Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Upgrade Yourself, Upgrade Humanity - Biohacking with Dave Asprey

Episode Date: February 1, 2023

This week’s conversation is with Dave Asprey, an entrepreneur & tech innovator, four-time New York Times bestselling author, award-winning podcast host, and pioneer of the Biohacking movement. For those of you who have listened for a while, you know I’ve had issues with the term “hacking” – and at the same time, I’m fascinated by folks who create and disrupt. Having devoted decades of his life to elevating human performance and creating significant brands like Bulletproof and Upgrade Labs, I wanted to dig beneath the surface to better understand Dave, the human.In this conversation, we not only cover his insights about performance and longevity, but also how he’s disrupted an industry, what “biohacking” means to him, and what’s behind his quest to live to 180 years old.We go to some opinionated places -- it's always fun to hear from different perspectives – and as with any episode, I encourage you to listen with an open mind, and make informed decisions that are best for you._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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stay present and engaged with my thinking and writing. If you wanna slow down, if you wanna work smarter, I highly encourage you to check them out. Visit remarkable.com to learn more and grab your paper pro today. Given what's happening with AI, given the rate of change of technology, given the last 20 years of research and nonprofit work in the anti-aging field, if we can't do way better than our current best today to reverse aging, I think I'm being conservative at 180. And I have no intent of having 17% of my skin thickness, which is what would happen given the current rate of decline of skin thickness, if you don't do something about it. So no, I am going to look as good and be

smarter and wiser than I am today when I'm 180. That's the goal. Okay, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, I trade and training a high performance psychologist, and I'm excited to welcome Dave Asprey as our guest for this week's conversation. Dave is an entrepreneur and tech innovator, four-time New York Times bestselling author, award-winning podcast host, and pioneer of the biohacking movement. For those of you who have listened for a while, you know that I have issues with the term hacking. And at the same time, I'm fascinated by folks that create and disrupt. Dave has spent decades of his life to elevate human performance.

And he's created significant brands like Bulletproof and Upgrade Labs. And I wanted to dig underneath the surface to understand the human, how he's disrupted an industry. He also has a new book coming out, Smarter, Not Harder, The Biohacker's Guide to Getting the Body and Mind You Want. And he's fully committed to living to be 180 years old. That's interesting. So with that, let's jump right into this week's conversation with Dave Asprey.

Dave, I'm stoked to sit down with you. It's been really fun to watch from a distance what you've built, the community that you've built, the influences that you've had over people's lives being better. And it's really difficult to get my arms around what you're trying to do, what you're trying to sort out. And I think it's probably very easy for you, but you've got so many different verticals. In a nutshell, what are they pointing toward? It's only two words. And it's in the mission statement for my companies.

And it's upgrade humanity. And that's what we're doing. And there's different levels that you can use to upgrade our hardware, our software, our firmware, and even the signaling mechanisms between each of the nodes in the great network of humanity. 40 Years of Zen, which is a high-end neuroscience company that trains executives' brains to work better. Something I've done to myself for six months. So I could have eight companies right now that I'm actively running, which is ridiculous and you shouldn't do that. But to be able to have my brain put on like that, okay, I did that. But to go from there to why would you make a new coffee company that has trace minerals in coffee called Danger Coffee? The uniting element is I want people who perform better and I want people who feel better and have

more energy because people who have more energy were wired to naturally be nice to each other. So we build a better world by building better individual humans and we build a better species by building better individual humans. Okay, so you're working from the inside out. You're working from the individual to be able to do that at scale. Sometimes from the individual. It always starts with you, but sometimes if you want to install something in society, that is not an individual thing. That is a marketing thing.

Or, I mean, you could argue that if enough percentage of a group of things gets an upgrade, at what point is the whole thing upgraded? For instance, wireless networks. When 80% of them are on 5G, have we completed the upgrade? But what if there's one that isn't there? So what percentage of humans do we have to upgrade to be better at sensing reality, to be harder to program malevolently anyway? I don't know what that percentage is, but it's probably not that big because as a species, we're pretty good at copying each other. That's good. There's a bit of research that came out for critical mass on shaping culture. Oh, this is good. What's the percent? It's one in five.

One in five. The most common number I've seen is 15%, which is very close. You're looking at 20 and I'm looking at 15. It's somewhere around there. And I've heard 18 for another person. So let's get one in five of us. Well, even if it was one in seven, I mean, these are not, this is one in seven in a coffee shop. Yeah. Right. One in seven in a business, one in seven in a community is, you know, well, the community level is a little bit larger, but it feels more doable to get one in seven. The reason I learned this is that years ago when I was working in Silicon Valley, I was

having massive brain fog in it. Okay. I'm 26. I'm allowed to attend board meetings for a $36 billion market cap company. I'm not allowed to speak, but I can at least attend them. And I'm just killing it in my career. And I'm so tired all the time. I have such crippling brain fog. I bought disability insurance. I don't even know why they think I'm able to remember all this because my brain is scrambled. So I had the accelerator pressed all the way to the floor and I felt like I was slowing down and I couldn't push any harder. So I started really getting into the whole biohacking thing. And as I started realizing how much of a shift I could have, I went to my LinkedIn profile and I was one of the first 100,000 people on LinkedIn, I'm sure.

And I put meditation, yoga, and modafinil in my LinkedIn profile. Now, you didn't do this 20 years ago. If you talked about meditation, you probably had a tinfoil hat and no competent venture-backed CEO, which I am. I've raised $80 million in venture funding, would ever meditate. And part of the reason for creating biohacking as a word and as an industry was to take these things that provably increase our performance and normalize them and actually make them cool. And that was the role of the biohacking movement. Okay. So you were struggling and then you said, I need to, I need to figure out a solution for myself. I also weighed 300

pounds. I mean, I was, I was a shit show. Okay. So why, how did you turn to meditation? Well, I did everything that's supposed to work as a computer science guy and network engineer. I'm like, well, I'll go to the doctor and I'll try to eat healthy. I ended up, in fact, the reason I wrote my newest book, Smarter Not Harder, I spent 702 hours going to the gym. I said, the most important thing that matters is losing weight. I will go to the gym 90 minutes a day, no matter what. I don't care if I'm sick. I don't care if I have a big meeting. It just doesn't matter. I'm going to go. And I did it six days a week, Monday through Saturday, half weights, half cardio. At

the end of 18 months of this, oh, by the way, I'm on a low fat, low calorie diet. At the end of this, I still had a 46 inch waist and I still weighed 300 pounds and I could max out all the end of this, I still had a 46-inch waist, and I still weighed 300 pounds, and I could max out all the tulip machines at the gym. And my first thought was, well, I didn't try hard enough. I'm probably eating too much lettuce because I already had to quit eating the chicken because it was too high a calorie and no dressing. It's a horrible, starved existence. It's one a lot of women actually lead now, where they overtrain and undereat because they think it'll make them look good, and they can't lose weight

because they broke their system. And it was a miserable existence. And I just wasted my time because as we're sitting here, I'm 8% body fat. I've had my shirt off in men's health, which is the most unlikely thing ever to happen to a 300 pound computer hacker in all of history. And something I never would have predicted or even asked for. And that was a byproduct of tuning my brain and my metabolism to work the way I wanted. And that's why around this movement, look, it's the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so that you have full control of your own biology. I got into meditation because all that stuff that was supposed to work didn't work. I tried being famous by the time I was 23. I was in Entrepreneur Magazine wearing the first product

ever sold over the internet. It was a caffeine t-shirt that said my drug of choice. I look like my testosterone is maybe 200 and that. I look androgynous in the picture. I'm 300 pounds. It's the worst picture ever. But OK, I tried fame. It didn't make me happy. I made $6 million on 26.

Lost when I was 28. Neither one of those made me happy. And like, what the heck is going on here? So when all the stuff that's supposed to work didn't work, I might as well try meditation. That's what the idiots do. So did you have, that's what the idiots do. That's what I believe, right? I was wrong. For like 2,600 years, those idiots. Yeah. So did you, the idiots meaning traditional medicine, like that approach or the fad diets? I was under the belief that we are meat robots and that we are entirely rational

beings and that my thoughts are everything. And what I've learned and what I'm really writing about in Smarter Not Harder is that there's an entire complex system. It's like your operating system that runs a huge amount of your reality and it's invisible to you. And that can be hacked. But once I acknowledge that was there and that system may not be rational or it may be rational following a very different set of assumptions than my assumptions about reality. In fact, they are provably different. So once I realized that was the case, all right, well then how do we address and modify and take control of that system? I am a computer hacker. I take control of systems for a living. At least I used to. Actually, I still do. It's just a different system. They're meat operating systems. So-

Which, let me pause you there. Yeah. The idea of a meat operating system, when I was reading your book, I was like, that's really good. That's really good. You know, because you're reducing, it's almost inflammatory to how complicated the system is, right? But your tongue in cheek, you're saying, listen, we're basically a bag of muscle, bag of bones. There's a Buddhist play in what you're doing. And you're saying like a meat operating system, let's upgrade the operating system to get the meat to be more optimized. So upgrade humanity, right?

It sounds very egotistical when you say it, but we've all got to do it. But if we don't admit that we're doing that, we will actually, we'll be like your computer. If you never apply the updates, it just stops working. And that's what's happening to our species right now. The world is changing and we are changing what we do and our behaviors, but we haven't changed ourselves to keep up with the world that we built. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In any high-performing environment that I've been part of,

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And so has the team here at Finding Mastery. In fact, our GM, Stuart, he loves them so much. I just want to kind of quickly put them on the spot. Stuart, I know you're listening. I think you might be the reason that we're running out of these bars so quickly. They're incredible, Mike. I love them. One a day, one a day. What do you mean one a day? There's way more than that happening here. Don't tell. Okay. All right. Look, they're incredibly simple. They're effective. 28 grams of protein, just 150 calories, and zero grams of sugar. It's rare to find something that fits so conveniently into a performance-based lifestyle and actually tastes good. Dr. Peter Attia, someone who's been on the show, it's a great episode, by the way,

is also their chief science officer. So I know they've done their due diligence in that category. My favorite flavor right now is the chocolate chip cookie dough. And a few of our teammates here at Finding Mastery have been loving the fudge brownie and peanut butter. I know, Stuart, you're still listening here. So getting enough protein matters. And that can't be understated, not just for strength, but for energy and focus, recovery, for longevity. And I love that David is making that easier. So if you're trying to hit your daily protein goals with something seamless,

I'd love for you to go check them out. Get a free variety pack, a $25 value and 10% off for life when you head to davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. How do you articulate, if you were to be a reductionist and play the game for a minute, what do you consider to be one of the great sources of pain for people right now? The biggest source of pain for people right now is they believe things about reality that are not true. And if I were to be concrete, I would say that, or ask, are you saying that we don't see the spectrum of colors? We don't actually work in the reality that we think we are because of the way that we're processing information. We don't have a full command of the smell. Are you being sensory

in that or are you being more conscious and psychological in that? It's actually both. Our sensory systems are taking in a lot more information than we actually see. And there's a great book about this called The Case Against Reality. And Mother Nature optimizes every species user interface on reality to optimize for survival so we don't need to see x-rays or radar therefore we don't see x-rays or radar but if we did need to see those we probably would because both of those have a biological effect that we could technically see brain would be like three times the size to be able to yeah or we'd have like weird bumps on our skin that

could do that who the heck knows but there are species you can see something like 27 times more data than we can. They're bacteria. So that's interesting. And imagine if you had a life-size map of Los Angeles. It would be useless because you couldn't use it to navigate. You'd have to just go there.

Well, when I see you, am I seeing all of you? Am I seeing each blood vessel? Am I seeing each blood cell? Am I seeing the spin of the protons inside? No, but all that's actually in there. So my picture of you right now and my picture of the world around us is a tiny, tiny, tiny sliver of what's actually there. Where does, let's go to consciousness for a minute. Okay. Your take there. Where, what is your take on what it means to be human? Are we a meat operating system? No. Or yeah, or there's something else. And then however you think about that

something else, I'm going to ask if it's local or non-local. I'm going to qualify that a little bit. After I tried the I'm a meat robot approach and it simply failed. I started traveling around. I went to Peru and I know it's really cool and actually overdone and dangerous these days. But at the time I did ayahuasca with a shaman and they actually said, you're white. I said, yeah, I know. But I've actually read myself. I've done my work.

I'm truly seeking this. And I found a shaman. There was no tourist industry. There were no like neo shamans who don't know what the heck they're doing, dishing out powerful, slightly dangerous drugs to unsuspecting executives. But I did that. And I traveled to Nepal and Tibet. And I learned meditation from the masters. And I studied with different lineages.

And I don't follow any one lineage. And I've done yoga for five years. I just interviewed Guru Dev Shri Sri Ravi Shankar out of India. I did his practices for five years. So I'm a cross lineage. I'm a biohacker. I'm curious and I just do what works. And that's the promise I made to myself. I'm not going to go to the gym and beat myself up and do all these things that don't work. I'm just going to measure what works. And that's at the core of biohacking. How do we measure what works and stop doing things that don't work? And if we do that, we get on this continuous improvement thing,

which ought to really resonate with business executives. If you understand Kaizen or you understand any of the continuous improvement processes. Open up Kaizen for a minute. Cause are you, is your model following the Kaizen model? I don't follow Kaizen continuously and religiously, but the idea of continuous improvement is is important okay and so go to the consciousness bit for a minute because

and i'll happily precede the idea is that we're much more than what we see so i'm agreeing with you there and then i'm saying that there is another dimension right there. There isn't. So I will just say it. My belief, based on all the data I've seen, is that substantial parts of our consciousness are non-local. Non-local. Yeah. And that some of it runs locally. But I'm a systems architect.

I design content distribution networks and distributed systems and AI and stuff like that. And if you look at how system signaling works, you look at how distributed systems work, it's pretty clear that we're an antenna. And when you have a web browser, some of your browser runs on your local machine and some of the contents in the cloud. I know for certain that some of our content is in the cloud. And it's not the cloud that I helped to build. It's the cloud that was there when we came onto the planet. And I choose out of rationality to believe in past lives. And you have to hear me out here. Okay. If there's no such thing as reincarnation,

you won't know it when you die. So if you choose to believe in reincarnation now, you'll be less afraid of dying your whole life and you'll make better choices because you're less fearful and if you're right great if you're wrong you still win it's the only rational choice similar to the model of life after death in most world religions there's something later so be okay now and do right now. And the point counterpoint is that it's a control mechanism. Oh, it's a control mechanism when someone else tells you that they get to decide what your afterlife looks like. Or what right and wrong are. Oh, yeah. And I don't ascribe to any of those types of structures. But I have, whether we're talking using advanced

neurofeedback techniques, advanced breathing techniques, shamanic journeying, fasting in caves. If you do some spiritual inquiry, you will see your past lives. And they look a very specific way. And people who do that kind of work know how they look. And I've had way too many things that could not possibly be explained any other way. And I'm comfortable with that. And if people think I'm crazy for that, you can think I'm crazy for that. It's all right. Maybe I am. It's just my shit

works. Do you get pushback from actually, of course, you get all kinds of people. What is the community that pushes against you most frequently and most loudly? There's two of them that are my favorites. One of them is the Calories In, Calories Out crowd. And it's this group of like highly traumatized people who are bullied usually. And then they grow up and they say a Snickers bar cancels out a Diet Coke because calories. And they ignore like the preponderance of evidence. And then they sit around trying to bully people online who might say things that are truthful like putting butter in coffee helps you lose weight because it's an appetite suppressant and it fixes your cell membranes. People lost

2 million pounds on my diet, but that crowd, they always push back. And I love them because they're like the best toy ever. And the other one that I love the most is vegans. All three arguments for being vegan fail, just grossly fail at the very slightest application of logic. And they're always so tired and they're always so easy to trigger. It's like, it's like having a little, little chew toy. I can just push on whenever I want to say something funny. I just mentioned vegan and I get like a hundred thousand people come in and they're always wrong. Okay. What are the three arguments? I was, so I think you, you were a vegan. I was a devout raw vegan. I was a vegan of raw vegan.

It doesn't work. So I stopped doing it. I was a vegan between, it was like 87 to 94. I lost it a long time. Yeah, I did. And you know what? I was not healthy during that phase. And so 87 was, there was no whole foods. Like it was hard. Yeah, it was really hard.

And I was like in my athletic kind of strike zone. And I didn't, I mean, that definitely didn't help. You need animal protein when you're an athlete even more. Yeah. So, I mean, I think I do want to hear the three arguments. Jimmy Graham was one of the, I mean, he looked like he was right, chiseled right out of stone. He was a tight end for the Seattle Seahawks. Amazing specimen, 6'8".

It looks probably 4% body fat. I don't seahawks amazing specimen six eight it looks probably four percent body fat i don't i don't necessarily know but amazing specimen and he he didn't mess around with me and same with tony gonzalez so tony so it can be done i've seen it there are a few people who get away with it yeah they might have a i don't know some sort of precondition that allowed them to metabolize in a certain way and they did it just absolutely with the greatest help and intelligence. They still tend to get injured more. Like Usain Bolt, as soon as he went vegan, he's like, I've never been faster for one race. And after that, it was injury, injury, injury, injury, injury, end of career.

Yeah. Okay. So what are the three arguments? Well, one argument is I'm doing it for my health. And that falls flat on its face for a variety of things. Some of that is in Smarter, Not Harder, the new book. One of them is phytic acid in vegetables or oxalic acid. These pull minerals out of the body and minerals are what make you a human who's better able to show up cognitively and physically in the world. And we're all depleted of minerals and plant-based

diets deplete minerals. And then there's the fat thing where you're eating omega-6 fats that don't work with the body. And all these we could talk about for a whole show. But basically, the vegan diet doesn't enhance longevity. It doesn't give you higher performance. It doesn't make you feel better. It makes you weaker. And so that's not a good reason to be vegan. That's the reason that I was vegan. The second reason that they'll give is, well, I care about Mother Nature more than you. And from that perspective, we have to look at habitat destruction and we have to look at the incredible environmental waste of plant-based fake foods and the medical effects of going vegan and spending the last 20 years of your life being in a hospital with Alzheimer's disease and all the other diseases that come when you're malnourished for most of your life. So the environmental aspects of it simply don't work out because to feed the planet with low quality foods like that, it creates a very self-destructive cycle. And it also destroys soil at a rate that's alarming because we run out of soil in about 60 years. I lived on and built and ran a regenerative

farm on Vancouver Island. And you have to have animals that poop in order to have healthy soil, in order to eat the kale and all the other weird stuff that vegans are still eating because they haven't learned how to feel good yet. By the way, you can see why I like to play with vegans. I mean, there's a lot of triggering in here right there's yeah vegans i was a vegan i love you i'm just having fun so third argument okay third argument is animal suffering i raise cows sheep pigs but if i eat a cow that's one death per year if I have a pound of beef every day. Now, if you eat a bowl of granola, you destroyed habitat, completely destroyed and sterilized the land from the soil on up. There were no bunnies, no salamanders, no snakes, no cute butterflies.

And if there were, they got chopped up by a tractor into little pieces and bits of them are in your cereal. So the deaths per calorie from soybeans is infinitely higher than the deaths per calorie from grass-fed regenerative meat, which actually increases environmental diversity and causes soil to thicken and hold more water. And soil is the biggest carbon sink on the planet. Now, I like the idea of carbon sinks. I'm also the guy who wrote the first $50,000 check that ended up becoming Elon Musk's $100 million carbon capture XPRIZE to use tech to pull extra carbon out of the air. So I'm about helping the environment. You help the environment with cows and sheep and goats and pigs, not with frankenfood. It simply doesn't work. There's not an environmental

argument, there's not a health argument, and there's not with frankenfood. It simply doesn't work. There's not an environmental argument, there's not a health argument, and there's not an animal cruelty argument to being vegan. It is simply a philosophy that doesn't work. It was based on trauma from World War II. The founder of PETA, who's been the primary voice behind convincing you that it's healthy to be vegan, his own daughter was on my podcast talking about how he was triggered by being in a concentration camp. That was why he couldn't eat meat anymore and how she got so sick on a vegan diet that she had to hide eating meat from her family because it was so politically incorrect to eat meat, but it was the only way she could get her health back. Dude, you went after

the daughter of the founder of Peter. No, she came to me. She wanted to be on my show to talk about it. That's how you went after the founder of Peter is you had his daughter on. His daughter came to me and said, can I tell my story about me? Not to make light of anything you just said because I can't have an informed conversation with you about it because I can't go further than you can go in here. So I run out of information other than like, okay, you've studied, you understand it. This is your point of view. There's, but I do know that there's, this is where I get lost in the field of nutrition

and I value nutrition and every six months I'm doing a blood draw. How often do you do a blood draw? I usually do them every quarter. Yeah. Okay. So, uh, is, is it a full workup or are you looking at specific things? I look at specific things. At a certain point after 20 years of doing anti-aging and all, you kind of know where

you stand. Yeah. And I looked, for instance, recently at my aging stuff because there's new tests with DNA methylation. So I was 11 and a quarter years younger biologically than I am chronologically. So that was a new thing. But you don't need to track that every quarter, do that every couple of years. So I do a lot of, a lot of labs, but I tend to mix them up a little bit. I was 11 years younger on that same test. Yeah. So that felt, that was, it's a little bit of a

moment where you go, you know, do you want to know your biological age? You know, obviously, you know, your chronological age. It's sort of like saying though, do you want to know your cash balances if you're running a business? You damn well better know them whether you want to know them or not. Do you think it was that when you were 26? Do you think you were older or younger? I was way older. I had all the diseases of aging before I was 30, like high risk of stroke and heart attack on labs, pre-diabetes, cognitive dysfunction, arthritis.

What was your heart doing? I had incredibly high rates of clotting factors in my blood. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. You were barely keeping the system going. Oh yeah. I was, I was really sick. So not only you 11 years younger than your chronological age, but you, you're, you've probably regressed like 22 years. Probably. I came from behind it. Anyone listening thinks they can't do it. I was the worst case. Yeah. Well, you know, you say that and also you're also presenting with high intelligence, big motor. Um, you can go, you can hedgehog down, you can stay wide. So you've got a unique capacity and set of abilities that are different than many. And most people cannot do and process the way that you're processing. And I'm not putting you

up on a pedestal. I'm saying that you're presenting like I'm the everyday guy, but I don't see it that way. Biologically, I was worse than the everyday guy. Cognitively, yeah. My grandparents met on the Manhattan Project. My grandmother's a PhD nuclear engineer. And I had Asperger's syndrome as a kid. So my pattern matching skills are unbelievable.

Oh, that's interesting. And when I went down and I repaired the neurological problems behind that, and then I reprogrammed my sensory systems in my brain to change that, I retained my ability to sift through lots of information and find patterns. And that's why I come up with some of the things I come up with. And some of the things like C8 MCT oil, which is a part of the Bulletproof Coffee recipe. I said, started with my book, this is the best one. It works better. And five years later, a study comes out and says, oh, this is the one that raises ketones the most because you can actually sense it when you've done enough, usually feedback-based work, but sometimes meditation to actually listen to what your body's

telling you. When you have Asperger's or you're somewhere on that spectrum, you actually ignore everything from the neck down because it's too noisy. And I just learned to reduce the noise so I could look at what was left in the signal. And it turns out there's a lot of crap in there. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentous. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday, what you put in your body matters. And that's why I trust Momentous. From the moment I sat down with Jeff Byers, their co-founder and

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wondering if what is your what is your connection to the your emotional life and the emotional life of others. I'll add one more dimension to it is that when you speak, you're emphatic. This is how it is. I am certain that there's part of us that's non-local. And some of the brightest mind in the world are like, we don't really know. And you're like, I am certain. So can you just drill underneath? Because I'm watching what you've built and it's extraordinary. And, and then underneath, like,

what is your, how do you work with emotions? Well, I used to think that they were really annoying and would get in the way. And that if I could just get rid of those damned things, that life would be so much better. That was before I was 30. And then I did actually a 10-day workshop. First time I did any kind of personal development. I'd already made and lost a fortune and just tried all this stuff. And I tried holotropic breathing for the first time, which was invented for trauma resolution. And it's a replacement for using LSD in therapy. I remember. It's not talked about much yeah a while back right i've been really honored i've had stan groff the inventor on my show he's 94 and he

actually did a breathing workshop with him where like he we co-led it sort of a thing oh very cool and one of the luminaries the inventor of transpersonal psychology and i just came out of there going what the heck just happened but there's all this stuff that I had written off as being useless. And the woman who ran the workshop who has since passed, her name was Barbara Fendizen. When I walked in there, she said, Dave, tell me about your birth. Like, I don't even know why I'm here. Like, a friend told me I had to come to this thing, my birth. I have hospitals, vaginas.

Like, what do you want? And she says, do you know anything? I said, yeah, there was a cord wrapped around my neck, but I didn't lose any oxygen. So it didn't make a difference. And she goes, yeah, I thought so. And she opens a little PowerPoint, like she had it printed out and she goes, this is you. And it was like a SWAT analysis of my personality, like all the shit that I was dealing with. And, and I'm like, what? It actually started crying. I was like, what do you mean? And I'm not a guy who cries normally, but it was like someone punched me in the gut. And she's like, look, it's science. When people have a traumatic birth, they come into the world and they're, they get programmed that there's some kind of a threat and then they're always hyper

vigilant. And you, these are just the signs of a hyper vigilant person. And so later we were sitting down and she's like, well, are you feeling anything? And I was really irritated. Are you feeling anything? I said, yeah, this is stupid. And I don't want to do this anymore. You know, like I don't even know why I'm here. And just lots of ego resistance. And she said, is there anything else?

And I said, yeah, there's a weird feeling in my stomach. And she goes, hmm, there's a name for that feeling. Do you know what it is? I said, no. She said, it's fear. And I looked at her and this is what set me on the journey of biohacking. I said, Barbara, there's no reason for me to be afraid. Therefore, I'm not afraid. And she looked at me in her wise way and she said, huh, fear is an emotion. It doesn't have to be rational. And I'm like, mind blown. What the hell? Like, why did no one tell me this? So I just decided that emotions were additional sources of information about what's going on inside me and oftentimes in the world

around me. And then I went down the process of years, a lot of it involving neurofeedback, of sorting out the difference between an automatic response to the world around me, which is being triggered essentially, versus intuition. And to learn that you can consciously turn some emotions on and off, like gratitude and forgiveness are programmable, tunable emotions that will negate programming that is triggering you. And that's what 40 years of Zen Mind Neuroscience practice is is based on is using a lie detector. So you can't tell yourself you forgave your mom for being mean to you when you were three. You can tell yourself you did, but if the computer doesn't agree, you're not done and

you're going to keep doing it. That kind of a practice has worked really well for me because this made me stupidly resilient to life stresses. And in the last year I've moved countries. I had an employee embezzle some money. I got separated, consciously uncoupled, moved to a new city. And I'm happy. And I'm at peace.

And I could have never done that when I was younger. Never in a thousand years. And it's because of those skills. You can turn that stuff on. We just don't have a control panel that comes default, installed, to be able to look at ourself and say, huh, how would I do that? But just because it's not a default capability that you know about doesn't mean you can't put that control system in place. And feedback is what does that. Feedback lets companies change

their behavior to increase the bottom line or to increase growth. It's tunable. And that's how I learned to think at Wharton as an executive. But feedback for your body, a lot of those systems are almost near real-time feedback. And it's so near real time that we don't see it because you and I have about a half a second delay that's invisible to us, but it's there. And I write about that as in Smarter Not Harder, that's part of our meat operating system. So all sorts of automated stuff happens in about a third of a second before our brain knows something happened in the world around us. That 300 milliseconds is remarkable what's actually taking place. And the high road and the low road, which you mentioned, you don't use those

terms, but information's coming in right now for all humans and the high road and the low road, the low road, it's going straight to the limbic, the amygdala as people would recognize and or like the threat detection. And it takes a little bit longer to get to the limbic, the amygdala as people would recognize, and or like the threat detection. And it takes a little bit longer to get to the high road, the cognitive processing. It does. But that 300 milliseconds is called P300D. And that's a neuroscience term. But that actually isn't even involving whether it's limbic or not.

That's just for the brain to get the first electrical wiggle. So if there's a sound, if you're in middle age, it's going to be about 350 milliseconds. And it gets a little bit slower as you age. And if you're maybe 18 or something, it'll be about 250 milliseconds. So I just measured mine last year. I have a 250 millisecond lag time. So I still have an 18-year-old window between reality and my brain getting electricity. But after electricity comes to your brain... Are you talking about the thalamic gate? Well, it actually eases even before that. So it'll get to the thalamic gate. That happens after the third of a second, and that's additional processing time. So it's usually a third of a second to get the signal plus processing time in the brain to determine what the signal was and then to decide what to do about it. So it's a meaningful lag on reality,

but our operating system edits that out. So we can't see it. Same thing in the middle of each of our visions. There's a circle like the size of a nickel right in the middle of each eye where you have a blind spot. I don't see it. Do you see it? No, no, but it's there and it's just conveniently edited out of reality for us. But what the heck else is your operating system editing out of reality? Well, whatever it's been trained to. Maybe you should be the one who trains it instead of Facebook. I love that thought.

So the cord around your neck, let's call it trauma one. Yeah. What are some of the other traumas? It was actually trauma to first trauma actually for most people is in the womb because prenatal trauma affects personality and it's just a fact and you can argue against it because you don't want it to be true but there's what I would consider to be incontrovertible evidence to that oh yeah epigenetics meeting high stress in the in the

there's a genetics That changes genetic expression. I'm talking about actual trauma. Meaning that the external world for your mother. Meaning that if your mother hates you or feels unsafe, you felt hated and unsafe because you couldn't differentiate yourself from your mother. And then you'll come into the world with an edge. So more concretely for you, you had a hostile womb experience. I had some of it. My mom wanted me and all that kind of stuff.

But she had hypothermia, almost died on a river trip when i was in there uh and uh and then i had a traumatic birth so i absolutely and i remembered this okay i i when i was doing a birth regression at the very beginning of my thing when i didn't have any details about my birth except there was a cord around my neck i was fine i remembered a sequence of events from it and i called my parents what was this? And they're like, oh, yeah, yeah. When you came out, they did this with you and I had remembered that. And I'm like, you're not supposed to be able to remember all this stuff.

What the hell? It kind of blew my mind. And when I talked with people who do this for a living, like, yeah, you mostly remember a series of emotions and images. But I did right at the point of birth. And it blew my mind because I did not think that was possible or want to do it in particular. I was just relaxing and breathing the way that the person who was working with me told me to do. What do you suggest to people who had early trauma like, let's say, the second trauma you had? Sure. In fact, if you had a

C-section, you had a traumatic birth by definition. You're warm and floaty. All of a sudden, some alien with bright lights reached in and pulled you out. And what the heck? So what I recommend for that is something called EMDR, which is a type of very fast, very rapid trauma resolution therapy. And what trauma is is simply something that left a mark in your nervous system. And your nervous system will be responsive and reactive to that whenever something feels similar, even if it's not the same. And it will be reactive before you can think. It'll send you the emotion and you'll make up a reason for the emotion and you'll yell at

your boss, you'll yell at your spouse, you'll flip off the guy in traffic. You don't see this because the operating system doesn't want you to. But when you resolve birth trauma, everything in life gets easier. And I've had the honor of sitting with people at 40 years of Zen who did that work. But the fastest way to get the most bang for the buck without going to a specific facility is to do EMDR once or twice a week with a therapist. It is cheap, it's widely available, and it's hundreds of times more effective than talk therapy. It's amazing the research around EMDR right now. It's really...

It's reset mode for the brain. Yeah, and for trauma, I think that PTSD got a really bad rap, post-traumatic stress disorder, because really what's taking place, to add to your commentary on it, is that we, they, reorganize their life to avoid being re-traumatized.

Exactly. Yeah, so it's a mechanism where it's not, okay, PTSD is like, oh, they got screwed up in some way and they're hypervigilant. Okay, that's such a callous way of thinking about it. But really what's happened is this amazing organism has said, let's not do that again. And let's not do it again automatically before you think about it. Your body was so afraid that it was going to die because that was how it felt, regardless of what it actually was. If it felt that way,

then it's going to automatically make sure it doesn't come close to dying again. And it'll tell you any story necessary in order to make you believe that. And this is really important for business people because a large number of business people at higher levels are actually motivated by whether it's early life trauma or quite often by bullying or by family issues to prove they're good enough. So they're doing all this career achievement. That was certainly the first half of my career. You're doing all this career achievement because you've been traumatized and you know that failure equals death. So you will do anything. The problem is you'll tell yourself any story,

including one that's a lie, and you'll end up being a narcissist. The definition of narcissism, as I use it, is someone who believes their own story when they lie to themselves and others. And that's different than a sociopath, with someone who knows they're lying when they lie to themselves and others. And in business, narcissism and sociopathy, that's what destroys great organizations. It's what pulls them down, And it's oftentimes triggered by trauma. So if you have people with lots of

trauma on your team or you have lots of trauma, if you're a leader, you just have to do EMDR or some other trauma resolution process. So you can sit in a meeting when everything's on fire and people are acting like bratty little children because they just defaulted to that. And you are the one person in the room who has what I write about at the end of Smarter, Not Harder. It's a state the Buddhists put at the highest level. It's called equanimity. And you start with empathy.

And if you're a first level manager, you know, I can actually sense and feel the emotions of people on my team. And that's better than not being able to do that. And I started out at the very bottom with no empathy either because I just didn't know any of this emotional shit mattered until I decided it did and studied. After empathy comes compassion. And compassion means I don't have to feel other people's pain, but I can automatically and cleanly wish them well for everything and everyone. And that's hard to do because most of the time, someone near you, they got a promotion and you didn't. And immediately, instead of going, amazing,

good for them, you go, why didn't I get it? That's a lack of compassion. So wishing well for others instead of the greed thing. Level two. But the highest level is equanimity, which is where you can choose your state, whether it's compassion or empathy or any other state, and you can hold that state in the middle of a hurricane, no matter what's happening around you. And that's at the core of why I called my first big company Bulletproof. That's the state of resilience. That's the state of equanimity where nothing can touch me. I think about, and I'm not going to lose track of the trauma bit here because this is really important. This is a fundamental insight, I would say, that I work from is that no one's coming through this life without drama, big T or little t. It's going to happen.

And so understanding how to navigate and work with it is essential. And stuffing it down, ignoring it, thinking that those signals are annoying is not, it's not, it's not highly dysfunctional. Please don't, please don't do that if you're listening. And if you, if you actually know you're doing it, you probably won't know you're doing it, but if you know you're doing it, no, no, we just blame other people. Well, that's what I did. Blame the environment, blame the external. Exactly. It's not you. Don't worry. Except it is. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down.

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I'm going to infuse a new idea for just a moment, 180-year-old community, and I think of your approach, and then I think of some of the other approaches of people living the good life. Sure, like what's an example of one of them? Oh, I mean, Buddhism. Okay, got it. Right, because I'm thinking about blue zones

as well and i'm thinking about the good life meaning that the science and discipline of the field of psychology okay it's really you know okay so there's there are approaches that this is what they've been after and when i think of like the good life if you will at 180 years old it's i don't know if we have the same image and I have, I don't have great clarity, but I'll start because I think you will have great, I think you've chosen 180. Cause I've said, I'm going to live to at least 180. That's why. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. I should have explained that. I've read that you want to live to age 180. To at least 180. The reality is I'd like to die at a time and by a method of my choice. That's freedom.

Yeah. And I would add to it, for me, I'm not interested in by my choice, but I'm interested in a quick one. Fair point. Yeah. Okay. And the reason quick, it's not out of fear. It's like- Why suffer? Yeah. It's the people around me suffering. And listen, I love the journey of being, I think death is a really important part of life. It's as important as birth and it should be done with the same amount of beauty. Very cool. So that little kind of comment that you made, which is significant about how you want to die, are you talking about being able to choose from a pill or a solution or are you talking about that type of dying? You know, if I decide I'm done at the time, I should decide how I want to die. And I may say, you know, the most fun would be to jump out of an airplane.

So I always wanted to be like to fly and okay, then I'm done, right? Or maybe at the time, like, you know, I just want to do a massive dose of morphine and LSD and I'm done. Or maybe I've learned enough that I can just say, guys, I'll be walking out of my body tomorrow. And then I do that. I have no idea. So you're not necessarily saying suicide. Not at all. You're saying, but maybe when you're done, you're done. I have had the great, like the great honor. When I was

in my twenties, I started running an anti-aging nonprofit group where my board members were 88 years old. And I learned from my elders and I've watched people pass and I've watched people pass by choice. And when you're done, you're done and you can be gone in a day or in three days. And some of the great gurus who I've studied, they do that. They really do call their followers, say, you know, I'm done. So I'll be leaving soon. And then they sit in a pose and 48 hours later, they're not in their body anymore. And then they burn their body or whatever.

I don't know how that stuff works. Like I'm'm not there yet and maybe i won't even get there but i all i'm saying is i don't want to be by accident i don't want it to be by disease i want it to be conscious and the accident bit can happen so how do you design your life to reduce accidents or i mean it almost sounds like you want to eliminate them but i can't imagine there's a system no i i i pretty much assume that if a bus runs into me it's splitting in two okay do it do it again i'm just what uh i i am not there yet we'll put it that way and probably none of us that i'm aware of are going to be able to do that. So really what I do for accidents is I drive a heavy vehicle because physics is your friend. And if you just follow basic statistics, drive a big pickup truck or a very heavy car and your chances of dying goes down very meaningfully. I also leave my flying to professional pilots.

When you are to the point where you can afford a small plane, your chances of dying go up quite a lot. So even though I'm probably capable of learning to fly, and when I lived in Canada, the only way to get to the US effectively was on a Cessna. I had a guy who was used to F-15s flying it because he's better than me. So I'm taking risks. I like to have professionals help me manage those risks. And ideally, you don't take unreasonable risks, but you also recognize that you can handle way more than you think you can handle. And that's why my new coffee is called Danger Coffee, is that when you're at your full power, you're unprogrammable and you have resilience and you can handle stuff. So I don't spend my life worrying about, oh no, like what if, what if I don't meet my 180 goal because a piano falls out of the sky on my head and, you know, I have

to lock myself in my house and be very, very afraid of something with a 0.002% death rate. I don't do any of that nonsense. What I do is I say, what can I do to make myself incredibly strong and resilient so that if something unforeseen happens, that I can handle it. I can handleseen happens, that I can handle it. I can handle it biologically. I can handle it neurologically. And that I have the tools and the people and the team available to help me should something bad happen.

So I get that you're not a rule follower. Are you a risk taker or risk manager? I would have to say I'm a risk manager. People who say that they don't take risks or something like that, they usually are not very good at it. In fact, one of my favorite interviews on The Human Upgrade after a thousand of them was Laura Logan. She was the CBS News reporter, like a war reporter. And she went into the most disturbing areas on earth. And as a blonde woman embedded herself with Taliban commanders and ended up in a very famous segment on 60 Minutes being gang raped in Egypt and almost died. And I interviewed her about like,

how do you come back from that? And I asked her the same question, like, you know, you take such big risks. And she got almost angry. She didn't get angry about any of the other stuff. It was because, no, I don't take risks. What I do is I do my research and I talk to the commanders and I talk to the people and every single thing that I can line up to keep me safe does it, but my work matters. So I do it because it's worth it. And it was such a really cool take on risk from someone who's done things far riskier than I've ever done, but how she managed it. And when you talk to stunt people, you talk to daredevils, they're very aware of their risk. They're just conscious of it. People who avoid risks are usually unconscious of risk. They're fearful and avoidant. And people who are not

fearful and avoidance, they say, well, what's the risk and what's the reward? And if the risk isn't too high and the reward is great, they do it. But they don't do it with fear. They just know that if the risk happens, I have a contingency plan. And that's what I do. Yeah. What I've learned from working in the back country and some of the most, what people would consider high risk environments there, they don't consider themselves risk takers. They consider themselves operators in consequential environments and they are so highly skilled mistakes have a greater consequence. However, they're not haphazardly taking risks. They're dangerous people because they know their shit. Yeah, they're really skilled. So, okay, I appreciate that tone there.

You're spending your thriving years right now thinking about extending to where physically you're not going to be as vibrant and buoyant as you are now. Why do you say that? Who programmed you that way? That your youth right now is more vibrant than your age at 180? That is something that seems obviously clear to me.

Well, okay. So we have different lenses on reality. I can respect that. So let's just think about- Why is that a true assumption? Because in your lifetime, it used to be that when you were 60, you were elderly. And so many 60-year-olds in 1990 got pissed off about that,

that they started measuring their grip strength and they had to change the definition of elderly by 10 years. If you look at the Golden Girls, the TV show, they're the same age you and me are right now, and they look really old, and we don't. What just changed in our life? Given what's happening with AI, given the rate of change of technology, given the last 20 years of research and nonprofit work in the anti-aging field. If we can't do way better than our current best today to reverse aging, I think I'm being conservative at 180 and I have no intent of having 17% of my skin thickness, which is what would happen given the current rate of decline of skin thickness if you don't do something about it.

So no, I am going to look as good and be smarter and wiser than I am today when I'm 180. That's the goal. I can get down with smarter and wiser. I'm also going to be hornier, more muscular and better looking. Okay. So I get the positive affirmations and then, but there is no case right now that I can make where a 90-old has the physical strength of a 26-year-old in both of training over decades of time. Well, the 20-year-olds can't train over decades of time. One decade. Okay.

So they start at 16. Got it. So a 16-year-old, a highly trained 16-year-old today is stronger than a 90-year-old? No, no. Let's say 26-year-old. Okay. Now, let's say that the 90-year-old now has spent the last 90 years and is a billionaire

working on modifying, tweaking, and upgrading his biology. And the 16-year-old is just a young pup. I'm betting on the 90-year-old. No, in different forms or different arenas, I would as well. However, the decline is noticeable. And sure, there's not the click at 40 that we thought it was or 50 that we thought it was. But there's still a decline. The decline is noticeable if you don't do anything.

So I'm doing something. Okay. So I just let me get the image right. Sure. At 180, you're as strong as you are today. Or better. You want to bet? It's a relief.

All in. Yeah. Let's bet, yeah. I mean, all right, talk me through it. All right. Because I do not have a limitation on imagination. So right now, in fact, I just texted him this morning, my friend David Sinclair. We both know David.

Yep, okay, you know David, good. He has announced that he's reversed aging in cells. I'm going to do some stem cell work. I've had more stem cells probably than any other person on the planet. I've had them injected in my brain, in my spine, every joint in my body. And I'm going to get David Sinclair-flavored reverse age stem cells where we take my stem cells and reverse their biological clocks and put them back in.

That's happening this year. I've had my natural killer cells cultures expanded and 2 billion of them added back into my body to reverse my immune system's age by 20 years. I'm sitting here in front of you and I've done this shit. What do you think this will look like in 20 years? Okay, like this is happening right now. You can do it. And the fact that most people don't know about it, when, when the Wright brothers were saying, we're going to fly,

I was like, you can't fly. If I have a list of quotes from my first webpage in like 1993. And one of my favorite ones is that atomic bomb is never going to explode. And I speak as an expert on munitions. This was a four-star US general talking to the president of the United States at World War II. Okay. We're at a quantum change in how we manage our biology. The technology is out there. It's in labs all over the planet. It's happening right now. And sometimes I go to those labs and I do the stuff and we're just getting going. Because 20 years ago, 25 years ago, when I started doing this, if you were an academic and you said you were working on aging, on reversing aging,

they would take your credentials because it wasn't possible. And now you can actually study that. And people finally, mostly because they read a lot of science fiction, I think people like Larry and Sergey and Elon, let's put a few billion dollars to work on the problem. If we can't do substantially better in the next 50 years than we have in the last 50, given all of the tools at our disposal, it's probably because the vegans killed all the cows and we have no more soil. Finding Mastery is brought to you by iRestore. When it comes to my health, I try to approach things with a proactive mindset. It's not about avoiding poor health. This is about creating the conditions for growth. Now, hair health is one of those areas that often gets overlooked until your hair starts to change. That's when people pay attention. Now, that's why

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The promo code is FINDINGMASTERY for 25% off, and then plus an extra $50 on us, because quality sleep is just too important to leave to chance. Okay. Do you think it is a function of imagination? I'm sorry. I'm just amusing myself. You just poked a couple of bears all in one fell swoop. Sorry, keep going. Is this, is this a limitation of imagination or is this a limitation of resources that are available or is it knowledge? I think the imagination's there. I'm not the only one who's planning to live a very long time and have a high quality of life and be and be one of the people who is an elder who has wisdom of generations

and is in a position energetically to have enough desire to give back and to help to guide things so i'm not the only one, but there aren't that many of us now. But the more of us there are, we keep growing them. My book on anti-aging was called Superhuman. And it was a New York Times bestselling book for multiple months. People are now saying, well, wait, if there's this thing that increases lifespan by 15%, but my doctor told me it's impossible to increase lifespan, well, maybe that one's wrong. But in every chapter, there's like five things that are shown to improve lifespan, which is different than average length of life, but the actual maximum possible life. So we're swimming in a possibility of living way longer. But one of the things that we're doing is

we're doing things that don't work very well. That's where I was. Okay. You're taking right where I wanted to go, which is like four people that do not have the access that you have, nor, um, nor the financial, uh, acumen to be able to play those bets because they, you know, what would you say? Let's go, let's go five, five things people could do. There are some core principles behind aging and behind what we believe works. And those core principles are things that you can leverage to hack yourself regardless of income. And yes, I do the craziest stuff that billionaires do. And I'm nowhere near a billionaire, but I'm more comfortable than I was when I was 20

and working at Auto Parts Warehouse. So what, what you're going to find is that when you understand the principles and you actually have an accurate model of reality, you can do things that you couldn't do when you believed something else. So in each of my books, I write about the things that are free because of a principle, the things that take advantage of new knowledge, things that are low cost, and then the big, expensive, crazy stuff. So what I'm doing with Smarter Not Harder is I say, all right, most people don't even know what health means.

You wake up, you want to be healthy? What is it? Well, it turns out after running Upgrade Labs in Santa Monica for eight years underneath Arnold Schwarzenegger's office, I've realized this is a human upgrade facility. It's now franchising across the US. So there'll be these in every city and it is meant to make it accessible because it's about the cost of a health club membership, but you're getting stuff that works better. But assuming you're not even going to go to that level, or maybe it hasn't opened yet, by the way, ownandupgradelabs.com, you can open one in your own city. I'd love that. There's a bunch going in LA, Seattle,

San Francisco, Salt Lake, Nashville, I named most places, Austin. It's one of the reasons I'm living in Austin. So like it's happening all over. But in the meantime, let's say that there's these five goals that people have. One of them is strength. One of them is cardiorespiratory or endurance. And those two don't always go together. You kind of have to pick a top goal. There's cognitive function. There's energy, metabolism, and weight loss. They all go together. I want my energy back is the same as I want smaller pants. They just go together like a teeter-totter. And the final thing is cognitive function. I want my brain to work better. So the idea is that if you understand that each of those goals is distinct and you pick

one as a primary goal and another as a secondary goal, then you actually have measurable things you can work on. And now you can choose what things to do that are going to increase your results in those domains. And it's not that different than how you'd solve a business problem. Like, okay, what are my actual goals? Okay. Which one's more important? Let's stack rank them. Now let's choose the technologies or techniques that help us reach those goals most effectively and efficiently. We don't do that with our health. We don't do that with our human performance very well. So those five domains matter. And there's a couple other ones I write about that are sort of

frosting on the cake. And one of them is I just wanted to improve my sleep quality. I don't care about the rest. The other one is I wanted it to be better in bed, which is the other one. So those are kind of little, little things you can do for those. But really, if you do these top five, you get everything. And if you just do one of the top five, you get benefits for everything. So when we talk about things that help you get your energy back and get your weight loss back or things that increase resilience, let's talk about resilience. That's probably an easy one. So one thing you could do is you could just say, well, I'm just going to tough it out, which is pretty much how I would have started it. That's where a lot of people are like, yes, I'm suffering. I'm just going to do it. Well, you can say,

all right, I'm going to meditate. So that would be step one. But as I write about in Smarter, Not Harder, well, it turns out breathing and doing breath work actually just works faster than meditating. So it's totally fine to say, hurry, meditate faster. I actually wanted to go play with my kids or I wanted to get a promotion. So I only wanted to meditate for 10 minutes instead of an hour today. And we have built into our operating system, not genetically, but actually by society, this idea that working hard and suffering

makes you a better person. I don't actually think that that's reality, but that's what we believe. Being able to work hard, having the capability to work hard does make you a better person, but actually doing it all the time just makes you tired. So what I would suggest is look at the different technologies and techniques that work most effectively for you to deal with stress. And certainly meditation, then you add breathwork. These are free. You can do these things, but understanding that breathwork provably works better than just meditating. I would say different aims. You know, meditation has there's there's a depth to meditation that breathing doesn't offer. And but mechanically breathing, training and breath work is from from so many standpoint, metabolic included, like it's outrageous.

It's outrageous. Yeah. And it's awesome. And for clarity, like, do you have a protocol that you're using that you're liking and I'm doing something which is a one one two one and I'm finding that to be meaningful for every one inhale so one five five seconds five seconds ten seconds five seconds or eight eight sixteen eight okay the thing that I like about what you're doing is as long as the exhales twice as long as the inhale that triggers parasympathetic function that's right which is which is good but it long as the inhale, that triggers parasympathetic function. That's right. Which is good. But it depends if you're trying to trigger parasympathetic.

Well, actually, in what I just described, so let's call it a 6-12. 6-1, 6-1-12-1. Because there's a pause. Six on the inhale, hold for one, exhale for 12, and then hold for one. Okay. So that's a parasympathetic classical parasympathetic breath okay but the 8 8 16 8 or whatever the cadence is for you the the actual

metric that actually creates oh it's a starvation for oxygen and on the 16 out and then the eight hold at the bottom at about like second five once you've, let's call it six cycles of that, and you're at your threshold, your entire body is lit up looking for an escape mechanism. Do anything. You can take a breath anytime you want. It'll stop doing that. Oh, yeah, it does. You push the capacity. That's how you get better.

And it's also a moment to be able to work with your own mind. You realize that your body is telling you that you're going to die. Yeah. And it's lying. It's your meat operating system lying. In fact, I wrote about that in my book on fasting, Fast This Way, the last one. Food's the same way. You're going to go 60 days before you starve to death, but if you don't have tacos for lunch, you're going to die. It's the message you get. Your meat operating system is just a liar. Really fasting from error for a little while to show your body, A, that you're in charge and B, that it's not going to die when it thinks it does. It will calm down over time. So when I started doing that five seconds with my lungs, I didn't feel like I was going to die. And sometimes I go 20 or 30 seconds and my lungs empty and I'm just at peace with it.

And it's entirely possible to just do two breaths a minute, just in, old, slow. 100%. And people don't know that you can do that and you feel like you're gonna die but you don't that's right and that is an adaptation moment for you and just to add one layer of i think um depth to what we're talking about is when you do that work and let's say you're in that starvation moment for oxygen and your my legs start to move and my feet start to kind of not um they just start to get fidgety, right? And so just quiet my body down one more time

and then work with my mind, stay in it, you're okay, here we go, this is what you're doing, you're okay, and that's the self-talk mechanism to work, to get to a place of effortless rather than strain. And I'll draw a corollary for you, the rage of cold right now. And so I think the benefits of cold are noted and the walking into the cold, I think might be as equally important. I believe it's equally important. It's the same reason that Tony Robbins will have you walk on coals. It the reason at my conference i had people jump off a three-story platform onto a stuntman thing because showing yourself that you

can throw yourself off an edge that is clearly sure death if you listen to your body just realize your body lies to you all i see all the time yeah yeah well it's designed the meat operating system to use language is designed to keep you alive not necessarily to keep you happy or to do anything that matters in the world. It's just don't die. So back to the happiness bit for just a moment. You said you're happy. Most of the time. I mean, sometimes I am, sometimes I'm not. Very few people can be happy all of the time. Would you say that you have a sense of joy? Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don't. It's more happy for for you sometimes i have a sense of joy but i don't i'm not in a state of joy all the time but certainly there are times how do i experience a sense of joy kind of daily basis i probably experience joy every day a little bit and when

i'm hanging out with friends going to burning man or just doing more playful longer term playful things then i have a lot more joy and content Do you feel, have a sense of peace and content? Yeah. A lot of the time, not always. And there are some people who are very restless and I've done a lot of, of coaching with people. And especially with the neurofeedback practice, people go really deep. If you have a mission and you're working on your mission, making progress on your mission, your sense of, if you're mission driven, your sense of contentment usually goes up. If you have a mission and you're working on your mission, making progress on your mission, if you're mission driven, your sense of contentment usually goes up. If you're not working on your mission or you're working on your mission and you're not making any progress at all, your sense of contentment will go down. And you can be making great progress and still not have content.

Most people have that. Yeah, the model is this isn't enough. And that's the model is this isn't enough yeah and that's the definition of suffering i have something i don't want or i don't have what i do want it it does absolutely create suffering and i don't know that i have anything else to prove from a business perspective like very few people have gone from zero to 100 plus million dollars with a company they founded. It's exceptionally rare. I went to $27 million before I took any venture funding.

Are you still the founder? I'm sorry. Are you still? Did you bring in an edit? I'm not on the board anymore. So I am still the largest shareholder. Largest shareholder. No longer operating.

Yeah. I have actually no contact with the company, but I'm the largest shareholder. And is that company Bulletproof? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay. Yeah, because it's now, I see it everywhere. So they hit the go button. We're a national brand.

And so there's that. And it's, oh, well, have I helped people? People, like hundreds of thousands of people have had their lives changed by my work. I mean, what do I have to prove? Did you feel like you had something to prove? I think in the early part of my career, I did feel like I had something to prove. And I had a very successful and impactful career in tech. But after that, even with Bulletproof, I was originally going to make it a nonprofit.

And it was too slow to do that. So I just started a blog. And it wasn't going to be a career at all. I was a VP of Trend Micro. I made a quarter million dollars a year with stock options. I didn just started a blog and it wasn't going to be a career at all. I was a VP of Trend Micro. I made a quarter million dollars a year with stock options. I didn't need a job. I had a young kid.

It was the worst time I ever started a company. I was just called to do it. So I did it. And that's what happened. Going back to high school, smart, chip on the shoulder. Well, obese. Obese. Largest kid in class. Yeah.

Low maybe emotional connection at that point. Just about none because I had Asperger's. I didn't even know the names of most of the people in my class at the end of the year. Brutal experience? Or was it like, no, I'm actually, like I didn't know. Oh, no. It was brutal. Plus, I grew up in Albuquerque, which is not exactly the bastion of peaceful.

And there was a lot of bullying going on. And when you're the biggest kid in class, the smaller ones, because the Napoleon's complex always come after you. How tall are you? I'm 6'4". So when the 6'4 bully or kid gets bullied, what was that like for you? Well, anytime you're bullied at some level, it tells your meat operating system that you're at threat of dying.

And yes, I've had knives pulled on me. I've probably been in 100 fistfights. I never lost a fight because physics. 100 fistfights you never lost. Yeah, before I graduated from high school. It's not true. One time I did. I was on crutches and I was stuck in the back of a van and the guy wailed on me.

He probably won. The rest of the time, I won. You and Hicks and Grace. And I never threw a first punch ever. What do you mean physics? Well, because when you weigh like 250 pounds or whatever, and these scrawny little guys who are looking to prove something, and their meat operating system says they have to attack the largest person,

especially the one without any friends. Well, I could just sit on them and they couldn't do anything about it. I also knew judo. So I put them in a headlock, put the golden gloves champion of Albuquerque in a headlock and put them in a neck brace because not only was I big, I was fucking angry. So no, it wasn't easy at all. But I, I went through and I've done all my like forgiveness work and all that kind of stuff. And I don't carry a chip on my shoulder. And I've had the, the honor of being with dozens of entrepreneurs when they're doing the 40 years of Zen process. And my friend Craig, he's like, Dave, I run a 1200 person call center in Mexico. I just realized that all of my career success comes from being

bullied in seventh grade. And this is exceptionally common because you just wanted to show you were good enough. And I will freely admit the first half of my career up until I was about 30, maybe 32 was about proving that I was good enough and running away from failure. It's a strong motivator, but it creates misery in your life. And when you switch around and say, well, okay, I'm done my processing work on that stuff. Maybe I'm going to move towards something that's worthy. It's just a lot less friction it's a lot easier yeah i hear i hear like your whole physiology changes right now in this part of the conversation yeah do you you notice that yeah absolutely and so do you i don't want to take you back into another state

but do you do you get triggered no that's not even a question if how do you get if i'm storytelling i i will take on aspects of the story for that um like kind of channeling how i would have felt during those times um do i get triggered it's pretty hard to trigger me i'm not you know i'm not invincible um one of my biggest triggers i'll tell you about, this is one that affected me in business. In fact, it's one I see a lot. And it's a very nuanced one. About sometime in 2014, 2015, I get a call from some guy and he's like, you should be on this other podcast. And I'm just going to be, I've never listened to a podcast up to this day. I don't listen to podcasts.

I don't have time for that. Jesus. Sorry. I haven't heard yours. I haven't heard mine. I haven't heard any of them. And it's this guy named Joe Rogan. So I go down to LA and I go in the studio and I just talk about grass fed stuff and coffee and he's ADHD and my work changes life. And I'm like,

okay, this is great. And like he talked about Bulletproof, my sales went up 10, 20% and I was already doing pretty well and I was really grateful for it. So I realized, okay, he's got a tribe and all this. Then I came back down to his show again. And the same thing. He's just saying all this great stuff about me. I'm like, thank you, Joe. Like, this is great.

I'm like, do I like offer him some of my company? Like, how do I say thanks? This guy is just being a big cheerleader. But I've also like paid back. I like helped him personally, helped his people understand why kale is probably giving kidney stones and all this kind of stuff like just doing my best to be a good my entire social media is just like dave you're changing my life from all these different people well one day joe just says dave i decided you lied and this was like like i believe your coffee is full of mold and and my other friends where I have financial

interests, these other companies where I'm going to make money, that they don't. And you're a bad person. He told all of his like full on attack on my character for 18 months. And the reality was that every time Joe said my name, I sold more coffee. It didn't matter what he said. But the feeling was like I've been stabbed in the gut. And all of a sudden, all these like organized trolls are coming to my social media pages i'm trashing them and it was like a cancel culture thing it's like a re-trauma to the the early stuff you know what i finally figured it out i had to go back because my team um in fact one of the guys on my team zach who was a convoy commander in iraq so he knew about you know these cities like dave you're acting pretty weird like

like he's that guy's a cool cucumber he cucumber. He's like, what's going on? I'm like, I don't know. So I couldn't figure out what it was. I went and I did the 40 years of Zen, the reset process that I work with clients through. And you kind of go into this altered state. And all of a sudden, I had this picture of something that happened in first grade. I hadn't thought of it in 30 years. Out of my conscious memory, I was in the bathroom.

And little Johnny comes in and pees on the wall. I go, and hey, teacher, little Johnny peed on the wall. And I know you're not supposed to do that, right? Did the right thing. So the little Johnny comes out and goes, oh no, I didn't pee on the wall. Dave peed on the wall. And then I got sent to the principal's office. And I was so full of outrage for doing the right thing and being punished for doing the right thing that it left like a mark in my operating system that i didn't know about it was completely invisible to me as they are designed to be so essentially i don't know whether joe's psychic and was trying to do that it just worked out that way but man like it pushed some serious buttons for me so i went in once i realized what it was i did the

trauma reset forgiveness stuff that i know how to do and then all of a sudden became abundantly clear joe thank you like just just keep saying I'm a bad person. It's fine. Like people see. And the fact that a small percentage of bullies, adult bullies came to my website, I just hit ban and delete. It's about a hundred angry dudes.

They're gone. And life is back to normal. And so, cool. Very cool that you did the work. Because what you're pointing to is it's not a mechanical surface solution. It's not a tactic that's gonna save save this it's like let me go back and see why this is so triggering you went in you find the original time you felt that way and you heal that and all the rest of

them heal automatically or the first related wound yeah yeah and that work is so immensely powerful i'm super surprised that we're talking about this yeah yeah you didn't think i did that kind of work no i did not that's how you hack your operating system i knew that you used maybe technology or the physical form to upgrade but i didn't think that you were working on what i would consider the invisible the psychological and emotional or and feeling aspect i do psychological emotional and spiritual i've done shamanic training yeah well you said it earlier i was like oh this is going to be interesting i do all of that because that's what works like i wish it didn't work it'd be a lot easier you know what happened yeah and so when i was in graduate school they're like if you can't measure it you can't if you

can't measure it you can't manage it i was like wait i can't see my thoughts i can't see love either and so how am i gonna how am i what game am I playing here that if I'm only going to work in the physical form, there's a whole nother part of me. Those are the meat robot people. And there are some people in business who really truly believe that we're just meat robots. And I was one of them. And we're simultaneously meat robots and something greater. And you can be both all the biohacking and the eight businesses, I'm going, there's some bullshit here. How does this happen?

Right? Because I know what a full day feels like. Yeah. And I imagine that you're going to say, well, you're not operating at the highest level. I don't know how you operate, but I don't, I go to bed tired, but I don't feel tired until the end of the day. I've got a fire and a vibrance that lasts. How do you maximize your days? Because this seems outrageous. You know, I recognize it's outrageous and I don't want to make the claim that I'm great at running all eight of my companies. That's good to know.

I'd love to say that. And I mean, I've made ginormous mistakes. I've hired the wrong people. I've trusted the wrong people too much. I've learned a lot about narcissism and sociopathy. So it's not perfect. But one of the things that I learned through my spiritual practices and my emotional practices is trust. And this is what holds a lot of entrepreneurs back is their control freaks because they're afraid and I'm not afraid. So, um, that means I empower people to do stuff and then I fire them if they don't. Um, how do you, uh, grow and empower people? And that's

how you grow it. And I had the great fortune of getting to ask Eric Schmidt about this. And I said, Eric, you know, scaling the tech at Google is not that hard. And okay, that might sound arrogant, but I actually did architecture and we hosted Google's first servers when it was two guys. I know how that shit works. It's not that hard. It just requires money and time. I said, but hiring a team like that. And I said, how did you stop the narcissists and sociopaths from tearing apart your organization when you grew it that much? And he told me something that I've taken in. He said, Dave, there are knaves and mavens. And a maven is someone who's odd, who gets a lot of stuff done. This is the engineer who can't work with HR, but just gets so much done.

And you know, I was one of those actually in my early life. So I get it. But then knaves are people who might be really good at their job, but they're building empires. They're throwing people under the bus. They're doing the stuff that we all know people do in corporations. And he said, well, after a lot of thought, he decided on a solution, which was public and traumatic firing of NAVs. And he said when he did a few of those, all the other ones left the organization. So what I'm working on in my companies and all this stuff is more empowering, more trusting people. And if

people steal money the way I've had happen this last year or lie straight up, I publicly fire them. And everyone knows if you don't perform for the team, you're out and we're not going to pull punches. We're not going to be unkind. We're not going to be mean. We're going to be truthful and truthful is kind and kind is not nice. So that's what I spend my time on. And I spend most of my time on being a content producer and being the champion of biohacking. And I started the movement, and now I help other entrepreneurs. I'm an investor in a couple dozen companies, do a lot of advisory works and board of directors work. And I work and empower my team to do the work.

Because I don't know. If I had to know every little thing going on in each of my little companies, I couldn't do that, but I hold it in my head because I have a strange brain. You do have a strange brain. Yeah. Yeah. Big appetite. It's also highly modified. I mean, six months of neurofeedback every single day with hours of electrodes on your head every day. There's stuff that all of our brains can do that we don't know yeah so i don't run a base os anymore do you are you able to get to like can you find a alpha theta ratio and kind of have a signature of how to get there like can you for what outcome just let's call it like a deeply relaxed focus state oh those are simple we've known those since the 90s.

No, no, without your technology. Oh, yeah. Sorry, I didn't finish the thought. Oh, yeah, sure. So like right now, can you go to an, let's go like, can you go to high beta if you want to? Oh, high beta is easy. Yeah, sure. That's like a quick and easy aggressive one, right?

Alpha is actually a harder one to get to. It's hard to find that that hurts. But can you find an alpha with theta so it's a focused relaxed state yeah the low alpha alpha theta crossover sure yeah and can you find that on command or do you need to do some breathing and a little bit of self-talk or a little bit of light movement it it'll probably it'd probably take like 20 seconds maybe yeah i i would guess um the the harder one for me though is going all the way into theta because one of the things that happens when you have Asperger's and for actually a lot of people no longer have Asperger's no I don't you don't you do not I make eye contact remember people's names my sensory inputs have all been

edited and tuned and I would not know if I watched yeah just i i don't present i don't meet the clinical criteria but i did and all of my aunts and uncles and my grandmother do like it runs in my family okay i see all right so uh it's uh it it's it is not a normal brain i'll give you that uh so where is it going about alpha theta yeah we're going to alpha theta you said like 20 seconds oh for theta yeah so when people, you'll see my cool glasses here, right? It could be because I think I'm Tony Stark, or this might be True Dark, which is one of my companies. And these glasses are designed to cut out certain parts

of the blue light frequency that create the most visual stress, given your eyes are a part of your brain. If I was to stare at the LED light over there for the length of time for this interview, my brain would have dropped into an open-eye disordered theta, essentially almost like a seizure inside the brain. So I developed, starting in about eighth grade, fluorescent lights and LED lights will do that to me. I developed a very, very strong theta suppress. So for me, going into theta is the hardest thing to do

compared to almost anyone else on the planet because the second it happens i get a danger signal because i'd go into theta in in high school and just like pass out on my desk yeah so i'm visually sensitive to certain light but it turns out people wear these during the day get less cravings their brains work really really well and there's an equivalent one for sleep so i tuned the light that goes into my operating system to make it do what I want. This is just a biohack. Yeah. Back in, let's call it 1993, 94.

No, 1999. I was exposed to Dr. Erlen. Oh. Yeah. In fact, I was inspired by her at the same time, maybe 2001. Yeah. Amazing. The work, like I put on, you know how she has all the different

lenses yeah i'm actually certified as an early practitioner oh it's okay so you know this so you'll so this was an early experience for me and i put down it was like wavy lines and dotted lines and whatever and i was an athlete and i put on i think it was maybe yellow i can't remember maybe pink i don't i don't remember and he said and he looked and he goes wait wait do that again i did it i took it off and did it again he goes the letters started stop jumping he goes do your do your letters jump i go what letters he goes like when you read a sentence do the letters kind of flutter and jump i don't know because i i didn't know that they could stop yeah and so like everyone thought it was stupid

it's and this was an this was not an eye issue this was a wave light yeah wave light processing yeah some of our brains are better at processing light than others and i think the healthiest brains are more resilient but the blue lights the lower part of the blue spectrum is very stressful for our brains and even if you can handle it at the end of the day you're weaker from sitting under bright office lighting than not. So there are like tens of thousands of people who use the true dark glasses now. And people who had severe problems like I did will go see Helen Erlin. And Helen actually said I was one of the three worst cases she's ever seen in terms of fluorescent lights. My whole body, without my conscious or even awareness, that was why.

My whole body would just like not up and i just get physically uncomfortable i wish she could scale like i wish you me too yeah i love helen she she's been in my house she's a phenomenal woman she doesn't have erlin syndrome she just listened to her patients she's rad yeah yeah amen to helen yeah if you're listening thank you yeah oh that's very cool okay listen i want to honor your time and I want to say thank you for the thoughtful conversation. I thought we're going to get into some weeds about mitochondria and whatever. And like, and it's really powerful, like what you're onto about mitochondria and it's a complicated, it's complicated. It's not as clean as.

Oh, the whole, whole Krebs cycle is you can cover a wall and all the little things that happen with it. But here's the thing, understanding this about reality, even if a listener doesn't understand that, you don't have to. I'm not even asking you to. But it points to the fact that there are direct ways to modify your system that you didn't think are possible. And I just go through them step by step, including once you're asking for a quick and easy hack. No, no, I was not asking for a hack. Earlier you did. You said, what could someone do who doesn't have any things in order to improve more quickly? I would call that a hack. What do you call that? I call that good science. Good science. So what if a hack is backed by good science? What do you call that? Because all the hacks I know seem to work, which means they're

backed by science. Isn't that weird? Yeah. You you and i talked about when i was on your podcast like the the hacking you know i i have an aversion to it i can appreciate your position i really respect that you introduced a concept and it's taken wildflower like wildfire but i'm not interested in hacks i'm interested in application of really good science you want stuff that's actually going to work and provably works. And I totally get it. Some of the hacks, I can tell you, this works. I can't tell you why. And it drives me crazy. But that's where the edge of science is.

But the vast majority of them, like there's studies in here. It's like one of them, just around putting on muscle, all of exercise is picking up rocks or running away from tigers in all of history. It's just the duration and the way we do that. There's five different ways you can put muscle on faster than lifting rocks. All right, good, man. So thank you again. Where can people find your book? Where do you want to drive folks to? Go to daveasprey.com. You get the podcast, get the books. If Upgrade Labs sounds exciting, go to ownandupgradelabs.com.

Okay. That's very cool, man. Appreciate you. Thank you. It's really fun to come in and chat. All right. Thank you so much for diving It's really fun to come in and chat. is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we send out every Wednesday. Punch over to findingmastery.com slash newsletter to sign up. This show wouldn't be possible without our sponsors

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