts.”

Dave: If you want to operate at a high level — like leading nine companies — the state of your energy becomes the state of your company. If you’re in chaos, everything around you will be in chaos.

When CBT Creates Shame

Megan: Not to mention, so many people “fail” at CBT because it’s not effective for them. Then they feel ashamed — like, “If I were better at changing my thoughts, I’d be calm.” It adds a whole new layer of self-blame.

Dave: Oh my God. You just gave me a huge insight. CBT is like the vegan diet.

Megan: Say more.

Dave: No matter how hard you try, it doesn’t work for most people — and it makes you worse. But you’re convinced it’s supposed to work, so you try harder. It’s the same cognitive bias: believing something will work when it provably doesn’t.

Dave: Executives fall into this trap all the time. It’s energetic. It’s mitochondrial. Your brain has about 20 ways of making decisions. It tries to use the lowest-power algorithm first. That’s the path of least resistance — but not the highest quality.

Energetic Economics of Decision-Making

Dave: Whether it’s “Should I buy this company?” or “Should I change this behavior?” — the brain uses the cheapest algorithm possible. All decisions feel right, even if they’re garbage.

Dave: A simple principle guides most of human behavior: If something feels good, do more. If something feels bad, do less. But in reality, there’s always an optimal zone — the Goldilocks zone — for almost everything, including business and emotional regulation.

Morality, Identity & Self-Improvement

Megan: I imagine for some people veganism is a great fit. I’m not a vegan myself. But I love the connection you made between CBT and veganism because there’s a morality component: “If I do this perfectly, then I’ll be good.” It becomes a way to avoid shame rather than understand imperfection.

Dave: Exactly. Both are fueled by the belief that perfection equals worthiness.

Childhood Wiring, Bullying & Nervous System Overload

Megan: Earlier you mentioned your family’s Asperger’s lineage and that you didn’t have a lot of emotional education growing up. Add bullying on top of that — your nervous system must have been dysregulated long before adulthood. How did you cope as a kid? Avoidance? Food? Games?

Dave: It depends on the developmental stage. Our interface with reality starts at conception. Even a single cell has sensors and decision-making rules: “Do I build tissue? Trigger stress? Produce heat? Make proteins?”

Dave: Every cell in your body still runs those primitive algorithms. And here’s the wild part: the body decides what you’re allowed to perceive before the brain gets the signal.

Dave: If I clap my hands, you think you hear it instantly. In reality, your body hears it first, waits a third of a second, decides if the sound is relevant, and then lets your brain perceive it. Your conscious mind gets leftovers.

Megan: So it’s not just sound traveling — it’s the interpretation delay.

Dave: Exactly. You’ve never touched a hot stove and consciously thought, “That’s hot, I should move.” Your body yanks your hand away before you even know what happened. Same with emotional reactions — they start before thought.

The Five F-Words of Human Behavior

Dave: Every entrepreneurial decision — and every life decision — follows the same order: Fear → Food → F*** (fertility) → Friend → Forgiveness.

Dave: First: “Is it scary?” Run, hide, or fight. Second: “Is it food?” Eat it. Third: “Can I mate with it?” Fourth: “Is it a friend?” Because groups mean survival. Fifth: “Forgiveness” — the only tool that turns off fear.

Megan: And connection. Emotions like guilt, loneliness, anger — all evolutionarily adaptive, all trying to get us to belong. Shame too.

Dave: Exactly. Shame exists because if you got kicked out of the tribe 10,000 years ago, you died. There were predators outside the boundary of 150-person groups. Shame evolved to keep you in community.

How Neurodivergence Shapes Perception

Dave: Guilt and shame drive so many entrepreneurs. One of the guys who went through 40 Years of Zen — he runs a 1,200-person company — told me, “I just realized all my success is me trying to prove to the bullies that I’m good enough.” You’ve probably heard that a lot as a coach.

Megan: So often, yes.

Running With Limited Cognitive Power

Dave: Here’s the thing: if you’re on the spectrum even a little, or you have ADHD, your brain often doesn’t have enough electrical capacity. You’re running on limited power.

Dave: With ADHD, the issue is low available energy. With autism-spectrum wiring, the signal itself is dirty — like static on the line.

Dave: Imagine trying to listen to someone through a terrible phone connection. Now imagine that’s your entire sensory world: facial expressions, subtle gestures, remembering names, recognizing faces — all of that gets deprioritized by the brain because the signal is too costly to process.

Dave: Meanwhile, tiny things that wouldn’t faze most people — a shirt tag, a flickering light, the sound of pillows getting hit with wiffle bats — become overwhelming because there’s not enough energy to process them.

Megan: Or the sound of people hitting pillows with wiffle bats…

Dave: Exactly. It’s not irrational. It’s energetically impossible to process.

Fixing the System: Power First, Then Signal

Dave: For me, the first breakthrough was fixing my mitochondria — the power plants of the cells. All willpower comes from mitochondria. When I teach entrepreneurs, we start with food, sleep, and some movement, because when you have more energy, you have more emotional regulation.

Dave: After boosting the energy supply, I had to clean up the signal — remove the static. That’s usually toxin-related or nutrition-related. Once I did that, I had a clean signal and a brain wired to operate efficiently even in low-power situations. Now at full power, the pattern-matching is next level.

Relearning Basic Processing

Dave: But there were things I never wired properly as a kid. I was reading at 18 months old — why would I crawl? I could read. So I had to relearn things like:

— how to move my eyes — how to move my tongue — how to hear properly — how to use ankle flexion and other basic movement patterns

Dave: I probably still have some internal logic patterns around how I organize reality — everyone does. Some people orient by direction, some by left/right, some by feelings or people. I’m oriented by function: what does something do? What are its components? That’s useful for diagnosing biology or even how a chair got made.

Why Faces Don’t “Register” the Same Way

Dave: If you walk up to me a year from now, especially because we met remotely, I might not recognize you without context. My internal database doesn’t store identity the same way. But I know people whose primary key is a person’s name — they meet you once and never forget your face. I didn’t learn that naturally.

Dave: I’m probably 100 times better at social connection than I was at 20. Back then, I couldn’t have a normal social life. Now I can — because I rebuilt those pathways.

Bullying, Shame & the Internal Alert System

Dave: Bullying builds shame. And guilt is useful — “I did something wrong; I’ll make it right.” Shame is toxic — “There is something wrong with me.” It keeps you stuck.

Dave: My deepest work — what we do at 40 Years of Zen — is an eight-step quantified forgiveness process. Forgiveness isn’t about telling someone what they did was okay. It’s turning off the internal alert in your nervous system that reacts to them.

Dave: That’s how you drop shame entirely.

Left-Handed Tantra & Finding the Sacred in Everything

Dave: From a broader spiritual perspective, the lineage I most align with is left-handed Tantra. Not the sexualized version people think about, but the discipline of finding the sacred in everything — including what seems least sacred.

Dave: If I have aversion to something — even sewage — I don’t want an alert about it. I want groundedness no matter the environment.

Dave: My personal definition of enlightenment is this: You can always choose your state, no matter what’s happening around you.

The Ladder: Apathy → Empathy → Compassion

Dave: In Buddhism, there are steps: First, develop empathy. But empathy is toxic. Empaths pick up other people’s pain and get dysregulated.

Dave: You became empathetic because your parent was dysregulated — you had to read their emotions to stay safe. Great training for healers, but healers get exhausted.

Dave: The next step is compassion. Empathy = “I feel your pain.” Compassion = “I genuinely wish you well.”

Dave: A compassionate leader can sit with someone’s drama and stay in their own groundedness. “I wish her well… and she’s fired.”

Compassionate Leadership Without Enabling

Megan: I think you’re speaking to something so important. Many leaders struggle with this — especially if they’re empathetic. It’s easy to feel someone else’s pain and not want to do the hard thing, like firing someone, even when it’s necessary.

Megan: Empathy for one person can be at cross-purposes with the health of the company. Prioritizing one person’s emotional comfort over the entire culture or the profitability of the business is a dangerous imbalance.

Childhood Conditioning & Over-Responsibility

Megan: I’m a therapist and coach, and I fit the profile you described. My parents had a really messy divorce when I was eight. My dad left my mom for someone much younger. It was chaotic. I was sitting on the edge of her bed at eight years old being her therapist. I’m grateful because it made me who I am — but it also created a pattern of over-responsibility.

Megan: What helped me was understanding the yin and yang of compassion. The yin is softness: patience, warmth, forgiveness. The yang is boundaries: expectations, consequences, respect for autonomy.

Megan: Without the yang, “compassion” becomes enabling.

The Shaman’s Teaching: “Respect Their Journey”

Megan: I once worked with a shaman after doing Bufo, and I kept saying, “Why is my dad like this? Why is my mom like that? Why is my ex like this?” She just kept repeating: Respect their journey.

Megan: I’d protest — “But if he just changed, his life would be better!” And she’d say again: Respect their journey.

Megan: It helped me understand that trying to rescue people is actually disempowering. It assumes they can’t handle their own life. Compassion includes trusting that people are exactly where they need to be.

Suffering Is a Teacher — And It’s Not Ours to Steal

Dave: Well said. And empathetic CEOs really need to hear this. People choose their suffering until they get the lesson. You do not have the right to take away their suffering unless they ask for help and give permission.

Dave: Otherwise, it’s non-consensual. It’s out of spiritual integrity. You might think, “I know how to help them,” but often what’s really happening is this:

Dave: You’re being pulled into the victim–persecutor–savior triangle.

The Victim–Persecutor–Savior Triangle at Work

Dave: Every problematic employee dynamic comes from this triangle. They come in seeing themselves as the victim and you as the savior because you hired them.

Dave: Then you give normal feedback — “Hey, you didn’t do what you said you’d do” — and suddenly they cast you as the persecutor.

Dave: Their entire worldview is limited to those three roles. If you weren’t the savior to begin with — if you had boundaries — you wouldn’t have hired them.

Discernment Is a Leadership Skill

Dave: Now when I hire people, it’s not just résumé and interviews. I tune into my gut — and I have two intuitive interviewers. If any of us gets even the slightest “wiggle,” we pass.

Dave: If I’d done that when running Bulletproof, I’d be worth hundreds of millions today.

The Executive Hire That Changed Everything

Megan: Tell me more about the context. Where were you at with Bulletproof when you made these hires?

Dave: I hired one executive who’d come from a very famous large company. She was the head of a business unit there — top of her class at Harvard — incredibly credentialed.

Dave: Throughout the year, this senior leader was responsible for major operational decisions. My plan was: we would lose $5 million — an acceptable investment — because we had just raised $30 million and were going to grow at 40%. That was fine.

Dave: Every week she reported, “Yep, we’re on plan.” December 1st: “It might be $6 million instead of $5 million.” Okay — still manageable.

Dave: December 31st: “Oops… I lost $28 million.”

Dave: I said, “Did you just burn through three years of venture capital in one year and not tell me or the board?”

Narcissistic Reality Distortion

Dave: This executive had wrecked our culture — rumors, internal division, the whole thing. And her story was: “I don’t feel like I failed.”

Dave: Narcissists believe their own stories. Even when evidence contradicts reality, they can’t accept it because their identity cannot accommodate wrongdoing.

Dave: When we let her go, she looked me in the eyes and said, “You should give me more stock options.”

Dave: I asked, “Why?” She said, “Because I set the company up for sale.”

Dave: I said, “We were going to go public. And if I give you more stock, it comes out of the pockets of employees who actually did the work.”

Dave: She burst into tears, stormed out, ghosted me — and to this day tells people she wasn’t at the company when all this happened.

Dave: This is why you always check references.

Checking In: Where Does the Pain Live?

Megan: When you tell that story, do you notice anything in your body?

Dave: I wasn’t really paying attention to my body. What did you pick up?

Megan: Nothing specific — I just imagine you’ve had to process this. It was a significant betrayal.

Dave: I processed it. I hooked electrodes to my head and spent a week releasing it. Now it’s just incredulity — no heat in the body.

Dave: And that wasn’t even the worst betrayal. I had a family member try to steal one of my companies. I spent $1 million on lawyers dealing with organized white-collar crime.

Blood Is NOT Thicker Than Water

Dave: People say, “Blood is thicker than water.” But the real quote is:

“The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.”

Dave: Meaning: your chosen family is more meaningful than your birth family. You have the right to divorce an abusive parent or cut off a narcissistic sibling.

Dave: The only way to deal with a narcissist is zero energy — no emotional fuel of any kind. If you’re angry but pretending not to be, they still sense it. And they feed on it.

Rebuilding Boundaries After Betrayal

Dave: Once you do the forgiveness work — the real internal kind — the person can’t trigger you anymore. But that doesn’t mean they get access to you. Employees who fall into narcissistic patterns must be removed.

How to Spot Manipulation Early

Megan: What do you look for now? You’re a public figure — lots of people want access. How are you more discerning?

Dave: Two experts shaped my thinking: Robert Cialdini and Robert Greene.

1. Cialdini’s Principle — If You Like Them Too Fast, Be Careful

Dave: Cialdini studied persuasion techniques used by salespeople. The #1 sign someone is running an “operation” on you — whether consciously (sociopath) or unconsciously (narcissist) — is this:

You like them immediately.

Dave: “Wow, this is my new best friend!” Nope. That’s either a trauma bond or manipulation. Real trust takes time.

2. Greene’s Principle — Watch for Envy

Dave: Robert Greene — one of the wisest humans alive — says envy is the most dangerous psychological force in business.

Dave: If you tell someone good news and they give you a split-second micro-expression of anger, that person carries envy toward you. They cannot be in your inner circle.

“You Have 60 Days” Rule

Dave: In my companies, we have a rule: If we accidentally hire a narcissist or sociopath, we remove them within 60 days.

Dave: If someone devolves into those patterns — meaning they weren’t that way at first — they also get 60 days to self-correct. They almost never do.

Dave: If they stay longer, they poison the culture. And when they’re finally fired, they take two good people with them.

The Moment He Should Have Fired Her

Dave: I once told a friend — a seasoned operator of a $500M company — about this executive who lost $28 million. His advice was simple: “You need to fire her.”

Dave: I said, “I can’t. She’s running too much of the company.” He picked up his phone and said: “Dave, are we using my phone or yours to fire her?”

Dave: If I’d done it then, I’d have $100 million more today. My story — the fear — was: “We can’t survive without her.”

Dave: If you ever think someone is irreplaceable, that’s proof they’re in your operating system. And it’s not real.

Dave: If they got hit by a bus, you’d find a replacement. So replace them before the bus.

Losing Control of Bulletproof

Megan: Let’s go back to your experience with Bulletproof. After that massive financial loss, the betrayal from that executive, and the regret of not firing her sooner… you said you were eventually kicked off the board. Can you share more about that?

Dave: After she was let go, I said, “I want to hire someone to run the company.” We had venture capitalists on the board. Here’s the truth: running a $100 million company sucks. I hated it. All the fun stuff — the things I’m good at — I wasn’t doing anymore.

Dave: I have an MBA from Wharton. I understand how to run a company. But it gives me zero energy. Yes, I built one from scratch — one of only 17,000 companies to reach $100 million — but it’s not what I’m here to do.

Dave: So I hired someone else to run the company. And within a month of joining, that person and the board “magically” found a reason to remove me from the board.

Dave: That was the beginning of what I believe — based on evidence — was a multiyear plan to acquire the company at a huge advantage to themselves.

Dave: When I uncovered the plot, I was shocked. Bulletproof was worth half a billion dollars. When it was acquired, it was sold for 10% of that.

Dave: And all of this is on me. It comes down to discernment — and to recognizing that not everyone plays a win–win game.

Why “Win–Win” Thinking Can Be Dangerous

Dave: If you’re a good human being, you assume other people are, too. So you think: “This is a win–win deal. I make money, you make money, so of course you’ll do what you said.”

Dave: That’s childish. There are people out there who believe: If you make any money, they lost.

Dave: That mindset runs deep — and it’s why many entrepreneurs get blindsided.

The Four Categories of People (From Lao-Tzu’s Lineage)

Dave: One of the leaders of a lineage that protects the Emperor of China — a man named Dr. Barry, whom I trained with — taught me this. There are four categories of people:

Category 1 — Win–Win (5%)

Dave: These people always try to create mutual benefit. They are rare. You want them in your inner circle.

Category 2 — Mostly Win–Win (Majority)

Dave: They’re good people. Sometimes they screw up, but when confronted, they say, “Oh man, I didn’t realize. How do I make it right?” They repair the rupture. These are the people you hire.

Category 3 — Win–Lose But Unaware (Narcissists)

Dave: These people genuinely believe they’re good — even when they’re causing damage. You can show them video evidence of wrongdoing, and they’ll still insist: “It couldn’t have been me.” They cannot see themselves fail.

Dave: These people destroy companies. You must remove them — quickly.

Category 4 — Win–Lose and They Know It (Sociopaths) — also 5%

Dave: They get off on winning at your expense. These are the most dangerous people in business. They understand exactly what they’re doing.

Culture Design: Your Company Must Expel Categories 3 & 4

Dave: In my companies today, we openly talk about these categories during hiring. Our culture expels Category 3s and 4s. Immediately.

Dave: If I had understood this at Bulletproof, everything would be different.

Eric Schmidt’s Advice: “Public and Bloody Firings”

Dave: I once asked Eric Schmidt — CEO of Google — how he built a 100,000-person company without narcissists destroying it.

Dave: He said: “There are two types of employee problems: mavens and knaves. Mavens know everything and may annoy HR, but they’re valuable. Knaves undercut others and build empires.”

Dave: His solution? “Public and bloody firings of the knaves.”

Dave: I asked, “What about HR?” He said, “Doesn’t matter. When everyone sees what happens to knaves, the rest leave on their own.”

Dave: It was one of the most clarifying lessons I’ve ever heard about culture protection.

If You Could Talk to Your Younger Self

Megan: In your journey — building companies, transforming your physiology, healing psychologically — how has your perspective shifted from who you were at 26 or 30? If you could go back and talk to that version of you, what would you say?

Dave: Your powers of self-deception are legion. Don’t believe everything you think.

Dave: Almost all of your thoughts are based on emotions you’re not aware of — unless you’ve been trained to see them. Your entire story is bullshit. Not as a judgment — but as a fact of how the mind constructs reality.

Dave: And here’s the other thing: there are a lot of people who genuinely want to help.

The Gift of Receiving

Dave: People who’ve been through what you’re going through want to help you avoid the buzzsaws they walked into. It makes us happy to help. When you ask someone wiser and more experienced for input — respectfully and concisely — you’re actually performing an act of service. Because it feels good to help.

Dave: So go to people further down the path and say: “I’ll respect your time. Can you help me with this one issue?” We love that. It’s why I do 40 Years of Zen. It’s why I run the Business of Biohacking program — we have 200 people in the health industry this year, and I’m teaching them how to build companies without making the mistakes I made.

Dave: Same with Upgrade Labs as a franchise — I figured out how to build a biohacking facility. Now other entrepreneurs can do it with me.

Dave: There are helpers. And there are users. Get really good at sorting them out.

One Biohacking Question Before We Go…

Megan: Before we wrap up, I’d be remiss not to ask you a biohacking question. What are the top three things people can do right now to regulate their nervous system or increase longevity and well-being?

Dave’s Top 3 Biohacking Practices

1. Intermittent Fasting

Dave: Number one: learn intermittent fasting. You’re not going to starve for 60 days. If your body is screaming with cravings because you’re eating tacos all day, you’ve lost metabolic flexibility. Fix that.

2. BICE — Brief, Intentional, Conscious Exposure to Pain

Dave: Second: read the part of Heavily Meditated about BICE — brief, intentional, conscious exposure to pain.

Dave: Entrepreneurs need this to regulate dopamine receptors. Monks used to whip themselves. Biohackers use cold plunges. You can eat hot chili peppers. Whatever works for your nervous system.

Dave: You need one minute of pain every day — no actual damage — and everything else gets easier.

3. Darkness at Night

Dave: Third: your body needs darkness at night. Get dimmer switches. Wear dark glasses at night — the really dark ones.

Dave: It’ll change the amount of energy you have during the day. More energy = more willpower = more emotional regulation = more money in your business.

Closing

Megan: Thank you, Dave Asprey. Your wisdom, your vulnerability — everything. It was so great connecting with you. I hope our paths cross again and I look forward to seeing how you continue to impact the world.

Dave: Thanks, Megan.