Inside the Lab: Igniton on The Human Upgrade
Ashley Grace joins Dave Asprey to talk through the science, the story, and the stranger edges of quantum-charged supplements.
Igniton's Ashley Grace — an executive at the company and a former leader at Charlotte's Web — sat down with Dave Asprey on The Human Upgrade for one of the more unusual conversations the show has run. The subject: a private lab, built to recreate conditions found at the surface of the sun, and what happens when you use it to charge the ingredients inside a supplement.
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The premise of the episode
Dave first heard about Igniton through Gaia founder Jirka Rysavy and the private lab he built. What Ashley describes on the show is Igniton's framework: a class of subatomic quasiparticles they call ignitons, which in that framework are generated by interactions between the sun's plasma and the photons it emits. The lab's stated aim is to recreate those conditions on Earth — using vacuum chambers, cold plasma, and lasers — and use them to charge supplement ingredients.
It's worth being plain about what that language is: this is Igniton's own framework and narrative, the story the company tells about how it approaches formulation. It's the lens for the conversation, not settled physics — and Ashley presents it as exactly that on the show.
What they actually get into
- How the lab uses vacuum chambers, cold plasma, and lasers to charge ingredients like citicoline and Alpha-GPC
- Coherence and cellular entropy as Igniton's framework for thinking about longevity
- How charged water molecules fit that framework, given how much of the body is water
- The sleep formula and its measured results
- The personal, sometimes hard-to-explain shifts Dave and Ashley each describe after long-term use — intuition, emotional regulation
- Where the company wants to take the work next
On the sleep formula
The most concrete result in the conversation is the sleep data, and here the exact number matters. In a study, REM sleep rose from 21.09% to 26.28% of total sleep — a 24.6% increase versus placebo, measured across a two-week window.**
Share of total sleep spent in REM, before and after, versus placebo.**
On the cognition formula
The episode also touches on Igniton's cognition work. For readers who want the underlying numbers, the measured outcomes come from a university study published in a peer-reviewed journal — shared here for reference, not as a promise of any individual result.**
Measured outcomes from a university study published in a peer-reviewed journal. Individual results vary.**
Dave's listener offer
Dave shares a 15% offer and money-back guarantee for listeners of the episode.
Get 15% off at igniton.com/dave →The part that surprised them both
Where the conversation gets genuinely unusual is the back half. Both Dave and Ashley describe personal shifts they attribute to long-term use — steadier emotional regulation, a sharper sense of intuition. Dave connects it to ideas like yogic siddhis and David Hawkins' consciousness scale; Ashley shares a personal story about an energy healer that shaped how he thinks about the work.
None of that is a claim Igniton is making about what a supplement does. It's two people describing their own experience, on a show that has always been comfortable at the edge of the measurable. Take it as story — the human layer around the science — rather than a promise.
Chapter guide
- 00:32Dave introduces Ashley and how he first heard about Igniton through Jirka Rysavy's lab.
- 06:15What ignitons are, in Igniton's framework.
- 13:29How ingredients are charged — vacuum chambers, cold plasma, lasers.
- 17:31Coherence, cellular entropy, and the longevity framing.
- 22:18Charged water molecules and the body.
- 26:25The sleep formula and the REM result.
- 32:02Intuition, perception, and the human-experience thread.
- 46:22The consciousness scale and muscle testing.
- 55:12Closing thoughts.
The full conversation runs about an hour and is worth it if the science-meets-story territory is your thing. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.
** These statements have not been evaluated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. This article reports on a podcast conversation; the personal experiences described belong to the speakers and are not claims by Igniton about any product, and individual results vary. Igniton's framework language (ignitons, coherence, charging) describes the company's approach and is not a statement of established scientific consensus. This page links to an affiliate offer; purchases made through it may generate a commission.