Don’t BS Yourself; Do the Four Basics of Holistic Health – Paul Chek with Dave Asprey : 725

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You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's guest is an expert in corrective and high performance exercise, kinesiology, stress management, and something called holistic wellness. Today we're going to go deep into what holistic really is. But this is science based. It's also experiential based. And today's guest is someone I've wanted to have on the show for several years and I always almost bump into it when I never really get a chance. And the whole virus thing has given me a chance to finally just reach out. We're going to do it virtually. If you're really deep and you go back and you look at some of the most intense holistic stuff that's written online, you'll find there's a guy associated with it and his name is Paul check. So for 30 years he, he's had his own approach to treatment and education and he builds systems that help people get well and do things that are really beyond what they're supposed to be able to do. I am a fan of his work and I've been inspired by his work. And I'm going to tell you a little while exactly one of the reasons of many. I wanted him on the show. But before that, Paul, welcome to the show.

My pleasure. It's really exciting to be with you, Dave. You've got a wealth of knowledge. I'm. I always know when I'm listening to your podcast because I need a dictionary and I think, God, this guy's got some deep, deep knowledge here. He's probably somebody that we need to hear more from.

Well, it's all the smart drugs. Do you take smart drugs?

If LSD and mushrooms are smart drugs, then yes.

It's funny. People get really worked up, especially maybe if you go back and you know this, but listeners may not. If you go back to the 80s, there was a movement and you see guys like Steve Fowlkes, who's a good friend who's been on the show a couple times, and one of my mentors who was writing about them, he had Dirk Pearson and Sandy Shaw from the early life extension movement. And they're talking about all these smart drugs. And it was pooh poohed widely in the press. And then the renaissance of them started happening about 10 years ago. And I like to believe that I'm one of the people who helped on that, where I was talking about Modafinil, I was on Nightline and all. But then the argument was that's cheating. And like, guys, you are holding coffee in your hand while telling me smart drugs are cheating. You are such a hypocrite. Because look, coffee, we'll call it caffeine and nicotine and yes, mushrooms. And if you want to count LSD as a fungal metabolite, which it is, then those are mother Nature's original cognitive enhancers at the right dose. Otherwise any of them can have negative effects. And when you say that, people are like, but it's really hard to argue against that when they're drinking coffee or tea or chocolate or any of these other mind altering substances. Why do you think you have 30 years of looking at this? Why do you think people are so negative on some but so positive on others?

Well, I'll quote David Bohm who said, real thinking is challenging work. That's why most people just rearrange their prejudices and call it thinking.

Ouch.

Real thinking is challenging work. That's why most people just rearrange their prejudices and call it thinking.

Ouch.

Well, the truth, it's just the truth. And I'm not trying to be mean to anybody, but most people actually our education systems designed to teach people what to think, not how to think. And being raised on a farm and having left school in the ninth grade and becoming a father at 18, I had to go out into the world and make shit happen. I couldn't, I couldn't a. I didn't want to settle for cheesy laborer jobs where I was never going to feel good about myself or grow myself. So I had, I learned on the farm. You know, we had a fully functional 140 acre sheep farm. We grew our own produce, we sold firewood, we were fully self contained, we milked our own cows, we slaughtered our own animals. And on a farm, you can't fool around doing shit that doesn't work because you'll starve to death. And my father was a special effects man for Universal Studios before we moved out of LA and immigrated to Canada. My mother's a very skilled and experienced advanced yogi, a weaver, a spinner, a crafts expert and a very accomplished sculptor. So my upbringing was always a mix of what does science have to say, but what do we need to do that works that we know for sure? So I kind of got raised by a father who was very, very intelligent with many, many different skills, who wasn't afraid to look into the science of various farming technologies or veterinary technologies, but also knew what worked consistently that the peasants used and that farmers used historically. So I Kind of came from this grounding where there's a certain limitation where science may say something, but that doesn't mean it's going to work in every situation. And I learned to be practical and to be functional and to get results or I couldn't grow myself, I couldn't demonstrate the value of myself. So that's really the underpinning that led to the development of my entire career is just really applying the concept of fundamental principles and then saying, here's what I know works for sure because I do it every day. Let's see what science has to say.

So your parents were actually magicians. Anyone who's spend a little bit of time with the special effects kind of guy, they are magicians. They're also scientists. But there's an art to what they do. And they literally are creating magic. ILM industrial. Like it's, it's part of it. And your mom, it sounds like certainly if you're doing really advanced yoga and all those other things like that, she's got, you know, one foot on another plane. So you, you. That plus holistic farming. I live on a 32 acre farm. We have a dozen sheep, we had a dozen turkeys until we found out that this batch of turkeys we got from the turkey hatching place had a bacterial thing. So we have less turkeys than we wanted to. We just figured that out yesterday and like you said, you know, okay, if all the turkeys die, then no one's going to eat them and that's a problem, right? So you have to do the science.

Turkeys keep you on your feet.

Oh man, I don't even like turkeys. They're not that good.

They'll come after you, baby.

They're not that good for you. And man, they're ugly, but they're also kind of cool.

They're mean bastards.

Yeah, they are.

But see, we had, we had lots of turkeys and I learned about turkeys quick. They'll chase you and they'll come after.

You and so will pigs too. You know, we have a, we had a dozen pigs. They just went off to the bacon. The bacon house recently. But it's funny because my kids, they're learning that stuff. It's a little different than when you are my, you know, my 10 year old's all into 3D printing because you can 3D print stuff you need. But they spend an hour or two a day working the farm and that's a requirement for them. And for you, it's funny, you were a mechanic and you were A welder. I used to weld Toyota truck frames and I put auto parts and boxes for five years when I was in my early 20s. I'm like, how do I pay for my college and go to college and do all this stuff? Before I started companies and got a career in Silicon Valley and all, you learn something by doing it with your hands. It seems like it's been lost. And so you had this upbringing with nature and with a cycle of life with hands on stuff, but with science and with, I'm going to call it, wizardry from the yoga side of things, all that stuff got baked into you. When did you transition from all right, I'm a marine mechanic and things like that into all right, holistic wellness? What was the hump that took you over?

I don't think I ever did transition.

When did you transition from all right, you know, I'm a marine mechanic and things like that into all right, holistic wellness? What was the hump that took you over?

I don't think I ever did transition, honestly. We made our own bread, we milked our own cows, we separated our own milk and cream, we made our own ice cream, we made our own butter, we slaughtered our own animals. My mother joined the Self Realization Fellowship, which is the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda when I was 12, which was a great relief because Christianity was really very stressful to me because nobody could answer my questions. And I had a lot of them because I found the Bible to be full of very intense conflicts that didn't leave me feeling safe at all. And when I couldn't get answers to questions, I was concerned. And their absolute insistence on not studying the materials of any other spiritual teachers. The first session I, the first temple ceremony I went to when I was 12 years old was a mind blower for me. The leader of the ceremony began the prayer by saying, heavenly Father, Jesus Christ, Paramahansa Yogananda, Sri Yukteswar Lahiri Mahasaya, Babaji Krishna, saints and sages and gurus of all religions, we humbly bow to you all. And it was like a wave of peace went through my body. I realized immediately I was with people that were open to and interested in the great spiritual teachers of the entire world and were not trying to convince me that I had to do things a certain way or I was going to burn in hell, which I found radically confusing. But to really expand on what I'm saying as I went out into the world, especially as an athlete, you know, because I was an athlete from the Time I was in first grade, I started wrestling in the first grade and I played every sport I could play in school because I just had so much pent up energy. And unfortunately my parents fought a lot and my, my, my real father died when I was 8, so there's a lot of unresolved trauma there. And so I had to find a way to dissipate my frustration, my anger, my fear and my stress. So athletics was my out. And one of my best friends was Mr. Canada in bodybuilding. He won the Canadian nationals in bodybuilding in 86. My buddy, who was my sparring partner for three years, Lloyd Anderson, was the Canadian national champion as a lightweight boxer. And then he switched over to kickboxing and won the world title in kickboxing in 89. Many of my buddies were elite skiers. I was a sponsor. I was sponsored by Honda as a motocross racer. When I was a kid, many of my buddies were nationally ranked motocrossers. I raced stock cars, I was a drag racer. I set three track records in stock car racing. And so as I merged into the athletic community and saw all the sort of tricks that they were doing from various powders and supplements and wraps and straps and creams, I noticed that the way they were eating and the way they were living was more based on what was in magazines and what they were reading from various books and things. But inevitably, these guys weren't as strong or as fast as me or they kept having injuries. And I, whenever I had injuries, just listening to my mother's advice and, and, and sort of listening to my body, I was able to heal quicker than them. So I begin to be suspect of a lot of these approaches. And whenever I would try them, I would start having skin problems, cognitive problems, I would get gas, I would feel lousy, and then I would switch back to just eating like I did on the farm. And I immediately noticed I felt better. So the point I'm making is every time I ventured out into sort of the modern approaches, I found that, that I was losing performance, I was losing recoverability, I was losing cognitive function. But when I stuck with really just eating high quality meat and high quality vegetables, training well, getting enough sleep and living like I lived on the farm, I felt better, I performed better, I recovered better. And that became the basis of what I taught. Because as I became more successful as a therapist and work with, you know, myriads of Olympic teams, professional sports teams, famous athletes, world record holders, and the list is long, the first thing I would do is say, along with all Their intake paperwork. I was like, tell me everything that you're using right now. Some of these guys would bring in big gym bags full of bottles of supplements and pills and this and that. Some of these guys were spending 1500 bucks a month and all this stuff. So the first thing I would do is put them on what I call the caveman diet. No nuts, no grains, no seeds, no dairy.

Amen.

Only butter if you can handle it. And cut out all supplements and drugs, unless you absolutely have to take them due to a doctor's prescription. And if they said that, I would call the doctor, tell them why I was doing what I was doing, and ask them if they could take one week off. To this day, Dave, I've been doing this work for 36 years. I started as the trainer of the United States army boxing team when I was 22. I'll be 59 next month. This is all I've done. Not one single human being I've put on the caveman diet has ever come back to me and said anything other than, oh, my God, I feel so damn much better. Why the hell was I taking all that shit?

Now? What happens if someone's on the caveman diet? And then say, you know, I'm going to take some turmeric. I'm going to take some blueberry extract. I'm going to take some periwinkle extract to increase blood flow in my brain. Like, do they have to be mutually exclusive?

No, because everything you've just said is really essentially an extract of a caveman diet.

Exactly. So I take a whole lot of pills, but most of them are things that are in food. I just can't eat that much food, or I'd just be stuffed.

Well, so here's the thing. What I do is I get what I call a baseline. I say, let's just go back to how we were designed by nature to eat. Nothing in those pill bottles is in its authentic form. And so, as you know, anytime you start processing things, you break them down. Royal Lee's research showed very quickly that vitamins function in complexes. There's no such thing as a vitamin in nature that's not wrapped up in a complex that contains proteins, fats, carbohydrates, minerals, trace minerals, enzymes, phenolics, terpenes, and alkaloids. His description was a vitamin complex functions like a watch. And he asked the question, what part of a watch tells time? Well, the answer is, the whole damn thing tells time. And if you lose one piece of it, you don't have a functional unit. So when I create a baseline for people, then I say, okay, now let's look at the supplements you were taking and let's look at whether they're good or not. Let's look at whether or not they come from organic sources. Otherwise you're just getting concentrated toxins. And then let's reintroduce them one at a time on a four day rotation cycle. Because everything that you take affects your physiology from the time it goes into your mouth till it leaves your anus. And that's well researched. You can put caffeine up your ass and it'll get you high.

It certainly will. Those coffee enemas, don't recommend them. If you're going to do them, you should cool the coffee off first.

Yeah, very good idea. So because it takes on average about 72 to 76 hours for a person's foodstuffs to move from mouth to anus, I asked them not to try anything more than once every four days. So they would have at least 24 hours for their immune system to completely rest from that input. And then I would be able to isolate which actual inputs, because if they were sticking to the caveman diet, they already knew what their responses were to that. So if you add some extract or some supplement or glucosamine sulfate or creatine or whatever, then they have a baseline that they can monitor their reactions. Inevitably, what I find is about 75% of the stuff that had all sorts of science behind it was supposed to be so magical, actually made them worse. It didn't make them better. And then I taught them this is how you determine what works for you. Everything in the world out there is backed by some kind of science. That science are the modern prostitutes of the world. You can get anything backed by science. Every drug that's been taken off the market was scientifically validated before it killed people. And I say we're as different on the inside as we are on the outside. So you have to take the responsibility to determine what actually works for you. And you also have to take the responsibility of determining if something's going to hop you up. What's the long term cost of that? Steroids are hop you up, but they'll also burn your liver out. So I ask them, do you want to be good for a season or do you want to be good for your lifetime? Once you make that decision, I'll support you, but I want to make sure you know the ramifications of the choices that you're making so that you're acting like an adult and not falling victim to somebody else's ideas, dogmas, or fantasies. And that really was. Is the basis. And I've worked for so many professional sports teams and Olympic committees and organizations that had reams of problems and had staffs of scientists and all the fancy gadgets. And inevitably it tracked right back to one of these basic principles that was being abused. And once I got that right, their body started to heal. I taught them how to lift weights properly, how to breathe properly, how to hydrate properly, how to sleep properly. And when they got the foundation principles back in place, and then they could discern which of the things that were being given to them by staff doctors and experts on biochemistry, then they could actually discern what the actual cost benefit ratio is. And I've really supported my athletes in becoming intelligent and learning how to think for themselves.

It's so important to be able to sense that. And I want to sort of gut check my algorithmic approach to this stuff. And knowing that you said you were. How old are you now?

I'll be 59 next month.

59. All right, so you've got another decade plus, a little bit more of experience than I do on this stuff. And what I found is I was wrecked. I had massive toxic mold exposure. I had arthritis in my knees when I was 14. I hit 300 pounds in my early 20s. I have very low blood flow to the brain. Daniel Amen's research, when his first book came out, I went and I got that test done. And when he saw my brain, he's like, dave, this is the brain of someone who lives underneath an overpass on street drugs. Like, you have chemically induced brain damage from the environment you live in. And I had to unpack all of that. And of course, they said Lyme disease and chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, all of which are toxic mold. And I was down, I would say, running at maybe 10% of mitochondrial capacity. I was wrecked. Sleep was crappy and all that. But when you're running at 10%, if you can do something that moves the needle 1%, you feel it because it's a 10% shift. Like, oh, my God, I got my life back. That's why I noticed yak butter tea, because I was at 18,000. I can remember my phone number exactly. My car keys aren't in the fridge today. I'm so pleased.

Right, yes.

And that sort of thing. So I feel like I got sensitivity there where I could intuit. Okay, this works. This doesn't work. But then I started out on the path you described. I said, all right, I'm going to try vitamin C and I'll just do it for a month and see what the changes are. And it seemed to work. But for my knees, man, glucosamine was a life changing thing for me because I could walk without constant pain. When I started taking glucosamine and grapeseed extract stopped these chronic nosebleeds. I used to just every day my nose would just start gushing and it was really irritating. And by the way, that's a classical sign of toxic mold in your house. And it has to do with vitamin C and glutathione and collagen synthesis for your arteries and VEGF for people who are really into that stuff. But all these things, I said, all right. And then I did the math and I said, for all the things that I think based on science could be beneficial for me, it's going to take me the rest of my life to try this stuff one at a time. And what if the right answer was I needed to take vitamin C and quercetin at the same time? So I got to look at combinatorials. So I turned it around. I said, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to pick up a challenge, I'm going to get my baseline and I'm going to do everything that doesn't seem to contradict itself. Given what we know. I'm going to do it all at once. And if I get the results I wanted, then I'm going to back stuff out like crazy to see if I can keep the results. But then I get to enjoy the benefits of it instead of testing things one at a time because I have no data that says only one thing is the solution to the problem. In fact, the systemic nature, the holistic nature of ourselves, says sometimes you need that whole complex set. And I found great results using the throw everything up. As long as you're not using poisons and toxins and you have pure stuff and you thought about it, that seems to work really well. How would you contrast that line of thinking with the one at a time line of thinking?

Well, there's a couple of ways to go about that. First of all, people come to me very much just like that quite often. I mean, I owned a physical therapy clinic. I worked in a chiropractic clinic for two years. I worked with an osteopath in the military who trained me in acute sports injury care. I worked in a physical therapy clinic with a surgical center for four years. I owned a Physical therapy clinic for three years. So I spent plenty of time in that environment. I did three years of training with the founder of Biohealth Diagnostics, Bill Timmons, who's actually the inventor of salivary testing.

Cool.

And so I did an internship for three years with him. And we traded. I took care of him, he trained me. So when I get a person like that, because today we have so many potential sources of toxins and electromagnetics and all that you're getting bombarded from every direction. You know, there's a new piece of carpet puts out 132 carcinogenic chemicals for the first year. It's in your building. A new car puts out 68,000 toxic chemicals for the first year. So when you start looking at all the potential sources of input, what I found. And my whole system is multidisciplinary. I've never tried to be a person who thinks he can fix everything. I've always developed a team around me of the people that I really trust their knowledge because I see good results with them. So if you were to come to me as a patient, the first thing I would have done is done lab tests on you. I would have done a 24 hour cortisol rhythm test. I would have done environmental toxicity testing, heavy metal testing. I would have wanted to know what exactly is in this guy. I would have tested you for parasite infections. I would have tested you for bacterial dysbiosis. And once I had all the data so I could actually get an idea of what is Dave's physiological load, what are the different factors, I would then prioritize what is the most important thing to eliminate first. And if you had fungal mycotoxin poisoning or a fungal infection, I would have got rid of that right off the bat. Because fungal mycotoxins can modulate the immune cytokines and leukotrines and all the immune messengers. And if you had heavy metal poisoning, I would have gone after that. Especially if mercury was involved. Yeah, you know, I've had a lot of those things too. I had six major concussions and my brain function was. Was so bad from bad accidents. Racing motocross years, kickboxing, years boxing. And so my brain used to just stop every four seconds. It would just go blank. I used to be lecturing all over the world. I wouldn't even remember what I was talking about. I wouldn't know what city I was in.

I was there too. I had exactly that. Okay, and you still be able to lecture?

Yes, because I was driven by the fire of passion. And concern for people. But the point I'm making is somebody trying to see me who didn't know I had mercury amalgam fillings. I had mercury poisoning. I had too much aluminum. When I was a paratrooper in the military, they lost my shot record twice. And it's the rule that if you lose a soldier shot record, they have to get all the shots. I had all the shots, 23 vaccinations, three times. So I was loaded with all the toxic they put in those vaccinations. And so when I finally got to the point where I really realized I've got to go get some help, I went and saw somebody that did neural therapy for brain mapping.

Yeah.

And they said, you, your head looks exactly like a person that's had a severe head injury.

Wow.

And I said, I've had six major concussions. I was out for two days, completely unconscious with a motocross racing accident. And he said, your brain completely stops for one second every four seconds. And I, so, so I told him the story that I told you about how I would forget what I was doing, where I was at. I, I literally wouldn't. I would go to hotels and I not remember where my room was.

Yeah.

You know, it was very.

Exactly this.

I'd have to go to the front desk and say, you know, I checked in here yesterday. But honestly, I can't remember where my room is. And, you know, it.

Like, I, I just, I love this because most people don't talk about that. Yeah. That's chemical or physical brain damage. Yeah.

With a person like you, I look at all the data and from a lot of training and a lot of experience, sometimes you have, you know, five or six dragons that are dangerous at once. But you have to say, okay. The body can only handle so much detoxification, so much clearing, and so much behavioral change. So I learned a concept of surrounding the dragon.

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So I learned a concept of surrounding the dragon. If there's a problem that's so big that you can't figure it out and the doctors can't figure it out, then you've got to do everything you can do to give the body the resources it needs to activate its own healing systems and give it access to the wisdom within it. I think if we give the body what it needs, it can heal from almost anything. But sometimes we have to take away the things like mercury and other toxins that are blocking it from doing what its own thing is. So really what I'm saying is I use all the available science that I have at my fingertips and in my network to get a picture of what's going on. And then I prioritize and I also prioritize the use of any kind of supplementation based on what is the most important thing for this person to accomplish right now so that I don't just end up with someone who's taking 55 different supplements and feeling like shit while they think they're doing the right thing.

Well said. I have for 10 years had people say, dave, can I have a list of the supplements you take? And every single time I've said, no, I absolutely won't do that. Here's why. You're not 6 4. You don't have a history of autoimmunity and obesity and you're not planning to live to 180. You don't have my metabolism, you don't have my blood type. And, and this stuff is customized based on data and based on what works and what doesn't work for me. And if you're going to do that kind of stuff, you can't just copy a stack because it isn't going to work. So I'm happy you're putting it out that way.

Yeah. I want to interject one other thing before you move on. People in the kind of condition that you're describing and the kind of, as your condition and the condition I'm describing. And oftentimes we're so depleted in nutrition and resources and energy that paradoxically, taking a bunch of supplements like that, if they're good, actually enhances the nutrient variety. Even though it's a shotgun approach. Some people all of a sudden start feeling really good because they're getting the molecules they need to activate different systems.

Yes.

And so even the problem is if they take too much, the body has to detoxify it. That's why I tell people if your urine's really smelly and it gets too dark, you're loading the system up. So back the dose down so that you're not getting if your sweat starts to stink. So I give them the kind of the symptoms that they should look for. But ultimately what's happening is people are shotgunning effectively. And as their vitality comes online and their sense of feeling themselves comes online, they often, especially if they're being coached effectively, become aware when all of a sudden, okay, this supplement that once made me feel better isn't helping or something's wrong and I need to figure out what it is. And I say, okay, what are you taking? So just let's go back to a rotation. Put them in a four day rotation so that you can figure out what's actually making you feel worse and what's making you feel better. And I've rarely ever had a case where someone in a four day rotation cycle couldn't identify the problem.

And, and four days is the same thing that we use for food rotation diets. And I did the elimination.

That's the same model.

Yeah, I did that late 90s to try and figure out what's going on with food. And it was revolutionary because I figured out, you know, what, I can eat garbage on Friday nights. That'd be my cheat day, because you're supposed to have a cheat day. And besides, I like cheesecake and crusty bread. So Friday night I do that. Saturday I'm like, I got a little gas, but I'm fine. And it was Monday when just the absolute feelings of just exhaustion and cravings and all that would hit me, But I never knew it was because of what I did on Friday night. Because some of These things are 24 hours, some are 48, and they can go up to 10 days. But four days, it gets almost all of them. So I love it that you're talking about four days. What I eventually evolved to is when I travel, I have a stack That I take when I travel, that's designed to support me. When I'm in hotels with crappy air, when I'm on airplanes, and when I'm on a disrupted circadian schedule, My inflammation stuff is gonna be higher, so it's all dialed in. When I'm at home, I don't pre make my little stacks of vitamins. What I do is I reach for it. And if you're listening, your body will tell you, don't take that one today, because you just want to. I don't want to. And then you just don't do it. And it's the same thing a cow will do. A cow will sniff that grass and say, ah. And it'll take the grass over there because it's got something the cow needs. They're not just randomly doing it. And.

And if they get sick, they will go eat strange herbs and flowers as very clearly borne out in the documentary called Ho, about Harry Hoxy's cure for cancer. So it being raised on a farm, I watch this all the time. When dogs are sick, they'll eat grass.

Yeah.

And so if you just watch nature, they all show you what we're supposed to be like if we're in touch with our instincts. Most people are so trapped in their head, they're like a kite with no tail. They've lost touch with the wisdom of the body, with the wisdom of the instincts. Most people are so trapped in their head that they don't even have access to intuition. I tell people, look, your mind is like a garbage disposal. The mind chops the wholeness of everything into pieces. So you can have a concept to work with. But intuition comes in lightning bolts. You can have a whole book come to you in a millisecond. But if you try to put a whole book through a garbage disposal, you'll just get little bits and pieces. It'll take you eight years to get to the place you can get by sitting still and meditating regularly. So you're opening the garbage disposal and slowing the blades down enough that the answer comes so with. With my life and my practices, and the monks taught me a lot about this, and what I teach my students is if you have a solid ritual that grounds you and helps you balance activity or working out physically, emotionally, and mentally with working in. So you have access to your feelings, because consciousness has four chief functions. Thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. So if you're beating your body too much, it really you usually means you're detached from your feeling and sensing capacities because you're under Some kind of stress or you've got a daddy problem or a mommy problem or a self esteem problem, or you're trying to be a superhero to make something out of yourself if you're thinking too much. Its complimentary opposite is intuition. So you can't intuit while you're thinking and you can't sense while you're feeling. Jung showed that very clearly and you can test it on yourself. So I tried to teach people techniques for re connecting to the feeling functions of consciousness, the sensation functions and the intuitive functions. Because very few people have a problem with thinking in our culture. We're programmed into it right from when we enter primary school.

It's interesting, I just had Dan on from Harvard who translated original bone texts. And these are the manuals for meditation from 700 years ago in Sanskrit and some of the original Buddhist things. But he's on faculty at Harvard. This is Dan Brown's name. Really interesting.

I know who that is.

Yeah, Dan. So fascinating.

He's very well known in meditation research and things like that. Yeah, consciousness research.

A complete rock star, but at the same time licensed, I think psychiatrist, psychologist, something like that. So he's got the science but he's also got the consciousness research side of things. And it feels like a lot of the consciousness things are missing from hustle culture and all that. And you said something that stood out to me. You said you can download a book in a second. My first book on fertility, 1300 references. Took me five years to do all the research for the book and to start writing it. The actual outline for the book was during an intense neurofeedback driven meditation session. The 40 years Zen stuff I do, I came out of this really altered pure intuition state. Wrote the entire outline just from my subconscious. And two weeks later Gary Taubes introduces me to a publisher and agent and the whole thing starts rolling. I didn't have to think of that. I already had the knowledge.

It might have been your. It might have been your superconscious Dave.

It could have been. I'm not going to say that I measured which one it was, but it was in there and it's that. How do you get into that state? How do you teach people to get into a state of intuition and download?

Well, the first thing you got to do is you have to be very careful about the weekly schedule. So most of the people. One of the first things I do in therapy is I say bring me your schedule that shows me everything you're doing in a typical week. Just like people have daytimers or calendars that they work off of. And what I do is I look at the relative output of physical, emotional and mental energy relative to time for input. So I look at anything that has an objective to be met versus something that has no objective objective to be met. So what I call unbound play versus achieving an outcome. And then I say, okay, what we've got to do is we've got to build sacred time into your schedule. And I teach them my four doctor model. The four doctor model basically is based on a concept that I developed that I, I borrowed part of it from, from the romans. And basically, Dr. Happiness is the chief of the other doctors. Dr. Happiness is the mind. Dr. Happiness is the part of you that's responsible for determining what is happy making in your life. What makes you inspired to live, to grow, to become an engaged life. What are the activities that you do that are stress reducing? Maybe it's music, maybe it's dance, maybe it's art. Whatever it is, we're each responsible for figuring that out. And Dr. Happiness is the chief of your values. I tell all my students and patients your yes has no value until you learn to say no. And without values, you don't know when to say no. Okay? And our emotions are triggered largely by our values, be they conscious or unconscious. So once I look at their relative output versus their relative input to things that are happy making and that are essential, such as nutrition, hydration, sleep, breathing, thinking and movement, I say, if you really want to be healthy or you really want to achieve your potential in life, we have to identify what I call sacred time. So then I work with their schedule and say, okay, you're going to need to make sure you're eating, ideally for the average person, three meals a day. If you feel like you're not hungry but you're healthy, then listen to your gut and don't eat. But as a general rule, we have to make sure you're adequately hydrated, you're adequately fed, you're adequately rested, and you have adequate amounts of movement to keep your body healthy. And then if that's done, then we focus on movement to accomplish a specific dream goal or objective, be it athletic or otherwise. Then I say, okay, what are we going to do to have time for you to spend time inside yourself? That can be Tai chi, it can be meditation, it can be breathing exercises, it could be slow walks in the woods. I try to find approaches that naturally fit their personality. So I structure the sacred time into their week and say, okay, now this is how much time you've got left for the outputting. And if you don't keep that balance, you're going to spend a lot more money on doctors and therapists and surgeons. Surgeons. And it's going to get to the point where most of my clients are spending more money than they can make because they're 200,000 or 250,000 or 300,000 into doctors, surgeries, tests, and nothing's improving. Why? Because they're living in a way that's completely exhausting their resources. And they're so detached from knowing who they are. They're not really in touch with themselves, their wants, feelings or needs. They're doing what they think they have to do to make a living or, or reacting to their developmental programming or their traumas without really doing the work of introspection and self connection it takes to identify what's really going on and what needs to be healed and who can help me do that. And inevitably what people say to me is, Paul, if I do that, I'm going to go broke. And I say, well, you're already broke. That's why you're here. You're broken. That's why you're here. You're paying me $750 an hour because nobody else could help you. And the question is, how long do you want to have to pay me this money to teach you what everybody has to learn eventually, or they end up spending a huge amount of their money on some kind of professional help. And the track record of the medical system in this country is not very good. We're the most expensive medical system, but we ranked 37th for overall effectiveness. You're now a statistic. I don't want you to be a statistic. I want you to be a good example to yourself, your children and everybody else and be a positive change maker in the world. So I simply say to them, how much more money could you earn if when you went to work you were actually happy, healthy, making time for yourself, adequately rested, getting the movement you need, and could focus your mind and knew that you were going to be able to go home, eat, rest, sleep and play and you weren't going to lose yourself doing something that you didn't want to do anyhow, you're just doing it to make money? Well, everybody, with rare exceptions, says, well, you know, if you look at it that way, you got something. So sometimes I have to start small, maybe only 15 or 20 minutes of some kind of introspective practice or meditative.

Practice as per day or per week.

Or typically per Day depends on what the situation they're in, how far down they are and how critical it is. Because if you don't give the body, you see, if you think of it like look at it financially, if somebody comes to you bankrupt and you say, okay, we have to make 10 extra dollars a week for the next 7200 years to get you to break even, that might fit their schedule, but they're not going to live that long, so they're going to have financial troubles the rest of their life. So if you're in a deep hole, then I say we have to make deep changes. If you're in a shallow hole, then we can start off with small amounts and we can drip feed you and, you know, sip into it, so to speak. So I always have to look with every person at the relative demand that their body, emotions, mind and spirit is calling for in order to achieve balance. But most people don't really know what health is. They don't really know what vitality is. And they're not really sure who they are or why they're doing what they're doing other than the fact that they're making money doing it. But most of them aren't doing what they love to do. And that burns people out. And then they go home and they have to medicate themselves with pot, alcohol, drugs to ease the pain of having to go to a mundane existence doing things that they really don't enjoy doing. Often with people they don't enjoy being around just to pay bills so they can drive the car they like and the house they like. But that's a, that's a very, a dead end road that leads to not only a physiological crisis, but a spiritual cris. So it's very complicated to coach people holistically, especially when you're dealing with the kind of cases that I deal with. Because you have to help them grow in so many areas at once, but also because they're in so much trouble, you have to be very careful not to give them control. Fatigue by giving them so many things that they have to now work on that it burns them out even further.

Okay?

And so really that's what I've spent my life working on, is how do I find that balance and determine what's the most important thing to do first? I learned that you never give a person more than four objectives to work on at once, or they're likely not to participate in any of them because of overwhelm. And so when I look at their life from the eyes of Dr. Happiness, I help them establish values for diet, quiet, movement. And then I look at the balance of too much or too little movement, wrong diet, right diet, high quality, poor quality, not enough rest and sleep, or rarely too much. Every now and then you get someone who's just sedentary and maybe they're living off of a trust fund or something and they're lacking activity, so I need to put a fire up their ass. But really, when I look at happiness, movement, quiet, and diet, I get a holistic picture of their life. Because you can't reduce a living philosophy below those four factors. Nobody can truly be healthy with three doctors. If you're good at happiness and good at movement and good at diet, but you don't get enough sleep, you'll be in trouble. If you're good at happiness and good at sleep and good at diet, but you don't get enough exercise, you'll be in trouble. So the reductio ad absurdum of holistic health, or health in general, is happiness, quiet, diet, and movement. And if you exclude one of those, you leave a hole big enough to trigger off some kind of a crisis if it goes on long enough.

So that's a powerful model. You've got happiness, movement, quiet, and diet. A lot of the practices that you're talking about, though, kind of sound like the yogic or the Buddhist. Chop wood, carry water, just do something every day. I have this mindset, though. You know what? I have a chainsaw. At least I'd rather have a chainsaw and a water truck here. So I went from my art of living, breathing exercises every day for five years, and especially before I had kids, no problem. Hour or two of meditation in the morning. I got this. And I can create rituals and journaling and candles and shamanic stuff. And then you have kids and you're like, oh, I kind of sort of am starting a company and doing this other stuff, and I found that I really could cram months worth of meditation in one week of super intense neurofeedback, where I'm spending 10 hours a day going way deep inside and having done it with a bunch of people now through my company that does that stuff for the people who don't want to chop wood and carry water, they actually want to have a chainsaw. Is there a way to get at least most of the benefits in either concentrated time or in less time? Just for people who are saying, look, I've got a big mission, I'm carrying a lot here, and actually I don't want to spend a half hour a day chopping wood and carrying water. I want to spend a week doing hardcore stuff or two days or one day a week. I'm just going to do nothing but lock myself in a cave. Is there an accelerated way of anything you can think of?

Well, I'll say if you were to look at my resume and see what I've done in my life, you would know that I've been busier than a one legged man in an ass kicking contest. But the only way I can do it is to go back to the basics. Because one of the most important things for me is to be 100 congruent with my teachings. When I stand on stage, there's only one person there. I don't need to wear masks. I don't need to be pretend to be an expert at this or that. I'll quote my buddy Laird Hamilton who says the truth is what works. If Dave can do it with electronics, then Dave can do it with electronics. Not everybody can do that. One of the problems I have with what would be kind of standard biohacking concepts is they detach people from the earth. They detach people from the very foundations. We are a biological organism. And if you get too trapped in electronic gadgets and shortcuts, then you actually lose touch with who and what you are. And when the power goes out, you're fucked. So I teach people, use whatever works for you, but don't bullshit yourself.

There you go. The ancient traditions are a part of it in teaching people to be grounded, just teaching people to sense the energy field around them. You can learn to sense things faster with neurofeedback. You want to teach someone how their breath works, show it to them on a screen when they're doing it. Like oh, I didn't know I was doing that. And so I feel like you can accelerate the turning on some of the senses. Oh, I just never knew that when I felt this it meant this and that. Oh, this is that state. No one ever explained that to me. And the Buddhist would say visualize this and imagine this. And there's all these things that are trying to transmit this state of the shape of the field around your head or your heart using words that suck at that. And so I'm saying, well okay, this is what it looks like. And so I'm just going to give you a sign when you do it right. And I look at that as accelerated teaching. If I can say what you're doing right is right. For me it's been really helpful. I didn't know what the heck Anything going on under my neck was. And I hooked up a heart rate variability monitor and said, oh, look at that. When I think about all the negative stuff that I have, lots of that I've cleaned out there, then I see a change in my heart rate. Oh, that. Actually, that. That feeling matters. Before that. I'm an engineer. That feeling doesn't matter. It's just some stupid noise from below the neck. You don't have to pay attention. Yes, that's helped me.

Right.

But I also.

Did you know what you're describing?

Yeah, go ahead.

What you're describing is the transition from what biohacking is to what I call bioharmonizing.

There you go.

Biohacking is traditionally taking shortcuts, but you become dependent upon gadgets to look and feel and perform a certain way.

That's not biohacking. No way.

Well, that may be not for you, but look at what's going on.

It's in Merriam Webster's. My name's in there. It's the art and science of changing your environment around you and inside of you to control your biology. That's it. It doesn't require tech at all. Right. You can do it with shamanic stones and drums if you want to.

Okay, good. But that's not what. Just Because I've developed the concepts of many things. I've watched people do stupid on Swiss balls and every other thing I've invented. And people say the foam roller is dangerous. You know, certain people have to learn the hard way. What I'm saying is, if you're dependent upon a gadget to do something that is actually a copy of a more advanced technology within you. For example, Steiner said in about 1897, human beings will continue to invent technologies outside of themselves until they realize that every technology is actually a copy of something inside of themselves, or they destroy the world. The question is, which will come first? And that's the situation we're in right now. So I have nothing against technologies, but when I was a fighter, I would wear a heart rate monitor. And when I was a triathlete, I represented the army in triathlon. I went to the national championships. I fought on the boxing team and competed as a triathlete at the same fucking time.

That's hard.

Try that on. Yeah, that is hardcore. And I'm sharing how I did it. I used a heart rate monitor, but I paid close attention to my perceived level of exertion. What was the experience I was having? Within about six months, I could tell you what my heart rate was within Three beats, no matter what the hell I was doing. So I said, I don't need the heart rate monitor.

That's 100% correct. Yes.

When you learn from the technology by paying attention to it as a teacher and you connect yourself to your inner experience, that's what I call bioharmonizing. Now you're using the advanced technology. Look, a watch cannot figure out its maker. So any biohacking device or pill or supplement out there cannot ever supersede the creator of it. What I'm trying to do with people is say, look, if Dave Asprey can come up with something that can enhance your ability to feel, perform or whatever, look inside yourself to see if there's something inside of you that it's teaching you to do, so that then you can be free of the technology. And the next time you need a piece of technology, it'll take you up a notch, you'll grow from it.

That's the only ethical use of technology in my perspective there. It's to help you learn faster. And all these people saying, I'm going to cut off my arm and get a robot cannon and I'm going to implant electrodes in my head, like, you know what? Not a good point.

That's not what I'm referring to. Yeah, you got to get your. Referring to.

Yeah, we use only a little bit of our hardware. It's that you turn on all of your sensors, make maximum use of everything your body has. And if you do that, there's a name for that, it's called full enlightenment. But if you do that, and then you need to plug in some electrodes. Okay, let's talk. Right, but until your hardware is maxed out in, every capacity that you have as a human being is turned on. And you are a master of it. Why would you need to replace hardware bits? I don't get it.

That's what I was referring to. So now you're supporting my point.

This is the first of a two part series with Paul Cech. In the second part, we go really deep on the metaphysical, on what's happening on the earth, what's happening with polarity, what's happening in consciousness, leaving your body, remote viewing, and like the really juicy stuff that you sometimes don't have anyone talk about. So there's gonna be two episodes. First one physical, second one metaphysical. Both of them rock.

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